We can edit it for you wholesale

It’s hard to avoid irritation at this self-serving crap from “head of Channel 4, Julian Bellamy”. I don’t even mind the backpatting Big-Brother-was-just-great-for-my-career flannel – it at least has the merit of honesty.

Nor is it quite hyperbole to claim that

Big Brother has been the most influential show of the modern era. Even it’s most vociferous critics would admit that. Quite simply, it revolutionised TV. It pioneered new technologies and fundamentally altered how viewers watched television.

This is not at all far off the mark. And that’s the problem.

The ‘revolution’ Big Brother offered – if it offered anything of the sort – was not on what we, on this side of the screen were doing. It was
what people like Bellamy were doing on the other side. Big Brother was the first successful, popular example of innovations in editing technology – fast digital editing – changing the kind of television programmes we could watch.

The economics of the show only work once digital editing exists. Hours and hours, days and days, of raw, unedited footage can be rapidly spliced into a convincing storyline: a process either slow, or horribly expensive (or both) with traditional analogue editors, but within the bounds of possibility once footage can be digitised and rapidly chopped up, reassembled, and slotted neatly into place. It’s a classic example of a capital-intensive investment pushing out labour, in fact; you move from human camera operators and skilled editors into glorified CCTV and a fast hard-drive.

The participants cost next to nothing. The sets are cheap. You save on expensive labour. And with so much raw footage to choose from, you have an extraordinary amount of control over the final output. Charlie Brooker explained the whole process, quite brilliantly, here.

But this means that Bellamy’s claims about Big Brother offering ‘a remarkable insight into the values and behaviour of the noughties generation’ are seriously disingenuous. We weren’t privileged to witness, like visitors at the safari park, strange creatures in their natural habitat; we weren’t even watching people, thrown into a weird situation and responding to it. We were looking at something that was, from top to bottom, largely constructed elsewhere, off-screen, away from whatever we were viewing.

Big Brother showed us a remarkable insight into what Endemol, Channel 4, and their advertisers and sponsors think we wanted to see of the ‘values and behaviour’ of the ‘noughties generation’. They don’t really like us very much.

They think it’s all over

Well, it isn’t.

First, the numbers don’t support it. Behind a certain amount of excitable flapping and squawking over a few decentish headline stock prices, much of the underlying data is grim: unemployment here continuing to rise, foreclosures in the US and late UK mortgage payments still rising, and wage settlements grinding to a halt.

All these matter hugely for both economies, since – with credit lines still jammed – they’ll directly affect consumption. And with consumption spending driving 80 per cent of US demand growth during the boom years[*], that’s a big blow to growth across the whole economy.

Coupled with the immense pressure now being exerted on government spending as a result of the bailouts, and it should be clear that future prospects for capitalism in its neoliberal heartlands remain somewhat shaky. The trillions now sloshing around the financial institutions may, eventually, trickle into the rest of the economy, stimulating a boom. But the underlying weaknesses remain.

That’s the real story here. The numbers are only part of it – and, really, only a fairly small part. The truth of the last 18 months or so is that the entire existing economic order, “neoliberalism”, the economic rules of the game we’ve lived under for twenty or more years now, suffered a massive seizure. But instead of changing that order, even in capital’s own terms, rejigging the institutions, rewriting the rules, doing everything just a little bit differently – we’ve placed the sickly patient on a drip.

That’s the meaning of the bank profits and the bonuses. Zombie neoliberalism is still with us, lumbering on as if nothing had happened. Yet it is far weaker than previously: without a purge of the banks and the financial institutions, killing off the insolvent and the incompetent, there is no reason whatsoever for any of them to reform. And without reforms, they will expose capitalism to the same illnesses it contracted last time: contagion, the spread of financial plague from economy to economy, and systemic risk.

But of course, the banks and the institutions couldn’t be allowed to collapse, whatever Mervyn King may have wished. They were peering into the abyss after Lehman Brothers collapsed. The grim prospect of an almighty domino effect loomed, with the ties between collapsing banks pulling more and more of the economy down behind them.

So the bailouts. The patient is hardly cured; more drugged to the eyeballs, and weakened.

[*] figure from Glynn (2004), Capitalism Unleashed, p.53

New Labour’s ideological hit man

There’s an interesting detail in Decca Aitkenhead’s Monday interview with Peter Mandelson, in which Aitkenhead notes his peculiarity, in their conversation, of returning again and again to the same point in his past:

…it’s striking that Mandelson’s point of reference goes all the way back to 80s, the era he returns to in conversation unprompted, time and time again. “It was like the wild west,” he says nostalgically at one point. “It was tough.” Interestingly, he also says that, excluding his present position, his favourite ever job was as Labour’s campaign director back then.

This must seem, to most readers as well as the baffled interviewer, like “nostalgia” for a piece of ancient personal history: and who, after all, does not look back on some long (and successful) battle with a warm smile? No doubt the entitlement that Mandelson – quite literally – claims grows directly from the struggles of his (relative) youth. Because if Mandelson says he had to be the hit man, and that the battle against the Left in the Labour Party – never, tellingly, referred to as such in this interview – was “tough”, he is being entirely honest. New Labour cut its teeth in those battles. It formed itself out of the comprehensive, shattering defeat of a credible left in British politics – a defeat that Mandelson played a decisive role in.

