Tag: Starmer

Starmer through the looking glass

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

The hypocrisies and biases of a political stance are often revealed starkly by keeping the grammar of a statement intact but reversing its terms. The result puts whats being said, and, crucially, what isn’t, into a sharp relief.

This is very clear in Keir Starmer’s statement on the Iranian retaliation for succesive Israeli assassinations and terror attacks and their latest assault on Lebanon.

For ease of understanding I have kept in the original word in brackets.

“I utterly condemn this attempt by the Israeli (Iranian) regime to harm innocent Palestinians (Israelis), to escalate this incredibly dangerous situation, and push the region ever closer to the brink”

“It cannot be tolerated. We stand with Lebanon (Israel), and we recognise her right to self-defence in the face of this aggression. Israel (Iran) must stop these attacks”.

Israel (Iran) “has menaced the Middle East for far too long, chaos and destruction brought not just to Palestine (Israel), but to the people they live amongst in Lebanon and beyond.”

“We stand with the people of Palestine (Israel) and we recognise her right to self-defence in the face of this aggression,” adding that Britain supports “the Palestinian People’s (Israel’s) reasonable demand for the security of its people.”

Landslides on thin ice?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“In many ways, this looks more like an election the Conservatives have lost than one Labour has won.” John Curtice.

This is evidently the case for the Conservatives. Their support more than halved from 2019.

The splintering of the Tory vote almost down the middle between the Conservatives and “Deform UK” is their most serious split since the Corn Laws in the 1840s. And its a real split. It can’t be overcome by some fantasy of getting “the Conservative Family” back together and arithmetically adding the Conservative vote to the Reform vote (which, at 39% would be 4% larger than Labour’s share).

Farage has a programme to ruthlessly pursue the logic of Brexit, slashing and burning regulation and taxes and the welfare state, cracking down on unions, playing racist dog whistles on trombones in a manner calculated to cause social unrest and violence, and suicidally abandon any attempt to resist climate change; in a way that more traditional Conservatives would consider disruptive and dangerous to social order and profitability.

Add to that the fact that Reform’s economic policy is like that of Liz Truss, but without the restraint, and you get an environment that is too risky for slow and steady profitability. The problem for the wing of the Tories that don’t want to go for this kind of adventurist far right alternative is that the Tory grassroots are largely in that camp; which has meant bending to them in Parliament. So, that’s where the realignment of the Right is heading. This will be put on boosters if Trump regains the White House.

With Tommy Robinson’s thugs planning a street action in London to “take over” central London on July 27th, when Farage promises “something that will stun all of you” its hard not to think that rubber truncheons will be involved.

At the same time, when people say things like, Labour is now “once again in the service of working people”, or how changed Labour has regained popular trust, those statements stack up oddly against the number of people who could be bothered to get out and vote for the Party.

In 2017, under “shh, you know who”, Labour won 12,877,000 votes.

In 2019, under the same man, Labour won 10,300,000 votes.

Yesterday, under Starmer, Labour won 9,600,000 votes, more than half a million fewer than in 2019, still being talked about as “Labour’s worst result since 1935”.

Overall this amounts to 35% on the share of the vote, up less than 2% from 2019.

And this was on a turnout of 60%, down from 67% in 2019.

Most of this small rise is accounted for by a 17% rise in Scotland at the expense of the SNP.

In England overall Party support flatlined.

In London it was down 5% and Wales down by 4%.

This is thin ice.

1,000 eyes for an eye?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“Also, I guess its permissible for a gentleman to kill children and women, as long as they are peasants”. Jason Lee Burke. Flags on the Bayou.

When Rishi Sunak says “There are not two sides to these events. There is no question of balance. I stand with Israel” he is stating his position in reverse order.

He stands with Israel, therefore there is no question of balance, and therefore there can be no acknowledgement that other side to the conflict can have anything legitimate to say.

Nor can he acknowledge that the ultimate cause of that conflict is the racially oppressive nature of the Israeli state; nor that the balance of power and therefore the balance of death and damage is overwhelmingly in Israel’s favour; with five Palestinians killed for every Israeli.

This year alone 49 Palestinian children have been killed by the IDF and settlers; something that stokes no moral outrage in our media, from our Prime Minister or leader of the opposition, let alone the despatch of two aircraft carrier task forces to the Eastern Med by the United States.

Because Palestinian children being killed is normal, expected, nothing to remark on. The natural order of things. Just as the inexorable dispossession of Palestinians from their land and the entrenchment of racist laws (over 50 of them) in Israel carries on with barely a comment, as though it were a force of nature.

Nothing anyone can do about it. Its just where the power lies.

