UK plc – an abomination

Sorry I haven’t posted in a couple of days. I’ve been out filming.

But I just wanted to say this.

The first time I heard the phrase UK plc I hated it. Now I know why.

When companies and banks go bankrupt there is a pecking order of who gets what.  The labour force gets laid off with nothing.  The share holders get nothing either.  The bond holders are the top of the heap. They are the ones who lent money and who must be protected from loss above all others.

This is the established logic of the market place.  I may not like it but its their business, their playing field their rules.  What I loathe is the fact that phrases like UK Plc start to smuggle the logic of the market into how we discuss and even how we understand, what a nation is.

Simply by saying or accepting the idea of UK plc we allow the nation to be changed.  And it is a dangerous change.

Companies have bond holders and share holders.  The UK has, as we all know, bond holders. As does every nation. But does that mean that those bond holders should be accorded the same relation to a nation as they have to a company.  Just because they lend to both does not in itself mean the two entities are therefore the same.

Why are we allowing bond holders to tell us, that when it comes to a nation, they are still top of the heap?  Just because they are bond holders of our nation does that somehow redefine us as  – as what? Are we now just share holders?  Is that what was hidden in that other nu labour/free market phrase – The Stakeholder Society?

I am not and never was a’stakeholder’ in my country.  No one has the right to redefine me as such. I was born a citizen and that is what I am.

For stakeholder, I hear shareholder. Just tweaked a little to make it sound like something new and modern and Nu.  Bollocks! To be a stakeholder is to allow yourself to be  robbed of your citizenship and be reduced to a share holder.  And once we allow that then when times get tough we will suddenly find, as the Irish ARE FINDING, that we are expected to stand aside and accept that in a crash, we are last in line.

Suddenly the logic we are told must be applied is that which has been smuggled in from the market.  The Bond holders are sacrosanct. They must get their money back.  The ‘stakeholder’ are just shareholders by another name.  We get nothing.

We are being, and the Irish already HAVE BEEN dispossessed of what was once theirs by birthright.

What are we in the logic of the market in the new redefined nation as plc but the disposable workforce and the lowly shareholders.

The nation that was your place of birth, the  homeland of your culture has been redefined as just a place of work, of ‘inward investment’ of economies and cut backs and economic realities.  You aren’t a citizen. You have no claim on this place you were born.  You just work here. You can be fired and if you are you have no value any more. Not in the logic of the national plc.

And just because you bought into the ‘shareholder’ idea doesn’t give you any claim either.  You’re just a share holder. And when the plc needs to raise cash or clear out some debts, your ‘stake’ can be written off and discarded as easily as any other bit of worthless paper.

This is what UK plc, or Ireland plc has bought us.

We have been dispossessed and stripped.

We MUST NOT let this stand.  Where I live, where I was born is NOT a plc, NOT a company, NOT just a patch of land for companies to set up shop and hire me and fire me as ready labour.  My connection and ownership of this place, this society, this nation was never for sale.  I did not sell it.

This land bore me as it did my family for generations. There is such a thing as society. It lives in me. I will defend it against anyone who tries to take it from me.

I reject totally and utterly the idea of UK plc. I repudiate the logic of stakeholder societies. The were and are an abomination created for the sole purpose of trying to rob me of what is and always will be inalienably mine and my children’s.

I will spill blood before I allow it to be taken from me.

34 thoughts on “UK plc – an abomination”

  1. Well said Golem. You have hit upon a deep truth at the heart of today's corporatised society. This, seemingly successful, attempt at social engineering was really kicked off in the 70's via the Chicago Boys, Thatcher, Regean et al. The extension of mortgage ownership to deliberately create a bourgeois, land-owning mentality among those who bought into it – middle class and working class alike – and leading directly to the criminal leverage-fraud catastrophe that we are now going to pay for.

    The UK, more than other countries like France or even Germany, bought into this con back then and I think it's now manifesting itself in the supine public reaction to these punitive cuts in public spending. The free market ideological bullshit has rotted the brains of more people in the UK than say France where at least they still have a sense that something valuable is being stolen from them, and they're at least going to put up some kind of fight.

