The Quiet Road

This time last year I published a piece over at Dorian’s site, On This Deity. It commemorated the final withdrawal – on this day in 1989 – of Soviet troops from Afghanistan and the end of that disastrous, bloody and futile invasion.

In my piece I draw the obvious parallels between the ill-fated Soviet occupation of that central Asian country and the modern US-led Western occupation. In both cases the stated reason for the invasion was to combat terrorism. In both cases the invaders believed they were liberating the people of Afghanistan from the clutches of an aggressive religious fundamentalism. In both cases the occupying forces went about trying to install relatively progressive policies: the insistence on a national legal system that would supersede tribal and Sharia laws; the promotion of greater equality for women (just as, if not more, aggressively pursued by the Soviet puppet regime than by the US puppet regime it should be noted); the establishment of secular health and education facilities; the de-politicisation and secularisation of the police force and civil administration.

All of these policies were pursued vigorously by the Soviet occupiers. Just as they have been by the western forces. And – I would suggest – with roughly the same level of success. Perhaps the current occupation has it slightly easier thanks to the relative lack of external support for the Afghan militants. Whatever aid being supplied to the Taliban opposition by dissident Saudis, sympathetic elements within the Pakistani security forces and Iranian smugglers is as nothing compared to the huge resources made available to the mujahideen by the CIA during the 1980s. Indeed, it was fairly obvious to the world that the United States was fighting a proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan. They pumped money, weapons and military training personnel into Afghanistan on a massive scale and in so doing, they strengthened the ultra-reactionary Islamist elements within Afghan society. Those very same elements who are now killing US and other western troops today.

Rarely has the old adage about being careful what you wish for been so dramatically demonstrated in the arena of world affairs. The United States wished to turn the fundamentalist elements of Afghan society into a force capable of resisting a superpower. I suspect they no longer find Charlie Wilson’s War quite so clever.

Just as with the fall of the Soviet Union – an empire that was militarily over-extended and consumed from within by an economic system that was unfit for purpose – the United States must surely now face up to its own slow collapse. They are mired in debt that nobody sane believes will ever be repaid, and which is being aggressively ignored by both debtor and creditors alike in the mistaken belief that the elephant in the room can be trusted not to break the furniture so long as nobody talks about it. They are rapidly reaching the limits of their ability to intimidate the world with military power (how long before China decides to repossess the US 5th fleet in lieu of the money they are owed?) And while there is currently little sign of a wane in their cultural influence, that too can hardly be far away. On top of that, the rifts in US society – between their own religious fundamentalists and the besieged bastions of liberal secularism – threaten to rip the nation to pieces from within.

Just as the collapse of the Soviet Union cannot be blamed on their invasion of Afghanistan – the invasion functioned both as a symptom of that collapse and one contributing factor; so the US involvement in that nation will not, historically, be viewed as the reason for the decline of America. However, it will be heralded as an obvious symptom of western self-delusion and over-extension. And I suspect it will also be considered a contributing factor – albeit a relatively minor one, compared to our psychotic financial system and the inability of consumer capitalism to cope with resource depletion.

So today we pause to recall the final humiliation of the once proud Red Army. And we take a moment to look a few years into the future at that humiliation being mirrored on the other side of that old Cold War divide.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Maastricht Treaty. Oddly enough, there don’t appear to be any high-profile celebrations of this milestone. No fireworks, no street parties, no parades through streets lined with flag-waving children. Instead there’s an almost embarrassed silence. Certainly the Greeks are in no mood to party. Even if they were; what with sky-rocketing unemployment and an unprecedented increase in urban poverty; it’s unlikely they’d be in a position to spend much on bunting and streamers.

Here in Ireland the mood is similarly sombre. It seems like every week the news brings us a fresh story about poverty becoming more widespread, companies shedding jobs, or another public service becoming even less fit for purpose. And as bad as these stories tend to be, they are made even worse by the accompanying tales of bondholders syphoning yet more money from the pockets of those who never owed them anything. Or new government plans to inflict further suffering upon the vulnerable while trotting out insultingly transparent nonsense about why the wealthy are being coddled.

