A view from the right… sort of. January 19, 2010
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Irish Politics, The Left.24 comments
Tony Allwright is back in the Irish Times. The last sighting was in November. Then there were missives in rapid succession in July, August, September and October. Then a hiatus in April, May and June prior to which there were twice monthly articles. Allwright would cleave to a… well… conservative view of the world.
For him the great concerns of the day are, to pick a selection from his writings in order to give a flavour, Zimbabwe (intervene), Corporate Homicide (Don’t do it! Don’t introduce it as a crime), Climate Change (scam – well, look below), Obama (shallow), Rugby… (I have nothing to say). And why not? As I’m always saying, let a thousand flowers bloom… But what is interesting is that he’s never shy to opine on the territory beyond that country of the mind. What we call the left. And so Allwright is convinced that, as he put it in 2008…
Left-wingers, or socialists, favour state intervention, with its inevitable inefficiency, plus the crushing of personal liberties. This has proven to be a truly wicked philosophy, which found its true soul in the murderous regimes of Stalin’s Soviet Union and in Mao’s China.
Hmmm… seems to me that there’s, what’s the word again, a ‘spectrum’ between these different and distinct poles. Is Scandinavian, or European social democracy (original form) ‘a truly wicked philosophy’? British labourism? Are the gulags its ‘true soul’. Do we wish to crush personal liberty? Are we besotted with but a single model of socialism and eager to introduce inefficiency? News to me.
Right-wingers, or capitalists, simply favour freedom for all to act, coupled with free markets, with minimal state interference in people’s pursuit of wealth and contentment.
That’s why it’s wrong to be Left and right to be Right. And why it’s an honour, not an insult, to be labelled right-wing.
An interesting thesis, which also posited that:
Socialism, on the other hand, is predicated on the decisions of central planners, who decide how industry, employment and wealth are to be distributed. They are few in number compared to the population, and are necessarily the authority in the land, as otherwise their decisions cannot be enforced.
The populace on whom these decisions are imposed have little freedom to make choices. And since the central planners do not themselves usually suffer directly the effects of poor decisions (as the hoi polloi do), there is little incentive to improve on them. So you have a climate in which the choices are few, and made by only a handful of brains – rather than by the millions in the population – while on the other hand the absence of disciplinary feedback ensures a steady deterioration in the quality of those choices.
Now you might think that that was a near parodic view of socialism. And you would be right.
And he does himself no favours with the unfortunate example used, that of China, which he has decided is:
Remarkable for the effect of the transition from socialism to capitalism… where an explosion of new-found wealth (250 per cent in a decade) is occurring due to the introduction of a limited amount of capitalism.
Yes, but no limited amount of centralised state political power, or as PJ O’Rourke once put it – and I paraphrase, he always got nervous when he saw strong parties and business elites combining. Which, when you think of if does O’Rourke no discredit at all, and hardly surprising given that he is a libertarian (US) Republican.
Which perhaps is why in his latest piece he’s decided that…
Left-wing politics has the monopoly on shouty protests because of a lack of intellectual rigour
SOME TIME ago I wrote something supportive of Israel and critical about the behaviour of Arabs towards Palestinians. This elicited some threatening if anonymous responses from people who were clearly left-leaning. This has me thinking.
What is the common thread when you see, in the West, demonstrations, marches, violence, threats concerning this or that? With the exception of football hooligans and a few neo-Nazi groups, they always seem to come from the left.
You know, there’s no small element of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s fear of the mob here, I’d have thought… but continue…
Those “Not in Our Name” thousands who demonstrated against the Iraq war formed the centrepoint of the left’s campaign. Yet was it not odd that right-leaning supporters of the war did not also stage demonstrations under banners such as “Free the Iraqi People”?
Actually some did. But what ‘violence’ was associated with those Not in Our Name marches?
The demonstrations during the UN climate conference were all in favour of anti-global-warming action. Yet where were the counter-protests to “Stop wasting taxpayers’ money on a scam”?
Well, putting the now – for the Irish Times – modish anti-climate change jibe aside, has he actually looked closely at the demonstrations? I seem to recall that there were small counter-protests. But, I guess that noting that would be to undermine his argument (and on a related matter, I’m always perplexed by the idea that improving efficiencies and moving towards sustainable use of resources is somehow a bad thing, whether climate change pans out the way I suspect it will – badly – or not. I mean isn’t one of the great cries of the right about efficiency, about using what we have in a better way? And yet on climate change it’s as if they undergo a collective nervous breakdown and can’t see that this is an opportunity for commerce… very odd).
People who object to multinationals such as McDonald’s or Shell under the rubric of anti-capitalism are the ones who see fit to smash up their premises or physically obstruct their projects. Why don’t rightists smash up icons of leftism such as trade union offices?
Firstly let’s note that violence against multinational outlets is conducted by a tiny minority of those who march or are active. And these attacks are more notable by their exceptional nature, particularly in this state, than their frequency. In other states with different traditions of political activity they may be more or less frequent.
Secondly all depends on context and societal strength. In a society where the centre right has unassailable power, as in this one, such actions are rare (and his thoughts would raise a wry smile amongst many on the left in countries across Europe where political violence initiated by the right is far from unknown and where it’s not just a ‘few neo-nazi’s’ but large embedded formations who in some instances have shared state power). But not entirely so. In this state during the 1920s onwards and into living memory attacks on left-wing political party premises were far from unknown and most memorably in the case during the attacks on the CPI offices where said offices had to be protected ineffectively by the Gardai. And what of the infamous, and Allwright will like this as a rugby fan, 1970 Springboks Tour – as noted by Brian Hanley here – in the wake of which, or rather protests against the Tour, there were attacks, including arson and gunshots, directed against a small Maoist bookshop in Limerick. I’m sure that many of us can give examples of smaller, but for those involved hardly less serious, incidents over the years until recently.
Individual threats of physical harm are invariably directed against right-leaning individuals. Think, for example, of the movie or video game depicting the assassination of George Bush. By contrast, rarely do you hear that, for example, raging lefties like George Galloway need bodyguards, except for perhaps intrusion by the press. Left-wingers know they can express their views without fear of intimidation from their opponents, which cannot be said for the pro-capitalism camp.
Hmmmm. Let’s consider that a casual perusal of right wing websites will demonstrate that hostility towards the current incumbent of the US Presidency, often in the most pointed (and racist) terms is far from unusual. One can see reflections of this on some major media outlets in the United States.
The fascistic dictators Franco, Mussolini and Hitler were responsible for perhaps 10 million non-combat deaths. Yet they are vilified far more than the Soviet communist despots whose tally was around 36 million, or Mao Tse Tung, responsible for a further 50-70 million.
Hmmm… isn’t it time we had a version of Godwin’s law introduced that covered Stalin and Mao, because from this rhetorical intervention he suddenly resiles… damage done, linkage created… with the rather mealy mouthed…
It is utterly wrong to suggest that modern righties or lefties should be compared with those evil, blood-drenched tyrants, other than in aspects of ideology. But on a street level, the left does seem more inclined to direct action than the right.
