Category: Democracy

BP CEO Bob Dudley Pay Increase; Flawed Ethos of Individualism

The grotesque 20% pay increase to £14 million per year awarded to BP Chief Executive Bob Dudley has surprised even business organizations such as the Institute of Directors (IoD) who now rightly fear that the government will take action on corporate governance. But this act of naked greed illustrates a number of problems with our broken socio-economic model. First lets look at the tired old excuse that has been trotted out once again for Dudley’s award by a BP spokesperson:

BP’s performance surpassed the board’s expectations on almost all of the measures that determine remuneration – and the [pay] outcome therefore reflects this.

In a nutshell here is the application of possessive individualism in a pure form – the arrogance of assuming that the individual at the top has achieved an organizational target solely on their own abilities without the help and co-operation of their staff. So they alone deserve the rewards of extra millions! But Dudley is not the only one, the attitude is endemic – just look at Martin Sorrell at WPP for another example.

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Thomas Jefferson: A Fatally Flawed Radical

Thomas Jefferson was a leader of the American Revolution, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and a principal author of the 1776 Declaration of Independence. He became the second Vice-President (under John Adams) and the third President. He was a significant thinker and proponent of democracy and republicanism and there are many quotes expounding his ideas of liberty which resonate with us today. One I find significant is:

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

Something which we can also identify with is Jefferson’s warning of the dangers of corporatism, which was sadly ignored:

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

But the practical working out of his republicanism had a flaw which limited its application as the United States developed through the 19th Century. He was at heart an agrarian and influenced by the Country Party tradition of British politics. He saw society working best when it was a free collection of planters, small traders and smallholders which in many ways was a regressive concept harking back to a perceived agrarian golden era. Lest this be considered a criticism based on hindsight we can compare his ideas with his great friend and contemporary, Thomas Paine. Paine was an urbanite and correctly perceived that in the future land would be used for many purposes other than agriculture. Moreover republican theory would have to deal with the fast emerging capitalist culture. Paine’s solutions were very different and included, for example, the introduction of a Universal Basic Income to compensate the majority of citizens alienated from land ownership.

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Bombay 1668; Autocratic Corporatism Then and Now

On March 27th 1668 an event took place which has an important lesson for us today with the possibility of a free Trade Agreement between the United States and the UK replicating parts of the stalled Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreement making democratically elected Governments subject to Corporate interests. I have written a post about how TTIP would work in practice. Back in March 1668, the restored British monarch Charles II leased Bombay (now called Mumbai) to the East India Company (EIC) for £10 a year. Charles acquired the Bombay islands from the Portuguese as part of a dowry payment when he married Catherine of Braganza. This was all part of a strategy to give extensive autocratic powers to the EIC and over the next couple of years Charles issued five Charters allowing the company rights to autonomous territorial acquisitions; to mint money; to command fortresses and troops and form alliances; to make war and peace, and to exercise both civil and criminal jurisdiction over the acquired areas. The Bombay islands was just one event in a series of significant events over the next 100 years which led to the EIC virtually monopolizing India (except for some minor areas of local control in the South) and becoming so powerful as to rival the British Government itself. This led to a series of Parliamentary Acts during the 1770s and 1780s which separated the commercial and administrative/political functions of the EIC and reasserted the supremacy of Parliament over the corporation. Apologists of the British Empire will point to the economic and administrative benefits of the EIC while avoiding the awkward facts of endemic corruption; massacres; looting of Indian treasures resulting in poverty; numerous famines including the Great Bengal of 1770; and exploitative systems of agriculture including the forced cultivation of opium in place of foodstuffs.

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Modern Citizenship Means Being Online

DigCit

For much of our history property ownership was an essential prerequisite to exercise your full rights as a citizen, but now you need an internet connection! To be a citizen can mean a variety of things. At its most basic it is merely a synonym for being a national of a particular country, thus possessing a right of abode. As a consequence of mass migration the question of what it means to be a citizen in this sense is of burning importance at the current time. But the broader concept of a citizen is actually very old, dating back to the ancient Greeks and is closely related to the idea of freedom and political agency.

