A welfare state for the rich

The Conservative government is intent on making the United Kingdom an offshore tax haven for wealthy individuals and multi-national companies thus showing Mr Trump what a good boy it is in its determination to break off entirely from Europe. A 2009 quote from the Polish born sociologist Zygmunt Bauman who died last week, reminds us that the process of establishing "Tax Haven UK"  has been going on for some time. Speaking of his fears for democracy, Bauman spoke of the United Kingdom New Labour government's bail out of the banks in 2007-2008 as the creation of 'a welfare state for the rich.'

In the summer of 2015 Bauman elaborated on his thoughts about the demise of democracy in an interview with Ricardo de Querol for El País :

We could describe what is gong on at the moment as a crisis of democracy, the collapse of trust: the belief that our leaders are not just corrupt or stupid, but inept. Action requires power, to be able to do things, and we need politics, which is the ability to decide what needs to be done. But that marriage between power and politics in the hands of the nation state has ended. Power has been globalised, but politics is as local as before. Politics has had its hands cut off. People no longer believe in the democratic system because it doesn't keep its promises. We see this, for example, with the migration crisis: it's a global phenomenon, but we still act parochially. Our democratic institutions were not designed for dealing with situations of interdependence. The current crisis of democracy is a crisis of democratic institutions.

Jeremy Corbyn is one politican who gives this issue a high profile and is, with his colleagues, already planning policy which will reverse the process when the Labour Party is elected to government.

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Sources:


2013: Mark Davis (ed.), Liquid Sociology: Metaphor in Zygmunt Bauman's Analysis of Modernity. Farnham: Ashgate


2015 Interview with Zymunt Bauman, Ricardo de Querol in El País http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/1453208692_424660.html  

Immigration, the cost of food and Jeremy Corbyn

Today I was once more energised by the negative way the BBC presents Jeremy Corbyn’s views. This morning for instance one of its reporters said the views Mr Corbyn expressed about immigration were confusing. This was untrue. Mr. Corbyn simply said that he didn’t think we should stop immigration but that we should stop  big business organisations attracting foreign workers here to the United Kingdom and employing them at minimal or below minimal pay rates in order to carry out mainly menial tasks. Preventing big business from doing this would be an excellent way to control immigration since the jobs that most of us imagine immigrants usually do would now be paid at a rate attractive to UK workers. If these enhanced pay rates did not attract British workers, we could reasonably conclude that it was the nature of the jobs that was not attractive to British workers and since many of these currently low paid jobs are carried out at a critical (critical because crops have to be harvested when they are ready, and critical because we all need to eat) stage in the food production chain, it would still be necessary for us to invite immigrants to carry out these jobs since the big supermarket companies want to keep the cost of food production down because this is what their customers (that is, all of us) demand. Still, should this be the case if we adopted Mr. Corbyn's approach at least those who were carrying out these crucial jobs would be better rewarded for their toil.

An alternative to this, as Jeremy Corbyn also suggested this morning, is to apportion the rewards of production differently by reducing the pay of very high earners and sharing this money around more equably. Now why would anyone think this an extreme idea? It might be argued that "top people" deserve higher rewards. Personally I don't see the logic in this. There is overwhelming evidence to show this doesn't work. Look at the mess the well paid "top people" have already made of our planet and you may see what I'm getting at.

Ah, well time to watch another BBC news report to see what will get my goat this time.