Tag Archives: Owen Jones

Don’t blame rising inequality on technological change

April 8, 2015MusingsArticle, Austerity, Business, Comment, Comment & debate, Economics, General election 2015, Main section, Opinion, Owen Jones, Politics, Social exclusion, Society, The Guardiandiana Stone

We all know this to be true, but nobody is going to do anything about it so it will only get worse as time passes.

This article titled “Don’t blame rising inequality on technological change” was written by Owen Jones, for The Guardian on Wednesday 8th April 2015 06.30 UTC

“There is no alternative.” It is the slogan, battle cry and sneer of our era. It is ever present in this general election, like a police sentinel guarding a sacred political consensus, batoning anyone who deviates from received wisdom. The fortunes of Britain’s richest 1,000 can double in a period of economic trauma while hundreds of thousands depend on charities to meet that most basic human need, food. A proposed mansion tax levied on a tiny fraction of the population is met with accusations of cruelty while predominantly poor disabled Britons are compelled to shell out money they don’t have because they are deemed to have a spare bedroom, all in order to balance the nation’s books. More than 400 people can be paid over £1m at one business alone, Barclays Bank, when the whole country of Japan has fewer than 300 executives paid that amount. Why? Because there is no alternative: either policies are pursued that guarantee the concentration of wealth and power in the bank accounts of a tiny elite, or the rich will flee and the economy will collapse.

Britain’s booming elite is soaked with triumphalism. It believes its traditional enemies – principally a trade union movement and political left with a coherent ideology and mass following – have been seen off. This elite is flattered, comforted and protected by an ideology that equates the perpetual enrichment of the wealthy with the wellbeing of the nation, promoted by a media owned by its own kind, an academy largely emptied of intellectual dissidents, and a network of thinktanks kept afloat by corporate and well-to-do private individuals. Any puncture, however small, to this suffocating triumphalism is welcome: to those of us who reject the status quo, it is like coming up for air.

Professor Anthony Atkinson is a pioneer of the study of the economics of poverty and inequality. His latest work, Inequality: What can be done?, is an uncomfortable affront to our reigning triumphalists. His premise is straightforward: inequality is not unavoidable, a fact of life like the weather, but the product of conscious human behaviour. The explosion of inequality as a result of intentional policy decisions has been rather spectacular. Take the US, which became steadily more equal from the end of the second world war to the late 1970s. By 2012, the top 1% had more than doubled the share of national income they enjoyed in 1979, and now receive a fifth of gross US income.

In our own country, the share of gross income belonging to the richest 1% after the first world war was 19%; it had fallen to 6% by 1979, and has since more than doubled. Inequality actually rose twice as much in Thatcher’s Britain as it did in the US, albeit from a significantly lower base.

Atkinson identifies the usual culprits: globalisation, in which the wealthy can easily pick and choose nations most favourable to their bank balances; rapid technological change, which has stripped away middle-income secure jobs; the explosion of a rapacious financial sector; a shift in attitude to high pay; the hobbling of trade unions, once a formidable counterweight to wealth being sucked to the top; and the erosion of redistribution based on progressive taxation.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Take the explosion in technology. In Britain, we’ve seen the rise of an “hourglass economy”, with professional middle-class jobs at the top (often reserved for the pampered through unpaid internships and expensive post-graduate qualifications) and insecure, low-paid service-sector jobs at the bottom. Many middle-income skilled jobs have been lost, often on the basis that machines can perform such labour more cheaply and efficiently. A recent study suggested that 10m jobs, or a third of all those in Britain, could be wiped out because of new technology and computers.

But Atkinson refutes the idea that technological change is “determined by the gods”: it is the result of decisions taken by scientists, investors, governments, consumers and others. Much of research and development happens in the public sector, as the economist Mariana Mazzucato has underlined in her book The Entrepreneurial State. If you’re reading this column on an iPhone, thank the state for its touchscreen technology, GPS and Siri. So why doesn’t the state take more of an active role in directing technological change so it benefits all? Look at Germany, which rather than opting for a hands-off approach promoted renewable energy industries, both confronting the climate change crisis and avoiding the rotting away of decent jobs seen in this country.

Some of Atkinson’s proposals are heresy in an era like our own. He suggests raising the top rate of tax to 65% – casting a cynical eye over studies that claim this is counterproductive when it comes to revenues – and calls wisely for proper crackdowns on tax avoidance. Partly it comes down to fairness for the professor: the government’s universal credit scheme aims to cut the marginal tax rate on the poor to 65%. If that’s good enough for those scraping by, why not for those richer than ever before?

In other European countries, it is taken as read that trade unions have a role in drafting social security legislation – why not here too? Another radical but attractive proposal is to grant all citizens an inheritance payment on reaching adulthood, funded by a 2% tax on personal wealth. With the return to precarious employment, the state could guarantee work, with a minimum wage that actually meets people’s living costs. A maximum pay ratio in businesses would stop shamelessly self-interested CEOs paying limitless salaries and bonuses while their cleaners languish on poverty wages.

These are the sort of proposals that are banished from the media-defined mainstream of the election debate. The parameters of acceptable political conversation are, after all, heavily policed: even a modest challenge to continually stuffing the mouths of the richest with gold is ignored, ridiculed or demonised.

We need a whole new way of thinking. The nation’s wealth is not the product of the genius of a few canny entrepreneurs. It is a collective endeavour, the product of the labour of millions and the support of the state. The hospital cleaner, the road-builder, the teacher training up both workers and the entrepreneurs of the future: all help generate wealth. The state builds and maintains the infrastructure, funds the research, educates the nation, protects property and tops up low wages. So much of our collectively produced wealth should not be locked away in a few bank accounts. The triumphalists will tell us that there is no other way. They are wrong, and it’s about time we called their bluff.

