Squid Game and the steel industry

In the mid-20th Century South Korea was an economic minnow. It was a war-ravaged country with a largely pre-industrial economy.

In 1960, if you divided the total economic activity of South Korea by its population (GDP per capita) it amounted to just $79 per person, but within sixty years, this figure has multiplied to over $47,000 per person, which makes it one of the most prosperous large economies on earth, above large developed nations like Japan, Italy, Spain, Argentina, and Russia.

This remarkable period of economic growth in South Korea is known as the Miracle on the Han River, and it started off in the early 1960s when their government initiated the first of the country's 5 year economic plans.

The objective was to modernise the South Korean economy through full employment, and strategic investment across numerous sectors, including infrastructure (roads, rail, ports), core industries (steel, fertilizer, cement, petrochemicals ...), science, and technology.

South Korea's rapid climb up the world development rankings is proof  of how astonishingly successful their strategic investment agenda has been.

Steel industry

When South Korea set about building their first modern steel production plant they were derided by the so-called experts. Why would a country like South Korea make their own steel, when they could just import it from countries with established steel industries?

Well, South Korea ignored the heckling and derision, invested in their own steel industry, and rose from absolutely nowhere in steel production, to become the 6th largest steel producer in the entire world in 2020. 

From having no modern steel industry at all half a century ago, they've soared past countries with long-established steel industries like Germany, France, and the UK.

In 2020 South Korea produced almost ten times as much steel as the United Kingdom! 

A country with a population of just 51 million people produced almost as much steel as economic giants like Russia (146 million), Japan (125 million), and the United States (331 million).

Not bad for a country that were laughed at when they first proposed developing their own steel industry eh?

Having their own government-owned steel industry gave South Korea a huge economic advantage, allowing them to provide cheap steel to other industrial sectors they wanted to develop, especially ship building, electronics, civil engineering, and road vehicle production.

This ready supply of cheap steel helped turn small South Korean firms like Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, and LG into globally recognised brands.

Thanks in a large part to the development of their own steel industry, South Korea is now the world's largest ship-builder, with 40% of the global ship-building market!

Only China even comes remotely close to the shipbuilding power of the South Koreans.

Strategic investment, and the deliberate nurturing of core industries turned South Korea from an economic backwater into an absolute powerhouse over the course of just a few decades.

While developed countries like the UK were deliberately de-industrialising their economies and outsourcing production overseas, South Korea rocketed past them by modernising their core industries and establishing themselves as the premier high-tech, high-skill, hyper-productive economic workshop of the world.

Creative industries

Having learned from their strategic investment in core industries, the South Koreans have recently begun investing in their cultural industries too, with the objective of establishing their nation as one of the creative powerhouses of the world.

The results have already been spectacular:

You'd have to have been living in a box for the last few weeks to have not heard of the South Korean survival drama Squid Game, that's absolutely smashing streaming records across the world.

But the hit Netflix show Squid Game is far from the first massive South Korean cultural export. 

In 2020 the South Korean boy band BTS absolutely dominated global music sales, securing first and second place in the IFPI album sales chart.

Then there's Bong Joon-ho's black comedy thriller Parasite, which became the first non-English language film ever to win the Oscar for best picture in 2019.

Either it's a massive coincidence that South Korea has come from nowhere to suddenly deliver worldwide smash hits in television, music, and cinema, or maybe could have something to do with their deliberate policy of investing in their cultural industries?

Investment vs Austerity

South Korea have proven twice over that strategic investment is the key to delivering future economic prosperity, but certain western nations seem determined not to learn this lesson, especially the increasingly-parochial United Kingdom.

The UK was home to the industrial revolution, and pioneered all kinds of industries from steel foundries, through railways, to ship building.

It's all gone now, thanks to the deliberate neoliberal policy of de-industrialisation that's been pursued for the last four decades.

• The country that invented the modern steel industry is no longer even in the top 20 world steel producers, and the remnants of its privatisation-wracked steel sector is now owned by Jingye Group, which is a state-owned Chinese regional bank.

• The country that invented the railways no longer has a single train manufacturer.

• The country that once "ruled the waves" deliberately tore down its own ship-building industry as part of a demented radical-right war on trade unionism (destroy the entire industry and the trade union dies with it).

As South Korea has stormed up the world rankings thanks to their strategic investment policy, the United Kingdom is falling away thanks to policies like de-industrialisation, under-investment, and austerity.

And there's a big danger of the same kind of sectoral decline happening in the UK cultural industries.

The UK is still an undisputed world leader in the creative industries, punching miles above its small island status in music, film, television, sport, and arts, but the process of decline is already underway.

• A decade of austerity cuts to the education budget has seen art, sports, and music cast aside in the public education system.

