Dispersal order notice

From the Thurrock Gazette:

Dispersal order notice

POLICE are imposing a dispersal order covering Purfleet Road, east of London Road, Purfleet into the High Street, Aveley along Stifford Road to the junction of B1335 (Aveley-By-Pass).

It will come into force on Monday July 14.

If an individual knowingly contravenes such a direction given to him/her, commits an offence under section 32(2) of the Anti social behaviour act 2003 they may be arrested.

People convicted of contravening the order can be fined and/or receive a term of three months imprisonment.

http://www.thurrockgazette.co.uk/news/localnews/display.var.2384321.0.dispersal_order_notice.php

The problem is one that affects many areas of Thurrock. The bitter experience provided by the ’solution’ of dispersal orders is that they merely shift the problem from one area to another. That is assuming there are enough police on the ground to enforce the dispersal order in the first place.

Only a sustained presence by police officers on regular beat patrols is going to start to solve the problem. Firstly, there is the deterrent effect. Secondly, a presence on the streets enables the police to build up a working relationship with the community they are serving. This will help in identifying potential troublemakers, enabling them to apply pressure to said individuals - and their parents - to start behaving or face the consequences.

Officialdom sees these parents as victims in need of help and counselling. Well, it doesn’t work does it? The parents who allow their kids to run riot are scabbing on their own community. Their selfish, uncaring attitude impacts the lives of the decent, law abiding majority. Like any scabs, these parents and their feral offspring deserve to be shunned by their community. Refuse to serve them in shops and pubs, isolate them so they clearly get the message people are sick of their selfish, anti-social attitudes and that the only choices they have are to get their act together or get out. Not at all PC but tactics like this have been tried and do work if people stand together.

‘Society is indeed broken’—and we all know who broke it

From the IWCA national website:

An IWCA take on New Labour’s latest law and order gimmick.

When submerged under a veritable deluge of ideologically-driven ‘reforms’, it takes something especially imbecilic to provoke a double-take. Louise Casey, the mouthy former head of the Government’s ‘Respect task force’, is set to spearhead the latest New Labour gimmick on law ’n order. Among the 20 proposals that fade from the merely banal to the truly asinine here are three that provoke a modicum of analysis.

Anonymous evidence

Elderly and disabled crime victims – as well as people at risk of reprisals— should be allowed to give evidence in court from behind screens. Ministers are sympathetic to the idea, which already happens routinely in cases involving sex offences and gangs.

Fine, in one way, except that ‘anonymous evidence’ does not allow the defence to cross-examine witnessess or indeed raise questions as to any previous relationship the accused might have had with the accuser that might have lead them to offer evidence (not to mention the possibility of witnesses being coerced as a result of a police vendetta) against the accused in the first place.

Internet crime maps

Online maps with crimes plotted on them to be published every month so people can see how dangerous their area is and how well the police are doing. Gordon Brown has backed the move in principle, but areas could be stigmatised if the maps are street-by-street.

The truth is many working class areas are already operationally stigmatised. ‘Control and contain’, whereby crime in one area is ignored by the police the better to protect a ‘nicer’ middle class area nearby, is commonplace. Online maps would merely give what is custom and practice an air of routine formality.

Youth clubs

Friday-night youth clubs to be set up in 50 of the most deprived areas.

Youth clubs for the the 50 most deprived areas? There are a number of delirious aspects involved in the proposition. Ever notice how New Labour ministers and the media are happy to talk blithely about ‘deprived communities’ without any mention to how they came to be ‘deprived’ in the first place? In the absence of any such analysis it takes a remarkable level of political remove to imagine that thirty years of the deliberate stripping out of the grassroots infrastructure in working class neighbourhoods can be remedied by organising ‘a youth club on Friday nights’. What about the other nights? Or ‘deprived area’ number 51? Or indeed 151?

The media who should be asking the serious questions don’t do so. The Independent’s response, for example, was almost unbelievable. ‘Funding for youth services is already being boosted with poorer communities targeted. But should high-crime areas be rewarded?’ it asks. It is true that poorer communties are indeed being targeted and not in the benign way The Independent likes to pretend. But more than that, as even government statistics demonstrate, it is self-evidently working class people in the high crime areas that are most likely to be the victims of crime. Why punish the community further? But as far as The Independent is concerned—Why not?

Former Tory leader Ian Duncan-Smith blathers on about ‘a broken society’ in a similar way. But rival parties never ever challenge him on who broke it. That is because the beginnings of a solution are staring them all in the face. But why bother going to the root of the problem (the callous and systematic destruction of a youth club infrastructure and the selling-off of school playing fields, and so on) when under existing neo-liberal orthodoxy the unthinking dribblings in the Casey formula work just as well?

