IDS's sinister welfare reforms

In these recessionary times, we're all very interested in unemployment. Newspapers and commentators pore over unemployment figures, whether they're up or down and reflect on what this says about the state of our economy. But nobody seems to care much about the unemployed.

One of the proposals in Iain Duncan Smith's welfare reforms currently being pushed through parliament is to involve more private companies in getting the unemployed back to work, who will then be paid for their successes. It's hardly an original idea – Jobcentre Plus already has contracts with hundreds of such organisations ('training providers' they're called in a classic example of New Labour-speak ) whereby claimants of Jobseekers Allowance are forced to attend 'employability training', which often involves little more than them being sat in a room with some newspapers and the Internet for 5 hours a day (if you care to search the web, there are a fair few ranting forums and blogs devoted to these places). The providers have various targets, for getting people into work or onto work placements, and they are paid according to their results. This was the New Labour version, so one can only assume that the Tory version is going to be even more wedded to free market dogma.

I worked in the employability sector for a while in the mid-noughties and have friends who still do. I can say fairly confidently that it is run by a bunch of cowboys. A4E, one of the government's largest private contractors, was investigated by the DWP in 2009 for fraudulent practices, including falsifying employer signatures. It was brushed off by A4E as an aberration, but it is symptomatic of the way that many such companies are run; I know of many cases, from my own and others' experiences, in which signatures have been forged, paperwork falsified and evidence faked in order for targets to be met and money to be claimed from the Job Centre. One such instance involved a bewildered client being asked to pose for a photograph standing by a photocopier, only to find out later that this was being used as evidence of an office work placement that she had never done.

These organisations treat their unemployed clients with contempt. People are regularly put on unpaid work placement schemes, usually with unglamourous high street outfits like Iceland or Poundstretcher, sometimes with the vague promise of a job at the end but just as often not, and expected to be grateful. One man I knew, a 50 year old from Sri Lanka, began a 2 week placement as a shelf filler at a high street chain on the understanding he would be offered a job at the end. The period was extended to 4 weeks and then to 6 weeks, at the end of which he had sustained a bad back injury from the heavy lifting and the offer of a job was withdrawn. 6 weeks of slave labour for a crappy minimum wage supermarket job that never materialised and which gave him a bad, possibly long term, back injury. Is this the kind of aspiration that IDS wants to see more of?

When you're on the dole, you don't have any power. You can complain all you like about the maddening bureaucracy of getting your benefits, about the dismissive treatment by Job Centre staff, or about being put at the mercy of a crooked training provider. But nobody will listen, because why should they? What are you going to do, go on strike? Who's going to fight on behalf of the unemployed?

So you think you want to sleep with me? Eight bedside books that should make a man think twice.

This is offered in the tradition of list-making cultural commentary and inspired both by some recent comments on my own bedtime reading and by my good friend Richard Kelly.

1. Defeat: Napoleon’s Russian Campaign – Philippe-Paul de Segur
The title kind of says it all.
2. Gender Trouble – Judith Butler
Difficult prose, complex arguments leading to a clear-sighted, almost playful, deconstruction of sexual identity. The conclusion: heterosexuality is basically impossible.
3. Moby Dick
It’s just intimidating – whichever way you want to look at it.
4. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State – Frederic Engels
The subtitle could be: I’ve thought a lot about this stuff and anything even vaguely romantic that happens between you and me is a) a socio-economic construct and b) is not going to lead to anything good for either of us or for the future of socialism
5. On War – General Karl Von Clausewitz
It’s like Les Liaisons Dangereuses without the sex. This book shows a commitment to military strategy and ultimately victory without any of the bodice-ripping erotic relief.
6. The Sex Lives of the Great Dictators – Nigel Cawthorne
Can power ever be fetishized enough? I think the answer might be yes. This book might just as well be a manual for alienated, narcissistic, paranoid (and possibly even murderous) relationships
7. The Rise of Modern Japan – W.G. Beasley
A modern classic since 1963. This book screams serious, boring… and impenetrable.
8. Any weighty biography (over 900 pages) of the following: The Duke of Wellington, Mao Tse Tung, Martin McGuiness
Not to be confused with biographies of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Che Guevera or Michael Collins – who can be comfortably accommodated into Romantic revolutionary and/or military heroes.