The problem is that this is such a narrow, parochial view, that it – of necessity – must ignore other contexts. Firstly he elides events that more commonly happen elsewhere with Ireland. Off the top of my head I can’t recall when a McDonald’s was smashed in in Dublin. Or a Starbucks. And I’ve been more likely to be found in the latter than protesting outside it. It’s a hot chocolate thing.
Then he must of necessity, for it would seriously dent his argument, avert his eyes from the US, and at a hugely motivated right there with significant tranches entirely happy to provide numerous examples of violence, threats and marches. He should perhaps consider the Tea Party protests last year against taxation. No end of vitriol expressed against the Obama administration.
What about the Town Hall protests that characterised one element (small, but publicity attracting) of the right-wing discourse on the health debate.
Then we can survey the grim history of anti-abortion activism, which whatever ones views on the issue of abortion surely go no small way to undermining genuine ‘pro-life’ approaches. Murders of doctors and other health staff not enough? Let’s move on to the more egregious examples of militarised right wing factions in the US in the form of various militias, most of whom it must be admitted are entirely law-abiding citizens exercising their Constitutional rights, but a small rump of which shade into very disturbing philosophies. And then beyond all that are the actual neo-Nazis, the racial supermacists in all their forms and so on…
Is it just that lefties are more sure of themselves, more courageous, more outspoken, more correct, and thus prepared to be more physically assertive? While righties can do no more than cower in the corner, in a fog of shame? Or is there something deeper at work? Some would maintain that the atheistic left lacks the constraints of a more Christian right. But I believe there is a more prosaic explanation. Logic is overwhelmingly on the side of the right, or as Margaret Thatcher once pithily observed, “the facts of life are conservative”.
Hmmmm… redux. As a leftwinger I’ve got to be honest. I doubt they’re either… opportunity and effort will wrest outcomes one way or another. But to think that a single statement is sufficient to justify that… well… go on…
For example, it is logical that if you give people the freedom to improve themselves, that is what they will generally do. With freedom to chose their own leaders, it’s logical that they’ll try to select ones who have their constituents’ best interests in mind. If everyone has such freedoms, then society as a whole will improve.
That’s one big ‘if’. In human history the present period in some countries is but a moment. And a far from perfect one too. So when did this ‘virtuous cycle’ first manifest itself? But the thesis ignores the reality that societies aren’t just about ‘improving oneself’, that other forces and dynamics come into play. Let’s take a small example. Having worked for multi-nationals I’m not particularly paranoid about them, but I am aware of their distorting effect, and that of business, upon public discourse, upon polities and so forth. Which makes the following seem so sanguine as to be almost utterly complacent…
If you enforce people’s property rights and contracts, and protect them from crime, they will be even better able to improve themselves. If you provide rewards for particular behaviour, you will get more of it, whether it is benign (think of hard work fostered by low taxes), or less desirable (such as long-term unemployment encouraged by generous welfare). If you provide services or benefits completely free of charge and without regard to their costs (eg medical, schooling, subsidies) we have seen how you get unlimited demand and unlimited complaint.
Note that everything, everything, is couched in a political approach. There’s no effort made to reach for a broader political, social or economic framework within which left and right can be placed, or even to localise the analysis. We are, as it were forced to live under the shadow of the gulag even if we find the gulag indefensible and even if we’re only talking about the most reasonable of social reforms. As pointless and deceitful an exercise as my arguing that European Christian Democracy can only be understood through the prism of Treblinka.
What about the European broadly traditional social/christian democratic model which underpinned through higher taxation and… yes… generous welfare provision… and even health and school care (I mean what’s happening here that free schooling is suddenly up for grabs in this discussion?) extremely strong economic and societal outcomes?
Clearly these counter examples don’t exist. Nope, political reality so obvious, so self-evident, so unamenable to challenge that it is one that is hardwired practically into our very universe… a ‘reality’ of low taxes, fee charging health, education, low welfare…
No mention by the way of the more than generous reliefs and subsidies to business and those on higher wages.
Thus it is very difficult for the left to develop a coherent basis for countering policies that are guided by such flights of reason. That is why it must resort to waffly arguments such as what is “fair”, what is “compassionate”, what is “hurtful”, the implication being that everything on the right is heartless. Such terms are intrinsically emotional while presenting no logic. Therefore to push them you have to put your own emotion into play. This in turn leads to the shouting.
And so, an entire literature on socio-economic and public policy matters spanning centre to further left is discarded with absolutely no evidence that it has been considered even in the slightest. From right social democrats, to left environmentalists their words are nothing. From Marx onwards to Gramsci to Harold Wilson to Gorz, in all the different circumstances those leftists faced…nothing. Left wing governments experiences and approaches – even those in Europe – are not addressed. Instead we are presented with a parody of what leftwing thinking is, where emotions are ascribed as if they are the actuality of many many different political policy platforms from various points on the left. This is truly remarkable stuff.
One might, at a push, as some were suggesting on the CLR yesterday about this piece, say that in Ireland the left is unable to present a rigorous and coherent worldview, but while true I think that that is more a function of how small the Irish left actually is rather than a functional problem of the left in general. The Green Party has been won over, perhaps not a hugely difficult task, to orthodoxy. Labour has sort of kind of dissented from it over the past twelve months. Sinn Féin, bar occasional wobbles, has more forcefully done so. The further left actually probably agrees more than disagrees on some aspects of an approach, but is too distant from power to have more than minimal impact. But none of these in any way diminishes the fact that there are left of centre governments across Europe and further afield, social democratic or democratic socialists governments, whose approaches are very clear and are fundamentally rooted in one or other approach generated on the centre left. Even the great apostates of British Labour have rediscovered Keynes in the past year. There’s little, whatever else about it, that is waffly about Brown’s economic policy. We may agree or disagree with it, but it is an exercise in the power of the state.
And again, these statement can only be made by ignoring the reality of life as it is in that state, literally a border away in one instance. By way of example, one of the most significant steps under social democracy, a National Health Service, so influential that it encouraged the zeal of Clann na Poblachta in the 1940s for state intervention in a minor key and opened the door to a series of half-steps in Irish health policy that were at least slightly progressive, was established on the island to our east. To ignore that, and other aspects of left wing history is entirely illogical.
Pitting right-wing logic against left-wing passion is a contest that no side can really win, because neither can comprehend the other, nor wants to. But on a brighter note, left-wing passion goes a long way towards explaining the undoubted superiority of the left when it comes to the modern arts. This may be because the right use the left-side of the brain, which is the part that is strong on reason, whereas the left use the right-side, where artistry lies. Left, right, it’s all very confusing. But at least when the left are singing they’re not doing damage.
The ‘superiority’ of the left in ‘modern arts? What on earth is he talking about? I’ve known one or two or maybe more people involved in that area, for one reason and another, and I can tell you that in the main they’re actually a pretty ordinary bunch when it comes to their politics. This though reads like someone is channelling a parodic view of 1950s beatnik culture. Hip.
