Why poverty is so expensive

We hear a lot from politicians at the moment about how much the poor cost society. So, I thought that could stand a closer consideration. Money is paid from the public purse to support people who are in desperate circumstances, but this is not the only way in which poverty costs money, and the other ways need thinking about too.

1) Poverty often leads to poor diets, in turn causing obesity, malnutrition, and weakened immune systems. These contribute to ill health. Sickness costs the economy in terms of lost work days, and people needing health care.

2) Poor people are known to be at higher risk of depression as stress and anxiety are causes of mental illness. An inadequate diet increases the risk of poor mental health. (Prisoners given vitamin supplements are less likely to reoffend.) Again, loss of days from work due to ill heath, cost to health services in terms of anti-depressants, and counselling. Huge knock on costs of suicide and attempted suicide.

3) Poverty is a motivation to commit crime. The more desperate people are, the more justifiable crime seems, including robbery, violent crime and rioting. Police, courts and prisons are all very expensive.

4) People with no disposable incomes cannot invest in their children’s education. No extra curricular activities or lerning resourecs at home. Under fed children are less able to concentrate in school, leading to a knock on problem of lost talent and economic potential.

5) Poor people have no disposable income with which to support the high street. Money for leisure tourism, entertainment, and luxuries are non existent, reducing available cash flow for large sectors of the economy. The more people are poor, the more these sectors are starved of cash. See HMV, for a recent example.

6) Heating costs money. Damp, unheated and cold homes can be very unhealthy. Being cold all the time is exhausting. This contributes to ill health and hypothermia can kill the sick and elderly. More costs in terms of lost working days and stresses on the health service.

7) Poor people don’t necessarily have spare cash for running shoes, gyms, swimming pools etc and if undernourished won’t have the energy for exercise. Absence of exercise in the lifestyle contributes to poor physical health and poor mental health, costs as described above.

8) Desperate, depressed and disadvantaged people are known to console themselves with drink and drugs, which can lead to violence. The cost to wider family, knock on effects on crime, with its attendant costs, impact on children, cost of social services interventions etc.

9) Bored teens with no prospects and no means of entertaining themselves are the most likely source of vandalism and antisocial behaviour. Repair costs, police costs, damage to communities as fear keeps people indoors.

10) People who have no hope eventually give up. If you don’t believe there’s any chance things can get better, what on earth is the point of trying? The harder things get for people in poverty, the more incentive they have, not to find work (as the government mistakenly imagines), but to fall into despair and apathy, with suicide an ever more tempting option.

Forgive the lack of detailed referencing to sources, please, but I’ve not drawn on anything wild or obscure here, and a lot of it I would like to think is common sense. My point is that none of the costs of poverty outlined above can be reduced by making poor people even worse off. I think there is every probability that short term cuts to the welfare budget will result in elevated long term costs on the health bill, social services, police, courts and prisons. We are storing up problems for the future.

There are economic arguments for not punishing the poor as a solution to recession. Point 5 should be the most evident. Take money out of the bottom of the system and business suffers. If you want economic growth, money in the hands of poor people moves. So what if they spend it on booze, or fags? If what you care about is GDP, someone made a profit there, some business benefitted, and will pay tax and maybe get to hire more staff. Economies depend on the flow of money. What we’re doing at the moment is reducing the flow.

Burying Thatcherism

Today we bury a dead former politician. I can see why, for those who were directly harmed by her activities, this would be something to celebrate. If, for example, you lost family members in her Falkland Islands war, you may feel she’s responsible for that and be glad to see the back of her. If you suffered, and you feel relief in her demise, fair enough. Beyond the personal response though, I don’t think we have much to celebrate. We may be burying Thatcher, but we are not burying Thatcherism.

She changed the political landscape across the world, apparently. She changed it so much that allegedly-Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair considered her an influence. Thatcher did not believe in community, only in the selfishness and greed of the private individual. Her policies reflected that, and in turn served to make it more true. That’s going to take a lot of unpicking. The vibe is still with us – mistrust and envy your neighbour, begrudge them what they have, consider what they cost you in taxes, see the needy as an unwanted burden and expense. It’s all about the money. Under Thatcher, we sold our humanity to the highest, private bidder, or the person who could do the work we wanted for least outlay. Thatcherism means an absence of compassion. It means looking at the bottom line, not at value, or quality, or long term impact. You can see all of these ideas underpinning our short term, money orientated, environment pillaging twenty first century.

