Thursday 10 April 2008

Coming Up For Air and Finding the BNP

Politicians and commenters have drawn attention repeatedly to the threat of the extreme Right in England. Anecdotally the British National Party is making headway among the poor, but in other, and most unexpected, places of relative wealth, too. Where there have been local votes, they have done well in pushing established parties into third place, though as yet they have had few first place victories; tactical voting still sees them kept out under our voting system.

They are kept out, too, by their racialism. We more than condemn racialist views, we are deeply embarrassed by them. In all fairness, our society does not really care about race. Curiously, the racial stuff has been imported by cultures that do care about race. Our culture cares about class, and wealth, and accessibility of resources. We couldn't care less about how people look (just look at how visitors to Florence from England look - do they care? They do not).

So why is the British National Party, whose identifier is racialism, making such notable progress in all and every election that manages to get itself held in England?

The removal of the economic and financial safety net that has been beneath every family since the institution of a basic, inalienable living standard, by all political parties in the United Kingdom since 1945, has done the damage. The fact that you have a mortgage on the house you live in, and a job, and the children are doing reasonably well in reasonable schools, and if you are ill there is accessible diagnosis and treatment, that your streets are safe and the bus and train are there and affordable has been profoundly undermined in the last 11 years.

The safety net, so crucial to most of us with few resources other than our own skills and social ties, is now fully occupied. If we stumble, if we need to ask the council for a house, if we need support during a period of unemployment, if our health seriously and chronically fails, we will be plunged into a maelstrom of savage competition for resources we thought were ours and paid for.

We have had not just our pensions undermined by Brown and his 11 years of ill-intentioned and poorly understood, rabid, classist policies. Undermined as well has been our social insurance, that was there for our parents and grandparents, but is no longer there for us, and for our children who do not face the benign economic climate in which we made our way in life.

Not the very poor; but those who might think of themselves as middle class, responsible, capable, are frightened that everything that was there should external forces strike us down, is no longer available.

And so a racialist party profits from social and economic fear, or even just bewilderment, as our sense of building a society in our country that we can be happy in, and proud of, is destroyed to deliver on an agenda for the permanent installation of European-style statist governance that was  never put to us and to which we would never have agreed.
 We have extended our growing well-being to the poorest. What we have not been allowed to do is replenish and extend the resources devoted to this, because that would have meant taking from the share of the rich, which has held steadily in England to some 50% of all wealth in our country. The rich are untouched by the needs of others; they are too far removed from the experience of destitution. We are not; and we have responded, but now we are on a knife-edge of real poverty ourselves, and there is nothing to catch us as -  not if -  we fall.

New Labour is nothing to do with the socialism we all might agree with, that isn't really socialism at all, just a sense of decency, and sharing, and giving everyone a chance, and that some things can be done better together and with a bit of direction rather than everyone for himself. People keep quoting George Orwell but they're quoting from the wrong book. It's Coming Up For Air that really says it all, and all we have lost.

'We had peace inside us. Of course I knew that
even in Lower Binfield life would have changed. But the place
itself wouldn't have. There'd still be the beech woods round
Binfield House, and the towpath down by Burford Weir, and the
horse-trough in the market-place. I wanted to get back there, just
for a week, and let the feeling of it soak into me. It was a bit
like one of these Eastern sages retiring into a desert. And I
should think, the way things are going, there'll be a good many
people retiring into the desert during the next few years. It'll
be like the time in ancient Rome that old Porteous was telling me
about, when there were so many hermits that there was a waiting
list for every cave.

But it wasn't that I wanted to watch my navel. I only wanted to
get my nerve back before the bad times begin. Because does anyone
who isn't dead from the neck up doubt that there's a bad time
coming? We don't even know what it'll be, and yet we know it's
coming. Perhaps a war, perhaps a slump--no knowing, except that
it'll be something bad. Wherever we're going, we're going
downwards. Into the grave, into the cesspool--no knowing. And you
can't face that kind of thing unless you've got the right feeling
inside you. There's something that's gone out of us in these
twenty years since the war [or 11 years since the New Dawn, ed.]. It's a kind of vital juice that we've
squirted away until there's nothing left. All this rushing to and
fro! Everlasting scramble for a bit of cash. Everlasting din of
buses, bombs, radios, telephone bells. Nerves worn all to bits,
empty places in our bones where the marrow ought to be.'

Are the British National Party picking up on this and, despite their despicable racialism, going to find supporters not among the very poor, but among the newly vulnerable whose insurances have been cashed to buy a voter base, and whose efforts over the generations redirected to ensuring permanence in power for a national and supranational political class?

15 comments:

Sackerson said...

Hg: help, please! Karl Denninger says that all middle income quintiles have gone backwards in income over the last 5 years - where do I find evidence for UK middle income quintiles?

hatfield girl said...

Have you looked at NIESR, or the Departmeent of Applied Economics in Cambridge S?

Sackerson said...

Are they web-accessible to outsiders?

hatfield girl said...

NIESR comes up with all its recent publications and data base stuff; I clicked on a couple of papers and they appeared in full, not just abstracts. The Department of Applied Economics offers all kinds of web research and data links, google DAE Cambridge and follow the Marshall library links. I didn't look for what you asked - easily distracted, that's the trouble. The NIESR site has some very interesting papers.

Sackerson said...

Many thanks, will have a go at ferreting out the info from NIESR.

Electro-Kevin said...

What do people turn to when they are repeatedly ignored on the issue of immigration.

This was a well racially integrated country until Nu Lab came to power. They ruined it, utterly and wickedly.