It would be entirely wrong to blame the disaster on Europe. The original goal of European integration was – as I wrote when I discussed the Maastricht Treaty over at On This Deity last year – a noble one. It was a well-conceived and entirely sensible response to half a century of conflict which had seen some of the worst atrocities in history perpetrated on European soil. After two world wars which had visited horrors upon the continent… the horrors of the trenches, the targeting of civilian populations in massive aerial bombing campaigns, and the concentration camps… after all that, Europe wanted peace. And they wanted to make sure it lasted.

Which is why, within a few short years of the end of second world war, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands signed a treaty that essentially marked the beginning of what was to become the European Union. It was a remarkable decision and even as the EU strains under the weight of morbidly obese financial institutions determined to bleed the continent dry while externalising their every mistake; and even as our political classes permit this obscene injustice – nay, encourage it; even now, despite all of these things, we should applaud that decision back in 1950 to set aside the enmities of the recent past and work towards a shared future.

And it’s fair to say that while mistakes were made in the decades that followed, the closer integration of the European economies was a positive development. There was a stability and a strength in the union. Resources were redistributed from wealthy areas to those suffering poverty. Human Rights were placed at the centre of the political agenda, and as internal borders began to dissolve, so did much of the distrust and suspicion that had festered in Europe for so many years. It didn’t disappear completely of course, and like so much of the gains made during those early decades, we seem determined to undo that particular achievement. Nonetheless, the original spirit of European Unity was a profoundly positive one, and we should work hard to salvage what we can of it, even as it is undermined by those who hijacked the European project for their own personal gain.

Which is the problem we face today. I’m not claiming that a united Europe was ever an explicitly socialist project, but it had at its heart a yearning for justice, for greater equality and for a kind of collective progress… a road that led away from poverty and war. That yearning is still there, but it has been sidelined by an unregulated rampant capitalism that threatens to destroy any good that emerged from half a century of work. Our political leaders – perhaps deliberately, perhaps through incompetence – have allowed a financial elite to infiltrate the corridors of European power and redirect the entire project. The European Union now works in their interests and explicitly against the interests of the majority of European citizens.

Instead of leading us away from poverty, we watch as wealth is drained from the general populace into the hands of reckless gamblers who lost their own money and then somehow convinced our representatives to give them ours. Instead of leading us away from conflict, we are forced to watch the rise of the Far Right in a number of European nations, to watch as suspicion of The Other sees a resurgence in our society, and to watch as the Irish and Greeks blame the crisis on an undemocratic French and German economic assault on their citizens, while Germans and French blame the crisis on the profligate spending of the peripheral nations. And all the while the real culprits continue to gather the spoils.

I have a quick word of advice for the German, Dutch and French populations… be very very careful how you handle this situation. Once the financial markets have bled Ireland, Greece and Portugal dry; once they have stripped our assets and plunged us even deeper into poverty; they will move on to fresh fields. There is no limit to the greed that has seen them subvert the political institutions of Europe. Out here on the periphery… we were just the softest targets; easy meat. Once they’ve picked our bones dry, they’ll move on to Spain and Italy. And then… then it’s your turn.

Which is why, in the end, there is a need for European Union now more than ever. Where once it was the horrors of the past we sought to escape; now we must unite to ward off the horrors of the future. This rampant capitalist beast cannot be tamed by Ireland. Or by Greece. Or by Portugal. Even together, the catastrophically weakened economies of the “bailed-out” nations simply can’t do anything about it. It’s not within our control. Sure, we could simply turn our backs on Europe altogether, and while I fear it may yet come to that; would it not be better to face down this destructive enemy rather than allow it to run roughshod over that original European ideal?

I’m not proposing some sort of radical pan-European anarcho-syndicalist revolution (as much as I’d like to see it happen, I’m realistic about the chances). Instead I’m simply proposing that Europe glance back 20 years to Maastricht. Even though the capitalist infiltration of our project began before that treaty, there’s a sense in which we were never more united than when we met in that Dutch town and pledged ourselves to a greater union. Hell, we even managed to drag the British tories along with us, which was no mean feat. So let’s try and recapture that sense of solidarity. Let’s realise that swallowing the lies of gangster capitalism will only impoverish us all in the longterm. And let’s unite once more to assert our togetherness in the face of an enemy that seeks to divide and conquer.

