We’re told that the trouble began last Saturday night 6th August. According to a BBC report, about 300 people gathered outside a police station that night and “demanded justice”. Their protest quickly spiralled out of control.

The justice the crowd were demanding followed the killing by police of a young black man, Mark Duggan. Details of the killing are sketchy, to say the least; but according to the first report issued by the “Independent” Police Complaints Commission there is no evidence to suggest that Mr Duggan shot at the police. However, a starter’s pistol that had been converted to fire live rounds was supposedly discovered near his body.

Although it seems that Mr Duggan had been involved with local gangs, his family and friends strongly refute the suggestion that he is likely to have become involved in a shoot-out with armed police; and according to the Guardian, although he had previously been held on remand, he had never before been convicted of any crime. The inquest into the shooting is scheduled for December; but if numerous previous inquests into the actions of the police are anything to go by (Stephen Lawrence, Jean Charles De Menezes, Bloody Sunday, Guildford Four, Birmingham Six, for example), anyone expecting justice would be well advised not to hold their breath.

The media coverage of the current urban unrest is unsurprisingly one-sided. Our TV screens have shown hours of coverage of those whose property has been damaged, stolen or destroyed. Many of these people are understandably angry and scared. Many others have been shrill in their demands for tougher policing, and there have been calls to use the army. All of our trusted leaders are unsurprisingly unanimous in their condemnation of the rioters, and their support of the police. We’ve heard stiff-lipped politicians and steely-eyed chief constables angrily asserting there cannot be any possible justification for the violence, and firmly promising the full retribution of the law. In the media’s ceaseless desire to provide “balanced” reporting, we’ve even seen numerous young people, many of whom are black, stridently condemning the trouble – although one or two have alluded to police oppression. We’ve seen dozens of angst-ridden commentators with puzzled frowns asking “why do they do it?” (which reminded me of George W Bush famously asking “why do they hate us?” in his apparent bewilderment at the Moslem world’s dissatisfaction with the outrages perpetrated against it by Bush’s government).

I don’t presume to speak for a single rioter. No doubt there are some who are opportunist small-time criminals. However, if one tries to take a reasonably objective view of today’s political landscape in Britain, it’s pretty difficult not to believe that most of the responsibility for the rioting lies in exactly the same place as with all civil unrest of this kind since the beginning of “civilisation”: our trusted leaders.

1. Over the last thirty-odd years our trusted leaders have killed-off British manufacturing – the primary source of the nation’s wealth. They have also colluded with international banksters, trans-national corporations and foreign governments to sell-off Britain’s publicly owned infrastructure: energy and water supplies, communications and transport. Then they sold off essential public services such as health and education. They indebted the nation’s future generation to the tune of hundreds of billions (possibly trillions) of pounds with their nefarious Private Finance Initiatives. Throughout all this a very tiny handful of people have become unbelievably wealthy, whilst the vast majority of Britons have seen their wages decline, or watch their jobs disappear altogether. When they can find employment (which is not an easy thing to do) the vast majority of young Britons must now work longer hours for less money and in worse conditions than their parents did. They cannot hope to retire at the same age as their grandparents did, and they cannot hope to receive as good a pension as their grandparents had.

There might be cause for a young person to feel a little discontent with that situation.

2. Britain looks more and more like a police state than it has done since the Civil War. The police who, until not very long ago took pride in walking the streets carrying nothing more dangerous than a short truncheon and a pair of handcuffs – even when the nation was at war, now strut around in suits of armour with a small arsenal of various lethal weapons at their fingertips. They can, and do, imprison people without charge for up to two weeks. It’s impossible for people to use an airport without being subjected to rigorous, intrusive, and perfectly ridiculous, “security” checks (a direct consequence of our trusted leaders’ repulsive foreign policies); and we routinely send our young people off to distant countries dressed up as soldiers of one kind or another where they are ordered to commit acts which, if any form of real international justice existed, would undoubtedly be condemned as war crimes.

There might be cause for a young person to feel a little discontent with that situation.

3. Then, of course there is the killing of Mr Duggan itself – the supposed trigger of the current unrest. Directly pertinent to the police state which Britain has become, the killing of this young man is indicative of the total impunity with which the police believe they can act. Violent police raids are a routine daily occurrence in underprivileged neighbourhoods throughout the UK. The raids are nearly always destructive, and terrifying, and often prove utterly fruitless. And numerous completely innocent people have been killed or wounded by the police, with the subsequent “inquiries” routinely exonerating the perpetrators.

There might be cause for a young person to feel a little discontent with that situation.

Whilst it’s most probable that none of these factors are consciously passing through the mind of some young person as he loots a store or sets fire to it, it’s equally probable that at least one of these reasons explain the daily living conditions of that young person. So far we haven’t seen a lot of rioting in the streets of South Kensington or Chelsea say, or any of the leafy suburbs or gated communities where the sons and daughters of politicians, banksters, corporate executives, lawyers and company accountants while away their comfortable lives. No doubt they’re too busy studying to become the next generation of trusted leaders.

However, there might be cause for some young people to feel a little discontent with that situation.

Some might think the scandal is confined to the national papers. Not a bit of it. The Guardian’s George Monbiot reported¹ that Sir Ray Tindle, who once controlled about 230 newspapers, including such giants as the Totnes Times, ordered his editors at the outbreak of the Iraq War in 2003 “to ensure that nothing appears in your newspapers which attacks the decision to conduct the war.”

Most British newspapers have always supported war and continue to do so to this day. It’s because war is very good for business, which matters far more to the Rupert Murdochs and Ray Tindles of this world than the shattered bodies of innocent and defenceless civilians (who are seldom even counted – let alone reported).

A piece of typically shabby war-loving propaganda appeared last Friday (22 July) in the Grantham Journal. An article bearing the title “Airman Rob is helping to defend the skies over Libya” displayed a nice photograph of a pleasantly harmless-looking chap who, apart from the fact he’s wearing military uniform, could be mistaken for an accountant, or a banker. The article tells us about ‘Airman Rob’s many important duties, such as supporting construction and catering “and even medical services.” Ahhh – he sounds a bit like a social worker really, or a comic-book superhero. But curiously enough, helping to overthrow foreign governments, dispatch tens of thousands of defenceless civilians to eternity, and plunder whoever’s left behind – which is the real purpose of ‘Airman Rob’s employers – doesn’t get a mention.

The words “helping to defend the skies over Libya” in the title are almost too ridiculous to comment on; “helping to steal Libyan oil,” although only part of the story would at least have been more accurate.

No doubt Airman Rob is a thoroughly decent chap with a loving family and human weaknesses just like all the rest of us; and is quite possibly as oblivious of the cynicism of his work as Nazi concentration camp guards were seventy years ago – a natural consequence of enduring similar brainwashing; but what is the media’s excuse? What is the media’s excuse for calling the plundering and murder of innocent civilians thousands of miles away from Britain ‘defending the skies’?

A friend of mine who once worked at the Grantham Journal told me that it was editorial policy that all articles appearing in the paper should be written for Earlsfield Man (Earlsfield is the part of Grantham with the highest social deprivation). It’s the sort of thing I could imagine Rupert Murdoch or Ray Tindle saying. It’s a line of thinking that proposes that the newspaper in general and its articles in particular should be composed in such a way as to appeal to what the newspaper editors consider the dullest mind. Well, a surprising number of these purportedly dull minds know exactly what’s going on in spite of the best propaganda efforts of the media. So if more and more people are turning to foreign internet sites and the likes of Al Jazeera and Russia Today for their news it’s hardly surprising. Although these sources are, of course, also rich in propaganda at least they tell us some of the hard truths about our own government – truths our own media should be supplying.

1. See Monbiot.com, 9.11.09, ‘Champions of the Overdog.’

Like most newspapers, The Times seems pretty indifferent about its function as a propaganda tool. Presumably it feels its ancient support of plutocracy is obviously too noble to question – let alone justify. Presumably, like most newspapers, it assumes its readers are either too well-conditioned to wonder about the possibility of being deceived; or perhaps it thinks they’re just too ignorant to notice.

Consider the editorial’s sub-title once again: “China’s record shows that capitalism without democracy lends itself to corruption.”

The patronising tone of that sentence suggests several things, most of which are untrue. Firstly, it suggests that Britain is some sort of icon of perfection in the subjects of capitalism and democracy, which, of course, it is not. Then it suggests that Britain is not itself corrupt, which, of course, it is. And, of course, the fact that the planet’s leading exponent of capitalism and so-called democracy, the United States, is also the single most corrupt nation on Earth is not indicated anywhere at all in the article.

On page 41 of the same edition of The Times appears an article about the ongoing economic rape of Africa. A short piece tells the story of one Philippe Heilberg. We learn that Mr Heilberg was “a former commodity broker”, so presumably knows a thing or two about the many wonders of capitalism. A little photograph of Mr Heilberg wearing a silly red hat appears at the bottom of the page. Behind him stand two sinister-looking military types, one of whom is armed, and who, we’re told are “fighters” of one General Matip. The article tells us how Mr Heilberg, together with General Matip’s son Paulino, “signed a deal to lease 1 million acres of oil-rich land in Sudan in 2009. A follow-up deal reportedly doubled his holdings.” Mr Heilberg heads something called Jarch Management which is based in New York (the high alter of capitalism and democracy), and has on its board “former US ambassadors and spies. Its Advisory Board is a who’s who of Sudan’s warlords.” A refreshingly honest quote by Mr Heilberg appears about halfway through the article: “This is Africa,” he told Rolling Stone magazine. “The whole place is like one big mafia. I’m like a mafia head.”

It’s very convenient that The Times provides such a blatant example of its hypocritical propaganda in the same edition: it saves people like me the trouble of pointing out the many, many further examples of the links between the planet’s leading exponents of so-called capitalism and democracy, and the ancient custom of corruption. Africa hasn’t been free of the vice-like grip of the west’s so-called democracies for hundreds of years, and many of the puppet leaders installed by those western so-called democracies, monsters such as Mobutu, Abacha and Mugabe have plundered billions of dollars worth of their own impoverished people’s assets for many decades; and Africa is far from being the only example of the virtues of western-imposed so-called democracy and capitalism. From Indonesia to Brazil, via India and the Phillipines, the catalogue of corruption, aided and abetted by the west’s so-called democracies, is long and impressive.

Much of this corruption is facilitated within walking distance of The Times’ head office. “The City”, as it calls itself, is home to possibly the largest collection on the planet of people such as Mr Heilberg, specialists in the murky world of commodity trading, and other gentle arts such as off-shore finance, a euphemism if ever there was one, for the gangsterism to which Mr Heilberg openly confesses.

Given that Britain styles itself as a leading exponent of democracy, whilst nurturing and protecting some of the planet’s richest gangsters, I don’t think there’s much room for The Times to be preaching to China about its record on corruption.

“A credible alternative political prospectus is also absent from the Opposition’s critique,” the unnamed writer sneers.

The key word in that sentence is “credible”. Who gets to decide what is or is not “credible”? No doubt The Times and the government would each claim that only they have the necessary combination of wisdom and responsibility to make that judgement. They would be partially right: they do indeed have some wisdom – but only because they ensure the vast majority of the population are kept in such darkness and ignorance that true understanding of our situation is all but impossible for them; and The Times and the government both have the responsibility that comes with the power of their positions – but responsibility to who?

Very few ordinary people understand much about economics, which is exactly the way The Times and our government like it. People don’t understand it not because of any great complexity in the subject, but simply because the very few truths and very considerable lies of “credible” economic theory are never taught and explained at non-elite schools. If they were taught The Times would have a very much harder job of convincing us about the “credibility” of “Opposition critique”.

There are two very simple truths about the prevailing economic theory.

1. Prevailing economic theory – that which has been imposed on most of the planet – is designed and built by elites for elites. It isn’t so much that it’s designed to intentionally harm the vast majority of humanity, the environment and all other living creatures, it’s simply that those issues are irrelevant to it – unless they can be used in some way to profit elites. In other words, the ONLY interests served by prevailing economic theory are those of elites.