Why London is better than New York (part 2)

I tried to place a bet on Sunday. It occurred to me as I logged on to the internet that I couldn’t even name a single bookmakers in New York and I’m not sure that in my three and a half years in the city that I’ve ever walked past one. In contrast, every high street (or main street) in the UK has at least one bookies - Ladbrokes or William Hill are household names. Gambling is something of a national past-time back home. I remember once hearing the statistic that the average British household spent more in a week on gambling than it did on vegetables. It’s nothing necessarily to be proud of but gambling just is a very normalized part of our national life. So much so that even someone like me has a Betfair account.

And it was this account I tried to access when I wanted to put some money on the Oscars. But when I got to the website I was greeted with the following message:

You may be attempting to access Betfair.com from a restricted country.

Our software has detected that you may be accessing the Betfair Web site from the United States. You may view the Betfair site, but you won’t be able to place any bets.

I vaguely remembered from an ecommerce course I’d been involved in years ago the various legal restrictions on gambling that were enforced in the US – part Puritanism, part protectionism. Given there’s not much use in viewing a betting site without being able to bet I decided to go elsewhere and find a US gambling site. I found one that seemed to be offering some interesting odds and combinations on the Oscars and registered for an account. I thought $50 dollars for starters should cover it. But as a non-US, temporary resident on a diplomatic visa I don’t have a social security number. I could have got one but I’ve never seen the need and I don’t like the idea of anything that smacks of ID cards. But without a social security number to verify my age and identity I couldn’t give this company my 50 bucks. A very helpful customer service agent phoned me. I explained my situation to him. He pointed out that I could use my credit card if, in advance, I sent them the relevant paper work – a copy of my visa, my passport, a letter from my employer and two proofs of address. I’m not that into gambling, I explained to him. I just wanted to put a few dollars on Best Director. I could also add money using a Western Union wire transfer – but again this would take a couple of days and I wanted to gamble now. A seasoned salesman, he did his best to help me. What were my gambling needs he asked – casino? Black Jack? I explained that I was a very light gambler and my upcoming betting needs would include the Cheltenham gold cup and, more importantly, the size of a possible Labour majority in Camden and St Pancras in the UK general election. Neither could he really help me with.

So the long and the short of it: a socially responsible, financially solvent, 38 year old civil servant was unable to place a bet.

Later in the evening, on the subway going to visit a friend to watch the said award ceremony I noticed an advert above the seats opposite me. It was vividly illustrated with two pictures of different handguns. The headline to the advert read:
“Which one is real: it’s not what you think”

The point of the advert – a public service advert – was to explain to commuters that in NYC it’s illegal to paint a real gun to look like a toy and it’s illegal to sell a toy-gun that looks real.

I suppose that’s information worth knowing but there was something about the advert which seemed to be missing the more fundamental point. Carrying a handgun in New York City, unlike in most of the US, is actually illegal. The illegality of carrying a handgun I would have thought would be the key point - not how the gun is accessorized. And the more profound issue is surely that guns kill people. But the advert on the subway was obviously starting from the point of view that it was kind of understandable that people might want to carry a gun. It was almost trying to help them not get arrested by mistakenly buying the wrong toy. The unquestioned desirability of guns is a huge part of this culture. But it never fails to shock me. It’s great that guns are illegal in NYC. The city is clearly full of people close to or on the edge. And it’s stressful enough getting the “C train” without having to worry that any one of these people might be concealing a weapon. In fact, when I discussed the advert with the friend I was visiting (an Australian) we both agreed that it was this lack of gun culture in New York that made it one of the few places in the USA we would consider living. But even so the dissonance was there.

It also reminded me how two days earlier I’d had my annual general medical at my family doctors. I have reasonably good insurance – costing me and my employer around $500 a month. Even so, just to say hello to a nurse I also have to stump up a “co-pay” of an additional $15. Which I guess isn’t that much but if you are actually sick and need to go to the doctors regularly or have small children this can easily add up. On my way to the surgery I realized I had no cash so stopped off at an ATM. As I was entering my pin number it just occurred to me how fucked up it was somehow for me to have to visit a cash point before going to the doctors.

