What can you do to end poverty

 What are the things that you could definitely not do without?

Think about it. Could you do without your car? Could you do without a new outfit every week? How long could you go without food? Or clean air? Could you go without a foreign holiday? Or perhaps a trip to the pub or theatre? Could you live without these? How about education? How many of these things are essential, how many are luxuries and how many are absolute basic needs?

The clock is ticking

Why, you might be thinking, are you asking me what I could go without. The obvious answer is that at the present rate of decline in our environment we may well be forced to forego a few minor luxuries. Such as food, clean air, water, that type of thing. That's not, however the focus of my thoughts today although it so easily could have been because here's a statistic that should worry all of us. On September 21st last year (2020)  artists Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd unveiled The Climate Clock which warned that there were 7 years, 101 days until Earth’s carbon budget is depleted, based on current emission rates. 273 days have elapsed since that point. If you are under 90 there is a good chance that the irreversible damage done to the planet by human activity will occur in your lifetime. As the Morning Star reported the latest United Nations report makes sobering reading: "Tens of millions are likely to face chronic hunger by 2050, with some 350 million people living in urban areas at risk of water scarcity from severe droughts at 1.5°C of warming. This rises to 410m people at 2°C." So if anyone is labouring under the illusion that climate catastrophe is a long way off and not worth worrying about yet it really is time to get your heads away from your posterior and face up to what we are collectively doing.

I know that at least some of the people reading this will be thinking: but hang on, aren't you blaming me and people like me for something that is really down to the government? Well, no I'm not, but I would ask which government is it that you want to blame? Climate catastrophe is not happening in any one country and it is not caused by any one bad decision, it is happening across the entire globe and it is a series of decisions which we have been unable or unwilling to reverse that is the cause. I also know that there are plenty of people out there, probably not reading this, who think that climate change, like everything else they don't like, is not really happening. Its all a conspiracy dreamed up by totalitarian governments who want to control us all. Well, thank goodness for QAnon for putting us right on this, but I'll put my faith in scientists who spend a lifetime studying these things thankyou very much.

If you want you can watch videos by failed politicians or people who think the World is being run by lizards telling you that you have nothing to worry about. Some of these people will throw in that Covid-19 is all a hoax too, and just don't get them started on 9/11. On the other hand, you can listen to climate experts from, to name a few: Australian Academy of Sciences, Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts, Brazilian Academy of Sciences, Royal Society of Canada, Caribbean Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, French Academy of Sciences, German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina, Indian National Science Academy, Indonesian Academy of Sciences, Royal Irish Academy, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Italy), Academy of Sciences Malaysia, Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Turkish Academy of Sciences, and Royal Society (UK).

Shortages

In a paper published in Science magazine in 2001 they argued that: "it is at least 90% certain that temperatures will continue to rise, with average global surface temperature projected to increase by between 1.4° and 5.8°C above1990 levels by 2100. This increase will be accompanied by rising sea levels; more intense precipitation events in some countries and increased risk of drought in others; and adverse effects on agriculture, health, and water resources." Now just hold on here when was that published? That's right - 2001. Twenty years later and we are still arguing about what to do. By the way, in case you think I'm being a bit alarmist here, according to NASA between 2001 and 2020 there was not a single year where the average global temperature was not a minimum of 1°C higher than the average for 1951-1980. 

So, I come back to my earlier question: What could you live without? Let's start with an obvious one. Could you live without food? Well, most of us in the so-called developed nations could probably do with losing a few pounds, but the truth is that nobody can live without food. It is, genuinely, a basic need for your survival. Unlike, say, a foreign holiday or for that matter a holiday of any description. Over the past 15 months as Covid-19 has disrupted what we like to think of as normality I have lost count of the number of times I have heard or seen people declaring their "need" for a holiday. Let me be absolutely clear. A holiday may be a nice thing, it may have all sorts of positive outcomes for individuals, but nobody "needs" a holiday. They may want one, but they do not need one. And, in times of great crisis we all have to make sacrifices and that 10 days on a beach in Benidorm is just one of the casualties of our previous lifestyles catching up with us.

But, I’m not here to tell you not to take a holiday, but rather to question whether our collective consumption levels are sustainable. A House of Commons Briefing Paper on Food Poverty published this year tells us that 5 million people were in what they term 'food insecure households'. What that means in simple terms is that 5 million of our fellow citizens in the UK alone do not have sufficient resources to ensure that they or their children have enough food every day. That briefing paper makes a very clear connection between food poverty and income poverty. Who would have thought it. One of the parts of your budget that you have some control over is the amount you spend on food whereas things like rent or mortgage or fuel tend to be fixed amounts. So, when bad times hit, food consumption is often one of the first things that gets cut. In particular, women will very often go without to ensure that their children can eat.

A Global Problem

It would be mildly reassuring to think that these figures were unique to the UK and it was all down to the obvious incompetence of our government. Unfortunately, the UK as bad as it is, is not alone, neither is it among the worst examples of food poverty. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation calculates that since around 2014 the number of people undernourished and actually starving has been rising year on year. In 2014 they estimated that 628.9 million people worldwide were undernourished. By 2019 that figure had risen to 687.8 million. These figures are, it has to be conceded, difficult to get your head around. But if you think that in 5 years the numbers of undernourished people rose by, more or less, the equivalent of the population of Britain, you will soon realise that this is a major and endemic problem.

