My mother’s maiden name was Connolly. As a child, she was sent ‘home’ to Ireland, during the Second World War, with her sister (my Auntie Phyllis) to safeguard them from German bombs and to make their Roman Catholic faith bombproof. She didn’t talk about it, certainly not to me, but there were whispers of predatory paedophilic attempts. And as outcast Irish, they were treated like cow shit. My Auntie Phyllis and my mum had a lifelong-bond based on shared hardship. They were Irish immigrants of a different kind, but they faced the same kind of prejudices and poverty.
My dad was born in Northern Ireland. But he came here as a child. His dad was here and his mum died early. He went to Our Holy Redeemer’s School (still going strong) in Whitecrook. He had a Scottish accent. Not Irish, like my Uncle Charlie and my godmother, Auntie Josie. Or like Pat McDaid’s dad, or Sporter Sweeney or Boxer Toi’s dad. We’re second or third generation and experience the cultural fade of fitting in and marrying into the existing population. Most of us remain mad Glasgow Celtic fans.
In the United States, it is evident that there is little or no difference between the second and third generation Irish who voted Republican and for Trump, the moron’s moron. A generation ago, when John Kennedy won by a very slim majority (and a bit of electoral cheating) Catholics were demonised and if it wasn’t for the electoral blocks delivered wholesale by Capos of the Irish-Catholic, Democratic, immigrant machine, he would have lost.
The Ireland my Uncle Charlie and Auntie Josie left a lifetime ago was rural. What little industry there was in the North, in Belfast, weaving and shipbuilding. The population halved after the Irish Famine (there was also a Scottish Famine mostly in the Highland and Islands) but it was in Ireland were subsistence farming meant the humble potato was breakfast, lunch and dinner for millions that famine took around a million lives directly and indirectly.
Ironically, the root cause may have been a cargo of seed potatoes from across the Atlantic in 1845. The population of Ireland had doubled from 4.4million in 1791 to above 8 million in 1841. Almost 90% of the population depended on the potato. The more prosperous tenant farmer who could afford a cow had assets to sell. Most did not. All they could offer was cheap labour.
An estimated 109 000 sailed for North America in 1846, almost double the total of the beginning of the Famine. What we now know as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina were less popular destinations. For those with little or no money, the short hop across the Irish Sea meant that tens of thousands a week ended up in the ports of Liverpool and Glasgow.
In their poverty and need, we were caricatured as sub-human and disease stricken. There was some truth in the latter. Ships bringing export goods from America and the British colonies filled their holds with human ballast, which they could charge a fee, and make the return journeys profitable.
For babies, one-in-seven did not survive the journey. Those packed below deck had a nominal space of 6 feet by 3 feet for married couples. Toilets were rudimentary. Women, in particular, crouched down and shat and urinated wherever they could. Water and food were rationed. Typhoid and dysentery were not. Coffin ships delivered their cargoes to cities that started asking for bonds to offset the cost of treating the ill, but which pushed up prices and more ships towards Canadian ports. But more than 90% made it ashore and became citizens. Women, in particular, became a prized asset.
When my Uncle Charlie left Ireland the population was still haemorrhaging the young and fit, but the destination pre-and-post War—with the Hungry Thirties as an interlude—was to British cities. Cities that were crying out for cheap labour the Irish specialised in. Labour that dug canals with pick and shovels, connected railways across continents, created reservoirs and build road after road and house by house helped make Britain and its former colonies Irish enough to have St Patrick’s Day parades and indulge the bonhomie of a green and pleasant land usurped by British rule. Step forward President Joe Biden, following in the footsteps of JFK, Jimmy Carter, and even Ronnie Reagan whose aspirations were more Protestant blue blood.
Ireland, that Irish tiger that has become a parking space for big corporations—with promises of low taxation—inside the EEC has seen its population double from when my Uncle Charlie left Ireland to around five million. It has more Polish immigrants than Britain. And to my great shame has also played the race card. Demonising immigrants while most of its wealth, like in Britain, goes to the rich and Irish 1%. The most oppressed people ever banner, once worn with pride, is now a rallying cry to deport and demonise those at the bottom. Cultural fade. Not for me. I’m not buying into that propaganda. We’ve a different kind of famine in housing and public services and it’s the rich that we need to pay their way. Not the poor, oppressed masses that America once claimed to represent as a sanctuary and offer a welcome. I’m not ashamed to be part Irish. I’m ashamed of such policies finding fertile soil in whatever side of the Atlantic you happened to be standing on. Sean Connolly offers a comprehensive account of what it means to be Irish, but that doesn’t mean the story is ended. It’s still being written by us now and I don’t like what I’m seeing or hearing.
‘It’s so important people know this. This is history.’