• Small theatres, galleries, arts centres, museums, and music venues across the country have been shut down in their hundreds as a result of absolutely ruinous Tory austerity cuts to local government budgets.

• Government funding of adult education has been halved since 2010.

• Profiteering private owners have flogged off hundreds of school playing fields as a result of the mass school privatisation programme the Tory government has been implementing since 2010.

• The BBC has had its funding repeatedly cut since 2010, and there are even more budget cuts in the pipeline.

• The Tory government has just announced a whopping 49% cut in funding for university arts courses.

• Direct funding for the cultural industries has also been annihilated, with the Department of Culture, Media, and Sports suffering massive austerity-driven budget cuts.

• Brexit is playing absolute havoc with the UK cultural industries by imposing expensive and time-eroding bureaucratic burdens on UK creatives touring across Europe, and on UK venues hosting creatives from elsewhere in Europe.

• And just to make his utter contempt for the wellbeing of Britain's £111 billion cultural industries unmistakable, Boris Johnson has recently appointed the notoriously thick, radically right-wing, culture war grifter Nadine Dorries as Britain's culture minister!

South Korea showed the UK the way on industrial strategy, but the Brits ignored it and did the polar opposite, which means South Korea is now an industrial powerhouse, and the UK seems locked into in terminal industrial decline.

South Korea is busy showing the UK the way on cultural strategy too, but once again the British government is doing the opposite, slashing away at cultural funding, when strategic investment is obviously the key to success.

The UK has already reduced itself from industrial pioneer to absolute minnows in industrial sectors that they themselves invented, and if there's not a rapid change in direction, the UK is going to see its position as cultural world leaders eroded away by the same myopic agenda of austerity cuts, and radical-right 'leave it to market forces' ideology, while other countries like South Korea surge ahead by actually investing for the future.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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How Facebook is systematically persecuting evidence-based debate

It's been obvious for a long time that misinformation has been a huge problem on social media, but Facebook's cack-handed efforts to counter it are massively counter-productive, because they're systematically punishing the pages that cite their sources, while letting the liars get off completely free!

Any social media site with the slightest sense of responsibility towards the standards of public discourse that they host on their platforms, would seek to actively encourage evidence-based debate, and discourage the spreading of outright lies.

But instead Facebook is systematically punishing pages that cite evidence via unappealable decisions that their evidence constitutes "spam", draconian distribution restrictions to dramatically reduce the audience of the evidence-citing pages, and even profoundly intimidating threats to delete the pages outright if they carry on trying to engage in evidence-based debate.

The draconian restrictions and threats against Another Angry Voice began on September 3rd 2021, with a supposed "spam" violation, which was actually an article on the independent left-wing media site Skwawkbox, posted to justify an assertion about the ongoing persecution of left-wing Jewish activists within the Labour Party.

The only previous "violation" of Facebook standards on record was one solitary algorithm glitch on a June 2020 post, which was absolutely hammering the Daily Mail for their support of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, where the algorithm somehow concluded that because the image contained a picture of Adolf Hitler, it must have constituted glorification of Nazism. The appeal against this ludicrous algorithm glitch was then ignored.

So just two so-called "violations" in well over a year, and the Another Angry Voice page gets hit with draconian reach restrictions, and intimidated with threats of outright deletion!

Since then, Facebook's "spam" algorithm has gone absolutely wild, with accusations that links to the following all constitute "spam":

• A link to an article about HGV driver shortages on the UK newspaper The Independent.

• A link to an article from the trade union Unite posted to counter an outright lie about what trade unions had been saying about Brexit (Facebook obviously took no action against the completely unsourced lie)

• A link to the website of the British Safety Council

• A link to the Another Angry Voice website, which has never even contained adverts, let alone "spam". There's obviously something seriously wrong with the system if the algorithm is flagging links as "spam" even when the link is from the website the page that posted it takes its name from!

Every single one of the these five links flagged as "spam" is from entities that have their own Facebook pages! (if they truly were spam-peddlers, why does Facebook allow them to have official presences on their platform?)

And every single appeal against these false accusations of "spam" has been met with a boilerplate notification that Facebook is too short-staffed to actually investigate the appeal, so it just stays on record as a "violation", adding more distribution restrictions, and edging the page ever closer to deletion.

Every single one of the links being punished as "spam" was either posted to justify a factual assertion, or to counter an outright lie with facts and evidence to prove it wrong, yet they're being used as the basis of draconian and unappealable punishments.

The strangling of the page via distribution restrictions is bad enough, but the threat of outright page deletion is a profoundly sinister attack on the concept of evidence-based debate.

If people think they're going to get their page deleted, just for backing up their assertions with facts and evidence, Facebook is actively making itself an anti-scientific forum, in which citing sources is punished, rather than rewarded.

