Here, briefly, is what it’s all about…

More starkly, perhaps, than at any time since our first industrial revolutions, two potential catastrophes of our human making threaten our whole world and many of our societies.

One, of course, is  climate change and the degradation of the environment through carbon emissions and profligate mis-use of the earth’s resources. Many believe we already know what could and should be doing, but we lack the political leadership and deeper commitment to do it. Time is running out for us and our posterity.

The second is associated with the financial and banking meltdowns of 2008. These threw many of the world’s economies into disarray, destroying jobs, incomes and social assets for the many while boosting the already obscene concentration of wealth in a relatively small, rapacious minority. So, widening social inequalities of wealth and opportunity have emerged, given fresh substance by the analyses of Piketty and others, as unsustainable and a patent threat to the future stability and survivability of our democratic societies.

Both these issues pose fundamental and imminent threats to all of us; but, collectively, we seem in denial at the threshold of necessary action. So is there a case, and is this the time, for asserting a particular, and pressing, role and responsibility for those of us in the Arts in facing up to them?

We believe there is and ‘Arts Social Action’ is to continue in the van of both the relevant dialogue and the stimulus to action . So, whatever space you occupy in your arts community, join us and watch this blog…

Ralph Windle
August 2014.

Austerity has burned deep and cruelly into lives and services, made infinitely worse by the obscene inequalities splintering our societies and progressively enriching a tiny minority of our citizens at the expense of most. Worse still, our hopes and plans for future generations are being blighted.

All this, by a regime in denial of the gratuitous hardship being heaped on the most vulnerable and arrogantly deaf to more informed or more compassionate counsel.

They seem mainly focussed now on the dizzying prospect of retaining power, by the gerrymandering of constituencies and slow atrophy of our democratic processes.

Still, in the rigidly maintained neo-con ideology of our iron chancellor, this was our necessary penance to the gods of deficit reduction, whom we less righteous had wrongly supposed banished in the 1930s.

So what joyful celebrations there were in Downing Street (and hopes in our proliferating food banks?) at his confident announcement in his November 2015 Autumn Statement that Britain was “out of the red and back in the black…” and his idiot critics finally confounded.

As it happened, any euphoria was rapidly dissipated as we took down our Christmas decorations and the evidence widened of our dangerously under-invested flood defences. By Thursday 7 January, the chancellor had stood his Autumn Statement on its head and announced instead a “dangerous cocktail of new threats to growth…”; that the economy was at “mission critical…” to all but the complacent – precisely the downbeat scenario he had previously laughed to scorn.

Behind the well-attested downturn in China, political crises across Europe and the Middle East, there was little on the less acknowledged factors of our own unbalanced economy, investment decline, low productivity and rampant policy confusions in education, health, local government and social services.

If you are detecting a slight tone of exasperation in this blog so far, your senses are not betraying you.

It was in August 2014, and after 3 years probing and exploring the role of poetry in these critical times, that we announced the Arts Social Action blog initiative, widening the appeal to all who see themselves as members of the arts community and pleading that they consider a more proactive role, with fuller deployment of their special gifts of communication in response to these growingly divisive pressures on our fellow citizens.

We have had some success, and reached out to many through our long sequence of blogs (listed and available here). This will continue; but there is no doubt that these predominantly illiberal neo-con regimes, like our own, still dominating major established and developing economies, are moving fast to exploit the potentials of ‘globalisation’ (through TTIP and other semi-covert, corporatist alliances) to subvert the more open, democratic freedoms we need and thought we had.

So there is an even more urgent job to be done by all of us who occupy some space in our arts communities; and this is no longer entirely an altruistic need, distant from our own more direct artistic interests.

For in another, insufficiently debated, Government policy initiative – the push to get the EBacc adopted in Britain for the heavy majority (90%) of secondary pupils – there is wide concern, as expressed by actors and musicians in the Times last week. This qualification lacks any ‘creative’ component and effectively prevents student access to the art potentials of other subject areas.

The Creative Industries Federation, with its primary mandate to maintain the economic performance and earnings of a healthy ‘arts’ industry, is usefully ‘up-in-arms’ about this; but the real threat goes much deeper into the needs and sensitivities of our school – and eventual adult – populations.

We can agree with John Kampfner (CIF’s Chief Executive) at least on this –

“It should not be possible for a school to be deemed outstanding if its students are deprived of a quality cultural education, in and out of the curriculum…”

These deeper consequences were raised here, in an October 2012 blog (Silent Springs and the Autumn of Creativity) where I explained the centrality of metaphor to all creative processes, and therefore to ‘creative education‘.