Global warming will inevitably make these figures worse, but they are not solely a function of the climate. Of course, as the climate crisis develops the amount of food being produced will be affected. The Ecologist reports that: "One study conducted by Arizona State University found greenhouse gas emissions could cause the yield of vegetables to fall by 35% by 2100. The reasons for the lower yields varied between factors such as water shortages and an increase in salinity and less filtering of the sun's rays." 

It is estimated that each day humans consume about 5.2 billion gallons of water and 21 billion pounds of food. As the population increases clearly those demands will grow at exactly the same time as global warming will make it more difficult, if not impossible, to sustain those figures. In other words, as the demand for food and water, those basic needs we have to meet, rises so the supply will, unless there is some amazing and unforeseen technological or scientific advance, fall. At the moment, as with most things, there is a huge disparity in the consumption of food and water between the richest parts of the World and the poorest.

Distribution not income is the cause of poverty

We have grown accustomed to thinking of poverty as related to income. This, I suggest, is an error. People think that happiness or at least a feeling of comfort can be had by having a few more bucks in the bank. An American survey found that people thought that around $624,00 per year (about £445k) would see them comfortable. Unfortunately, most people are a long way from this figure as the average income is a mere $68,703 (£49,479). Only 10% of Americans earn over $100,000 a year whilst some 34 million Americans are below the poverty line. Poverty has never been about income it has always been about distribution. That said, Michael Roberts, a Marxist economist I have mentioned previously, estimates in his latest blog based on the annual Suisse Credit Report “that the bottom 50% of adults in the global wealth distribution together accounted for less than 1% of total global wealth at the end of 2020. In contrast, the richest decile (top 10% of adults) owns 82% of global wealth and the top percentile alone has nearly half (45%) of all household assets.  These ratios have hardly changed in 20 years.” Note that final sentence. These ratios have barely changed in 20 years. So much for the trickle down effect.

If this situation was only 20 years old it would be an indictment of the 21st Century social system. But, although there have certainly been changes in the way we live the extent of poverty was first mapped by Charles Booth in 1886. Prior to that Karl Marx made extensive use of factory inspector reports in Capital which was published in 1867. Kenneth Galbraith, one of the foremost economists of the twentieth century published ‘The Nature of Mass Poverty’ in 1979, Susan George published ‘How the other half dies - the real reason for World hunger’ in 1986 and as recently as 2019 the United Nations condemned the British government for its austerity programme, a programme incidentally supported by most so-called developing nations. The point is that poverty is not new, and the only conclusion that follows logically is that it is an endemic feature of our social system.As Susan George noted in an oration in 2007: "I believe that the forces of wealth, power and control are invariably at the root of any problem of social and political economy."

A question that moral philosophers often ask their students is this: if you were walking down the street and saw somebody who was obviously starving and you had the means to do so, would you help them? Most students answer that they would, but often get challenged because their peers know full well that they are fairly oblivious to all the homeless people they see on the streets. Nonetheless, the question about being prepared to help has a moral dimension in that regardless of what we do in practice we know what we should do in theory. Now, if you are prepared to help somebody who is hungry if they are in your view the next question is would you be prepared to help somebody who you couldn't see? This is where things get more tricky, of course. Confronted with the inequality which is built into the system many people will give up a few pence to alleviate the worst of those symptoms. But, in a World where the hunger caused by our consumption is often thousands of miles away, the same impulses do not work.

Is charity a bad thing?

There are a number of psychological reasons why this is the case. American psychologist Sara Konrath asked people what motivated them to give to charity. She came up with 6 reasons: "altruism, trust, social, (financial) constraints, egoism, and taxes". There are no great surprises here. But, even if we think that people giving to charity is not necessarily a bad thing, it clearly does very little to alleviate poverty. What charitable giving does more than anything is make people who are already doing a bit better than others feel good about themselves. The other important point about charitable giving is that it simply reproduces the social system that caused the need for charity in the first place. From a socialist perspective it leaves those in poverty as victims unable to fight for themselves whilst those with incomes and jobs are painted as their saviours.

Am I being too hard on charity? I am sure that many readers of this article, and its author, give to charity. But lets take the big fund raiser Children In Need, broadcast on the BBC as an indicator of the way in which charity has become embedded in our social fabric. The first Children In Need was broadcast in 1980 and it raised just over £1 million. Each year the telethon sets itself the target of raising more money and by 1997 it was raising nearly £21 million. In 2017 it raised just short of £61 million, a figure it has since failed to match. In 2009, when Children In Need raised £40.2 million, the Labour Government began closing or merging Sure Start Centres, a policy that the Lib Dems and Conservatives took up with enthusiasm as part of their austerity programme. Sure Start Centres had a budget in 2009 of £885 million. The point is that even if charities can raise millions of pounds each year they cannot hope to replace government funding.

To put this into figures. In 1979 approximately 12.6% of children in the UK were living in poverty, by 1996 it was 32.9%. By 2010, after 13 years of New Labour the percentage of children in poverty  was about 18%. This is seen as a major achievement of the Blair and Brown governments but we should note that it was still 5-6% above the figures Margaret Thatcher inherited. I am not getting into a bunfight with Blairites over the fact that 900,000 children were raised out of poverty, but the point is that 18% of children whilst better than 33% is not really an indication that poverty was ever going to be eradicated. Indeed, raising people above the breadline by various government measures, mainly to do with benefits and tax, whilst desirable in its own right is more a failure to address poverty than a significant success in giving poor people back their dignity. As Mike Stanton says on this week's Socialist Hour: "The Blairites forget the bit about being tough on the causes of crime", he could have added that they also forgot about being tough on the causes of poverty.

