In June 2016 Britain voted to leave the European Union (EU), a decision which astonished a commentariat accustomed to the populace falling into line at the last minute. Advising that it was best to Remain were the leaders of the four main parties and the received wisdom from business, academia and the unions. Urging Leave was a xenophobic racist party which wants to strip the few remaining protections guarding the rights of workers.

Leave won because the working class in the industrial cities of England backed the neo-fascists and the opportunist but seemingly popular Tory, Boris Johnson. How come? Theories abound, but one reason was the very fact that the experts were agreed that quitting was a bad idea. If the elites and the politicians want something, goes the post-postmodern folk wisdom, do the opposite. Had the commentariat read the two books under review, they might have caught up with the mood and not have been so surprised.

Hsiao-Hung Pai and Owen Jones wrote before the referendum was called, so it’s not mentioned in either account, but both Pai and Jones are interested in the English working class, a demographic that, post-referendum, the chattering classes are scrambling to understand. Why was there a strong pattern of Londoners, and richer, professional and younger voters Remaining, while the poorer, the older, and provincial England wanted out.

Jones would have anticipated the split, recognising it as the culmination of a trend. When they were university students in the UK he and a few classmates were granted an interview with a “Tory grandee” on the condition that he remained anonymous. The politician thus allowed himself to admit what would never go on the public record: “What you have to realise about the Conservative Party is that it is a coalition of privileged interests. Its main purpose is to defend that privilege. And the way it wins elections is by giving just enough to just enough other people”. 

Class Analysis The Key

If like-minded people organise themselves into a single entity, it stands to reason that they have a reason for doing so, and there are a few characteristics of British Conservative MPs that are well-known. They have always tended to be richer than the average. Many have been to private schools. As their name implies, they don’t want to rock the boat. The name for this interest is that it is a class interest. Tories exist to protect privilege.

Given the evidence, so much should be axiomatic, yet it is generally held that “we’re all middle class” now. For Tories there’s an obvious tactical motive. If everyone is middle class, if we’re all average, or could be, then there’s no room for a class analysis. So if you haven’t got much and you’re critical of elite policy (for any reason) you are said to be displaying the “politics of envy”. If we all have the chance to enrich ourselves – the assumed motive of human activity – but the Tories have managed it better than the rest, it must be that they’re good with money. We’ll let them manage the economy.

Jones takes an opposite view. To him class is the essential concept for looking at the way society is structured. Class divisions, he thinks, are embedded in Britain, and they’re widening, yet it’s sometimes supposed that because there are no longer whole villages trooping to work in a mine that the “working class”, as it was known for generations, no longer exists.

Jones challenges the common assumption that class is just about money or status, a subjective thing. He defines workers as those who have to sustain themselves by selling their labour and have no autonomy in their jobs. People still work for the man and four of every ten males are still manual workers. The difference mainly is that big industries like steel, mining and shipbuilding have been replaced by supermarkets and call centres.

But while modern jobs might be cleaner, they don’t pay as well. And the old jobs were permanent, allowing a sense of community. Bosses now seek to have a “flexiforce” of contingent employees, usually with no certainty about the future and little union protection. It’s been called the precariat. The chavs of Jones’ title are the white working class of England. Chav is apparently an insulting term of uncertain origin.

Undeserving White Trash

If you’re a chav you’re “poor white trash”, and Jones, whose sub-title is “The Demonization Of The Working Class’, thinks you’ve been trashed unfairly. In a country racked by class feeling for centuries it’s not surprising to read of an open contempt of Conservatives for working people, but Jones shows that insulting the chavs is something of a national sport, not least among “liberal bigots” who see themselves as progressive. But four of every ten men are potential chavs.

Victorian Britain talked of the poor as being “deserving” or not, and provided workhouses for those who needed to be brought into line. Neo-liberal Britain talks of the poor as being “aspirational” or not, the idea being that if you try hard enough you can escape into the virtuous middle classes. Being poor is a moral failure, a sign of an inadequate character.  Yes, this is the essence of Thatcherism, the ideology of the woman who declared that there was “no such thing” as society.