And so it does. The “West” supports Israel because Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians is like that of the West to the rest of the world in microcosm, and the fault line between the Global North and the Global South runs through the territory controlled by Israel. Israel itself is generally seen as being part of the Global North. The Palestinian territories are definitely not.

Rishi Sunak stands with Israel because it is defending Western wealth and power, and capacity to discriminate and deny wealth and power to others, with force in the same way that the UK and USA do. They are doing it within territory they control, rather than in a series of expeditionary forces far from home, but its the same relation of power that is being “defended”, or enforced, depending on what side of the process you are on.

Power, wealth, dominance. Being seen as human comes from having it. Those who do not have it, the dispossessed, are not, and cannot be, counted as fully human. “Human animals” as the Israeli defence Minister put it. Who deserve their punishment. Kay Burley might not say that “Gaza has it coming” but its the unspoken presumption behind every broadcast and the framing of every report.

Because Apartheid was, and is, not an aberration. It is the normative racial expression of colonial power. And that is shown most starkly in whose lives matter, and whose don’t.

That’s why its possible for Sir Keir Starmer to say that it is legitimate for Israel to “defend itself” by cutting off food, water, power and medicine to all of the two and half million people who are trying to survive in the Gaza strip.

Just think about that for a moment. Imagine it the other way around. Would it be legitimate for the Palestinians to cut Israel off from food, water, medicines and power, if they could, as an act of self defence from the regular bombing and shelling it gets from the IDF? Or is it only acceptable for those that have the power to do so. The strong have the right to defend themselves against the weak, because they can? Might makes right?

This is also normative. It is how the “West”, that embodiment of enlightenment values, “defends” itself against any regime, of whatever sort, that challenges it, from the half million children starved to death in Iraq in the 1990s through sanctions to the 40,000 who died in Venezuela in the last decade.

The humanity of those who die cannot be allowed to come into it. Some lives matter more than others and therefore the deaths of those that do can be pressed into service to create a great tsunami of moral outrage that can justify horror on a far grander scale to restore the natural order of things. The most lurid stories about this – widespread rapes, the beheading of 40 babies on a Kibbutz – are now being quietly withdrawn for lack of evidence. But they have served their purpose on the front pages and social media feeds to prepare the ground for the retaliation; which will be on a terrible scale.

All the more terrible because Israel has suffered the humiliation of having one of its army bases overrun. “Facts on the ground” will have to be reasserted so they can carry on trying to keep themselves safe, not by seeking peace and equal rights for everyone in the territory they control, but by doubling down on the exclusion and repression that has generated this reaction in the first place. The human losses in the immediate term will be appalling. In the longer term, a state that will have to become ever more violent and repressive, simply postpones the point at which this breaks and makes the eventual reckoning apocalyptic.

This is the pattern as we saw with 9/11. Three thousand five hundred people died on that day in 2001. Their stories were told, their loved ones interviewed, their last messages played back, the rubble was sifted through for traces of DNA that could be buried. There was no doubt that these people’s lives mattered. The “war on terror” that the USA unleashed in response killed four and a half million people. Their lives did not matter. The ratio of deaths is over 1,000 to one.

And that is the scale of the barbarism of the “enlightened West”. They kill on such a large scale, with such sophisticated weaponry, in so many places, so often, even at home sometimes against the “lesser breeds without the law” that live among them, partly because they are terrified of the consequences of what they know they have done.

The atavistic fear of the slave rebellion subconsciously acknowledges the terrible injustices done to the enslaved, in terror at their vengeful uprising; and tries to assuage itself by redoubling the injustice, building walls and bombing harder. Impossible to live with that unless you deny the humanity of the people you are doing it to.

And so it is with flags. Showing a Palestinian flag in the UK can now be a matter for the police -as it can be seen as a form of threatening behaviour. Flying the Israeli flag on public buildings at a time they are bombing Gaza more intensely than at any point in the last 16 years, smashing six neighbourhoods, hitting 18 health facilities, killing 1,200 people so far, is considered a fine gesture of solidarity.

In the second wave of the wars for the New American Century, dissent will increasingly be defined as treason, extending humanity to the oppressed considered inhumane.

On one level, its possible simply to turn questions like that of Richard Littlejohn on the front page of the Daily Mail on Tuesday on its head. “How can the British Left make excuses for a terrorist group that murders women and children?” And that would be valid as far as it goes. “How can the British Right make excuses for a terrorist state that murders women and children?” But the deeper question is what the answer is and where the solution lies.

