The UK’s crisis of self-respect

Britain is a society in crisis. A political, social and economic crisis. But this is accompanied by a crisis of self-confidence and self-respect. How else is it possible to explain how people who have been direct victims of Tory policies are preparing to vote for them?

According to the United Nations there are 14.6 million people living in poverty in the UK. That should be 10 million votes in the bag for Labour’s transformative manifesto right there (about 4.6 million are children and can’t vote). Given that the last Labour landslide in 1997 was achieved with 13,518,167 votes, a total nobody has beaten in recent years, we can see how important it could be if poverty = Labour vote.

According to the Trussell Trust, who now run 1200 food banks throughout the UK, some 1.6 million food parcels are distributed each year rising by 23% year on year. We have a serious crisis of hunger in the World’s 5^th richest economy. Nobody who has to rely on food banks should ever vote for the party that caused them. But, some do, or they don’t vote at all.

According to the Office for National Statistics average earnings have increased by just 0.9% in real terms. Full Fact has calculated that average weekly wages have fallen by £20 in the past 10 years. As they point out averages hide as much as they reveal. Younger workers and those in the public sector have been particularly badly hit. Whilst these groups tend to be more favourable to Labour, a not insignificant number of low-paid individuals will give their vote to a party whose main interest is protecting the rights of their employers to keep them low paid.

Meanwhile the Institute for Fiscal Studies issued a report earlier this year showing that average spending per pupil had decreased by 8% in the past 10 years. Head teachers have demanded an immediate increase in funding of £5.7billion just to restore spending to where it was in 2009. Of course, this differs slightly in the devolved nations, but even they are dependent on a settlement decided by the Westminster Government. In short, anybody who works in a school or has children should not even consider voting for the party that is responsible for those cuts. But, many will.

In September the National Housing Federation estimated that 8.4 million people in the UK were living in sub-standard housing. Around 2.5 million people cannot afford to pay their rent or mortgage. The Federation said that the country needs to build over 300,000 houses per year, of which half should be affordable “social” housing to deal with the crisis. How is it possible then that some of the people who would benefit from those additional houses (promised in Labour’s manifesto) will not countenance voting for the party that will deliver the home they need?

The Equality Trust argues that the UK is one of the most unequal countries in the developed World. In 2018 the richest fifth of households had incomes 12 times that of the lowest fifth. There is nothing natural about this it is the result of deliberate Government policies. Policies which the United Nations condemned as “a return to the workhouse”. Since 2010 we have witnessed a transfer of wealth away from the poorest to the richest in society. But some among the poorest will still vote for the party that has deliberately and recklessly made them worse off.

But, here’s the rub, all of us, including those who are ‘relatively’ well off, would benefit from changes to a system that is so unequal that for those at the bottom life is intolerable. Even for those in the middle the fear of losing what they have or of their children not having the life chances they have enjoyed, means that life is far from perfect.

How then do the Conservative Party, a party set up to conserve the status quo (the clue is in their name), manage to convince ordinary people that it is in their interests to vote for them? Around 37% of voters in the lowest income bracket voted Conservative in 2017 according to the British Election Study. According to one poll (carried out by ComRes for the Telegraph) that figure could rise to above 40% in two weeks time.

However, a report from the University of Kent (which analysed BES data) did find that 48% of those who thought their household income had declined in the previous year voted Labour. But, staggeringly, 27% were prepared not only to vote for the party that was responsible for that decline, but apparently quite happy for them to reduce it further.

Just how do the Tories keep managing to convince these turkeys to vote for Christmas? The obvious answer is that the Tory propaganda machine is far more pervasive than anything the opposition can muster. The Media Reform Coalition released a report recently showing that just three corporations (News UK, Daily Mail Group and Reach) dominate 83% of the national newspaper market (up from 71% in 2015). When online readers are included, just five companies (News UK, Daily Mail Group, Reach, Guardian and Telegraph) dominate nearly 80% of the market.

At the same time, since Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, the main broadcasters in the UK – BBC, ITV, Sky – have pursued what amounts to an active campaign to undermine him. They have been aided in this by members of his own party who have seized every opportunity to voice their disquiet at both the leadership and the members who support him.

There are now a number of academic reports that show that the bias against Jeremy Corbyn goes beyond what could be considered fair comment. The LSE In 2016 concluded that “UK journalism played an attack-dog, rather than a watchdog” role, in denying Corbyn or his supporters an opportunity to deny allegations made against him by his detractors. 