This time last year, on the anniversary of Bertrand Russell’s death, I published a piece celebrating his life and work over at On This Deity. Russell is rightly remembered for his work – in collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead – on the three volumes of Principia Mathematica (the book has since passed into the public domain and can be downloaded as a very chunky PDF file if you so wish… it’s currently available on rapidshare, or alternatively do a search for “Principia Mathematica PDF”).

However, while Principia Mathematica doubtlessly secured his place in the ranks of the Great Philosophers, it’s a highly technical and specialised book about the relationship between mathematics and formal logic. I recall flicking through it when I was a philosophy undergraduate and instantly deciding that unless I spent the majority of my three year degree immersed entirely in Principia Mathematica, I wouldn’t do it justice. And given that I was, at the time, more interested in gaining a broad overview of philosophy, rather than focussing on a single narrow aspect of the subject, I read a few bits and pieces about Principia Mathematica in Hospers (and other similar volumes) and pretty much left it at that.

However, it wasn’t long before I encountered the name Bertrand Russell once more. This time it was while I was eagerly devouring books on political philosophy… in particular left wing and anarchist political philosophy. So while to this day I’ve still not gotten around to reading Principia Mathematica, Russell’s Proposed Roads To Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism was one of the more influential books on my intellectual development. The full text of Proposed Roads… can be read over at the University of Virginia Library website and is worth your while checking out.

Sadly, as I suggested when I was talking about the work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon recently, the hopes and dreams of Russell in that near-century-old text have been comprehensively ignored by a society which has dedicated itself to the attempted gratification of individual desire through over-consumption. Russell called upon us to overcome these baser instincts and push ourselves onwards, towards a more just and free world. But as he said in Proposed Roads… (echoing the views of Proudhon, half a century earlier) the use of violence to achieve supposedly enlightened ends is almost always self-defeating. The achievement of a better world “requires a breadth of outlook and a comprehensiveness of understanding which are not easy to preserve amid a desperate contest”.

Which is why, as well as being the author of one of the seminal works in logical philosophy, Russell is also remembered for being a dedicated peace campaigner. As a founder-member and the organisation’s first President, he gave the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) the intellectual legitimacy it needed to gain a critical mass. And even into his nineties he was active in the movement (as well as organising international opposition to America’s war in Vietnam). Russell firmly believed that humanity held within itself the ability to move past our aggressive selfishness. He saw clearly that violent competition in nature can be – and often is – tempered with a drive towards cooperation. And he felt that we have reached a point – thanks to technology and our global interconnectedness – where it has become imperative that this cooperative drive should now supersede our competitive instinct. Otherwise we risk destroying all we have achieved.

Russell was convinced that the overthrow of capitalism was necessary for us to achieve this evolution. But he was also convinced this could not be done with violence. At least, not if we wanted to replace it with something better. Of course, it’s difficult to see how it can be achieved non-violently, given how entrenched the power of the capitalists has become. However, as he was fond of saying… “we are obliged to give the matter some thought”.

It’s difficult to summon any enthusiasm to write about Irish politics at the moment. Over the past few months I’ve pretty much worn out all the words required to do the subject justice. There’s only so many times you can use words like “incompetent”, “craven”, “absurd” or “destructive” before they start to lose their impact. On top of that, the realisation that the fools and charlatans that comprise our political class have no intention of listening to reason, and are determined to persevere with ineffective policies, like punch-drunk bluebottles convinced they’ll somehow pass through the window if they just keep flying into the glass for long enough… well, it’s just disheartening.

Sometimes I look at a politician on the TV and my heart goes out to them with the same kind of melancholy sympathy that I feel when I see a clumsy child desperately trying to impress those around them with a plucky, if badly executed, attempt at sports. And then I remember that unlike the child in the local park, these men and women are in positions of power thanks to their ruthless ambition and willingness to deceive those around them. And they are being paid huge salaries to completely destroy this country. At that point my sympathy turns to anger and contempt. In Irish politics, as with the Hollywood film industry, people seem to fail upwards.

