Too Big To Fail

Britain can take pride in its contribution to the Global Financial Crisis. The first signs of contagion were detected here when Northern Rock subsided under the weight of unsecured debt. British bankers introduced us to such new concepts as Libor Rate Manipulation, Coercive Insolvency, Quantitative Easing and Too Big To Fail while the UK taxpayer saved them from total collapse with funds amounting to £19,900 for every child, woman and man. Banks are the best friends we could possibly have – one look at their aspirational life-affirming TV advertising is enough to convince. Images of happy healthy children, active and sporty adolescents, high achieving students, fun-loving mums and dads sharing chores while doting grandparents busy themselves setting up trust funds for the little ones roll endlessly across our screens, numbing the senses as they do so. Positioning themselves as agents of human happiness and gateways to all the pleasures of a consumer society serves to conceal their desperation to turn a profit on every transaction. Money laundering for drug lords and totalitarian regimes is yet to feature in any publicity.

Today’s postcards are views of the Bank of England from the early decades of the last century – a popular landmark for postcard photographers, in part due to the endemic traffic chaos that expressed the excitement of new technology. It was the Bank that brought us Quantitative Easing (QE) – priming the economy with money conjured up out of a vacuum, a form of fiscal alchemy. Freshly created cash was handed over to banks in return for financial assets such as bonds – all the online guides to this process omit to explain just how the parties to these deals agree a price. If somebody approached you offering ‘free’ cash for unspecified assets it would only be natural to give up as little as possible for the maximum amount of that cash. The plan was that the additional money in the system would enable banks to lend more to business which in turn would expand their activities and hire more staff whose wages and salaries would boost consumer spending and before you know it our problems are over. There is no agreement among economists on whether QE has done any good for the wider economy beyond a generally stabilising effect. The only known beneficiaries are the banks for whom it presented an opportunity to rebuild their balance sheets and strengthen their depleted reserves.

The Banks are Made of Marble

The tenth anniversary of the first signs of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08 is being marked, rather than celebrated, by much media commentary – platitudinous hindsight for the most part. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Messrs. Osborne, Cameron and Clegg (aided and abetted by a supine opposition) we now know that that the world economy crashed due to the incompetence of Gordon Brown and the profligacy of the Labour government’s reckless public spending. Anyway, enough of fake narratives – we pay homage here to the spiritual home of casino banking, the USA. Birthplace of the Collateralised Debt Obligation, Credit Default Swaps and the Subprime Mortgage. After 30 years of assiduous creation of their legendary status as brutal and callous deal-makers, the banking community had finally over-reached.

The Los Angeles bank vault is a tribute in gleaming metal to the efforts of the rich to defend their property and the corresponding efforts of the criminal class to get their hands on them without the inconvenience of earning them. All cool reflective surfaces and empty spaces. Most of these cards pre-date the crash of 1929 and include some small town retail banks of the type that failed in the thousands as well as large faceless operations concealed within skyscraper towers and lesser buildings of varying degrees of architectural pomposity.

A New York State farmer named Les Rice wrote the song, The Banks are made of Marble in the late 1940s and Pete Seeger, who was a near neighbour and acquaintance, included it in his repertoire for the rest of his career. In the 2012 clip below, Pete’s accompanied by the Rivertown Kids, a notorious bunch of brain-washed, alt-left, merchants of hate. Watch and shudder. The most stirring version is the one performed by Leo Kottke and Iris DeMent on Prairie Home Companion. Sadly, only the corpse remains visible on YouTube.

Virtue Signalling for Beginners

It’s my view that the private lives of politicians should be respected as such. But when they choose to disclose details of their private lives we have the right to pay close attention. Almost 9 months have passed since my last comments on the world of current affairs in which time we’ve been introduced to Remoaners, Enemies of the People, Snowflakes, the new Party of Working People, Fake-news, Fake-Potus and Flotus, even Fake-lies, all of which I’ve let pass without comment, having nothing really to add to what has been much better expressed elsewhere. But yesterday’s news that the Prime Minister is abstaining from the consumption of crisps for the period of Lent has roused me from my torpor. 

There are many levels on which this is disturbing. Beginning with the scale of Mrs. May’s act of self-denial – we are told she is especially fond of salt and vinegar flavour so the inference is that this is a heroic sacrifice on her part. Withdrawal symptoms cannot be ruled out. If she plans to donate the money saved to charity it would over a period of 40 days be unlikely to exceed £10 unless she is given to uncontrollable bingeing (not a pleasant image). I would have been no less impressed if she had given up beetroot or chewing-gum or avocado or nail varnish. No less effective in drawing oneself closer to God. Who would dare to describe this behaviour as virtue-signalling? 

We might ask whether Mrs. May’s choice was designed to make a good impression on all those former Labour voters she is keen to embrace. Perhaps there’s a picture in her mind of the typical Labour voting family gathered in front of the TV on a saggy sofa, sustaining themselves exclusively on a diet of potato snack products. We must accept that between the fashion shoots for Vogue and the turkey-shoots with the Leader of the Opposition, there’s not much time for keeping in touch with ordinary people. So hats off to the May family for all the Happy Meals, Quiz Nights at the local, trips to the Tanning Salon and Car Boot sales where they keep the faith with their social inferiors. 

As the daughter of an Anglican clergyman Mrs. May stands firm in her Christian faith even if it takes a form not universally recognisable as such. She will insist on taking positions on refugees and immigration that fly in the face of the Church’s teaching on the value of charitable impulses and the relief of distress. And though the rich man may yet struggle to enter the kingdom of heaven, he can rest assured that Mrs. May’s first duty as Prime Minister is to defend his prosperity on earth. 

