Last week Australian National University announced that they will be making all of the staff in their music department reapply for their jobs resulting in cuts of over 10 academic staff (here’s the grim letter they sent to staff). This is on the basis that teaching music properly makes a loss, and is being done under the cover of reorganising the curriculum for the purposes of employability, replacing staff and one to one tuition with fancy eLearning facilities. You can see all of the most horrendous spin on this in a press conference they gave last week:

Marnie Hughes-Warrington, who is the foul managerialist on the right in that video apparently also oversaw 350 redundancies at Monash University too. Anyway, there’s been a brilliant massive backlash, and a few days ago the head of department who is behind these sackings, Adrian Walter, went on indefinite leave due to the pressure. Except it’s just been revealed today that he’s got a new job starting in September at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts – he’s clearly a massive wanker who’s essentially working as a management consultant to implement cuts which will devastate music teaching internationally. Anyway, if you want to support the students and staff fighting these sackings you can sign a petition here: http://www.communityrun.org/petitions/savetheanuschoolofmusic-1 and follow the campaign on facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/AnuSchoolOfMusicSaveYourDegree

It has been quite a weekend for Europe. The bondholders’ settlement has been well and truly shaken. First Hollande deposed Sarkozy. He has entered office on a pledge to amend or reject Fiscal Union, a treaty that will force Eurozone governments to cut spending during any present or future recession. Yet the real tremor came on Sunday when the Greeks – who for 6 crucial months have been ruled by an unelected former banker – were finally given a say on how they ought to be governed.

And thus a long overdue bonfire of Greece’s mainstream parties took place. PASOK, Greece’s main social democratic party, spent its time in office imposing savage cuts in order that the country could continue to service its debts to French and German bondholders. On Sunday they were all but wiped out. Their share of the vote dropped from 42% to 14%, and they were beaten into 3rd place by the Coalition of the Radical Left. Like PASOK, Greece’s major Conservative party had pledged to stick to the terms of the European imposed austerity plan. And they too saw their share of the vote tumble from 33.5% to 19%.

The real winners were the three big parties of the radical left who been them took a third of the vote. Meanwhile, an absolute majority of seats has been won by groups who, in opposition to the mainstream parties, pledged to reject the bailout-austerity package – a system under which Greece continues to cut public spending to the bone, in order to keep the debt payments flowing to Europe’s banks, and in return is allowed to borrow just enough to keep on functioning.

Of course, neither Angela Merkel , nor her allies in the EU and the ECB, are troubled by such trifling matters as the results of elections. After all, it is German bankers who, first and foremost, stand to lose if the countries of Southern Europe begin to unilaterally repudiate their evidently unpayable debts. It took less than 24 hours for Europe’s new Holy Roman Empress to come out and tell Greece to bloody well carry on as before.

Needless to say, she has been quickly backed by Europe. Pia Ahrenkilde, spokeswoman for the unelected European Commission said that she “hopes and expects that the future government of Greece will respect the engagement that Greece has entered into” with regard to the bailout-austerity package.

Now of course, in the generality of human life, there is some virtue in people sticking to what they agree. But the pertinent question is “what was agreed and by whom?”. Because so far the people of Greece have not had the chance to agree to anything. When the former PASOK PM Papandreou proposed that Greeks be given the the opportunity to agree to the bailout-austerity system, by means of a referundum, Merkel and her Euro allies wasted no time in hounding him out of office and replacing him with Papademos – an former official of the European Central Bank, who had never stood for public office. And for the past 6 months it has it been he who, with no popular mandate, has negotiated Greece’s austerity plan vis-a-vis the EU and the IMF.

Just who on earth do these people think they are? How dare Pia Ahrenkilde – elected by nobody – tell Greece to ignore the fact that its voters chose to shatter the country’s political establishment, and that they did so precisely over the question of the EU/IMF bailout. It’s democracy versus the bondholders, and the EU establishment all know who’s side they are on.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m launching a new conference on tax justice in London this Wednesday through International Tax Review magazine, so here’s one final shameless plug and an invitation to come and debate an issue which, I think, is one of the most important facing the world today.   