There are only individuals and families – and therefore there is no need for the State to intervene to mitigate the ravages of “market” economics.  “New Labour” under Tony Blair agreed, and the chavs were left with no influential friends. The new morality was a call to consume. The aspirational were supposed to spend, but at a time when the Thatcher government’s main idea was to tell the country that there was an enemy within, coal miners.

The tactic, which proved successful, was to pick a fight with the miners, who had a strong trade union, to then rely on importing coal, and to export manufacturing to the Third World. Beat the miners and you can beat down wages. The result was that at a time when millions of people were being encouraged to buy, buy, buy, they had less money, money, money to do so. Between 2000 and 2007, on the eve of the great collapse, private debt increased by ₤55 billion. As the UK skewed to a FIRE* economy and the present age of inequality, finance was prospering at the expense of the middle and poorer classes.  * FIRE= finance, insurance, real estate. Ed.

Chavs are the sons and grandsons – female chavs are largely invisible - of the former working class, the generations growing up after the jobs have disappeared and village social groupings from the age of industry have disbanded. The opinion elites are agreed: as everyone’s now middle class, the chavs’ failure to aspire means that they’ve opted out. As fellow ideologue John Key sees it, they’re losers.

Jones discusses the assessment of Neil Kinnock, a former leader of the British Labour Party. Is there a class war? No, Kinnock answered, there isn’t, because “we signed the peace treaty without realising (the Tories) hadn’t”. This is instructive in that Jones shows that it was during Kinnock’s tenure that the drift from working class values began. Either Kinnock and his mates didn’t know what they were getting into, when they abandoned their base supporters (empowering the burgeoning Thatcherites), or they did know. Was the British Labour Party incompetent or treacherous?

The same question can be asked of the New Zealand Labour Party – and the wider Left – where the trend from a class analysis has been even more pronounced. In both NZ and the UK it’s common to hear dismissive talk of “poor white trash”. They’re our chavs.This Americanism came about because in a slave-owning ethos it was necessary to point out that it wasn’t only people of African descent who existed in degraded, hopeless poverty.

The phrase implied surprise that a person of European origins would be so situated. The connotation is now very different: poor white trash is the one demographic which polite society finds contemptible. Try to imagine another ethnic group being so described. Jones repeats a notorious anecdote about Gordon Brown, the Labour Prime Minister who succeeded Tony Blair. Electioneering in 2010, Brown stopped at a likely photo op, a (white) woman who worked with disabled children for a council. Nothing could be more Labour.

Sure enough, the woman raised core Labour issues, telling Brown of her hopes for a greater emphasis on education and health. She hoped the vulnerable would be looked after. Back in his car, with the mike, unnoticed, still on, Brown was furious: “That was a disaster. Should never have put me with that woman….”. What did she say? “Ugh. Everything – she’s just the sort of bigoted woman, said she used to be Labour. It’s just ridiculous”. Her sin apparently was to have raised mild concerns about the level of immigration.

This was the same Gordon Brown who had used his speech at the 2007 party conference to call for “British jobs for British workers”, a slogan that Jones notes was then borrowed by the British National Party, fascists who were nothing but bigoted. It was a policy that Brown – and Blair and Cameron – have directly and explicitly undermined, “flexible” labour, recruited globally from anywhere cheap, anywhere poor and powerless, being the aim of their “free trading”.

The daily news doesn’t let us forget the inevitable consequence of the social distintegrations. There are lots of angry white people. Hsiao-Hung Pai’s title gets to the point. She wants to look closely at marginalised men in an English town with a history of racism and violence. Luton’s story of decline is typical of the rust belt. In 1905 Vauxhall started making cars there, drawing in immigrants, with the industry peaking in the 1950s. Since then, the steady jobs have gone, but the children of the immigrants remain. 

Pai spent a lot of time with locals, gaining their confidence, listening. As an immigrant herself, from Taiwan, Pai can’t be accused of being blinded by the usual tribal prejudices, and she’s given the men of Luton (where 56% were for Brexit) the rare courtesy of her patience. There everyone’s a migrant. Everyone’s potentially displaced, hoping to belong. The angry white people are the children of Ireland and of Britons who had moved from Scotland and rural England. They thought they’d found their place. The non-whites are frequently Muslims, and this of course provides fertile grounds for trouble.