Blair/Brown ‘pretend society’ exposed

From the IWCA national website:

£35bn debts to avoid being seen to be working class.

It all seems rather silly now, but it was not so long ago that many on the liberal left fully expected the Gordon Brown coronation to deliver a significant change of political direction rather than a mere, though welcome, change of style.

It was always a fantasy, of course, and Brown did not waste much time in disillusioning them. But what was the basis for the wishful thinking in the first place? In part it can be put down to Brown seeking to out-manoeuvre Blair with a series of ‘dog-whistles’ to the party faithful. These supposed ‘values’ were in turn given undue credibility as a result of a febrile media constantly delivering bulletins on the teeth-bared battle behind the scenes between the so-called Blairities and Brownities for control of the party, and, as too many allowed themselves to think, for the soul of it. After all, if the intense internecine warfare was not evidence of a deep ideological divide, what was it about? After the wretched dithering over the autumn election, the fêting of Thatcher, the delay in nationalising Northern Rock, the 10p debacle and much more, culminating in the tactics leading up to the Crewe & Nantwitch by-election, the mystery may have been resolved. New Labour’s strategy at Crewe is what caused the penny to drop.

First of all, here was a party that once grandly announced that it had ‘no problem with people getting filthy rich’ and had spent a decade and half of bowing at the altar of privilege now attempting to dupe voters by playing the class card. More than anything it is the little details that suggest the gig is up. For example it has been reported that voters had been woken up at 4am by callers pretending to be Tory canvassers. And four-by-four vehicles festooned with blue balloons according to an article in The Independent have been careering through council estates – more pretend Tory canvassers. Next minute they’re pointing the finger at the Tories for being soft on immigrants. A chorus of ‘You don’t know what you’re doing!’ would have mocked these clunking inconsistencies in the New Labour message in any football ground in the country. The sheer desperation, panic and by-any-means-necessary approach is not, however, matched by the ruthlessness characteristic of the Blair regime in terms of delivery. Instead, there is an absurdly amateur element that would have had Blair apparatchiks recoiling in horror. Which raises an interesting question. If, as is now almost universally accepted, the Brown v Blair tug of war never was ideologically based, why then were there ‘Brownites’ at all? What were they for? It is when you check out the Brown Cabinet, jam-packed as it is with sycophantic time-servers who could never have hoped to have made the cut in the Blair era, that it starts to make sense. There never was any genuine Brownite faction devoted either to leader or cause at all. What there was were individuals who, aware of the Blair-Brown pact, hitched themselves to Brown’s bandwagon out of nothing more than grinding personal ambition matched deep down with a cold-eyed estimate of their true abilities. In short, sub-prime ‘Blairites’ to a man/woman—and they all know it.

One senior Labour MP quoted in the London Evening Standard said, on the disastrous Crewe Nantwitch by-election campaign, “It has been juvenile and counter-productive. And if they think this has played badly in the North of England, that’s nothing to the way it looks to people in the South and London who thought class warfare was a thing of the past. Down here people do not hate those who are better off—they aspire to join them.”

Many indeed may well ‘aspire’ but jumping classes is an altogether different matter, as a recent survey shows. Millions of Britons are getting into debt to finance a lifestyle beyond their means simply because they want to give the appearance of being middle class.

An astonishing 15 million people have racked up debts of £35billion des­pite their income being below the national average, the survey found.

Six million wannabe middle class households bring in less than £15,000 a year and many rely on credit cards and bank loans to fund their spending.

The average income for working class people is £23,000 and £33,000 for the middle class.

But rent and mortgage payments are nearly the same at £366 for a working class household compared with £334 for the middle classes.

Those considered to be in the ‘upper middle class’ were found to earn more, with average earnings of almost £52,000 a year.

Richard Mason, director of moneysupermarket.com, which carried out the research, said: ‘It’s worrying to see that so many people are spending and borrowing beyond their means to try to keep up with the lifestyles of others.’

Rather optimistically, personal finance expert Sue Hayward said that it all showed ‘the class divide was shrinking’. Actually what it shows is that together with the ever-expanding wealth divide between rich and poor, the politically more significant class divide between working and middle classes is also keeping pace. More significant because in the real world, contrary to myth, it is the working class, not the middle class, that is really expanding. But if Ms Hayward is confused it is understandable. With his slogan ‘we’re all middle class now’ Blair seemed to promise a meritocracy. But as repeated surveys show, neo-liberalism did not and indeed could not deliver. Social mobility stalled or went in to reverse. So what we have instead is not a society based on solid achievement but on the appearance of achievement; a facsimile of a true meritocracy. And while ‘pretend canvassers’ might be risible, a pretend society, with all the attendant psychoses, will in the long run be the real Blair/Brown legacy that will prove altogether more damning.

