Jon Cruddas | ukwatch.net

It truly is a game of two halves

Alex Doherty — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:49:55 +0000

JUST in case you hadn’t noticed, the FA Premier League football season has kicked off again, bringing nine months of unbridled joy and tension to millions of homes and significant stress to associated bank balances.

The Barclays Premier League is now the most lucrative football league in the world. The combined revenues of Premiership clubs stood at approximately £1.9 billion last season and the 20 clubs spent an astonishing £600 million on playing staff alone. Owing to season ticket price hikes of

7.8 per cent on average – more than double the rate of inflation – and lucrative new broadcasting rights awarded to television monoliths Sky and Setanta Sports, revenues are set to rise dramatically this season

Despite this affluence, poverty pay remains endemic throughout the league for the people manning the turnstiles, serving the tea, sweeping the terraces and even those servicing the luxury hotels of certain household name clubs. Every single club – despite the fortunes being paid at the top end – is condemning many of their workers off the pitch and away from the spotlight to a life of working poverty.

Speaking recently at the headquarters of Premier League sponsors Barclays, recent convert Boris Johnson continued the work of former London Mayor Ken Livingstone by announcing a new London living wage of £7.45 an hour. He said: “In London, largely because of housing costs, you need an hourly rate of nearly 18 per cent above the minimum wage to take you above the poverty level.” All five football clubs in the capital – by extension – are employing hard-working staff on working poor terms.

Further evidence from the anti-poverty authority the Joseph Rowntree Foundation supports this assessment, stating that a single person in Britain needs to earn at least £13,400 a year before tax for a minimum standard of living, while a couple with two children need to spend at least £370 a week. According to bodies such as the TUC, in these difficult times of exorbitant energy, food and housing costs, a British citizen must earn at least £6.80 an hour in order to reach an adequate standard of living.

It has also come to light recently that the Fair Pay Network – which includes the TUC, Unite, Unison and the GMB as coalition members – and the Institute for Public Policy Research have conducted research and sent Premier League clubs voluntary surveys to ascertain what knowledge they have of their own internal pay structures and external agency organised supplier chains. They have discovered widespread low pay at minimum wage level, examples of part-time working based solely on commission or the possibility of a match ticket and even one British-based supplier chain for three Premiership clubs paying an aggregated rate of £2 per hour for the production of official club merchandise

This is scandalous. The moral case for any business and certainly hero-worshipped sporting clubs with vast turnovers paying their staff a fair wage should be obvious, but the business case for such an ethical course of action is just as robust. In addition to Barclays, corporate titans such as Price Waterhouse Coopers, HSBC, Deutsche Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland are now all implementing fair or living wage policies. They do so not just because this is ethically sound, but also because it makes hard-headed business sense.

Two notable examples of a growing number of private, public and third sector bodies which have set in place fair pay policies are Barclays and KPMG – one of the largest professional services firms in the world employing more than 123,000 people. Since 2006, KPMG has ensured that every cleaner working in its British offices – although employed by third parties – receives the appropriate living wage employment conditions plus allowance for inflation. Similar conditions are given to all on-site supplier staff including catering, mailroom and security employees. Guy Stallard of KPMG told the Fair Pay Network: “We have found that paying the living wage is a smart business move, as increasing wages has reduced staff turnover and absenteeism, while productivity and professionalism has subsequently increased.” Barclays has echoed his sentiments.

With the growth of low-paying jobs such as hospitality and retail positions increasing in the Premiership, the prognosis for low-paying work spreading throughout the elite clubs is very real. Gone are the days when supporters sipped molten Bovril and chewed cold meat puddings; no soccer day out is now complete without a visit to the club superstore and club-branded fast food. For some, even a stay in a glass-fronted swanky stadium hotel is now de rigueur.

Our national sport can and should set a national standard for fairness and lead by example. As my colleague, sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe, put it: “Everyone working for these clubs makes a valuable contribution and it’s only right that they should be fairly rewarded.” The same can be said for all hard-working people across the low-paying sectors throughout Britain, far too many of whom receive low pay as a norm. Initiatives such as the Fair Pay Network serve to reignite grassroots social justice campaigns, not least among trade unionists and local Labour Party members.

