An Open Letter to Sadiq Khan

I know that you are bricking yourself after the Euro results. You are worried that Ed's not going to get into office, and that you're not going to get that red box you've always dreamed about. 

I understand that and I feel sorry for you.

We've all made mistakes in the past. I know I have.

I myself haven't put nearly enough effort into denouncing you and your friends for having sold out the labour movement to capital and for risking Labour's electoral fortunes by being generally useless.

But we can move on from our mistakes.

I can get better at denouncing you. And you can get better at not pandering to racists.

You say, to the working class voter imagined by your public school educated Progress intern with a bad sociology degree, that "immigration has driven down local wages."

I think I know what you mean. And I'm all for talking about immigration. I said so earlier.

But you know what? The only people who can 'drive' down wages are bosses. You can do something about that: you can support a statutory living wage. 

You can unshackle trade unions from Thatcher-era legislation. You can publicly talk about how racism is used to divide us, to the detrminent of everyone's pay-packet.

You're also talking about overseas people claiming Child Benefit and about kids in schools not being able to speak English.

Nobody else is doing that. Except the far Right. 

And there's absolutely no evidence that these are genuine, real, things in the world.

Please stop doing this.

Oh, and please start writing in paragraphs. We all mistakes, yadayada, but you just look stupid.

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Original here

It's just a step to the left, and then a jump to the right

The FN victory in the French popular vote is the story of these Euro-polls, and something which ought to frighten us. It's also worth minuting likely gains for Sinn Fein in the RoI and Syriza in Greece as at least some evidence that austerity in 21st century needn't push an electorate into the hands of the right.

In our own lacklustre way the Brits have provided a story too. Suffice it to say that the  "UKIP are nothing to worry about. They're being talked up by the BBC, and the council elections were nothing special" line now looks a bit daft. Nor is it just an English shire counties thing.

I have no intention spending a bank holiday writing a long blog about all of this. But a few things:

• Before we even get on to politics or morality, or that sort of thing, it would be an unmitigated electoral disaster for Labour to attempt to steal UKIP's clothes by talking up 'tough' policies on immigration. 
• It's the economy, stupid. The discontent which leads to (most) UKIP votes or (more significantly) low turnout is rooted in the failure of a political elite to do anything about bread and butter issues. Action on housing costs and supply, on stable, full-time, employment, on wages and on pensions would be the priorities for even a moderate social democratic party hoping to win in 2015.
• The disconnection of the electorate from party politics isn't just about policies. How about some more candidates who are not career politicians, and come from backgrounds which could reasonably be described as working class? 
• Labour can and should talk about immigration. It can do this without appealing for clampdowns. It is possible to win arguments on immigration from the Left. This cannot be done simply by spouting liberal truisms about how diversity makes everyone happier, or capitalist truisms about how immigration makes for a dynamic economy. We need to talk about how racism is used to divide and distract, we need to say that. We need to talk about securing decent pay, conditions and representation for all workers, so neutralising the 'cheap labour taking our jobs' line. And we need to actually start telling stories about the reality of immigrant experience, about detention and deportation. Labour could do that.

The European issue also can and should be neutralised. Labour should support an in/ out referendum.

Right, I'm off to sun myself before Nigel Farage tries to deport me somewhere.

That London

Nurtured in the bosom of that most talked about of fictional entities, the white working class, away from large urban centres, I have spent my entire adult life in London. I therefore straddle the electoral divide of the moment, in the eyes of the commentariat, that between London and, um, absolutely everywhere else in England.

London, which is "educated and civilised", doesn't vote for UKIPers and returns Labour councils. Everywhere else is brimful of racist yokels who hang on Nigel Farage's every word, have abandoned classical political allegiances, and who would no doubt be described using the phrase "sea-change" if journalists hadn't stopped using the phrase "sea-change" about a decade ago.

