Ken Livingstone don't give a fuck

The furore over Ken Livingstone and his remarks about Hitler and Zionism last year has resurfaced. Finally the verdict is in: Livingstone has not been expelled from the Labour Party for his comments, but he has been suspended for another year. Before all this happened Ken was on the NEC and posed as a key ally to Jeremy Corbyn. Now he is out of the game until the summer of 2018.

The story has been covered as if the Labour Party should have stripped Livingstone of his membership and anything short of this makes them cowards. The Blairites and Brownites have been queuing around the block to hurl dog muck at the Labour leadership. One anonymous MP told the New Statesman: "Years from now, the foul stench of anti-Semitism will become one of the defining characteristics of the Jeremy Corbyn era in the Labour Party. A shameful and totally unforgivable chapter in our history."

Every wing of the British media establishment has taken part in the shit storm around Labour and anti-Semitism – from the BBC and The Guardian to The Telegraph and The Spectator. The Naz Shah scandal, and Ken Livingstone’s unhelpful intervention, is just the latest to be picked up. The British press has manufactured this scandal in a bid to create a crisis and, in turn, undermine the Labour leadership. But this hysteria also represents the high emotional stakes in Israel among the commentariat.

As a critic of the Israeli government, I have defended the Palestinian cause and its supporters against charges of anti-Semitism. And I have defended Ken Livingstone and his loose lips on more than one occasion. Still, I wish Ken had not brought up Hitler and Zionism in the middle of the Shah case. I do not think it was anti-Semitic, though I do think it was reckless and played into the hands of the Blairites.

Ken Livingstone ran into the Shah scandal like a bull into a china shop. Hopefully, we have just  heard the last vase smash against the floor. Plenty of leftists have pointed out the Haavara agreement, the Nazi plans to deport European Jews to Madagascar and elsewhere. However, the facts of Nazi Germany are not really relevant or helpful here. The real controversy is over Livingstone’s use of the term ‘Zionism’ to describe Nazi policy.

Laying out the historical record cannot dispel the outrage (even as much of it phony). The damage is done, sadly. Even before this, Livingstone was rated as an anti-Semite by certain people thanks to the media. Vilification campaigns are successful because it is virtually impossible to resist mudslinging. If you explain yourself, deny the claims or even apologise, you’re screwed. It’s too late. It’s never enough.

In this sense you can understand why Ken Livingstone has not apologise or concede ground, he just fires back against the press and his opponents in the party. Journalists kept asking him: "Do you recognise that you caused offence?" He does not, clearly. Much like the honey badger, Ken Livingstone don't give a fuck.

What does Corbyn have to lose?

For a long time, I thought that the Conservative government was a weak regime depending on a slight majority in Parliament. This starting point was necessary to proceed on the assumption that the Labour Party stands a chance of winning in 2020. Particularly as Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing supporters are trying to turn the party around from Blairism. However, the new terrain of Brexit shows 2020 is far from a certain defeat for the Tories.

What I failed to take into account: The Conservatives could well expand their majority by swallowing up the UKIP vote. The Tory majority, the smallest since 1974, counts on just 24.6% of the eligible electorate, which translates to 36% of the vote under our antiquated electoral system. Note UKIP counted for 12% of the vote in 2015 - that's 4 million votes. So Theresa May is going for a full-blooded Brexit because she thinks she can steal back these right-wing voters.

If the Corbynistas are to succeed, the Labour leadership needs to refocus its policy initiatives around a few key areas, adopt a permanent campaigning style to remobilise the base, a voter registration drive and, perhaps most importantly, reshape the media debate. This is vital if Labour is to answer the questions facing the country. In short, Labour's only hope is to increase voter turnout (which is easier said than done) to thwart Tory incursions and expand into enemy territory.

Stoke and Copeland

This is why the by-elections are not simply reflective of future prospects. For starters, the victory in Stoke was partly based on a low turnout and yet Labour came out on top: the Tory-UKIP vote fell by 4,000 votes, but remained split in the end. So the first-past-the-post system favoured Gareth Snell's Blue Labour campaign to rescue English nationalism from the racists. In other words, this win was not an unambiguous one. Though it is possible to rebuild the party's Stoke base over time, it just depends on what happens over the next three years.

That being said, it was great to see Paul Nuttall knocked back on his ass. It wasn't just because Nuttall lied about Hillsborough though, more importantly UKIP has lost its raison d'etre since Leave won the referendum. Still, Paul Nuttall was thick enough to believe the bogus media narrative that the Northern working class vote was more UKIP than Labour. The UKIP base has always been a strange right-wing coalition: one part Tory lite, one part fascist, one part libertarian fruitcake. This is a multi-class bloc, but the working class element are unlikely to come from the Labour base.

At the same time, the real triumph of Nigel Farage may be that the Conservatives are taking up UKIP's nationalist agenda. The May government has made it clear it is going for a hard Brexit and that it is open to restricting immigration, even at the detriment to economic growth and stability. Farage has already won without ever coming close to real power. The electioneers around May will have calculated that the party can survive the social fallout, while Labour remains divided and weak.

By opting for a hard Brexit, Theresa May has successfully neutered the UKIP threat to her party. UKIP was only gaining in Labour seats because it was subsuming the right-wing opposition vote under one umbrella. If the Tories had been more focused on Stoke they might have eaten through Nuttall's base and squeezed Labour's majority even further. But the Conservative leadership decided to focus on the easy target. This brings us to Copeland.

There's no doubt about it, the loss of Copeland was a serious blow. It revealed three factors: 1) the Conservatives were able to swallow up UKIP, while the Labour vote was squeezed on two fronts by 2) the Tories over Sellafield and 3) the Lib Dems over Brexit. The lack of a clear message on nuclear power cost Labour the jobs vote, whereas Corbyn's three line whip on Article 50 cost the party support among Remain voters. The latter factor may be far more important in the end, compared to the more localised nuclear issue.

