Latest from The Guardian on ‘The Cuts’

Punches were thrown around the Cabinet table yesterday after a heated argument between the education secretary, Michael Gove, and the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, over the brutal and sadistic decision to reduce vitally important investment in something that stops puppies from dying, tastes like raspberries and makes children smile. Critics say that these are the most shocking and unjust cuts since the last ones.

The mostly male Cabinet of  privately-educated millionaires looked on in shock as their two privately-educated and wealthy colleagues began pelting one another with gold coins before briefly trading blows. William Hague used his diplomatic and judo skills to break up the pseudo-aristocrat and upper-middle class combatants, who both promptly swept out of Downing Street into their respective ministerial sedan chairs.

The decision to stop confiscating money from people under threat of imprisonment in order to pay for this very important thing has caused shock and dismay amongst those who benefit from the subsidy as well as several politicians who keep their heads up their bottoms. In a shocking development, those who earn a living from this very important thing are simply unable to comprehend the reasoning behind the decision, particularly as no-one ever should ever be allowed to lose their job.

This change in policy threatens to destroy all the incredible good things created in the golden era of 1997 – 2009, when nothing bad ever happened and the world smelled of freshly-baked gingerbread. Critics say that without continued public spending on this good thing and constant government intervention, people will just fecklessly lie motionless in gutters, grow fat eating litter and wallow in their own filth before inevitably dying from a heroin overdose.

A spokesman for one group with a vested interest said there was a belief that “we might as well just shoot the children now, as a form of mercy killing”. Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers described it as the “clearest U-turn since Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany”, stating that she “had never changed her opinion on anything in her life” and expected her politicians to be equally blinkered and doctrinaire in the face of reality.

Sources close to Gove said the education secretary believed the good thing was not actually a good thing at all and was bureaucratic and wasteful. The claims were immediately and unthinkingly dismissed as “mean” and “nasty” by critics. Tragically, Polly Toynbee was so filled by sanctimonious outrage that she actually exploded, leaving only a fine red mist of hypocrisy and foolishness wafting through the Guardian offices.

There will be a savage human cost to the end of this good thing. Mary Allen, a 27-year-old good thing worker who now faces a cruel and uncertain future, may have no choice but to sell one of her kidneys and turn to prostitution to pay the rent on her disease-ridden hovel – satisfying the darkest fantasies of depraved perverts just to afford a Tesco Value Meal and stave off the workhouse. “I think it is outrageous what the government has done. I don’t understand why they don’t use some of the money that falls from the sky, or pay for the good thing with the power of dreams. Don’t they realise that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown invented good things in 1997?”

Ed Miliband urged voters to turn back to Labour to ensure that no difficult or unpopular decisions ever have to be made again.

 

(* and *)

“vulgarity, greed and financial meltdown”

More casual bitterness and off-hand prejudice against Dubai today in the UK press. This throw-away line, from the Guardian’s Middle East Editor no less:

In the west Dubai may be a byword for vulgarity, greed and financial meltdown but it also represents modernity and efficiency. These qualities are rare in the Arab world, where secret policemen routinely beat suspects and rely heavily on informers. “Dubai employs modern technology to uncover crimes,” said an Egyptian columnist.

Are “vulgarity, greed and financial meltdown” really unique to Dubai? Or are such associations largely due to journalists such as Mr. Black who unthinkingly propagate them?

Today’s drivel

There’s some real idiocy online today. We first have someone on the Guardian website trying to argue that free speech is only for nice people.

Yet Roeder is not being treated like a terrorist (except, perhaps, by his fellow extremists who regard him as a laudable martyr). Unlike the detainees at Gitmo, who mustn’t even be allowed near sunlight lest they convince the sun to join with al-Qaida, Roeder is allowed to conduct interviews from his cell in which he delineates justification for his crime in such a way that tacitly urges his compatriots to repeat the act.

And YouTube, whose community guidelines purport to “take seriously” any content containing “predatory behaviour, stalking, threats, harassment, intimidation, invading privacy, revealing other people’s personal information, and inciting others to commit violent acts or to violate,” is providing free hosting services so that Roeder might disseminate his message of violent hatred.

(…)

Roeder is a terrorist. It is flatly inexplicable why he is not regarded as such, nor his campaign of murderous rhetoric treated with the according contempt. Free speech was never meant to protect from embargo the communications of those who justify and exhort organised terror.

The key phrase here is “tacitly urges his compatriots to repeat the act”, which is obviously why the interview remains on YouTube, as the columnist is unable to provide any quotes of actual incitement to violence. The writer would be far better off refuting the argument than attacking the right to make it. There is an important difference between restating an ideological or philosophical argument (however flawed or distasteful it may be) and actually co-ordinating or organising violent activities.