Not only does this systematic persecution of evidence-sharing discourage the responsible practice of citing sources to justify assertions, it also gives succour to misinformation-peddlers by intimidating and dissuading those who would be inclined to counter their lies with links to facts and evidence.

If Facebook really wanted to counter misinformation on its platform, they wouldn't be systematically persecuting evidence-sharers, and restricting the visibility of their pages, they'd be rewarding them, and giving them priority over the misinformation peddlers, and over those who don't bother to evidence their claims.

But Facebook is a profit-seeking corporation, so their priority isn't the fostering of healthy evidence-based debate on their platform, it's whatever makes them the most profit in the short-term.

I'd argue that Facebook's best strategy for the long-term would be to introduce some kind of social peer review, via a gamefied feedback system designed to reward pages that provide verifiable information, and reduce the reach of those that promote lies, and also to reward users that provide accurate peer review feedback, and penalise those that try to game the system though malicious misreporting of links that they just don't like.

But as is always the case with capitalism, it comes down to the conflict between short-term profit and long-term gain.

It's obviously more profitable in the short-term for Facebook to allow the misinformation-peddlers to keep churning out content on their platform, whilst introducing cheap sticking plaster solutions (like appending automatically generated information warnings onto posts based only on keywords, and algorithmic solutions that end up systematically persecuting evidence-based debate).

But they really need to consider whether it's a good long-term branding strategy to run their site as a vast misinformation hub, where misinformation-peddlers spread their lies with impunity and those who approve of, and engage in, evidence-based debate are actively driven away onto other social media platforms.

I'd be more than happy to talk to someone at Facebook about these issues, but it's basically impossible to get hold of anyone there, even to get the false 'violations', distribution restrictions, and intimidating threats removed from my page, let alone to talk about better strategies for combating actual misinformation-peddlers on their platform.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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13 things every Newcastle United fan should know about the club's new owners

In October 2021 the tyrannical Saudi regime completed the takeover of Newcastle United FC, via the nation's sovereign wealth fund. 

Here are 13 things all Newcastle fans should know about their club's new owners.

It's the Saudi state

This isn't just some rich guys from Saudi Arabia who have bought an 80% stake in Newcastle United, it's the Saudi government's Public Investment Fund (PIF).

Their chairman of this fund the murderous tyrant Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), who is also the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

No matter how much the Premier League tries to maintain the ridiculous pretence that they haven't, what they've done is allowed the nationalisation of Newcastle United, into the ownership of the world's worst regime.

Sportswashing

The Saudi tyrants have invested their oil money all over the world. They've got stakes in Facebook, Twitter, Formula One, Boeing, Bank of America, Disney, Uber ... Wherever you look in the capitalist system, the Saudi tyrants have probably got a stake in it.

The difference between these investments, and Newcastle United, is that their capitalist investments are aimed at making profits, while their investment in Newcastle United is aimed at improving their public reputation, at a massive cost.

Why do you think they've made that appalling wax-faxed woman Amanda Staveley the figurehead of their ownership, despite her only owning a tiny stake in the venture, rather than one of their own head-choppers?

It's all about massaging their public reputation, and putting a slick westernised veneer onto their barbaric autocracy, rather than making any kind of monetary profit.

We've seen it already with Manchester City, and the way huge numbers of Mancs immediately turned themselves into amateur unpaid PR operatives for the Abu Dhabi despots who took over their club.

MBS and the Saudi head-choppers expect to receive exactly the same kind of sycophantic fawning from Geordies.

War crimes

The despotic Saudi regime has been waging war in neighbouring Yemen since 2014, and they've shown absolutely no respect for the normal conventions of war. 

Probably the most famous war crime occurred when they conducted an airstrike against a bus full of school kids, but they've also used helicopter gunships to attack refugees, and deliberately bombed civilian targets across one of the poorest countries on earth.

One of the most despicable tactics the Saudi tyrants use is the targeting of water supplies and food distribution infrastructure, in order to use starvation and disease as weapons of war against the Yemeni people.

Their absolute disregard for human life in the Yemeni conflict has created what the UN has consistently described as "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world".

Terrorism-spreaders

Ever since the oil money started flowing in, the Saudis have been using it to spread their extremist version of Islam (Wahhabism) across the globe. Wherever you find barbaric Islamist terrorists, you'll find financial and logistical links back to Saudi Arabia.

15 of the 19 September 11th attackers were Saudi, and the ideological figurehead of Al Qaida was Osama bin Laden, who came from a wealthy family that's still well connected in the Saudi regime.

During the 2016 US election Hillary Clinton's emails about the Saudis were leaked, and in them she made it absolutely clear that the US administration knew perfectly well that Saudi Arabia funds terrorist outfits like Al Qaida and ISIS.