    It used to be that the "Market" was part of life – the success of the monetarist ideologues is that the mortgage owners and consumers of retail debt out there in the UK are apparently unable or unwilling to question the new reality that they have been given – namely, that life is now part of the "Market".

    By the way Golem – does the publisher your using deliver copies of "the Debt Generation" to Oz?

  2. Seen any Tarkovsky lately?
    His are a good pair of glasses through which to view today's secular cultural vandalisation. (the process was far advanced in the cultural setting in which he filmed).
    The process is not decades old but centuries.
    I think Scruton is delineating it better than anyone else I've come across.
    ps. LOVE your documentaries David.

  3. dave from france

    Dexter Midnight — delivery to OZ? Yes, and to my other family in NZ,NY,Glasgow. If you have a complicated order (like me) e-mail YPD Books and they will sort.

    Golem — excellent argument there on "UK PLC" . I remember years ago reading the word, and then hearing my sister use it about some consultation at her work, and wondering where the Hell it had come from, and if it really meant … er … anything.

  4. Bravo!

    Appealing to one's sense of patriotism is a powerful method of gaining a wider audience. Financial and political issues are daunting to many people, and depressingly dull to others. However, if a person's citizenry is called in to question then many more will realise they ought to be outraged.

    Sounds like a second book to me.

  5. Stakeholders versus blood-sucking banks!

    Which actor will play Golem in this low-budget horror movie? I say 'low-budget' in the hope that the starring role does not go to yet another American actor.

    More funding for British films please! We need to be reminded occasionally how British we are.

  6. Very powerful piece. It's ridiculous how money is able to change our relationship with such fundamental concepts like citizenship. The same thing is happening in the (apparently recession-free) Middle East where human rights are bought off by regimes through tax breaks etc.
    When did it become ok for governments to shirk responsibility to citizens in favour of profiteering? World plc more like.

  7. Also, we've been burdened with the responsibility to pay back the debt – a citizen's responsibility to his country and government as David Cameron has been piously sermonising. This makes it all the more sickening that our own rights as citizens are being quietly annihilated by the greed of bond holders et al.

  8. Very good piece !! something in what you say reminds me of why the UK has an Anglican church, why parliament was formed in the first place… to ensure separation of church and state…

    The current systematic emptying of nations coffers to pay off their bond holders to borrow more from same bond holders indeed suggests the necessity for an equivalent separation / disestablishment of market and state … we're back in the days of tithes to the aristocracy , gold to the vatican, but on a larger scale.

    This may be a naive thing to say, but what you have written above suggests in that in some way a nations government prioritising the interest of bond holders over the interests of its people may be unconstitutional and patient of legal redress. i.e. would there be any point in formalising your arguments and petitioning the Crown r.e. an abuse of parliament ?

  9. Two meals away from revolution? More like 200 channels. It's gonna take a lot more to make folks put their tea cups down. It's always been this way though, we just never had the internet. It would just be Rich GB and yours truly in a tavern talking about a rumour of a person named G.

    Cheryl Cole for PM

  10. Shades of Charlton Heston…

    I'm intrigued to know what your politics are Golem – though I understand a decision not to let political tribalism distract attention from your excellent analysis, which has always struck me as exemplary of a commitment to ethical civic-mindedness.

    But this impassioned post seems to me to be very short on detail – and contains an ambiguity that strikes me as dangerous. What political parties could adopt this kind of language to harness a generalised feeling of dispossession and anger? I don't see why the English Defence League couldn't make the same appeals to Society and against corporate robbery / interference. The rhetoric of the Tea Party isn't a million miles away from this – and I don't mean that to sound as dismissive of your writing as it probably sounds.

