Internet piracy isn’t subversive. It is as much a part of the 'I want' culture as Jimmy Carr’s accounting

At some point during the last 10 years or so, the idea that everything that can be taken for free should be taken for free has become widely accepted. The most intriguing thing about the 2009 parliamentary expenses scandal was not the relaxed set of regulations governing the expenses process, but rather the widespread assumption by MPs that if it was possible to put in a claim for something it would be fit and proper to do so – the morality of the claim itself being a moot point.

Further down the food chain, a visible feature of last August’s rioting was the proportion of trouble that appeared to be motivated by little more than an unquenchable thirst for consumer goods; free consumer goods. There can be little doubt that deprivation and broken homes played a part, perhaps even providing the much talked about “spark” that “ignited” the trouble. But disenfranchised youth looting sports gear has more in common with the mantra that “greed is good” than with any coherent “rebellion”.

A belief in deferred gratification – that is, the idea that if you want something you must bide your time and patiently save the money for it – sounds to today’s debt-ridden society like a well-conducted tour of Atlantis. You will even hear corporate press officers explaining the popularity of technological devices such as the Kindle (a tool for reading books, no less) in terms of the instantaneous gratification they provide. People don’t want to wait several days for their book to drop through the letterbox, so the corporate message goes. They want it now: this instant. (One wonders if these “consumers”, so concerned with speed, start reading from the back of the book, all the better to immediately discern what the plot is.)

Not only do we expect to get our hands on the things we desire right away, but we increasingly turn our noses up at the prospect of giving anything back in return. Nowhere is this more apparent than the music industry, where record sales in the UK declined for the seventh successive year in 2011, due in large part to internet file sharing. In 2010 global music sales fell by almost £930m, with “physical” sales of CDs dropping in the UK by almost a fifth.

A recent article that appeared on the American NPR music blog summed up the attitude of many young people to free downloading. The author, a young lady called Emily White, said she had an iTunes library in excess of 11,000 songs of which she had “never invested money”. “I honestly don’t think my peers and I will ever pay for albums,” Ms White went on to admit. “All I require is the ability to listen to what I want, when I want and how I want it. Is that too much to ask?”. Responding to Ms White’s article, David Lowery of Artists for an Ethical Internet described her attitude as “unexceptional”, and based on a common disconnect between “personal behaviour and a greater social injustice that is occurring”. “You are not just ripping off the record labels, but you are directly ripping off the artist and songwriters whose music you ‘don’t buy’,” Mr Lowery said.

And it is not only the music industry that is suffering because of the increasing unwillingness of individuals to pay for content. According to a study by US Professors Michael Smith and Rahul Telang of the Carnegie Mellon University, the film industry too is being badly hit, with around 40 per cent of the revenue for a typical film being lost to piracy. The traditional copyright model meant that in the past an artist maintained control of his or her work because it was recognised as the property of the individual that created it for a set period of time. This gave the artist the right to sell the fruits of their labours and make a living from it, which in turn allowed artists and writers to operate professionally without the film and music industries being the preserve of a wealthy elite.

Today all that is changing. Because it is now technologically possible for corporations and individuals to exploit the property rights of artists and writers the piracy lobby insists it must therefore be ethical. In other words, technology has begun to dictate what is morally acceptable rather than morality dictating how technology is used. The debate has also misleadingly been framed in terms of censorship rather than elementary workers’ rights. A recent statement to the press made by the Pirate Bay after the UK’s internet service providers were ordered by the High Court to block the Swedish site as cretinous as it was disingenuous.

“The Western countries of the world all complaints [sic] about the censorship in Iran, China, Saudi Arabia and so on. But they are really the worst culprits themselves, having double morals in doing an even worse thing themselves.”

You could be forgiven for confusing this with a child throwing their food off the plate because Mummy won’t give them the big plastic spoon. Ensuring that people are paid sufficiently for their work (an admirable and progressive goal one would think) has very little to do with censorship and is in no way comparable to the repression of governments that have been known to “disappear” their critics. One almost expects those who run the Pirate Bay to come out and say they are being “oppressed” because they’ve run out of chocolate Hobnobs.

Strangely, the cause of unfettered internet piracy is most often pushed by people on the political Left – a movement that has traditionally believed in the furtherance of workers’ rights as a first principle. Are brow-beaten musicians, film directors and writers not as deserving of a decent day’s pay as workers in other industries? Or are they exempt from such concerns because they make their living doing something they enjoy?

Internet piracy isn’t subversive. It is as much a part of the “I want” culture as Jimmy Carr’s clever accounting. As Mr Lowery puts it: “I have witnessed the impoverishment of many critically acclaimed but marginally commercial artists. There is no other explanation except for the fact that ‘fans’ made the unethical choice to take their music without compens ating these artists.”