We then have this utter stupidity from, quelle surprise, “a left-wing think tank”:

The working week should be cut to 21 hours to help boost the economy and improve quality of life, a left-wing think tank has said.

The New Economics Foundation claimed in a report the reduction in hours would help to ease unemployment and overwork.

The think tank said people were working longer hours now than 30 years ago even though unemployment was at 2.5 million.

The foundation admitted people would earn less, but said they would have more time to carry out worthy tasks.

They would have better scope to look after children or other dependents, there would be more opportunity for civic duties, and older people could even delay retirement, it said.

Anna Coote, co-author of the 21 Hours report, said: “So many of us live to work, work to earn, and earn to consume, and our consumption habits are squandering the earth’s natural resources.

“Spending less time in paid work could help us to break this pattern. We’d have more time to be better parents, better citizens, better carers and better neighbours.

“We could even become better employees – less stressed, more in control, happier in our jobs and more productive.

“It is time to break the power of the old industrial clock, take back our lives and work for a sustainable future.”

The foundation’s policy director Andrew Simms added: “A cultural shift will throw up real challenges, but there could also be massive benefits for our economy, our quality of life and our planet.

“After all, hands up who wouldn’t like a four day weekend?”

The idea that by reducing the working week to some arbitrary level you magically reduce unemployment is so daft as to defy belief. If we force a brain surgeon to only work 21 hours a week, this does not magically create a job for an unemployed IT consultant. You may recall that the French tried doing something along these lines (the 35 hour work week), only to subsequently weaken the legislation when it didn’t solve the unemployment problem. In fact, France’s unemployment rate has been significantly higher than the UK’s for the last decade.

The irritating thing about this report is that it is proposing blanket legislation to impose something that develops organically. As economies become more knowledge-based and as levels of wealth rise further beyond subsistence levels, people start to substitute leisure for work naturally and evolve more flexible working practices. Simply compare working and living conditions in the UK in the 1920s and 1930s to today: in general people today enjoy far more pleasant work and home environments, more leisure time and more flexible working practices. Those people who value leisure time more than money need to work for fewer hours to meet their basic needs and can make their own choices about their priorities. There are certainly far more options for flexible working, part-time work and tele-commuting today in developed economies then there were in previous decades. In fact, the NEF should really be proposing a more flexible labour market so that people can more easily choose work that fits in with their lifestyle preferences, rather than lobbying for an impractical and foolish government imposition.

As Tim points out, this gibberish is at least partly funded by the tax payer.

UPDATE – Tim has weighed in on the NEF’s latest madness.

UPDATE 2 – I looked up some of Melissa McEwan’s previous articles and all became clear. Check out this sublime piece of self-obsessed victimhood. It’s pathetic. How awful it must be to go through life looking for offence: constantly on the lookout for some perceived slight or insult so that you can bestow some deeper and profound significance upon it by interpreting it in the light of the great patriarchal conspiracy against you. I would feel sorry for her if her world view was not so pernicious in its self-reinforcement, with argument and debate interpreted simply as further proof of her victimisation. The danger of such a mindset is that such liberal niceties as free speech become secondary to the righting of these perceived wrongs and injustices. It is a depressing combination of group think and self-absorption: any criticism of a woman is by extension a criticism of all women and thus of her, and any criticism of her is by extension a criticism of all women.

Humourless sanctimony of the day #1

The award for most irritating twerp of the day goes to Daniel Nasaw, whose pious drivel regarding the “misogynistic gags” in the Super Bowl ad breaks is a waste of pixels.

Obviously he is used to more nuanced TV advertising that doesn’t try to appeal to a target demographic and instead explores the wonderful complexity of the human condition by avoiding all use of simplistic stereotypes and caricatures. I’m sure that Werner Herzog’s tampon ad is a particular favourite of his.

Silly person.

A veil of a time

A columnist in The Guardian weighs in on the possible banning in France of wearing the veil in public places and drops a couple of clangers.

For a start, the vast majority of women concerned have clearly actively chosen to wear the veil, sometimes in the face of opposition from their family. Moreover, many see their veils as a means of expressing independence, even sometimes as a vehicle of feminine empowerment.

In the 70s, Muslim women who had recently arrived from north Africa were often kept behind suburban doors by the heavy-handed control of their husbands. Sometimes they were forced to wear the veil, but we hardly gave a damn. But, paradoxically, once the veil had emerged as a voluntary item during the 80s, visibly flaunted in the street by a new generation of determined young Frenchwomen, concern began to rise. Pseudo-feminist rhetoric cannot conceal the fact that it is indeed the voluntary veil which is being fought, and not the imposed article.

