Labour Spin [Young Greens]

Another henchman Murdoch can add to the list.

 

My first piece for the Green Party. Written for the Young Greens in the wake of the People’s Assembly demo, and as a response to Labour’s policy proposal on young people’s benefits.

Ed Miliband’s announcement that he would cut unemployment benefits for 18 to 21’s is the latest proof that the Labour establishment, despite protestations to the contrary by some of their MPs and supporters, are pushing the same pro-austerity narrative as their opponents across the aisle in parliament.

Our government will often smear those opposed to slashing essential services by saying they are “economically irresponsible”, or don’t believe in fiscal prudence on behalf of the state. Few people actually advocate spending beyond one’s means in any context, so what the Conservatives or their partners won’t add is the fact – as those with the People’s Assembly in London yesterday demonstrated – this debate boils down infinitely more to how we spend taxpayers’ money rather than whether we do or not.

Osborne’s tax cut for the highest bracket, the coalition’s utter failure to crackdown on tax havens, their continued complicity in massive domestic and international subsidies for non-renewables, their push for British intervention in Syria, just to name a few things, all point towards an abject lack of priorities on the part of the political mainstream. But, rather than call it out as enthusiastically as they should, Labour is debasing themselves by jumping on the bash-the-poor bandwagon that leads to small-fry attacks on people as irrelevant to the crash as the unemployed young.

Since graduating from Reading last summer I’ve gone from temporary work at a local restaurant, to a journalism training course in London, to volunteering at my local British Heart Foundation store in Winchester. And, in-between each of these desperate attempts at finding a living, the already paltry allowance I receive has played a key role in allowing me any kind of normal life. Were it not for the kindness of my parents, who have helped me however they can by giving me a place to stay when I needed one … I don’t know how I would have got by.

I’ve lived on the edge, and rather than pull me back from the precipice Labour would push me further in to the poverty I and countless others have had to endure.

Good Luck Explaining This To Your Grandchildren

And remember to vote Green next time,  it’s good for your health.

My reaction to UKIP‘s success and victories of the far-right across Europe was mirrored nicely yesterday by Occupy London, probably good I waited to share it as I might be able to unleash a torrent of expletives on facebook but God knows who might stumble across my blog. And before anybody pipes up, the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza), the United Left (Izquierda Unida), et al are little consolation. Advances by the left were, mostly, seen in the smaller EU states or by parties near the political centre.

Germany will be electing their first Nazi representative since the Second World War and the Front National, who require no introduction, wiped the floor with the centrist/leftist parties in France. Similar groupings to the NF did as well, or nearly as well, in places such as Austria, Hungary, Denmark, and Greece.

How long will it take for people to realise that attacking immigrants, the unemployed, refugees, or religious and ethnic minorities, take your pick, will not give them back their hope for prosperity?

We’ve been robbed, are being robbed (to an extent never seen before with TTIP and TPP) not by the people who have nothing, but by the people who have everything. As long as we allow these inherently divisive xenophobes, neoliberals, and neo-fascists to rule over us, nothing will change.

BBC News won’t tell our side of the narrative because the very people theGreen Party of England and Wales, The People’s Assembly, and so on are criticising – corporatists and the wealthy elite – also happen to be the mainstream media’s paymasters. The predominantly right-wing media will blame European immigrants and the vulnerable of all shades because they have to blame somebody, clearly, for what’s happening. But can we really be surprised they won’t level blame at the real culprits?

My Dutch Jewish grandmother barely made it through the occupation, and not everybody else in her family was so lucky. In a sense I’m a survivor, nearly unborn, so I must ask myself … does Europe need to survive another wave of this hatred? Its object may change, Muslims and migrants, rather than Jews and gypsies, but the end is always the same: pain. Until all are free no one ever will be, and, like the oppressed, the oppressor must suffer.

–

“I don’t believe it’s possible to be neutral. The world is already moving in certain directions. And to be neutral, to be passive, in a situation like that, is to collaborate with what is going on. And I, as a teacher, don’t want to be a collaborator.” – Howard Zinn (You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train)

Editorial Collaboration: Papal Paupery [TDC]

By March 2014 Pope Francis, or Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was a year in to his tenure as leader of the planet’s largest religious organisation. Bergoglio, formerly the archbishop of Buenos Aires, had taken charge of a church whose members believe him to be the final authority on all holy matters. But interestingly enough, some in the secular world are beginning to think the same.

We are used to people like the Dalai Lama, who represent a very personal and non-invasive form of religion, being accorded praise from within and without their congregations. In recent years  however, the Catholic establishment has been almost exclusively defined by its approach to matters of sexual morality (homosexuality, contraception, etc.), and its incompetent reaction to the child abuse scandal. Pope Benedict’s resignation, the first by a pontiff in over half a millennium, was of course spurred by the PR-storm the Vatican found itself in. And when Catholic laypeople were themselves leaving in droves, any talk of projecting a positive image onto the wider world would have been laughable.

