Remember the Remembrancer

It sounds like the title of one of Arnie’s least loved films from the 80s doesn’t it? The Remembrancer: Rememberance with Extreme Prejudice. Well, that would probably be preferable to the reality.

The Remembrancer is an employee of the City of London Corporation, which if you don’t know, is the city and county Government of the City of London. Not Greater London, but that small part of London where the financial systems are based. One of the few local councils where they’re so damned democratic they actually let companies vote, which I think does them great credit. They’re also a very rich council. Oxfordshire County Council, to use one example, has an annual budget of nearly £600 million. Poor old City of London only has a budget of £372m. However, Oxfordshire does have 66,000 residents to CoL’s 7300, and covers over 1000 square miles to CoL’s (famous) single square mile). So whilst Oxfordshire only spends £870 per head and half a million per square mile, CoL has £50,000 per resident and (I didn’t need a calculator for this one), £372m per square mile. Which is nice. Maybe David’s Mum should move to the Barbican, then she won’t have to sign those petitions?

Anyway, one other benefit the City gets is a Remembrancer. The Remembrancer is responsible for all the lovely pageantry and sorting those special events the City loves so much. They are also what is known as a Roll A Parliamentary Agent. That means that, alongside a few very select solicitors from a few very select law firms, they get to sit behind the Speakers chair in Parliament and gets privileged access to legislation. They are the man from the City in Parliament, with access to the Parliamentary estate, a special seat and the chance to introduce, write and promote legislation. They are, basically, a sodding nightmare. Appointed by an organisation with no democratic oversight, an organisation that was at the heart of the 2007 crash, that resists all attempts at regulation and working with investigators and whose members donate huge sums of money to the Conservative party.

There are other Roll A Parliamentary Agents, private lawyers who promote themselves as lobbyists as well as legal advisers, who have access at the highest level. They’ve been involved in many of the scams and scandals of the past few decades, and yet, few have ever heard of them.

We’re often told when some big, pomp and ceremony type event is on by the news that “Britain does it best”. Rather handsome men on horseback in rather handsome uniforms (I have a particular fancy for the Royal Horse Artillery uniform — always a delight to see), carriages and silly hats and so on. The past has such a strong influence on the way we see ourselves and our futures in this country. We like our Monarchy, and out swan tupping. The mistake is to think that these things are just echoes of the past. Nice to see it trotted out, but not really relevant to today. That is a catastrophic mistake. The past is with us today, with influence and power far beyond what we can see. We must do away with these relics.

So, why an EU referendum anyway?

We are probably just a few months away from a referendum on the EU, and a a potential cataclysm if we leave. Big rhetoric is always going to be a part of debates around EU, but for my area at least it is not an piece of rhetoric. EU funds around here are a lifeblood. Without the EU, places like North Wales would be in a far worse state.

Am I the only one slightly confused about the referendum? I understand the Tories froth about all sorts of things and they need to pacify their base from time-to-time, but this is big. They were willing to piss them off on gay marriage, fox-hunting is still illegal and Thatcher’s funeral was as close to secular (in as much as Anglicanism is secular) beatification as possible. Why the EU?

Well, in my last post I talked about how I was certain that the Tories, despite appearances, are not stupid. Obviously they cock-up, but they know what they are doing. Everything that denigrates the state and makes it weaker is a step closer to their ultimate goal of private interests running things. It’s not entirely greed, it’s ideology. They believe with all their cold, frosty hearts in this stuff, as much as Corbyn believes in being nice and BBC directors believes Chasing Cars still makes for a stirring finale soundtrack.

So, if we accept that the negotiations and potential Brexit aren’t a screw-up, what is the rationale? Well, it isn’t immigration. Or welfare reform. Or Eurozone problems. It’s the City.

There’s one thing that utterly, utterly terrifies the City. What if the people of the world actually start realizing that a global problem requires a global solution. It took a lot of time and effort before the tax havens were even begun to be pressured, but the ball is rolling. What if the Robin Hood tax starts coming back around? What if people start to think that because Google and Amazon make their money internationally, we might need to start thinking internationally in our efforts to regain some of that cash.

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Cisco Systems and Oracle all have nearly half a trillion in cash, just sort of sitting there. That’s how much has been wiped off the European stock markets in the last 6 months thanks to the rumblings of the next big crash. That’s two of Greece. That’s $30 billion more the world (both government and private) spent on global warming in 2014. These companies could more than double the efforts to prevent the world from destroying itself, but no. It sit’s there. Despite the huge amounts they plunge into new capital projects.