Jamal Khashoggi

In October 2018 the Saudi government lured the Jamal Khashoggi to the Saudi embassy in Turkey, where he was murdered and dismembered. The remains of his body have never been found.

The aeroplanes used to fly his murderers in and out of Turkey were owned by PIF, the very company used as a front to buy Newcastle United, and the CIA concluded that the murder was ordered by Muhammed bin Salmen himself.

The reason Newcastle United's new owners killed Khashoggi and hacked his body to bits, is that he was a critic of their regime. He was the son of a mega-rich Saudi arms dealer with connections to the Saudi regime, but he saw the light, recognised the vile tyranny for what it was, and began criticising their political repression, and their war crimes in Yemen.

He was a brave man who stood up for what he believed in, and for that, the owners of Newcastle United ended his life, hacked his corpse to pieces, and hid the remains to deny him a proper burial.

They kill journalists just for criticising their horrific regime.

Misogyny

Probably the most famous piece of folk knowledge about Saudi Arabia in the last half-century is the fact that they hate their own women so much, they wouldn't even allow them to drive cars.

Saudi Arabia is still a profoundly misogynistic society in which women barely have any rights.

They're not allowed to travel or get a passport without permission from their male guardian; they're not free to choose who they marry, and until recently Saudi girls as young as 8 were forced into marriages with adult men; they're barred from all manner of professions; they're banned from studying abroad without their male guardian's permission; they're discriminated against in family courts; and feminist activism in Saudi Arabia is treated as akin to terrorism.

Homophobia

Saudi Arabia is one of the most homophobic regimes on earth, which maintains the death penalty for homosexuality.

They kill people for being gay. Do we really need to say any more than that?

Anti-democracy

In 2019 the Saudi tyrants conducted a barbaric mass-execution of 39 people, including one death by crucifixion. Most of the victims were pro-democracy protestors (including a lad who was 16 at the time he attended a pro-democracy street protest!).

These absolute tyrants literally kill people for supporting the democratic rights that British people take for granted. 

Islamist extremism
 

We already know that the Saudi regime is responsible for spreading their violent, extremist Wahhabist interpretation of Islam across the planet, but within Saudi Arabia they're just as bad.

Apostacy (the "crime" of renouncing Islam) still carries the death sentence in Saudi Arabia. 

Most Saudis who renounce Islam are forced into exile, which is especially hard for women because of the travel restrictions they're subjected to. And even then, they're forced to continually look over their shoulders, because Saudi operatives obviously aren't remotely afraid to carry out extrajudicial killings overseas. 

Corruption

The Saudi regime is notoriously corrupt, and they'll do literally anything to get away with it.

The Saudis even threatened acts of terrorism against the UK in order to pressurise the UK government into scrapping a Serious Fraud Office investigation into the estimated £1 billion that Prince Bandar took in bribes from the British arms company BAE.

The threat of Saudi-orchestrated terrorist attacks on British soil was enough to convince Tony Blair to personally intervene to shut down the corruption probe!

Premier League greed

The reason Premier League approval of the Newcastle takeover took so long wasn't that they had any concerns about the corruption, homophobia, democracy-repression, murder of journalists, misogyny, war crimes, terrorism-spreading, Islamist extremism, or even threats of terrorist attacks against the UK ... it's because a TV company with links to the Saudi government had been broadcasting unauthorised streams of Premier League matches!

Once this company put a stop to their unauthorised streams, the Premier League quickly gave the green light to the worst regime in the world to take over one of England's most historic and storied football clubs!

If you're looking for anyone to blame for the absolute shame of these horrific tyrants taking over your club, look no further than greed-obsessed Premier League executives.

Forget whataboutery

"Whataboutery" is one of the weakest debating tactics known to humanity. It's just a distraction strategy aimed at completely derailing the discussion.

• What about other terrible football owners like UAE/Qatar/exploitative US capitalists/Abramovich?
• What about other repressive regimes like North Korea/Iran/Israel? 
• What about other Saudi investments in stuff like Facebook/Twitter?
• What about Mike Ashley's ruthless zero hours contract exploitation at Sports Direct?

All of these other things are varying degrees of bad. And very many people have consistently highlighted and criticised these other things in the past. But the subject of discussion now is the fact that Newcastle United has been bought out by the worst regime in the world. 

The only reason any Newcastle fan is going "what about ...?" is to distract attention and derail the discussion.

It's a shamefully poor debating tactic, which nobody with even a shred of moral decency would try to use.

Buying loyalty?

The Saudi tyrants believe that just because they've bought Newcastle United, they've bought the Newcastle fans' undying loyalty too.