Here is the music test. What do you listen to when driving? I grew up with disco. But I don’t listen to anything. I don’t turn the radio on. I don’t listen to audiobooks. I don’t play CDs. I listen to my thoughts, which make me seem far more interesting than I am. I’m not for or against disco. I just don’t really care.
We’ve had classical music since the world began. Capitol, Mercury, Columbia, Decca and RCA. The 78 revolution per minute (rrm). Jazz. Ronnie Scott and the Ginsberg/Jack Kerouac beatnik poetry culture of first thought-best thought, which was more suited to 33 r.r.m.
Swing and the big bands and crooners like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. Bill Haley & His Comets didn’t Rock My Clock. Looking at them now, they seem middle-aged, middle-class extras that wouldn’t have hung around with the other middle-aged girls like Rozzo in Grease.
P.J.Kavanagh nails it when he talks about the forgotten war in Korea. ‘We went away to Glen Miller and came back to Elvis Pressley.’
We all remember Vietnam, the euphoria of it ending. Just as disco was Stonewalled. Climbing out of the black and gay clubs in New York. From loft apartments and basement bars injected into the mainstream. A generational change that gave us that white jacket John Travolta wore in Saturday Night Fever. I wore a similar white jacket following out of the fire-exit of bus and onto my arse. Perhaps I’m still on that bus somewhere in Ireland. Too drunk to care or wave my hands in the air.
I remember The Budgie Song. I fucking hated the fucking Budgie Song. If Steve Dogs or Steve Dolls, or whatever he was called, got together with Meatloaf at Comiskey Park and arranged to blow up The Budgie Song, I’d be there cheering him on with the other loonies from the Christian White is right party of good ole Ronnie Reagan, the vanguard of the moron’s moron Trump.
Funny that. How you can love and hate records. Cultural changes isn’t just the stuff left to the politicians. Disco allowed the black and brown and gay community to express themselves in ways that were not just acceptable but could be monetised and exploited. The seeds of its own destruction to quote Marx. Or somebody with a similar vibe.
Notes.
Episode 3. Stayin’ Alive 1979.
29 of 43 Grammy Awards went to Disco and Disco songs. We’d created a culture that was unstoppable.
Fashion industry created clothes to match the beat.
National magazines do articles about it.
A lot of people wanted to capitalise on that. It got bloated. It also got rich.
You’d songs that were powerful. Then you’d corny songs that killed the disco vibe.
In every successful thing have the seeds of its own destruction.
Disco started with soul. But totally lost it. This is we want the money. So let’s do this bullshit.
TOTP. Our Number 1 this week is Village People. YMCA.
Nicky Siano: Village People were a studio band. That means they were a group of musicians picked to record a song a producer wanted to make.
John Parikhal: Marketing and Media Strategist: The answer with the record company is if there’s money in it, I’m interested.
Jacques Morali (producer) Village People from France.
Ad: Must dance and have moustache. Greenich Village.
Village People: Village People (album)
2nd album Macho Man.
Village People. In the Navy.
Sharon White, DJ. They were a lot of fun. They brought energy to an audience. {Navy] didn’t realise, the guys behind the scenes couldn’t get into the navy because they were out and openly gay.
Larry could stop a room cold. They’d be chanting…Larry…Larry…Waiting for the next thing he’s going to do.
AnaMatronic, Scissor Sisters: Their songs are very repeatable and singalong. Not a lot of people understood. It was quite a Trojan horse.
Nicky Siano: The US Navy wanted to use In the Navy as a recruitment tool. It just proved to me, the US Navy didn’t get the song/band was filled with gay stereotypes. And it was kinda of an off-colour joke, to a lot of people.
The agreement was they would allow us to use one of their ships to shoot the song. If we allowed them to use it.
2 of their albums Platnium sold a million.
At the end of it they gave us jets that flew over.
Larry would take a ladder out at 2 o’clock in the morning. Get a ladder and clean the mirror ball. Have 2000 people sitting on the floor. Shut the lights Put a record on. The place would go crazy.
Honey DiJon, DJ Producer: That was great for those people in Kansas. But people of colour and gay people weren’t listening to it. Records in Clubs. This was a time when New York was the clubbing capital of the world. Clubs were church.
Studio 52 or Paradise Garage.
Bill Bernstein, Photographer. Paradise Garage was an old garage that was converted to this dance base. That was their life. They would become a persona that made them seem free. There was a smell of poppers in the air. A smell of marijuana. And they said the punch was spiked with acid.
No other club had a DJ like Larry. Who played the music he did. That made the decisions. As much in charge of the night as Larry.
Extremely loud. You could hear the base through the wall. And the quality of the sound was extremely good.
Michelle Saunders, Paradise Clubee. We used to make our own outfits. They had nothing to do with fashion. Gays, Straight. Any colour. It was mostly gay.
