A General, All
Purpose, Omni-Directional, Jazz-Rant, Expressing My Dissatisfaction On a Number
of Matters of Current Importance
[Alternate Take]
Any idea, however brilliant, epoch making, or profound, has
a half life, a period over which it becomes less relevant.
Any idea, however brilliant or epoch making, can become
irrelevant over millennia or milliseconds, but so long as the arrow of time
points forwards, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics must be obeyed.
An idea may be brilliant, but ideas get old.
Or they evolve. Look at imaginary numbers. The square root
of minus 1. An impossible number. A mathematical curiosity, nothing more. Then
the dawning of the digital age and it turns out that this seemingly redundant
branch of mathematics is the key to the kinds of data compression needed to
download data at the speeds we've been experiencing in recent years. So, every
time you download a podcast or stream a TV show online, you're using imaginary
numbers, ironically, to simplify the types of calculation your computer is
required to perform. It's a healthy advert in favour of research for research's
sake.
Fifteen years ago, when I was an astrophysics undergraduate,
theories about superstrings and hyper dimensional space were at the fringes of
scientific thought and broadly ridiculed by the mainstream. Today, superstring
and hyper dimensional space are the
mainstream, and Michio Kaku, author of 'Hyperspace', the book I was reading as I
started university, is a household name.
Newer, more relevant information becomes available. What we
take to be true today turns out to be nonsense tomorrow. Yet what remains
entrenched in our psyche and our cultural identity can seem like a marvel. Some
ideas are spellbinding. They seem to be doing most good usually when doing most
harm.
A few weeks ago I was watching something on
television. I forget what it was, but the chairman of RBS was being
interviewed. During the interview, he uttered the immortal line that I have
heard repeated at regular intervals throughout my life:
Capitalism may not be
perfect, but it's the best system we have.
Surely 'the best system that we have' would demonstrate a
little better common sense than we've seen in recent years?
In the last twelve months, I've seen something of the top of
society and something of the bottom. Working PPI claims for a bank, I got to
see how a bank can mishandle the mishandling of its PPI mis-selling. I've
blogged about this in the past
(here). However, I recently heard that the
Financial Ombudsman's Service upheld 86% of all complaints they've received
about the bank I worked for, so it really is worth taking matters all the way. It also costs them money.
(incidentally, does it strike anyone else as a coincidence that the government is talking about re-privatising RBS and Lloyds TSB, right as their PPI projects are coming to an end? - I wonder how much that has cost the public purse, the government said it wouldn't cost us a penny, so I'm guessing £billions. It's something to think about.)
There are people, mostly in the north of England, who take
the piss out of George Orwell for moving to more squalid lodgings when he was
writing 'The Road to Wigan Pier'. Yet what else was he supposed to do? He was
writing a book about poverty, what writer worth the name wouldn't want to see
life lived at its most extreme? Of course Orwell did that, it's why he's
remembered today and why it's gone three in the afternoon and you're still
sitting in your pants.
Also, this is to ignore the tradition out of which Orwell
was writing. Orwell's great influence was 'The People of the Abyss', Jack
London's report on the conditions in the East End slums at the beginning of the
20th century. London had come to the English capital that shares his name to
report on a conference. The conference was subsequently cancelled and London
found himself wandering among the East End and moving into the area to write
his great work of anthropology. Both Orwell's 'The Road to Wigan Pier' and
'Down and Out in Paris in London' were written with that same dedication to
research.
I've always liked to kid myself that I'm the Jack London of
office work (if Jack London had mainly worked in the North West of England). I
always take mental notes on my surroundings, whatever sector I end up working
in, for recall and use later. Six years ago I could get a phone call on Friday
and be in a job Monday for anything from a day to three years and always be
sure of finding something else. Since the recession, the public sector has
shrunk and what few jobs there are now involve going through tortuously tedious
competency based interviews, which are designed to ensure middle of the road
types, less likely to go walkabout to another job, costing the organisation
further recruiting costs.
