Review: Darren McGarvey, Poverty Safari

This is a good book which held my attention right through though some of it seems cut and paste from what could have been free-standing articles. But I think it is about something more than what it says it is about, and I think there is a fault line in the characterisations.

In any stratified class society which nonetheless permits some social mobility, then the more differentiated the strata the more anyone who is mobile (up or down) will find that they become strangers to the class they have left and never quite belong in the class where they have arrived. Especially in the last two or three chapters, Darren McGarvey is beginning to live with those consequences of his upward mobility, culminating for the moment in becoming an Orwell Prize- winning author and published by a London house which I guess insisted that though in Glasgow it might be all right to spell it  fucking down here it is spelt f**king. Welcome to the world of middle class values, here comfortably hitched to the values of American-dominated corporate publishing.

But the body of the book is concerned with what it is like to begin life at the bottom and, in many cases, to remain there. For Marx, the bottom stratum of society comprised the lumpenproletariat easily mobilised by the forces of reaction and less easily by progressive social forces. Marx had nothing good to say about the lumpen.  Others have called this stratum the dregs of society and beyond ordinary political help. Others again have called it the rough working-class distinguished from a respectable working class which, at a minimum, gets out of bed each day to clock in on time and doesn’t spend all its wages on drink. But since the Thatcher years in the UK which created what we now call the Benefits Culture, the rough working-class has more or less ceased to work, even casually or intermittently.

McGarvey’s background is at least half rough or lumpen, his mother a violent alcoholic and worse, dead from her addictions at the age of thirty six. He writes movingly about this. But he is coy about his father, who is never (unless I missed something) assigned an occupation but who is acknowledged as a source of encouragement - his father does not pooh-pooh Darren’s dream of becoming a writer, but actively encourages it. So I am going to guess that McGarvey’s father is the respectable half of a dysfunctional pairing. This is important. 

Many years ago, for example, Colin Lacey in Hightown Grammar decided to ask the question, Why do some working-class boys succeed? rather than the question Why do most working-class boys fail? He discovered that in most cases of success you could identify a mentor or a sponsor who encouraged and supported at least some kinds of ambition. A typical case would be that of a mother who had married down socially, probably regretted it, and tried to redeem the situation by encouraging a son to push back upwards. D H Lawrence had described the scenario already in Sons and Lovers.

In the body of the book, McGarvey’s use of the term underclass obscures the important distinction between rough and respectable and the dynamic which exists between these groups who may often live cheek by jowl. The voice of respectability is heard very clearly at page 175 when McGarvey quotes the very, very left-wing Scottish militant, Jimmy Reid, addressing shipyard workers occupying their place of work back in 1971 and telling them that there will be no hooliganism…no vandalism. Yes, Sir!

Anyone with any sense acknowledges that not all social problems admit of a political solution. True, some problems are much less acute in societies which are more economically equal than the UK or the USA. This is the lesson of all the academic studies of inequality - Wilkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level most notably. But for the problems of dysfunctional families and the cycle of deprivation which children born into them experience, there is no quick fix from even the most benign nanny state. As McGarvey repeatedly emphasises, there are problems for which you have to accept some responsibility yourself and deal with them as best you can.

Review: Owen Jones, The Establishment

This is a straightforward Them (the 1%) and Us (the 99%) book. It's lucid, well-documented, compelling and sometimes - as in the chapter on the police - scary. Rather than concentrate on its many strengths, I will focus on my doubts.

(1) Trade Unions. It's true that the assault on Trade Union power, led initially by Mrs Thatcher and continued ever since, has helped produce a much more casualised, readily exploitable, and lower paid labour force than existed for many industries - but not all - in the 1960s and 70s. But that assault was possible because the old Trade Unions pissed off a lot of people and not just the bosses.

There has always been some tension between the goals of trade unions and the aims of socialist or social democratic political parties. The former are designed to advance the interests of sections of the labour force; the latter to advance the interests of all workers. Those aims can conflict. In the UK the miners, for example, got into the habit of expecting everyone to stand up for their pay claims - partly playing on other people's guilt when they didn't themselves do such dirty or dangerous work - until a point was reached (for me, in 1984) when people no longer wanted to jump when the miners said Jump! Oh, the miners might get sentimental about the nurses, but that's not the same as a proper discussion about who should be paid what and why. 

Look at France, which retains strong unions ever-ready to strike, and what you see, partly as a long-term consequence of unions pursuing sectional interests is, on the one hand, large groups (notably in the public sector) with very good terms and conditions of employment and, in stark contrast, two big, overlapping, excluded groups: young workers ( or would-be workers) and migrants from France's former colonies, mostly blacks and mostly Muslims. Whatever the rhetoric - and there's an awful lot of it in France - the effect of sectionalism has not been favourable either to equality or fraternity. 

