Tuesday 25 September 2012

Elite arrogance

The contempt and loathing of our ruling elite for the ordinary people of the country was graphically evident from the reaction of the government chief whip Andrew Mitchell to the police who prevented him from doing exactly as he wanted to. In other words he was treated like the rest of the plebs he so evidently despises. I hope he remembers how worthless the plebs are the next time the police provide him and the rest of his despicable crew with the protection they so depend on on a daily basis.

Mitchell and our noble betters at the apex of our political system are the result of our system of first-past-the-post voting. This system has produced a hereditary system of government in the UK through which the political elite can indulge in their favourite pastime of excluding those who they disapprove of, those who do not belong to 'their people.' Our elite actually have a nickname for the sort of people that they socialise with, they are PLU's, people like us. The rest of the plebs are of course not like them and so must be excluded from their circles, which includes the top echelons of society in all its manifestations, government, civil service, and all areas of decision-making.

The FPTP voting system allows the party leaderships to centralise decision-making in the parties and therefore control all aspects of the party including candidate selection and party management positions to ensure that only those people whom the leaders can depend on will come through the system. Thatcher and Blair were experts at this form of manipulation and ensured that all people of talent within the major parties were excluded if they posed any form of threat to their leadership and control. That is why we have such an appalling level of politician in the UK. All the people with any talent and ability were weeded out in case they posed a threat to the leadership with the result that Thatcher and Blair were surrounded by PLU's, in other words a group of brainless yes people who refused to exercise any form of independence and were quite content to say and do whatever the leadership told them. As a result we are saddled with the choice of Cameron and Osborne or Milliband and Balls. It's genuinely enough to make you weep. I don't think its an exaggeration to say that if you combined the IQ's of all four of these eminent political giants you still would not manage to get a half-wit.

As a result, any hope of meaningful recovery in the UK is predicated on a genuine root and branch reform of the political system, beginning with the electoral system. One of the imperatives of British politics is that Scotland will have to vote for independence if it is to avoid the worst ravages of the political and economic destruction that is being, and will continue to be, inflicted on the rest of the UK. Scotland must detach itself from a Westminster parliament that has lost all sight of its roles and functions, that has become a vehicle for class warfare and advancing the interests of a select group of PLU's. This has nothing to do with nationalism and everything to do with democracy and economic realism.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Friday 21 September 2012

Modern British politicians are characterised, above all things, by their capacity for lying through their teeth without the slightest twinge of remorse. If a modern Westminster politician's lips are moving you can be sure he/she is telling a lie.

The biggest and most repeated lie, utilised by all our major parties, is that there is no alternative to the policies being pursued to reduce the deficit and cure the economic disaster that was caused by the very same policies. It never fails to amaze me how the British public can accept such nonsense, particularly as it is demonstrable nonsense, and the evidence of its nonsensicality is before everyone's eyes every day. Economics is the study of a particular form of human behaviour. It is not a science and has been demonstrated by our recent past, and present national shambles, to be very imprecise and practised by a professional gang of incompetents. As I have said before, humans are generally irrational and so economic behaviour is generally irrational as well. The free market concept of the rational consumer is obvious garbage. An entire marketing industry depends for its success on exploiting that irrationality, in persuading you to purchase things you don't need and don't even really want.

For every economic problem there is a multiplicity of alternatives. You may not like or agree with them, but they are there and available. For example we could raise taxation and switch the emphasis of our tax system from indirect to direct taxation. This would have the result of redistributing resources from the better off to the poorer; instead of the present system that does precisely the opposite. We could nationalise public industry and services and create employment by direct state intervention. The biggest potential employer in the country is local government, that is one of the reasons why the neoliberal has such a hatred for local government. To say that we can't do such things is simply a lie. It is only not a viable alternative if you are totally committed to the neoliberal free market economic model that has demonstrably failed. Britain used to have upper income tax rates in the 70 and 80% range. The country didn't grind to a halt, the sun didn't fall from the sky and human life didn't suddenly disappear. In fact, a bigger percentage of the population had a better standard of living and most people were in meaningful full-time employment.

No-one should ever vote for any politician who tells you that there is no alternative, and all politicians who persist with this lie should be sacked on the spot. Poverty and unemployment could be seriously reduced in the UK quite easily if the will was there to do it. However, by doing that you would reduce inequality and that is what the neoliberal will not tolerate. As I said, you may not like some of the alternatives, but don't listen to anyone who tells you there are none. It is a lie because they know that what they are telling you is not true. If they actually believe that themselves they are the worst kind of fool.

