Saturday, October 31, 2020

The loss of clubbing: a collective cathartic experience

The club experience is a collective one. Its power comes from people feeling the same thing in the same space at the same time. That feeling of losing oneself in a dark room, with a low ceiling, being disinhibited and carefree is unlike anything else. The strength of emotion and passion felt when dancing like nothing else matters, because, at that exact moment, nothing else does. It is a powerful, exhilarating and otherworldly escape. It’s a chance to forget about the how the country is becoming a progressively more hostile and inward looking place. It’s an opportunity to forget about how the young will be on average be poorer than their parents, with greater debts, entering a worse labour market with more precarity and needing to rapidly decarbonise the planet after neglect by previous generations. It’s an invitation to temporarily ignore the fact that the future, especially for young people, is looking increasingly bleak, along with the rise of bullshit jobs, where a growing amount of people feel incomplete in the knowledge their job adds no value and thereby makes them feel unfulfilled.  Neoliberal Britain before the pandemic could feel like a grim monochromatic place - with dreams dashed, hopes eroded, creativity stultified. And now, with economies locked down, clubs closed and physical distancing in place, the cathartic release that came from losing a part of yourself, and your independence, and being glad to “when your brain pulses with the same validation of being with so many people who have chosen the same path”  is something that is being sorely missed by many club-goers.  

Following a week at work in a job that often feels like your creative potential is sapped by increased bureaucratization, the nightclub offers an escape. After turning up to work, obeying your boss and competing with your neighbours, the nightclub offers a an intoxicating way out and a disruption from the monotony and banalities of late capitalism. There is a cruel irony at play that an ideology so focused on individualism, turns and churns individuals into zombie consumers who are robbed of their creativity, individuality and uniqueness. And yet, the nightclub provides an opportunity to immerse oneself in a positive, permissive atmosphere of unity, joy and euphoria.  

There has, however, been an increasing commercialization that has affected clubbing. Nightclubs, like the legendary Plastic People and London Astoria, have been closing for over a decade, due to a toughening up on licensing laws, a clamping down on so-called ‘public nuisance’ and the increasing prevalence of capital and private real estate sucking the character out of cultural hubs. Rents have been precipitously increasing due to the flogging off of social housing and the greed of profit seeking vultures like buy-to-let landlords and property developers, as well as successive governments failing to adequately build social housing for over 40 years. Rather than changing the character of an area through social cleansing or gentrification, this gets branded as ‘regeneration’. The results are usually devastating, with London boroughs looking increasingly the same: a Pret here, a Tesco Express there, a closed pub or club, and a newly built block of privately developed flats that are anything but affordable. This pushes out those who used to be able to afford to live in the area. Culture becomes replaced by capital. This is part of the reason why clubs remain a cherished hub, offering a chance to form a break, however temporary, with the notion that social relations are dictated purely for and by financial reasons. 

Clubs that survive are not immune from increasingly competitive financial pressures, resulting in a commercialization inside the club. With entry prices rising to meet escalating rents, those seeking solace in a nightclub have to fork out more than ever. With overpriced drinks too, it can sometimes feel as if fun and communal subcultural spaces are themselves being commodified. As anyone who has been to Printworks in Surrey Quays, a nightclub in the former Harmsworth Quays printing plant can attest. Beyond the protracted queuing, and the at £30 ticket (at the very least), there is an additional further £10 to be forked out for having the privilege of a locker, with the communal cloakroom being eschewed for this venue. The token system also works to capitalize on intoxicated people forgetting to get refunds. It is easy for such a night to end up being in excess of £50 per person. The venue itself boasts a capacity of up to 3000 people, and it is undeniable that the atmosphere is less enjoyable as a result, often more rowdy and lacking the intimacy that comes from being in a small club. The crowd feels energized, perhaps, but not in warm and receptive or empathetic way that smaller venues tend to. Compounding this, in my experience at least, has been the indifference to dancing or interacting with the music from many touristic attendees. It is a venue that is as easy to lose friends in, as it is to lose one’s mind, given the sheer vastness and confusing layout. And yet, its lights show is like no other, with an audiovisual pairing that few other venues in London can match. The lights are architectural, shape shifting between sets, coupled with a large 14 metre surface that has various visual content and an array of transfixing images, where it is hard not to be mesmerized by the visuals on show. 