Now take a step back and look at our ailing economy. We don’t invest in innovation anything like as much as we could. We have an economics of bland mediocrity where ‘quality’ means ‘identical’ and no one wants to gamble on anything original. Our fashions, fictions, movies, TV, is mostly rehashing what is old and safe. Retro is in. Retro is that which we have done before, mostly, the sellable, the known market. Our economies dwindle. Could it be that we don’t want to spend our money on recycled ideas and old creations in barely new skins? Could it be that the drive of the bean counter is away from the desires of the consumer, not towards? This is definitely the case in the arts industries, and I suspect is true more widely, as well.

Thatcher was one of the founders of our almost religious devotion to free market economics and our wholly irrational beliefs that markets can drive everything to best effect. The worship of those Gods, Supply and Demand are hers. The prayer ‘let there be greater customer choice’ comes from the same place. Yet, we privatised the trains, and we don’t have a better service than before, ticket prices are high, and the government is still paying a subsidy. We do not speak of these things because they are tantamount to heresy. Thatcher championed privatisation. Well, we took energy out of the public domain, and the net result is that energy companies make huge profits while consumers struggle to pay bills. Of course that in turn takes money out of the rest of the economy. What Thatcher’s legacy gives us is not a thriving flow of energy and resources, but a tendency to draw too much money to too few people. It just doesn’t work, but in politics, that’s an unspeakable truth. We don’t go there.

There were problems in Britain in the late seventies. Yes, our traditional industries were ailing and failing. Yes some of the publically held resources, like British Telecom, were not working well. Thatcher told us there was one solution, and only one solution – free market, private enterprise. The magic wand to solve all ills. It wasn’t.

That we tried a thing and it hasn’t worked would not be a problem, had we not taken the concept on as indisputable truth. We sing the praises of free trade, and consumerism, even as they fail to deliver. In the last week or so, politicians have still praised her saying that what she did was the only way. I’m sensitive to the language of religious fundamentalism, and it is here, in Thatcherism, The One True Way.
Politicians like to tell us there are no alternatives to the solutions they offer, but this is ALWAYS bullshit. There are invariably other ways of tackling things. We didn’t have to ditch industry in favour of the banking sector, as Thatcher did. We could have made a bid for being a knowledge based economy. We have some of the best universities in the world. There are a lot more real jobs, real progress to make, real value to generate in a knowledge based economy. Banking is a make believe world of pretend money in which nothing of any real value is made.

I hope we manage to bury Mrs Thatcher quietly and with some dignity, and some good solid, responsible protesting alongside it. We should not be spending this much money on her funeral in the current economic conditions. The day I celebrate, however, will be the noisy burial of Thatcherism, when we collectively wake up and realise that, as in religion, so in politics: There is no one true way, there are always alternatives, we do not have to follow her lead.

(I wrote mine before I saw this – http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/16/bury-not-just-thatcher-but-thatcherism)

Supporting Judith O’Grady

The odds are that you’ve not previously heard of Judith O’Grady. She’s a pagan author, of the book God Speaking, published by Moon Books. (pre order info here – http://www.amazon.com/Pagan-Portals-God-Speaking-Judith-OGrady/dp/1780992815) I think it’s a very important book, which is why I’m going to be putting in some effort trying to make sure it gets into people’s hands. The trouble is, Judith isn’t famous already. She doesn’t have a TV program, or a movie deal. Most people have never heard of her. This means that most physical book stores will not automatically put her books on the shelves, and most people will never even encounter her book, and this sucks. So let’s not have it be like that.

God Speaking tackles head on that problem about mental health versus religious experience. We live in a society where to hear voices, is to be crazy. Most Pagans sidle carefully around the subject, wanting to claim personal experience but at the same time not wanting to sound deranged. This book explores the issues in a witty and compelling way. Judith O’Grady is a person with a lot of valuable insight to share, and a really accessible writing style. She deserves and audience.