Later, being a citizen to the ancient Romans meant not being a slave and this idea carries potent implications to the present time. In Renaissance Europe the idea of a citizen was linked military service for your city or state, where you may be expected to serve part-time in a militia or reserve force. As today, much debate took place in seventeenth century England as to the definition of a citizen and whether everyone should enjoy the same rights. The highest level almost always involved the ownership of substantial property and conferred Parliamentary voting rights. At the bottom and often regarded as foregoing citizenship were the poor who received alms or worked for wages (much less common in pre-industrial societies) The emerging idea of a citizen being of independent means is an important one and is acutely relevant today. Crucially, very few definitions at that time included women, unless they were also property holders by widowhood or inheritance.

If citizen is a word plagued by ambiguity then the associated citizenship suffers similar problems. Again, it could mean simply the state of being a citizen, but that gets us little further forward. It is more useful to consider citizenship as a process; of how we take our part as an active member of society. On that basis, citizenship implies that we have various rights and responsibilities, some of which may be withdrawn permanently or temporarily. For example we may consider prisoners as being citizens, but of lesser kind without some rights, such as the ability to vote in elections (though this is being reviewed). In general, as societies developed, so the concept of the rights possessed by a citizen have similarly evolved. In modern western democratic states citizenship brings with it not only a right (or responsibility) to vote, but rights to welfare, education, health care, security etc. This means the necessity for the state to ensure that its people possess the knowledge, skills and means to take advantage of their rights and responsibilities. Moreover citizens must have the confidence to use the knowledge and skills effectively. The responsibilities of citizenship have also evolved, becoming ever more complex. If we take a wider view of citizenship as being actively involved in politics (in its broader sense, not just party based) the situation is similarly involved with a plethora of campaigns which may easily straddle international and even continental boundaries.

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In, out, shake it all about

By Alison Rowland

I am delighted to welcome guest blogger Alison Rowland to the Radical I-Pamphlet with a post containing her thoughts on the EU Referendum debate. Alison is a jewellery maker, advocate for social justice and an enthusiast for Labrador dogs and Ancient History. She can be found on twitter as @Rowland35Alison and on Facebook at BlueForestJewellery1

A referendum sounds like such a lovely fair and democratic thing, doesn’t it? Like something the British might have proudly created during that brave experimental time when we had de-capitated one King, and not yet replaced him with another equally as bad.  Sadly, history is an object lesson in not learning from our mistakes. Granted, we have evolved to a situation in which our monarch has relatively little political influence, despite retaining obscene levels of wealth and privilege. But we still regularly vote into power people whose background allows them to control and influence the media and effectively buy their power, and then let them use that power to pervert the notion of democracy.  And we are about to launch into a ‘debate’ which is already being defined around the notion of ‘sovereignty’ without any real hope that what that actually means will ever really be allowed to surface.

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With all this jockeying about for power, its like they’re playing at kings

We have only managed two major referendums, the original EU one in 1975, and the Alternative Vote one in 2011. The first allegedly an exercise in gauging support for the EU which would never be legally or constitutionally binding; the second a bad tempered spat between the then coalition partners over an alternative many didn’t understand, with a disproportionate amount of debate focussing on whether voting Yes would lead to yet more dreadful coalition governments.

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Jeremy Hunt: Clear Contempt for Democracy

If the case of Jeremy Hunt was unique then we could deal with it. But dissembling and evasion appears to be the default approach of Government, one which is not just limited to the Conservatives. I spoke with two people yesterday, one 20 year old and one of 50 who simply view all politicians as devious, narcissistic money grabbers. They considered these vices to be endemic, a basic fact of life which meant there was little point in trying improve the situation. Now, like many other people I fully accept that Government has to keep certain information and discussions confidential. National security is the obvious example. But the UK Government assumes secrecy as a default.