You have to ask yourself, if you or I were to set about writing an analysis of the right which was so detached from ideological moorings, that didn’t bother to reference any – y’know, ideological or philosophical strands, or figures such as Strauss, von Mises, Buckley, Kristol, Powell, Joseph or so on, or indeed given that no article can set sail without him, Burke – all of whom I and most of us have read a portion of, that sought to reduce the right and conservatism down to a hodge podge of say… ‘selfishness’ and Thatcher… how far would we get?
European lobbying January 18, 2010
Posted by Tomboktu in Amsterdam Treaty, Business, European Union, Freedom of speech, International Finance.4 comments
I think that this article in the European Voice deserves a wider readership, so I’m doing my bit.
The hook for the story is simple enough:
One of the biggest tobacco manufacturers in the world led a group of chemical, food, oil, pharmaceutical and other firms in a successful long-term lobbying strategy to shape European Union policy making in their favour, a new study says.
That tobacco company is BAT. The mechanism for this was an item in the Amsterdam Treaty on impact assessments.
The form of impact assessment pushed in this period by BAT [...] – and the one ultimately embraced by the EU via changes to the EU Treaty in the Treaty of Amsterdam – was so desired, according to the survey, because they believed that it would hamper the introduction of public smoking restrictions and those against tobacco advertising.
Which is fine, in an uncritical theory, in a democracy: BAT is as entitled as anybody else to push its case. (A little more critique would ask how much cash BAT has to bring to the table compared with others. But that’s another story I don’t go into here.)
Did you notice I edited the quote above, dropping a phrase in the middle of it? “The form of impact assessment pushed in this period by BAT [...]“. The original story read “The form of impact assessment pushed in this period by BAT and its front group”.
BAT asked a UK consultancy, Charles Barker, to work out the advantages of pushing such an approach at the UK and EU levels, the study says. According to the scientists, the firm warned BAT that they would need to tread carefully, lobbying through a “front” organisation and enlisting other “big industry names” in support, in particular the chemical and pharmaceutical industries.
The front was established by a consultancy company called the European Policy Centre.
In order to win such a change, from 1996 onwards, say the scientists, BAT “relied heavily” on the European Policy Centre (EPC), while also sometimes working with the Weinberg Group, a consultancy firm that had been involved with Philip Morris.
The EPC then went on to form the front group, the “Risk Assessment Forum” on behalf of the tobacco company and its allies, with both BAT and the EPC working to recruit other companies to join the Forum, the new research says.
EPC is stung by the report, with its director pointing that these shenanigans occurred before he joined the consultancy and thet he closed down the Risk Forum.
But the nub, I think comes at the end.
Think-tanks throughout the European capital have consistently refused to join the European Commission’s lobby registry, arguing that think-tanks do not engage in “lobbying.” The EPC, however, was the first think-tank to sign up.
I was tempted to comment or analyse, I won’t. I think the report speaks more eloquently than I could.
Open wide and say… 2008 levels of dental expenditure are not equal to 2008 levels of service provision. January 18, 2010
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy, Irish Politics.1 comment so far
I’m still a bit… I guess… gobsmacked… by the reduction in financial support to PRSI payers in regard to dental treatment. The idea that an examination alone is sufficient unto the day each year seems woefully, or even willfully, misconceived. I’m fortunate with my teeth, so far so good. But others I know, and many of us, aren’t so lucky. Life becomes a never-ending trial where teeth that are particularly susceptible to decay despite assiduous flossing and brushing require almost continual patching up.
It’s fascinating then to read that the dentists are on the march. So to speak. With a meeting this weekend at Croke Park where a good third of those in private practice turned up to vent their ire.
And I can’t say I disagree with the Chief Executive of the Irish Dental Association, Fintan Hourihan, who argued that €110 million in cuts [including €30 million from medical card patients and €29 million in removal of tax reliefs] was astronomical.
Nor, and this is particularly invidious, do I think he is wrong when he argues that this will lead to ‘rationing’. What in effect will happen is a rationing by money.
Given that dental treatment is expensive – ask anyone who isn’t covered by PRSI, including public service employees and self-employed (by the way, I consider both of those groups exclusion to be unjust) – the dynamic, given most peoples aversion to getting there in the first place will most likely be to put off costly remedial care.
That free examinations are a good thing, even simply as a preventative measure, and that following on from them free or low cost treatment is a good idea, makes the current policy approach seem merely perverse. Add to that Hourihan’s very telling point that…Ireland was the only EU member state not to have a chief dental officer, reflecting its lack of concern for dental health.
This is a public health issue and one which requires continual supervision and monitoring in order to maximise positive outcomes.
You’ve got to laugh, though, reading the response from the Ministers office…
[he] said that the cuts had brought dental spending to 2008 levels. He added that the budget had to be delivered against the background of the current economic situation. The €30 million in the dental treatment service for medical card holders was out of €400 million in non-pay expenditure cuts that had to be made this year, and the reduction in the PRSI-related schemes was a social welfare cut.
This then is the reality of what many glibly talked about when they argued prior to the Budget that cuts would simply be rewinding the clock back to 2008, or 2005 or whenever. Dental spending may be in total at 2008 levels, but it is clear that provision of services have now shifted to a position that I haven’t experienced in my working lifetime as someone who has been a fairly assiduous user of those services across a decade and a half or so.
And the bigger picture? Well Michael Taft has a piece on that here which demonstrates that this is just the beginning.
Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week January 17, 2010
Posted by Garibaldy in media.10 comments
Quite a bit of competition this week, with a quote that I thought was going to win initially not even making the top three. Having said that, the odd sensible thing too, and not just from Gene Kerrigan. Must have been the snow giving people time to think. I’m sure it will wear off shortly.
In third place, Brendan O’Connor, at the start of his analysis of what went wrong with the banking system.
Okay. Everyone got greedy — the whole country.
All those unemployed, people on minimum wage and children on the poverty line or in need of extra help at school. The greedy bastards.
A spot of faux-feminism from Carol Hunt, which completely misses the point about why Irish Robinson has been the victim of so much oppobrium. It’s called corruption. Anyone who has lived in Ireland, and especially over the last couple of decades, shouldn’t need that pointed out to them.
This is ultimately a personal tragedy, which any family should be allowed to suffer in privacy. This is also a political tragedy in that a very sick woman is being punished by losing her career and having her life held up to ridicule.
And in first place, Aegnus Fanning, who seems to think that Thomas Hobbes is the person to rescue us from our ills.
It can be argued that Noel Dempsey is entitled to his holidays, that people are entitled to social welfare, that public servants are entitled to their pay and pensions. That may be so, but only if there is enough money to pay for them.
In fact, we are entitled to nothing at all if the money isn’t there.
The day before Hitler attacked western Europe in 1940, the Belgian army increased its annual leave from two to five days a month. Eighteen days later, King Leopold surrendered unconditionally, leaving a 30-mile gap in the front line.
No doubt the Belgians felt entitled to the extra holidays, but did they get them?
Did it even matter?
And after all this, a suprisingly sensible piece about the need for a stimulus package from Daniel McConnell.