It's up to the people of Newcastle to show them how wrong they are, and that buying the badge doesn't automatically buy them the respect of the Geordie people.

If Newcastle fans have any decency and dignity whatever, the next home game will be absolutely festooned with pride flags, Yemeni flags, women's rights banners, and pictures of Jamal Khashoggi.

Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered by the owners of Newcastle United at the age of 59, so the 59th minute would be a profound moment for the name "Jamal Khashoggi" to ring out around St James' Park, to tell these sick bastards that they might own your club, but they'll never earn your respect if they go around murdering and dismembering their critics.

Will Newcastle United fans put on a show of defiance against the absolutely horrific tyrants who now own their club? Or will the next home game have an absolute party atmosphere, featuring thousands of Geordies giving the worst regime in the world a heroes' welcome with tea towels on their heads?

The game against Spurs on Sunday October 17th will tell the entire world an awful lot about the true character of the Geordie people, won't it?

 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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Why you'd have to be an idiot to oppose wage rises when the cost of living is soaring

Wes Streeting is Labour's Shadow Secretary for Child Poverty. Today he's been on the television to agree with the radically right-wing Adam Smith institute that rising wages would be a bad thing because they would cause a "wage price spiral".

Just a Labour Party shadow minister agreeing with a radically right-wing think tank that rising wages would be awful.

Starmer's Labour is an absolute shamblespic.twitter.com/puiw9wg0St

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) October 7, 2021

There are very many reasons that this is a profoundly stupid position for a Labour Party minister to take.

Labour is supposed to be the party of the workers (the clue is in the name), so spouting radically right-wing rhetoric against wage rises is a completely extraordinary thing for a Labour minister to be doing.

Streeting was obviously attracted to the Adam Smith propaganda because it used the term "economically illiterate" to chastise Boris Johnson's Tory conference speech.

But for years people on the left have been using the phrase "economically illiterate" to describe economy-strangling idiocy of 'lets cut our way to prosperity' austerity ruination, but Wes never really had a problem with austerity (he abstained on George Osborne's brutal austerity cut in 2015), but suddenly he's enamoured with the phrase, because a radically right wing think tank pinched it to attack wage rises!

Anyone with any sense knows that Johnson's rhetoric about rising wages is pure bluster. He's been in a party that's overseen the worst decade of wage stagnation in economic history. But it's unbelievable strategic ineptitude for an opposition MP to adopt the position that Johnson's blustering that wage growth is good, so I'll say it's bad.

The supposed justification for opposing wage growth is that it would cause inflation, but this is utterly backwards. The inflation is already happening, largely because of Brexit, so keeping wages repressed at this moment would actually create wage deflation (real terms income cuts).

Imagine being such an economically clueless dweeb that you put the effect before cause like this, and end up calling for wage devaluation, just as the prices of energy, food, and housing are spiralling out of control.

'Derp, the opaquely funded and radically right wing pressure group say Boris Johnson is wrong to say wage rises are good, so I'll argue that wage rises are bad!' - this actually appears to be the way Streeting thinks!

I know thinking is a wildly over-generous description of whatever's going on in Streeting's head, but the thinking seems to be that Corbyn and the Labour left would have supported wage rises for ordinary workers while prices are soaring out of control, so it's the duty of Labour's much-vaunted "new management" to oppose them!

A few months ago the junior Labour minister Alex Sobel criticised capitalism over climate change, and Starmer reacted with indignant fury, forcing him to issue a grovelling apology for offending capitalists!

Today another Labour minister is parroting ultra right-wing rhetoric in order to attack the interests of UK workers, and Starmer says nothing!

In the raging battle between workers and the capitalists who exploit them, Starmer's clearly on the side of the capitalists, even though he's supposed to be the leader of the party of the workers!

Starmer's surrounded himself with such idiots that Johnson doesn't even have to do anything to outflank Labour to the left, and appeal to British workers.

All the Bodger has to do is issue absolute platitudes like 'wage rises are good' (even if he doesn't actually believe it himself) and then watch on passively as the strategically incompetent divs in Starmer's top team rush out to argue that 'wage rises are bad actually', and that what British workers really need is another punishing dose of wage stagnation, supposedly in order to prevent the inflation that's already happened!

This short clip perfectly illustrates the problem with liberal capitalist 'centrism'. These people don't actually stand for anything at all.

They've got no convictions; no firmly held beliefs; no understanding of political or economic history; no empathy for other people; no point that they wouldn't argue with equal vehemence for or against, depending on the circumstances; no reason behind anything they do besides self-advancement and political point scoring.

If Johnson had said 'wage rises are bad', the likes of Wes Streeting, Neil Coyle, David Lammy, and Jess Phillips, would have argued that 'wage rises are good actually'.