Politicians are notorious for evading responsibility for their actions by defining the terms of debate in the most restrictive and legalistic form. So if we should discover Mrs. May in the act of scoffing a tube of Pringles or cheerfully chomping her way through a jumbo-size bag of Doritos with a clear conscience, she would be ready with a reply. These products clearly do not meet any plausible definition of ‘crisps’, being triangular or parabolic aggregations of corn-starch. Mrs. May will take no lectures from those who would force the public to eat nothing but crisps for Lent. Still less from those who never eat crisps. 

The portrait was photographed on a building in Whitecross Street, Finsbury last September.

Hometown Brexit Blues

I normally avoid writing in the first person in this space. Politics rarely intrudes – I have no interest in offending readers. But when we are overwhelmed by a political catastrophe, it’s time to make an exception. I was born in the North East of England, 3 months after the war ended – a middle-class child and grammar school boy. Something about the region got into my bloodstream and the North East (rather than England) always felt like my spiritual home even though I was relocated to Metro-Land with my family from the age of 13. There’s a place in my heart for Metro-Land (an amorphous entity of surpassing strangeness when closely examined) but the North East (especially Sunderland and Hartlepool) has by far the greater claim on my affections. Perhaps the determining factor was a boyhood fascination with the hard-core industrial character of the place – a thrilling spectacle to an impressionable child of blast furnaces, coalmines, petrochemicals and shipyards.

Outside the urban areas was a pleasing variety of countryside to enjoy – majestic Pennine uplands to surprisingly verdant valleys. Plus the City of Durham – a special place with one of the most spectacular cathedrals in all Europe. Locals were neighbourly and affable in a North Country way and humour (often sharp and quick) was never far from the surface. Many had Scottish or Irish ancestry whose forebears had moved there in search of employment. From a North East perspective almost all of England lay in the South, a city like Sheffield might as well have been a land of palm trees and cocoanut groves. When I got to Metro-Land I learned that Sheffield was a dark and distant industrial dystopia.

It wasn’t a great surprise, but no less shocking for that, to discover on Friday morning that the voters of Sunderland and Hartlepool had voted in greater numbers for Brexit than almost anywhere else in England. A great white working-class electorate sent up a howl of protest against the ruinous effects of half a century of de-industrialisation where the dignity of labour for a majority has evaporated. The solidarity of the workplace has vanished in an atomised, insecure low-wage job market and social provision has been systematically and ruthlessly decimated in an ideological crusade to maintain a low-tax regime for the wealthy and tyrannise the unemployed into a world of zero-hours and short term contracts. Lifelong Labour voters finally responded to the question, “What’s Labour ever done for us?” by deserting the party in tens of thousands.

Just how did the last residual loyalty to the Labour tribe finally fray away? Perhaps the beginning of the end was Peter Mandelson’s term as MP for Hartlepool (“intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”) during which New Labour did very little to tackle the desperation and deprivation of the nation’s former industrial heartlands. Was it accelerated by the coalition’s austerity-driven assault on social and welfare provision? Almost certainly. Did a 20 year tabloid (and broadsheet) campaign against the mostly fictional deficiencies of the EU play a part? Definitely. And did the utterly unscrupulous and venomous 12 year blitz of xenophobic propaganda by the same newspapers have an effect? Absolutely – otherwise how can the hostility to immigrants in a region that is one of the last destinations for migrants in search of employment be explained? This is a population, cynically groomed by masters of misinformation, opinion formers who would have served the Third Reich with distinction, given the opportunity. Easily persuaded to place the blame for all their discontents on outsiders and remote Brussels bureaucrats.

This is all deeply depressing but what is even more astounding is that these voters have placed their trust in Johnson and Gove, a Gilbert and George tribute act in which two slightly weird looking performers attempt to outdo one another with the scale and audacity of their lies. The fight-back against an oppressive establishment elite is to be lead by a pair of former journalists whose careers were built on their ability to distort the truth to fit the prejudices of their masters and readers. Their elitist credentials are impeccable – private income, public school, Oxford. Despite that they are essentially puppets of megalomaniac media proprietors. In the case of Johnson, the strings are pulled by the weirdo Barclay Brothers whose Daily Telegraph pages are besmirched by regular windy diatribes from the pen of Johnson – for which dubious services they pay him £250K per year. The Gove strings are pulled by Rupert Murdoch (CEO, News Corporation) by whom he was employed as a Times columnist for almost a decade. Gove is a regular around Murdoch’s dinner table – who knows what they talk about but I can say with total confidence that addressing social and income inequality has never been a topic for discussion. Johnson and Gove are two of the loudest cheerleaders for the callous neoliberalism that drove their new-found followers to despair. 

What next? Can the Labour party find the language to reconnect with its lost voters? Unlikely at present. Is there a Labour leader in waiting with the skills and personality to make a difference? Maybe – but I couldn’t name one. Can Johnson and Gove deliver the White Supremacist State that the worst of their followers believe they have been promised? If they lack the stomach for a programme of repatriation there are others with no such scruples. The recent ugly scenes in Newcastle may be just the start of something very much worse. Johnson and Gove are postmodern politicians – clever and shallow, puny in stature, devoid of conscience, no grace or gravitas. Will they persuade the Scots to remain in the Union? Do they command the necessary public trust to deal with the unravelling of the Good Friday Agreement? Watch them choke as they attempt the simultaneous ownership and consumption of cake. Their false promises and falsehoods exposed will be their undoing. And they will turn to us, hold out their hands and say – it was only ever a piece of performance art. Get over it.

Photographs of St. Andrew’s, Roker