Classic Divide & Rule

Pai’s theme is suggested in a foreword from Benjamin Zephaniah, a poet: “I have always thought that these poor white people and these poor black people should unite and confront the people who oversee all of our miseries. It is classic divide and rule. The biggest fear of all the mainstream politicians is that we all reach a point where we understand how much we have in common and, instead of turning in on ourselves, we turn on them”.

The men who feature in Pai’s account are connected to white supremacist groups, yet race is not their primary motivation. The need is for identity, for a sense of belonging. It was loyalty to the town that mattered, and before the ethnic lines were strictly drawn, black and white felt they were in the same team. That team was the Luton soccer team, whose honour had to be protected from the likes of London fans.

Darren explains that the football fights on Saturday afternoons made “you feel like you’re taking control of your own community…. I was drawn to it, even though I feared getting beaten up. It was like we all suffered together… You could smell burger, fear, urine, beer, sweat, all in the air. Strangely, I felt alive”. It started as “black and white together”, but after the National Front (NF) muscled in, “you had to pick sides”, and the NF, Nazis, defined the sides along racial lines.

In the meantime, with (other) identity politics privileged, all is tribal, and, as Jones suggests, “a racialised ‘white’ working class is not seen as having a place in this classless multiculturalism. There are, after all, no prominent, respected champions for the working class in the way that there are for many minority groups. The interests of ethnic minority people end up being ignored too, because the focus is on building up the ethnic minority middle class by ensuring diversity within the leading professions”.

A writer for the English Defence League – the version of poor white fascism prominent in Pai’s Luton – was explicit. The white working class was a distinct ethnic group with its own culture. That culture became chav culture. Perverted and manipulated by the NF and other racists, soccer hooliganism spread, especially as the effects of Thatcher’s policies took hold. In 1985 English fans were the cause of two mass deaths at European games as first fire and then riots broke out in the stands.

Thus a London Times editorial was able to declare that soccer had become “a slum sport played in slum stadiums, increasingly watched by slum people, who deter decent folk from turning up”. The Times is a Rupert Murdoch vehicle, ideologically committed to the class war, but liberals also joined the chav bashing. One typical offering remarked that “tax-paying immigrants past and present keep indolent British scroungers on their couches drinking beer and watching TV”.

As we know only too well, much of the white anger is directed at Muslims, who are accused of taking the jobs. It’s an all too familiar complaint. Pai shows that the charge is misdirected. It’s neo-liberal globalisation that has taken the work away, but with no-one to champion the cause of the working class (whose interest is colour blind) the confused and the alienated get tribal. While Pai is fair to the angry white men, who lack the tools to present themselves favourably, the effort shows. She’d never call them chavs, but that’s what they are.

But to her non-white and Islamic interviewees, all of whom come across as tolerant and moderate, she’s more than fair. From her account you’d conclude that in Luton all the Muslims were secular humanists and none shared the fundamentalist delusions that regularly explode into the headlines. It’s a typical habit with liberal intellectuals to see no fault with the targets of white bigotry.

The Angry White People Have A Point

This habit might be why, in these pages at least, Pai does not allow herself to reflect that the EU can be seen as a rich man’s club which legislated a common market knowing that mobile labour is cheap labour. The angry white people have a point. And to accuse them of racism, impure and simple, as was the facile response to the referendum within the commentariat, is worse than condescending. It means that the experts still don’t get it.

The angry people of England were not just white. Second and third generation coloured people often voted to Leave, and their animosity was as likely as not directed at white people from Eastern Europe. It’s the economy, stupid. Forty years ago, when the UK joined what was then called the European Economic Community (EEC, also known as the Common Market), it could be seen as the merely administrative convenience it has always claimed to be.

But in the meantime, managerialism and globalisation have eroded sovereign democracies so that those “faceless bureaucrats” in Brussels take the hit. The faceless bureaucrats are sideshow alley clowns, the easiest of targets. That way the real villain, monopoly corporate power, escapes notice. What we call globalisation is not the rulings of the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels – it’s the expression of capitalist power.