Tough on capitalism, tough on the causes of capitalism

If you have a social system founded on the belief in rich people having money to invest in entrepreneurial schemes which create jobs for people lacking such money, it is inevitable that you must have a minimum of two social classes. First a class that has wealth and second a class that has no wealth. In this respect, capitalism is very successful. Not only has it created these two classes, but it has ensured that whilst the first class (lets call them the bourgeoisie for fun) is relatively small and stable, the second big class (lets give them a funny name too, how about the proletariat?) cannot escape from the conditions of poverty or near poverty that the bourgeoisie rely on to maintain their extravagant life styles. There is simply no way that we can have a capitalist system without capitalists. And, therefore, there is no way that we can have a capitalist system without proletarians.

I should explain here since I've thrown in a bit of Marxist jargon, that the proletariat are not the working class, although often Marxists will make that connection. Technically speaking the proletariat are those who are productive workers creating commodities for sale. So whilst all proletarians are working class, not all the working class are proletarians. Not that this really matters for this argument. Even in  a socialist economy some of the problems we are now experiencing would continue if we continue with our present levels of consumption. It would probably be a disaster for the planet if in eradicating poverty we were to bring 687.8 million to the same levels of average consumption as those not currently in poverty. 

And, this is a major problem facing those of us who want to end poverty. We cannot continue the current levels of consumption without severely damaging the planet. But, morally, we cannot continue to support a social system where the unequal distribution is so unfair as to leave millions without sufficient food or shelter. Simply replacing capitalism is no longer the option it once appeared. The task facing socialists is to replace capitalism whilst at the same time winning the argument that we must stop jumping on jet planes for holidays in the sun, or buying rubbish we do not need but still want. Which brings me back to my earlier question: what things are you prepared to give up both to bring other people out of poverty and, equally importantly, to save the planet?

I .

UNITEd we stand

If Twitter is to be believed the future of the left in the U.K. is in the hands of the 1.4 million members of Unite the Union. Current General Secretary Len McCluskey, a staunch supporter of Jeremy Corbyn and a major figure on the U.K. left stands down shortly and the new General Secretary will be announced on August 26th.

In April 2017 McCluskey had retained his leadership of the union after coming under pressure from both the right in his own union and right wing Labour MPs who felt he had too much influence within the party. McCluskey won 59,067 votes (45.4%), right winger and current hopeful Gerard Coyne won 53,544 (41.5%) and grassroots candidate Ian Allinson took 17,143 (13.1%), on a turnout of just over 12%. For the anti-Corbyn Guardian the result was all about how Coyne came close to beating McCluskey and what this could mean for a Labour leader they wanted gone.

There is no doubt who the right are rooting for. Coyne was their man, and remains so, but the left as ever cannot pick a contender and back them. Oh no, whoever gets the left’s support has to first take on the supporters of other left candidates before getting a run at the prize. The reality is that “the left”, I’ll come to those inverted commas in a moment, are doing a lot of the rights work for them.

Reification

So why the inverted commas? In Marxist theory the term reification is used to describe the way in which social relations are treated as real things. “The left” strikes me as a reification in that “the left” is not an entity in its own right it is a shorthand term for a collection of people, organisations and ideas. Of course, the same could be said of the term “the right”. On more than one occasion this week I’ve seen the term “the left” used as a means of blame shifting. 

A Twitter user I generally agree with, @MerryMichaelW, tweeted about the gradual selling off of the NHS and asked the question: what has the left ever done about this? In another private conversation on the Telegram app, talking about poverty a contributor made the point that people on “the left” are often middle class and care more about their foreign holidays than people dying on the street. I should say that I don’t particularly subscribe to either of those views, though it is certainly true that left social media, if indeed that itself is not another reification, has a fair number of people who are what sociologists would refer to as middle class.

You may be wondering what this has to do with the election of Unite’s new General Secretary? In some ways probably very little, but the idea that it is “the left” who should unite behind a single candidate suggests that there is an entity called “the left” that was like some sort of organism with a group think mindset always moving in unison. That is clearly untrue and it makes unity far more difficult because whilst people on the left pride themselves on their independent thought when it comes to elections those same people can very often demand that we give up our independence to back the leader or party they believe to be the latest contender for “the great left hope”. As the old joke goes “we are going to discuss this fully and everybody is entitled to their view. Then at the end of that process you’ll all agree with me.” Come to think of it, perhaps that’s not a joke.

The left united?

As far as Unite is concerned initially there were three candidates carrying the left banner. Steve Turner, assistant general secretary for manufacturing, politics and legal chief Howard Beckett, and executive officer for organising and leverage Sharon Graham. On Twitter it was clear that those who had previously been Labour Corbyn supporters were behind Howard Beckett. However, if that was the view of the left it was clear that other sections of "the left" were not in agreement. Socialist Worker, for example, were unequivocal in their support for Sharon Graham, citing her commitment to make Unite a workplace based organisation. The SWP of course were founded by Tony Cliff whose refrain "The power of workers is in the workplace" was used in The Redskins 'Go Get Organised'. The Socialist, paper of the Socialist Party, called for Graham and Beckett to get together and agree one candidate, but they did not endorse either. What was clear was that any support for Turner would be equivocal. Their supporters are now tweeting that Turner was never a left candidate and have thrown their weight behind Graham.