Nevertheless, beyond offering an escape, nightclubs are subcultural spaces and sites of creativity and self-expression for all genders, irrespective of background. The nightclub is not class or age-based, attracting individuals from all walks of life and social position. Though the increased commercialization of the experience is having an effect by lessening the diversity of class composition.  The exorbitant price of events like Printworks dissuades those with less to spend. This is particularly problematic as dance culture stems from New York, Chicago and Detroit, with the pioneers being gay, black Americans who were generally economically and socially disadvantaged. Black Brits, albeit to a lesser extent, are also from an economically disadvantaged background. It is therefore incumbent upon those who enjoy nightclubs because of the struggles of black Americans to not lose sight of this. And it is even more important that profit-seeking establishments actively try to mitigate the increasing commercialization. An example of trying to do this can be seen from LA’s dance parties Rave Reparations, which tries to make dance parties more black, in line with its roots, through donations and discounts. Another example would be for London nightclubs not to always prioritise the bottom line in a way that it appears Printworks does. They must aim for inclusivity over profitability - that goes for race and class, as inequalities for both are inextricably linked. Anything else helps continue the whitewashing of techno, house and rave music.

Whilst the nightclub is based on a ‘weekend culture’ of hedonism and sensation, it offers a freedom to provide an opportunity to construct experiences without withdrawing from mainstream society.  It is a chance to forget the mundanity and engage in fantasy. It provides a venue for collective engagement, where new social groups can meet to dance and have a cathartic emotional release. The knowledge that others are engaging in the same decision, in the same place, listening to the same music provides validation. A shared bond can be formed, however loosely, due to the spatial temporal closeness. And yet, unlike when one is close to others at work or commuting, and wanting to be anywhere else, this is an activity that is sought out, desired, and even craved. 

We often strive to give our lives purpose. Through engaging in specific activities we can provide a sense of autonomy. As Avi Shankar notes, the club provides such an opportunity, providing an apparent contradiction between overt sexuality and child-like innocence.  Another contradiction comes from those who want to stay in control, whilst at the same time wanting to disengage from reality. It is this creation of a space allowing people to behave as freely as they want whilst also showing respect and warmth to others, which allows for the feeling of being in a community, instilling a sense of belonging to something greater than oneself. In the neoliberal age of increasing atomization, where a sense of community has almost been lost, this quest to freely become a part of something greater than oneself is why nightclubs are powerful experiences that provide more than an escape. It is that feeling of being together in public having a shared hedonistic experience that feels so enjoyable. 

The spontaneity and uncertainty of not knowing where an evening of dancing might lead was part of the thrill. The surprise could involve a DJ seamlessly mixing records you have never heard, twisting, turning, and stringing a crowd along in the palm of their hand - in different directions, with scintillating, tantalizing and enticing undulations. Or, it could be the impulsiveness of ending up at an after party with a group of people you met earlier in the smoking area. Or, it might even be both. The possibilities seemed endless.

The intimacy of the nightclub is mirrored by its intensity. The sensation of a powerful sound system pumping a heavy bass through your chest, all the way down your body, through to your feet can make it feel like an out of body experience. The simplicity of repetitive rhythms works to induce a feeling of blissed trance. A feeling of oneness emerges with both the music and with those around you. And the music creates textures around you, caressing and surrounding you, as it comes at you from all angles, fully immersing you in the experience. It is something that cannot be captured by any smartphone. With the increasing trend of London nightclubs banning phones from dance floors, this works to emphasize the intimacy from such nights, with a small amount of mystery remaining tethered to the space, rather than being shared on social media.

Dancing is an expression of emotions that words cannot express, a natural release of hidden and repressed emotions or trauma. The language of our bodies is one of movement. When emotions are repressed, muscles forcefully constrain and contract. Over time, this leads to tensions, which result in becoming stiff and passive. Mirroring that passivity is the working week, where a large portion of time is spent sat at a desk or sat commuting. A natural response is for such emotions and tensions to be expressed, let out, danced away.  

Ultimately, we have multiple selves and identities, and the responsible worker role, along with its attendant pressures, invites an abandoning on the weekend for a self-expressive pleasure seeker. Out goes the routine of rising early, living healthily and in comes the avoidance of sleeping for long periods of time. There is a yin and yang dualism at play.  