I think a lot of people outside the book industry imagine that what happens when you are published, is that the world magically beats a path to your door, you become wealthy and it’s all good. What really happens is this. Something like 250,000 books are published every year. Many barely sell at all. Something like half the books printed end up in landfill. Most authors, you have never heard of. Most books, you have never heard of. Most will never get into bookshops, or libraries. JK Rowling, Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey represent wild anomalies, not the normal authoring life. Which is a pity really, because there’s a lot of good stuff out there deserving of far better sales than it gets.

Most publishers simply don’t have the huge international marketing budgets needed to compete with film, TV, computer games, internet, phone aps and all the other things you may spend your disposable income on. Moon Book certainly cannot buy Judith the visibility she deserves. These days even the big houses fail to manage that. Books depend on word of mouth. That means you.

I want there to be good books. I am very bored of lightweight, predictable, derivative writing, and that’s what dominates the mainstream. I am desperate for substantial, engaging, well written and original material, fiction and non fiction alike. Therefore, if I find something good I am going to shout about it. The thing is, if no one buys an author’s books, they get depressed and demoralised. They maybe can’t justify the time and energy it takes to make another one. They maybe don’t see any point. I’ve been dangerously close to that myself, and this is part of my solution to that problem. If we could establish that there is a market for good, ground-breaking, original, surprising stuff maybe the mainstream publishers and bookstores would not focus so much on the celebrity crap, the obvious rip-offs and all the rest. I want nothing short of a revolution in the industry.

So here’s what we need to do, in this case and in others. We need reviews of Judith O’Grady’s work in as many places as possible. If you have a review site, can review for a publication or have a blog with a LOT of followers, see if you can get a review copy from the publisher. I think people who read this book will be convinced of its merits. I’m doing this purely because I read the book and was really inspired by it. Or, if you can take a blog post or an article, or something of that ilk and put it online and tell people about it, step up. If you leave a comment here I can get your email address from it and pass it to Judith. She’s not really an internet person, but she has a lot of ideas and opinions and will happily write you some content. Also, if you blog her stuff, tell me and I will tout the hell out of that post as well.

If you’re reading this and thinking ‘I know a book that deserves this support’ then get the word out. If you think I can help, tell me. Review on goodreads and amazon. Mention it on facebook. For one, authors do notice this stuff and it really seriously can mean the difference between feeling there is a point to what you do and keeping going, or feeling all is hopeless futility and quitting. One good word. One person who understood and was inspired. That’s honestly how marginal the creative life can be. So if you value something, talk about it.

Becoming a non-person

It’s well known that if you want to destroy a person, or a minority group, it’s best to start by dehumanising them. This makes it easier for your people to feel comfortable about the destruction process, and it also makes the victim more passive and easier to destroy. In fact, do a good enough job of the dehumanising and the victim will sometimes destroy themselves and spare you the effort. What further complicates this already nasty issue, is that most of us assume (until it happens to us) that we could resist. We think we’re clever enough to see through the propaganda, smart enough to get out of the violent relationship, capable of resisting government led denigration. The people who don’t, are therefore stupid and probably deserve it, we imagine. This actually makes us easier to take down too, because we refuse to see what’s happening. We don’t want to believe we’re falling, we want to beleive we’re clever enough that it couldn’t be hppening to us. Once someone is starting to go under, it gets easier to push them all the way down.

There are a number of ways to turn someone into a non-person, and you can start small. Constant criticism of lifestyle choices, personal appearance, preferences and so forth undermines confidence. We judge by economic contribution (our elderly suffer as a consequence.) Ridiculing of opinion – which we see all the time online and in the media. “Only a stupid person could think the way you do.” Doing things and then lying and saying they never happened (as is so often the way with workplace bullying). Minimising damage. We only pushed him, it wasn’t really a thump. It was only a joke, we didn’t mean for her to kill herself… Blaming the victim – we aren’t doing this to them, it’s happening because they are weak, stupid, lazy and irresponsible. Labelling them – note the way in which the word ‘benefits’ is so regularly publically linked to the word ‘fraud’ so that when you hear the first the second is more likely to show up in your head. (Illegal) Immigrants, Muslim (terrorists) Unemployed (scroungers) … there are many more, but you get the idea. We build the associations.

