In maybe the most offensive manifestation of the Daily Telegraph‘s slide from serious paper of record to hate-filled propaganda rag for the literate over-80s, their personal finance editor, Ian Cowie, brings us the following suggestion to improve Britain’s democracy:

 …here’s an idea that might really stir up some interest – and improve our nation’s governance.Why don’t we restrict votes to people who actually pay something into the system? No, I am not suggesting a return to property-based eligibility [oh no, that would be indecent]; although that system worked quite well when Parliament administered not just Britain but most of the world [oh, the good old days...]. Today, income would be a much better test, setting the bar as low as possible; perhaps including everyone who pays at least £100 of income tax each year.

[...]

This modest proposal [unfortunate choice of words, there] would, however, exclude large numbers of people who have no ‘skin in the game’ and who may even comprise the majority of voters in some metropolitan areas today [*cough* Labour voters *cough*]. Their contribution is not just negative in financial terms – they take out more than they put in – but likely to be damaging to the decisions taken by democracies.

[If you have the stomach for it, you can read the whole thing here: http://bit.ly/iHVEZF]

I was planning to fisk this pathetic little screed (including his embarrassing pub analogy), but there’s really no need with an argument so riddled with flaws and lacking in human empathy. I’d rather focus on what it says about the standard of public discourse in this country that such a suggestion – literally disenfranchising the poorest in society – is endorsed by a quality newspaper.

We’ve already seen the proposal by DWP minister Iain Duncan-Smith (who manages to be both profoundly boring and evil) that the long term unemployed be forced to clean the streets in high-vis jackets for £2 an hour (http://bit.ly/aXLdpM), which resulted in relatively little outcry. Once it becomes acceptable to force the unemployed into the kind of menial labour more commonly used as punishment for criminals, why not take away their political rights as well? Is that really such a leap?

This also illustrates something about the right wing press in this country: namely their monopoly on lunacy, paranoia and sheer fucking hatefulness. This was the subject of a very good piece by Dave Osler at Liberal Conspiracy (here: http://bit.ly/gZNQmJ) a while back concerning the columnists Simon Heffer and Melanie Philips and their opinion of the Soviet/Marxist credentials of the current government (really). He concluded, quite righly:

No serious left of centre publication – not even any low circulation Trot rag, come to that – would make space available to the broadly equivalent contention that Ed Miliband is some form of fascist.

‘Looney Left’, indeed.

We seem to be setting a standard nowadays for justifying injustice and dehumanising the poor. In the aftermath of the expenses scandal, there’s been much talk by various groups of ‘cleaning up British politics’. I suggest that addressing this would be a good place to start.

EU gotta be kidding!

Yesterday’s vote in the European Parliament’s to extend maternity leave to 20 weeks on full pay across the EU should be welcomed by anyone who believes the work-life balance in the UK needs to be seriously revised. If approved, which is far from certain given Conservative opposition in Britain, it will also encourage more women who want to start families to feel secure in starting a career. Contrary the dribbling Daily Mail headlines, and the jerking knees of my Europhobic Third Estate colleague, the EU can actually do some good things. But unless paternity leave is equalised with maternity leave, the reform may do almost as much harm as it does good in the long run.

Despite strict equality laws, a report earlier this month from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission found that women in the UK earn on average 16% less than men. That this gap widens to 27% for women over 40, who are more likely to have started a family, is significant. Maternity leave – a fundamental necessity of modern society freeing women from having to choose between family and career – has had the unintended consequence of reinforcing the glass ceiling effect they experience in the workplace. All other things being equal, employers find themselves predisposed to promoting men to senior positions because they are unwilling to promote women who may take much lengthier and more costly maternity leave if they choose to start a family. This is one of the reasons women make up only 5% of the executive director positions of the top 600 British companies.

At present, women are entitled to 39 weeks maternity leave, with 6 weeks at 90% of their pay and the rest at a flat rate of £123.06. Men, on the other hand, are allowed only two weeks paternity leave at £123.06. The EU’s proposal will make those two weeks fully paid, but it will dramatically increase the gap between the two benefits by giving women ten times the amount of time off on full pay.

There are obvious reasons why maternity leave should be more generous than paternity leave. For one thing, men don’t have to go through the pain of childbirth. Nor can they produce milk. However, in a society where employers exploit pregnancy and maternity leave as a reason to underpay and underpromote women, increasing the gender gap in parental leave may throw up new obstacles to narrowing the gender gap in the workplace. Moreover, it reinforces the notion that the woman’s role is that of carer and the father’s that of the breadwinner. The only way to tackle both problems is to equalise paternity leave with maternity leave.

