Trigger Warning – This book can cause serious damage to your propaganda

 

There is an innocuous-looking paragraph tucked away in John Pring’s marvellous exposé The Department which says so much about how the British political class has carefully nurtured this appalling, though largely unrecognized, scandal over several decades. And how – when faced with incontrovertible and accumulating evidence of the human damage inflicted – it has just doubled down.

On page 51, Pring recalls how in the US in the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan imposed a series of cuts to disabled people’s benefits, resulting in a spate of suicides. One woman with arthritis, spinal disease and severe depression, left a note saying, “the message I’m getting is either work or die.” “The Reagan administration”, Pring writes, “reviewed about 1.2 million cases and stopped payment to nearly 500,000 claimants, with 200,000 of those terminations reversed on appeal, until Congress forced a halt to the programme in 1984.”*

This sounds so much like the “slow violence” of British All Work Test/Personal Capability Assessment/Work Capability Assessment programme, even down to the huge number of successful appeals, that it’s quite uncanny. With the exception of course that no-one in authority has had the courage to say stop*.

That failure, as Pring relates, has been responsible for hundreds, possibly thousands, of deaths. These casualties comprise three kinds: people suffering from mental distress who were hounded and threatened with destitution by the Department of Work & Pensions (DWP), those whose real and impairing physical conditions were ignored, and those, such as ex-squaddie David Clapson, who died as a direct result of sanctions.

And it reveals the political/ideological lineage of what has happened over on Airstrip One which all began in 1989 when Thatcher’s social security minister, John Moore, sent a note to chief secretary of the Treasury, John Major, stressing “the need to tackle the rising expenditure on these benefits” with “no choice” but to make “long-term savings”.

But though the policy was shot through with its Reaganite/Thatcherite parentage, it did not loosen its grip when the Tories lost power in 1997. In fact, so keen was Tony Blair to demonstrate that Labour was no longer the party of Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson (and heaven forbid Jeremy Corbyn) that he made it a point of pride to extend the policy. It was the Labour party that introduced the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) in 2008 (under Gordon Brown actually) and vied with the Tories in the 2010 election campaign over how quickly existing Incapacity Benefit Claimants could be re-assessed (the promise was 10,000 a week). Of course, it was the Conservatives – in the person of Iain Duncan Smith in particular – who actually perpetrated this, resulting, as Pring documents, in a spike of deaths and suicides at the height of austerity in 2013/14. But the sad and sobering point is the Labour party would have done exactly the same thing.

And is doing now. Rachel ‘tougher on benefits than the Tories’ Reeves has kept Tory plans to further tighten eligibility for sickness benefits, resulting in ‘savings’ of £1.3bn. This further turning of the screw follows the creation of the WCA itself (because previous testing regimes like Peter Lilley’s All Work Test and Tony Blair’s Personal Capability Assessment were still too tied to the pesky opinions of medical professionals), more stringent rules introduced by Labour in 2010, yet further fine-tuning by the Conservatives in 2012, and of course Rishi Sunak’s goodbye present to the sick and disabled.

But still there is the common perception that if you self-diagnose as feeling a bit peaky, you can just saunter in to your local Job Centre and claim benefits. For example, Paul Routledge, chief political correspondent of the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror recently informed his readers that millions who “should and could work” “sign on” for long-term sickness benefits.

Yeah right.

As Pring illuminates, the fact that people “know” this can be attributed to the determined, and astonishingly effective, propaganda campaign enacted from the start of the ’90s that inculcated a fashionable cynicism that most ‘disabled’ people on benefits were, at best, swinging the lead and, at worst, outright frauds.

That this belief is as fresh as ever is illustrated by Sir Kier’s instruction to the Department of Work and Pensions (the Department of the title) to rifle through benefit claimants’ bank accounts to find evidence of fraud. The fact that fraud is miniscule, and for Personal Independence Payments it actually stands at zero, doesn’t make any difference.

