Imagine a Sandal stamping on a human face forever

It's a sad day when doing a favour for a friend garners the attention of local authority snoops intent on criminalising you for nothing other than being a good person. But this exactly what happened to two young mothers from Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire recently.

Leanne Shepherd and Lucy Jarrett, who are both Detective Constables at Aylesbury Police Station, were on a job sharing arrangement in which they both worked around each other - so allowing the mothers to spend precious time with their children.

Being good friends, they did what parents have been doing since children were invented (I'm told this was in 1981 when Cliff Richard accidentally discovered sexual intercourse whilst roller-skating. He subsequently patented the invention and still receives royalties now), which is to take it in turns to look after each others nippers when the other parent was working.

For this outrageous act of blatant common-sense, they were reported by a neighborhood busybody to the Office of Standards in Education (OFSTED), who subsequently visited DC Shepherd to inform her that without the appropriate permits she was breaking the law. According to the Telegraph newspaper;

"There was no rigid pattern to the arrangement – its virtue was its flexibility – but it was reciprocal: each woman received a benefit in the form of [...] free child care during most weeks of the year. This supposedly violates the Childcare Act of 2006, which prohibits adults not registered as child-minders looking after other people’s children for more than two hours a day for reward – the reward being the free care."

“I was in shock the whole time,” remembers the police officer. “I couldn’t imagine I was doing something wrong – I thought I could clear it up if I told her everything. She talked about reciprocal care; I argued that it was an arrangement based on friendship.”

Just over a fortnight later the women were sent a letter telling them that they must cease the child-minding arrangement, and that they could be "subject to surveillance and unannounced visits by Ofsted inspectors". That's right SURVEILLANCE!! Forget about bomb plotters, mafia bosses or gun-runners, it is apparently the well-meaning citizenry who are deserving of the excesses of state intrusion.

Incidents like this are all too often a regularity these days – under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the authorities in this country regularly (mis)use anti-terror legislation to tap phone calls, secretly film us and gather information in order to enforce petty regulations.

Combine this with existing or proposed legislation such as the need for ISP's to monitor connections for illegal file-sharing, the biometric ID card, the 'Gulags for Slags' policy and the scarily high number of CCTV cameras, you don't need to imagine some fictional oppressive society ala 1984, we already have it in the form of the nanny state.

George Orwell described a society ruled by force and bureaucracy, we have one ruled by both of these with an unhealthy dose of sandal wearing Social-Workerism thrown in for good measure. Don't bother imagining a boot stamping on a human face, imagine a sandal doing so instead.

But what effect do these sort of state intrusions have on society at large? And why have we gotten to this position anyway? Well in this specific case, the effect has been that Mrs Shepherd, who has a take home pay of £1000 a month, is now paying £487 a month in childcare costs. Unable to pay these costs, she is forced into the position of having to accept supplemental benefits from the state to survive. Also, she now has to work less flexible hours in order that she can pick up her children from the childminders at a given time. In Mrs Jarrett's words, “This is crazy, ridiculous. What was our gain, our reward? Being allowed to return to work to pay tax?”.

A commentator on the article at the telegraph comments that one effect is that the nanny state creates jobs, and indeed this is true in a direct sense; the heightened demand for 'professional' childcare arrangements creates a need for those paid childcare jobs to be created (more often than not by the state itself). But whilst a 'job' may have been created, no extra wealth has been produced for society.

All that has happened is that the use-value created by the mothers in the act of child-minding, and exchanged directly through reciprocation, has been monetised and transformed into exchange value that can be exploited by capitalists for profit. If anything, value has been destroyed in this process by introducing bureaucratic and organisational inefficiencies – regulators, administrators and tax inspectors all have to be paid for extra, unproductive work that was previously unnecessary.

Looking at it like this, an unfortunate logical imperative emerges. In a state-capitalist society which has finite resources but depends on geometric growth curves just to maintain itself, more and more sources of use-value need to be tapped into in order to fulfill that growth expectation. New snooping laws and over the top regulations have the effect of tapping into the previously unexploited use-values found in reciprocal and informal exchange, and once in place, make it very difficult for them to be removed without serious disruption to employment figures.

Now, whilst I don't believe for a second that the state is self-conscious or competent enough to have this as a deliberate policy, the fact remains that it is economically easier to increase nannyism than it is to reduce it. Hence we move towards greater and greater government control as time goes by. But a contradiction exists in this trend, and the process of centralisation cannot last forever.

I mentioned briefly how organisational inefficiencies creep into the system when we monetise use-values previously exchanged through reciprocation, and these inefficiencies can only increase as the centralisation occurs. Ultimately, the admin costs involved in state snooping will rise above the amount of surplus value that can be squeezed from those areas being snooped on. When that point comes, we will get another nudge in the direction of a new crisis in capitalism -and one of these days, a crisis is what will bring the state to its knees.

This may sound like a pessimistic end to my first blog, but actually it is the most optimistic I could contrive. It is a comfort to me to know that authoritarian states have an automatic end-stop built in. When the time comes that the state is due to fall from grace, I for one will welcome its demise