Dave Depino, DJ. No clocks. No mirrors. No alcohol. What could they had done to stay awake? Could it have been…drugs?
David Maroles, DJ: Grace Jones, Mick Jagger, Boy George, Michael Jackson, they’d all come and hang out.
Back in the day, the best crowd was the gay crowd. Never any arguments. Never any arguments. Never any drama.
Larry was ahead of his time. The first mixer. The first producer. The first artist.
Nicky Siano: Then I used to hear about Larry LaBelle the DJ, who was always upfront. Grand entrance. I’m here. I’m queer. Get used to it.
One afternoon he said Nicky, would you teach me how to play records? I’d work with him on mixing techniques. How to beat match. How to pick the next record.
He is the template of what a DJ is now. Larry would go into a recording studio. See through all the excess tracks and pull out the gold.
Eg Inner Life Feat, Jocelyn Brown, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough. Mixed by Larry Levan.
It’s what we call a Garage classic.
Mark Riley, Radio Presenter, Music Creator. He was obsessed with the music. He’d be messing with the records as people came into the club. To be sure the sound wrenched your guts out.
Joceyln Brown, Artist. You’d the trend of music you didn’t hear anywhere else. It was incredible. He allowed me to sing it in my way. It might not have been Number 1, but it was Number 1 in a lot of people’s hearts.
Performing this song at the Garage was one of the most major things I’ve ever been involved in my life. Everybody was singing. It was fantastic. I’m trying to stay a good girl inside. The way things were touching on that level. It was more spiritual than anything else. It tore me up.
Frankie Crocker, biggest DJ in New York city would come to the garage and steal things.
Francis Kervorkian, DJ Producer. He’d force Larry to give things to him. And the next day you’d hear on WBLS records that weren’t going to come out for six months. Suddenly, everybody was crying to get a copy of, but couldn’t buy it. Cause it’s not out.
Larry’s fame got the Garage bigger. Then the Garage got bigger and got Larry bigger.
John Parkihal Record companies then were like film companies. The big hits paid for the losers. The more you sold. The more money you made.
I think it was a racial backlash. Because so many of the stars, like Gloria Gaynor or Donna Summer were black. And I don’t think white, rock and roll America was ready for that in the seventies.
Every night, almost, the photographers were there showing people getting turned away from Studio 54. Showing people being turned into losers. Showing people being turned into unworthy. This is a country, only 10 years earlier had gone through a period of massive inclusion where racial walls were tore down. Everyone wanted to love. Kumbuya. Brother and sister and sing in a circle. Then all of a sudden, news cameras all over the country show people being excluded.
Anita Ward; Ring My Bell.
When I was younger. I never thought of having a hit record. That never came to my mind. I graduated from college in 78 with a degree in psychology.
After teaching for around 4 months, Ring My Bell came out. It was a hit. Overnight. Number 1 in 20 countries.
I was called a one-hit wonder. You’re a commodity. That’s what you are.
They weren’t seen as artists. They were seen by the producers as vehicles for their songs.
Nicky Siano: Most of the one-hit wonders were on independent labels. Always looking for the next hit. They weren’t looking to develop artists.
More marketing. Looking for more artists that sounded like that. Eventually, they began to fade.
They’d commercialised it so much, that every record sounded the same. I no longer had any interest in words like ‘Shake your booty.’ Or ‘Get up and disco dance’. I didn’t want to hear about it. this is turning into a shitshow.
Then you had the negative backlash like you sold me a record, with a disco banner that was absolute crap. My girlfriend went out again with those fucking gay guys to go dancing, instead of staying home with me.
Then you had Studio 54 turning around 1000 people away every night.
Vince Aletti, Music Critic. That’s what music labels do. They didn’t understand what was going on half the time. [50 songs in Billboard top 100 disco]. They saturated a market that couldn’t absorb it.
Jamie Principle. Artist/Producer. There were novelty songs.
Eg Ricky Dee and his cast of Idiots. Disco Duck.
Ana Matronic. You had garbage. Cash-grab music. Coming out of garbage. Cash-grab record labels.
Marshall Jefferson, DJ Producer. I really hated it. It was just so corny.
Robert Williams. Founder of the Warehouse. Artists just couldn’t get their music out. You’d put a record out and it was just a regular ballad singer or regular folk singer. You couldn’t get your music out. They were too busy discoing.
Jake Shears, Scissor Sisters. It was too much. People were sick of it. If you were going to oversaturate the culture with a sound to that degree. People are going to turn on it.
By 1979 200 radio stations had switched to all-disco formats.
Bill Bernstein, photographer. The fact that rock and roll was overtaken by disco for a while, for a lot of people had a really negative effect.
People saw disco as a threat to the white hegemony straight people had for a decade and a half.
America saw New York City in particular as this very wild, decadent city. Everybody sleeping with everybody else.
