In light of recent developments, not least, the announcement of Michael McGrath as the next EU Commissioner, it is timely to look again at the infernal plight of workers of conscience – those noble people who blow the whistle on wrongdoing, and who strive to keep a corroded system from descending further into the abyss.
Until 2022, Michael McGrath was Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform (referred to henceforth as DPER). Under his Ministry, new EU protected disclosures legislation of 2014 was advancing, and also EU Directive number 2019/1937 of the European Parliament and of the Council of Europe of 23 October 2019 was set to be transposed into Irish law.
This provision was, however, effectively sabotaged long before it was transposed, and Minister Michael McGrath was central to that. The entire Protected Disclosure Act is under the remit of DPER.
Cynical Collusion
The now sinister OPLA – Office of the Parliamentary Legal Advisor was exposed on these pages before in November 2022 and again in March 2023. Its rapid expansion appears to have been in anticipation of the significant effectiveness of this EU Resolution on Protected Disclosures to stem corruption and protect whistleblowers. Two things happened to neutralise and sabotage this EU provision before it was transposed:
The vast expansion of OPLA involved OPLA being placed, unconstitutionally, on the statute books in December 2018, just as the Dail was rising for its Christmas recess. It occurred with no committee stages, or debate. This was in defiance of the Dunning Capacity Report, into OPLA which was not sent back to the sub-committee on Dail reform for consideration in December 2016 by the Dail Clerk who received it from Dunning. Thus, Dunning’s report was effectively suppressed. The integration of the OPLA into the Houses of the Oireachtas as rank-and-file civil servants, under the Dail clerk(a civil service appointee) in the Executive Arm of Government, is, as pointed out, a violation of the constitutional Separation of Powers. The discovery that OPLA was secretly involved in the investigation of Protected Disclosures in defiance of the provisions of the Act since 2013, and that it was all set to escalate as per Dunning, exposes a sleight-of-hand to virtually cut the legs out from under whistleblowers, striking a lethal blow at an integral part of democracy.
The unlawful appointment of the Ombudsman by the civil service body – the PAS (Public Appointment Service) – is a violation of the Ombudsman’s Act 1980, and subsequent amending acts. The Ombudsman Act specifically disallows the Ombudsman from being appointed by the civil service. The Ombudsman was also appointed as Commissioner for Protected Disclosures, another canny moved within DPER while Michael McGrath was Minister. The Ombudsman knew full well that the OPLA – since 2018 a civil service body – was already involved in the investigation of Protected Disclosures since 2013, and that this was considered the main area of “growth and challenge for OPLA.”
I have been in email contact with the CEO of the PAS about this unlawful appointment of the Ombudsman. I accused her of stepping outside of her remit in the appointment of the Ombudsman and pointed out that the Ombudsman’s Act 1980 specifically excluded it as a civil service appointment. To this she replied that it was done by PAS as “sanctioned” by the then Minister, Michael McGrath.
He has no power to unilaterally alter legislation. The competition for the Ombudsman’s job was held by the PAS in August 2021, when the Dail was in recess and during the holiday season. The only Irish applicant was Ger Deering. On the appointment board was David Moloney, SG in DPER who was central to the entire legislation, as it was progressing at Committee stages in the new Protected Disclosures Act. David Moloney merely continued what Robert Watt, whom he replaced, had commenced.
Both David Moloney and the Ombudsman appeared before the Finance Committee, which was responsible for the deliberations into the Protected Disclosures legislation, and which met several times in 2021 and 2022 to discuss the enhanced the Protected Disclosure Bill 2014, and the EU Directive about to be transposed.
David Moloney effectively misled the Finance Committee in failing to inform the Chair and members that the PAS, with the apparent collusion of Minister Michael McGrath, after unlawfully taking over the appointment of the Ombudsman, whom it was also decided would become the new Commissioner for Protected Disclosures.
Ger Deering’s appointment is a Constitutional one, and it thereby had to be ratified by the Dail before he went to the Aras to get his seal of office from the President. Mr Deering appeared before the Finnance Committee and made a speech on his appointment in December 2021 for the purpose of his appointment being ratified by the Oireachtas.
I contend that Deering also misled the Committee, whose members and Chairman seemed to have been unaware that the Ombudsman should not have been appointed by the civil service body – the PAS – by law. Deering knew that he would be using the unconstitutional OPLA as new Commissioner for investigating Protected Disclosures, but he never revealed that at the Finance Committee despite the fact that John McGuinness, the Committee’s chairman, discussed the plight of whistleblowers with him fairly extensively and name checked a number of better known ones.
McGuinness and his committee approved Deering’s appointment on behalf of the Oireachtas and he duly went to the Aras to receive his seal of office from the President.
Whistleblowers – The Walking Wounded
The dual strategies of the newly expanded OPLA – an unconstitutional entity since 2018 – and the sabotage implicit in the appointment of the Ombudsman utterly neutralised the provision of the EU Directive on Protected Disclosures, even before the full transposal of the EU Directive in January 2023.
It was all done by DPER under Michael McGrath as Minister. The senior civil service have dealt a mortal blow to democracy, with full ministerial collusion and, above all, have commenced the ongoing campaign against whistleblowers – the walking wounded in a deeply corrupt system.
In 2022, at a meeting of the Finance Committee, which McGrath attended with his senior civil servants, including David Moloney, and where a number of whistleblowers were also present, the civil servants backed by McGrath managed to get the provision of the EU Directive on PDs known as ‘The Presumption of Causation’ excluded from the EU Directive as transposed.
This had provided for the presumption of victimization of a whistleblower, who reports wrongdoing without the whistleblower having to prove victimization is as a result of whistleblowing. This, of itself, was a significant blow to the effectiveness of the EU Directive.
Democracy Under Threat
Democracy depends on five major planks:
A free, robust and independent press.
A free and independent judiciary.
A robust and independent police force.
Robust whistleblower legislation.
A functioning democratic parliament where issue of major public import can be raised under privilege.
The combined forces of the OPLA and the unlawfully appointed Ombudsman has dealt a direct, mortal blow to at last three of the five planks listed above. OPLA is unlawfully involved in Protected Disclosures and in the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) and the Labour Court – both courts are subordinate to the High Court and a significant number of whistleblowers prosecute their claims, or aspect of their claims, in the WRC/Labour Court.
Above all, OPLA has dealt an absolute mortal blow to the Dail itself. Arguably it has paralysed our parliament: there are numerous examples of OPLA muscling in, in a very heavy handed way on Dail Committee, especially in cases brought under privilege by whistleblowers to the Committees.
The Committee Chairpersons are gormlessly allowing this, and are being bullied by the Committee Clerks who, in turn, are taking their instructions from the Dail clerk, Peter Finnegan, himself the chief architect of the draconian new OPLA in December 2018.
In a case I had with the CPPO Committee, the OPLA took over the case from its clerk designate. I pointed out to the head of OPLA that no Standing Order (SO) of the Oireachtas allowed for it and asked what allowed it. I received no reply from Melissa English, the Chief Parliamentary Legal Adviser, whom I have accused of unlawfully and unconstitutionally trespassing into the sacrosanct area of the Oireachtas and the Ceann Comhairle, in a violation of the Separation of Powers, and a blow to the prudent use of Dail privilege.
As OPLA operates in secret in addition to its listed function in Dunning’s capacity report of December 2016 as listed below, it may well be involved with the Gardai, and indeed with media enquires as fielded by the more robust elements in the media. I know from personal experience that the Gardai co-operate with the Ombudsman, attempting to sideline one complaint of a criminal nature I made to the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman cannot investigate suspected crimes.
The table below from Dunning’s Capacity Report (Dec 2016) includes all the secret areas OPLA are involved in where they have no jurisdiction:
OPLA, and indeed its boss, Peter Finnegan (Dail Clerk) have no remit in at least four areas of growth as listed above. OPLA’s remit is ostensibly confined to the tripartite functions of 1) Advices to the houses of the Oireachtas and its staff, 2) Defending the Houses of the Oireachtas in Court and 3) Help with drafting Private Members Bills (PMBs). Enhanced Protected Disclosures legislation and the whistleblowers who rely on it have been taken out with military precision.
I have raised the OPLA and the unlawful Ombudsman appointment with John McGuinness, Chairperson of the Oireachtas Finance Committee unsuccessfully. I have also made a complaint to the Relevant Section in the EU, responsible for the transposal of the EU Directive on Protected Disclosures into Irish law, backed by a number of other whistleblowers. The EU passed the buck back to the Irish courts. As if any whistleblower can afford to go to Court!
Several whistleblowers (myself included) have appealed to mainstream media outlets to expose the OPLA in its unconstitutional reconfiguration since 2018 and its unlawful involvement in PDs. They have all refused to act.
Transparency Ireland have become a quangoistic arm of state, which now fully funds the organisation. Dr Lauren Kierans, the Maynooth academic in the area of PDs who wrote the new Protected Disclosures Act for DPER has been informed that her act was sabotaged as outlined above. She passed the buck to Transparency Ireland and is now on maternity leave.
The retaliation against and destruction of whistleblowers is all set to escalate as OPLA continues to expand. As Transparency Ireland expands too, and academic departments and units on whistleblowing mushroom in Maynooth and Galway Universities, whistleblowing has now become a lucrative industry, where everyone is well-remunerated bar the destroyed whistleblowers themselves – for whose welfare these organisations ostensibly exist.
Whistleblower, Shane Corr (where OPLA also interfered) was suspended as a Principal Officer by Robert Watt in the Health Department. Watt was himself central to the creation and the funding of the OPLA since 2018 when he was SG in DPER until replaced by David Moloney in 2021. Corr was threatened by Watt with a criminal breach of the Official Secrets Act after OPLA deemed his submissions to the PAC were not covered by privilege.
Whistleblower and very senior official, John Barrett, the Garda Head of HR according to a Village Magazine article some time ago, was subjected to tyrannous retaliation by Drew Harris for exposing the Templemore Garda slush funds scandal. He is awaiting a hearing in court. This is to name but two of an army of destroyed whistleblowers.
In a deeply compromised, dysfunctional democracy, everyone will be rewarded bar whistleblowers. The Finance Committee is in a state of paralysis and the Minister who colluded all the way, Michael McGrath becomes an EU Commissioner in circumstances where he actively incapacitated the EU’s own Directive for the protection of whistleblowers.
The irony of this cannot be overstated. What part the early announcement of his departure has to do with my rigorous challenged to the CEO of the PAS in recent days, Margaret McCabe, is anyone’s guess.
After all, the vacancy for the EU Commissioner does not arise until October. Meanwhile, whistleblowers will continue to be condemned, vilified and relegated to the ranks of public pariah, while endless amounts of public money will be thrown at the industry and the army of persons who have colluded to destroy them. Foremost among these is OPLA and the Ombudsman. According to theLaw Society Gazette in July 2018 OPLA’s Melissa English believes she’s worth it. Our democracy meanwhile, which can always be measured by the treatment of whistleblowers, was never more undermined.
U.S. President (1932-45) Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born into one of the most aristocratic families in America. A distant cousin, Teddy, had even been elected President. In his youth FDR, as he became known, was a bon vivant and ladies’ man, who strayed from Eleanor, his saintly but formidable wife. This blue blood seemed an unlikely person to buck the entire system of U.S. capitalism. He remains a hate-figure for U.S. Conservatives to this day.
Any account of his life should include the enormous personal tragedy of incapacitation from polio. He could not walk, a disability which may have broadened an empathy for others’ suffering. He was elected President in 1932 on a platform to provide a New Deal to the American people after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression. The destitution of the American people is movingly depicted in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939), where a group of ‘Okies’, led by Tom Joad, are ruined by dustbowl conditions, and the calling in of loans by ruthless bankers, and in E.Y. Yip Harpburg’s Broadway Musical Brother Can You Spare Me a Dime (1930). Even brokers were forced to eat from soup kitchens, as erstwhile respectable folk were reduced to ‘hobos.’
A bull market of speculation collapsed after an unregulated free market had built mountains of sand out of folly and greed. The dominant economic philosophy of laissez faire brought light touch regulation and government passivity, as with our present, similarly hegemonic, neo-liberalism. The view then, as today, was that government had no business interfering in private transactions and that wealth, growth and efficiency are best achieved through the operation of an Invisible Hand. The banking crash from 2007 has had similar deleterious social consequences.
FDR in 1933.
FDR adopted the then heretical advice of the economist John Maynard Keynes that to save capitalism it was necessary for the government to intervene in the market. He set up national agencies and support structures for aid and assistance. It was a bailout to protect the poor and disenfranchised, not the rich. His New Deal was in the national interest, not to protect vested interests. The Supreme Court initially blocked the legislation, insisting it had no business varying contracts. In response, an exasperated Roosevelt informed the judges that if they did not approve his legislation he would appoint new ones, which led to a change of heart. This became known among wags as ‘the switch in time that saved nine.’
The assumption of liberty of contract is that anyone is free to enter into a bargain under whatever terms they choose, but once the deal is struck they are bound by their word. But this is based on the pretence that the market is a level playing field. Many sign on the dotted line without fully understanding the implications, or do so under duress.
Roosevelt may at times have displayed an ambivalence towards democracy, but he favoured those at the bottom of the social ladder, as he recognised that democracy had been sabotaged by vested interests. Just like today, transnational corporations and law firms were dictating to governments. He revived the U.S. economy through a Keynesian stimulus as government expenditure raised aggregate demand. This brought investment to help ordinary people, not the infliction of wanton cruelty in the form of perma-austerity that runs contrary to even capitalist logic. The best evidence is that a mixed economy, combining private enterprise and public initiative, with social safety nets and support for small enterprise, is a model that works best for society as a whole. Keynes was right then, and still is, but over time his approach went out of fashion.
John Maynard Keynes in 1933.
In late 1970’s Britain in particular, the excesses of socialism were becoming obvious, with the three-day-working-week, refuse on the streets, and the stranglehold of government by the Unions. In circumstances where initiative was stifled, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan championed the old doctrine of unregulated markets, conveniently referred to as neo-liberalism. The ideological underpinning came from the Austrian Friedrich Hayek and the Chicago School under Milton Friedman.
The curious assumption was that wealth would trickle like manna from heaven down from rich to poor under free market conditions. Instead we got the 1980s yuppies like Donald Trump, accumulating vast fortunes. Over time we have seen a dismantling of the Welfare State; the removal of social protections and safety nets. Today the richest 1% are on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030, with the rest of our existences increasingly precarious. The distinction between working class and middle class is being eroded as we revisit a medieval pyramid of barons and serfs. Yet, ironically, Hayek actually described socialism as the new serfdom. But old-fashioned Marxist class divisions no longer make sense.
The unprecedented banking collapse after 2007 led to bail-outs being awarded to those who were responsible, and the infliction of austerity on the wretched of the earth. This led Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stieglitz to point to a socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. Yet those countries which adopted Keynesian approaches – including nationalisation of banks – such as Iceland, have been vindicated by stabilisation and recovery.
Ireland achieved the worst of all possible ends. It established a bad bank NAMA, which cut deals with failed property speculators and lawyers and the congeries of the corrupt. As the IMF and Europe imposed austerity on the defenceless masses, those responsible were bailed-out and their debts cancelled. The fraudulent banks had made money on misrepresentations, providing negligent lending advice about the value of stocks, investments and credit ratings. This caused the economy to overheat and generated a property bubble that many had pointed to. Now institutions continue to foreclose against the poor and defenceless, as sanctity of contract is insisted on. The perversion of the system it that the richer you are, the more easily you can cut a deal; the logic of a bank too big to fail.
The neo-liberal recasting of homo sapiens into homo economicus, also initiates a new form of Social Darwinism, permitting the survival of the most ruthless in a dog eat god universe. We have seen a slippage in standards, where the young are habituated to lying, having witnessed the deceit of those in high office. Lines between fact, semi-fact, lies and deceptions have been blurred. Even in the courts of law fabricated cases have reached pandemic proportions. This has also led to increasingly vicious tactics against those who demure: like a plague, the corruption of banks has spread to other private agencies and even state institutions; where whistleblowers are systematically undermined. In a distorted world, the mugshots of heroes of our time now feature in rogues’ galleries of subversion. The indicted include human rights lawyers, public-interest journalists, and anyone in public life with a shred of a social conscience.
It is an increasingly divisive ‘them’ and ‘us’ social setting, where the poor, the migrant, the displaced, the activist, and the public intellectual, are marginalised and destroyed in increments. Targeted assassination by the state is now evident across Europe, and not just under Mr Putin. Our corporate suzerains lead political discourse towards safe issues around individual entitlements. Suddenly the political class are all in favour of gay marriage, gender equality and decriminalising someone for puffing on a joint. But what about more fundamental rights intrinsic to sustaining human life, such as health care, housing and social support?
Around the world courts are evicting and rendering homeless surplus populations, and in India dumping them on the streets. Housing, either buying or renting, is increasingly unaffordable, diminishing the prospect of human flourishing. Now crucially also, the privatisation of health care has led to life or death becoming a matter of affordability not a right or entitlement. There are other sinister ramifications. Those teachers, academics or professionals in badly paid but socially worthwhile occupations must toe the line, or are fired for exposing corruption. Survivors sing for their supper, while in journalism the phrase he who pays the piper calls the tune is increasingly apt.
The wise sensei or village elder is no longer looked up to, but instead the old are being asked to quietly await their death. Intelligence and achievement have to be costed and channelled into wealth producing activities. You are not seen as a man if you do not have the mentality of the hunter. Short-termism both in contracts and outlooks has brought reactive decision-making, wherein people are desensitised to the suffering of others. These depredations being heaped on society are deliberate. The Shock Doctrine pioneered in Chile and Indonesia by neo-liberals in the 1970s have been visited on Ireland and Greece, and elsewhere. It brings cuts in funding to socially useful public agencies, such as libraries, which are being gradually eliminated. There have also been huge cuts to legal aid, imperilling the ability of the innocent to defend themselves against criminal charges.
It is clear that we require a Renewed Deal, bringing Keynesian stabilisation measures, including support for small businesses, social safety nets and the shutting down of corporate tax avoidance. The E.U. must desist from imposing austerity under the guise of the Growth and Stability Pact, and reinforce regulatory protection of labour rights and the environment, resisting the lobbying of giant corporations. Courts in Ireland should also recognise a basic human right to housing, including prohibition against arbitrary eviction, as well as healthcare. So let us organise a petition then for an umbrella organisation to bring a Renewed Deal to the world.
Codicil
I write this as the Coronavirus pandemic sweeps through the world, with governmental intervention and support in the Keynesian sense right back on the table, particularly in the U.K. But there is appearance and there is reality; smoke and mirrors.
My concern is with the Malthusian ideas emanating from an ongoing devotion to the tenets of neo-liberalism, and also that social distancing and other precautionary measures will accentuate pre-existing social atomization, and amplify a lack of care and concern for one another.
Emergency measures could also empower authoritarian elements within States, undermining cherished civil liberties.
My fear is that any Renewed Deal and stimulus to avoid economic meltdown under the politicians currently in power in the U.K. and Ireland will be selectively targeted, with many if not most of an over populated planet permitted to wither away by increments. We cannot have another Bailout to preserve the assets of those at the top of a latter-day feudal pyramid.
