Let’s get rid of one-dimensional Globalisation

We hear far, far too much about the supposed necessity of ‘embracing globalisation’ but for some the embrace is much closer than others and clings with a deathly chill. I refer to those workers whose jobs have been stolen and shipped abroad by the owners and managers of multinational (i.e. mostly US dominated or with fealty to no nation) corporations and, alas, many companies still headquartered in this country if no longer in British ownership.
The receiving enterprises in the Eastern world, especially the far east including China and Bangladesh have working and environmental conditions ranging from outright exploitative through dire to lethal - as those multinational companies who profit the most from this trade have known for years. Each new ‘discovery’ of appalling working conditions, death trap buildings, cancer clusters, suicides and child labour of course comes as another ‘surprise’ to the profiteers.
There is no need for any of this. Trade, like politics, is what we make it. It is what governments allow it to be. These same governments do not allow their citizens to run amok in terms of crime (other than financial) nor should they in terms of the consequences of so-called ‘free trade’. Trade which is free in the sense that multinational profiteers are free to spend their gotten gains as they wish and the displaced workers or those younger people who will now not get a proper job are free to take a zero hours contract. In these ways, we’re all in it together.
The globalised companies take full advantage of slack or absent regulation and their ability to play one country off against another through lack of international co-ordination and covertly compliant governments. One company starts off-shoring jobs and the others, equally devoid of conscience but not of greed, follow suit with their erstwhile employees herded to the edge of the cliff like lemmings.
Ideally globalisation should be unwound – as I have argued in other posts on this blog. Globalisation didn’t arise overnight nor can it be got rid of quickly, but for western governments to plead powerlessness in the longer term is both defeatist and false. They may be thinking more of their campaign contributions.
But if we are stuck with globalisation, let us at least make it two-dimensional. This second dimension is an effective international tax regime to net the multinational tax dodgers, force them to pay a reasonable rate of tax and get rid of the parasite tax havens that facilitate them. In addition, a worldwide financial transactions tax would raise substantial revenue from a sector that can well afford to pay. Needless to say, the British Government is opposed to it but other countries may yet make a start.
And in future, when politicians and business big shots urge the embracing of globalisation let them embrace the two dimensional version in which they show some decency, social responsibility and some awareness of a common good beyond themselves.

Zero tolerance for Zero hours!

I was disgusted, though not entirely surprised, to learn that the extent of the use of zero hours contracts in business was far more widespread than officially acknowledged. And it turns out that organisations that should know better, such as some charities, are also exploiting people in this appalling way.
Someone on one of these zero hours ‘contracts’ has no guarantee of the number of hours of work that will be available to them in an upcoming week. There is also often no sick pay or holiday entitlement and they may be denied permission to get extra work elsewhere. They may also be expected, at short notice, to work far from home.
Doesn’t this all tell a dreadful story about the scandalous state of commercial morality today – zero hours at the bottom and big bonuses at the top. It also says much about the credibility of official employment figures as many of those unfortunates on zero hours contracts are taken to be fully employed. It is also one more reason to account for the huge profits made by usurers such as Wonga.
One national newspaper carried the headline ‘Why stop at Zero hours? Why not revive child labour?’ But this is, of course, exactly what is happening except that child labour is outsourced, along with the original jobs, to the Far East.
The apologists for these outrages need not trumpet that it is part of commercial reality and inevitable globalisation. Both are what we make them. And we should start re-making them immediately. There should be zero tolerance for zero hours.