2. Prevailing economic theory is utterly devoid of humanity. The only thing that matters to it is having MORE. Its core ethic was perfectly encapsulated by Andy Grove, one time CEO of Intel and therefore one of its leading exponents. According to Mr Grove, the whole purpose of capitalism is “shooting the wounded”.

No doubt Mr Grove’s opinion would be deemed “credible” by The Times and government alike, as indeed it obviously is – given the economic condition of the planet. But is it right? I suggest it isn’t.

Without trying to present an exhaustive proof for why Mr Grove’s views are wrong, I shall quote Paul Bairoch who, as a professor of economic history, knows a thing or two about the subject. Prof. Bairoch wrote:

If I had to summarize the essence of what economic history can bring to economic science it would be that there is no “law” or rule in economics that is valid for every period of history or for every economic structure.

In other words, there simply is no absolute truth about whether or not a particular economic theory is ‘right’. There are only points of view; and one person’s point of view could be pretty much as “credible” as anyone else’s. So let’s try making a start with a view that’s the exact opposite of Mr Grove’s. Let’s say that ‘right’ economic theory is one that helps the wounded; then let’s go a stage further and say that such a theory should not be based on having MORE, but having ENOUGH; and that it should be founded on humanity and happiness, not inhumanity and misery.

The good people of The Times together with our trusted leaders would no doubt react with hysterical laughter or apoplectic outrage and shout that such an opinion has no “credibility”. They would be wrong. It is entirely credible, it’s simply the complete opposite of what they want.

But let’s consider a couple of basic economic principles.

Possibly the most important elements of economic theory are Demand and Supply. Economic harmony must surely prevail when supply equals demand. But this point of equilibrium is never fixed – for any individual or any society.

Next let’s concentrate on the word ‘Supply’. Supply of what?

I think Supply could be divided quite neatly into two components: necessities and desires; or needs and wants.

Then we should consider the role of government which, in my view, is obliged to ensure that needs or necessities are provided. Wants and desires should be provided by private enterprise. Once again there’s no clear division between wants and needs. Government is responsible for ensuring people’s needs are met, but can only supply the needs it’s capable of paying for: a rich government could provide a considerable variety of needs, but a poor one couldn’t and would have a far shorter list of needs for which it is responsible.

Now our existing inhuman economic theory claims to believe that government shouldn’t ‘interfere’ with the economy at all, that ‘market forces’ should run things. It’s an egregious lie because a) big corporations (which are the main players in our economy) wholly depend on governments they can manipulate to their ends, and b) ordinary people wholly depend on governments to protect them, which includes protection from corporations, which have a long-established history of psychotic brutality – such as “shooting the wounded.”

So in order to establish the proper roles of government and private enterprise let’s now return to the basic principle of demand and supply. Let’s say that government and private enterprise should take responsibility for two distinct areas of demand and supply; that government should ensure the demand and supply of needs and necessities are met, and that private enterprise is responsible for the demand and supply of wants and desires. This surely is a “credible” economic model?

The inevitable conflict this would provoke, of course, are agreeing definitions of wants and needs, but of these two it’s more important to obtain an understanding of what comprises government’s responsibility – that of supplying needs.

For this we need to begin with an ethical position i.e. what rights could an individual properly expect her government to provide? The UN Declaration of Human Rights is a pretty good place to start. From this we could state that any individual has a natural right to the following:

a. Security
b. Nutritious food
c. Potable water
d. Health care

These basic needs should be met by any government anywhere in the world for any individual, no questions asked: they are all basic human rights. The degree, amount or quality of those basic needs depend on what any particular government can afford, which brings us to the next issue: how could a government pay for the needs it is required to supply?

There are two obvious sources. The first is familiar to everyone: taxation. The second is not so familiar: organised labour.

Every individual should have the rights listed above. But… every individual of working age should also accept that those rights are conditional upon their acceptance of a duty to work. This arrangement is partially applied in any first world country with a welfare system. However, the work available for them to do is controlled by private enterprise and, when it’s available at all, is invariably onerous, or poorly rewarded, or dangerous, or degrading or soul-destroying. This is a natural feature of our existing economic model whose purpose is to instill fear into workers and to keep low-paid workers permanently low paid by maintaining a permanent pool of desperate unemployed people.

So, how should a government organise things differently?

If we return to my key concept of having government take responsibility for supplying the needs of individual people – rather than the corporations which have long been the main recipients of government largesse – we could also suggest that it’s government’s responsibility for providing the labour that supplies those needs – some of which need not be paid for in wages, but in kind. In other words, those who cannot pay for food, water and shelter, say, should be able to turn to the government for immediate help – in return for doing a few hours work for the government. This commitment should never be onerous or degrading – such as workhouses were. Any individual of working age should be guaranteed a week’s secure accommodation, good food etc in return for about twenty hours work – for the government, NEVER for private enterprise. And this is important. Private enterprise exists to make a profit – and there’s nothing wrong with that – but it must never be allowed to profit from government’s duty to provide essential needs to ordinary people. Private enterprise may make all the profits it likes from supplying wants and desires (for which there will always be demand), and good luck to it – but I repeat, it must NEVER be allowed to profit from supplying needs. People should be free to work for private enterprise if they choose to – but should never be totally dependent on it.

Here then is a credible economic theory that is diametrically opposed to our existing inhuman economic theory. It is founded on helping the wounded – as opposed to shooting them; it proposes supplying ENOUGH for needs whilst providing the means to have more – as opposed to ignoring needs altogether whilst supplying the wants of those who can afford them; it provides for all those who want to have meaningful work (helping their fellow citizen) to have it – as opposed to providing no work at all; it provides for people to be happy – as opposed to deliberately keeping them fearful and miserable.

Of course The Times and its many friends in government and the elite establishment that rules us would find nothing at all credible about this model. I suggest they would be wrong.

Quite so.

The funny thing is that when I look back at things I wrote some years ago I seldom embarrass myself very much. I don’t find myself thinking how wrong I was, or how extreme my opinions were. If anything I realise they weren’t extreme enough.

So when I write things that I know would cause widespread offence it’s not because I get some weird kind of pleasure from it, I do it because it must be said. The subject for this little essay would definitely cause outrage, because my question is this: which is more accurate: to describe the British armed forces as heroes… or fools?

Of course the overwhelming majority of good British citizens would, after recovering from their outrage at even being asked such a scandalous question, cry ‘heroes’ without even a moment’s thought. They will recall the ‘great’ battles of history… how Edward Longshanks pacified the Welsh and hammered the Scots, remember Agincourt, the Armada, Trafalgar, Rourke’s Drift… perhaps even the Pals Battalions in that senseless slaughter of the ‘Great’ War – ‘None Wavering, None Doubting The Cause’ (or so hundreds of war memorials tell us) – then there was the Battle of Britain of course, D-Day… etc, etc, etc. The list goes and on in one long seamless link, as it’s meant to do, right up to today and ‘our boys’ in Iraq and Afghanistan… again.

But what is the first duty of a soldier or, to put the question more correctly, what should be the first duty of a soldier?

Is it not to protect his homeland or, more correctly, to protect the ordinary people of his homeland? After all, it’s the ordinary people who pay him, who protected and nurtured him through childhood and from whose ranks his friends and comrades came. Surely the first duty of the soldier is to protect these ordinary people?

Of course it should. But this isn’t his first duty at all; and it never has been. The first duty of today’s soldier is the same as it’s always been: to serve the purposes of the super-rich.

Of course this is not how the thing is taught. From grandfathers, fathers and uncles who themselves once took the queen’s shilling – and lived to tell the tale – to schoolteachers and priests, to newspapers and our TV screens, young people are relentlessly bombarded with fanciful nonsense about the ‘heroism’ of the soldier. They are never, NEVER taught about the barbarity of war, the senseless slaughter, the inexcusable pain, suffering and misery inflicted on defenceless people… in the sacred name of plunder – just so the super-rich may become even richer.

This is the painful truth about soldiers: they’re killers, employed to serve the super-rich. They’re not social workers, or aid workers, or champions of freedom and democracy – as their slick PR departments would have us believe. They’re killers, sent thousands of miles away from the people they should be protecting – in order to kill defenceless civilians.

It might be argued that no one else sees soldiers quite like this – certainly not their families, who fear for their safety, nor the soldiers themselves who are either ‘only following orders’, or doing ‘a job they love’, nor the wider public who stand cheering in the streets and waving their little Union Jacks as the troops march past. But… how do their victims see them? How does the dirt-poor peasant farmer feel when his family is obliterated by some overweight geek sitting in air-conditioned luxury at a computer screen on the other side of the world? Or the mother whose door gets kicked in at three o’ clock in the morning by gun-toting thugs to see her husband or sons dragged screaming from their beds to torture and indefinite imprisonment… or worse. Even the very people soldiers should be defending – their own kind – are not safe from the savage and cynical brainwashing to which all soldiers are routinely subjected. How many defenceless civilians have suffered at the hands of those who should be protecting them, in the sacred name of ‘only following orders’ or ‘just doing my job’? From the Peterloo Massacre to the Armenian Holocaust to the slaughter of hundreds of civilians in Gaza – all by armies of their very own countrymen. Or what about the murders of young soldiers by firing squads of their very own comrades – at the rate of about three every two weeks during the First World War, the ‘Great’ War, the ‘War To End All War’? How would all these victims have seen all those ‘heroes’?

I’ve read quite a few accounts of the First World War, the ‘Great’ War, the ‘War To End All War’. The most moving are always those from the survivors and the relatives of those who were killed or horrifically injured. What you never, NEVER read in these accounts is people saying how glad they were that the war happened, how proud they were of what the soldiers did. You read the exact opposite. You read about old soldiers who refused to speak about the war for the rest of their lives, who became sad or angry or broke down in tears whenever it was mentioned. These are not the actions of people who are proud of what they did. One of the most powerful silent testimonies of all is that of Annie Souls of Great Rissington. Annie was a lady who lost five sons in the ‘Great’ War and who, afterwards, refused for the rest of her life to stand up whenever the national anthem was played. The horrific betrayal of those hundreds of thousands of young people by those they, and their families, trusted was perfectly summed up by Wilfred Owen, who was himself sadly cut down scant days before the armistice. Owen wrote:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.¹

War memorials are meant for one reason and one reason only: to make heroes of soldiers, to make soldiery seem such a noble calling that new hoards of children will be gulled into following in the doomed footsteps of previous generations. I see the Tomb to the Unknown Soldier and I always wonder where is the Tomb to the Unknown Civilian? Whenever I look at a war memorial, and read there some variation of Owen’s Old Lie, I always think how much more appropriate it would be to replace those words with the simple truth – just one word would do it … FOOLS!

1. It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.

The new law, called the Finance Bill 2011,  will, amongst other things, provide for British-based companies with overseas operations to forego the tiresome business of having to pay any Corporation Tax on their foreign investments. As it stands at the moment, these companies must pay the difference between whatever the tax is due in the overseas country, and the modest 28% wholly British businesses must pay – for now (this same draft legislation includes proposals to reduce Corporation Tax each year for the next four years).

So say you had a business registered in London, Pirates-R-Us say, with a lucrative little operation in the well-known resort of Treasure Island. The annoying authorities on Treasure Island insist on you shelling out 10% corporation tax; but that’s the least of your problems because the British government requires you to cough up an additional 18% to bring you into line with other British businesses. But all that’s about to change.

There are eighteen sub-sections to that bit of the Finance Bill concerning Corporation Tax. On page 70, in the sub-section “Taxation of Foreign Branches” and under the heading “Proposed revisions”, we can read:

The legislation will… allow a company to make an irrevocable election for all its foreign branches, located anywhere in the world, to be exempt from UK CT [Corporation Tax] on their profits.