Lee Abarms, Media Consultant. I really wasn’t a fan of disco. I was definitely in the rock category. This Studio 54 image was terrible among rock listeners. Because you couldn’t get in unless you looked the right way or acted the right way. Or just had that look…
Ana Tronic. There was already in America a movement to turning the stations that were disco back to a rock format. You had a lot of stations doing things like disco demolitions.
Nicky Siano: I think it came to a head at Caminsky Park. 12th July 1979. Chicago Whitesocks and Detroit Tigers. Highlight a disco demolition.
Steve Doll. Demolition. Anti disco.
Tickets 99c. So it was packed. People brought their kids. Double header. Best bargain in the world.
Chicago a very segregated city. 90% of blacks prefer the Y-socks. Northside have a lot more white fans.
All these white people coming to a Whitesocks game to blow up disco records.
Steve Dog out in a jeep and wearing full military gear.
It was theatre. And everybody knew that. They knew it wasn’t real. But they wanted to play along. Listeners did.
It was an amazing promotion. Probably one of the best ever. It was kinda like Woodstock. The second game in the double header had to be cancelled.
Everyone was there. Of course they weren’t. But either, the greatest moment in rock and roll. Or evil. Like burning books. But at the time it was kinda the perfect storm.
The Christian Right. The Bible thumpers were trying to press it down. But it was coming up.
Nobody was ringing my bell. I had to go back to teaching.
Candi Staton. Shame on you Steve.
Events at Comiskey Park hastened the commercial demise of disco.
Two years later, change would also come to the dance floor.
1981. AIDS. [at the time referred to as a rare form of cancer]
Talking about this gay cancer and friends of theirs had it.
Nicky Siano: I was scared to death. We didn’t know how it spread. Or if it was going to be fatal to everybody. It was a horrific time. We quickly learned, having a diagnosis of AIDs meant you had 2 years to live.
1-5 chance a victim will die in the first year of illness.
Gays became stigmatised. People that went out to clubs didn’t want to go out to clubs with gays.
Allen Roskoff. Gay Rights Activist. It was scary shit. Because people you had know for decades were suddenly gone. I lost 2 partners from AIDs. So…many people disappeared. It’s like coming back from a war. Seeing people like, oh, you made it out. I’m serious. You made it out of a war.
Ostracism. Incomprehension. Total lack of sympathy from the public, whatsoever. You’re gay. You deserve it. Good riddance. It was just bad in every way.
There was never a time when the Garage looked emptier. But you’d look in a group and say, ‘where is he’? and you knew.
Nicky Siano: Most of my friends died of AIDs. Eg David Rodriguez (DJ) was the first person, close to me, that died of AIDS.
Huge backlash. That’s when Ronald Reagan came into power.
One of the worst days of my life was watching RR get elected. I knew how bad it would be.
Ronald Reagan wouldn’t close the blood banks. Blood was getting transfused. Straights were getting AIDS.
4 years after AIDs emerged. RR publicly acknowledged the epidemic for the first time.
RR: We will not rest. We will not stop. Until we’ve sent AIDs the way of smallpox and polio.
Alex Roscoff: I’m not sure how much disco came back after the AIDs crisis. I don’t think it did.
By the 1980s, some of disco’s pioneers had moved to Chicago (from NY). Sounds of a new underground movement (Candy Staton: You can’t stop creativity).
Marshall Jefferson. DJ/Producer; you got rid of the disco. Wait and see what you got next.
Ron Trent, DJ/ Producer: Chicago is an interesting place because you’d people coming from the South, eg Mississippi. That kinda thing. West Kansas. My folks were from Kansas. City more industralised. More opportunities. Factory work. Bar tending. Let’s be clear, big budding scene. Outside the factory, you could be a musician. That’s what we Afro-Americans do. We take the scraps off the table (gig economy) and turn them into high cuisine. And that’s exactly what house music is. Then later it became associate with a style and genre that came out of Chicago.
A formula lots of people don’t understand. Very simple. But very powerful.
Frankie Knuckles is considered the godfather of House.
Our version of going viral. Frankie would take one tape and give it away. Exponential growth. Giving the music to the people. That’s how a lot of records got introduced to the public.
Basically, disco breaks in R&B songs. And Frankie used to play a lot of things reel-to-reel and he’d drum machines. So he was using those drum machines and disco loops and he was creating this new genre of music without anyone really knowing it.
Frankie worked at the Warehouse. And the term House music came from the Warehouse.
Prof Francesca T Royster, Writer/Academic. House music was disco’s revenge. The very parts of disco that were lost. Black and brown creativity. Queerness. The way that disco was part of a soundtrack of exploration before its whitewashing. House music picked that up and ran off with it.