Treated like second class citizens…

This letter from a local resident who has to walk to work in a major new warehouse development in Purfleet along an unlit main road with no adequate lighting is just one example of the contempt working people in Thurrock seem to be held in by our lords and masters:
http://www.thurrockgazette.co.uk/news/letters/display.var.2246505.0.concern_over_bypass_walking_hazard.php

While new employment opportunities are welcome, they are being put in with no regard to providing a well planned infrastructure to support them. What the planners have done in this case is make the lazy assumption that everyone will travel to and from this warehouse development by car. The consequence is that they have failed to look at the surrounding infrastructure to ensure that it caters for all modes of transport – walking and cycling as well as driving.

We’ve got news for the planners - we don’t all drive cars! Given the continuing downward pressure on wages, some of us wishing to keep our bank accounts in the black for at least some of the month have decided that the expense of running a car is one expense too many and have opted to use other, less expensive modes of transport such as walking and cycling. This isn’t a lifestyle choice because we wish to go green – a glance at the bank balance means there simply isn’t any other option for a growing number of working people who are having to cut back their expenditure.

But when we come to exercise this option, thinking walking to work is a simple matter of putting one foot in front of the other and heading in the right direction, we find that hey presto, there is no pavement and you are obliged to walk along a muddy grass verge or out on a hard shoulder! As this is a large scale development, we presume the Thurrock Thames Gateway Development Corporation (TTGDC) have had some involvement in its approval. Yet they don’t seem to have bothered to look at the transport infrastructure to see if it will cater for those of us who simply cannot afford the expense of running a car and have to walk or ride a bicycle to and from work. This is just another example of why people in Thurrock don’t trust the TTGDC when they can’t even get the basics right with the infrastructure needed to support all of the new development going on in the borough.

Given that warehouses tend to be 24/7 style operations with shifts starting and ending at anti-social hours, not having a pavement or any effective lighting on the route into a major employment zone has got to be a breach of health and safety regulations. Working anti-social shifts is bad enough but when you have to risk injury or worse because you are forced to walk along a hard shoulder, to put it bluntly, it shows a callous disregard for safety from a planning authority that is completely out of touch with the reality of people’s lives and circumstances.

Brown’s folly

From the IWCA national website:

Satirist Rory Bremner put it best. Describing Gordon Brown he said; “It’s like having an uncle who’s been building something in the shed at the bottom of the garden for the past ten years. You look through the window and there’s nothing there.”

Former MP and minister Brian Wilson compares him to Donald Crowhurst. Crowhurst was the yachtsman who was so desperate to win the round-the-world yacht race in 1969 that he reported false positions and faked his log book while sailing around the Atlantic. It was only when it looked like he was going to win that the extent of the deception was exposed. Brown’s problem is slightly different.

It has only been since it began to look like he might not win that the serious scrutiny has begun. Inevitably there is confusion and muddle. What does he stand for? Will the real Gordon Brown stand up? and so forth. To a large extent the fog is a creation of his inquisitors.

When his coronation looked imminent there was a vested interest, on both left and right, to have Brown packaged as a loyal son of Old Labour, more true to the party’s traditions than Blair. Cameron was happy enough to go along with the pretence out of self interest, and it proved equally valuable in soothing the brows of the liberal middle class left.

All eye-wash of course. Brown was, after all, one of the principal architects of New Labour. Increasingly the New Labour project is being widely accepted for what it was from the outset: an aggresively right-wing, neo-liberal undertaking. And, equally important, there is no philosophic or economic alternative on offer from either the Tories or Lib Dems.

Nevertheless many, more in sorrow than anger, continue to claim that it is ‘the disjunction between values and actions that is so damaging for Brown’. But that can hardly be the case, as New Labour is arguably the most consistent of governments in terms of policy. At all levels there is disillusionment and disaffection with the Brown goverment.

But his critics are hardly any more coherent. One Labour minister quoted in the Guardian claims; “We’ve created an ideological vacuum. All major political parties have abandoned ideology. The Tories have done the same; they’ve abandoned tax cuts. Then, when Brown came in and talked about his moral compass, you thought ideology might be coming back. But it wasn’t. His actions don’t fit his words - inheritance tax, ending the 10p rate. So you can’t argue, this is what we stand for.”

