Rob the Gob

Yesterday afternoon (depending on where you are, I suppose), Barack Obama announced that there would be regulations placed upon banks whereby the riskier investment activity would be more tightly controlled, and would have to be separated from the  more vital and socially supportive activity of banks. Furthermore, bank sizes will be controlled so that the collapse of a single institution can’t collapse the world economy. Uncontroversial, you’d think – except that a lot of people have made a lot of money with the way things currently are. And still are. The stock markets reacted predictably, and a lot of people stated to complain. Especially bankers.

There are many social structures that we have created to facilitate human interaction. One of these is banking. At the most basic level, banks exist to enable those with money to lend it to those without, with the hope that they will use that money to flourish, and so be able to repay the lent sum with interest, thereby making more money for the person who had it in the first place. Everyone’s a winner, right?

Well, fairly obviously, given the events over the passed two years, no.

Let’s put this plainly. Some time ago, the governments (and, therefore, the people) in almost every country in the developed world, were held to ransom by a small group of people so intent on making money that they were prepared to risk the financial provisions we all make to provide for us when we can no provide for ourselves. Not only that, but the places we live and companies we work for. So far do the tendrils of this industry extend that, if allowed to collapse, it’ll take everything with it, through the developed world and beyond. Because we’re all involved. These are the same companies that lend us money for our houses in Wolverhampton and Wyoming. These are the companies that have our savings, traded across the globe. They own everything we do, and have connected it to everything else.

Given that, you’d think they’d try to act responsibly, but no. In fact, this structure has a form almost opposed to stability. These ‘masters of the universe’ (self named – and if you ever needed proof that these institutions were being run by the kind of egoistic megalomaniacs you should be ashamed to share a genome with, there it is) see it as their duty to take control of as much as possible and then take the biggest risks possible in order to generate the biggest profits possible.

Are they doing this for you? No. they are doing it because it makes them money. Huge amounts. Steady, sustainable growth is completely possible, but undesirable. Sudden, rapid growth, which enables you to gobble up everything around you, makes you more money and sod everyone else. They use this structure to be savage.

And how do they justify this abhorrent behaviour? They tell you that it is natural. They appeal to principals such as ‘survival of the fittest’, and use terms like ‘dog-eat-dog’ to try and paint the global financial system as some sort of savage environment. And it is. But only because that’s how they behave. In and of itself, it is nothing. It has no existence independent of us.

So then they appeal to human nature. We know, at base, human beings can be vicious, savage, self-interested things. But we also know that we have the capacity to love, to be artistic, to care for their neighbours, to create nothing but beauty. Human beings can be Adolf Hitler and Attila the Hun, but they can also be Mother Theresa or Buddha if they are allowed to be. And civilisation is surely a collection of structures that allow this; structures that help our better aspects to flourish. We could all be savages beating each other to death with rocks and eating what remains, but we have institutions and cultures precisely to allow us to be better than that, to find our capacities for caring, our sense of community. The point of civilisation is that we don’t have to be that heartless, brutal thing. And whether your weapon is a rock, a policy or a laptop displaying current share prices, if you act without heart, if you are that radically senseless thing, you are as much of a brute as the BNP thug in footy shirt or the sweary teenage muggers you look down your nose at. Being rich and well educated doesn’t automatically make you a better person.

Why, then, should we allow the brutish, uncaring attitude to so dominate one of our most important social structures? Well, we shouldn’t, it’s as simple as that, and that’s why it needs to be regulated. That is embracing the idea of community – controlling the actions of the vicious and selfish to benefit the whole. This is also human behaviour and just as ‘natural’ for being precisely that.

When we let the banks bully us, that is a bad system. When we let a system turn us upon each other, that is a bad structure. It should be restructured, or removed. Sometimes we have to recognise that certain social structures are bad and need to be revised. They do not exist independently or spontaneous, like some creature adapted to its environment, and they are not shaped by forces beyond our control. These are our structures, and we can change them and remove them as we feel like it. If something is against the very notion of social utility, if it is acting against the very purpose of civilisation, then it needs to be changed.

It is often said that the banks have made a huge amount of money for Britain. In the most basic analysis, they have. More specifically, however, they have made a huge amount of money for a very small number of people. The ‘trickle-down’ economic model (Thatcher’s failed approach) would have you believe that this, in turn, should slowly make everyone richer, as these few rich people will buy more goods and services, all of which will flourish, thereby employing more people, increasing wages for the upper echelons, who then in turn spend more money and so on and so on. Also, they pay more tax, right? So we should be able to pay for better public services? No, because, largely, it doesn’t work like that.