Becoming a non-person isn’t an event. It isn’t about a single occasion of someone being a bit mean (really, you’re a man, you can take it). It isn’t weakness (thin skinned, melodramatic, making a fuss). Note how we can further denigrate people for becoming victims. No, this is a process, and it can happen so slowly and over such a long time that you don’t even notice your personhood being stripped away. Or your participation in doing it to someone else. You slowly become an object, an expense, a nuisance, a scrounger. You stop being Bob who can tell a good joke and likes the footy, and you become that useless man. You stop being beautiful Esme who is a great mum, and become that lump of meat he shoves round the kitchen of a Friday night before using for sex. And somewhere, maybe you stop looking at yourself in the mirror because you can’t bear the eyes of the person looking back at you. Somewhere in the process you start to believe, as you are being told, that this all makes perfect sense: it’s happening because you deserve it. If everything around you reinforces your status as a non-person, are you going to hold out against that?

Disbelieving everything you are told starts, after a while, to feel a bit crazy. So you try harder, do more, work longer hours, try to humour the boss, accept the benefit cut, accept the brutal sex, and the labels, and you let yourself believe it is all your fault this is happening, and you lose a bit more self.

I’m watching my government undertaking this process aided by the gutter press, and every day the news items, and the shit in the media makes me sick. The language of denigration, the deliberate, relentless dehumanising. Right now, the victims of preference are the poor. We’re hounding the poor into ghettos. We’re doing it by forcing people on housing benefit out of more affluent places, especially London. We’re well under way with forcing them to work unpaid for the state, with the welfare to work scheme. We haven’t moved them into camps for that yet, but maybe we don’t need to. Does this sound familiar to anyone yet?

Are we going to wake up one morning and find that the Tories have come up with a bold, final solution to poverty? And by then, will we have dehumanised the poor so thoroughly that, as the Germans did with their vulnerable people in the 1940s, we let the state kill them? That’s where you ultimately go with this kind of logic.

When they came for the disabled, I did not speak out, because I was not disabled. When they came for the single mums, I did not speak out, because I was not a single mum…

The bottom third of the UK population is now experiencing poverty, from what statistics I’ve seen. We have to start speaking out and we have to actively resist all attempts to dehumanise the vulnerable. No more labels, no more blame culture, no more robbing people of their basic dignity. You don’t need gas to kill people. You can freeze them to death with homelessness, or inflated energy prices. You can starve them to death. You can drive them to suicide. You don’t have to be as obvious as a death camp. You can make your whole country a death camp for the ones you don’t want along.

Gratitude and fortune

I am lucky. When my life fell apart I had enough inherited cash that I did not have to seek social housing. I can earn some money, even though I’ve been ill, and thanks to self-employment have been able to stay out of sickness related benefits. I do get some help from the government – you can get support alongside quite decent incomes, if you have children. But on the whole, I’m not as dependent on the system as many people are, and that’s pure, blind luck.

It was sheer luck that the bad choices in my history did not leave me in a mental health hospital, or out on the streets. It was pure chance that set me up in life with a decent genetic intelligence and some good teachers. Not everyone gets that. I’ve been able to roll with changes and challenges, survive setbacks and find ways round problems because I am fortunate enough to be passably bright and pretty well educated. Not everyone gets those breaks.

It’s all too easy to look at the successes in our lives, and put those down to how good we are. We deserve our winnings, our paychecks, our comfy homes, good health. Of course we want to believe that because it gives us an illusion of control. If we made it and earned it, then we ought to be able to keep it. This is just an illusion. Bad luck, an accident, a folding company, ill health, a run on your bank, a tree root undermining your house. The lucky amongst us are seldom more than a couple of missing payments away from total disaster. Should that happen, much depends on how lucky we are in our friends and family, and how much support we get.

Blaming those who get into trouble is a way of reassuring ourselves that it won’t happen to us. We’re too smart. We work too hard. We’re too together to have a mental health problem. We jog, so we aren’t going to get sick. No matter how hard you try, one mistake with a car can take all of that way from you in a space of minutes. We want the people at the bottom to be lazy scroungers, so that we don’t have to be afraid of that happening to us. Well, we should be afraid, and we should see our illusions of security for what they really are. Bad luck strikes randomly, and does not pay much attention to how clever, hard working or health conscious you are. There’s only so much you can ward off by doing the right things, and only so far a clever mind will carry you. I’ve seen it happen to plenty of people. There are lots of folk on narrowboats who got here because they were too smart to entirely go under. Businesses ruined by supermarkets. Lives ruined by violence and abuse. People plagued by ill health, or who lost everything in a messy divorce. But people who had enough left and enough imagination to take up boating, and survive. Not everyone has the inner strength to keep getting up when they’ve been knocked down more times than they can count.