But of course there is no ideological vacuum. What we have instead is ideological convergence. An entirely different beast altogether. Nor is it true that expressing concern about inheritance tax and at the same time doubling the 10p income tax rate ‘cannot be argued for’. It can, in the City or the Tory shires. How it goes down in the former Labour heartlands is another matter.

Brown presided over a boom based on cheap credit and mega City bonuses, while inflicting the giant mortgage on the nation that is the private finance initiative (PFI). His final budget snatched money from the working poor purely in order to score a quick hit against the Tories, but he never countenanced bringing in higher taxes at the top.

His government found billions to bail out Northern Rock, but refused to find the £40m to refund the struggling families who had saved for Christmas clubs through Farepak. In addition he is pushing ID cards and detention without trial, while his government has given councils and 318 other bodies unprecedented powers to spy on citizens suspected of the most minor offences.

Even his introduction of tax credits to help working families has been disingenuous, because the process of claiming them has deliberately been made so bureaucratic, punitive, intrusive and censorious that many of those otherwise entitled refuse to jump the hoops. Those who do go through it often end up in debt, and dealing with an autocratic and vexatious Revenue and Customs.

Recently it has emerged that 160,000 repayment demands made between 2003 and 2005 may have been illegal and will have either to be abandoned or, where the money has already been clawed back, repaid. Another 90,000 more recent cases are also to be reviewed.

According to a whistleblower, Revenue & Customs have been routinely breaking Section 18 of the Tax Credit Act 2002 by reopening tax credit awards without notification, even though there is no evidence of fraud. Almost laughably, it is here, of course, the 5 million workers damaged by the ending of the 10p rate are recommended to go, cap in hand, by New Labour.

Which goes to the heart of the whole affair. If Brown as Chancellor really wanted to help the seriously low paid in the first place, the simplest way would be to rid them of the obligation of paying tax altogether. But that wouldn’t do as it would be seen to bestow on them a civic right (who knows what they might feel entitled to as a follow-up?).

Far better to accept the bouquets from a credulous liberal left at the same time as making sure that those applying for tax credits understand that as far as the government and its snooty agents are concerned, it’s nothing more than a handout, akin to leaving a basket of leftovers on the back porch for the help after the feast. Tax credits carry all the hallmarks of a privilege granted. And as with all such gifts, if it can be given, it can also be - as millions will soon find to their dismay - taken away.

Like any neo-liberal government, New Labour is determined to end - only for those beneath a certain income, needless to say - the so-called ‘something for nothing society’. So after their new dentistry contract, not only have millions been left without access to an NHS dentist, but dentists are paid a regulation amount regardless of the level of repair the patient might require. Could the sign ‘Go Private’ be more heavily flagged?

It is the same mindset that forces people into giant GP surgeries, while at the same time openly wondering whether doctors ought not to be signing their patients as fit for work rather than signing them off. A proposal that would subvert the essential element of trust between doctor and patient at a stroke.

Is there a sliver of doubt that when Housing Minister Caroline Flint, a Brown appointee, questions the appropriateness of tenancies for life and whether council or housing tenancies ought to be conditional on the tenant having a job, that such thinking it is not reflective of the same obsession? This kind of kite flying suggests New Labour is only too eager to open up another front in its attack on working class sense of place and security.

During the week, the government will be trying to push through 42-day detention for terror suspects, and combating a rebellion over the doubling of the 10p income tax rate. No one, not even MI5, believes that 42 days are operationally necessary, but Brown opted for it in the expectation that it would leave the Tories open to the charge that they were ’soft on terror.’

Equally the looming mutiny over the tax hike for the low paid, introduced by Brown himself last year, was to allow him to cut the standard rate of income tax by 2p in the pound and so again steal a march on the Tories. The doubling of inheritance tax thresholds was part of the same, as Brown saw it, astute positioning. But how clever does it look now?

Where Brown has tripped himself up is not actually as a result of the failure of long-term strategy, the flaw lies in the smaller detail - short-term electoral tactics.

As his biographer Tom Bower explained, having the ability to ‘wrong foot’ your opponent is what Brown considers to be the real essence of contemporary politics, particularly in a situation where near everyone that matters agrees on the fundamentals.

And as the agenda is irrevocably to the right, the skill is in always and on almost every issues being a step to the right ahead of your opponent. Horrendous though it all might be, of idelogical muddle there is not a scintilla of evidence. On the contrary: the solid Tory poll leads are because New Labour has been thoroughly true to neo-liberal type.

But “Labour’s not in power to make the poor poorer” bewails one Labour MP. Oh yeah? Since when? This is Brown’s real folly. After more than a decade of double-talk, obsfuscation and spin, the New Labour message to its erstwhile suppporters is now irrevocable and unmistakeable: “You’re on your own!”