A quarter of Sunday Times rich list are Tory Party donors

The trade union subscription to the Labour Party for an individual member is around three pounds a year, which it is possible to opt out of and which is less than half the cost of a book of First Class stamps. Conservative MPs often make the charge that the Labour Party is “bankrolled” by the unions. “More than half of Labour MPs have had their campaigns bankrolled (that word again) by the trade union threatening to disrupt the lives of millions and bring our economy to its knees,” was how Baroness Warsi scornfully phrased it in an interview with the Daily Mail during the recent fuel strike that never was.

And what of the response of Tory HQ to businessman Peter Cruddas’s claim that giving money to the Tories could prove “awesome for your business” (committing the crime of attempting to sound hip if nothing else). “Unlike the Labour Party, where union donations are traded for party policies, donations to the Conservative Party do not buy party or government policy.”

No equivocation there then.

But there is an element of truth to Tory claims. Swap the word union with the phrase “working people who voluntarily donate to a union fund that goes to the Labour Party” and you are getting closer to the truth. The Labour party is indeed bankrolled (if you’re the sort of person who insists on calling it that) by the trade union movement; but this movement (an appropriate word if ever there was one) consists of millions of working people who it is the Labour Party’s raison d’etre to represent.

Perhaps trade unionists have more in common with a greater number of the electorate than, say, those who grace the pages of the Sunday Times Rich List. For when nearly a quarter of the top 1,000 richest people in the country have given money to the Conservative Party, which they most certainly have if this year’s directory is to be believed, those claiming the problem is union funding of the Labour Party really ought to quieten down.

248 of the top 1,000 individuals featured on this year’s Rich List have financially supported the Conservative Party since 2001, with donations totalling £83.6m. The Swedish Hans Rausing food packaging dynasty were the highest placed donors on the List in 12th place, with gifts to the Tories totalling £886,000. They were followed by Sir Anthony Bamford and Family, who donated £4.7m to the Tories and who were 20th on the Rich List; the Fleming family, who donated £1.3 million and came in at number 42; and Lord Ashcroft, whose donations to the party totalled £6.1m and who was 62nd on the List. In fifth place was our good friend Peter Cruddas, who donated £1.1m to the Conservatives but who lumbered in at a proletarian 101 on the List.

So what might these individuals of contrasting fortunes be getting for their dosh?

A trade unionist might hope for at least something in return from their modest contribution to the Labour Party. A decent minimum wage for those at the bottom of the pay scale, perhaps. Or maybe a guarantee that they won’t be thrown out of work because a superior has taken a dislike to their skin colour or sexuality. He or she might trade in their three pounds in the faint, perhaps misguided hope that there will be a political party which grudgingly carries his or her hopes and dreams somewhere in its DNA. For the price of a packet of stamps, it does seem worth a try.

But what could possibly motivate Britain’s most privileged individuals to donate such large sums to the Tory Party? What might they expect in return for their generosity?

“It is clear the wealthy look to the Tory Party to protect their interests and they have been repaid with policies like the change in Income Tax, down from 50p to 45p,” said General Secretary of the GMB union Paul Kenny.

“This is not philanthropy. It’s an investment by an elite in an elite to look after their interests.”

If the Tories are to be believed, union donations are traded for Labour policies at three quid a head. Were that true, it would mean policies for the benefit of quite a few heads – there are around seven million trade unionists, after all, which is considerably more than there are candidates for the Sunday Times Rich List. Which leaves one wondering: if three pounds gets you a slight nod from the Labour leadership at conference now and then, what must the sort of sums mentioned above get you from the Government? Quite a lot, I would imagine, but for a much, much smaller proportion of the population than carry trade union membership cards.

Originally posted @The Independent.
(Image: The Independent)

Politicians of the ‘centre ground’ have led us to the brink of catastrophe

The era of moderate politicians is at an end. Right across Europe many people who grew up on a diet of consumerism and political cynicism are beginning to shake-off apathy and re-engage. As a consequence, from the Élysée Palace to the so-called “cradle of democracy”, the people of Europe are starting to rediscover the radical possibilities of the ballot box.

In Britain things remain relatively quiet. The £10-a-drink cocktail bars in the shadow of Canary Wharf are not stalked by fears of a socialist politician promising to tax the rich until the pips squeak. Nor is there any prospect of the extremities of left or right breaking through significantly at the next election. Judging by the turnout at last month’s local elections (turnout was 32 per cent, the lowest since 2000), people remain about as uninspired as ever.