You might think of the film ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ as some dated artifact, featuring Dub-a-lin in da rare auld times. But many of the cultural assumptions revealed in the film, and which later went towards hindering the film’s reception, are still very much alive in today’s Ireland. The sacred cows may have changed, but the overall cultural relationship with those things deemed sacred is still strikingly similar.
From the opening shot where the proud young boy reels off the complex theological dictates of the Catholic catechism in a machine-like patter, beaming with pride at his own parroting, oblivious to the meaning of the words he is reciting by rote; the film not only captures a moment in Ireland’s time, but achieves something far more profound: it captures the Irish sensibility, a quality slower to date than many would like to believe, and one which still informs how we do business even today.
For instance, in the opening summary of the 1916 Easter Rising, the commentator (Peter Lennon) says that one of the goals of the leaders of the rising was to ‘awaken a lethargic and indifferent Irish population to an ideal of freedom.’
To awaken to an ideal of freedom. What does that even mean? Not just freedom in the context of colonial Ireland, but freedom itself? What would it mean to be awakened to an ideal of freedom?
Vulgar Chancers
In a 1916 essay – the perhaps over-dramatically titled ‘The Murder Machine’[i] – Patrick Pearse critiques the British education system as it was applied in Ireland, arguing that it was deliberately creating lesser people; people for service, and people, in times of war, to be wasted on battlefields, as was happening in France at that time.
His point was that an ideal of freedom entailed having a say over your own education system, which would then be designed to enhance natural gifts, rather than designed essentially for enslavement to the requirements of a greater, indifferent power.
In the essay he recounts a wonderful story, which we would now recognize as a foundational argument for arts subsidy. A farmer comes to him (Pearse was a teacher) complaining about a ‘lazy’ son who chose to do nothing all day except play the tin whistle. ‘What am I to do with him?’ says the farmer. ‘Buy him a tin whistle’, says Pearse.
But is our education system any better equipped now? It seems to have been designed, like the British education system of Pearse’s time, to facilitate powerful institutions. Even at the top end, the universities often seem like dispensers of tickets for corporate jobs. In Ireland today the bulk of jobs are to be found in retail and ‘hospitality’. The modern equivalent of service.
President Michael D. Higgins recently criticised Universities for being too focused on market outcomes where they should be places to provide a ‘moral space’ for discussion. He said that this was due to a perception in academia that there was ‘magic happening in the marketplace… when in fact actually what you had was a whole series of vulgar chancers.’[ii]
In this brave new republic we now occupy, where neo-liberalism informs the values of everything, the arts appear to be regarded as something of an anomaly. Talented people are flung into dead-end jobs with the same casual disregard that they were once thrown into gunfire. The unions are weakened, landlords are murdering people, economically speaking, with killing rents; workers are over-worked and underpaid; the government is in thrall to big business; and people at the bottom are now going hungry and homeless. No matter how you might like to dress this up with figures for job creation and GDP percentages, I doubt that any of it adds up to anyone’s notion of an ideal of freedom, except perhaps the small percentage at the top, benefitting economically from the enslavement of the rest.
Silence and Gratitude
The sense I have after watching ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ is that little has changed. The place has been repainted and the furniture moved around, but it all seems eerily similar, with one set of sacred cows replaced by another. The ‘economy’, that eternally needy abstract entity, serves as a replacement deity to whom we now must all pay homage, or face dire consequence.
Thus in 2011 Enda Kenny endowed his government’s austerity budget with a penitential quality: “The budget will be tough, it has to be,” he said, adding it will be the “first step” on the road to recovery.”[iii] Cut-backs to vital services appeared to be punishment for the ‘sins’ of excessive spending during the boom era.
The point is, people’s relationship to power in today’s Ireland is more or less the same as that portrayed in ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’. They are just now focused on a different God and a different set of authoritative ‘priests’, but the relationship to authority seems essentially the same, and a similar apathy still prevails.
As for an ideal of freedom; this has neither been articulated nor discussed in the state’s short history. It is not an ideal that informs the cultural life of the country. If anything, it is understood in the negative. Freedom from, rather than freedom to.
In the Rocky Road the question after independence becomes: what to do with your revolution once it has been achieved? The idealists hoped for the emergence of a true republic of equality, fraternity and so on.
Instead, as the writer Sean O’Faolain says in the film:
The kind of society that actually grew up was what I called urbanized peasants…A society which was without moral courage, constantly observing a self-interested silence, never speaking in moments of crisis, and in constant alliance with a completely obscurantist, repressive, regressive and uncultivated church. The result of all this was…a society utterly alien to the ideals of republicanism…a society in which there are blatant inequalities…the republic is not going to come slowly, it will be the creation of a whole generation, perhaps two generations… who will have the courage to speak and who won’t be afraid of those sanctions that are continually imposed on them if they do so.
Those sanctions of silence are still imposed on people who speak against the prevailing orthodoxies. And often those sanctions are most strenuously imposed by those who are themselves victims of structural inequalities.
The role of Irish people, mainly born in the 1930s, as identified in the film was to be ‘one of gratitude, well-behaved gratitude’, says Peter Lennon. The understanding being that freedom had been won; now, simply, shut up.
Criticism was regarded as betrayal. But whose freedom was it? What was being asked of Irish people now by the revolutionary generation, or those who had ended up in power, was a ‘new kind of heroism. Heroic obedience.’ In essence, to wait patiently while those in power created the republic.
That, to my ears, sounded exactly like what was asked of Irish people after the banking collapse. Heroic obedience and gratitude. It seems to be the same bargain struck in the name of austerity. And again, criticism is seen as betrayal. Your duty is to be patient while those in power rebuild the republic; to demonstrate allegiance with obedient silence.
But who betrayed who this time around? Did Fine Gael in power care for the people targeted by vulture investors? No. They let them fall into homelessness and left them there. It would be dull to go through the litany of Fine Gael betrayals since austerity. Everyone knows what they are. Besides, this isn’t about Fine Gael. It’s about Irish people and their reaction to being lumbered with yet another, self-serving authoritarian clique, supposedly building or rebuilding the republic.
Participation
How do you build a republic anyway? What does it need? I suppose you could say that a century of heroic obedience and silence – while the big boys build the thing – hasn’t really worked. And there is a very good reason for that. Submissive silence in a people is the antithesis of a participative republic.
A republic presupposes participation. But as the documentary about the reaction to ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ shows, Irish people seem to guard jealously the silence that acts as cover for the powerful, more than they aspire to the necessary participative nature of a functioning republic.
Put simply, it is not up to powerful vested interests to build a republic – they’ll never do it anyway, because, as Mel Brooks once observed, ‘It’s good to be the king.’ Who in power is going to spoil their own party by introducing policies that reflect true equality and fraternity?
It’s up to people, by being participative, to build a republic. You don’t even have to do anything dramatic. In the Irish case a way forward might be to simply quit ridiculing those who speak out, as was the fate of Patrick Pearse when reading the Proclamation outside the GPO; and is the metaphorical fate of most anyone who speaks against the prevailing orthodoxies in Ireland.
This above all is what the Rocky Road reveals, the Irish penchant for keeping itself enslaved by imposing on itself heroic obedience and silence. By shutting itself up.
Peter Lennon’s film was widely denounced in Ireland, characterized as a betrayal of a people. The usual rubbish when Ireland is looked at critically by an Irish person. This was in 1968.
In contrast, the film became a huge hit in Paris – a place where they build and maintain republics. It served as inspiration for many French students for what happens to a people when they agree to the pact of heroic obedience and silence.
Interestingly, when Peter Lennon came back to Ireland in the mid-sixties he still saw the glaring power of the church everywhere. But people in Ireland, he found, genuinely believed that all that church stuff was now in the past.
They were enchanted and duped by the ‘modernising’ trend – more-yah in the guise of crooning, finger-snapping, condescending Fr Michael Cleary, singing acapella to new mothers in a maternity ward, of all places.
The young people of the time assured Lennon that Ireland was changing, that the grip of the church’s power was broken, that the grey 30s, 40s and 50s had been consigned to the past. And yet, Lennon’s film, shot with the unerring gaze of Raouel Coutard’s artist’s eye, showed a country still hopelessly in thrall to power; and, most tellingly, in total denial of its own condition. Unquestioning, obedient, silent. Until, that is, they saw Lennon’s film and found something to turn their mute hatred on.
How To Build A Republic
There is in the attitude of the ‘great little country’ – ‘the Best Small Country in the World in Which to do Business’ according to Enda Kenny’[iv] – to its own myths and legends, a sense of the magical mirror that only flatters. And when you critique any of it, you bring down upon yourself the wrath that surges angrily from denial revealed as delusion.
But that, unfortunately, is how you build a republic: by questioning its precious presumptions. This may explain why it has taken so long to even frame the question: how do you build a republic, without getting yourself killed?
The Ireland we dare not look at is decked out with cruel inequities everywhere you care to look, particularly in relation to the low paid, the unemployed, Travellers and Direct Provision tenants.
More recently we were reminded again in the RTÉ documentary ‘Redress: Breaking the Silence’[v] that state officials, in their cumbersome way to make right, actually had the effect of re-traumatising the victims by way, really, of imposing on them an old authoritarian relationship.
This time the concern was whether the victims were fibbing for monetary gain. For the victims it was just another cold authority disbelieving them.
The authoritarianism that truly informs Irish culture peeks out in all its judgmental cocksureness everywhere you look. It’s there in the house rules for Direct Provision tenants, ‘No excuses!!’ it says. It’s in the jokey management sign at the expense of workers, describing them as animals: ‘Where’s your sense of humour?’ It’s in the contempt for the jobseeker as ‘welfare cheat’. It’s in the greedy landlord hinting that payment through sex might be acceptable. It’s in the look-at-me-publican hushing almost the entire county because he feels an urge to sing a song and the world must stop to listen because he’s the man who controls the drink tap. It’s in the bus-driver’s contempt for the social housing passengers who ‘should’ have cars. It’s in the anti-intellectualism that seeks always to control through ridicule.
How do you build a republic? By participating. By speaking up and speaking out. By taking responsibility for the thing that needs to be said, and not waiting for someone else to come along and do it. Or by simply deciding not to ridicule and demean the speaker, because you’re proud of the fact that as a salt-of-the-Earth Irish person that it’s considered clever to broadcast your ignorance and affect a pose of being unable to tell the difference between art, intellectualism and insanity. Even valiantly locking your jaw in that context would be a small contribution in the right direction to the development of a wiser republic.
[i] ‘The Murder Machine’ (1916) by P.H. Pearse: https://www.cym.ie/documents/themurdermachine.pdf
[ii] Jack Horgan-Jones, ‘Universities do not exist ‘to produce students who are useful’, President says’, Irish Times, March 2nd 2020, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/universities-do-not-exist-to-produce-students-who-are-useful-president-says-1.4190859
[iii] Mary Regan, ‘Living Beyond Our Means’, Irish Examiner, December 5th, 2011, https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/living-beyond-our-means-176062.html
[iv] Peter Bodkin, ‘s Ireland the ‘Best Small Country in the World in Which to do Business™?’ Not any more…’, TheJournal.ie, December 9th, 2014, https://www.thejournal.ie/ireland-ranking-for-business-1844047-Dec2014/
[v] RTÉ ‘Redress: Breaking the Silence’ https://www.rte.ie/player/series/redress-breaking-the-silence/SI0000006787?epguid=IH000390934&seasonguid=127629864186
Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother’s womb
A fanatic heart.
W.B. Yeats, ‘Remorse for Intemperate Speech’ (1931)
With proportional representation in multi-seat constituencies, Irish elections tend to be colourful affairs. Debate rarely rises above the clamour of claim and counter-claim as candidates seemingly festoon every available lamppost the length and breadth of the country with posters. In rural constituencies especially, local causes tend to trump national concerns, while questions of global import rarely register.
But times are changing as cosmopolitan younger voters gravitate towards parties from beyond the political establishment. Until the 1990s Fianna Fáil (‘soldiers of destiny’), Fine Gael (‘family of the Irish’), and Labour – which historically assumed the role of minor coalition partner to Fine Gael – enjoyed near total domination of Dáil Éireann, the national parliament. Today no single party expects to command an overall majority, and coalitions are the norm.
The ruling Fine Gael party, having spent four years in an unprecedented ‘confidence and supply’ agreement with its old foe Fianna Fáil, called a snap election on January 14th, seemingly hoping to be rewarded for its competent handling of Brexit negotiations, and to avoid losing a no confidence motion over the performance of the Minister for Health Simon Harris.[i]
Unexpectedly, however, a political earthquake is on the cards as an array of left-leaning parties, especially the increasingly popular Sinn Féin (‘ourselves’), the Green Party, Labour, People Before Profit, the Social Democrats, and even an unheralded socially conservative newcomer Aontú (‘consent’), have made social justice the central issue of the campaign.
For the moment opposition to the centre-right mainstream of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil is coming from the left, responding in particular to an ongoing Housing Crisis. But Ireland is not immune from the wave of identity politics sweeping far-right Populists into power elsewhere.
Another recession might easily trigger far-right Populism within the existing framework, bringing together an unholy trinity, seen elsewhere, of xenophobia – including opposition to E.U. membership – climate change denial and opposition to abortion services.
Who me?
Identities are hotly contested on the island of Ireland. Thus the Fine Gael-led government’s recent proposal to rehabilitate the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) – the British Crown’s police force prior to independence in 1921 – brought a veritable Twitter storm of anger and bewilderment.
In its wake, the rousing Wolf Tone 1972 rebel song ‘Come out ye Black and Tans’ topped the iTunes charts in Ireland, and the U.K.,[ii] before being ripped off by Kerry independent candidate Michael Healy-Rae for his election campaign song.
The bizarre decision perhaps explains Fine Gael’s steep decline in support, as revealed in recent opinion polls. Although a wave of violent crime, including the horrifying murder of a Drogheda teenager,[iii] and the story of a homeless man receiving ‘life-changing’ injuries after a tent, with him inside, was forcibly removed by heavy machinery from the side of one of Dublin’s canals,[iv] contributed to widespread unease with the orientation of Irish society under the current administration.
Identity politics vary from country to country, and from epoch to epoch. In the U.S. race has long been a divisive issue. In the U.K. incipient (so-called ‘Little-Englander’) nationalism is the new clarion call, with the shattering of transnational working class identity emphasised by the implosion of the Labour Party in Scotland.
Historic cleavages in Ireland have tended to be religious rather than ethno-linguistic or racial, pitting Catholics against Protestants and Dissenters (or Presbyterians), at least since the failure of the United Irishman project in the 1790s; although, in the South at least, divisions have also recently emerged along familiar liberal versus conservative lines – especially over reproductive rights and marriage equality.
Identity politics tend to shred solidarities based on economic status both within countries and internationally, often involving deference to aristocracy or accumulated wealth. Developing a political movement based on social class, however, can also be problematic, as for example where a person’s ‘bourgeois’ speech or mannerism is stigmatised. The great diversity within any class formation is also easily overlooked.
The success of the Populist far-right in both the U.S. and U.K. has been achieved by combining working class disaffection – including resentment towards the kind of educated middle-class ‘elites’ generally at the helm of socialist parties – with ‘primordial’ racial or national identification.
As with the racism exhibited by poor Irish-Americans against former African-American slaves who migrated North after the U.S. Civil War (1860-65), the lowest income strata is often most resistant to new arrivals, who may be seen, and are often depicted in the media, as competitors for jobs, housing and other government services.
Brexit Effect
Whether, and for how long, Irish politics avoids the gravitational pull of far-right Populism is unclear. Certainly Brexit stoked identity politics in Ireland by amplifying latent anti-English prejudices.
Notably, over the course of protracted negotiations, the Irish media lampooned English nostalgia – emanating from ‘swivel-eyed loons’ – for a bygone, imperial age. The Irish Times leading columnist Fintan O’Toole even boasted that for the first time in history Ireland, with a population of under five million, was now a more powerful State than the U.K.,[v] which has a population of almost seventy million.
At least Irish nationalism tends to oppose unsavoury outlooks identified with English nationalism, including a xenophobia previously directed against Irish living there. Sinn Féin has also tempered historic anti-E.U. sentiment in the wake of Brexit, perhaps on the basis that ‘my enemies enemy is my friend.’
Moreover, Ireland’s openness to foreign investment, and low corporation taxation, means Steve Bannon – and presumably Donald Trump who owns a golf course and hotel in Doonbeg, County Clare – see little reason to interfere in Irish politics, with U.S. armed service personel permitted to use Shannon Airport as a stopover. But this might change if the rise of the left, especially Sinn Féin, continues unabated.
Arch-Imperialist Mike Pence was today greeting American troops in Shannon Airport
It is a continuing disgrace to the Irish people that American Imperialism should be allowed to use any part of Ireland as a military staging ground
— Anti Imperialist Action Ireland (@AIAIreland) January 25, 2020
Radical Redistribution
The absence of a legacy of heavy industry in the shape of rust-belt towns denies far-right Populists in Ireland the ‘blue-collar’ support base relied on by Trump, and Tory Brexiteers. On mainland Europe too, far-right Populists have successfully appealed to these working class former supporters of social democratic parties.
Most of what passes for a working class in Ireland, historically, are really petit-bourgeois pastoralists, many of whose sons became publicans, auctioneers and shopkeepers, selling commodities on the international market, and in recent times relying on grant aid from the European Union. These farmers have tended to vote overwhelmingly for one or other of the centre-right parties. But Irish society, and politics, is in a period of significant flux.
The two main centre-right parties are now struggling to retain the support of an aging, and shrinking, livestock farming cohort. That sector is in crisis owing to a slump in beef prices and existential fears around climate chaos and Brexit. Over the course of the past year, supermarkets and processing plants have been blockaded, as a schism grows between better-off dairy farmers and beef farmers, overwhelmingly reliant on subsidies.
Meanwhile, with a population approaching two million that dwarfs the other main urban centres of Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Galway that barely register half a million between them, the capital Dublin is the economic engine of the country. But chronic under-investment in transport infrastructure and social housing has brought spiralling rents[viii] in the capital, affecting the young disproportionately. Therefore, calls for a radical redistribution of wealth, along with action on climate change, are growing louder.
Across the country, the rising cost of living, from property to health and childcare, since recovery from the Economic Crash of 2008 and subsequent EU/IMF bailout is disrupting the centre-right consensus, dominant since the state’s foundation.
Riding high in the polls, Sinn Féin only emerged after the end of the Northern Ireland Troubles in 1999 as a serious force in the South. It has successfully twinned the objective of achieving Irish unity with radical (at least for Ireland) redistribution, pledging to enshrine the right to a home in the Irish Constitution. Its manifesto also promises to pay back €1,500 to renters, a three-year rent freeze, and the largest public housing funding scheme the state has ever seen.[ix]
Sinn Féin MPs, MLAs & TDs gather ahead of the Dáil100 event.
On the centre-right Fianna Fáil appears to be regaining pre-eminence, after riding pillion passenger with the minority Fine Gael administration. A formal coalition of these two is the most likely outcome of the election. Nevertheless, for their combined share of the vote to drop significantly below 50% is unprecedented.