The months of physical distancing remaining between now and whenever a vaccine is hopefully discovered will only increase the desire to rekindle that feeling of being a part of something bigger than oneself, of having a collective journey in a subcultural space where the intimate hedonism is inexplicable to those not present and all too understandable for those that are. 

Monday, October 26, 2020

IPSO: the problem of a toothless regulator, a misleading 'free' press and the strengthening of 'capitalist realism'

The UK print press acts largely with impunity, regulated by a toothless regulator. One that is afraid of taking on the organisations that fund it, undermining its very independence. The result is a media landscape where false and deliberately misleading stories are printed, undermining the fundamental notion of a free, fair and accountable press. The phone hacking scandal rocked the political world in the UK and beyond. It exposed a deep and murky web of dubious relationships between the powerful: newspapers, a media mogul, politicians and the police. Phones of celebrities, politicians, members of the British Royal Family, as well the deceased, such as Milly Dowler, British soldiers and victims of the London 7/7 bombings were hacked. The response, The Leveson Inquiry, was a public inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press, chaired by Lord Justice Leveson, which resulted in the Leveson report.

Chief among the report’s recommendations was the creation of a new regulatory watchdog independent of MPs and newspapers. The Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) was subsequently created in 2014, replacing the much-maligned Press Complaints Commission (PCC), which had been described as ‘a joke’ with as much use as ‘a chocolate teapot’. Hopes were high that it would be effective, helping to regulate the most misleading sections of a deeply partisan press, improving press standards. Though the purpose of regulation is not to prevent criminal conduct, it was meant to ensure the print press reported fairly and accurately, respecting rights of individuals, and allowing for a fair balance between freedom of expression and the public interest. It was billed as being “the toughest in the Western world”. And yet, six years after its creation, it’s been a failure beset by regulatory capture. 

IPSO is funded by the publishers it is supposed to regulate, through a body called the Regulatory Funding company (RFC).  The RFC itself is a replacement of the Press Standards Boards of Finance – an industry that raised a levy on newspapers to fund the PCC. All of the directors of the RFC are industry insiders. This works to institutionalise the power of the biggest national press companies, affording them a veto over the appointment of IPSO’s board members, its chair, and any potential investigations.

IPSO’s Editors Code of Conduct is written and controlled by editors, which was until fairly recently chaired by Paul Dacre. The same editor of the newspaper known to breach the Code more than any other paper.  

A recent report by The Media Standards Trust makes clear that IPSO is failing 25 out of Leveson’s 38 recommendations for a ‘genuinely independent and effective system of self-regulation’.  Key among these is the lack of independence. It notes ‘the extensive control the industry can exert through the Regulatory Funding Company…that present extremely high hurdles for standards investigations’. It is hard to imagine another industry regulator being funded by those its supposed to regulate and using pressure to stop any investigative work.

Beyond this, the report states that IPSO’s ‘inability to implement a single standards investigation over five years of operation is one additional key indicator of its lack of regulatory power and independence’. This investigative power is one of IPSO’s additional powers. It allows IPSO to mount a ‘standards investigation’ if a publisher persists in failing to comply with the Code, or if IPSO has serious concerns about its actions or behavior. It can impose a fine of up to £1m if it finds serious wrongdoing. And yet, it has not fined a newspaper so much as 50p.

IPSO changed recommendation 19 in the Leveson Report, from needing ‘serious or systemic breaches of the standards code’ in order to impose sanctions to the much higher bar of needing both ‘serious and systemic’. IPSO has subsequently failed to outline how such a threshold is met. Even if IPSO were inclined to conduct a standards investigation, it would be far harder to find any of its members in breach. If that is not hard enough, the publisher under investigation has up to six opportunities to intervene in the process, while complainants have no opportunity to participate or make representations.  

IPSO is restrictive on which publishers can sign up to be regulated. Recommendation 24 in the Leveson Report was allowed for membership to IPSO being open to all publishers, yet it operates rather differently. Compounding this is the fact that the MST report found its voting system operates by how much a member pays in subscription to the RFC. The result is that membership for a new publisher is ‘unlikely to be fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory’.  