“…in exploring the significance of ‘metaphor’ as a key catalyst in the processes of scientific and creative search and discovery I referred to the work of Lakoff and others in the field of linguistics on the human need to understand abstract concepts by metaphorical extensions of physical experience’. Metaphor is not merely a decorative element in literature, but fundamental to the very way we think and act.”

This was prompted by the then 50^th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ in September 1962. This, and her courageous exposure of DDT and other synthetic fertilisers killing our birds, launched the ecological movement which got us to the Paris Climate Change Summit in 2015.

It was Jay Griffiths, writing in the Guardian at that time (26^th September 2012) who best articulated the creative connection…

“In silenced forests, in silenced seas, in silenced springs, the human mind loses its thoughtways, risking the extinction of metaphors, losing the resonance of language…. The web of life is also the web of thought… the human mind needs nature in order to think most deeply…”

So there must be no copping-out, no giving-up, on the imperative of resisting these small-minded attempts to curtail our creative horizons, and those of our children, teachers, schools and colleges.

A further dimension of these threats – in the Governments so-called ‘Green Paper on Higher Education’ – is clinically exposed by Stefan Collini in January’s London Review of Books.

At least we can take comfort at the news that the self-appointed Great and Good of the World’s Leaders are about to meet again for their annual love-in in Davos, with the usual small sprinkling of women for the photo-calls.

So, let us pray….

From ‘Davos Man’ Ralph Windle 2014

Could it be something to do with poetry’s widespread relocation to the university campus and ubiquitous ‘creative writing schools‘? This was one hypothesis I had discussed with my American poet friend and collaborator Dana Gioia (“On The Silence of the Poets” September 2012) quoting his chastening conclusion for the US (in Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture. Graywolf Press.1992):

“In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet asks another upon being introduced is ‘where do you teach?’. The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It’s just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform to institutional ones…”

There can be little doubt that this relocation is well advanced in the UK – but is it a key factor in contemporary poetry’s relative detachment? Or could it be a ‘class’ thing? Hadrian Garrard, director of Create, an arts organisation, commenting on a recent research collaboration with Goldsmiths, University of London on the provenance of people in the UK’s contemporary arts, considered that “the UK is in danger of returning to a pre-1950’s era when the arts were considered to be largely the preserve of the rich”. Arts audiences, too, according to the Warwick commission, are predominantly white and middle class.

I had first asked “Where have all the poets gone?” in May 2012; and was happy, in September that year, to welcome Carol Ann Duffy’s promising Olympics bid to earn her laureate’s ‘butt of sack’ with “Translating the British, 2012”. There seemed some promise for our cause in her…

“We’ve had our pockets picked,
The soft, white hands of bankers,
bold as brass, filching our gold, our silver;
we want it back…”

Sadly, the seismic implications of the 2008 financial melt-down and inauguration of the Age of Austerity seemed not yet to have gained entry to most other ‘creative-writing’ poetry agendas.

In the meantime, however, we returned to the theme with the much more significant poetic event of Tony Harrison’s magnificent first reading, on BBC Radio Four, of the unexpurgated text of his 1980’s poem ‘V’.

“Who Owns The Language?” (March 2013)

This was a much-needed ‘master class’ in what an involved and responsive poetry can make of the social and political realities around us. I hoped they were all listening out there on the campuses.

It was also a reminder that, with the clear exceptions of Tony Harrison himself, and Seamus Heaney, there were few other obvious contemporary ‘poet’ candidates to join the wider, socially vital, ranks of the so-called ‘public intellectuals’ – men and women distinguished in their own field of expertise but acknowledged to have the ability to communicate ideas and influence debate outside it. This deficit was cruelly deepened by the death of Seamus Healey, later in 2013.

“Seamus Heaney: Poet of Spade and Pen” (September 2013)

These reminders are simply the baseline for more recent events. Since August 2014 we have focused primarily on the two dominant issues in the socio-economic and political worlds which we might expect to exercise our arts communities widely and, in particular, our more engaged poets. These issues were, and remain, the count-down on climate change and the widening inequalities of earnings and opportunity. Both, though in widely different ways, threaten the well-being of ourselves and our open societies. And on both, it has been theatre which has so far made the more significant running, as its particular idiom and mode might suggest. We have reported on some of its stimulating initiatives.