We shouldn’t forget that the real reason the faceless bureaucrats are unpopular with the corporate elites is that they are the main thing holding off a dictatorship of big money. Hence all the insults and jokes. It was not the original EEC or EU so much as Thatcher and Blair who crafted British woes. They then compounded urban decline by selling council houses. In a spiralling trend of inequality, the centre of cities like London became enclaves for the rich (Remaining) as racially defined ghettos sprouted in Paris-type edge cities (Leaving).

Fittingly perhaps, if unfortunately, New Labour borrowed from French to call its divisive policies “embourgeoisement”. All middle class now? Not really, not when society is being hollowed out, with more billionaires and more jobless and homeless and ever fewer earning wages near the country’s median. Jones provides an interesting measure. In 1973 (marking the end of the post-war economy, when, for a generation, inequality and poverty had actually fallen) nearly 2/3 of UK wealth was in the form of wages.

Bankers Destroy Social Value, Workers Create It

Now that portion is just over half. This is very much a reduction in the common wealth, the lost share having been appropriated by the 1%. And FIRE profiteers aren’t spending a few extra quid at the local store. They’re stowing their takings in tax havens in Panama and New Zealand, robbing the communities which have to clean up after them. One study reports that for every ₤1 “earned” by bankers, ₤7 of social value is destroyed; and for every ₤1 “earned” by advertisers, ₤11 of social value is destroyed.

On the other hand, jobs undertaken by the working class (regardless of its members’ ethnicity or religion or gender) create social value. Hospital cleaners create ₤10 for every ₤1 earned. Waste recycling creates ₤12 for every ₤1. You won’t read about this in the financial section. It isn’t measured as part of gross domestic product (GDP) – and the share market sees safety and cleanliness as a cost - so it isn’t considered.

The chav-bashing classes tell us that social democratic parties can get themselves elected only by abandoning their principles and “moving to the centre”, where they offer no alternative to current malfeasance. Jones disputes this hopeless logic, pointing out that when it was ousted by David Cameron’s outfit, New Labour shed five million votes while the Tories gained just one million. Labour lost working class votes as it moved to the Right and to identity politics.

Why vote for those who probably think you’re nothing but a chav? The one common theme from both Jones and Pai is the reaction they find against Labour and towards apathy. In all the so-called Anglo-Saxon economies, we see a rejection of political inclusion in favour of a cheap cynicism, interrupted by sporadic lurches to the paranoid and the demagogic, to the likes of the “independent” nationalists in the UK - and in the US to the appalling Trump.

This suits the elites just fine. In NZ, where the ruling consensus echoes that of UK Tory/New Labour, it’s said that John Key is a pragmatist who straddles that “centre”. He’s the nice guy who assures us that there’s no need to pay attention to what’s going on. He’ll take care of us. No, he’s like the Tory grandee who understands that the way to keep his class in power is by giving just enough to just enough other people to ensure privilege is not challenged. When the “nationalists” don’t deliver and the chavs feel betrayed yet again, where will there be a place to go? As bad as it is now, it’s hard to see how it won’t get a whole lot worse.

WEALTH AND NEW ZEALAND
by Max Rashbrooke, BWB Texts, Wellington, 2015

Max Rashbrooke has previously contributed to an excellent analysis of inequality in New Zealand. Here he concentrates on the distribution of wealth, which is not quite the same thing. Being unequal in itself begs the question of whether it matters. People could all be rich or athletic, or whatever, to varying degrees, but there’s no doubt about what it means to have no wealth. Having no wealth is not good.

When people discuss inequality, as they are doing these days, they tend to talk of income and money. Rashbrooke says that to have lots of money is to be rich. To be wealthy is to have assets that can be traded. The type isn’t important. What matters is the amount the assets would sell for. It’s possible for a rich person to be fired or to lose it all gambling and quickly become poor, and it’s possible for a person to live in a mansion and thereby be asset rich or wealthy but have no ready cash.