None of this takes place in a vacuum, the Labour Party is in historic decline because the Blair years cost the party 5 million voters. The New Labour strategy of taking the working class vote for granted, as it chased after middle class families, has cost the party dearly. This is why the 2010 and 2015 elections were lost. It's partly why Scotland was lost. Despite the flaws of the Corbyn leadership, the Blairites and Brownites lack an alternative. A return to New Labour is not possible in a world where the combined Tory-UKIP vote stands at 48%. But a nationalist turn won't cut it either.

Corbyn's Promise

The promise of Corbynism to reverse this trend has not yet been realised. I put this down to a lack of political strategy and coherence on policy and message, as well as the overwhelmingly hostility of the media and the efforts of Blairites to undermine Corbyn. The illusion is that Corbyn is the fundamental problem for Labour, when it was clear that the Brown government lost power and Ed Miliband lost Scotland. Putting a David Miliband or a Dan Jarvis in Corbyn's place will not change the reasons why Labour is in a losing streak.

It's not about your jawline or what suit you wear. The bid to transform Labour is still real for as long as there is no alternative to the radical left in the party. But it takes work to repair 40 years of damage. Some pessimists would argue it is hopeless. If Labour is unsalvageable, then Corbyn may go down with the ship - taking the blame for decades of rot. Even still, I think it would only ensure the collapse of the party to turn back now. It's not about Corbyn, it's about what kind of country we want to live in. The old phrase "socialism or barbarism" is more than rhetorical now.

Bizarrely, Conservative Lord Finkelstein has offered some recommendations in his Times column. Far from arguing for retreat in the hope of saving face (as Owen Jones has done), Danny Finkelstein suggests the only hope for Corbyn is to instigate a new antagonism within the Labour Party to change it forever:

"[Corbyn's] only hope must be as a subversive challenger, relentlessly organising to take over the party and talking about his efforts to do so. He should come out with huge, earth-shaking radical left-wing policies and not care that Yvette Cooper and I both think that they are bonkers. He should skip prime minister's questions in order to attend protest rallies. He should organise to deselect critics and win selection contests for his people."

Finkelstein is not alone, but it's interesting to hear this from a prominent right-wing journalist. Another writer, Benjamin Mercer, has taken to the pages of The National Student to make the case for far-reaching democratic reform within the Labour Party. This is surely the best case for Corbynism, and the best hope of the Labour left:

"Much as the franchise has been expanded for the leadership elections, so it must be expanded at the level of the CLPs. power should be transferred downwards from the General and Executive Committees to the grassroots. Participation should be made easier and the decisions should be made by a committee of the whole membership, not merely a clique of the same. Every member of the CLP must have the right to become its MP, and the membership should be ballotted before every election - or by-election - in order to choose the party's candidate. This should end the practice of 'parachuting' supposedly orthodox candidates into allegedly safe seats. No more Hunts in Stoke. labour Party MPs will be accountable, first and foremost, to their constituencies and not to the leadership, the PLP or the NEC. Re-selection at every election will ensure that this remains the case."

Up until now Jeremy Corbyn has stuck to a centrist style of leadership. However, the Labour coalition of liberals, social democrats and socialists, may just be too broad for the new situation. The broad church approach has been a recipe for incoherence on policy and a lack of strategy on the media. If Corbynism is to succeed, the party has to be transformed in the long-term and that requires thinking beyond 2020. A surrender or a retreat would just offset this process of democratic reform.

If the experiment ends with Corbyn stepping down in 2020, the opening for transforming Labour into a mass democratic party would be lost. This would close the space for a radical leadership. Not only would it mean that the left would not be able to contest the elections in 2025 and 2030, it would mean Labour would fall back into the hands of the extreme centre. Contrary to Blairite illusions, the party would resume its lacklustre performance under Ed Miliband, or, worse, try to stake out a position as the party for English nationalism under the guise of Blue Labour. Either way, Labour is dead meat.

This article was originally written for Souciant on March 3, 2017.

Corbyn Coup: Jeremy Fights Back!

The coup against Jeremy Corbyn has now fully transmuted into a leadership election. But the key challengers are unlikely to win over the membership: whether it is lacklustre Angela Eagle, or the mediocre Owen Smith. Corbyn is officially on the ballot, albeit with new barriers to his supporters. Sadly the contest may take until September to conclude, while the Conservative government is busy regrouping.

Things are moving very quickly. Not long ago, there was a great deal of anxiety over the NEC vote on whether or not to allow Corbyn to remain on the ballot paper. Many feared Labour would deny the incumbent the right to defend his position from Angela Eagle. The Blairites are cynical enough to take this decision. It would have been a transparent move to overthrow the leader and close the democratic opening within the party. But we shouldn't forget this almost happened.

Much like the no-confidence motion, the NEC held the ballot in secret. The point being to embolden the anti-Corbyn vote, as it had done with the no-confidence motion. This same method allowed 80% of the PLP to fall into line with the Blairite coup. Yet even with the secret ballot, the Corbyn camp won the NEC vote by a modest margin (18:14) and now NEC elections may see the balance of votes turn in the Left's favour.

However, the NEC rammed through new measures, once Corbyn and his allies were out of the room, to deny 128,000 members the right to vote and suspend all branch meetings until after the election. This should not surprise anyone. The Labour Party has a long tradition of rigging its internal contests for the sake of 'unity' and 'stability'. Democracy and contestation is a threat to this Tammany Hall system.

The enemy revealed

First, Angela Eagle emerged to take on Corbyn, but now Owen Smith has entered the field. Smith represents a division in the anti-Corbyn faction, where Eagle is not seen as necessarily the best candidate to take on the leader. He is now positioning himself to be the single challenger to face Jeremy Corbyn. He has called for a second EU referendum, appealing to the liberal europhiles so easily disenchanted with Corbynism. It's an appeal to the muesli belt.

Overall, the Smith campaign looks like a serious bid for power. The Pontypridd MP vows to refocus efforts on inequality. He has proposed a £200 billion investment programme to build housing, colleges, hospitals and improve existing infrastructure. Smith was self-aware enough to outmatch Stephen Crabb's call for a £100 billion plan. He's even pledged to bring in a war powers act to ensure no future government can take the country to war without parliamentary support.