It’s free to attend if you’re an activist or with an NGO and you’ll hear from a whole host of great speakers including former Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short, and anti-poverty activist Richard Murphy. I would urge you to come and make your voice heard. Tax transparency is one of the biggest issues facing the developing world right now, and indeed our own public services as UK Uncut activists seeking to ensure multinational corporations pay their fair share of tax have shown.

Development agencies such as Christian Aid and ActionAid, which have long argued that poor countries lose more through tax avoidance than they receive in aid, are pushing for country-by-country reporting, a standard which is soon to become a reality for companies in the extractive industries. The NGOs argue that tax is not simply a legal issue, it is a moral one, and it is not enough that taxpayers remain within the letter of the law, rather they must adhere to its spirit. Most multinationals remain sceptical about country-by-country reporting, but where it was once a niche issue demanded only by hardened activists calling in from the cold, now it is something companies cannot afford to ignore.

Check out the full programme and register here.

It emerged today that Greece will hold snap elections less than 4 weeks from now. An official announcement will be made tomorrow. Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal have confirmation from an unnamed government official that the poll will take place on May the 6th.

The radical left, meanwhile, have surged forward in the polls. According to recent opinion polls, three parties to the left of PASOK (the main social democratic party) will get 30-40% of the vote between them. The Coalition of The Radical left – a kind of Greek version of the Socialist Alliance – are on 10-12%, while the newly formed Democratic Left have been gaining up to 16% of the prospective vote. Meanwhile the Communist Party having been polling significantly above the 7.5% they gained in the last election.

In many ways this is no great surprise. PASOK united with the Conservatives to back the bailiff regime of Papademos – an EU imposed technocrat whose only real objective has been to force through austerity at any cost. Last week a pensioner sent shockwaves through Greece when he shot himself outside the parliament. His suicide note called on Greece’s youinger generation to rise up and hang the treacherous political class “as the Italians hanged Mussolini.”

With Greece electing its deputies through a PR system, the next parliament could well be exciting and indeed very radical. And we may see a head on clash between Greece’s political institutions and the EU, hich so far has proved determined – above all else – to make sure that Greek interest payments keep flowing into the coffers of French and German banks.

And without a doubt, this is part of a general European phenomenon. Jean Luc Melenchon is taking the political establishment by surprise in France. In Ireland Sinn Fein nearly trebbled their representation, while the Socialist Party gained their first seats. With living standards being squeezed across the continent for the beneift of bondholders, and after decade in which mainstream Social Democratic parties have very much embraced Neo-Liberal economics, people are finally, and understandably looking elsewhere.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

Things can quickly get out of hand. It started with questions being asked about how much tax Mr Livingstone actually paid. Boris’ tax arrangements were inevitably brought into the argument. And then came Mr Osborne, who has indicated that the shadow cabinet will happily release all of their tax returns – a move that would, by necessity, be reciprocated by the Labour front bench.

And thus we have the next great upsurge of triviality on our hands. Precious column inches will be devoted to who earned what, and how much tax they paid on what income. We might even hear that some of them are “out of touch” – a cliche that has been worn to within a cubic milimetre of nothingness.

Frankly, I couldn’t care less. Even the current crop of multi-millionaire front bench Tories are not so wealthy that their tax arrangements materially affect the nation’s finances. If it turned out that Francis Maude arranged with the HMRC to pay his tax bill in monopoly money, the whole exercise would still be of questionable political importance.

If this was a one-off distraction then it wouldn’t matter. But these fundamentally pointless character tests are quickly becoming the very stuff of politics. Historians will look back upon our generation and note that just when our economy was coming apart at the seems, and millions were being thrown on the scrapheap, the media was obsessing over who built a moat at public expense, and whether or not a few hundred grand ended up in the wrong pockets.

Before expenses, it was cash for peerages – as though any of the life peers, paying or non-paying, actually deserve to be voting on our laws. In the future, I imagine, politicians will begin publishing their school reports, so as to demonstrate that they never stuck chewing gum to the bottom of their desks during their adolescence. And somewhere in between the very many discussions about whether individual members of the political class are good or naughty, we might, very occasionally get the opportunity to ask what on earth politicians intend to do about the fact that 3 million of our citizens are without work.

