Oliver James | ukwatch.net

Selfish capitalism is bad for our mental health

Tim Holmes — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 11:32:06 +0000

By far the most significant consequence of "selfish capitalism" (Thatch/Blatcherism) has been a startling increase in the incidence of mental illness in both children and adults since the 1970s. As I report in my book, The Selfish Capitalist - Origins of Affluenza, World Health Organisation and nationally representative studies in the United States, Britain and Australia, reveal that it almost doubled between the early 80s and the turn of the century. These increases are very unlikely to be due to greater preparedness to acknowledge distress - the psychobabbling therapy culture was already established.

Add to this the astonishing fact that citizens of Selfish Capitalist, English-speaking nations (which tend to be one and the same) are twice as likely to suffer mental illness as those from mainland western Europe, which is largely Unselfish Capitalist in its political economy. An average 23% of Americans, Britons, Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians suffered in the last 12 months, but only 11.5% of Germans, Italians, French, Belgians, Spaniards and Dutch. The message could not be clearer. Selfish Capitalism, much more than genes, is extremely bad for your mental health. But why is it so toxic?

Readers of this newspaper will need little reminding that Selfish Capitalism has massively increased the wealth of the wealthy, robbing the average earner to give to the rich. There was no "trickle-down effect" after all.

The real wage of the average English-speaking person has remained the same - or, in the case of the US, decreased - since the 1970s. By more than halving the taxes of the richest and transferring the burden to the general population, Margaret Thatcher reinstated the rich's capital wealth after three postwar decades in which they had steadily become poorer.

Although I risk you glazing over at these statistics, it's worth remembering that the top 1% of British earners have doubled their share of the national income since 1982, from 6.5% to 13%, FTSE 100 chief executives now earning 133 times more than the average wage (against 20 times in 1980); and under Brown's chancellorship the richest 0.3% nobbled over half of all liquid assets (cash, instantly accessible income), increasing their share by 79% during the last five years.

In itself, this economic inequality does not cause mental illness. WHO studies show that some very inequitable developing nations, like Nigeria and China, also have the lowest prevalence of mental illness. Furthermore, inequity may be much greater in the English-speaking world today, but it is far less than it was at the end of the 19th century. While we have no way of knowing for sure, it is very possible that mental illness was nowhere near as widespread in, for instance, the US or Britain of that time.

What does the damage is the combination of inequality with the widespread relative materialism of Affluenza - placing a high value on money, possessions, appearances and fame when you already have enough income to meet your fundamental psychological needs. Survival materialism is healthy. If you need money for medicine or to buy a house, becoming very concerned about getting them does not make you mentally ill.

But Selfish Capitalism stokes up relative materialism: unrealistic aspirations and the expectation that they can be fulfilled. It does so to stimulate consumerism in order to increase profits and promote short-term economic growth. Indeed, I maintain that high levels of mental illness are essential to Selfish Capitalism, because needy, miserable people make greedy consumers and can be more easily suckered into perfectionist, competitive workaholism.

With overstimulated aspirations and expectations, the entrepreneurial fantasy society fosters the delusion that anyone can be Alan Sugar or Bill Gates, never mind that the actual likelihood of this occurring has diminished since the 1970s. A Briton turning 20 in 1978 was more likely than one doing so in 1990 to achieve upward mobility through education. Nonetheless, in the Big Brother/ It Could Be You society, great swaths of the population believe they can become rich and famous, and that it is highly desirable. This is most damaging of all - the ideology that material affluence is the key to fulfilment and open to anyone willing to work hard enough. If you don't succeed, there is only one person to blame - never mind that it couldn't be clearer that it's the system's fault, not yours.

Depressed or anxious, you work ever harder. Or maybe you collapse and join the sickness benefit queue, leaving it to people shipped in to do the low-paid jobs that society has taught you are too demeaning - let alone the unpaid ones, like looking after children or elderly parents, which are beneath contempt in the Nouveau Labour liturgy.