So to say, in a rather roundabout way – three more reasons why I don’t want to live in the US: a place where it’s somehow a more “normal” thing to do to pretend that your toy gun is real than it is to put a few quid on the Oscars.

Why London is better than New York (part1)

I try to divide my time between London and New York and am a subscriber to both the London Review of Books (LRB) and the New York Review of Books (NYRB). With both journals some issues are better than others but in general terms, high-quality, insightful, challenging and thoughtful writing is assured. While both the LRB and the NYRB have a similar perspective - I guess an anglo-saxon world view that is, however, outward looking, internationalist, left-leaning and analytical - they also have their national particularities grounded very much in the contemporary politics of their respective states: Ross McKibbin on New Labour in the LRB or Ronald Dworkin on the Supreme Court in the NYRB, for example.

Basically I feel familiar and at home in the pages of both of them. However when I move away from the reviews, articles and opinion pieces towards the classifieds the difference between the cultures of my two homes becomes clear. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the personal ads.

Here's one from a recent edition of the LRB:

"This is an advert full of cheap innuendo lazy come-ons and needy sexual impropriety. Just like the LRB letters page. Woman, 49"

It's self-deprecating, knowing and understated.

Now here's a woman of a similar age in the NYRB:

"Smart and beautiful, intellectually curious and athletic. Consultant/educator - tall, slim with natural radiance. Adventurous with calm, warm demeanor; genuineness of character, expressive, affectionate, divorced, 5'8". Laughs a lot, thinks deeply politically liberal and interested in social change, literature, politics, nature, beauty...."
And on it goes for another almost 50, five dollar a throw words, with not an understated and ironic syllable to be found.

In the deepest recess of my English soul I cannot think of any circumstance in which anyone can in all sanity describe themselves as possessing "natural radiance". And I think the majority of my compatriots would feel much the same - and certainly those subscribing to a high-end, literary journal like the LRB or NYRB.

The difference between the two approaches sums up for me one of the essential, ideological problems I have with living in the United States. Everything in the US is a pitch - an attempt to sell or a plea to buy. Of course the LRB personals have the same ultimate aim but it's done with a kind of awkwardness at the prospect acknowledging the slightly tawdry nature of the exchange (they also create as a byproduct some entertainment for the reader). The adverts in the NYRB possess no such coyness - everyone is beautiful, alluring, successful and functional. This incessant self-promotion makes relationships absolutely impossible - unless on some level you see yourself - and your partner - as a commodity. And what kind of purgatory that must be.

It's my affair: a feminist rant.

I was listening to Woman’s Hour this morning and heard a really interesting debate. It was about the sexualisation of young girls and its effects on girls’ attitudes to sex generally as they grown up. The panellists were Valerie Walkerdine, a professor of social science at Cardiff University, Gigi Durham, the author of a book called The Lolita Effect, and Eleanor James, a member of the feminist campaign group Mind the Gap. It was a great discussion – very intelligent and impassioned. Lots of good points were made about the objectification of women. Pole dancing classes and university beauty pageants were linked to the increasing marketisation of female sexuality. Durham pointed out that these things establish for women an unhealthy link between sex and sex work. I felt encouraged listening to James, a former student activist, who talked eloquently and intelligently about the issues at stake.

There was one moment in the debate, however, which depressed me – actually it made me sad. James was explaining what lead her to her critical feminist perspective on these issues. She told us that she had been ‘a chubby teenager’ and as a result of pressure from magazines, TV programmes, etc, had suffered from a number of eating disorders. Her reference to these eating disorders was almost casually dropped in to her account. There were no gasps of shock or other reactions of surprise from the other panellists; what she was describing was not particularly out of the ordinary. And that’s what made me feel sad – that in our culture we know, we expect, that many teenage girls will hate their bodies so much that they will resort to extreme ways of physically punishing themselves – they will starve themselves until they are weak and unable to function, or gorge on food and punch their stomachs until they throw up. What madness is this?