The rise and rise of scandal mongering can only be explained in part by the greater intensity of media scrutiny. A far more important factor is the general depolitisation of politics. These days, her majesty’s official opposition only ever seems to want to talk about the “competence” of the governing parties. This was evident in Labour’s pathetic response to the government’s deeply unpopular attempts to radically expand the govenrment’s power to snoop. Yvette Cooper meandered on about the government’s “incompetence”, and its need to “get a grip”, while leaving us none the wiser with regard to what Labour actually believed the policy on internet-snooping ought to be. Likewise, when David Cameron temporarily scuppered the Fiscal Union treaty, Ed Miliband offered us no clue as to what he thought about the great issues at stake – namely fiscal union and financial regulation – but did, of course, manage to tell us that David had handled the diplomacy very badly.

The focus on such matters as politicians’ tax returns both reflects and sustain the current vacuous, non-political parliamentary culture. These upsurges of interest in the personal conduct of ministers and MPs draw attention away from the real issues for which political leaders ought to be accountable. And they enable the various front benches to do battle with one another without having to go to the trouble of establishing real and important areas of disagreement.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

Ed Miliband accuses the Tories of playing politics with the tanker drivers’ strike. The Mail accuses Miliband of playing politics with the Olympics, because of the party’s funding by the unions (IIIE has already covered the ham-fisted idiocy that is the Tories’ attempts to paint the unions as undemocratic). Guardian commenters (again, let’s not go there) accuse Fiachra Gibbons of playing politics by not respecting the sheer tragedy of the Toulouse shootings; the same week, Nick Cohen in the Observer tells us to ‘not play politics with murder’. This is nothing new, really, but it seems to have become a lot more common lately.

What’s the trouble with this? Surely it’s reasonable to suggest that we shouldn’t derive political capital from tragedy? Why can’t we deal with a crisis without making it about gains for our poll ratings? These arguments appear commonsensical, but it doesn’t exactly work like that. There are two sides to the claim that someone is playing politics: One is to do with the landscape of institutional politics in this country, while the other has wider ideological implications.

It’s in the nature of our short news cycle, and our confrontational parliament with its thick, unimaginative front benches, that point-scoring and soundbites become the main form of political ‘debate’. Mostly when people are accused of playing politics, point-scoring is what they’re doing. As much as I dislike his tendentious style, I think Nick Cohen is genuinely concerned with the dangers of these tactics in responses to situations like the Toulouse shootings.

When the accusation is made by those in power against less powerful groups the trouble starts. I’m thinking of Gove versus ‘Trot’ school governors, for example. If we say that taking a politically informed stance is playing politics, we imply that there is a really existing neutral space in which events can be objectively observed and managed in a way that transcends politics. This is not the case. This argument is only ever invoked to support a deeply ideological position – one to do with the exclusion of certain events, problems, or forms of life from the arena of political thought or action – or more precisely, to remove them from the ambit of actors with politics in opposition to yours.

I can see where some of those who invoke the idea of ‘playing politics’ as critique are coming from – it’s infuriating to see someone as inept as George Osborne or Francis Maud flailing around to employ a situation to their advantage, and it’s infuriating to see how myopic parliament can be when it comes to dealing with sacred cows like the austerity drive. But the issue here isn’t that they’re politicising a neutral situation by, for example, using the strikes as a stick to beat the Labour party. It’s not even a problem that their position is ideological. The problem is their ideology. The situation is always already politicised, and the Tories (or Labour or the Lib Dems, why not) are on the wrong side when they assert the neutrality of the event.

That’s how these acts of ‘play’ should be dealt with: by asserting the politicised nature of the event, and bringing the discourse into that arena. I don’t care if you want to have a debate about what’s political and what’s not, I’ll happily argue with you. Just don’t deal with point-scoring by suggesting we should depoliticise things and people.

The cash for access scandal is neither exciting nor particularly concerning. Representatives of big business do not need to endure dinners with David and Samantha in order to exercise undue influence over government policy. More worrying is that the revelations have, once again, given rise to demands for the state to fund political parties, so as to diminish the “big donor culture. Such a reform would ossify politics  - institutionalising even more the dominance of the established parties. Insofar as party elites could depend state subsidies, they would become even more insulated from any need to engage with their grassroots, and what is left of inner party democracy would remain in tatters. Meanwhile  voluntary political assocations would, in effect be turned into quangos.

