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Showing posts with label Labour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Labour. Show all posts

Wednesday 19 May 2010

The Tories’ moral mandate in Scotland

A letter from a Tom Gill appeared in Monday’s Herald, critical of Alex Salmond’s comments about the Tory Party’s moral mandate to govern Scotland. I sent the undernoted reply, but it wasn’t published. As a great admirer of the Herald’s Letters page, let me say that I am sure my response was simply crowded out by a number of fine letters on other highly important topics, and that this was simply a question of space and priorities.

Nonetheless, I would like my argument to be on record, and here it is -

LETTER TO THE HERALD (unpublished)

Dear Sir,

Tom Gill (Letters 17th May) criticises Alex Salmond’s statement that a Tory government has no moral  mandate to govern in Scotland. Under the UK’s deeply flawed electoral system the new Tory/LibDem coalition - with the Tories as the dominant partners – has a legal and constitutional right to govern Scotland, but morally, they have no mandate. That is what the First Minister said.

85% of  Scottish voters did not vote for a Tory government – they voted for a centre left government, with the majority voting for a Labour government. Every commentator and media pundit has recognised that Scotland and England voted, to quote one such view, “as if they were on different planets …”, and that the implications of this for the Union and for democracy are deeply disturbing.

Tom Gill also advances the familiar, but deeply flawed argument that this is equivalent to an area of Scotland opting out of a general election result. Others have used the same argument for an English county opting out. Both analogies are utterly false and misleading.

No one, least of all the First Minister, is suggesting that we should opt out of the result – we are bound by the electoral outcome.  But Scotland is not an area of the UK – it is not a county, nor is it just a region - it is a nation of over 5m people, with its own legal system, its own church, its own Parliament and its own proud history and unique culture.

Scotland, a sovereign nation,  entered into the treaty of union voluntarily,  but reluctantly, with profound misgivings and with many dissenting voices. For the last century at least, that union has not served the Scottish people well. At the very least, a substantial minority of Scottish voters now believe that we should end that treaty and withdraw from the union, and no one constitutionally denies our right to do so if a majority vote for it in a referendum. The deeply undemocratic outcome of the general election has now caused many more Scots - and a great many English people - to question the continuing relevance of the UK as a political entity.

My belief is that a great political watershed has been reached, and that radically new thinking about political alignments in Scotland between the Labour Party, the SNP and the trades unions is urgently required. The outcome of the Labour leadership election will be a catalyst in this process, especially if it results in David Miliband as the new Labour leader  reviving the deadly power cliques and disastrous policies of New Labour.

yours faithfully,

Peter Curran

Tuesday 20 April 2010

Eric Joyce MP, YouTube clips, the BBC and copyright

A Youtube comments exchange -

ericjoyce1 to Moridura

I was thinking about taping BBC footage and editing it and then putting it in youtube.
Did you experience any copyright problems while you were doing that?

Moridura to ericjoyce1

None so far, Eric - as far as I know, most broadcasters regards this as clipping for the purposes of fair comment. The practice is widespread on YouTube, and any MP trying to halt it would deliver a golden apple to his or her critics, on the basis that they were suppressing fair comment, which I am sure is not the intention behind your query. If the BBC contacts me or youtube on this, I will of course respond, and abide by the law and the rules of YouTube. I may blog on this.


Sunday 28 March 2010

Why are the Unions always the bad guys? – Part Two

"One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the efforts of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.

Combination on the one side is patent and powerful. Combination on the other is the necessary and desirable counterpart, if the battle is to be carried on in a fair and equal way.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes – 1896

During my industrial and consulting career, I used to have a term that reflected Oliver Wendell Holmes famous judgement. The term, expressing a principle, was the iron law of wages. I often used it in my workshops on negotiation relating to terms and conditions bargaining, and before that in my career as a manager in personnel and industrial relations, now more cynically renamed Human Resources management.

The iron law of wages is that it is an employer’s objective to pay the least amount possible to attract, retain and motivate workers, from unskilled labour to professionals, and that it is a trade union’s objective to secure the highest amount possible for their members.

The iron law embraces all aspects of remuneration, from basic wages or salary (or fee) to all others terms and conditions, including pensions, bonuses, sick pay, overtime premium rates, allowances, holiday pay, subsidise canteens, hours of work, etc. (Brutally realistically, it also embraces the cost of maintaining a safe operating environment and indeed, any form of legal compliance that costs the employer money.)

The reaction of workshop participants tended to be sharply divided when presented with the iron law. Some said that many employers paid over the market rate, and were motivated by altruistic considerations, or concepts of equity and justice. Others derided this view and said that, if such employers had ever existed, they were now long gone, and the iron law was the dominant remuneration policy benchmark.