The Left Archive: The Prospects Before Us – Revolutionary Marxist Group, 1970s January 17, 2010
Posted by irishonlineleftarchive in Irish Left Online Document Archive, Revolutionary Marxist Group.72 comments
The Revolutionary Marxist Group is an intriguing Trotskyist formation on the Irish left from the 1970s. Never very large it consisted of former members the League for a Workers Republic and Young Socialists, according to Wiki. Some of our regular contributors will, no doubt, add detail to this picture.
This a fascinating document, written by the pseudonymous “Robert Dorn”, that attempts in a number of chapters to provide a rationale (perhaps retrospectively) for the political position of the RMG and potential alternatives. In the course of engaging with that there’s some good analysis in here of Republicanism and Irish politics.
This ideology makes only fitful pretence to the Socialism claimed as the ideal by the movements in Britain and Europe. Here, of course, we refer to militant Republicanism (Gardiner Place and Kevin St.). At a later stage of development, we will have to face up to a further fact: that the form of Republicanism that exercises most hegemony over the workers is, still, neither that of Gardiner Place nor that of Kevin Street, but the pretender of Upper Mount Street; the Fianna Fáil cuckoo. The extreme vagueness of Republicanism [sic] precepts (basically: ‘Break the connections with England and you’ll be all alright’) enabled this situation to come about. the victory of the ‘Yes’ vote in the recent referendum exposed the limitations of militant ‘Separatism’ and the creed could give no reason such a vote was incompatible with their basic views.
And the mention of certain groups places this within a clear historic timeline.
The circumstances that have made for the predominance of Republican ideology in the Irish working class have prevented any sort of serious opposition from being counterposed to it. The Irish Labour Party developed from a rigorous application of a syndicalist economist interpretation of certain aspects of the teachings of James Connolly inevitably becoming an expression of petty bourgeois Social Democracy. Such an ideology only has its staying power in the metropolitan state of imperialism. Basically, Irish Social Democracy accepts that ireland is another such state. This is at loggerheads with the facts. It has cut off the I.L.P. from any permanent claim on Republicans and has left it to depend entirely on imperialism’s ability to industrialise Ireland: and ability, as we are seeing, of only limited range. The development of an apparent ‘Tribunite’ tendency around the Liaison Committee of the left is not based on an internal ‘Tribunite’ base, but on the influx of debased Trotskyists and Stalinists.
There are also harsh words for the Communist Party of Ireland…
But, of course, there is a further complication. Real Communists might have been able to survive and develop better than the vanguard with which (until recently) the Irish working class has been lumbered. The history of Irish Stalinism includes 1 1/2 liquidations of its party. The first (1923) was to accomodate to the Syndicalist, Larking. The second (1941) (in the Twenty-Six Counties only) was aimed to overcome the embarrassment that would be given to the USSR by its allied party supporting the war effort of Russia’s ally and Ireland’s oppressor.
There’s also some background to Trotskyism in Ireland.
A more certain Trotskyist strain was already developed. This was amongst certain of [Michael] Price’s followers but also amongst members of Fianna Éireann who were disillusioned with the lack of politics of the Republican leadership…After the War, these formed a short-lived Revolutionary Socialist Party of Ireland which constituted to the only Irish section fo the Fourth international to date. This never grew beyond twenty. It was liquidated early in 1950…
Later many of them were to be prominent around Noel Browne, during his last period of organisational independence. However, by this time, they had lost most of their original revolutionary fervour. They did not try to create a proper Bolshevik Party out of Noel Browne’s National Progressive Democrats…
A complaint – however sardonic – one doesn’t hear every day.
The document also deals with the RMG itself and clearly delineates its ideological position:
In January 1972, we broke finally with the LWG and its YS. In February we held our founding Conference. Since then, we have been guided by three main lines, as defined by the faction fight, as much as anything.
(1) A general agreement with Comrade Ernest Mandel’s analysis of the developing crisis in world capitalism. (Though, in detail, a disagreement with his delineation of the qualitative change from Imperialism to neo-capitalism) and a resultant support for the Fourth International.
(2) The general view that the main propaganda field is on the national issue.
(3) Affiliation to the SLA.
The weakness is, that except for the first and Comrade MacGregor’s bluepring for action in Northern Ireland, nothing much has been done to spell out this (in itself correct) strategy.
There’s a most interesting analysis of the prospects for entryism to either Official or Provisional Sinn Féin where one of the reasons not to try the former is..
…it’s traditional activism harnessed to the policies of its leadership means that real entry work will entail activity, not alone time wasting, but of an actively counter-revolutionary nature. Trotskyist entrists will have to agitate for a ‘Northern Irish Bill of Rights’ and to sell the United Irishman with its libellous attacks on our politics. (This is more than was expected of Troskyists in the Labour Party). In the case of Kevin Street, there is always the pitfall of its undoubtedly Fascist (Fennell) wing and that it will distort the course of the struggle.
There are many names already familiar to those who have studied this topic over the years, and it’s written in a readable and in places highly entertaining style. Well worth considering.
Hmmm… unusual… January 17, 2010
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.5 comments
Here’s something that’s interesting… Agan Harahap, an Indonesian photographer and illustrator, who merges images of superheroes and historic events. As Wired magazine put it, it generates something Zelig-like… It doesn’t entirely work, or rather, not all the images do… Darth Vadar? Why? But the Fidel one is oddly dislocating.
This weekend I’ll be mostly listening to… Farflung January 16, 2010
Posted by WorldbyStorm in This Weekend I'll Mostly Be Listening to....add a comment
It’s like some sort of elaborate joke. Farflung, a band from California, Their 7th album album A Wound on Eternity. Cool! Cover image, a sort of storm in space. Of course! Song titles? Unborn planet and Endless Drifting Wreck. Whynaturally!Videos? Cue 1950s flying saucers and men in 1950s spaceman outfits. How could it be otherwise? A lead singer who looks disturbingly like Eddie Izzard and has an English, no, London tinge to his vocals? Hmmmm! And the logo? Have I mentioned the logo?
They’ve a crossover with Hawkwind, one of their number has worked with the indefatigable Nik Turner (and I’ve long been tempted to put up a post on his Hawkwind redux outfit Space Ritual, but I can only find the live video on YouTube, and really, the female dancer fills me with trepidation as to the message that sends out)…but…I hear a mixture of the psychedelic, punk, heavy metal, Hawkwind, Kyuss, Black Sabbath… Then you know me after a year of This weekends… I hear what I want to hear…
Punk I say? Why yes… but more on that in a moment.
Their early albums, and they’ve been at this since the early to mid 1990s as far as I can tell, fetch ridiculous prices on Amazon. Seriously ridiculous prices.
How do I know this? You’d be better off asking why do I know this? But the punky speedy rush of more recent singles… not that they really do singles… the aforementioned Unborn Planet and Endless Drifting Wreck are their own business card punching out as fast as they can. I like spacerock – period. But I prefer spacerock which remembers that it wasn’t just born in metal but that it in part begat punk and that Motorhead and others come – again in part – from that place.
