Join the Masons

Morning everybody. Lots to do today, including finishing a column for the university magazine and seeing lots of dissertation students - mostly those who don't realise quite how good they are: my job today is to point out exactly how much work they've done and how much sense it makes.

There is a spectre haunting The Hegemon: the spectre of Mason

Firstly though, here are a few photos of last night's inaugural professorial lecture by Paul Mason, the distinguished Newsnight economics journalist, and now Visiting Professor. The main theme of the night was the crash and whether or not it fits executed Soviet economist Kondratiev's theory of long waves (Stalin's henchmen realised what he didn't: that the wave refuted Marxist belief in the historical inevitability of Marxism). 

'Peoples and countries will be pitched against each other' as we struggle to get out of the slump he said. There's a reckoning to be paid for the past 20 years or so of economic madness: the question is who pays it, and whether we take a lot of pain now or a massive amount of pain later (for instance, we could inflate our way out of debt now, but everybody's savings would disappear overnight). In a really serious slump, you see things like party political broadcasts being conducted by candlelight, as he remembers happening in the 1970s (send me a link, someone?).

Mason's shadow makes a point

 It was complex, thoughtful and pretty gloomy. Mason himself spoke authoritatively and passionately: he thinks in the long term and clearly cares about actual people rather than economic models and states. He felt that elite groups such as those who meet at Davos are in a state of some panic, and have little conception or interest in the public good. We shouldn't look to China either: they don't want to be a hegemonic power setting and keeping to standards of behaviour. Instead, we should expect a prolonged period of post-globalisation protectionism (we can already see it happening in sneaky devaluation, which just shifts economic problems onto other countries): we just have to hope that it isn't fascists leading this charge. Or, he said, we could easily inflate our way out of trouble in no time: just start a war with Iran. Oil prices will rocket, so will inflation, debts wiped out. There are a few down sides to this of course…

This chap was sitting in front of me. I was very distracted by his directional haircut.

 The discussion also took in the big one of UK economics: the supposed high-tech manufacturing miracle which politicians always say is coming won't help employment. Modern factories are virtually deserted. So what is everybody else meant to do? We can't sustain an economy based on people serving each other coffee for low wages: there's no demand available now that credit-fuelled spending is off the table. I don't have the answer to that one, and nor does Mason. But he thinks we should be worrying about it. Plenty of people on the left (Marx, deriving it from Hegel) looked forward to the end of work, whereas others believe in the Dignity of Labour. Here's Marx's vision of the perfect society:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

He also made the point that technology doesn't lead booms: oceans of cheap money lead to tech booms as investors seek risky bets. This reminded me of David Harvey's work. In it, he says that the credit crunch wasn't caused by too little cash in the system, but too much. The Germans saved all their money. They therefore got low interest payments on their cash. So they started showering it on risky, silly investments: obscenely high mortgages in Ireland, speculative Spanish building, weird derivatives, CDOs, MBSs and the rest of the alphabet soup. The more money went in, the safer it looked: after all, risk had been 'sliced and diced'. When actually, it just meant that everybody held debt with absolutely no idea of its provenance or actual risk. When the penny dropped, panic was the only sane response. Bingo: the crunch.

He's got the whole world in his hands

Other highlights: Mason reckons embittered Mervyn King (outgoing chair of the Bank of England) believes he saved the UK economy from a much, much worse fate by quietly allowing the pound to devalue in 2008, propping up exports to some extent.

Finally, Mason cautioned students even on the most vocational of courses to cherish the opportunity to engage with ideas, pure and simple. Music to my ears.

The rest of the photos I took are here.

New media, same old hegemony

TED, as you may know, is a purveyor of controversial, ground-breaking, free-thinking ideas promoted by the finest, most untrammelled minds of our times. They're delivered to very exclusive audiences of the mega-rich and powerful, then released over the web for those of us who move in less exalted circles. 

TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading.

Our mission: Spreading ideas. 
We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other. 

Usually. 


Here's an interesting TED talk that - almost uniquely as far as I can tell - was not deemed an Idea Worth Spreading. In fact they declined to make the video available - only bootlegs are available. 