Elevating parties above society.

In making the case for state funding in yesterday’s Independent, Mary Ann Sieghart argued that the power of unions over labour would be diminished and that the party would thus become more “independent”. When it comes to political parties, “independence” is not always a virtue. It is quite reasonable to object to the excessive party-political influence enjoyed by those who have money to splash. It is however, distinctly whiggish, to imagine that the ideal political party is one that is elevated above the fray of social interests. There is nothing untoward about trade unions – that is to say, civil society organisations that represent the interests of millions – exercising influence within political parties. The problem with state funding is that it would make party elites all too “independent”. The  huge financial, and hence institutional, power enjoyed by Labour’s leadership would no longer depend, in any sense, upon its capacity to generate active political support, or upon maintaining a relationship with its social and political base.

Rescuing the Liberals.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the Lib Dems have long been the biggest advocates of state funding. Clegg, after all, considers the influence of  all “vested interests” – whether they are investment bankers, or the elected leaders of millions of working people – to be equally corrupting. Meanwhile, due to its lack of any solid social base, his party has always had an interest in the state coming in and “levelling the playing field”. It is worth pointing out that it was not ever thus. Up until the beginning of the 20th century the Liberals enjoyed the support of key trade union organisations. The powerful miners union, for example, only moved over to Labour in 1909. Now the Liberals would like the state to come in an neutralise the political decisions made by Britain’s trade unions, and to make up for the parties historic failure to maintain the allegiance of organised labour. Yet it is absolutely right and proper that the political decisions made by mass democratic organisations should be capable of advantaging one party over an another.

Where public money goes, demands for regulation follow.

While Labour might become more indpendent from the unions, state-funding would almost certainly make all political parties less independent from the state. There is a reason that the BBC gets far more browbeaten than the rest of the press: namely that were public money goes, demands for regulation invariably follow. Parties getting taxpayer cash would, to varying degrees, be seen as public property.  There would certainly be an outcry the first time an “extreme” party got its hands on public cash. And what if suspicions of nepotism arose? What if it was suspected that a party leader was using “public money” to put his friends and family on the party pay role? Would the state then be asked to intervene in a party’s internal appointments. For sure, I could be accused of making a “slippery slope” argument. Yet it is entirely reasonable to anticipate the political debates that will arise, once society as a whole feels it has a legitimate stake in every political party going.

However awful the current big donor culture is, our democracy would not be made healthier by turning established political parties into quangos. The fairly tight spending electoral spending limits ought to ensure that parties are far less reliant on rich individuals than is currently the case. A British elections costs less than a hundredth of an election over the channel. Big donors have become prominent because they fill a vacuum: if Britain’s established parties were not so bloody moribund – if they were capable of generating a level of political support that was in any way proportionate to the dominance they  enjoy – they would be far more capable of financing themselves without recourse to the super rich. It is this democratic vacuum that needs to be addressed – and this is a problem that would be made worse, not better, by subventions from the state.

——-

I would also highly recommend Paul Cotterill’s take on all of this over at Though Cowards Flinch.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

Seven million people watched the first episode of the new series of The Apprentice, which screened this week on the BBC. This means that seven million people should have gained a rather interesting insight into the economy, and the government’s plan for recovery. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to have happened so I thought I’d spell it out. The government tells us time and again that the route to recovery is through enterprise. By this they mostly seem to mean start-up firms, funded by venture capitalists. You get the idea from the Department of Business, Industry and Skills’ shiny new website “Business In You”. Clearly what the Government want the huge unemployed populace to believe is that the way out of the poverty of unemployment is to become an entrepreneur. What is imagined by enterprise, here, is something akin to a magic hat. And he who possesses the magic hat can pull endless value out of it, regardless of the rest of the economy. The magic hat will solve your poverty so long as you believe in it.