There is much tearing of hair across the media and advocacy of nose-pegging on these pages of the "grin and bear it" variety. In fact, there is an alternative. We desperately need - and before long, I predict we will get - a passionate, charismatic, probably female leader who advocates the Unselfish Capitalism of our neighbours. The pitch is simple. Not only would reduced consumerism and greater equality make us more ecologically sustainable, it would halve the prevalence of mental illness within a generation.

· Oliver James is discussing Selfish Capitalism with Will Self, Madeleine Bunting and Stewart Wallis in three London seminars this month www.selfishcapitalist.com

Cheap Labour

Alex Doherty — Sun, 13 May 2007 22:20:29 +0000

Being reminded of what might have happened in the past 10 years has been miserable. In his characteristically mawkish, self-deceiving homily on Wednesday, Tony Blair exhorted us to go back to 1997, to "Think back. No really think back".

Well, Tony, in all seriousness, I can hardly think of anything that you got right. I suppose you managed not to balls up John Major's Northern Irish initiative. Some 600,000 children are not in poverty who would otherwise have been - but then that was Brown, not you. More money was spent on health and education than the Tories would have - but your real goal was privatisation, and it's not that many years from now before the new hospitals and schools become the property of the companies that built them.

Most nauseating of all was your attempt to portray us as a great nation at peace with itself. The truth is that 23 per cent of us suffered a mental illness in the past 12 months, and the same percentage again is on the verge of it. This is exactly twice the rate for mainland Europe, which is 11.5 per cent.

Apart from enabling a basic level of economic success, sufficient to pay for food, health and education, the purpose of government is to minimise the amount of mental illness by creating a benign society, like the Scandinavians have been doing for 70 years. Blatcherism has done the opposite. If you can face it, here's a glimpse of what really happened to our social psychology in the past 10 years, starting at the beginning of life.

Foetuses depend on having calm, happy mothers. There is abundant evidence that feeling stressed in the last trimester is an independent cause of hyperactivity and behaviour problems. The mother's high levels of cortisol - the fight-flight hormone - are passed through the placenta and continue to affect the child nine years later. Yet, since 1997, women have been more, not less, likely to work right up to the birth.

It just goes on from there, as if the New Labour control freaks are oblivious to the evidence of what makes for mental health. Caesareans have multiplied several-fold, even though they interfere with bonding. British babies are even less likely to be breastfed than anywhere in Europe, again reducing emotional intimacy. Then, mental illness-inducing strict routines for babies, like insistence on four-hourly feeding or imposed sleep schedules, have become widespread. Where is the government action, following the damning study of this method published last year? It shows that, compared with babies raised in infant-centred regimes (for example, demand-feeding or sharing the parental bed when distressed), at three months the routine-nurtured babies spend 50 per cent more time crying or fussing: the Discontented Little Baby.

On top of all this, the past 10 years witnessed a massive growth in children's television channels, with non-terrestrial TV penetrating more homes, left free to have their wicked way with our minds. The resultant heavy viewing is bad for your nipper's mental and physical health. (Aric Sigman's book Remotely Controlled examines this phenomenon.) There is the greater aggression but also, as a recent American Psychological Association report shows, increasingly, the content sexualises little girls, making them neurotic about looks.

Then there has been the rise of electronic games (also harmful if taken in excess) and unhealthier eating. These significantly contributed to an epidemic of childhood obesity. (See Sue Palmer's Toxic Childhood.) Small wonder that Britain was at the bottom of this year's Unicef study of child welfare in 21 developed nations. Even the Americans were doing better - just.

As a foetus, an infant or a toddler, since 1997 you were more likely to have the kind of nurture which predisposed you towards being angry, depressed and anxious. This is a dreadful preparation for an education system which, even with the best early childhood in the world, you would find considerably more stressful.

SATs pressurised you to measure your performance relative to others. Obsession with GCSE results quotas governed teachers' methods. While average class sizes came down slightly, this was almost entirely due to the introduction of relatively low-paid and unskilled teaching assistants.