The Communist Party of Britain, who broadly speaking use the Morning Star as their outlet, have endorsed Turner. In a short piece on 26th March they "called on all communists, socialists and trade unionists to support Mr Turner." The problem with Steve Turner is not so much gaining the endorsement of the CP, but rather that he also seems to be the favoured candidate of some who have no left credentials at all. Skwawkbox has been running a campaign for Beckett, much of which was aimed at showing that Turner was 'friends' with people who are certainly not friends with anything even remotely left-wing.

So, what happened as most people will now know is that following the nominations result which Turner won, a number of people including Owen Jones and Paul Mason, began a campaign to get the other two candidates to withdraw in favour of Turner. The inevitable result of that campaign was that supporters of Beckett in particular took to social media to condemn Jones, Mason and anybody else who did not back their man. In addition, it became difficult to have a rational conversation about this leadership contest without it becoming increasingly factionalised and intemperate. It was not enough to endorse Beckett, who some people regarded as the heir and successor to Jeremy Corbyn, but it was also necessary to dismiss both Turner and Graham as somehow not truly left wing.

Take me to your leader

In the end, as we now know, Beckett withdrew and endorsed Turner. This creates a bit of a quandary for some on the left because they have just spent the best part of a month insulting Turner in part at least because he wasn't Beckett. If Beckett was undoubtedly the most left candidate of the left, then Graham must be next. But to endorse Graham would be to ignore entirely what Beckett is proposing.

I should probably say at this point that I am not a Unite member so will not be voting in the election. If I had a vote I would have given it to Beckett. I don't quite know who I would have shifted to, so I can understand that people are floundering slightly. But, for me, this whole debate is not really about who should lead Unite, as important as that may be, but rather why it is that we seem to end up in these positions where people who agree on Palestine, on anti-austerity, on abolishing the monarchy, on welcoming refugees, on supporting the rights of people regardless of race, ethnicity, sexuality etc, who oppose the reintroduction of the death penalty, who get their hands dirty and turn up for demos and rallies, and who agree on virtually everything get themselves in such a lather over those who would be our leaders.

What is it about leadership that is so seductive? I can understand the motivation of those who want to be leaders. That is about power, prestige, sometimes money, often ego, and about a certain arrogance that says others should follow you. But I don't fully understand why people who have a shrewd understanding of the state of the World, and are students, one way or another, of politics, want so clearly to be led. It suggests to me that so many people on the left of the political spectrum have an almost quasi-religious belief in a messiah. A new prophet who is going to lead us, implausibly it has to be said, to the promised land. It is sometimes as if the past two or three hundred years never happened. As though we have not witnessed sell out after sell out by people who we thought were the real deal, but who then found the illusion of power more persuasive than actually taking on the system.

Leaderless organisation?

There have, of course, been outstanding figures: Arthur Scargill, Tony Benn, yes even Jeremy Corbyn, but the truth is so many leaders have disappointed. It would be too cynical to claim that every leader is a sell out waiting to happen. Of course, some people get elected to positions and try to stay true to what got them there in the first place, but so many people who have made their careers on the backs of the hard work and commitment of ordinary people prepared to give up their time and effort, have proved to be at best ineffectual and at worst treacherous. I am not saying that this is true of Howard Beckett, Sharon Graham or Steve Turner, but it has happened so often in the past, that I have to wonder how we keep falling for the same trick.

I know what many people will be thinking and it is precisely this: how can we have a movement with no leaders? What would such a movement look like? Well, I can't tell you exactly what that movement would look like, but I can tell you what it wouldn't look like. It would not look like the Labour Party or a bureaucratic trade union. It would not involve endless meetings to decide who to follow. What it would involve is real people having a real say in their own lives, in their own movement. But, more importantly than that. It would involve people trusting themselves to do things for themselves, rather than constantly putting the emphasis on somebody to do it for them. Leaders, my friends, are not part of the solution, they are part of the problem. 

As I wrote this piece not only did news break that Howard Beckett had removed himself from the fray but news also broke that Labour had received just 622 votes in the Chesham and Amersham parliamentary by-election. The Breakthrough Party, who have hopes of replacing Labour, managed just 197 votes. If Labour is in trouble, which it is, the answer is not yet another party vying for less than 200 votes and humiliating the entire left. Yet. Within 24 hours of Beckett withdrawing some of his supporters launched Ordinary Left which whilst not a political party as such will almost certainly contain a good many people who have that as an aim. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result then the UK left (though I doubt this is confined to the UK, to be honest) are definitely insane. It's not just that we keep repeating our mistakes, but also that we refuse to learn from them, and moreover, rewrite history to pretend that those mistakes were never made in the first place.

Celebrity Big Politician

In between starting writing this on Friday afternoon and completing it 24 hours later, another name had reappeared. That of George Galloway. In my honest opinion, Galloway's main preoccupation is George Galloway. I am not entirely sure how George and his ego manage to co-exist, but there is no doubt that he has plenty of supporters or that he does at times say things that at least on the surface suggest he has a broad understanding of what is actually going on in the World. But, is he a man we should all get behind? One important point worth noting about Galloway is he is not a man to ever compromise, apologise or put others feelings before his own belief in his own ability to always be right. This has led him into some strange positions not least that of a cat on Celebrity Big Brother. But, I am not here to assassinate the character of somebody many people admire for his outspoken views. I just tend to feel that if Galloway is the answer, we might well be asking the wrong question. And, it should be noted, that Galloway appears every now and then with the express intention of getting himself a paid political position in whatever forum will take him. Are his politics now dictated by his desperate desire to be part of the political class? Only he knows the answer to that. What I will predict is that if Galloway stands in the upcoming Batley and Spen by-election his Workers Party will not achieve anything approaching the 6% attributed to it in a recent poll. The problem, however, is not George Galloway, it is the very system he is determined to ride.