For the Right the conflict in Israel-Palestine is posed as between two ethnic groups. Power relations are ignored, or taken as the natural order of things. So, the motivation for resistance becomes a flaw in character. Evil terrorism from people who can’t accept their place. “The Palestinians have to accept that they are a defeated people” as US neocon Daniel Pipes put it. There is therefore no solution but endless repression to keep those who currently have the upper hand, one of “our allies” and therefore the good guys, in power forever. And, if that looks like a boot stamping on a child’s face over and over again until the end of time, so be it. Not “our” children after all. “Little snakes” according to former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked.

For the Left, the conflict is about power and equal rights and the solution is everyone having them. The slogan “No justice, no peace” is not a threat, it is a description.

Round the twist and up the spout. Why the mental health crisis?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Keir Starmer’s pledge in his Party conference speech that a Labour government would make sure that anyone needing mental health support from the NHS would get it within a month, is a reactive response to an increasingly evident mental health crisis that until recently hardly dared speak its name. However, it is also a fire fighting response to symptoms; implying no attempt to look at causes.

That requires a deeper look at what’s going on, what is the scale of the problem, why it is happening, what are the “solutions” that are currently being tried; and what are they trying to do and whether they work (and who for)?

What’s going on?

The MHFA in England reported the following before the pandemic.

  • 1 in 4 people experience mental health issues each year.
  • At any given time, 1 in 6 working-age adults have symptoms associated with mental ill health.
  • Mental illness is the second-largest source of burden of disease in England. Mental illnesses are more common, long-lasting and impactful than other health conditions..
  • People with a long-term mental health condition lose their jobs every year at around double the rate of those without a mental health condition. This equates to 300,000 people – the equivalent of the population of Newcastle or Belfast.
  • 75% of mental illness (excluding dementia) starts before age 18.
  • 70-75% of people with diagnosable mental illness receive no treatment at all.

When considering young people.

  • 12.8% of young people aged 5-19 meet clinical criteria for a mental health disorder. 
  • Women between the ages of 16 and 24 are almost three times as likely (26%) to experience a common mental health issue as males of the same age (9%). 
  • The percentage of young people aged 5-15 with depression or anxiety increased from 3.9% in 2004 to 5.8% in 2017.  
  • About 20% of young people with mental ill health wait more than six months to receive care from a specialist.
  • In a 2018 OECD survey of 15-year-olds, the UK ranked 29th for life satisfaction, out of a total of 30 OECD countries.
  • About 10% of young people aged 8-15 experience a low sense of wellbeing. 

Not surprisingly, research carried out in the UK by NHS Digital between February and March 2021 found a very high and incidence of sleep problems, eating disorders and loneliness among young people aged 6 to 23; and that these had risen very sharply since 2017.

Four things jump out from this.

  1. It is widespread.
  2. It is damaging.
  3. It is expensive.
  4. It is growing fast.

Why is it happening?

It is apparent that, as a general rule, people with less social standing, wealth and power get more depressed than people with more. The Joseph Rowntree Trust reports:

“Across the UK, both men and women in the poorest fifth of the population are twice as likely to be at risk
of developing mental health problems as those on average incomes.

Material disadvantage (with low educational attainment and unemployment) was associated with common mental health problems (depression and anxiety) in a review of population surveys in Europe… and is more marked in women than in men”.

So, the worse off you are, the more likely you are to suffer depression and anxiety.

So, though individual mental frailty or a chemical imbalance, or genetic predisposition can be factors, the main underlying factors are primarily social conditions that can be exacerbated or ameliorated by policy.

Its not hard to work out why. If you have resources, a comfortable place to live, assets in the bank, secure well paid employment, a role in society that confers respect, smart clothes, time and money to pursue culture and (sometimes) power over others; you live in a different world to someone who has no job, or a zero hours contract, or casual employment, scraping along on benefits, owing money to a loan shark, having to use a food bank, paying rent at an extortionate rate with no security of tenure for a gaff with mould that is ruinous or impossible to keep warm, wearing clothes until they wear out, and looked down on as a person worthy of no respect or value, no matter how much they graft. Being in the “Precariat” can be like standing on the edge of a precipice being relentlessly nudged towards it, while a rock capable of crushing you hovers over your head; and every system you try to use to navigate your way out presents itself as a labyrinth of tricks designed to frustrate you. Not this office mate, down there…Hopelessness, powerlessness, frustration.

And, women get more depressed than men. Which reflects the patterns of wealth and power, in society and the family.

And People on the receiving end of racism, are also hit harder than average.

  • “Black men are more likely to have experienced a psychotic disorder in the last year than White men
  • Black people are four times more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act than White people
  • older South Asian women are an at-risk group for suicide
  • refugees and asylum seekers are more likely to experience mental health problems than the general population, including higher rates of depression, anxiety and PTSD.”