Not that this is anything new of course. The formative years of my generation - those born in the eras of Thatcher, Major and Blair - were spent against a backdrop of increasing prosperity and declining political engagement. Whichever party you put a cross next to on the ballot paper it seemed like the outcome was always the same - a predictable set of policies within increasingly narrow confines. With more money in our pockets, or at least the illusion of it, many people started to drift away from the political process entirely. In an era of cheap credit and even cheaper materialism, those who did register to vote often did so for no other reason than the prospect of an improved credit rating. The citizenship of past generations was replaced, to an extent at least, by a generation of pushy consumers who identified not with political parties but with brands.

Even the political left accepted the politics of moderation in its own way, ditching the idea of class solidarity in favour of touchy-feely tropes about individuality and identity. Radical political groups began to draw up shopping lists of the hot issues they could campaign on and talked about the rights of small sections of the population while ignoring the problems facing the wider community. To be left was to be parochial in one’s concerns. Because ideas that might compete with liberal capitalism failed to attract mass audiences, front organisations sprang up which drew members of the public to causes of a more palatable nature. Contrary to common wisdom on the left, the British people didn’t spurn radical politics because of a hostile and conspiratorial media; they did so because they had money in their pockets and were under the strong impression things were going to stay that way. It was therefore left to radicals to attract support by convincing the wider public that they too were sufficiently versed in the politics of moderation.


And then Lehman Brothers collapsed. Cheap credit dried up and people were thrown out of work by the bosses of companies they had until that point viewed as benevolent and kind-hearted pillars of their local community. The grand proclamations of an “end of history” made by certain academics began to look like bombastic wish-thinking.

And yet in the aftermath of the crisis party politics remained largely unchanged, and the election across Europe of governments committed to austerity betrayed a feeling that a few years of belt-tightening would give way to a swift return to prosperity. Interestingly, the newly triumphant politicians of the centre-right looked not to the depression of the 1930s for lessons in dealing with the financial crisis, but to the 1980s – their formative political years – and sought to push-back the state in a way their political role-models had done a generation before.

One of the consequences is that Europeans are now beginning to understand what happens to living standards when economies are starved of money during economic contraction. Recognising that things are not getting any better, people have begun to punish with unpredictable consequences those parties that have been advocating austerity the most enthusiastically. In Greece, a neo-Nazi party has entered parliament and it looks increasingly likely that a leftist coalition will come out on top in the re-run of elections next week. This would make a Greek default and corresponding exit from the Eurozone a near certainty. If one country departs, other weak countries could follow, leading to the complete break-up of the Eurozone. In September of last year, economists at UBS published research on the potential consequences of the Eurozone falling apart. Monetary union break-ups, the paper warned, rarely occur without mass civil disobedience and even civil war. A Greek exit from the Eurozone might also trigger a run on British banks; and Alistair Darling, the pragmatic figure who bailed out the banks in 2008, has been replaced at the treasury by George Osborne, a man who at the time of the 2008 crash was willing to let the banks (and the savings of their customers) go to the wall.

Anyone who has ever been politically active will have heard it said at some point that they are “too political”; the underlying assumption being that in the 21st century politics is not something one needs to concern oneself with. Tony Blair, perhaps the most well-known political embodiment of the idea that what matters is what works, enunciated this way of thinking in a speech to students at the University of Singapore last year. “We live in a post-ideological era of government,” Mr Blair told the audience. Before adding that the “fundamental political divide between left and right is a phenomenon of the 20th century.”

What a tragic irony it is then, that we should be led so close to the economic brink, and perhaps in a very short space of time over it, by a generation of politicians and voters (after all, it is us who elect our representatives) whose hollowed out, non-ideological politics betrayed a belief that the major political questions of the day had already been resolved. As anyone even slightly switched on will have figured out by now, post-ideological politics has an ideology all of its own: one which at present is embodied by our elected representatives slashing living standards across Europe in order to placate a financial monster they can no longer control.

The era of moderate politicians is at an end, and as a consequence so is the complacent notion that it is possible to stay out of politics. “All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia,” as Orwell once said. Leaders who previously put their faith in a certain type of economic system and claimed this as an expression of their moderacy didn’t know everything and as a result it turns out they didn’t really know anything. As for the rest of us, perhaps all we can really do now is wait for the economic and political storm to hit.

Chav-hating is not always about class

The word chav is used less and less frequently in the British media these days. Just a few years ago it was a term thrown around by almost everyone – from A-list celebrities to comedy Z-listers. The success of a certain book, along with a corresponding recognition that the word is often an expression of naked class hatred, have gradually and by consensus banished it from most forms of popular entertainment. The term still lurks around certain corners of course – often in places where one finds a cacophony of other unreconstructed attitudes – but there is increasingly an element of shame attached to the word that equates it with more than a degree of social prejudice.