Seven albums? They don’t sound like a band with seven albums to their name. I leave it to you to figure out is that a good or bad thing. I know my own views on it…
Unborn Planet
Endless Drifting Wreck
Possession
Invincible
This week from the Irish Election Literature Blog… January 15, 2010
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Irish Politics.4 comments
As AK says, ‘another batch….’ which seems to slightly diminish the interest factor of what’s here – again many thanks to him for what is turning into a weekly insight into past political activity, with some very contemporary resonances… Take it away AK!
First off “Students- Everything you wanted to know about the Workers’ Party” -circa 1990
Amongst The party policy explained is Democratic Centralism, The policy on The North and what a member would be expected to do.
Then a lurch to the right with two things that may be of interest…..
These are two leaflets from a Libertas canvassers pack. One is a canvassers newsletter and the other a list of rebuttals of ‘negative isues’.
During the campaign, Ganley was being portrayed as the bad guy all over various swathes of Media. In Dublin the Libertas candidate Caroline Simons, wasn’t particularly convincing.
Yet looking at the Newsletter you can see the production values are excellent with a message so populist it would put Bertie to shame. If you didn’t know anything about Ganley’s business background and were not concerned about Libertas funding you’d find the whole thing quite attractive.
Which leads on to the second item which is titled “Rebuttal of Negative Issues & Dealing with Primetime”.
Back Left again with …
Democratic Left’s Liz McManus, Minister for Housing and Urban Renewal, from the 1997 General Election in Wicklow.
Finian McGrath from his first General Election in 1992.
Sadhbh O’Neill and David Healy of the Green Party,again from the 1992 General Election.
A Cieran Perry leaflet from the 2007 Local elections.
And being opportunistic [ouch! - wbs]… Killian Forde from the 2004 LE.
The property market – a love affair goes sour. January 14, 2010
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy, Irish Politics.13 comments
Thanks to the person who forwarded me this, which apparently was doing the rounds on Twitter. It’s just two links… three years apart… but worth the read. In a way. And I’ve found a third link which is worth throwing into the mix…
For, under the heading The smart, ballsy guys are buying up property right now Brendan O’Connor (profession: columnist with the Sunday Independent… not estate agent) treated us in 2007 to his thoughts on the property market. Now, I have to admit that the most cogent analysis I’ve ever heard about the boom was from Conor of Dublin Opinion who expressed astonishment at the idea that, and I paraphrase… ‘the fuckers [media, estate agents, etc] were making people – anyone, everyone – believe they could play the property market…’. So take it away O’Connor. See if you can match that…
SO THE sky is falling in again. The Irish stock market is apparently in meltdown, because of the housing market, which is also apparently in meltdown. The level of property horror stories is at an all-time high and everyone is tripping over each other to predict even greater gloom than the next guy.
Now, here’s a thing. You might think these are clues… but… O’Connor begs to differ…
Tell you what, I think I know what I’d be doing if I had money, and if I wasn’t already massively over-exposed to the property market by virtue of owning a reasonable home. I’d be buying property. In fact, I might do it anyway. You don’t even need money to buy property these days. Imagine if you walked into the bank and said, “Listen, guys. I want to gamble a million on the stock market. I have 100 grand myself, will you guys lend me 900 grand at really low rates and I’ll pay you back over 40 years? In fact I won’t even pay off the principal, I’ll just pay off the interest.” They’d laugh you out of it. But substitute gambling on the property market for gambling on the stock market and they’ll fall over themselves to give it to you.
And…
So why would I be buying property right now if I could? Well, for starters, property is good value these days. It’s certainly cheaper than it was six months ago. While the official figures on aggregate surveys are talking about drops of two to three per cent in property prices, anyone who is out there in the jungle will tell you that it is a buyer’s market bigtime.
Cheaper than six months previously – eh? And who are those in the jungle?
If you’re smart and you have balls and you’re dealing with the right buyer you can knock 10 per cent or more off the price of a house these days. And that could well be a house that has already been reduced in price by 10 per cent or more in the last six months. Because while the big picture suggests a 3 per cent drop, the big picture is made up of lots of little pictures and you don’t knock 3 per cent off the price of your house if you can’t sell it. Individual house prices fall in substantial chunks.
There you go. Don’t even consider this as a business decision which might have ramifications for years, decades after you sign a contract. Think machismo…The smart balls equipped amongst us do. People like, like, like… feck me…
John D Rockefeller famously said that the way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets. Buying into a boom is kind of a mug’s game, and, as we know, anyone can do it. The really smart and ballsy guys are the guys who are buying when no one else is.
Hmmm… and why aren’t they buying. Perhaps because markets are tanking, or about to tank, or because there’s no credit, or because…
The guys who made real money on property in Ireland were the ones who bought property before everyone else, when it was unfashionable. They were in a minority. Most people who bought property bought it recently, in a seller’s market, for top dollar. Which makes no sense when you think about it. When you think about it, it makes sense to buy property now. Though of course some people say it always makes sense to buy property. There is no such thing as a good or a bad time to buy. It’s always a good time to buy.
Or maybe… just maybe it makes no sense at all to buy property, unless you truly need it and… and this is the crucial bit… you can afford it… today, tomorrow and those years and decades already mentioned.
Anyway, there is blood on the streets, or at least an impression of blood on the streets, and it’s time to buy.
Because…
You can be guaranteed that’s what the smart guys are doing. Every smart, rich bloke (the two can, in fact, occur in the same guy) I’ve spoken to for the last few years has been, to some extent, hoarding cash, waiting for this. And now they’re around picking up bargains. Some of them might be waiting a little while more, in the hope that we haven’t reached the bottom yet. But lots of them know that the trick is to buy and sell stuff a little bit too soon. Lots of guys have gone broke waiting for the actual top or bottom of the market.
Oh dear God.
Not only is property better value now than when everyone was barrelling into it a year ago, it also provides better returns. Rents are booming right now. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it: right now you can buy property for less and it will yield you more. That’s a better deal than six months ago.
Dear God redux. And what about in 18 months when rents begin to tank – as they did, as people I know can attest as they enter rent wars with neighbours equally eager to have tenants in the houses they bought during the boom at inflated prices with mortgages to match that… despite all the talk of prices falling… still have to be paid off at the same rates as last year and the year before. For years. And decades.
Money is also still cheap. OK, interest rates aren’t 2 per cent any more, but 5 per cent is still cheap money in anyone’s books and everyone seems to agree it’s not going to get much dearer.
[Buries head in hands]
This is not to say everything is rosy in the garden, but then you know that. The vultures of doom who have been circling for years waiting to be right eventually are having a field day.
It was another week of gloom and doom in the headlines.
After years of willing it, journalists who didn’t buy property when they should have think they’ve finally got what they wanted.
Come again? Journalists? Who didn’t buy property when they should have? Am I alone in thinking that’s a mad analysis?
And they are wallowing in the mire. They also know that bad news is good news and a headline that’s going to scare the crap out of people is more fun than one that just says things are still OK.