What scares the City is that international cooperation could start addressing these problems. Anything that brings nation states closer together and allows public pressure to begin to increase, anything that threatens their almost complete dominance of economies must be stopped at any cost. That’s why free-trade agreements and barriers to the City are big parts of negotiations, and ultimately why they don’t mind losing. If we don’t get those protections, the City gets them by us leaving the EU.

It’s not about sovereignty, or refugees, or anything else. It’s money. It always will be.

Beyond parody

Two cracking, unbeatable stories this week. First off, the Govt has announced that it is moving the powerhouse of the Northern Powerhouse out of the north and to little old London. Clearly there’s not enough actual power in the North for it to kickoff the mighty explosion of power that the scheme will eventually release. It’s like nuclear fusion in that respect.

Secondly, Osborne has stated in the Commons that now we have the recipe for curry, we don’t need any more immigrants coming here with the recipe. Somehow the Tories are parodying the parodies of them from 1980’s. What happens when they start getting ahead of current day satire, I’m not sure, but I think it’ll be like more like nuclear fission, Chernobyl-style.

It’s easy to point at these things and say, “Good grief, they really are a bunch of idiots. Messing everything up”. I mean, it’s understandable. By most standards of rational behaviour, the actions of the Govt are utterly irrational. But, as Weber made clear, there’s no such thing as irrational behaviour, only behaviour you cannot understand the rationality of. Like Dawkins and religion, Trump and human beings, and myself and crossfitters, you have to think as the supposedly irrational person does to understand their thought and decision making processes.

We are all victims of it. We buy from Amazon when we decry their tax-status, we drink Coke when we know it’s awful for our health (though not as bad as for the health of trade unionists in Latin America) and so forth. Irrationality is human behaviour in a nutshell.

We know that Osborne and the rest of them are not stupid (bar Andrew Lansley, of course). So why does their behaviour seem so irrational? It’s because their actions conflict utterly with their words. From the “greenest Government ever” to Osborne saying he wants everyone to have a “fair share” of the economy, their words suggest one thing, but their actions another. Rising inequality, harsh attacks on the vulnerable and some no limits, hardcore fracking action suggest another.

We have reached a place where politicians know that their words count for almost nothing. Where Osborne can stand in Parliament and perform a Rowan Atkinson sketch with a self-satisfied smirk on his face, and yet mean it. When politicians are beyond parody and virtually unchallenged, what do we have left to stop them with?

Historical triumphalism is the biggest danger

We humans are funny things aren’t we? For instance, for a little over £20 you can buy a gadget that helps you slice your own bread (Worse than sliced bread). Not a new type of knife, but a stand for un-sliced bread.  Someone invented that and apparently there’s a market for it. Rather than buy sliced bread or live through the ignominy of slightly differently sized slices of bread, some people would rather have that than a takeaway with a friend, a few bottles of wine or an emergency cigar lighter for angrying up the plebs.

The thing that most confuses me about humans though is our complete inability to accept that things change. We (collectively anyway) have known about evolution for a century or so now. Entropy is a long established scientific fact. The whole fashion industry is based on change, and considering how well Fifty Shades beats (no pun intended) out Chaucer in the fiction sales each month shows that not only does our language change but our tastes as well.

So why do we also have this inbuilt assumption that the current state of affairs is, for better or worse, the apotheosis of human development? King John was pretty damned certain the Barons owed him fealty with nothing in return, Charles the First knew all of his rights were divine (like his shoes) and America of course is the land of manifest destiny (bar the poor, the immigrants, the gays and the lesbian-abortionist-femi-Nazis). We choose to see this procession from feudalism to industrialism to finance capitalism not as changes, but as ‘developments’. Marx and his crowd saw communism as the next, obvious, pre-destined step on from that.

We think like this because it fits into our tribal assumptions that ‘we’ (our class, our country, our religion, our race etc) is the tip of the top, creme de la creme, the hairiest and low-swingingist of the dogs bollocks. Sure, things would be better if we had a bit more of this (usually money) or a bit less of that (usually other people), but things don’t get much better than this.

I wrote before about how we fail consistently to see that history repeats. That within every action is the seeds for that actions reaction. Previously it was about Palestine (My visit to Palestine) and how both sides seem to have ignored the tragic, awful history of the place and how history dooms us all when we conspire to repeat it. That change is at the heart of everything.

I’m currently reading Paul Mason’s new book, PostCapitalism, and whilst a lot has been written about how his suggested new approach is unworkable (and there’s a whole other blog post on the book and how excellent I think it is), he early on gets to the heart of the matter in taking apart the argument that financial capitalism is the pinnacle of economics.