You might have found yourself in a spanking new building (soon to be the property of a private company), with your exercise books and teaching aids festooned with logos of their commercial sponsors. But successive education ministers confessed that the new system's purpose was to create compliant producer-consumers, not to meet our children's need to think for themselves.

That you now learn in order to earn was made explicit by the withdrawal of university student subsistence grants and the introduction of tuition fees. As in America, a high proportion of British students found themselves doing "McJobs" in order to survive. Despite that, on average they graduated with debts of £15,000. This is hardly a good preparation for the next stage: even more massive debt, nil savings, workaholism and consumerism, all underpinned by spiralling property prices.

The cost of the average house rose from £68,000 to £205,000 during the 10 years after 1997, a far higher increase than in previous decades. Interest rates were at record lows and lenders were allowed to offer six times annual income for mortgages. Shortage of housing stock was exacerbated by the absence of restrictions on foreign ownership. As prime London locations were bought up by wealthy foreign-born residents, seeing UK plc as a tax haven, the indigenous rich were forced further and further out of the centre, pushing up prices everywhere.

At the same time, affluenza-stoked consumerism was roaring, with unsecured debt spiralling on deregulated credit cards and loans. The virus of placing too high a value on money, possessions, appearances - both social and physical - and fame was everywhere, and in all classes. Authentic psychological needs - for emotional security and intimacy, for example - were conflated with material wants. We became a nation living on the never-never, with trade deficits exceeding all recent levels.

Yet the consumer goods were a gigantic swizz. As soon as retailers had our credit card details, they no longer wanted anything to do with us. Although the advertising mood music had been very different, it was a one-night stand they were after.

For, infuriatingly, built-in obsolescence had grown. When my MP3 player broke down after two years, I did everything possible to get it repaired. After a succession of lengthy, expensive and extremely frustrating calls to "customer services representatives", I was finally convinced that it would cost more to repair than to replace. It's the same story for toasters, children's electrical toys: you name it. Largely unregulated customer support departments are just a way of getting you to hang on when ringing a costly 0845 number. There are no real repair departments any more, and it's you who has to live with the guilt of global warming as you make for the dustbin.

You were looking for a long-term relationship but these bastards loved and left, and it was the same with your employer. As a 2004 International Labour Office report showed, compared with other nations British job insecurity has become extreme with short-term contracts and fewer employment rights. Addicted to consumption, huge mortgages and unsecured loans, you had to buckle down. As the average debt-laden student emerged into this workplace trying to catch their breath after the frantic rush to get a (heavily devalued) 2:1 or a first for their increasingly vital CV, they already knew they were going to have to kick the shit out of workplace competitors to be able afford that first, poky flat.

Service industries continued to replace manufacturing even faster under Blair than they did under Major - down to 15 per cent of jobs, compared with 20 per cent in 1997. A 2006 report by the Institute for Public Policy Research revealed that, in this service-industrial world (remember the politico-babble of Living on Thin Air: The New Economy by Charles Leadbeater or The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy by Anthony Giddens?), office politics and self-presentation had replaced real measurable achievements as the key to career success. Chameleonism, Machiavellianism, hyper-competitiveness and workaholism were what was needed. The twentysomething could see this all too clearly on Big Brother or The Apprentice, as they slumped, exhausted by the longer working hours, to eat their unhealthy supper, washed down with ever greater quantities of booze (perhaps after getting home from the deregulated pub).

The political rhetoric from all the major parties was of aspiration, greater prosperity and social justice, which is just double-think for inequality. The reality was a gap between rich and poor not seen since Victorian times. In the first five years after 1997, the average chief executive's salary doubled, with the likes of Philip Green trousering a £1.2bn dividend and removing it tax-free to Monaco. In the second five years the liquid assets (cash, or property that could be quickly turned into cash) of the wealthiest increased so much that the richest 0.3 per cent now own half of them in the UK.

Children depend on parents, employees on employers, consumers on producers, and electors on politicians. In the past 10 years, all these dependant relationships have broken down in Britain. There was nothing inevitable about this: globalisation cannot be blamed because, in many European nations, the relationships have become more, rather than less, nurturing. It could have been a different story, Tony. And it still can be, Gordon and Dave: there is an alternative.