The rich pay so little tax that it’s laughable. Indeed, there is a whole minor industry – tax accountants – who exist solely to make sure that they pay as little as possible. Quite a lot of them use international banking to avoid paying tax on their savings. Many of the companies that trade in this country aren’t even registered here, and pay us no tax at all. And even the money they spend, like it or not, is very commonly spent in ways that can’t possibly benefit the community as a whole. Expensive foreign cars? Nope. Buying property abroad? No. Buying a property as an investment to let, or outright for one of their children? No. Like buying a second home in Cornwall, all that does is drive up house prices, stopping anyone as modest as say, a teacher or a nurse from being able to do anything but rent… from someone who just bought an investment property… Going on fancy holidays is generally only good for the airline companies and occasionally a travel agent. I’m all for spreading the wealth to exotic countries, but in this context, it can hardly be used support the argument that it’s significantly benefiting ours.

In short, then, we aren’t getting much for the damage that these people do. The argument for higher taxation is there, but people always say ‘well, then the talent will take itself abroad!’ So what? Let them go. Many of the companies and people are already registered outside the UK anyway. In our current economic model, we have extreme wealth and extreme poverty. The average standard of living in comparably developed countries with higher levels of taxation is almost always higher than ours. Our low-tax low-regulation Reagan-Thatcher model has attracted talent only in the sense that it’s attracted people who have a talent to be brutish, savage and exploitative. If you want to attract actual ‘talent’, sponsor investment programs into alternative fuel technologies like the Danes do. The current structure of banking is a bad structure that does not benefit our society as a whole, all it does in its current form is ensure that a few of the richest people in the world continue to get substantially richer.

So, broadly, I support the ideas that Barack Obama has put forth. The idea that we should try our best to ensure that important things like you and your wife’s pensions are protected from the potentially volatile investment markets is a no-brainer. But I think there’s something else here that we’re not discussing.

The savings that we put aside for our old age should not be used primarily to benefit one small section of society. That kind of thing is not what banks are for, it’s what governments should do, and this Anglo-American ‘everything must be floated on the stock market’ attitude places us at the mercy of the savage. We should separate the provisions for our old age entirely from this game of rich ungentlemanly gentlemen. We need to come up with some alternative to our current pension schemes. We haven’t always done it this way. Why we should ever think that we could trust banking institutions with something so vital is beyond me. Despite, theoretically being partially owned by almost everyone, they are almost impossible to hold to account. The idea that we should connect something so vital to something so volatile is ludicrous. It’s our world, not just theirs. It’s a bad and foolish structure that doesn’t help us. Let’s change it.

The Iraq inquiry, the snow and the forthcoming election campaign – what do these three things have in common, apart from all being very popular things to blog about? They are all examples of the consequence of our demand that politicians lie to us. ‘Our demand?’ I hear you cry (ok, only in my head), ‘but surely what we want is honesty from our politicians!’ No it isn’t, or if it is, you are one of a very rare breed. Or perhaps you are lying to yourself. It’s not unlikely, most people do all the time. Especially about this.

I haven’t blogged for a while, since Africa, in fact, and though many things have happened since then that may have briefly woken me from my blogmatic slumbers (yep, that’s a Kant joke), such as Nick ‘Fat-Hitler’ Griffin being on Question Time, but I’ve been rather busy. I’ve driven up and to and beyond the Arctic Circle for a start, which brings me back to the weather.

In this country (and many others), people tend to whinge and moan about things that are their own fault (or nobodies fault), blaming everyone and anyone else they can. Part of this is that terrible inheritance from primitive culture that fiddles away with our neurons – ‘but what have we done to deserve this?’ as if everything is some sort of divinely-allotted reward or punishment for virtue or lack thereof rather than the simple series of basically random events that it is. [Once and for all let us lay this to rest. Whether you believe in the Christian-Freudian-father-god, the spirits of the earth or karma, people are not rewarded and punished on the basis of their behaviour by anything other than our rules. We know this, because Donald Trump, Simon Cowell, Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher and every other conniving two-faced selfish manipulative horror of a person that exploits everyone else around them, providing they don’t break the law too much, have a pretty nice life full of money, respect and satisfaction, whereas selfless care workers, heroic veterans and charity workers tend to work without reward of any kind from society or life in general, and very little respect. Both groups have the same chance of ending up dying of cancer, and due to their inability to protect themselves from the world with a money buffer, the nice people tend to get raped, stabbed, burgled and mugged more often. Virtue, if it has any reward, is simple peace of mind, knowing that instead of exploiting and shattering the dreams of hopeful people for your own end, you’re helping them. But the bastards sleep well at night too. Generally next to a supermodel.]