Jake Shears, Scissor Sisters. When the disco suck’s movement came, all the budgets got cut. Suddenly there was no money for them anymore. I think those cut budgets made people more innovative with the sound.
It was unique. It was different. It was fresh off the block.
Prof Francesca T Royster, Writer/Academic. In the way hiphop grew out of the physical disinvestment in the black and brown community’s of NY, house music out of these neglected spaces became communities of creativity. And entrepreneurship.
Robert Williams. Founder of the Warehouse, Chicago, Illinois. I didn’t go to Chicago to open a club, but I saw this little …building. Which was on Jefferson.
That was Frankie’s entre to Chicago, when Larry (The Garage) said no.
Prof Francesca T Royster, Writer/Academic. Primarily a gay club with African American members. Though other folks came as well. And it was a place where you could go and dance and feel safe.
Frankie Knuckles became the most powerful DJ in Chicago.
In 1986 he mixed one of the most influential house tracks.
Jamie Principle, DJ/Producer. I didn’t get into the whole culture until I met Frankie. I wanted to do something a little different. I didn’t want to be like the norm.
Jamie Principle & Frankie Knuckles: Your Love. (b.w. Baby Wants to Ride) First house vocalist. I didn’t know I was going to be a figurehead. I look at other singers and they do great. Maybe I was the first person they gravitate towards because they could actually see. And feel connected with.
Jamie Principle DJ/Producer I didn’t know how popular the song was. Traffic jam on a Sunday. Me and my boy were in a car. And I said ‘that’s my song playing. And it was jumping from one car to another car. And we were like…stuck in traffic. He was saying, you should tell them that’s your song. And I said ‘Really?’ They don’t believe that was me. But they were hearing your love.
By the mid-80s, piano had become the dominant sound in house music. Inspiration came from an unlikely source. Elton John.
At that time there was nothing remotely resembling piano on house music. I was doing the graveyard shift on letter sorting. It was as boring as it sound. The trick was to make music in your head. I had to get home before I forgot it.
Yamaha 2×1.
Entire session. 2 hours. I’m going to give it to Ron Hardy at the music box. Plays it six times in a row.
Marshall Jefferson: Move Your Body.
April May 1986. That’s when it started leaving Chicago. That’s because all these journalists flew to Chicago and started interviewing me.
Started interviewing everybody else. All of us got record deals. With major labels.
Ron Trent, DJ/ Producer: Marshall is a smart man. He came up with something that changed the pulse.
It was different. There was nothing like it.
Vinyl Mania Records.
Then suddenly all music, tech, afro, latin, soul, disco. > all under the genre> house. [Simplification]
Ani Tronics. Marrying punk and disco> Blondie, Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime. New wave. New Order, Blue Moon. It was just a wildly creative time.
Disco didn’t go away. The name just went away. The rhythm, the beat, the sound carried on.
Grandfather Flash & The Furious Five: The Message.
Ron Trent, DJ/ Producer: Everybody stands on somebody’s shoulders. Let’s be clear.
I used to be into hip-hop. That’s how I got started. Later 80s. Moby: Go.
Early 90s? here comes Rave. Prodigy: No Good (Start the Dance).
New group of people. The story being re-written.
If you take all the electronic music today, it owes everything to disco.
MNEK Artist Producer: We’re all dancing to a variation of what disco was.
Jesse Ware, artist: Disco’s legacy to teach, inspire, elevate. Safe space. Fun space. Liberating space.
The future of disco, is more disco. I’m very grateful for the forefathers.
It’s so important people know this. This is history.
I wasn’t sure how to structure this. I’d a vague idea about explaining the significance of the tax-credit U-turn by George Osborne and the jibes about Mao’s Little Red Book, a joke that backfired and made the Shadow Chancellor seem the more foolish. I also thought about telling you about my visit to the dentist. We are an ageing nation of shrinking gums. So I guess I’ll start there.
I’m good on nostalgia. The dentist I go to is the same dentist I went to forty odd years ago. We used to scale the wall in the same way we got our teeth scaled and steal the needles from the dustbin. They smelled of different planets and we’d lunge at each other, wild with excitement. Boredom set in quicker than rain. We’d fling them away. Back then the dentist prodded and poked at your teeth with a hooked pick until he found a hole to fill, a tooth to take out, usually, both. It’s the same rooms, upstairs or along the extended hall, with faded white paint, but it’s a practice now, a business, the hook comes out before you’re allowed to see the leading practitioner, or business man, or woman. Receptionists want to know who is going to pay for treatment. There’s different kinds of forms for different kinds of patients. You can get your teeth whitened for £250. An older woman, a pensioner, was told she had the wrong kind of mouth for a plate, and the practice couldn’t be expected to carry the cost.