See the accompanying slides here. No. 8 is good: as millionaires' taxes plummet, unemployment rises - despite the plutocrats' claims that freedom from taxes creates jobs. No 10 demonstrates that while wages have dropped considerably, unemployment has risen - despite Tory Chancellor Lamont's claim that unemployment is 'a price worth paying'. Capitalists say that minimum wages prevent people being employed - but actually it inserts a floor which keeps a bit of cash in the economy. 


Why ever not? The format's right: a billionaire enthusiastically outlining his big idea for fixing the economy. Exactly the kind of thing TED usually likes. 


Not this time. Because Nick Hanauer is a RENEGADE! He's a billionaire who dared tell TED's sugar-daddies that billionaires don't create jobs. Even more devastatingly, he makes the simple (and to me very familiar argument) that high wages = healthy economy. But don't take my word for it. Henry Ford was a very rightwing and rapacious capitalist - but he realised that for American workers to afford his cars, they had to be paid well. Modern capitalism, as you'll all know because it's happening to all of us - operates on the basis of relentless cutting wages to inflate profit margins. Money that would have gone into wage packets and thence into the economy is diverted to a tiny group of managers and shareholders. 


It's really simple: a bit more money in millions of pockets helps the economy a lot more than a lot more money in a few pockets. Even Tory Simon Jenkins agrees: he says it may be time for 'helicopter money': time-limited vouchers sent to everyone in the country rather than pumping £325bn into the banks' coffers. I agree with him. I'd stipulate that it could only be spent on goods made at home, to stimulate manufacturing. I'd treat myself to a fine tailor-made suit, thus supporting apprentices and craft skills. Or a selection of the smelliest cheeses known to humanity, as long as none of them were made by Alex James who should be hung from the nearest lamp-post by the Cotswolds peasantry. 


They keep it offshore away from the tax man, or invest it in property: nothing that helps the economy. The idea is that if we don't cut wages ('brutally', to quote Google's disgusting CEO), jobs will go to China or elsewhere - states which are happy to essentially enslave their workers. That's how capitalism works: it encourages us to see fellow workers in other countries as competitors to be undercut in a race to the bottom. But the Chinese government doesn't agree. As export demand slumps, it's realising that domestic demand is the only thing which can fill the gap - and that requires decent wages. 


Clearly TED's mission is to think the unthinkable… until its sponsors' ideological hegemony is challenged. TED really is just a rich man's plaything with little to add other than tired old technodeterminism. A genuinely open debate welcomes controversy. A fake one shuts it down. This, friends, is a small example of what happens when hegemony is challenged. 


New tech, same old tyrants.

First horse, then cart

Today's Twitter sensation is this article in the New York Times, in which a Goldman Sachs equity trader explains to his company why he is leaving.

The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for. It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients.

I can sympathise with him, of course. No doubt his colleagues are scum-sucking con-men bent on enriching themselves at the expense of clients (Smith seems to have no conception of a society beyond Goldman Sachs and their customers).

But amidst the general electronic rejoicing at the Prodigal Son's redemption, the liberals have missed the major point. Greg Smith's major assertion is that a culture of greed has damaged Goldman Sachs as a company. Bad people have wrecked a good system.

He's utterly wrong. A bad system has produced damaged, greedy, amoral people. Speculative capitalism isn't an honourable and sustainable enterprise occasionally besmirched by greedy individuals. Speculative capitalism assumes that individuals are driven by greed and self-interest and turns those characteristics into the engines of economic growth. By legitimising selfishness (such as destroying a company's value overnight to enrich Goldman Sachs through short-selling - deliberately engineering panic-selling of its shares), Goldman Sachs and similar companies deliberately turn human failings into structural features of the economy.

What's missing from Greg Smith's mea culpa is any understanding of economies and human society as a structure. To him, individual motivations and behaviours significantly affect structures. To us marxists, structures dictate human behaviour: culture is part of what Marx called the 'superstructure', while economics is part of the underlying structure. His disgusting colleagues aren't bad apples: they're behaving rationally and logically within the paradigm of speculative capitalism. It might offend Smith's personal code of conduct, but for 12 years he has enthusiastically participated in an economic activity which has impoverished massive swathes of the planet's population.

For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied.

He neither comprehends nor regrets this. Instead, he's shifted attention to the attitudes and sharp practices of a few individuals within an inevitably corrupting system. Smith's a cog in a machine, and he has no critique at all of the mechanism - he's merely personally offended by local difficulties.