Not much of a Premium

National Savings and Investments (NS&I) has announced that the number of prizes awarded to holders of premium bonds will be cut from the 1st of August. The effective interest rate is being cut from an already miserable 1.5% to 1.3%.
This is very disappointing and more bad news for those people who are still attempting to save and is counter to what government related financial agencies could and should be doing. The excuse offered by NS&I was that it set the prize fund in a way that ‘balanced’ the interests of savers, taxpayers and the ‘broader financial services sector’.
My goodness, who would want to see the financial services sector experience any challenge or discomfort? How do those bankers manage to exist on their incomes anyway?
Taxpayers? Sounds reasonable at first but of course savers are usually taxpayers and so of course are many borrowers. But borrowers have gained hugely from the protracted artificial suppression of interest rates – except of course those in the grip of financial sector firms such as Wonga and its appalling ilk – but then this class of borrowers hardly registers with government.
If any sector of the economy needed shaking up and presenting with a serious challenge it is the banks, pseudo banks (which is what most ‘building societies’ seem to have become judging by the way they behave) and the multifarious money lenders and financial gamblers that riddle what’s left of our economy.
It is no use waiting for such a challenge to come from within the private sector – it will never happen when extracting profit from hapless punters is the driving motive. This financial fracking has got to be stopped. The only way this will come about is if the public sector takes distinctive action and stops running with the private sector wolves.
NS&I should do its own thing and give savers a break. If there’s an inrush of money this would nudge up private sector savings rates too. But even better of course would be a genuine public sector bank - or several of them in the form of the municipal banks for which I have campaigned on this blog and elsewhere.
I hope that the Church of England initiative against payday lenders gets into gear once they have disentangled themselves from their embarrassing indirect investments. Why are they not more careful about this sort of thing?
But while they get most of the headlines it is not just hard-pressed borrowers that need protection and support it is the equally hard-pressed savers. Maybe it will happen, but it is a bit like waiting for Godot for either Westminster or Whitehall to get their heads out of the clouds and put the interests of ordinary people, savers included, first.

Parliament Must Pardon Alan Turing

Members of Parliament are at last taking action to right the appalling and longstanding injustice which saw world ranking scientist and code-breaker Alan Turing convicted in 1952 of what was then officially condemned as ‘indecency’. This was to be punished ruthlessly regardless of the presence of discretion and affection and the absence of any complaints.
There followed his subsequent cruel, legally imposed, physical mistreatment (chemical castration) and persecution that led to his death from cyanide poisoning – which was then officially classified as suicide.
A 21st Century Parliamentary pardon for Alan Turing is the very least the politicians should do. In fact they should also strike a medal and commission a statue – ideal for the plinth in Trafalgar Square that has seen so much rubbish displayed.
The Government that refused calls for a full pardon in 2012 has now said it would not stand in the way of the bill, but this dismal passivity may not be enough to guarantee the bill’s passage. The Government needs to give it their full backing.
Alan Turing was pre-eminent in the team at Bletchley Park that cracked the Enigma code, a breakthrough critical to the allied war effort. He is now universally recognised as a leading computing pioneer and a highly original scientific thinker in mathematics, computing and indeed other fields.
But at the time of his death he was virtually unknown to the general public, as his work at Bletchley Park was kept secret until 1974. His work to crack the Enigma code probably turned the course of the Battle of the Atlantic, shortened World War II by two years and may have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
The country would have faced starvation - and some of us may not have been alive today - if Turing and his team had not cracked the codes that showed where U-boats were intercepting vital supplies from the United States. You may owe him your life. The country certainly owes an enormous debt to Alan Turing and debts should be repaid - as the Chancellor of the Exchequer is constantly reminding us.
In 2009 the Prime Minister at the time, Gordon Brown, did issue an apology for Alan Turing’s appalling treatment at official hands, but campaigns for a full pardon for Alan Turing have not so far been successful.
The prime ministerial apology, though welcome, is not nearly enough. The fundamental concern is not about putting legal technicalities first; rather it is about much higher things - atonement, justice, recognition and indebtedness to Alan Turing.
After the war, Alan Turing went on to help create the world's first modern computer, the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine – pioneering work that was built upon by the mathematician John von Neumann in the United States. Alan Turing also devised the famous Turing Test for the detection of artificial intelligence, which is still widely referred to in the literature.
Many of Britain's leading scientists, including Professor Stephen Hawking, have called on the Government to grant Alan Turing a posthumous pardon. The Government should respond to this call and rapidly revise its position and take the lead in expressing gratitude to Alan Turing and according him, after 61 years, the full public recognition and standing that he so richly deserves.