As surely as my tongue runs over a newly-fitted filing this is the future of the NHS. People will be turning up with the wrong kind of body. An estimated £20 billion is needed to keep our NHS treating patients until 2020. Osborne has fronted some of the money, which is a politically astute move, as it stops some NHS trusts threatening to shut at Christmas. Bah Humbug! But it’s never enough, because too many old people are living to long. Let’s call them bed blockers.
Where do all these bed blockers go when they come out of hospital? Most bed blockers become the responsibility of local authorities. Local authorities have had between fifty and seventy five percent of their budgets cut over the last five years. The Monty Pythonesque leaked letter exchange between out glorious leader David Cameron (with less that twenty-five percent of the electorate voting for him, the ‘great ignored’ as Cameron termed them before the 2010 election, leaves me thinking what we’d call the other 75%) and The Conservative Prime Minister writes to a Conservative council leader Ian Huspeth in Oxford and asks him why he’d made such dreadful cuts to ‘front-line services’ such as care of the elderly. Couldn’t the councillor made savings by sacking people that weren’t needed and not hired people that were needed, and sold off some surplus land or council properties. But says Councillor Huspeth I’ve already cut off our arms and legs, fell on my sword, sacked 2 800 staff, sold off all our ‘surplus property’ to try and make up our £72 million deficit because we get 37% less from central government than we got last year. And this is one of the more affluent front-line areas.
Service cuts are uneven. Even the Conservative-controlled Local Government Association talks of a postcode lottery. Councils in poorer areas can no longer afford home care service for the elderly. Social care is in an inverse relationship to health care.
The Office for Budget Responsibility suggests that the Osborne has to find £22 billion of cuts from 15 departments with a total budget of £77 billion. Here’s the rub. Their budgets have already been cumulatively cut by 30% since 2010, spread unevenly with local authorities’ grants in particular hardest hit and with backtracking on tax credits and policing all signs point towards being cut even more.
This is politics at its basest level. It’s personal and it’s ideological. Beveridge described the five giants on the road to reconstruction. They were poverty, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. All are related and feed into the roots system of the other. Whatever way you measure them they are all on the increase. The idea of welfare has been a stick used to beat us.
I’m with William Keegan on this one: ‘Personally, I always preferred the older term ‘social security,’ which gives a better indication of what the social settlement during those early post-war years of austerity was all about.’
The terrorist attack in Paris dominates the headlines, as it should, when we really are all in it together. Kenan Malik idea of social and political hegemonic influence gets it about right: ‘Evil…is not simply about defining an act of being particularly wicked, it also about defining the space within which we can have a meaningful debate about good and bad, virtue and wickedness’.
France spends around 54% of its GDP on public services. The United Kingdom currently around 38%, spends less that all other G7 countries with the exception of the United States. Trying to balance the books is a good story and achieve a surplus like China is an even better story. It fits in with the Dickensian notion expounded by Mr Micawber’s famous, and oft-quoted, recipe for happiness:
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
There is an element of truth in this, but only if Mr Micawber didn’t have his own printing press in his basement and wasn’t allowed to print money quicker than the Japanese. Added kudos, if like the most successful company in the world in terms of share value, Apple, they could choose to fund their growth by borrowing at in interest rate of almost 0%. Indeed buying and selling money is what the United Kingdom does best. Before the Crash of 2008 it accounted for almost a quarter of all UK tax receipts. It allowed Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, to build hospital and schools and invest in the infrastructure of the country, which was seen as the common good. This has been turned on its head.
We are not fighting a war against Isis, not yet anyway. Government debt has rarely been lower over the last 300 years, but with every bomb we drop over Syria (if or indeed when Cameron is given his mandate) can we expect to think there goes another public library in Islington. There goes a Sure start Programme in Drumchapel. There goes another mental health unit in Belfast. There goes free school meals. Some wars are more pointless than others. We have been lied to for too long. Shakespeare gets it about right with Shylock’s promise that he will outdo the evil that was done to him.
The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.
William Keegan suggests in the aftermath of financial crisis and fiscal policies pursued since the summer of 2010. ‘If the historical pattern of growth had been allowed to continue, output in the UK would have been up to 20 per cent higher in 2013-14 than proved to be the case.
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times in the 2013 Wincott Lecture: Monetary Policy clearly and decisively failed to promote recovery. Animal spirits were completely destroyed. Demand fell. It was a machine designed to fail.’
Joe Stiglitz notes the same pattern over the other side of the Atlantic. Subsidies for the rich, mass poverty for the poor. A race to the bottom. The Big Mac Index, for example, is an economists attempt to measure the relative expenses of living in different countries. Stiglitz describes working for McDonalds as the income of last resort, with more than a thousand applicants for every job. Martin Ford describes how a worker for McDonalds in October 2013 called his employer’s financial-help hotline, asking for help, and was advised to apply for Food Stamps and Medicaid. Yet, the fast food industry continues to grow, at around £6.9 billion in the UK in 2012.