As in the last U.K. election, there is a huge divergence between the voting intentions of the young and the old, with the former despairing at the failure of successive administrations to deliver affordable housing, public transport, address the climate and biodiversity emergency or further the cause of Irish unity. Similarly to the U.K. too, the left in Ireland suffers from a factionalism that makes a grand coalition unlikely.
Labour leader Brendan Howlin said he is hopeful of a progressive alliance after the #GE2020. He said there are “very serious barriers” to working with Sinn Féin. He said, “There are fundamental issues of trust about who runs SF.” pic.twitter.com/0KvTLlmbdY
Over the course of Irish history neither of the two dominant centre-right parties have been over-burdened by ideology, although Fine Gael’s ‘Just Society’-wing endeavoured to forge a social democratic party in the late 1960s.[x] Today, predictably, Fianna Fáil lays claim to more centrist policies with campaign literature proclaiming ‘an Ireland for all.’
Extended periods in opposition have tended to witness greater emphasis on left-wing causes by both parties. Once a government is formed, however, the ‘realities’ of power, often enunciated by a stubborn legion of Sir Humphreys in the civil service, brings business as usual.
Famously, in 1987 after hounding Fine Gael for its attempts to curb government expenditure in order to reduce the national debt, Fianna Fáil under Charlie Haughey introduced a series of its own swingeing cut backs.
In Ireland, substantive reforms arrive pitifully slowly as manifold Quangos, persistent Nimbyism and entrenched property interests inhibit infrastructural schemes, with the notable exception of motorways in a car-centric country. Tellingly, Dublin is the third worst city in the world for traffic congestion[xi] due to long term failures in delivering public transport, and historic corruption in land rezoning that brought a judicial tribunal lasting for fifteen years due to constant legal challenges.
On the other hand, the Irish economy has grown exponentially since the mid-1990s – reversing long-term emigration trends and attracting signification immigration for the first time – notwithstanding the catastrophic EU/IMF Bailout of 2010.
The Progressive Democrats (popularly referred to as the PDs), a breakaway party from Fianna Fáil that first enjoyed success in the 1987 election, played an important role in laying the foundations for the sustained economic growth and high employment that ensued from the mid-1990s.
Under the leadership of Desmond O’Malley, Mary Harney and Michael McDowell, the party sought to modernise the country, preferring the private sector to assume the role of an often inefficient (and corrupt) State. Despite its Fianna Fáil origins, the PD’s economically liberal agenda appealed to business-minded Fine Gael supporters, despairing at that party’s handling of the economy.
Although the party reached a high water mark in the 1987 election and steadily declined thereafter, before disappearing entirely in 2009, it left an indelible mark on successive governments. This helped created the so-called Celtic Tiger, with Ireland moving ‘closer to Boston than Berlin’, in the words of Mary Harney in 2000.[xii]
The PDs were coalition partner to Fianna Fáil over the course of four administrations (1989-92, 1997-2002, 2002-2007, and 2007-2009), securing Ireland’s position as a low tax haven for foreign multinationals. But the delivery of social and affordable housing was left in the hands of the private sector, which yielded insufficient units throughout the boom years. Moreover, the State, including local authorities, lost its capacity to construct social housing, from which it has been slow to recover.
Not only did PD ideology influence Fianna Fáil – with Minister for Finance (1997-2004) Charlie McCreevy once flirting with membership – but also Fine Gael. Thus, the former leader and Minister for Health (2004-11) Mary Harney is recorded as a confidant of Taoiseach Varadkar, who rose to prominence as a staunch critic of his own party’s social democratic tendencies.[xiii]
Under neo-liberal policies, in particular the low corporation tax regime of 12.5%, Ireland attracted significant foreign direct investment, with global technology giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple establishing European headquarters, along with pharmaceutical firms like Pfizer.
Google HQ, Dublin, Ireland
Low interest rates after joining the euro also contributed to runaway inflation in house prices until the bubble burst after 2008, leading to negative equity that ruined hundreds of thousands. Many workers, especially in the construction sector, were forced to leave Ireland for good. But consistent tax returns from the employees of multinationals in particular, allowed the exchequer finances to recover more rapidly than expected.
The EU/IMF Bailout stabilised property values, and the low taxation regime continued to attract investment into the Irish market, resulting in a bonanza for the surviving indigenous landlords. But the restoration is now working to the detriment of much of the indigenous population, with salaries failing to keep pace with rental costs.[xiv]
New Ireland
Away from the economy, over the course of the last decade, a new species of identity politics took centre stage, dividing upholders of ‘traditional’ Catholic values and ‘modern’ liberals, mainly of a younger vintage. Battles lines were drawn over marriage equality and reproductive rights, with liberal values emerging triumphant in two referendums.
Dublin Castle after 8th Referendum results declared.
Similar to ‘One Nation’ Tories led by David Cameron, Fine Gael under first Enda Kenny and then Leo Varadkar embraced a liberal social agenda, with the gay half-Indian Varadkar’s accession to power a symbol of widespread tolerance, and acceptance of diversity.
Indeed, although the country has experienced an unprecedented surge in immigration since the turn of the millennium, with the number of non-national inhabitants now almost 13% of the total,[xv] there is little sing of a far-right Populist insurgency.
Brexit also provided the Irish government with an opportunity to play a card generally monopolised by more nationalistic political rivals – with Varadkar speculating on the possibility of a united Ireland in his lifetime[xvi] – although the bizarre decision to commemorate the RIC seems to have used up that political capital.
The other side of Fine Gael’s liberal coin has been a conservative reluctance to interfere in the economy, particularly where provision of social housing has been concerned. In part at least, this stems from Leo Varadkar’s apparent aversion to anything hinting at socialism. Thus he complained in a 2018 speech about those who wanted ‘to divide our society into people who live in different areas, with some people paying for everything.’[xvii]
Real Estate Investment Trusts
The scale of an unfolding Housing Crisis, however, of unaffordable rents, homelessness and under-supply is now even attracting criticism from former PD leader, Michael McDowell, who recently wrote:
There is an ideological problem here. The private sector cannot solve the issue. The State must intervene to boost housing supply – social and owner-occupied. Even the term “private sector” is mutating before our eyes. When Reits [real estate investment trusts] buy entire developments to let at high rents – a new phenomenon – that has become the new meaning of the “private sector”.
Allegiance to the centre-right has previously been secured by an expectation among property owners that mortgages will ultimately yield capital appreciation. This requires consistent economic growth, which without adequate rent control measures has brought the rental inflation driving younger voters into the arms of Sinn Féin, and other left-wing parties.
Younger buyers are still assisted by inter-generational transfers, but this is a single step on a steep ladder. Decades of mortgage repayments await, alongside spiralling childcare and healthcare costs. Although Leo Varadkar claims to represent early rising workers, in fact his government’s laissez faire policies are to the advantage of substantial rentier property owners.
I am a champion for the self-employed & people who get up early in the morning and nobody gets up earlier than the Irish farmer! As long as I am around self employed people will never be taken for granted #IFAAGM
As the 2008 Crash proved, a fairy tale of Irish economic growth-without-end cannot endure – quite aside from ecological constraints – given the inherent volatility of the capitalist system itself. As David Graeber explains: ‘Capitalism is a system that enshrines the gambler as an essential part of its operation, in a way that no other ever has, yet at the same time, capitalism seems to be uniquely incapable of conceiving of its own eternity.’[xxiii]
With steady U.S. economic growth the Irish economy is likely to continue to grow in tandem, as has been the case since the 1990s, but another U.S. recession could see a Populist far-right emerge from out of the long grass in Ireland.
Direct Provision
September’s well-organised protests in the small town of Oughterard in County Galway,[xxiv] along with demonstrations against other proposed Direct Provision accommodation centres for refugee and asylum seekers, indicates a new anti-immigrant mood in rural Ireland. But unless, or until, one of the three main nationalists parties embraces such an outlook it is likely to remain marginal.
The Irish ‘Blueshirts’
With origins in the ‘Blueshirt’ fascist movement of the 1930s, Fine Gael has occasionally accommodated far-right views throughout its history. One prominent anti-Semite of the 1940s was Oliver J. Flanagan, ironically the late father of the current Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan, who has promised to introduce anti-hate crime legislation; much to the chagrin of far-right vloggers, such as the journalist-turned-far-right-politician Gemma O’Doherty.
Varadkar appears to assume that a half-Indian background insulates him from accusations of racism. Thus, in response to People Before Profit’s Bríd Smith’s criticism in the Dáil of Fine Gael’s recent by-election candidate Verona Murphy – who had claimed asylum seekers as young as three years-of-age could be influenced by ISIS – he claimed to know ‘a little more about experiencing racism than perhaps you do.’[xxvii]
Fine Gael has since de-selected the Wexford woman, who is standing as an independent in the forthcoming election. Yet even Danny Healy-Rae (the brother of the aforementioned Michael) was able to expose the hypocrisy of Varadkar’s criticism of Noel Grealish’s inflammatory (and erroneous) Dáil speech on Nigerians sending home remittances.[xxviii]
Fine Gael’s overriding focus, however, is to deliver the elixir of economic growth, rising rents, and well-remunerated jobs, through foreign direct investment, while embracing further integration with the European Union. Anti-immigration rhetoric jeopardises that political and economic formula.
Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil and Aontú
Given a nationalist background in Northern Irish politics, and historic advocacy of protectionist economic policies outside the E.U., Sinn Féin might seem a likely candidate for adopting a nativist agenda. But the Party has remained faithful to its anti-colonial principles and avoids Populist anti-immigrant messaging. Moreover, many of Sinn Féin’s new cohort of young supporters would be alienated by such an approach.
Under the steadying hand of Micheál Martin, Fianna Fáil stands on the brink of power, either in coalition with Fine Gael or perhaps a combination of other parties. Under his guidance the party is highly unlikely to embrace any form of far-right Populism. But another recession, and a further leftward surge, could tear up that playbook, with a different outlook emerging under new leadership.
Although Martin advocated for a ‘Yes’ vote in the abortion referendum, a majority within the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party opposed repeal of the Eighth Amendment.[xxix] Notwithstanding its crushing defeat in the 2018 referendum, there exists in Ireland a substantial and well-organised anti-abortion movement, prompted by journalists and vloggers,[xxx] which might easily fall in behind a large party such as Fianna Fáil, as occurred with the Brexiter takeover of the Tories in the U.K..
Opposition to abortion services does not necessarily connote adherence to a broad spectrum of far-right ideas, but nor is it a stand-alone issue. Far-right ideologues around the world, including in Ireland, speak of a Great Replacement conspiracy theory wherein the native population is replaced by immigrants. Abortion is considered a means of diminishing the indigenous population.
Undeniably, Peader Tóibín, the leader of the newcomer Aontú represents the views of many in ‘middle’ or ‘forgotten’ Ireland. It will be intriguing to see how this conservative party performs in the forthcoming election.
There is no doubt there is a growing unease and concern among many people in Ireland around the issue of immigration. Our view is very simple, there needs to be sustainable levels of immigration in this country, it needs to be managed. There needs to be some link between the capacity of the country and the numbers of people coming in if there’s not there’s going to be hardship for indigenous and newcomers alike.[xxxi]
Should Aontú achieve electoral success on the issue of immigration in a future election, it would not require a great leap of imagination to envision ‘soul-searching’ in Fianna Fáil that leads to a ‘harder line’ being taken on immigration, and perhaps the embrace of other far-right platforms. Aontú may not survive long, but like PDs they could leave an indelible imprint on Irish politics.
Climate change denial would also appeal to farmers under pressure to reduce emissions from a sector contributing 34% of the national total; as well as a motor car-lobby resistant to carbon taxes and public transport.
Cognitive Dissonance
Thankfully, it requires a degree of cognitive dissonance for the far-right in Ireland to adopt the anti-immigrant rhetoric employed in the U.S. and U.K..
First and foremost, Irish people have emigrated in extraordinary numbers over the course of the past two centuries. Secondly, it can hardly be argued that the country lacks space given the population density was greater in the 1840s than today. Indeed, stemming a decline in rural Ireland’s population is an ongoing challenge.
The furore over Direct Provision is better assessed in terms of a housing crisis in the greater Dublin region. This led to the State securing cheap properties elsewhere; perhaps in an attempt to avoid the accusation that it looks after refugees, while failing to provide accommodation for homeless in the capital.
Finally, anyone appraised of Irish history will be aware that the Irish ‘nation’ is a composite of many waves of migration and conquests. The medieval Book of Invasion (Lebor Gabála Érenn) tells of the land being taken over six times by six different peoples. Thus James Joyce argued: ‘What race or language … can nowadays claim to be pure? No race has less right to make such a boast than the one presently inhabiting Ireland.’[xxxii]
James Joyce: ‘What race or language … can nowadays claim to be pure?’
With the institutions of the Irish state ill-equipped for a significant influx, however, friction with an indigenous population confronting a housing and homelessness crisis, if unchecked, seems inevitable.
Island Nation
Operating as an offshore member of the European Union, located between the two most populous (and powerful!) English-speaking nations brings significant advantages to an Irish State that struggled to hold its people for the first eighty years of independence. The Industrial Development Authority, established in the late 1940s, has played a crucial role in attracting some of the largest companies in the world, providing secure employment for indigenous and foreign workers under a low corporation taxation regime that infuriates many of Ireland’s E.U. partners.
The EU/IMF Bailout, however – through which the State consented to take on the debts owing to unsecured bond holders – is a Faustian Pact mandating economic-growth-without-end to prevent another debt crisis. It has restored the price of property, and rents, to levels seen during the Celtic Tiger era.
A low corporation taxation regime and lack of significant property taxes attracted the interest real estate investment trusts (Reits) that have brought the boom back with a vengeance. This works to the benefit of an ever-shrinking proportion of the population, with the young in particular struggling to live in a capital ill-served by public transport.
Long term, to address the extraordinary wealth tied-up in property meaningful land taxes ought to be introduced. Here, unfortunately, Sinn Féin has evinced reluctance to introduce what might prove unpopular measures in the short term; proposing instead to phase out unpopular local property taxes, and only to tax the earnings of Reits.[xxxiii]
But land taxes[xxxiv] could bring more land into productive use by penalising land-hording, permitting young people to buy homes at more affordable prices from empty-nesting elders, who should be accommodated in smaller, climate-friendly units. A reduction in the cost of agricultural would also encourage the development of alternative, climate-friendly, agriculture.
In the wake of Brexit, Ireland may re-assess its relationship with an E.U. (including the euro) struggling to contain atavistic forces in many countries. In the event of another global recession, the Stability and Growth Pact, requiring deficits to stay within 3%, should not impede the State from responding with Keynesian measures. Otherwise austerity policies could lead to a Populist far-right gaining traction.
The Irish general election of 2020 may prove a watershed, with the duopoly of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael being knocked off their seemingly unassailable perch, and a more conventional left-right division developing. But the politics of identity may derail ambitious social programmes, with the question of the border unresolved.
A ongoing challenge for the left, and Irish progressives more broadly, is to develop a fair distribution of resources, and sustainability, in a State still bearing the wounds of colonisation.
Featured Image (c) Daniele Idini.
[i] Fiachra Ó Cionnaith, ‘TD calling for no-confidence vote in Simon Harris’, RTÉ, January 9th, 2020, https://www.rte.ie/news/politics/2020/0109/1105248-politics-no-confidence-motion/
[ii] Michael Staines, ‘Come Out Ye Black and Tans tops Charts in the UK and Ireland after RIC controversy’, Newstalk, January 9th, 2020, https://www.newstalk.com/news/wolfe-tones-come-out-black-and-tans-947680
[iii] Paul Reynolds, ‘Drogheda feud reaches new level of barbarity with teenager’s murder’, RTÉ, 18th of January, 2020, https://www.rte.ie/news/crime/2020/0117/1108136-mulready-woods-drogheda/
[iv] Conrad Duncan, ‘‘Absolutely disgusting’: Homeless man suffers ‘life-changing’ injuries after tent cleared away by Dublin city council’, Independent, January 15th, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/homeless-man-life-changing-injuries-dublin-city-council-ireland-varadkar-a9284936.html
[v] Fintan O’Toole, ‘Fintan O’Toole: For the first time since 1171, Ireland is more powerful than Britain’, September 14th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-for-the-first-time-since-1171-ireland-is-more-powerful-than-britain-1.4014922?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Ffintan-o-toole-for-the-first-time-since-1171-ireland-is-more-powerful-than-britain-1.4014922
[vi] Finn McRedmond, ‘Finn McRedmond: Like Tories, Corbyn has failed Ireland’, August 24th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/finn-mcredmond-like-tories-corbyn-has-failed-ireland-1.3995334
[vii] Press Association, ‘Sinn Féin pledges to secure border poll within five years’, Breaking News¸ January 28th, 2020, https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/sinn-fein-pledges-to-secure-border-poll-within-five-years-978299.html
[viii] Sorcha Pollak, ‘Dublin rents to rise 17% by 2021 due to lack of supply, report finds’, Irish Times April 8th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/dublin-rents-to-rise-17-by-2021-due-to-lack-of-supply-report-finds-1.3853074?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fbusiness%2Feconomy%2Fdublin-rents-to-rise-17-by-2021-due-to-lack-of-supply-report-finds-1.3853074
[ix] Roisin Agnew, ‘Can Sinn Féin’s young voters finally pull Ireland to the left?’ The Guardian, January 31st, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/31/sinn-fein-ireland-left-election-ira
[x] Rhona McCord, ‘Book Review, ‘A Just Society for Ireland?’’ The Irish Story, December 16th, 2013, https://www.theirishstory.com/2013/12/16/book-review-a-just-society-for-ireland/#.Xjg8giPLdPY
[xi] Fergal O’Brien, Dublin third worst city for time spent sitting in traffic – survey, RTÉ, February `13th, 2019, https://www.rte.ie/news/dublin/2019/0213/1029375-dublin-traffic-survey/.