I am not going to repeat here what I said a couple of weeks back about the nature of the capitalist democratic system as being about protecting what many people these days prefer to refer to as "the elite", but I still maintain that history will show that the possibility of a party to the left of Labour with a socialist agenda breaking through the current system is nigh on impossible. The system is set up to ensure that capitalism can continue, it was never intended to be used to end that system. Does that mean that parties have no place in left-wing politics? Clearly, there are political parties and organisations whose main function is not getting elected but rather in supporting the struggles of ordinary workers. If anything elections represent the lowest form of politics mainly because they are a politics of elitism in that they maintain an illusion that somebody (man or woman) can achieve socialism for us, rather than what should by now be an obvious truth that socialism requires a collective effort in which ordinary people far from asking the question: "what has the left ever done for me?" ask instead "what can I do to ensure that the left can be part of the movement for social change?" 

Who cares?

Mahmatma Ghandi once famously said “The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.” By that measure a society that allows its most vulnerable members to be treated without respect must be judged fairly badly.

Imagine this scenario. Some will not need to imagine as they are likely to be living it. You are a married (or cohabiting) couple who have been together for 40,50 or 60 years. You have created a life together, you have friends, perhaps a family, you’ve weathered the bad times and reached a point where you are retired, perhaps with a modest amount of savings for a rainy day. Then one of you begins to lose their memory and becomes incontinent. The other partner soldiers on trying to give support and care but increasingly finding it impossible to cope and rapidly falling into despair. Eventually you make the decision that your partner, somebody you have loved for the best part of your life, must go into a home. But, now comes the first whammy. Finding a home in an overcrowded market. And, then the second whammy. Remember those modest savings well if they are over £23,000 you are now responsible for the entire cost of your loved one’s care. And, whilst you are struggling with the guilt people often feel at making this decision, your loved one is disappearing deeper and deeper into a reality of which you are no longer a part. Old age far from being the golden years rapidly turn into a living nightmare.

Elderly population in the UK

According to Age UK there are around 5.4 million people aged over 75 in the United Kingdom. To be clear they are not the only vulnerable people, but as we now know they were the most susceptible to Covid-19. Around three-quarters of deaths from Covid-19 were in the over 75’s and around one-third occurred in care homes. When younger people, frustrated at the lockdown restrictions, refer to Covid-19 as “only” killing a few elderly it reveals a deeper seated prejudice against the elderly. It is that prejudice that leads to a situation where citizens who have given their lives to their communities, in one way or another, can be discarded.

The Methodist Homes Association estimates that about half a million people currently live in care homes in the U.K. Of these, approximately, 288,000 are living with dementia. In Wales, which is where I live, there are about 23,000 people living in around 673 care homes. Data on this is quite difficult to come by and those figures are taken from a report from the Public Policy Institute for Wales published in 2015 and titled, interestingly enough, The Care Home Market In Wales.

It’s interesting that the report describes the provision of ‘care’ as a market, though a better word might be ‘racket’. According to a U.K. Government report from 2017 the care sector was worth £15.9 billion a year.That report suggested there were 5,500 different providers in the UK operating 11,300 care homes for the elderly. Around 95% of the sector was privatised. At that time there were around 410,000 people in care homes and the cost was, on average, £44,000 per year.

Professional qualifications

Professional carers are very often thoroughly decent people but they are professional only in the sense that they get paid for what they do. Which is just a way of saying that being a carer requires little in the way of the professional qualifications that accompany a profession such as, for example, nursing. You might think this does not really matter. After all, you can't teach people how to care can you? You either do or you don't. But a side effect of not being professionally accredited is that wages are kept down. The average care worker earns between £16-22k a year. As a comparison a refuse collector typically earns £14-22k a year. Working as a shop assistant you might expect £12-20k. 

Pay is not everything, but you might consider pay as an indicator of where society places you in terms of the esteem in which you are held. In 2009 the New Economics Foundation produced a report on esteem in which they make the following point: "The least well paid jobs are often those that are among the most socially valuable – jobs that keep our communities and families together. The market does not reward this kind of work well, and such jobs are consequently undervalued or overlooked." 

Ask yourself this: if you are an ordinary person on average wages what are you most likely to need in your life, a carer or a stockbroker? A stockbroker earns between £15-101k a year. According to Totaljobs website "There are no set qualifications if you want to become a Stockbroker.." So, a stockbroker is very comparable to a carer. There are, according to Statista, 53,000 stockbrokers in the UK. According to Skills For Care there are about 1.6 million people employed in the care industry (thanks to Twitter user @DebraClaridge for providing this data).

All these stats tell us important things about the global picture (at least as it applies to the UK), but behind them lie a multitude of real lives taking place in real time. I have a friend who I shall call Martina whose Mother went into a care home in Wales recently and this is her story. I should stress this story may or may not be typical.

Martina's story

My Mother was diagnosed with dementia in 2014. To start with it mainly affected her memory and she would forget what she had just said and tell us the same thing two or three times. But, other than that she seemed fine. Then last year things started to deteriorate and she started hallucinating, seeing people who weren't there, and also started to lose control of her bodily functions becoming unable to control her bladder. It was this that got to my 90 year old Father. He really did not know how to cope and to be honest it really rocked him.