Jon Cruddas is Labour MP for Dagenham and a patron of the Fair Pay Network. To find out more about the campaign, please visit: www.fairpaynetwork.org/football

Nothing is more important

JamieSW — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:03:38 +0000

There is a tangible shift occurring in British politics. Gone are the days of traditional class politics, when the working class voted en masse for Labour and the more privileged for the Conservatives. A new force is emerging, which will, if left unchecked, prove disastrous for both Labour and the left in general.

Magnus Marsdal’s article talks about the changing politics of Norway and finds comparisons with the rest of western Europe. It is a phenomenon that is also taking place in Britain, albeit a few years later than in some other countries.

The British National Party (BNP) was formed in 1982 out of an earlier split within the National Front and for many years it languished on the fringes of politics. In 1999 Nick Griffin became its leader and his more political and media savvy approach enabled the party to exploit rising racial tensions in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in the summer of 2001. Since then, against a backdrop of rising Islamophobia, a growing eastern-European migrant workforce and New Labour’s fixation with Middle England, the party has risen steadily. It now has 55 councillors and last month secured a seat on the London Assembly.

And all this in a period of supposed economic success.

The BNP has long been dismissed as a cranky fascist party, made up of thugs, criminals and Nazis. While it is true that the leadership has its ideological roots in fascism, it is time we had a better explanation for the party’s rise and appeal.

Society in Britain, like much of the industrialised world, has become dislocated over the past few decades. Globalisation and the increasing dominance of international finance and corporations have shifted power far away from local communities. This, coupled with the loss of empire, Britain’s changing place in the world and even the possible break-up of the United Kingdom have all challenged the identity of many, particularly those towards the bottom of the economic ladder, who naturally are more concerned about change.

Politically, there has also been the growing divorce between the political parties and their electorates. The preoccupation with a small number of voters in a few key marginals has resulted in New Labour echoing the whims and prejudices of a mythical Middle England. Class has been removed as an economic and political category in Westminster discourse. Labour’s traditional voters feel ignored, taken for granted and even abandoned. At the same time, the Tories have for decades ceased to offer a real opposition in many traditional Labour areas, leaving a dangerous vacuum.

In 1968 US sociologist Don Warren described the emergence of the ‘middle American radical’ to explain the rise of right-wing presidential candidate George Wallace. He saw a radicalised group of voters, drawn largely from the skilled working class, who opposed the political and economic elites while simultaneously despising those who they regarded as undeserving poor. A white identity emerged that had no political articulation.

A similar phenomenon is occurring in today’s Britain. The Labour Party too often fails to articulate the concerns of large swathes of its traditional working class supporters. Over the past 20 years turnout has slumped in Labour heartlands. Suddenly, as the BNP has emerged as a political force, many are now turning out to vote for them. Towns like Stoke-on-Trent reflect this change. Only a few years ago Labour held every seat on the council. Today, it holds just 16 out of 60, with the BNP close behind with nine. The local ethnic minority population is comparatively small, suggesting that voters are flocking to the BNP for some far more fundamental reasons.

Nor is there much comfort for parties to the left of Labour. It is easy to blame New Labour for the rise of the BNP but few have questioned why the far-left parties fail to attract significant support from white working-class voters. If anything, the far-left vote has actually shrunk since 1997 and the occasional successes of Respect or the Greens have been based on specific ethnic minority communities or middle-class liberals.

Race is a prism through which many voters view their world but it is not the underlying issue. That is why immigration minister Liam Byrne’s attempts to quicken the introduction of the Australian points system will ultimately fail to deal with the political problem. He might hope to appease voters’ concerns over immigration but unfortunately he, like many others, is misunderstanding the rise of the BNP.

Britain might have been slower to see the emergence of a major far-right party than elsewhere but this could change very quickly. Next year’s European elections, contested under proportional representation, will give the BNP its greatest chance to break into the mainstream.

The rise of the BNP is not a passing phenomena. We must now debate new strategies for organisation and policy, counter- organise on the ground and deal with the material issues that lie behind its popular support. Nothing is more important for this movement.

Jon Cruddas is the Labour MP for Dagenham. Nick Lowles is editor of Searchlight magazine