Looking to the future…

After what was a disappointing election result by our standards when we contested the Stanford East and Corringham Town ward, we have undertaken a preliminary review into how we operate and relate to the community. 

The overwhelming message we have received from our network of supporters since the election is one of keep the faith. They are acutely aware that troubled times lie ahead and now more than ever, we have to carry on fighting to give working class people in the area a voice.

The next election in the ward isn’t until May 2010. We have at least eighteen months before we need to start thinking about what we will be doing in that contest. We fully intend to use this time to campaign with residents on the issues that matter to our community and to start to achieve some meaningful changes.

Already, we have identified a number of issues we will be campaigning on and work is already underway on one of them as we write. We will use this blog to keep you updated as to the progress of these campaigns – without giving anything away to any opponents who may seek to hi-jack an issue for the political gain of their party!

We will be constantly reviewing the way we work to ensure that we campaign effectively and get results. However, our resources are limited at the moment. As we campaign, we hope to expand our base of activists so that we can achieve more for our community. Lastly, but by no means least, we would again like to thank our supporters who stayed loyal to us – we will endeavour to ensure that support is rewarded.

Local elections, May 1st - our manifesto

Your candidate…Dave Amis

Dave got involved in the IWCA in 2003, stood as a candidate in the local elections last year. He is standing again this year in order to get across the concerns of working class people to those in power. Over the last twelve months Dave has worked hard to establish the IWCA as an alternative voice for the growing number of ordinary people who feel abandoned by the main parties.
 
He identifies with the real sense of frustration and anger of ordinary people who feel Thurrock Council is ignoring their aspirations, concerns and fears. He strongly believes that these concerns need to be voiced in a positive way. And in a way that will lead to real and lasting change. So a vote for the IWCA is much more than just a protest vote against years of neglect and marginalization – it’s a vote for an ongoing, campaigning presence in the community.
 
Dave set up home in Stanford-le-Hope in 1979.
He works as a Mac operator.
He is married to Liz and has a daughter at university.

HAVE YOUR voice on the council
Vote Dave Amis for Stanford East & Corringham Town ward
Council election Thursday 1 May

Housing crisis

- New Labour’s attempt to force everyone into becoming a home -owner has hit the rocks

- Working class people simply cannot afford to get onto the property ladder

Even though house prices are stagnating or falling as a result of the credit crunch, because demand outstrips supply here in the South East, prices are way beyond what many working class people can afford. With pay levels stagnating, or in many cases falling, many young working class people are locked out of the property market.

Where can they go? The supply of council homes is severely limited with allocation favouring those deemed to be in the greatest need – the situation with housing association properties is little better. Assuming people can get on the waiting list for social housing, they face a very long wait as the supply of new homes at so-called ‘affordable’ rents has slowed to a trickle. There are too many heart-breaking stories of families with genuine housing needs being excluded from the waiting list because the criteria for getting onto it are so rigidly defined.

New Labour policies on housing are driving young working class people into the private rented sector because there is nowhere else to go. As the government intends to bring rents for social housing up to market levels – regardless of whether they are affordable or not – soon there won’t be much difference between the public and private sectors.

New Labour policies with their attempts at social engineering, plus a slavish devotion to the market that ignores peoples needs, have created an unprecedented housing crisis.

There is an answer…

Allow councils to build enough housing to rent, at affordable levels, to fully meet local housing need as is happening elsewhere.

Re-write tenancy agreements to give tenants more responsibility for, and control over, their homes and estates.

Regeneration for who?

- The lack of any democratic control over the regeneration proposals for East Thurrock has led to widespread cynicism and mistrust

- Regeneration is seen as something that is being done to us rather than for us

The lack of any democratic control over the Thurrock Thames Gateway Development Corporation means people feel they have no ownership of the regeneration process and that it is being imposed upon us.

This is exacerbated by a complete lack of transparency on the part of the ‘corporation’ particularly when it comes to explaining their aims regarding new housing. People see the ‘corporation’ giving the green light to housing developers to make huge profits while at the same time, not answering questions about how local housing needs are going to be met. 

We want to see regeneration in the area, but it has to be for the benefit of local people, meeting our housing, employment and training needs.

Regeneration has to be in the ownership of people in the area and subject to democratic control, not in the hands of an unelected, undemocratic, unaccountable quango doing the bidding of a New Labour government.