An ex-Chair of the BBC Trust voiced his concerns over the lack of impartiality. Sir Michael Lyons, who chaired the trust from 2007 to 2011, claimed that there had been “some quite extraordinary attacks on the elected leader of the Labour party”.

He told the BBC’s The World at One: “I can understand why people are worried about whether some of the most senior editorial voices in the BBC have lost their impartiality on this.”

Whether people actually believe what they read in the press is very difficult to discern, but what is being reported forms a background noise to people’s daily lives. They may well be more interested in who is on Celebrities Dancing On An Island (or whatever reality TV show is this weeks big news) or whether Jose Mourinho can turn Spurs into genuine title contenders (I confess I am quite interested in this myself), but some of the big political headlines will seep into their consciences.

According to the British Social Attitudes survey (one of the largest and robust social surveys in the UK) only around one-third of the population profess a great interest in politics (that’s you and me, dear reader), but whilst around 40% have some interest, somewhere between 32-37% say they have no interest at all in politics. It is those with “no interest” who are most susceptible to what we might term ‘involuntary bias saturation’. That is they do not have considered political views but rather absorb, unquestioningly, the general sense from the dominant background noise.

There is still a direct correlation between those who have an interest in politics and actually voting. In the 2010 British Social Attitudes survey 86 per cent of those with a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of interest in politics reported voting in the May general election, compared with only 53 per cent of those with “not very much” interest or “none at all”. This is worth bearing in mind when we consider that turnout at General Elections is around two-thirds of registered voters. So, having no interest does not necessarily mean you will vote Tory, or as Oscar Wilde had it “you have no interest in politics? Oh,you’re a Liberal”, because of those people around half will not vote at all.

A report from the National Centre for Social Research showed that interest in politics was directly related to income. Based on the BSA the reports authors state: “Just 34% of people in the poorest fifth, and 28% of people in the second lowest income group say they had ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of interest in politics, compared with 56% in the highest income group.” 

This is interesting because what it suggests is that those with most to gain from electing a Labour Government profess less interest in political issues and are subsequently less likely to vote than those with better incomes, better houses, and better life chances generally.

What this tells us is that Labour’s natural demographic, those who would most benefit from their programme, do not vote, and show not much interest in politics generally. It is easy to write off non-voters as apathetic or “thick”, but this fails to recognise the psychological impact of poverty (though if you are not living in poverty apathetic or thick might apply, but I’m too polite to say such things about my fellow citizens).

A 2015 report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation included the finding that: “Those experiencing poverty show significantly lower levels of confidence in their own ability to succeed.” It is not just that they lack self-confidence in their own abilities but this leads to a fatalism about their ability to change anything. They can begin to internalise the negative stigma attached to poverty and this undermines their self-respect. If others do not respect them, then how can they respect themselves?

Persons lacking in this form of self-respect (there are various types of self-respect) may act in ways that run counter to their best interests because they do not regard themselves as equal citizens. The upper classes are taught from a young age that it is their right to rule, the middle classes are taught that it is their right to expect improvement in their lives, but the working classes are told that their destiny is to be governed by their betters, to do as they are told and to accept that “nothing ever changes”. I vividly remember being told as a teenager not to fight the system because the system always wins. Like plenty of others I rebelled anyway, but those negative messages become embedded into your conscience chipping away at your self-confidence even when you are doing well.

I realised as I found myself doing well at university (thanks to a mature students grant) and as I climbed the professional ladder that many of those I came into contact with had a sense of entitlement that I was totally lacking. If truth be told I always had the feeling that I was going to be found out and sent back to my bedsit and life on the dole. Somehow I got away with it!

The point about this lack of self-respect is that it runs deep and is fatalistic. It prevents people from thinking that “real change” is possible. It encourages people to be grateful for what they have, and rather than being outraged by massive inequalities to envy those with even less – benefit scroungers, immigrants, those on low wages, you get the picture.

As a class those lacking self-respect become pessimistic not just about the possibilities of social change but about whether change is even desirable. That state of mind, encouraged by the mass media, by schools and often by parents, encourages people with most to gain from change to vote to conserve the status quo or to leave the decision-making to those who know better.