Your Servant

Doktor Kommirat

The Working classes can get lost - please

It should be obvious now, even to the most bigoted Tory thinking supporter that the neoliberal free market obsessed governing classes in the UK are openly exclusionary, that is, their policies are designed to exclude large sections of the British population from the benefits of the wealth and privileges of their economic and social policies. These benefits are reserved for the privately educated and property owning elite that the dominant classes regard as (in Thatcher's famous phrase), 'one of us.'

The most obvious example of this is the national policy on student finance that is targeted to exclude working class students, particularly mature students who make education their way out of a cycle of poverty and unemployment. In addition, higher education is seen as a method of training as opposed to education. The government only requires you to be 'educated' to the extent that you can function in a neoliberal economy. Education will be the preserve of the private system and the elite universities who cater for the economic and political elite. The neoliberal sees no immediate economic advantage in subjects such as social sciences and so are unwilling to fund them. For example, the Metropolitan University in London has closed its history and philosophy courses. Think about that, the society you live in is the result of its history and the ideas that have shaped it over the years and you will never understand the present society if you are ignorant of such things. That is what the neoliberal wants, a robotic, low paid ignorant workforce who can't and doesn't think and who can't and won't challenge the system. As Jonie Mitchell sang, don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till its gone, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot. They're paving over the education system, health, welfare etc., and putting up a sterile society where progress and success are limited to a wealthy and privileged elite and everyone else is excluded, because health, education, and every other important aspect of what makes a society civilised will soon be completely privatised  and only available to those who can pay. Welcome to your modern slavery, you voted for it! At least the Scots are showing another way and may escape the worst ravages that are soon to be visited on the rest of the UK.

Your Servant

Doktor Kommirat

Saturday 15 September 2012

Workers beware

I have tried to awaken people to the dangers that working people are being reduced to sophisticated modern forms of slavery. Everything that the authorities do in the field of labour relations only confirms my fears. Vince Cable's widely acclaimed success in watering down the Tories plans for no fault dismissals should not deflect our attention to what the Lib Dems have agreed to. Britain openly boasts that it seeks the most flexible labour force in the Western world. Flexible means that the working person has no protections and no guarantees. Cable's attempts to dilute Tory plans is only a holding action that will allow us to become accustomed to the reductions of our employment rights and make us less resistant to the next dilution of our rights and liberties.

The excuse for these measures is the old saw that we must make it easier to hire and fire, and that such measures are attempts to clear the ground for increased employment opportunities. This is of course garbage. The increased employment opportunities being planned by our masters are in part-time, temporary, low wage jobs where you are being increasingly expected to work unlimited unpaid overtime. Flexible means being prepared to work for no wages, (as the modern confidence trick of offering work experience has been shown to be the reality for many people) no pension entitlement and without employment rights. This is the increasing reality in modern Britain. Most of these measures are being put in place in preparation for a massive assault on the workforces in the public sector, particularly the health service which is seeing, and will continue to experience, its services outsourced to the private sector and the delights of the neoliberal labour market. This labour market is increasingly approaching the Thatcherite neoliberal dream of a truly free market with no regulations on its activity.

What must always be remembered is that the 'right to manage' is a different thing from the right to do what you want, and employers are demanding the right to do what they want, unrestricted and unregulated.The dilution of our employment rights is only one factor in the wider plans to dilute all of our rights and liberties and remove any resistance to the complete domination of our neoliberal elite and their accumulation of unrestricted wealth and power. When your employment rights are stripped from you, then it will be a simple matter to strip the rest of your civil liberties. Working people have only one option at their disposal if their conditions become intolerable and unacceptable, that is the ability to remove their labour. Should working people lose that ability, which is one of the most fundamental of human rights, then you will be in the position of  being at the total mercy of the employer. If you must accept whatever conditions you are offered, and have no redress other than to refuse to work in such conditions, and that refusal results in you forfeiting all you benefit rights so that you are left with no income whatsoever, then you have been stripped of choices. If you take the work and are then sacked for simply trying to complain or raise your standard of employment, then you are truly in a situation of having no rights. That is a form of slavery, and that is what is coming in the United Kingdom. You have been warned.

Tuesday 11 September 2012

The state


One of the major problems with modern Britain and a major barrier to meaningful economic recovery is the dominant hatred of the state. This has led to UK policy making being completely schizophrenic throughout the last 30 years. British government policy formulation has been genuinely non-sensical for the past several decades, with a constant emphasis on ‘rolling back the state,’ ‘removing the dead hand of the state,’ and ‘getting the state off our backs,’ whilst formulating political policy that has consistently enhanced the roles and the power of the very state that they are so desperately keen to diminish. As a result, political and economic policy formulation and practice has been, and continues to be, contradictory and self-defeating. We have witnessed the economy being increasingly deregulated and privatised, our public services systematically dismantled, all of which has resulted in increasing economic centralisation and monopoly, whilst the centralisation of the state under neoliberal control has reached levels that Stalin would have been proud of with a massive transfer of power and decision-making to the executive, the marginalisation of parliament, the politicisation of the civil service and the police, the proliferation of surveillance and the power of the state and its security services under the guise of a bogus ‘war on terror.’