It’s clear in whose interests this supposedly independent regulator operates, and in which way they would settle the balance between individual’s right to privacy and freedom of expression. Which other regulator allows those it is supposed to regulate to write the rulebook, and appoint the referee?  

A newspaper advert for IPSO describing it as delivering ‘all the key elements’ in the Leveson Report and proclaiming that it would be ‘the toughest in the Western world’ was pulled by the Advertising Standards Authority due to it being misleading


IPSO’s failings: illustrative examples

Examples of IPSO’s failings are instructive. Particularly apparent is its failure to deliver prominent and timely corrections. 

IPSO upheld a complaint regarding The Sun’s false claims of ‘one in five British Muslims supporting people who have gone to Syria’ to fight for groups like Islamic State as significantly misleading due to its inaccurate nature. However, the paper avoided having to print notice of the adjudication on its front page. 

This approach works as an incentive to lie and then only publish a correction when found out. IPSO’s toothless rulings do not forbid online articles that are debunked from being read. This can be seen from the Times’s story reporting that a ‘white Christian child’ had been left distressed after being placed with two Muslim households in Tower Hamlets over a period of six months. This story proved to be a one-sided account, with it emerging that the girl’s grandmother, with whom she was ultimately placed, was a Muslim and did not speak English. IPSO upheld the complaint due to a breach of the Editors Code, concerning accuracy. And yet the story is still available online for voters to be misled. 

 

This is troubling given how the Leveson Report noted that accuracy was "the foundation stone on which journalism depends". 


Steve Barnett, media professor at the University of Westminster and member of Hacked Off, argued that the Times’ ‘white Christian child’ story should have prompted a wider investigation. He states that if "such a disregard for industry code happened in any other industry, the press would have been up in arms condemning the shocking negligence of these professionals".  

Barnett has also questioned IPSO’s definition of a systemic problem, commenting how the litany of untruths published by the British press during the referendum campaign was a case study of what ought to have led to an investigation. The Sun’s ‘Queen Backs Brexit’ prompted the monarch to file her first complaint with the regulator. 

A more recent failing by IPSOs concerns its failure to act in the face of blatant and misleading lies by the Daily Mail when it covered the launch of a report to the Labour Party titled ‘Land for the Many’. The Mail on Sunday turned an independent report for the Labour Party into ‘bombshell plans being drawn up by Labour leader’ before lying about its contents. It claimed that the proposals included ‘to scrap the capital gains tax exemption on main homes’, which was demonstrably false. The lie was subsequently picked up by senior Conservatives, and then used repeatedly in the party’s campaign materials, before being reproduced by other papers.

An author of the report complained to IPSO. It took five months, including intimidating partisan bombardment from the newspaper. Most complainants would give up or accept any complainants, leading George Monbiot, a co-author of the report, to conclude IPSO is unfit for purpose.  The complaint was upheld yet a correction would only becoming after the 2019 December election. Such nonchalance about allowing a clear falsehood to be used in newspapers without issuing a corrective, at a time when such a story is misinforming and influencing voters ahead of an important general election, is wholly demonstrative of an organisation that is in the pocket of the print industry. 


Cynicism in the media and ‘capitalist realism’

The powerful newspapers know they can print with impunity and only issue a small correction that will receive far less prominence after a complaint is upheld. This helps the toxicity of the print press, far from trying to inform voters on the details and nuance, they instead mislead and scare with deliberate falsehoods. The result being that the UK print press is the least trusted in Europe.  This is hardly surprising given how the print press is largely unregulated, with it receiving 8,000 discrimination cases between 2018-2019 and upholding just one.  



The rise of client journalism,  with journalists acting as stenographers for the government and its power, is helping to increase the trend of journalists not being trusted.  It is often seen in broadcasting with the likes of Robert Peston and Laura Kuenssberg, regularly retweeting and ‘reporting’ what is fed to them unquestionably, acting as a government mouthpiece, being manipulated by Downing Street. As Peter Oborne has noted, political editors are so grateful to be given ‘exclusive’ information "they report it without challenge or question". This is often the case when either of these journalists refers to a ‘senior government source’.  It happens whenever Laura Kuenssberg tweets from a ‘No.10 source’ including what is essentially a press release, repeated to her 1.2 million followers, without any scrutiny. It is chilling that reporters and broadcasters are increasingly peddling Downing Street’s lies. 