“Theatre in Action and the Moral Limits of Markets” (Nov 28, 2014)

“Royal Court Theatre Takes On Climate Change” (Nov 13, 2014)

It was the high profile media build up to the December ‘Climate Summit’ (now convened in Paris) which at last kick-started some more noticeable reaction from a number of poets, for which one main initiative was The Guardian’s longer-running ‘Leave It In the Ground ’campaign. Alan Rusbridger its late editor turned Oxford College Head, persuaded Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, to ‘curate’ a sequence of twenty poems broadly on the climate change theme by twenty invited writers – serialised during May by the Guardian newspaper.

This was a great, if late, initiative and many thanks are due to both The Guardian and Duffy. The series evoked some highly sensitive pieces, with Alice Oswald’s ‘Vertigo’ outstanding; but the process of late-stage ‘commissioning’, from a fairly predictable group of celebrity writers, seemed to emphasise the low spontaneity of take up of the issue and the predominantly internalised, passively nostalgic treatments mainly evoked.

Of the ones that might stir hearts towards action on the way to the Climate Summit, David Sargeant’s ‘A Language of Change‘ had a more proactive ring to it, helped by his wisely chosen preliminary quote, unequivocally ‘fixing’ the political context of his theme…

‘…as late capitalism writhed in its internal decision concerning whether to destroy Earth’s biosphere or change its rules…‘ Kim Stanley Robinson

We’re sat by the ocean and this
could be a love poem; but that lullaby murderer
refuses each name I give it
and the icebergs seep into our sandwiches,
translated by carbon magic. And even this might be
to say too much. But the muse of poetry
has told me to be more clear – and don’t,
s/he said, for the love of God, please, screw things up.…

Welcome stirrings but still far to go if we are not to ‘screw things up‘ – not only to reverse the desecration of our planet and the grotesque inequalities splintering our societies ; but now – yet again – the doleful dash of our governments towards unwinnable wars and others’ deaths.

So what a booster to have the crystal clear poetic voice of a youthful, 18 year-old Shelley suddenly restored to us in the shape of his radical 1811 “Poetical Essay on The Existing State of Things” a pamphlet poem now digitised and available via the Bodleian website. His state of things, 200 years ago, seems not dissimilar to ours; but the poetic voice, confident and polemical, smacks of felt passion and concern. On the iniquities of war, the cruel ravages of empire, the need to abolish obscene inequalities of wealth – here was a great poet who minced no words as he observed the real world around him, showed no fear of speaking out.

He asks if “rank corruption” should “pass unheeded by“; mourns the Asian (Syrian?) who “his wife, his child, sees sternly torn away; and the political advisers (the lobbyist aficionados of our Government’s ‘revolving doors’?)…

Ye cold advisers of yet colder kings,
To whose fell breast no passion virtue brings,
Who scheme, regardless of the poor man’s pang,
Who coolly sharpen misery’s sharpest fang…

And this poet of anger and compassion was also a poet of necessary action:

Yet this alone were vain; freedom requires
A torch more bright to light its fading fires;
Man must assert his native rights, must say
We take from monarch’s hand the granted sway…

I think I know where he would have been today – on Climate Change, Inequality and our Government’s eagerness to drop more bombs on Syria…. Quite a good poet too, don’t you think?

He was exercised by what he saw as the dangers, in the UK, of a society so split between divergent cultures – at that time, that of the confident, forward-and outward-looking ‘ scientists’; and that of a traditionalist establishment (inadequately labelled at first ‘ the literary intellectuals’ but closely allied with the keepers of the ‘governing culture’ of the time ). Each seemed incapable of understanding or meaningfully communicating with the other.

Such ‘cultures’ were not so much about the minutiae of their different reading habits or common room dialectics ( though sometimes trivialised into this by critics, commentators and occasionally Snow himself ); but about divergent world views and sensitivities particularly towards the known needs of the hungry, suffering and deprived both nearby and across the wider 1950s world.

We have the know-how to do what is needed, was his plea…

“Before I wrote the lecture, I thought of calling it ‘The Rich and the Poor’ and I rather wish I had not changed my mind”, he subsequently wrote in ‘The Two Cultures: A Second Look’ (1963).

Through the years, Snow’s ‘Rede’ lecture has supplied rich, red meat for many literary critics, academic commentators and political scavengers to dine on; but its persistent, if flawed , genius survives in its evocation of the dangerous and frightening realities for a ‘free’ society, when it divides so deeply on the direction of its social aspirations and its interpretation of fairness and moral behaviour, that its whole necessary community of shared ideas, language and understanding begins to unravel.

