Maurice Saatchi is wrong

Okay, I'm no expert. I state that right at the beginning because although I have opinions, I don't pretend that they hold much weight.

The piece by Maurice Saatchi in the FT (here) needs to be answered; as I'm sure it will be by people with more knowledge and better arguments than me, but I'm going to add my two pennyworth anyway.

Let's start with the first sentence: 'Everyone wants to be immortal'. Well, not me. I'm quite looking forward to the grave - a bit of peace and quiet. What's more important, a good Christian like Margaret Thatcher would not doubt realise that wanting fame is the worst way to get into heaven. Me? I'm a good old-fashioned atheist, so I have no fear of death and none of the absurd prejudices that Christians carry around with them. What an arrogant way for Saatchi to begin an article! - by assuming he knows the minds of every person who has ever and will ever exist!

So, Thatcher's values are timeless and eternal! Anyone can give a clear idea of what she stood for? Well, yes: greed. That just about sums it up! Greed and not caring about others. Not very Christian, is it? Okay, so Thatcher cares for others - let's give her the benefit of the doubt on this one. But let's be clear about something else: when the Tory era came to an end in the 90's, Britain was not a fair society. People did not consider themselves 'free'. People did not mostly consider themselves well off.

The reason is simple: what Torries gave with one hand, they took away with the other. Now, I'm too young to remember the politics and economics of the 70's - or much about the 80's in any depth. But I did go to school with people whose fathers were out of work due to closing collieries. They were not free. They were not better off. They were mostly confused and depressed. Thatcher did nothing for these people. Now, I'm not a socialist. I don't think that people should be paid to do nothing or to produce something that isn't worth the effort. But there is good coal in those mines. They would have been cost-effective but for the stubbornness of the unions on one hand and the government on the other. The polarisation that the Torries effected was as much to blame as the pig-headedness of the NUM. This wouldn't matter a jot if it weren't that there were real people involved. Ruined societies. Ruined lives. Ruined families.

'Britain can be great again'. Again, let me be clear: if there is one prejudice I despise above all others it is nationalism. That vainglorious trumpeting and banging of a hollow drum. Trying to pretend that British people are 'better' than any other people is sickening and is, in my book, a misdemeanour against humanity.

Lower taxes. Not low taxes: lower taxes. In other words a tax system which aims always at lowering taxes. Think about that: schools, hospitals, police, fire service always getting less money. Okay, the right argue that due to wealth creation the government will get more money in anyway. Well, that can work up to a point, but it is foolish to think that the economy will always grow and tax revenues will always increase. They appeared to do so during the Thatcher period for the simple reason that they destroyed manufacturing and so made many people unemployed and at the same time reduced government spending so that teachers and nurses (in particular) were underpaid. Of course, they paid the police well, because they needed the police on the government's side. As the economy recovered after the destruction of many core industries, tax revenues increased. But let's be clear: tax revenues increased because unemployment was falling - unemployment that the Torries had created. A better approach would have been to reduce over-employment in these industries over many years - an evolution rather than a revolution. But the Torries only cared about cold figures and assumed that their economic theories were sound.

This, for me, is the coup de grace for Thatcherism: that as the wealthy get wealthier, the poorer get wealthier too, albeit not at the same rate. The 'trickle-down' effect - that wealth will trickle down from the rich to the poor. This inevitably means a widening gap between rich and poor. This doesn't in itself worry me. I don't care that rich people are rich. I always feel very uncomfortable around rich people, but I'm not jealous of them - I don't want to be in their shoes. For me, I don't find happiness in comparing myself financially or materialistically with others. What does matter is how the general population behaves with a widening wealth gap. The only point to free-market Thatcherism is that people should be happier. But they are not. Happiness in the UK is very low. People were much happier in the 70's than they are now. The key to this seems to be that people are aspirational when it comes to material things, but not when it comes to what they give back. Free market philosophies encourages people think about their own self-interest, and makes them compare what they have with people they can never catch up with.

