Showing posts with label Labour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Labour. Show all posts

Saturday 23 September 2017

Social Democracy Uber Alles

The outcry over the revoking of Uber's London licence shows that the service it provides is popular, and it's unquestionably a significant, innovative use of new technology to improve transport. On the other hand the outcry from drivers about lack of benefits and job security show that the application of technology is being used (not uncommonly) both to increase exploitation of the labour force and to flout legal regulation designed to protect labour and customers. The outcry of Black Cab drivers against Uber ignores the fact that people flocked to Uber not merely for convenience (though that is considerable) but because Black Cabs had priced themselves out of the market with the last big price hike.

Put all this together and it's clear that all the parties need to get together and find a workable solution, which is highly unlikely to happen because of the vastly different political atmospheres between UK and USA, and a general lack of adult leadership on both sides. I can imagine a system where Uber's technology is used, within a revised legal framework that brings in Black Cab drivers too. Uber would have to give up predatory pricing and recognise its employership, while Black Cab drivers would have to slacken their monopoly. And pigs would have to mount flying unicorns.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber and the rest have built a worldwide, highly effective infrastructure of the sort that socialists (especially Stafford Beer) used to dream about - but unsurprisingly, as private enterprises, they use it to generate mega-profits for their owners and to erode working conditions and pay for their workers. The challenge for social democrats - which few are thinking straight (or even talking) about - is to devise new reforms that will make this infrastructure work better for the public interest, without destroying it or crushing its ability to keep innovating.

Tax avoidance by the big tech companies is certainly a major issue, and getting them to pay anything at all would be a step forward, but punitive taxation is not a solution either. Similarly with ownership, old-style nationalisation is unimaginable, unaffordable and might in any case stifle innovation. As for regulation, we need to grasp in precisely what ways the new connectivity renders many older forms of regulation ineffective, and modify them to the new reality. In fact we need to rethink a whole complex of now-inseparable issues - benefits, universal basic income, employment rights, taxation, public v private provision.

Not convinced? Then remember for a moment all those billions of pounds from the public purse that have been wasted over the last 50 years on failed NHS and other public IT projects. Now try to imagine how technology like Amazon/Google/Facebook's would help the NHS with appointments, record keeping and sharing, even diagnosis...

No parties that I'm aware of on either side of the Atlantic are thinking seriously about these matters in sufficient depth and urgency. In the USA the sheer incompetence of the Democratic Party has put the Republicans in a position not only to erase what remains of New Deal social democracy, but also to salt the earth against any possibility of its regrowth. In the UK social democracy has fallen down the crack that runs down the middle of the Labour Party, between a Right that remains wedded to neoliberalism, and a Left often hobbled by nostalgia (not always conscious) for state socialism. Not until Jeremy Corbyn starts calling himself a social democrat rather than a socialist, can you be sure that the party has remembered the difference.

Saturday 3 March 2012

A Very British Coup?




 






In 100 years time the last week of February 2012 will be remembered as a turning point in UK history, for three events that don't seem all that remarkable at first sight.

The first event was the appearance of Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan police Sue Akers at the Leveson inquiry, where she claimed that there was a "culture of illegal payments" at the Sun newspaper, in which police officers and other civil servants were not merely paid for specific information but were in effect kept on retainer to leak regularly. Akers testimony coincided with James Murdoch finally resigning the chairmanship of News International, the Sun's holding company. 

The second event was the announcement that the West Midlands and Surrey police authorities have invited bids from G4S and other major security companies on behalf of all forces across England and Wales to take over the delivery of a wide range of services previously carried out by the police. A West Midlands spokesman said that "Combining with the business sector is aimed at totally transforming the way the force currently does business – improving the service provided to the public". Needless to say Home Secretary Teresa May is an enthusiastic promoter of this scheme, which she hopes to have in place by next spring.

The third event was Prime Minister David Cameron's admission that he had indeed repeatedly ridden a horse loaned to former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks by the Metropolitan Police.

Now to anyone with a modicum of political nous it should come as no surprise to learn that the so-called "ruling class" is nothing of the sort - it is not a class, nor is it singular, nor does it "rule" in any straightforward way. Complex social democracies like that of the UK are ruled by a collection of powerful institutions that pass around power and funds between them, not with much sense of solidarity but more like a Darwinian struggle for dominance. These three events shine a spotlight on three of the most powerful of the institutions, two public (the Tory government and the Metropolitan police) and one private (News International), but other equally powerful ones like parliament and the judiciary are currently involved in a titanic struggle that almost amounts to coup and counter-coup.

That News International has had a baleful influence on British politics for the last 30 years is scarcely news to any but a blinkered few. During its 18 wilderness years the Labour party developed such a debilitating fear of the Sun's power over its natural voter base that NI in effect controlled the mainfesto of New Labour, dictating a continuance of Thatcherite economics and a hands-off policy on the media regulation that might have set them free. However it is somewhat newsworthy to learn that Cameron's "detoxified" Tory party too is almost completely integrated with News International, socially as well as politically.

It appeared for a while that News International's hubris had actually brought it down - the flagrancy of its illegal and anti-democratic behaviour over phone hacking lead to public revulsion and a revolt by parliament and the judiciary: to the Leveson inquiry, the closing of News of the World and the downfall of both Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch. Last week Sue Akers testimony suggested that the Metropolitan Police, feeling the strength of the gale that's blowing, had changed sides in this struggle and decided to clean out the corruption, sever links with News International and start doing its job again. And then, POW!, we learn that the power of the police nationwide is to be dissipated by hiving off many of its activites to private sector security firms already known to be rapacious, inefficient and mired in corruption. What a coincidence.

I had a foretaste of what's to come when my motorbike was stolen a couple of years ago. The police found it, damaged and immobile, just outside London, but the officer who came to my door explained they could no longer return it themselves: instead it was being held by a private recovery company in Stevenage who charged £150 storage for every day I didn't reclaim it. On contacting my insurance company they were unfazed by this and having assessed my claim eventually paid some £900 storage fees (though of course I and everyone else ultimately pay in increased premiums). The bike was written-off rather than repaired as a result. This is the thoroughly British way of corruption, an insurance claim (whiplash, a "burned hearthrug", a privately-stored motorbike) rather than a handful of banknotes as in India or Latin America, or a newspaper parcel of home-grown cucumbers in the old Soviet Union.

This campaign poses the biggest threat to rule of law since Robert Peel first established a public police force. Combined with the concurrent assault on the NHS, it threatens to change entirely the nature of British society, driving it in the same dysfunctional and collapsing direction as the USA. Business interests will ensure News International eventually wriggles off the hook. Corruption will dominate everyday life as people strive to pay for their health-care and protection from crime. Private security firms will effectively become warlords in the poorer parts of the country. And all this is from the Detoxified Party of Law and Order. I think I preferred the toxic version, at least you knew where you were.

GILT BY ASSOCIATION

I don’t have any special credentials as a commentator on geopolitics, but occasionally, like now, I feel obliged to have a stab at it. The c...