My MP is Mr Paul Uppal. He is a multimillionaire property developer with a fairly distant relationship with Truth and Honesty, as I've chronicled over the three years since his marginal election.
One of Paul's proudest boasts is that he has never ever voted against a single Government measure, despite supposedly representing one of the poorest, hardest-hit areas in the country. Disabled children's support? He voted to cut it. £9000 tuition fees? Yes please. The bedroom tax? Get those shirkers! NHS privatisation? It couldn't come fast enough for him. Education Maintenance Allowance? A disgusting subsidy. Sweep it away!
And yet, what's this? Paul and I have both signed a petition opposing the closure or sale of the local municipal swimming baths! He objects to any 'front-line' service cuts'. What can possibly be going on? I know why I oppose closure: I use the pool a couple of times a week and know how good it is not just for individuals but for public health. The fitter people are, the less likely they are to need NHS support for obesity and other ailments.
But why is Lazy Paul suddenly discovering the joys of grass-roots democracy? Surely it isn't because he believes in public provision of services for the common good, with his track record? Don't be silly: it's because he's a cynical hypocrite. He'll sign anything that gets him in the local paper or on the radio, anything that gets him a few votes. Does he care about the Central Baths? Not a bit. If anything, I suspect he'd privatise it tomorrow without a care in the world.
I'll say this for the Conservative Party: they've played a blinder with the massive public sector cuts. The true genius was to load the biggest cuts on to local council budgets, and in particular on to northern, poor and mostly Labour councils. Stricken Stoke, for instance, lost £200m over the past couple of years, well over 10%: plenty of rich Southern areas saw reduction in the 1% range. The political genius was to funnel the cuts through councils which are largely not Conservative. People will blame the immediate axe-wielders – in Wolverhampton's case, Labour – and (the Tories hope) vote in the opposition in the next local elections. If that's not breathtakingly cynical, I don't know what is.
The immediate effect is that you get millionaire Conservatives signing petitions and on the streets crying crocodile tears while solemnly voting in Parliament for massive cuts that they'll then oppose locally. We've seen it before with Cabinet Ministers such as William Hague campaigning against local hospital closures that they've supported in principle and in practice at the higher levels, while claiming to be entirely innocent.
I'd like to hear more from Paul Uppal. He voted through massive cuts for public authorities to pay for the banks to be bailed out. If 'front line' services are to be protected, where should the cuts go? This council has been cut to the bone and beyond in recent years, thanks to him and his friends, yet they have absolutely nothing to say when challenged about this. Rather than take a principled line for or against these attacks on the public realm, they have their cake and eat it: vote through disgusting cuts then campaign against them when there's a photographer around.
Will he change his behaviour in Parliament? Of course not: he's going to go round attacking the council for doing what his party has made it do. Thanks to the lack of any serious media scrutiny, people like him will be able to play it both ways: vote for cuts and attack cuts simultaneously. He's probably writing a speech about 'local government waste and inefficiency' right now.
Uppal's is one signature this petition can do without.
Showing posts with label hypocrisy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hypocrisy. Show all posts
Monday, 11 November 2013
Friday, 25 May 2012
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.
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.
TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading.
Our mission: Spreading ideas.Usually.
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.
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.
Tuesday, 28 June 2011
More Tory hypocrisy - and close to home
Another fine moment for Paul Uppal MP.
He voted for a motion to ban strikes in the emergency and transport sectors unless a majority of those eligible to vote cast a ballot in favour (i.e. 50%+1). Now I could go on about the massive weight of biased Tory-inspired laws (retained by Tony Blair because he's a Tory wanker) which work to prevent this happening, but instead I'll remind you of Paul Uppal's electoral record and position on AV, the electoral system which proposed that MPs have to get 50%+1 just of those who bother voting, to be elected.
Did Paul support a system which would have required him to persuade 50% of those voting (not the electorate, unlike the law he tried to apply to strikes)? He did not.
Did he get voted in by 50%+1 of the electorate?
He did not.
Conservative majority: 691.
Turnout: 67.9%.
So Uppal is MP thanks to 40.7% of the 67.9% who bothered voting.
So of the 60,000 or so eligible voters (and don't forget that Uppal counted non-voting trades union members in his spiteful little motion), he was 'elected' by 16,344 of them: that looks like 27% to me.
So by his own logic, he's illegitimate. Time to resign on principle.
He voted for a motion to ban strikes in the emergency and transport sectors unless a majority of those eligible to vote cast a ballot in favour (i.e. 50%+1). Now I could go on about the massive weight of biased Tory-inspired laws (retained by Tony Blair because he's a Tory wanker) which work to prevent this happening, but instead I'll remind you of Paul Uppal's electoral record and position on AV, the electoral system which proposed that MPs have to get 50%+1 just of those who bother voting, to be elected.
Did Paul support a system which would have required him to persuade 50% of those voting (not the electorate, unlike the law he tried to apply to strikes)? He did not.
Did he get voted in by 50%+1 of the electorate?
He did not.
| Paul Uppal, Conservative | 16,344 | 40.7% |
| Rob Marris, Labour | 15,653 | 39.0% |
| Robin Lawrence, Liberal Democrat | 6,430 | 16.0% |
| Amanda Mobberley, UK Independence Party | 1,487 | 3.7% |
| Raymond Barry, Equal Parenting Alliance | 246 | 0.6% |
| Candidate | Votes | Share %Conservative majority: |
|---|
Conservative majority: 691.
Turnout: 67.9%.
So Uppal is MP thanks to 40.7% of the 67.9% who bothered voting.
So of the 60,000 or so eligible voters (and don't forget that Uppal counted non-voting trades union members in his spiteful little motion), he was 'elected' by 16,344 of them: that looks like 27% to me.
So by his own logic, he's illegitimate. Time to resign on principle.
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