The public grows in their distrust for the press when journalists and reporters repeat the lies that are fed to them by deceitful politicians and stretch credulity beyond plausibility. With this, cynicism and apathy grow and the chance of reimagining let alone recreating a better society becomes increasingly harder.  Therefore it “becomes easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”, this is ‘capitalist realism’ as Mark Fisher put it.  Though this ‘realism’ is not a representation of the real, it is a determination of what is deemed politically possible.

Cynicism about the media helps serve capitalist realism. As the media stands in for the public sphere, if journalists and politicians are perceived to be “all liars” as they widely are, then there is no hope to be had in public life at all.  It is beyond saving or improving. 

When it becomes almost impossible to imagine an improvement in material conditions, ‘negative solidarity’ grows.  The idea, as Mark Fisher put it is: “More than mere indifference to worker agitations, negative solidarity is an aggressively enraged sense of injustice, committed to the idea that, because I must endure increasingly austere working conditions (wage freezes, loss of benefits, declining pension pot, erasure of job security and increasing precarity) then everyone else must too”. With an almost unregulated press spewing hate and punching down, an agenda of divisiveness is implanted in the psyche. This benefits the defenders of capital and its gatekeepers in both the Conservative Party and the majority of the ‘free’ press.



‘Free’ press – how the UK press is anything but

Extinction Rebellion (XR) was recently accused of undermining the free press and attacking our democracy after blockading a Murdoch-owned newspaper printing works. Priti Patel, as expected, was salivating at the prospect of having XR proscribed as an organised crime group. Yet such knee jerk authoritarian reactionary impulses, notwithstanding their broad support across the Conservative party membership, completely miss the point. Our press could hardly be less free, for three main reasons.

First, the billionaires that own the press set the agenda . Owners interfere with what is published, as Harold Evans, a former editor at the Sunday Times, made it clear to the Leveson Inquiry how Rupert Murdoch interfered with the editorial policy. Evans said how Murdoch was constantly telling him what the paper should be. Such an account was corroborated by David Yelland, a former editor of the The Sun – who said that Murdoch editors look at the world ‘through Rupert’s eyes’.  

With six billionaires as majority voting shareholders for most UK national newspapers it is of no surprise that they mostly supported the Conservatives in the last election. The Conservatives in 2017 paid back their support by dropping the second part of the Leveson Inquiry from their manifesto, which was supposed to investigate the relationship between journalists and the police.

Second, corporate advertising revenue censors the content. Peter Oborne, former chief political correspondent at the Telegraph, resigned from his job after he was censored from writing about HSBC as it was one of the paper’s larger corporate advisers.  As David Edwards and David Cromwell of Media Lens have put it, the corporate structure excludes entire frameworks of understanding. “If writing something disagreeable about HSBC or animal rights is problematic, imagine editors consistently presenting corporate domination as a threat to human survival in the age of climate change”.  There’s a reason why climate change denial is organised by powerful political and industrial interests and supported by conservative newspapers, their financial backers, and the whole system that supports the status quo is in drastic and urgent need of a radical overhaul to eliminate the threat of climate extinction. Why would conservative proprietors allow such a message to be published in their newspaper, contradicting their advertisers and arguing against the economic model that has provided all their wealth?

Third, privately educated white men dominate the print press. Nearly half of UK national newspaper columnists graduated from Oxbridge, compared with less than a percent of the population. 54% of the nation’s ‘top 100 media professionals’ attended private schools compared to around 7% of the population.  This helps cement a bourgeoisie worldview in much of the media. As Frank Boyce explains, this means austerity can be read as ‘regrettable but pragmatic’, whereas to ordinary working people it’s anything but pragmatic and utterly devastating.  Further, women are under-represented in journalists and the coverage received with male experts on flagship news programmes outnumbering female experts by 3:1.  Compounding this, research has found ten times as many UK male journalists on the news as female politicians.  

It is hard to believe that an overwhelmingly privileged and predominantly white, male, privately educated Oxbridge graduates would understand the situations and choices faced by most people in the country, let alone truly represent modern Britain in all its diversity.  