So far, so structural.

When we look at trends, its clear that increased impoverishment combined with disempowerment lead to an epidemic of mental ill health in the last decade; as any notion that the future offers hope to people at the bottom of the heap is closed off. Hopelessness tends to depression or rage, or sharp veers between the two.

Increases in child poverty since 2010 are continuing, and sometimes given a push by government legislation – like the restriction on benefits to larger families that came in in 2017. The Joseph Rowntree Trust has these figures for before the pandemic.

  • Poverty rose from 13% in 1996/97 to 22% in 2018/19 in lone-parent families working full time.
  • Between 1998/99 and 2010/11, the child poverty rate in lone-parent families working part-time more than halved from 52% to 22% but it has since risen back to 41%.
  • Poverty among single earner couples where one parent works full-time rose from 29% in 1996/97 to 38% in 2014/15 and remains at this level in 2018/19.

This is what the UN Special Rapporteur concluded about the UK in 2018.

“14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty. Four million of these are more than 50% below the poverty line, and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials”.  

The pandemic is reckoned to have put a further 200,000 children below the poverty line.

The impact of the pandemic has also generated greater inequality and mental illness, hitting the poorest, women and ethnic minorities hardest – in cases, deaths, long Covid, bereavements, job losses, increased debt, increased workloads. This study in the Lancet shows that the countries with the worst infection and death rates have had the greatest increase in depression and anxiety and spells out the reasons this has hit women harder than men. “Women are more likely to take on additional carer and household responsibilities due to school closures or family members becoming unwell. Women also tend to have lower salaries, less savings, and less secure employment than men”.

At the same time, the number of billionaires in the UK increased by a quarter; and people with secure settled jobs they could do at home on a laptop piled up additional spending power. The combination of being more vulnerable to illness and increased insecurity on the one hand, and declining social standing on the other is potentially devastating for those losing out and left below.

And hovering over everything, the impact of the climate crisis is now unmissable. Even the Murdoch press in Australia has began to wake up and move in. Turn on the news and there are pictures of cars being flooded down German streets like so many paper boats, Chinese tube trains filling with water, London streets flash flooding, towns in the North Western USA burned out in minutes, plagues of locusts in East Africa. As a consequence, recent survey of young people showed that 75% globally (and 72% in the UK) are frightened of the future, 54% think that humanity is doomed and 39%, as a consequence, are planning not to have children. “No Future. No Future. No Future for you” as the song went. Climate anxiety is a live discussion in schools. This is not a false anxiety, not a mental disorder, but a completely rational response to a real threat.

The consequence of a continued failure to develop a social mission to avert climate breakdown is likely to be an increasingly pathological society; as a fatalistic or defeatist acceptance of impending civilizational breakdown leads to a last days of Nazi Berlin hedonistic frenzy. The field full of discarded single use plastic tents at the end of the Reading Festival at the end of August could stand as an early sign of this.

None of this is down to chemical imbalances or personal frailty. All are consequences of political choices.

These are huge over arching issues. There are other, smaller but no less real factors gnawing away at people’s self respect and security bound up with the way work is organised. All advanced economies are predominantly service sector. Thomas Piketty has pointed out that improvements in productivity are relatively straightforward in manufacturing. Invest in more modern and effective machinery and the production per worker increases. This is not so straightforward in services.

In education, for instance, it has been argued that, although the quality of learning has gone up, the scale of input needed to squeeze each additional measurable point in performance from students gets greater and greater. So a class of 30 kids with one teacher in 1990 would get to a level lower than a comparable class in 2020. But that has required a massive investment in IT – whiteboards etc – and additional personnel, Teaching Assistants; which is positive and gives children a richer experience. But it has also come with a bunch of people in the Senior Management Team whose role in life is to walk round with clip boards measuring everyone’s performance.

This application of Taylorism to teaching has made it increasingly mechanical, squeezed the life out of pauses and reflection, put enormous pressure both on educators and students, both of whom have been disempowered by the process; as appraisal is constant for the staff and testing constant for the children. UK children are the most tested in Europe. Tests for 4 year olds (imagine trying to do one – have Ministers ever met any four year olds?) and a return of Key Stage 3 SATs are the latest wheezes. Is it any wonder that children in the UK come 29th out of 30 in life satisfaction in the OECD. To put it another way, we are a world leader in the unhappiness of our children.

At the same time there is an equally relentless pressure – and this is common to the entire service sector – for compulsory happiness. What might be called a “smile though your heart is breaking” policy.

I stress this point about education because another reference in Starmer’s speech was to a return to the formulas of the Blair years; that squeezing additional performance out of the education system would underpin the programme of any future Labour government. If this is to be done in the same way, what might be summarised as OFSTED, OFSTED, OFSTED; this will compound the problem.

