Well, that says it all.

Tweets, status updates, blogs: we spend a lot of time voicing our message, communicating our opinions, talking to (at?) others about what we believe in - a right old case of meme warfare.

Not so much time is spent on listening.

For sure, we do listen, sometimes, but even then it’s only to some people; only to the people that we side with, our own choice victims. For feminists, women; for race activists, ethnic minorities; for capitalists, businesses; for Marxists, workers; for recovering addicts, current drug-takers; for labour voters, the vulnerable in need of public services; for conservatives, the employed who need lower taxes.

My friends, there is something painful in that, this myopia, that we only listen to the suffering we identify with – to everyone else, we preach, pontificate, even persecute, determined to being them ‘on side’, to our side. Sure, why wouldn’t they support our cause, worthy as it is? Except they’re supporting their own cause, as worthy also, as that actually is.

This is a very sad situation. A very stuck situation.

Camps of tribal affiliations, groups of equally noble causes fighting their own corner, fighting each other. I’ve often seen this: that something isn’t good enough, because it doesn’t include everything else. Conservatives are wrong, pulling back spending on public services in their pursuit of lower taxes for the employed, because they don’t speak enough about protecting the vulnerable. Labour is wrong, seeking to maintain spending on public services for the vulnerable, seeking to invest more capital in infrastructure to build houses, because they don’t speak enough about the need to reduce the deficit, to relieve the burden of debt on the next generation. A polarity thus develops, both sides declining to see the full picture: that we are no longer as well off as a society, that perhaps taxes have to either remain constant or even go up if we wish to maintain the current level of social services, and at the same time, in the face of these higher taxes, we must nevertheless accept a reduced quality of life. There simple isn’t as much to go around. Mother Earth hasn’t got as much left to give. 

Nowhere is this tribalism more evident than on Twitter, where camps of different tribes, affiliated to their own chosen values and causes, form exclusive cells with impermeable membranes.

For me, I’d much rather belong to no group. Whenever I feel myself getting subsumed into one camp or another I subvert the process by focusing on something else. I abhor affiliations - political, ideological, religious, whatever. I like to promote a diverse, sometimes conflicting array of narratives: feminism, equality, Buddhism, social welfare, the NHS, mental health, environmentalism, renewable energy, population controls, atheism, banning pornography, reformed/regulated capitalism, a non-regulated press, and nuclear decommissioning.  I buy the Observer and The Telegraph on Sundays. Both usually make good points. 

But that’s just me.

My point is that life is too complex, too complicated to foster simplistic affiliations. That’s far too close to religion, to dogma, for me. I’m a complex person, with strengths and weaknesses. I make good points sometimes, and terrible mistakes. I find it hard to see both sides of the story most of the time, but I want to try, and I have a right to try. On Twitter I’ve seen people being jumped for trying to consider an alternative view, and quite often I’ve been the one doing the jumping. I don’t like this part of me – I don’t think it’s useful, let alone humane. And I don’t like the process. It smacks of the schoolyard fight where everyone gathers round chanting ‘fight, fight, fight’. There’s an absence of human dignity in it. I want to be more patient, more at ease with difference. I want to feel less of a megalomaniac, living as I sometimes do from some bizarre, arrogant belief that I can change the world if only I say the right thing at the right time to the person I believe needs to hear what I want to say.

I can’t change the world.

So, if there’s anything I want to be able to say upon my death bed, then, it’s not that I changed the world (an impossible task!), but that I made a difference to some people, and that I tried to understand, and that I was as non-violence as I could be. To do that, I need to listen more. Maybe the last thing that I can do then, on my death bed, is listen, to those around me, and to myself, to just listen and try to understand.
When all is said and done, maybe that’s the only thing left to do, to listen and try to understand.

News Round-up (March 24th-30th)

BENEFITS: Stay-at-home parents have seen tax increases since coalition came to power, unlike single- or both-parents who go to work, who have all seen reductions. Suggestions that Tories undervalue stay-at-home parents taking root.
(Telegraph)

MEDIA REGULATION: “Hands off from my interwebz!" says local blogger.
(Twitter) 

HEALTH AND SAFETY: Triangular flapjacks banned for health and safety reasons, but not square or rectangular flapjacks. Many concerned about the increase of corner-related injuries.
(BBC Radio 4)

ON THE PAPERS: Telegraph and Sun move to join Financial Times and others embracing paywalls. The Guardian denies intent of doing same, despite its online advertising revenue failing to sustain newsrooms. Many now ask: How much is news worth?
(BBC Radio 4)

CELEBRITY: Angelina Jolie at Nzolo camp in DR Congo fights to raise awareness of warzone rape in Africa.
(Metro)

EDUCATION: Teachers call for children as young as eight to be taught about risks of porn, including sexting. Also in the news, teacher strikes looking likely as general discontent on the increase.
(Metro; Guardian)

NEWS ON NEWS: Various stories of isolated, heart-breaking tragedies involving ordinary people you never knew.
(Metro etc.) 

