Johann Hari: Strike, yes – but not at this target
The elite have a vested interest in directing our rage away from them on to anyone else
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Independent Minds
And so the rage begins. For months we have sat inert as the economic roof collapses in on us. The Greeks and the French rioted, but we – the British – were shocked into silence. Until now. The pervasive insecurity has finally taken physical shape, with thousands of unofficial strikers taking to the streets bearing fury-streaked banners.
So which of the people responsible for knocking out the support beams of the economy are being picketed and pilloried? Is it the market fundamentalist politicians – both Tory and New Labour – who told us endlessly that economies work best when they are regulated least? Is it the bankers, who used this deregulation to spread the dry rot of bad loans throughout the banking system? Is it the bank CEOs who – even now – are using taxpayer money to pay themselves fat bonuses for screwing up? Is it the corporations who are refusing to pay £12bn in taxes every year? Is it the super-rich who are stashing £11.5trn in tax havens – many of them British dependencies – rather than contribute to rebuilding this mess?
No. It is a few immigrant workers, living in hostels. They are the only people who have seen a British protester outside their door in this depression. The wildcat strikes are directed at them – and they are spreading.
Our anger has skipped over the people responsible, to people who are not. Why? The political elite and much of the media have a vested interest in directing our rage away from their own responsibility on to someone – anyone – else. Murdoch's News Corporation – and other lackeys of self-interested billionaires – sold us the deregulation- mania and tax-slashing that contributed to this disaster, and have refused to pay any net taxes in Britain for over a decade.
The political elite was happy to follow their lead and bask in their applause. So now it has reached its predictable end-point, they have failed to tell the story of how this disaster came to pass. They have not named and shamed the bankers and market fundamentalists who brought the economy crashing down – because they would have to point into a mirror.
So the wildcat strikers settle on the people closest to hand: the Poles and Italians. The men protesting outside their factories and plants are – rightly – worried about their jobs and their futures. Because nobody has given a shape to their anger or offered a roadmap out of this insecurity, they have lapsed into zero-sum scrambling for the scraps that seem to remain.
There is a real issue concerning recent immigration – but it is low on the list of the factors threatening these men's livelihoods. Nonetheless, we have to be honest about it. It is true that immigrants make a net contribution to the British economy of £2.5bn a year, but it is also true that this benefit isn't felt equally. When there is a significant increase in the supply of cheap labour – with immigrants arriving in large numbers – the price businesses pay for it falls. This means at the bottom of the income scale, wages are eroded. It is not racist or irrational for people in that position to feel angry.
But is the solution to turn on those immigrants? The protesters in Hull and Lincolnshire are motivated first, second and third by a desire for a secure job. They need to be shown that the route they are pursuing now won't achieve it – but there is an alternative to fight for that will.
What would happen if we ended the freedom to work across the European Union? Yes, one million Europeans based here will have to go home, and you won't be competing with them any more. But the 1.5 million Brits based elsewhere in the EU will also have to return too. You would be competing against them instead, in an economy that would be even more depressed by the unravelling of European trade.
No. The best way to deal with the wage-depressing effect of immigration at the bottom is to demand an increase in the minimum wage. This places the white working class and immigrants on the same side against the CBI-led elite – rather than squabbling among themselves as the bankers stroll away laughing.
But this is only the first step. If we are going to pull out of this depression, we need the Government to embark on a huge programme of job creation, just as the US government did in the 1930s. We urgently need millions of jobs anyway to turn Britain into a low-carbon economy – and the Government can pay for it by closing tax havens and finally getting the rich to pay their fair share. That's real, urgent work.
But so far, the Government's fiscal stimulus has seemed to only concentrate on people at the top: bankers and big business. Gordon Brown is not talking plainly about launching huge programmes to get Britain working through a depression. His response has been filled with jargon and hard to follow.
Compare it to Barack Obama's statement last week, calling Wall Street "shameful" and saying "the American people will not tolerate this behaviour". David Cameron's Conservatives are much worse, renouncing the idea of any fiscal stimulus at all – guaranteeing a much more bitter economic contraction.