And when this process moves beyond an assumed, mis-match of language, towards a deliberate construct of political intent, we move beyond the relatively benign – if misunderstood – warnings of a Snow towards the more blood- chilling admonitions of his contemporary, Orwell and 1984.

Yet this is the parlous scenario we now seem to be creating in the UK and the wider ‘globalising’ world, fed by intensifying ideologies of unregulated corporate and market power and mainly dated in our own era from what Michael Sandel in his brilliant 2012 Penguin book ‘What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets’ labelled ‘The Era of Market Triumphalism’.

“The years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 were a heady time of market faith and deregulation – an era of market triumphalism… it began in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher proclaimed that markets, not governments, held the key to prosperity and freedom.”

Yet sadly, Sandel’s suggestion that “Today that faith is in doubt. The era of market triumphalism has come to an end” has already proved deeply flawed, or at least premature. The in-power, free-market ideologues here, and across the West, have successfully re-written the narrative of the 2008 banking/financial collapse and embraced acute austerity and deficit reduction as the more solid buttresses of their market philosophy in its programme for shrinkage of the democratic state.

We have just witnessed it in full aggressive flow, and with its characteristic neo-liberal insensitivities, in both the recent UK election – which further enshrined austerity/deficit reduction and socio/income inequality in our own society; and, more recently still, it has upheld the dubious interests of a coterie of unelected bankers and ‘creditors’ over the sovereign and democratic will of an already impoverished, and humiliated, Greek nation.

The Greeks, to their credit, put up a struggle; but one of the great, unanswered questions of our age, which Snow was asking of his own, is by what perversion of cultures within our societies have we come to isolate our ‘individual’ from our ‘social condition’ – whereby we are currently acquiescing in avoidable, deeply punitive, social, educational and economic deprivation for so many around us?

“The (individual condition) isn’t all”, Snow argued, in another generally mis-interpreted aspect of his moral argument.

“One looks outside oneself to other lives, to which one is bound by love, affection, loyalty, obligation: each of those lives has the same irremediable components as one’s own; one that one can help, or that can give one help. It is in this tiny extension of the personality, this seizing on the possibilities of hope, that we become more fully human: it is the way to improve the quality of one’s life: it is, for oneself, the beginning of the social condition”
(The Two Cultures: a Second Look)

So the elitist fog around some common-rooms and high-tables which long threatened to reduce The Two Cultures to a silly beauty contest between science and literature is well-wide of the mark – and, more crucially, misses its great contemporary relevance. Snow, of course, had a firm foot in both these ‘cultures’. It is their fusion, not exclusion, for which he is looking, and a more interactive educational strategy required (and still is). Predominantly, however, he was delivering a moral message based on a more progressive mix of social awareness and empathy; and a more extroverted, full-blooded, dissemination of needed and available knowledge and skills.

In spite of the plethora of recurring comment since 1959, it seems the full import and significance of Snow’s critical analysis and warning may have been missed. What Sandel, David Marquand (in his devastating ‘Mammon’s Kingdom’ – Penguin/Random House 2013) and others have graphically described, is much more threatening than a mere policy change.

It is a massive, deliberate “culture shift” intended to create an irreversible breakaway from a previous, more liberal and socially oriented, view of state and society.

Snow was reminding us that deep conflicts of culture and the dying of dialogue – even in the more egalitarian society of the post war consensus- was a dangerously toxic mix; how much more so for us now than in 1959, as inequalities of income, education and social mobility are being deliberately converted into our new cultural norm.

Which culture do we want ?

Here, at Arts Social Action, where we encourage poets, and others in the arts, towards a more active involvement in this dangerous world about us, our usual regrets about another creative talent temporarily lost to an academic ivory-tower, creative writing school or perpetually-rotating literary festival, was happily tempered by Armitage’s promise, via Alison Flood in the Guardian, to eschew “professorial grandstanding” and give Oxford an insight into “what is occasionally quite a muddy world, and a muddy artform”.

This is encouraging, though hopefully not to be confined to Oxford’s callow youth; a late frolic in the mud and touch of the Edward Snowden‘s could do wonders for the enlivenment of poetry’s opaque establishments, so we will be cheering Armitage on.

And can it be entirely coincidence that Ben Lerner plots a possible course forward in the current London Review of Books (Diary. 18 June 2015)? As with most significant revelations, he is obliged to start with an uncomfortable truth for all aspiring poets: “what if we dislike or despise or hate poems because they are – every single one of them – failures?”