Now at the end of each sub-section is a table titled “Summary of Impacts”, which makes for moderately interesting reading in its very own right. The first part of the table is titled “Exchequer Impact”, and is supposed to indicate how the proposed changes will impact the public purse (we don’t learn how these numbers have been derived). However, page 70 tells us the new law is expected to have a “steady state cost [to the government presumably] of £100 million a year,” and that the “primary benefit of this proposal will arise in two sectors: banking… and general insurance.” Another bit of the table is headed “Impact on Individuals and Households”. Quite a few of these summary tables have a one line entry for this that reads: “The proposal is for CT, and does not impact on individuals or households.”

Whilst a mere £100 million a year loss to the nation is indeed smaller than other “steady state costs” listed in “Exchequer Impact” (such as the proposed “Reduction in the Small Profits Rate of Corporation Tax” for example, which is projected to be running at about a £1.4 billion a year loss by 2014 – see page 57 of the Finance Bill), it’s difficult to believe that this annual drain on the Treasury will have no “impact on individuals and households”. Most individuals and households, if given the choice, would far rather see a couple of billion pounds a year going into public services than into the offshore bank accounts of company executives who are not exactly short of a bob or two.

But that’s not all.

According to Monbiot, not content with saving multi-billion pound organisations the inconvenience of paying tax on foreign earnings, our government also permits these people to claim the cost of those overseas operations as a tax deduction on their domestic earnings.

Monbiot concludes his piece, as always, with a comprehensive list of the sources he’s used, two of which should come as no surprise to anyone who understands how government really works. They’re lists of “representatives from businesses” who helped the civil servants draft the new bill by providing “strategic oversight [to] the development of corporate tax policy”.

Nearly all the names that appear on these lists are either employees of banks, insurance companies or some other corporation. So one of the questions that keeps me up at night is this: with all these “experts” representing the business community to help the civil servants draft this no-doubt wonderful new legislation, who was representing the interests of the “individuals and households”? Who was it exactly who predicts with such confidence, and so often, that “The proposal is for CT, and does not impact on individuals or households”?

Appearing several times throughout this draft bill we see that the reason for its existence is to “simplify” the tax system. We also read an entire section on the fascinating subject of “Anti-avoidance” – no doubt to reflect the government’s deep concern for those naughty little accountants who earn their keep by saving their masters the trouble of paying anything to a government that seldom fails to miss an opportunity to bend over for those same masters and smile invitingly over its shoulder.

Although my life is fortunately not so sad that I’ve actually read the Finance Bill 2011 from cover to cover, I must say the overall impression I have is that the government has done a fairly good job of “simplifying” and “Anti-avoidance.” It’s whittled away at those tiresome laws to such an extent that accountants will no longer have to trouble themselves with the effort of avoiding them. Tax avoidance for these guys will no longer be illegal because there won’t be any legal requirement to pay any tax at all. Mission accomplished.

Not entirely unrelated to all this were two other pieces of “news” that have made the BBC’s six o’ clock show recently. The first was about some young Air Force cadets who have been told that they are being “let go” and will not be able to complete their training course (on how to plunder the taxpayer’s pockets on totally unnecessary and illegal wars for a foreign empire). The second piece of “news” was about thirty other long serving servicemen who have been told they too will be “let go” – in a year’s time. Both of these situations are, of course, because of the government’s cuts in public spending.

What we were not told, of course, was how many of these people would have lost those jobs as a completely normal part of military life. (When I was an army cadet doing my training, it was part of the process to start with about thirty trainees, fully expecting to finish the course with about ten. It was completely normal for trainees to be kicked off the course in the sacred cause of “pursuit of excellence”.) Neither were we told how many of the other servicemen were due to end their contracts fairly soon anyway.

All of this was, no doubt, another cynical manoeuvre intended to rally public support for “our heroes”, and public opposition for cuts to “defence”. The government could have just as easily (and more usefully) sacked a couple of dozen generals who do nothing more dangerous than idle their time away in their London clubs, and saved itself even more money – but that wouldn’t cause anywhere near as much public outrage against “defence” spending cuts as the gradual removal of ordinary service personnel who may have been on their way out anyway.

In 1979, Andy Gray (recently in the headlines for what must be the most ludicrous non-story of the year) achieved similar notoriety. He moved home from Aston Villa to Wolverhampton Wanderers (a far more manageable 7 or 8 miles) for what was then the highest transfer fee ever paid between British football clubs – £1.5m.

In 1979 factory work was a fairly well paid job in England. In Grantham, for example, where I live, there were several sizeable factories employing significant numbers of people. They were factories that made highly engineered products requiring people with considerable skill to make them. The town has a proud engineering history (though we’ll draw a veil over the fact that it produced the first battlefield tanks, and remained an arms maker into the 1980’s). Workers normally worked a standard forty hour week with weekend work paid at overtime rates. Now I don’t know what the average wage was for a general operative back then, and it isn’t easy to find out, but if I said about £3 an hour, I’m probably slightly overestimating.

Today all of those big factories have now died (murdered would be a slightly more accurate description); but there are a few small engineering firms doing quite well in the town (green shoots of recovery and all that). I don’t know what general operatives are paid there these days, and I can’t be bothered to find out; but if I said it was about £7 an hour, I would probably be exaggerating (given that the minimum wage is currently £5.91, and modern employers are not famous for paying much more than absolutely necessary).

Now then, 1979 was quite a significant year for something else; for that was the year that a grocer’s daughter became the first female Prime Minister of Britain. And Thatcherism was born. “We’re all in it together” could have been a catch phrase her army of propagandists might have employed as she rolled up her sleeves and set about decimating the bedrock of the British economy – its industry.

Today’s equivalent of Andy Gray costs his employer more than thirty times what would have been paid in 1979. If a factory worker’s wages had increased at a similar rate, she would be on about £100 an hour.

Of course we’re all in it together. I never doubted it for a minute.

How very odd, I thought: how could one of the wettest places in Europe run out of water. Just as the story ended my wife came into the room, and I told her about it. She too thought it was odd, so I changed channels so she could watch it for herself on BBC One, the Beeb’s main channel, where their “news” was just starting up. This time there’s no mention of dry reservoirs; we’re told instead that the water shortage was due to water pipes bursting as the long spell of recent freezing weather thawed them. Exactly the same story, told by exactly the same “news” provider, but with an entirely different cause.

The following morning that leading organ of British printed propaganda, The Times, ran an article about it on page 14. At the time I didn’t know that Northern Ireland was just about the last part of Britain whose water supply has not been privatised… but I started to wonder. I didn’t have long to wait. The story has been in the “news” ever since and the recurring theme, in The Times and on TV, is that Northern Ireland Water is a public company, whilst most of the mainland’s water supply is provided by private corporations.

Curiously missing from all these national “news” reports, however, is any information about how the rest of the mainland’s water supply has been coping after enduring very similar weather conditions. So it’s obviously quite difficult to know how the rest of Britain is managing for water, and one could be forgiven for assuming there simply isn’t a problem with the nation’s wonderful privatised water supply as the national “news” hasn’t anything to say about it. But my local “news” provider, which covers the East Midlands, has been reporting plenty of burst water pipes and an “unprecedented” number of calls from the public on the subject.

So contrary to the way the national “news” providers are spinning the story, it would seem that Northern Ireland’s burst water pipes have nothing to do with the fact that the supplier is a public company rather than a private one; and their water problems, like the rest of the country, are pretty much down to the fact that Britain has just experienced the coldest December in a hundred years.

Headlines are a very important part of the propagandist’s craft, and the story provided by last Saturday’s Times appeared beneath a fine example of the art: “UK taxpayers’ money goes down the drain in subsidy for failing Ulster water company”.

The article proceeds to suggest that households in Northern Ireland pay an average of just £80 a year for their water services, whilst households on the mainland pay around £350. This is because, we’re told, British taxpayers must subsidize Northern Ireland’s water to the tune of £10 per household. In case The Times readers struggle with simple arithmetic, the paper reinforces the point by telling us that Northern Ireland customers pay: “a quarter of the typical water bill that the rest of the UK pays.” Clearly we’re supposed to be outraged and offended by our hard-earned taxes “going down the drain” and wonder why the Irish should get away with such cheap water bills. Well, this reader is indeed outraged and offended – but wonders instead why customers on the mainland must pay FOUR TIMES as much for their water as Northern Ireland consumers when, if my home county is anything to go by, the service appears to be about the same.

The Times and the BBC “news” are, of course, produced by elites for elites, and it’s very obvious that Northern Ireland is being softened up to accept the privatisation of its water supply, so that the good people of that country can savour the benefits of paying FOUR TIMES as much for basically the same service as the one they’re getting now. A letter in that same edition of The Times by someone rejoicing in the name Lord Baker of Dorking, who proudly tells us he was intimately involved in the mainland’s water privatisation under Thatcher, advises Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister, “to privatise the operation in Northern Ireland so they can go to the markets for their capital requirements [because] Governments can only go to the taxpayer.”

No, Mr Baker, capital does not magically appear at “the markets” it comes from exactly the same place as governments find it: the taxpayer. It might have a different name, like Water Bill, but it’s still the taxpayer who pays it.

The suggestion that privatised utilities are better than public utilities is, of course, total bunkum – but absolutely central to the Chicago-school economic model that rules the world. The private organisation that provides water services to my English home is owned mostly by Australian and Canadian corporations, with a mere 15% of its shares held by a British company. This means the business end of the profits made on me spending FOUR TIMES as much for my water as some of my fellow Brits flies away to different parts of the globe instead of being reinvested in our own water services.

Not entirely unrelated to this story was a short discussion I heard on Al Jazeera the other night. I’ve long had my doubts about which side Al Jazeera is batting for, and their studio guest on this occasion did nothing to reassure me, being as he was from the Washington-based Cato Institute, a right wing “think-tank” that promotes itself as “dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace” (at least it has a sense of humour). The subject was Latin America and how remarkably well the economies of Latin American countries are looking at present. I had a sense of foreboding before the Cato-man even opened his mouth. Sitting back smugly in his chair he suggested to Al Jazeera‘s viewers that this was a direct result of the stringent-though-much-criticised economic policies imposed on the continent in the eighties and nineties. In the absence of any “balancing” studio guest at Al Jazeera I thought I’d add the words of John Perkins which flashed instantly through my mind:

Thanks to the biased “sciences” of forecasting, econometrics and statistics, if you bomb a city and then rebuild it, the data shows a huge spike in economic growth.

Much of the rest of the world is bracing itself for its dose of economic shock treatment this year. I’m predicting the “huge spike” in economic growth will start appearing when the next round of US/UK elections kick off in about two years time, when no doubt we shall all be treated to endless lectures on the far-sighted wisdom of our economic leaders for their savaging of public services in 2011.

Apart from one point, which was quite well made, and to which I shall return later, the rest of Durkin’s work was, at best, trite rubbish, and at worst just completely wrong. I assume he sincerely believes the nonsense he was spouting, so I won’t call him a liar; but that makes him either seriously misguided or a cynical fascist. In either case, Channel Four made a big mistake in giving him ninety minutes of unchallenged airtime. If he had to be screened at all it would have been far more appropriate to give him the same three minutes that is allotted to other far less dangerous people in their Three Minute Wonder strand.

Spelling out what exactly was wrong with Durkin’s dross isn’t easy – not because of any difficulty identifying it, but because there was just so much that was wrong you don’t know where to start.

His central thesis is that Britain has a national debt of £4.8 trillion. He spent quite a long time ranting on about this number, showing how various members of the public struggle to get their heads around the size of it (not unreasonably). He also produced various members of parliament who clearly had absolutely no idea about the size of the nation’s debt, nor the difference between that and the budget deficit. Interspersed with these various talking heads who seem to have been carefully selected for their ignorance of the subject were surreal clips of small children who were either expounding knowingly on the subject, or supposedly protesting for fiscal reform, or being ‘entertained’ on a dismal beach by a Punch an Judy show about fiscal reform. For all this concentration of effort on his core premise not one second of the programme was given over to how exactly Mr Durkin arrived at his figure of £4.8 trillion. For all we know, it was simply a number he plucked out of thin air. This simple trick – not proving his core premise – meant of course that he would not have to defend a position that is basically untenable.