*Oliver James is the author of 'Affluenza - How to be Successful and Stay Sane'*

Equality of Life

Tim Holmes — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 02:37:59 +0000

The final report of the "Equalities Review":http://www.theequalitiesreview.org.uk/, commissioned by Tony Blair, pays lip service to the idea that there is more to equality than cash. It maintains that people can be unequal in their quality of life as well, for example. But it completely fails to challenge the way in which the two key egalitarian ideals that emerged after 1945 - namely, meritocracy and female emancipation - were hijacked and grotesquely perverted after 1979.

We were doing OK in both respects until Thatcher, Major and Blatcher came along. Using the words "opportunity", "aspiration" and "freedom", they dangled in front of women, and middle- and low-income people, the fantasy that everyone can be rich and No 1. Lively debates about what was being merited (remember Michael Young's "The Rise of the Meritocracy":http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Meritocracy-Classics-Organization-Management/dp/1560007044?), and what the liberated woman would be (what was she being liberated from, in order to be whom?), were replaced by a new orthodoxy.

Education became a system for allocating resources - you learn to earn. The ruling elites quickly adapted (exam results became important at public schools) and so a low-income person born in 1958 was more likely to change social class than one born in 1970. It became received wisdom among the educated elite that genes largely determine individuals (along with the unspoken conviction that the same was true of class, at least among Blatcherites), and that history had ended.

Feminism became men in skirts grasping money and power as destructively and greedily as those they replaced. Yet women became even more anxious about their physical appearance and although men did get more involved in the home (housework and child-rearing), women still did the lion's share.

Managerialism replaced politics, in all spheres; private was good, public was bad; consumerism was conflated with individualism, true needs with wants. In the social sciences, Freud, Marx, Durkheim and Darwin seemed to have outlived their usefulness and cranky nonsense, like postmodernism, gained sway, alongside a burgeoning empiricism, which only investigated what could be measured.

But now things are changing, even if the elite is not, and the equality reviewers have not noticed. For reasons that escape me, climate change has suddenly started being a mainstream concern, making people no longer as comfortable consuming as they were, even if they still go on doing it.

At the same time, there is a widespread awareness that, emotionally, many of us feel like shit for most of the time. While politicians have tried to exploit and water this down (ignore all the thin stuff about happiness and quality of life), just as advertisers have been doing for decades, certain basic truths are now obvious to most people.

Very few approve of educating our children like dogs being taught tricks, however much parents may feel forced to play that game themselves - "what can you do, he's got to get good grades in his GCSEs?" And equally, many deeply dislike their own workaholism and need to pay others to care for their babies and toddlers.

People will simply insist that the role of education is to encourage imagination, real scholarship and true individuality. And increasingly, men will become true feminists. They will cease to see it as the woman's issue as to whether to go back to work when there's an under-three-year-old, and either share the job, or do it full-time during that brief period of their life.

The trouble with Freud, Marx, Durkheim and Darwin was that, although they explained why we are the way we are, none offered a clear picture of what a sane individual in a sane society would be like. Through the mists of bullshit, that is gradually becoming apparent: a green system, which meets our fundamental psychological needs for security, community, feeling effective and authentic autonomy.

Reject Blatcherism

Tim Holmes — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 18:31:19 +0000

Next "Wednesday":http://www.diy-therapy.com/event.htm, at the House of Commons, I shall throw down a gauntlet to "James Purnell":http://www.jamespurnell.org.uk/: admit you have been conned by Third Way bullshit, reject the ways of Blatcherism, offer the electorate policies that have their foundations in the reduction of mental illness by the meeting of the needs of small children and the eradication of the "affluenza":http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0091900107?ie=UTF8&tag=sexylabelscom35-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=0091900107 virus. As the "Unicef":http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2013217,00.html report published this week shows, Nouveau (riche) Labour has done little to halt the decline in the welfare of our children which Thatcher began in 1979.