Some of what pushes people to the bottom of the pile is not pure bad luck. It’s deliberate abuse by others. Unlucky to get a dose of that, but not wholly accidental. Robbed, raped, beaten, bullied, intimidated, forced out, mistreated, conned… there but for the grace of… go any of us. These things destroy mental health, destroy financial success, demolish lives. If we’ve avoided one of those disasters, it may not be because we’re too smart, it may just be we were lucky. Sometimes people fall because they are ignorant, or naïve, or gullible, or too willing to forgive, or not mean enough to take advantage of others. Are these things we really think others should be punished for?

If we recognise that luck, it’s a lot easier to stop assuming the poor are at the bottom of the heap because they can’t be bothered to arrange anything better. It’s easier to find some compassion, and not to judge everyone without knowing any of their details. As the job market dwindles, more and more people are pushed, wholly against their will, into poverty and dependence. People who want to work if they could, who would gladly take on anything. Why burden them further by stigmatising them for things beyond their control? So that we can hang on to the belief that we deserve what we have and it won’t be taken away. And because it suits the government as they take yet more money out of the welfare system.

When it is taken away, when you find life spiralling out of control, and you desperately need help and someone to pick up the pieces, there’s much to be said for finding yourself in a kind and compassionate system. Because the alternative is to believe that you deserved the fall as well, that it represents a failure to work hard enough or be good enough. You are a failure, then. Or the alternative is no safety net, and destitution, and no second chances.

Picture yourself (if you’ve not been here) suddenly out of a job, and unable to pay the bills, with the mortgage company threatening to take the house, and your relationship falling apart under the strain, and the anxiety making you feel so sick you can’t get out of bed in the morning, and crying for no reason sometimes and wanting to die. Picture yourself there, and then ask how helpful you’d find it to have the government treating you like a lazy scrounger who is destroying the economy.

We’re long overdue a culture shift on this one.

Why do we need International Women’s Day?

I hear in my memory, the voice of a man I once knew, talking about why isn’t there a men’s day, and how women hold all the power anyway. He, and those like him, are exactly why we still need to raise issues and awareness.

There are plenty of Western women who believe that the equality issues are all sorted and feminism is just another bit of history. I’ve met them too. And there are guys who believe that what they do in the privacy of their own bedrooms and marriages shouldn’t be anyone else’s business. Including the belief that the police should not be investigating them.

We need International Women’s Day because internationally, definitions of rape are too often shoddy and sometimes non-existent. Worse still there are countries where the female victim of this crime can be punished for sex outside marriage. I’ve heard men speaking on the radio about how if girls dress in provocative ways, of course they are going to get raped. As though to be a man is to have no self control. That’s an insult to men. The guys who think that lack of self control is a justification for rape and violence need telling that no, they are not proper men. Real guys can keep it in their pants when they need to. We have a long way to go on that score.

We need International Women’s Day for the many, many victims across the world who suffer domestic abuse. Not just the ones who are bruised and bloodied, but the ones whose self esteem is taken from them, who are used as slaves, drudges and sex objects. Those who die at the hands of men also need to be spoken of. There are still too many people of both genders who think its fine for women to be subservient to men. We need today for the trafficked girls who are kidnapped and sold, and who, if rescued will be stigmatized by their communities for what happened to them. We need it for the girls from impoverished families who don’t get an education and are sold into marriage before they even hit puberty. For the girls in their early teens who still die in childbirth every year. For the victims of forced marriage everywhere.

We need it here in the UK too, where your typical woman still earns 20% less than your typical man and a working mother can still expect to do most of the housework and childcare. Here in the enlightened west where a rape victim in a court room can still expect to be asked what she was wearing when the assault took place, as though that made a difference.