I don’t doubt that some ‘eminent expert’ somewhere did a bit of number crunching for him, as a considerable number of these ‘experts’ were lined up to reinforce Durkin’s position, which I shall come to shortly. We saw at least three Tory grandees who had served as Chancellor of the Exchequer. We saw various ‘leaders of The City’, assorted economists and writers who are so right wing they’re almost re-emerging on the left. To provide ‘balance’ we were shown a total of about five minutes of the ex-Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling, and head of the TUC Brendan Barber. (One wonders if Mr Barber is possibly more interested in a comfortable retirement in the House of Lords, where he might rub shoulders with one or two ex-union traitors, than actually fighting for the worker.) In any event, Mr Barber did himself, and more importantly justice, no favours at all by playing the stooge for Mr Durkin.

Moving on to some of Durkin’s more ridiculous views and claims.

Without any doubt, Milton Friedman would have been proud of Channel Four’s film maker, as most of the ninety minutes was pure ‘Chicago School’ economics. All the nation’s problems are of course the direct fault of taxation and public spending. Durkin tells us:

“Public spending will stimulate growth is the biggest myth of the twentieth century, and is the cause of Britain’s economic decline.”

In one of the many patronising and banal statements he made throughout the programme he opines that if public spending could stimulate growth…

“Why doesn’t the government go and hire more social workers and lollipop ladies?”

In an effort to try to prove his claim that the nation’s woes are the direct result of taxation and government spending, and perhaps to try to attach a degree of academic rigour to his Thatcherite nonsense, Durkin cites two cases from history – Britain’s Industrial Revolution and Hong Kong. Like almost everything else in his film, it is a carefully selected montage of, at best, half truths.

Durkin tells us he is from the North East, but sounds as much like a Geordie as Tony Bliar. Wandering around some of that industrial wasteland with one of the numerous right wing extremists that ‘inform’ his film, Durkin waxes nostalgically for the golden years of the Industrial Revolution, when…

“High wages drew people from far and wide to work here.”

And…

“The standard of living from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century improved hugely.”

The truth of course, was very different.

It wasn’t high wages that drew people to the hell-on-earth of Britain’s factories and mines, it was starvation that forced them there. And although the standard of living did indeed improve in the nineteenth century, it simply couldn’t have got any worse, as any authentic history of the Industrial Revolution would quickly verify. Also excluded from Mr Durkin’s history lesson were the facts that people became slaves in all but name because their life-sustaining land had been stolen from under their feet through the iniquitous enclosure laws; and that standards of living had improved not because of wonderful employment opportunities, but because of England’s imperial exploitation of India and Africa, and because social revolutions throughout Europe were giving Britain’s aristocrats real and justified cause for concern.

Much of Durkin’s film came from Hong Kong, whose well-heeled rich clearly impressed him. Hong Kong’s success, we’re led to believe is directly attributable to a John Cowperthwaite, a British civil servant whose main claim to fame appears to be that he did absolutely nothing to improve the lives of ordinary Chinese workers, whilst doing everything he could to ensure that British ‘interests’ were well and truly catered for. Once again Durkin’s use of history is carefully selective. He completely forgot to mention the fact that Hong Kong was wholly founded on the British opium trade, a trade it forced a very unwilling China to comply with by the frequent use of its considerable warships (possibly made by some of Durkin’s ‘well-paid’ North Easterners). The more recent economic successes of the island were not much more creditable, with Hong Kong being one of the more secure havens for the rapacious pirates of off-shore banking scams. Whilst Durkin gazed in wide-eyed wonder at the island’s gleaming underground stations and billionaire media executives, he didn’t waste a single second at the homes of those who have to maintain the subways in their spotlessness, or who keep house for Hong Kong’s version of Rupert Murdoch.

Then there were the parts of Durkin’s film where he used ‘humour’ to try to discredit the principle of public spending. He did this by using children, and cartoon-like examples of whatever point he was making. I’ve already mentioned the ridiculous Punch and Judy scenes, but there was another little piece of children’s theatre which opened with the taxman visiting a restaurant owner. The restaurant owner opens his till and gives fifty pounds to the taxman, who returns to his office and hands the money over to ‘a bureaucrat’, who then spends it at the restaurant. The triviality of this example of how the system works is exceeded only by the fact that the example is these days largely wrong.

The core principle of Chicago school economics, of which Durkin is clearly a leading exponent, is that all public sector spending is wrong, and that all private sector ‘enterprise’ is wonderful. It is a model that has failed the people wherever it has been imposed, from South America to Russia. It provides quick profits for banks and corporations of course, which is why it is so beloved by these institutions, but as for the people who must live in the ruins created by the snatch and run merchants… who cares?

These days, thanks to the wonderful Private Finance Initiatives, a far more accurate example of the children’s restaurant sketch would have had the taxman handing over the fifty pounds to some well pampered billionaire, who would not take it back to the restaurant to spend (where the money would at least stay in the country’s economy), but who would lock it up in his own private vault in some offshore tax haven. Alternatively he could have shown the taxman handing over the fifty pounds to some be-ribboned general who would then happily spend the money buying shiny jets or drones to go bomb defenceless peasants somewhere.

Chicago school economics sells itself as opposing taxation and supporting abolition of government. It ‘reasons’ that this provides the right environment for private enterprise to flourish, which creates wealth by providing full employment. It’s absolute rubbish, and something that the real sharks of ‘private enterprise’, the ruthless psychopaths who run the international banking system and ‘globalised economy’, themselves violently oppose – in deed if not in word.

Although he didn’t say so, Durkin’s passionate hatred of the public sector would not extend to those public services that protect the captains of industry he so admires. For example, presumably he would not object to those public officials who make it almost impossible for workers to go on strike, or for those good policemen who beat up G20 demonstrators and other social activists. I assume he would have no objections to the continued use of armies to wreck other people’s countries for his wonderful bankers and industrialists to plunder; and of course he could not possibly mind the countless no-bid juicy government contracts that are handed over to corporate sponsors of election campaigns. He would have no objection to the public servants who administer ‘justice’ in our courts by contriving and interpreting laws that favour ‘The City’ and Wall St., whilst brutalising poor people. He would not possibly oppose those public servants who help facilitate the multi-billion pound tax-avoidance scams in offshore banking; and of course he would have no objection to the taxpayer gifting hundreds of billions of pounds to failed banks, on terms that no self-respecting bank would ever offer to any taxpayer seeking a loan – or if he does have any such objections they didn’t feature much in his film. It’s fairly clear to see that Durkin and his like do not really object to public spending at all, the only real objection they have is when taxpayers’ money is used in a way that actually benefits the taxpayer, rather than some gangster masquerading as a corporate executive.

However, I mentioned at the beginning of this piece that not everything about Durkin’s film was absolute rubbish. He actually made one good point, but as this point took up only about one minute of the ninety minute production, it’s fairly safe to say that about 95% of it was indeed absolute rubbish. So let me finish on a high, and mention the 5% of this film that was almost worth watching.

At one point Durkin claimed that about seven million people in Britain are employed by the state. Using another of his childish graphics which was for once quite useful, he showed that only about two million of these people are employed in a fairly useful capacity – like doctors, or teachers, or policemen; leaving the overwhelming majority of public servants doing not very much at all that is of any use to anyone other than themselves. Whilst Durkin didn’t demonstrate it, he could have gone much further and shown how much of this number occupies itself in ‘management’. Management of public services is where there is indeed a huge, obscene, and completely unnecessary overspend. As an ex-public servant I’m speaking from personal experience here.

Channel Four TV does itself no favours by entertaining the likes of Durkin and other right wing fantasists. Whilst I’m all for free speech, even for the likes of Durkin, it’s a principle that requires ‘balance’. So we now need to see Channel Four commissioning a ninety minute film from the likes of Noam Chomsky say or Jo Stiglitz, or Ha-Joon Chang, Naomi Klein or George Monbiot even, together with a studio debate where Durkin and his other plutocrat apologists could be confronted by a few people who not only have a bit of knowledge on the subject but who also have a bit of a passing interest in the rest of humanity.

The real horror story is how the nation’s media, who are the public’s main eyes and ears to the world and by far and away the most important formers of public opinion, have all joined ranks and formed up behind the selfsame forces that have devastated the world economy. The media are solidly united behind the voice of power, and resolutely refuse to see how power is shaping the world to its own benefit, and to the detriment of ninety percent of the Earth’s population, and towards the long term destruction of the planet’s fragile eco-systems.

The psychotic lessons of Chicago school economics, so clearly beloved by Durkin, are exactly the same principles of economics that gangsters use – exploitation of the weak by the strong. They are principles that have only one purpose: enrichment of the strong; everyone else can sink or swim.

But that’s just the frustration talking. Sanity and humanity soon return… because, of those three qualities, greed, ignorance and indifference, it’s ignorance that’s the biggest problem. Most people simply don’t know what the problem is; and given the absolute dominance by our controllers of the information we receive, from the cradle to the grave, that’s hardly surprising. Most people are not naturally disposed to inflicting suffering on others; they have to be trained to do it, slowly, by degrees. Most people are naturally good people, and once given good and humane information, usually make good and humane decisions – and that, in a nutshell, is why our controllers ensure we never have good and humane information.

Which is why most people fail to understand why the cuts being imposed on public sector spending by European governments are so very wrong. Most seem to think that because their governments tell them the cuts are absolutely necessary, that There Is No Alternative and that We Are All In This Together, that it must be the right thing to do. After all, out trusted leaders always act in our best interests, don’t they? That’s why we trust them. And that the majority of us do trust them is obvious – otherwise why do so many keep on turning out at elections?

But it isn’t difficult to show why repairing our ruined economies by cutting public spending is so very wrong.

1. First and Foremost, The Banks Did It.

Although this is arguably the most emotive reason, it is nevertheless true and compelling, and needs to be stated.

The massive public debt which government cuts are supposed to redress was caused by investment bankers acting in league with government regulators (or de-regulators to be a little more accurate). Although quite a number of people have pointed out this glaring fact, as though expecting that some account should be made of it, our trusted leaders continue to look the other way and insist that the people must pay the banksters debt, not the banksters themselves. There Is No Alternative. Although Britain’s chancellor, George Osborne, recently imposed a new levy on banks, that levy is a derisory 0.04% of profits, an amount so trivial that you have to wonder if he did it deliberately to inflame public rage, or if his aristocratic arrogance is so well-refined that he simply doesn’t care – the Osborne equivalent of ‘let them eat cake’, something he can snigger about over pink gins at the club with the rest of his taxes-are-for-little-people mates.

Demanding savage cuts to public services whilst requiring a mere 0.04% compensation from the banksters who plundered the economy in the first place is not just wrong, it’s evil.

2. Cutting Public Spending

Then there is the issue itself. Is the cutting of public spending really necessary, and if so, what is the best way to do it?

a. Anticipating that these cuts were imminent about a year ago, I wrote to the leader of our local council. I explained that I could show her how to make significant savings to her budget without any noticeable loss of service provision to the public. It wouldn’t be difficult. I used to work in the public sector: I know. I wrote not because I really expected her to take me up on my offer, but because you have to go through the hoops: you have to provide an alternative model in order that they can never say later on There Is No Alternative. I also did it for another reason: I believe in public services being delivered by local governments controlled by elected officials. I do not believe in public services being delivered by anonymous, unelected, and very distant corporate boardrooms. Whilst I know very well there is huge waste and inefficiency in the public sector, I also know very well that public services are best delivered by the public sector – not corporations.