I shall propose two fundamental policies. First, hard commitments to end the massive inequality in income and private wealth. Second, the payment of the average national wage to all families with an under-three-year-old, to be used by both partners or one, as they wish, to enable them to care for their children - as the "British Social Attitudes":http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/oliver_james/2007/01/post_1025.html survey recently demonstrated that most parents wish to do.

A secondary proposal, which will go some way towards paying for this second proposal, will be based on the fact that the Ministry of Defence (or should that be "Offence"?) owns 1% of the British landmass. Just as Purnell must reject the spending of £20bn on new Trident missiles and of nearly £30bn a year on an MoD which has been far too busy attacking other nations under Blatcher, so he must call for the sale of all but the most vital defence land - why does that ministry need to own so much of "Salisbury plain":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salisbury_Plain?

Next Wednesday, I shall also propose to Ed Vaizey that when the Tories get round to making firm commitments, they put clear red water between themselves and Gordon Bratcher (as he undoubtedly is, whatever the mood music with which he is about to pollute our ears). If they mean what they say about the family, climate change and hugging hoodies, many of the policy options required for an unselfish capitalism are ready and waiting for them in Denmark.

I shall exhort him to admit that the Blatcherite chant, "private good, public bad" has been a neocon excuse for robbing the poor to give to the rich. Private often means greed and incompetence, as well as fraud - think Enron, think the incompetence of the private companies supposed to be supplying computer systems to government departments, think the hundreds of millions paid to consultants by Blatcher. Confess sinner, there was no trickle down effect and the utilities were mostly flogged off to rich friends of Thatcher for disgracefully small sums, compared to their real worth, in order to get the investors queuing up.

Having made these points, I shall rebut some of the critics of my argument in the book Affluenza.

Daniel Finkelstein from the Times and Tim Worstall state that there is no connection between national inequality and mental illness, contrary to my evidence. But my claims concern this relationship in developed nations. Obviously if, as they do, you add in developing nations such as Nigeria, it is a different matter - my arguments regarding affluenza apply to developed nations. On top of that, wilfully or because they have not read the book closely enough, they misrepresent my argument as being based on inequality. Rather, my point is that selfish capitalism (of which inequality is a consequence) is what is doing our heads in.

In the Observer, Nick Cohen is open about his dislike of my writing style. While he admits this is not a ground for rejecting an argument, his critique seems to be wholly based on selective use of a "review":http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19325881.800-review-affluenza-by-oliver-james.html of my book by Andrew Oswald in the New Scientist.

Oswald has built a large edifice upon studies of happiness, life satisfaction and wellbeing. He accuses me of ignoring these. On the contrary, in footnote xiv on page 347, I offer convincing scientific grounds for rejecting such soft evidence. What Oswald finds disconcerting is that my argument is based on far more rigorous studies than his - the World Health Organisation study of prevalences of mental illness.

As Oswald will recall, I pointed out to him in person at one of Richard Layard's Happiness Forum meetings that this happiness evidence does not tally at all with properly conducted studies of mental illness - happy countries are often severely mentally ill. Since both bodies of evidence cannot be right, I am much more inclined to trust the very detailed and numerous questions entailed in evaluating mental illness. Many happiness surveys are based on one crude question: are you very happy, happy, unhappy or very unhappy, or somewhere in the middle? I find it implausible that answers to this question tell us anything significant about individual or, when collated for collective results, national happiness.

Finally, I shall take Richard Layard to task for having bought into the cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and positive psychology industries. While I have great respect for Richard and am singing from the same hymn sheet as him on many issues, and while I am all in favour of the setting up of a network of therapy centres (as proposed in his Depression Report), he is wrong about CBT. Quite simply, if you read the evidence, it shows that it does not work in the long term (see the definitive review of empirically tested therapies by "Drew Westen":http://www.psychology.emory.edu/clinical/westen/index.html).