Ironic that that best way to promote female equality is to give men more rights.

As the trade unions awake from a decade of deep sleep and call for a wave of organised attacks against the austerity budget, I think it’s important that we get a grip on the timescales we’re talking about with these cuts, and the kinds of effects they may have.

There’s a temptation to fall into a narrative of fantasy. ‘The Cuts’, like an earthquake or vampiric shadow, will terrorise us. Without compassion or reasoning, It will weigh down upon the country like a scythe, slashing the poor and needy, crushing the working class. Some areas will be devastated by the plague: the North will be ravaged, London slums will reappear. 10 million unemployed, hundred of thousands on the streets…

Cuts fantasy: I want to suck your public services!

The reality may be far less poetic, but in ways more insidious. While, as Reuben points out, we now have 2.5million people chasing 500,000 jobs, there are many millions more who are finding themselves in unfulfilling, boring jobs which they perhaps may otherwise have been able to avoid. This is for two reasons.

First, many people I know at the moment find themselves unemployed, lacking the career options that a few years ago would have laid open before them. For the moment, they find themselves with emptier lives, full of uncertainty but perhaps new opportunities. In 6 months or so, this very well may have changed. Faced with decreasing savings and increasing living costs (thanks recession), I’m sure I’ll start to know more and more people with 9-6 jobs, be it waitressing, temping or tutoring. These may be jobs that some people want to do, but others fall into without choice, and often without any of the perks we might associate with temporary jobs: autonomy, low-responsibility, etc.

This is the second reason: jobs themselves will get worse. With more temps and fewer positions, workers lose their bargaining abilities in negotiations, leading to more hours, less pay, more abuse from bosses and less camaraderie in the workplace, as workers are made to compete for the remaining jobs under fear of redundancy. And it will keep going. So while Jon might cry (quite rightly) ‘at least you have a job’ to those people who moan about the tube strikes, we should remember that the jobs people have may be getting worse, and they’re in these kinds of jobs for longer.

The long term underemployed isn’t something that’s going to be the strap line to a campaign, and the unions are right to point to increasing unemployment as focal part of the cuts. But the effects of unemployment knock onto the employed in a big way, and it is this slow, grinding change which may come to characterise the recession, not the looming scythe of fantasy.

Here’s the final paragraph from an online Telegraph article on the tube strike:

Having trouble getting to work? Please share your tales of travel woe below. For readers who live outside London, this is your chance to gloat about your trouble-free commute.

Who said conservatives don’t have a sense of humour? Yes, vent your anti-union anger if you have a job to go to (as 800 Tube employees won’t, if the cuts go through), or, if you live outside the city, you can ‘gloat’ about your ability to get from one inferior location to another.

The reaction to the strike has been typical and quite boring. I think these headlines point out something quite disappointing in our political culture:

Tube strike: millions hit by travel chaos with 9 lines affected – The Telegraph

Tube strike forces Londoners on to buses and bikes – The Guardian

Autumn of discontent begins as Tube walkout brings misery for millions of commuters and tourists – Daily Mail

I don’t think it would be too degenerate to point out that public transport strikes can be annoying, but there’s very little outrage to be found over the planned 800 layoffs, which is surely the story here. The Guardian even has a blog post entitled ‘London tube strike – tell us your stories’. Here’s my story from this traumatic incident: Yesterday I decided to postpone a drink with a friend, and my mother had to get up earlier than usual; when she got home she was quite tired, and she shouted at me for not informing her that my wardrobe is a bit broken at the moment. Guess what – she still has a job. No surprises in guessing that most people have stories about as boring; they either took the bus, hopped on a bike, or worked from home (which some regard as a luxury, btw).

I find the sympathy for the poor tourists in the Mail headline quite amusing. How patriotic of them to suggest Londoners forgo their industrial disputes for the sake of Johnny Foreigner’s holiday. This has the added benefit of applying practically every day of the year in London.

Striking public sector workers are always deemed ‘selfish’ by popular grumbling; I think it’s clear who’s being selfish here.

In the last month we’ve all heard about David Cameron’s proposed crackdown on benefit frauds. Lots has been said around the left about how these proposals are completely missing the mark in terms of where the government can be saving money if need be, but there hasn’t been much of a defense of the benefit frauds. There seems to be a tacit agreement that the fact that these people are “stealing our tax money” means that they are doing something wrong. The problem is that this idea comes out of the premise that there is something noble about working: that it is “the right thing to do” and “the right way to live.”