An end to divide and rule

- The first ‘Black History Month’ held in Thurrock was an irrelevant, politically correct gesture

- The time, effort and money involved could have been better spent on projects benefiting the entire community

Given pressing issues from the need for better youth provision, improved care for the elderly, through to improvements in the maintenance of housing estates and the need for more affordable housing, ‘Black History Month’ was an irrelevant diversion.

Yet, in a perverse way, it served its purpose in getting people to focus on their sense of identity, whether in support of, or in opposition to it. But once the importance of identity is heightened, notions of fairness and equality for all British citizens take a back seat. Issues such as housing need, the provision of community facilities can come to be seen in racial terms as the locally born population, and various ethnic and cultural groups, appear to be in competition with each other for attention and scarce community resources.

Divide and rule is a useful tool to ensure everything remains politically stable. A guarantee that people spend their energy defending their ‘rights’ instead of focusing on the institutional injustices of the political and economic system which affect us all.

In the name of equality and fairness for all, the IWCA will continue to support only those projects that benefit the community as a whole.

Policing to meet targets

- The policing we get is designed to meet targets set by the New Labour government and to suit the internal agenda of the police

- The police are not responsive to, or accountable to, the community they are supposed to be serving

The result is an increasing loss of faith in the value of the police as a service. Public relation gimmicks such as the half term crackdown on underage drinking or a one-week crackdown on scrambler bikes add insult to injury. These exercises are designed to give the impression that ‘something is being done’ but the majority of people see through these cynical New Labour style stunts.

The reality is that while the police meet their ‘targets’, the antics of the malign minority of anti-social youth remain unchallenged and boy racers continue to use the Manorway as their own personal racetrack without fear of being challenged.

We need policing that meets the needs of, and is fully accountable to, the community it is supposed to be serving.
 
Youth – investing in our future

- Young people are our future

- Better youth provision is a sound investment in that future

When there is nothing to do, it is all too easy for a malign minority among local youth to have an unwelcome and undue influence on the majority.

Most people we have talked to do recognise the need for a decent range of challenging activities for the majority of kids who do behave themselves. At the same time they endorse tough sanctions on the minority who continually misbehave.

Inevitably there will always be an element of disaffected youth and uncaring parents who will not be reached by this increase in provision and support. They need to be made to understand that once identified they will be named and shamed. Those who make life intolerable for the community will face sanctions by the community.

We will campaign for more and better youth provision, offering a range of challenging activities, with individual support and mentoring where needed.

New Labour’s Matrix world crumbling at the edges

From the IWCA national website:

From Tony Blair’s pronouncement that ‘we are all middle class now’, it was clear to many of us that ideologically, New Labour was living in some parallel universe.

What wasn’t so immediately obvious was the nature of the Matrix world New Labour inhabited economically. This was a world where the economy gleamed with low inflation, low interest rates, low unemployment and steady, uninterrupted growth.

That was Brown’s world and what he never told us, of course, was how it was made possible by the boom in house prices which allowed people to spend more than they earned. A boom in house prices, artificially created by the stubborn refusal to meet the demand for social housing, which was in itself inextricably tied to Blair’s ideological pipe dream.

Today the rest of us live in an economy where a growing number of working class children leave school barely able to read and write; where 1.2 million languish on council waiting lists, where child poverty targets are a distant chimera; where the NHS is subject to incremental de-structuring; where the infrastructure and public transport shames a modern economy; where the balance of payments is worse than it has been for decades; where the Stalinist imposition of targets on the state sector has destroyed any form of public service ethos, and where the national accounts are only kept in rough balance by the regular sale of Britain’s best companies to overseas buyers.

These woes are not the result of American credit crunch but home grown. And with the froth being blown off the nation’s prosperity, and with people now so saturated with individual debt that they cannot take on any more, these shortcomings will become much harder for New Labour to shrug off.

The reality is that the government has itself been running up debts at an unprecedented rate for peacetime, because though Government spending accounts for 45 per cent of UK economic activity, taxation covers only 41 per cent. The balance has to be borrowed but that could force up interest rates.

The finances will get worse because economic slowdown will mean less from capital gains tax, company profits tax, stamp duty on house sales and even VAT as shoppers lose their appetites. If house prices start to fall sharply they will be in even deeper trouble.

Growth, government borrowing and tax are the three things any Chancellor has to worry about, and with all three going the wrong way no amount of despatch box bravado, (not likely from Darling in any case) or Budget Day theatricals can properly conceal what lies beneath.

That is why the verdict on his speech, after the dust settles and the political tinkering has been dismissed for what it is, is that we have passed another milestone in New Labour’s slow decline.