Above all, it is an American confection for returning workers to the workplace with a temporary and wholly false smile on their face. Studies of Americans show them to be living in a rose-tinted bubble of positive illusions. They are unrealistically optimistic about how much their friends like them or about the future. When asked to rate how sensitive they are to others, 90% of Americans believe they are in the top 10% of sensitivity - by definition impossible - and it is similar for their falsely bloated self-esteem or view of their own capacities.

Americans who have accurate perceptions of themselves are deemed by researchers to suffer from "depressive realism". That is a dangerously barmy formulation, personally and nationally.

If you do not know that things are going wrong, you cannot put them right. There is a real danger that CBT is often no different from the spin which political parties put on their performance. A spun society will find it harder to change direction when it is heading for the rocks. Likewise the CBT patient.

What we need is a campaign for real therapy, not this psychic face-paint, and nationally it is the same. We need a return to the ideals which informed us post 1945 - meritocracy, female emancipation, egalitarianism and democracy.

For nearly 30 years, all of these have been gruesomely perverted by the great neocon, whether served up by Thatcher, Major or Blatcher and in a few months time, Bratcher.

Daycare Believers

Alex Doherty — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 21:17:26 +0000

John Hutton, the work and pensions secretary, thinks it would be best for all concerned if single mothers with small children "get back to work.":http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2001959,00.html For the very poorest there is a SureStart day nursery.

But I wonder if Hutton or any of the nouveau riche Labour elite used group daycare for their nippers. Somehow I doubt it. Although virtually none of the Blatcherites I have spoken to have actually read the considerable scientific evidence that daycare children are at greater risk of being insecure in relationships, aggressive and indiscriminately friendly, they just seem to instinctively realise that if you are going to have substitute care, a nanny or a granny is best. It would seem that it's alright for kiddies of sink estate single mums to have daycare but when it comes to Torquil and Samantha, only one-on-one will do.

For full-on Blatcherites, saving on benefits and swelling the ranks of the low-paid workforce, strengthening the hands of employers, is the reason to winkle single mums away from their babies. For Brownites, they honestly believe that only paid work confers dignity and is a moral duty of us all.

Both privately also confess that many mothers from the underclass do the job appallingly, so their children's life chances are improved if someone else does most of the care. Never mind that the British Social Attitudes survey last week "revealed":http://www.natcen.ac.uk/natcen/pages/news_and_media_docs/BSA_%20press_release_jan07.pdf (pdf) that there has been a rise in the proportion of mothers who would like to spend more time parenting and less time working - up to 90%. Never mind that there is overwhelming evidence that under-threes need the care their parents can provide. Never mind that most men and women would like much more flexible working, so that they could share the care between them. The market must have its way with us; Brown's Americanised values say that only paid activity is of worth.

In fact, if you apply the scientific evidence the absurdities of substitute care as a social policy soon emerge. Under-threes need one-on-one from the same person or a close relative every day. If SureStart substitute care was being done with mental health in mind, you would create a national nanny network. In many cases, this would consist of single mums leaving their babies or toddlers to go to the home of another single mum or toddler to be paid to care for it. In some cases, two single mums would simply be being paid to care for each other's little children - completely barking, on every level.

Today's paper also "announces":http://education.guardian.co.uk/earlyyears/story/0,,2001745,00.html that the average cost for a full-time pre-school nursery place has risen to £152 a week. This story, which crops up from time to time as if it is an outrage that childcare costs so much, always makes me laugh - £152 is not nearly enough. Childcare workers are doing incredibly important work and they need to be paid far more. On top of that, to do the job properly, they need to have a ratio of one-to-one, which would require so many carers as to make it impossible for the private providers to make profits.

Having spent a week observing what is probably the best nursery in the world in Copenhagen, I am sure that daycare is a lousy option. In my book ("literally":http://www.amazon.co.uk/Affluenza-Oliver-James/dp/0091900107/sr=1-1/qid=1170171152/ref=sr_1_1/203-4396775-7404765?ie=UTF8&s=books and figuratively), since so many of us have been duped into believing that paid work is the only activity of worth, the solution is simple: pay every family with an under-three the national average wage, with either parent able to do the job or share it. Since most of us want to look after our children and since it is best for them, it only serves selfish capitalism not to take this measure. It would also give a strong signal that there's more to life than The Office and Brownite workaholism.