Now, don't get me wrong, against the Pollyannaish line being pushed by the liberal-left, the UKIP results yesterday are significant. As I said. But the whole "it's a crazy world outside London" explanation of Farageism is less than adequate. For reasons including, but not limited to, the following:

• The rush to paint London as some kind of leftist paradise that inevitably keeps its head whilst the rest of the country wraps itself in the union jack has to reckon with the fact that Boris Johnson twice beat Ken Livingstone in a straight contest.
• It is pretty much to be expected the Labour will do proportionately better in (a) large urban centres, and (b) places with significant minority ethnic populations. Thus, not just the results in London, but also in Manchester and Liverpool.
• It is absolutely true that there is disillusionment with Labour, and a widespread sense of abandonment amongst its traditional working class base. The factors giving rise to this are equally present in London. The difference in London is that there are counteracting forces preventing a peel-off to UKIP or apathy: notably more radical Labour programmes in key boroughs (Camden, Islington), strong left/ green alternatives and/ or community groups to absorb dissent in places where Labour are shit (Newham/ Lewisham). None of these things are entirely unique to London.

There remains a serious crisis of working class representation in England, and the rest of the UK. It is compounded by an immediate housing crisis and an economic 'recovery' that is having zero impact on peoples' actual well-being. These are the issues Labour needs to address; sidelining the persisting reality of class in favour of a supposed fissure between London and the provinces is the kind of politics that belongs in Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch. It has nothing to offer.

First thoughts on the great rush to UKIP

Some years back, one of the fifty seven different varieties of anarchist group that could be found within spitting distance of my then home in Hackney, put out an anti-BNP leaflet, consisting solely of the words "NICK GRIFFIN : POSH TORY TWAT".

There was, I want to claim, a wisdom in that verbal economy. If nothing else, the leaflet's authors recognised that simply running around shrieking "racist" and "fascist" at far-Right politicians is neither effective, nor gets to the heart of the motivations of those who vote for these people. These days, of course, Nick Griffin looks set to be consigned to the electoral equivalent of Hitler's bunker. And yet, the spirit of that anarchist leaflet finds new application. I give you Nigel Farage, former commodity broker, hard-line Thatcherite, and Arthur Daley impersonator:

At the time of writing, UKIP are making gains in Labour's north-of-England heartlands. And it's not just a northern thing. They have won a sufficient number of councillors in Thurrock to shift the council from Labour to No Overall Control. Those who have pointed out that UKIP has a working class electoral base, and those who feared the impact of this for Labour, stand vindicated already.

What to say about this? A few quick things.

UKIP : Racist Eurosceptic Tories

First, Nigel Farage is a racist. UKIP is full of racists. These things are true. Even the Sun thinks they are true. There is no harm whatsoever in saying them. Had Ed Miliband done so, it might have stopped a proportion of people voting UKIP. His equivocation on this basic point is initially puzzling, although not inexplicable (see Lenin here).

As I said a moment ago, mind, crying 'racist' isn't enough, and on its own would be counterproductive. Two other things about UKIP:

They are Eurosceptics. Whilst this, seemingly crucial, part of their stall took a back-seat to their desire to protect Britain from a surge of Romanian ne'er-do-wells in the campaign, it wasn't entirely absent. Witness the  flag poster,

Apart from looking like an album cover by a mid-90s Guns 'n Roses clone band, it's a reminder that the politics of Europe do actually feature in European election campaigns. A good number of people are not terribly happy with the EU. This is not universally because they don't like foreigners, or fear their good honest bacon and eggs being displaced by croissants: there's a sense of power being distant from them, of life being increasingly beyond their control. Now, I'd want to say a lot about this being primarily a result of capitalism, rather than the EU. But the latter is a tool of the former, the EU is not beyond criticism, and opposition to the EU is not intrinsically Right-wing. It's about time the Left started talking more about this issue. As your host suggested a while back.