Existing public services are mostly staffed by a grossly inflated management bureaucracy and a barely sufficient workforce. Whilst the workers (those who look the public in the eye) are fairly paid for the work they do, managers (who generally avoid the public like the plague) are overpaid many times over for the little value they provide. Once this simple fact is clearly understood a solution is obvious: reduce the cost of management.

I proposed to our council leader that she re-model the management of our council on a sort of co-operative system, where decision-making is done by the workers themselves agreeing changes by majority consensus. The model has been used successfully for centuries (if not millennia) all over the world; there’s nothing new about it, and its effectiveness is beyond dispute.

It took her some time to respond, but when she did, she did so on the phone (not in writing) replying that my model would mean that people would have to work ‘out-of-grade’ which, because it contravened some pay and conditions guide, obviously meant it couldn’t happen. Well obviously.

However, I learn through my sources, that that selfsame council is now embarking upon an exercise where the workers’ pay is to be cut… by re-defining their pay grades. It would seem that when it suits our controllers to do so, workers having their duties and grades changed isn’t quite as difficult to achieve as I was led to believe.

b. It was quite interesting to look at the specific areas of public spending our good chancellor intends to butcher. Anything that provides essential support to struggling people, from social housing to welfare payments to pensions, is for the axe. Government departments that provide absolutely no value to the people, such as overseas ‘aid’ and the good chancellor’s own Cabinet Office, and a multitude of obscure QUANGOs escape with only minor damage, or completely unscathed.

The ‘ring-fencing’ of overseas ‘aid’ is moderately interesting. It creates the impression that no matter what, Britain will honour its commitments to helping poor people overseas. Ahhhh… But if charity begins at home, why should our trusted leaders be far more concerned with ‘ring-fencing’ overseas aid than ‘ring-fencing’ aid for our own poor people? As with most things to do with government, first impressions can often be… a little misleading, shall we say.

‘Aid’ is another one of those words which means exactly the opposite of what our trusted leaders would have us believe. Adhering closely to the Orwellian model, the word ‘aid’, when issuing from the mouths of our trusted leaders, actually means ‘exploitation’. Overseas ‘aid’ takes various forms from the supplying of armaments to military dictatorships to the dumping of excess cereal production by wealthy, and heavily subsidized, western agricultural corporations upon struggling third world economies, to channelling charitable donations that people make in good faith into international banking corporations ‘to manage’. Once that little fact is understood it becomes a bit more obvious as to why overseas ‘aid’ must be ‘ring-fenced’.

c. Qui Bono? Who really benefits from cuts to public spending? In a word, corporations.

Cutting public services to the most vulnerable creates ‘opportunities’ for corporations to fill the vacuum thus created. The taxpayer still pays of course, with various corporations being gifted contracts by government to supply the services for which government itself was recently directly responsible; but there are all sorts of benefits to having those services supplied by some anonymous boardroom, such as:

       i. Accountability. As government no longer directly supplies the service it can ignore the quality of it; indeed, it can even pretend to sympathise with outraged recipients of said service and, if necessary and/or expedient to party interests, find a different provider. (However, this can sometimes result in an even more severe financial burden to the taxpayer as corporations employ seriously expensive lawyers to ensure that when this sort of thing happens, very lumpy law suits follow.)

       ii. Juice. Elections are paid for by wealthy corporations, which are legally mandated to maximise profits. In other words, they don’t spend a penny unless they expect to get ten pennies back… at least. The only way of ensuring that electioneering juice keeps flowing is to ensure the corporations are getting their pound of flesh in return.

The public, inevitably, are worse off. Not only must they pay new corporate service providers indirectly with their taxes, they must invariably pay the provider an additional amount for whatever service they receive. But that is not the only way the public is stuffed – far from it.

One advantage to public services being supplied by public servants is that whatever the cost of that service in wages and salaries, that money tends to stay in the country by being taxed and spent in local businesses and services – the famous ‘trickle-down effect’. Once a corporation gets involved, however, all that changes. The lowliest workers who must now provide the service a fairly well-paid civil servant once did must do it for much less pay. There will be fewer of those workers working longer hours and in more insecure conditions. In short, there is less money reaching local economies from the pockets of workers, because there are fewer workers being paid less. Meanwhile, at the top of the shitheap, a tiny handful of obscenely well-paid individuals will be doing everything in their power to ensure the corporation’s money is not taxed, and that their personal fortunes might be spent in any part of the world: the ‘trickle-up’ effect.

The sheer bloody evil of the system we call government manifests itself in many ways, but that system has to be understood before any of the evil can be seen. It’s a bit like watching a magician: magicians can make you believe all sorts of amazing things – until you know how the trick works, at which point you wonder how anyone could believe such nonsense. There is absolutely no benefit to the general public from cuts to public services. The only people who benefit are the same tiny handful of people who always benefit: the very rich. Not for the first time in human history, it seems that only the French are awake in Europe.

So far, I haven’t heard a single dissenting voice from the nation’s media, nor the trade union movement – which does not surprise me.

Clarke’s new policy is of course being dressed up as being in the best interests of prisoners and society. It is supposed to alleviate boredom, encourage prisoners to get used to hard work, teach transferable job skills, blah, blah, blah…. But just like everything government does, the initiative relies upon an ancient and very successful controlling illusion: that government always acts in our best interests. It doesn’t of course, and never has. It acts in the interests of the tiny handful of plutocrats who truly pull the strings.

As is normally the case with politicians’ speeches, it seems that Clarke’s performance was rich in oratory and poor in detail. But let’s take a little look at Clarke’s proposal in as dispassionate a way as I can muster.

1. The Practical Argument

British prisons are notoriously overcrowded places with very little spare space in or around them. Where exactly is all this work going to be carried out? Are the scarce recreational and educational facilities that currently exist in prisons, such as exercise areas and classrooms, to be transformed into places where people are to be forced to do something they might not want to do? And what provision will be made for the subsequent loss of those facilities i.e. how would prisoners get any exercise at all, or learn the few useful skills they can currently acquire, once those meagre facilities are converted into sweatshops?

How exactly is this new regime to be administered? Many prisons currently require prisoners to be locked up in their cells for nearly all of the day – no doubt as the most cost-effective means of administering the system. How exactly is that regime to be changed so that people no longer need to be so confined?

2. The Ethical Argument

Ethics is of course largely irrelevant to our government (the one and only morality it acknowledges is subservience to the plutocrats who rule us); but that doesn’t mean the morality of forcing people to work should not be examined – quite the contrary: if our trusted leaders ignore it, along with the nation’s media and supposed champions of the worker – the trade union movement – then obviously someone else must do the job.

Our labour is intimately connected to our freedom, and it is one of the very few things we can significantly control – albeit not easily, for most of us. Many people spend most of their waking hours working, so it stands to reason that the more control we have over the conditions under which we work the more freedom we are able to exercise. Prisoners obviously have no freedom. If Mr Clarke was suggesting that prisoners should be free to choose whether to work or not – i.e. they would not be discriminated against in any sense if they didn’t so choose – I wouldn’t be writing this article: I wouldn’t need to. But that is not what he is saying. He said prisoners will be made to work.

There’s a perfectly good word for prisoners who are made to work: slaves. For most people, the ethical argument begins and ends in that simple fact.

c. The Economic Argument

Since it became an unofficial American state, our government does very little unless it produces a profit somewhere along the line for the plutocrats. On the face of it, converting prisoners into slaves makes no economic sense. We might think the fundamental premise behind ‘making prisoners work’, is that there is work for them to do – otherwise work is obviously being created just for the sake of creating jobs, something which is supposedly anathema to the New Capitalists who rule the planet. The fact is, however, that there’s little enough work available for non-prisoners, let alone those who must be made to do it. So one might reasonably wonder where all these jobs are that must be so plentiful they can fully occupy the nation’s sizeable prison population.

The one clue given appeared in a BBC report which suggests Clarke intends somehow to convert factories into prisons – as happens in some other great democracies such as Brazil for example, or China. That might explain how the work will be produced, but does it produce a sound economic argument?

As I said Clarke’s speech was typically light in detail, so we’re left on our own to try to join the dots.

If existing factories (which are presumably in already in working order) are to be converted into secure prisons, existing prisons will… do what? Perhaps they’re to be used just to provide sleeping accommodation for the slaves, who are to be transported each day between prison and factory? And this is in the nation’s and the factories’ economic interests?

I am of course being slightly ironic. England has a great history of exploiting slave labour. It became a wealthy country by using two different but related tactics. Firstly it made things in factories (at home as well as abroad) where the conditions for workers were arguably the worst in recorded history. Secondly it used its laws, reinforced by its naval and military might, to ensure the products of those factories dominated the domestic market, and had free access to foreign markets – usually to the total exclusion of anyone else.

After the Second World War, English imperial control took a nosedive, which meant that markets for its products (foreign and domestic) collapsed. The government could have resisted much of the subsequent demise of manufacturing by taking a more aggressive stance on imports; but no, not while huge profits could be made by exploiting virtually free (and union-light) Asian labour. Directors of factories made huge fortunes for themselves by killing off British industry and switching operations to Central and Eastern Asia. It was of course short-sighted, but who cares? It’s all about filling your boots today – fuck the future.

So today England now finds itself in a position where it simply cannot compete with India and the Far East – unless it can somehow re-create a slave labour force which is even cheaper to run than Asian sweatshops are. It has no chance, of course – even under prison conditions. It will inevitably cost more to produce something in a British prison than it does to produce it in Asia. It will also cost the government far more to administer a slave labour prison factory in anything vaguely like a humane manner than it would cost it simply to run a prison. So what on earth can be the economic sense behind such an idiotic proposal?

Catherine Austin Fitts, the one time director of a Wall St investment bank, and a Federal Housing Commissioner during the reign of George I, explains on her website exactly how American corporations profit from the prison business – it’s a truly obscene little story.¹ Given that the British government is basically a department of the United States government, which is itself joined at the hip with Wall St., it comes as no surprise to learn that our so-called ‘Justice’ minister (who is no stranger to the inner workings of the British Treasury) intends to copy our American role model.

The economic argument turns out to be a very simple one. It basically boils down to the same old story: more taxpayer pounds diverted into the bottomless pockets of corporations. American prison corporations worship ‘growth’ just like any other corporation, and the way they grow is by increasing their volume of prisoners – with the willing assistance of the state. What these prison-factories actually produce is irrelevant. Clarke’s proposal means that British prisoners themselves are to be exploited, exactly as American prisoners are, just like any other commodity; but at public expense, for private profit. An obvious implication is that the numbers of prisoners must inevitably be made to increase, for maximum ‘growth’ – the raison d’etre of all corporations.

Clarke’s speech was all but ignored by the media through the use of one of their more common tactics: ‘distraction news’. If it weren’t for the fact that I just happened to hear the briefest of mentions about Clarke’s new policy whilst listening to a fringe rock music radio station I wouldn’t have known anything at all about it. Because on the very same day as the return of slavery was publicly announced the Tories also informed a largely indifferent nation that child benefit would no longer be payable to rich families, and this was the non-event that the nation’s media locked on instead, successfully diverting our attention away from Clarke telling us about a far more serious outrage.

There’s absolutely nothing to commend Clarke’s proposal. His existing American role model proves without doubt that forcing prisoners to work as slaves in no way improves their later employment prospects. Instead of our taxes being used to improve prison conditions, to rehabilitate and help provide meaningful work to people once they leave prison, they are used instead to enrich corporate directors.

All this from someone rejoicing in the title Minister for ‘Justice’?

1. See Cornell Corrections.

Last night the ‘news’ led with a story that in 1972 the Roman Catholic church conspired with the British government to transfer a priest, Fr James Chesney, from his church in Claudy, Northern Ireland, south into the Republic. A bomb had recently killed nine people in Claudy, and the suggestion is that Fr Chesney had something to do with it.

Now, all the main players are long dead and buried, and almost certainly the real truth behind that particular atrocity will never be known. So whilst it would indeed be interesting to learn the full story, the fact is we’re unlikely ever to do so.