Now people really feel that they want to tear it all up rather than let someone else have their country. These are dangerous sentiments caused by all major parties ignoring genuine and legitimite concerns.

Anonymous said...

"... the share of the rich, which has held steadily in England to some 50% of all wealth in our country." You are right of course, you could add that that has been the share in national income maintained by the richest 10% of the population.

The distribution of wealth is much more unequal than income distribution and its concentration has increased, to a dreadfully high Gini inequality index of 0.67 (on a scale from 0 for absolute equality, to 1 for absolute inequality i.e. one takes all). See Davies-Sandstrom-Shorrocks and Wolff, The world distribution of household wealth, WIDER-UNU, 2006, www.wider.unu.edu.

And you are right in pointing out that any extension in welfare coverage that has taken place (in width rather than depth) has been a form of redistribution among the poor.

Old Labour at least re-distributed income to workers and the poor. New Labour redistributes it to banks, companies and investors. Reverse socialism, or rather perverse, that is.
Lord (sic, or rather sick)Anthony Giddens pontificates on "Humanising Work", while what we need is de-humanising capital.

Sackerson said...

Caronte: this source says the UK Gini index is 37 - how to explain the disparity?

http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/facts/UK/index51.aspx?ComponentId=12699&SourcePageId=18134

Anonymous said...

HG: Reading this has finally turned me into a manic depressive. So to counter it I need some cheer. Desperate measures are needed.

Accordingly, I have just smashed great grandma's priceless porcelaine piggy bank and retrieved the small handful of now almost worthless coins. I shall mount my trusty, but slightly rusty, bicycle and pedal off into the sunset.

At the end of the rainbow, I shall alight at the sign of the Silver Arches (the Golden ones having been sold off cheaply many moons ago) and enter the premises. There I shall order a Big Macbroon Double Whammy, with Brownies, a dreadful pickle, and a large bucket of Cries on the side. This will be followed by a double scoop of tartan-hued I Scream (despite the fact that nobody has yet been able to determine what those funny green bits in it are).

Regrettably, I do not have sufficient funds to enjoy a glass of whine with my meal as I have to pay the Toll, Congestion Charge, Parking Fees and get the puncture repaired first. Bon appetit.


PS: I promise not to pedal over the cliff on my way home!

hatfield girl said...

Nomad! :) Stop at Monculi on the way; people who come for a few days have been known to find months have slipped by in just staying till after lunch...well, perhaps it would be best to make a really early start tomorrow.

hatfield girl said...

It's all to do again, E-K, but this time what is meant to serve for a rainy day must be for just that, not turned to other political ends by a relatively small group wielding power without authority. Other countries have overthrown apparently immovable authoritorians in the last 20 years.

And done before false explanations for what has happened, and evil remedies poison our lives. This looming up of the extreme right makes it very urgent to deal with this mess quickly.
New Labour opened the door for one purpose and let in something else that is much worse.
I haven't a sure fire remedy but the movements that shifted regimes in the East were local,(at first) inclusive, and thought about and discussed constantly what might be done. Local is my first watchword, we work best with those we know, and inclusive is essential because divide and rule may be hackneyed but it is their route to staying in charge.

Malthebof said...

There is no party that speaks for the working man. All the main parties are divorced from the people, they are a political class with no policies save holding on to power. The Political Class have no concept of how the majority of people feel about the society they have created. To give but one example the police (politicised & run by central government) will not put policemen on the beat which is what every poll says the majority want, cf Robert Peel's priciples of policing.
Any party which hears what people want and responds will achieve power even the BNP.

Elby the Beserk said...

The utter disassociation of politicians from real life is illustrated by one minister or another, a few months back, warning that we would have an underclass if we weren't careful.

Clearly, he hasn't been out of his front door except to catch a taxi to the H of P.

Ladies and Gemmun, as a perfect symbol of the well-entrenched underclass, I give you Karen Matthews and her extended "family".

My ex, working for the DWP in Bristol, notes that some of the families they deal with have had no working adults for 3 generations. Breeding quickly, you can see how it happens. Not only are they raised on the concept of not working for a living, but they are also incapable of working - incapable of getting to work on time, incapable of working when at the place of work, incapable full stop.

hatfield girl said...

Are you saying that there are three generations of working-age adults withouta life experience or culture of work at all, Elby? That would take us back 50 years!

Anonymous said...

"Caronte: this source says the UK Gini index is 37 - how to explain the disparity?"

Sackerson: we are simply talking about different things.

You and your source refer to the distribution of income. Income is a flow which accrues, over a given period of time, to recepient households in the form of salaries, wages, interest, dividends, pensions, etc. I believe that 37 (as long as you and your source of course mean 37per cent) is indeed the Gini coefficient for the distribution of income in the UK.

I - and my source - refer to the distribution of wealth. Wealth is not a flow measured over a period of time but a stock, measured at a given moment in time (in my case 31 December 2000, the latest and only dataset available for wealth world-wide). Household wealth is made of capital assets: land, buildings, own firms, cash, bank deposits, bonds, shares, etcetera, of course net of liabilities such as mortgages or overdrafts or credit card debt and the like. This is what has a Gini coefficient of 67 (per cent) in the UK in the year 2000.

In everyday language "the rich" can refer both to high income recipients, as to those who have large amounts of valuable assets - regardless of the actual income they obtain from those assets and from other sources of income. Hence the ambiguity in communication.

The distribution of household wealth is of course necessarily always more unequal than income distribution because the value of human capital is not included under wealth, although it produces income. What is striking therefore is not that the Gini is higher for wealth, but just how very high it is, and the fact that it seems to have increased under New Labour.

Indeed, New Labour is a misnomer. They should be called Non Labour.