    I disagree with a political opposition that declares itself under the figure of Nation or State. Let's take the post-war period as one in which there was a great deal of energy and commitment invested in principles and the practice of social justice; to me, this commitment is opposed to a view of society that relies on patriotism and state-identity. If one were to extend a positive interpretation of the formation institutions such as the UN, then that would have to rely on a valorisation of international mechanisms to counter-act the proclivities of nation-states to act violently towards one another that will come out of these checks are not in place.

    Now we find that internationalism has been co-opted by financial institutions; but that is not to say that a return to the nomination of value and hope for justice in the nation-state is the appropriate corrective.

    As you've so pertinently pointed out, we're witnessing a return to economic warfare between states: precisely the sort of competitiveness that the EU project identified as a cause of the two world wars. I, personally, fear the measures that will be put in place in the name of society, tradition and citizenship. As you say, 'UK plc' entered the lexicon of political consciousness as part of an insidious process; I see no reason why 'spilling blood' for one's homeland is a great improvement or step forward.

  11. Golem XIV - Thoughts

    Beneke99,

    I too fear measures that some will no doubt put in place in the name of society , tradition and citizenship. Some already have been here in GB and in the U.S.

    But dreadful things have also been done in the name of ideologies which are supranational such as Christianity or Islam. Others have been done in the name of secular beliefs such as Stalinism/Soviet Communism. Others are being done in the name of the Free Market and Democracy.

    The sins of those whose crimes were commited under cover of national or ethnic pride do not make pride and love of one's culture, ones society nor of the land in which that culture and society exist, a bad thing. It just means that bigotry, ahtred and cruelty will always find somewhere to incubate.

    I am not a little Englander nor some sort of degenerate ethnic or national purity nut job.

    My politics is Green in that I think the concerns of the environment are pressing and serious. I am left wing in that I believe there is a duty of care for those less fortunate or less able and do not believe ithe market is a magic solution. I am a Quaker in that I belive war and violence to be a terrible tragic failure of human courage and imagination. But I will in the end, if all else has failed take up arms in shame to defend the weak from the powerful.

    I am not and never have been convinced by many of the post war convictions, such as the feeling that national identity or cultural pride are retrograde, or negative and are the root of international strife.

    They can be. But I do not believe the necessariily are.

    Charlton heston was a tool. So are the flag waving cretins of the English Defense League. So too are those who at one and the same time, think feeling oneself to be English is a sin, while at the same time advocating multiculturalism and interest in other cultures.

    There is a rich cultural heritage in every country. Mine included. It means something powerful to feel oneself to be English, or Scotish, Welsh, Irish or indeed British. Just as it means something profound to feel Indian, West Indian or Tuareg.

  12. Great post Golem, I feel sick to my stomach.
    Also, an excellant response from "andrew".
    Clearly we are in a new place where the philosophies of our fathers are redundant (the post war optomism , honesty ,fairness and the belief that a working class man, with his free University Education, could hold sway in the world, is now shattered).
    How can we fight this injustice when 95% of the population cannot comprehend it?
    We need a latter day Oliver Cromwell.

  13. At the beginning of 2009-10 Mr Brown had 23, while the Tory leader has 19 on his staff.

    However, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has five – meaning the total for Downing Street as a whole is slightly higher than previously.

    The highest earners are Number 10 director of communications Andy Coulson, on £140,000 a year, and Mr Cameron's chief of staff Ed Llewellyn on £125,000.
    Altogether the public is said to be paying £4.9 million for Government Spads this year, some £700,000 below the sum declared under Labour last year.

  14. Thought-provoking comments Golem and Beneke99. It's small differences of opinion like this that stimulate the debate and build a consensus on what kind of society we wish to inhabit.

    How could bond holders be re-prioritised? If they do not receive the promised interest payments what would happen? I assume that the UK would then be 'defaulting'. I'm not ruling out re-prioritisation, but I'm curious about the consequences.

  15. What does 'being a Brit' mean these days? Does this have any relevance when we are no longer aggressively colonising the world and suppressing poorer nations' cultures?

    When I see this question I can't help thinking about the old films about World War 2. What a sorry state of affairs it is when nationality is defined by the wars it fought!