This coming from a man, who was not in Parliament to vote for the Iraq war, surely strengthens his bid for the leadership. But it's not entirely accurate to say Smith is anti-war. In the past, Owen Smith has expressed support for the occupation of Iraq on Eustonite grounds – going as far as to compare the conflict to the Spanish civil war. This was long before Hilary Benn used the same analogy to support the invasion of Syria.

Meanwhile the Eagle campaign has been markedly lukewarm. So far Angela Eagle has succeeded in winning over sympathy with questionable claims of intimidation by leftists. Her debut was spoiled by Theresa May's victory after Andrea Leadsom pulled out of the Tory leadership race. The journalists rushed out of the room to cover the real news. But even when Eagle gets airtime, she fails to inspire. It looks like a kamikaze candidacy.

The aim is victory through destruction. The Blairites and the 'soft left' are trying to use Angela Eagle as a front to slam the Labour leadership. The election will be dragged out over the summer to guarantee maximum damage. The Labour Right would prefer to see Corbyn fail than see him challenge the Tory government. This is just as the government is largely rudderless. A united opposition could have serious impact right now.

Perilous terrain

Faced with Smith, the Corbyn camp has returned to its own take on quantitative easing. John McDonnell has laid out plans for a national investment bank and £500 billion programme for infrastructure. It would be coupled with regional banks to increase the level of investment to the North and the Midlands. This not only tops Smith's position, it is a return to Corbynomics – a radical mix of heterodox Keynesian and post-socialist economic policies.

If Corbyn combines a well thought out platform with a social media strategy and grass-roots organising, the leader should be able to win with a landslide. Victory has to be total here, or it will embolden the anti-Corbyn faction to draw their knives later. It's not just a matter of having the right ideas and decency. The extreme centrists want to recapture the party leadership, and they are willing to ruin its electoral chances to do so.

Not surprisingly, Jeremy Corbyn has fallen back on tried and tested social media networks. This allows Corbyn to connect with his base in a much more direct way than his competitors. It does have limits, though it is the best option. The real battle is how Corbyn can assert influence in the media and reach a mass audience. He recently gave a pretty relaxed interview to the BBC in Finsbury Park. But the press is still overwhelmingly hostile to the Left.

The main problem is not the right-wing press, but the lack of a left-wing press. The Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the New Statesman have led the herd of independent minds. This herd includes liberals and leftists who take issue with Corbyn's idealism. Even the Daily Mirror, the only Labour red-top newspaper, called for Corbyn to let the coup plotters win. So there is no progressive commentariat backing the Labour leader.

The Corbyn leadership faces the difficulty of getting the word out in a hostile media environment. At the same time, the party is locked into a crisis which predates the last nine months and goes back to the compromises of Blairism and even before. The redistribution of power and wealth was always offset to secure gains within the system. Now there is the real struggle to transform the party in order to change the country.

This article was originally published at Souciant.

Corbyn Coup: Britain At Its Best

Two weeks after the UK voted to leave the EU and the country is still reeling from the impact. Economic disarray, as the pound has crashed and the financial markets have taken a $2 trillion hit. Reports of racist violence are surging to new heights. Infighting has ensued across the political class, and the government itself is paralysed. Fear and anger can be detected almost everywhere. This is Britain at its best.

The opposition has declared war on itself. The Blairites have moved to oust Jeremy Corbyn, the most left-wing Labour leader in the party's history, rather than allow him to face-off the government at its weakest moment. Crises are an opportunity for the Left, not just the Right. It looks like the Blairites were plotting for a long time, and may have waited another year or so, to launch the coup. The Brexit vote just hit the accelerator.

No doubt, the bid to overthrow Corbyn took months of planning. Hilary Benn's challenge and mass resignations were planned on WhatsApp. Reportedly, the plotters typed to each other as part of 'the Birthday Group'. This may explain why the resignations were not all in one go, but staggered across two days to guarantee maximum press coverage. Beyond media stunts, however, the Blairites had little plan.

How to botch a coup

It looks like the putsch is dead, but it's worth asking why it failed. We know a coup was being planned in which Margaret Hodge would fire the first shot, the Telegraph reported in May. Notably, Hodge initiated the no-confidence motion against Corbyn. The plan was clearly drawn with conventional politics in mind: If your entire cabinet resigns, and you lose a no-confidence motion, you are supposed to step down!

Bristled with overconfidence, the Labour Right moved to deliver the first and final blow. The domain name for Angela Eagle's leadership bid was already bought. The Right would recapture the leadership and begin the process of purging the inconvenient members. Once done, the party could get back to business as usual. But the plotters completely misread the situation. They moved too quickly, and missed their target.

It soon became apparent that the plan had a fatal flaw, it relied on Corbyn willfully resigning. The no-confidence motion was technically an extra-constitutional measure, as Labour (unlike the Conservatives and the Liberals) was formed by trade unions and grass-roots members. Officially, the party is governed by conference, not by its elected representatives. Jeremy Corbyn could just dig his heels in.

Some would argue the 172 Labour MPs have a greater mandate than Jeremy Corbyn because they were elected by millions of people. But it is worth asking, where were these "millions" of enthusiastic supporters of Blairism? If New Labour was such a success story, why couldn't they get their "millions" of supporters to swamp the election? The argument does not stand up to scrutiny, even if it were not unconstitutional.

Of course, if these people really believed they had the support they would allow Labour supporters to take part in the no-confidence motion. Likewise, the Blairites would launch a new leadership election, or they would put themselves up for re-election to affirm their position. Yet there are no such efforts. Instead what we have is a media coup without the means of a serious political wager. It was doomed, even if it were to succeed.

Not only was the no-confidence not legally binding, the resignations just cleared the shadow cabinet of opponents. At the same time, the Blairites had no real alternative to Corbyn and they know they will lose an open election with the leader on the ballot. Right-winger Peter Mandelson wanted to use Angela Eagle as a front to reintroduce the New Labour agenda. The soft-left were on board with the coup, but they didn't care much for the candidate.

People began clambering over one another to find an alternative. Heads turned to Tom Watson, but he ruled himself out. Owen Smith became the great hope, and we still don't know who he is or what he looks like. People continued to fantasise about Keir Starmer, or David Miliband being flown into a parliamentary seat over night. In short, the anti-Corbyn faction wanted to bring down the leader, but could not agree on anything else.