That “willingness to deceive” was on show again this week. Our Inglorious Leader, Enda Kenny, spent a few days at the World Economic Forum in Davos. I found myself calling to mind Stewart Lee’s stand-up routine in which he viciously skewers Top Gear and its presenters. In that splendid diatribe, he compares Richard Hammond to the obnoxious little kid we all knew from school who would hang out with the bullies, egging them on and squealing with laughter at their cruel jokes. It’s the sycophantic survival strategy of a coward. This week in Davos, Enda Kenny adopted that strategy. And just like the little coward at school, as soon as Kenny thinks he’s out of earshot of the bullying cabal he want so desperately to impress, he contradicts everything he’s said in their presence and pretends to be our best friend.

For those who have forgotten, let’s step back a couple of months to the weekend prior to our last budget. Enda Kenny appeared on our TV screens like a low budget horror film and gave his State of the Nation address. There’s an oft-quoted line from that speech…

Let me say this to you all: You are not responsible for the crisis.

He looked us straight in the eye when he told us that. It was almost as if he was being sincere. And let’s be clear; it’s the truth; the people of Ireland are not responsible for the current crisis (except in the sense that they voted for the gombeens who brought it upon us, and continue to do so… for that much they must bear responsibility). But whether Kenny believes it or not is open to interpretation. Because this week in Davos, to a rather different audience, he contradicted this position when he announced that the Irish people “went mad borrowing”. It was, he insisted, a collaboration “between people and banks” which created…

a system that spawned greed to a point where it just went out of control completely with a spectacular crash.

Once again, let’s be clear; throughout that dark period when this country was being ravaged by The Tiger, Enda Kenny and his Fine Gael cohort were the biggest cheerleaders of that greed. They weren’t on the opposition benches urging caution. They weren’t denouncing financial deregulation or tax cuts for the wealthy. Far from it! They were on their feet baying for more of the same. The tax cuts and the deregulation didn’t go far enough for Kenny and his ideologically blinded party. He wasn’t calling for The Tiger to be tamed, he was demanding we throw more meat into it’s gaping maw.

Certainly there was a culture of greed spawned in Ireland during those years, but it was spawned at the top and rampaged downwards doing more damage the further it got from those who unleashed it. And the evidence of this is that most of those at the top are not being badly affected by the crisis that is plunging the bottom tier into poverty. And the evidence that this injustice is still being supported by Kenny and his ilk can be seen in the budgetary policy that cuts disability benefit, the winter fuel allowance, child benefit and back-to-school allowances; money that helps keep poorer heads just above water; while drawing a high ring-fence around the wealth of those at the top. All the while his party fills the media with stories that blame the public service and try to make villains of the unemployed rather than those who landed them there.

When Kenny speaks to a gathering of international financiers and political leaders, he immediately falls back on blaming the Irish people for his woes. As though they are his woes in the first place. As though he’s feeling any of the financial pain he and the rest of the political class are inflicting upon the people – not just in Ireland, but elsewhere around the world. It’s the riff-raff that are the problem, he insists. If only they’d have the good grace to go away and keep quiet, then decent people like you and me – here he raises his champagne flute in acknowledgement of his well-fed dinner companions – could get on with the serious work of consuming our lobster salad.

And it goes without saying that once he’d blamed the financial crisis on the reckless greed of the Irish people, he immediately backtracked when confronted by the Irish media. “Our people have been the victims of this situation”, he told an interviewer. So are we the victims? Or are we the mad borrowers, Enda? Are we responsible for the crisis or not? It seems he needs to know what the questioner wants to hear before he can answer those questions.

Let’s get one thing straight. Many Irish people did borrow too much during the boom. In fact, as The Guardian pointed out earlier this week, 15 individuals alone owe Anglo-Irish Bank over half a billion euro each. I guess they’re Irish people all right. But it’s hardly fair to describe them as The Irish People. Certainly I don’t recall borrowing €500 million, and none of my friends or family did. And I doubt any of my neighbours did either, though I suppose they could be keeping it to themselves.

The reality is; it was a small number of politicians, bankers and property developers who created the Irish crisis. And they were eagerly encouraged by European banks and other international financial institutions who bought into the bizarre fiction that the Celtic Tiger could somehow live forever. It was they who destroyed this country and not the unemployed, the disabled or the poor families living in negative equity who are now being hammered by a government determined to make anyone at all pay, other than those who morally should do.

It’s a travesty; an absolute nightmare of a problem. And Enda Kenny’s two-faced attitude tells you all you need to know about the people who are supposed to be fixing it.