The fact is that benefits in our country are piss poor. As a young unemployed person in London you can be expected to live on approximately £50 per week. Many large families are squeezed into tiny accomodation. Many have to live in estates that are, due to decades of poverty and lack of investments in boom periods totally run down. Although a steady stable job might allow people to escape from these conditions, it does not signify anything noble. In fact it is entirely the existence of these conditions, the fear of poverty, which is shown to us every day in its true horror, that forces people to work.

And on a more general level, there is nothing in the slightest bit noble about most jobs. Yes, there are the jobs that can help people, but the fact is that when the profit motive for your job disappears, whether you’re a miner or a doctor, your job disappears with it. And now, when there are so many people unemployed, when there are so few jobs, the myth of the nobility of labour is a nasty pernicious lie invented to beat those who are least well off in our society.

The thing that keeps people in our society in work, ultimately, is not the myth of meritocracy, rather it is the reality of the possibility of starvation. Meritocracy is merely the spoonful of sugar that encourages us to continue swallowing this toxic medicine, but without the sugar we’d still have to take it.

So I pose this question, when people live in a society that is so unfair, when people are forced to live in such conditions, is it really so wrong that people steal from the state? The fact is that there are a whole bunch of more profitable ways to make money illegally, and they tend to be a whole lot worse for the whole society than taking a bit of extra money alongside benefits. The fact that people are willing to put themselves through the possibility that they may lose everything (their houses, their benefits, their freedom), that they go in for such a difficult method to get a bit of extra money, should show us something about their motives.

Part of the problem is how the question of money is seen by the rightwing press, tax money is always treated as our collective money, as if in a very American way we could take a class action against these benefiit frauds. But we can pose the question in the negative: Is it not correct to say that the money that we have paid in tax money has been consistently been misused, that instead of being used to help the country and its people, it has been used to prop up a system that has resulted in massive unemployment, a system that is totally sustainable alongside the impoverishment and immiseration of millions of people. Would it not be better that these people on benefits were bringing a class action against all those who voted for governments that rather than stealing a few pounds a week have instead stolen any opportunity for these people to live a reasonable existence?

And so it seems right that when people are subjected to such conditions of living they do the moral (if not quite legal) thing of taking money from the state to which for whatever perverse reason we say they are not entitled. This is a battle against inequality, and we must accept that whilst there may be the odd occasion of benefit fraud by someone taking real liberties, most people are simply taking what they need to exist in a world in which living is becoming an increasingly difficult.

So the con dem coalition are looking to make cuts a little bit more popular. And what better way than to talk about cuts to housing benefits. If you read the papers last year you would have seen a number of “scandals” over the high amounts of rent local authorities were paying to house larger families. Councils have a (fairly weak) statutory obligation to ensure adequate housing, and often such homes were amongst the cheapest that could be found.

Yet there is a reason that renting homes for people on benefits can cost so much. If you have dealt with landlords or letting agents any time recently you will have become used to a notice emblazoned on virtually every website and shopfront: “no DSS”. In other words we won’t rent to the unemployed. It such circumstances it is obvious that the small number of letting agents who are willing to deal with these apparent untouchables will be able to charge what they like.

It is in fact a disgrace that years after the worst forms of housing discrimination started to be tackled, this kind of crap is still allowed, and for no good reason. Renting to somebody on benefits is in fact less risky – because the money comes straight from the DSS. And moreover the idea that everybody on benefits shares certain unesirable characteristics is – not least in the present climate – obvious rubbish. The unemployed now acccount for 2.5 million people. Considered against the fact that there are only 500,000 vacancies in the economy, it is patently obvious that unemployement is for many people an inevitable reality.

Given the coalition aim to bring down benefit bills, and given the moronic Iain Duncan Smith’s professed concern for the most vulnerable in society, then they really ought to do something about this. I wouldn’t hold your breath.

BREAKING NEWS – PLEASE REPUBLISH!

Earlier this afternoon all staff in the Arts and Education section of Middlesex University received the following email:

 Dear colleagues,

Late on Monday 26 April, the Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities, Ed Esche,
informed staff in Philosophy that the University executive had ‘accepted his
recommendation’ to close all Philosophy programmes: undergraduate, postgraduate and
MPhil/PhD.

