Nu Labour: Bankers and the Art of Creating "The Other"

Another day, another Nu Labour attack on a section of the people of this country. And today's attack victim is that gift that keeps on giving for Nu Labour - the bankers.

Alistair Darling is drawing up plans to face down the country's top bankers by taking the "nuclear option" of a windfall tax on their bumper bonuses as part of measures aimed at the super-rich.

Oh, goody. That will incentivise bankers employed in those institutions we, the British public, now own to work hard. And in no way whatsoever will this lead to bankers and banks heading abroad, to countries where the ruling elite are not so in favour of crippling the financial services sector.

This notion that bankers should be penalised for the crime of earning bonuses is as dense as it is ignorant. Bonuses are incentives for working hard and achieving goals. That is why banks - and other organisations - pay them. If a bank pays bonuses to those who do not deserve them, then that is their own silly fucking fault. And would result, in the long term, in that bank going under - except that doesn't happen any more, since Gordon Brown uses such circumstances to posture like Superman. Assuming, of course, that you see Superman as a fat ghoul with the personality of a rancid corpse. But the notion that banks should be able to do what they think is best is abhorrent to Nu Labour. I mean, they love to be interventionist in every single aspect of every single part of British life, but no-one gets quite the same level of intrusive manipulation and control than the banking sector these days.

The government's desire to control the banking sector is not simply down to their natural obsessive compulsive need to justify their existence through constant fiddling. No, this is something more. See, bankers have become the whipping boys of society - and the government can play to the public gallery by pursuing punitive policies against them. They can argue, every time they further cripple both a sector and the people working within that sector, that these people aren't in public favour just at the moment, they are simply doing what the public want them to do. The only problem with this is that the government, through their panicked rhetoric and desperate desire not to be caught up in the financial crisis they helped to create, made the bankers into a hated class of society in the first place.

A lot of political philosophy discusses the concept of "the other"; that (under)class of people within a nation that wider society defines itself by being in opposition to. There is much debate about whether "the other" naturally exists, or whether it is created by the powers that be in order to unite a naturally divisive society behind its ruling elite. I personally think (somewhat pessimistically) that it is a mix of the two. However, what is startling about Labour is just how carefully and cynically they have worked to create "the other" across their years in power. You can actually trace the history of Nu Labour by looking at which parts of society Nu Labour have set up to be shat on.

It started with the Tories. Back in 1997, when the Tories were about as popular as bowel cancer, Labour set them up to be the evil part of British society. However, as Nu Labour got involved in various scandals and as the Tories showed themselves to be about as effective as a fart in a hurricane, that stopped working. So Nu Labour helped to manufacture another subspecies to kick around. The paedophiles. And it worked very well. They managed to whip up a hysterical storm about child sex predators, and had the baying mob ready to shred anyone who looked a bit dubious. Of course, that didn't work so well either. Partly because mobs are difficult to control (particularly when fired up by such an emotive issue as child sex abuse) and also because paedophilia remains mercifully rare - at least in the high-profile cases of child sex killings. Which left the government with a vacancy for the post of the bit of society that the UK can shit on.

Then the Twin Towers came falling down, and the government turned their attention towards Islam. It was subtle at first, talking about engagement with the Islamic community - a small yet both clever and corrosive way of highlighting perceived differences between "mainstream British society" and that of that of the Muslim section. Then, of course, it got more and more blatant as the UK invaded Muslim nations. After 7/7, the government rhetoric was at its most poisonous. But yet again "the other" refused to play ball with the government so determined to ostracise them. The vast majority of Muslims in the UK are peaceful, productive members of society; and of the minority who are not, they showed themselves (barring 7/7) to be incompetent in the extreme. I mean, it is difficult to paint a section of the British population as dangerous when their extremists carry out terrorist attacks on Glasgow airport that end with a terrorist getting their teeth kicked in by a baggage handler. Then there was the problem of the attrition of civil liberties designed to combat Islamic terrorism. They led to government defeats and both to much mirth and indignation about the crassness of such policies. And the end result of this attempt to ruthlessly stigmatise Islam in the UK? The English Defence League. Well the fuck done, Nu Labour. Hark the sound of one hand clapping.

So when the economy went down the shitter, the government - in particular the Prime Minister, desperate to preserve the utterly undeserved reputation for being an economic genius - turned to and then turned on the banking sector. Of course, bankers were in part responsible for the current recession. And many of them paid for it with their jobs. And bankers perhaps don't help themselves by being so arrogant and refusing to defend themselves in the notorious court of public opinion. Yet the government's attempt to make the whole banking sector into a scapegoat will fail - if only because at some point, in our service based economy, it is going to become clear to even the ignorant shites in Numbers 10 and 11 of Downing Street that we need a strong financial sector, rather than a crippled husk of one. But for now, they won't stop. The anti-banker rhetoric is just too useful to them.

Of course, other governments do the same thing. It will be interesting to see how long it takes the Tories to turn on their usual hate figures (such as immigrants) when they get back into power. However, it is Nu Labour who have turned this use of McCarthyism into a central government policy, and also transformed it into a constantly updating tool to both control and breed resentment within society. Their treatment of the bankers is just the tip of the iceberg; they have come to define their style of government by their ongoing cynical attempts to define British society as a whole through government sponsored resentment to a perceived bogeyman - regardless of whether the opprobrium is deserved or not. And this stands as yet another damning indictment of this hopefully moribund regime.