So today’s the day. Today the Irish government hands €1.25bn of public money to the unsecured, unguaranteed bondholders of a defunct financial institution. The stated reasons for this transfer of wealth make absolutely no sense. The real reasons are purely ideological. What’s happening today is the logical conclusion of allowing capitalism to remain unregulated.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware that this grand larceny flies even in the face of free market philosophy. But capitalism is not synonymous with free market philosophy. Of course, I’m no fan of unrestricted free markets either, but at least under that system – if it was being correctly applied – it would be those who invested in Anglo-Irish Bank who would lose money; not the citizens of Ireland who could have expected no share of the profits had the investments panned out. What’s happened is that capitalism has co-opted the language and appearance of the free market to permit ever greater accumulations of wealth in ever fewer unscrupulous hands. Our system is more akin to the robber barons and gangster capitalists of the late 19th century than it is to some ideal of free market economics where wealth flows efficiently to those who “generate” it. The Anglo-Irish Bank bondholders did not generate the wealth they are receiving today. And as David McWilliams points out; by allowing this insanity to continue – worse, by encouraging it – the Irish government is losing credibility in the markets, not gaining it.

The finance capitalists who are now running our nation from afar have managed to hoodwink and pressure those elected to represent our interests into acting as though our interests were in fact synonymous with those doing the hoodwinking. And they’re not. In reality, they are diagrammatically opposed. And as we hand over our money, I feel certain that the investors can’t quite believe their luck. “Is it possible”, they wonder, “that the Irish people are really as thick as the old jokes implied?” Certainly that sad excuse for a leader we’ve got, Enda Kenny, seems to think so. Today, as he signed the metaphorical cheque, he insisted that Ireland must honour its debts. “We have paid our way and will pay our way”, he told the Dáil.

Here’s the thing, Enda, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t agree that Ireland should honour its debts. The problem we have – and it’s one that you don’t seem to have the wit about you to appreciate – is with honouring the debts of others. Today’s transfer of public wealth into private hands is not paying our way. It’s paying someone else’s way. Someone who not only doesn’t have Ireland’s interests at heart, but whose actions are impoverishing the citizens of this nation; whose greed is laying waste to our society. And although you may equate those reckless fools with “Ireland”, the rest of us really don’t. Your place in history, Enda, will be an ignominious one. Our last government sold us out, and you eagerly embraced their madness.

And that’s not all

There’s yet one further twist in this sorry tale. A twist that would appear to make our government look even more irresponsible. A twist that gives the impression Enda Kenny and his absurd collection of incompetents are actively maximising the amount being paid by the Irish people, even as they claim to be minimising it. Less than three months ago, we handed over €715m to Anglo-Irish Bank investors (you have to understand, the €1.25bn in private debt that we’re paying today is just the latest in a long line of payments that will continue for the next seven years at least and will leave this country crippled with sovereign debt). As we made that payment, Shane Ross (independent TD) made the point that the current bondholders were not the original investors in Anglo-Irish Bank. That in fact the current bondholders bought those bonds on the secondary market during a period in 2011 when the market in Anglo-Irish Bank bonds fell by 40%. They ended up paying a little less than 60% of the face value, and today will reap the rewards when Enda Kenny honours the full amount. As Ross said, quite correctly, the current bondholders “decided the Government was going to sting the taxpayer, rather than sting them, and so they bought”.

Which raises the obvious question… if Kenny, as he claims, was always determined to cover the full amount of these bonds, why in the name of everything that’s sacred did he not instruct the treasury to buy the bonds when the price dropped by 40%? I mean, I don’t think the Irish people should be paying even 1% of the private debt run up by greedy fools, but if our Inglorious Leader is determined to pay those debts, why insist on paying 100% when there was an opportunity to pay 60%. Is it me, or is that just wilful idiocy?

It is being reported in the Irish media that the government is planning yet further savage attacks on the poor and vulnerable. Joan Burton, deputy leader of the Irish Labour Party and Minister for Twisting The Knife, is considering a plan to issue the unemployed with an ultimatum… get a job, or lose your benefits. If there’s one very tiny good thing about this, it’s the fact that the Labour Party are finally abandoning their embarrassing pretence of being concerned with social justice and representing the vulnerable. That they are openly embracing their role as cheerleaders for crony capitalism isn’t particularly helpful, but at least it’s honest.