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the trust of its clients — for very much longer.

A careful reading reveals not a radical, but a conservative. He wants the system to survive. He wants Goldman Sachs, one of the most destructive and predatory corporations on the planet, to survive. He has no concept of speculative capitalism's destructive impact on the human condition.

Greg: yes, many of the trees are falling down, but you need to realise that the wood itself is rotten.

PS: there's a much funnier take on the piece here. 
PS2: so what's my solution? Here's my naive and confused first steps.

She told you this would happen

Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, tells us that free-market capitalism uses any serious political or economic event to institute a vicious hard-right monetarist regime: consumer, environmental and worker protection abolished, corporate taxes cut, public services abandoned.

This is exactly what's happening in the UK, as Johann Hari points out.

As a proportion of GDP, Britain’s national debt has been higher than it is now for 200 of the past 250 years. Read that sentence again. Check it on any graph by any historian. Since 1750, there have only been two brief 30-year periods when our debt has been lower than it is now. If we are “bust” today, as George Osborne has claimed, then we have almost always been bust. We were bust when we pioneered the Industrial Revolution. We were bust when we ruled a quarter of the world. We were bust when we beat the Nazis. We were bust when we built the NHS. Or is it George Osborne’s economics that are bust?

Our debt is not high by historical standards, and it is not high by international standards. For example, Japan’s national debt is three times bigger than ours, and they are still borrowing at good rates.

David Cameron claims that, despite these facts, they need to cut our debt by slashing our spending because the bond markets demand it. If they do not obey, then our national credit rating will be downgraded, and we will have to pay much higher interest on our debt. But here’s the flaw in that plan. That’s not what the bond markets say. Not at all. Professor Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist whose predictions have consistently proved right through this crisis, says Cameron is conjuring up “invisible bond vigilantes” who “don’t exist.” Who is the bond market really punishing? It’s the countries that cut too fast, and so kill their economic growth. The last two nations to be down-graded were Ireland and Spain, who followed Cameron’s script to the letter.

The irony is that in this case, it was the utter failure of capitalism which brought about the catastrophe and ushered in the medicine of… free-market capitalism.

I think I'm starting to understand where it went wrong now.

Masonic Secrets

As promised, quality economics journalist Paul Mason came to give a presentation today, on the subject of Is There An End to the Crisis?. He was excellent - a good speaker but also a good listener. His thesis is that we aren't living in a moment of crisis: crisis is the normal state of capitalism (though he did point out that it's a lot worse because we invented some insane financial securities in the late 90s).

The key challenges are: rebalancing an economy so it's not just finance but real things like manufacturing; moving to an investment-based growth strategy rather than a credit (i.e. debt) funded economy; reducing the deficits without causing revolutions. On this last, I disagreed: what's wrong with a revolution if it's the only way to change things?

Along the way we discussed house prices, the decline of the US and its passionate hatred of state spending (I asked why the US government couldn't trick the Tea Party by spending loads of money on weaponry as usual, but he thought they're too angry even for that to work), the Roman model, house prices, the long-term decline in real wages (American salaries have remained flat or slightly lower since 1973), the rise of China and the prospects for the Euro.

It was fascinating stuff. Mason's very interested in China. He says that they're moving towards a slightly freer system but that they're not (as yet) interested in the kind of global hegemony America's operated. They want to be regional bosses, and they're not yet sure about whether to move to a social welfare/infrastructure-building state, or a consumer capitalist one (let's hope it's the former).

With the Euro, Mason's pretty pessimistic. He thinks the Greeks will leave: they don't want to stay in and the Germans, whose economy underpins the Eurozone but also creates the imbalances between rich Germany and poor Ireland/Spain/Portugal, doesn't want to carry them any more. He thinks Ireland will be bailed out massively though, because it's a 'conduit' between Germany and Co., and the offshore tax havens. What a revolting role for a nation to pursue: lice-picker to the productive bigger fish.

He uses an interesting analogy for the role of the banks (no time for the disgraceful behaviour of regulators, credit-rating agencies and the accountants). They are, he said, like the Alien in the film of that name. They've attached themselves to our economies, and if you cut them off, their acidic blood - the debt which has fuelled the economy for twenty years - will eat through the ship's decks - the real economy - one by one. The saviour this time, he says, was the state (at massive cost to us, hence the austerity we're facing), but no states are strong enough to do it a second time.