He quotes poet and critic Allen Grossman to explain the dilemma…

“you’re moved to write a poem because of some transcendent impulse to get beyond the human, the historical, the finite. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. So the poem is always a record of failure”

Thus, the fatal problem with poetry is – poems… a rueful Lerner concludes.

He cites Keats as coming nearest to resolution of this paradox, but even he cannot finally pull it off – he may suggest the ‘music’ but it can never be played…

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

Though there is more to come, this argument already adds conviction to ArtsSocialAction’s own, sustained advice to fellow poets – not to exhaust all their creative energies on a desperate search for the unattainable, high on some imagined Parnassus; but to look where Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Tony Harrison and – earlier – Sappho, Shelley and many another inspired role model has, through history, found a sufficiency of wonders about them to compel the potent spinnings of their muse.

So, when Lerner goes on from his concept of every poem as a record of failure to the even more startling conclusion – that this explains why poets themselves celebrate poets who renounce writing – I begin to sense some pulling of the poetic leg by this self-confessed writer of several collections ! At the very least, there would seem to be a little of that poetic mud here, which Simon Armitage is pledged to dispell .

However, the Lerner thesis was not, even now, fully exposed, and I was delighted, as a welcome antidote to his unattainable poetic dream, to be pitched into the irrepressible William McGonagall’s “ Tay Bridge Disaster ” and – one of my favourite poetic worlds – the Anthologies of Bad Verse (Lerner quotes from ‘Pegasus Descending’ – a ‘ book of the best bad verse’; my own favourite is ‘The Stuffed Owl’ Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, JM Dent 1930).

Lerner’s descent into McGonagall‘s Tay Bridge Disaster is explicitly based on its being “famously considered one of the most thoroughly bad poems ever composed”, a view amply confirmed by his quote (though happily overlooked by McGonagall himself, to our great gain).

Beautiful railway bridge of the silv’ry Tay
Alas, I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away…

Yet McGonagall, along-side Lerner’s Keats and Dickinson exemplars…

“makes a place for the genuine by producing a negative image of the Poem we cannot write in time. The very bad, and the great have more in common than the mediocre or OK or even pretty good because they rage against the merely actual, have a perfect contempt for it…”

So since – if I begin to understand this impasse – we can never aspire to write that perfect poem in time, and our best remaining options lie between ‘failing big’ or rivalling Keats, I anticipate heavy bookings for the creative writing school with the most secure franchise on the McGonagall method.

Meanwhile, against historically stiff competition from several past Poets Laureate and Oxford Poetry Professors, I’m gunning for a spot in the next edition of The Stuffed Owl, my much-preferred Anthology of Bad Verse.

(Illustration by by Paul Rainer)

Arts Social Action stays firm in the hope that a keen eye for the nuance of language is a characteristic of people in the arts; so you will have noticed that, in its renewed ascendancy, our predominantly ‘rightist’ governing regime has lost no time in imposing its preferred agenda on a dispirited ‘left’. And, as ever, it is doing it first by re-defining the permitted language – with, regrettably, some early success among the more gullible of the candidates for the Labour succession.

In first place is the innocent-looking but evocative little word ‘business’.

Oddly, the ‘conservative’ right has long assumed a lien on the word, to which it has no current, past, legal or moral entitlement; given that the creation of ‘business’ wealth and the heaviest burden of its labour has always been down to the greater proportion of its employees who are not, by nature, in sympathetic affiliation to Conservative Central Office, or even CBI.

Yet we have been here before – in the wake of equivalent Thatcher/Reagan attempts to re-politicise ‘business’ and annexe it permanently to the right; resisting far more widespread pressures, from employees, but also many senior professional managers and directors, to liberalise its restrictive language and regimes in the late 80s and early 90s.

This is a story more fully told elsewhere, and which helped change attitudes to the role of women, enhanced human relations and sought to open up the business language beyond the stock-exchange closing figures. For what is ‘business’ anyway ? I had asked…

It’s a good, Old English word that has been progressively wrenched away from its core meanings – task, work, occupation, profession, trade – toward a more narrow concept of dealing, buying, selling and, more recently, the thin financial and accounting veneer of business activities. We need ‘business’ back for that richer diversity of activities by which we all barter our work and skills for our pittances. Tycoons and top people are not the only ones in ‘business’ even though, in the age of the image-makers and business pages, they have become obtrusively dominant.