It made me think of a couple of seemingly unrelated experiences from the last week. On Saturday I went to a rally in support of the indefinite strike action at Tower Hamlets College by UCU members in response to the massive cuts the new principal is imposing. There was a long procession of speeches from various local activists, ranging from brief messages of support from other local unions to tub-thumping calls for revolution. The highlight of the speeches, however, undoubtedly came from 2 former students of the college – 2 young Bengali women from the area – one wearing hijab, one not and one of whom is running the Facebook group in support of the strikes. It was a simple speech - they expressed their outrage at what the principal is proposing, talked about how important further education is in the Tower Hamlets community and made an impassioned plea to everyone to support the striking lecturers in whatever way they could.

As I thought about these inspirational women afterwards I was reminded of the infuriating argument that springs up in the media from time to time that we should ban Muslim women from wearing headscarves. The argument goes that these garments are a symbol of a refusal to integrate and to embrace citizenship and western values. Now, I am no fan of women being forced to wear anything, but I am also no fan of women being forced to take anything off. And what greater symbol of integration, of citizenship, of participation in society, could there be than speaking at a rally in defence of a local public service, or organising an Internet group in support of the strike. Hijab or no hijab, give me that over pole dancing classes any day.

The second thing I thought about was a moronic debate that has been had in the media this week about a motion being tabled by the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists at the TUC Conference. The motion puts forward that employers should not have the right to force women to wear high heels as part of a work dress code, in recognition of the various health implications wearing heels can have, especially if women are having to stand up for long periods of time. Fairly uncontroversial, I would have thought – women should not be forced to wear uncomfortable footwear if they don’t want to. But no, this has been seized upon by newspapers from the Daily Mail to the Guardian and been portrayed as union busybodies wanting to BAN HIGH HEELS. Why all the interest in what, to me, is an uncontroversial and fairly minor motion being tabled at the conference? It seems to me that people are interested because – as in the debate about headscarves - society is always interested in what women wear and what they look like; we are public property and everyone wants to have their say. Would there be the same kind of response in the media if this was about male footwear? I think not.

Maybe these links are tenuous. It does strike me, however, that if the idea were to take hold that it is up to women what they wear and doesn't matter that much anyway, then teenage girls might hate themselves less.

Mad men (and women): some hurried thoughts on US advertising

Sunday evening prime-time. 6 September 2009. Labor Day weekend and I'm in New York . The medical TV show House is on Channel 9. I'm quite inured to commercial breaks every 7 minutes. I've almost built them into my viewing experience so that I surf the web or check blackberry messages when the ads are on. The programme is not that good anyway. It clearly doesn't demand attention – it invites distraction: that's US TV. It took me less than the time it takes to watch an NBC comedy special to realise that there really is no point comparing US and British television. They have only a passing resemblance to each other. And as we increasingly get our content chunks through more diverse and mobile media their fundamental differences become clearer and clearer. The television itself after all is only really an exhibition mechanism – it's the systems behind: of creation, distribution, ownership, that really define what it is we watch. Not to pretend that there is no link between medium and message but what we consume our messages on is less significant than how those messages get made, by whom, for whom and to what overall purpose. And I guess that in gener,l I'm in favour of the kinds of purposes that favour some idea of the common good rather than enriching the Murdoch family. (which raises an interesting question that I'm sure those policy gurus at the BBC have been mulling for some time – if no one watches their “tv” on 'tv” any more, how do you collect the licence fee?)...Anyway, I digress, I don't want to go into the more than 20 easy reasons why public service broadcasting is a good idea.

Of course commercials exaggerate, embellish and maybe even sometimes lie but this wasn't what struck me. What really came across was their insanity – a quality of quite extreme illogic and irrationality.

Commercial No:1: An attractive young woman is frantically trying to clean her show-house living room which – horror of horrors – seems to have actually accumulated a little dirt on the carpet. It's the kind of thing that happens when people live in a house and use it. But this poor woman is in pieces. Cut away to a mean looking old woman in the passenger seat of a car speeding towards the house. “My mother-in-law will be arriving any moment and I haven't got the time to do a steam clean!” But then a reassuring man in a red t-shirt proudly bearing the slogan RESOLVE appears at her doorway. Don't worry he tells her. Buy this product and everything will be fine. He sprinkles this magic potion on her carpet and heh presto, shiny immaculate floor. The mother-in-law arrives and the first words out of her mouth are compliments to her daughter-in-law on how lovely her house is. The woman is saved: thank God – approval, my mother in law loves me! On what level is this a healthy, functional, desirable relationship? It's not even the casual sexism of it which is pretty obvious and every day (women, if you don't keep to the highest standards of hygiene you are a failure), it's the total conditionality of the relationship presented between two – one would assume – quite intimate people. The commercial in its bland, mass market way presents the idea that obstacles or conflicts in any relationship can be mediated through consumption.

