One Nation Labour: One Europe? (Basildon 2014)

I was pounding the pavements all day yesterday in Basildon (South East Pitsea Ward) and attended the count at the local Towngate Theatre for the early results. As the first successes of UKIP were announced across the tinny tannoy the room froze. We were aware of the other results in Essex; the sheer size of the UKIP votes stunned and shocked us in equal measure. Suddenly there was an awareness that politics in Britain had changed: huddles of panicked whispering began to discuss the new brand of fascism that had just come of age in Britain!

Is this an over-reaction? Not really. If fascism is defined as a political movement that: appeals to the emotions rather than the intellect; defines itself according to idealised romantic images of national identity; and feeds on the absence of truth and vacuums in power, then UKIP is as much a fascist party as Berlusconi's Forza Italia. Forza Italia held power in Italy over the last couple of decades.

Why are UKIP so successful? It is probably an over-exagerration to describe UKIP as a 'political force' in Britain. So far they have made useful progress in terms of representing the protest vote - but this is a fairly flimsy foundation upon which to build a career. The reality is that protest is (and always has been) a political force in Britain. Protest has mutated through various forms of extremism in the past. But no other party is making politcal capital out of our need to protest today. The protest vote is a curious animal. In theory it is all about cultural and economic anxiety and a collective surge towards a unifying identity in the face of a variety of (real or perceived) threats to our (national?) security.

How can the UKIP threat be challenged? Inside the hall last night it began to occur to me that Labour is weak on narrative. By narrative I mean the one thing people would say is the main reason they are voting for any political party. And a narrative that is situated: in this case on the door-step not the TV/Radio studio. The UKIP narrative is about Immigration and/or Europe. The Conservative narrative is about Capitalism. The LibDem narrative has virtually collpased now but was about Localism. The Labour narrative set out to be 'One Nation-ism'....but tell me now, how much more have we learnt about what this means?

What is the Labour narrative? Milliband needs to revisit the 'One Nation' agenda in response to the strong support for UKIP on Immigration and the Conservatives on Capitalism. If 'One Nation' means more Equality, then that can be interpretted as more equality for Britain among our European allies, a more equal balance between immigration and emigration within the borders of Europe, and more equal access to the profits of capitalism across the UK. Equality also means a rainbow alliance that has now become part of our national identity - if changes to the constitution of the monarchy and the Church of England are to be believed.

So the voice of Basildon, Essex and the UK has spoken: now the leaders of the country must listen. Milliband is a new type of inoffensive politician who appeals to young voters, has a clean media image and is fairly user freindly. But he is not good at the cloak and dagger, violently aggressive, coup de'tat type of politican that the older generation respect and admire. Rather than question the Labour leadership it is time for the leader to step up to the challenge. Milliband must now organise a re-shuffle to clearly define the 'One Nation' image for the party and the country; create a policy narrative around the central idea of Equality; and lead the party to success at the next general election.  

News From Nowhere

I am meeting a number of people who are complaining of common themes: socio-economic stressors putting pressure on peoples’ socio-emotional relationships that expose deeper conflicts in their socio-cultural and psycho-sexual identities. This is a picture of mental health that looks at the spread of illness through bio-psycho-socio-economic fissures buried deep below the surface of the structural relations of capitalism; this makes it a public health problem and an anthropological phenomenon that can best be studied using an epidemiologic methodology. However, this bizarre triangulation of scientific evidence-bases is not something that services are currently equipped to monitor let alone analyse.  

As central government’s austerity agenda begins to cascade down through local communities, a tsunami of economic stressors is swelling up and threatening to drown us all in a nightmare of gigantic proportions. The only thing now that is standing between us, our local health and social care services and complete psychological Armageddon is the resilience of our individual interpersonal relationships. In a post-modern, virtual-reality, multi-cultural, local/global community that is exposed to the daily fluctuations of almost every market, the fragmentations of the psyche are never far from the surface of our social-emotional and economic relationships.         

Guerrilla Rhetoric

1. Discourse is information that has been communicated.
2. Discourse is not the narrative but it is the material manifestation of the narrative.
3. Discourse is the collection of artefacts and material products produced by the intellectual and emotional labour of the communicators.
4. Discourse has dialectic properties: it is both the manifestation of the social consensus and the conflict within/between linguistic cultures - without a conflict in positions the need for communication does not arise.
5. Social conflicts within a broader consensus create internal contradictions that are recognised and exploited or buried within/concealed by the Master Narrative.
6. Internal contradictions can be located as logical anomalies within a discourse; but they are often hidden beneath habitual assumptions.
7. Internal contradictions within a social, political, clinical, educational, economic or historical discourse violates the perfect consensus:
8. Internal contradictions within a social, political, clinical, educational, economic or historical discourse violates the truth of, and trust in, the narrative.
9. Internal contradictions within a social, political, clinical, educational, economic or historical discourse create psycho-pathogenic ‘double-binds’ (RD Laing).
10. Internal contradictions cause fault lines within the consensus that can become exposed when the consensus/linguistic culture comes under stress.