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I was Paloma Faith’s support act – but politics can’t reach the parts music can

April 1, 2015MusingsArticle, Comment, Comment & debate, Culture, Main section, Music, Opinion, Owen Jones, Paloma Faith, Protest, The Guardian, World newsdiana Stone

Nope sadly it can’t anymore: Perhaps it is just apathy? Or is everybody really happy about the way things are now?

This article titled “I was Paloma Faith’s support act – but politics can’t reach the parts music can” was written by Owen Jones, for The Guardian on Wednesday 1st April 2015 06.00 UTC

Music can inspire, move, even devastate, like few cultural forms. Its functions and roles differ: making that morning jogor an afternoon of exam revision bearable, the backdrop to millions of unforgettable nights out, the comfort blanket after the traumatic end of a relationship.

Music can date our lives like the rings of a tree trunk. We sometimes listen to a song because it conjures up a period of our lives. And because of its raw emotional power, music has the potential to make us contemplate social injustice more effectively than any column the likes of me can churn out. Yet this function has been neglected – partly by circumstance, partly by conspiracy.

When I told friends or acquaintances that I was going to be the Brit award-winning singer Paloma Faith’s support act, the response was a mixture of bafflement and concern that either my career or life was going to end in a volley of bottles at London’s O2 arena. I shared their nerves, though comforted myself with the positive response I received when I took to the stage at Glastonbury to rail against injustice and nuclear weapons in 2013. This audience would be rather different, it was pointed out. Faith was taking a risk, too, but her courage and strength inspired me. The daughter of a Spanish immigrant, fed up with the scapegoating of those at the bottom and the failure to hold those at the top to account, concerned that a disillusioned electorate would not use their hard-won democratic rights, she wanted to find new ways to engage her fans. But here’s what moved me: she wanted to rebuild a link between music and politics that was once strong, but which has been heavily eroded.

Politics and music once blossomed. When the US was convulsed by struggles over civil rights and the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 1970s, music reflected many of the contemporary traumas. Marvin Gaye’s anguish at the social ills of the era was voiced in songs such as What’s Going On. “Vietnam, police brutality, social conditions, a lot of stuff,” he said at the time. “With the world exploding around me, how am I supposed to keep singing love songs?” I remember singing Pete Seeger’s pained anti-war anthem Where Have All the Flowers Gone at primary school; little did I know how he and other politicised musicians such as Paul Robeson were hounded and persecuted by the McCarthyites for speaking out.

There was Bob Dylan, of course, capturing the upsurge in challenges to the US social order in 1964 with The Times they are a-Changin’. He was consciously allied to the insurgent struggles for emancipation, saying later: “The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time.” The blue-collar hero Bruce Springsteen was radicalised by Ronald Reagan, and – rather like Paloma Faith – railed against the demonisation of immigrants. Hip-hop is often portrayed as corrupted by hyper-commercialism and rampant individualism, but Public Enemy incited rebellion among US youth in the late 1980s.

The marriage of music and struggles against an unjust status quo is a global phenomenon, of course. Chile’s Victor Jara – Latin America’s very own Bob Dylan – was part of the movement that culminated in Salvador Allende’s election. Shot dead by August Pinochet’s henchmen, he penned a poem in his final hours: “Silence and screams are the end of my song”. From the struggle against Nigeria’s military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, Fela Kuti founded the entire musical genre of Afrobeat. As if to underline the potentially subversive power of music, the Russian authorities had Pussy Riot locked up in 2012 for singing against Putinism in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

And then there’s the political music traditions of Britain too, of course. When Thatcherism stripped industry from swaths of the country, entire communities were left without work or hope. With despair growing, no wonder the Specials’ Ghost Town resonated in 1981. Red Wedge brought together musicians united against Thatcherism, including Billy Bragg, Madness and Paul Weller.

Yes, politicised musicians are still there, but all too often they are deprived of a mainstream platform. What happened? It’s complex, certainly. Like much of the media and popular culture generally, barriers have been erected that prevent those from non-privileged backgrounds from making it. From acting to journalism to music, it is those who can afford to live off the bank of Mum and Dad who are favoured: everything from the housing crisis to the benefit sanctioning regime help see off musical acts with limited financial means. The accelerated commercialisation of music hasn’t helped either: the big businesses dominating mainstream music are hardly sympathetic when it comes to musicians sticking it to the man. There’s fear: speak out, and the Daily Mail will retaliate with a series of hatchet-jobs on your personal life. And then there’s the general decline of the left: all those defeats under Thatcherism, the disappointments of the New Labour era, the unabashed free-market triumphalism of the post-Cold War era.

No era lasts forever, of course. That celebrities such as Paloma Faith, Russell Brand and Michael Sheen are speaking out about politics is symptomatic of a broader trend. There is a rich seam of disillusionment with Britain’s current social order, and it occasionally bubbles to the surface. It is often directionless, lacking a coherent alternative in which to invest hope and truth, and frequently contradictory. But it is there all the same.

The current election campaign will be marked by character assassinations, while the Britain of food banks, zero-hours, in-work poverty, housing crisis, job insecurity and young people facing a future bleaker than their parents will not be given the hearing it deserves. When I supported Paloma, no bottles were thrown: the crowd (some who I’m sure were pretty bemused) listened politely and cheered me at the end, no doubt with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Let’s be honest, though; even well-intentioned commentators and politicians fail to stir popular emotions about the great causes of our time. Music, though, can reach us where modern formal politics often does not: our hearts. Love and loss always have their place in music. But there are other traditions, too, and maybe our musicians should start rediscovering them.

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