The neoliberal has a completely negative view of the state, summed up by Karl Popper’s description of the state as ‘a necessary evil that must not be allowed to grow greater than is absolutely necessary.’ State activity is seen as a restriction on the freedom of individuals to make their own decisions free from external constraint and to control their own resources.
This is simply wrong, and portrays the state as some kind of ‘thing,’ as an entity with its own existence independently of the people who compose the state and direct its activities. The state is an administrative concept. It is the administrative arm of the government and exists to regulate, control, implement and sustain government and public policy. As a result, the state is not evil, it is neutral and is a reflection of the people who make up its personnel and the policies they are tasked with implementing. The state can be evil, of that there is no doubt, but that is when it is directed by evil people. However, the state can also be benign or beneficial and enabling.

As I repeat without apology, the fundamental assumptions that underpin free market    economic theory and its political equivalents are wrong, and, are demonstrably wrong. They have manifestly failed and the empirical evidence of that failure is all around us. Government policy is simply stupid and is based on ideological dogma that is founded on a set of false hypotheses.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Sunday 9 September 2012

Yes, let's champion the wealth creators

I trust you will have seen the latest Tory plea to abandon the politics of envy and champion the wealth creators in our society. Absolutely, first-class, I agree. But wait a minute, are we talking about the same people?

My problem with the Tory point of view is that for their mentality the only people who create wealth are the business and financial class. To the free market mindset working people do not create wealth; they are wealth preventers, rather than creators. That is because these people only see the working class as a cost, never a benefit. It never occurs to the Tory and free market mentality that wealth comes from labour. You see, you can have all the money in the world for investment, but without the physical labour of a working man or woman, that investment will never realise wealth. You may finance a golf course for example, and provide facilities for people who will pay to play golf for the next thousand years, thus returning a very lucrative profit on that investment, but nothing will happen until that golf course is physically built. In addition, the course has to be designed and planned. It is very unusual for any one person to have the money to invest in a new golf course and then have the ability to plan, design and then physically construct that course all by themselves. In addition, they will necessarily need to utilise tools and machinery that were themselves produced by human labour.

Another argument is that the state and the public authorities cannot create wealth. The most successful, and prestigious golf course in the world is a municipal course, owned and maintained by the local council, St. Andrews. It also hosts, arguably, some of the most prestigious wealth creating tournaments in the world. This creates wealth for the whole kingdom of Fife, and of course the Tory government's tax coffers. It would be interesting to know how closely Scottish golf courses, most of which are municipally owned, rival the royal family in tourist income for the nation?

Of course the idea that wealth comes from the input of labour will be immediately dismissed by the intellectual giants from the free market right-wing as Marxist, despite the fact that it is a truism. Marx said it so it must be wrong, simples. In addition, anyone who agrees with this point of view must, by defintion, be a Marxist as well, they are incapable of exercising their intellect to come to such conclusions without being infected with communist propaganda.

However, does it ever occur to such people that teachers and doctors and janitors and bus drivers etc.are wealth creators as well? How much wealth would be created in a modern economy without the ability to read, write, count and work a computer? How much of those activities would be possible without the ancillary services that underpin them and maintain them? As a result, the activities of the state and the public sector, so hated by the neoliberals, are fundamental to the process of wealth creation. We therefore come to the realisation that the creation of wealth is a whole society activity, it is a social activity and cannot simply be attributed to certain individuals regardless of how gifted they are. I therefore look forward with full and confident expectation to the Conservative Party sponsoring the trades union movement as an essential cog in the wealth creation machine. I mean the Tories are not stupid people are they?