Evidence please? And how did the veil suddenly go from being an imposition on housebound wives to being the ‘must-have’ fashion accessory of the 1980s?

Also, answers on a postcard as to how exactly you can ‘flaunt’ a veil?

As to the second, theological justification, it is almost laughable to see members of the government and the president himself pompously arguing that such a veil is not truly Muslim, as if more knowledgeable than the Muslims themselves about the orthodox prescriptions of their own lifestyle. A peculiar facet of so-called French secularism sees government ministers assuming the fashionable role of imams.

See what he did there? Raise the question and then dismiss it without actually addressing it. What is actually laughable is the author’s own pompous and unswerving certainty about what Muslim Frenchwomen believe and want.

Others will opine that one cannot be a true citizen if one hides one’s face, because one is thus refusing human interaction. Yet some people wear dark glasses out of shyness or pure obnoxiousness, and nobody would think of denying them their right to humanity.

Is he implying here that women who wear the veil are shy or obnoxious? Is he seriously equating sunglasses with religious dress?

But this is nothing compared with his penultimate paragraph in which he vanishes completely up his own arse:

The worst about all this fuss is that we are completely off target. Women donning the full veil are not against modernity but represent rather its sophisticated product, just like westernised Buddhists. The veil, ­surprising as this may seem, is good news for modern values. Some smart young women keep a niqab in their bag but only wear it in Paris’s Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, in order to draw attention to the fact that they belong to the best Muslim set, that they really have got that Muslim chic, something like the equivalent behaviour in a gay district. This deep western social movement is no threat to modern values, but rather vindicates the latter under unexpected aesthetic guise: it is so ­individualistic and depoliticised that it is more of a real threat for Islamism and terrorist networks themselves.

Words fail me. Perhaps you have to be French to appreciate post-modernist drivel like this?

The funny thing is that I actually agree that the proposed ban is a silly idea. I disagree with the theology and premises of the veil and hope that eventually it will go the way of various other archaic practices, but I support one’s right to wear it if one chooses. The ban is a pointless and illiberal piece of gesture politics which has an unpleasant Rousseauian ‘forced to be free’ feel to it. Such authoritarianism over what women may wear is as wrong in France as it is in Riyadh. The problem is that the author gets bogged down trying to defend the veil  as somehow empowering rather than making the simpler and much more effective argument that the government simply shouldn’t be interfering in this aspect of people’s lives. I suppose such liberal sentiments don’t come naturally to Guardianistas.

Who left the lefties in charge?

 It may be petty of me, but I’m slightly amused by this news:

Guardian News & Media, publisher of The Guardian and The Observer, is expected to announce this week how many jobs are being axed in the latest round of cuts at the troubled newspaper group.

Up to 100 staff from the company’s 900-strong commercial and advertising department will be made redundant in the latest attempt to stem losses which currently run at £100,000 per day. Most of those affected have already been told their fate, but the deadline for the company to confirm individual redundancies passes today. (…) But there are already predictions that the job cuts will not be enough to return the company to profit following a disastrous year in which revenues have fallen by £33m.

Industry analysts have said the company needs a “root and branch” restructuring programme, with a much bigger reduction in staff numbers, if it is to have any hope of returning to profit, while Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of parent company Guardian Media Group (GMG), has already said losses at the newspapers are “not sustainable at their current levels”.

(It’s interesting how much of this description also applies to the country that The Guardian’s favourite political party has been governing for the last 12 years.)

There are signs that 2010 could be even worse than 2009. A change in Government after next year’s general election is likely to be disastrous for the Guardian’s revenue from public sector job adverts, on which it has long depended, as the Conservatives have strongly hinted they will save money by moving much of the advertising online.

GNM, which is heavily unionised, is owned by the Scott Trust, a charitable institution set up in 1936, and has never imposed compulsory redundancies on its editorial staff, resulting in what one insider described as “bed blockers” clinging on to highly-paid jobs.

The Scott Trust recently varied its agreement with editorial staff to allow compulsory redundancies “in dire economic circumstances”.

In August GMG reported that it had lost £89.8m, compared with a profit of £306.4m the previous year, though the 2008 profits were inflated by the one-off proceeds of selling 49.9pc of Trader Media Group, publisher of Auto Trader.