Philosophy is the highest research-rated subject in the University. Building on its
grade 5 rating in RAE2001, it was awarded a score of 2.8 on the new RAE scale in
2008, with 65% of its research activity judged ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally
excellent’. It is now widely recognised as one of the most important centres for the
study of modern European philosophy anywhere in the English-speaking world.

The MA programmes in Philosophy at Middlesex have grown in recent years to become
the largest in the UK, with 42 new students admitted in September 2009.

The Dean explained that the decision to terminate recruitment and close the
programmes was ‘simply financial’, and based on the fact that the University
believes that it may be able to generate more revenue if it shifts its resources to
other subjects – from ‘Band D’ to ‘Band C’ students.

As you may know, the University currently expects each academic unit to contribute
55% of its gross income to the central administration. As it stands (by the credit
count method of calculation), Philosophy and Religious Studies contributes 53%,
after the deduction of School admin costs. According to the figures for projected
recruitment from admissions (with Philosophy undergraduate applications up 118% for
2010-11), if programmes had remained open, the contribution from Philosophy and
Religious Studies would have risen to 59% (with Philosophy’s contribution,
considered on its own, at 53%).

In a meeting with Philosophy staff, the Dean acknowledged the excellent research
reputation of Philosophy at Middlesex, but said that it made no ‘measurable’
contribution to the University.

Needless to say, we very much regret this decision to terminate Philosophy, and its
likely consequences for the School and our University and for the teaching of our
subject in the UK.

· Professor Peter Hallward, Programme Leader for the MA programmes in
Philosophy,

· Professor Peter Osborne, Director, Centre for Research in Modern European
Philosophy,

· Dr. Stella Sandford, Director of Programmes, Philosophy

As many readers will know, the philosophy department at Middlesex is one of the most important departments working on continental philosophy in the UK. It has, for a long time, been a centre for people working on critical theory, aesthetics, marxism, psycho-analysis, and radical philosophy. To say that such a department made no measurable contribution to the university is an absolute travesty. The figures speak for themselves, but do not show the great contribution that this department has made to academic life both in London and around the country.

Tonight a man’s life and livelihood hangs in the balance. He has been savagely denigrated in the national press, and the most personal details of his life laid bare. And tonight he is suspended by his employer and looks set to be sacked. His crime? To engage in the wrong kind of sexual role play with consenting adults.

Yesterday the Mirror made a splash. It revealed that Gareth Mead – head of social housing and homelessness at Fulham and Hammersmith council –  had a kink for Nazism . And what’s more he engaged with other men who shared his fetish. Somehow the Mirror managed to get hold of some of the more intimate text messages that he sent, and have thus given us a window into the kind of roleplay in which he engaged.

Except they haven’t quite reported it like that. In yesterday’s big splash Mead was presented not as a nazi fetishist but, in their words, as a “secret nazi”. Though the roleplay context is blindingly obvious – he met the men through a fetish site, not stormfront – the Mirror insisted on taking his Nazi-related intimate pronouncements at face value.

They quote an unnamed moron anonymous source as telling them:

“What he was texting was really too much.

“I could not believe that he had such extreme views while he is earning a lot of council taxpayers’ money paying lip service to multi-cultural political correctness.

“The pictures showed just how far he had gone with the whole thing. He had all the bits to go with the uniform. He even had a gun in one picture laid out on a Nazi flag.”

Seriously, what an idiot. How stupid must you to imagine that what a man does for sexual thrills offers a serious indication of his political opinions. Are we to believe that anybody who chains up their boyfriend or girlfriend without first acting out a court scene believes in imprisonment without due process?. Most ridiculously the Mirror go on to say “in recent years the housing policy has been likened to “ethnic cleansing” for discriminating against poor and ethnic minority tenants”. Obviously its because the man in charge dresses like a Nazi.

Now if Hammersmith and Fulham council were decent employers with a bit of spine they would:

a)  Treat this gossip abut a man’s sexual proclivities with the contempt it deserves.

b) Offer some support to an employee who is probably traumatised by having his most private feelings cruelly paraded in the national press.

But instead they have suspended him pending a disciplinary, and apparently intend to sack him. An anonymous council source told the standard “Once we saw the pictures there was really not much else to say – he was not going to stay in his job much longer after that”. That a council figure should communicate such a foregone conclusion to the press prior to any disciplinary hearing represents, in itself, a disgusting contempt for this mans rights.

So, readers and fellow bloggers, will you join me in a campaign to defend this man?