Particularly when you consider that what comes to the front of Starmer’s mind when considering curriculum review is that students should get “life skills” training, like how to fill out a mortgage application – indicating an imaginative horizon bounded more by Moneybox Live than IPCC Reports. The need to review the whole education system, so that our society can rise to the challenge of climate change, passed him by.

But this loss of control is widespread and counterproductive. Even noting that working from home, which gives workers more control over pace, timing, cutting themselves a bit of slack when they need to, working intensely when in the zone, has led to an increase in productivity of around 15%; companies are investing in software that enables supervisors to check up minute by minute on what their workers are doing; thereby killing the autonomy and (accidental) sense of trust that has generated the productivity increase in the first place. Its as if they are afraid that people will notice that this sort of role isn’t needed.

Its even worse for workers in warehouses denied union representation, controlled by wrist monitors dictating a pace of work that has them peeing in bottles, who are not in much condition to generate a sense of well being and fulfillment from their work.

So, the mental health crisis is being driven by the dynamics of the system we live in.

What is being done?

Driven by the economic costs – estimated to be £105 billion a year – and the need to keep the show on the road, the approach is to aim to patch up the people who crack up under the strain enough to make them once more functional, productive members of it – or at least not out of control and a danger to themselves and others; like the nearly 60,000 that were sectioned in 2019-20. This might be described as the Craiglockhart method; after the centre that treated victims of shell shock (PTSD) in the First World War; so they could be sent back to the front line and shelled again. The problem is individualised and the task is to make the patient fit back neatly into the systems that caused them distress in the first place. Starmer’s pledge is an indication of how far this inadequate framework is under resourced and under strain.

According to the Mental Health Foundation in 2014;

“The proportion of people with a common mental health problem using mental health treatment has significantly increased…. It is estimated that 75% of people with mental health problems in England may not get access to the treatment they need.” 

There are two main methods. Tablets or talk. Sometimes both.

Prescribing tablets is the first reflex.

This report from NatCen in 2019 shows that

  • The number of antidepressant prescriptions dispensed each year in England doubled between 2008 and 2018
  • Survey data show that the proportion of adults reporting use of antidepressants in the past year increased in the 1990s, and again between 2007 and 2014
  • The average length of time that antidepressants are continuously prescribed to people for has increased over time.

Public Health England reported “that, in 2017 to 2018, 11.5 million adults in England (26% of the adult population) received, and had dispensed, one or more prescriptions for ….antidepressants, “.

Confirming the analysis above they continue “Prescribing rates for opioid pain medicines and gabapentinoids had a strong association with deprivation, being higher in areas of greater deprivation. Antidepressant prescribing had a weaker association with deprivation. For benzodiazepines and z-drugs, prescribing rates slightly decreased with higher deprivation. For all medicine classes the proportion of patients who had at least a year of prescriptions increased with higher deprivation.“

The questions that arise are obvious;

-if a quarter of your population has to be prescribed drugs to be able to cope with everyday life, what’s wrong with the system and what changes need to be made?

At the same time, 1.4 million people were referred to talking therapies in 2017 and just under a million started treatment. The most common form of this is Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. These are time limited sessions, geared to teaching mental techniques to help people cope with pressures that might otherwise prove overwhelming. Its not the same as psychoanalysis and doesn’t seek to cure anything deep seated; more to train the brain in mindfulness and relaxation methods to make the otherwise unbearable bearable. While this is often essential so that a lot of people can cope with everyday life as it is currently lived – and preferable to old fashioned coping strategies like getting drunk – which never worked but had a massive negative knock on effect on personal health and domestic violence – its role is to enable people to get by, not to remove the source of their problem.

So, the approach to mental health is the same as the approach to COVID. Find ways to live with it.

What else might we do?

“We need to stop pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in”. Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

We might add, many of them are being pushed.

If the underlying sources of anxiety and depression are primarily social, so are the solutions. Poverty, inequality, sexism, racism, disempowerment of people at the bottom of the heap (and the individualisation of their problems) are built into capitalism and daily regenerated by it. So, we can’t expect a top down solution.

However, societies with a shared collective purpose at times of danger have lower levels of mental illness. We are at such a time of danger now with climate breakdown. Anxiety is the only sane response to it. Taking collective action to transform our world is the only way to stay sane while it is happening.

And that applies to every other form of oppression and exploitation. We need to reach out and join up. Humans become more human, creative, empowered, respected when acting in solidarity. Acting together to put things right gets us out of the black box of solitude.

Avoid the tabs, organise!