So I'm struggling to find a job, but since I'm in the area,
I've been taking notes. For a start, trying to get housing benefit has been a
Kafkaesque journey through the halls of bureaucracy. Four months to process a
claim that should have taken two weeks. Always requesting more information
about the tenancy agreement, but not actually writing to tell me that, so back
to stand in the queue at the council offices for another half hour, waiting to
find out what they need this time. At time of writing, the council still owe me
three weeks back rent and have cost me a couple of hundred pounds in late fees
and fees for being over my overdraft limit.
In the meantime, I had my benefits stopped for a month,
because I failed to attend an appointment. The encroaching changes to the
benefit system worry me. If you want to see what a society really is, take a
look at the way it treats its most vulnerable people. The nature of the work
I've done over the years has meant that I've signed on from time to time, a
fortnight here, couple of months there. So I've seen some of the ways benefits
have changed over the years. Since the current government came to power,
they've barely stopped changing.
There was a time when you had to see an advisor every three
months. Then it was every six weeks, once a month, now it's every two weeks.
Often the advisor can't see you on the same day that you sign and so you have
to come back. When it is on the same day, it's usually scheduled for first
thing. I sign on in the afternoons. So it's easy to get confused. In the past,
they'd let you rebook and it was fine. To be honest, my interview is usually a
waste of time. I usually spend longer waiting for the interview to begin than
in the actual interview.
This time I was due to sign on Bank Holiday Monday and so
the adviser was saying over and over, you don't need to come Bank Holiday
Monday, you're excused signing, like it was some kind of special treat. Then
she scheduled an appointment for the next day, which hasn't happened before.
Bank Holiday Monday used to mean no signing day and no interview.
Not this time though and the rules have now been changed and
tightened and all failures to attend, rather than being dealt with sensibly, as
in the past, have to go to an adjudicator. When the government say they want to
cut the benefit bill, what they really mean is that they want to redirect it. I
understand that the people who adjudicate on such issues are private, third
party companies, who presumably are in it to make a profit for themselves and their
shareholders. I've never really understood how a profit making organisation is
better for the public purse than a non-profit making government department. I'm
no economist, but even I can see that this makes no financial sense. It's not
that we want to cut the benefit bill, but that we want to keep as much of it
away from the poor as possible.
I remembered on the Wednesday that I'd missed the
appointment and went up to the benefits office and spent a long time sat down
with the guy there (and they are generally very helpful people at the place I
go) and he wrote out quite a long declaration on my behalf to make sure I wouldn't
be sanctioned (an Orwellian word, meaning penalised) for an honest mistake.
When the decision arrived in the post, instead of making
reference to my detailed explanation, the letter merely said that when asked
why I had failed to attend, I said, 'I did not attend the appointment'. It then
goes on to say that 'the law says' this is not a valid reason for failing to
attend and my benefits were to be stopped for a month. If I did it again, they
could be stopped for three months. So apparently not only did I fail to turn up to
one my many appointments, but I'd also broken the law. Unemployed now equates to criminal. I waited in all
weekend, but the police failed to arrive and arrest me.
In the end, they paid me four weeks benefits two weeks
later. I'd been sanctioned, but not penalised. Well, apart from that day I had
so little money that all I had to eat was a bowl of tomato soup and the two
bits of bread that hadn't gone mould in the breadbin.
Why does a bully bully?
Same reason a dog licks its bollocks. Because it can. For the same reason, the lives
of the poor, the unemployed, the disabled are continuously fucked with by
people who evidently didn't get enough hugs when they were young.
What this government amply demonstrate is that all the
money, education and privilege in the world can't buy one any class. Cameron,
Gideon and 'Gradgrind' Grove ('Now what I
want are facts. Facts are what's important') and the rest are the last
people on Earth who should be running things. Education should be in the hands
of teachers, the NHS run by ex nurses and GPs. Not this current crops of
chinless wonders, few of whom have ever had to live in the real world and so
are ill-equipped to manage things.
"While money doesn't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony."
Bob Dylan
In the end, I've had to move back home for a bit. Now, don't
worry about me, I'll be fine. This isn't about me (although even by saying
that, you should know that it's a little bit about me). I'll soon find a job
and get back on my feet and the bills will be up to date in no time. I'm quite
stay at home anyway. I spend most of my money rescuing secondhand books from
charity shops.