So what are our options:
1. Devalue the currency so we can export a lot and not afford to import much. That exports unemployment and suffering to the third world.
2. Do nothing and face revolution.
3. Radically restructure the global economy and work together. He thinks China's toying with some interesting ideas, such as a non-dollar global reserve currency to end currency wars.

For a man who clearly admires the US, he's pretty pessimistic about it: the politics, the poverty, its whole-hearted endorsement of naked capitalism. For instance, he points out that Nissan has moved away from the unionised East Coast high-wage areas to the Deep South. It pays less and its supplier factories have moved too. These subcontractors pay much lower wages, so that only undocumented immigrants work there. Then the locals get all racist and a spiral of social decline sets in. The population doesn't want the government to spend any money and even the stimulus isn't working because local authorities provide so few services that they can't effectively spend any of the money Washington is giving it to restart the economy.

Mason's solution is to copy Germany - his version of that country is one of high public investment. They spend a lot on schools, training and infrastructure. You therefore get a workforce with very high skills (hence BMW, Porsche, Siemens etc) who earn a lot because their jobs can't easily be outsourced. German companies grow through investment rather than debt (state-owned industrial banks help) and they're always technologically advanced. Think back to the 1960s: Britain's car industry died because it carried on producing outdated rubbish on outdated machines - investment was never a possibility. The UK would become like Germany: more boring, less extreme, but stable.

I found all this very interesting. I did have a few questions though. Such as: how are we going to move to an investment economy? Our entire financial system is based on allowing bankers and speculators to make massive profits overnight - short-selling is a clear example. There's nothing to make these people invest for the long-term. So if there's a profit to be made from halving your company's share price overnight, they'll do it, even if it means you can't raise money for new machinery. Also, how do we get the accountancy firms to stop authorising wheezes, and credit-ratings' firms from behaving irresponsibly? We've spent 30 years claiming that regulation destroys dynamism and innovation: just because the state has saved capitalism doesn't mean that capitalism will submit to the state. They're out there trying the same old stuff… they never learn.

Anyway, it was a fascinating session, and I'm really pleased that Mason is coming back for more.

George's Irish Stew

I linked to the article this clip is based on a week ago, but it's a good little reminder of the man you voted in as Chancellor.

What did the Druids know about economics?

Well, they were definitely fans of George Bush and Tony Blair's 'shop to save the economy' plan. I just read that the ceremonial dumping of precious objects in rivers and pools (as they did in Llyn Cerrig Bach) may have been a religious cover for stimulating spending: dump your old stuff and buy new! Keep the economy liquid!

Which is fine when the entire population of Europe is a few million at most, not so great when 60 million not so ancient Britons go to Primark every week…

Socialist Heroes No. 1: The US Military

I mean it. The US armed forces are the world's greatest and most powerful examples of socialism in action.

I realised this when I sat in front of the TV watching Tea Party lunatics calling for small government and an end to government spending, while expressing a desire for more soldiers, bigger guns, and more wars.

But armies are paid for by taxpayers. The government takes your money and spends almost 5% of GDP and 44% of US Government tax income ($663.8 billion) on war. Massive standing armies, a huge navy, enormous Marine Corps, gigantic air force, the National Guard, covert operations, missile silos, satellites, research and development, propaganda, accommodation, vehicles, educational programs: the list is endless, and it costs a lot of money.

Brilliant.

Eh? Surely that's not a very Vole thing to say. But I do. The US is a military state. It spends almost half the tax it collects on the military. This is genius. The government knows that Americans hate taxes and distrust governments. They also know that the more you hate taxes and governments, the more likely you are to like guns and massive military force. So someone sat down and thought about how to support the US economy while keeping these loons happy, and hit on the idea of a mighty military.

Think of it like this: if you manufacture enough enemies, you can usually be at war with a couple of no-mark sandpits at any one time, while keeping a massive enemy in reserve - once the USSR, now China. Your voters therefore demand that you hugely outgun and outspend them.