As a country the UK lacks confidence in its ability to produce a fairer, more equitable, more tolerant society. Such a society is not just a way to tackle the crises outlined above it is a way to improve the well-being of all citizens. As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrate in their book The Spirit Level : Why greater equality makes societies stronger, in countries where wealth inequality is least (Norway, Japan, Sweden,Finland) well-being as assessed by life expectancy, happiness, trust and a range of other indicators, is significantly higher.

The task for the left in the UK, regardless of what happens in the election, is to increase the self-respect and self-confidence of those, especially the poorest, who think that maintaining the status quo is in their best interests. On almost every measure of well-being the UK is close to the bottom among developed countries. This is simply unsustainable in the long run. We now have a mainstream political party with a genuine chance of governing that is committed to changing that. 

If Labour wins the election the transformation in people’s lives will be immediate and long standing. If we do not win, the economic and social crisis will continue to grow. The left will have a fight on its hands to maintain the commitment to more equality which is ultimately the only way to deal with the crisis of self-respect that is holding us back.

Polls apart

According to the polls Labour is in for a drubbing come Election Day. Latest polls give the Tories a commanding 16 point lead which could translate to a massive majority for Johnson and his deceitful compatriots.

Déjà vu? On the 15^th April 2017 (five weeks before the General Election) the Sunday Mirror reported a ComRes poll that showed the Tories with a massive 21% lead over Labour. Labour were predicted to lose anywhere from 40-100 seats, even losing their hold in strongholds such as Wales. It seemed a disaster was looming.

Based partly on their insurmountable popularity as evidenced by the polls Theresa May, who you may recall was Prime Minister at the time, asked for an early General Election. She had good reason to be optimistic. The massed ranks of the British print and broadcast media had spent 12 months laying into Jeremy Corbyn.

It’s worth recalling how the media have treated Jeremy, a principled politician who was first elected in 1983, and has been a thorn in the establishment’s side ever since. Initially he was the plucky outsider who needed the signatures of MPs who were never going to vote for him to even be on the leadership ballot. Once he won he was just too nice to be a leader, despite having the support of over 60% of members (twice). Then he was a joke, a man who had an allotment and made his own jam. Then he was a terrorist sympathiser, Czech spy, dangerous Marxist, anti-Semite and just plain too boring to be PM. Unsurprisingly his personal poll ratings plummeted.

Despite this, in June  2017 the Labour Party secured more votes and a greater vote share than at any time since Blair’s 1997 landslide. Labour gained 32 seats and 40% of the vote. The Tories lost 13 seats with 42.5% of the vote. Their majority was slashed meaning that they had to do a deal with the DUP in order to remain in Government. The rest, as they say, is history.

In the 2-3 days before the 2017 election most pollsters, with the exception of Survation, had the Tories on 44-46%, with Labour trailing on 33-35%. So, how did the pollsters get it so wrong? 

The British Polling Council, to which all polling companies subscribe, noted that whilst the polls are good at predicting the Tory vote, they are less good when it comes to predicting Labour. However, this being the case in 2017, it was the exact opposite of 2015 when the BPC’s internal enquiry concluded:

“..the primary cause of the polling miss in 2015 was unrepresentative samples. The methods the pollsters used to collect samples of voters systematically over-represented Labour supporters and under-represented Conservative supporters. The statistical adjustment procedures applied to the raw data did not mitigate this basic problem to any notable degree.”

What happened in 2017 was the under-reporting of Tories in 2015 was corrected, mainly using statistical methods rather than more rigorous sampling techniques, but this produced an under-reporting of Labour support, and a slight over-counting of Tory votes.

To understand the inherent bias of opinion polls it is important to realise that polling companies would love to be able to say that they predicted the result of a General Election 6 or 7 days prior to the actual count. They are professionals and although the heads of the organisations may well be Tories many of the researchers on the ground and doing the statistical analysis will not be. This is simply to say that they are not reporting Tory leads just because that is what they would like to be true. They believe they are telling the truth.

Most of the companies now conduct the majority of their research online. One or two still conduct telephone interviews but few now employ an army of interviewers knocking on doors to talk to people. To do online research is a considerable financial saving, but it comes at a cost to quality.

To conduct online research it is necessary to compile a panel of people prepared to take part. Most companies now invite you to join their panels on their websites and some even offer payment. But, what this means is that the panels are, by definition, self-selecting. You may think that provided the panel is sufficiently large that is not a problem. That certainly seems to be the attitude of the polling companies.