1. Narrative is the sequencing of otherwise unrelated events; our brains do this automatically, the results are not always logical, as in dream sleep.
2. Autobiographical Narrative is the construction, integration and normalisation of emotional material/events in the construction of a Self-Identity
3. The more internally logically coherent and the more congruent it is with external events, the more valid the Autobiographical Narrative becomes.
4. The more valid an Autobiographical Narrative is the more able it is to minimise the damaging/destabilising effect of behavioural impulses and their cognitive associations in response to the environment through the prediction of otherwise unexpected events.
5. The more valid an Autobiographical Narrative is the more quickly the information from/ about the environment will be processed.
6. Autobiographical Narrative links the biological, psychological and sociological spheres; but the lexicon changes between each of these logical levels and between the different scientific/ linguistic cultures.
7. Autobiographical Narrative is grown organically from the memories embedded within neurons and their structural (material) relationships with the means of production.
8. The Autobiographical Narrative may be logically consistent or inconsistent with the Master Narrative at different points in its account of the organism's history.
9. The Master Narrative is the most efficient and effective Narrative according to the greatest number of Authors (e.g. Adam Smith, Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins) as determined by a process of natural selection (Charles Darwin).
10. The Master Narrative, like the American Monomyth, generalises over populations and geo-political spaces, this results in what we call 'culture'.
11. All Narratives necessarily contain generalisations (viz. heuristic expectations) like 'the Hero will always overcome the obstacle'; these generalisations are worked out within an infinite number of sub-narratives, or sub-plots.
12. Guerrilla Rhetoric attacks the Master Narrative by identifying specific sub-plots that contradict the conclusions of the Master Narrative, specific examples that defeat the logic of the generalisation.
    

Currency of Self: A Theory of Human Capital

Harmony Squared: A Response to Prince Charles

A Plan for Public Health and Wellbeing

A Brief Manifesto for 21st Century Healthcare; in response to a Labour Party consultation:

Knowledge and Skills

Discrimination between professional classifications should be dismantled and human resources more tailored to front-line needs. This can be achieved by a modular life-long training programme open to any health care professionals (HCPs) who have passed the pre-requisite modules. Thus, clinical skills will be learnt as required, and clinicians will be employed on the basis of a skills portfolio. Different skills may be seen as more or less valuable by staff or service users, and this will determine the pricing structure of the jobs market and job mobility.

Risk Management

We should end the knee-jerk responses to medical and forensic risks and replace them with a system where the money spent is proportional to the risks being reduced. In public health, we know what increases the risks of cardiovascular, cardiopulmonary, neuromuscular and psychiatric illnesses and their relapse. In mental health and probation services we know what increases and decreases the risks of many common addictions and offences. We can calculate a risk rating for every person in the country based on their individual risk profile and pay service providers accordingly.    

Service Delivery

We need to update the primary care delivery model to tackle the risks where-ever they are found in the community. The GP practice surgery model is no longer fit for purpose. HCP consultations should be mobile and accessible to all; appointment booking and initial triage should be conducted online, where possible, with assistive technology; care-coordinators should commission services based on accurate risk assessments and the known return-on-investment. Virtual wards and other home treatment models should expand with greater empowerment of patients, reductions in the contamination risks of large hospitals, and proven gains in health and wellbeing outcomes. 

New Kapital

Some people say that State-run economics died when the Berlin Wall fell; but since then the free-market of Capitalism has also collapsed - only to be saved by state intervention. Few people know where to turn next; but I think we need to work out what was right and wrong about the old ideologies before we can move forward. 

I remember some US commentary on Das Kapital talking about Marx’s theory of value being redundant in the face of the supply and demand calculus of capitalism. However, as a humanist I have always understood the conversion of a commodity’s intrinsic value to a (need determined) use-value and a (market determined) exchange-value as being the basis for working class alienation from, and exploitation as, a means of production.

I had thought that knowledge workers, in the knowledge economy, carrying with them mental capital as the new ‘means of production’, riding the wave of an information revolution, protected by their new intellectual property rights, would reconcile this alienation. I envisaged some sort of natural law forcing all forms of communication to be maximally efficient and economic – ‘why speak if you having nothing to say?’ sort of thing – so that any exchange of information had to be useful as well as possible, within the means of the individual's resources.

However, reviewing all the hyperbole that is ‘exchanged’ per second by the global media, the national politicians, the markets and the local fishwives, it seems there is an overproduction of ‘information’, very little of which, in any way, could pass as useful ‘knowledge’. It is grandstanding, persuading, entertaining, sensationalising, dramatising and catastrophising but it is not useful. This daily diet is similar in nutritional content to Coca-Cola and chocolate in comparison to vegetable soup and bread.

