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Thoughts on Dale Farm

Just a couple of thoughts on the planned evictions and demolitions at Dale Farm, where a traveller community has overshot its planning permission:

I wonder how people’s attitude would change if instead of travellers who had overstepped their planning permit, it was a middle class community who had built 4 bedroom houses?

Guess what: evicting these people, bulldozing everything and then dealing with the homeless men, women and children you’ve created is going to cost a hell of a lot more taxpayer money than just leaving them be. Yes, they were wrong to overstep their planning permission (might I add overstep – since they did rightfully have it for half the site), but going in with bulldozers is mindlessly destructive. (more…)

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Neo-Feudalism

We now risk entering an era that might be best described as neo-feudalism. The children of the next generation will be divided into distinct classes, of those who own, and those who are effectively owned. One will inherit property, the other trans-generational mortgages. One will own companies and take profits, the other will work all available hours at “competitive” rates, to pay the interest on their debts, that they might lessen the burden on their children.

We may even reach the stage where the indebted effectively sign themselves over to their creditors, where the monetary chain is bypassed and work is done directly for creditors in exchange for continued subsistence. This is not an impossible conclusion to the road we have set ourselves upon.

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Taking our jobs…

Reading about immigration tensions in the US and a familiarity with mass feelings here, makes me think about the nature of immigration and the concept of “taking our jobs”.  The Xenophobe constantly raves about the “lazy immigrant” on one hand and yet, on the other, compains about people “coming over here and taking our jobs”.

Fundementally, the idea is almost a paradox.  We live in a world, nay, a country, where there a mouths that go unfed.  So when a worker arrives from afar and offers to work in this nation, for the most minimal reward, contributing his sweat to the production of food, this is apparently a bad thing?  From a resource based perspective, this makes no sense: any able worker, especially one working on the land for low wages, inevitably produces more than they consume.  Their efforts, in real terms, feed more mouths than just their own.  Yet we reject this? (more…)

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Notes on Swing Voting

Current events in US politics have had me thinking.  There’s a huge fear that a lack of satisfaction in Obama may well provide an opportunity for the extreme right.  It is true that the chances of an radical group coming to power increase drastically in times of crisis, but we must not view the situation as on first glance.

One of the great advantages of a two party system is that those who lean left, can vote for the left-leaning party and those who lean right, vice verse.  There’s no worry that, as in a three party system like the UK, a vote for the Lib Dems might be “wasted” and instead benefit the Conservatives (of course, this is one reason we wanted STV/AV).  The cost of this however is a lack of choice – if the left-leaning party is in fact too centerist for you as a voter, you’re between a rock and a hard place. (more…)

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Obligatory Post-Riot Blog Post

As a result of the recent riots, it seems like every man and his dog has returned to their blog to pass comment.  I’m therefore going to, in typical riot style, join the masses and put forward a brief (turned out not so brief) post.  It’d almost be wrong not to.  One thing I must say however is that most of what can be said has been – I won’t claim to be adding anything new, although I have managed to agregate some of the better stories of the past week or two.  The unfortunate problem is that the people with the power to change things aren’t listening, so we might just have to shout louder to escape the liberal echo-chamber.  Please though, no looting.

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New Labour? Blue Labour? Can I get a pint of Labour Classic?

It’s very rare that people actually ask me to comment on stuff.  More often, I just stick my nose in where it isn’t wanted and generally offend at least a handful of folks.  Several days ago however, my good friend @sarahcritcher asked for my comment on a piece in the Independant about “Blue Labour”.  Here’s my take:

Socialism is now a dirty word.  It’s almost more acceptable to say you’re a BNP supporter than a Socialist.  There’s an overwhelming consensus among society that Socialism is “bad” – although nobody really knows why (this is in fact, something I wish to discuss further in my upcoming book, but that’s for later). (more…)

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Super-injunctions shouldn’t even be an issue

This is a response to my friend Sarah’s blog post on the Ryan Giggs super-injunction.

In all honesty, 9/10 of super-injunction cases wouldn’t even be an issue if the press didn’t concern themselves with personal business. I don’t agree with super-injunctions, but I’d rather see them obselete and unneccesary than anything else. (more…)

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The Hypocrisy of Discrimination

After the somewhat biblical length of my last post, I’ve decided to leave today’s offering somewhat shorter.  In many ways, I’m forced to, because I have only a few answers for a number of questions.

Questions like: why is it socially unacceptable to say that you, as an individual, hate black people, but yet perfectly okay for a whole institution to disciminate against homosexuals, because of what’s written in the bible? (more…)

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Why public sector cuts have missed the mark

It’s been a year now since the Tory/Liberal coalition came to power in the UK.  That also means nearly a year since George Osbourne’s emergency budget, which instantiated massive, broad-sweeping cuts across the public sector.  In reality, it’s taken this year for the cuts to take effect.  The effects are starting to bite, hitting the vunerable groups the worst.  Despite this, the government maintains its line that it is “making the hard decisions” and “doing what is necessary”.

The problem is, just as the easiest option isn’t always the right one, neither is the “hardest” one.  The government has decided to cut hard rather than cutting smart.  It’s taken a chainsaw to a situation that required pruning scissors.   That’s not to say cuts weren’t necessary, or even to decry the overall scale, but it’s the bluntness of approach that is the problem, the reason that not only will this hit hard, it won’t even work in the long run.

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The Royal Wedding in Retrospect

I’m not going to launch into a tirade about how I detest the Royal Family and would rather push splinters under my fingernails than watch the gross exercise of PR indulgence that we called the “Wedding”.  I’ve made my feelings there pretty clear in the past and that last sentence alone probably sums it up.  I will however, provide a quick illustration for any who are still confused, so we can move on to my actual point:

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