Generally speaking research on the general population (for elections that means adults aged 18 and over) is regarded as fairly robust with a sample above 1,000. In 2017 sample sizes ranged from 1,000 to 11,000. However, sampling theory tells us that for that 1,000 people to be representative of the study population (in this case voters in the UK) it should be randomly drawn from that population.

Companies are rather secretive about their panels, but YouGov has stated that it has around 1 million people signed up to its panel in the UK. That may sound a lot of people but it is important to remember that the UK electorate consists of 45,775,800 people (as of December 2018, the latest figures). So, whilst 1 million is a lot of people it is only 1/46^th of the people who could be included.

More importantly it means that over 44 million electors in the UK will never be asked their opinion by YouGov. This may not be important. If the one million panel members had been randomly selected then every elector had an equal chance of being selected, and within certain known parameters that sample of the voting public could reasonably be claimed to be representative.

Full disclosure. I am on the YouGov panel which means I know how you get to be part of that million electors whose views are reported as if representative of all voters. I was not contacted by YouGov to join their panel after my name was drawn randomly from a metaphorical hat, but rather I clicked a link on their website inviting me to join their panel. There was nothing random about it at all. I just fancied taking part.

To understand where the random element in online sampling comes from we only have to realise that the majority of polls for YouGov use about 2,000 respondents. That means every member of their panel has a 1 in 500 chance of being selected for each survey. Were they randomly sampling from 45 million voters the chances would be around 1 in 10,000 chances of being selected. That is quite a difference.

A question that is rarely asked of opinion polls is: what is the probability of any particular voter being included in the sample used? To put that more simply, how likely are you to be asked? The answer is that unless you are on their panel, zero. And, that means that the results may be representative of their panel, they are not however representative of the UK electorate.

This of itself, however, does not invalidate their polls. The question becomes not whether 1 million people is enough, but how close are those people to the rest of the population. I have long suspected that people who sign up to be on panels are anything but representative. My suspicion is that they are likely to be older, better educated, and more middle class than average. Although that does not fully explain why they are more likely to be Tory it does explain why the Labour vote which is strongest among younger people and working class people is likely to be seriously under-represented.

It is this under-representation that leads to statistical manipulation of the raw data to produce results which the researchers think is more accurate based on previous factors. Here’s an Opinium poll from October. 

“Conservatives maintain their poll lead at 16% as they hit 42% in the polls.” 

Note the use of the word “polls”, rather than the singular poll which Opinium had carried out.  The headline gives no margin of error. Margin of error is a statistical technique used on random samples to determine the likely range of the true figure. Typically for random samples of over 1,000 the margin of error would be + or – 3%. In other words, the 42% should be reported as somewhere between 39-45%. It should also be made clear that this was a survey of Opinium panel members and since that excludes the majority of voters it is far from representative. At best it is a rough guide.

But, that is not the only problem. If you look at the data on which this result is based you will find that 512 people said they would vote Tory. That is 32% not 42% of the sample. The figure has been massaged to produce the larger figure because the sample was clearly not representative. To be fair, Labour’s figure was massaged upwards too by 4% to give 26%. The Tories still had a 10 point lead but not the 16 points being reported.

Polling companies are notoriously unhappy about revealing exactly how 32% becomes 42% hiding behind the concept of weighting. In 1962, a social scientist called Thomas S. Kuhn wrote a brilliant book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He wrote about how scientists work within what he termed ‘paradigms’. It debunks the idea that science consists of brilliant minds having “eureka” moments and shows that the conduct of science is rather more mundane and incremental. 

The point is that opinion pollsters, like scientists, work with a set of taken-for-granted assumptions that dictate the presentation of their work. Imagine if you were a researcher for a large polling company working on a general election. Your data shows a large lead for one party. What would you do to be sure that this lead existed?

First you would compare it with previous polls of your company – is it consistent with them? Second, you would look at recently published polls by rival companies – is it consistent with them? Third, you would use other data particularly the previous general election to see where the relative positions of the parties should be. If your data is consistent with all those checks you would feel happy presenting it. But, what if your data is the only data giving this lead, how happy would you, and possibly more importantly your bosses, be to present a “rogue” poll?

The polling paradigm is equivalent to a herd mentality. If we are all saying, more or less the same thing, based on very similar methods, then we must be right. If the data is consistent, then it must be right, if it isn’t then more weighting is required to bring it back within the paradigm.In this way 32% can be confidently reported as 42%.