We don’t –as yet- pay directly for our healthcare. But Nicholas Timmins, The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State, noted the paradox of we used to send experts to the United States to advise them how to run health care, but now that has been reversed. Advisers come from the States, with the most profligate health service in the world (see Pickwick) and advise us. It’s no great surprise that Jeremy Hunt, our Health Secretary, doesn’t believe in the NHS. He’s rich and will never need it. Neither will any of his colleagues or friends. Only poor people will (short-hand for scroungers).
A programme was recently shown on BBC 2. Unlike those Jeremy Kyle-type programmes on Channels 4 and 5, and the Hollywood movie Friends With Benefits, it was meant to show the diversity of Scotland and it’s working population. For example, bespoke food from land and sea for the tables of the rich in London. Compare this with the idea of bespoke care for the poor. The elderly poor. It would cost too much. The idea is ridiculous. The difference between a fish farm and a granny farm is one of them is under water. Southern Cross and other ‘caring’ companies threaten bankruptcy unless local authorities give them more money.
Assets such as the buildings in which old folk have been corralled have been separated on the balance sheet from the cost of caring (price) of caring for residents. The problem of liquidity fits into a larger narrative of Freidrich Hayek, the title whose book The Road to Serfdom could be rewritten and neatly quipped as the slippery slope towards totalitarianism any government intervention entails. Milton Friedman and the problem of demand is one of supply. If money is cheap enough demand for it will grow and problems such as unemployment will disappear, but only if the government doesn’t interfere. Chile’s Pinochet was an admirer. After the fall of the Berlin Wall advisers from the Chicago School helped to create a new Russia from the old Soviet Union modelled on Friedman’s principles.
The new kids of the block of the early eighties Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had won the Cold War and already set out their stall to roll back the state. Simple equation government = bad (totalitarianism). Free market = good (liberalism). The hidden hand, I want for Christmas, had never had it so good.
Why fling good money after bad on a defective product?
But it doesn’t begin and end there. We’re all familiar with the idea of bureaucracy = power. And bureaucracies become bloated and create their own reason for being. Think local government. Think any government. Companies listed on the stock exchange. They are not off the raider. They too are bureaucracies
Predatory lending. Is there any other kind? What does non-predatory lending look like? It looks like James Stewart, a man you could trust. You may remember James Stewart playing someone that was not James Stewart, George Bailey, who looked confusingly, for us old timers, very much like a young Henry Fonda, in a feel-good film, shown every Christmas about the value of non-predatory lending. It wasn’t called The Value of Non-Predatory Lending, but the more striking It’s A Wonderful Life.
It’s a simple equation: Non-predatory lending = It’s A Wonderful Life. ‘Every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings’. Clarence Oddbody, that’s a good name for an angel. The run on Bailey Building and Loan would be something familiar to those over thirty watching this film on telly every Christmas, those living in small-town America of the hungry thirties, or the citizens of modern-day Greece. ‘I’ll stroll, you fly,’ was George’s advice to Clarence, but Oddbody’s however quick he or they travel can’t save Bedford Falls. George appeals to reason, those paying in and having a stake in the Building and Loan were bankrupting themselves. They weren’t just borrowers but lenders. That Tom’s money was tied up in Ed’s house and Ed’s money tied up in Mrs Davis house and when they hadn’t worked for a while George didn’t chase them for repayment. He knew they’d come good. George was just asking for the same consideration for the Building and Loan. He wasn’t asking how much they wanted, but how much they needed to get by. They were shaking the same tree.
George, of course, has hard cash to back up his rhetoric, a thousand dollar bills set aside. He runs a thrift and he’s thrifty. ‘How much do you need Tom?’ George asks the first customer, pushing to the front of the line. ‘$242,’ Tom demands, ‘and that’ll close my account’.
‘Have you no romance in you?’ asks George. The thousand dollars is, of course, money he’s set aside to travel with and for his honeymoon.
‘Yes, I had some, but I soon got rid of it,’ answer Tom.
Tom has made a rational choice and not a romantic choice. Ed, next in line asks for $20. Mrs Davis asks if it’s ok if she gets $17.50. George kisses her on the cheek. State regulations means that the doors of the Building and Loan need to stay open until 6pm. George and Uncle Billy kick out and have a party as they carry two crumpled dollar bills and deposit them in the vault. They have made it through the day without Old Man Potter closing them down.
Henry F Potter is a twisted crocodile. In the opening scenes he rides in a carriage and one kid asks another ‘who’s that? Is he a king?’ He is of course. But a king without subjects. Peter Bailey (senior), at the dinner table, explains to his son George why they should feel sorry for Old Man Potter. Henry F Potter has no future. He is unmarried. No children. ‘What’s he going to do with all that money?’ The message is he’ll get his comeuppance. Later in the film, when Clarence grants George’s wish not to be born Bedford Falls becomes Pottersville. There’s bars on every corner, where people go to get seriously drunk and half-dressed girls spilling out of every club. Full employment and housing to rent. Pottersville sounds like my kind of town.