‘Clever bastards’ those multiculturalists

 From the IWCA national website:

OK, so it looks like Sharia law will not be incorporated into British law any time soon, but the ill-advised (although to an extent misinterpreted) lecture from the Archbishop of Canterbury recently highlights two issues we must be vigilant about.

The first is that the various religions have realised that they have considerably more to gain from cooperating with, and supporting each other, than from competing against or ignoring each other.

Whether they consider Christ as the son of God or just a prophet or definitely not the messiah, to them it matters less than the fact that the more religious society is, the better it is for all religions.

Given that religions are not just a set of rules about worship protocols, but complex moral and ethical systems that define how to live your life within your community (from what you can eat to how you should relate to others, including what kind of sex you are allowed to have, with whom, and when), religious people obviously would like to see society run according to those rules.

For them, the law is the will of God, and as such the boundaries between the private and the social are rather blurred: if blasphemy offends God, then it is not simply enough for you to refrain from blasphemy – everybody else must as well. It cannot just be an individual choice: it’s the rule for the community, for believers and non-believers alike.

Accordingly, the technique religious groups are increasingly adopting is to use anti-discrimination legislation to claim a specific right for a minority religion, and then escalate the claims, to the point of being vexatious. The Archbishop’s argument is that the law of the land cannot force a religious minority to act against its convictions.

Once the specific right is granted, the general principle is accepted, and then it is applied back to a majority religion: for example, if to avoid discrimination the Muslims are allowed to follow their own rules on divorce on religious grounds, then why can’t Christians be allowed to discriminate against homosexuals on, say, religious grounds?

After all, if religious grounds are reason enough for one group, then they must be for all others. Do you see the pattern? The next step is: if Christians are allowed to discriminate against homosexuals, why can’t the Muslims? And on, and on, to infinity.

The fact that the reasonable adjustments the Archbishop called for do not involve imposing the rule of one religion on outsiders is irrelevant: what matters is allowing the principle. Once that has been accepted, then you can chip away and instead of asking for the rule to be imposed on society as a whole in one go, you ask for the “right” for one group at a time, until you have extended it to all.

The whole argument is based on the fact that you cannot submit a religious belief to rational scrutiny: the fact that a conviction is written in or even just derived from a holy book means that it is the revealed truth, and as such it cannot be questioned. But in actual point it must be examined.

Look at how long it took for a Pope to admit that Galileo was right after all. Curiously enough, the argument also allows religious groups to oppress other groups on a religious basis, because they believe that by definition their convictions are superior to any other conviction.

Apart from the fact that some of us do not believe in a God, the problem with a law that claims to represent God’s mind is that a) there is more than one religion, and b) even amongst the scholars of the same religion there is no agreement on what exactly the interpretation of God’s words is.

Which is why the law of the land must be secular and based on principles that have passed the test of rational examination: rape is a crime not because it offends a God, but because it necessarily involves threat or coercion. Homosexuality amongst consenting adults is not a crime, because even if some maintain this or that God will be outraged, there is certainly no victim on this Earth.

Throughout the history of civilization men and women have spent their lives fighting to purge the law of the land from the concept that a sin is a crime. But what the Archbishop’s lecture tried to highlight is the fact that for religious people busily juggling their multiple identities, the law of God must always take precedence over the law of the land and this reality must now be acknowledged and incorporated into the law of the land. Utterly undermining it in the process.

It follows that once the principle is accepted, on the basis that it’s just a reasonable adjustment and it doesn’t apply to criminal cases but only to harmless family law, chances are the line be redrawn later, and several times. And since when, for that matter, has family law been deemed to be’harmless’?

For the Catholic Church a battered woman still cannot divorce her violent husband, Christians who divorce cannot remarry in church (which is the hypocritical way of some denominations to accept divorce because historically they stem from one, but still feel uneasy about parting asunder what God united), and an article in the Guardian explains that under Sharia law “a woman wanting divorce usually needs the consent of her husband. But most schools allow her to get a divorce without her husband’s consent if she can prove he is impotent. If he consents she does not have to pay back the dowry. Men have the right of unilateral divorce. A divorce is effective when the man tells his wife he is divorcing her.”

Which leads to the second issue, that of locking people into whatever they were born in and dividing society in tribes. One’s cultural/religious/ethnic origin stops being the origin, that is, one’s starting point, and becomes identity, one’s ending point too, and thus something that must be defended against any attempt at diluting it or, perish the thought, changing it.

Isn’t that what psychologists and comedians call “arrested development”? A very useful tool to ensure political equilibrium, identity: it guarantees that people spend their energy defending it instead of focusing on the institutional injustices of the political and economic system we all live under. Which is what the clever bastards who invented multiculturalism intended all along.