Something else I read recently, Umair Haque’s piece on the fallacy that the world is improving (The Predator’s Bargain), prompted this outpouring from me on Facebook, and it certainly relates.

This is an outstanding essay on, in short, all of human society and development.

I think my favourite line, of many, is “The world is getting better only in a very narrow kind of sense. In the same sense that the wolf might argue, during the long summer, that the world is getting better for the sheep. The valley might be blossoming. And the sheep may be tranquil. But the winter is coming, and it may be a winter without end. The wolves will reign.”

There are two important facts that we must recognise – that money does not bring happiness and that inequality most certainly does not either. These are quantifiable facts, demonstrated in study after study. If we accept that the aim of human society should be our own collective happiness, we must accept that our individual happiness comes from seeing our fellow man happy as well. Only the most morally depraved Randian would take pleasure in seeing a homeless person or a starving child. We currently have refugees risking their lives to escape war, torture, rape, persecution and starvation at the mouth of the Channel Tunnel and yet we have all seen people, including the Prime Minister, dehumanise them. That is what allows us to pretend that we are still being moral. They’re not humans fleeing the worst the world can throw at someone, they’re insects, barbarians at the gates, cockroaches to be squashed.

We also know that the planet is not simply being destroyed by our industries, but the resources that power those industries are running out. Environmentalists are described as ‘doomsayers’ and pessimists, but the fact remains that whether you see the glass as half-full or half-empty it remains a glass, not an ever re-filling magical chalice. How can we spend so much resources, time, money, will and ultimately human lives attempting to protect an economic system that is, at heart, doomed to fail? Ignoring all the ethical AND scientific problems that the systems has, it is a simple fact that it cannot continue. The Prime Minister himself is fond of the saying about repairing the roof whilst the sun shines. Well, live your own words.

I am an exceptionally privileged person, in a variety of ways. But we must accept that our current system is both morally bankrupt and economically doomed. Never accept that things are getting better. My privilege comes at the detriment and the cost of so many people. All of ours does.

I think Bertolt Brechyt summed it up best when he said, “Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.” Change is coming, and we must prepare for it.

Ostriches and students as consumers

I started this PhD with a clear image in my mind of what it was I wanted to do, the plan fell through. The Plan B, that I was less comfortable with, but seemed doable also fell through during January. Since then I’ve basically been an ostritch. Shoved my head into the sand of denial and pretended that the plan I had was at all what I wanted to do or even really doable.

So, I finally pulled my head out of… the sand… and spoke to some people and have settled on a new approach. I’ll still be looking at the student movement, but from the perspective of the rise of students as consumers. I’ve written before about the massification of higher education, and it seems to me that the marketisation of higher education is a logical progression. Academically speaking I mean, the process itself is not something I am a fan of. My hypothesis at present is that the flood of wholly new, different groups into the student body and thus into the student movement sparked the changes that occured in NUS at that time. Could the same happen now that we have consumers?

So, yeah. Still setting some of the fundamentals of this, but it’s really good to be back on a path I find interesting. A chance to explore some current topics, with a mix of methodologies that I am comfortable with and an approach that can blend history and social policy. My heaven basically.

Almost a year on

Well, it’s been nearly a year since I last blogged, and I’m trapped by rain waiting to be picked up by my housemate. The last blog was about starting my PhD and the questions I was seeking answers to. Well, a year later, I’m still (theoretically at least) a PhD student trying to answer these questions. The last few months though have been absolutely dominated by doing work for the University and the SU and launching a brand new Postgraduate Society at Bangor.

This is my first week largely free of any other commitments, and I’ve spent the day trying to turn a 20k word thesis from my MA into a 10k chapter for a book on Students in 20th Century Europe, based on the proceedings of a conference last summer. I apparently have completely forgotten a lot of what I written, and it’s been nice to come back and look at a piece of work I actually finished and am relatively proud of. Hopefully I’ll finish it by the end of the week, so next week I can start afresh on the PhD, with relatively fresh eyes.

So, a year on, what have I learnt? Well, being a PhD is hard fucking work. I don’t think I’ve been so consistently exhausted. Part of that is the last few months especially have been full on, working on three different research projects, looking at a potential Student Union research ethics committee (which I think I need to write a blog about soon) and all the Postgrad Society stuff. For those of you outside of Bangor, the Uni and SU have almost no staff aimed at Postgraduates at all. Not full-time and not exclusive to postgraduates anyway. So, we’ve relaunched the old society and have had some great social events, but my main interest is trying to foster a sense of academic community amongst postgrads here, something that PTES and PRES suck balls at. We’ve got a great committee and postgrads have responded really, really well to what we’re trying to do, and the SU have been excellent in helping out. The problem is the University. They talk and talk and talk about wanting to do all these wonderful things, but don’t actually do anything. We have seven senior managers with some responsibility for PG’s, including a Director of PGT and Doctoral School Director and Doctoral School Manager. Their combined budget, I estimate, is somewhat less than the fees for a full-time Masters student.