 

Eventually it became obvious that Mum needed to be in a home where she could be looked after by people who knew what they were doing. My Dad was just shell shocked.By this time Covid was on us and we were in lockdown so getting into a care home was not easy. I knew that Covid had been pretty rampant in care homes so this was pretty worrying, but Dad just could no longer cope and when the first care home went into lockdown the day she was due to go in, he went into meltdown. Our social worker was brilliant and found us a small, family run home not too far from where Mum and Dad lived. The thing was we had no chance to really check it out because Dad was desperate. So Mum went into this home and we had to hope for the best.

 

Everything was fine to start with but because of Covid Mum had to quarantine for 2 weeks. This struck me as really harsh. She had been vaccinated, she'd had a test which was negative, but she had to be in a room on her own. I know this wasn't the home's fault but I contacted my MP and also the Older Peoples Commissioner for Wales to register that I thought it was inappropriate for people living with dementia to be placed in quarantine for that length of time. We have only a limited time with our loved ones and the state is stealing that time from us. The MP just sent me a standard letter back but the OPC gave me a good piece of advice. It was still possible to have a window visit provided it would not put other residents at risk.

 

By the time all this had happened Mum was out of quarantine and able to mix with other residents. I suggested to the manager of the home that I could have a window visit and he thought this was a good idea. But it was in the guidance, so he should have known this. But then as we were about to visit, there was a positive test of a member of staff and the manager told me that the visit was cancelled. I got back to the OPC who said that the guidance allowed window visits even if there was an outbreak. When I told the manager he was really put out. He accused me of going behind his back writing to the MP.

 

After that the whole attitude toward my Mum changed. The staff were constantly phoning me saying that she was abusive and attacking other residents. On the phone Mum was in tears saying the staff had favourites, that they had told her she was a "mean old woman". When I raised this with the manager he just ignored it and said they were trying hard to contain her. She's a 88 year old woman with dementia!  Things just went from bad to worse. Mum was really upset, the staff seemed to be victimising her and then I got a call saying they were issuing a V1. I had no idea what that was and when I asked they said they couldn't tell me and I'd have to ask our social worker.

 

I felt desperate because I felt that the manager was angry with me for telling him what was in the regulations, which he should have known, and they were taking it out on my Mum.  Eventually I found out that a V1 was a safeguarding notice requiring a mental health assessment. The manager of the home was trying to get my Mother sectioned! Unfortunately for him the mental health team found nothing wrong with my Mum but did tell me that they thought the home wanted her gone.

 

A few days later I got a call to tell me Mum  had had a fall whilst in the toilet. The manager had no idea how this had happened giving me two totally different stories. They were giving Mum more and stronger drugs to control her alleged violent behaviour. I’m saying alleged deliberately because apart from staff saying other residents were scared of her there was never any actual evidence. 

 

Then I got a call from the manager to tell me that they were “reluctantly” giving her 28 days notice. A week later my Dad got a 2 line letter confirming that. In a way we were relieved because she was so unhappy there.  I’ve got to say the social worker was brilliant and found her another home and she is now there with really dedicated and kind staff and the change in her is amazing. I wrote to the Care Inspectorate in Wales and got a bland letter back telling me that they did not investigate complaints but my letter would be on file come the next inspection.

Concerns not complaints 

The Care Inspectorate in Wales is the statutory body which has responsibility for both adult care and children’s homes. It has a budget of £14 billion a year and  their annual report reveals that they received 1,117 “concerns” last year, none of which they directly investigate. It is interesting that they use the word concern which means “to relate to” rather than “complaint” which means “an expression of grievance”. 

They also received 139 concerns from children’s care homes. At least some of those “concerns” would have been about Ty Coryton a children’s home in Cardiff. According to BBC Wales whistleblowers, or what you and I might call ex-employees with a conscience, described how children were humiliated and restrained. Allegations included a teenage girl locked up because she was menstruating, a 10 year old denied lunch because he had eaten two packets of crisps, a young person who had soiled himself being put in a bath and forced to wash in his own faeces, and a boy held down for over 20 minutes causing a member of staff to think he “was going to die”. A spokesperson for Orbis Care and Education Ltd (profits of £4.86 million last year) told the BBC:

"During the period since these alleged incidents took place, Ty Coryton had 21 inspections or visits (up until 17 May) by independent organisations and authorities who found no faults relating to any of the allegations”

Twenty one inspections and not one of those inspectors noticed systematic abuse. You have to ask whether there is a problem with an inspection regime that fails so miserably? Whilst the companies running care homes rake in huge profits the staff are kept on the minimum wage and homes starved of resources. Martina told me that the home her mother was in (profits of £386k) promised WiFi access when her Mum arrived but staff had to use their own phones for the video calls they arranged.

We are failing the most vulnerable

Care homes are tasked with caring for the most vulnerable people in our society. That they so often fail in that duty is problematic. That we only hear about those failures when a catastrophe happens is an outrage. Martina was advised to write to the home detailing her complaints. She did so and the complaint was investigated by a director of the company against whom she was complaining. The outcome of that complaint which she forwarded to me was “I found no evidence to support your allegations.” Big surprise there. 

The statutory body overseeing care homes does not investigate complaints, the minister responsible for funding this massive business passes on concerns to the statutory body, the homes which are supposedly being regulated are free to carry out their own investigations and invariably find themselves innocent. Family members who complain are told that others are not complaining therefore they must be wrong. Staff who raise their head are in danger of being blacklisted. Meanwhile humiliating and abusive behaviour towards those who are least able to fight back continues.

