Will Gordon brown call a General Election?

There is much talk around about whether Gordon Brown will call a general election. It is far from clear that it matters much; he could at the worst hand over government to Cameron this year in 2007, 2010 (the longest the Parliament can run) or by 2112, if he wins an election this year.

Of course in a head-to-head with the Tories I would hope for New Labour to come out on top – just as I wanted Chirac to defeat Le Pen in 2002 and Kerry to win over Bush in 2004. In all these cases one’s vote or wish is essentially negative; i.e. to prevent the gratuitous nastiness of the Right, while having little affinity for the ‘left’ side in these Twiddle-Dum Twiddle-Dee battles.

In 2005 Blair romped home with a safe overall majority of over sixty seats on around 35 percent of the votes, and Brown’s chances of doing the same depends less on how many votes Labour receives than where they are cast. Stacking up votes - from working people who think Gordon is ‘more Labour’ than Tony - in Labour’s heartlands of the north and in the cities counts for nothing. Brown needs to retain votes in the marginals in the South, Midlands and suburbs while hoping for a high Liberal Democratic vote.

So not only does the outcome of the election not count for very much, but the idea of one voter with one vote of one value determining the result reveals itself as a meaningless deception.

Reading

Reading is something we all do; in fact it is oxygen of life, for without it our brains would simply dry up or become polluted by the mind-rotting junk spewed out every day by our television sets. Yet, though the books we have read can be counted in the thousand, they disappear into the ever-more-difficult-to-access recesses of the brain.

One task I find useful to keep reading in focus is to write a short ‘review’ of each book that I finish. My rule is to spend no more than five minutes on this task, so my ‘reviews’ are hardly intellectual comments, but they do form a point a reference long after the book is back on the shelf. I also find myself mentally composing my comments as I read the book.

Here is my comment for the following book.

WILSON, A. N. – After the Victorians

Arrow 2006

Read September 2007

This book is a hefty read and an interesting one. In this extremely well written book Wilson sets out to examine key themes in British society and politics in the years from the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 up to the coronation of Elizabeth in 1953. The subtitle of the work is ‘the world our parents knew’

Wilson’s choice of topics is eclectic – in fact, the book could almost be seen as a collection of essays - but it is always interesting. The dominant theme of the work is the loss of empire which gives the book a superficial right-wing feel, especially when you learn that his father was a special constable during the 1926 General Strike. Yet, Wilson comes across very much as a ‘neutral;’ he takes a vast array of evidence of sustain or dismiss the prevailing ideas of the twentieth century.

His approach is to take a contemporary story (e.g. Laurel and Hardy in the case of Churchill’s relations with Roosevelt) extract a point and then consolidate the point with historical facts and anecdotes.

WILSON, A. N. – After the Victorians

Arrow 2006

Read September 2007

This book is a hefty read and an interesting one. In this extremely well written book Wilson sets out to examine key themes in British society and politics in the years from the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 up to the coronation of Elizabeth in 1953. The subtitle of the work is ‘the world our parents knew’

Wilson’s choice of topics is eclectic – in fact, the book could almost be seen as a collection of essays - but it is always interesting. The dominant theme of the work is the loss of empire which gives the book a superficial right-wing feel, especially when you learn that his father was a special constable during the 1926 General Strike. Yet, Wilson comes across very much as a ‘neutral;’ he takes a vast array of evidence of sustain or dismiss the prevailing ideas of the twentieth century.

His approach is to take a contemporary story (e.g. Laurel and Hardy in the case of Churchill’s relations with Roosevelt) extract a point and then consolidate the point with historical facts and anecdotes.

BERNDOTTE, Folke – La Fino

Societo Esperanto, Stockholm 1945

Read September 2007

This book is a translation into Esperanto from Swedish, and is essentially the memoirs of a well-meaning, well-connected and well-off Swedish Red Cross Official who visited Germany in the last days of the Third Reich in an attempt (mostly successful) to free Norwegian and Danish prisoners.

The book provides a limited account of life in Germany at that time, but focuses mainly on the author's meetings with Himmler, Ribbentrop and Schellenberg. These Nazi officials' main interest in the author is to open up a line of communication with the Swedish government in an attempt to negotiate a separate piece with the Western Allies. Germany at this time is all but defeated and the author recoginses this as the vane that it is to cluch at straws.

The author makes clear his disapproval and horror of the Nazi project, and yet this contrasts with his all too human interactions with these leading Nazis.

Overall, this short book is an interesting, if somewhat dated and limited, read about the period, and is written in simple and easy to read Esperanto.

Some Reflections on Happiness

Happiness is rarely in the present and dissolves if we achieve it.

In most people's minds our purpose in life is to be happy. I am not thinking here of whether that involves being selfish or altruistic, but of happiness in a broad sense in which we do things to make ourselves, or others, happier. When we act we have the purpose in our head of making ourselves happier. What constitutes greater happiness varies from person to person, time to time and from one social group to another. Happiness may consist of possessing a new car, a walk in the countryside, giving a child an ice cream or having a leg amputated. Yet all of the above examples are the same in one fundamental way; we desire to move from our current situation (A) to a new situation (B); and that new situation (B) gives us more happiness than if we had done nothing. If the analysis were left like this, the world would, other things being equal, become progressively happier. Unfortunately, two factors work against this conclusion.

First, it is extremely difficult to reach a state of happiness because often the happiness we strive for lies in the future, and like tomorrow we are never there. In other words, most of us are walking along what we hope is the road to happiness, rather than actually being there; or to quote a popular adage, 'Tis better to travel hopefully than to arrive.' We execute acts not for their own sake but in order to attain a purpose that always lies in the future. We acquire money, not because we want the money for itself, but because we know that other people want our money and will give us things or do things for us in return for our money. We buy a ticket not, not for the sake of buying a ticket, but in order to travel, in order to reach our destination, etc. The holiday refreshes us so that we can get back to our normal lives in a better state, so that, etc. We often have as much difficulty attaining that future state of happiness as we do jumping over our own shadow.