Commercial No. 2. A reassuring voice speaks over intimate family photographs of a couple mountain biking together. “Ever feel like you don't want to do anything, that you can't enjoy anything?” As the photo montage progresses to ever more blissful pictures of intimate family relationships, the voice-over continues to tell us that the answer to some of these nagging feelings of sadness and inadequacy is a product called Cymbalta. Cymbalta is an anti-depressant that you should talk to your doctor about if maybe you don't enjoy time with your husband, family or friends. It could really sort you out... and yet, federal regulations demand that this nice, cosy voice remind us that Cymbalta should not be taken in a whole host of situations and can lead to – among other things - liver failure. Oh yes and the common side effects include nausea, dry mouth and constipation (if you weren't depressed already).
Seeing these two adverts back to back I couldn't help but wonder that presenting anxiety about what your mother in law thinks of you if you have a little dirt on your carpet might in itself as a NORMAL response could in itself be a factor in depression. Buying product one leads you to product two. Or to put it another way, if the first and the most encouraged response to feelings of anxiety or discomfort – particularly around how we relate to “difficult” or “challenging” people that inevitably all of us have to deal with if we aren't living on our own in a cave – is to buy something, then alienation must surely follow. And this is what made me think that these commercials are truly quite mad.

Postscript: Commercial No 3 was for a new “miracle” Revlon foundation that magically matches your own skin tones and makes you look young and flawless. So much healthier - just common or garden lies.

Twenty years since the end of history

“What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution.”
Francis Fukyama, 1989

“Imagine a war which everyone won, permanent holiday in endless sun. Peace without wisdom, one steals to achieve, relentlessly pretending to believe”
DJ Culture, the Pet Shop Boys, 1991

1990 – Iraqi troops invade Kuwait
1991 – UN authorize operation Desert Storm in response to Iraq's action in Kuwait; dissolution of the USSR; coup in Haiti removing democratically elected president
1992 – break up of Yugoslavia; signing of NAFTA; Zapatista uprising in Mexico
1993 – China tests nuclear weapons
1994 – siege of Sarajevo; genocide in Rwanda; Russia launches attack on Chechnya
1995 – continuation of Yugoslav wars; France carry out nuclear test in the Pacific
1996 – Taliban take over Afghanistan
1997 – financial crisis in emerging economies of Asia
1998 – violence between Serbs and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo; US air strikes on Iraq
1999 – war in Kosovo - NATO air strikes against Serbia; massacres in East Timor after referendum approves independence from Indonesia, intensified fighting between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, military coup in Pakistan
2000 – election of far-right party in Austria under Jorge Haider, second intifada in Palestine, contested election of George Bush in the USA
2001 – 9/11 attacks on the world trade centre, USA and UK launch campaign in Afghanistan against the Taliban
2002 – unsuccessful US-supported coup in Venezuela against elected president Hugo Chavez, Bali bomb killing 202 people, North Korea announce that it's developing nuclear weapons
2003 – US-led invasion of Iraq without the backing of the UN, NATO take over ongoing military operations in Afghanistan
2004 – bomb attacks in Madrid killing 191
2005 – assassination of Rafik Hariri in Lebanon, France and the Netherlands vote against EU constitution, bombings in London, election of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in Iran
2006 – Hamas win election in the Palestinian authority, elections described as "extremely professional, in line with international standards, free, transparent and without violence". Hamas government not recognized by the USA and EU and aid suspended; escalation of violence in Iraq; both India and North Korea test-fire nuclear weapons, Iran announces that it has enriched uranium
2007 – Israel launches military attack in Southern Lebanon
2008 – near collapse of the world financial system - bank bail outs and nationalization, Georgian troops in South Ossetia, Russian troops in Georgia
2009 – $3 trillion US budget including range of government intervention to prop up the economy; part-nationalization of the auto industry in the USA, ousting of elected President of Honduras