We could write to the council, make a noise, and much else. As of now I am going start tagging #DefendGarethMead on twitter and ask you to aswell.

Because this does matter. This is about the rights of workers to have a private life, and about the rights of individuals to do what they want with consenting adults – even if it makes a few narrowminded peasants feel uncomfortable.

The irony of this situation is 50 years ago Mead might have been hounded out for being gay. While great progress has been made in this regard, the current government really has really tightened the screws on more marginal sexual minorities. Today a man or woman potentially be imprisoned for possessing adult BDSM sexual imagery.

So I submit to you that this is a battle worth fighting.

Defend Gareth Mead #DefendGarethMead

As I was leaving a poker game at the School of African and Oriental Studies a week ago I saw some bloke removing a flyer from one of the trees outside. It was a manifesto for Clare Solomon’s election campaign for presidency of the University of London Union. Upon my questioning him he said something along the lines of “I wouldn’t want that fucking awful woman imposed on anyone.” I’ll be totally honest, I was rather too stoned to coherently convince him otherwise, but the fact that Clare inspires such hatred amongst right-wing cunts is an absolute credit to her, which is why I am writing this piece to congratulate her on her election last Thursday.

I work in the University of London, and across the board (along with the higher education sector nationally) we are facing massive cuts. In my institution, £1m of staff cuts are expected, and similar is happening elsewhere. With the policy of the current Blairites in charge of NUS to be to condemn strikes by university staff, it is only through the election of more radical student representatives that we will be able to effectively fight what is happening. We need the unity of students, support staff, and academics.

We are consistently told by management that Higher Education is “going through a tough time at the moment.” What they fail to say is that what we are seeing in the HE sector is far more permanent than the recession. For years we have been building up to the end of affordable higher education, the end of education without taking on massive debt, the end of the possibility of people from low-income backgrounds attending university. We are seeing the end of small specialised courses, an increase in the division of intellectual labour when interdisciplinary courses cannot receive proper funding, and in all likelihood the absorption of many smaller specialised centres of study into larger universities to the detriment of their academic work.

It is times like this that we need a properly radical student union movement (to compliment a hopefully radical UCU and Unison.) Clare’s election is a promising sign that students are recognising this, and let us hope that it brings us a year of campaigning, fighting, protesting, and unity. We’ll sure as hell need it. Already we are seeing the beginning of the cross-London struggle with the formation of the London Education Activist Network, which has begun to produce bulletins on ongoing struggles in the universities.

As a little extra I thought I’d just put a little shout out to counterfire, who have recently returned to the left blogosphere. They look to be a good addition to left-wing online literature regardless of the difficult and much-debated situation from which they have been reborn.

Guest post by Ben Lyons

What do Blue Peter and John Bercow have in common? Neither of them pay their interns. With an increasingly competitive employment market, getting a job today often relies less on your interview skills than your ability to intern for free. An article in the New Statesman this week highlights this problem, but even they fail to pay those interns who are working for them.

To support yourself in London for three months costs around £2000. The division between those who can afford to do internships, and those who cannot, is greater than ever. Where students are intelligent, qualified and want to work, but can’t afford to live without pay, we have a problem. Britain will be a worse place in 20 years if a generation of potential journalists, fashion designers, TV producers and politicians are wasting their talent because their parents couldn’t afford to fund them why they got a foot on the ladder.

Each year thousands of students and graduates are turned away from the opportunities they deserve because they are unable to complete internships. This isn’t just unfair, going against the basic principle that work should be paid, but it is a growing cause of inequality. Earlier this year, the former government minister Alan Milburn headed a report to try and find out the major causes of inequality in Britain today. Unpaid internships required a chapter.

A solution lies in the government’s own minimum wage legislation, which must be changed to recognise interns as short-term employees. It is a national scandal that after over ten years of the minimum wage, many young working people do not receive it and in November, the Employment Tribunal sitting in Reading ruled that expenses-only internships are illegal. This isn’t to stop people working in their local Oxfam: the minimum wage legislation explicitly excludes genuine volunteering.

Today’s internship system leads to inequality. That’s why I launched a campaign called Intern Aware. It started as a Facebook group, Interns Must Be Paid The Minimum Wage. We now have 2,000 members and are supported by the NUS, trade unions, several ex-ministers and MPs and have branches at different universities.Visit http://www.internaware.org/ and ask your MP to support the campaign. Asking people to work for free is exploitation. Interns deserve better.

Ben Lyons is the co-director of Intern Aware