Second, any given state of happiness that we might reach is subject to decay. For instance, the other day I decided to have a warm bath; I poured myself some wine, put on some jazz and relaxed in the warm water. I had attained a state of sensual happiness, but it was a happiness that started to decay. The jazz began to irritate me after a while; the water started to get cold and I got fed up with the wine. I had to destroy my previous source of happiness by getting out of the bath and switching off the music. The notion of the inevitable decay of happiness could equally be applied to sex, food, holidays and everything else that we strive for. The pleasure peaks and then decays, which of course can be devastating. Once a friend wrote to me and said he was completely happy in every aspect of his life. I wrote back to say how sorry I was, as from thereon his life could only deteriorate. Happiness then is merely a temporary prelude to its diminution. Total happiness is therefore to stand at the gate of depression, decline and failure.

In conclusion, we can see that, although we have the freedom to make choices in our lives, our ability to attain happiness is cruelly limited. Happiness too often lies in a future which never comes and when it does, it proves to be temporary and subject to instant and inevitable decay. How is it then that human life and action revolve around the pursuit of something which is so intangible and ephemeral? Quite simply, we pursue that evasive happiness simply because we have no other choice.

Social Inequaity in Britain

Social inequality is a factor which contributes to many social ills such as poverty, crime, homelessness and educational under achievement. And though a recent opinion poll found that over ninety percent of Labour and Liberal Democratic voters (i.e. the majority of voters) thought inequality was too great in Britain, the New Labour decade has seen social inequality rise rather than fall.

Inequality can arises from several causes (e.g. luck, effort, talent, choice, etc), but the payment received by the owners of capital and those at the top of commercial organisations - which is hundreds of times that earned by ordinary workers - has nothing to do with these factors. It has everything to do with the systematic extraction of surplus value from workers in Britain and abroad – i.e. exploitation.

Peter Mandelson, early guru of New Labour, once said he was content with the ‘filthy rich’ but what Mandelson means is that he is happy both with the exploitation of workers to create such inequality and with a society founded on massive social class divisions.

Two points should be made here. First that the political left is nothing unless it embraces policies to reduce social inequality and exploitation. Second, there is a consensus among voters for the left on this issue, but the popular consensus does not extend to the leaders of New Labour.

Brown-nosing to Thatcher

A couple of days ago the octogenarian Margaret Thatcher visited Gordon Brown in 10 Downing Street for tea. The prime minister complimented his guest saying that she, like him but unlike the current leader of the Tory Party, was a conviction politician. We do not see, however, two politicians steeled in their convictions on either side of a class divide, but rather two co-ideologists both committed to burying social democracy distinguished only by a gap of twenty years.

Mrs Thatcher’s election victory in May 1979 was a turning point in British politics in that it established as the dominant twin principles of British politics: the commercialisation of every aspect of economic activity and an authoritarian state. New Labour, of which Brown was the twin architect, was a continuation of that policy under new urbane management. So when Brown imposed PFI on the Tube and hospitals, and when he backs ninety-day detentions, his ideological progenitor is not Labourism as it was until the mid 1980s, but Mrs Thatcher.

Mrs Thatcher was a ‘great’ Prime Minister because she defeated the left and brought about a political ‘opposition’ in her own image consisting of men like Blair and Brown.

Measure to help the poor

Gordon Brown seems to want to present himself as a champion of rights for the low paid while running an aggressive form American capitalism in Britain. Yet three fisco-legislative measures would do much to help worst off relative to the rich.

First, increase both the threshold at which income tax is paid and the rate. Thus on say the first GBP 10 000 of income a year, the tax rate could be nothing. Why take money from the poorest people at all? On incomes over that amount the standard rate of tax could be 25 percent – hardly a high rate by European comparisons.

Second, the minimum wage should be increased to seven or eight pounds per hour. This would go some way to end the scandal of people in full time employment and living in poverty.

Third, tax the property of the rich. Whereas income can always be hidden, property cannot. All persons owning land valued at over GBP 400 000 would be required to pay say one percent of the property’s value in tax. Similar rules could apply to four-wheel-drives, yachts, etc.

Of course in reality Brown will do none of these things. While paying lip service to the poor, his loyalty remains not just to American style capitalism for Britain, but also to the rich who benefit from it.

A Peeping Tom

Minor crime is dramatised and excessively punished in Britain for propaganda effect.

The BBC’s website yesterday carried a story – mainly for amusement it would seem - about a fumbling peeing Tom. The facts seemed pretty simple: a man was on roof of a sun tanning establishment and peeped through at a woman lying naked on her back on a sun bed. The clumsy idiot, however, was spotted by the woman underneath.

Quite obviously the woman had a right to privacy, and the man had no right to peep. In so far as a matter of this kind had to come before the courts, one would have thought that a small fine and an apology would suffice. (If the fellow were a headcase and repeatedly doing things of this kind, mental health measures might be in order.)

In actual fact the whole matter went before a crown court and the man was sentenced to three months in prison suspended for two years. True, he wasn’t actually imprisoned, but by a hair’s breadth he avoided becoming one over 80 000 now incarcerated in Brown’s Britain - a life ruined and a person consigned to social marginalisation and poverty for life.

This absurd case has no direct political meaning, but it does illustrate the state-led lust for authoritarianism which is so evident in Britain, from the ubiquitous CCTV cameras, anti- terror laws and zero-tolerance of whatever grabs a headline for government.


.