But reading between the headlines, a more balanced picture emerges.
Ah yes. So, let’s quote some purely disinterested sources… or let’s not.
For example, Jim Power of Friends First was credited with giving a gloomy outlook for the economy and housing last week. In fact, Power was relatively upbeat about property. Is a 2 per cent drop in the market overall really going to kill us? Is that not a soft landing? And did Power not predict that prices would start to rise again next year due to less supply, more mortgage-interest relief and stabilising interest rates? If that’s what we regard as gloom these days, then clearly we’re spoilt.
The Central Bank’s version of gloom last week was to say that growth will fall this year – to 5 per cent. As falling growth goes, 5 per cent ain’t bad.Unemployment is going to grow too – from 4.5 per cent to 4.75 per cent. It’s hardly the bad old days, is it? Four or 5 per cent unemployment constitutes practically full employment when you take into account frictional, structural and voluntary unemployment – the unemployment that always exists even if there are jobs for everyone.
And it will always be like that, for ever and ever amen. Or perhaps not.
And, yes, the Iseq is down 6 per cent this year, but balance that off against the 30 per cent it gained last year. The 6 per cent fall doesn’t even fully cancel out its gains of last December.
So, you know, maybe the sky is falling in, but maybe you should think twice before you follow the Chicken Lickens of the media into Foxy Loxy’s dark cave.
I’ve got to be honest. Anyone who took property advice from someone who wrote about Chicken Lickens and Foxy Loxy’s probably deserves much of what is coming to them. But… this is what we call mood music, this is what generates a response. This is part of a background discourse which in some part prodded people to making what most charitably can be described as not great decisions…
Let us turn to another person, remarkably – as it happens – with the same name, Brendan O’Connor writing coincidentally in… the… er… Sunday Independent. And this time more recently, why, this very year in fact…
The heading is… No use cursing day we mounted property ladder
And this O’Connor writes;
House Price Indices used to be much more fun. Every few months or so some website or building society or estate agents — we didn’t care who — would put out a press release announcing that property had gone up by 10.8 per cent or some such. It was always a really specific figure with a decimal point, so it felt quite scientific. And then we would all scrabble to work out how much we had made in the property business in the previous year. Some years you would discover, courtesy of Permanent TSB or Daft that you had ‘made’ more money just by owning your house than you had by working the previous year. Indeed, some people took that kind of thinking to its logical conclusion, decided to stop doing anything productive in their working lives, and just fooled around with property, making millions. On paper. Indeed, the fact that so many of Ireland’s risk-takers and visionaries focused on property was probably to the detriment of the development of other areas of the economy.
Never! And this was ‘paper’ gains? Really? Amazing stuff. But hold on, risk-takers and visionaries who focus on property are clearly more risk takers than visionaries… as O’Connor will demonstrate… and aren’t they the same ballsy smart guys?
We don’t celebrate the house price indices so much these days. For example, when Daft.ie told us a few days ago that asking prices for houses fell by about a fifth in the last year, we didn’t get out the calculators with such glee. I don’t know about you, but for me and most of the people I know, in a direct reversal of the boom years, we lost more just by owning our houses last year than we earned by working. All those paper millions that made us all feel so rich are gone, and now we curse the day we ever got on the ladder, we curse the ancestry that gave us this obsession with the land, and we curse the politicians, the banks and the media that encouraged the madness.
Yeah. Those feckers. Those fecking feckers. Writing in – oh, I don’t know – 2007 perhaps? Big timers with their smart rich ballsy property developer friends just waiting to push unsuspecting house purchasers and journalists (no, wait, those bastard journalists had missed the boat and were envious of the other journalists with their smart rich ballsy property developer friends or, hold on… didn’t that journalist already have a house, just like the envious journalists?)… But we curse them anyway.
That’s how it goes with most compulsions. It starts out great and you think, this is all good, I want more of it and I want it all the time. And then, gradually, you learn to rue the day you ever laid eyes on your compulsion. So the tendency now is to hate property, to view our homes as a liability, to regret the decade of prosperity we “enjoyed”, to wish we lived in a rented bedsit, and to want to kill various people from developers to your local bank manager.
Or journalists. Yeah. Journalists. But did this O’Connor actually buy a house? Or any property. Because in 2007 he was pretty damn clear that he was already over-extended. He was just advising the rest of us… the ballsless and dumb. Small timers.
In reality, given that most of us are stuck in a relationship with our houses, we should perhaps learn to live with them. Yes, the infatuation is over, so maybe it’s time to settle into something more long-term and less superficial. Maybe it’s time to start loving our houses as homes, to realise that, unfortunately for some, the home might be a lifetime commitment.
Oh dear God.
This is a difficult one for us to get our heads around. Irish people’s relationship with property, characterised by the property ladder philosophy, has tended to involve a form of social climbing. You started out with an apartment, dumped that once you could afford something better and eventually settled down with a nice sensible house when you hit your 30s. Maybe now we have to accept that that model doesn’t work anymore, not for the time being anyway.
Or… crazy thought… for many many people that’s not and has never been the model.
You could argue that we should have known this all the time, that the fetishising of property prices should never have happened. I’m often reminded these days of Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary in his final days. I keep thinking these days of that scene in Downfall, the movie telling the story of Hitler’s final days days, where his secretary, Traudl Junge,
[Pause] Yeah, we got that Traudl Junge was his secretary in the preceding sentence. But then again, ballsy smart rich guys probably can’t keep simple names of er… Hitler’s secretary in their mind for more than a nano-second while they’re out being… ballsy…[Resume]
…as it all begins to fall apart and the end is nigh, discusses with others the prospect of leaving the bunker. But Traudl [Hitler's secretary in his final days... his secretary, Traudl Junge, from his final days, just in case you missed that bit] asks where she could go. And she says something roughly along the lines of: my family and friends warned me not to get involved with the Nazis. What am I supposed to do now, tell them that I’ve realised it was a bad idea now that it’s all gone wrong?
Yes. The Irish property market. So similar to joining the Nazi party. And becoming Hitler’s secretary. Traudl Junge. But the broader point… forget about Traudle Junge, if you can… is the crucial one. What of the responsibility of those who fetishised the prices. Who played… as it were… Hitler to a gullible Traudle Junge of the public. And who – apologies for the mass breaching of Godwins Law, but he feckin’ started it – promoted the good news?
Now that the whole property dream has gone wrong, we shouldn’t be ashamed to realise too late that it was a bad idea. In fact, changing your thinking to suit changing circumstances is a sign of sanity. Not changing our mindset to reflect our new circumstances, if not madness in itself, would certainly lead to madness. Policymakers also need to get with the new reality, as do the banks.
This is great. He’s positioned himself as victim rather than perpetrator. Kudos. And like many of those on the right before his solution is? Think yourself happy. Stuff the fact you and your partner are, as was said to me recently by an acquaintance, rattling around a house now that one is unemployed and both still have a mortgage that – curiously – no one in government seems that concerned to do something about… at least in comparison to the alacrity of their measures to introduce NAMA and support the financial sector.