[xii] Dan White, ‘Dan White: Harney was right — we are closer to Boston than Berlin’, Herald.ie, May 24th, 2011, https://www.herald.ie/opinion/columnists/dan-white/dan-white-harney-was-right-we-are-closer-to-boston-than-berlin-27980646.html
[xiii] Frank Armstrong, ‘Leo-Liberal’, Cassandra Voices, October 5th, 2019, https://cassandravoices.com/current-affairs/politics/leo-liberal/
[xiv] Sean Murray, ‘Dublin now in top 5 most expensive places to rent in Europe, research finds’, The Journal, March 13th, 2019, https://www.thejournal.ie/dublin-rent-europe-4538856-Mar2019/
[xv] Kevin O’Neill, ‘Irish Population rises by 64,500 bringing it to almost 5m’, Irish Examiner, August 28th, 2019, https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/irish-population-rises-by-64500-bringing-it-to-almost-5m-946672.html
[xvi] Untitled, ‘Varadkar says he would like to see a united Ireland in his lifetime’, Irish Times, October 25th, 2018, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/varadkar-says-he-would-like-to-see-a-united-ireland-in-his-lifetime-1.4062543
[xviii] Untitled, ‘The Irish Times view on property investment funds: Doing the Reit thing’, October 10th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/editorial/the-irish-times-view-on-property-investment-funds-doing-the-reit-thing-1.4045602?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Feditorial%2Fthe-irish-times-view-on-property-investment-funds-doing-the-reit-thing-1.4045602
[xix] Untitled, ‘Bibby: Irish SMEs struggling with rising costs’, Shelf Life, October 15th, 2019, https://www.shelflife.ie/bibby-irish-smes-struggling-with-rising-costs/
[xx] Untitled, ‘Massive IKEA store approved for Dublin’, BreakingNews.ie, June 13th, 2007, https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/massive-ikea-store-approved-for-dublin-314846.html
[xxi] Brian Mahon ‘Show Vendors, ‘Election 2020: Fine Gael promises end to ‘boom and bust’’, The Times, January 17th, 2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/election-2020-fine-gael-promises-end-to-boom-and-bust-9dk70kjdj
[xxii] Dan Mitchell, ‘These Were the 6 Major American Economic Crises of the Last Century’, Time Magazine, July 16, 2015, https://time.com/3957499/american-economic-crises-history/
[xxiii] David Graeber, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, Melville, London, 2011, p.357
[xxiv] Eileen Magnier, ‘Protest in Oughterard over possible direct provision centre’, RTÉ, September 28th, 2019, https://www.rte.ie/news/connacht/2019/0928/1078800-oughterard-direct-provision/
[xxv] Kevin Doyle, ‘Taoiseach says direct provision ‘better than using tents’’ Irish Independent, October 31st, 2019, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/taoiseach-says-direct-provision-better-than-using-tents-38647784.html
[xxvi] Untitled, ‘Leo Varadkar says Georgia and Albania driving rise in asylum-seeker numbers’, BreakingNews.ie, November 3rd, 2019, https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/leo-varadkar-says-georgia-and-albania-driving-rise-in-asylum-seeker-numbers-961488.html
[xxvii] Pat Leahy, ‘Taoiseach stands by Verona Murphy despite further controversial remarks’, November 19th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/taoiseach-stands-by-verona-murphy-despite-further-controversial-remarks-1.4088124?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fnews%2Fpolitics%2Ftaoiseach-stands-by-verona-murphy-despite-further-controversial-remarks-1.4088124
[xxviii] Vivienne Clarke, ‘Danny Healy-Rae defends Noel Grealish for comments about Nigeria’, Irish Examiner, November 13th, 2019, https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/danny-healy-rae-defends-noel-grealish-for-comments-about-nigeria-963665.html
[xxix] Philip Ryan, ‘More than half of Fianna Fáil parliamentary party backing ‘no’ vote in referendum’, Irish Independent, May 3rd, 2018, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/abortion-referendum/more-than-half-of-fianna-fail-parliamentary-party-backing-no-vote-in-referendum-36870462.html
[xxx] For example: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT9D87j5W7PtE7NHOR5DUOQ
[xxxi] Fiach Kelly, ‘Peadar Tóibín’s immigration remarks spark heavy criticism’, Irish Times, April 8th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/peadar-t%C3%B3ib%C3%ADn-s-immigration-remarks-spark-heavy-criticism-1.3853813
[xxxii] James Joyce, ‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages’, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, Oxford University Press, Oxford, p.118.
[xxxiii] Pat Leahy, ‘Sinn Féin unveils plans for dramatic increase in public spending’, Irish Times, January 29th, 2020, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/sinn-f%C3%A9in-unveils-plans-for-dramatic-increase-in-public-spending-1.4154513?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fnews%2Fpolitics%2Fsinn-f%25C3%25A9in-unveils-plans-for-dramatic-increase-in-public-spending-1.4154513
[xxxiv] Dr Frank Crowley, ‘How a land value tax could solve many economic headaches’, RTÉ Brainstorm, October 18th, 2017, https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2017/1017/912913-how-a-land-value-tax-could-solve-many-economic-headaches/.
‘The interesting thing is that they’re protesting against themselves. There’s no enemy out there. They know they are the enemy.’ J.G Ballard, Millenium[i]
The 2019 Reuters Institute Digital News Report points to increasing de-politicisation across the Western world. This accompanies a seemingly inexorable rising tide of ‘identitarian’ Populism, globally led by Steve Bannon. The movement channels latent anger into cynicism towards central governments and supra-national institutions such as the E.U.; just when we require solidarity to address climate chaos.
Symptomatic were Conservative Party tactics during U.K Election 2019 – under the influence of Bannon – promising nothing beyond ‘getting Brexit done’; in other words a negation of the country’s institutional ties with other states – rather than a vision for improvement. This recalls Donald Trump’s ongoing pledge to ‘DRAIN THE SWAMP’ of Washington politics.
In a climate of suspicion, roguish buffoons like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson have lied and cheated their way to high office. The moral landscape has altered to a point where the truth doesn’t seem to count for much anymore; in contrast to a cosy relationship with Big Data, and plenty of campaign dosh, which is more vital than ever.
Delving deeper, these political trends are tremors from a seismic Internet Revolution radically re-shaping our societies and very brains. This new medium has proved a fruitful ground for the advancement, and enrichment, of varied corporate entities and human beings. Those benefitting include Canadian psychology Professor Jordan Peterson, arguably the first public intellectual of the Digital Age – with many of his lengthy YouTube lectures hitting numbers associated with music videos.
It is instructive that Steve Bannon targeted Peterson’s online devotees before the last Presidential election. Peterson came to prominence especially through the so-called culture wars, contributing to a ‘woke’ caricature, which really should be attributed to the liberal centre, given the emphasis leading lights such as Tony Blair, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton placed on political correctness and multiculturalism.
Peterson’s cult status brings adulation of a type associated with Pop stars, drawing huge audiences to venues across the English-speaking world. A predominantly male audience has been impressed by a refusal to pay the usual fealties to political correctness, and offered the kind of sound, fatherly advice that many seem to lack, but Peterson abuses his power by peddling climate change denial, while demeaning collective institutions, and governments.
Politicide
In 2003 Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling published a book called Politicide, which charted the destruction of the Palestinian nation as a political entity. He claimed the state of Israel was transforming Palestinians into a leaderless community struggling for an identity – as had previously been the case.[ii] Thus in 1969, then Prime Minister Golda Meir questioned the existence of a distinctive Palestinian people, an inquiry that might soon be aired again.
Israel’s erosion of Palestinian identity has been achieved through collective impoverishment, targeted assassination of key leaders and the age-old technique of divide and conquer. Now the Palestinian voice on the international stage has been reduced to a barely audible whimper.
A similar, though less overtly violent, campaign of Politicide is being waged by Steve Bannon, Dominic Cummings and other unelected political advisors across the Western world. Democracy is being corroded by sophisticated technology, including from the notorious Cambridge Analytica, mining data from social media and other online interactions to develop advertising specific to targeted groups in key marginals.
The old left that forged bonds both within countries and internationally, especially through working class solidarity is the immediate target of attack ads that are having an effect. In this respect, Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 comment ‘And you know, there is no society’ recalls Golda Meir’s aspersion of Palestinian identity. Lacking sufficient resources for social media campaigns, and pilloried by journalists increasingly beholden to conservative billionaires such as the Koch brothers, socialism is on the decline across Europe and beyond.
Drawing support away from the old left, so-called Populists – who really have little in common with the agrarian-radical originals of the late nineteenth century led by William Jennings Bryan – are incubating acceptance of a global corporate order, directing oppositional energies against what they characterise as a corrupt state – which of course is being hollowed out by those same corporations, through lobbying and regulatory capture.
An important component of Politicide is for growing numbers to be turned off news content altogether. Thus the Reuters Digital News Report for 2019 found an average of 32% across a large number of countries actively avoid it, up from 29% the previous year. In the U.K. that figure reached 35% in the election years of 2019, a striking 11% increase on the previous poll. Such shifts do not occur by accident. Turning people off trusted news sources increases susceptibility to fake news arriving via political ads.
The success of the Bannon formula is not measured purely in terms of increasing vote share, but also in opponents losing support through apathy and despair. The most important social media platform remains Facebook, still the dominant player by quite a margin, especially for older people. There we find the kind of attack ads long a feature of U.S. political culture targeted precisely at voters in marginal or swing constituencies or states.
Both Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings are clever political operators, they are not, however, geniuses. But the project of politicide, working distinctly to the advantage of large corporations, is the product of broader cultural currents. The first wave of the Internet Revolution is fraying old systems of thought, and recasting political discourse. The Jordan Peterson phenomenon is instructive.
The rise of the ‘Petersonites’
Notably, Steve Bannon mined the data of the followers of Jordan Peterson before the 2016 U.S. Presidential election as ‘they were looking for a father figure to tell them what to do,’ according to a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower.[iv] Apparently they possessed ‘the big five traits’ of easily manipulatable men: frustrated economic opportunities; an estranged father; enjoyment of word salad; not showering on a regular basis; and ranking in the top quartile for the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Jordan Peterson is not, however, a political extremist – by North American standards at least. Nonetheless, his generally compelling talks – with ideas distilled in particular from the archetypes of C.S. Jung and Aristotle’s virtues – have been adopted, and glossed, by a legion of far-right digital warriors. He also represents a successful formula for the entrepreneurial pursuit of an online personality in this neo-liberal zeitgeist that has been copied more broadly.
Peterson’s fame, or notoriety, derives mainly from impressive public speaking performances and televised debates rather than through books. Indeed, his literary output is a relatively modest two publications[v] – the most recent a self-help bestseller.
Like Donald Trump, Peterson is a master of the new digital medium. While the U.S. President specialises in cutting brevity – ‘show me someone who has no ego and he is a loser’[vi] – Jordan Peterson represents the opposite pole, opting for grandiloquent expression; dazzling audiences with a flurry of references; fluently recalled using streams of synonyms ‘maxing out’ any SAT Writing and Language test. He reaches a crescendo of self-righteousness when laying waste to scruffy woke opponents.
The Digital Age
We are in the early stages of a communications revolution reconfiguring human societies, and perhaps rewiring our brains.[vii] This Digital Age is characterised by a ‘secondary orality’ conveyed through video, podcast and memes that still depends on an inheritance of books.[viii] As the pace of change accelerated with the arrival of affordable smartphones from 2010, the quality of political journalism declined in tandem.
The great U.S. reporter Seymour Hersh recently offered a withering assessment of contemporary media to the effect that ‘We are sodden with fake news, hyped-up and incomplete information, and false assertions delivered non-stop by our daily newspapers, our televisions, our online news agencies, our social media, and our President.’[ix]
It is perhaps unsurprising that abandonment of books in favour of digital ephemera should herald a cultural decline. On social media the image is king, and language, as Richard Seymour argues in the Twittering Machine, is increasingly reduced to its effects, like all manipulative communication, from marketing to military propaganda.[xi]
These developments are unravelling a profound cultural inheritance. Walter Ong contends that ‘More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.’[xii] ‘By separating the knower from the known’, he says, ‘writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the objective world quite distinct form itself but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set.’[xiii]
It is through textual records, passed down and renewed by each generation of scholars, that the wide-ranging dialectics required for scientific research and philosophical enquiry occur. The development of writing allowed us to determine and convey facts.
The increasing dominance of a ‘secondary orality’ of video and podcast is shifting political debate away from philosophic “articulate intropsectivity”, and also bringing celebrity veneration, as “the knower” (or quickfire know-all such as Jordan Peterson) merges with what is “known.”
Moreover, unlike public intellectuals of the recent past, who conveyed facts and ideas in books, the output of a digital-era leading light arrives in a stream of video, more challenging to parse, or counter, than the venerable medium in print form. Thus, previously agreed upon facts are more easily dismissed as we enter an era of post-truth.
‘An explosion in identity talk’
Alongside devotion to vacuous celebrity, Richard Seymour observes that over the course of the last decade, as the numbers regularly accessing Twitter and Facebook grew into billions, there has been ‘an explosion in identity talk.’[xiv]
Jordan Peterson is perhaps the intellectual apotheosis of this trend. Thus, in 2016 after igniting controversy for refusing to adopt gender-neutral pronouns, he released a series of videos justifying his positions.[xv] Soon he had emerged as a global conservative champion in the culture war, ‘destroying’ interlocutors with well-rehearsed, and often, it must be said, reasonable arguments.
Peterson railed against a woke-ish political correctness that many on the left already acknowledged had lurched into absurdity, to the exclusion of more pressing discussions of climate change, ecological collapse, spiralling inequality and unaccountable digital platforms.
Amy Chua identifies acute problems with identity politics ‘on both sides of the political spectrum,’ which she says, ‘leaves the United States in a perilous new situation: almost no one is standing up for an America without identity politics, for an American identity that transcends and unites all the country’s many subgroups.’[xvi]
Peterson has amassed a reasonable fortune in the process of emerging as both hero and villain in the febrile culture war. Knowingly or otherwise, he has served the interests of Bannon and his ilk.
Narrowing Debate
Jordan Peterson is broadly correct that the parameters of debate in Anglophone so-called liberal – or ‘woke-ish’ to use the term de jour – media such as The Guardian and TheNew York Times have narrowed. The phenomenon of no-platforming outspoken thinkers such as Germain Greer for questioning whether a transgender individual should be considered a woman is disturbing. The media’s obsession with celebrity sex scandals often amounts to little more than clickbait.
Harvey Weinstein believes he can rebuild career if cleared of charges https://t.co/CJbsye1pIR
Moreover in America, and elsewhere, a range of media from Fox News to Breitbart have picked up the slack, accommodating so-called conservative, increasingly far-right, standpoints.
Similarly, right-wing views are well represented in U.K. media by established players such as The Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Express as well as newcomers like Spiked, whose founders’ journey from Marxism to the alt-right is symptomatic. The traditional viewpoint that Peterson purports to represent is far from being marginal across the Anglophone world.
A shift towards identity politics can be traced to the fissuring of the political order at the end of the Cold War, as mainstream centre-left parties in the U.S. and U.K. pivoted to the centre-right.
Thus in the U.S., Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama essentially ignored spiralling inequalities attending the rise of the digital behemoths, assuaging discontents by endeavouring to roll out state-funded medical care that has done little to break the dominance of Big Pharma and an epidemic of legal drug addiction. With identity politics centre-stage, Obama’s victory – that ‘Audacity of Hope’ – was mistakenly viewed as the harbinger of a tolerant and inclusive society.
Then stories such as the ‘birther’ controversy– an unfounded rumour that Obama had not been born in the United States which, if true, would have debarred him from the presidency – generated endless columns in the liberal media,[xvii] to the exclusion of reporting on social and environmental issues highlighting the despoliation of the Earth by large corporations.
Focus on identity politics, from race to feminism and same-sex marriage, not to mention abortion, diverted attention from the long-standing exclusion of the poor of all ‘races’, with real wages stagnating for decades,[xviii] while extraordinary wealth and privilege has been concentrated in increasingly few hands.
Donald Trump tapped into economic insecurities – offering up poor Latino immigrants as a scapegoat to blue collar workers – to win the Presidency of 2016. Hilary Clinton and her handlers persevered with identity politics, emphasising the importance of a female candidacy, and focusing on her opponent’s philandering, rather than addressing entrenched poverty and social exclusion, let alone the excesses of the military industrial complex, and lost.
In the U.K., the Labour Party also settled in the centre, or even centre-right, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (1997-2010). New Labour essentially accepted Margaret Thatcher’s (1979-90) market deregulations and privatisations to the satisfaction of the newspaper barons that tend to decide elections. ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’ read Rupert Murdoch’s Sun after John Major’s come-from-behind victory in 1992 – a cheeky headline masking a sinister political reality.
The Sun newspaper, April 11th, 1992.
As Mark Fisher memorably put it: ‘Blairism has consolidated and outstripped the ideological gains of Thatcherism by ensuring the apparently total victory of PR over punk, of politeness over antagonism, of middle class utility over proletarian art.’[xix]
Later David Cameron and his fellow ‘modernisers’, or ‘One Nation’ Tories, rebranded the Conservative Party in the dress code of New Labour, embracing non-economic issues such as marriage equality and increasing the visibility of female and ethnic minority representatives, while pursuing Thatcherite, austerity policies in the background.
This approach yielded electoral success in 2010 and 2015, before Brexit derailed the formula. Similar to Trump’s victory over Hilary, Brexit bubbled up, dialectically, inside the cauldron of identity politics first stirred by the centre-right.
It is disingenuous therefore for Jordan Peterson to bemoan the excesses of identity politics given it was the centre-right he claims to support that has promoted ‘woke-ish’ causes. Grandstanding on controversies over transgender identity simply gives oxygen to debates that are of little consequence, at least by comparison with fundamental issues of human welfare and climate chaos.
Logos
As a psychologist with extensive clinical experience Jordan Peterson is acutely attuned to what makes a primarily male target audience tick. Skillful rhetoric taps into the concerns of essentially Anglophone or Nordic males, perturbed by suggestions they should be ashamed of privileged upbringings, another unhelpful idea that entered debates around identity politics.
Importantly, Peterson also gave intellectual credibility to belief in God after decades of sustained attacks from evangelical atheists such as Richard Dawkins, and, following Jung, identifies the role of spirituality in recovery from mental illness. His appeal to mythology also presented novel insights to an audience jaded by a dominant discourse of scientific materialism.
More problematically, however, Peterson also styles himself a philosopher and scientist. But as James Hamblin pointed out in The Atlantic what Peterson is really selling is a sense of order and control. Thus, while science is about settling questions and determining facts, self-help is concerned with supplying immediate answers to the question of how to live in the world. Hence, a recurring idea in Jordan Peterson’s book is that humans need rules as ‘an antidote to chaos.’[xx]
A crucial concept that Peterson has pronounced on is ‘logos’, which the Aristotelian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in Whose Justice Which Rationality describes as follows:
To engage in intellectual enquiry is then not simply to advance theses and to give one’s rational allegiance to those theses which so far withstand rational refutation; it is to understand the movement form thesis to thesis as a movement towards a kind of logos which will disclose how things are, not relative to some point of view, but as such.
Essentially, logos, in contrast to moral relativism, permits us to pronounce on moral ‘truths.’ In the wrong hands, however, it leads to moral absolutism, and is a sinister recipe for totalitarianism of a sort the Catholic Church institutionalised through the idea of a Pope speaking ex cathedra.
In our time, where celebrity veneration increasingly equates the knower with the known, real danger lurks in vesting any individual with a singular authority. We should instead assess the merit of their ideas on a case-by-case basis.
Jordan Peterson makes compelling arguments regarding the excesses of political correctness, and even in assessing virtues necessary for a good life, but he should certainly not be considered omniscient, or even competent, in fields beyond his ken.
The ‘Lion Diet’
Notably, Peterson has revealed himself as a climate change denier having argued before the Cambridge Union that views on climate change are inseparable from political orientations,[xxi] an assumption no doubt resting easily with a conservative fanbase, or market. It would certainly have pleased Steve Bannon.
Here we can see the contradiction that lies at the heart of Peterson between the scientist and the charmer, with the latter winning out. One may speculate as to why he holds these views that are at variance with scientific orthodoxy. Perhaps adherence to a ‘carnivore diet’ led to the distortion and departure from science, and logos.[xxii]
The edifice of Peterson’s ideas starts to crumble when we examine the ‘Lion Diet’ he has adopted on the advice of his daughter Michaela. James Hamblin recalls how:
On the comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast, Jordan Peterson explained how Mikhaila’s experience had convinced him to eliminate everything but meat and leafy greens from his diet, and that in the last two months he had gone full meat and eliminated vegetables. Since he changed his diet, his laundry list of maladies has disappeared, he told Rogan. His lifelong depression, anxiety, gastric reflux (and associated snoring), inability to wake up in the mornings, psoriasis, gingivitis, floaters in his right eye, numbness on the sides of his legs, problems with mood regulation—all of it is gone, and he attributes it to the diet.