But now it occurs to me that the Big Society is indeed a call for a return to the intrinsic worth of people and things; a Tory recognition that the extrinsic price of a commodity (the worker) at auction is indeed a poor estimate of its (his/her) real worth. In a way I'm glad about this because I really do believe that there can be no exchange-value without use-value, no extrinsic value without intrinsic value.

I also believe, therefore, that all production begins with the (free-) exchange of commodities according to their use-value, and not vice versa as the markets/Tories would have us believe. Each party to the exchange then automatically has some use-value to the other party. In a stalled negotiation I call this maneouvre 'give some, get some, got some'. This free-exchange, I believe, is the basis of trust, contract, and the investment of otherwise competing self-interests towards mutually desirable goals. What I am saying is that use-value binds an in-group together in a very organic communal and humanistic way. Markets cannot do this, infact markets have a habit of reversing this. When you are at the bottom of the pile you are more likely to think along the lines of: 'got nothing, give nothing, get nothing'.  

Exchange values, on the other hand, occur when one group needs to exchange its products in return for another group’s products. At this point, the group not the indiivdual becomes party to the exchange; the individual psychologies merge into a collective psychology; the members of the group value themselves in terms of the value they attribute to their group in comparison to other groups; not the value of the individual to the other group members as individuals. Often there is a delay in the exchange of products and so tokens of value are exchanged instead. Tokens represent groups in the same idealised abstract forms as 'in-group identities', 'branding' or 'stereotypes' do. The risks and dangers (of lying, cheating, stealing, starvation and warfare) increase when individual accountability is subsumed within a superordinate, abstract and idealised collective identity. In short the ideological politics of exchange are very different to the raw economics of utility.

Individuals do compete and hierarchies do form internally to an in-group, but usually only in relation to the use-value of the individuals involved, not in relation to their ‘exchange value’. The leader of an in-group has little or no value to the members of an out-group; otherwise they would not be so ‘out’, more ‘in’ as it were. However, when out groups compete it is very definitely on the basis of exchange values - the out group becomes replaceable, surplus to requirments, expendable. I believe this is the basis upon which Marx and Mao envisaged class divisions could arise and class struggles would take place. But I think we recognise now that our respect for any out-group depends more upon our psychological classifications of our own in-group membership, and political self-interests, than upon our respective histories of material wealth or deprivation.

At this point in history, I believe, it is probably wiser to caution that our psychological classification systems are becoming more porous, chaotic and malleable, under the prevailing conditions of information overload and global connectivity; Group membership and group leadership are likewise becoming amorphous, dynamic propositions, not stable traits or states.

However, if we assume for instance that the group we are interested in is defined by the geographical borders of the UK; the group members are its inhabitants (of a certain duration, qualification, belief, criterion, etc.?) called UK citizens; and that the group leader is the UK PM/Queen, we might suppose that the use-value of all the members could be defined by the average productivity of each and every citizen (GDP). This statistic puts the UK in the top ten economies of the world.

But what then do we make of the UK trade deficit? The UK has the third worst trade deficit in the world. We are some of the most highly efficient producers, but apparently have to consume products from almost everywhere else in the world. Surely this demonstrates how alienated we have become from our own productions.

So what do we produce? We are told that a few of us produce technological know-how, most of us produce consumer and financial services, and a few of us produce manufactured goods. Think about that for a while. Does that mean that we are the cause of the information overload that is engulfing us? The sales, commercials, fashions, fantasies? Do we rationalise all our emotional attachments, sell them to the highest bidder, and in so doing cut ourselves off from everything that we actually need? Watch X-Factor, think Beckham, play Wii? How do we price this production and consumption of information goods and services? How do we price real knowledge? How do we price our own mental health and wellbeing? Are we even aware of it? Or do we stuff our faces and fall over drunk in order to ignore our emotional needs for community?

When I think about the credit crunch, and I start to think in terms of community health and well being; when I look at income inequality rising year after year only stunted by the occasional recession; when I think about ‘market confidence’, and trust, and ethics; I start to think maybe Marx was right, alienation is killing us and making us wealthy at the same time. So I am starting to believe that no-one in the UK has more of a need of all this information and knowledge, this non-nutritional entertainment, these goods from all over the rest of the world, than the richest people, who just get richer by the day.

Im starting to feel sorry for them. They have more mental health needs than any of us, because they are the most alienated from themselves, the most alienated from the realities of everyday life, the most alienated from us the workers, and the most alienated from the rest of the world; But they are intent on sucking us all into their vacuum of greed and hopeless, helpless, despair, like tyrannical spoilt children who have all the power and money in the world but no meaning at all to their sad little lives.

And when I think like that the dialectic replies - the only way to reverse this alienation is to start saying and seeing me, I, and we, in place of they, that, and them? Am I the rich? Am I the vacuum? What can I do to make this right? So the popular answer is the 'Big Society', which nobody understands but everyone 'gets'.

It’s a strange world – it really is.