I think what this shows, and you could do the same calculation on almost any published opinion poll is that the polling companies are not simply reflecting public opinion they are actually creating it. Their self-selected samples have a built in bias toward certain sections of the population who are clearly over-represented, hence the statistical manipulation. But, perhaps more importantly, the samples used are representative only of those who sign up to be panel members rather than the voting public per se.

There is another important issue to be considered in the reporting of general election polling. A general election is not a single event, it is 650 discrete events. Each constituency is affected by a range of national and local circumstances. Opinion polling tends to reflect only what people broadly think about the national issues. It does not tell us what voters in Liverpool Walton (Labour’s safest seat with 80% of the vote) think. But I can confidently tell you that if there are 42% of Tories in Liverpool Walton they are very well hidden and they do not vote at elections!

Any attempt to extrapolate a national opinion poll to the number of seats each party will get is pure nonsense. Even with a sample of 2,000 that would mean each constituency having a sample of 3 people. Surveys of less than 1,000 in individual constituencies are worthless even if random sampling takes place. This is worth pointing out because the Lib Dem’s have been reporting constituency level surveys of 400 or so voters recently which, surprise surprise, show them in the lead.

Given all this you might wonder why anybody takes any notice of opinion polls at all. Unfortunately, the results of opinion polls are manipulated enough that they are never too far from reality. They have a kind of plausibility and particularly so given the inherent anti-Labour bias in most sections of the media. That has less to do with their accuracy than opinion polling companies using previous elections as their guides. The press tend to report them as fact, particularly when, as they often do, they accord with their own editorial position.

So, should we just ignore polls altogether? I would say yes but unfortunately that would not get rid of them. My own suggestion is to challenge polling companies and the media to explain how they have sampled and to give a proper breakdown of what weighting techniques they use. 

When I see polls I tend to use a calculation of my own to arrive at what I consider to be a fairer representation of the data. My own guess, though I stress that this is only a guess, is that on average Labour support is under-counted in polls by about 4% and Tory support is over-counted by around 6%. That is a result of the sampling bias I have discussed.

So, if they are reporting 42-26, the actual figures are likely to be closer to 36-30. And, to this I would add a margin of error of 3%, meaning that the real figure could be 33-33. If that’s right, there is still everything to play for as it is too tight to call. As ComRes put it in their recent poll report:

“…beware of pundits trying to forecast the unforecastable. Only someone who’s been on the eggnog would bet the mortgage on the outcome of this one.”

Why I’m sitting out this election

Why I’m sitting out this election

It’s an exciting time to be a socialist in the UK. Despite the combined efforts of the Tory-owned media and the state funded BBC there is real belief building that Labour can beat the Tories and we could have a socialist Government as an early Christmas present.

So, as the joke about the horse in a pub goes: why the long face? Why do I feel that I am caught between a rock and a hard place? We are perhaps weeks away from a paradigm shifting electoral victory and yet….

I have voiced my fear on a couple of forums. Put simply it is this. I live in a constituency with a sitting Labour MP. This is a marginal seat. It went Labour in 2017, helped by the Corbyn bump and Momentum sending canvassers to flood the place.

Our MP was not chosen by members, but imposed by the Welsh NEC. Our MP has not had to face a trigger ballot because Welsh Labour ducked and dived in order to ensure that there was no time for them to take place.

Our MP is a long way from being a Corbyn supporter. She has made herself a prominent anti-democrat by promoting, by all means, her personal preference for a ‘People’s Vote’ and latterly by imitating the Lib Dem’s demand to revoke Article 50.

Our MP has never lifted a finger to help dissipate the anti-Semitism smears aimed at the leadership and members. Indeed, she joined the ‘Enough is Enough’ protests organised by the Jewish Labour Movement. She was also a signatory to the letter organised by Tom Watson to have Chris Williamson labelled a racist and demanded he should have the whip removed. When the Jewish Labour Movement gleefully tweeted that Chris would not be a Labour candidate she liked the tweet.

Our MP does not like the whiff of democracy and regards any attempt by ordinary members to sanction a sitting MP as “bullying”. At the same time she has nothing but contempt for long-time activists such as Pete Willsman, who she labelled a racist. When Luciana Berger, Chuka Ummana etc left the party with the express intention of destroying our chances of electing a Labour government she lamented their loss.