Angela Eagle was left making absurd statements. "Jeremy Corbyn still has time to do the right thing," one of her inner-circle told the BBC. Officially, Eagle was giving Corbyn more time to resign. Of course, the hesitancy to launch the leadership bid revealed that the Blairites knew the candidacy would fail with the incumbent in the race. By this point, 60,000 new members had rushed into the party ranks.

This figure would soon climb to 100,000. The total membership may be set to reach 600,000 people – far higher than the halcyon days of New Labour platitudes. This is just as all other political parties are shrinking rapidly. The tension is between the party base and the leadership on one side, the elected representatives and the entire political and media class on the other.

Where next?

There has been talk of a split in the Labour Party between Blairites and Corbynistas. The problem with this view is that there is no obvious form it would take. The lack of leadership would still hold the project back. It's also likely that there are less than 50 MPs – maybe as few as 20 – who would actually go ahead with it. This doesn't mean the so-called 'big hitters', like Tom Watson, would defect.

Some of the Blairites have been looking into legal claims to the Labour brand because they understand they are nothing without it. But a split would be a radical change in itself. You could imagine the Conservatives breaking up into a hard-right eurosceptic wing and a pragmatic neoliberal wing. It's conceivable that the Blairites could find common cause with market liberals across the isle.

However, the worse case scenario may not be the prospect of a split, or even the putsch itself, but the continued unity with New Labour apparatchiks. People like Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson may not be able to engage in political trench warfare, yet they still have a great deal of influence in mass-media. The Blairites could just bunker down and cause havoc to prevent the Left from making any gains.

Despite appearances, the Left has some advantages over its right-wing opponents in the party. The membership is energised and the trade unions are on side (that's 50% of the party's funding). Even in terms of political talent and innovation, the Blairites are much weaker at this point, the extreme centre lacks credibility and a strong base. This could well be the death of the party as we've known it.

The failures of the coup should embolden the Left. Members should capture the party infrastructure and embed themselves in committees, councils and prepare to put forward left-wing candidates for Parliament. This is the only way to reinvent the Labour Party. Corbyn represents the start of a shift towards class politics. Pasokification is still on the cards, and a left turn is necessary to save the party.

This article was originally published at Souciant.

Is Labour anti-Semitic?

No, the Labour Party is not an association of anti-Semites. Yet the media storm over anti-Semitism and the Labour Party has been building for a long time. The Naz Shah case, and Ken Livingstone’s intervention, is just the latest to be picked up by the media. In fact, the British press has manufactured this scandal in a bid to create a crisis. This hysteria represents the emotional stakes in Israel. It is precisely because of the state of British political discourse that this was possible.

The Anglosphere is culturally and politically invested in Israel in a way which other world powers are not. Make no doubt about it, this is the result of settler colonialism. Israel fits into the imperial ambitions of Western powers. The American intellectual class fell in love with Israel after the 1967 war, which came as a welcome sign that the world was not in total disarray. So the conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a coincidental part of our political discourse - it is necessarily a part of the way the conflict is understood in the West.

For these reasons, we might say Ken Livingstone ran into the Shah scandal like a bull into a china shop. We still may not have heard the last vase smash as it hits the floor. Plenty of leftists have pointed out the Haavara agreement, the Nazi plans to deport European Jews to Madagascar and elsewhere. However, the facts of Nazi Germany are not really relevant or helpful here. The real controversy is over Livingstone’s use of the term ‘Zionism’ (an idiotic choice of words) to describe Nazi policy. Laying out the historical record cannot dispel the outrage (much of it phony). The damage is done.

Vilification campaigns are successful because it is virtually impossible to resist mudslinging. If you explain yourself, deny the claims or even apologise, you’re screwed. It’s too late. It’s never enough. There is no way of adequately deflecting, let alone dodging, the mud. You’re always guilty in the eyes of some people. Even before this, Livingstone was rated as an anti-Semite by certain people thanks to the media. But what is the point of all this?

Right now, Jeremy Corbyn is leading the Labour Party and this represents a major challenge to the status quo in Britain. So far, Corbyn has beaten all the odds against him (he has to, there are no half-measures), but the Blairites are desperate to inflict a defeat on the Left. They feel the party has been snatched from them. They want it back. The Blairites already tried to destroy him by branding him an apologist for terrorism, now they're gunning to smear him as sympathetic to xenophobes.

Guido Fawkes helped start this shit-storm

As you may have heard, the Labour Party has a problem with anti-Semitism. Or at least that's what the right-wingers are yelling. It all started with Guido Fawkes, a.k.a. Paul Staines. Mr. P Staines dug up some Facebook posts by Naz Shah from August 2014. This is meant to tell us that the Labour Party is a front organisation for rabid anti-Jewish fanatics. Maybe, we ought to ask questions about Mr. P Staines and his motives for sliming Corbyn's Labour Party.

The 2015 General Election.

I covered the election cycle for Souciant. My first article focused on Ed Miliband and what he represents for the centre-left and for the Labour Party.

The early signs of the Miliband leadership were not promising. He shirked from making promises early on, apparently to avoid commitments he couldn’t fulfil, probably to avert any infighting. Labour veterans will remember, with no nostalgia, the splits in the 1980s, which ruptured the party’s electoral chances, consigning it to the wilderness for the best part of two decades. So long as the party remains united, it can back neoliberal policies. 

In this regard, sectarianism has its virtues over unity. As Leo Panitch has emphasised, it might be necessary to divide ranks, and prompt a full-blown confrontation, in order to rescue the official social democratic party from its own rightward drift. Contestation can lead to progressive outcomes, but plenty of people prefer to play the safe game holding onto a scintilla of hope. The last battle for the life and soul of the Labour Party was fought in the 1980s. 

The post-war Labour Party has consistently sought to buttress the system and avoid the redistribution of wealth and power. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the plan was to secure ever-rising living standards through adjustments to income and jobs policy, as well as an inflationary monetary approach, to make the pie appear bigger for everyone. Then in the 1990s New Labour promised it could do this by further compromise and, ultimately, by heaping greater debt onto people. 