However, the focus of these strange opinions we so often voice as far as this little rant is concerned is the lies we know we are telling, and those we are inviting others to tell us. Here’s one: ‘Why weren’t the government better prepared for the winter weather?’

Because they shouldn’t be.

We know this. Most reasonable people know that, given the limited budgets of councils and government as a whole, things must be prioritised on the basis of likelihood. At least half of the people who go on and on asking the question ‘why weren’t we better prepared for the winter weather?’ already know the answer. Because buying, transporting, collecting and storing the huge amount of grit, diggers trucks and snowploughs that only might be necessary means that you can’t spend the same huge wedge of cash on a new fire engine, fifty units of blood, a policeman and a nurse. In fact, it would be utterly irresponsible for the government as a whole or your local council to have spent that money preparing for this winter. The next point made by the Great-British man-in-the-street-alliance is usually ‘well, they cope with it well enough in Scandinavia don’t they? And they have a decent health service.’

Yes they do, on both counts. Because they have higher taxes. Which the  Great-British man-in-the-street-alliance is unwilling to pay. But also, they have a predictable winter. They use their ploughs and gritters and such every year without fail for months. Vast parts of the country would be entirely shut off for weeks at a time without them. Of course they are prepared, and yet even they sometimes get caught out, too.  We need them only for a few days once every few years, and the consequences of incapacity are a hundred times less serious, because it usually goes away pretty quickly of its own accord. It’s just not the same return for the same investment. So we invest less, and put the money into more useful things.

Now, as a consequence of this, we should think, when some little village gets snowed in ‘ah well, hard luck, but I guess that MRI machine will more likely be of use still anyway.’ But we don’t, and we know we won’t. We might just think ‘ah well, I guess someone might have seen this coming, but given that they didn’t I guess I should probably not drive for the next couple of days, or if I do, take it really steady’, but in the vast majority of cases, we’re not even that realistic. Oh no. Mostly we expect this: ‘It is the government’s job to perfectly predicts and cope with everything that happens so that I can get on with my life in an uninterrupted way as if nothing at all happened.’  Which is insanely unrealistic. But it’s what most of us, at our core, seem to be demanding.

Little wonder then, that any politician of any grade in any position of power will always tell you that they are prepared for every eventuality. They know they’re not, we do too, but we conspire to make them say that they are. Likewise, any opposition politician can make grand political capital by stating the bloody obvious all the time – that things are going to happen which those that are in power aren’t prepared for. This little web of lies is informed by the democratic system itself; in order to attract votes, you have to be seen to be better than the other guy – in this case, in terms of competence, (although in some contexts, such as attracting votes for the BNP, ‘better’ can equal something as awful as ‘more racist’ or ‘anti-gay’ in the eyes of some).

Essentially, we are inviting, if not demanding, that people lie to us, and lying brings us nicely around to the Iraq enquiry and Tony Blair’s impending testimony. Of course he was lying. It was about using terrorism as an excuse to secure future oil supplies and demonstrate the might of the world’s biggest superpower. It was a bad plan, but then, as it was dreamed up by right-wing extreme-capitalist religious fundamentalists, we probably shouldn’t be surprised. If he’d sat down and said to the country, ‘Look, you’re not going to like this. I don’t, really, but I’ve thought about this a great deal and the Americans have this plan to secure our oil supplies for the next few decades and try to bring some measure of stability to a region that hasn’t seen much recently, at first by establishing a military presence in the area, and later by placing a friendly power in the region. We hope that in the long term we can make up for the damage we cause by improvements to infrastructure and institutions, but you should understand that this is not guaranteed. What we do know is that if the current situation continues, things will never improve, and will like become drastically worse, and, unfortunately, we can see no simple or pleasant solutions. Ours isn’t an ideal solution, and it isn’t without risk. In fact, it might make things worse, but on balance, I’ve decided that it’s best if we support them. It’s going to be unpleasant, and lots of people are going to die, including some of our soldiers, but we really think it’s worth doing. I’ve set up a website so you can see more information about the history of the region, and previous mistakes that governments of the past have made to lead us to this unfortunate set of circumstances. Please go and look at it.’ I still wouldn’t have agreed with him, but I’d have appreciated it. But no. Because we ask our government to protect us from thinking about things like this, what we got was a big fat pack (or dossier, if you prefer) of easy to swallow lies. Such is the nature of this institution of lies that we even end up lying to the U.N. Not clever.