Concluding thoughts

The Conservatives and the billionaire newspaper proprietors have shared interests and a mutually beneficial relationship. If the newspapers focus on the culture war, with disproportionate attention being given to Muslim enemies, refugees or asylum seekers and out of touch lefties, over the far more important issue of material conditions of the majority of working people, it provides an opening for the Conservatives. The Tories can avoid discussion of how their 'levelling up' agenda is anything but, or their disastrous decade in office, instead uniting a broader coalition against a supposed enemy. More punching down and distractions, with justified anger being redirected away from the billionaire offshore tax dodgers (incidentally these are the people owning most of the print press), the financial speculators and the financial parasites that caused the 2008 financial crash.  With the printing press effectively being allowed to print falsehoods due to a partial and supine regulator works to benefit both the Conservatives, and billionaire newspaper proprietors, who can drive the culture war and continue to set the agenda. When they profit off this, we all lose out. Often an individual’s right to privacy is lost. The minorities that are constantly scapegoated lose out. The standards of journalism sink ever lower. Lying politicians coupled with lying journalists mean a more misinformed public and a weakened democracy.

The essential purpose of the free press should be to discover and tell the truth. Yet the UK print press, which is anything but free, regularly fails to do this. A function of the corporate media has been to isolate, making people distrust their discontent with a world controlled by business interests. And with a sham regulator like IPSO, it is becoming increasingly clear that those newspapers get to decide how they will be regulated too. This has a corrosive effect on democracy in the UK. It becomes ever harder for facts to be reported on, and voters become increasingly distrustful of the media and politicians. With this cynicism, the view that a better world is possible becomes ever harder to imagine. Instead, if the view that the state is only good for making life harder, it becomes easier to imagine that citizens want others deprived of rights and freedoms because they have had to suffer themselves due to deregulated finance capitalism.

We are governed by a group of serial liars. The need for newspapers to report accurately, informing voters and being accountable has never been greater. With a multitude of crises, such as the fall out from the pandemic, the refugee crisis, the crisis of income and wealth inequality, the mentality health crisis, a productivity crisis, a housing crisis, a homelessness crisis, the social care crisis, and the most catastrophic of all, the climate crisis, it is more important than ever that we have a press working to hold power to account. The first step to improve this would be for IMPRESS, IPSO’s competitor, to be recognised as the main print regulator. Unlike IPSO, it is fully compliant with all recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry. It can also launch an investigation when a code breach is either 'serious or systemic'. Crucially, it is not funded through those it seeks to regulate. Though this would be no panacea in reforming a deeply corrupt industry, it would help reestablish a balance between the rights of individuals and freedom of expression, giving greater prominence to accuracy and the truth. In the age of disinformation and politicians lying more than ever, the need for the press to tell the truth and provide accurate journalism has rarely been greater. And the longer the press is able to spew misleading hate, the longer the real crises will worsen. 



Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Rather than ‘levelling up’, the Tories are showing their true colours

The Conservatives won big last December in large part because of their willingness to trash their record in office. Not only was Boris Johnson able to paint himself as an outsider and an insurgent, banishing the austerity rhetoric that helped Theresa May lose her majority in 2017, but he was going to invest big: 20,000 police officers, 40 new hospitals, and 50,000 more NHS staff. Never mind that these commitments were necessary because of a decade of needless austerity his party enacted. And the fact these figures were grossly misleading wasn’t important either. With a media circus rarely working to inform voters on policy nuances, such details can, and often do, get drowned out in the noise. What mattered instead was that this would be a government spending to invest in infrastructure, improving public services and as Johnson triumphantly declared on the morning after the election ‘unite and level up’. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Much has already been written about the Conservatives' willingness to engage in culture wars since last year’s election. But a recap is instructive. From invented threats about the BBC Proms banning ‘Rule Britannia’,  deliberately misconstruing the Black Lives Matter movement and the so-called ‘War on Woke’, it is clear that this government knows that cultural defeats can be intoxicating, politically effective and good for polling ratings.  Rather than trying to bridge divides between those who voted Leave and those who voted Remain, those in cities and those in towns, the young and the old, this government knows where its base is, and knows who they can blame for society’s ills. It lies with the ‘activist lawyers’ representing asylum seekers, the refugees crossing the Channel in search of a better life, and those anarchists toppling the statue of slaver Edward Colston. 

