We Don't Need Stepping Stones When We Can Take Great Strides

In November 1977 two men produced an unpublished report called "Stepping Stones". The authors were of little experience politically; John Hoskyns  and Norman S Strauss carved out their careers prior to the report in business. The former with IBM and the latter with Unilever. 

The two men looked at Britain both socially and economically. They wanted to pare down and at best destroy the established order of organised workers and a stagnant UK economy. Their peers in the conservative establishment were fighting a battle they could not see ending. Hoskyns and Strauss saw how the bigger picture of repeated trade union victories were humiliating for Britain's standing in the world markets.  

The timing of their report was culturally perfect. They saw a vulnerability opening in front of them. The same year the film Star Wars depicted one lonely warrior destroying what was seen as a monolithic Empire with one shot from his lazer cannon. The authors got their own shot very much spot-on. 

They executed their ideas scientifically as they saw this process of elimination would lead to the greater success for the people who shared their ideas. 

'Such thinking and planning is perhaps better described simply as "systematic", rather than strategic. Any game...which involves competitors, goals and a choice of routes, each with associated risks, demands a strategy. The question is whether such strategies are developed haphazardly or systematically. The systematic approach requires considerable initial effort, a higher ratio of "thinking time" to "doing time", in the hope of getting the consistently....better performance which in the end separates winners from losers.'

To the hawks within the Tory right this document was the clearest objective they had yet to follow. Immediately it was foisted upon their leader, Margaret Roberts. She was two years before her election victory and here was the blueprint for a country coated in Tory blue. The majority of what was proposed in the report came true. North Sea oil was controlled; the steelworkers, dockers and miners as a community and force were emaciated; the Labour Party was riddled with in-fighting and chaos; the media was used to its full potential to push this agenda; the EU was shunned by xenophobia. 

The two authors were never taught on the national curriculum as far as I and my peers are aware. They may have reached the hearts and minds of those privileged in society and somewhat clinical enough to appreciate this work. Indeed it is frightening how such a force in one document can hold so much portence and rapture without seeing the light of day. 

Hoskyns and Strauss were, however, broaching a political system weighted towards the worker ever since the British worker got organised in the Victorian era. They wanted the scales tilted back to the entrepreneurial industrialist, and the corporate shareholder. British prime ministerial power has been an advocate of the Stepping Stones mantra since Roberts was shoved off her throne in 1990. It has reached the extent that the British Labour party betrayed their very foundations in 1994. In 1979 "Labour wasn't Working", according to the smart guys at Saatchi and Saatchi, however in 1994, under Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown, Labour was working...with the free market economic structure at the very heart of their Treasuries. 

However a Tower of Babel can come down, and coming down is what it is precisely doing now. At a chaotic pace the unions are now beginning to feel the sting of their demise. They are starting to protest. Once the veil of Labour dissolution cleared, the working classes are seeing their lives turn into the cathartic lives their elders experienced in the early 1980s under the Stepping Stone plan. The unemployed, an ever growing benefactor to the taking away of skilled labour, are bearing a brutal attack on their basic of needs. 

In 2008 the world economy suffered a blow-out that has psychologically turned the tables on the ethics of free market engineering. As a "turn around strategy" Stepping Stones stated:

"the more factual, cool and rational that debate (regarding the trade unions of Britain at that time), the more it will open the public's eyes to the unions' existing privileges and destructive role..."

The unions, it could be argued, were not out to make a profit. Their very existence was to protect and harness the welfare of the worker who worked for the men who had the largest houses on the hill overlooking the slums. They were criticised in Stepping Stones for asking for more wages, vilified for collecting together and "holding the country to ransom".Today, "existing privileges" are out of the workers' hands: they're in the hands of the very same people who bought into the idea of Stepping Stones. Banks are now criticised for being bailed out by the taxpayer. Global capitalists fly into the country at short notice when they want to sway a policy the government into their own advantage.  

The time for the zeitgeist to brook is imminent. What Hoskyns and Strauss could not have foreseen when they saw a world in which the working classes were cajoled was the invention of the world wide web. Communication in their time was a relic compared to the speediness of today's. (As you can see, they sent the report to Roberts in a badly typed form.) Normal people, who work in the jobs that keep them quiet and sedated have the tools to arm themselves. They can communicate, they can organise, they can criticise. Blogs are available for free and therefore opinion can be shared and our political representatives can be brought to book. It is tantalising to think how the world would have reacted in 1929, after the Wall Street crash, if everyone had access to an iphone or a PC. History may have taken a twist that could have perhaps averted the Second World War. However that is a different story. 

On the televisions in the 1970s, leading directly up to the Stepping Stones report, there  were talent shows dominating the airwaves. Music was peddling out often benile, pub sing-along tunes that said hardly anything to the people it reached. People were  on the streets protesting against issues that struck them personally. This could be today. 

With the adaptation of the Stepping Stones report to reflect principally and completely on the economic and political conflicts that we inherited out of Thatcherism, we can evaluate what the problems are when a large amount of capital is hoarded. We can evaluate the structure and power of the banks and corporations. We can disable them in the hope of getting the 'consistently....better performance which in the end separates winners from losers.'

To do this we need to take great strides over the stones. 

Win Yourself A Cheap Tray

There is sometimes a grotesque missed opportunity within the flurry of technological advancement. A freedom of choice which in leaps and bounds can help us immensely to those who do choose it. A revolution of the masses tap away at their gadgets, going to places that they can do at a graceful ease.