But now we are told by Liz Kendall, who lives, by the way, in a Notting Hill mansion and claims thousands in Parliamentary expenses to pay her heating bill, that there a millions of not really ill people on sickness benefit (god knows how they got there), who need a bit for firm encouragement (doubtless through the threat to cut off their only source of income) to join the virtuous ranks of the “economically active”.

This attitude has survived unscathed since it was first fleshed out at the start the century under the previous Labour government. Then, as Pring relates, DWP-linked academics convinced themselves and others that the country was in the dreaded grip of a “malingering epidemic”. A book on the subject, Malingering and Illness Deception, mentioned the word “malingering” more than one thousand times – despite the fact that there was no actual evidence that the thing existed (the excuse being that the research hadn’t been done yet or was too difficult).

In Pring’s words – in an interview about the book – “There is this belief that people are defrauding the system and it is based on nothing whatsoever.”

As five months of a new government committed to ‘change’ have demonstrated, this conviction is as firmly entrenched as ever. Its latest iteration is that after Covid, there are millions vegetating on “long-term sickness” benefit whose purported ailments (or “illness behaviours” as they were termed a few years ago) shouldn’t stop them working. And as compassionate [sic] guardians of the public interest, we are going to flush them out.

The fact that Britain is now, post-Covid, a lot sicker, both mentally and physically, than before is not allowed to seep into the brains of these ideologues. After more than a decade of fiscal austerity combined with stagnating wages – and then topped off with a lockdown that imprisoned people in their homes followed by inflation, high interest rates and a resultant ‘cost of living’ crisis – this shouldn't come as a surprise.

This country was, though no-one in power wants to face it, suffering from falling life expectancy before Covid hit.

In reality, though the absolute numbers of disabled people on out-of-work benefits has risen, the proportion of disabled people on those benefits has dropped slightly.

Possibly if you want to reduce the benefits ‘bill’, you should strive to make society and the economy healthier for the people who make it up. Just as if your aim is to curb the tax credits ‘bill’, you increase wages.

But that kind of thinking would just get in the way of the smooth transmission of the propaganda, wouldn’t it?

At the end of Pring’s book, he evinces the hope that those who suffered because of decades of “dehumanizing bureaucratic neglect, cruelty and violence” can retrospectively receive justice.

But the prerequisite for justice is acknowledgement, recognition, awareness. And I’m sorry to say I can see neither hide nor hair of that.

This is the first part of this review. In the final part, I would examine what this tale of wanton “neglect, cruelty and violence” reveals about the corporatisation of British politics and system’s reliance on an unholy fusion of politics and the media.

 

*As the linked article relates, Reagan’s eventually aborted plan of withdrawing benefits from hundreds of thousands of disabled people was revived by Donald Trump during his first administration. I honestly don’t know whether it was implemented at the time but, given that he’ll be back in office from January, it probably will be.

Who is Jeffrey Sachs and why is he saying these things?

Last month the economist Jeffrey Sachs said something which should have sent shockwaves around the world. “I chaired a commission for The Lancet for two years on Covid,” Sachs told a conference in Madrid. “I’m pretty convinced it came out of US lab biotechnology, not out of nature; just to mention after two years of intensive work on this. So it’s a blunder, in my view, of biotech, not an accident or a natural spillover."

 This is not the kind of claim that can be safely dismissed – as claims going against the orthodoxy invariably are – as a ‘conspiracy theory’. Sachs is a famous economist. Twice one of Time Magazine’s most influential people in the world, he was responsible, as an advisor to Boris Yeltsin, for imposing shock therapy on post-Communist Russia (coincidentally the 1990s saw life expectancy in Russia fall by the largest amount, outside of war or famine, in any nation in history). Since then he’s undergone something of a metamorphosis, endorsing Bernie Sanders in the 2020 American election.

The Lancet is a famous British-based peer-reviewed medical magazine, not noted for its articles on the Loch Ness monster, Big Foot sightings and the lost city of Atlantis.

The Sachs/Lancet combination is therefore not one that can be plausibly accused of spreading fake news in order to garner a few thousand likes on Twitter. But what Sachs had to say wasn’t greeted with the kind of peaked curiosity you might expect from the media. The UK right-wing press – Telegraph and Daily Mail – did register his comments, though noticeably without the level of glee that accompanied claims from the year before that China, alone, might be responsible for Covid. State media (the BBC) and the liberal press (The Guardian) were conspicuous by their silence. Likewise the left-wing, and generally pro-China, Morning Star.

‘This was teamwork’

If Sachs is too close to the Establishment to be branded a conspiracy theorist, claims he is merely a “Xi propagandist” (Xi Jinping is the President of China) don’t really stack up either. After all, what he is saying does not exonerate China. To do that, he’d have to parrot the Chinese government line – and that of many western scientists – that Covid definitely originated in the wild.  Or echo Chinese media claims that the Covid-19 virus was cooked up at a US military base in Maryland. But he’s doing neither. He’s saying it’s very possible – not definite, no-one can know for sure without transparency by all parties – that SARS-COV-2 (Covid) was a deliberate creation of a US-Chinese scientific partnership and leaked out inadvertently as a result of a terrible mistake.  

It’s a matter of public record that US government agencies funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology among other places. This was a result of a 2014 Federal ban on such research in the US because it was considered dangerous. There were, Sachs says, grant applications that wanted to manipulate coronavirus strains to make them more infectious to humans (the logic being that if you do so, vaccines are supposedly easier to formulate). The National Institutes of Health – the US government agency that doled out the funds – says that no such proposals were approved. But, retorts Sachs, it’s common knowledge in these fields that some research is always undertaken in advance of the securing of funding.

“If this came out of a lab, it was US biotechnology that made it possible,” asserts Sachs. “The US actually trained the people at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they were engaged with them, they were part of the same grant proposals. This was teamwork.”

Two caveats should be made. One if Covid was released from a lab, it was a catastrophic error, not part of some dastardly plan to create a devastating new bioweapon. Two, there is no certainty. “We don’t know for sure, I should be absolutely clear,” Sachs cautions. “But there’s enough evidence that it should be looked into and it’s not being investigated, not in the United States, not anywhere. I think for real reasons that they don’t want to look underneath the rug too much.”

 

Oops

 

But what is clear is that, Jeffrey Sachs aside, there isn’t much of an appetite for truth here. Some people – US Republicans, Tony Blair etc. – were all for lifting up the rug when they thought China was the sole perpetrator. Certain Trumpists even wanted to go to war over it. But the enthusiasm on the Right for the unvarnished truth has waned the more the plot has thickened.

American Democrats and centrists and liberals of various hues are fervently attached to the zoonotic explanation for Covid because to depart from it puts science in the crosshairs when it belongs firmly on a pedestal.  When the Chinese government isn’t agreeing with them for slightly different reasons, it’s urging the World Health Organisation to investigate the sudden closure of the US military base denounced as the harbinger of Covid.

But Covid as the bastard child of a joint US-China scientific project gone cataclysmically awry? That doesn’t have quite the same partisan appeal, not least because you can’t blame communism or the US military. Ironically, if it is true, the only possible scapegoats for a death toll of, conservatively, over six million and counting, are the signature forces of our age, globalisation and outsourcing.  I mean who’d have thought they could have any downsides?

That’s the one certain ‘takeaway’ in the Sachs version of the lab leak theory. The world is a lot stranger than you thought. A new Cold War, even direct military conflict, is brewing between the USA and China. The most ‘globalist’ candidate to replace Johnson as UK PM, Rishi Sunak, promises to “face down China” as the biggest threat to world security. And yet here were these deadly enemies cooperating on extremely risky germ research. And that’s beyond dispute; they were cooperating even if at this point the Armageddon outcome is a matter of conjecture. I’m fairly sure that in the actual Cold War, even at the height of détente, the US didn’t farm out biomedical research to the Leningrad Medical Institute.

In all probability, even if some version of the lab leak theory is what happened, it will never become the accepted narrative. To concede that would be to invite a moral reckoning so seismic it would fatally damage the legitimacy of the world’s two superpowers and give a new fervour to the forces of ethno-nationalism and religion. I’d like to think the non-national, council democracy of the Kurds could step into the breach but I realise its libidinal reach is at present a lot smaller.

 It will be interesting to see how the final, peer-reviewed report of Sachs’s Covid commission in The Lancet deals with the issue; whether it will be as outspoken as he has been. If it is, I expect it to be one of the most unwelcome items of news in history.

Addendum, 1 Nov 2022

Maybe as expected, the Commission report hedges its bets about the origins of Covid, saying it is “feasible” the virus leaked out as a result of a “research incident” but also that a “zoonotic” explanation – a natural spillover – is equally plausible. In the absence of independent investigation of US laboratories engaged in “manipulation of SARS-CoV-like viruses” or laboratory research in Wuhan, it is not possible to say with any certainty what happened. “Commissioners held diverse views about the relative probabilities of the two explanations, and both possibilities require further scientific investigation,” the report says.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/lancet-report-claiming-covid-could-132931783.html

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)01585-9/fulltext

 

However, evidence for the synthetic origin of Covid-19 remains: https://twitter.com/mbalter/status/1583203103293071360

The Liberalism Nobody Knows

Liberal democracy (or liberal-democracy) appears as one of those natural pairings of the English language – a linguistic partnership that enhances, rather than does violence to, its constituents. It has become a modern truism that liberalism and democracy are inseparable bedfellows, soul mates even. Where liberalism is vanquished, democracy, at best, becomes a plebiscitary tool to vindicate the wishes of absolute rulers. Conversely, where liberalism is allowed to flourish, democracy – defined as free elections, an independent media and free speech – inevitably follows.

But this comfortable view, which permits its proponents to always feel they are siding with the angels, is a delusion. As Domenico Losurdo shows in Liberalism: A Counter-History, liberalism had quite separate roots from democracy and was fully prepared to countenance the seemingly illiberal tools of coups and dictatorship if it felt threatened from below. The much vaunted, and supposedly natural, coupling of liberalism and democracy was a slow, painful and fitful process, invariably achieved against the will of liberals and to which they have never been reconciled.

The rarely told history of liberalism

Losurdo traces the history of liberalism back to the Glorious Revolution in Britain in 1688. The subsequent Bill of Rights limited the power of the monarch and allowed a Parliamentary (though emphatically not democratic) system to emerge. From that point, liberalism was defined as opposition to concentration of power, in the form of the monarch and sometimes the Catholic Church. The other side of the coin was the liberty of people to be unrestrained by state power. But this liberty was never meant to be the birthright of everyone. Far from it, only “the community of the free”, in Lusurdo’s phrase, a small minority of male property-owners, were so blessed. The role of everyone else – the vast majority of people – was merely to be their servants.

Thus it was no accident that the liberal era was coeval with the slave trade, “the largest involuntary movement of human in all history”, and the establishment of a brutal system of racial chattel slavery in the United States – a British settler colony that achieved independence. In the metropolitan countries, the vast majority of non-property owners were not slaves but they were enchained as serfs or wage labourers. Freedom, to early liberalism, was the freedom of property owners to enjoy their property as they wished. In England, from 1688 (the Glorious Revolution) to 1820, the number of crimes carrying the death penalty increased from 50 to between 200 and 250 and these were almost always for crimes against property. In England at the start of 19^th century you could be hung for taking an unauthorized clipping from an ornamental bush.

The newly independent United States of America was a bastion of liberalism. But as British loyalists pointed out, this love of liberty went hand in hand with the consecration of the ‘worst species of slavery’. The Britain derived from the Glorious Revolution, the rebel colonists shot back, presided over the horror of the slave trade and treated its white servants little better than slaves.

Both accusations were true and both exposed the underbelly of liberalism. The veneration of freedom for some people was dependent on the complete opposite – total subjection and domination – for many others. To work this required an intricate ideology of dehumanisation. The French liberal Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès regarded wage labourers as “bipedal machines”, while the British liberal-conservative Edmund Burke (a man considered to be the father of modern conservatism who incidentally subscribed to the most elaborate Jewish conspiracy theories) looked upon workers as mere instrumentum vocale.

And when these machines began to make demands, the sheen of opposition to ‘despotism’ miraculously fell away. John Locke, the most influential of the early liberals, regarded physical force as entirely justified in the event of a tax not authorised by those affected by it. Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, was intransigently opposed to attempts to legally reduce the 12 hour day, introduce progressive taxation or instigate rent controls and believed “nothing authorizes the state to interfere in industry”. He supported the idea of a temporary dictatorship to modernize France. In Britain, between 1790 and 1820, more than 60 Acts of Parliament were passed aimed at repressing working class activity. Liberals enthusiastically endorsed the discipline of the workhouse.

The story of the vote

This is not to deny the umbilical connection of liberalism to self-government and representative, elected institutions – ‘no taxation without representation’ as the American rebels famously proclaimed – but the section of the population to be represented was necessarily and intentionally tiny. Britain had Parliamentary institutions – powerful bodies that had succeeded in executing a King and, since the Glorious Revolution, formed part of a constitutional monarchy – but prior to the Great Reform Act only 3 per cent of the public were entitled to determine who their members were – about 200,000 out of a population of eight million.

In 1832, the franchise was extended to 13 per cent of adult males, but Chartism, a mass movement calling for universal manhood suffrage and annual elections, was bitterly resisted and above all by avowed liberals. “In England” Karl Polanyi reminds us, “it became the unwritten law of the Constitution that the working class must be denied the vote. The Chartist leaders were jailed; their adherents, numbered in millions, were derided by a legislature representing a bare fraction of the population, and the mere demand for the ballot was often treated as a criminal act by the authorities …. Inside and outside England, from Macaulay to Mises, from Spencer to Sumner, there was not a militant liberal who did not express his conviction that popular democracy was a danger to capitalism.”

Britain did not approach becoming such a democracy until after the First World War. On the eve of that conflagration, only 30 per cent of the adult population (no women and 60 per cent of men) could vote. Britain was thus less democratic than its illiberal adversary, Germany, which had manhood suffrage.

The community of the free in the US was more expansive – voting for all white men was in place by 1856 – but that was because of the existence of millions of black slaves and endless expanses of supposedly “unpossessed” land. Even so, the idea that wage labourers were, in reality, wage slaves – because of their material dependence on employers, their state was comparable to that of chattel slaves – was enormously strong in the 19^th century.

And one of the strongest of the liberal “exclusion clauses” related to women. The vote wasn’t granted to women in the US until 1920. In Britain female votes were only achieved following a campaign of militant civil disobedience and hungry strikes and the massive turmoil of World War One. Women gained the vote partially in 1918 and, unconditionally, in 1928.

Far from being synonymous with democracy, liberalism, as Losurdo points out, regarded it with “coldness, hostility and sometimes frank contempt” – an attitude maintained for more than two centuries. Democracy and equal rights didn’t flow naturally from liberalism; they had to be prised from it:

… it must be borne in mind that the exclusion clauses were not overcome painlessly, but through violent upheavals of sometimes quite unprecedented violence. The abolition of slavery in the wake of the Civil War cost the United States more victims than both world wars combined. As for censitary discrimination [restrictions on the electoral franchise], a decisive contribution was made to its abolition by the French revolutionary cycle. Finally, in major countries like Russia, Germany and the United States the accession of women to political rights had behind it the war and revolutionary upheavals of the early twentieth century (Liberalism: A Counter-History, p 341).

The new liberalism

But, it will be objected, all this refers not so much to the history of liberalism, as its pre-history. With the emergence of the ‘new liberalism’ in the late 19^th century, the creed of liberalism changed beyond recognition. It became reconciled to – even championed – democracy, economic regulation and racial and gender equality. John Maynard Keynes, for example, an economist synonymous with scepticism towards laissez-faire capitalism, was a lifelong member of the British Liberal party. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, probably the most famous of 20^th century American liberals (he never called himself a socialist), placed freedom of speech and freedom of worship on a par with freedom from want for “everyone in the world”.

The face of modern liberalism can be seen in the public letter of 30 writers, historians and Nobel laureates published in January who warn that European “liberal democracy” is confronted with “a threat not seen since the 1930s”. The liberal values espoused here are those of internationalism, anti-populism and toleration. Democracy is ostensibly defended, not derided.

But the older liberalism has not died. It is, in fact, arguably more influential than its modernised twin. Neoliberalism (‘new liberalism’) has been guiding force of the economy since the 1980s. Neoliberalism holds that market forces should determine economic decisions, taxes on wealth and corporations should be as low as possible and government budgets should be balanced (a feat always to be achieved by cutting public spending rather than raising taxes on the wealthy). Neoliberalism harks back very directly to economic liberalism, the doctrine of laissez-faire that asserted that contracts negotiated between ‘free’ individuals should not be interfered with by the state.

Except that economic liberalism is a misnomer. The original 20^th century economic liberals, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises, did not regard themselves as economic liberals but consistent liberals. To them, the other liberals had abandoned the tenets of liberalism and embraced ‘socialism’. It was always a cause of some regret to Hayek that his ideas were taken up by the British Conservative party – he was a major influence on Margaret Thatcher – rather than the Liberals.

Taking the risk out of democracy

And Hayek and Von Mises retained the older liberalism’s coldness towards democracy. Hayek, for example, was full of praise for Chilean dictator Augustus Pinochet and believed that “liberal dictatorship” was infinitely preferable to “democratic government devoid of liberalism”. Von Mises, a generation older, regarded trade unionism as a form of terrorism and thought the merit of Italian Fascism – won through saving European civilisation from the workers’ movement – would “live on eternally in history” (and this in a book entitled Liberalism).

The temptation is to say that we are dealing with two distinct political currents that, by dint of historical coincidence, go by the same name. But that would be too hasty a judgement. Hayek, for instance, was very sympathetic to the idea of European federalism. To him it offered protection against the virus of democracy. “The absence of tariff walls and the free movements of men and capital between the states of the federation has certain important consequences which are frequently overlooked,” he wrote in a 1939 essay. “They limit to a great extent the scope of the economic policy of the individual states.”

Hayek’s praise for the virtues of “one single market” thus prefigures the creation of the EU’s single market which does indeed limit the economic policy of individual European states and enshrines the free movement of capital and people. And the single market – resolutely supported by Margaret Thatcher it should be recalled – is the core institution of a European Union whose “liberal values”, intellectuals warn, are under attack from nativists and xenophobes.  

But the clearest bridge between the two liberalisms can be seen in the outlook of the corporate elite at the Davos World Economic Forum. Their concern about the threats to what they term the “liberal order” has now risen to a crescendo. This order comprises the free movement of capital and commodities (globalisation) coupled with a cosmopolitan attitude and support for gender and racial diversity.

However their stance towards the arch destroyer of that liberal order – Donald Trump – is revealing. They are repelled by his protectionism, hostility to immigrants, sexism and xenophobia but irresistibly attracted to his indulgence of the immensely wealthy. When, in 2017, Trump massively cut taxes for the rich (reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 per cent and instituting tax breaks for millionaires), Davos went weak at the knees at this long overdue “tax reform”.

Contrast this with the unrelenting hostility directed towards left-wingers such as Jeremy Corbyn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders who are in fact resiliently liberal in their opposition to attacks on immigrants, refugees or LGBT people but also in favour raising taxes, moderately, on the wealthy (and, in Corbyn’s case, renationalising public services). Should Corbyn become UK Prime Minister – which now seems likely – expect that hostility to ramp up into brazen attempts to bring down his government, by any means possible. And liberals will be at the forefront of that effort. The tragedy is, they will always return to their roots.