If you have both riches and wealth then you can be said to be affluent. When people say they want to be rich, or secure, they’re expressing the wish to be affluent. As Kim, from Australian TV’s Kath And Kim puts it, “I wish I was effluent”. Total net wealth (the amount that all assets are valued at minus debts) in New Zealand is $1.3 trillion. Total personal wealth through private persons owning valuables is $800 billion.

Rashbrooke considers other forms of wealth such as what we call human or social or cultural capital, suggesting that the affluent are advantaged in enjoying the benefits of, for example, a good education or access to recreation. He does not include “natural wealth” as he thinks it impossible to quantify environmental benefits. Besides, the big outdoors in NZ is (still) accessible to all.

(See the reviews above of UK politics for more on human capital. I reviewed “Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis”, edited by Max Rashbrooke, in Watchdog 133, August 2013, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/33/19.html. It has the same examples. For a look at natural capital see my review of “Six Capitals” by Jane Gleeson-White in Watchdog 138, April 2015, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/38/07.html). Thanks to the work of Bill Rosenberg and Geoff Bertram, from whom Rashbrooke provides otherwise unavailable data, we know that the amount of wealth within NZ that is foreign owned is somewhere between 13% and 27% of the total, while a very few, very rich New Zealanders have $180 billion overseas.

That’s equal to 75% of gross domestic product (GDP). There are repeated references to the work of Thomas Piketty*, who has provided a masterful account of wealth at a global level.  *For a detailed analysis of Piketty’s book “Capital In The Twenty First Century”, see Bryan Gould’s article “Capitalism Produces Greater & Greater Inequality: Ever Increasing Concentration Of Wealth Among Owners Of Capital”, in Watchdog 136, September 2014, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/36/06.html.  Ed.

The Top 10%

Like comparable economies in the rich world, the top 10% of asset owners in NZ have 50% of all wealth. Or they did, when Rashbrooke published. The most recent numbers, from June 2015, show that the top 10% now own 59% of all wealth, with the top 1% owning 22% (Press, 29/6/16, http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/81539857/the-top-tenth-of-kiwis-hold-well-over-half-of-new-zealands-wealth). The bottom 50%, struggling with mortgages and layoffs, has almost 0%.

It’s this type of inequality that matters. Repeating some of the ground covered in “Inequality In New Zealand”, Rashbrooke makes a convincing argument that NZ’s wide divergences in wealth are unfair and inefficient, and, thanks to successive Governments’ policies, they’re also getting wider. This is because the 1991 Employment Contracts Act reduced the influence of trade unions. From representing 70% of workers in the 1980s, unions now act for just 20%. Weaker bargaining abilities have been an enabler of the wealthy to get wealthier.

The best estimate is that 40% of the rise in the wealth of the most affluent can be attributed to weaker unions. Salaried workers have lost around $19 billion a year or $10,000 per wage earner per year to the owners of capital. Another wealth enhancer was the 1991 Ruthanasian Mother of all Budgets, which slashed welfare. At 1/3 of the average wage the NZ unemployment benefit ranks 32nd among 34 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

This compares with The Netherlands, where the benefit is 70% of the average. Because benefits are not tied to the average wage, but to inflation, which has lagged, the resulting inequality keeps widening. A third weapon against the poor has been taxation policy. In NZ those who enjoy more than 1.6 times the average wage pay just 22% in taxes. This compares to the 32-40% demanded in Australia, Canada, Ireland, the UK (where “austerity” fuelled Brexit) and the US, all jurisdictions which themselves favour big money.

Deregulation

NZ is further unusual in extracting no capital gains or inheritance taxes. Besides hugely benefiting the wealthy this munificence is “also inefficient, since it distorts incentives and encourages over-investment in property”. Tying all together has been deregulation, a euphemism for the process of allowing the wealthy to plunder the nation. Rashbrooke quotes Susan St John, an economist in Auckland, where they know all about property prices:

“Deregulation of the labour market, ostensibly to give workers a chance to get a job, produces the low wages that allow higher profits to flow to the shareholders. The poorly paid need cash support such as Working for Families to sustain demand and so to sustain profits while allowing wages to be low… Likewise, the tax-funded Accommodation Supplement is appropriated in higher rents by landlords. GST on everything is part of the flat tax mantra and allows flatter lower tax rates for top incomes”.