The re-creation of the Victorian class divide in education

 From the IWCA national website:

The Guardian reported on 1st February that 85% of white boys from poor backgrounds leave school without attaining five good GCSE’s, that “White boys in disadvantaged areas are the lowest performing group of pupils in schools after the small population of Traveller children”, whereas “nearly half of their wealthier classmates in England hit the government’s target of five GCSE’s at grades A* to C, including English and Maths.”

This follows some recent remarks made by Dr Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College in Berkshire and a prominent biographer of Tony Blair, that the private education sector has “emerged pre-eminent in the British education system” and was “perpetuating the apartheid which has so dogged education and national life in Britain since the Second World War”.

For Seldon, the independent education sector –which accounts for 7% of British children- “cream[s] off the best pupils, the best teachers, the best facilities, the best results and the best university places. If you throw in the 166 remaining grammar schools, which are predominantly middle class and private schools in all but name, the stranglehold is almost total.”

These statements linking educational achievement with social class have been expanded on by Professor Stephen Ball of London University’s Institute of Education in his recent book ‘The Education Debate’. Ball argues that Britain’s current education structure is increasingly coming to resemble that of the Victorian era. Then, the working class went to elementary schools, the middle class to grammar schools and the upper class to public schools, with the Church and philanthropists wielding significant influence over the system. The same situation is re-asserting itself now: community schools for the working class, faith schools for the middle-class and private and public schools for the top echelons of British society.

Ball states that “The class gap in participation rates in higher education is larger than ever before… We are seeing the recreation of almost all the elements of the Victorian class-divided education system”. In spite of much action by New Labour in the sphere of education, the class inequalities have not been erased because, in Ball’s view, “governments have only listened to the middle classes… throughout history, the middle class has been seen as a problem whose [educational] needs need to be responded to, while the working class has been seen simply as a social problem. Our education system has always provided the means for middle-class families to gain social advantage and to separate themselves off from ‘others’… Grammar schools, parental choice, ability grouping, faith schools, gifted and talented have all been a response to middle-class concerns”.

Sally Tomlinson of Oxford University concurred with Ball’s findings, stating that ‘high-quality education’ “has always been monopolised by higher socio-economic groups with some concessions to lower-class ‘gifted’ individuals”

This simply re-confirms the words of Sir Peter Lampl of the Sutton Trust that “The middle classes start with a huge advantage - an educational system that is socially selective. The richer you are, the better the school to which you send your children, whether private or state, specialist or non-specialist”. The government’s own research, and ministers, acknowledge the use of ‘covert selection’ by the leading state schools to produce “socially segregated intakes”.

In a recent profile of education in Bristol, which “has the highest concentration of independent school places outside of a small exclusive corner of north London that includes Hampstead and Highgate, and some of the poorest performing state schools”, one middle-class parent, when asked why she didn’t want her 11 year old son to go to a state school that served the St Paul’s area of Bristol –which saw riots in 1980- answered: “Snobbery. It’s awful snobbery, but I care who my son mixes with. I don’t think he could cope in a rougher school with bullies. He’s sensitive”.

The increase in educational inequality along class lines hasn’t happened in isolation: it is simply a product of how this country has been deliberately changed over the last thirty years. OFSTED’s 2000 report on educational inequality stated that “There is a strong direct association between social class background and success in education: put simply, the higher a child’s social class, the greater are their attainments on average… This is one of the longest-established trends in British education but the association is not static. Indeed, there is evidence that the inequality of attainment between social classes has grown since the late 1980s”; and the Oxford economist A B Atkinson wrote in 2003 that “the major equalisation of the first three-quarters of the century in the UK has been reversed, taking the shares of the top income groups back to levels of inequality found fifty years ago”.

Educational achievement is largely a reflection of material and social advantage, and as the country has become more unequal, so have educational outcomes. This didn’t happen by accident: the raison d’etre of the neo-liberal project was -and is- to concentrate and redistribute wealth and power towards the top, and safeguard the position of capital.

The practical result of these changes have been that social mobility has declined in the UK to levels similar to those in the US, and substantially lower than in Canada and Scandinavia: the supposedly meritocratic, flexible neo-liberal countries are, it turns out, a good deal less meritocratic than the supposedly ossified, relatively egalitarian and social democratic countries.

The historic role of public education has largely been to prepare working class children for a life of wage slavery, drudgery and subordination. Recent political trends now mean that the chances of working class children escaping that fate are diminishing, whereas the offspring of the wealthy –no matter how dull- are, like their parents, as secure in their future as they have ever been.