Also, UKIP are Tories. Massive Tories. Nigel Farage is the economic equivalent of Nigel Lawson on crack cocaine. Within UKIP you'll find support for a flat tax, the dismantling of pretty much all employment protection and trade union rights, the privatisation of anything that moves, and opposition to the NHS. They have succeeded in this election in getting significant numbers of people who would never dream of voting for these policies if advocated by the actual Tories to vote for them. This is partly because their electoral opponents didn't tell the truth about UKIP's policies loudly enough; although, let's face it, it would be hard for Ed Miliband to push the 'arrrggg, UKIP support really bad austerity, which is likely to cause unemployment' line too hard given his own support for quite a lot of austerity. It is also partly because UKIP were savvy enough not to talk about their policies so much as about an out-of-touch political elite governing in their own interests rather than those of their voters. About this they were correct, even if they did carelessly fail to mention that Farage himself is part of said elite.

UKIP voters : neither racists nor stupid

So, then, we have established that UKIP are a bunch of arse. What to be said about their voters? This is surely the kind of question on which the liberal internet will have a subtle, nuanced, opinion. What says it?

Well, first of all. UKIP voters are bigoted, nasty, racist, xenophobic, sexist, homophobes. All of them. For instance:

Not only are there lots, and lots, and lots of convinced Nazis sprinkled throughout the towns and villages of Britain. No, for the panicked liberal narrative, the UKIP gains evidence the stupidity of voters. The brainless masses have come home to roost.

The Huffington post can be relied on usually to come out with this sort of thing; and it does not disappoint. And check this out:

#WhyImVotingUKIP I'm incompetent enough to fear that my job actually might be taken by an unqualified Romanian who doesn't speak English
— Veronica (@_BingCherry) May 20, 2014

Yes, that's right. Fear for the security of your job, or being in (what gets termed) unskilled work, makes you an excellent target for comedy. There's a strand of class hatred dressed up as progressive values running through the UKIP jokes. This is the 'chav' narrative rewritten for Guardian readers. It reminds me of nothing more than American liberalism, which sees itself as a bastion of educated civilisation against a redneck terror, and as a consequence plays straight into the hands of a populist Right which accuses it (correctly) of elitist metropolitan disdain for the mass of the population.

Making out that UKIP voters are basically just variants on Homer Simpson saves the bother of actually engaging with their fears and concerns, with the feelings of being ignored and of discontent with the status quo. It also avoids tackling the issue of immigration. Because, yes, no small number of people do see immigration as a threat. They are wrong, but they are not all signed up members of the Master Race. The Left can win arguments about immigration - we can talk about the use of low wages to divide workers on the basis of nationality, and we can talk about alternatives based on internationalism, solidarity, and levelling up. But we can't win arguments in which we don't engage. On immigration we've ended up talking only to those who already agree with us, and that leaves rich pickings for the likes of UKIP.


Disillusion versus smug liberalism

It's an unedifying choice isn't it? But it's one which not a few people felt themselves faced with.

Here be dragons, of course. The Blue Labour wing of the Labour Party - Glasman, Cruddas, and their cronies - will agree with pretty much all of the foregoing analysis. Their solution would, and in the coming weeks will, be the familiar cocktail of Family, Faith, and Tradition. This is a kind of homeopathic remedy for UKIP, a useless, diluted version of the real thing. As an attempt to reassert Labour's identity as a party of the working class  it fails not least because it is premised on ignoring those members of the working class who happen to be, say, women or members of ethnic minorities.

A socialist alternative, based not on getting a bunch of students and caring professionals to stand behind a, "Support Palestine. Defeat the Tories" stall on the High St once a fortnight, but on rootedness and hard work on estates and in workplaces, is really the only way to go. I can't say I'm optimistic, but we need a proper class-based, labour movement. I'll give the last word to Owen Jones,

To paraphrase Brecht, don’t lose confidence in the people and want to elect a new one if Ukip do very well. The political elite is to blame
— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) May 23, 2014

Friday Video Corner : Special UKIP gains edition