The forthcoming election campaign will be a continuing and massive festival of conveniently avoided truths, spin and outright falsehood right up to election day. At which point it will continue, but (probably) with the cast reversed. Everyone present will lie day on day about how they will use your tax money better and cut budgets without cutting frontline serves by eliminating ‘waste’ (that only tall tale is one of their favourites – as if they weren’t just replacing a couple of dozen guys at the top capable of changing nothing but a few broad-stroke policies but were somehow going to change every institution right down to replacing individual bin men – as everyone actually knows, institutions of a given size are wasteful to a given degree and when you tighten up one area, it just means something else goes slack, especially when the same people are working there, managed by the same people utilising much the same resources for exactly the same purpose). We might as well all just scream ‘lie to me, please lie to me’, or rename the election Britain’s ‘best comforting bullshitters contest’. Who do we thing is the most comforting and charismatic liar? Who’s going to make us feel better? It’s pathetic, quite frankly, and we’re exactly the people who are being pathetic about it. Because there are important decisions to be made, ones that are going to be made one way or another (and not always the same by each party), and when we are more concerned with who’s going to make us feel better about what we know is really going on but don’t want to listen to, those decisions are inevitably going to result in the deaths of innocents, the persecution of people, the exploitation of populations home and abroad, the destruction of our natural environment. The sad fact is that we might as well best sticking our fingers in our ears, screwing up our eyes and singing.

Part of this is that we really couldn’t have referendums for everything, because you can’t boil complex situations down to simple choices very easily. For example, ‘Would you rather pay a lot more for petrol over then next few years and have us throw lots of tax money at fuel research and then make you buy a new car in a few years, or would you like us to make it really expensive to own a car and massively improve public transport, or would you prefer it if we made your lives cheaper and easier but killed a few hundred thousand people in a different country? Tick A B or C.’ Perhaps that’s only a question that could have been asked in America. Let’s try this instead. ‘Would you like keep up good relations with the world’s most powerful country and kill a few hundred thousand people in the Middle East, or would you like to upset them and risk ruining relations (this might have some serious economic side effects resulting in your recently-graduated daughter being unable to pursue a career in finance)?’ Or, ‘Would you like us to ensure that we can cope with a freakish snowfall, or would you like some more ambulances?’ ‘Would you like us to prepare to cope with every possible freak flood event or would you like five new hospitals?’ ‘Would you like us to put air conditioning in everyone’s home in case we have a freak heat wave again, or would you like a police force?’ Nope, none of them a quite right. ‘Would you like us to ban imports from countries that exploit their people in might-as-well-be-slave-labour conditions and take a shot in the pension fund and cheap clothes departments or don’t you care enough for us to bother?’ Better, but still not right.

Even if we had someone better than me formulating the questions, the British and the Americans – and indeed, I suspect, all of the world’s – populations are nowhere near educated enough or well-informed enough as a whole to be allowed such direct access to democracy. We’d have capital punishment back within twenty-four hours and a crippled economy within the week. This is why we empower people to lead us, so that they can dedicate all their time to becoming suitably well-educated and well-informed to do it. However, if we have to rely on people to lead us, that doesn’t mean we can’t have honesty. What I resent is the relationship with have with the truth behind the decisions they make. They lead to the kind of silly bloody lies that have resulted in things like Iraq. All we need is to be told the actual reasons for the decisions they make, and eventually we’d come to understand (and, of course, for the opposition to say what they’d have done instead of making cheap political capital out of everything). Then, if we felt that they were being too bastardly, we could vote them out, and at least we’d know what we were responsible for.

You might say, I suppose, that in these new, more honest circumstances, any party that did lie would instantly get in. No it wouldn’t, because after a while we’d know. They’d be the one’s obviously lying. Most of us know that NOW, let alone of they were the only people offering free ten pound notes.

However, we are the ones that need to do something to demand this honesty. Firstly, and primarily, we need to stop demanding unrealistic things from our leaders. We need to stop pretending that we don’t know what we know. If we are going to get decent answers, we need to ask decent questions? We know there are cuts in services coming. We know that if we want to maintain things we need to be taxed. We know that there’s no magic ‘waste-saving’ solutions. We know that sometimes we go to war for resources, we know that sometimes it is in this countries best interests to support the Americans, and sometimes it isn’t. I realise that this isn’t going to change quickly. So let’s start small, work our way up, let them know that we know and stop conspiring to ask our leaders to lie to us. So, first and foremost, can we please stop being so unrealistic about the bloody weather?