We also need to celebrate the women who have been persistently written out of the history books. We have a tendency to focus history on male politicians, ignoring the roles of women, their work and actions. It creates an impression that all women do is stand round as ornaments and squeeze out babies, and this has NEVER been the whole story. Have a look some time at the role of women in dissent and radicalism in UK history – they take some finding because most books don’t include them. You’ll need a specialist, feminist text for that, but thankfully they exist.

We are a good half of the population. We have as much intelligence, skill and potential as those who landed in this world blessed with a willy, on the whole. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but on the whole, we are more alike than different. But there are still places around the world where to be a woman is to be a second class citizen at best. And there are still people who can’t hear ‘no’ in every country. Until rape is consigned to the past, until trafficking has gone forever, until there is no man on the face of this planet who is able to imagine that he has the right to own and control women, we need today.

While we’re here, it’s a good time to also appreciate the good guys, the heroes, fathers, co-workers, equals, companions, friends… the ones for whom respect is natural and a given. The ones who listen, care and respect themselves enough to do the right things for the right reasons.

A Druid economy

Of course these days as a Druid you do not get to talk sense to those in charge in any kind of structured way, so I’m just going to vent theories on the blog.

Austerity. It doesn’t work. The UK is still borrowing a lot of money and not paying off its debts, and at the same time the poorest are suffering. Apparently millionaires are poised to get tax breaks, because we all know how much those folks are hurting… (gah). Now, the poorest people in the UK are not just unemployed or too ill to work, but also include a lot of people in part time and low paid employment. Rising rents and council tax, rising fuel costs and amenities (while companies make profits) put the squeeze on incomes that are not rising. People pay for the essentials, and they buy cheap because they have to, in order to survive. The more pressure you put on the poorest in society, the less economically active they become. Oddly enough, high streets are increasingly dominated by pound stores and charity shops, while big chains close an average of 20 stores a day across the country. Every store closed represents more job losses, more people needing a hand, and having less money. And so the squeeze extends.

The way things are set up, economies depend on movement of money. GDP is simply a measure of movement. The faster the money moves the more everybody appears to have. It’s a funny old world. However, reduce the incomes of the poorest, and they stop buying those luxuries like books and music. They stop going down the pub, for a night out. When enough people stop doing that, pubs close, and ooh look, HMV has just folded. (Music, for anyone unfamiliar with them.) In this climate, only bargain basement stores selling dodgy horse burgers are going to thrive.

There’s no political will to cap rents. We hear a lot about how people on benefits are scrounging off the state, and nothing at all about how much public money ultimately finds its way into the pockets of private landlords. So run that past me again about who is scrounging here? People in work get tax benefits because in the current climate, the minimum wage is not enough to live on. We’re not talking heady luxuries, we’re talking bare essentials. No one is talking about how private employers ought to be paying workers a living wage rather than the state picking up the tab. Remind me about who the scroungers are, please. In the last decade or so the private sector has not invested in growth or jobs. It’s just paid fat dividends to shareholders and ever more obscene bonuses to management while the people who do the work struggle on a not-living wage. Then, thanks to that lack of investment, business in the UK does not thrive, jobs move overseas, businesses fail to pay their fair share of taxes. The rich underpay the poor, decline to pay their own taxes, pay themselves huge bonuses… Meanwhile those with no hope, no prospects, no opportunities and no money sink into despair, and when the government notices the total apathy out there, they ascribe it not to depression or futility but to laziness.

If we had a level playing field and all you needed to do was work hard and you’d succeed, then berating the poor for not making an effort would be fair enough. That’s not the score. But it’s not at all clever, because the more money you take out of the pockets of the poor, the less money you have moving around. Those people sat on huge wads of cash are not spending it to drive the economy. Squeezing the poor does not make for a healthy economy. How about paying a living wage, providing work opportunities, having business invest in business rather than creaming off the profits all the time… we could have something that works passably well.

Perhaps David Cameron wants to bring back feudalism, picturing himself as mighty ruler of Great Britain. The trouble is Mr Cameron, go on this way and you will have total power over all your serfs, but all you’ll get is to be King of a pile of dirt, dressed in a ragged and filthy robe of state, with a crown made out of rusty spoons. We got rid of feudalism for a reason – we were tired of the Dark Ages. Go back there if you want to, get into re-enactment or something, but for pity’s sake, stop trying to take the rest of us with you.