David Lammy was on the telly the other day using his oratory skills to attack the idea of transitioning towards a £15 per hour minimum wage, but everyone watching surely knew perfectly well that had he been ordered to argue in favour of the policy, he'd have summoned up the exact same faux passion to say what a fabulous idea it is.

These people believe in nothing.

If their party leader tells them to abstain on Theresa May's unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment", or George Osborne's brutal austerity cuts, or Priti Patel's despicable legislation to allow undercover cops to rape women with impunity, then that's exactly what the Labour right-wingers will do, because they don't believe in anything.

That's why they hated Corbyn so much, and worked tirelessly to sabotage Labour from within between 2015 and 2019, and keep the Tories in power.

They hate people with actual principles with a burning rage, and use the word "ideological" as a slur, as if it's some kind of sickening aberration to actually believe in anything, and have a principle that can't be bought.

They knew that having a principled person lead the Labour Party meant their career advancement options were curtailed, so they burned the Labour house down from within to get rid of him.

They put their own narrow self-interest above the unspeakable agonies of millions of others who were suffering under Tory austerity, Tory wage repression, Tory public service cuts, Tory disability persecution, Tory welfare vandalism ... and now they've succeeded in getting rid of Corbyn, we're stuck with a truly horrific Tory government, and an opposition composed almost exclusively of these dreadful people.

So this is why we're witnessing the strategic stupidity of a Labour minister attacking the interests of workers.

He doesn't know anything; or believe in anything; or care about the history and traditions of the labour movement; or have any strategic plan for winning power and making the nation a better place.

He was simply bewitched by a load of radically right wing nonsense, and then mindlessly regurgitated it for the cameras, without even giving a moment's thought to what he was actually saying.

 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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The Silent Knight has walked right into Bodger's trap

Keir Starmer has wantonly wasted his first Labour Conference as party leader.

Instead of taking the fight to the Tories, he waged factional war on his own party with new rules to rig the nomination process for his successor.

Instead of creating the "unity" that he promised during the Labour leadership election, he delivered division, discord, and disillusionment.

Instead of taking the opportunity to reach out and engage the public with bold policies aimed at improving the lives and communities of ordinary people across Britain, he dropped an absurd 14,000 word essay and delivered an interminable bore-fest of a conference speech that was only enlivened by the heckling.

Instead of offering people anything inspiring to actually vote for, he's given existing Labour voters reason to doubt they'd even bother with him in charge.

Boris Johnson may be a bone-idle, lying philanderer, but he's no fool.

His conference isn't going to focus on petty and divisive score-settling against rivals within the Tory ranks.

He's not going to write ludicrously long essays that nobody but the most hardcore of political nerds is ever going to read, nor deliver an absolute policy-vacuum of a conference speech.

He'll focus on a few touchstone issues like "jobs", "wages", and "the economy". 

Yes, of course virtually everything he says about these subjects will be lies, but it's only the political nerds who will know it.

The majority, who only pay passing attention to party politics outside of general elections, will hear Johnson and the Tories talking about "jobs", "wages", and "the economy", when all they heard of Starmer's conference, if they heard anything at all, was how he stitched up the nomination process to decide his successor, and then got heckled throughout his speech.

In fact Johnson's lies on these issues won't do him any harm at all, because he provokes his critics into critiquing his lies.

He's more than happy with the attention because he's comfortable in the knowledge that his target audience of low-information voters won't even follow the details of the debate, they'll just see all the clips of him talking about the things they care about, like "jobs", "wages", and "the economy", without registering or remember all the complicated facts and evidence demonstrating that he's lying again.

They'll associate him with the subjects he wants them to associate him with, and if that means telling lies, doing something ridiculous, or saying something utterly egregious for attention, that's exactly what he'll do.

It worked for Trump, and it's working for him too.

Johnson is a politically experienced showman who's figured out how to game the system to his advantage, and Starmer just keeps on proving what a politically naïve and uninspiring figure he is, who has surrounded himself with the worst kind of strategically incompetent fools.

Labour should have learned from 2015 that it's impossible to win voters off the Tories by pathetically imitating them, refusing to oppose them, and deliberately abstaining on all their malicious legislation.

I mean, who on earth wants watered-down ersatz Toryism, when they can have the real undiluted Toryism just by voting Tory?

And even if this uninspiring Tory-lite agenda does end up attracting a few "soft Tories", they're massively outnumbered by Labour's existing supporters abandoning the party in frustration.

Starmer and his mob have been actively driving away Labour's own supporters in the vain hope of attracting these largely mythical "soft Tories", and this strategic idiocy plays right into Johnson's hands.