Keeping score? In the name of getting the Government out of people’s lives, rich people are more lightly taxed here than in other similar countries. The diminishing treasury is then raided to further buttress the wealthy. This is in the land which claims to oppose State subsidies.  We can’t expect action from Parliament. Rashbrooke reports that, in 2012, 77 MPs from the four main parties, owned a total of 292 properties. He reminds us that these numbers do not include MPs’ trusts, in which property is almost certainly a dominant investment.

Piketty gave a context for global wealth, detailing how there has been a permanent tendency for those who already have assets to accumulate more at a greater rate than wage and salary earners. This happens even without the ministrations of governments like ours. Perhaps the most important assertion in Piketty is his insistence that the mitigation of the trend to ever greater inequality that we witnessed in the decades roughly between 1945 and 1975 was an aberration. According to Piketty the present reversion to greater inequality means normal (dis)service has resumed.

Certainly the recent history of NZ confirms this – though NZ’s reputation for egalitarian values is based on earlier policies. Rashbrooke reports that in the 1890s, before the Liberal government broke up the squatters’ estates, the richest 1% had 60% of the country’s wealth, and the top 10% had 90% of it, an accumulation equal to that of pre-revolutionary aristocratic France. By the 1930s and the first Labour government the 1% had to make do with a mere 30% and the 10% had only 65% of national wealth. Brian Easton found that in 1956 the 1% had 25%, and in 1966 they had 18%. For 70 years inequality was ameliorated and the economy expanded.

For the last 30 years we’ve been rushing back to the sort of extremes last seen in the 19th Century. A 2001 estimate found that median individual net wealth, the wealth of the person exactly halfway between the richest and the poorest, was $60,000 (median is a more reliable indicator than average as the very rich distort the number misleadingly higher). The wealthiest 10% were said to be worth $195 billion (but Piketty says that the very wealthy always have more than the records show). Meanwhile the poorest 10% were in debt by $3.3 billion

The latest data shows the top 1% as having an average worth of $3.4 million – or (June 2015 update) 18% of national wealth. Imagining all Kiwis at a hundred individuals, Rashbrooke finds that the 67th wealthiest person, who has more than 1/3 of other New Zealanders, had $25,000 of net assets, and the 34th richest person, who is better off than 2/3 of other New Zealanders, has $196,000 in net wealth.

That’s the big picture. Rashbrooke goes on to provide regional and ethnic breakdowns. Some numbers: European New Zealanders, who comprise 71% of the population, command 85% of national wealth. At the other extreme, Pasifika, at 5% of the population, own just 1% of total wealth. Women command 46% of wealth and 51% of population (this statistic must hide huge variations up and down when other measures are factored in). The median wealth of those who most need relief - solo parents – is a minute $15,000. Regionally, the lowest median and also the greatest inequality are in Auckland – where most of the very rich surely live - and Waikato. As you go south, both average wealth and equality of distribution keep increasing.

Rashbrooke has given us invaluable raw data. The numbers he reveals would inform policy in a healthy polity, which would design programmes to foster greater equality, and with it, greater wealth and fewer headlines about violence and crime. They won’t in New Zealand, where in the foreseeable future the gaps will only widen. In the meantime we can reflect that whenever the Government says it can’t afford to clean our rivers or house our families, it’s not true. It’s because they don’t want to. 

THE RACKET
by Matt Kennard, Zed Books, London, 2016

Before he turned into a passionate and very active critic of American imperial power, Matt Kennard was a journalist for the Financial Times (FT). That’s an unusually sharp career change. It’s an advantage in more than one way to have started out within the Establishment: Kennard knows the arguments that are routinely rolled out to divert attention from dissent. It’s evident too, that he knows how to get the attention of the power elites.

Kennard says that the most influential person in his intellectual and political development was Noam Chomsky, and in reading The Racket the influence is obvious. Like Chomsky, Kennard ranges wide in a relentless attack on “the racket” of the rich and connected and their global greed.  He’s been compared to that other tireless campaigner, John Pilger. It was after 9/11 and the declaration of “The War on Terror” that Kennard “had a partial awakening”. He was fully awake soon after when he went to work at the FT. “There I was exposed to the other side of this war-industry coin – the world of high finance, (part of) a global elite’s prolonged war on the peoples of the world with the sole aim of pumping up their bottom line”.