Old Man Potter is sick and he wants to infect George and the town with his values. He’s tried everything and now he tries buying George. He offers him a salary of $20 000 a year to manage his affairs. George admits the offer is tempting. Cost-benefit analysis. Money’s tight. He’s got four kids now. Around $40 a month. An old barn of a house. Old Man Potter offers George a thick Cuban cigar, time to think about it, reminds him that’s starting salary and if he plays along he could make more. The answers, ‘No’. The answers always no. ‘You spin your little webs,’ George tells Potter.
The problem that Bailey Building and Loan faced was they had the wrong kind of money tied up in buildings and loans. Think of poor Southern Cross and other care companies with properties full of poor people, which they could monetise and sell separately from their services. They had no way of knowing who was going to pay, when they were going to pay and if the Bailey Building and Loan would be there for them to pay into. Modern economists make short shrift of that thrift. Thrift is shorthand for the thousands of Savings and Loan companies spread out throughout the United States and loosely bound by US government support for home ownership, the biggest franchises being Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae) owned and run by the US government; the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), around 1 in 10 US mortgages at a very conservative estimate of $100 million mortgages on its books and is backed by the US government; Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporations (Freddie Mac) was a corporation created by Savings and Loan companies were backed indirectly by the US government. These organisation had like the Bailey Building and Loan, which George bailed out with a handy $1000, a problem of liquidity.
Everything is a problem of liquidity if you look at it properly. Let’s get back to George Osborne’s speech to the Conservative Party conference, October 2013, and his claim to have a seven-year plan to achieve an absolute budget surplus before 2020.
How to define it as a problem of ‘idleness’.
Here it is wrapped in the Stars and Stripes with mum’s apple pie: ‘We had the oldest secret in the world, “hard work”’. This from a man endorsed by fellow Texans George W Bush, his father George H W Bush and further afield Bill Clinton. These Presidents of the United States whom Lance Armstrong on speed-dial helped quash an FBI investigation into the activities of the seven times Tour de France winner. Let’s put a figure on Lance Armstrong, career earnings of somewhere between $70 and $100 million. That sounds a lot to me and you (who can forget Margaret Thatcher going to the European Union and crowing that she’d saved Britain a million pounds a year) but Armstrong’s career earnings were the kind of loose change ‘geek’ bond traders such as Michael Lewis of Salomon Brothers could lose without burning anybody important. Perhaps I should put in here that David Cameron was a stockbroker as was his father before him… Lewis tells us that Salomon Brothers the directors boasted that they had the equivalent of $80 billion worth of securities in portfolios every night. Multiply that by 365 and you’ll get an estimate of their annual income. Bigger than the combined profits of all other Wall Street operations. Bigger than the Netherlands GDP. Salomon Brothers, of course, later went to the wall. Financial institutions are the auteurs rewriting the economic script of what is meant be profit and loss, success and failure as they went along. In the years 1977-1986 when Salomon Brothers had almost a monopoly on new bonds they had helped create in regard to housing the trading floor jumped from millions to billions to $2.7 trillion, with ‘mortgages so cheap your teeth hurt’. That was the ‘gospel’ of the rich. What Lance Armstrong was selling was a message rich people wanted others to hear. Compare Armstrong’s message with, for example, the message Aaron Schwartz was selling, and the outcome of the subsequent FBI Investigation into Schwartz’s activities.
Mao’s Little Red Book? Simple. A problem of liquidity. We’ve been giving rich folk billions of pounds every day to help poor folk. We can’t keep doing that (see Pickwick). We’ve being building nuclear reactors since the end of the 1950s, but we’ve asked the Chinese Government to send experts to build one at Hinkley Point. This creates in the region of 25 000 jobs. With or without the Chinese, or any other nationality this creates around the same number of jobs. Crucially, though, the Chinese have agreed to finance it. In the short-term they transfer a few digits from their machine’s finance model, we add it to ours. We agree to the costs of any mishaps and the hundreds of thousands of years it takes to get rid of spent fuel rods. We subsidise the Chinese economy by moving money from the poor in this country to the rich in the Chinese economy. I suppose it makes a little change from subsidising the rich in this country. Win-win. Apart from the far more worrying Balance of Trade deficit. But that’s another story. I’m sure when that nice Mr Osborne will deal with it when he’s Prime Minster in five years’ time. Merry Christmas, Boris Johnson. Now there’s an angel for you. He doesn’t look like Clarence Oddbody for nothing. He winging it for now, but we’ll see how he turns out.
odonnellgrunting 