A Privatisation for Ideologues

Only one third of the population support the privatisation of Royal Mail. This is not surprising given the high esteem in which the Royal Mail is held notwithstanding the enforced price hikes to set it up for the profit, sorry, private sector.
I expect that this one third includes most government supporters, funders and lobbyists, so the rest of us can just lump it. In terms of strength of feeling only one person in 25 strongly supports the disposal of yet another public service. I wonder if these are the tiny minority who have their chequebooks at the ready to buy shares before selling them at a profit to absolutely anyone just as happened with earlier privatisations.
There is massive public support for the re-nationalisation of the railways and well over twice as many people believe that former publicly owned utilities such as energy and water should be in the public sector as believe they should remain private. And of course ‘private’ does not mean ‘British’.
The aforementioned utilities have introduced deliberately confusing price structures and rip off consumers more or less as they please – sorry, with the approval of regulators. Furthermore, those of us who do not dodge our taxes contribute to a three times greater subsidy for private railways than British Rail required. Digging deep into the public purse is par for the course be it for G4S, A4e or PFI not to mention the Banks.
Given the positive feelings towards the Royal Mail and the sorry saga of privatisation just touched on above, the opposition to privatisation of the Royal Mail should be no surprise. If not immediately, the Royal Mail will fall into the hands of foreign owners, possibly German or Chinese. Prices will go up even more and services will be degraded - hardly in the interest of the common good.
It’s not just a case of nation-wide coverage that may, for the time being at least, be reluctantly continued under private ownership. There are many other ways to lessen the service – for example no weekend collections or deliveries of letters (and maybe not even every weekday) and maybe you’ll have to install a mailbox at the end of your drive US style.
The Royal Mail is not in Government ownership – it’s ours. And that’s the way it should stay.

Why the Royal Mail?

As expected, the Government has confirmed the sale through the London stock exchange of the world’s oldest postal service, the Royal Mail, or at least a majority stake in it.
The Government is unconcerned about who will end up buying the bulk of the shares - hedge funds, other city speculators, institutional ‘investors’ or anyone else who sees an opportunity to cash in. We’ve seen to our cost the consequences of privatisation before and we don't want to see the results again.
This is a tragic decision, the Royal Mail is no ordinary business, it is part of our national inheritance. But if this wretched government gets its way, the Royal Mail is about to be ripped from the heart of our communities and put into the hands of private profit makers.There's money in the millions to be made also by the bankers (mostly in foreign ownership) and lawyers who will be called in to 'advise' on the sell-off.
Centuries of history are being discarded for a paltry £2-3bn that could be raised in other ways - for example by withdrawing the government’s recent tax cut to the very rich.
Having already had prices for letters and parcels hiked up massively to make the Royal Mail more saleable; prices will certainly be jacked up again, year after year as we have seen with other former publicly owned services.
Long gone are the days when the Royal Mail was overstaffed, inefficient and loss-making. Many changes have been made under public ownership. Last year, Royal Mail delivered over £600 million in profits back to taxpayers and is set to do so again this year even after the disgusting payments to the chief executive. With profits already on this scale what more ‘commercial freedom’ is needed?
The Royal Mail is a public service not a means of making more money, just as is the NHS and, tax dodgers apart, that’s what we pay our taxes for. There has to be some national infrastructure that is retained in public ownership with a service ethos and that is not subject to the greed, dishonesty and tax-dodging of today’s profiteering companies and super rich individuals.
If this process isn’t stopped and the Royal Mail falls into ruthless hands, if I were HMQ I would insist that 'Royal' be rescinded. Why should this prestigious seal of approval for a public service be carried over to enhance the profits of any old money maker?
But protests, petitions and the wishes of the people count for very little and the government will almost certainly make the disposal regardless of public opposition. This is just one more example showing that the country desperately needs to have a political movement that will undo some of the damage that is being done and which will seek to promote he common good. But if this comes at all it will not be in time to save the Royal Mail.

Time for some real changes

We live in diminished and threatening times. The original source of much of the damage to our economy, the public well-being and our national standing was of course the greed and reckless incompetence of the banks – still largely unreformed – and that is how they are likely to remain given the totally undue influence that the financial sector continues to have both in terms of national policy and contribution to party political funds.

This has been and will continue to be compounded by the 'austerity for some' policies of this government and those of our economic and geographical neighbours. Then there is glorious globalisation (if I hear the word 'embrace' once more in this context I'll explode) driven either by the public spirited and 'all in it together' captains of industry or by the avarice of individuals high up the corporate ladders and in hedge funds operating in a patriotism-free zone allied to their political placemen – I'll leave you to guess which.