There is something truly obscene about these assaults by the rich and powerful on the poor and powerless. Indeed, it’s increasingly difficult to see government policy as something other than deliberate cruelty. There’s a quasi-sadism to the decisions to hit the poorest hardest and the richest hardly at all. As Joan Burton is chauffeured around Dublin in her ministerial car, is she insulated from the poverty she chooses to inflict upon hundreds of thousands of less fortunate people? Or does she take a certain satisfaction in it? Well, perhaps that’s going a bit far. After all, I suppose that €170k salary buys a lot of insulation. Enough in fact, that she may be completely oblivious to the oblivion into which she is consigning so many of her fellow citizens.

People in the I.T. sector will be told to find a job within 3 months or risk losing state benefits. Everyone else on the dole will have 6 months. At least, that’s the speculation in the press. But given that the story is likely to have arisen from a judicious leak from Burton’s department with the aim of gauging public reaction, there’s every chance it’s pretty accurate.

And it’s important to put this story into context. There are currently 443,200 Irish citizens in receipt of unemployment benefit. In March 2007, just before the economy began to collapse, there were 156,000 people out of work. That’s close to a trebling in less than half a decade. What’s more, although the rate of job losses has slowed and the number fell slightly in December (by 3,300), the trend is still upwards with more people being laid off than are finding work. This is no surprise really, given that the most recent available figures (for the third quarter of last year) show a drop in the number of jobs being advertised.

And those numbers are made look better than they actually are by a net emigration of 34,100 people last year. Though of course, our Finance Minister cynically – and some might say, contemptuously – suggests that Irish emigration is “free choice of lifestyle” and has little to do with the economic collapse and resultant unemployment… which is weird given the massive net immigration that Ireland experienced during the boom years. Anyone would think he’s just making up offensive nonsense rather than facing reality and accepting responsibility for the failed policies of his government.

In fact, it seems to me that if anyone should have a deadline set, it should be the people who promised to solve the mess and are paid massive salaries to do so. How about we give Joan Burton and Michael Noonan 3 months to create 100,000 jobs or risk losing their ministerial pensions? I mean, if putting people under extreme stress by threatening them with poverty is likely to make them more effective at finding a job, then I’m sure it’ll be just as effective at doing a job properly. Or does it only work with the already poor?

And even though it’s a bit of a tangent, can I also remind you, dear reader, that it was Joan Burton who recently decided to hire a spin doctor on a €128k salary (a former Labour Party adviser and friend of the minister). This is despite the government announcing – soon after they took office in a fanfare of “we’re here to clean up politics” – a salary cap of €93k for private advisers. Burton defended her decision to breach the salary cap by €35k (a figure that by itself is more than the average national wage) by insisting that her new spin doctor had been earning more than that in the private sector. Also, he possesses “exceptional skills”, apparently. In a climate where teachers, doctors and nurses are being cut from front-line services one is forced to wonder how Joan Burton has the cheek to place her public relations brief above the educational needs and physical welfare of Irish citizens.

But hey, maybe that’s the plan for the unemployed masses she’s threatening with extreme poverty… if you don’t find a job within your allotted time, I’ll pay you €128k to say nice things about me to the press.

So, to summarise, Ireland is a nation that is currently shedding more jobs than it is creating. It is a nation in which the number of available jobs is actually shrinking, not expanding. On top of that, every independent analyst of note is predicting 2012 will be a year of significant global recession. And yet, Joan Burton and the Irish Labour Party are considering driving anyone who fails to find a job within an arbitrary time scale into severe poverty. Or overseas. Indeed, it’s already been suggested that this is essentially a strategy being employed by the Labour Party to try and push the poor out of the country.

Quite who they think is going to vote for them once they have deliberately driven out or impoverished their traditional voters is anyone’s guess. Perhaps they’ve bet the Irish Green Party that they can produce an even more spectacular electoral meltdown than they managed. Who knows?

Of course, the timing of this announcement is interesting… just after our IMF / ECB / EC puppet-masters have left the country. I suspect Bruton is actually acting on instruction from her bosses in the troika. And let’s be realistic, it’s too much to expect a Labour minister to put her people or her principles before her pay-packet.