But neither party is going to spontaneously propose the New Deal we need. They have to be pressured into it: even FDR had to be spurred by heavy waves of public protest. My friend Nick O'Donovan has launched a British equivalent to the US campaigning group moveon.org to draw together the great latent mass of people in Britain who want to lobby for a progressive way out of the slump. It is called Dosomethingaboutit.org.uk – and it should be the fulcrum for turning anger currently directed at immigrants into demand for a British New Deal.
If we turn on each other like rats in a cage, the depression will only become longer and more bitter. There is a better way. We should be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the wildcat strikers and, yes, immigrants too, in protests outside Downing Street demanding a big fiscal stimulus that will get us all back to work. That's the only outlet for our anger that will drag us up and out. Our choice now is between a New Deal – or a national ordeal.
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Comments
The legitimate target is government.
Their insatiable demand for money, begged, borrowed or stolen (from us) is the real problem.
They collect & spend a ludicrous large percentage of the GDP, and still they borrow more.
Your "big fiscal stimulus" is borrowing from the future, we, in our old age, & our children will have to pay for it.
The way to stimulate the economy is to put money back in the pockets of those who created the wealth in the first place (that's you & me BTW).
My plan would be:
1: Increase personal allowance.
2: Make the current base rate tax, the flat rate.
3: Do something about interest on savings, encouraging saving and giving the banks some real money to lend.
In Canada I listened to a debate in which Jim Sinclair, President of a public employee's union was asked about illegal immigrants. I waited, cringing, for his response, which I assumed would be xenophobic, I got a huge surprise instead.
His comments focused on the notion that he was not going to condemn poor people for looking for a job. As a union representative, he didn't want his members (or as yet non-unionized workers and members of the public) to turn on other poor people. He wanted the focus to be on solutions for everyone.
This response made perfect sense to me. I admired Sinclair for rising above petty nationalism and caring for (trite as it sounds) the workers of the world.
It is completely misdirected anger.
The real culprits and criminals (big business, the banks, the government, the City, the FSA, neo-liberalist policies) are let off which is why they got away for it so long in the first place, instead a few immigrants are blamed. What a simplistic society we live in.
Where are the Conservatives, UKIP and even the BNP, whether you agree with them or not, are a legal political party? But why exclude the Conservatives, they are afterall the main opposition party? This is hardly embracing democracy is it?
'Progressive' is the term Livingstone is promoting in his attempt to re-enter the stage again. Certainly the Guardian last week experienced overkill, with Livingstone and his cohorts extolling the virtues of 'progressivism' interesting they got short measure, from the readers.
If there is no hidden agenda, partiality or exclusivity, then it is worthy of consideration, but until then it appears to be no more than 'meaningful' platitudes that are on a par with the current incumbents 'doublespeak'.
Very disappointing
But wait, what's this I see? Immigrants too are being attacked by the left, and not just random lefties but unions no less. (They even seem to be speaking against the EU ? will such blasphemy be forgiven unto man?) In truth, this is only the most obvious manifestation of a something that has been true for a while ? that anti-immigration feeling is mostly on the left these days. Sure, there are still racists (wrongly called "far right") who hate anyone with darker skin, but most hatred of immigrants these days is inspired by a fear of people who still know what a day's work is. The British worker, weakened for decades by the twin cancers of unions and benefits, has long forgotten, and can only survive in a hermetically sealed environment in which all competition is kept out.
I refer to Saint Barack Obama.
In 1995 he was the prime mover of an amendment to the Community Reinvestment Act which required U.S. banks to advance mortgages to millions of poor, predominately Black Americans. This was guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under instruction from Bill Clinton.
The resultant massive housing boom caused bankers to discard their basic criteria and start to believe things could only get better (echoes of Zillionaire Blair). Those more cautious, usually older, bank executives were put out to grass or shunted into areas where they could not stand in the way of the great illusion.
This is the funniest comment I have ever read. Thank you.
'San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank Governor Randall Kroszner has stated that no empirical evidence had been presented to support the claim that "the law pushed banking institutions to undertake high-risk mortgage lending". In a Bank for International Settlements ("BIS") working paper, economist Luci Ellis concluded that "there is no evidence that the Community Reinvestment Act was responsible for encouraging the subprime lending boom and subsequent housing bust," relying partly on evidence that the housing bust has been a largely exurban event.Others have also have concluded that the CRA did not contribute to the current financial crisis, for example, FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, Comptroller of the Currency John C. Dugan, Tim Westrich of the Center for American Progress, Robert Gordon of the American Prospect,[64] Daniel Gross of Slate, and Aaron Pressman from BusinessWeek.