Bannon
Trump’s victory and the Brexit Referendum are products of a profound, and arguably justifiable, disillusionment with the political status quo. Washington and Brussels are both seen as corrupt centres of power. Many of the arguments against these institutions are valid, but ignore the essential functions federal and supranational institutions still perform, with the baby being thrown out with the bathwater in the case of Brexit.
Of more importance to Populist success, however, has been the growing sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’, derived from identity politics. Mistakenly characterised as ethnic pride, it diminishes solidarity between human beings. Thus we enter the third decade of the millennium increasingly lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive and dependent, to quote Erich Fromm.
The Internet Revolution has brought opportunities for a few, particularly the first corporations to optimise social media, and aggressively pursue audience share through acquisition of kindred platforms in Facebook’s case. It has also allowed human beings of varied intelligences to thrive, from Donald Trump to Jordan Peterson, and more encouragingly, Greta Thunberg.
Peterson is the reigning conservative intellectual champion, who has used an undeniable talent to deflect attention from the real challenges confronted by humanity. His strawman of the left is really a creation of the liberal centre. Peterson may prove to be a dangerous guru whose eccentric tastes have brought climate denial.
The intellectual decay associated with Peterson provides the soil wherein Bannon’s seedlings germinate. Peterson informs his legions of fans to stand up straight and ‘own’ their prejudices (whether against transgender individuals or supranational institutions), while Bannon’s software prowls online preferences for signs of alienation.
We are only slowly coming to terms with a Digital Age reshaping our reality. The rise of a “secondary orality” is fraying our allegiance to the older print medium of books that acted as a conduit for facts. Video and podcast are easily accessed but content is not easily parsed. Moreover, as we retreat into a solitary cyberspace the view of the world is often jaundiced, and Bannon wins.
Feature Image by Gage Skidmore/wikicommons: Jordan Peterson speaking with attendees at the 2018 Young Women’s Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Hyatt Regency DFW Hotel in Dallas, Texas.
[i] J. G. Ballard, Millennium People, Fourth Estate, London, 2003, p.109.
[ii] Deaglán de Bréadún, ‘Contemplating Politicide’, Irish Times, August 9th, 2003, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/contemplating-politicide-1.369096
[iii] Dominic Cummings, ‘‘Two hands are a lot’ — we’re hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos…’ Blog Post, January 2nd, 2020, https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/
[iv] Andrew Hall, ‘Steve Bannon Targeted Jordan Peterson’s Followers Because They Were ‘Easy To Manipulate’’, Laughing in Disbelief, November 4th, 2019, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/laughingindisbelief/2019/11/steve-bannon-targeted-jordan-petersons-followers-because-they-were-easy-to-manipulate/
[v]Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Routledge, Abingdon, 1999 and 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Penguin Random House, New York, 2018. Peterson has also authored or co-authored more than a hundred academic papers.
[vii] Hilary Bruek, ‘This is what your smartphone is doing to your brain — and it isn’t good’, March 1st, 2019, Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/what-your-smartphone-is-doing-to-your-brain-and-it-isnt-good-2018-3?r=US&IR=T
[viii] Walter Ong, ‘Orality and Literacy – The Technologisation of the Word METHVE and co. London, 10982 p.2
[ix] Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir, New York, Random House, 2018, p.3.
[x] Untitled, ‘Leisure Reading in the U.S. is at an all time low’, Washington Post, June 29th, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/29/leisure-reading-in-the-u-s-is-at-an-all-time-low/
[xi] Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine, Indigo, London, 2019, p.118
[xv] Jessica Murphy, ‘Toronto professor Jordan Peterson takes on gender-neutral pronouns’, BBC News, November 4th, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37875695
[xvi] Amy Chua, ‘How America’s identity politics went from inclusion to division’, The Guardian, March 1st, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/mar/01/how-americas-identity-politics-went-from-inclusion-to-division
[xvii] Michael Calderone, ‘Fox News Gives Donald Trump A Pass On Birther Crusade It Helped Fuel’, Huffington Post, August 23rd, 2016. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fox-news-donald-trump-birtherism_n_57e54a06e4b08d73b830d54e
[xviii] Drew Desilver, ‘For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades’, Pew Research Centre, August 7th, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/
[xix] Mark Fisher, K-Punk – The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 -2016), Shepperton, London, 2018, p.61
[xx] James Hamblin, ‘The Jordan Peterson All-Meat Diet, The Atlantic, August 28th, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/08/the-peterson-family-meat-cleanse/567613/
[xxi] Jordan Peterson at the Cambridge Union: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBbvehbomrY
[xxii] Adam Gabbatt, ‘My carnivore diet: what I learned from eating only beef, salt and water’, The Guardian, September 11th, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/sep/10/my-carnivore-diet-jordan-peterson-beef
Five predictions for 2020: The Trump Card, an analysis of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019, CES 2020, implications of 5G rollout and a Republican climate change pivot.
The Trump Card
For all the talk of a fading U.S. Superpower since President Trump came to office, there is one statistic firmly in his favor. The U.S. remains the world’s most powerful global economy in absolute terms, and home to the largest stock market.
In truth, economic indicators have rarely looked better. Corporate taxes have been cut and red tape slashed. As a result, the stock market has surged to an all-time high[i] and unemployment is hovering at levels last seen in 1969.[ii] Sure there is still serious inequality, and poverty, but at least there are employment opportunities for those willing to work.
The big question for 2020, then, is whether the bull market continues. As ever, we’re feeling Bullish, but not as much about the political ramifications.
Whatever the latest polls are saying in the wake of the Impeachment, when the economy is in this state, it’s hard to see an incumbent President losing an election.
Over the course of 2020 we anticipate billions of dollars being spent on influencing the American electorate which way to vote. All of this will be keenly watched by a global audience, who are aware that where the U.S. travels, others follow.
The outcome has a sense of inevitability, hinging as it does on the health of the stock market. As Bill Clinton, another President who faced Impeachment, famously said: ‘it’s the economy, stupid!’, and this still holds true. Barring a dramatic stock market crash, or a natural disaster, Trump is going to be re-elected.
Patriot Act
In the event of the stock market crashing, Bull Moose predicts Trump will wrap himself tightly in the star-spangled banner, much in the way his one-time mentor Roy Cohn did whenever he faced trouble.
The big question is whether appealing to patriotism will be enough to save him. After all, this approach can be replicated by the Democratic opposition, even if Republicans have owned the story in recent times.
Enter another iron law of U.S. politics: whenever the nation is involved in a military conflict, Presidents don’t lose elections.
‘whenever the nation is involved in a military conflict, Presidents don’t lose elections.
Much in the same way as other ‘strongman’ leaders have done – Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Putin and Kim-Jong Un spring to mind – Trump is likely to develop a rallying cry, awakening fears of an external threat beyond anything the Democrats are serving up to him – just like the Bush administration used the War on Terror to galvanise its base.
He’s sure to deploy the usual rhetoric about the dangers of socialism and the ‘woke’ left, epitomized by ‘The Squad’, a group of four Congresswomen (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan), all from so-called ‘minority’ backgrounds. But against a more centrist Democrat candidate, such as Joe Biden, this might not prove to be enough. Trump needs a scarier prospect, an enemy to make mainstream Democrats quake.
Alexandria Ocascio-Cortez
The drone-strike assassination of Qassem Soleimani on January 3rd was aimed at a domestic audience as much the Iranian regime. Much remains to be said, but henceforth every decision taken by this President should be viewed in the context of a single-minded preoccupation: to win re-election for another term.
Reuters Report
Hot off the press, The Reuters Institute Digital News Report[iii] makes for interesting reading about the state of news journalism in the world. Perhaps the most important takeaway is this:
There is no sign that the majority of people are about to pay for online news, although many recognise that information on the internet is often overwhelming and confusing. Younger audiences in particular don’t want to give up instant, frictionless (and ideally free) access to a range of diverse voices and opinions. They don’t want to go back to how the media used to be.
The global media landscape has changed forever. There is no going back.
Specific to the United States, the report reflects our view that ‘audiences remain deeply polarised, much more so than most other countries.’ This reflects what we said back in July: ‘Among the least discussed, but perhaps most important influence of the Digital Age is our tendency to live in bubbles. We no longer have to be rich to live in the equivalent of gated communities.’ A near total absence of communication between the two sides is a clear and present danger to democracy itself.
It should also be noted that many media organisations are still struggling hugely in the digital era, despite the rosy economic picture overall. Nonetheless, a few leading companies continue to do well, in effect consolidating their market dominance – think Washington Post, New York Times & Fox News.
The report points to jobs cuts affecting a variety of lesser publications, from the venerable Cleveland Plain-Dealer to digital-platform First Look Media. Notably, in January 2019, BuzzFeed laid off 15% of its worldwide workforce (a total of 220 positions). That very week Verizon Media Group, which owns HuffPost, announced a 7% reduction across its media properties, totalling about 800 positions. Gannett, the leading U.S. news publisher, also announced layoffs at local newspapers across the country.
The Report says this is ‘stoking continued concerns about the future of local news,’ although perhaps more reassuringly viewership on local television news has remained steady.
Podcasts are bucking the downward trend, however, with the U.S. leading the world in listenership, including daily news-focused offerings. The New York Times’ ‘The Daily’ began broadcasting in 2017 and now averages 1.75 million daily downloads. It is joined by the Washington Post’s ‘Post Reports’, Vox’s ‘Today Explained’, Slate’s ‘What Next’, ABC News’ ‘Start Here’, among others. Another notable development is VICE News partnering with Spotify to produce the bilingual podcast series ‘Chapo.’
While these may seem like the usual suspects, a host of small players are also succeeding in this space. This trend is likely to continue in 2020, increasing the depth and breadth of coverage around the world and inviting people to step outside their news media bubbles. This bodes well for micro-operators, such as the Joe Rogan podcast and our own Cassandra Voices, that offer fresh angles.
CES 2020
January is the time of year that for the great and the good to gather in Vegas for CES 2020 and discover the latest news and hands-on reviews from the world’s biggest tech show.[iv] Well over 200,000 people attended this year’s event, providing a useful bellwether on where the digital economy is headed in the years to come.
Amid heightened concerns about infringements on personal data, the headline panel featured representatives from Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple, to discuss privacy.
Alarm bells should be ringing that measures are being taken by the conglomerates themselves, rather than restraints being imposed on them by democratically elected representatives. While most Americans are interested in protecting their privacy, an unspoken consensus seems to have developed, where convenience is the trade-off for the loss of personal data. The question is how long the truce will last, before consumers start to object to being told what they desire.
Bull Moose had some cause for concern himself over the holidays after being surprised to receive a data usage warning from his latest model Galaxy smartphone – unusually all 64GB of storage had been used up. On top of all that, the photo and video file cache was empty.
Facing a choice between asking his young nephew to figure out how to delete the files, Bull Moose plugged the phone into his computer to explore what was happening. Lo and behold, he came across a cache of external sites that had been collecting data on the phone’s activities – involving all manner of companies and apps.
Collectively, these were using 32GB of storage, and after deleting these nothing was lost in terms of functionality. Presumably this data was there for companies to access relevant information at their time of choosing.
Let’s be clear, the primary reason data is collected is to allow companies to profile you in order to sell you goods and services, which they believe you will want.
On the surface, a limited amount of this is ok – advertising is often a bit of a shot in the dark after all – and people are ultimately free to make up their own minds. It’s just about fine provided there is government oversight to prevent identity theft or malicious use of data. The problem is there isn’t any.
It’s only really the relatively toothless and tedious GDPR, enacted by the E.U. in 2018, and California’s new Consumer Privacy Act[v] that are attempting to curb the data free-for-all.
The Rise of 5G
Enter 5G technology, which is likely to alter the way our societies interact with technology. 5G-enabled technologies and networks are characterized by delivery of ultra-high-speed bandwidth, ultra-low latency, and ultra-high reliability of service. It is believed this will lead to connection speeds up to one hundred times faster than we are used to. But it will also generate greater possibilities for tracking and data collection.
CES 2020, then, will be an opportunity for tech makers to demonstrate that 5G will be an actual thing this year, and they’re not going to hold back. Some of these announcements will be around specific devices, like Dell’s 5G-ready Latitude laptop. Others will be around chipsets: MediaTek, for example, plans to roll out a premium 5G chipset for phones at CES, and Qualcomm will likely expound upon the announcements it made at its annual Hawaii summit back in December. Most importantly, expect infrastructure updates, as the US carriers continue to expand their 5G networks and show off how the fifth-generation of wireless will transform healthcare, “smart” cities, and autonomous vehicles.[vi]
While most consumers view 5G much like the arrival of 3G or 4G, i.e. as just another smartphone upgrade, in fact it will have a transformative impact on the technology we use ever more in our daily lives.
Besides privacy questions and public health issues (5G requires a great number and more integrated cell-phone towers), there are also concern around China’s, and specifically Huawei’s, lead in this new technology. As Linsday Gorman in the Atlantic puts it:
Policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic, from European economics ministers to President Donald Trump, have viewed the 5G dispute first as a trade issue … the West has ample reason for caution about Chinese 5G suppliers. For one, the recent Chinese National Intelligence Law requires these companies to comply with Communist Party demands to turn over data or otherwise engage in snooping or network-disruption activities.
… recent revelations about how China’s ruling party exploits the full panoply of personal information it has amassed about its citizens—facial-recognition images, mandatory DNA samples, 24-hour GPS coordinates, and search-history and online-activity tracking, as well as plain old eavesdropping—to quash religious freedom and basic rights should give major pause to Western governments and wireless carriers alike.[vii]
Taken together – trade, security, changing interaction with technology, tracking and personal health – the issues that came to the fore around 5G in 2019 seem likely to gain traction.
Five Predictions for 2020
The stock market run will finally come to an end, forcing President Trump to play his remaining card. Military involvement in the Middle East will escalate as the President wraps himself in the flag to counter ‘unpatriotic’ Dems.
News fatigue and mistrust will reach all-time highs. On the positive side, however, the demand for reliable information and fresh content will see people exploring beyond their news bubbles.
Trump will be re-elected. Each one of the four realistic Democratic Presidential candidates, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg has weaknesses that will be mercilessly exploited.
The roll out of 5G will bring renewed scrutiny of Big Tech, with fears over data intrusion becoming a political issue.
Global warming will continue to hog the headlines as fires and other disasters occur around the world. Here we may see a Republican pivot, with denials giving way to acknowledgement and the identification of opportunities, just as Putin’s Russia is looking ‘to use the advantages’ brought by climate change.[viii] Notably, Trump has recently acknowledged that climate change is no hoax.[ix] Watch this space.
Featured Image: Tampa, Florida, USA 24th Oct, 2016 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump hugs an American flag as he takes the stage to speak at a campaign rally at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa, Florida, the third of five cities Trump is visiting during a two-day campaign swing through Florida. (Paul Hennessy/Alamy)
If you appreciated this argument please do us a favour and share it. Also, feel free to drop us a line with your thoughts on what you think are the big issues that will affect the U.S. in 2020 to bullmoose@cassandravoices.com.
[i] Yun, Li, ‘Here’s what happened to the stock market on Tuesday,’ CNBC, December 24th, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/24/what-happened-to-stock-market-tuesday-new-all-time-high-for-nasdaq.html
[ii] Untitled, ‘U.S. Unemployment fell to 3.6%, lowest since 1969,’ Washington Post, May 3rd, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/05/03/us-economy-added-jobs-april-unemployment-fell-percent-lowest-since/
[iii] Reuters Institute, ‘Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019,‘ Oxford University, December, 2019, http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/
[v] Cohen Coberly, ‘California’s Consumer Privacy Act has taken effect, bringing GDPR-like data protections to the US,’ Techspot, January 2nd, 2020, https://www.techspot.com/news/83385-california-consumer-privacy-act-has-taken-effect-bringing.html
[vi] Untitled, ‘The 8 Things We Expect to See at CES 2020,’ Wired, January 4th, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/ces-2020-preview/
[vii] Linsday Graham, ‘5G Is Where China and the West Finally Diverge,’ The Atlantic, January 5th, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/5g-where-china-and-west-finally-diverge/604309/
[viii] Agence-France Press, ‘Russia announces plan to ‘use the advantages’ of climate change’, The Guardian, January 5th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/05/russia-announces-plan-to-use-the-advantages-of-climate-change
[ix] Rachel Frazin, ‘Trump says ‘nothing’s a hoax’ about climate change,’ The Hill, January 9th, 2020, https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/477548-trump-says-nothings-a-hoax-about-climate-change
Today it is shameful to be unemployed and regarded as an achievement to sell oneself into part-time slavery, meekly accepting as natural that one is not free for half one’s waking hours. Theodore Zeldin, The Hidden Pleasures of Life – A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future (2015).
With an Irish general election looming, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has again appealed to early risers.[i] Thus the early bird, rubbing sleep from his swollen eyes, is promised an array of tax cuts. This is compensation, we assume, for the long commute and attendant sleep deprivation involved in living in a ‘starter home’ in a peripheral zone, all to the ultimate benefit of a minority in an increasingly unequal society.[ii]
I am a champion for the self-employed & people who get up early in the morning and nobody gets up earlier than the Irish farmer! As long as I am around self employed people will never be taken for granted #IFAAGM
As David Graeber put it: ‘The real question is how to ratchet down a bit more toward a society where people can live more by working less.’ He further opines that the non-working poor may be ‘pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one’s penchant for self-annihilation.’[iii]
The Tedium of Work
Neo-liberalism is predicated on a shaky assumption that success, measured in money, sex or fame, derives from a single-minded focus on hard work, and paying off one’s debts. It has led to Leo’s misplaced veneration for the alarm clock, and political scapegoating of ‘welfare cheats,’ and others among the ‘undeserving’ poor.
It is a grand delusion that early rising and hard work make dreams a reality, at its extreme recalling the banner greeting Concentration Camp inmates: arbeit met frei ,‘work will set you free’. A devotion to labour for its own sake is misplaced. In fact, an excess can dull the mind.
Detail of the main gate at Dachau concentration camp in Germany.
Adam Smith, the father of Classical Economics, argued that the tedium of monotonous industrial tasks would render anyone ‘stupid and narrow-minded.’ He maintained that the torpor of repetitive labour renders an individual incapable ‘of relishing or bearing a part in rational conversation’, or ‘conceiving generous, noble or tender sentiment;’[iv] asserting this would come in the way of ‘any just judgment concerning even the ordinary duties of private life.’
Over the course of the last century especially, workers, including those engaged in monotonous ‘unskilled’ work, joined forces to win a series of improvements to their conditions. These included a five-day week and eight-hour working day, along with a living wage. It brought scope for many, if not most, among what has been pointedly referred to as ‘the working class’ to enjoy a reasonable standard of living across the Western world.
Steadily rising standards of living in Post-War U.S and Europe brought a profusion of recreational activities including sports, and unprecedented access to the arts, especially film – the defining cultural form of the twentieth century – along with access to higher education for the children of the poor.