    Britishness can't just be about Morris Dancers and 'Last Night of the Proms'. If we can't define Britishness then perhaps UK plc is what we deserve.

    I blame the decline of Pinewood Studios.

  16. This is a tricky one.

    I've been reading recently about the fourth quarter of the 19th Century (Hobsbawm – highly recommended) when the phenomenon of nationalism – in a form which we would recognise in the modern world – sprang up. Nationalist sentiment has been a powerful tool of both left wing and right wing politicians ever since and the debate among the various followers of Marx about whether or not to endorse nationalism has never gone away.
    My tendency is to reject the nationalist interpretation of the current situation. Not out of any shame in my Welsh heritage but rather through fear that nationalist rhetoric can be too easily co-opted by the ruling elite themselves and movements which arise out of patriotic feeling can be too easily railroaded by the same elite into racism, xenophobia and isolationism. See the Tea Party's recent shift into this area as an example.
    I prefer the interpretation that you have used before Golem, of an international financial elite who are unconcerned with national identity but exploit the weak and vulnerable wherever they exist and then, when they've been sucked dry, move on to fresh pastures. The political lackies who enable them in each country are enriched while the rest of us must fight for survival in the misery they leave behind.
    It is is the best interest of all peoples in all nations which are a target for this kind of vampire capitalism to fight against it. The enemy exists without (the financiers who regardless of citizenship will be non-domiciled) and within (the enabling politicians) the borders of our nation. Trying to fight them on a nationalist footing would leave us vulnerable, in my opinion, to the perversion of the movement's aims.

  17. That's what I'd like to see, everybody go to London, quietly, without burning cars and smashing windows.

    We would all amass outside No. 10 in silence. Somebody, whoever got nudged out to the front would be spokesperson (we'd all know what to say).

    "You stop playing with peoples lives to line pockets that are already lined or you'll all be swinging, every last one".

    Then we'd all just go home, no fuss, no trouble.

    Nothing like a near death experience to adjust your mentality. Pander to the rich or die, mmmm, tricky one.

    We ALL change our clocks this weekend, we can work together.

  18. Golem XIV - Thoughts

    24K,

    You've got me thinking now.

    RichGB,

    I agree with you about the value of Beneke99's comments. It is when we debate with passion and with respect that we get closer to building something new.

    I wanted to add this about the whole Nationalism/culture debate.

    When I say I am proud of my culture and of my nation it is not in any way a pride which depends on claiming 'mine is better'. NOT AT ALL.

    I want others to be as proud of their culture and their nation as I am of mine. I see it as reclaiming culture, society and nation from those who want to argue that we are all just naked individuals put here to work.

    Capitalism is very much in favour of us feeling separate and feeling no connection to each other. Nothing better than people who have no identity other than as employees.

    I am saying, reclaiming culture and society gives us ties and loyalties that can bind us together. Not just with those who share our particular culture, society or nation. But with others who take the same pride in theirs.

    It is not about saying my culture is better than yours. It is about saying, that our cultures and the values they embody, of care for your fellows, for community – they matter. They mark us out as 'cultured people'. As opposed to those who would like there to be no cultural values at all for anyone. A word where cuture and society have been sneered away, leaving nothing of any value but the use and be used system of finance and mercemary contract.

    That is the world of the Financial Class. It is a drab world of uniform loneliness and mass powerlessness.

  19. golem
    it was capitalism in the days of stiff upper lip and everyone muck in together. I think you would have to call it something else now, since there's no capital behind it, nations being insolvent.

    r.e. the "spilling blood" thing beneke99 complained about, I read this as rhetorical device, and assumed you meant that you thought what you were talking about was worth spilling blood over, rather than that you would immediately go out and commit hari kiri on your neighbours lawn, or next to your beetroots, a new kind of suburban western martyr.

    At any rate, i hope not.