The new reality is that house prices are not going to “recover” to previous levels in the near future. The new reality is that house prices in Dublin have fallen nearly 50 per cent in real terms since 2006, according to Sherry Fitzgerald. This period has been characterised by two things — historically low interest rates and wild lending by the banks.
Nah, it’s not as if in – say – 2007, some were noting that here had been falls since 2006. Or had put out some warning signals about that. And that others, in the media, perhaps, had dismissed that because y’know, the ballsy smart rich guys knew better than the ‘doomsayers’… And incidentally, this ‘new’ reality sounds an awful lot like the old reality. Having a mortgage is a risk of some proportions. One shouldn’t spend more than one can reasonably expect to earn. We’re not all smart, ballsy and rich.
The wild lending has come to an end and the low interest rates will before the end of the year. Add to this imminent property taxes an d the outlook does not look good for property prices. If property prices couldn’t thrive while the banks were throwing out money with minimal interest rates, they’re certainly not going to double in the absence of those two spurs.
Wait. They did thrive while the banks were throwing out money. At least up until… ahem… 2006.
And that’s what they would need to do to get us back to to pre-crash prices. Even the 7-10 per cent growth in property prices for 2010 predicted by Bloxhams on Friday, if it were to happen, would claw back only a fraction of the value people have lost. House prices would need to double to “recover” back to what they were. And we all accept that the days of property prices doubling in a few years are gone. So basically, anyone who bought in the last few years is operating with what you might call a legacy cost base, a mortgage that does not reflect the current value of their property or maybe even what they currently earn.
Oh God.
We all have a part to play in accepting the new reality. The Government needs to get rid of stamp duty on residential property. They should do it for a year and then they should probably do it for another year. The banks need to start lending in a reasonable fashion and they need to create mortgage products that reflect the new legacy-cost-base nature of home ownership. They need to create longer-term mortgages and perhaps even mortgages that would allow people in negative equity to move out of properties they currently own and into homes in which they will live long term.
Now, not all of that is entirely unsensible, although there are basic reasons to do with human longevity that limit the term of mortgages and this legacy-cost-base nature of home ownership while intriguing me greatly seems near impossible to implement. As for stamp duty… well, we’ll come back to stamp duty. But remember how the Sunday Independent got more and more exercised by stamp duty as the cause of the woes of the property market? Stuff the underlying dynamics… and note that there is a complete misunderstanding of what the boom in prices represented. For O’Connor the reality that those prices were inflated isn’t the issue. All he wants is to prop up house ‘values’… to in effect have a boom redux and in miniature.
And what a pity that those commentators with national platforms during the boom years didn’t try to divert the discourse away from what the clearly not entirely smart, ballsy rich were saying and doing.
And meanwhile we can all only hope that when inflation does come, it will wash all our debt away with it.
If wishes were mortgages. But why this change of heart?
Well, what of the following… hat tip to Quotes from the Irish Property Bubble (a most interesting and dispiriting site) for this link… from another Brendan O’Connor who writes in the Sunday Independent last June… perhaps the following statement gives us an idea…
AS A homeowner, in massive negative equity, who knows a lot of other homeowners who are in massive negative equity, I want to know why John Hurley, Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, has a job. I want to know who the fuck John Hurley thinks he is. He and his Central Bank cronies have made a complete balls of this country. I want John Hurley fired.
Why such ire – even if one is in ‘massive negative equity’? Perhaps because…
John Hurley announced last week that the kind of dramatic and devastating property price falls that we have seen in Ireland over the last year or two were “inevitable”. He also said that he expects further falls in house prices this year. “It’s anybody’s guess where house prices will go in the future,” he says.
O’Connor is angry…
You may think from his fatalistic, shoulder-shrugging, nothing-to-do-with-me-Guv’ attitude to all this that Hurley is new to the Central Bank job — a clean pair of hands, as it were. But in fact Hurley has not only been in the job for more than seven years, he was reappointed to the job in January. In other words, it was felt that the best possible person to oversee the Irish Central Bank going forward was the man who had presided over it during a time when banking dragged this whole country into the gutter.
The big defence of Hurley has been that in 2004 the Central Bank warned about the risks associated with excessive lending. Mind you, it didn’t do anything about it, because it apparently didn’t have the power to, but it did mutter about it.
Then again, whatever thesis you wanted to back up about Hurley, you will find evidence to support it. Between 2005 and late 2007, he repeatedly assured everyone that there would be a soft landing in Irish property prices.
And amazingly, some journalists with ballsy smart rich property developing friends didn’t actually repeat him. Although perhaps they should have given that they poured scorn on any who mentioned a landing, soft or otherwise. No, their prescription was that in a fading boom that was precisely the right time to buy property. And I’ve quoted evidence to support that above.
Just last year, in January, Hurley was saying that the property market was robust. He said that underlying housing demand remained strong, that “private rents are continuing to rise, at about 11 per cent year-on-year, and employment and earnings are still growing”. He did concede that employment growth would slow a bit in 2008 due to the weakening construction sector, but, he said, “while this is likely to lead to some increase in unemployment, the unemployment rate is expected to remain low by international standards”.
Yeah… Still… does the following ring a bell…“Unemployment is going to grow too – from 4.5 per cent to 4.75 per cent. It’s hardly the bad old days, is it? Four or 5 per cent unemployment constitutes practically full employment when you take into account frictional, structural and voluntary unemployment – the unemployment that always exists even if there are jobs for everyone.”
Hilariously, this great guru of banking — who, remember, was reappointed to the top banking job in Ireland just recently — went on to say, less than a year-and-a-half ago, that “our stress-testing of the banking system and our extensive financial stability analysis … indicate that Irish banks are solidly profitable and well-capitalised and with no major exposures”.
He added, “Our own banks remain robust in the face of international credit problems and they retain a strong shock absorption capacity to deal with the risks that have emerged.”
No genius. That’s for sure. But… surely no different from someone who used the front page of a national Sunday to argue that as a bubble property market was in the first stages of collapse then was the time to buy…
So, clearly, John Hurley is incompetent. Anyone else, in any other job, who had made those kind of cock-ups in judgement — and Hurley repeated his message about the stability of our financial system frequently in the last few years — in an area so central to their job, and whose lack of judgement and foresight had contributed to the kind of national disaster that banking caused in this country, would be branded a chancer and they would never work again in this town.
Hurley gets given the job again for seven years, and is also then allowed free rein to shit all over the lives and dreams of ordinary young people. It is an outrage. But, of course, it is no surprise.
Now, one can indeed lay blame at the door of the Central Bank, and if one wishes at the door of Hurley. But for all his sins he at least suggested that things wouldn’t remain boom like forever. So unlike… er… er…
So let’s look at what Hurley is at. He is telling us that it was “inevitable” that anyone who has bought a house in the last four or five years should be in negative equity. Putting aside the issue of whether Hurley saw this inevitability when he repeated his soft landing thesis on more than one occasion, what is infuriating — and probably the most alarming thing — is the detachment with which he can speak about things that are ruining tens of thousands of lives.