This leads to massive recruitment, taking young men and women off the dole queue caused by your decline as a manufacturing economy. They serve their country, learn to be docile and obedient citizens and view the armed services as the epitome of American-ness, and they get an excellent education paid for by the state after they leave. So you're fiddling the employment market and contributing to the education system. You also employ a lot of people to teach and train these recruits while in service. Then there's the housing for your forces, and the military bases. You scatter these throughout the country until every small town has a military outpost. That keeps them patriotic and ensures that they (and their local politicians) will never object to the military expenditure because it's keeping their town alive.

You also invest massively in university and industrial research and development, providing more jobs and tying everyone into a state-regulated economy without ever mentioning the dread word 'socialism'. But that's what it is. Shhh. Don't mention it to the Americans.

Top Marx

This is how the recession happened:

Screw the markets (redux)

The bond markets are joining the rightwing press in their attempted coup. They're going to ignore the UK's massive economy and downgrade its credit rating if the Liberals go with Labour, even though this could be a more stable partnership than Con-Lib.

This sounds ominous. A Lib-Lab pact would "almost guarantee" a downgrade of the UK's top-notch credit rating because both parties oppose early spending cuts to reduce the government deficit, according to analysts at BNP Paribas. They advised investors to sell the pound against the dollar.

"A Labour/Liberal government is the least-liked option by markets and would almost guarantee a downgrade of the UK sovereign," the analysts said. This is because "both parties agree that early expenditure cuts could harm the economy."

Taken to its logical conclusion, presumably the financial services sector would prefer us not to have elections at all. I'd rather devalue and export our way out of recession than rely on these vultures for a single pound.

Stuff the markets

I've been getting increasingly irate over the weekend by the sight and sound of bond market traders and bankers telling the media (and thus us) how our next government should spend our money. Politicians are (rightly) terrified of the markets, which pass judgement on political decisions by selling or investing in the currency and government-issued debt, which is how day-to-day state spending is financed.

The world's a more complex place than I'd like: the markets exist and to some extent are useful, but we're in danger of losing democracy, simply because some very rightwing people accountable to nobody are happy to bankrupt countries they don't like. They aren't 'rational actors' of the type deified in economics textbooks: they attack liberal and socialist governments.

Even if you think this is OK, remember this: the ratings agencies which are bankrupting Greece and may turn their attention to the UK are the very same people which told us that Enron, the Icelandic banks, credit defaults swaps and all the other insane financial instruments were absolutely fine. They're not just vicious, selfish capitalist scum, they're utterly incompetent.

Added to this is the fact that they're paid to cause short-term moves in the bond and currency rates (ruining a country's currency or bond yields is as profitable as boosting them) and you have a recipe for selfish destructiveness in the fiscal system. Who loses? Governments which need to pay pensions, build new hospitals or schools without waiting for the next tax year.

Let's remove them. Let's organise the IMF and World Bank to trade debt instruments between sovereign nations. Some of my readers know much more about this than I do: are there ways to circumvent these bastards?

Poor David Cameron. None too bright.

A long time ago, he said it was time to end 'Punch and Judy politics' - before spending the intervening period abusing Gordon Brown in an abusive student-debating fashion (and despite having a reputation for being utterly poisonous). In addition - his political strategist Steve Hilton was arrested for loutish behaviour - apparently top Tories don't need to actually buy train tickets.

Next up was Dave's silly Banana Republic-style personal posters. Then his sidekick Osborne announced that the solution to the banking crisis is to sell us the banks we'd already paid for and supported - at a low price. The only other problem with this brilliant wheeze is that we need the bank shares to reach 70p to get our money back. So selling shares to us at half price means that investors won't want the shares - so we'll never get our money back. He's going to be chancellor, by the way.

Now Dave's in trouble with the serious economists. He's been mocking Labour for weeks, suggesting that the International Monetary Fund (a bunch of reactionaries, by the way) might need to intervene in the British economy, as they did in the 1970s - a major humiliation.

Let's turn to the IMF. What do they say?

Oh dear. They say that David's plan to immediately pay off the debt we incurred saving David's banking friends and donors is a really bad idea. They seem to think that Gordon's plan to keep investing in the economy while reducing the £170bn deficit slowly is more likely to prevent ruin.

This government thing. It's not like having a jolly old chinwag down at the Bullingdon Club, is it?

Economics… through the medium of rap

Ken MacLeod (my favourite Scottish Trotskyist science fiction novelist) posted this bizarre but accurate rap of the competing interpretations of the credit crunch. Perhaps I'll use it for my economics lecture on Thursday…

Lovely, lovely books

Yes, the trucks are now rolling in. Lots of wonderful Welsh literature, and some hardcore Anne.