'Some legal and financial experts note that CRA regulated loans tend to be safe and profitable, and that subprime excesses came mainly from institutions not regulated by the CRA. In the February 2008 House hearing, law professor Michael S. Barr, a Treasury Department official under President Clinton, stated that a Federal Reserve survey showed that affected institutions considered CRA loans profitable and not overly risky. He noted that approximately 50% of the subprime loans were made by independent mortgage companies that were not regulated by the CRA, and another 25% to 30% came from only partially CRA regulated bank subsidiaries and affiliates..."the worst and most widespread abuses occurred in the institutions with the least federal oversight". According to Janet L. Yellen, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, independent mortgage companies made risky "high-priced loans" at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts; most CRA loans were responsibly made, and were not the higher-priced loans that have contributed to the current crisis. A 2008 study by Traiger & Hinckley LLP...found that CRA regulated institutions were less likely to make subprime loans, and when they did the interest rates were lower. CRA banks were also half as likely to resell the loans. Emre Ergungor of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that there was no statistical difference in foreclosure rates between regulated and less-regulated banks, although a local bank presence resulted in fewer foreclosures.'
...SO: What can we glean from this? The CRA was at fault here is patently uncorroborated and false. It's also painfully to most independent and government researchers that the CRA positively bolstered the regulatory framework.
THE PRIME MOVERS IN THE SUBPRIME LOANS FIASCO WERE THE IRRESPONSIBLE, UNREGULATED BANKERS. The CRA imposed stricter regulatory hurdles, which actually made lenders less keen to dole out 'easy' money, and when they lent money it tended to be at a fairer price than that provided by UNregulated and UNDERregulated banks and mortgage lenders.
FURTHERMORE, CRA-regulated lenders were LESS LIKELY to repackage their loans to sell them off to bankers. And if you've paid ANY attention to the news (which has been banging on and on about this here in the UK) it was these repackaged mortgages which are at the heart of the present crisis. Those dodgy loans were repackaged into 'grade AAA' (actually dodgy) securities and sold off to greedy, under-regulated financial institutions worldwide. These 'securities' have ended up being liabilities to their holders, hence the implosion in bank balance sheets and the unravelling of credit markets worldwide.
The absence of regulation and the greedy compunction to score a cheap dollar (pound/euro), coupled with a Reaganite/Thatcherite love for deregulation, have put us in the mess we're in today.
Predicable dig at Cameron, for heavens sake, please change the record. I have no wish to live in a one party Labour state because of Mr Hari's rather deep chip on his shoulder. Oh and girly love affair with Mr Obama!
The workers who Total intend to employ (through a contractor) will live on barges. People should not live on barges, they should live in houses and flats. End of.
The strike leaflet produced by two Socialists on the strike committee makes this totally clear. Please do not ignore such an improtant statement, which has alos been tranlsated and printed in Italian. Both leaflets do attack the government. See www.socialistparty.org.uk
No-one, apart form the BNP - whose delegation was told to clear off from the Lindsey site - is saying 'send the foreign workers home.' No one is turning on anyone 'like a rat in a cage'.
2. "Action from the government which will insist that companies applying for contracts on public infrastructure projects, sign up to Corporate Social Responsibility agreeements which commit to fair access for UK Labour.
3. "Overturn European legal precedents which allow employers to undercut wages and conditions. A European Court of Justice precedent gives employers a license for 'social dumping' and prevents unions form taking action to prevent the erosion of UK workers' pay and condition."
Though a distinction can be made between official union declarations and the general demands of the strikers in the case of a wildcat strike, I feel that these demands are broadly in line with the views of those involved directly in the strike, expressing as it does a criticism of the circumvention of pay deals by the use of foreign workers, not foreign workers in themselves.
Circumstantial and anecdotal evidence suggests that demands have been made by other unions, with broad support; for these foreign workers to be included in such pay deals, for the implementation of interpreters employed by the unions to integrate foreign workers, that the BNP have been unanimously turned away from certain striking areas.