The Poetry of Business Life. 1994

Nothing has done more to subvert this more wholesome and democratic concept of business than the rapid development of the so-called ‘revolving door’ between Government and corporations. It is concisely and accurately described by economic historian David Marquand.

This now plays a dual role in British government. Through it, former public servants and politicians make their way into the corporate sector (‘revolving out’ in the jargon). Meanwhile, businessmen of varying degrees of eminence ‘revolve in’ to posts in the public service. Both powerfully reinforce the hold that private corporations exert on the machinery and policies of the state.

Mammon’s Kingdom. Penguin 2013

This has gone way beyond the innocent swapping of experience and has become, among other things, a highly questionable money and influence gravy train. As a prescription for ‘being on the side of business’ it is hardly one to which leaders of the future left should aspire. More imminently, this process is undermining the notion of an objective civil service working for the public interest and converting them into ‘agents of a market state‘ (Marquand’s phrase).

In the end, we need to be assured that aspirants for the leadership of the left are not so naïve as to allow the conservative right to set both the agenda and the language for the future. It requires the skill and courage to occupy the moral higher ground within the growing decadence of the ‘market’ jungle.

Michael Sandel has it right…

Altruism, generosity, solidarity and civic spirit are not like commodities which are depleted in use. They are more like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise. One of the defects of a market-driven society is that it lets these virtues languish. To renew our public life we need to exercise them more strenuously…

And so, in the end, the question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honour and money cannot buy?

What Money Can’t Buy. The Moral Limits of Markets. Penguin 2012

We listen and hope…

Certainly, there seem to be some distinctly 1984ish features to our contemporary world as we slither down the electoral slopes towards decisions which may at last determine the future of our planet and the kind of society in which we wish to live.

The two key issues – of climate change and widening inequalities in our societies – continue to head our ASA agenda, and both are complicated by a deepening distrust of our hyper-active politico-corporate establishments. Sometimes, post-Snowden, we can sense a vague, shadowy presence in the wings.

At last, some revelatory light is being shone into these covert corners by, among others, historian David Marquand (‘Mammon’s Kingdom’), philosopher Michael J. Sandel (‘What Money Can’t Buy-The Moral Limits of Markets’); journalist and writer Owen Jones (‘The Establishment’) and, of course, playwright David Hare whose work we have often flagged. There is more and still more is needed, from our arts and creative communities.

“A functioning democracy depends on collaboration and openness; so persistent lack of transparency inevitably breeds distrust and insecurity”.

writes Christine Elliott who continues to monitor some major issues for us…

“but this is the very situation being created by the European inter-governmental handling of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiation”.

She cites a report (March 25) from the UK Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Committee which contends that ‘dog-whistle‘ politics have obfuscated the case to be made in support of this extensive proposed Trade agreement, while making it clear that more detail needs to be made available to allow TTIP’s proper public scrutiny.

But the Committee declined to support the ‘Investor State Dispute Resolution’ (ISDS) provisions in the agreement, which Arts Social Action previously argued could allow corporations to sue governments for changing their policies and laws; restricts elected representatives’ collective ability to tax and regulate corporations; and, taken to a logical extreme, could inhibit their right to promote activities that sustain the planet for the greater good.

Sadly, the UK Government is not planning a response to the European Commission’s consultation on ISDS with Member States; leading BIS to conclude that the Government is not treating seriously the concerns that have been raised about the range or use of such clauses.

“Openness, transparency, these are among the few weapons the citizenry has to protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt…”

Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore

The UK Government’s line on TTIP stands clearly in contempt of democracy – the kind of arrogant ‘establishment’ behaviour that has of necessity been challenged by our predecessors in the arts in a long tradition linking Moore to Shakespeare and back to the ancient Greeks.

ISDS is the Trojan Horse in TTIP and we in the Arts need to help make the wider world concerned, angry and active about it. To paraphrase Edward Snowden, ‘harming people isn’t the goal; transparency is.’

RW/CE. April 2015

“The good news is that pressure is growing. In fact, that relentless climate movement is starting to win big, unprecedented victories around the world, victories that are quickly reshaping the consensus view – including among investors – about how fast a clean energy future could come … and its thinking can be easily summarised in a mantra : Fossil freeze. Solar thaw. Keep it in the ground.”

Read it, and take heart from some better climate news – but not too much yet, if we are to keep our feet on the ground of political realism too!