Likewise, Miliband promises to tweak the system just enough to placate the incorrigible masses. He tries to make the right noises about taxes, health care, jobs and housing, but ultimately falls short. We’re told he’s the official left candidate, and yet he talks about ‘responsible’ capitalism. The days of Bevan and Attlee are long gone. These may be the end times for the centre-left.

I wrote these words for an article, the Death of the Centre-Left, published on March 31. For the election I looked at almost every major party, with the exceptions of Plaid Cymru and the Lib Dems, with particular attention paid to the Green Party, Labour, UKIP and the Conservatives. Here's my take on the 2015 election:
The Anti-Cameron - On the significance of the SNP as an alternative to the Whitehall consensus and what it means for those of us on the left-of-centre.
The New Ted Heath - A historical look at Cameron's Conservative Party and how it reached this peculiarly modern manifestation of right-wing politics.
These Greens Are Different - A critical, yet sympathetic, look at the Green Party, their social programme and what has gone wrong for them on the campaign trail.
White Identity Politics - A comparison of UKIP and the DUP in historical terms of colonial and racial oppression, specifically how the oppression of the Irish helped to constitute the white identity to which UKIP now appeals.
Small was Beautiful - A look at the strangely reactionary history of the Green Party, how they came to be and why they are left-wing today.
Dead Labour - Again, a critical look at Labour and precisely the history of its infighting and how it produced the current political impasse.
Early 90s Flashback - Looking back to the 'surprise' victory of 1992 in terms of the Conservative majority won and secured by David Cameron. What lessons can we draw from this?

Why Nana Didn't Vote UKIP.

"I'm the only politician keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive." - Nigel Farage

The night of Thursday 22nd of May I got a phone call from my nana. She told me, "I was going to vote UKIP, but then I read what they were for..." She referred to a spread in The Daily Mirror where the party's positions on issues other than immigration were presented. Farage was much less appealing as a Thatcherite, who wants the privatisation of the NHS, the abolition of maternity leave, sick pay, and redundancy pay. Tooth and nail libertarian ideas hardly appeal to a bread base of voters and for good reason. In the end my nana voted Labour, saying "I always used to vote Labour..." and adding "they used to be for the workers". That's the crux of the matter.

My nana was interested in voting for UKIP because she wants a referendum on EU membership and, in her own words, UKIP are "against asylum seekers". This is where the party appeals to a broad base of voters. Only on these grounds could an ex-banker and former Tory, like Farage, market himself as a man of the people. Relatives of mine have voted UKIP in the past out of opposition to the European Union and mass-immigration. But these are former Labour supporters. The media closes in on issues like immigration, benefits, and the EU, to steal away the core support for social democratic measures. It has been a successful campaign in many ways - there is widespread opposition to immigration and widespread support for benefit cuts - while failing in other ways - opposition to universal health-care remains insignificant.

How can people who have voted Labour all of their lives, and in the case of my relatives, even voted Green in the past, turn to a party of right-wing spivs. The extent to which UKIP has succeeded in stealing Labour voters is debatable, but it is the key to any long-term electoral strategy. It is not enough to compete with the Conservatives. Even though the raison d'etre of Faragisme is to force the Conservative leadership further rightwards. The current austerity isn't enough. The stealth privatisation of the NHS isn't enough. Anti-immigrant campaign vans aren't enough. Cuts to disability benefits aren't enough. The tax-cuts for the rich aren't enough either. It should be clear what these people are about.

The facts of UKIP's prejudices are not amazing to anyone on the liberal-Left. Never mind the core base of support for anti-immigrant policies. What does amaze people are the policies which Farage would implement if he had real power in this country. When asked by Norman Smith whether he would ringfence the NHS the UKIP leader said "No, I want to see us getting better value for money." Need I say anymore? Yet that wasn't plastered on every headline throughout the country. The media demands the debate on immigration because it can only move between two poles: liberal internationalism in one corner and populist nationalism in the other. It's convenient for a discourse which doesn't do serious politics and peddles easy answers to complex problems.

Tony Benn - He Encouraged Us.

You've all heard it said. It is one of the leading cliches in politics: the older one gets, the wider one's waistband expands, and the more conservative one becomes. There are notable exceptions to such sad cases that affirm this dictum of aging reactionaries. One such prominent case was Tony Benn, who started out as a mainstream Labour politician of the social democratic post-war establishment, only move further to the Left as he passed through Parliament and more than one Labour cabinet. The only thing startling about the old man was that he was ever a banal centrist.

The praise now being showered on Tony Benn relegates him to the dull realm of acceptability. It was not so in the days when Benn posed a serious challenge to the Labour leadership and the prevailing Cold War consensus. The Murdoch gutter press went after him with characteristic fairness, they went through his bins, produced a bogus report on his mental well-being, and probably tapped his land-line. The hysterical press barons saw a dictator of the proletariat on the horizon, but they also saw a similar figure under their beds at night. Those days are long gone. The Soviet Union collapsed and with it the threat of democratic socialism evaporated. The death of socialism and the end of history were proclaimed. Only liberal capitalism was left standing, seemingly everywhere triumphant. A socialist like Benn could be praised for his integrity only because the game was over. The conservatives and liberals can now applaud him precisely because they think the battle is over and his ideas don't really work.

No longer a prospective dictator, we find Anthony Wedgewood can be lauded as a man of principle from the old-fashioned days of Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan. The exactitude of the principles if a another matter entirely, we're led to believe that the 'Old' Labour Party was for stripping away the wealth of the propertied classes. It just didn't work. It turned Britain into the Sick Man of Europe. Have no doubt about it, the Labour government of 1945 to 1951 established a welfare state and mixed economy which produced greater development, economic stability, and growth, than have been enjoyed since the post-war settlement was dismantled from 1975 onwards. As much a creature of the War (not to be confused with any mere wars) and the social democratic consensus of the 1950s and 60s Benn had the qualifications to speak for the anti-war movement and the socialist movement.