‘Don’t kill your gran’ implores a sneering Matt Hancock, with Boris Johnson warning young people against ‘complacency’ during the pandemic,  after refusing to condemn his chief advisor for travelling across the country to his second home when he should have been self isolating. This incident helped undermine the Government’s strategy, messaging and weakened the public enforcement according to police. And yes, this is the same Matt Hancock who was recently pictured in a chauffeur-driven car without a face mask. As if entering a lockdown too late, ignoring SAGE’s advice for a national ‘circuit break’ lockdown, failing to have adequate PPE and continually outsourcing untendered contracts to failing companies is unrelated to the effectiveness of handling the Coronavirus pandemic. Far from wanting to unite the country and build consensus, this government knows it can shift the blame to others to distract from its constant failings. 

Better the discourse focus on how the Government is willing to stick it to Brussels than focus on what has gone wrong with Test and Trace, or Dido Harding’s incompetence, or another contract going to one of Cummings’ mates. Easier to fan the flames of a culture war and unite a broad coalition around a supposed enemy than address substantive material conditions for the majority of working people. It is too convenient a way of turning attention away from their litany of failings. It is a tactic utilised in the US by the Republicans with the help of Fox News. The similarities between the reality TV leaders, Johnson and Trump, wanting to focus on the unreal, are plain to see. Rather than ‘uniting’, the Tories are on more comfortable terrain playing their old favourite: divide and rule.

‘Levelling up’, the bold new approach outlined by Boris Johnson, which was supposed to undo four decades of prioritising London and letting the North, parts of the West Midlands, Wales and the North East decline due to what Gary Younge calls the 'four horsemen of late-stage capitalism: inequality, austerity, deregulation and privatisation'. It is a phrase regularly parroted by Conservative MPs, and credulous journalists asking softball questions about how it will be achieved. The truth is that it won’t be. 

The government and Greater Manchester’s local authorities and metro-mayor, Andy Burnham, have been unable to reach an accord over lockdown relief. The area now enters into tier three – where pubs not serving substantial meals will have to close, household mixing is banned with a variety of other organisations compelled to shut. £5m was the figure at the heart of the dispute, miniscule in terms of government spending. Burnham wanted a more generous furlough scheme as was originally provided for. However, despite Sunak previously saying he would do ‘whatever it takes’, both he and the government are keen to avoid a return of the nationwide furlough.  Burnham, quite rightly, pointed out that those on the minimum wage would need 80% of their wage covered, not the 66% the government is offering. The Government, instead, claims that Universal Credit can top up wages. Yet it takes at least six weeks to receive payment, with the local furlough scheme not open for applications until December, meaning it could be months until people receive any money. 

Even before the pandemic, the UK’s workforce had seen a decade of lost wage growth - the biggest squeeze on incomes since the Napoleonic Wars. 12 million people in the UK have ‘low financial resilience’, with BAME people and the young overrepresented amongst that number. 15% of people have no savings at all. Even if it’s topped up by Universal Credit, losing 33% of a wage is going to plunge a lot of people into some dreadful circumstances. 

The financial package secured for Greater Manchester to go into tier 3 is a paltry £22m, for a population of 2.8million. As a comparison, Robert Jenrick’s constituency of Newark received £25m under the Towns Fund, for a population of 72,407. That works out to £7.85 per person in Greater Manchester, and £237 per person in Newark. The Secretary of State who helped billionaire Richard Desmond avoid a £45m community levy to a cash strapped London borough perfectly encapsulates how this Conservative government sees fit to run the country. Pork barrelling and accepting donations from billionaires who want to avoid tax are to be prioritised over providing adequate financial support and relief to lock down during a deadly pandemic. 

Instead of providing relief and adequately subsidizing the wages of the poorest and those directly affected by the closing of viable businesses, this ‘levelling up’ government is paying Test and Trace consultants £7k a day.  Consultants on these extortionate contracts are pocketing our money when it should be going to adequately furloughed workers; so much for Tory fiscal responsibility and the efficient private sector. Michael Gove indefensibly defends this as ‘value for money’. 