Today's haul:
Kate Roberts' One Bright Morning, translated by Gillian Clarke (a brilliant writer herself);
Kate Roberts' Y Lon Wen / The White Lane (also translated by Clarke);
Lynette Roberts' Collected Poems (inspired by the Lynette Roberts conference I didn't go to);
Fintan O'Toole's Ship of Fools, about the rape and pillage of the Irish economy by a clique of greedy, tightknit bankers, businessmen and politicians;
Cecily Devereux's edition of Anne of Green Gables;
Barry, Doody and Jones's Annotated Anne of Green Gables (which looks rather wet, actually).

Mmmm…

Here's one for Gordon

Mervyn King, Wulfrunian and governor of the Bank of England, made a speech last night pointing out that the banks have us over a barrel now. They can, he said, take even stupider risks now, because there's less competition, and they know that the taxpayer will always bail them out.

The solutions, he said, are to break up the bigger banks, so that ones that fail don't wreck the whole economy, and to separate investment banking from retail (bank accounts and mortgages). All sound good sense: the oil monopolies were broken in the early years of the 20th century in the US, and Glass-Steagal, introduced in the post-Depression years, similarly separated banking functions.

Will the government enact these sensible reforms? Don't be an idiot. That would take radical thinking, which in this government is reserved for bashing its natural supporters - trades unions, the poor etc.

The questions I really want to address to my party leaders are these:
You made speeches for 15 years about the need to let the markets do whatever they want. You reduced regulation, turned a blind eye to tax evasion and said you were 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich'. The banks have now crashed. You gave them all our money. They're now making even more money, but they're not lending to us or paying tax. Additionally, you're saying that because you've given all our money to the banks, the people who have already lost their jobs or are struggling, are going to suffer even more. The people who need Meals on Wheels, a decent public library, good state schools, good hospitals. You, and your banker friends don't use these services, and won't notice their decline.

Why is it OK to make us suffer to ensure that banks continue to make massive profits, which they salt away offshore?

Where, seriously, are the Labour values in all of this? Where, for god's sake, is the idea that government is the people's collective will to care for each other? What are you for?

Support the SOAS cleaners!

SOAS is the School of Oriental and African Studies, part of the University of London. Given that name, you'd think it would be good on multiculturalism.

You'd be wrong: the private cleaning contractor ISS (typical - give the dirty work to some grasping gangmaster), the university and the police got together to imprison and interrogate the cleaning staff about their immigration status - at their place of work. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that they waited until the end of the shift, to extract a few hours work without interruption. In response, the students have occupied the building.

OK, you might object to the presence of undocumented migrants working here. That would be fine, if it wasn't the case that illegal labour pays our way. We rely on slave labour all round the world to make cheap goods for us. Even the expensive goods, such as my lovely old Mac, are made in the cheapest, most exploitative conditions available to corporations. How many UK citizens do you know who deliver pizzas, sell kebabs, clean your offices? These things are too cheap because we don't want to pay people properly, especially those whom we never meet. My institution, at least, pays its cleaners direct - and get good service in return for proper conditions.

By contrast, cleaning, especially in London, is the preserve of the poorest, the most desperate. When they start to agitate about illegal pay levels, dangerous conditions, or unreasonable burdens, their employers sack them or, if they're feeling particularly vindictive, call the immigration service, as has happened in this case.

Yes, local people should have jobs - but a lot won't take 'menial' work, and many more won't take illegally-paid jobs (the minimum wage is £5.73, in case you want to check your wage packet) on principle, which is quite right. This country owes its colonial victims a lot more than £5+ an hour - and we need to run our economy justly and fairly. Until this happens, unscrupulous companies will employ the desperate to do what we won't, then cast them aside. Support the SOAS cleaners!

The power of blogging?

Is Robert Peston the man who broke banks by blogging discussions about solutions to the banking crisis on his BBC site (he's the BBC Economics Correspondent)? The Daily Mail thinks so, but that's because it a) hates the BBC, b) is the world's worst newspaper and c) has no understanding of economics or the real world. If a single journalist can cause panic in the finance market, then the system is even weaker than we thought…