What is the answer? In 1980 only 17% of the care home market was privately provided. Now it is 95%. This means that 95% of care homes are now seeking to make a profit. And, the profits to be made are huge. HC-One, the largest provider in the U.K. made £3.2 million last year, Barchester Healthcare made £37.7 million last year. That money is in large part public money. As with so many privatisations this was not the state selling off an industry wholesale, it was the state transferring monies from the public purse (that’s your taxes dear reader) to private companies. Private provision does not entail private individuals taking a risk, it is private companies taking over public services and being guaranteed public money to sustain them. Don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing that private provision is always bad, my Father finished his life in a Barchester home and as far as I could tell from 150 miles away was reasonably well cared for. But, if the profits of the companies are so high what are they cutting back on? If those companies were run on a not-for-profit basis how could that money be spent to improve the living conditions of residents and the working conditions of those who care for them? And, how can an industry caring for the most vulnerable in our society be left to an inspection regime that does not even recognise the word complaint and is happy to support a situation where the accused are not just innocent until proven guilty but are allowed to appoint themselves as judge and jury with the inevitable result that the word 'guilty' becomes as redundant in their world as the word 'complaint' is to the inspectorate?

 

If I Ruled the World

Last week a Twitter user called @Posh_Jock made what at the time I thought was a flippant remark. “ I was just wondering........would you consider running the country for us?......please..pretty please ”. I dismissed this in a light hearted way but then @GailMac27 supported the idea: “Don't sell yourself short. I've often thought that what we really need is individuals like you as opposed to the bunch of self serving charlatans currently occupying the green benches on both sides of the house!” So, I’ve decided to appoint myself as your President. No - that is a joke. And, not a very good one at that. But it got me thinking were I to become leader of the U.K. (and let me just say for the sake of clarity that is not going to happen) what would be my priorities.

I suppose my first act were I in a position to create a socialist society would be to get rid of the very idea of leaders and followers. I know this sounds absurd because we are so conditioned to think in terms of ‘strong leaders’ but it is precisely the idea that one person can somehow make decisions for all of us that infantilises the population. The French philosopher Rousseau notes in The Social Contract: “As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the State is not far from its fall. When it is necessary to march out to war, they pay troops and stay at home: when it is necessary to meet in council, they name deputies and stay at home. By reason of idleness and money, they end by having soldiers to enslave their country and representatives to sell it.” 

Citizens juries

I remember the first time I read this thinking that it is so much easier to pay somebody to make all your decisions than make them yourself, but when you do that the decisions are likely to serve the interests of those you pay rather than those doing the paying. How obviously true this is when considered against Gail’s comment above. 

The counter argument is that in a complex society such as Britain, America or any of the so-called democracies, there are simply too many people for everybody to be involved in all the decisions that affect them. I don’t think that is a good reason for not changing the way we make decisions. There is a considerable literature around the use of citizens juries which are used extensively in some countries and rather more sparingly in others. Let me be clear though whilst a citizens jury consists of a random selection of citizens who meet to deliberate upon a particular issue as far as I know nobody has yet suggested that they should replace representative democracy altogether. I wonder whether some of the appeal of our current system of elections is that, apart from ensuring that most representatives are from a very narrow strata of society, that they also bring short term excitement, particularly for the press who must find it quite tedious having to spend hours obscuring what the Government are doing.

The experiments in citizens juries carried out in some of our so-called democracies suggest that, surprise, surprise, if you provide ordinary people with the facts they tend to reach informed decisions. If you empower people to ask questions they are remarkably dogged in using that power to find out what they want to know. In 2014 a team of Australian researchers led by Jennifer Whitty reached the following conclusion:

“There is evidence of growing political disengagement among the citizens of many OECD countries and of increasing lack of trust in political leaders and representatives at all levels of government. However, there is also evidence that some citizens are willing to participate in more thoughtful and intensive forms of political debate, especially if these are seen to make a tangible contribution to policy developments.”

Participatory willingness

Some of the problem of citizens juries grafted on to our current system is to be found in that phrase “some citizens are willing”. The issue is that the citizens who are unwilling to take part tend to be from the higher and lower income stratas, the former because, frankly, they tend to get their own way anyway and the latter because they lack the confidence to put themselves into a forum which will look from the outside very much like the educational experience they often fell foul of as youngsters.

Policy makers have experimented with the idea of citizens juries but never in such a way as to challenge the status quo, leading some to regard them rather cynically as a ploy to make unpopular decisions the fault of somebody other than those implementing them. In Scotland a jury was brought together to debate wind farms but as Shared Future note:

“Roberts and Escobar’s reflection on the two day Scottish wind farm citizens jury noted that after discounting breaks, introductory sessions and so forth the two day process only left some 8 hours to hear witness presentations and to deliberate. ‘It seems clear that conducting a process like this in two days has considerable limitations, and it would not be advisable in real decision-making processes. Time constraints were indeed at the heart of most shortcomings in this project’. (Roberts and Escobar 2015)”

According to the Jefferson Institute a citizens jury, if it is to be effective, should last for a minimum of a week. But, if time is a constraint a parliamentary paper from 2007 points to an even more significant downside:

“Clearly, because they involve only a small number of people they are unlikely to reflect fully the views of the wider population.”