Infected by Affluenza

Alex Doherty — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 12:50:54 +0000

Let's stop the pretending: Blatcherism has been an inexcusable missed opportunity to take Britain in a completely different direction (towards Denmark rather than America) and it has significantly contributed to our spiralling rate of mental illness.

I have discovered that citizens of English-speaking nations are twice as likely to suffer mental illness as ones from mainland western Europe.

Specifically, my analysis reveals that over a 12-month period nearly one-quarter (23%) of English speakers suffered, compared with 11.5% of mainland western Europeans.

What explains such a massive difference? It is extremely unlikely to be genes - English-speakers largely come from the same gene pool as Europeans. Indeed, the World Health Organisation study of mental illness in 15 nations, on which my analysis is based, strongly implies that genes play little or no part in explaining national differences in mental illness, and that among developed nations economic inequality is highly significant.

The US is by some margin the most mentally ill nation, with 26.4% having suffered in those 12 months. This is six times the prevalence of Shanghai or Nigeria, a huge discrepancy. Again, genes do not explain it - studies show that when Nigerians move to America, within a few generations they develop American prevalences.

It is looking increasingly likely that major flaws in studies of identical twins - on which the genetic case has wholly rested until recently - have led to a large exaggeration of the role of genes. Molecular genetics (direct studies of DNA) has disproved the idea that there are single genes for almost any mental illnesses and may eventually prove that genes play little role at all.

It is selfish capitalism which largely explains the greater prevalence among English-speaking nations. By this I mean a form of political economy that has four core characteristics: judging a business's success almost exclusively by share price; privatisation of public utilities; minimal regulation of business, suppression of unions and very low taxation for the rich, resulting in massive economic inequality; the ideology that consumption and market forces can meet human needs of almost every kind. America is the apotheosis of selfish capitalism, Denmark of the unselfish variety.

Selfish capitalism causes mental illness by spawning materialism, or, as I put it, the affluenza virus - placing a high value on money, possessions, appearances (social and physical) and fame. English-speaking nations are more infected with the virus than mainland western European ones. Studies in many nations prove that people who strongly subscribe to virus values are at significantly greater risk of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and personality disorder.

Follow the logic? Selfish capitalism infects populations with affluenza; it fosters mental illness; English-speaking nations are more selfish capitalist - ergo, more prone to illness.

In 1997 we trusted that Blair was only pretending to be Blatcher. Most of us signed up to his selfish capitalist manifesto thinking that it would really be unselfish - that the third way bullshit was really code for this. Alas, it was not.

Yes, there has been much more spent on education and health than the Tories would have done. But private companies now own many of the buildings, and criminal rates of interest and privatisation are the real goal. The only thing about which I am totally convinced is the reduction in child poverty. Otherwise, Blatcher and Thatcher have been indistinguishable.

The net consequence for true Labour voters has been to force us to become more or less severely virus-infected. Above all, the clamping on of nosepegs to vote for these closet selfish capitalists has been incredibly harmful to our mental health, making self-contradictory frauds of too many. Doctors, teachers and public service workers have had to pretend that money is more important than patients or pupils - as it all too manifestly is to Blatcher and his acolytes, personally and politically.

For Brown to get me out on polling day, a major apologia will be required: "I am terribly sorry. I promise not to perpetuate the Nouveau (riche) Labour catastrophe for another day. Like everyone else, I was fooled by Tony."

__Oliver James's book Affluenza - How to Be Successful and Stay Sane is published today.__

New Labour's "Affluenza"

Alex Doherty — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 12:11:01 +0000

In the recent epidemic of New Labour depression confessors there was little insight into the cause of their troubles. Apparently Alastair Campbell's negative patches just come and go, without rhyme or reason. David Blunkett's "clinical depression" is put down to pressures that, apparently, would have broken anyone less heroically stoical than he paints himself. Stephen Fry took up two hours of prime BBC2 time to persuade us that he fits the manic-depressive diagnosis but that he hasn't a clue why.