So, me and a small band of PG’s (both PGT and PGR) are trying to do what Universities all over the world actually pay people to do – encourage postgraduates to interact with each other, socially and academically. Unbelievably, there isn’t even a way for a History student to find out what the Social Sciences research seminars are on.

Anyway, my lift is here, so that’s me for now. I’ll try and remember to blog again because I’ve got some ideas in my head I want to flesh out.

The next three years

So, as many will know, I have recently started at Bangor again as a student; this time a PhD student looking at the student movement in the UK since the early 1990’s, and applying all sorts of sociological and political theories to movement to try and understand where the movement stands today.

 

I’ve been involved in my student union and the NUS since my first year, as a wee baby undergraduate back in 2008. I attended the extraordinary conference that ratified the new constitution and structures of NUS, and since then have been involved in almost every level of the organisation in some way. I have, in short, seen the organisation at it’s vacuous, factional and self-serving worst and it’s inspiring, united and passionate best. I’ve come to know officers and staff of the organisation, some of whom I count as friends and some of whom I wouldn’t micturate on if they were on fire. It’s fair to say that I have complicated relationship with it. At heart though, I know it is a good thing. 

 

What has always caused me pauses for thought though, is the relationship the organisation has with actual students. For all the claims of 7 million members, student politics across campuses are seen as the strangest sort of extra-curricular activity by the majority of students and engagement with the democratic structures that seemingly provide much of the legitimacy of these organisations, including the NUS, is incredibly low. When unions celebrate about 10-15% turn out for elections, I still cringe slightly.

 

A few months ago, an idea began to form in my head for a research project. Using the theories of three academics (Robert Michels, Max Weber and Philip Altbach) I’m going to spend the next three years looking at how the student movement in the UK today stands up against Weber and his questions on who we are aiming claims of legitimacy at, Michels and his Iron Law of Oligarchy and Altbach’s writing on student movements inspired by the tumultuous events of the 60’s. Do the changes we have seen in society mean that these theories are no longer applicable or relevant? What can we learn today by looking at what we thought we knew before?

HE is interested in student engagement? That’s nonsense

This is my first higher education related blog in a while and that’s simply because for the past 6 or 7 months I’ve been out of the loop. Until recently, I’ve been largely applying for jobs and gradually developing a plan for a PhD which I am now in the happy position where I am almost certainly going to be able to do it.

As things have developed, I’ve spent more time reading and thinking about the sector but it wasn’t until I was told that my submission to an edited volume on student engagement in Europe had been accepted, based on the work of my MA dissertation, that I had enough of an urge to blog*. It turns out that out of 41 authors in this volume on student engagement I am one of only 5 British academics. Two of them are married, and the other two jointly submitted.

We hear a lot about student engagement these days, not a fortnight goes past without my twitter column filling up with some sort of Guardian live chat or conference on engagement somewhere. But the people at these aren’t academics, or rather, not in the sense that they are academics of student engagement, but policy officers, student experience directors, sabbs, and the now familiar set of “Big Names”.

Research on the topic seems to be largely short term work or done only in one institution. I know that Universities want to know how satisfied students are and OFFA wants to know how many people at Oxbridge wouldn’t make it into Burke’s Peerage, and it is fair enough that this work is done. But this cannot be the only work being done on this. Martin Hughes (aka UniversityBoy) has written about short-termism in the sector (http://theuniversityblog.co.uk/2013/06/27/watching-everyone/) that talks of the dangers of it, and I believe that this lack of focus on seemingly anything to do with students is an example of this.

The sector at present has been in a curious state in the last few years. As one who studied the sector in the era of the Robbins Report and the UGC, the differences seem monumental. If the sector wants to remain strong, to remain relevant and to know what the future may look like, isn’t it time that we start seriously working on that?

* Whilst there’s definitely a blog in the current route to becoming a research post-grad that could fill the internet,  full of expletives, it has all been said before. And ignored.

Money is no game

Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal — that there is no human relation between master and slave.

Leo Tolstoy

I’ve been thinking a lot about money. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about the point of money, of economics, capitalism, communism and all the systems and designs that humanity has tried throughout history to come to some arrangement between one another. The history of this area is fascinating, and there are many books and documentaries that explain the various systems by which humanity has based the societies it lives in on.