A pro-business media bias plays a significant part in misrepresenting such occurrences, this one put forward as halfway towards a race riot by the BBC and the media at large. However, this representation you generally go along with, and it is disappointing that a journalist so scathing on the issue of mediation as regards the root of the financial crisis, Hugo Chavez, Somali 'pirates' et al. would approach this issue from such an uncritical, hegemonic interpretation. The notion that solidarity leading to better wage conditions can only be bought at the expense of the exclusion of outsiders is abhorrent to me, and I can only assume your article to be a crude but well-intentioned polemic informed by a similar idea.
But Hari explicitly says it isn't a racist movement: "It is not racist or irrational for people in that position to feel angry."
Why don't people read the articles before they comment?
Might I refer you to the title of this article as evidence of the overall angle of the piece? I'd also advise that foraging for isolated quotes, deployed in a schematic manner out of context of the direction of the piece, doesn't warrant you being so smarmy.
The people who say things like 'flexible workforce' when they mean 'easy to sack' , or 'competitive' when they mean 'cheaper than the others by whatever means necessary'. I blame the hangover from the Age of Deference, when rich people really were considered by many at the bottom of the pile to be their 'betters'.
And it's not exactly in rich people's interest to correct the misapprehension, is it ? Much better to let the proles carry on blaming some poor starving sod from Portugal for their troubles.
The proles are your equals and always have been you utter snob!
Governments are blindly trying to restore the status quo, in spite of the fact that it is completely the wrong thing to do. Business is trying to use the opportunity to squeeze wages and pensions hard - bankruptcy is a preferred method, but where that can’t be used, workers can be laid off, and are being laid off in their thousands.
The biggest part by far of any manufacturing cost is that of labour, which is why outsourcing has become the industry watchword. To aim now for an increase in the basic wage would be to fly in the face of a virtual financial hurricane.
No government wanted to be responsible for calling a global shutdown - it would have been political suicide. Far better to accept the fact that something has done their dirty work for them, and move on from there.
We should be manning the barricades for rationing - not an increase in the basic wage! Then we have to find a way to live with the result, and preferably not like the overcrowded rats in a cage that we are fast beginning to resemble.
The white working class are not the professional benefit claimants of the Mail and Express commentators' stereotype: they're actually those of my friends and relatives who, a generation ago, would have held well-paid jobs in the mining or manufacturing industries of our West Yorkshire home town but who now work in warehouses alongside motorway junctions.
They're placed there by agencies because that's to the financial advantage of their mainly multinational employers; refused union recognition for the same reason; and forced to listen impotently when one of those agencies boasts that it's not had to increase pay rates for four years owing to the availability of migrant labour.
Meanwhile other multinational corporations heap increase after increase on their utility bills and, until the bubble burst, the younger ones with the hardly unrealistic desire to buy a house and start a family have to watch the price spiral out of reach thanks to those already on the housing ladder and the plague of buy-to-let landlords playing the market for financial gain.
And so those already in these jobs are trapped there because there's little else available around here, while others with the aptitude or good luck to be able to do something else choose not to enter them in the first place - from which point it's not far to the myth of the jobs local people refuse do.
In reality, it's not that local people won't do them - any more, incidentally, than people in rural Lincolnshire won't harvest vegetables or process meat - it's that they can't afford to if they've any ambition of a standard of living beyond that which so many exploited migrant workers are prepared to endure for a short period.
Is there any wonder so many of them are now angry? Perhaps the immigrants shouldn't be the target of their frustration - but then there aren't many investment bankers, hedge fund managers and derivatives traders in Immingham or Warrington. Sadly, it's human instinct to attack the symptoms while ignoring the causes.
That's why the real culprits get away with it and, I fear, will continue to do so.
I actively campaign against racism but the situation just becomes more complex as time passes. Quite simply how do you convince people that foreign workers are not taking their jobs when in an indirect way they are. Also and I realise this might be inflammatory but I have had migrant workers tell me that british workers are lazy and don't want these jobs. I must repeat I actively campaign against racism in my city, just in case anyone might think I am 'on the other side'.