The question is, why did the Beeb choose to lead its so-called ‘news’ with something that happened almost forty years ago? The story was brought into the light of day as a result, we’re told, of a report released by the Northern Ireland ombudsman. But reports by civil servants are being churned out daily, so why does this one, about a forty year old incident, which has attracted zero national ‘news’ coverage in recent times, and was dead ‘news’ within twenty four hours, suddenly deserve such prime-time prominence? Its effectiveness as distraction ‘news’, a primary purpose of the BBC, goes without saying, but why was that particular story chosen from what must have been several hundred alternatives?

I’ve long found the timing of Northern Ireland’s most recent peace agreement interesting. That tragic little region provided employment and profits for Britain’s police-military-industrial-intelligence communities for the best part of thirty years leading up to the new millennium. Throughout all that time peace was a castle in the air, Irish mist on a warm summer morning. Peace? Never in our time. We’ll never surrender. We’ll never talk to terrorists. Then all of a sudden, almost overnight, implacable enemies were suddenly making a government together. The timing was fascinating: war in the Middle East was inevitable – having all your armed forces tied up in the backwaters of Northern Ireland must have been seriously inconvenient.

Today, Britain’s police-military-industrial-intelligence communities find themselves no longer useful in the main region that has occupied their attention for the last ten years. Iraq is now a peaceful, stable democracy (lol); and the public are getting seriously pissed off with the number of body bags returning from Afghanistan. There are promising signs of a new ‘cold war’ building up, and no doubt we’ll be off to play in Iran fairly soon, but what are the boys going to do with themselves in the meantime?

Perhaps in thirty, forty, or fifty years time, when the documents about the curious timing of Northern Ireland’s tortured ‘Peace Process’, which for now must be bolted behind closed doors… ‘in the nation’s interest’… are finally declassified, some of the truth might emerge. Perhaps a dusty ombudsman will write a report, and some junior mandarin in the British Brainwashing Corporation might think it makes a great piece of distraction ‘news’. But I wonder how many people will pause to think about the given proof of government conspiracies thirty, forty or fifty years earlier, and ask themselves… ‘I wonder what are the bastards up to today?’

An article by Andrew Ellson was all about how benefit fraud is routinely punished in British courts with a jail sentence, and how tax evasion almost never is. Beginning with the legendary quote from US billionaire, Leona Helmsley, that “only the little people pay taxes” Mr Ellson relates a couple of cases to help illustrate his point.

We learn how one Susanne Rees was sentenced to 60 days in prison for defrauding her local council of £19,000 in benefits, but how a certain Michael Frost, who admitted evading payment of £65,000 income tax, was punished with a mere 60 hours community service. Mr Frost is no doubt a relatively small player – otherwise it’s unlikely he would have had to suffer even that small indignity. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, for example, a very big player indeed, pays “almost no tax worldwide” – according to Boyle and Simms in their New Economics – A Bigger Picture; but as Mr Ellson works for one of Murdoch’s papers I’ll excuse him from reminding us about that.

Also omitted from Mr Ellson’s piece was any reference to the glee with which the entire nation’s media always and routinely leap upon any story of benefit fraudsters (and it’s even better if they’re immigrants), but how they usually appear to be looking the other way when it comes to cases of tax evasion.

Mr Ellson went on:

A quick trawl through court records shows that defendants convicted of benefits fraud of more than £20,000 are often sent to prison… Yet fewer than one in every 1,000 people subject to HM Revenue & Customs investigation for tax evasion is prosecuted to the degree that a criminal sentence even becomes a possibility… Paul Malkinson, the chairman of Boston United Football Club, avoided jail despite defrauding the taxman of almost £400,000. Had Mr Malkinson’s cleaner fraudulently claimed even a tenth as much in housing benefit, you can be sure that she would have ended up in prison.

The second article related to today’s theme was by Christine Seib, writing from New York. Her piece was about banking giant Citigroup.

Citigroup is having a hissy-fit because the British government has dared to send them a tax bill. The bank, with assets of around $2trillion, is squawking about a $400million tax bill (50% of which it paid out in discretionary bonuses), and has “threatened to pull out of Britain if the Government imposed further swingeing taxes (sic) on banks.”

Our trusted leaders, clearly concerned about upsetting the corporate world, humbly rub their hands Uriah Heep-like and assure them that the tax bill is a “one-off.” Why the British government should be so anxious to appease foreign companies who don’t want to pay any taxes whilst imprisoning home-grown petty fraudsters is a fairly interesting question. It’s yet another example of how far removed our government is from its people, most of whom would respond by offering to help hasten the bank’s departure (or words to that effect), AFTER they’ve paid up, of course, or done their time just like any other villain should.

Britain arguably leads the world in the gentle art of tax evasion. It has for many decades hosted the wishes of the world’s super-rich through the super-discreet services of the shadowy operators residing in its numerous island dependencies, safe and sound from any prying eyes. (Poacher-turned-gamekeeper John Christensen’s superb essay ‘Dirty Money: Inside the Secret World of Offshore Banking’ is a must-read for anyone slightly interested in this quite obscene little subject.)

So whilst your average working stiff struggles to pay her taxes like a good girl, and meekly accepts our trusted leaders’ exhortation to tighten her belt and wave goodbye to the public services she hopes her taxes are paying for, because There Is No Alternative; whilst we meekly accept the right of US investigators to pry into almost every personal bank account in Europe in the holy name of the ‘war on terror’, the super-super-rich are sulking about trifling tax bills and thinking about taking their custom elsewhere…

Well, allow me to get the door.

Then I started thinking about the dedication I would write for her – even though September was several months away. The more I thought about it the more difficult it became, so that now it is something of a major dilemma. Here’s the problem:

My sister-in-law and her family are, unsurprisingly, a perfectly normal family, probably leaning a little right of centre. In other words they have little idea how the world really works. My book is seriously radical – by mainstream standards. Although I genuinely believe it’s a wonderful piece of work, it shatters just about every controlling myth our rulers use to keep us in our place – and then it gets worse: it proposes a New Idea for fixing things.

So my dilemma is fairly obvious. I’ve promised to send a copy of my book to Meredith, but I know that if she actually reads it, it will conflict with just about every value she has been taught so far, and it will conflict with just about every value she will be taught in the future.

I firmly believe the world consists of two kinds of people: those who are part of the problem, and those who are part of the solution. The former group is, by a very long way, the bigger one – even though the vast majority of them don’t actually know that. Those few of us that are part of the solution have a duty to re-educate the problem group; but what about the human cost of doing that?

On the one hand I’m driven by my responsibility to re-educate (failure to do so would make me part of the problem group). On the other hand I’m aware of the potential for causing pain – which is not something that comes easily to me.

The potential for causing pain has two very real sources. Firstly, there are Meredith’s parents. Lovely people though they are, there are parts of my book that will scare them rigid: that fly full in the face of some of their most deeply held values. Revealing to Meredith truths that would most likely embarrass her parents is not a recipe for fostering family harmony. Possibly more serious than that, though, is the fact that real enlightenment – understanding the truth of how our world really works – is not a happy outcome; it’s really quite depressing. If we actively seek such enlightenment, and find it, we should be able to live with the consequences of our own action – the searching. But is it right to inflict the pain of depression on someone who was previously perfectly happy and hadn’t sought enlightenment? Ignorance is bliss, they say, probably for this reason; but at what point is it right to point out that it’s the primary reason for The Problem – in fact, it is The Problem.

When people are enduring unimaginably difficult lives as is normal for millions of families in the third world, there’s a strong case for mandatory enlightenment – after all, how much more miserable could their lives be? But a child being raised in the relative luxury of the first world is a different story: what excuse can I have for causing her pain? Because I think it’s right to do so? I did that once before – hurt someone I loved because I thought it was the right thing to do. It wasn’t.

All this over a bloody book! Which Meredith probably won’t read anyway. And then there are her two younger sisters…

As I strongly suspected last year when the Great Swine Flu Panic first dominated every ‘news’ report in the western world, there was something of an odeur of pig slurry in the air (see ‘Flying Pigs?’ 29th April 2009), and Cohen and Carter’s excellent piece does everything but formally charge those responsible.

But let’s start with the word ‘pandemic’, which is actually a very good place to start. What does it mean? And who gets to decide whether or not there is one?

In an earlier BMJ article by Peter Doshi we learn that at the beginning of 2009 the WHO (World Health Organisation) believed that

an influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus appears against which the human population has no immunity, resulting in epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.

On 8th May 2009, Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of the WHO said,

H5N1 [bird flu] has conditioned the public to equate an influenza pandemic with very severe disease and high mortality. Such a disease pattern is by no means inevitable during a pandemic. On the contrary, it is exceptional.

…which is rather different to the WHO’s previous position on what constitutes a ‘pandemic’. In the same speech Dr Chan reassures us: “The decision to declare an influenza pandemic will fall on my shoulders.”

A month later on 11th June, Dr Chan is back, doing exactly that:

I have conferred with leading influenza experts, virologists, and public health officials. In line with procedures set out in the International Health Regulations, I have sought guidance and advice from an Emergency Committee established for this purpose. On the basis of available evidence, and these expert assessments of the evidence, the scientific criteria for an influenza pandemic have been met…The world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic.

This apparent change in position by the WHO as to what exactly a ‘pandemic’ is did not go entirely unnoticed, and attracted some comment at the time (if one looked hard enough for it). But in another interesting piece by Peter Doshi we learn that the WHO appears to be airbrushing out its own history, and denying that it ever suggested pandemics had catastrophic consequences. Doshi writes:

Now a second widely cited WHO webpage has been altered. The document was formerly titled “Ten things you need to know about pandemic influenza”, four of which included: “Widespread illness will occur”, “Medical supplies will be inadequate”, “Large numbers of deaths will occur”, and “Economic and social disruption will be great”. The document has been renamed: “Ten concerns if avian influenza becomes a pandemic”. By altering the title, the WHO has changed self-described must-know information about “pandemic influenza” into “concerns” about “avian influenza”. Most troubling, however, is that the contents (and datestamp) of the document remain unchanged.”   (my emphasis)

This observation must bring to mind 1984 to anyone who’s read it, and the sinister ‘memory holes’ that Winston used for his daily job of erasing historical records.

And then one has to wonder if perhaps conflicts of interest might be a slight consideration.

Cohen and Carter point out that prior to all this a good ten years of ‘pandemic preparedness planning’ had been happening at WHO including ‘committee meetings with experts flown in from around the world.’ However, the C & C study goes on to expose in fairly explicit detail the quite significant (but often vaguely-declared) links between many of those ‘experts’ and international drug companies who sell, amongst other things, anti-flu vaccines.

How many people bought Tamiflu last year? This must-have swine-flu treatment was produced by the Swiss drugs company Roche. The drug, itself was originally made by the American company Gilead, and sold to Roche who continued to pay Gilead a sizeable royalty for every tablet sold.

A Swiss news web site, swissinfo.ch, reported last year that Roche (and Novartis – another Swiss drugs company) spent $7m on American politicians in the first half of 2009, “to influence policy”.  (Why foreign corporations are allowed ‘to influence’ US policy is perhaps something Americans should be a little concerned about).

One such American politician who might have done quite nicely from all this is the charming Donald Rumsfeld. Whilst I’m sure it’s pure coincidence, Mr Rumsfeld happened to run Gilead for a few years. Although he had by then sold his shares in that company (and trousered $5m in the process), there’s no suggestion that he’s in any way connected to this story (although it’s not clear whether he has, or had, any holdings in Roche).

In March 2009 Roche’s shares were trading at about Sf120.

On 26th April the US government declared a national health emergency. Peter Doshi’s article shows this was done when the incidence of flu in the US had been consistently falling for the previous six weeks to a scarcely noticeable 8% of tested respiratory specimens. The US government’s health warning seems to have triggered a huge spike in the number of specimens presented for testing, and although at the time of the warning there is no significant increase in the numbers testing positive for swine flu. The government announcement also seems to have triggered a feeding frenzy for the world’s journalists, and the Great Swine Flu Panic became a permanent fixture for every ‘news’room in the western world.