With their immense power, popes have a unique ability to force change, and this is what is crucial in an institution that needs radical quantities of it. With the Catholic Church swimming in accusations of immoral and illegal activity, the worst possible kind to boot, Francis can be held to a demanding standard. The Pope’s ability to affect change is not limited to the Catholic sphere either. When you’re at the helm of a collective embodying 1 out of every 7 people alive, you are responsible for much much more.

Earth’s most influential people have always appeared to hold the Pope in high esteem, but even here there now seems to be a change in the wind. Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to the Vatican last week was her first abroad since 2011’s to Australia, and like Obama when he was personally given a copy of Francis’ work Evangelii Gaudium (the Joy of the Gospels) a week earlier, the Queen and Pope exchanged gifts. The Pope has described Evangelii Gaudium as a statement of his intentions for the Vatican, and Obama said, “I actually will probably read this when I’m in the Oval Office, when I am deeply frustrated, and I am sure it will give me strength.”

One of the central themes of Evangelii Gaudium (arguably as it was in the gospel), is inequality and poverty. Such themes could give the Democrats, particularly the more left-of-centre economic populists, the resolve they need in the upcoming battle with the deeply entrenched plutocratic political class. It is this ability to inspire Davids rather than Goliaths that characterises the ‘Francis factor’.

There are fairly few doctrinal differences pre and post-Francis, but it is the change in focus that counts, as a recent theological conference at Jesuit-run Georgetown University noted. Rather than pick on the already embattled women and sexually oriented minorities of our time, Francis has chosen largely to fight against those who create rather than experience suffering and oppression. By saying “who am I to judge” when asked about homosexuals who want to practice Catholicism, asking the world at Lampedusa to remember “how to cry” for refugees, kissing the feet of female Muslim prisoners, or assuring atheists their good deeds may earn them a place in heaven, Francis truly sets wonderful precedents that the liberals in the church can at last look forward to building on.

Francis’ ability to also pinpoint institutional rather than isolated injustices, like the dog-eat-dog social Darwinism of unfettered capitalism, has earned him the scorn of neoliberalism’s most vociferous defenders. Rush Limbaugh described the Pope as a “Marxist,” and his criticism isn’t entirely misplaced, as one of the Catholic Church’s greatest traditions is the critique of dominant economic systems’ excesses. Unapologetically, the Pope described the collapsed garment factory in Bangladesh, and the economies complicit in it, as representing “slave labour.” On a separate occasion Francis described capitalism as idolatry and tyranny.

Francis’ simple attire, which he said like his namesake Francis of Assisi, is in itself a direct challenge to the vanity of the day. Other senior figures in the Church have already started imitating him. On top of it all, the Pope drives a Ford Focus, often cooks his own meals, and immediately chose to avoid living in the luxurious Papal palace. Francis has taken more combative action as well; by firing Germany’s Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, or “Bishop Bling,” he is reminding everybody of the distaste for ostentatious wealth that a life in the developing world can instil.

Francis is far from perfect–he has only just named the people who will sit on the child sex abuse commission and has yet to come even close to supporting women’s ordination (though he did advocate the creation of a ‘women’s theology’). Not to mention that, while the Pope is making advances like reforming its bank, the Vatican still sits on mind-blowing quantities of hoarded wealth. And, Bergoglio entered the Papacy accused of not doing enough to fight Argentina’s fascist regime during the dark days.

Ultimately though, Francis doesn’t have to reach perfection if he is simply capable of being a force for more good than evil in world, or if one can say he is a huge improvement over his predecessor. To one of these things observers can almost certainly say yes, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say both.

When the Pope blesses a statue of a homeless Jesus near St. Peter’s Square, falls to his knees and confesses his sins to an ordinary priest, or the theologian, George Mannion, at Georgetown’s conference describes Evangelii Gaudium as “ecclesiological dynamite” — clearly something is amiss. Mannion continues to say, “there is no sugar-coating” it, the exhortation has “little substantive continuity with the ecclesial agenda” of Francis’ predecessors.

If what Mannion says appears to portray radicalism, add to this the Pope’s words that a true church should be poor and for the poor, or the Vatican’s creation of a Council of 8 Cardinal Advisers (C8) which Francis has filled with other collegial members of the Catholic hierarchy. Professor Alberto Melloni, an ecclesiastical historian, has described the decentralisation of power embodied by the C8 secretariat as the “most important step in the history of the church for the past 10 centuries”. And it’s worth reminding oneself, a millennium ago, the Catholic Church was only a third of the way through its life. If in just a year the 266^th, but 9^th youngest Pope can transform a thousand years of tradition, imagine what else he may leave behind.

Co-writer: Peter Hardy