However where are they going? There comes a point where everyone is saying the same thing in internet subcultures but a point has clearly not been reached. A marker for society isn't put down. 

This stasis goes back to the aged problem of the zero point of the words that sound funny: homo sapiens. Undoubtedly when words became de rigueur and a bounce of bright sorts decided to get creative from this form of species we have been treated to works of pure, other worldly joy. 

But there is a puzzle involved. It hasn't been straightforward. Never has it. If everything were simple then we'd spin off the axis and end up in a better terrestrial stream. It seems that an acute puzzle affects the one precise point of creativity: lasting the course.  

It must be a matter of endurance. It must be a dispelling of pride, arrogance, exorbitance and all the other flowery adjectives. At worst boredom can castrate beauty. At its most obvious we're all massively in love with the idea that as you get older you get stale.  

An example that is both frustrating and glorious at the same time is The Smiths. I take this example as The Smiths sear into a cultural, and sometimes lazy conscience. It's understandable that a career which spanned five years brought out the best in a country bored to tears with the politics affecting their society. 

What bothers me about them is not Andy Rourke continuously chasing Mancunian drug hostels, or Mick Joyce getting his share of the band takings erratically wrong. Nor is it how Johnny Marr was overworked to the point of his quiff collapsing. It was only because they got slack and broke up.

Millions of relationships, not documented in grand poetry, do the same thing too many times. It's a continual hiccuping of missed chances. The failure of the adjudged unfailing. Like witnessing an accident when you don't expect to witness it a shock overtakes the soul and time takes a wicked paternity.  

I feel sorry and hateful for creativity at the exact same time. I don't have a laudable skill in it. By the power of every possible thought imaginable I wish the genuinely gifted ones realise that you may get bored, irritated, doleful, tired, angry, jealous, confused, victim, arrogant, drugged, undrugged, geographical, political, religious, naive....famous.      

We may take for granted that "we know so much about these things". 

In Racist Soil (In Memory of Stephen Lawrence)

London has today seen outside one of its law courts human bouts of stamina that does not need an Olympian fanfare or an expensive ticker tape parade as we shall see magnified later in 2012.

Doreen Neville stood on the steps of the high court to read out a speech that you felt didn’t have the pride of achievement an athlete would show on a podium. In fact it was a speech steeped in a pyrrhic melancholy that will greet the relatives of the Hillsborough relatives when justice is found after their day in court.


When Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death after immediately hearing the words of "Wot wot nigger" the leaders of Britain were dreaming of a world of "back to basics". It was a nation of quiet bowling greens for the post-Thatcher well-to-do village dwellers. But in the other land of that time there was the underclass struck in the motorway queues waiting upon answers from the Cones Hotline. There was recession not only in the economy but also in the feeling that, with every epoch of self-indulgence, there was a bigger recession culturally. The Cones Hotline didn't seem to actually exist; it was the Established institutions which maintained this situation. 

Stephen Lawrence wanted to become an architect, and with a family that was always supportive to him he would have seen this happen in his life. To him, the career in architecture would be just another life getting fulfilled. The problem was that Stephen stood at a bus shelter late at night in 1990s Britain.  

The five who were captured by the police on camera in 1994 acting out fantasies of racist abuse were and are of a typical breed. But they are not typical in the sense that they can easily be worked out as being white, working class thugs from Eltham in London. There is such a thing we see in our lives as cause and effect. In the pitch battles of wars in the middle ages there were two opposing lines of belligerents and that was it. The big bang. The rest was down to fate and its shaping of history.

David Norris would not know how to “set ‘em alight”, as he threatened towards an imaginary “load of niggers and pakis” in the surveillance video. He and his mates acted on a ten second impulse with a large knife, in the pitch darkness of a South London night in April. Lawrence was with a friend who thought he would be the next victim, but Duwayne Brooks needn’t have worried, as whoever struck the blows with the knife ran away. Ironically, the perpetrators were the scaredest.

The five – Gary Dobson, David Norris, Luke Knight and the Acourt brothers – are the victims of their own lack of self-esteem. It is obvious in the surveillance video. They are the epitome of the chuntering under your breath when you don’t really express what you want to say to someone – or some group – that you don’t like. One of the gang is seen acting out a stabbing with a knife. He is on his own in the room. It is an embarrassing and pathetic sight to watch as he could easily have been playing air guitar or scoring an imaginary goal. He is a boy playing out fantasies that have unfortunately in this case been poisoned by their fathers’ or peers’ prejudices.

And then there are the Metropolitan police who let the basic of crime detection skills slip away as easily it was for the five to do on that night. The role of the Met in their direction of ethnic communities versus the macho idiots who drag up their sons into their inept worldview always stay the same. It happened in the riots in the 1980s and also in the incidents in London last year. The Met is a riddled beast that cast pestilence among the minorities of London because they know that it only takes a special handshake to get away with it.

We are now left with three of the cowards, two of whom are brothers whose surname sounds like what they have to see before they die – a court. The three remaining culprits ran away that night into a freedom that they thought would be protected forever by Metropolitan police institutional racism. For Dobson and Norriss this luxury has lasted for eighteen years. Science can beat the stupidity of corruption, so Knight and the Acourt brothers need not be so complacent.

Andy Warhol famously said that every wannabe without the talent have their fifteen minutes of fame. However, when it comes to seeking justice in this country it takes over fifteen years to reach any level of success. The ones who are looking for the justice are the most talented and honest of people. So, Doreen and Neville Lawrence, take up your place on the podium.