BANKING: Cyprus decides not to raid Cypriot deposits under EU100,000. Bigger deposits hit by up to 100% as Cyprus attempts to remain in the Euro. Decades of hardship predicted as Cypriot economy teeters on the brink.
(Guardian)

IMMIGRATION: Tory focus on immigrants continues, as new, more stringent conditions on how immigrants access welfare and housing is proposed. Many worry of increased inequality, with the UK at odds with EU legislation on human rights. Farage of UKIP highlights the duty of government to house the homeless as undermining Cameron’s intentions. Others highlight how less than 2% of immigrants claim unemployment benefit, far below the national average.
(Guardian)

FEMINISM: Femen in the spot-light: some question their naked tactics - others emphasis freedoms and empowerment. On Twitter, @winnersusedrugs is faced with misogynistic backlash as she comes out in criticism of video-game conference “booth girls”. Those in support of her analysis called for a better view of women in the gaming industry.
(Guardian; Twitter)

POLITICS: Conservative narrative of ‘anyone can succeed if only they try hard enough’ read by some as ‘poverty is sinful’. Says Guardian journo satirically: "the state must shrink to a nub, because the humans who need it don't deserve it."
(Guardian)

WEATHER: Brits grit teeth as temps hit the pits.
(Various)

POLITICS: Mair maims mayor as Boris Johnston is stripped down by Eddie Mair in publicly celebrated interview accusing the conservative top dog as ‘a nasty piece of work’. Boris later praises Mair’s work.
(BBC)

News Round-Up

HOUSING: Tories divided as local councillors seek to protect ‘environmental safeguards’ accusing government of ‘over-development’ while national Conservative party seeks to galvanise house-building market, injecting £3.5b into New Homes Scheme.

FEMINISM: Twitter inflamed over #Steubenville as sympathy expressed for convicted rapists, including on CNN, and suggestions repeatedly made that rape victim was partly to blame.

INTERNATIONAL NEWS: Cyprus in chaos as politicians desperately seek solution to crippled banking system – a 25% bank levy on savings deposits over EU100,000 currently proposed. Observers fear bank run and immanent collapse. Banks have been closed for last seven days.

WEATHER: Bristol struck by cold snap, while nation’s eye turns to dwindling gas reserves as supply from Belgium is cut off by pump failure.

POLITICS: Labour pull ahead in polls as Conservative stick to current economic policy (Poll Average: Con: 30  Lab: 40  Lib-Dem: 11)

MEDIA: Newspapers contemplate new cross-party agreement on new regulations backed by law. Early indications suggest some may refuse to sign. Supporters insist regulations protect freedom of the press while protecting the public.

RELIGION: New pope calls for a ‘poor church’.

WELFARE: “Bedroom Tax” to be implemented as “Mansion Tax” is dropped – nation split between the need for housing and the needs of the vulnerable. Conservatives reward both parents when they decide to work by offering more childcare support – many now ask how much Tories value the work of stay-at-home parents.

Authority's End

Pluto is in Capricorn, and authorities are being relentlessly cross-examined: the police, the government, MPs, Celebrities, the Church, the media, the BBC, the NHS. It is a time of great upheaval, both in the stars, and on the ground. I don’t believe in astrology, but certainly the stars are not far off on this particular subplot of the zeitgeist.

What does it mean, then, to be without authority? More specifically, to be without an external authority? Classically, we’ve killed our fathers, possessed our mothers. Patriarchy is eating itself.

We’ve got nothing to guide us, only appetite, desire, the need for an endless, directionless “more”.

Here, in the great silence of a murdered God, in the graveyard of moral certitude, there resides a trembling silence, a open plot.

We stand alone in ourselves, our own hearts and minds our only guide. Do we have the confidence, the groundedness, the courage to follow our own lights? What does our own voice sound like, apart from the multitude of voices we try to discern around us and try to please on a daily basis? What do we, in ourselves, think is right, beyond what gets us praise or blame? Who are we, apart from what we think we are perceived to be by Others?

The child stands with dagger in hand and Daddy dead. The child looks about, realising what it has done. What next? For Mommy cannot be possessed forever. She will die, her nurture end. All that remains now is the inevitability of being left, alone. What then for the child without authority, without guidance, with nothing but its own heart and mind to heed? What then?