Our MP acts as if Jeremy Corbyn either does not exist at all or is an embarrassment to be avoided at all costs. During the 2017 election she refused to put his name on her literature or to recognise him as the elected leader of the party. In 2019 she goes further. Her campaign boards do not even reference Welsh Labour but only an invocation to vote for her.

Her twitter feed whilst picking up on the perceived bullying of female members such as Jess Phillips contains no mention or solidarity with the most abused MP, Diane Abbott. 

Whilst she supports everything that Tom Watson says and does, she had nothing to say in support of Jennie Formby, who Watson attacked publicly whilst she was undergoing chemotherapy.  Indeed, it is a long time since she tweeted anything at all from the UK Labour Party or Jeremy Corbyn.

The only time our MP has any interest in ordinary members is when they are telling her how wonderful she is or, at present, when she expects them to assist her in maintaining her position and her, three times the average wage, salary.

There are no doubt worse MP’s. There are no doubt MP’s whose self-centred careerism is more obvious. But, this is my dilemma. I want a Labour Government led by Jeremy Corbyn. Others desperately need what he stands for. I understand what the stakes are, and that they are high. But, I do not want to see that government undermined from within its own ranks.

I cannot, in all honesty, endorse a candidate who I partly blame for the Brexit impasse, who has fanned the flames of a witch-hunt by allowing the false allegations of anti-Semitism to go unanswered, and who holds ordinary people in obvious contempt.

I am told by others on the left that the only goal in the run up to December 12^th is to elect Labour MP’s. That to do anything other than support whatever candidate the NEC select for us is tantamount to giving the Tories a free pass into Number 10.

Yet, as I write this the media’s focus is entirely on one man – Ian Austin. Let me remind you. Austin has been an elected Labour MP since 2005. Many left activists in Dudley North would have freely given up their time to campaign for Mr. Austin. On four separate occasions.

Ian Austin found few foreign wars he could not support and whilst not a member during the Iraq War, together with other Blairites, consistently voted against an enquiry into that disaster. His voting record is certainly not awful. On many social and economic issues he would have been alongside the majority of his Labour colleagues, including Jeremy Corbyn toward whom he has developed a pathological hatred.

Austin is a member of Labour Friends of Israel and was forced to issue a rebuttal for falsely claiming that a Palestinian human rights group, Friends of Al-Aqsa, had denied the Holocaust happened in an article he wrote on the Labour Uncut website in 2011. 

As an MP Austin was heavily implicated in the expenses scandal, but this did not prevent activists from campaigning for him to retain his seat in 2015 and 2017 on the basis that any individual in a red rosette is better than one with a blue rosette.

He was/is an individual who has been frequently rebuked in the House of Commons for inappropriate behaviour. This included In July 2016, being reprimanded by the Speaker of the House of Commons for heckling Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn by shouting "sit down and shut up" and "you're a disgrace", as Corbyn criticised the 2003 invasion of Iraq in his response to the publication of the Chilcot Inquiry.

In February 2019 he resigned from the Labour Party to become an Independent. He stood down as an MP this week and immediately called on Labour supporters to vote Conservative. He was joined in this by both John Woodcock and John Mann. Strangely enough, all three are now being paid by the Conservative Party, or the government which amounts to the same thing.

My point is simply this. The idea that the election of any Labour MP is a good thing has been thrown into sharp relief lately. Austin, Woodcock and Mann were all elected as Labour MP’s on the back of the hard work of the activists in their respective constituencies.

As were Angela Smith, Luciana Berger and, of course, Chuka Umunna all of whom are now standing against Labour as Liberal Democrat’s. We can add to that list Joan Ryan, Chris Leslie, Ann Coffey and Mike Gapes who deserted Labour to become the laughably titled Change UK. And, lest we forget Frank Field, Gavin Shuker, and Louise Ellman have abandoned Labour to become Independents.

I’m not sure if my current MP would ever jeopardise her access to the gravy train and actually leave the party. But I do know she is a member of the Welsh Labour establishment who have blocked every attempt to democratise the party and are, at times openly at other more guarded, critics of the leftward shift in the UK Party.

But, I hear you say, if you don’t vote for the Labour candidate, who will you vote for? Obviously whilst I am a member of the Party I would not vote for another party. But, this is not just a question of voting, but of being able to campaign for somebody I believe in. In all honesty, I have no more faith in my current MP than I do the local Tory or Lib Dem.