The problem is that believing in it isn’t so easy, and it is here that we turn to The Apprentice. For those who haven’t seen the programme, it involves 16 hard-headed, hard-faced business people, all “the best”, all wearing suits so sharp you could slit your wrists on them (oh how much I wish I could after an hour of this dismal television.) These people are apparently experts in the production of profit. They know everything anyone can know about producing and selling. These hard-faced businessmen and -women are split into two teams and are set tasks in enterprise by Sir Alan Sugar. Whichever team makes the most profit, wins.

Sir Alan Sugar: Business Twat

So in the first episode, the two teams were charged with starting a print business, in which they were given all the machines necessary for printing on to bags and tshirts, and then had to sell their products on the street. The two teams, with ridiculous corporate names Phoenix and Sterling, worked for two days and managed to make profit as follows:

Sterling: £214.80

Phoenix: £616.20

It may be worth getting out a calculator and having a think about what this actually means. Together, 16 highly talented people, with all of the experience in the world, made a total profit of £831. Now, assuming on each day of the two-day task each team member works for 8 hours (this is a generous estimate given that the show clearly shows them working for about 12 hours on the first day), this gives a total man-hours of 256. It is significant that under the conditions of The Apprentice, the contestants aren’t paid, but let’s look at what happens when we convert this profit into wages: each team member, each highly skilled business person, was making a totally huge £3.25 an hour. I am not a businessman, but even I can see that this doesn’t look like a great investment or a good use of one’s time.

£3.25 an hour is just over half of the minimum wage (which currently stands at £6.08 an hour), and converts into a wonderful annual salary of £6760 a year, which is significantly less than the minimum the government believes people need to live on, based on the rates of Jobseekers’ Allowance added to Housing Benefit. And indeed, all of these “highly skilled” business people would be eligible for Working Tax Credits of well over £2000 a year, just to keep them alive. Meanwhile, Sir Alan Sugar was in The Sun last week saying that the government ought to cut the benefits system. How strange that he wants this when he encourages business practices, which, without a benefits system, would lead people to total destitution.

But the story is worse than that: all sorts of help is given to the businesses in The Apprentice: they don’t pay rent on warehouses or on market stalls, they don’t buy any machinery, and liquidity with which they start is interest-free. And also we’ve made the assumption that all profit can become wages. This may, at a stretch be the case if you are running a business alone, but with an investor involved (as the government encourages), wages must be calculated as an added cost and not just as the profit. And in fact even for a one-person business, by the end of the challenge all the free liquidity has been used up, and some profit will be needed to reinvest and buy new stock. Adding in these costs, it becomes obvious that even for the “experts”, entrepreneurship is probably not profitable, and almost certainly will not pay you a wage.

Seven million people watched the programme. Seven million people watched all of these highly qualified people making piss-poor profits. What does it take for seven million people to put two and two together, and realise that the government’s deification of enterprise is a farce. Only enterprise, we are told, will deliver us, and surely we know already that it will deliver us only into poverty.

Conservative and Liberal Democrat ministers have “banged” the table at a cabinet meeting to mark the impending passing of the death warrant on the needy, elderly, and disabled into law, Downing Street has said.

The Death to the Poor Bill, for England, has had a difficult passage through Parliament but was finally passed by the House of Lords on Monday.

The government hopes it will now enter law by Easter.

A Downing Street spokesman said “cross-party” celebrations had taken place.

But Labour have forced a Commons debate on Tuesday on whether MPs can consider planned executions for a final time before an assessment of the potential risks to the victims is published.

Afterwards, MPs will consider the amendments to the bill agreed by the Lords on Tuesday.

The legislation would abolish life and indeed any hope of surviving illnesses and give much greater control over the administration of death to those who may profit from it.

The bill has been the subject of a prolonged battle over the past year – with professional bodies representing doctors, nurses and other NHS workers resisting murder of the public.

There has also been criticism from several leading Liberal Democrats of Conservative Death Secretary Andrew Lansley’s plans.

But the prime minister’s spokesman said there had been “cross-party banging” of the table at cabinet to mark the imminent Royal Assent for the legislation.

He added that it would become law before the Easter Recess, which starts next Tuesday, commenting “Easter, the traditional time for the celebration of death, seems a fitting moment to implement this new law.”