History shows that such employers did exist, but were always in a minority. Other employers paid over the market rate because of a hard-nosed commercial policy of being the best, being seen to be the best, and thus attracting the best. This, of course, is still the iron law in operation.

Others paid more than the market rate because of the strength of trade union power in their company or industry, and suffered competitively as a result. Those still in this category are now to be seen desperately trying to get out of this situation, and in some case are engaged in union-busting activities. (British Airways?)

THE MARKET AND MARKET FORCES

The iron law can also be described as the naked reality of the market – what some economists, most employers, and some politicians are fond of describing as market forces, which they regard in a quasi-mystical sense as a law of nature - the hidden, beneficial force that must be obeyed, which left to its own devices, produces the maximum good for the maximum number of people, and ultimately enriches all. The concept is central to capitalism.

There has always, however, been a worm in the apple of market forces, or rather two worms. The first is that the process operates without malice and without pity, and can enhance or destroy, and when its destructive force operates, it does not distinguish between employer and employed, and it can lay waste to lives, communities, entire generations and even nations. The second is that low skilled or unskilled workers rarely benefit from market forces – the opposite usually applies.

It is little consolation to the business man or woman when their entire life’s work is wiped out, and their fortune vanishes, that it was the work of the market. Equally, the individual worker, labourer or professional, does not regard the market with equanimity when his or her job and income vanish, or when, still in work, the return for their work diminishes.

Consequently, the first thing a prudent business does is to try and limit its exposure to the downside of the market. A range of options, legal and illegal, present themselves to the business attempting this damage limitation, from insuring against loss to cartels, monopolies and price and wage fixing.

While extolling the virtues of the market and free, untrammelled competition, the businessman quietly does everything to limit and reduce effective competition, moving speedily to industry and trade associations, both open and clandestine. Business, especially big business, fulminates against interfering with market forces in the same way as organised religion fulminates against greed for material wealth – business attempts to limit the operation of the market as it affects them, while the church is happy to enrich itself from the contributions of the faithful who can ill-afford them.

Market forces and moderation are always a virtue for the other guy but not for us. The panic-stricken squeals of the bankers in 2008 when the market actually began to operate were a great hymn of horror and a plea to be absolved from the full force of the market.

THE LABOUR MARKET

Until the 19th century that aspect of the market called the labour market operated mainly to the advantage of employers, who were often landowners. The laws of supply and demand certainly operated in procurement of materials and goods and services, but a greater equality existed between purchaser and supplier, albeit one affected by the relative size and scale of operation of their respective companies or landholdings, and their market share. But in the labour market, different dynamics were at work.

Highly skilled professionals, individually or in partnership, could rely on the relative scarcity of their skills to command a reasonable rate. The ancient craft guilds operated their own form of monopolies, and enjoyed the dual bargaining advantages of skill scarcity and combination. But for the low skilled or unskilled, the situation was grossly unequal.

They had to live, and faced destitution and starvation if they were unable either to produce their own food and gather their own fuel, or find paid employment; they could rely not rely on the scarcity of their labour – they were in abundant supply – nor could they call upon any form of organisation to support their bargaining position.

The mores – and the organised religion – of their society regarded this inequality as ordained by a higher power, and any challenge to it as unacceptable, and in some cases even criminal or blasphemous. In Scotland, the churches would attempt to alleviate the impact of this inequality on the poor, and in the absence of any state provision, this was welcome and indeed vital, but ministers of religion, with significant and honourable exceptions, preached resignation to, and acceptance of the established order, and allied themselves with the employers or landowners in any dispute or attempt to change things.

The poor faced the choices they had always had throughout history – fight, pray or dig. They could either join the criminal classes and prey on their fellow man or join the army or the navy and kill their fellow man, join the clergy and live on the gifts or tithes of their fellow man – or they could work the land, either for themselves or for a landowner.

But the flight from the land to the cities and progressive industrialisation changed everything. Some justice might have been expected from the more enlightened landowners, but the development of the factory and the relentless progress of the machine age created even greater inequalities, and this time, it was not only the unskilled who suffered – mechanisation removed the power of many of the traditional crafts and their guilds and associations.

And so the trade union emerged as a force, in spite of bloodshed, brutal suppression and flagrant misuse of the law. And in the latter part of that century, Oliver Wendell Holmes’ words heralded the beginnings of proper legal recognition of the rights of working people and their representatives – the trades unions.