As both Chomsky and Pilger have done, Kennard starts his account in 1945. In common with a general consensus, he dates American supremacy to the end of World War 2, when other big powers had been brought down to size. His view of how the US extended its reach globally is essentially the same as Chomsky’s – and equally trenchant. A frequent tactic was through manipulating poorer countries into debt and dependence.

He traces the current epoch to Ronald Reagan’s 1980s’ Presidency, when the US forced a recession in the course of pushing its agenda of privatisation. Kennard has a keen eye for the necessary falsehoods of power, including the benign but mendacious language – expressions like “development” and “sustainability” - which has become so tediously familiar. What does the latter mean? he asked a mining executive in South Africa. “I wouldn’t actually know how to define it: it’s very ill-defined and got such a broad spectrum,” came the response. “We care about making sure the local community is brought into the process, but I don’t know if that’s the definition”

Well, no, it isn’t. It’s meaningless waffle. The man had never thought about it. In Cape Town or Johannesburg (or places like New Zealand) the company would have hired spin doctors whose whole job is to soothe and evade. Telling lies in the world where the 1% rule is a lucrative career choice. People talk of the need to tell truth to power, but not many would so enjoy doing it as Kennard.

He says that when Henry Kissinger spoke to an “enraptured” audience at Columbia University, he asked the great man – one of the most purely evil public figures of our age – how he slept at night. ‘“Do you think you’re morally superior to me?’ Kissinger asked after a pause. ‘Yes. I do’, I answered confidently, stunned that he might mistake me for a mass murderer. All the while there were groans in the room from fellow students and professors, a startled disbelief that a journalist might actually confront a powerful mobster rather than attempt to fondle his ego with fatuous questions”.

A Tiny Ray Of Hope

The lies take many forms, though one need overrides all. The racketeers have to justify themselves by frightening everyone to think that the bogeyman is kept from our houses only by the projection of military and financial power. Kissinger had persuaded his highly educated audience of this. The original scapegoat, which enabled the racket to operate globally, was the Soviet Union, which had neither the wish nor the ability to threaten the West, but all our opinion elites came to believe it did.

Kennard points out that since the USSR melted away and the Cold War ended, US military capability has actually increased relative to other powers. “In 2001 its military budget was six times more than the next biggest, Russia, and seven times the size of the next three together, France, the UK and Japan”. Unlike the academic Chomsky, whose travel is pretty much restricted to conferences, Kennard goes to trouble spots.

At one stage he was staying with a Palestinian family in East Jerusalem who were being threatened with eviction as part of an Israeli “ethnic cleansing”. Thirty metres away, overlooking him, was the hotel where Tony Blair, “the most willing servant of the American racket in the world, was staying in a luxury suite when he graced Jerusalem with his presence as the racket’s ‘peace envoy’” He didn’t get to meet Blair, but he did get soothing messages of “concern” from staffers.

Kennard’s travels were indeed wide. There are chapters on Turkey and the Kurds, Egypt and North Africa and quite a bit on Latin America, where the US, always wary that democracy might break out, is waging a “war on hope”. He includes several chapters on internal American issues, but nothing substantial on his native Britain. It’s surprising in that rebels typically reserve their deepest anger for sell outs that they know.

He does allow a tiny ray of hope by being encouraged by the support offered to the progressives Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. But Sanders is already sidelined and Corbyn is reeling from the disloyalty of his Blairite colleagues (by the time you read this he might have been dumped). In his introduction Kennard opines that the “sole purpose of intellectuals is to make the racket acceptable to the US public”.

By the end, having spent his contempt and frustration, he’s a little more measured, suggesting that the media is mostly comprised of normal people with no particular wish to champion neo-liberal lies. That they do is the result of “groupthink” and the sheer difficulty of swimming against the tide of convention and convenience. Kennard promises to do just that for some time to come.