One month later Dr Chan is clouding the meaning of the word ‘pandemic’, and a month after that Dr Chan is declaring one.

By the end of the year it was pretty clear that the Great Swine Flu Pandemic had failed to materialise and governments around the world were wondering what to do with warehouses full of stockpiled Tamiflu and, oh yes, Roche’s shares were trading at about Sf170.

I can’t think why none of this is of any interest to the same media who, just twelve months ago, were totally obsessed with the subject.

This is just one, quite small feature, of having absolute power. At the time it was completely normal, not just in Rhodesia, but pretty much anywhere else in the whites-run world, for white people to behave this way – and for black people to ignore it, quite possibly to sometimes not even notice it. Comedians, for example, routinely included racist material in their work, and white people laughed at it in their hundreds of millions.

I was reminded of this little ‘perk’ of absolute power a couple of days ago. I was browsing the history section of the International Monetary Fund’s website, and was reading their glowing tribute to Harry Dexter White – pretty much the founder of the IMF.

The IMF is arguably the most powerful non-military force on the planet, and understanding a bit about it is therefore quite useful. It was created in the closing stages of World War Two. The old king (the British Empire) was dying, and the new king (the American Empire) was fidgeting impatiently in the wings looking at his watch. As their representatives gathered at Bretton Woods to carve up the planet, the final showdown occurred between White (for the new king) and John Maynard Keynes (for the dying one). This is how the dispute is described by the IMF’s website:

Where the two founding fathers differed most was on the third theme: how independent and how powerful should the IMF be? To Keynes, what the world needed was an independent countervailing balance to American economic power, a world central bank that could regulate the flow of credit both in the aggregate and in its distribution. To White, what was needed was an adjunct to American economic power, an agency that could promote the balanced growth of international trade in a way that preserved the central role of the U.S. dollar in international finance.

As the old king was in his final death throes it’s perfectly understandable that Keynes should have been such a passionate advocate for an ‘independent’ counterbalance to the new young upstart (ten years earlier it’s highly unlikely the thought would have crossed Keynes’ allegedly powerful mind). But now it was all too late, and there was never any doubt about whose view would prevail, so the ‘adjunct to American power’ was born.

It’s that little phrase ‘adjunct to American power’ that took me back to my Rhodesian childhood. When you have absolute power you can afford to be completely indifferent about casual expressions of that power.

Most people have no idea what the IMF is. And if they were to give it any thought at all they might say it’s some sort of international organisation – like the United Nations – and that its decisions are probably made by all sorts of different countries. I mean, it’s called ‘International’ isn’t it?

Those of us actively engaged in the War On Error are fairly used to the glazed expressions we see in people’s eyes when we start yet another rant about the real threat to world peace. You can see them thinking: “Here he goes again: more conspiracy theory.” So it’s always quite pleasant to see our opinions reinforced and confirmed by the Empire itself. After all, you can’t get much better than the IMF’s very own website admitting that it was originally designed as an ‘adjunct to American power’. As my dictionary defines ‘adjunct’ to be something that is ‘subordinate or incidental (to or of another)’, it’s fairly clear to even the dullest mind that the IMF is a very long way from being the independent economic policeman its servants and supporters claim it to be.

The activities of the IMF’s employees seldom make the evening ‘news’; which is a bit of shame because these busy people are invariably jetting around the planet where they are often engaged in something they call ‘Article IV Consultations’. A quick glance at the ‘News’ section of the website shows what I mean. Just this week, for example, these busy people are having their ‘Article IV Consultations’ everywhere from New Zealand to Senegal; from Zimbabwe to Switzerland. What’s Article IV? It’s about the IMF’s rules on currency exchange rates. Now whilst I don’t question the principle that “someone” ought to be doing this, I strongly question that it should be those working for an ‘adjunct to American power’.

Like the racist society of my early childhood that never thought for one second about casually using the word ‘kaffir’, we now live in a society that doesn’t think for one second about the implications of the world’s most powerful non-military institution casually referring to itself as an ‘adjunct to American power.’

Some might argue that is all now ancient history – that it might have been the view of Mr White, but we now live in far more enlightened times – just as white people would now no longer refer to black people as ‘kaffirs’… except for one small glitch.

The tribute about Mr White was written relatively recently, in 1998, and is still on the IMF website today. The piece concludes with these words: “What remains of his [White’s] legacy is the International Monetary Fund, which still bears his imprint more than any other’s.”

Headlines are a very important part of the propagandist’s art. They are seldom written by the same person who writes the article to which they refer. As far as ‘news’ reporting is concerned, headlines are the vanguard of subliminal brainwashing. We automatically think they summarise a news report, telling us in advance what we can expect to learn from that report. A headline will remain in our memories as a summary of that article. Even if we do not actually read the article at all, we will probably have noticed the headline, and a little note will be stored in our memories that we have read something, somewhere about whatever that story is about, and the vague memory of the headline will be our sole recollection of that story.

North Korea has been a popular western whipping boy for about as long as Cuba. It is identified as the same sort of threat to world peace that Iran currently enjoys. Consequently when a headline in last Saturday’s Times read “South Korean ship ‘sunk by torpedo from North Korea’”, we naturally expect the attached ‘news’ report to inform us of how that arch-villain North Korea has been spoiling for a fight again. The problem is the article which accompanies that headline simply doesn’t provide a single shred of evidence to justify it.

The very first sentence of the report reads: ‘A South Korean naval ship sank last night after an explosion that may have been caused by a North Korean torpedo.’ Note the words ‘may have been’, as they’re quite important. As soon as they’re employed the writer is at liberty to conclude the sentence any way they like. They could claim the explosion ‘may have been’ a suicide bomber, an asteroid, the cook forgetting to turn off the stove … anything. So we read a little further to find the evidence of this North Korean torpedo, but already feeling a little suspicious of the words ‘may have been’.

Next we learn that ‘Six naval ships and two coastguard vessels’ were in the area. As these vessels rescued most of the crew of the sunken ship, and because the article doesn’t say otherwise, we can probably assume they were all South Korean. Then we read that ‘it was not clear whether North Korea was the cause of the explosion’. Not clear? That’s a little different from the very clear headline. So too was this sentence: ‘”We have been unable to pinpoint the exact cause of the incident,” a spokesman for the South Korean Navy said.’ Next we learn that a ‘South Korean ship in the same area fired shots towards an “unidentified target”’.

In short, apart from a vague reference to unattributed ‘reports from Seoul’, not a single word in the actual article offers any evidence at all that North Korea had anything whatsoever to do with the sinking of the South Korean ship. In fact, what the ‘news’ report tells us is that the only ships in the area appear to have been South Korean, and the only ship that appears to have been doing any shooting was South Korean – a very different set of circumstances to that suggested by the headline.

The similarity between this story and the ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident’ is quite remarkable. That scandal is now known to have been made in America two months before the USS Maddox was allegedly attacked – an action that was used to trigger a full scale US invasion of Vietnam. Not that the Tonkin Incident was the first time the US had taken itself to war on the back of an alleged attack upon it. In 1898, the sinking of the USS Maine in mysterious circumstances off the coast of Cuba was used to provoke the brief Spanish American war over ownership of that blighted island.

How on earth is the Average Person supposed to have any chance at all of forming a reasonable understanding of how her world works? When pillars of the journalistic profession such as The Times routinely peddle such obvious propaganda, presumably on behalf of The Empire, what price truth?

I don’t know about anyone else, but if my country had just been devastated by some awful catastrophe and I had to rely on a foreign government coming to save me, a government that had quite cheerfully ignored the plight of tens of thousands of its very own citizens when they had been similarly struck down, I’d be fairly worried.

We have had blanket news coverage this week of the aftermath of the recent earthquake in Haiti. Amidst all the usual terrible scenes of human suffering and tragedy one very brief incident is transfixed in my memory. It was of a news conference with some senior US politician who had something to do with the ‘relief’ effort. I forget who he was – it doesn’t matter: if it hadn’t been him it would have been a clone. A reporter asked him why they didn’t just parachute in essential supplies, like food and water, to the desperate survivors who were wandering around the ruined streets of Port-au-Prince quite naturally scavenging anything they could. The politician dismissed the question almost as though some naive child had asked it, and, before quickly moving on answered that if they did that there would be carnage as desperate people fought over whatever was supplied. In other words they’re not supplying immediate relief because that’s in the Haitians’ best interests.

Let’s give that gentleman the benefit of the doubt, and say that he actually believed his own words; so I won’t call it a lie, I’ll simply call it the biggest load of rubbish I’d heard since… I don’t know… the previous night’s ‘news’ maybe.

The only situation where this gentleman might have been correct is if the available aid was so miniscule that it could not possibly have provided significant relief. If that is the case, why is it? I mean, the west is absolutely swimming in ‘humanitarian’ organisations of one kind or another, why are they so poor and disorganised that they can’t respond to a crisis when it actually happens? If that were the case it would mean either that these organisations just don’t have or can’t get stocks of essential food and water; or there is a transport problem i.e. they can’t get it there. I simply don’t believe that is the case. I cannot believe that a professional relief organisation doesn’t have the ways and means to obtain food and water instantly; and as the world’s media have arrived in Port-au-Prince without any difficulty, and the US has had enough time to send half its navy to the scene (together with thousands of ground troops), I’m struggling to see that there might be a transport problem. There must be another reason.

They say a picture tells a thousand words, and another brief clip shown on the BBC this morning was particularly helpful in this respect. It showed the US marines helping the relief effort. Ahhh… This was they how they were doing it: one marine was handing one small bottle of water to one Haitian child. Behind that child was another, and perhaps another child behind that one. All very ordered; all very controlled. You could almost see that image on the recruiting page of the US Marines website beneath a caption reading “Saving Childrens’ Lives in World Disasters.”

There’s no love lost between the people of Haiti and the United States. The US managed the military overthrow of the people’s chosen government under Jean-Bertrand Aristide, just as they’ve done in many other places in the region, and have helped to cruelly oppress a tragic land that Christopher Columbus once described as ‘rich and bountiful’ (just prior to his nation exterminating the quarter of a million of so Arawaks who were living there).

Disaster ‘relief’ is seriously big business where corporate profits and political prestige must be considered long before anything as mundane as helping desperate poor people. With the US ‘leading’ the relief of Haiti, quite apart from feeling even more sympathy for the Haitians than we otherwise would, the single most important thing to understand is that that ‘relief’ effort will be managed not by ordinary caring human beings but by big business – because the US government and big business are one and the same thing; and big business is legally mandated to maximise its profits.

Maximising profits means controlling supply, and making that supply as cheap as possible to produce, and as expensive as possible to buy. From a profit point of view, the idea of just parachuting food and water to desperate people whist proper support systems can be set up is pure madness. Not only does it cost money but it would also mean that desperate people aren’t quite so desperate anymore, and therefore aren’t quite so easy to control. In a country like Haiti, which has every reason to be deeply suspicious of American soldiers, the population needs to be adequately ‘prepared’ to accept the authority of a foreign army. Normally the preparation of suspicious populations requires considerable bombing and armed invasion – but just because nature provides the prerequisite devastation free of charge (if that was in fact the case here), that doesn’t mean you can afford to be more liberal with the supply side of the equation, it simply means the costs are even lower and therefore the profits even more bounteous.

The United Nations is the only organisation that has truly legitimate international authority. The fact that it is being muscled aside in Haiti, with the US marketed as ‘leading’ the relief effort, is of course no surprise. But the fact is that it is the UN and only the UN who should be left alone to co-ordinate the relief effort. That’s the only way we can be reasonably sure the job is being done with minimal ulterior motive, and that the people of Haiti are getting the best support and assistance possible. My heart goes out to the people of Haiti. Not only have they been struck down by a terrible catastrophe, but they are forced to rely on the most ruthless government in existence for their relief.