As a Labour politician who lived through the first Wilson administration which had sought to deliver significant rates of growth rather than address the distributional basis of the economy. The hope was that the growth would raise living standards for the working-class without really changing the class structure of Britain. Yet Wilson had come to power just as an economic boom was hurtling out of control. The government had to look to hold down wages and prices to get a grip on inflation. In the midst of this Tony Benn was made the Minister of Technology and would go on to chair the Industrial Reorganisation Committee. He spent the last years of the Wilson government picking winners and backing takeovers in the midst of the Jim Slater era of asset stripping and ram-raids on corporate structures.

History is full of ironies. It was the beginning of the deindustrialisation of Britain that would eventuate in the 1980s and 90s. The conditions of the post-war settlement which amounted to the grave crises of the 70s are what led the way for Thatcherism and later Blairism. Only for the new establishment to lead to the current crisis we're living with today. The vast swathe of Labour parliamentarians were on board with the new consensus by the 80s and many of them had been even before it had fully emerged from the womb of social democracy. It was the Callaghan government which had signed up for the IMF austerity programme, which Denis Healey later admitted was unnecessary and probably cost Labour the election. We can and should praise Benn for learning from this experience and having the fortitude to take the stances he did against the onslaught which was well underway by 1979.

The stagnation of the 1970s matched a political crisis within the establishment itself. The Conservative Party wasn't going to forget the humiliation of 1974 and was determined to inflict a historic defeat on the trade unions. Under these conditions Margaret Thatcher came to the foreground. Originally the candidate was going to be Keith Joseph, who had helped to spread the ideas of Milton Friedman. He argued the crisis was down to the decline of wealth-producing sectors of the economy and the growth of the public sector and government. It was tremendously popular in contrast to the perceived bungling of Ted Heath. In the end Joseph eliminated himself by giving a eugenicist speech on poor mothers and their children. This may have been the exuberance of the emerging consensus which would be consolidated under Thatcher. Few people saw what was coming.

The major ideological triumphs of the Thatcher regime can be rounded down to just two: the Falklands War and the Miners' Strike. Tony Benn was on the right side in both instances. He saw that the war was an unnecessary loss of life and should have been handled through the United Nations. It really was a battle between two bald men fought over a comb. Without the war the Thatcher government may have well paid the price for its vandalism and suffered a defeat in 1983. Instead the Conservatives benefited from the patriotic fervour whipped up for the war. It's possible that the subsequent battle over the mines would have not arisen had the tide been turned back at that point. Once the miners had been defeated in 1985 the Thatcherite era had well and truly consolidated its gains and could go on to further victories. The labour movement that had vanquished Heath was smashed.

Even in the face of such defeats Benn stood strong and kept to his principles. He maintained his position as MP for Chesterfield and condemned the pit closures which would toss so many onto the trash heap. He stood as a voice of working-class interests against the tidal wave of Thatcherism and its bid to dismantle the entire edifice of social democracy. He remained steadfast in his optimism, at a time when many despaired, and had good reason to do so. The arguments he put forward were rooted in common-sense and populist appeals to the moral collectivism of the people. He was not a Marxist, but a left-moralist. The influence of the Fabian tradition, with its gradualist approach, and fetish for reform, can be picked up here; but there's also a break with Fabian progressivism in Benn's shift to the Left. His faith in the democratic mechanism is not as lukewarm as some on the hard Left may like to claim. The welfare state was socialist development, but it wasn't the end itself. He wanted to see democracy extended to the economy, it was a syndicalist call for industrial democracy.

Another Comrade Lost.

It's not often that there are two such prominent exits at the same time. First Bob Crow, now Tony Benn. Let's hope these passings don't come in threes as it is so often said. Tony Benn was a veteran of the Second World War, a stalwart campaigner, a democratic socialist, a diarist, and historian. He was one of the few 'moderates' to see that it wasn't good enough to try and run the system slightly better. Benn had seen the Labour government of the 1960s try to offset a redistribution of wealth by trying to boost growth. In the 1970s Benn saw the Labour Party swallow monetarism and a package of austerity measures for the IMF. In one of the best cases of a person becoming more left-wing as they get older Benn concluded that there had to be a radical opposition for there to be an opposition at all. Benn took a stand against the neoliberal agenda of privatisation and deregulation. And that is why he is referred to as 'divisive'.

Nothing marks out the predominance of liberal Oxbridge graduates in the commentariat than the use of 'divisive' as a pejorative. There is nothing inherently wrong with sparking a division. If anything we have too little division in the trilateral consensus in Whitehall and we could do with much more dissensus. In fact, that would be to understate the dire stasis we're enduring right now. The liberals at the BBC (let alone the conservatives there) want to believe that Benn cost Labour the election with the potency of his 'dangerous ideas'. It's impossible for them to imagine that the combination of the Falklands war, Callaghan's record in the 70s, the SDP insurgency, and the ineffectuality of the Labour leadership, set Michael Foot for defeat in 1983. Foot was then succeeded by Neil Kinnock, who led the Labour Party with much greater concessions to Thatcherism. It's no coincidence that the SDP evolved into the Liberal Democrats who now share a bed comfortably with David Cameron. Only such mush-heads could find the word 'consensus' beautiful.

Tony Benn has been forgiven in his old age as he was no longer a threat to the system. His passing has been greeted with qualified statements of '... even if you didn't agree with him' and the like. Unlike Bob Crow, who was very much a figure of the 21st Century, the late Anthony Wedgewood was one of the most significant British socialists of the latter half of the 20th Century. This connects him with the post-war settlement and its breakdown in the 1970s and 80s. It's precisely because this man stood up to the Thatcherites and the rightward shift in the Labour Party that he can't simply be mourned without hesitation. The past is scary and historical reflection is even more terrifying. It's inconvenient. One might ask uncomfortable questions. Some would like to know why the IMF bailout was received and the package of austerity measures, implemented under Callaghan, if it were unnecessary as Mr Benn claimed and Denis Healey confirmed. Not only does it raise troubling questions about the way our society was transformed in the 1980s, it raises troubling questions about what is going on in government right now.

The Evacuation of Meaning.

