A look at the legacy of "the pursit of inequality" at a time of raging Amazon forest fires

(This blog post includes link to a February 1975 BBC radio interview with Margaret Thatcher on the Jimmy Young show, on Thatcher becoming Tory Party leader. It should be noted regarding references to the then Labour Government, that the Conservatives' Edward Heath had lost a 1974 General Election, and been replaced by a Labour Government led by Harold Wilson. Wilson stood down as PM in 1976, and was replaced by James Callaghan without a General Election taking place again till 1979.)

Politics & Insights blogger Kitty S Jones writes:

Why is the UK so unequal? by Kitty S Jones

The US and UK share an ideology of 'free-market' fundamentalism and competitive individualism. More widely called 'neoliberalism' these ideas were introduced, respectively, on both sides of the Atlantic by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. 

Earlier this year, Angus Deaton, professor of economics at Princeton University and a Nobel laureate, launched a five-year review on the subject of inequality. Sir Angus, who is teaming up with the Institute for Fiscal Studies, with funding from the Nuffield Foundation, a charity, intends the review to be the “most comprehensive scientific analysis of inequalities yet attempted”, examining not just the gaps between the rich and poor, but also differences in health outcomes, political power and economic opportunities in British society and across the world. 

Personally, I have some major issues with the neoliberal language of "incentives." .....

 More at from Kitty S Jones at https://politicsandinsights.org/2019/08/23/why-is-the-uk-so-unequal/

Equality/inequalities, and the Social Model of Disability

Writing in July 1984 piece entitled 'Equality is Doing What Comes Naturally', Huw Richards wrote:

The American constitution proclaims the equality of all men to be self-evident. However it took until the Civil War to decide that ‘all men’ includes black men. And the battle continues today to extend constitutional equality to women - with the Equal Rights Amendment tantalisingly short of getting enough support to become law. Indeed White House opposition is one of the major forces against the Equal Rights Amendment. The election of Reagan was a major defeat for supporters of equality; for the first time since well before the Second World War a US administration came to office openly rejecting equality as an objective.

It’s a shift paralleled in Britain. Twenty years ago Prime Minister Harold Wilson was saying: ‘All children have the right to a start in life, but not a flying start’. Today the job is held by Margaret Thatcher who believes: ‘Opportunity means nothing unless it includes the right to be unequal’. 

Thatcher — unlike Boris Johnson — had risen to Tory Party leadership while that party was out of office. Later, "the Conservative Party ... no longer certain that the pursuit of inequality won votes ... brought Margaret Thatcher's career to a reluctant end" after the poll tax had proven deeply unpopular. (Yet the 'poll tax' that proved so unpopular was replaced by Council Tax that still taxes tenants rather than land owners!)

Before Thatcher became Prime Minister, Harvey Andrews and Graham Cooper had drawn attention via a song called 'Targets', to the gulf between spin and reality that was propelling 'Mrs T' onward and upward:

"Call us 'equal'? Call us 'proud'?
Call yourself a liar;
No matter what the people do,
They set the targets higher."

I should note regarding the song's

"Someone's got to lead the blind
And see that the cripple rises"

terminology that that song was also written before the Social Model of Disability could draw attention to the true barriers to disabled people's equality and inform the language around disability.)

Andrews later quipped in solo concert that took place in London before the Conservative Party ousted Margaret Thatcher as their leader, "I tried to warn people about her, but Jimmy Young would not play the record."

'Incentives', participation and disability

The Social Model of Disability draws attention the the physical, social and economic barriers that obstruct disabled people's participation in society, as does this recent Disability News Service account regarding the situation of a disabled person who might otherwise be portrayed as "a burden on society":

Anne Novis (pictured, left, holding a consultation document on the proposals), who chairs Inclusion London, and received a commendation from the Metropolitan police only last month for her work as an independent advisor to the force, said she was likely to have to quit both those voluntary positions if the council’s proposals went ahead.
Because she was left some money when her mother died, Novis will be hit hard by the reduction on the cap in charges. She is set to lose support worth £3,500 a month.
She said: “If that is removed as proposed, I will have to pay for all my care, an impossible request if I am to live.” [Continue reading at https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/councils-planned-care-charge-rises-could-prove-fatal/]

Financial incentives clearly fit into a capitalist system and its ideology. Anne Novis, like many disabled volunteers regardless of our politics, volunteer as a means of participation in society: "No-one is an island entire and of itself." In my personal experience as a disabled volunteer and jobseeker, I found that cuts in public spending and shifts in government priorities were a major determinant of the outcomes for my career advancement.

As an example, I was praised for my "endless patience with slower learners." I was a Basic Skills Learning Support volunteer in 2004 in a non-statutory funded Computer Club for adults with learning difficulties, and a slower learner myself. As a child I had struggled to achieve basic literacy, to the point of being hit by child rheumatism before I was given extra tuition at school and home access to Encyclopaedia Britannica in a middle class family. So, mine had not been the kind of "flying start" that Harold Wilson had objected to in 1964, but helped lead me to literacy behaviours and skills.