“Combination on the one side is patent and powerful. Combination on the other is the necessary and desirable counterpart, if the battle is to be carried on in a fair and equal way. " 

I fear I must now commit to a Part Three to cover the present relevance of all of this – more later this week.

 

Wednesday 3 March 2010

Steven Purcell

I regret the skepticism displayed over Steven Purcell's surprise resignation and his motives displayed by many commentators. Admittedly, the way he handled his legal and PR front is puzzling - perhaps explained by his being admitted to a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre - but I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Here's what I wrote about him last March. I still feel that way, and wish him well in his recovery. I hope he sees the light and changes his party to the SNP, but whatever he does, he will do it well and honourably.

Of course, I may be wrong and his critics right, and if so I will eat crow.

FROM MY ARCHIVE
Sunday, 15 March 2009
Sunday, Sunday - and Steven Purcell

Oh, the Labour Party! What it has become is both tragedy and farce. Someone should dramatise its decline and fall. It could tour the world, like Black Watch. Brian Cox could play Gordon Brown as a Lear-like figure, crying in the political wilderness. There would be parts for Iain Gray, for Wendy - tears (crocodile variety) would flow copiously ... Stop, stop! This is serious - I mustn't get carried away.

Among the ruins, however, I find wholly admirable Labour people, still alive and kicking, albeit a little damaged. Today, one of them, Steven Purcell, leader of Glasgow City Council, is in the news, for all the wrong reasons as far as Iain Gray and the Labour leadership are concerned.

He is the kind of young Glaswegian I recognise and celebrate. He was born in 1972 in Yoker. Now to men of my generation, born in the centre of Glasgow (E1) but living in Dalmuir, near Clydebank in the early 1960's, Yoker was a kind of frontier town, on the Clydebank/Glasgow border.

When the pubs shut at 9 o'clock (yes, my children, 9 o'clock) Yoker pubs, lawless and rumbustious, stayed open until well into the night - well, half-past nine, to be exact. With a fast car from Dalmuir - say a Hillman Imp - you could be thrown out of the Park Bar in Dalmuir at closing time and be in the Cawdor Vaults for a final swally before half-nine. When the Clydebank licensing laws changed to permit opening until 10 o'clock (oh, bliss!) we were all skint by 9.30 and had nowhere to go but home.

But our hero, Steven, missed all that. A 16-year old school leaver, and a YTS trainee in a building society, he was precocious politically, apparently (I look twice in astonishment) joining the Labour Party at 14 and being elected to Glasgow City Council, for the Blairdardie Ward, at the age of 23. He just rose and rose, being elected - unopposed - as Leader at the age of 32. That career path is not down to luck - it must be due to formidable ability and political nous, allied to superb people skills. And if all this was not enough, he seems like a genuinely nice guy. There is still hope for politics, and for Glasgow, if not for Labour.

It's such a pity you are in the wrong party, Steven, but you've got all the years ahead of you to see the light.

You will be a worthy opponent for Alex Salmond when the hapless Gray disappears. I look forward to the contrasting styles at First Minister's Questions. Good luck.

Tuesday 9 February 2010

Chilcot and Afghanistan

The evidence given to the Chilcot enquiry has shed new light on the twin follies of Afghanistan and Iraq,in spite of the lack of intensity and rigour in the questioning of the witnesses.

I reprint below my piece on Afghanistan from Novemebr 2009 in the hope that it has new relevance in the light of the subsequent witness testimony.


Saturday, 7 November 2009
Corruption in Afghanistan - and Brown's folly

Gordon Brown spoke for half an hour yesterday (6 Novemebr 2009) about his government's commitment to the futile Afghanistan conflict. He mustered as much passion and rhetoric as an innately dull man can in a bad cause. There was nothing in it that spoke of the man himself, because only a leaden mass now exists where that man once was, a man whose true destiny was to be the minister in an undemanding rural kirk, or an accountant in an old-fashioned company, or a worthy lecturer in a redbrick university.

He existed for ten years in the reflected glow of Tony Blair, longing for the day when he could radiate alone, unaware that he was a dead satellite, with no inner furnace to generate the his own light. Now he is polluted ground, contaminated by the nuclear waste of Blair's deadly polluted policies. He has only a half life, his power ebbing away at exponential speed. But he continues to play the old Blair and Bush tunes as his motor runs down and the tune becomes more distorted and the lyric incomprehensible.

And those who dance to that tune stumble and twist in confusion, trying to follow a music without rhythm and words without meaning.

His entire case for remaining in Afghanistan rests on a lie - that we are there to prevent terrorism threatening Britain.