I meant to use this post to comment on the neoliberal free market hatred of the state, I will address that next.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat 

Friday 7 September 2012

May the NHS rest in peace

I trust the British people will have carefully noted the appointment of Jeremy Hunt as the new Health Secretary. This is the man who was co-author of a pamphlet that stated that

"Our ambition should be to break down the barriers between private and public provision, in effect denationalising the provision of health care in Britain."
For the next part of this post I am indebted for my information to the Guardian newspaper and I sincerely hope they do not mind me quoting from their publication.
The Guardian reports (Friday 7/9/2012) that 20 NHS trusts in the South-West of England have formed themselves into a consortium, The South-West Pay, Terms and Conditions Consortium, in other words a cartel, to initiate a system of locally negotiated pay, terms and conditions of service. The Consortium has begun its official life with an open threat to all of its employees that if they resist these moves (which the BMA have called 'draconian') then 6,000 of their 68,000 employees could be sacked.
The Department of Health's response is the one we have come to expect from our highly politicised civil service who will never fail to do their masters bidding, they tell a barefaced lie, stating that  "There are no plans to cut NHS pay. Pay agreements need to be fit for purpose." Now I trust you will recognise the complete contradiction within that short statement. There are no plans to cut pay, but if we need to we will because agreements need to be fit for purpose. This consortium has already announced plans to cut pay, or else why do they wish to enter into locally based negotiations, indeed why did the BMA refer to the plans as draconian?
The health unions, including the BMA have all said that the attempt to localise agreements is with the purpose of cutting pay rates, reducing holiday entitlement and reducing sick-leave provisions. Now we all know that the Tories have a neoliberal obsession with privatising the health service, and Hunt has admitted this with his desire for denationalisation when he tells us that denationalisation is 'in effect' privatisation. If you denationalise, you no longer have a national service, and, the Tories already have legislation in place to ensure that denationalised health boards must outsource their services to private industry. President Obama told us in his State of the Union address in January that 57 million Americans have no health insurance. The necessity for private health insurance in the UK is the next Tory objective. Remember, British public policy is inherently exclusionary, that is, our policy excludes people rather than includes them. This is seen in health, education, housing etc. I do not apologise for repeating the Tories hatred of disabled people and their continued attempts to exclude them. You see, the disabled are seen as a cost that has to be reduced as far as possible. 
The British people cannot say that they have not been warned. We are well on the way to being a carbon copy of the United States in all things. The health service is doomed and medical provision for the British people free at the point of service is also doomed. Medical provision will no longer be provided according to need, but according to ability to pay, and if you can't pay, you will die. That day is not very far off, perhaps only ten years or so, in other words if the Tories get another term in government. That is what Hunt's appointment is warning you.
In addition, you must give the Tories full marks for consistency. The solution to any economic crisis is to hammer the workers, cut their pay and conditions, extend their working day, week, year. I warn you again, these people are introducing sophisticated modern forms of slavery, and it is quite planned and deliberate. 
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Tuesday 4 September 2012

Welcome to British notions of justice


One man is sent to jail for six months for stealing bottles of water worth £3.50p Another man steals £40,000 from the taxpayer and is found guilty by his superiors of having committed a series of serious breaches of the rules over a considerable period of time, receives no punishment other than a demotion for two years, and is then promoted into the British Cabinet. Welcome to British justice and notions of fair play and equality.

David Laws, the MP was given the opportunity to repay what he fraudulently stole from the public purse, the man who stole the water wasn't. Of course the miscreant who stole the water did so as a result of being involved in the rioting that took place in the UK during the summer of 2011. David Laws was a member of the government whose policies led to the rioting. But of course British society is not dominated by social class and anyone who even suggests that it is is a dangerous left-wing lunatic, it stands to reason! British justice is fair and independent and everyone is equal before the law, and of course it must be correct because the British wouldn't vote for anything else would they?

British politics and society are in a very perilous state, as this type of corruption is not only widespread but is endemic. It is structural and built into the very fabric of the nation. As a result, British government and the Westminster system is losing both its authority and its legitimacy. There will be serious long-term consequences for the nation if this situation continues for much longer. The increasing destruction of the health service and the slow slide into slavery for the working class, the disabled and the unemployed cannot continue much longer. This government now officially classifies people with terminal cancer who have more than six months left to live, victims of strokes, and people paralysed from the chest down as fit for work. I am reminded of the book and television series "The Nazis, a Warning From History."

Your Servant 
Doktor Kommirat

Monday 3 September 2012

On the subject of human behaviour I often marvel at a phenomenon I witness regulary in supermarket cafes. There are tables that have just been used by customers and they haven't been cleared. They have trays and plates and cups etc. Next to them there are tables that have been cleared and cleaned. People will go to a table that is cluttered with trays and plates etc. and start clearing the table and placing everything on a clean table next to it so that they can sit at that particular table rather than simply sitting at the clear table. I never get used to seeing that and still marvel at it. It is completely irrational behaviour, but is quite normal and happens regularly.