But unions said they would not relent in their opposition to the bill once it becomes law.

“We will continue to campaign hard to try and mitigate the worst excesses of this bill,” said Unison general secretary Dave Prentis, adding that ministers were ignoring the “groundswell of opposition” to the proposals.

“Patients will have a two-tier health service and how much they earn will determine whether they are allowed to live or die.”

Members of Unison, which represents more than a million public sector workers, held a minute’s silence outside Parliament in protest at the changes.

This is a guest post by Amy Kavanagh. You can follow her on twitter at twitter.com/BlondeHistorian.

One of the classic responses I get from people when I tell them I am disabled is; ‘oh but you’d never know to look at you’. This is usually meant as a compliment. Yet I believe this twisted praise reveals the relationship between the perception of disability and the impact of that perception on the lived experience.

I was born with a condition called nystagmus. This means I am visually impaired. I am very short sighted, I have limited peripheral vision, compromised balance and very poor depth perception.[1] My vision is continually variable and it can go from my standard limited sight to total blindness as a result of environmental factors like stress, tiredness, heightened emotion (including arousal, always amusing), and substances like caffeine or alcohol. I have been registered as partially sighted since the age of twelve.

I was brought up to regard my disability as a challenge to overcome and not an excuse for a dependent lifestyle. I went to a mainstream private school and, at the age of 22,  I am now doing a PhD at King’s College London. I live a high quality and ‘normal’ lifestyle the majority of the time.

I receive the lowest band of Disability Living Allowance. I get £19.55 a week for mobility reasons. ‘Individuals are entitled to the lower rate mobility component if they are so severely mentally or physically disabled that they cannot walk outdoors on an unfamiliar route without guidance or supervision from another person most of the time.’[2]

While I am relatively independent if I go to a new place somebody else has to show me to the toilet and generally explain the layout of the area. So I don’t crash into the Gents and can find my way back to where I was. I frequently fall over on unfamiliar routes if unassisted. I cannot judge the distance of a car speeding towards a pedestrian crossing. Sometimes I can’t use a knife to prepare a meal or monitor a boiling pan. I do not claim the DLA care portion of the benefit, while my partner does act as an informal carer on my bad days my lifestyle does not depend on him. The carer portion of the benefit is also £19.55 a week.

‘Individuals are entitled to the lowest rate care component if they are so severely disabled that they:

• require another person to give them attention in connection with their bodily functions for a significant portion of the day during a single period or a number of periods; or
• cannot prepare a cooked main meal for themselves provided they have all the ingredients and are aged 16 or over’

My disability is variable and this is the case with most individuals. Sometimes I have to lie down or rest in a safe quiet place until my vision improves. Sometimes I cannot complete my work, use the tube or recognise my friends. Under the Personal Independent Payment scheme I will be assessed by a panel for a few minutes in order to determine whether I will continue to be entitled to receive my £19.55. They will see a snapshot of my life.

David Cameron wants to cut the lower level of DLA under the Personal Independent Payments scheme. This lowest band covers many individuals who have mental impairments or long term illness. How independent is a person who needs mobility assistant occasionally or needs a meal preparing for them occasionally?

A small amount of money which enables people to work and access carer resources will be taken away based on the opinion that many disabled people generally cope. People like me will be forced to claim more benefits when they are unable to travel to work or lose the carer who helped them with meals. This will further create a culture which will force people into dependent lifestyles.

The fact I have overcome so many aspects of my disability and do live a relatively ‘normal’ life should not take way from the point that I was born less able than others. I am socially, economically and physically disadvantaged by being visually impaired. There are many people who have a similar condition to myself and claim more financial support because they have not had the opportunities or encouragement that I have had to overcome my disadvantages. I do not absolutely financially depend on my £84 a month as many do, but it certainly helps, and may one day be vital. Let’s face it in this current climate, who’s going to give a job to an academic that occasionally goes blind? I’m over qualifying myself just to prove I can work to a government and a society which increasingly sees people like me as a drain on the economy.

The worse thing about the Personal Independence Payment Scheme is that I will have to stand in front of a group of professionals, prove myself valid and beg for money that I have been rightfully entitled to for ten years. I ask, what is independent about that?

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net