But the popular image of Mandelson as merely a sinister manipulator, or superficial spin-merchant (tediously reprised here) was never accurate. The man himself identifies his real significance:

“Who was it who wrote the policy review in the late 80s? Me. Who presided over the creation – who was one of the architects of New Labour, and of that change in policy that created a new political force in the 90s? Me. Who enjoyed driving new policy as a minister at the beginning of this government, and is now doing so again? Me. So I’m certainly not a policy blank. My big preoccupation is policy.”

And it is this role he has returned to in government: here calling for “industrial activism” in the new, post-crash economy; there staking out a defence of government intervention. He has, since re-entering the Cabinet, been the only minister even beginning to take seriously the thought that the wheels had come off New Labour’s old, debt-and-property economic model.

John Rees, defending the anti-war case on the Moral Maze

Feb 15 revisted

With a cunning Freedom of Information request, The Sauce has obtained police helicopter footage of the Feb 15, 2003 Iraq war demonstration:

Tony von Hayek and Gordon Friedman

Potlatch on New Labour’s sterling defence of inequality:

It’s clear in the political writings of Hayek and Milton Friedman that economic inequality is the guarantor of social and political difference. Far from the state being tasked with reducing it, the state has an obligation to defend and construct the mechanisms which produce it.

It is without any sarcasm that New Labour ought to be recognised for its achievements in this regard. It has defended free markets, competition in education, the valorisation of sporting achievement, the optimisation of London relative to the rest of the UK, and so on. Forget the filthy rich or David Beckham for a moment. New Labour has done an excellent job in defending the legacy of Hayek and Friedman, who at least had the self-awareness and courage to say what they believed in. Either we live in a society where the wheat is distinct from the chaff, or we live in one of potential tyranny; that was the original neo-liberal claim.

It’s interesting to speculate that New Labour was a far more able defender of the neoliberal project than the Tories ever could be. They were able to do something that Thatcher and Major never did: persuade large numbers of people that, even if they did not like free markets, the worship of the rich, and inequality on a spectacular scale, there was little fundamental that could be done about it. This bitter pill could be sweetened a little by making some efforts at reducing poverty – hardly a radical anti-neoliberal claim, given (for example) Milton Friedman’s own support for a minimum income guarrantee.

And New Labour have (or perhaps had) their own little claque of cheerleaders and defenders who convinced themselves that the existence of free markets could be squared with the existence of social justice, conventionally defined.

New Labour’s crisis is so deep precisely because it has now dramatically and visibly failed on both halves of that equation: it can neither defend free markets effectively, nor can it deliver justice.

Guido – Beautiful Complication

Newtrament – London Bridge Is Falling Down

A Very British self-pity

Chris Mullin, MP for Sunderland South, author of A Very British Coup, writing in the London Review of Books, myopically unable to conceive any (Labour) MP had done anything much wrong in the expenses scandal:

The damage is incalculable. Not just to us, but to the entire parliamentary system. We are sinking in a great swamp of derision and loathing. No matter that the guardians of public morality at the Telegraph appear to have paid a large – and so far undisclosed – sum of money for discs that seem to have been stolen, open season has been declared on we wretched, despised servants of the people.

Self-pitying whinging aside, the sheer blinkeredness of Mullin – and close to every other MP asked to comment on the issue – reminds me of the standard Labour Party reaction to the Iraq protests.

Opposition to the war on Iraq, we were told, was just a problem of communication on this one issue; that voters were otherwise happy; that the Parliamentary system was fundamentally sound. New Labour loyalists either could not or would not grasp that the ferocity of the opposition to the invasion was the bubbling to the surface of many, other, much deeper-rooted discontents: with Labour’s steady abandonment of its core support; with the ill-concealed contempt Westminster held for opinions in the rest of the country; and with the casual, blase attitude to the truth Blair and Campbell evinced, in particular. All these separate complaints and irritations fuelled the anger. Underneath it all was a withering of political legitimacy in this country – as noted by the unjustly (if predictably) ignored Power Inquiry.

That withering has become a near-collapse, in the wake of economic crisis. Scarcely an institution exists  that has not been damaged in the last eight months: the police, the City of London, Parliament, the Treasury: either directly, or indirectly, the economic crisis has had extraordinary political effects.

(The last of the above, for many reasons, interests me especially: from secretly running the country under Brown, the Treasury  has been pushed into a  position of  what must be almost unprecedented weakness – certainly nothing like this has been seen since the war. Take Mervyn King’s continued insubordination, for example, unthinkable even a few years ago, “independent” central bank or not; whilst Darling and his mandarins have been wholly unable to prevent Mandelson creating a new super-department overseeing key economic functions.)

Adam Curtis website

Here, chiefly to promote his new mixed-media documentary installation thing, up in Manchester,  “It Felt Like a Kiss”.