To quote Fawlty Towers, there’s enough material here for an entire conference, but I suppose that’s what happens when you try to run a business in line with even vaguely socialist principles: inefficiency; dead wood; and unsustainable dependence upon private and public subsidy. It is really quite delicious that George Monbiot’s eco-rants and Seamus Milne’s socialist clap-trap are partly funded by the profits made by the thoroughly environmentalist and Marxist-Leninist Auto Trader. What is less amusing is the effective taxpayer subsidy of The Guardian:

The Guardian currently dominates this market and, according to research by Reed Personnel Services, advertises two-thirds of public sector jobs. Its Wednesday Society section carries more than 30 pages of job ads each week, which could effectively disappear if the Tories got into power. The move would also hit titles such as Third Sector, Young People Now and Regeneration & Renewal, published by Brand Republic owner, Haymarket Publishing.

There’s more:

The government is being criticised for placing the majority of its recruitment advertising for public sector jobs with left-wing newspaper The Guardian.

A study by Nielsen Media Research showed that 26,175 out of 42,914 public sector jobs placed in national newspapers between January and September were advertised in The Guardian.

(…)

The government’s relationship with the Society supplement is already being closely watched by Labour critics, because the publisher is Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, former special adviser to Peter Mandelson, when he was a cabinet minister. Wegg-Prosser’s role, however is not an editorial one.

The COI Communications department handles advertising for public sector jobs and is responsible placing all 42,914 jobs. The 26,175 ads it places with The Guardian compares with Scotland’s Sunday Herald in second place with 7,586 ads and ethnic minority newspaper The Voice with 2,719. The Times newspaper takes 1,269, plus 1,255 in The Times Education Supplement and 802 in the Sunday Times. The Guardian’s rate card price for a full-page colour ad is £10,762, and a black-and-white page £7,762.

The Guardian has dismissed the criticism and called it unfounded. The paper pointed out that any talk of collusion with the current government was ridiculous and showed a lack of understanding of how the recruitment market, and the government’s involvement in it, worked.

A spokeswoman for The Guardian said: “So far this year, thousands of individual clients, with individual budgets, have advertised in Society Guardian. Those decisions are made independently and are based entirely on value for money and response rates. Those clients include Conservative and Liberal Democrat-controlled local authorities.”*

 Hmm. I’m not buying it, especially given that Mr. Wegg-Prosser eventually went from the Society Guardian to work with Tony Blair at No.10. (Looking at Mr. Wegg-Prosser’s Linked-In profile for some reason makes me think of Lord Turner’s ‘socially useless’ comment about the banking industry – not sure why.)

If it isn’t a conspiracy, it’s certainly a cock-up and a massive waste of public money. Needless to say, the Tories have already proposed the following:

The Conservative Party has promised to overhaul advertising for public sector jobs in a move that could potentially hit The Guardian newspaper.  Shadow chancellor George Osborne has vowed to move all public sector job ads from newspapers to a new official website if his party comes to power after the next general election.  This plan could result in newspapers, particularly The Guardian’s Wednesday Society section, losing around £790m spent by local and central government on job ads each year. The dedicated public sector website would only cost an estimated £5m.

If anything, £5 million is a bit on the high side when services like madgex exist, which provide a ready-made and scalable job board system that powers such notable online portals as, you guessed it, Guardian Jobs. It’s actually quite scandalous when you consider how much public money was unnecessarily diverted to subside The Guardian; no wonder they don’t fancy the idea of public sector cuts.

Oh well, I suppose at least The Guardian pays tax on any profits it makes out of all this. After all, its been pretty vociferous in its criticism of tax havens and those evil tax dodging corporations. 

Tax Justice campaigners had a small demonstration outside the Guardian’s offices today to protest at the hypocrisy of the Guardian campaigning for FTSE 100 companies to pay more corporation tax when, despite GMG making £300 million in profits last year, it paid none itself. GMG took advantage of a perfectly legal loophole to avoid paying taxes on the capital gains made on the sale of Auto Trader. Without exploiting the law they would have had to pay more than £50 million in tax!

(More on this hypocrisy here, here and here.)

The final insult from the newspaper that attacks the fat cats and their ‘rewards for failure’?

The newspapers have been in financial turmoil since the Guardian’s editor in chief, Alan Rusbridger, decided to move the papers from broadsheet to the current medium-sized Berliner format in 2005.

(…)

Despite the losses, Mr Rusbridger received an 11pc pay rise last year to £445,000.

(* – Apologies for the age of these articles. I tried in vain to find more up-to-date information. If anyone has more statistics on this let me know; however, I don’t think a great deal has changed, although one would imagine the number of public sector appointments might have fallen in the last year.)