Earning it

We hear a lot from the government about workers and shirkers, the hard working who deserve their money and the scroungers who deserve nothing. By this we are to understand that wealth itself is evidence of effort while poverty indicates laziness. That would be a very convenient explanation, skipping over how much wealth is earned and how much inherited. Wealth buys opportunity, education and connections, but if you acknowledge that, you have to recognise that massive earning differences have nothing to do with worth.

Now, if someone is out there saving lives, then it would be hard to over value their worth. Firemen would be a fine case in point. Would any of us argue with massive pay rises and bonuses for firemen, who risk their lives on a regular basis to save the lives and property of others? Firemen are heroes. We will never be able to thank them enough for what they do. But, compare that to bankers who take other people’s money and effectively gamble with it, and seem to get paid whether they make money for their bank, are mediocre or actually bankrupt a country. I’d love to know how that works. The guy at Barkleys Bank wisely declined his obscene bonus this week, perhaps recognising it might not be politic to take what he clearly hadn’t earned.

We have a system based on ideas of growth, market development, investment and whatnot. Now, skipping over the issue of infinite growth with finite resources…. I learn from the Guardian that the economic boom of the noughties was an illusion. Businesses were not investing or growing, and most of the money came from borrowing against inflated house prices. FTSE top 100 companies grew by 2.6 % on average per year while executive bonuses went up by 26 % a year, on average. My ten year old can do the maths. It’s insane. If a person gets paid way beyond what they earn, or generate for their company, they have not earned it. A bonus based on actual profits, actual development would make some kind of sense, but this doesn’t. It’s all about those in high places having the power to set their own pay scales and enough friends also in power to back them up. If you can’t show your company is thriving, you haven’t earned a bonus, and the only bonus you could earn would be in line with company profit. Anything else is TAKEN, not earned.

Let’s backtrack to those thought forms about hard work and earning your money. No company could survive without the people who do the work. The makers and builders, the ones on the shop floor, the ones talking to customers. These are the people at the bottom end of the pay scale, least valued by the company and they aren’t paid bonuses, in the normal scheme of things. Why assume if a company thrives that it is only due to the efforts of the management?

What I’d like is legislation that requires bonuses and pay rises to be linked directly to profitability in a meaningful way. (Not think of a multiplier and use that). I think there should also be a requirement that bonuses be paid out to every employee, not to managers alone, in situations of profit and success, and that people who are discernibly doing a mediocre job, or failing, should not get pay rises. Workers don’t get pay rises if their annual review doesn’t see them as being valuable. Why should bosses be different?

The irony here, is that this would be a system to drive genuine growth and investment. Full on capitalism. The people who claim to be capitalists evidently aren’t – rewarding failure and not investing to grow do not a capitalist system make. It’s not about the market, it’s simply a leech culture. And here’s me, anarchic and anti-capitalist with a vision that, although it alarms me to say it, is really speaking more innately capitalist in principle than what the capitalists are doing.

Yes Mr Cameron, we do have a culture where there are hard working people, and scroungers. Generally speaking, the scroungers are doing really well at bleeding the economy dry for their own benefit, while the hard workers are not anything like as well paid as they deserve to be. This is because we have a system that rewards power, not effort, or achievement. Just power. But that’s probably not worrying you, given that you are quite definitively In Power. However, as every leech knows, if you bleed a thing dry, you starve. A little enlightened self interest might not go amiss

Rebellious Roots

I spent last night listening to the BBC radio 2 Folk awards. On the whole radio2 tends towards the shiny end of folk, and I tend towards the raw and dirty end, but they had Billy Bragg on and Treacherous Orchestra, so that was fine. Folk is where I come from, it’s home, ancestry, community, more so than Druidry because folk has been there my whole life. I’ve seen a fight, in my lifetime to keep the folk traditions alive. Back in the 80s, the prospect wasn’t good, with aging and dwindling clubs, but, there’s a tremendous resurgence going on and a lot of brilliant young people coming through.

At the Druid Network convention back in November, Paul Mitchell pointed out that our folk traditions are as much a part of our heritage as Stonehenge. More so, because folk has the potential to belong to everyone, and apparently Stonehenge doesn’t, and we can’t all get there and it would be bloody crowded if we did. Folk is where you are, there’s plenty around. It’s your traditions, your heritage, be that farming or industry, or protest or something else.