…the vast majority of carbon reserves still in the earth are unburnable if we were to stay within the UN agreed limit of 2C of global warming…

You’ll remember that Arts Social Action was quick to pick up the significance of Bank of England Governor Mark Carney’s surprise revelation, last October, that the ‘vast majority’ of carbon reserves still in the earth were ‘unburnable’ if we were to stay within the UN agreed limit of 2C of global warming. Since that limit implies no more than a further 565 gigatons of allowable fossil fuel burning, it was a chilling piece of arithmetic to learn that 2,795 GT (5 times that limit) were already located, ready to burn, but still on the asset books of leading global energy corporations.

Notwithstanding the dire implications of use, there is little evidence yet of their spokesmen, lobbyists (and powerful political friends in the UK and USA) giving up on such rich assets. (Governor Mark Carney’s warning, in the House of Lords, that climate change was one of the biggest risks facing the insurance industry, was attacked by former conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Lawson on the grounds that global warming was ‘green claptrap’).

…growing Inequality and the still unresolved outcomes of the 2008 Financial and Banking crises are inexorably linked with Climate Change…

So this is the point at which the vibrant, voluntary action movements achieving great things around the earth, will inevitably collide with the realities of our more ‘formal’ political systems and processes – and the ultra-sophisticated corporate constituencies which have become expert in manipulating them. This is the sense in which we in ASA have seen growing Inequality and the still unresolved outcomes of the 2008 Financial and Banking crises, as inexorably linked with Climate Change as the defining issues in the way of fairer and happier societies; the very issues which were largely triggered and sustained by a myopic, neo-market fundamentalism, which has held us all hostage for far too long.

And this is why, on the way to the December Climate-Change Summit, eyes must be not only on the exhilarations of continued voluntary action, but also the critical imminence of elections in the UK, US and elsewhere. We need elected leaders over these next critical years who are not in the pockets of the Koch brothers in the US or, nearer home, at least better able to distinguish the tax avoider / bonus-happy banker from the ever-welcome party donor and potential cabinet-colleague.

The recurring HSBC tax-haven frauds and well-oiled ‘revolving door’ phenomena by which our Lords Green and others glide smoothly between dubious boardroom, High State Office and House of Peers remain astonishingly robust, a defining feature of our dismal times.

Latest, and remarkably little noticed outside the financial press, is the quiet elevation of Sir Howard Davies to the Chairmanship of the Royal Bank of Scotland, still massively beholden to the UK taxpayers who were obliged to bail them out – largely as a result of Sir Howard’s own infamous ‘light regulatory touch’ pioneered by him when first Chairman of the Financial Services Authority; thus encouraging the more widespread, ineffectual management regimes which have blighted so much of the UK’s banking sector.

In so far as ‘good judgement’ might be a useful attribute for such a role, it seems the appointment also overlooked the notorious incident which required his resignation as Director of the London School of Economics following some shady institutional deals with Libyan dictator Gaddafi and his regime – hardly a ringing reassurance. He has, as far as I know, not yet enlightened us on his views on bonus policy.

…we should engage, rather than ignore, our faltering electoral processes…

And so it remains difficult to see where, on current evidence, we are to find those more open leadership minds to help us forward on these more exacting issues of Climate Change, Inequality and Sustainable Economies. Yet that is the very reason why we should engage, rather than ignore, our faltering electoral processes; insist that candidates give us responses on these issues; and make our votes count, at least in our necessary search for some fresher-faced leaders, less tainted by the deep cynicisms which brought us here.

RW 11/03/2015

The supposed causes of the meltdown have been widely sought, speculated on and pontificated about – banker/corporate greed, lax regulation regimes, complacent attitudes towards risk, global over-stretch, over-borrowed property speculation etc. Seven years on, these and other diagnoses fall well short of supplying any credible consensus on what remedial action and positive change might pre-empt future relapses.

In a web-post dated Feb 12th 2014 (‘Death and Resurrection of the Business/Market Model’) I insisted that some more incisive analysis was urgently needed…

“It becomes clear that the true causes of the meltdown go much deeper than the irresponsible behaviour of bankers, lenders and regulators and into the very heart of a failed, long-standing business model…”

This ‘business model’ asserted the primacy of ‘the market’ not only in corporate decision-making but increasingly across most domains of economic, public and social policy (including health, school and university education.)

The more serious commentators (Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman, Robert Reich and others on the economics/inequality aspects; Michael Sandel (‘The Moral Limitations of Markets’) and others on the moral, political and philosophical implications) have penetrated more deeply but, so far, with little apparent impact on mainstream policies.