The representative closed shop

The criticisms of citizens juries really encapsulate the problem of representative democracy. The system we have now whilst formally open is actually very good at maintaining what is a relatively closed shop where, as I’ve written previously, our parliaments tend to be dominated by a very specific strata of people. In the U.K. your chances of being an MP increase considerably if you have been to a private school or to Oxbridge universities. Of the 800 Lords in the second unelected chamber 262 of them are members of the Conservative Party. In 2005 the Sutton Trust found that 62% of the Lords were privately educated, a figure which rises to 79% amongst Conservative members and 98% among hereditary peers. So, whilst the odd ‘commoner’ can get onto those green benches very few will have come from my council estate background. It is as if being privately educated gives you a very particular entitlement to tell others what is best for them.

The sense of entitlement that comes from being part of an established elite means that you take it for granted that you know more than those below you.  But the trick is to present this elitism as if it is the fault of the politically illiterate masses. As Matteo Bergamini CEO of the youth network Shout Out UK, pointed out in an online interview: “Many young people, and people in general are politically illiterate ... This is not to say people are stupid, but simply that if your education is completely devoid of a subject, naturally you will know nothing about it.”   He runs workshops aimed at young people to increase their understanding of politics. His company is getting rich doing so, and I suspect that no matter how sincere he is the underlying project is the maintenance not the destruction of the capitalist system.

Citizens juries are not the answer to the democratic deficit which ensures that for the majority of people, most of the time, politics is what others do to them, occasionally for them, but rarely by them. I don’t believe that because people vote for parties that act against their interests that they are stupid. Elections are a circus of lies and deceit whose main function is to convince ordinary people that they have a say in their own lives when any objective analysis will tell you that very little changes as a result of any given election. Sure, taxes may go up or down, policy may swing (on a narrow pendulum) from public to private provision, cronyism and corruption may increase or decrease slightly, but essentially elections give you an opportunity every few years to cede your political control to the class that had it in the first place.

Enacting justice

So why have I taken so long to talk about citizens juries? I’ve been lucky, or unlucky, enough to be called for legal jury service twice. On both occasions I found myself surrounded by people from very ordinary backgrounds. For all their talk of civic duty the middle classes tend to avoid jury service like the plague. What I found on both occasions was a group of people who were determined to enact justice. On both occasions I was the most formally educated person on the panel, but although there were people with naive or racist views the majority wanted to reach the correct conclusion and worked hard to assess the evidence as had been presented to them.

The reason I raise this is that those who currently have the power to make decisions that affect our lives are incredibly reluctant to cede any part of that power to those they consider their intellectual inferiors. Their belief in their own superiority is matched only by their evident inability to separate their prejudice from actual evidence. When found out, as we have seen recently, so sure of their position are they that lying is not a last resort but used as regularly as the truth so that what is actually true is so obscured that truth itself becomes just an opinion to be challenged by so-called journalists whose main interest is their own career. Sometimes it feels that the Eton educated buffoons currently ensconced in Westminster are playing some strange ritualistic game to see who can get away with telling the most outrageous lie. At the moment, it is probably neck and neck between Johnson, Gove and Hancock, but rest assured Starmer will try to emulate them when they eventually admit him to the club, something he clearly desires more than anything else.

My experience of jury service, my years working in factories and building sites convinces me that ordinary people are not well educated in the formal sense, but they are far from stupid. If they sometimes make, what to we on the left consider, irrational choices it is because they have been left with no real hope of change. And, crucially, no real expectation that they should ever have a say in the running of their own lives. Poverty is not, for them, a statistic any more than racism is for those with black or brown skins or accents that single them out as different. These are lived realities and that people give up on change has been encouraged by a politics that argues for better leaders of the current system rather than a better system where leadership is given to those best equipped for dealing with particular problems. The leaders we have now may be part of the problem, but simply changing leader does not change the system. Citizens juries, as flawed as they are, point to a possibility that we can move beyond the narrow confines of parliamentary democracy and its incestuous coupling to capitalist elitism and actually empower people to run their own lives.

Imagine this. You were part of a community that met whenever there was a decision to be made. Every member of that community would have an equal right to speak and to be listened to. And the right not to. That your deliberative forum (to give it a fancy sounding name) was empowered to seek expert advice and guidance to enable it to make decisions based on evidence rather than emotion or prejudice (not that these have no place in our deliberations but should not be the sole motivation for any decision). That employers, most of whom would have forums of their own so that the workers could take part in decision making affecting their own workplace, would have to allow you time off to take part in these forums. That each forum, consisting perhaps of 100-200 households, would randomly select individuals on a regular basis to take part in larger forums where the issues went beyond their locality, and those representatives would be changed regularly to avoid the emergence of a political class. Where schools taught children democracy not as some abstract idea called citizenship studies, but rather in the practical management of the school through forums which included teachers and taught. It may sound fanciful, but it was precisely these notions that guided the very first forms of democracy in Athens and Rome, and principles which came briefly to fruition in the Paris Commune and the soviets of the Russian Revolution. I can feel you nodding along but see in your eyes that it sounds like some form of utopian nonsense. But, from the depth of a tunnel it can be difficult to see the light at the other end and give up all hope when all that is ever needed is to make the first step.

So, thank you to those who think I would make a good leader, but I must politely decline. You do not need a benign leader to make a rotten system work you need a change of that system so that we have a genuine democracy that works for everybody. That starts from imagining a better world, believing such a world is possible and doing what you can to bring that world into existence.