He's going to talk about issues that ordinary people are actually bothered about rather than fulminating against sections of his own party, and then he'll announce a couple of new policies designed to position the Tory party to the left of Starmer's tepid and unadventurous fare on a couple of headline issues.

He'll probably even end up promising one of the things that Starmer's just sternly lectured the public that they're stupid and unrealistic for even wanting. 

It's been painful watching Starmer walk himself into this trap, not so much because it's so obviously going to happen, but because his deluded supporters in the corporate media hack pack have tried so hard to portray Starmer's strategic ineptitude as some kind of 'brilliant new dawn', and because of the absolute torrents of vitriol and venom spat by the Starmtrooper online bully boys at literally anyone who's tried to warn them about the trap they're actively cheering Starmer into.

To walk into a trap like this shows strategic ineptitude of such magnitude, it's no wonder that more and more people are coming to suspect that Starmer's advisers are deliberately giving him duff advice because they're once again conducting internal sabotage like they did with the 2017 general election.

Whether you believe Starmer's advisers have led him into this trap through malice or incompetence doesn't really matter at this stage. He's already put his foot in the Tory bear trap now, and it's going to crunch agonisingly closed on his leg over the next few days.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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£15 per hour is overwhelmingly popular, so how could it be made to work?

In the middle of his first Labour Party Conference Keir Starmer engineered the resignation of his Employment Minister Andy McDonald by instructing him to argue against moving towards a £15 pounds per hour minimum wage, and decent rates of Statutory Sick Pay for UK workers.

 

People were quick to find pictures of Starmer himself protesting for £15 per hour for McDonalds workers in 2019, meaning he had to perform the most absurd mental contortions to pretend that he meant only McDonalds workers deserve £15 per hour, not care workers, nursery staff, hospital porters, delivery drivers, or anyone else!

By instinctively favouring the interests of capital over the interests of British workers, Starmer made an absolute fool of himself, and it's only been worsened by a Survation poll showing that moving towards £15 per hour is an overwhelmingly popular policy, with 65% of people saying they strongly or moderately support it, and only 14% saying they strongly or moderately oppose it.

It's an astonishingly popular stance that has majority support across supporters of all political parties, and all age demographics (the least enthusiastic are the 65+, but they're still 59% in favour!).

Starmer's vehemently insisting that in order to be "electable" Labour has to fiercely oppose a policy that's overwhelmingly popular with the public! 

He's sent out ministers like the moral contortionist David Lammy to argue against public opinion with a series of misleading claims, but let's say Labour did want to actually appeal to the public, how could they actually make £15 per hour work as a policy?

Here are a few considerations:

Increased tax revenues

If UK workers' wages are dramatically increased, that obviously means the government will benefit from significantly increased Income Tax and National Insurance revenues, which would be enough to offset a significant proportion of the increased public sector pay bill.

Increased demand

If millions of UK workers are lifted out of destitution over the next few years, then people will actually have a bit of money to spend on nice things, rather than desperately scrimping and saving to get by. This means higher economic demand, which means more economically productive activity, which means more jobs, and more business opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Savings and investment

Lifting millions of people out of poverty would create new opportunities for people to save and invest. Financial experts have been repeatedly raising concerns that current generations of workers simply aren't saving enough for retirement, but a big pay raise for UK workers would help to reverse this trend.

Any government approaching the policy sensibly would do it in combination with innovative savings and investment policies, such as giving people the option to save a proportion of their wage directly from their pay packet, for example, via a National Savings and Investment Bank.

Massive social security savings

If all workers began making decent wages, that were actually enough to live on, the social security savings would be absolutely enormous. Government spending on Universal Credit/Working Tax Credits could be virtually eliminated over the course of a few years.

Housing benefit savings

In recent years the UK government has been spending £20 billion+ per year on housing subsidies like Housing Benefit, which mainly goes to subsidise the unearned profits of private landlords.

If a £15 per hour minimum wage was introduced, along with rent caps to prevent greedy landlords extracting it all for themselves through hiked rents, then this £17.9 billion housing subsidy expenditure could be dramatically reduced.

Small businesses

One of the most commonly raised objections to the policy of increasing minimum wage involves plaintive cries of "how will small businesses cope?", but this attitude betrays a belligerent resistance to finding ways to make the policy work.

If a government really wanted to make £15 per hour work, they could offer all kinds of business support schemes.

As long as the small business demonstrates that they're tax-compliant (UK registered, no offshore holding companies, transfer pricing scams, or other tax-dodges) they could be made eligible for business support to cover a decent proportion of their workers' wages. 

Small businesses would get the support until they become profitable enough to pay their own way, while massively profitable tax-dodging behemoths like Amazon simply wouldn't be eligible, meaning they'd have to pay wage rises out of their own profits, not out of the taxpayers' pocket.