I could become a transient canvasser travelling to a nearby constituency to support a more left-wing candidate. But, I’m not sure I want to spend the next few weeks travelling miles to canvass. There is something about campaigning in your own locality that has always appealed to me. And, this time, despite my enthusiasm for the manifesto I feel unable to do so. The whiff of a sell out is just too strong.

The problem is not just my MP either. But, the idea that Welsh Labour is somehow distinct from the party in the UK. They seem to believe that in Wales ordinary voters vote for this entity called Welsh Labour and are totally unaffected by the media obsession with Jeremy Corbyn. During the last campaign I knocked on a lot of doors and, yes, Jeremy came up, both as a plus and a minus, but the only time I recall Welsh Labour being explicitly mentioned was to tell me that they would never vote for Carwyn Jones, then Leader of the Welsh Government, who I explained was not actually standing.

I am, to use football parlance genuinely gutted. I can see from watching Twitter and Facebook how much excitement there is out there. I sense that this election is make or break for the Corbyn project. I have not been this enthused about a manifesto since 1983, and I sense that the Tories are repeating all the errors they made in 2017. But, at the risk of alienating myself from those who are kind enough to follow me on Twitter and to read this blog, my contribution is going to consist of commenting from the sidelines.

When I say I’m sitting this election out, it does not mean I will not be involved. This blog will be supporting Jeremy Corbyn and the UK Labour Party. My Twitter feed will be aimed at supporting Labour and doing what I can to undermine the Tories and Lib Dem’s. Or to put that another way I’ll be trying to undermine the Tories regardless of which party banner they are under.

If I had a candidate I believed in, or even one who had been selected by an open and democratic decision of the members I would gladly leave the warmth of my home to trudge the streets knocking on doors. But, I cannot take part in an election in which I feel so disenfranchised by the Labour right wing who continue to run the party as if it is their private club. I hope Jeremy Corbyn gets into Number 10, but I will be shedding no tears on election night if some current Labour MPs, including mine, lose their seats. 

Taking on big pharma

At the heart of a debate about healthcare is how best to ensure that everybody, regardless of wealth or status, has access to drugs if they need them. This inevitably brings drug companies into conflict with government. 

If, for example, you are unfortunate enough to contract hepatitis C you can expect to be treated by the NHS and to receive the drugs you require on the basis of your need. You do not need, as is the case in the USA for example, medical health insurance. Maintaining the principle that the NHS should be free at the point of use is likely to be a key theme, especially for the Labour Party, in the forthcoming General Election.

When we are ill and require drugs we tend to take it for granted that these should be provided for us regardless of our ability to pay. But, this assumption depends on pharmaceutical companies providing the drugs at a price the NHS can afford. Given that ‘big pharma’, as these companies are known, are private companies their priority is as much, some would argue more, about securing large dividends for their shareholders, than ensuring sick people get treatments to alleviate, or cure, their conditions. Put bluntly, big pharma doesn’t care about individual suffering, it cares about making money.

As private companies, there is nothing to prevent drug companies setting whatever price they think is appropriate. Bear in mind, that many of these drugs are monopolies. The company producing them own the patents that prevent other companies, or countries, from producing them. 

This produces the situation where very often people who need drugs cannot have them because they (or the NHS in the UK) cannot afford them. In other words, they are distributed on ability to pay rather than need. Nothing socialist or democratic, but the logic of a capitalist economy where nothing is valued unless a monetary value can be placed on it.

In his speech to the Labour Party Conference, just a couple of weeks ago, Jeremy Corbyn referenced nine-year old Luis Walker, a cystic fibrosis sufferer who was being denied access to the drug orkambi because the NHS would not pay the £104,000 per patient per year cost.

“Luis, and tens of thousands of others suffering from illnesses like cystic fibrosis, hepatitis C, and breast cancer, are being denied life-saving medicines by a system that puts profits for shareholders before people’s lives.” Corbyn told the conference.

The NHS in England has since joined with those in Scotland and Wales to offer orkambi, but this was after a long set of discussions with NHS chiefs and health ministers. What we are not told is how much it’s manufacturers Vertex are being paid, though somewhat less than the original price of £104,000.

You might think that £104,000 for a daily injection that could provide someone with relief from a condition that literally prevents them from breathing is rather a lot. But, drug prices are not dictated by compassion but by the cold logic of market forces. It is a question of supply and demand, nothing more.