By the same token, the purchase for me of a home PC in 1998 after my experience of Training & Enterprise Council-funded access to computer skills training had proven inadequate with my much slower learning pace and no home access to a Windows PC, gave me a relatively 'flying start' to Windows Computing that I passed onto other disadvantaged learners from 2004 to around 2010 as a one-to-one teacher of such skills to other disadvantaged learners.

Yet the Learning & Skills Council London Central that "[existed] to help make England better skilled an more competitive" was ignorant of the learners to instructors dynamics of supporting pre-literate adults and prioritised promoting National Vocational Qualification Levels 2 and 3 outcomes toward implementing London 2012 Olympics, at the expense of NVQ Level 1 take up, and so that Computer Club ran out of non-statutory funding and cuts in statutory funding for paid staff.

(Learning & Skills Councils had replaced Training & Enterprise Councils.)

That and further cuts denied me opportunities to advance, and in 2018 I retired after having been a claimant of Employment & Support Allowance since 2009.

The financial incentives argument in a world of diminishing resources gives rise to increasing narcissism

Before I close this article or its drafting for now, I shall give brief mention to forest fires in the Amazon, the 'war of words' between world leaders arising from that, and how consumer action might be an antidote to the narcissism that seems to be worshiped in a commercial advertising sponsored media society.

Thinking of including an image of Amazonian forest fires, I just keyed into the advertiser-sponsored Google search engine the keywords

amazon forest fires

and the search engine suggested

amazon fire stick

a technology pioneered by one of the world's wealthiest men, Jeff Bezos, founder of Internet based company 'Amazon'. That incident in itself heps to highlight the interplays between the framings of 'opportunity' and capital. Before I entered uni in 1993, Windows(R) personal computing was not as mainstay as it had become when I entered training for NVQ accredited Microsoft Office skills training in 1997. Now, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is one of those popularising a view that the world has never been better, and getting heard.

Gates is clearly not a claimant of the UK's 'digital by default' run Universal Credit. But to return to the matter of forest fires raging in the Amazon, the lungs of the world.

Amazon forest fires LIVE update

A 'war of words' has erupted. In such circumstances, ultimately, perhaps a closer look at the root causes of Amazon deforestation, followed by consumer action, is the most powerful thing we as consumers can do?

As has been reported, a major source of the Brazilian urge for deforestation is palm oil cultivation Few people read the small print regarding ingredients of palm oil products such as those produced by Procter & Gamble. Similarly, an ingredient in many supermarket bought biscuit packets is also palm oil, as I've noticed only through reading the small print ingredients lists on the packets. We live in a global market in which the source of origin of, say, beef products is obscured, as I reported recently. We should examine the link between the global cattle feed industry and Amazon deforestation. And take consumer action!

I close with a link to an article regarding matters of rising inequalities, and how the 'entrepreneur' role in neoliberal capitalism ties in with narcissism.

Unhappy talk: Spirit Level authors are back

Anyone, Mrs Thatcher believed, who rides a bus or a tube after the age of 30 is a failure. She envisaged a car-owning democracy and herself was carried about like a four-wheeled Queen of Sheba. Clement Attlee, the PM who brought in the post-war welfare state, was often seen going to work on the Underground from Stanmore to Downing Street. Don’t expect to see Theresa May sitting next to you on the Northern line.

He says many foolish things, but among the most foolish is the view, expressed by Boris Johnson, that society is like a packet of cornflakes (echoes of Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates): shake it and the genetically gifted cornflakes will rise to the top. Like Boris.
Wilkinson and Pickett (with the usual supporting barrage of graphs) see it differently. “The belief that people are genetically endowed with substantial differences in intelligence and ability, which determine where they end up in the social hierarchy, is almost the opposite of the truth,” they tell us.

We’ve never had it so good but Heaven knows we’re miserable now. A follow-up from the authors of The Spirit Level asserts that inequality is to blame, says John Sutherland

02 August, 2018 — By John Sutherland
Those who reach the peaks in an entrepren­eurial society, like those of the US and UK, they assert are quite likely what they call “snakes in suits”. Entrepreneurism has created “an epidemic of narcissists”. What do narcissists lack? Empathy.

Narcissists, like snakes, are out for themselves. Try stroking one.

Oddly, Wilkinson and Pickett don’t mention the sociologist who pioneered the techniques they use. Why, asked Emile Durkheim (definitely a top cornflake), are Catholics less prone to suicide than Protestants?

A moment’s thought supplies answers – look, for example, at the families coming out of Our Lady of Hal church, in Arlington Road, on a Sunday.

The biggest causal factor in suicide was what Durkheim called anomie. Rootlessness.
Why is there an epidemic of self-harm, gloom and suicide among today’s young – even that privileged elite at university? “Deracination”, loss of community. We live in lonely crowds.
“Human beings are more fundamentally social animals than is often recognised” assert Wilkinson and Pickett.....
[Continue reading at http://camdennewjournal.com/article/unhappy-talk-spirit-level-authors-are-back if you so desire.]

In conclusion to this blog posting, I believe that in the 'global village', we are all connected and the fate of the world depends on our taking that reality on board and acting upon it.