Back to Jeremy Hunt for an illustration. On 8th February The Independent newspaper reported in this article that both the NHS Employers and Hunt’s own Department of Health were prepared to accept a proposal from the British Medical Association (BMA) thus averting the impending Junior Doctors strike. Here it gets a little murky as the paper reports it was ‘sources’ close to the BMA which claimed that Hunt personally intervened to block the deal and crashed the negotiations. ‘Sources’ means that the claim was unattributed and thus not subject to public verification. The following day, however, Hunt was asked directly about the assertion in the House of Commons by Shadow Health Minister Justin Madders. You can view the interaction here.

Instead of answering the question put to him, Hunt takes the usual path of answering his own question. If he did veto the deal then we need to know the reasons. The Department of Health is not his personal fiefdom to do with as he likes. It is not as if Jeremy Hunt hasn’t had other opportunities to set the record straight. For example he could have dealt with it in this article a few days later on 12th February for Conservative Home.

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Maximus & TTIP: A Clear and Present Danger

TTIP

The poor folk of Cumbria have enough to deal with at the present time and the fact that Atos has the contract for providing the IT Services for decommissioning their local Sellafield nuclear plant is probably fairly well down the list of their concerns.  But when the floods have subsided and some semblance of normality returns the one constant in their lives along with the rest of us is the relentless march of unaccountable Corporate interests.

Atos has a well-documented track record of public sector failures including the spectacular termination of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) contract for the Department of Work and Pensions and the failure of a critical UK Border Agency IT system. Considering one of the criteria for awarding public contracts such as this one  for nuclear decommissioning contain elements such as technical capability and experience, the fact that contracts continue to get awarded to these companies is a mystery.  Significantly, it is also a mystery to MPs as the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee has been heavily critical of the Government in this report (see Section 2 from Page 9 onwards). The fact that nothing has changed is an indictment of our system of democracy.

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Remembering Dora Marsden: Suffragette Anarchist

A few weeks ago I wrote a short post about Constance Markievicz, suffragette and the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons (though she never actually took her seat). But there are some people for whom the passion for change burns so strongly that it brings them into conflict even with the cause they espouse.  Such was the case with Dora Marsden who died today (13th December) in 1960.  Marsden operated from Manchester and occupied a position on the radical activist wing of the suffragette movement, frequently engaging in illegal activities. From 1909 she accepted a post in the Pankhursts Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) but her assertive campaigning style resulted in frequent conflict with the organization hierarchy.

Splitting with the WSPU in 1911 she pursued a  literary path, founding the Freewoman, the New FreeWoman and Egoist journals. She gave voice to many radical authors who challenged accepted notions of society such as the role of marriage. It would be fascinating to know how she would have viewed same-sex marriage! Another important radical thinker who must NOT be eclipsed by the establishment historical narrative.

Lady Astor MP in 1919; but who was Constance Markievicz?

On December 1st 1919 Lady Astor took her seat in the House of Commons having been elected three days earlier.  She is sometimes erroneously described as being the first woman to be elected to the Chamber.  But that accolade belongs to Constance Markievicz (née Gore-Booth), an Irish nationalist, socialist and suffragette who was elected almost a year earlier in December 1918. Markievicz, a Countess by marriage,  was in Holloway prison when elected but due to the Irish Republican tradition of abstention did not take her seat in Parliament on release.  The policy which remains to this day was a result of the entirely understandable principle of refusing to swear the oath of allegiance to the monarch.

The American-born Lady Astor herself was a colourful and controversial character. Ironically for an American she was a believer in British Imperialism and held religious prejudices – dissuading the employment of Jews and Catholics at The Observer newspaper which was owned by her husband Waldorf Astor. Flirting with groups with Nazi sympathies during the 1930s, Astor possessed a great gift of wit which she used effectively to put down male hecklers both on hustings and in the Commons.

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