The beauty of supporting workers' wages this way is that it changes the dynamic completely. Instead of supporting low-paying businesses by using public funds to top up the paltry below-subsistence wages they pay their workers, the businesses themselves would have to apply for the support, and demonstrate that they actually need it, and that they comply with basic norms and conventions like paying their fair share of tax. 

Incentivising difficult jobs

There are two main reasons for the massive labour shortages that are causing empty shelves, petrol panic, rotting food in the fields, turkey shortages, and a proposed mass cull of pigs.

One is Brexit restrictions driving away workers from the continent, and the other is widespread poverty-pay across numerous UK employment sectors. 

Why would anyone do back breaking or emotionally laborious work like picking cabbages or caring for vulnerable and incontinent elderly people, for wages that are impossible to even live on?

And since we decided as a nation that we don't want to exploit Eastern Europeans into doing it anymore, the only sensible solution is to incentivise British people into doing it by paying them decent wages isn't it?

Conclusion

 

Unfortunately it's highly unlikely Keir Starmer is going to change position now.

Starmer made a huge show of trash-talking Labour's 2017 manifesto in his interminable bore-fest of a conference speech, to make out that policies aimed at materially improving people's lives and communities are unaffordable, unrealistic, irresponsible, and unwanted.

He's determined to return Labour to the spectacularly failed 2015 strategy of trying to appeal to Tory voters by offering them a watered-down version of Toryism, rather than trying to offer them anything that's recognisably better.

And to do this Tory-lite act, he's going to adopt the absurd strategy of telling the public that they're wrong, rather than trying to figure out a workable way of giving them what they overwhelmingly want.

The arguments are all there for someone to make the case that the public are right, and that Britain does deserve a pay rise.

However it seems vanishingly unlikely that Keir Starmer, or any of the right-wing dolts he's surrounded himself, with will ever snap out of their arrogant delusions that they know best. 

They're simply too far gone up their own fundaments to embrace the idea that people might actually like the hope that things could become better, a bit more than they like another unappealing serving of austere, ersatz Tory gruel from a Labour Party that really should be doing better.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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Another 'stunning success' for the Tory rail privatisation agenda

The hated Southeastern rail franchise has finally been cancelled after the private operators were caught stealing £25 million in public funds since 2014.

Despite a long track record of delays, cancelled services, appalling working conditions, strikes, and lamentable customer service, this woeful franchise had been repeatedly extended by the Tory government since 2014, but the axe has finally fallen to the relief of passengers across the south east.

It turns out the private profiteers were running the services so inefficiently that the only way they could even spin a profit was to embezzle public cash!

And similar to the failure of all the other private rail franchises over the years, the public sector is going to have to step in at the last minute to take over operations.

The most absurd example being the way private operators have abandoned the flagship north east mainline franchise three times, with the public sector taking over at the last minute each time, running the service better, and gradually returning profits to the public finances, only for the Tories to hand it over to another bunch of profiteers who cut and run again, as soon as it becomes unprofitable to them.

This endless cycle of private operators extracting the profits, and public cash being used to clear up their mess is entirely consistent with the Tory ideology of "privatise the profits, nationalise the losses".

As a result of this spectacularly failed rail privatisation agenda, not only does the rail network cost more in subsidies to private franchises than it did to run the entire rail network when it was privatised in 1994, the government has built up a secret £50 billion+ black hole of rail debt from renting the track out to these profiteers at miles below the actual cost of maintaining them.
 

An overwhelming majority of the public want to see the rail network renationalised, and run as an integrated not-for-profit public service.

Yet the Tories persist with this shambolic mess of private profiteers extracting profits, then offloading operations onto the public whenever the profitability dries up.

Labour should be absolutely hammering the Tories over this, not just on the principle that rail privatisation has proven to be an absolute disaster, but for the sheer incompetence of allowing a private rail operator to steal £25 million from under their noses.

But unfortunately Keir Starmer is too busy waging internal factional war against his own party to care about establishing a critical narrative, and his shadow finance minister Rachel Reeves has only just been pledging her undying loyalty to the interests of capitalist profiteers, by swearing she'll ignore economic common sense, and the will of the British people, when it comes to the need to renationalise vital national infrastructure.

And to make matters worse the Tory Transport minister Michael Green Grant Shapps is seeking to protect the shambolic rail privatisation agenda by hiding it behind a fake renationalisation, whereby private operators keep extracting their publicly subsidised profits, but under a unified brand of "Great British Railways".

It's never going to get better when both main Westminster establishment parties adhere to the warped and treasonous ideology that essential British infrastructure and services are better run by a mix of corporate profiteers and foreign governments, than by the British government on behalf of the British people.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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