None the less, the implicit message of their ruminations was that genes cause depression and that only drugs or cognitive behavioural therapy can treat it - except in their cases, as they are too special or brave to use such mere palliatives. Leaving aside the facts that genes play little or no part in causing much depression and that early parental care, economic inequality and low income are proven to be critical, none of these Blatcherites had any awareness of another major cause: the affluenza virus.

I define it as the placing of a high value on money, possessions, appearances (physical and social) and fame. In samples from 14 different nations, people who have the virus are significantly more likely to suffer from depression. They also have higher rates of anxiety, substance abuse (how does Campbell relate his ex-alcoholism to his depression?) and narcissistic personality disorder (which may be Fry's true diagnosis).

Because the drug companies and their pharmacists in the psychiatric establishment control the perception of mental illness, hardly anyone is aware of this substantial body of scientific studies. But Blatcher's depressed inner circle should pay close attention to it, for the virus is rife among them.

I recently spent several hours chatting to a very powerful New Labour woman who has played a major role in British politics since 1997. Despite this, she was not happy with her lot. Because of an attack of hubris in former years, she had never become an MP and therefore could not fulfil her longing to be prime minister. I said she should not let this spoil the satisfaction she must have gained from her influential position, to no avail. But then perhaps all politicians are plagued by what might have been. What really shocked me was a still greater cause of distress to her: lack of money.

Although her husband earns substantial sums and she gets six figures, there is never enough, what with the mortgages for the house in a fashionable part of London and the one in the country, cars for the children, holidays and so forth. Perhaps this should come as no surprise, for Peter Mandelson told me (and anyone else who would listen) before the 1997 election that "we are seriously relaxed about people becoming very, very rich". The longing to join this club or rub shoulders with it has been a hugely damaging feature of Blatcher's reign.

Mandelson's excessive property aspirations led to his first resignation as a minister. The Blairs resent having sold their Islington house before the property boom. In buying two flats for £270,000 in Bristol and a £3.4m home in London they show distinctly materialistic leanings. Tony will make shedloads of money from his American admirers on leaving office. In the Tessa Jowell-David Mills affair, we were asked to believe that a £350,000 payment to her husband had never arisen in their discussions.

Almost wherever you look in the Blatcher kitchen cabinet, pound notes spill out. Blunkett took his totty to the Duchess of Devonshire's cottage, and his second resignation was due to an undeclared investment. Campbell is set to make a bomb from his memoirs. Prescott sported a stetson at the casino mogul's ranch. Of the key players, only Brown and Straw seem to have avoided being caught with their trotters in the trough. Even Blatcher's media poodles admit it.

Asking a close adviser why they are so infatuated with wealth, Andrew Rawnsley was told: "They spend too much time with very rich people." Rawnsley concluded that "ministers argue themselves into believing that they deserve a similar level of lifestyle to the mega-rich". It's been Nouveau Riche Labour.

The greatest crime of the Blatcherites has been the spreading of the affluenza virus among the rest of us. They seem to despise mothers who care for their small children - or anyone else whose work is not paid. They use education to create good little consumer-producers, not to set minds free. They lock students into debts, then impose an insecure, workaholic working environment and a bloated property market that keeps the young on a hedonic, consumerist treadmill. Above all, their talk of "opportunity", "choice" and "freedom" is just Americanised material aspirationalism.

A government survey of British mental health shows that 23% of us had a mental illness in the past 12 months and about one quarter more are on the verge thereof. This is twice the prevalence of other European nations, which are less Americanised and less virus-infected.

By perpetuating Thatcherite selfish capitalism, Blatcherism has spread the affluenza virus. Small wonder that some of its key proponents are suffering from mental illnesses. For Brown to have a chance of winning the next election he will need to offer an unselfish capitalist manifesto based on the Danish model. If it's going to be just Bratcherism, he might as well not bother.

__Oliver James's book Affluenza will be published in January.__