This ‘levelling up’ agenda is not concerned with guaranteeing free school meals throughout school holidays in England, after families had been issued with vouchers during the spring lockdown and through the summer break with a ‘Covid food fund’. In the midst of a pandemic, where 32% of families have seen a drop in their income, with 900,000 children being registered for free school meals since March, this Government have decided it is indeed time for austerity again. George Osborne’s austerian mantra of there being no money left returns, like the Ghost of Christmas Past. There’s no money to avoid child poverty, but there will be £100bn to ‘expand Covid-19 testing’,  presumably shorthand for further NHS privatisations by stealth. 

All of this is shocking yet hardly surprising given Boris Johnson urged us months ago to show our appreciation and clap for ‘wealth creators, capitalists and financiers’. The PM repeated his assertion in trickle down economics at the Conservative Party’s conference, with his speech arguing that ‘we must be clear that there comes a moment when the state must stand back and let the private sector get on with it’. The past four decades have been an experiment in the state standing back whilst the private sector 'gets on with it'. Whether that is its failure to stockpile PPE, or Deloitte losing tests at Chessington World of Adventures, to the on-going calamity of Serco’s management of the Test and Trace system.  The Thatcherite dogma that has let the free market get on with it, helping to prop it up when things go wrong like the financial crash, is the precise reason why large swathes of the country are dealing with poverty, deprivation and underinvestment. Regional inequality in the UK is the worst in Western Europe. Left to the free market, the gap between wealthiest and poorest will only increase. 

After all, nowhere went as far or fast in the process of privatisation as the UK, with 40% of all privatisations undertaken by OECD countries between 1980 and 1996 occurring in the UK. The result being that of the 10 poorest regions in Europe, 7 are in the UK. Letting the private sector ‘get on with it’, is what led to the gaping chasm of inequality in wealth and income that exists in the first place. Letting the free market extract more wealth and income from workers and the public will only lead to further levelling down, in spite of the Government’s rhetoric to the contrary. 

Adding to this is the chancellor’s obsession with debt. Sunak has warned of ‘hard choices’ to protect the public finances to get debt ‘back under control’. At a time of historically low borrowing, when economists warn that either cutting spending or raising taxes would choke off Britain’s economic recovery and damage future income, Sunak seems set to follow in Osborne’s footsteps. Never mind that the IMF and the World Bank are advocating stimulus over austerity, with economists being unworried about Britain’s debt. The UK’s sluggish barely recovery for the past decade should be instructive here, with economists noting that public debt is not a concern when interest rates are well below the economy’s growth rate. Only when interest rates and inflation start rising substantially due to excess demand should the deficit be considered. Talk of ‘balancing the books’ as Sunak outlined is premature and will harm the recovery as tax rises are anticipated. It will do nothing to help those in regions that are gripped by poverty and yet here we are again. The ideology of a shrunken state and smaller public sector is more important than jobs, growth or wellbeing.  


Rather than level up, this government’s planned cutting of the already meagre and insufficient universal credit by £1000 a year shows this government wants to level down. Analysis by the Resolution Foundation shows the hit would fall directly and disproportionately on families in areas the government promised to ‘level up’, 62% of working age households in Blackpool South, and 44% in Great Grimsby, Birmingham Northfield and West Bromwich West. The move could affect 6 million households, and is forecast to push 700,000 households into poverty at a time of rising unemployment. It is estimated to result in levels of unemployment support falling to its lowest real-terms level since 1991. 

These gaping holes between the Government’s rhetoric and the reality should be fodder for the Left. It is clear that, at least for now, Starmer’s Labour does not see fit to speak in terms of class interest, preferring to point out some of the inconsistencies between the Tories’ rhetoric and their policies, focusing on the Government's lack of competence. This is partly understandable, in a time of national crisis, where the one thing that the public loathe more than incompetence are politicians seen to be ‘playing politics’. It is also hard to imagine legitimate concerns about class interests being reported in a neutral and balanced way given the state of print and broadcasting media in this country, and the way that the last Labour leader was reported on when doing so. However, the longer Labour fails to make the case for a coherent alternative, pointing out the Tory lies about ‘levelling up’, the harder it will be to be to seize the narrative, and actually regain the votes of those in places that are in desperate need of ‘levelling up’. The longer the discourse is focused on cultural issues, where the Tories can play divide and rule, stoking up culture wars and focusing on the unreal, thereby splitting a potentially election winning coalition of Labour’s, the harder it will be to dislodge this band of charlatans.


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