Again, so different to those who would cheerlead the approach that led directly to the very real ruin of peoples lives. Still check this out…
It’s probably easy for a guy like Hurley to talk so casually about negative equity. Hurley, like most civil servants of a certain age, probably bought his fine house years ago. He may even have the mortgage paid off. This “inevitable” correction, necessary for Nama, probably won’t affect him.
What though about people who also had houses bought by the time the boom peaked. Even people who are in ‘massive negative equity’? Because however difficult it is for Brendan O’Connor, and I have no idea one way or another what his situation is beyond what he likes to tell people on the front page of a national Sunday which – frankly – for the most part is more than enough, there are perhaps those who perhaps took the advice of newspaper columnists… perhaps… at the height of the boom who might… perhaps… find themselves in even worse straits.
Does Hurley worry about the human consequences of his economic ideology (Hurley has been saying for years, since 2005 at least, that house prices need to go down)? His political masters should certainly worry about it. When Fianna Fail politicians wonder why so few voted for them and why they need to make themselves “fit for purpose” again, they should perhaps think about the consequences of letting civil servants who are cushioned from the real world launch Scud missiles on the electorate.
Economic ideology? Civil servants? He’s got to be kidding. This was the policy of a right of centre government writ large. A sort of crony capitalism which embraced the public and private spheres to the benefit of a rather small group of people. That those in the leading circles in the state, including some in the civil service, bought into this is identical to the way some in right wing newspapers bought into and, arguably worse, promoted it.
There are real hardship cases out there when it comes to negative equity. There are people who can’t keep things going right now — people who own houses they can’t afford to live in, who bought in an attempt to get on the property ladder in some way, who rented the houses out to pay the mortgage while they waited to be able to afford to move into them, and who are now burdened with a debt from which they will never recover. They will never live in a house they own themselves and they will spend their whole lives in the red, struggling to get out of crippling debt.
In fact, guys like Hurley, who may well have wiped another few per cent off property with his recent comments, are probably creating a whole generation of hard-working, middle-class people who will spend their lives failing to recover from this supposedly necessary and inevitable adjustment.
It gets better, or worse, depending on perspective.
For these people to hear that it is necessary for them to be plunged deeper into negative equity in order to ensure that Nama works, in order to bail out the banks, only infuriates them more. And thus, Fianna Fail’s natural constituency doesn’t vote for Fianna Fail anymore. Because, as far as they’re concerned, the Central Bank works for Fianna Fail and for this administration. And it is playing fast and loose with our lives, our dreams, our futures, in order to complete some ideologically driven economic model. That’s what Cowen and Lenihan need to think of when they allow civil servants to run the country. And this is all about the civil servants who surround the Government, and specifically the guys who surround Lenihan.
Hurley is not alone. This is the stated policy of this Government’s chief financial guru. Alan Ahearne, an ex-economist with the Fed who subsequently worked at an Irish business school, is effectively driving this country’s economic policy now. Ahearne has been very clear in his beliefs on where our economic salvation lies. He believes property needs to fall by at least 50 per cent in order to restore equilibrium. He also believes that the only way Ireland can get back to growth is through exporting, and the only way we can gain more exports is through an effective devaluation — massive wage cuts and falls in our standards of living.
So Ahearne and the other advisers to Lenihan have been the ones driving the obsession with deflating our economy instead of stimulating it. They have led the Government to believe that only by shrinking can we get growth. Again, this probably works well as an economic model, but Ahearne’s political masters should also recognise that in reality, in Ireland, it is not working, and the human cost of it might be unacceptable to people, to voters.
Hmmm… perhaps someone should call Michael Taft, for it seems that O’Connor has come over to the side of those of us who believe the deflationary strategy is profoundly misconceived. Continue, please.
This is where the deliberate deflation of the economy has got us to this weekend: a new report shows that nearly half of us are having to use our savings to pay our bills. One in four of us is having to use our savings to cover day-to-day living expenses. The most common groups that are using their savings to pay daily living expenses are women aged 35 to 50 and women aged 60 and over.
Meanwhile, there has been an attempt to spin the deflation figures as good news. Prices have fallen nearly five per cent, we are told, and this is compensating for increased taxes and wage cuts.
Two issues there. First, deflation is not a healthy thing in general. It’s not even good for your pocket if you are, like most Irish people, in huge debt. Because deflation of five per cent means that the real value of your debt — your mortgage or your motor loan or whatever — has actually gone up by five per cent. Inflation is far better news for indebted nations and indebted people like us.
Well, that’s actually true. Finally. Something.
Second, this deflation isn’t really anything to do with drops in the price of the actual things you buy every day. It is almost totally down to the extraneous factor of mortgage repayments falling by nearly half in the last year, and partially to do with energy prices too. Interest rates will not stay this low and energy prices are already rebounding.
Extraneous… well yes, but… it’s not as if those were taken on in a vacuum. What of those cheerleaders of the property market…
The fact that general cost-of-living factors are not deflating indicates that the Government’s attempts to deflate the economy have been unsuccessful, apart from creating a complete wasteland where no one is buying or selling anything and people are losing their jobs by the hundreds every day. But then perhaps Alan Ahearne and Hurley and Co feel this is an inevitable and necessary adjustment too.
But does Brian Lenihan? Does Brian Cowen? Do the rest of Fianna Fail’s embattled TDs? And how do they feel when they see that Gordon Brown’s policy of stimulating the UK economy, which they denounced as a mistake, has resulted in the UK recession being over, according to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research among others, while Ireland has at least two years to go in our crippling recession? And what do they think about Gordon Brown being roundly supported as leader despite Labour’s worst performance in an election in 100 years, because people see that his policies are working?
Watching that, are our politicians, who had a sharp dose of the real world recently, still happy to be led by the nose by academics, civil servants and abstract-expressionist economists who have no idea of the real cost of their ideologies?
Hmmm… but what ideology is this? It’s certainly not a left-wing one. And here’s the thing, the smart guys, the ballsy guys, the rich guys are all for the proscriptions emanating from Government…
Looking over enviously at the UK, Minister Lenihan, are you not starting to think you should trust your own gut on things? You’re a smarter guy, and definitely a smarter leader and politician, than Ahearne or Hurley or any of those guys. So do you not think it might be time for a little stimulus before you strangle us all?
And what glorious mechanism would O’Connor choose to help reflate a deflating economy? Increased borrowing perhaps? Something else perhaps along the lines that David McWilliams has suggested in the Irish Independent this week as regards NAMA http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/david-mcwilliams/david-mcwilliams-were-being-robbed-by-our-supposed-protectors-2010941.html? Some unique scheme of his own fashioning? Something that will calm troubled waters, smooth our path into the future, make “us” happy again.
What Brendan, what?
Just a few messages that might get some confidence going again.
Go on… just tell us… a nation awaits…
For the pittance you’re getting from stamp duty, would it not be worth it now to send a message and abolish it, for even a year?
[Bang head off wall… pause. Repeat.]
For more on this consider this piece on Irish Left Review…
or this on Politics.ie