The deal for this vital drug took 4 years to negotiate, during which time multinational Vertex refused to submit any of its other drugs to NICE for approval. The deal is probably worth around £100 million per year but was was wrapped up in commercial sensitivity clauses preventing any scrutiny of what the Tories offered Vertex in return for their agreement.

This story has the veneer of a happy ending. Cystic fibrosis sufferers in the UK will now have access to orkambi, but it shows how big pharma can hold national governments to ransom. These companies are huge conglomerates. Somewhat unsurprisingly given the cost of that one drug, Vertex Pharmaceuticals has a revenue of $304 billion a year. It’s profits are expected to rise by 20% next year.

Vertex is not alone. Johnson & Johnson, the largest of the big pharma’s had income of $306 billion last year with profits rising by 42% in the last quarter. “Small-timer” Pfizer only had an income of $14 billion last year, and only posted a “measly” 30% quarterly profit. Now, of course, some people will say that it is a good thing they make so much profit because that means they pay lots of tax which can support good things like the NHS. Cash which the NHS can then use to buy drugs and boost their profits even further.

With these billions of pounds sloshing around we might think Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs would need a special room just to store their taxes in. But, it turns out that most big pharma companies are no keener on income tax than the misnamed Taxpayers Alliance. 

In September 2018 Oxfam issued a report that showed that 4 large companies – Pfizer, Merck, Johnson & Johnson and Abbott dodge $3.7 billion of taxes annually. All the companies denied it of course. But the Oxfam report showed that profit margins of the companies based on their own published finances were on average 5% in developing countries, 7% in advanced countries and 31% in tax havens.

I should point out here that most of them are doing nothing illegal. However, rather than pay taxes in the countries where they are based, they move their profits around to ensure that a large proportion of their profits are tax free. That’s money that could potentially be spent on the NHS or education or social care that is instead being kept in offshore banks in places like Bermuda, the Cayman Islands or Panama where corporation tax does not exist.

So, we have a situation where national governments are held to ransom by massive multinational corporations who, through the perfectly legal ruse of patent ownership, develop drugs over which they have an absolute monopoly. These drugs, which to be fair, the companies research and develop, are then offered at prices which are dictated by what the market will pay rather than any sense of providing a service to people who need it.

These companies, in common with other large corporations, then use tax havens to avoid paying tax on their profits taking billions out of governmental coffers that could fund, for example, the NHS. It is this reliance on private profit as the driver of drug development that brings big pharma into direct conflict with an ideal like the NHS which has a stated aim of providing healthcare free for those who need it.

The Labour Party, alone amongst UK political parties, has a plan to confront the problem caused by exorbitant pricing of specialised drugs. This includes:

·      Actively using voluntary and compulsory licenses to secure affordable generic versions of patented medicines where the patented product cannot be accessed;

·      Increasing the transparency of medicine prices, the true cost of research and development and pharmaceutical company finances so that the NHS can have informed discussions on drug pricing.

The NHS is the jewel in the crown of the UK, but we tend to think of it in terms of new hospitals, more doctors and nurses and better access. All those things are important, but if we cannot afford the drugs people need then there is no point in building new hospitals or employing more nurses. That is what makes Labour’s plans so radical.

To take on big pharma will be one hell of a fight. It’s not just the companies with their sophisticated tax avoidance schemes, or their use of patents to prevent drugs being affordable, nothing sums up global capitalism better than the existence of the stock market. 

This is a market that actually produces nothing tangible but is dominated by the wealthy being able to accumulate ever more wealth. They “gamble” (or invest) in companies being successful. In the case of pharmaceutical companies who prevent any competition to their drugs through the use of patents it is hardly a gamble at all. It is the William Hill’s of the establishment, where your access to drugs may be dependent on somebody else’s ability to gamble on what is a fixed race.

We will hear a lot about the NHS in the next six weeks and in particular about how much parties will be spending in the future. Whilst you can take most claims of extra cash with a large pinch of salt, even if they are true, there is no point in ploughing millions into the NHS if all that happens is it ends in the hands of the shareholders of huge global companies who are happy to avoid their fair share of tax. Only Labour has committed to transforming this and whilst it may not be the most talked about policy in the manifesto it is absolutely vital to the likes of Luis Walker who are deprived of drugs that could alter their lives for the better.