Outside of journalism and the commentariat, however, the word remains in wide circulation. Not only in the vocabulary of the sort of person who uses it to disparage what their grandparents might have called “the lower orders”, but for people of a distinctly working class background, who associate it with behaviour that increasingly blights the areas where they live. For them, the word relates not so much to income or social class, but to the negation of a basic level of decency expected of their fellow human beings.

Without the luxury of gated communities and private security guards, it’s often the working class who bear the brunt of the anti-social behaviour most commonly associated with ‘chavs’. To them, the word is associated not with working-class culture, but rather with the violent, work-shy louts who plague their otherwise peaceful neighbourhoods. Put another way, one need not condone the unpleasant undercurrent the word sometimes has to recognise that it’s not always an expression of unadulterated class hatred. During last Augusts’ riots, it was poor immigrant families and the elderly – the most vulnerable – who were in many instances barricaded inside their homes while a whirlwind of tracksuited youth swept the streets outside in the hunt for consumer goods. If they had dismissed those rioting as chavs, would they really have been expressing “class hatred”?

Interestingly, new data has found that the highest level of support for a petition to remove benefits from those who took part in last Augusts’ riots came from areas affected the most by rioting. That is, in the areas where, according to some of the more crude analysis, there was so much deprivation that lots of people decided to riot. The postal districts contributing over 500 signatures to the petition were:

SW11 (Clapham) – 1,102
CR0 (Croydon) – 998
E14 (Canary Wharf) – 935
SW18 (Wandsworth) – 897
SW19 (Collier’s Wood) – 892
SW6 (Fulham) – 865
N1 (Islington) – 743
SW15 (Putney) – 675
SE1 (Southwark) – 664
SW17 (Tooting) – 620
SW16 (Streatham) – 557
SW4 (Clapham) – 549
SW12 (Balham/Clapham) – 514
SE16 (Bermondsey) – 500

What the data seems to show is that those who wished to see the greatest sanction for the rioters were themselves just as likely to be from socially deprived areas as the rioters themselves. It is, after all, highly unlikely that a person who has just watched their livelihood go up in flames will be spewing out euphemisms about “uprisings”, nor view someone who has just robbed them as a victim. Which raises the question: is it not possible that those who, according to Owen Jones, were demonised as chavs on the back of the rioting were given this label, to an extent at least, by people who live in close proximity to them? In other words, by people just as working class as they are?

A friend recently relayed to me how during the riots he was unceremoniously set upon by a group of youths. The man who attacked him was part of a larger group, and jumped out of the shadows and hit my friend in the face as he walked home from a night out. On the back of the attack, my friend required an operation to re-align the bone around his eye socket, which had sunk back several millimetres through the force of the punch. He asked the attacker before he fled why he had done this to him; why he had hit him, and for no apparent reason. The attacker explained to my friend that he was mistaken. He had hit him for a very good reason; my friend was on his “patch” – in other words, he had walked through “his” estate. Speaking to me recently, my friend, who works as refuse collector, described his attacker as a “chav”. He wasn’t, as far as I am aware, expressing any sort of class hatred, but rather recoiling from a type of person who, he said, was increasingly prevalent on the estate where he lived – aggressive, violent individuals who were simply incapable of civilised behaviour. The people he really despised, he said, were not the huddles of threatening-looking teenagers and those who drove up and down the streets every night with booming music playing in their cars, nor the people who engaged in “postcode wars” and once put a burning newspaper through his letterbox while his two year old son was asleep upstairs (“the kids round here do it for a laugh”, he told me nonchalantly), but the parents of these people. “Where exactly are they in all of this?” he asked.

That is not to say that social class does not matter. I do not think it would even be going too far to suggest that a small proportion of the weekly television entertainment schedule is given over to laughing at the poor. What many people use the word chav for, however, is to express frustration at the gradual disappearance of basic decency. All too often anyone who recoils at the sort of boorishness commonly ascribed to the chav is lazily dismissed as a snob. And let’s not forget, chavs can also be incredibly wealthy – when a celebrity is labelled a chav it is not their poverty that is being mocked so much as their unabashed materialism and often proud ignorance. Many (usually those who themselves live in affluent areas) will instinctively scoff at even the concept of decency and dismiss it as “bourgeois”, well aware that it will not be their locality that is ransacked the next time it all kicks off.

By all means despise those who use the term to express their nasty little prejudices, but don’t, in the process, forget that lots of working class people also detest what they would call chavs. They’re not expressing class hatred, but rather rejecting the very people who give their social class a bad name.

Originally posted @The Independent
(Image: The Independent)