(2) The Big State. Around the world, more egalitarian societies have bigger states, taking a larger share of GDP. This is a bit depressing because in the UK at least, the state has a poor record for efficiency and transparency. To this day, the National Audit Office churns out report after report documenting the waste of billions. Transfer activities have an inherent inefficiency because when you take from A to give to B, there are always administrative costs and, on top of that, there is often bungling. It would be nice if we could cut out the middleman.

Apparently, there is just one major state - Japan - which scores well on equality but has a relatively small state (for details, see Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level). 

How could you achieve both a lot of equality and a smaller state? It could be done, for example, by legislating high minimum wages and capping top wages. If that is combined with the use of inheritance tax as a major source of state revenues, you can dramatically level the playing field. The last thing I can get enthusiastic about are systems which make heavy use of indirect taxes (VAT) and subsidies such as tax credits and housing benefit. On the other hand, when you legislate for equality then if you are way out of line with market forces, you just end up with black markets, dual systems, evasion and so on. That is, unless people are satisfied with their situation - Owen Jones, for example, points out that nowhere else in Europe do bankers expect to be paid such huge amounts as those in London. And in Germany, at least,corporate greed seems much less common - big companies are kept in the family, not asset stripped and bankrupted by their bosses. So there are cultural issues - and I suspect they include such things as the culture of stag parties and men-only football (In Germany at the time of the World Cup, I was amazed to find the streets full of painted, flag-waving but mixed-sex and sober groups).

(3) Profit. Owen Jones spends a lot of time denouncing the selling off and outsourcing of public services for private profit. Leave aside that there exists some support for this because people got fed up with crap public services. Concentrate on the issue of Profit.

Suppose it cost the public sector £150 to provide some identifiable chunk of a service - like issuing a TV licence or producing a chest X ray. Now suppose a private firm comes along and offers to do it for £100 plus a whacking £25 profit. It's still better value for money than the public service. Why not let them have their profit?

Since there may be important reasons to keep a service public, the first response to this situation should be to ask why the public service is more expensive and whether it can be made more competitive. Frequently, it can indeed be made more competitive - and Owen Jones is quite right to point to the purely ideological commitment to private provision which characterises our recent governments and which led, for example, to the selling off of the one public service rail franchise (the East Coast mainline) which just happened to be more efficient and more profitable than any of the heavily subsided private sector rail rackets. 

To make Profit the enemy is a dangerous oversimplication (as in "People not Profit"). People can benefit from Profit - but not from ideologies of Profit which is what we are currently offered.

Essay: America Cannot Continue Like This

I haven't reviewed any books recently - I have been giving up on books half way through and therefore -  under the terms of this Blog - cannot review them. This is true of Joseph E. Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality (Allen Lane 2012). I kept comparing it unfavourably with Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone - a book which Stiglitz does not mention.

The problem with Stiglitz's book is not its argument - which relates only to America - but in a decision to consign all the evidence to the footnotes. There are 290 pages of text and over 100 pages of footnote citations and discussions. This leaves the text uncluttered, but - unfortunately - dumbed-down and repetitive. I gave up.

But this is not at all to deny that growing inequality in America, combined with the weakness of the political system,  is a problem for us all and could become a pressing problem.  America surely cannot for long escape its own Arab Spring. Its rent-seeking (Stiglitz) or, as I would put it, extractive elites (the 1% who own and rule and don't pay taxes) have no intention of conceding any ground - indeed, they are still pushing for even more favourable treatment. And their grip over the media, the political process and the legislature has disillusioned citizens where it has not simply disenfranchised them. That is a recipe for civil disorder not orderly political renewal.

Wilkinson and Pickett's book contains many graphs correlating different kinds of Inequality with different social and economic measures. On most of those charts, the USA is an outrider - it has more Inequality and it has worse performance on measures of employment, health, security - you name it. It is never anywhere near the average. Some of those outrider figures surface in Stiglitz's book. We may in a sense already know it, but it is still shocking to read - for example - that "roughly one in three black men will spend time in prison in his lifetime" (page 70). That's a Gulag-like statistic and no society which achieves that outcome can be other than dysfunctional.

Here in Europe, serious newspapers and their serious readers looked at the Republican primaries with jaw-dropping disbelief. How do these nutters get to be front-runner Presidential wannabes? And when Romney finally emerged as candidate, the sigh of relief was quickly replaced by the fervent conviction that No Way, No Way do we want this man to become US President. That would be true across the political spectrum. Even the Conservative Party guardians of Britain's "Special Relationship" with the US pray each night for an Obama victory.

To tell the truth, they pray because they are scared. We are all just a bit scared and become a bit more scared every time some strange Congressman holds forth on Abortion or Evolution or Rape. These guys are Fundamentalists and they are Dangerous, make no mistake.

Whether they are scared in China, I do not know. But in China they are watching America carefully. It is only Chinese money which prevents America's financial implosion. If you think Greece has got problems, look at America's federal budget or its trade balance.

And back of it all, we know that America's war industry is lobbying for another War - and Romney knows that, if elected, he will have to give them one. It makes money and it makes jobs. That the War will be lost, just like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, is of absolutely no concern.