La Dolce Vita
With a decent life available to most of the population, the decades after World War II are known as Les Trente Glorieuses in France and Il Miracolo Economico in Italy, as salaries kept pace with labour productivity. In large part down to the political clout of the left, including Communist parties.
But these developments have given way to a sustained global period of widening inequality,[v] associated especially with Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K.. Henceforth according to David Graeber, ‘we were all to think of ourselves as tiny corporations.’[vi] This has worked to the detriment of the bulk of the population ill-equipped to understand the complexities – or just uninterested – in financial transactions. Above all it has brought a veneration of property ownership, with speculation encouraged by unscrupulous banks, leading to the property inflation that culminated in the Financial Crash of 2008, when the bubble burst in Ireland and elsewhere.
Far from bringing wealth to the many, since the 1970s real wages have stagnated, while private, and public debts spiraled, with the wealth of a few expanding grotesquely, especially in recent times.
U.S. Productivity v Real Wages (source https://thecurrentmoment.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/productivity-inequality-poverty/)
Tellingly, whereas in the 1950s the CEO of General Motors, then the model of a successful US business, was paid 135 times more than assembly-line workers, fifty years later the CEO of Walmart earned 1,500 times as much as an ordinary employee.[vii] In recent times, the efficiencies enabled by new technologies, often protected by exclusionary patents, are enriching those at the apex of corporations.
Unions, which were vital for bringing workers’ rights, are now in retreat. Those that remain often only represent employees in privileged positions. A chasm below an unemployment cliff looms in front of us, with little opposition to the new world order.
Automation
These developments are a feature of a technological revolution, especially in communications with the advent of the Internet, shattering an apparent post-Cold War consensus, and now shifting the political substrate. The world wide web has rendered words, video and music virtually uncommodifiable, wreaking havoc upon the livelihoods of independent-minded writers, musicians and others artists, who struggle to share their revitalising visions for life.
Automation now beckons in a host of industries which will further enhance ‘labour productivity’, at the expense of labour, and to the benefit of capital.
Our present disorder is comparable to the expansion of the Roman Republic in the first century BCE, when territories to the east and west fell to generals such as Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. These charismatic consuls pillaged unprecedented loot, generating an early form of welfare populism and eventually an oligarchic triumvirate. This gave way to the Roman Empire in 49BCE, under the first Emperor Julius Caesar.
The First Triumvirate of the Roman Empire: Caesar, Pompey and Crassus.
Today, we have our own benign despots within Big Data, whose loot would make an emperor blush. Their algorithms convey us from purchase to purchase, intruding ever more into our inner-most thoughts. Most worryingly, the independence of voting intentions are being severely tested by sophisticated (anti-) social media platforms.
At the outset of a dizzying technological revolution a small number of individuals wield unaccountable power, and as time passes the freedom of the Internet recedes. Just as the Celtic tribes of Gaul cowered before the ingenuity of Roman legions, structures of democratic government – states and transnational bodies – melt before the tortoise formations of the corporations, and their often solipsistic commanders.
As in another age where the value of men was assigned in battle, a capacity to appeal to a wide public with a new Internet tool, whether useful or not, has brought mind-boggling fortunes to the founders and shareholders of Google, Facebook, Instagram and the rest. There is little to prevent villainous characters developing unassailable political power through vast fortunes. The descent of the Roman Empire into corruption and excess should serve as a warning.
Moreover, just as Johannes Gutenberg was buried in an unmarked grave while others profited from his invention of the printing press, opportunism rather than ingenuity tends to be rewarded; as with the phenomenon of the real estate speculator Donald Trump, who recalls the fiddling Emperor Nero himself. This acknowledged master of the soundbite is the product of inherited wealth, and the redoubtable political nous of Steve Bannon, who preyed on the insecurities of the American worker.
One such liberal centurion, Leo Varadkar, offers no opposition to the current economic order. Indeed, he unashamedly promotes dominant corporations in Ireland, through a low, or non-existent, corporation tax regime, long justified simply from the perspective of national self-interest. We had an ‘Ireland First’ doctrine here long before Trump invented America’s.
The Irish state has been reduced to the role of croupier at a casino table where the super-rich trouser their winnings without being required to even tip the attendants. So obsequious has the Irish government become that the award of an enormous windfall to the exchequer of the Apple tax bill is resisted: ‘Would sir like to cash his chips in now or later?’
Fuller Flourishing
The impending obsolescence of much unskilled work may provide an opportunity for a fuller flourishing of homo sapiens. Liberation from tedious tasks, such as driving and manufacturing, should provide scope for the development of the “generous, noble and tender” sentiments referred to by Adam Smith. This wealth ought to be shared with the Global South too that was ravaged by the imposition of unfair loans during the 1970s and 1980s.
A powerful remedy to our present difficulties could be for a wealthy country such as Ireland to provide a legal guarantee of a basic standard of living for all citizens. This could offer an opportunity for individual fulfillment in various domains, to the ultimate benefit of society at large. It requires additional funding to educational and cultural facilities, and depends on the state regulating the housing market.
An often parasitic financial services industry should be regulated and taxed effectively, while life’s essentials: especially a roof over one’s head, nutritious food, and public transport, must all become affordable; if not the cheap air travel to which we have grown accustomed. This may seem a Communist ideal, but greater distribution of wealth can work to the benefit of the small-time entrepreneur and lead to a thriving local market.
The Financial Crisis from 2008 originated in failings within the banking system, unconnected to what were, in fact, increasing efficiencies simultaneously occurring in the real economy. Rethinking economics in its wake involves questioning theoretical limitations on fiscal stimuli. The value we attribute to money is a product of the human imagination, and governments possess a singular capacity to generate more of it through expenditure, as exponents of Modern Monetary Theory demonstrate.
Magical money.
Thus George W. Bush’s administration spent its way out of recession without generating inflation. On the other hand, the austerity measures characterising the response of E.U. member states brought prolonged recession, which disproportionately affected the poorest.
This was not only unnecessary, but economically counter-productive as those on low incomes tend to spend money on day-to-day goods, generally patronising local businesses. Whatever else one may say in favour of the E.U., the Growth and Stability Pact, enshrined in Treaty, represents an obstacle to any member state’s capacity to adopt a fiscal stimulus in periods of recession, and needs to be done away with.
Aligning policy to the basic needs of the population should be the role of democratic government, but this is often derailed by special interests. Socio-economic rights could ultimately be enshrined in European treaties so as to avoid a repeat of the disgraceful impoverishment of ordinary Greeks and Irish after the 2008 Crash. But generous government expenditure must avoid the bureaucratisation and careerism often found in the state sector, where many seem to stay in jobs through fear of the alternative.
Intoxication
Objections to ideas such as basic income and other socio-economic rights, often stem from a pessimistic assessment that if not spurred by the need to work, most of us will indulge our vices, especially excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol. Yet it is apparent that the oblivion of intoxication is associated with the end of the working week in jobs that do not inspire. It is also clear that feelings of worthlessness generate excessive, and often self-destructive appetites.
A legal right to economic security would take much of the fear, and even boredom, out of life, while affording the possibility for many of us to follow our dreams, and engage in the kind of blue-sky thinking from which innovations arrive. The pursuit of money as an end in itself, is a lust for power held in common with the warlords of yore. Billionaire moguls are a rare breed requiring containment (who in their right mind would have the motivation to earn more than a billion?), and perhaps even compassion.
Naturally, many of us enjoy the regularity and community of daily work. There is nothing wrong with that and numerous roles will survive the technological onslaught, preserving the satisfaction many derive from a regular schedule.
Home-makers, farmers, carers, and teachers of all kinds will always be required. The satisfaction of craftsmanship and independent enterprise should be enhanced, so as to generate greater pride and commitment in a chosen field. Goods produced in an ethical and sustainable manner could be encouraged through education, and targeted subsidisation aimed at a diminished carbon impact and reduced waste.
Technology professionals are particularly prized in our economy, and their continued usefulness is assured. Many wish to devote their talents towards altruistic goals, however, rather than work for vampire corporations, which exploit people and the Earth. The model of the open source Linux operating system – such as I avail of in this software – shows how a spirit of cooperation endures to make technology a collective resource.
Open-source Linux operating system.
Company Law
We might also contemplate a radical shift in company law. The inherent danger of profit-seeking corporations was once widely recognised. Thus, between 1720 and 1825 it was a criminal offence to start a company in England, during a period of rapid economic expansion.
In the United States until the nineteenth century there were two competing ideas regarding the purpose of companies: the first involved those with charters restricted to the pursuit of objectives in the public interest, such as canal building; the other regime issued charters of a general character, allowing companies to engage in whatever business proved profitable.[ix]
The latter category emerged triumphant, divorced from responsibility to fellow citizens; an unaccountable abstraction with separate legal personality established in the landmark 1897 case of Salomon v. Salomon. By altering the nature of the company under law we may continue to harness the thrusting energy of entrepreneurship, but for positive ends.
Acquisition of wealth is not the be-all and end-all for most of us, especially if basic needs are met: we may still have a real dedication to what we do and the drive to achieve it without the promise of untold riches. Changes in company law requiring any enterprise to have a public interest purpose contained in articles and memoranda of association could prove hugely beneficial to society at large.
Human creativity is manifest in a wide variety of fields. We may discover different vocations throughout our lives, some economically productive, others seemingly desultory, but perhaps crucial to individual development, and sanity, at particular junctures in life. How many criminals – a huge financial burden on any society – are the product of unhappy careers?
The technologies we have developed should allow many of us to indulge our passions, which can ultimately be to the benefit of all.
For some of us, the orthodox structure of the working day is unsatisfactory, and diligence occurs in pursuit of self-ordained objectives, rather than via external imposition This may seem like the privilege of an avant-garde, who tend to have enjoyed educational privileges, but many are increasingly imperiled by current economic structures, and wish to stand apart from what amounts to a conspiracy promoting the purchase of property.
We might draw wisdom from the lifestyle of the early modern craftsman, who was not beholden to a dictatorial clock, which has cast its shadow over the working day since the Industrial Revolution. Households would retire for a few hours after dusk, waking some time later for an hour or two, before taking what was referred to as a second sleep until morning.
During this interlude, people would relax, ponder their dreams, or perhaps make love. Others would engage in activities like sewing, chopping wood, or reading, relying on the light of the moon, or newly invented oil lamps.
Nor was the working week set in stone, and the seasons would dictate the extent of one’s labour. Naturally, the number of burghers who dragged themselves out of a generalised misery at that time was limited, but those managing to do so could operate in tune with their own bodies and the rhythms of nature, rather than the demands of the omnipotent factory owner who emerged ascendant after the Industrial Revolution.
The Factory Clock.
Winners and Losers
The level of poverty we permit in our superficially developed societies is, simply, unconscionable. Insecurity and fear afflict far more than those living in destitution, and are the silent forces that drive addiction and insanity. We have our winners and losers, but the number in the former category has declined considerably in recent decades, as the technological race stretches out the field.
Just as the Roman Empire grew out of economic imbalances resulting from conquest, our own societies confront unassailable capital, which feeds a delusion that chosen people can be saved from barbarian hordes.
The possibilities for homo sapiens are boundless. But we require basic safeguards to flourish. Companies can operate for the benefit of society as a whole, harnessing the dynamism of the entrepreneur, and working cooperatively as the craftsman once did. Let us avoid the fate of the Roman Republic, and prosper together.
An earlier version of this article appeared in February, 2018.
[i] Fintan O’Toole, Varadkar’s vacuous slogan reveals a mean streak,’ Irish Times, December 31st, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-varadkar-s-vacuous-slogan-reveals-mean-streak-1.4127418?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Ffintan-o-toole-varadkar-s-vacuous-slogan-reveals-mean-streak-1.4127418
[ii] Elaine Edwards, ‘Irish inequality blamed on ‘unusually high’ levels of low pay and weak protections’, Irish Times, February 19th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/irish-inequality-blamed-on-unusually-high-levels-of-low-pay-and-weak-protections-1.3798081
[iii] David Graeber, Debt – The First 5,000 Years, Melville, London, 2011, p.390
[iv] Theodore Zeldin, The Hidden Pleasures of Life – A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future, Maclehose Press, London, 2015 p.77
[v] Ted Knutson, ‘Income Inequality Up In Every State Since The 1970s, Says New Report From Liberal Think Tank’, Forbes, July 21st, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/tedknutson/2018/07/21/income-inequality-up-in-every-state-since-the-1970s-says-new-report-from-liberal-think-thank/#3f0e83a023e9
[viii] Gabriel Sherman, ‘“I Have Power”: Is Steve Bannon Running for President?’ Vanity Fair, December 21st, 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/bannon-for-president-trump-kushner-ivanka
Long Term Patterns: the U.K. Prefers Oxford University-Educated Conservative Prime Ministers.
Only Winston Churchill, and John Major among election-winning Prime Ministers since World War II did not pass through ‘the city of the dreaming spires’ during their formative educational years (neither University of Edinburgh-educated Gordon Brown nor Jim Callaghan, who could not afford a university education, won an election to become Prime Minister).
A former President of the Oxford Union, Boris Johnson (Baliol College, 1987), joins a list that includes Theresa May (St Hugh’s, 1974), David Cameron (Brasenose College, 1988) Anthony Eden (Christchurch College, 1922), Harold MacMillan (Balliol College, 1914) Edward Heath (Balliol College, 1939), and Margaret Thatcher (Somerville College, 1947), as well as Labour PMs Tony Blair (St John’s, 1974), Harold Wilson (Jesus College, 1937) and Clement Atlee (University College, 1904).
Apart from political points of difference, the well documented hostility exhibited towards Jeremy Corbyn, across the media spectrum, since he was first elected party leader[i] may be attributed to bias (unconscious or otherwise) against an individual perhaps deemed to lack the necessary polish – or debating skills – conferred by the elite institution.
Moreover, it is clear that Conservatism, an admittedly amorphous and pragmatic body of ideas, fluctuating historically between pro- and anti-European Community positions, represents the mainstream of British politics, with the Party holding power for forty-four of the seventy-four years since the end World War II (or 60% of that time); rising to twenty-seven out of the last forty years (or 68% of the time since 1979).
Shares of the vote in general elections since 1832 received by Conservatives (blue), Liberals/Liberal Democrats (orange) and others (grey).
The Conservative formula has been based inter alia on a partisan press, Atlanticist foreign policy involving periodic military commitment, increasing Euroscepticism since Margaret Thatcher, free trade, low taxation, privatisation of government services, and emphasis on financial services in the south-east of the country as opposed to manufacturing industry in the north and west (apart from an arms industry that earned £14 billion in export revenues in 2018[ii]). Moreover, particularly under Tony Blair, New Labour (1997-2010) broadly embraced Conservative policies.
Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist politics thus represented an usual anomaly in U.K. politics – a genuine threat to the Conservative consensus on how to govern Britain, through a grassroots movement, albeit focused in the south of the country. The scale of the threat is demonstrated by Corbyn’s ability to attract almost as many votes to the Labour Party in the General Election of 2017 (c. 12.9 million) as Tony Blair did in his 1997 landslide victory (c. 13.5m).
The disturbing character of the campaign to defeat the Labour Party under Corbyn in 2019 has exposed the limits of democracy in the United Kingdom, and bears the fingerprints of Steve Bannon’s tactic of unsettling opponents by ‘deliberately crossing the line, defying normal courtesies, disrupting debate by scorning its conventions.’
The ‘Bannonisation’ of the Conservative Party: my @tortoise piece on the profound change triggered by Boris Johnson’s leadership – and the battle ahead for the party’s soul #CPC19https://t.co/VhIiRtTAvl
The Labour Party Bucks European Social Democratic Decline (to an extent).
Much has been made of the commonalities between Trump’s election and the Brexit referendum, but as the Polish writer Stefan Bielik observed ‘With its lurch to the right, Britain is no longer special in Europe.’[iii]
The relative decline in the fortunes in the British Labour Party can be placed in a broader European context, wherein a traditional ‘working class’ no longer support mainstream social democratic parties. In many cases this ‘blue collar’ constituency has shifted to Populist nationalist (or Nativist) parties, including Rassemblement National (formerly Front National) in France, Lega in Italy, and Alternative für Deutschland in Germany – although in many cases these parties adopt causes traditionally associated with the left.
Similarly, during the Brexit Referendum the Leave side made increased funding for the NHS a central plank of its campaign. The crucial distinction with socialism is that government services are envisioned as being restricted to the native population.
Brexit Bus Pledge, 2016.
Johnson’s proposal to build a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland also fits with the Populist, Bannonite formula. Post-Truth politics permit imaginative policies that barely consider logistical challenges or advantages, such as a wall the length of the U.S.-Mexican border, and as with Trump’s main policy proposal going into the last Presidential election, someone else would pay for it, in that case the Mexican government; whereas the EU is set to foot the bill for the bridge.
In the U.K. election of 2019, the Labour Party secured a 32% share of the electorate (or 10.2 million votes), which represented a significant decline on the 40% (12.9 million) received in 2017. That proportion, however, compares favourably with the fortunes of other mainstream European left-wing parties, especially when the success of Scottish and other national or regional parties is taken into account.
Among other large European countries, only in Spain did left-wing parties (Socialist Party and Podemos) secure a greater combined share of the vote than Labour in the U.K.. The steep decline of the German Social Democrats from 40% of the national share in 1998 to just 20% in 2017 might serve as a warning to those complacent enough to assume that Labour cannot sink any further.
U.K. figures are skewed by a first-past-the-post electoral system that leads to tactical voting, and seriously diminishes opportunities for smaller parties. Nevertheless, at least by comparison with other European socialist parties, the U.K. Labour Party has emerged from Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure in relative good health, crucially, having retained its position as the second major party, it lives to fight another day.
The U.K. election in 2019 witnessed another poor performance from the Labour Party in Scotland. This decline stems from the 2015 election under Ed Milliband’s leadership, when the Party lost all but one of its seats. This election emphasises that Scotland is a political entity increasingly at odds with the rest of the United Kingdom, in which the Scottish Nationalist Party (S.N.P.) won forty-eight out of fifty-nine seats (with 45% of the vote); as in Northern Ireland, constitutional questions, including membership of the European Union and the United Kingdom are now deciding factors for the electorate.
In contrast, in Blair’s landslide victory, the Labour Party won fifty-six out of seventy-two seats there. Thus, the bald statement that this was Labour’s worst result since 1935 fails to take the altered politics of Scotland into account.
Vitally, Labour under Corbyn fought off the Liberal Democrat attempt to assume the mantle of challenger to the Conservative Pary, and potential extinction in an unforgiving first-past-post-system. An early surge in Lib-Dem support saw them surpass Labour (23% v. 21%) in at least one poll prior to the election at the end of September.[iv] The party had become a refuge for both disaffected Labour politicians (including Chuka Umunna and Alastair Campbell), and claimed support from Conservative grandees such as John Major and Michael Heseltine.
In the election itself, however, Liberal-Democrat support fell away to just under 12% of the total – an improvement on 2017 when the party won just 8% of the total – but a massive disappointment nonetheless considering their high hopes of becoming the main party of opposition, especially through favourable coverage in the pro-Remain The Guardian.