The people I worry about are the ones that are left behind. Not just
the unemployed, but the disabled too. The ones who are going to have to
navigate the new universal payment system. I was told the other day that
eventually you won't even have to sign on to get paid, but you will still have
to attend an appointment, presumably now every week. Being on benefits is like being on probation. Tagging of the disabled to follow shortly.
Tagging the disabled my sound melodramatic, but then we have
already seen the unemployed working as indentured servants for Aldi and
Poundland and the like. In America, the richest country in the world, the most
powerful in a system where accumulated wealth is the only consideration that
counts for anything, nearly 2% of the population, 10% of the African-American
population, is in prison. Capitalism there has led to the bottom fifth of the
population being rendered as surplus to industrial requirements and locked up
for the crime of being poor. Of doing the kinds of things that poor people do
to try and relieve the monotony. Slavery had been effectively reinvented and
used to provide cheap labour for the commercial sector. It's not something I
want to see ending up happening in this country.
Wouldn't our best system, having once abolished
slavery, feel no need to reinvent it? Hasn't something gone terribly, terribly
wrong?
If you were to ask me, I'd say I'm a misanthropic
socialist. I don't know what you take socialism to mean, it's one of those
curious words, like communism or anarchism or feminist, which were named by
their enemies. Using ism and ist makes the supporters of such movements sound like fanatics,
lowering their credibility.
I take Bertrand Russell's definition of Socialism,
as modified by George Orwell. To be a Socialist, Russell said, one needs only
believe in three things:
Freedom
Equality
Social Justice
Actually, I would modify the definition once again:
Freedom of choice
Equality of choice
Social Justice
And that's it. If you believe in those three things
then you are a socialist. Moreover, if you don't believe in these three
principles of society, what do you
believe in and why am I even sharing a society with you? Socialism is much
maligned, largely because its ethos is in sharp contrast to the corrupt brand
of capitalism that we've inherited. Yet when you break it down, when all the
rhetoric is wiped away, socialism is simply the process of being part of a
society. Pick up your neighbour's shopping or let someone cross ahead of you at
an intersection and you are engaging in socialism. Yet because the market
wishes to rob us of even our sense of community, the co-operative spirit is
called being a lefty, or a red, and maligned and discouraged. If you don't want to
be socialist then get like Robinson Crusoe and maroon yourself on an island.
I say to hell with it all. I've got social networking
and my own blog. Governments are terrified of new media. It means they can't
manage the way that news comes out, like they were once able. Twenty years
ago, we'd be hearing about the Syrian conflict about now. New media makes news available
almost as soon as it happens. How long did it take before the News of the World
folded? Two weeks of sustained pressure on the advertisers maybe. This is where
the capitalist bear (why not?) can be hurt. Stock is only as good as its image.
If its image becomes toxic, the stock becomes worthless and it ceases to have
power. Why bother to hack a company and cause it some mild discomfort, when
enough dissatisfied customers can make a company do things it doesn't want to
do, just to protect its image?
Hey, did you know that the US Constitution was
based on Native American principles? The different states on the east coast
initially lived in opposition to one another, like a mini version of Europe,
but that wasn't working out so they took their cue from The Iroquois Great Law
of Peace. Just a good example of how a fresh approach can be the making of a
country.
I mention this partly as free advice, but mainly as
an example of how a fresh approach to old problems can encourage growth. For
some capitalism has been a godsend. For many others it has been a plague and
the plague is only intensifying. Ideas evolve or they decay. When I hear people
talk about tradition or the way things have always been done, it tells me that
no one has had a new thought in quite a while.
Ultimately I hate the idea that capitalism is the
best system we have because it's a statement of ownership. A message to
ordinary person to say, we own you, and don't you ever do anything to try and
change that. Mostly what it makes me want to do is to try and change the system
to a more fair and equitable system.
Besides, in a properly functioning Capitalist state,
wouldn't there be no poor people? Isn't that it's one measure of success or
failure? So what the hell is this?
Isn't it time for some new ideas?
Or make the ones that we have finally work for us?
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