It is of course all but impossible for the average citizen to glean the real truth behind events such as these. We can only filter through the various snippets of information provided by the corporate press and try to work out what’s really happening by reading between the lines; and then hope against hope that what we come up with is a little closer to the truth than what’s being sold. The given reasons by the British government for their actions can obviously be dismissed out of hand, like the bit where Governor Wetherell says “it is not a British takeover” (In fact it’s a pretty good rule of thumb to usually believe the very opposite of what governments tell us). The good governor’s statement was full of the usual professional bureaucrat’s flannel: “We need to stabilise TCI’s finances and help rebuild a more diverse and vigorous economy.” (But according to the Independent, TCI’s economy grew under the leadership of Premier Misick from a GDP in 2003 – when he came to power – of $216m to $722m, and tourism grew from 175,000 visitors per annum to 264,000) And the bit I particularly liked: “We need to clean up public life and start to develop a fairer, more open society” – by sacking the elected administration and suspending trial by jury?

Other news reports suggest that Misick and his government were indeed living the high life – but that sort of thing never usually disturbs the slumbers of HMG; indeed, it’s more usually an essential qualification. So what might really be going on?

For me, one particular sentence stood out from a quite good report in the Independent way back in March (25th): “Sir Robin’s commission heard how Mr Misick and other ministers had grown rich by acquiring publicly-owned Crown land, selling it to developers and receiving commissions.” In the same article another interesting little gem claimed: “Canadian legislators have made regular overtures to unite with TCI. Nova Scotia voted in 2004 to invite the islands to join the province.”¹

Surely those dastardly islanders wouldn’t be presuming to decide for themselves what to do with their own land would they? Sorry, I meant to say HMG’s land?

The arrogance of the British government’s decision to scrap the islands’ democratically elected government is of course reason enough to arouse our suspicions – especially when none of the story has made it into Britain’s mainstream media (like the recent military coup in Honduras); but the real clincher is the fact that the government has also chosen to scrap trial by jury for the next two years. Something very dirty is happening in paradise.

1. This is a little misleading, as indicated in the following excerpt:

   In recent news, Nova Scotia’s parliament voted to offer a Caribbean nation, Turks and Caicos, to join their province if they were to pursue political and economical union between Canada. Although it’s official, no talks have commenced on the topic.

   Canada has had several talks with the Caribbean country, which is a British colony, all of which have led to absolutely nothing. The main factors on Canada’s part has been it’s unwillingness to be seen as a neocolonist. The Caribbean islands have been pursuing a union for almost 100 years, and it has popped up yet once again.

   See Christopher Walsh, “Turks and Caicos move to join Canada,” Canadian Content, 25 April 2004.

You want proof? Of course you do; and quite right too. I’ll give you a little proof – little not because only a little exists, but because there is so much proof that even if I were to write a whole book on the subject I would still only be scratching the surface; and that’s if we only talk about the proven cases of deliberate outright lies our trusted leaders tell us; if we included the full catalogue of half truths, omissions and deceptions we could fill entire bookcases.

Try visiting your favourite on-line book store and typing the words “lies and history” into the search engine. When I did it 690 books were listed. O.K., some of them are duplicated or out of stock, and others are irrelevant to this subject, but you get the point.

Leaders cannot be trusted. The importance of this fact cannot be understated, as our entire society is founded upon the bedrock of trustworthy leadership. Now this is not to say that all leaders are untrustworthy, and certainly not that they are untrustworthy all of the time – but this just makes the problem worse, because we seldom know for certain when we’re being lied to, or intentionally deceived, until it’s too late.

When ordinary people are sacked from their jobs for misconduct – or even just a sniff of misconduct, it’s almost impossible for them to find re-employment in similar work on the assumption that they cannot fully be trusted. But when it happens in public office or corporate boardrooms it seems to serve as an important examination that’s been passed, an essential rite of passage confirming one’s suitability not only for re-employment, but promotion to properly high office. The biggest prizes are reserved for those special rising stars where misconduct is strongly suspected, but cannot be absolutely proven. Ideally these examinations should not attract too much public attention, but even if they do it doesn’t present anything like the same obstacle to one’s career as it would for millions of lesser mortals.

Once properly schooled our public and private sector leaders then assume their rightful places as master puppeteers. Many lead quite uneventful lives and may remain as sleepers throughout their careers and never be called upon to seriously betray the nation’s trust. However, sometimes they are required to exercise the skills for which they’ve already shown a talent, and which won for them their exalted position. They could be required to lead a largely unwilling nation into an illegal war, say – a task requiring reasonable acting abilities, a total disregard for the truth, and psychopathic quantities of inhumanity.

Such is the situation in which we find ourselves. It’s not a new situation – a brief examination of history from the people’s perspective quickly shows that our leaders have nearly always proven themselves completely worthy of total mistrust. So what can be done about it?

First, and most important of all, is simply recognising that basic truth: leaders cannot be trusted. This is not an easy step to take, because the implications are truly immense, but it is an essential step: we can only fix a problem once we actually realise we have a problem.

It’s worth repeating that very few leaders are untrustworthy all of the time. Many, perhaps most, don’t even know themselves they cannot be trusted. These comprise the junior and middle ranking leaders who form the essential glue to keep the whole rotten edifice standing upright. Most of the time this very substantial group sincerely believe in the rightness of what they’re doing for no better reason than they’ve been told to do it by someone who they suppose knows what’s going on. “Just following orders” – that famous defence that was rightly blown out of the water at Nuremberg. How many ordinary soldiers in how many wars would have gone “over the top” to their certain deaths for absolutely no reason whatsoever except for the fact that some poor brainwashed fool of a junior leader went over first shouting: “follow me chaps”?

Next, after accepting that leaders cannot be trusted, we need to think about a very important question: what do we actually need leaders for? What ‘value added’ to our lives do they supply? In all the time I’ve thought about this subject (and that’s quite a lot), the only answer I can come up with is that in times of crisis it’s pretty useful to have someone who knows what they’re doing directing or co-ordinating the actions of others. But how often do such crises occur? Unless you work in the emergency services, how often does a real crisis affect your daily life so badly that you actually need a leader telling you what to do? Providing you’ve been properly trained for your job, have the appropriate resources to hand, and have good lines of communication with equally well-provided colleagues, how much do you actually need to be led? Even in times of national emergencies it’s not actually leaders we need, but organisation. Even the greatest leader can achieve nothing without an organisation; but an organisation may function perfectly well without a leader in sight – it only needs well trained, properly resourced people with efficient lines of communication.

Leaders affect almost every aspect of our lives, and the first realisation that they cannot be trusted comes as something of a shock. However, this is more than compensated for with the realisation that we don’t actually need them anyway. Anarchists have been telling the world this for many years, but have singularly failed to get the message across. Not that it’s entirely their fault. Our leaders, some of whom are not very stupid, fully understand the considerable danger to their positions of a world that suddenly comprehends it no longer needs them. Consequently they employ the awesome forces at their disposal to poison the minds of the people to the powerful messages of anarchy. Indeed, the very mention of the word conjures up to most people images of mindless wild-eyed fanatics smashing up anything and everything in their way (individuals who are often paid agents rather than real anarchists anyway), not something that prizes noble virtues such as peace, freedom and equality.

Perhaps the most traditional “essential” function of leadership is decision-making. We are encouraged to believe that our leaders have two very special qualities to enable them to undertake this vital function. Firstly we’re conditioned to believing that our leaders have particular natural gifts that enable them to make extraordinarily inspired decisions – decisions that no ordinary person could ever hope to make. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, we’re led to believe that our leaders always place our interests far above their own (the fact they must suffer lives of pampered luxury while the rest of humanity rubs along as best they can is no doubt some sort of penance they must endure for their noble self-sacrifice).

So let’s examine a little more closely this special duty of leaders: decision-making.

Firstly, consider the notion that they might have particular natural gifts and abilities. Undoubtedly there have been one or two leaders in the past with quite extraordinary personal abilities – but usually these talents have manifested themselves in the form of awesome ruthlessness and inhumanity. Upon closer examination, about the only notable quality of your average national leader, like some of Britain’s monarchs and certain American presidents for example, seems to be a quite spectacular lack of intelligence. Even the really bright ones seem unable to demonstrate an original thought they might once have had. How could such people possibly glide effortlessly from one inspirational decision to the next?

Then there’s the notion of self-sacrifice – the view that our leaders are driven only by the purest of ideals: to serve the greater good, a noble desire to do what’s best for us, the lowly mortals who gaze up with misty-eyed trusting awe at our saintly protectors. In other words we are conditioned to believing that the decision-making of our leaders can be wholly trusted because they always act in our best interests.

Armies are quite a good place to look for examples of leadership in practice; after all, they do epitomise the rigid hierarchical control model that is mirrored almost everywhere else in society. But there’s a bit of a problem. If military leaders (or their political masters) are so selfless in all their decision-making, why do they always locate themselves behind expensive desks in comfortable offices at very safe distances from any real danger? Why does their self-sacrifice on our behalf confine itself to sending ordinary people to distant deserts and frozen wastelands to kill and die for their own good? Why do our trusted leaders never lead from the front, or send their own sons and daughters to have a turn at getting up close and personal with death?

Directly related to the principle of self-sacrifice is what I call the payola-paradox. The private sector is the best exemplar of this (although the public sector is not far behind). The payola-paradox says that whilst all the best leaders will naturally be fully committed to self sacrifice, the best way for all that selflessness to be demonstrated is for them to accept top dollar – but the best way for workers to demonstrate their own self sacrifice is by working for nothing. So the greater a leader’s wealth, and the greater the workers’ poverty, the greater must be purity of decision-making and sacrifices everyone is making for the common good.

It’s cruel I know, but sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, and mocking such high-principled self sacrifice just has to be done in order to make a pretty valid point: the only people our leaders truly serve, and have ever truly served, are themselves.

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a little self interest; after all, it’s directly related to the survival instinct that’s common to every living thing. The real problems occur when the self interest of some individual, or class of individuals, is awarded grossly preferential weighting to the self interest of others (as it always has been).

So where are we? We’ve established that leaders cannot be trusted, and we’ve established the myth of perfect decision-making by self-sacrificing leaders; but the most significant point to take on board is that we don’t actually need leaders anyway. We’re perfectly capable of making our own decisions.

This is scary stuff; but consider it for a moment. What goes into making a good decision?

There are just three basic components: information, information and information.

First off, you need just the right amount of background information about any situation that requires a decision. This is best provided not by dozens of experts all repeating each other, but simply by two experts – who disagree with each other. Then you need the right consequential information about the possible results of any decision you might make – no chess player worth her salt ever makes a move without thinking about all the possible consequences; and finally you need a reliable means of informing relevant people about what the decision is. None of these components are, of themselves, difficult; but they are often made extremely difficult by devious people serving their own self-interested agendas.

It isn’t difficult to grasp the essential requirements of a good decision – it’s only taken me one paragraph to write it. So instead of being conditioned to rely on people we can never fully trust to make our decisions for us, why can’t we instead be conditioned to just make our own? And the decisions of government should be OUR decisions to make. After all, we pay for them – often with our lives.

Some would rightly argue that oftentimes group decisions need to be made; and that if a group of people is involved in anything it must be led. Not so. Groups need organised systems with a few key individuals providing specific communication functions, not leadership. Ah, but you need a leader to create the organisation. No you don’t. Groups are more than capable of organising themselves when there’s a real need to do so, as tens of thousands of rebel groups throughout history can testify.

But perhaps the most compelling argument for the failure of the principle of leadership, and why we have to abandon it, is this: the world is full of leaders, and look at the state of it. We have permanent war, ecological catastrophe, and a global economy that institutionalises massive poverty and obscene wealth for tiny all-powerful elites who, coincidentally, are the most strident advocates of leadership. Leadership is a failed experiment. The people, properly informed, must be free to manage the governments they pay for.