And so, in the City, we hear people complaining about the 50% tax rate. It's for people who earn over £150,000 per year. Remember: these are the people who got us into this financial mess. The City was allowed to do what it does because it was supposed it knew what it was doing. The huge salaries were justified on the basis that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Well, it seems we got very high earning monkeys: they messed things up good and proper; then they complain that they have to pay! They say they'll all go abroad. Good! Let someone else give them their gold-plated bananas. This country needs to concentrate on creating wealth with the majority of its population, not a privileged minority.

Lower taxes are good 'for moral reasons'. What complete rubbish! The idea that having a bit more money gives you more choice! Well, let me be frank: if you're lucky enough never to need the help of the state, then you may be able to buy a bigger car or a new kitchen or a plasma-screen television. But if you happen to lose your job, your house, your car - in fact everything - then you'll find very little morality in Thatcher's small state. A widening wealth gap is not a moral vision: it is a sickening prospect that does no favours for the children of the wealthy nor for the children of the poor. Not being poor does bring obvious benefits, but it does not follow that the richer you are, the freer you are.

It's really amazing how many stupid prejudices lie in people's morality! What is quite clear is that having wealth as a goal is not a route to happiness.

"But today, those principles of capitalism are under question." Saatchi is making a case for the moral weight of Thatcherism. The problem is, there is no moral weight. It seems to me that the lone thing that Thatcherism brought to this country was a realisation that we cannot ignore economic certainties. You cannot fight inflation by generating money. You cannot ignore government debt. In other words, ignoring the obvious will not get you out of a hole. Let's be clear, though: the free market capitalism of which Saatchi is so proud should be in question, because they themselves ignore quite obvious facts. Firstly, the free market is an ideal, not a fact. It is a concept - markets are never free: they are always influenced by governments, large corporations, national protectionism - remember, even George W Bush was protective of the US steel industry. The free market does not exist. Secondly, inequitable societies are unhappy societies and Thatcherism inevitably creates inequitable societies. As the wealth gap increases, as it must do if you want to generate wealth from the rich, the poor compare themselves not with how they were 10 years earlier, but with the unattainable levels of wealth they see others have. Thatcherites like to think that they support people getting what they deserve - if you work hard, you will get your financial reward. However, the children of those who are wealthy have not worked hard. Those who inherited wealth have done absolutely nothing to earn their wealth. This creates the complete opposite of what Thatcherites seem to intend. What's more, the poor are even poorer in comparison with the rich.

The thing is: asset prices are not fixed. If the wealth of the nation rises, then the cost of a house will rise. If the wealth of the nation rises inequitably, then the cost of larger houses will rise at a larger pace than smaller ones. What's more, some regions will have much higher house prices than others. We have reached the stage in this country where the average wage is woefully insufficient to buy an average priced house. People in the north cannot sell a house and buy one in the south. Therefore, moving from a poorer area to a richer one brings with it a fall in living standards - but that may be all someone can do in order to get a job. In principle, the free market should create jobs in poorer parts of Britain - and yet that seems not be happening. Job and wealth creation is continuing in the South East to the detriment of the rest of the country.

What is needed is not a 'left' and a 'right', but a pragmatic view. A small state is not a good goal in itself. The size of the state needs to be correct for what it wants to do. A large state, therefore, is also not a good goal since it consumes too many taxes. Smaller taxes is not a good goal: what is required is sufficient taxation to do the will of parliament and to fund whatever sized state is required. Wealth should not be a goal because wealth does not produce freedom or happiness as Thatcher stated. A better goal would be reducing poverty. Inequality is not a good goal: this does no-one any favours long-term: economic equality is a much better goal.

My humble conclusion is: don't listen to those who see Thatcher as bringing solutions. Similarly, don't imagine that a class war drives the politics and economics of this country. What people are talking about when they question the free market is a million miles away from the pre-Thatcher period. In fact, when anyone uses old, politically-motivated words to discuss where we are and where we should be, imagine that they are all wrong: we need new words and new ways of thinking - not ones that ignore the past, but ones that build on it to create a new capitalist future: one that is more equitable, more self-aware and more self-critical.