David Hume tells us how reason is the slave of our passions and always must be so. For Hume our passions are such things as our natural drives of hunger, thirst and lust, but they also embrace our emotions, many of which are social, such as pride, envy etc. They are the likes and dislikes we experience that motivate our behaviour. What Hume argues is that we do not have the feelings we do because we reach them through the application of reason, but rather that we reason on the basis of our feelings, which are the result of our passions. As a result, the collective beliefs and moral codes of our society are the result of the dominant feelings on any particular matter. Most of the rules and norms that guide our behaviour in our society are not determined by cool detached reasoning over what is good or bad, but are the result of our feelings towards any particular social phenomena. In the UK as these feelings are the result of the dominant forces in society, they are class feelings. That is why we often uncritically accept the dominant views that denigrate working people and their organisations, immigrants, Muslims and the disabled. 

These feelings are, of course, the result of our socialisation, and so, most of our feelings are not our own, they have been given to us by external forces, such as parents and other powerful influences on us, that we internalise without really considering them.  As a result most of us operate through a normative system that we have never really considered with reference to its influence on us, or to whether it is correct or incorrect. How often have you asked people if they would like something to eat and they tell you that they don't like it, and then admit that they have never tasted it?

Thus, moral, political and ethical convictions are positions we choose, not because we have reasoned them to be right or wrong, but simply because we feel that they are right or wrong, and, if asked to explain why we think something is right or wrong, we cannot really give a satisfactory explanation, we just feel it. We can then understand that they are not logical conclusions reached from the application of reason, they are the result of desire or aversion.

Sigmund Freud supports Hume's thesis arguing that we are motivated by what he terms our affective interests. Our affective interests are what Hume calls our passions, our emotional faculties. Freud writes that

Students of human nature and philosophers have long taught us that we are mistaken in regarding our intelligence as an independent force and in overlooking its dependence on emotional life. Our intellect, they teach us, can function reliably only when it is removed from the influences of strong emotional impulses; otherwise it behaves merely as an instrument of the will and delivers the inference which the will requires.

and that

the shrewdest people will all of a sudden behave without insight, like imbeciles, as soon as the necessary insight is confronted by an emotional resistance, but that they will completely regain their understanding once that resistance has been overcome.

So, why do we clear a table when there is a better option available? Because we want to sit at a particular table and not one that is on offer. If we sat at the other table our meal would not be so enjoyable, would it? It would taste different. Food is therefore affected by our choice of seating in a restaurant, just as all disabled people are benefit scroungers and all Muslims are potential suicide bombers, it stands to reason doesn't it? It must because if the government and its henchmen in the tabloid press say these things are reasonable, then they must be, simples!


Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Saturday 1 September 2012

Humans are rational beings - aye right!

If anyone still labours under the illusion that the human being is a rational being they need look no further than Britain's coalition government for evidence that will finally dispel that illusion. Following August 9th 2007, the day that the CEO of Northern Rock, Adam Applegarth, said had changed the whole world, we were comprehensively shown that the fundamantal assumptions underpinning free market and neoliberal economic theory were in tatters. These monumental events proved once and for all that the human being may have the capacity for rationality, but most certainly does not start from that basis, indeed quite the opposite.

It is now over 5 years since these dramatic and world changing events, but still the British government, nor the majority of its people, have learned one thing from their experience. Government still labours under the failed theories, still applies the same discredited policies and still refuses to accept reality. That is why they are failing and must fail. You cannot have a successful conclusion from a false hypothesis. So, why are they continuing with what are demonstrably stupid and dangerous theoretical assumptions?

Class, that is why. Greed on a monumental scale. The description of the Prime Minister and his Chancellor as arrogant public schoolboys is absolutely spot on. The Tories, and their Liberal partners are simply class warriors, who have a towering contempt for ordinary people, and a hatred of working people in particular. The free market experiment based on neoliberal economic theory begun by Thatcher has failed, and has demonstrably failed, but this will not be accepted by our ruling elite, why? The why is that they know that their ideology is bankrupt but that they are intent on looting as much of the country's wealth as they can before the people finally waken up to reality and get rid of them.

British government is dictated by a determination to stick with policies that are deeply damaging to the British people and are destroying the social fabric of the nation in a manner that is threatening to become irreversible, and they don't care. Make no mistake, the health service in England and Wales will very soon be completely privatised and run by foreign business interests for profit. These people are slowly but surely introducing modern sophisticated forms of slavery and they are being aided and abetted by the British government. But, you voted them in and if you continue to vote for such people and their policy agenda then you will get what you deserve.

Now you tell me that British government and the British electorate are rational individuals! I will return to this theme later as I should explain why people are not naturally rational and should not expect it to be self-evident, even though it is.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat