Not So Great Expectations

Recently I was struck by a quote from geographer Danny Dorling on the fact that, in 2020, the UK recorded the highest number of excess deaths since the Second World War.

“All these excess death calculations that are being made, we’re comparing ourselves in 2020 with five truly awful years,” said Dorling last month, “whereas other countries are comparing themselves with the best years they’ve ever had.”

Excess deaths are defined as deaths above what could be expected based on an average of the previous five years. Because of Covid-19, there were nearly 85,000 excess deaths last year. In the first three months of 2021, there were over 32,000 excess deaths.

However, the problem in using excess deaths in the UK as an indicator of the unprecedented nature of the Covid pandemic is that, because of the political choice of austerity, between 2014 and 2019 – the previous five years – excess deaths were already rising. There were, for example, over 32,000 excess deaths in 2015, over 20,000 excess deaths in 2016 and 2017 and over 22,000 excess deaths in 2018.

In other words, because of the preceding “five truly awful years”, the huge rise in excess deaths in 2020 and 2021 was less pronounced than it would otherwise have been. In yet other words, the true extent of the present human catastrophe overseen Conservatives has been masked by the previous human catastrophe overseen by the Conservatives. You might call that ironic.

Lifting the veil

This can happen because a veil of denialism still surrounds austerity. With Covid, the bare facts are generally accepted even if the reasons for the enormous death toll – at the time of writing the sixth highest in the world – are blotted out. Austerity does not even have that chink of light. A cheer-leading consensus has blinded a rational acceptance of its effects. The entire political class was in cahoots – though austerity was carried out by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, the pre-Corbyn Labour opposition voiced its support from the sidelines.

Austerity was largely implemented through swingeing cuts to benefits and central government funding to local authorities. A combination of the popular and the invisible.

The ground for the former was prepared by a massive, and effective, propaganda campaign, portraying benefit claimants – especially allegedly sick claimants – as scroungers living off the naive generosity of the taxpayer. In addition to direct cuts in benefits – the benefits cap and freeze – there was a huge increase in the sanctioning (the withdrawal of all financial support) of claimants. Over a million sanctions were imposed in 2013, a 345% rise on their 2001-2008 average (they had been introduced by the previous Labour government).

Local authorities, however, bore the brunt. The central government grant to local councils was cut by 49%. Given that most local government spending (around 60%) goes on social care, this is where the axe fell, with palpable consequences for mortality rates. In 2014, there were a million fewer social care visits to the elderly than there had been five years before.

There is nothing painless about cuts; they don’t just eradicate ‘waste’. “ … the more cuts there have been to public health, social services and benefits – particularly for people in old age – the more earlier deaths there have been in the UK,” says Dorling. “Cuts that prevent visits by social workers to elderly people reduce their chances of being found after a fall. Cuts that make it harder to rehouse someone who is currently in a hospital bed back into the community result in hospital beds not being available for others.”

All this was compounded by what was happening to the NHS. Though formally “protected” from austerity, between 2010 and 2015 health spending rose by an average of 0.5% compared to an annual uprating of 4% since 1950.

In 2017, a study published in the British Medical Journal found that the post-2010 squeeze on public finances was linked to around 120,000 excess deaths in England alone, with the over 60s and care home residents most affected. The researchers estimated there were more than 45,000 excess deaths between 2010 and 2014 and over 152,000 people could die between 2015 and 2020 unless the “mortality gap” was closed by more funding.

Mind the gap

But such was the size of the mortality gap, it was starting to eat into life expectancy. In autumn 2017, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revised its predictions for life expectancy for both women and men, cutting the estimate for both by about a year – an estimate that had been made just two years previously. Life expectancy was flatlining. After rising consistently for decade after decade, it was now barely creeping upwards. During David Cameron’s time in office it rose by a month a year for men and by just two weeks for women. By contrast, in the 1940s and early 1950s life expectancy rose by a year every three years and accelerated again in the 1970s and ‘80s.

This means, explains Dorling, “that 110 years of improving life expectancy in the UK are now officially over. The implications for this are huge and the reasons the statistics were revised is a tragedy on an enormous scale.”

The evidence kept accruing. In February 2020, the Marmot Review, an investigation into health inequalities originally commissioned by the Brown government, found that overall life expectancy had failed to increase for a decade and had actually declined for the poorest 10% of women. The author, Michael Marmot, blamed austerity for taking a “significant toll” on the nation’s health and being responsible for “flatlining life expectancy”.

And the pension industry believes life expectancy is actually falling. In 2018, The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries cut adult life expectancy by six months in what it said was “a trend as opposed to a blip”. In March 2019, Continuous Mortality Investigation, a company owned by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, found that the life expectancy of men and women aged 65 had fallen by five months from 2017. According to one group of analysts, the main reason was that deaths in 2018 were “particularly high”.

However, there is a silver lining. In 2017 the Financial Times had reported that the “sharp slowdown” in life expectancy could wipe £310 billion from the deficits of large companies’ final salary pension schemes.

In an irony typical of this economic system, deteriorating public health is actually good for the financial health of big firms.

At present, official life expectancy is stalling, as opposed to actually declining as it is in the US, but further revisions are not unlikely.

For whom the bell tolls

Changes in life expectancy such as these are momentous. Besides the human cost, they signal that something very significant is happening to an economic and social system. The collapse of the Soviet Union was preceded by rising mortality and declining health spending. In 1976, a French demographer – widely ignored at the time – correctly predicted the demise of the Soviet system on the basis of rising infant mortality figures. Coincidentally, since 2014 infant mortality has started increasing in England.

But despite our free institutions and allegedly adversarial media, stagnating life expectancy here and now has created nothing more than a faint murmur. The ONS’s downward revisions referred to earlier were buried in an appendix to a press release. The BBC can claim that Covid “has undone the progress made in the last decade or so” and ignore the pre-Covid rise in excess deaths (that its own graphs show!). Matt Hancock can pontificate about adding five years to life expectancy through healthy eating.

Nothing is being suppressed. All the information contradicting official complacency can be readily collated (I just have). But in the absence of mass exposure and repetition – the secret of news becoming received wisdom – the truth about austerity and life expectancy reaches, at best, a minority who want to hear about it.

And far from the damage being repaired, austerity – as enshrined by Rishi Sunak’s last budget – will continue. With the evidence about the effect of austerity in 2010s now clear, the government is responding by upping the dose.

Meanwhile, the land of make believe strides on, brimming with absolutely unwarranted self-confidence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Basic income versus the economy of coercion

 Proving basic income is affordable is merely the first skirmish in long war

In 2015, an academic from Birmingham University asserted that, contrary to the beliefs of sceptics, basic income was eminently affordable. Using Canada as his example, Richard Pereira quantified the likely effects of savings from the abolition of existing social security benefits, reductions in bureaucratic costs, a smaller burden on public health care and a crackdown on tax avoidance and evasion. His conclusion was that you could introduce a basic income at a ‘decent level’ without additional personal taxes. In fact, basic income might even enable reductions in personal taxes.

One of the priorities Pereira identified in making basic income affordable was plugging ‘tax leakage’ by multinationals and the rich. “Vast wealth is channelled away from public goods though … shady and secretive offshore jurisdictions,” Pereira wrote. “Some of the largest multinational companies are paying zero tax and receiving tax refunds and subsidies simultaneously.”

The release of the Panama Papers has lent Pereira’s claims about the affordability of basic income a distinct air of, to use a contemporary political buzzword, credibility. According to the Tax Justice Network, global offshore wealth amounts to $21-32 trillion. Get hold of that vast wealth and the whole political landscape shifts. Austerity loses its justification and basic income becomes a feasible aim. “Some may disagree with the notion of an unconditional cash grant, or object to it going to everyone. Just don’t say we can’t afford it,” noted one Panama Papers post-mortem.

The realisation that a colossal trove of wealth exists to fund basic income is coupled with a growing awareness that punitive welfare systems don’t even succeed in meeting their most elemental aim – that of saving money. All that checking on people’s fitness to work and whether they have applied for 47 jobs that week as they promised in their job search agreement, costs an inordinate amount of money. According the UK’s National Audit Office, the cost to the taxpayer of the private contractors carrying out fit to work tests is at least £600 million more than the government is forecast to save in benefits reductions. The ‘age of austerity’ should be renamed the ‘age of needless pain’.

But there is a danger that basic income advocates are lulled into the belief that all they need to do is rationally convince the public and policy-makers that a basic income is affordable, will lighten the burden on multiple public services and vastly increase personal freedom. People will slowly see the light.

This, however, is less than half the battle. A great many, very powerful people will not want basic income regardless of how affordable it is. They will fight against it mercilessly precisely because it will vastly increase individual freedom, and their entire worldview rests on human subjection.

The great German psycho-analyst and socialist Erich Fromm advocated a basic income sixty years ago his book, The Sane Society – he called it a ‘guaranteed subsistence minimum’. After refuting the idea that basic income sounds too ‘fantastic’ to be affordable, Fromm was less sanguine about convincing everybody that a basic income was necessary and right. “However, the suspicions against a system of guaranteed subsistence minimum are not unfounded from the standpoint of those who want to use ownership of capital for the purpose of forcing others to accept the work conditions they offer,” he said.

Even more than in Fromm’s day ownership of capital is now overtly predicated upon forcing people to accept the work conditions that are on offer. Economic recovery after 2008 rests upon low wage, insecure service sector work. According to economists, all the net growth in jobs in the US since 2005 has been in ‘alternative work arrangements’, such as contract and temporary posts. In Britain, zero hour contracts have mushroomed during recovery from recession, while other forms of flexible work contract have proliferated. In continental Europe, massive political weight has been expended to make it easier for employers to fire workers. In France, the Nuit debout protests are against a planned labour reform that would place the country’s entire labour laws up for negotiation with employers, including the 35 hour week.

All these changes are inherently about increasing coercion. “The labour market is never free,” says Paul Mason is his book, Postcapitalism. “It was created through coercion and is re-created every day by laws, regulations, prohibitions, fines and the fear of unemployment.”

The rise in sanctioning people on benefits in Britain for not looking for work with sufficient ardour and the hounding of sick and disabled people is not primarily about saving money because, as is evident now, money is conspicuously not being saved. The reason is to force people to take work at wages they can’t live on, make life on benefits so astoundingly awful that zero-hour contracts seem attractive, and to sound a clear warning to those in work that they need to knuckle under and obey. “Economics is the method,” said Margaret Thatcher. “The object is to change the soul.”

By contrast basic income threatens to undo all the hard work of neoliberalism in shoring up the power of employers. At present, as one basic income advocate says, “all negotiating power is in the hands of those offering the jobs and not those looking for them”. Basic income will grant palpable bargaining power to individuals in the labour market, and, for the first time, allow genuine personal choice. Erich Fromm thought basic income would be the beginning of real freedom of contract between employers and employees. Work will have to be interesting, or well-paid enough for people to want to do, or will be automated because no-one will.*.

But to the rulers of our societies this represents, not a dream of liberation, but a nightmare of the collapse of social coercion. Who knows where such a society will lead. Marilola Wili of the Swiss group, Generation Basic Income, contends that basic income will “unpredictably set human forces free in ways one may have never thought about”.

“Work for a salary is the bedrock of the system,” says Paul Mason. “We accept it because as our ancestors learned the hard way, if you don’t obey, you don’t eat.” Basic income will loosen that bedrock and quite possibly, in time, smash it completely. For that reason, many people at the summit of society will do anything to ensure it doesn’t come to pass. Let’s not kid ourselves, achieving basic income will be an almighty struggle. But it’s a struggle we need to embrace.

*Automation represents another danger basic income might pose to capitalism. According to Karl Marx, ‘the most fundamental law of capitalism’ is the tendency for the profit rate to fall as machines replace human labour, which is the ultimate source of value. If basic income cause a spurt in automation and a reduction in labour intensive employment, as unpopular jobs are increasingly mechanised, then profit rates may well, in time, crumble. Capitalism in the West has become reliant on low-wage, low productivity but labour intensive service sector jobs, which do not have to be done by people and in the future almost certainly won’t be, regardless of whether basic income is adopted. But basic income will accelerate that process. Human, sweatshop labour in China and East Asia has provided an enormous boost to profitability for multinational corporations, but that source of profit is drying up as the Chinese economy, and thus globalisation, slows. It is also true that, according to Marxian economics, various forces counteract the tendency for profit to fall, such as increased wages boosting consumer spending. Basic income could also be an offsetting force to falling profits, so its economic impact may be complicated.

Feeling invisible is the least of working class problems

“If I was of colour or had a disability or a different sexuality I just wouldn’t even bother turning on the television, because you feel invisible,” Times columnist and author of How to be a woman, Caitlin Moran, told the Radio Times last week.

“The lack of working class people in culture at the moment is notable,” she went on. “And when they are represented … Take Benefits Street. It’s the only time I’ve seen people on benefits on television, but you didn’t get to hear them talking about their ideas on philosophy or politics, you didn’t get to see them being joyful – it was simply about surviving, and that made them look like animals. It didn’t show them as human beings.”

This is true but something jars. Representation of working class people is not the same as representation of other so-called minorities. It’s far more troublesome because the implications of genuine representation are far less containable. Put simply, it’s possible to have a resolutely capitalist society that is authentically diverse, and comfortable with multi-ethnicities, equal representation of women, fluid sexuality and disability. It’s not possible to have a resolutely capitalist society that pays more than lip service to working class lives and experiences.

Merely on a superficial level, working class representation in culture is different. The problem is not invisibility but abject distortion and hostility. When the working class is heard in popular culture, it’s invariably with the prefix ‘white’ as if working class views can only be amplified in racial terms. Benefits Street, Benefits Britain, On Benefits and Proud, Benefits by the Sea, On the Sick, Benefits Hotel, Benefits Cat* etc (it’s quite a long list) are all fixated on looking down at people whose lives, intelligence and moral scruples are presented at a qualitatively lower level than those of the viewer. People live in ‘benefits’ houses, have ‘benefits’ babies and smoke ‘benefits’ fags.

These portrayals are dripping with condescension, stereotypes and malice. Invisibility would be a major advance. You could compare this representation with the way homosexuality or ethnic minorities were depicted in the 1970s but even that was less spiteful. It’s like the venom that’s now not acceptable to vent on other racial groups or non-heterosexual people has been stored up to be spewed on targets few will defend.

What does working class mean?

However these depictions are not of the working class per se but people on out of work benefits. The closer people are materially to those at the bottom of the heap, the more they may well want to differentiate themselves. “I don’t think I would want to be in the same class as somebody who takes what they can and has the attitude of ‘Well, I’m better off not working,” Lorraine, a fork lift truck driver, is quoted as saying towards the end of the book, Social Class in the 21^st Century.

Just under half of society, if you credit official definitions, are now working class. 10.6 million people in Britain can be described as poor (in work poverty has now overtaken out of work poverty), as their income is below 60% of the median. A further 760,000 are claiming Jobseekers Allowance and 2.3 million are getting either Incapacity benefit, or its successor, Employment and Support Allowance. The term ‘working class’ can be applied to all of these groups, or just one, depending on your intention.

It’s possible to react to working class stereotypes in the same way as racial stereotypes or homophobia. Just as there is sexism and racism, so there is classism. The solution is to fight an attritional battle on sexist, racist, homophobic or classist attitudes so that eventually society is free of them. In this ideal world, working class people have their voice heard equally in culture in the same way that women, ethnic minorities, non-heterosexual and transgender people do. The working class are not looked down on or stereotyped.

But this would be a false utopia. Being working class is not a collection of attitudes to be respected, or the spur behind an ambition to colonise the commanding heights of society, but a state of being that should not exist. The aim should be a classless society. The working class should be abolished. And that is a truly transgressive aspiration.

Diversity

It’s easier to see the distinction if you examine society’s acceptable and seemingly unstoppable radical edge, the push for diversity. Since 2010’s Equality Act it has been illegal to discriminate against job applicants on the basis of, not just sex or race, but sexual orientation, transgender status or disability. Discrimination obviously does happen but officially it shouldn’t. Government departments have been at the forefront of this drive. The Home Office has been recognised as one of the UK’s Top 50 Employers for Women and offers guaranteed interviews to qualified people with disabilities.  Secret service agency MI5 been has named ‘employer of the year’ by LGBT rights charity Stonewall. In the US, since the time of George W Bush, the US federal government has declared itself in favour of ‘workplace diversity’.

Allied to this, there has been constant pressure to make corporate boardrooms and the upper echelons of public sector bodies more reflective of society. The 30% Club campaigns for greater gender balance at board level in the UK. Groups such as OUTstanding claim business can benefit from greater productivity by enhancing representation of LGBT people at executive level.

It is, without question, a good thing that society, and its cultural expressions, reflect its actual diversity. Gay and transgender people, in particular, have suffered terribly from bullying and worse. The current stigmatising tone of coverage of benefit claimants prepares the ground for sanctions and cuts to sickness benefit. So a more realistic, and, gulp, sympathetic portrait may have tangible effects.

But cultural diversity and equal treatment by employers are profoundly inadequate tools for dealing with the inescapable inequality and autocracy of the capitalist organisation of society. This becomes apparent when you consider how the working class fits into the diversity agenda. The short answer is, it doesn't.

If an employer doesn’t want to discriminate, for example, against working class people, how are they to proceed? They could aim to ensure that people with working class backgrounds aren’t excluded. That would be difficult to define and enforce, but beyond these surface difficulties, whether a working class person even gets to the application or interview stage, is dependent upon innumerable factors. These elements, such as education, childhood experiences, parental wealth, ownership of assets, or cultural capital are produced by entrenched political and economic forces, and not within the gift of enlightened employers to bestow.

The result is that, despite the ostensible backing of Left and Right for greater social mobility and equal opportunity, the reality either gets worse or remains static. Two decades ago, Conservative Prime Minister John Major promised a ‘classless society’.  With impeccable amnesia David Cameron now claims the Conservatives as the ‘party of equality’. But class cannot be undiscriminated away.

A cooperative economy

However the incongruity goes far deeper. Genuine representation of working class opinions and experiences cuts against the grain of organisations built on hierarchy and career progression. For a telesales worker, a front-line nurse, a fork lift driver, a cleaner or a receptionist to have an equal say in the management of the organisations they work for presupposes an end to the arbitrary power of management, and the reaping of profits by senior management and shareholders. This simply cannot be allowed to happen. Power should steadily accrue to those who ascend career ladder. So working class experiences and opinions are necessarily suppressed in favour of those of the upper middle class.

If, however, you wish society to genuinely listen to the experiences of working class people, you have to move towards a cooperative economy, in which the distinction between employer and employee is abolished. This doesn’t mean that a division of labour is no longer needed or that management disappears as a function. But it does mean that enterprises and public sector organisations become classless and democratic. The huge cooperative enterprise at Mondragon in Spain, which contains over 250 businesses, indicates this is quite feasible.

The implications of such a change are massive for a society increasingly defined in terms of status, seniority and inequality. But, like a basic income heralding a post-work future, a cooperative economy could be just as liberating for those convinced they benefit from the current make-up of society, as for everyone else.

*This one is made up but I’m hopeful Channel 5 will commission it