Feminist Wedding?

Here's a link to an article by a feminist who is getting married.

She seems very nice and sensible, but I have a couple of things that I'd like to say to her.

Firstly, I really hate the idea that deciding on how roles are split in a relationship is a 'feminist' idea. Okay, I can see how feminist thinking would need a different split in a relationship to the traditional one. But every relationship is different. Only relationships which aren't very deep are 'traditional'. My wife and I share the housework. I didn't expect her to do more than me. I don't think of this as 'feminist'. It's just how we do things. The point is: it doesn't need a label - it's just you. My wife does think of herself as a feminist. But really this just means that she doesn't want to be a bored housewife.

Secondly, that whole thing about weddings is a bit old-fashioned. It seems to me that the biggest problem you have is not with the notion of marriage but with the notion of a Christian marriage; the answer to which is simple: don't have a Christian wedding.

My wife and I had a humanist wedding. We got to decide exactly what we wanted in the ceremony. There was no 'giving away' of the bride. The structure of the wedding still had some of the traditional aspects: the bride dressed in white coming down the isle; readings, albeit secular ones; but that was what we wanted. We pillaged tradition for the things we liked.

You cannot ignore the fact that one of you is male and one female. To do so would represent an absurd blindness to a biological fact. Men and women are different. That's not to say that either is 'better' on the whole. Men tend to be stronger than women, women tend to be better at remembering and organising than men. It's not universal, but it's not imposed by culture either: it's biological.

What's more, you can never ignore the culture you were brought up in. Without culture, everything is meaningless. Your attitude to cultural aspects will help morph it into something new - and this is where it is important to have an attitude; but don't imagine that you will never be a cultural stereotype. All you can do is create your own idea of a stereotype

Muck Spreading

This comment seems typical of the ones I've read today about the BBC's (and Robert Peston's in particular) response to the news that George Osbourne may have been more interested than he should have been in receiving donations for the Conservative Party from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

I am more than a little dismayed at the public's response. To me it seems important that all politicians are investigated for their probity, especially if they are seeking to become Chancellor of the Exchequor, as George Osbourne is. However, what dismays me most of all is the idea that the BBC is launching its own campaign to smear George Osbourne because they are naturally left-wing.

It seems to me that the BBC is quite right in pursuing the direction that they are. The BBC has shown that it is not adverse to making life difficult for the government. Many heavyweight Labour politicians have had to resign because of investigations by the press (Peter Mandelson twice); nor did the BBC show any favour towards the government over decisions to invade Iraq, much to its own cost.

And now, people are saying that the BBC is biased towards the government because it dares to suggest that George Osbourne has some very serious questions to answer.

It is important to recognise this as a sign that there may be something in these accusations after all. Rubbishing the reporter of a piece of news is a good way to suggest that the news has no substance without having to prove it. Hopefully the BBC will re-double its efforts to show one way or another whether George Osbourne has a serious case to answer.

Well, he does. At the very least, George Osbourne has shown a huge error of judgement. It is clear that he has seriously annoyed Nat Rothschild, who is not known as a supporter of New Labour and who, therefore, must have his own reasons for wanting to accuse George Osbourne. According to Robert Peston, it is because he feels that George Osbourne took advantage of his (Nat's) hospitality by encouraging newspaper reports that embarrass two other of Nat's friends, Oleg Deripaska and Peter Mandelson. In other words, George Osbourne has politicked amongst friends and has been rebuked in a very public forum.

Bizarrely, most people seem to blame Peter Mandelson for this. It seems that Peter can be blamed for everything.

It should be noted that George Osbourne is not immune from making unfounded accusations of his own.