 

 

You may have heard recently that the Labour Party has rediscovered itself as the revolutionary vanguard ever ready to play dictatress to the proletarians of the UK. Unfortunately the slogan won’t be ‘Peace, Bread, Land’ exactly because Ed Miliband has pledged to freeze energy prices for 20 months, to protect the minimum wage, repeal the bedroom tax and to incentivise private companies to develop on the land they own. No promises to reverse course on tuition fees, certainly not on ‘free schools’, the coming sale of Royal Mail and the on-going privatisation of the NHS so ignored by most of the mainstream media. If you read The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Sun and The Daily Express you will of course know this is the most radical position ever taken in the last thirty years. That is only demonstrative of just how deeply the termites have spread and how well they have dined. Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson have condemned Ed Miliband’s positions for abandoning the New Labour script of triangulated means to compete for the Conservative vote and, naturally, taking the working-class vote for granted. The Blairites are totally on board for the Cameron prescription of fiscal conservatism (for the poor anyway) to restructure the welfare state and public services.

The right-wing commentariat are on the offensive to safeguard the existing order (or should that be disorder?) of bloated energy oligopolies and the particular approach Cameron has taken to pumping up a housing bubble in London. The bedroom tax has appeal because gutting the benefits system will make some in the public feel good that Nicky Welfare isn’t getting away with spending his £60 a week on lager anymore. That’s the only discussion we’re allowed about benefits. No one wants to talk about the fact that Nicky Welfare’s housing benefit doesn’t go on his drinking habits, but it does go straight into the pockets of a landlord. The housing crisis is not up for discussion anymore. The Conservatives and Lib Dems have been hard at work trying to patch up the system as it was when Gordon Brown was in the Treasury. All of them will talk the talk about the need to build more houses to stoke the chronic shortage and lift people out of dilapidated housing. There is no serious commitment to extending public money to building more social housing. Instead the government and the so-called left-wing opposition are signed up to selling off these houses thereby feeding the same processes of debt and property speculation which laid the basis for the last crash.

 

At the same time, the Labour Party has not reclaimed Clause 4 to recommit itself to the nationalisation of industries and assets. Instead Miliband waffles as the NHS is sold off bit by bit and even as the delegates vote unanimously in favour of renationalising the railways the Labour leadership looks for the door. Yet ‘Red’ Ed can’t help himself from affirming a vague commitment to an even more vague democratic socialism. It seems like just five minutes ago Ed Miliband was calling himself a “modern progressive social democrat” and affirmed a commitment to a “responsible capitalism”. It shows how far things have gone, Tony Blair knew what he had to say to get ahead back in 1983 when he described himself as a socialist influenced by Karl Marx. Keep in mind ‘Red’ Ed is the same leader looking to chuck out the troublesome unions, while he has taken the side of Boris Johnson in his support for a “use it or lose it” policy on land ownership. Even Margaret Thatcher maintained a 60p tax for nine years, but Ed is so ‘red’ for supporting the 50p rate. The truth is the spectrum has moved considerably to the Right and now the much lauded centre is hardly a bastion of moderation. At best Labour offers to hold back a bit more than the Conservatives: austerity lite, rather than austerity.

 

Meanwhile the liberal press is in just a bad shape as it agrees with the right-wing analysis for the most part. The liberals love the idea that the socialist movement and its project are long dead. To them Ed Miliband is a nuanced centre-left politician, better than Tony Blair but not as bad as Tony Benn. It’s just another variation on the Third Way paradigm of New Labour and New Democrats. There is virtually no difference in rhetoric as Miliband has been oh so very careful not to distinguish himself from the odious stench of Blairism. Nor has he set out to distance himself from the Brown mound. He doesn’t want to define himself or to be defined and yet he expects to win an election on the same old pablum. The conservative press have already laid down their script, as they had done from day one, Ed Miliband is a leftist and his failures are to be taken as failures of the Left. The liberals more or less have swallowed so much of the premise as to tie themselves to this conclusion. When it came to Syria the Labour leader was distinguished not by his success but by his failure to push through his ‘yes’ motion. It would’ve made his father proud. It might only be reasonable able to hope Miliband can produce more of these fuck ups once in office.

This article was originally written for and posted at the Third Estate on September 27th 2013.

Reclaiming the 'Lesser Evil'?

There’s a great anecdote recalled by Tariq Ali when David and Ed Miliband faced each other for the Labour leadership. Towards the 1992 election David Miliband was a speechwriter for Neil Kinnock. Around this time the old man phoned Tariq Ali and asked him if he had listened to Kinnock’s latest speech. Immediately without hesitation Ali launched into a tirade against Kinnock, deeming his speech ‘empty nonsense’ to which Ralph replied “I think David wrote that speech.” On that note the pair enjoyed a good laugh. Contrary to what you’ve read, in the mainstream press, both the Miliband brothers were always a part of the right-wing of the Labour Party. Even as the two of them stood on stage and poised against one another for the big seat neither stood out. Three years later and we can say that if David Miliband had won then we would probably be on the road to war right now, if not indeed in the early phases of a readily expanding bombing campaign.

Last week I criticised the ‘lesser evil’ supposedly offered by Ed Miliband. Only three days later Miliband had delayed the vote on Syria and put forward a rather dull motion to slow the process with the hope of avoiding a split in his own party. Effectively Miliband was shirking from giving an unequivocal ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the fundamental question and wanted to hold off what seemed to be inevitable for a little while longer. In the end the modicum of opposition posed by the Labour Party converged with a rebellion in the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats. In the end, by 13 votes, David Cameron was defeated and so was Ed Miliband as both motions were cancelled out. It was the first time a government had lost a motion of this importance since 1782, ironically when the British were considering an intervention to snuff out the fledgling Whig Republic across the Atlantic. Later the British Empire would clash with the early USA as the Madison administration set out to annex Canada in a tradition we could summarise as ‘When in doubt, conquer Canada…’

In my last article on ‘red’ Ed I highlighted the cowardly manoeuvres he has pulled to secure his base even as he courts the Conservative vote. Just as Ed Miliband had sought to avoid a clear answer (which might rock the boat) on Syria, he had given contradictory answers as to whether or not he would repeal the Health & Social Care act of 2012 – the bill which amounts to an enforced path of gradually privatising the NHS. I think the main point that Miliband has lacked any guts still stands. Though it should be noted it was his bungling leadership which opened the space (perhaps unintentionally) for Parliament to effectively rule-out British participation in the Syrian conflict. Miliband may reap the electoral rewards for this as the vote has shown up just how inept and vulnerable the government remains. It could’ve so easily gone the other way. Indeed it would have if ‘red’ Ed had got his way, it remains the case that he believes Britain can do something about Syria he’s just not clear on what that something might be, or is, or should be.