    Rhetoric might be what sets armies on the move but its also what causes nations to lay down their weapons.

    here's hoping yours gets you somewhere. But shooting ourselves in the foot won't help, however British that may be.

    p.s. catarina is " andrew"(above) on another computer

  20. p.s. as an artist/musician i have struggled with ( to borrow an in vogue military term} an appropriate response to the hijacking of nations wealth by those who own said nations banks – said nations then hijacking it from their citizens .

    I have come to the conclusion that an emotional response (be it anger or frustration or whatever) is "inappropriate" because the fraudulent and reductive logic used to justify their actions is unemotional- even zombie like in its herd reasoning ( we must be as them to survive).

    Emotional arguments are only useful for answering emotional arguments.

    It's your lucidity and rationality that your commentors on this site value, in the face of the blunt-edged quasi-rationality used by governments to justify rooking their flock. That you argue well and with passion gives your take on this a power which I for one respond to and am willing to put my weight behind where possible. Threatening to spill blood makes me run away. The RBS attracted no suicide bombers; thank fuck. That also is a "a tie that binds us together" as you put it.

  21. pps another answer comes from "proudchav" posted on the guardian 9 september 2010

    For those posters asking when the riots will start, don't hold your breath. Don't expect anything from the ineffectual Labour Party or the toothless TUC. However, there will be resistance to this attack on the poor.

    The resistance will come from people of my class, the underclass. We may not know that we are resisting, but resist we will. Our children will mug your children for things that none of them really need. Some of us, in despair, will turn to drink and drugs, and to fuel our newly acquired habits we will burgle your house, or shoplift from your businesses. Others of us will turn to prostitution, and spread disease and family break-up. If I had my way, our resistance would take a more recognisable form, whereby we would visit the bailiffs, the police and the politicians in their homes and make them regret their attacks. Unfortunately, this would require a heightened political awareness we don't possess.

    However, we do have an instinctive political awareness. We know our enemy. I have many happy memories of when, as a teenager, my mates and I would commit acts of petty vandalism in the Tory voting areas we had to pass through on the way back to our edge of town council estate after a night out. We weren't sure why we were doing this, but we knew we were doing it in the right place.

  22. Good article as we all know Dave. What you say fits in with the general attitude. To take a specific example of when there is a decision as to who to back in a debate on jobs. By this I mean when a bank or BigBiz whines about the clampdown on visas, you know which way the cookie crumbles. The welfare of the indigenous workers is second to that of the multi-national company and there will be 'flexibility'. Right now, our very own bank LLoyds TSB is busy shipping hundreds of back office IT jobs off-shore. We own a good proportion (40%) of this bank but the market rules over all and if it is good for the company then it is good for Britain (copyright G Brown).

  23. Golem XIV - Thoughts

    I wanted to say thank you to all of you.

    It is such a pleasure to read all the comments. I hope nothing in my reply to Benek99 was offensive and s/he will continue to post challenging comments.

    Thank you also Andrew/Catarina for suggesting how, what I said, may have struck people. I never want my personal politics to become an issue. I get angry, that's all.

    IanG's comments speaks to me also. When he says 'the rights of indigenous workers' right there is one of those places where racist cretins try to insinuate themselves. 'Yes, yes', they'll say, "It's all the fault of those foreign workers.' And THAT is where the racist interpretation versus mine and I think IanG's, divide.

    To make the observation about foreign workers doing jobs more cheaply is not to put the blame on them. It is simply to state a fact. If I was poor and was offered a job, I'd take it too. There is no blame in wanting to provide for your family.

    Those shipping the jobs off-shore or hiring cheaper foreign labour would like nothing better than for us to blame the 'foreigners'. It distracts us from the real issue.

    For twenty years we have believed those who claim the unfettered free market and its logic CANNOT and MUST NOT be resisted. Our entire poltiical class, left and right, has swollowed this argument and rolled over for the markets, stripped us of any protections and delivered us and our society naked into the market machine.

    The company bosses and our politicians chose to believe that the market logic is all powerful. And some of them really believe the market knows best and cannot be resisted. They are moral cowards and feeble thinkers. OR they are simply making too much money to care.