Maybe George Osbourne has simply been naïve. The Tories maybe need to learn that they cannot continually throw mud at the government without two things happening: firstly, people will get fed up with the amount of mud that sticks to politicians - and not just Labour ones; and secondly, some of the mud will splatter themselves too. What's more, for those of us who are not affiliated with the right or the left, the Tories' constant barrage of some founded and some unfounded criticisms of Gordon Brown undermine the very good points that they do occasionally make, such as that the government borrowed too much when times were good; and that they allowed debt levels to get too high. (The one thing I do not believe is that the Tories would have been any different, since it was under Thatcherism that the seed of unregulated credit markets was sown, and further regulating markets is not a Tory policy).

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

Can humanity be redeemed?

I have changed.

In the very heart of my being, I am a different person.

The way I define myself; the way I define humanity: it is all changed utterly; but there is no beauty sufficient to redeem humanity for me. I can see no hope for humanity.

Yesterday on the radio I heard the account of Zawadi Mongane, a young woman from the Congo, who was forced to hang her own baby by rebel soldiers after watching them butcher other villagers, including her brother and her two oldest children.

No person living or dead can do enough to assuage that crime. I feel guilt and utter shame that fellow human beings could perpetrate such a crime.

Reckless, thoughtless selfishness seems to be the norm for people. I have known this for a long time. Never before now have I understood the depths of depravity that human beings can sink to. Despite the vast works of art, literature and history that exist dedicated to the holocaust, it somehow never quite struck home. Maybe because it was an historical act - an act outside my lifetime - and also maybe because of the political manipulation that so often goes hand-in-hand with holocaust accounts; and maybe also because the descendants of the victims of that holocaust are intent on becoming aggressors and criminals in their own right in the way they treat the Palestinian people inside and outside Israel. For them, it was not a crime against humanity, but a crime against Judaism.

Can anything redeem humanity from this crime against Zawadi Mongane? It seems to me that if every human being alive and yet to come were to do nothing but good, selfless acts for all eternity, it would be insufficient.

We are men of filth.

Economic Meltdown

The last few weeks have tested the greatest economic minds to their limits. What chance my feeble one to make any sense of it all?

I am beginning to come to a few conclusions, however. Firstly, it is hard to see how even the most right-wing, laissez-faire economics advocate can maintain such a position given recent happenings in world economics. George Bush's government is having to spend what might end up being a trillion dollars of taxpayers' money to shore up the US economy, on which the world relies. Henry Paulson, US Treasury Secretary, former Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, that is to say, arch-capitalist extraordinaire, is the architect of the plan.

If you were to suggest giving away $3,000 per head of US population to rich bankers, paid for by taxation, people would say you were mad. But that is exactly what Henry Paulson is suggesting. Not only is the US government planning to take on all of the Toxic Debt, they are planning on doing so in such a way that is highly favourable to the owners of that debt. So favourable, in fact, that it is in the interest of a bank that has dealings in the US to have such debt, since they will make a profit on it.

The only justification (and it is a scant one, in my opinion) for large profits for banks and bankers is the level of risk. Risk that they could lose all of their capital. But where is the risk if the US government bails out the banks? Where is the risk to the bankers' personal wealth?

If I were a US taxpayer, I would want to know where my $3,000 is going, how it will help me, and how it can be used to my benefit. I would also want to know how the money was going to be clawed back from rich bankers who are destroying the world economy by their greed.

I would want to know what mechanisms are going to be put in place to ensure that large financial institutions become incapable of making vast profits from what is essentially defrauding Joe Public.

I would want to know how the government was going to chase those who made immoral cash from the financial system to ensure that no-one profited personally from this debacle.

I, for one, will never be able to look at an investment banker again without scorn and hatred. No-one has a right to be rich. No-one deserves to be rich. Capitalism is not meritocratic. The rich are rich at the cost to the poor.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-capitalist; but neither do I believe capitalism is self-justifying; nor that those who are at the heart of it are the most worthy of the wealth that is generated.