It might have been expected that in an election in which the Conservative Party put Brexit front and central that the only U.K.-wide party fully committed to remaining in the European Union would emerge as the main challenger. But this re-running of the referendum did not materialise.
Again bearing in mind the unrepresentative, and arguably anti-democratic, nature of the first-past-the-post system, a socialist message, articulated by Jeremy Corbyn, appears to remain a vote winner – at least among those opposed to the Conservative Party – by comparison to the centrist liberal platform; with many voters also aware that the Liberal-Democrats had entered into a coalition government with the Conservatives between 2010 and 2015 that implemented austerity economic policies.
Thus, reasserting a centrist, Blairite approach, including a swift return to the European Union, does not seem a likely formula for a Labour Party revival unless its policies cleave closely to the Conservative consensus to a point where the electorate is indifferent to the outcome: as under New Labour when voter turnout dipped below 60% in 2001, compared to 68% in 2017 and 66.5% in 2019.
Unequivocal Brexit Policy Proved Crucial to Conservative Victory.
It is widely assumed – with the former BBC Newsnight journalist Paul Mason a prominent advocate of this view[v] – that Jeremy Corbyn’s unwillingness to make a firm commitment to remaining within the European Union was the Labour Party’s undoing. The argument runs that had Corbyn campaigned with a defiant promise for a yes vote, perhaps in alliance with the Liberal-Democrats, he would have carried the day. But this flies in the face of the reality.
After years of bickering inside Parliament, leading to the infamous proroguing, and courtroom battles, it would appear that serious Brexit fatigue had set in among the electorate. The Conservative pledge ‘To Get Brexit Done’, repeated at every possible juncture throughout the campaign with admirable unity of purpose, proved an unbeatable platform – helped of course by an overwhelmingly supportive media, increasingly hysterical in its opposition to Corbyn.
Even Remain-voting Conservatives seem to have been attracted by the simplicity of the message, albeit the claim that a vote for the Liberal-Democrats could bring Corbyn to power may also have proved effective. More importantly, the Conservatives exploited an enduring grievance that the democratic will of the people, as expressed in the Referendum of 2016, was being ignored by a political elite – an argument that resonated strongly in Brexit-voting parts of the country: Labour’s so-called ‘red wall.’
All of these constituencies, bar Stroud in Gloucestershire, Kensington in London and Ipswich in Norfolk, are in the North of England or Wales – Labour’s traditional industrial heartland.
This emphasises the extent to which Brexit dictated the electoral outcome, especially given Labour retained seats in those same constituencies in 2017 with a manifesto promising to respect the result of the referendum.
Thus, while opinion polls register distaste for the Labour leadership among the electorate, after a sustained campaign of vilification in the press, this cannot be separated from the substance of policies (particularly indecisiveness over Brexit), as the opinion questionnaire purports to.
We asked voters why they had not voted for particular parties in our on the day poll (12th December). For Labour the key issue was the leadership. pic.twitter.com/pu7iBWDp94
Thus, both David Broder[viii] and Owen Jones[ix] have persuasively argued that Labour’s failure to replicate its Brexit policy from the 2017 election was its undoing. Labour certainly lost votes and even seats to the Lib-Dems and S.N.P. in 2019, but these parties would probably have supported a minority Labour government which promised to re-run the referendum.
Jeremy Corbyn can certainly be faulted for adopting what appears to have been a principled neutrality on the question of Brexit, but perhaps it was the decision of his leading lieutenant John McDonnell to advocate for another referendum and a Remain vote – contrary to the Bennite anti-EU tradition within the Labour Party to which he belonged – that was the real problem; indeed, revealingly, McDonnell has ‘owned’ the electoral disaster.[x]
It may plausibly be argued that the stubborn refusal of many within Britain – and without – to accept the clear verdict of the British people on membership of the European Union, however sinister the tactics of the Leave side, permitted the political gambler and serial liar that is Boris Johnson to win the U.K General Election of 2019, by a handsome margin.
According to Matthew D’Ancona there ‘really is no way to understand how radically’ Boris Johson is ‘trying to remould the Conservative Party, and the very specific way in which he is framing contemporary political debate, without reference to the self-appointed father figure of the worldwide right-wing nationalist movement.’
2019 marked a new low in British democracy, as fake and misleading information became central to the Conservative Party’s campaign of undermining its opponents, in particular Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour Party for the most part, fought a clean fight, essentially winning the campaign on the relatively free medium of Twitter,[xi] where organic sharing is rewarded above political advertisements.
Conservative Party distortion began in earnest during the first leaders’ debate, when its press office temporarily changed the name on its official Twitter handle to ‘FactCheckUK’, implying it was an independent fact-checking source. That the Party was prepared to do so given the near certainty of discovery is indicative of the cynicism of Post-Truth contemporary political campaigning. Under the guidance of Steve Bannon, who masterminded Donald Trump’s victory, Populists bend reality and impugn the motives of all politicians.
Thus, Adam Ramsay describes the Conservative strategy as being to: ‘wage war on the political process, on trust, and on truth.’ The Hobbesian project ensures ‘the whole experience is miserable, bewildering and stressful.’ All that remains is to ‘ask voters to make it go away.’[xii]
Although those with an interest in politics tend to gravitate towards Twitter, Facebook actually has three times as many daily visits in the U.K.,[xiii] and as the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed, users of the platform are susceptible to sophisticated propaganda, and political ads are not verified.
Moreover, the Conservative Party raised more than three times as much as Labour in large donations (over £7,500) over the course of the campaign (£18 million compared to £5 million), providing them with ample resources for online campaigns targeting key marginal constituencies.
Added to this, the Conservative Party retained partisan support from most of the widest circulating newspapers in the country, including The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, The Times and The Sun. Only The Daily Mirror was demonstrably supportive of Labour.
Left-leaning or liberal broadsheets, The Guardian and The Independent were generally opposed to the Conservatives, but tended to be at least as supportive of the Liberal Democrats as Labour, and ran stories damaging to the latter, including unsubstantiated allegations of antisemitism against Jeremy Corbyn.[xv]
The Guardian also ran a damaging opinion piece by the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore in which he amplified these claims. He made great play on Corbyn’s unsatisfactory responses to aggressive questioning by Andrew Neil (whose formidable inquisitorial skills Boris Johnson refused to be subjected to) in which the interviewer demanded that Corbyn condemn the proposition that Rothschild Zionists were controlling world governments. Montefiore also referred to the Labour leader’s 2012 support of a grafitti artist’s work apparently featuring antisemitic tropes, in what was an article strikingly thin on substantive evidence for a damaging allegation.[xvii]
In a Facebook post in 2012, Corbyn offered his backing to Los Angeles-based street artist Mear One, before subsequently conceding he was wrong to support the graffiti artist.
Alongside criticisms of Corbyn by leading cultural figures in the liberal media, in an unprecedented move, the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis wrote an article for The Times[xviii] arguing Corbyn was unfit to be Prime Minister.
Notably, antisemitism charges were hardly leveled against Corbyn prior to the 2017 election. The extent of the campaign running up to the 2019 elections suggests a coordinated, prolonged strategy, designed to impugn the reputation of a long-term anti-racist campaigner in Jeremy Corbyn, just as Arthur Scargill’s reputation was smeared at the height of the miners’ strike.
‘Good luck Jeremy…you’re better than them. Nice one’
This gent explains, in 60 seconds, why the establishment attacks @jeremycorbyn#ge2019
The episode recalls Fyodor Dostoyevksy’s 1872 Devils, towards the end of which the conspirators Lyamshin is put on trial and asked, ‘Why so many murders, scandals and outrages committed?’ to which he responds that it was to promote:
the systematic destruction of society and all its principles; to demoralise everyone and make hodge-podge of everything, and then, when society was on the point of collapse – sick, depressed, cynical and sceptical, but still with a perpetual desire for some kind of guiding principle and for self-preservation – suddenly to gain control of it.[xx]
The BBC is no longer a guardian of British democracy (if it ever was).
Considering the distinct disadvantages that the Labour Party laboured under during this election, with traditional media and fake Facebook ads ranged against it, British democracy was reliant on the BBC to provide a measure of balance. Alas, the public service broadcaster not only failed to vindicate its public service mandate, but actively participated in the fake news campaign in support of the Conservative Party. It was left to Channel 4 to provide meaningful criticism of the Conservatives on the television.
The BBC’s subtle falsification of news content began early in the campaign with the use of archive footage from 2016 of a dignified Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary laying a wreath outside the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday – in place of actual footage of a dishevelled Boris Johnson making a mess of placing a wreath at the ceremony in 2019.
There followed the doctoring of a video in which laughter greets Boris Johnson’s claim that he always told the truth, which was used in subsequent news bulletins.
As Peter Oborne pointed out in a stinging critique, the BBC tends to be biased in favour of any sitting governments, but the level of duplicity of 2019 is unprecedented in recent history. The broadcaster reverted to depicting a general lowering in political standards, encompassing the Labour Party and presumably itself. Thus on the night before the election Radio 4 broadcast a montage of moments seemingly aimed to make the point that all the protagonists were misleading voters.[xxiii]
The conduct of the national broadcaster reflects the radical challenge posed by Corbyn and his team to the ruling Conservative consensus.
Jeremy Corbyn took the U.K. establishment by surprise during the 2017 Election campaign, coming within a whisker of victory. This would have had serious ramifications for the domestic economy, but perhaps more importantly also U.K. foreign policy, and the arms’ industry, both in the U.K. and the wider military industrial complex in the U.S., in particular.
It is unsurprising, therefore, then that a sophisticated and well organised campaign involving elements within both the BBC and other liberal media should have been deployed to undermine Corbyn and his politics.
has a single #bbcnews journalist resigned in protest over having been asked to become an essentially a State News Agency, & smearing the opposition so as to bring an extreme right-wing, racist government into power? Even one?
Finally, conspiracy theories are just that, but it is perhaps notable that the London Bridge stabbings was the only so-called ‘terrorist’ attack that has occurred on U.K. soil since, again suspiciously, the spate of attacks preceding the 2017 election.
We have no evidence of provocateurs in action – as during a CND protest that occurs in Chris Mullin’s 1982 novel A Very British Coup – but the febrile atmosphere generated by hysterical media in the wake of any terrorist attack is certainly advantageous to a Conservative Party long associated with law and order – especially when confronted by a Labour leader, who previously welcomed former terrorists into the political fold.
Notably, within hours of the attack a screenshot of a fake tweet, depicting the Labour leader as unsupportive of the police response, easily shared via WhatsApp, emerged.
Fake Jeremy Corbyn Tweet that appeared soon after the attack.
‘Corbynism’ has shifted the mainstream of British Politics to the left, but socialism still needs a makeover.
Jeremy Corbyn is now a lame duck Labour leader, while the Party considers a replacement. His generation of Bennites, who remained true to socialist and pacifist principles throughout the long period of New Labour centrism under Tony Blair, have, almost miraculously, seized the opportunity to define the philosophy of the Party for the forthcoming decades. This maintains the threat to the ruling Conservative consensus operating since World War II, notwithstanding Boris Johnson’s ‘thumping’ majority.
The ranks of the Labour Party swelled to over half million under Corbyn, having stood at barely two hundred thousand while Ed Milliband was at the helm.[xxiv] Exceeding Conservative Party membership by three hundred thousand, it is among the most formidable, and youthful, left-wing parties in the developed world, and the largest of its kind in Europe.
Moreover, running parallel to the Party is the campaigning Momentum movement, with forty thousand members. Any prospective Labour leader must now appeal to this young radical constituency. An immediate reversion to a centrist Blairite leader is an impossibility, and moreover is unlikely to be well received by an electorate in the grip of Bannonite Populism.
‘Corbynism,’ such as it is, is often derided as a middle class and metropolitan phenomenon. This is considered a structural weakness of most social democratic parties around the world. It ignores, however, the shifting dynamics of altered economies, as those once considered middle class are squeezed increasingly by high property prices and diminishing opportunities in careers such as education and the arts.
It should also be born in mind that crippling poverty, afflicting a majority of the population, generated socialism at the end of the nineteenth century. Even for much of the twentieth century, a considerable proportion of the population was actually malnourished, whereas today the poor are more likely to be obese. Notwithstanding the food banks that emerged during the Cameron era of austerity, the extreme poverty that engendered socialism has largely been eliminated.
Ironically, the tangible gains socialism brought to Britain and other European societies in providing for cheap food, accommodation, education and healthcare now actually work to the benefit of Populists that prey on consumer and entrepreneurial aspirations, while incubating a fear of an imminent immigrant ‘other’ destined to appropriate indigenous welfare, educational and healthcare entitlements.
Unlike their older peers, young people across the U.K. were, however, disproportionately attracted to a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn,[xxv] including principled opposition to militarism, a Green New Deal and effective redistribution of wealth, including inter-generational transfer. This reveals a growing awareness that high capitalism has brought unprecedented inequality and rampant corporate control, requiring decisive state intervention. This should provide the impetus for a reconceived socialism that merges an aspiration to raise human welfare with the environmental and anti-war movements.
It should also be conceded that the Labour campaign’s robust defence of the NHS against privatisation, and outside interference, has probably ensured the Conservatives will maintain public health services, at least to British citizens, for the time being. Thus, in defeating Corbynism the Conservative Party has been forced to adopt policies that many among its ranks do not support.
The Conservatives now have unanimity on Brexit, but it remains to be seen how long a Party prone to factionalism will hold together, especially after absorbing Populist Brexiters. This will provide opportunities for Labour to chip away at the Conservative consensus.
A priority for the Labour Party will be to develop policies to defeat the Conservative Party in the North of England and Wales. With Brexit ‘done’ the Conservative hold over the ‘red wall’ seems fragile, especially with younger people preferring Labour, and Conservative supporters dying out. Ongoing wrangling with the E.U. could cause serious economic damage, including to manufacturing industries in the North, which the Conservatives will surely be held responsible for.
Hearteningly, the idealism of the Corbyn years has provided a learning ground for a generation of activists, now attuned to the difficulty of challenging the Conservative consensus. There are genuine grounds for optimism that a new generation of tech savvy activists can ultimately defeat Bannonite Populism, and lay the political and economic foundations for a carbon neutral New Jerusalem. But the dominant Conservative faction will, as ever, be difficult to shift, especially in the current atmosphere of Post-Truth, and attendant disillusionment with the political process.
To lay the foundations for a New Jerusalem it is incumbent upon the Labour Party to redefine the socialist project, accommodate entrepreneurial innovation – with the mantra that ‘small is beautiful’ – and avoid the bureaucratisation that was a hallmark of New Labour under Blair and Brown.
Labour can, and should, offer principled opposition to the enormous corporations, including Facebook, whose interests the Conservative Party has long served, and which New Labour in its giddy appreciation of business leaders also embraced.
A moral obligation to address the poverty and inequality, still strikingly evident throughout the U.K., should be accompanied by an appeal to small business people. The message that eradicating poverty and reducing inequality serves entrepreneurship should be made loud and clear: an impoverished population cannot sustain new ventures. Thus, the Labour Party may appeal to a nation of shopkeepers, selling new and environmentally friendly innovations, and no longer reliant on dark satanic mills that loom across post-Industrial Britain, fueling a Populist right.
[i] Dr Bart Cammaerts, Brooks DeCillia, João Carlos Magalhães, Dr Cesar Jimenez Martinez, ‘Journalistic Representations of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Press’, LSE, 2016, http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/research/research-projects/representations-of-jeremy-corbyn
[ii] Dan Sabbagh, ‘UK reclaims place as world’s second largest arms exporter’, The Guardian, July 30th , 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/30/uk-reclaims-place-as-worlds-second-largest-arms-exporter
[iii] Stefan Bielik ‘With its lurch to the right, Britain is no longer special in Europe’, The Guardian, December 24th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/24/lurch-right-britain-special-europe-authoritarian
[iv] Gus Carter, ‘Lib Dems overtake Labour in latest poll’ Metro, September 19th, 2019,
[v] Paul Mason, ‘AFTER CORBYNISMWHERE NEXT FOR LABOUR’, paulmason.org, December 16th, 2019, https://www.paulmason.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/After-Corbynism-v1.4.pdf
[ix] Owen Jones, ‘Brexit and self-inflicted errors buried Labour in this election’, The Guardian, December 19th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/18/brexit-labour-election-corbyn-left
[x] Rowen Mason, ‘’I own this disaster’: John McDonnell tries to shield Corbyn’, December 15th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/15/i-own-this-disaster-john-mcdonnell-tries-to-shield-corbyn-rebecca-long-bailey.
[xi] Annabelle Timsit, ‘The UK election result shows why Twitter does not speak for most voters’, Quartz, December 13th, 2019, https://qz.com/1767195/uk-election-result-shows-twitter-doesnt-speak-for-most-voters/.
[xii] Adam Ramsay, ‘Boris Johnson made politics awful, then asked people to vote it away’, Open Democracy, 22nd of December, 2019, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/boris-johnson-made-politics-awful-then-asked-people-vote-it-away/.
[xiii] S. O’Dea, ‘Leading social networks by share of website visits* in the United Kingdom (UK) as of June 2019’, Statista, September 3rd, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/280295/market-share-held-by-the-leading-social-networks-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/.
[xiv] Rupert Evelyn, ‘88% of Conservative ads on Facebook ‘misleading’’, ITV News, December 6th, 2019, https://www.itv.com/news/2019-12-06/88-of-conservative-ads-on-facebook-misleading/.
[xv] Letter: ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to apologise for antisemitism proves he is unfit to be prime minister’ Independent, November 27th, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letters/jeremy-corbyn-antisemitism-labour-andrew-neil-interview-chief-rabbi-election-a9220576.html.
[xvi] Letters, ‘Concerns about antisemitism mean we cannot vote Labour’, The Guardian, November 14th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/14/concerns-about-antisemitism-mean-we-cannot-vote-labour.
[xvii] Simon Sebag Montefiore, ‘This antisemitism poisons any good Labour might do’, The Guardian, November 30th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/30/antisemitism-poisons-any-good-labour-doing-simon-sebag-montefiore.
[xviii] Ephraim Mirvis, ‘Ephraim Mirvis: What will become of Jews in Britain if Labour forms the next government?’ The Times, November 25th, 2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/ephraim-mirvis-what-will-become-of-jews-in-britain-if-labour-forms-the-next-government-ghpsdbljk.
[xix] Adam Bienkov, ‘Boris Johnson called gay men ‘tank-topped bumboys’ and black people ‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’’, Business Insider, November 22nd, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/boris-johnson-record-sexist-homophobic-and-racist-comments-bumboys-piccaninnies-2019-6?r=US&IR=T.
[xx] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Devils, (translated by Michael R. Katz), Oxford, 1999, p.748.
[xxi] Untitled, ‘BBC caught in the crossfire: why the UK’s public broadcaster is becoming a big election story’, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/bbc-caught-in-the-crossfire-why-the-uks-public-broadcaster-is-becoming-a-big-election-story-128639.
[xxii] Peter Oborne, ‘In its election coverage, the BBC has let down the people who believe in it’, The Guardian, December 3rd, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/03/election-coverage-bbc-tories.
[xxiii] Ramsay, 22nd of December, 2019, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/boris-johnson-made-politics-awful-then-asked-people-vote-it-away/.