To pluck the fruit of adulthood from this wasteland of destruction – is it possible? Is it inevitable? Is it even conceivable?

A turn for the different.

These days I’ve taken to be, well, less political and more creative – something that happens to me annually; winter stokes the coals of my birthing-burner like an old man poking at the open fire, sending up crackling sparks that from out of the dark set his peering, crinkled face aglow. I scratch the flint over these faceless stones, and from that comes strange tales, mystic messages. Warmed, I shimmy up to these building flames, listen to the roar in the hearth, and let myself dream.

The cold, sharp clink of metal brought down on metal – clink.

These days there is a controlled violence in my words, an accuracy that is visceral. I look forward to these moments with the muse, like one might look forward to an evening’s chat with a close friend before the fire. Nodding and smiling, turning over thoughts between two: ploughing the field.

These days I relish such moments, where I treat words with the respect they are due, select them, and place them, with care. With care, yes. This is the season when I create with care.

A Step too Far? What's the Story with Social Welfare?

Everything has a price tag these days, from politicians' expenses to the Olympics' opening ceremony. In any one day, on reading The Guardian alone, we are informed how much Barclay's has been fined (£290m) and how much in bonuses Bob Diamond will now forego as a result of the Barclay's shambles (£2.7m). We also know how much fuel duty Brits will no longer have to pay (3p), as George Osborne does a U-turn, and we're told how much this will cost the government (£550m). We are informed that London bus drivers are striking over Olympic bonuses, and told how much exactly these bonuses are (£500). The list goes on, from the cost of loan companies to how much the M&S Chief Executive is being paid; even how much BT Vision paid for 114 Premier League football matches (£738m).

Never before have people known so well the price of everything. When the cake gets smaller, we all start eyeing the crumbs.

No wonder then, that the welfare system is now being scrutinised under the analytical, economic eye of the public. And yet, how we look at the costs of the welfare system, and what story we pin these costs to, makes a great deal of difference in the world of politics.

Take, for example, the last few months and years, where a story has been slowly building around the welfare state, about how much it costs the UK and whether those who benefit from it actually deserve such benefits. A provocative story, no doubt; yet stories, however moving, can be very misleading. Compare, for example, the story that 'the government will pay out more in social security benefits than it raises from workers in income tax this year (2009)' to the story that 'the UK is ranked significantly below many other European nations in terms of how much it spends on welfare, including France, Germany, and Italy'.

Of course, we've been inundated with figures, the latest eye-watering figure to join this deluge of price tags being how much housing benefit for the under 25s costs the UK every year - coming in at £2bn. Add that to the total UK debt: £1tr (up £2.7bn in a year)

The analogy that's made, then, is of course the image of a family in debt. You can't borrow your way out of debt, you've got to cut back, right? Of course! And to do that, you've got to spend less, right? Duh!!

So, that's what the government is doing. Cutting back to pay off their debts, and the place they've chosen to do this is social welfare; the reason being that there are too many people dependant on the state. Social welfare gives the wrong impression, that you're better off on benefits than working for a living. This from Cameron:

'A couple will say, "We are engaged, we are both living with our parents, we are trying to save before we get married and have children and be good parents. But how does it make us feel, Mr Cameron, when we see someone who goes ahead, has the child, gets the council home, gets the help that isn't available to us?"

One is trapped in a welfare system that discourages them from working, the other is doing the right thing and getting no help.'

It's a provocative, and somehow alluring argument. It does indeed sound incredibly unfair!

In the face of the economic facts and figures, Cameron has focused on cutting back the welfare state in order to help pay off the UK's debts. Dependency on welfare, described here as the "welfare trap," needs to be tackled, and urgently. Cameron is not alone. The Telegraph, along with a great many middle-class couples living at home, not to mention a great many Tory donors, clearly supports the PM's agenda. Here, the story of a whole generation raised on a 'culture of entitlement,' looms large. A very alluring argument: blame it on the feckless young. Just look at them, listening to their terrible music and causing nothing but trouble!

But, let's take a step back for a minute. There is another way to tell this story.

In the hours and days immediately following the news that Cameron was setting his sights on removing housing benefit for the under 25s, a whole swathe of dissenting voices rang out, not least of which was Polly Toynbee's, who described Cameron as "stirring up those on quite low incomes against those on very low incomes". Here, writes Toynbee, Cameron is deliberately setting up a false dichotomy, dividing and ruling, by 'pitting "those who work hard and do the right thing" against those on benefits, all the time ignoring the fact that these are for the most part the very same people'. Polly confronts us with a whole new set of figures that Cameron has chosen to overlook:

For a start, the majority of people claiming benefits are not unemployed at all, they are the low-paid employed, the workers and cleaners, care-assistants and child-care workers, the people who clean our streets and who take care of our elderly loved ones, the people who mind our children. They are the 62% living below the poverty line who are employed but require benefits to survive. And as a counter-narrative for those who mean to suggest that this is a tidal wave of scroungers, 95% of the rise in housing benefits this year is paid to people in work. Only one in eight people who rely on housing benefit are out of work.