We’ve used gold and silver and salt and wool and chocolate and all sorts of things as the basis for our finances, and now we have developed a system that has taken elements of the system developed during the Industrial Revolution and merged it with the latest in technology. The global financial markets are seen as the altar at which all money must present itself and to which we must all work for.

Wealth is the thing to which we all aspire, whether from pure avarice and greed or whether we wish simply for enough to be able to remove ourselves from the “system”. It says something that there are two types of “perpetual traveller” around today – those like Christopher McCandless who seek a simpler, nomadic and subsistence lifestyle and those whom jump from tax haven to tax haven. However, most of us are tied to social or familial groups or are not wealthy enough to sustain either of these lifestyles. The dream, though, of living a life free from the indentured labour that the employment market represents is one that resonantes with many of us.

No sane person though could reasonably suggest that the current system we have for sharing in the benefits of the combined resources of the planet and ingenuity of the human race is at all workable. Even if you think we should take care of our own first, it is estimated that in the twelve years from 2008 to 2020, average family incomes will have dropped by 15%, yet at the same time we have more people than ever before “earning” over £1 million.

These figures get bigger as things get further up the ladder of money. In 2001, over $2 trillion was traded PER DAY on the foreign exchange markets alone. This is 100 times more money than exists in all the stock markets throughout the world, and things have not improved. Only 2% of that money actually represented something that existed.

This is the heart of the problem with money. How can humanity exist in a system whereby money that doesn’t exist can be used to make more money that doesn’t exist? It is a game, pure and simple, and like all games require first and foremost an imagination. Except, things like hunger, poverty, sickness, homelessness, are not products of an over-active imagination – these things are real.

I qualified an earlier statement by saying, “Even if you think we should take care of our own first”. Whilst imaginary money is the core problem with this system, this statement is the core problem with humanity. We are led to believe that those that live in dire need are not part of humanity. We can walk past the homeless, ignore the facts of slave and child labour in the production of our clothes, the wars and slaughter caused by coltan mining, the environmental annihilation that comes with our agricultural, manufacturing and resource extraction (mining, forest felling, disposal) that impacts so hugely on those that live in these places, because they are not humanity.

I cannot believe that man wishes to be so inhuman to man. There are lots of well thought out reasons why we can keep our eyes closed, but fear is probably the main one. Ultimately, we are afraid of what might happen if we do not have money, for money is everything isn’t it? It isn’t greed, it is self-preservation. But what are we afraid of?

Money exists because central banks issue bonds – and aren’t they well named? Bonds that exist on paper become bonds of steel in our minds. Left, right, capitalist, communist, socialist, Labour, Tory, Republican, Democrat. These are all teams in the game of money. Let us recognise the simple fact that money is simply a means of keeping score – but this is a game we play with costs so much greater, so much more terrible, than the ones we try and pretend matter.

If you think you’re free, try going somewhere without fucking money, okay?

Bill Hicks

White privilege or: How I learnt to love Intersectionality

The past year has seen me take a lot of steps in my understanding of the politics of power, privilege and intersectionality. I have to say though, the past few months of debate, argument and outright hostility and threats that have marked recent ‘conversations’ within especially the feminist movement have been difficult to follow.

I have always felt that whilst those of us that would like to see a world free of discrimination or privilege, should aim to work together as much as possible, people are entirely within their rights to publicly state that they are only interested in their patch. It’s not the most positive thing they could do, but I know full-well that because of my own experience and knowledge, I can only really talk with confidence on certain areas, so why spend brain time on areas where I’m not going to be useful. 

 

Well, that was until I read this excellent blog post (http://renieddolodge.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/this-is-white-privilege/) by Reni Eddo-Lodge on the recent events. Never before have I felt quite so much as if someone had taken every inner-monologue and thought I’ve had on this and systematically taken them all apart. 

Of course intersectionality is the key to this. Of course it is about power. The encounter she relates of speaking to someone who comes out with the line, ‘You don’t know if that was racism. How do you know it wasn’t something else?’ made me cringe like hell. How can I go around talking about inequality and discrimination when I’m more than willing to cop out entirely with such an argument?

How many people deciding on what candidate to offer the job to will think when choosing between a white person and a black person, or a man and a woman, or an able-bodied versus disabled person, “Well, I’m not racist/sexist/etc, so it isn’t racism to give it to  person A over person B. They’d just be a better fit.”?

I’ve never had such a stark awakening, and I’m pretty ashamed that my mind hadn’t made that connection before. More people on our side need to wake up and allow reality into their carefully constructed theories and assumptions. We can’t rail against bigotry and then enable it quite so effectively with those weak words.