There is a perverse competitive force at work here that belongs more to Catastrophe Theory than the ‘dismal science’ - an old nickname for economics that's more apt than ever in these benighted days – and the self-serving and lemming-like mentality of large scale businesses: "the others have made a killing out of 'shutdown-and-offshore' so we deserve to have this extra lucre too".
Thus it was that our real industry, especially manufacturing and engineering, was eviscerated along with other productive sectors such as mining - and agriculture has had its standing much reduced. We sometimes hear convenient rationalisation about a ‘post industrial society’. But you cannot have a post-industrial economy with a fair and decent standard of living in a country much larger than the Cayman Islands, Bermuda or other disreputable havens for tax-dodging, disloyal, avaricious and morality-free capitalists.
I have said for many years that when the United States Government came to see that the 'globalisation' (often meaning little more than 'send the workers' jobs to China and points east') trumpeted by self interested executives and stockholders was not working for the country they would stop singing along with the shrill brass. There is evidence that this is now the case in Democratic circles – but not of course in those associated with the likes of the Tea Party and Bain Capital. It remains to see what becomes of this however, given the weight of money and influence.
‘Free trade’ is a hypothetical, bookish concept that is never realised in practice. In theory it might work to the mutual benefit of some sections of societies when practiced by responsible agents between countries with similar values. But here in contrast I am refering to the real world and fundamental moral concerns such as pre-Victorian working conditions, lethal factory buildings, child labour, befouled environments and corporations that knew full well for years what has been going on.
‘Free trade’ - is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Its merit depends on the conditions and principles under which it operates. A bit like America’s constitutional right to bear arms - one thing in the birth of a nation phase, quite another today. What can produce benefit of sorts in one set of conditions can be malignant in another.
And trade is not the only thing that should be assessed as to its ‘freedom’. The people producing the goods to be traded should be free too. Unless they are, we do not know that the export / import imbalance in their societies is what the people would choose to have. And national currencies should have their relative levels set in comparable and consistent fashions. These conditions do not exist for many major participants in global trade. Fair trade amongst free peoples should be the goal. What we have now is far from fair and there has been too much cheating for many years.
There is another critical factor - the distribution of power and choice in overseas countries and regions used - I choose this term deliberately - by globalised corporations to make their vast profits. Used and abused with fatal consequences and then ignored in the ruthless quest for ever greater ‘shareholder value’ and executive bonuses.
The domestic consequence here has been the demise of great swathes of the Midlands and the North of England and also the Midwest of the United States. The production of industrial wastelands and ruined, demoralised communities at home is as corrosive a by-product of global profiteering as is the effluent recklessly discharged in countries to which jobs and production have been sent.
An essential context for free trade to work fairly and in the interests of the common good is morality and social conscience. We’ve seen the lack of principle (which resulted in the lack of principal) in the banking sector and the disregard for the fate of communities shown by those entrusted with the power to manufacture.
Executives should not be able to act regardless of scruple (nor should they want to - a change essential for a long run solution) any more than they should be free to ignore safety or chemical pollution. Corporations should be trusts, not in the sense of being monopolies (although they are often effectively these anyway) but in the sense of holding the livelihoods of individuals, the life of communities and the self respect of nations in their hands. We need to see due diligence here rather than just in takeover bids.
The timescale required for such changes could be a generation – the spots run deep. We’ve seen the resistance to social pressure to reform disgusting bonus cultures and the continuation of contempt for people seen as ‘punters’ and profit fodder in banks and other ‘services’. There needs to be a comprehensive re-education of our corporate and political leadership. They should stop moaning about the education of youth and concentrate on their own re-education. And to get the policy right, the funding of political parties desperately needs to be freed up from the unseemly and unseen influence of all big donors – we should see more than just tribal attacks from one party on another. In fact we need our own cultural revolution.
Nicknames apart, the original name for economics was ‘political economy’. What is needed now is a ‘virtuous economy’ where concern for the human consequences of decisions is embedded in the mindset of corporate bosses and national leaders - as should be a sense of responsibility to the society that gave big business the opportunities that they so frequently now abuse.
Some genuine competition in the provision of goods and services might not be a bad idea too, rather than the spurious competition (such as in banking, communications, power and fuel supply and a good chunk of retailing) that is little more than informal cartelisation designed to exploit consumers and produce huge and unwarranted profits.

Included too should be the politicians who have so often seen their primary role as the reinforcers of, and apologisers for, this dire mis-managerial capitalism. Democracy is not a free good – we pay for it one way or another – so much better to have public funding than costly biased policies.
International economic discussions should have an infusion of social, moral and environmental responsibility and develop a global taxation framework – what is good enough for the workers jobs should be good enough for the owners' profits too. If profits are reaped abroad so should be taxation.
Failure to get a grip on the greed and disloyalty of a 'jobs only' globalisation, the culture of cheating, deceiving and tax dodging, the disregard for people's lives as well as livelihoods, sustainable limits to growth and the lack of morality that produced these and other undesirables will show us what a post-industrial society in the Western world would really be like. Trust me, we do not want to see this!