So, what the hell is going on then? What kind of story can we tell, if the problem of rapidly rising welfare costs can't be explained away solely by scapegoating a minority? How inconvenient, that we have to think a little harder.

Well, Owen Jones of The Independent, along with Polly Toynbee, attempts to explain the situation, not by blaming the inner psychological workings of the so-called undeserving poor, but by examining three external factors that feed in to this rapidly snowballing situation: low wages, high housing costs, and a dearth of job opportunities.

Regarding low wages, The Living Wage Foundation currently sets the living wage at £7.20/hr. With the national minimum wage set at £6.08 for those over 21 and £4.98 for those 18-20, we can see there's a bit of a deficit between what many are being paid on minimum wage and what is needed to survive in the UK. As such, people are relying on benefits to top-up their wages, not to scrounge. So, in this instance, taxes aren't primarily going to scroungers living off social welfare, they're subsidising big businesses who refuse to pay a living wage. Combine this with the rising cost of living and you might be tempted to think that it's not so much about cutting benefits, but increasing wages.

How about that for a twist in the tale?

The story doesn't end there, however. 95% of the increase in housing benefit is being paid to people in work who can no longer afford to pay their rent because their wages do not cover the costs. Housing costs have been rising far more than the minimum wage, and far more than the rate of inflation, three times more, to be exact. Again, then, instead of singling out a minority, and describing their apparent immoral inner workings, the temptation now might be to focus on reducing rents in the private sector, by, for example, imposing a cap on how much private landlords can charge, or maybe reducing the cost of buying a house, by investing in more social housing. After all, it's not so much that taxes are going towards maintaining feckless teenagers in the lap of luxury; they're going into the pockets of rich landlords who raise rents beyond affordability. Capping rents would mean all those people who are working on minimum wage might be able to afford their rents, or even get a mortgage, without having to rely on benefits in order to survive.

And finally, the elephant in the room, which doesn't require much more of my word count: How can you fit 2.5m unemployed people into 460,000 job vacancies?

In all this it's interesting to note that it is the so-called free-loading chav, the scrounger, who is the one deemed immoral, and not the big businesses who refuse to pay a living wage, or the private landlords who raise rents to impossible heights. Just as Jimmy Carr was scapegoated for the failure of the government to impose a fairer, more water-tight tax system, here too, the unemployed are singled out instead of the wider malaise, a system run by capitalist values, that is so out of control the government needs to subsidise it in order for it to survive, by paying housing benefit to the already employed, for example, not to mention bailing out banks.

Add to all this the final fact that we all intuitively know, that:

As each year passes, and the richest one per cent get richer still, the rest of the best-off ten per cent increasingly have a little more in common with the remaining nine-tenths of society, and less and less in common with those at the very top.

The only people gaining from all this are the richest of the rich, who have seen extraordinary rises in their wealth over the last few years.

[T]here has been a short, sharp entrenchment of inequality in the past two years. Last year, the earnings of FTSE 100 executives went up by 49%, while the annual pay of waiters and waitresses fell by 11% and those of cleaning staff by 3.4%. The average director at Britain's top 100 companies now earns 145 times more than their average worker.

We might note too, that a quarter of these people, the richest of the rich, are Tory donors.

So, now that we know the price of everything, which story do we want to tell?

Has the welfare state taken a step too far, encouraged a generation of entitled scroungers? Are we angry that our taxes are supporting this undeserving free-loader? On the other hand, has capitalism gone too far? Are we not angry that our taxes are subsidising big businesses who won't pay a living wage, and rich landlords who raise rents to unaffordable levels? Is David Cameron taking a step too far, by drawing back the welfare state in the wrong way at the wrong time, when to do so will only leave a rising number of people unable to cope? Is that the way we wish to end the tale? With rising homelessness, increased poverty, and a widening gap between the richest and the rest? Or do we want to create a different ending, by looking at establishing a living wage and investing in social housing, creating jobs, and laying the foundation of a good future for the next generation? Wouldn't that be a nice ending?

So, now that we have the figures, what's the story with social welfare? More to the point: which story do we want to tell?

Something Terrible

To see something terrible happening to a human being, click *here*.