We are there, as Obama is there, as the 43 countries of the coalition are there, because of a profoundly mistaken instinct by a right-wing group of American Republicans and their puppet, George W. Bush, to lash out at something after the tragedy of 9/11 and the appalling loss of life and blow to American prestige. We are there because enormous profits are yielded to armaments manufacturers, and to contractors of services to the military, and because a shadowy enemy, a perpetual threat, and inducing paranoia in the population have always been a prime recourse of failing regimes.

Britain is there, and the coalition is there because Europe does not yet have the cohesion to stand up to a flawed American foreign policy on the Middle East and the Israel/Palestine question. We are there because Pakistan worries us deeply, because it is an unstable ally with a nuclear capacity, with a religion and a culture the West has never begun to understand, and it, together with Israel, forces us to recognise the weaknesses of the West's self-serving nuclear policy - committed to retaining its own weapons of mass destruction while engaged in a vain attempt to stop others from following the same route.

The vacuum at the heart of Brown's position yesterday was starkly exposed by the threat to pull out if the Karzai regime did not root out corruption. Leaving aside the inconvenient fact that a significant proportion of the corruption is induced by the activities of foreign contractors, something made clear in an aside by a commentator from the region last night, what this says in effect is this -

"We are are here to prevent Afghanistan from being a seed bed for attacks on Britain, but if you - the 'democratic' puppet government that we have put in place - don't behave, we will abandon the whole misconceived enterprise and let the region revert to where it was before, thereby allowing the threat to Britain re-establish its potency."

Brown - and Britain's - behaviour over Afghanistan reminds me of the behaviour of directors and senior managers in a private company or large public enterprise who have mistakenly committed themselves to a project or policy that is manifestly going to fail. A marked distaste for re-examining the fundamental premises of the enterprise emerges, and a growing hostility to critics however rational.

The old accountant's motto, that sunk costs are irrelevant in reviewing a flawed project, is speedily abandoned, and the accrued costs to date are used as a justification for continuing.

It's like the gambler's fallacy at roulette - that if you keep doubling your bets, you must win eventually, a fallacy that ignores the sum of what has already been lost, ignores the possibility to long runs of bad luck, and and ignores the exponential growth in losses of doubling up.

Those opposed to the lunatic project are increasingly characterised as enemies, not as loyal employees trying to pull their company back from disaster.

When the Emperor has no clothes, who will speak out, except the naive child?

I am also reminded of a fable recounted by an American academic (I have forgotten his name) to illustrate this dilemma.

THE PEANUT STORY
The Chairman of a giant company calls in his favourite guru, a management consultant, and tells him of a problem he is facing.

"Gerry," he says to the consultant "I've got a big problem in the Minnesota plant, the one now devoted to developing a process to make high-octane jet fuel out of peanut oil ..."

"Fascinating! Can that really be done?" asks the consultant, Gerry.

"Hell, no! It's impossible - initially we thought it might have a chance, but it's been evident for years now that it can't. We're sinking millions of dollars into it, and it's doomed."

"Why not pull the plug on it, Glenn?"

Glenn the CEO, looks uncomfortable. "Well, you see, Gerry, it's like this - the plant director in Minnesota, Charlie, has committed his whole reputation to this project, and I just can't bring myself to pull the plug on it, because I'd be pulling the plug on his whole career. I just tell him to hang in there - that he can do it. Get down there, Gerry - see if you can talk some sense into him..."

Gerry arrives at the Minnesota plant, and is greeted by Charlie, the plant director.

"I guess I know why you're here, Gerry. It's about the big project - the peanut oil project."

Gerry nods. "I understand you're working on a process to make high-octane jet fuel from peanut oil, Charlie. Can than really be done?"

"Hell, no, " says Charlie ruefully, "but I can't pull the plug on it for two reasons. One, the CEO, Glenn, is totally committed to it, and when he comes down here he says 'Hang in there, Charlie - you can do it.' And my research director, Joe, has committed his whole reputation to this godammed project, and I just can't bring myself to destroy his career. Have a word with him, Gerry - maybe he'll take it from an outsider."

So Gerry meets Joe, and the pattern repeats itself. Joe knows the project is doomed, but it's the CEO's baby, it mustn't be questioned, and Charlie, his boss keeps telling him he can do and to hang in there.

The pattern repeats all the way down the management pyramid, except in the lower echelons, there is a growing contempt for those above them for their pursuit of a manifestly impossible objective.



This consultant's fable is playing out as a nightmare in our world, except the price is not only being paid in money - it is being paid in lives - in blood.

Call a halt, now.