Oddly missing from this post-2008 soul-searching, however, has been any clear recognition or serious analysis of how such an all-pervading ideology of the market’s precedence has come to be so widely and fixedly implanted, not only in our corporate , managerial and related political elites; but progressively ‘evangelised’ across traditional borders and into the heartlands of the wider, once public, sectors of our societies. How could this have come to pass so little noticed or questioned?

Yet the fact is that, for over 100 years…

…a globally expanding system of ‘management education’, symbolised and spear-headed by the elitist ‘business-school’, has stood atop an expanding hierarchy of business institutions, management centres, think-tanks and other outreach facilities; the whole primarily geared to the corporation’s perception of its ‘needs’ and their furtherance.

And these ‘needs’ have been, especially since the Reagan/Thatcher years, progressively transmuted into the nation’s own.

Corporately invested and financed (and with public subsidy, though largely outside the public education domain and control ) the business school has become the most ubiquitous symbol of the globalisation of ‘business’ and the ascendency of its neo-liberal ideas on markets, economics and society.

The corporate establishment’s lobbying and policy-influencing capabilities, helped by media ownership concentrations world-wide, have further accelerated this assumed convergence of the ‘national’ with the sectarian ‘corporate’ interest; and, by dint of the murky TTIP negotiations (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) now afoot behind closed doors, our governments could soon be sued in special courts, outside their jurisdictions, for any serious deviations from the perceived policy interests of these cross-border behemoths!

Yet it is the burgeoning, supposedly independent, corporately beholden business-school-system, with its ‘management education’ satellites, which has arguably been most effectively and consistently engaged, for over 100 years, in the steady indoctrination of our established and emerging manager elites; not only in the professional mechanisms of ‘managing’ but also in the regressive ‘free – market and corporative’ ideologies which under-pin it.

The years leading up, more immediately, to the financial crisis of 2008 were, as Michael Sandel describes…

“a heady time of market faith and deregulation – an era of market triumphalism – which began back in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher proclaimed that markets, not government, held the key to prosperity and freedom”

Words such as ‘faith’ and ‘ideology’ for this ‘market-belief’ orthodoxy seem no longer merely the stuff of far-fetched satire. We have before us the recent saga of Lord Green, fluent mover between pulpit, boardroom and cabinet office, who presided – when Chairman of the global HSBC – over his bank’s massive programme of tax evasion and criminal behaviour for his rich clients.

Long a favourite of corporate-friendly government, he is now advocating MBAs for more of our vicars, presumably to give them a glimpse of what he considers the real world (and the true religion?).

…through its financial dependence on, and assumed spiritual identity with, the corporate ethos, and its relative freedom from public scrutiny and regulation, it has become the de facto incubator both of a discredited corporate/market philosophy and of the cadres which practise, sustain and disseminate it.

The suggestion is not that the Business School complex is part of some considered plot to subvert economic and social justice and democracy; but that through its financial dependence on, and assumed spiritual identity with, the corporate ethos, and its relative freedom from public scrutiny and regulation, it has become the de facto incubator both of a discredited corporate/market philosophy and of the cadres which practise, sustain and disseminate it.

As such it had a prime, though as-yet unexamined, influence on the disasters of 2008, and remains a weighty incubus on our social, economic and political futures.

For its own, and the public good, this would seem to be the right and necessary time for a more open and informed discussion and analysis of the business-school phenomenon. We are at work on this and, by June this year, when Oxford marks its own mere 50^th year of ‘management education’, we plan to publish our needed, more penetrating look at both the local and international, century-old significance of these institutions.

© 2015 Ralph Windle ]]> /arts-social-action/business-schools-seminaries-of-a-failed-free-market-fundamentalism/feed 0 /arts-social-action/pharrell-williams-silenced-by-ttip /arts-social-action/pharrell-williams-silenced-by-ttip#respond Thu, 05 Feb 2015 23:55:01 +0000 /?p=1061 Pharrell Williams, who this June had been due to head a global music event to get the world’s population behind stopping climate change, has pulled out of the event for ‘personal reasons’.

Mr. Williams was unavailable for comment, but a source close to Al Gore, who is behind the pro-environment music extravaganza (reportedly involving one hundred acts on seven continents), said that the U.S. government had threatened to revoke entertainment licences and security cover due to fossil fuel companies threatening to sue for compensation under TTIP legislation. Continue Reading »