[xxiv] Rowena Mason, ‘Labour membership falls slightly but remains above 500,000’, The Guardian, August 8th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/08/labour-membership-falls-slightly-but-remains-about-500000.
[xxv] Adam McDowell and Chris Curtis, ‘How Britain voted in the 2019 general election’, YouGov, December 17th, 2019, https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/12/17/how-britain-voted-2019-general-election.
I especially enjoy visiting the Austrian side of my family around Salzkammergut during Christmas. The highlight is Little Christmas, or the Feast of the Epiphany, on January 6th best witnessed in the home town of my relatives in Ebensee, under the watchful gaze of the Traunsee mountains, which provide a perfect backdrop to the procession of children’s kites.
Christmas there is suffused with the ubiquitous Salzburgian carol ‘Silent Night,’ first performed in 1819 in the small town of Oberndorf Bei Salzburg. The song is about Christmas and indeed children. It promises stillness and peace, both of which are now in increasingly short supply.
Ebensee, Austria
The great British actor Charles Laughton made one foray, during an illustrious career, into direction. Though a commercial flop, in my view it was his greatest achievement. ‘Night of the Hunters’ from 1955 is one of the greatest films ever made about children.
The film is deeply disturbing with its focus on a mentally deranged, sociopathic killing machine – also a religious maniac – played impeccably by Robert Mitchum. It is the entrancing dream sequence at the beginning that sets much of the tone, and resonates over time.
The face of the great silent movie actress Lillian Gish – persuaded out of retirement for this film – fronts ends the film with bright stars and children’s faces floating and twinkling all around her; she issues a stern biblical warning about the good and evil of the world for children. It is they who are pursued and victimised. Beware of false prophets she warns.
Her message is inspired by Christianity, yet contains a warning against religious mania, and the abuses it fosters, fused with dollops of sociopathic behaviour.
Pity the little children
It begs the question as to what dangers we should warn our children against in today’s day and age, and what is best left unsaid.
First off, it has become all too fashionable to listen to children without a critical filter. There is a growth industry of exploitation propagated by often nefarious family lawyers and social workers. This is often motivated by religious mania, or sexual hysteria, where highly toxic and opportunistic prosecutors engage in latter day witch hunts, in both Ireland and America, conniving with deeply corrupt and extremist states, tottering on the brink of fascism.
This has led to the framing, as they perceive it, of whistle-blowers and Enemies of the People for child sex abuse. Witness Garda McCabe and others in Ireland. Foreign or non-national or mixed nationalities are targeted in particular. And of course ‘little people’ are children too. Garda Maurice McCabe was treated like a child, or rather a lamb to the slaughter.
In the process the lives of others, and children, are damaged and even destroyed by people who are truly beneath contempt.
Chomsky, among others, has pointed out the toxic relationship between neo-liberal Republicanism, religious mania, and philosophical relativism: a school of thought permitting Creationism to be put on the same curriculum as the Theory of Evolution.
Brave New World
More insidiously states[i] now facilitate and implicitly promote an idea of children ‘getting in touch’ with their transgender sides. The effect is to generate a confusion that renders our young into docile adults, disengaged from political activity – beyond identity politics at least – leading to confused and undirected lives.
Advertising and consumerism generate a soma-induced soporific state redolent of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian 1929 novel Brave New World. The aspiration is to create a conformist and pliant workforce – Margaret Atwood’s Handmaids Tale (1985) and The Testaments (2019) writ large.
I believe children benefit from rigour and discipline, not over-indulgence, in their education in order to realise their potentials as human beings. Instead we have the snowflake phenomenon, wherein sensitivities cannot be upset, and sentiments are imparted in a non-structured way, as a substitute for rational argument. The soporific softness of soma leads to over compliance and undue deference.
Furthermore, attention is increasingly being diverted to solipsistic social media conversations that achieve nothing – the Doomsday Machines that provide for these platforms are a slow train to economic and environmental destruction.
The harsh realities of the challenge confronting us are obscured from most children. Trickle down is trickling out for most of the planet and much about human existence is unsustainable. The light is dying. It is a much worse scenario than any dystopian novel – a juggernaut gaining speed.
A lack of statesmanship and sound judgment, clouded by partisanship and compromise, is laying waste to the world. The controlling corporatocracy of the military industrial complex believes in the young solely for exploitation and cheap labour. The rumbling preceding the avalanche recalls Raymond Briggs’s 1982 graphic novel The Snowman in which a boy is carried on the back of a flying snowman, but when the boy wakes in the morning, he finds his snowman has melted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upH1QZU4Z0Y
Birds of a Feather
So what can the Baby Boomers or Gen X, to which I belong, teach the young?
Like the snowman we all melt away into the abyss of time, but the transfer of real knowledge, the utilisation of talent and intelligence, against the forces of ignorance, endure. We are birds of passage in that respect.
Let us warn people and children in particular through parables, public intellectualism and real journalism – vindicating George Orwell’s stance that ‘Journalism is printing what someone else does not want published; everything else is public relations’ – about the false prophets. We should instill true values upholding innocence; protecting the little people against the gathering storm. This will involve the preservation of the literary canon against the forces of post-modern barbarism, and empowering children with critical lenses.
Alas, in our over-worked and siloed professions we are afforded little time, let alone incentive, to confront the Gorgon’s head. Thus suffer the little children who need protecting. Now more than ever we need real answers and remedies not more fakery and false promises.
So let us not bid ‘Au Revoir Les Enfants’, in the words of the 1982 Louis Malle film by that name, and instead inspire them through human rights organisations, which are truth-seeking and truth-telling, with the will to fight back.
Scrooged
I recently came across a glittering old edition of Charles Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol from 1847, where Ebenezer Scrooge emerges as the archetypal dishonest businessman, dedicated to the pursuit of profit at the expense of others. He is the type of corporate monster I have had the misfortune to encounter and even serve.
Scrooge is of course visited by the ghosts of the past, in the shape of his ex-partner Marley who he drove to an early death, and the future of the Cratchett family including poor Tiny Tim. This allows him to recognise the perversity and error of his ways and repent – it is a wonderful fiction!
Dickens was the great chronicler of the instabilities and social malaise of Victorian society to which I believe our present woe-begotten age is returning, and above all else of unchecked capitalism and the huge inequalities it generates.
Now, if the people, like Oliver Twist (1837), arrive with a bowl of porridge to ask for ‘more’ the authorities of the modern day workhouses go berserk: ‘Are you not happy with your existing pile of gruel? ‘Are you not Mr. Tsipras?’
‘Well no not really. We need you to extend us more credit to maintain a decent standard of living. Or are we to starve?’
It is also apparent that a death by a thousand cuts to government services, however necessary these may be in certain instances, leads to a precipitate decline in standards of care and professionalism.
The growing dominance of a neo-liberal cost benefit approach to the provision of government services suggest there is little reason to celebrate, and much to reflect on. Like Scrooge, we can mend the error of our ways, and reflect on how incompetence, ideology, short-termism, greed and delusion are laying waste to the social fabric.
If we have any sense of individual or collective decency let us all embark on an Ebenezer Scrooge voyage-of-purification and help the Bob Cratchetts of this world to survive Christmas. And let us also note how such greed grips the legal community.
But perhaps the most crucial text for our time is Dean Jonathan Swift’s 1729 masterpiece ‘A Modest Proposal’, in which he suggests that babies might be sold as a delicacy to the rich, thereby solving the geometric demographic increments of Malthusian Capitalism – an Early Modern precursor to our present neo-liberal status quo.
Greta
This brings us to Greta Thunberg, our only child public intellectual. Still only sixteen, yet Time Magazine has seen to fit to make her its person of the year. She became famous for not attending school to demonstrate against her government’s inaction over climate change, leading to a spate of copycat demonstrations.
Her recent short text, available in any decent book store for £2.99, No One is too Small to Make a Difference (2019), provides a summary of her speeches. She questions, given an imminent mass extinction, whether attending school is a terribly worthwhile idea, and identifies a cathedral solution. This is a great analogy as what is needed is deep structural and integrative thinking, and the leadership of the just and the wise. She might also have noted that serfs and slaves built the cathedrals, just as wage-slaves constructed those great cathedrals of capitalism: the skyscrapers.
Greta Thunberg sees the world through black and white lenses. Good and evil. This is a refreshing clarity, demanding action is taken now, or her generation will have no future. She is right insofar as the overwhelming majority of scientists are to be believed. But notwithstanding this shining light, a little bit of grey and complexity should be introduced.
Her appeal is to an older generation who are responsible for the mess. Though of course not all of us, just the neo-liberal corporate ascendancy, such as Donald Trump, who of course derides her, or perhaps presciently regard her as a threat. You are acting like spoiled, irresponsible teenager she is told. Fortunately, she is Swedish and retains a comparative freedom to speak her mind. The writ of neo-liberal justice does not extend to that Nordic country just yet.
She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see! https://t.co/1tQG6QcVKO
Interestingly from my point of view, Greta has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, as I have been myself. This leads us to speak the unvarnished truth, identifying the inappropriate adults in the room. In my case, this largely occurs in the criminal courts. I see Greta as our modern day female Oscar banging the modern day Tin Drum – the idiot savant with a clear view of the righteous path.
So let us listen to Greta, rather than the siren poetry of Genesis or the right-wing triumphalism of Bannon and Johnson, or indeed even, the fatalism of Silent Night. We do not need false reassurances and false gods at Christmas. Instead we require decent housing, healthcare, and environmental protection.
Postscript
The Nobel Peace Prize is announced on December 20th in Stockholm. It is an honour not untainted, having been founded on the proceeds of the invention of dynamite. Some very rum people have won it. Perhaps most awfully the war criminal Henry Kissinger. Mostly it is a reward for high political office, irrespective of a mixed pedigree, although one suspects that at least Donald Trump will not have the honour bestowed on him, assuming our world does not take a further dystopian twist.
As it takes place just before Christmas, and with silent night in mind, let us lobby for a Swedish national Greta Thunberg, in particular for her recent non-attendance at school and advocacy of a permanent ban on flying and veganism, unpopular causes which challenger the dominant consumer culture of neoliberalism.
[i] Robbie Meredith, ‘School transgender support guidelines published,’ October 17th, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-50076038
For anyone to become an opinion writer for the ‘paper of record’, the Irish Times, requires considerable ability. But does a particular viewpoint give an aspiring columnist a distinct advantage?
It is said that if you’re not a socialist in your twenties you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative in your forties, you have no brain. Given the increasing centre-right consensus across Irish media, including the Irish Times, anyone aspiring to be a journalist there might do well to accelerate that learning curve. There are, of course, true conservative believers from the outset.
Once such appears to be the precocious Finn McRedmond, who in recent months has become a fixture op-ed writer for the Irish Times. The daughter of David McRedmond, former chief executive of independent commercial television station, TV3, and currently chief executive of semi-state An Post, Finn McRedmond attended Rathdown Secondary School, and completed a Classics degree in Cambridge University, graduating c.2015.
In a series of waspish recent articles for the Irish Times, she has attacked the Brexit movement,[i] lauded the statesmanship of Leo Varadkar,[ii] while heaping scorn on both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn.[iii] These contributions situate her politics on the centre-right – liberal-conservative and Remainer – an ideological slant very much ascendant in the Irish Times.
This outlook has been evident in the paper’s coverage of the forthcoming U.K. election. Along with condemnation of Populists, especially Nigel Farage, the U.K. Labour leader is a recurring bête noire,[iv] albeit full-time U.K. correspondent Denis Staunton has generally remained impartial.
The cartoon drawn by Martin Turner on December 3rd provides a good example. It features Corbyn alongside Boris Johnson with a list of some of the calumnies we have seen during the election. The point seems to be: these are two extremists – one as bad as the other.
Martin Turner, December 3rd, 2019.
Even apparently centre-left Fintan O’Toole was moved to describe Corbyn before the 2017 election as: ‘a highly problematic leader, not least in his inability to think about how to create a majority in England for this radical social democratic vision.’[v] Curiously, O’Toole has not expressed views in any articles on the Orwellian campaign of online distortion characterising U.K. election 2019.[vi]
In her latest opinion piece, McRedmond laments the loss of Ken Clarke, Nicholas Soames, Nick Boles and Philip Hammond from Conservative ranks, and reventilates paper-thin allegations of anti-Semitism[vii] orchestrated to discredit Corbyn, concluding: ‘there is no good choice, and no obvious way through this election.’[viii]
While still a student, McRedmond revealed she gave her vote (presumably enjoying that right as an Irish citizen) to in the 2015 General Election to David Cameron’s Conservatives, who won an overall majority for the first time in nearly two decades. Published in the The Cambridge Tab just after the election – with austerity in full swing as over a million people relied on food banks[ix] – the headline read: ‘Being a Tory does not make you a bad person.’
McRedmond supported David Cameron over the then moderate Labour leader Ed Milliband. Perhaps in response to university peers whose “hearts” may have ruled their “heads,” she protested:
I’m not a bad person because I voted Conservative. I voted to decrease the deficit. I voted to raise the basic state pension by 2.5% a year. I voted to increase the health budget by £8bn by 2020.
I didn’t vote for closing the NHS, I didn’t vote for free champagne for all FTSE 100 CEO’s, I didn’t vote to “literally kill vulnerable people”. I didn’t actually vote for Satan. I voted for the party that I think this country needs.
…
I didn’t vote Conservative for low taxes so I can keep my mansion while everyone else can live in a slum. I don’t even have a mansion. It’s a townhouse.
No party is perfect. No party will be the indisputable moral saviour of Britain. The bedroom tax is odious. Cutting benefits is sad and maybe not the best way forward. The country isn’t going to be absolved of all moral transgressions with Labour or LibDem or Greens in power. In the same way that Conservatives aren’t going to do that either. But I am sick of people occupying the moral high ground because for some convoluted and laboured reason they see their party ridding Britain of all immorality and filling it with biscuits. God Ed Miliband loves biscuits.[x]
It is noteworthy that McRedmond attended Peterhouse College while at Cambridge, among the oldest and most traditional institutions in the University. In the 1980s it became association with Conservative, Thatcherite politics, counting Michael Portillo and Michael Howard as alumni.
Since graduating McRedmond has been writing – alongside Irish Times work – for British commentary and news magazine Reaction. Its editor-in-chief Iain Martin was previously head of comment for the Telegraph group, while Chairman of the board, Lord Salisbury, was once Conservative Leader in the House of Lords, opposing the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, and offering freelance services to the mujahedin in Afghanistan in the 1980s.[xi]
Its advisory panel includes luminaries such as Lord Hill, a former European Commissioner and advisor to John Major, as well as Adam Boulton, Editor at Large for Sky News.
McRedmond’s association with the publication perhaps came about through Deputy Editor Alastair Benn, whose Linkedin profile reveals he too graduated from Cambridge in 2015, also with a Classics degree, and with whom McRedmond has collaborated on a number of podcasts.[xii]
Finn McRedmond clearly has no taste for the Populism that has overtaken the Conservative Party, and being Irish, no truck with English nationalism or Brexit either. But anti-left bias might be detected in a recent somewhat snide Irish Times article she wrote entitled: ‘Are Sally Rooney’s heroines too skinny?’
McRedmond opines: ‘Rooney speaks the language of the so-called Woke Left. She is interested in political activism. And she has made her career writing about young people sensitively.’ But, she warns: ‘Her frequent references to thinness feels unconscious. A writer who is so careful and precise in her descriptions of people and their relationships has, like us, a culturally produced blind spot.’
‘This recurrent theme,’ McRedmond warns, ‘that women who are thin are more interesting than those who are not, and that women who are thin are the only ones worth writing about – is potentially dangerous.’ She counsels that ‘we should be sceptical of novels that propagate ideas most harmful to those supposed to find them most relatable.’
McRedmond is certainly a capable writer, and displayed refreshing candour in revealing her political choice. There is no reason to believe she is a bad person, but given the current orientation of media, her rapid progression to become a regular opinion columnist for the Irish Times – the national paper of record – while still in her twenties, is surely connected to the political ‘maturity’ she has displayed.
[i] Finn McRedmond: ‘Getting Brexit done is last thing Farage wants,’ Irish Times, November 9th, 2019. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/finn-mcredmond-getting-brexit-done-is-last-thing-farage-wants-1.4076850?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Ffinn-mcredmond-getting-brexit-done-is-last-thing-farage-wants-1.4076850
[ii] Finn McRedmond, ‘Neither rogue nor wily fixer, Varadkar confounds British’, Irish Times, August 17th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/neither-rogue-nor-wily-fixer-varadkar-confounds-british-1.3988483?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Fneither-rogue-nor-wily-fixer-varadkar-confounds-british-1.3988483
[iii] Finn McRedmond, ‘ British voters trapped between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson’, Irish Times, November 28th, 2019,
[iv] For example: Chris Johns: Who would I vote for in the UK? Anyone who would defeat the Tory candidate, Irish Times, December 2nd, 2019. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/chris-johns-who-would-i-vote-for-in-the-uk-anyone-who-would-defeat-the-tory-candidate-1.4100958?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fbusiness%2Feconomy%2Fchris-johns-who-would-i-vote-for-in-the-uk-anyone-who-would-defeat-the-tory-candidate-1.4100958
[v] Fintan O’Toole, ‘Fintan O’Toole: Corbyn’s nostalgia less of a fantasy than May’s’, Irish Times, June 6th, 2017, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-corbyn-s-nostalgia-less-of-a-fantasy-than-may-s-1.3108284?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Ffintan-o-toole-corbyn-s-nostalgia-less-of-a-fantasy-than-may-s-1.3108284
[vi] Frances Perrauden, ‘Twitter accuses Tories of misleading public with ‘factcheck’ foray’, The Guardian, November 20th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/20/twitter-accuses-tories-of-misleading-public-in-factcheck-row
[vii] Jamie Stern-Weiner and Alan Maddison, ‘Smoke Without Fire: The Myth of a ‘Labour Antisemitism Crisis’’, Jewish Voice for Labour, November 26th, 2019, https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/smoke-without-fire-the-myth-of-a-labour-antisemitism-crisis/
[viii] Finn McRedmond, ‘ British voters trapped between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson’, Irish Times, November 28th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/british-voters-trapped-between-jeremy-corbyn-and-boris-johnson-1.4097084?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Fbritish-voters-trapped-between-jeremy-corbyn-and-boris-johnson-1.4097084
[ix] Patrick Butler, ‘Food bank use tops million mark over the past year’, The Guardian, 22nd April, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/22/food-bank-users-uk-low-paid-workers-poverty
[x] Finn McRedmond, ‘Being a Tory does not make you a bad person,’ The Cambridge Tab, (more than five years ago), https://thetab.com/uk/cambridge/2015/05/11/tory-not-make-bad-person-52498
[xi] Anthony Seldon, ‘The Saturday Profile Viscount Cranborne, Conservative Peer: The last true blue blood,’ The Independent, November 21st, 1998, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-saturday-profile-viscount-cranborne-conservative-peer-the-last-true-blue-blood-1186204.html
[xii] Alastair Benn and Finn McRedmond, ‘Deconstructing “I’m literally a communist, you idiot”’, Reaction, July 25th, 2018, https://reaction.life/deconstructing-im-literally-a-communist-you-idiot/