Google Chrome

So, Google have released their own browser. The headlines are:

1. It's fast! Much faster for JavaScript-heavy sites like Google Mail.
2. It uses process partitioning for security between browser tabs. This also helps with speed issues, since each tab has its own execution threads. The JavaScript in one tab cannot hog the processor and prevent another tab from becoming responsive.
3. It takes some of the best ideas from browsers like Opera and Firefox to create a nice user experience.

The main reason for Google releasing their own browser is to promote the use of the web applications that Google itself creates. The browser is not just a way of looking at online content: it is also a way of delivering critical applications that we use everyday, such as email, word processing and spreadsheets. By making the browser more stable, they've made the delivery of web applications for critical tasks a more palatable proposition.

By promoting Google Gears (which seems to be behind the new browser), Google are also moving towards an offline web application world. If you use Google Docs and you don't have internet access, you can still use Google Docs! The server where Google Docs is hosted is essentially just a central repository that the web application can be updated from and can (if required) store documents on; but it is not required to be available to use Google Docs, since documents you create can also be stored locally.

When you add Google's Chrome browser, the facilities that Google Gears provides and the speed gains in JavaScript execution together, what you get is a very attractive platform on which to write Rich Internet Applications, without needing the Flash or Java plugins.

I haven't had time to play with Google's GWT. The idea is a very cool one to a Java / web developer like me: write Java code and deploy it on the browser. The key, though, is development and design tools. If Google want to compete in the RIA world, they need to provide a simple, intuitive development environment, like Flex Builder (but hopefully better). The would give Google the upper hand over Microsoft, Adobe and Java in terms of delivering applications via the browser.

They've got a long way to go yet!

Wealth and Poverty

Two things have prompted me to write this blog entry.

Firstly, a recent programme on the BBC which showed a handful of British twenty-somethings who were interested in or involved in the clothing industry being taken to India to learn about the clothes trade there. They were all of them very middle class and well off, even by British standards. The short series showed them working firstly in an high-end factory which makes clothes for some of the expensive labels on the high street. They all, except one, found the sewing work too difficult, either because it was beyond them technically or because they were too slow (despite the arrogance of the men who initially thought the work too easy). They found the conditions very difficult - most notably due to the discipline: no talking, no walking around; just concentrating on the work at hand to ensure a profitable throughput of work. These middle-class youngsters couldn't bare normal factory working conditions. The group was taken to work at other locations too: picking cotton from the fields (very low paid, back-breaking work - and the programme didn't discuss the high levels of cancer-causing pesticide used); working in a cotton processing plant; and, finally, working in slum conditions in a back-street factory where they were expected to sleep in the same room they were working in. The programee was a real eye-opener in terms of showing the conditions Indian workers suffer in order to provide us with cheap clothing.

The second is the state of the world and British economies. The British economy has had low inflation for the last ten years. It appears that this is in large partly due to cheap imports from India and China. Clothes are no more expensive now than they were 10 years ago. This has helped keep inflation down, enabling the Bank of England to keep interest rates low, which stimulates growth in the economy. When clothes manufacturing jobs moved from Britain to India, it was thought that it was good in terms of developing a third world economy. Britain would get cheap imports and India would be able to provide a living for more of its most poor. The manufacturing jobs lost in Britain would be replaced by higher-paid, more specialised jobs (call centres, for example).

That was the theory. In terms of the British economy, it has worked for the last ten years. But at what cost? Our supermarkets have squeezed suppliers until the poorest paid workers in India are poorer still. Capital is squeezing labour across international boundaries - and what comeback has the Indian worker to British supermarkets? The UK government does not represent Indian workers. Democracy is toothless across country boundaries.

With the economy becoming more challenging, what will be the outcome for the poorest in our global economy? To what extent can we squeeze more labour for less expenditure when food prices are rising globally and the poorest are worst hit by this? It seems to me that the wealth sinks of our economy will be the first to suffer: house prices, car sales, electronic gadgets; and along with these, the poorest too, causing hunger, suffering, disease without ability to pay for basic healthcare or clean water.

I will leave it to the reader to decide who suffers most.