I have some sense of who my people were, what they did and the land they come from. Not everyone has that. One of the things the folk tradition does is gives you a huge pool of possible ancestry to pick from. Of course you had your share of poachers, soldiers, peasants, and poets – we all do. Not everyone engages with folk, too much beard, woolly jumper and finger in ear… except most of it isn’t like that, and never was. Folk can be sexy, angry, militant, ironic, dangerous… and also loud, or more like classical, or all kinds of things. Still, I’m not going to lure everyone in.

I was listening to Billy Bragg talking about how much now is like life under Margaret Thatcher, and about how it keeps coming round and we keep having to fight the same fights. The protest songs serve in part to connect you to all the people who had to do it before, to make it less lonely, help see the point, keep your courage up. We all have these fights, and in sharing them, they become easier. Workers protest songs from a hundred years ago and more are very relevant. We’ve rioted before over impossible rents, and lack of food, and shitty systems and we’ll do so again.

It helps to know this. How many people don’t know? How many people live in the small awareness of a few generations, overwhelmed by what the system is doing to them and unable to imagine that you could fight back, much less that it would work. How many people don’t know about Ned Ludd and the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Peterloo massacre, the peasants revolt, chartism, levellers, diggers, and all the other brave attempts to put things right. Each round of fighting takes us a little bit further forward. Without that knowledge, without the history of dissent, revolt, non-cooperation, and uprising, it’s easy to believe that you can’t do anything.

What does that give you? A whole new kind of feudalism, in which the peasants are held in place not by laws, but by our own lack of knowledge and disbelief. That’s the developed world for you, all too often. Bread, circuses and being dictated to by our lords and masters.

Show of Hands, in their song ‘Roots’ have this line – “Without our stories and our songs, how will we know where we came from?” We don’t. We have no idea, and that makes it very hard to figure out where we might be going or how to even own that process a bit.

Beating the system

I’m watching the economic and social justice memes floating about on the social networking sites. The sheer joy of seeing the blindingly obvious being stated. You cannot run a system purely to serve those at the top, it will break and fall apart. Economics is more make believe than proper science. What we have doesn’t work. And that other one, the 100 richest people in the world could end extreme poverty four times over with what they raked in last year. I’m not going to say ‘earned’ because there is nothing that could merit that kind of wealth. People are recognising and saying that money earned does not equate to hard work, or effort, or value of what you do. It equates to the power you had in the first place. The Emperor has no clothes on.

The thought I keep coming back to, is that I do not want to contribute to the bank balances of the super rich. Watching the immoral, illogical behaviour of my own government, I’m not mad keen to give them cash either, they clearly cannot be relied upon to make good choices in how they use it. So what does that leave me? I can’t decline to pay taxes.

Or can I?

Small businesses and lone traders do not, if their turnover is very low, have to register to pay VAT. If I stay away from products with duty on them, that’s more money that isn’t going to the government. If I buy second hand, from charity shops, that’s all kinds of sticking a finger up at the system. If I buy from a creator then I know at least in the short term, my money goes to them. If I buy a small brand not a big name, use a local shop not a supermarket, and so on. Basically, if I can see the person who made the thing, or grew it, or undertook it, and I pay them, I have some idea where my money went.
If I make my own alcohol and give it away.

Giving things away is really powerful. No tax. No engagement with the money systems at all. I used to use freecycle, and when I’m not on the boat, I will again. I just gave away my poetry. I give away my time for good causes, and my ideas in the form of this blog. I can do more.
There is no way I can extricate myself entirely from a system that sends cash to people who have way too much of it already, but if all of us just made a few token gestures at non-cooperation we’d make some interesting progress.

Money appears to be what our government cares about. Protesting doesn’t bother them. Vote and you get different faces and the same shit. But hit them in the bank account, take away even a little bit of power from their economic systems, and they become vulnerable. They can’t legislate into making us give money to Rupert Murdock rather than going to a live gig. They can’t make us buy fuel rather than walking. You can’t lock people up for not buying lager, or for giving away clothes they don’t want any more, and yet the power to destabilize the whole system is there, in those small acts of rebellion.