So it’s nearly a week since my last piece on Miliband, have I changed my mind? Broadly not, as the Labour leader remains a problematic figure as he has from the very beginning. It remains the case that there is an on-going crisis in the political class as well as in the economy. The paralysis of Lib-Lab-Con over Syria is partly symptomatic of this crisis, and we as leftists can’t take advantage of the situation then we aren’t to be let off lightly. With all that in mind, good reasons for caution, we may praise Ed Miliband for a brief moment of originality which speaks rather kindly of his bungling way. Even if it’s a failure, it is a failure which would’ve made his father so very proud.

This article was originally written for and posted at The Third Estate on September 1st 2013 as a follow-up to Miliband's 'Lesser Evil'.

Miliband's 'Lesser Evil'.

It is timely given that it was Ralph Miliband who predicted that Labour would always fail the working-class. He couldn’t have been more right. Yet the failures of Ed Miliband will be portrayed as the inevitable disaster of a leftward shift. To understand such a falsehood is to grapple with history. The Labour Party surrendered the ground of opposition long ago. It was set in motion years before Ed Miliband took on the leadership role. The battles waged in the 1960s and 70s internal to the Establishment have had consequences which are still living with. Monetarism filled the cracks of the decaying post-war settlement with James Callaghan stepping in with just the rhetoric the IMF demanded of the British government. That was 1976. By 1979 the choice we faced was between a right-wing Labour government and an even more right-wing Conservative government.

Almost 35 years later and we’re still ensnared by the politics of frugality. The election of 1979 should not be forgotten even if the old hag has finally given up the ghost. The lesser evil offered by Labour in 1979 set the course for the way things have transpired and before we knew it the lesser evil of Tony Blair was on the television. The incessant bleating of John Major’s scandal government couldn’t have made the Third Way more appealing. Blair would make a few gestures to his base – such as minimum wage, devolution, fox-hunting ban etc. – only to institute tuition fees, crackdown on civil liberties and leave the banks to run amok. All the while the Labour government sat back as income inequality steadily grew to its highest point since 1961. As if all of this isn’t bad enough, by 2005 Blair had invaded Afghanistan and Iraq with all the gusto of a child playing with toy soldiers. There ceased to be a lesser evil at all in other words. 

The afterbirth of Blairism first appeared before us as the mound of Brown, only to be left inert and solid by the cold winds of the 2010 election. Since then Ed Miliband has tottered about as Labour leader making as few commitments as humanly possible. The gutter-press went on a pre-emptive offensive against any possible imaginative thoughts in Miliband’s head and dubbed him ‘Red Ed’ for good measure. Yet Miliband soon brought on board Maurice Glasman to engage in ‘Blue Labour’ shenanigans to siphon off the communitarian appeal of ‘Red Tory’. The competition is over a very small slice of votes, while the working-class vote is taken for granted. So he’s had plenty of experimentation with ‘Blue Labour’, ‘predistribution’ and, finally, ‘One Nation Labour’ which was literally plagiarised from the Conservative government of 1868. In spite of this inconvenience, Matthew D’Ancona described Miliband’s speech as ‘divisively left-wing’.

Serious minded people can see that the trilateral consensus has reached an impasse where the only task left is to dress up right-wing policies as cute and cuddly. Brown’s odour remains very much with us. Even though the financial crisis was a product of decades of economic policy around the world the Conservatives have succeeding in shifting the terms of the debate from growth to cuts. The Labour Party works within the same field of assumptions. Appropriately Blair is all for austerity and Ed Miliband has, in effect, signed on for austerity lite (at best). The reddest moment might’ve been last September when Miliband said “We will repeal [the Coalition’s] NHS bill” on the grounds that “it puts the wrong principles back at the heart of the NHS.” That’s not a bad statement, yet the NHS bill isn’t specified (thereby leaving open the possibility of a U-turn). Around that time Labour leader was saying that the next Labour government wouldn’t spend £3 billion to undo the restructuring currently underway. Again, the Health and Social Care Act remained unnamed. Then in June of this year the same walking disappointment reiterated his desire to repeal Cameron’s ‘Health Act’. None of this wordplay inspires confidence.

It seems obvious that the Labour Party is not settled in leadership, let alone in policy where Miliband has insisted that he won’t make promises which he cannot keep (so he makes no clear promises at all). The cowardice is for all to see. Blair and Brown managed to lose the Labour Party around 5 million votes in a period of 13 years. It may be too early for the Labourites to distance themselves from the legacy of New Labour. That would concede ground to the Conservatives who seek to blame everything that they are doing on Brown’s juggernaut-like spending spree. It is significant that the Conservatives failed to achieve a parliamentary majority against this backdrop of mass-disaffection. In fact, the Conservatives could only muster a 3% increase since 2005 and they haven’t seen a majority victory since the glory days of John Major. Perhaps it was a sign of inexorable decline when the carcass of Stephen Milligan was found festooned with electoral cord, bin bag, fruit and stockings.

The state of crisis within the Labour Party may be obvious, but the parallel crisis in the Conservative Party has received little discussion. The plump-lipped Michael Portillo has speculated that the Tories might not see a majority in this decade either. No governing party has ever increased its majority in Parliament since Anthony Eden. In that case it will have been 30 years since the Conservatives held a majority share of the seats in Parliament. No opposition party has achieved a majority swing for a good eight decades. It looks as though Parliament may still be hanging in 2015. Only the well-disciplined bootlicker Liberal Democrats can secure another coalition with one of the real parties. And the psephologists of the Labour-Conservative oscillation know it. In other words, the conditions are there for a left-wing alternative to challenge the centre-ground. We can even build that alternative, or sit and wait for the lesser evil to reappear.

This article was written for and posted at The Third Estate on August 26th 2013.