    They tell us there is noting we can do. But that is not true. Not true politically nor economically. It is the great lie of neo-liberal free-market ideology.

    It is a lie we had better stand and face and defeat in argument if we do not want to see our children impoverished.

    We are a group of people on a planet still abundant and rich in resources. We are divided by fears and bigotries. But it is not beyond us to find a better logic than the one that insists that only when the greediest among us are aboslutely sated, only then can the poorest be spared a crumb. That is the logic of the unfettered market.

    We can do better.

  24. Hi Golem,

    You are right, uk plc is a unreal, stomach churning concept. Just look out your window and watch the world – pretending that it is 'money that makes the world go round' is just plain wrong.

    You may have seen this article from the independant, via Naked Capital.

    Protest Works Just look at the proof

    Your blog may just have more effect than you think. Who knows?

  25. Jamie i forgot to say i would've loved to go but I was working overtime to buy drums for my band so we can sing 'Songs of the Great Repression'.

    Rob i doff my hat to you and G, i told you leaflets are the way to go.

    The cold hard facts printed on a sick bag, just in case they make people queasy.

    With a large enough font that can be photcopied from a copy from a copy from a copy. Physical facts from a virtual world, nice.

    Get writing people, send them to G and he can pick the best and put them in the pdf gallery, bit like this dude:

    Tony Hart -check the music-

    "Here we have a lovely one from Carol aged 53. I love the way you have written FRAUD, CHEAT and STEAL, very good. Next we have John aged 26..".

  26. I have come to this post a bit late but I totally agree with this idea of Golem… the words do matter… the way things are described matters deeply. They propagate the prevailing myth of the markets. UK plc exactly!
    But when it comes to resistance nobody has mentioned the Poll Tax and the huge and wonderfully diverse resistance movement it brought about. Small groups grew up in every town and began to work together. The political parties such as Liberal Democrats and Labour while supposedly against the idea of the Poll tax actually did nothing. The movement grew out of ordinary people's rage and gradually growing idea of what was being done to them. People who quite often were not in the ordinary way political. I am quite convinced that it was the the threat of widespread civil disorder after the Poll Tax riots that forced the conservatives to ditch Thatcher. What was striking was the way that most people while not maybe supporting the riot in Trafalgar Square were also not willing to fall in with the hysterical reaction in the media against it. Something had to give and it was the Poll Tax and Thatcher.
    Of course financial issues are much harder to get across but Golem is hitting the nail on the head here. Once the issue is clarified people begin to think and once they ask the questions the whole edifice starts to tremble. Long way off? Maybe. I have been astonished at the way the Irish have accepted what's gone down… but somehow its the myth of the overspending society that has to "rein in spending" that is paramount still. There is still a masochism abroad. But this stems from a failure to understand. Once these ideas and facts do start to enter the mainstream then I think something could really start to happen…

  27. Golem XIV - Thoughts

    wirplit,

    Thank your for commenting. I'm sorry it's only me replying. It is a weakness of th eway my blog is set up that posts tend to get forgotten. I wish I was clever enough to keep threads active and somehow show which ones are still active. But I don't know how to do it.

    For what it's worth I remember the poll as you do. A true grass roots uprising. And as you say even those who would tut at smashing up cars were reluctant to condemn it in the event. And Mrs T went as a result.

    We did it then. No reason to think we can't do it again.

  28. I love your blogs. So well informed and so intuitive. UK plc was right on the money if you will excuse the pun. The interesting thing is that all these companies will probably have ‘Investors in People’ awards and who are the first out of the door with nothing? Yes, it’s workforce. Platitudes like ‘our people are our biggest asset” are bandied around by many companies and all of these things are meaningless when we see time and time again, people discarded immediately there is financial difficulty. What is the point of these ‘Investors in People’ awards? Let’s dispense with meaningless claptrap and see it for what it is – a pathetic fig leaf which covers very little.

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