I received the text from David Lammy just as the protestors broke through the police line.
At that moment, I was standing opposite the gates of Downing Street on Whitehall. The group of protestors, who had marched from Trafalgar Square to join a demonstration against the Queen's Speech, were young and angry. David Lammy, meanwhile, was on the scrounge for nominations to be Labour's candidate for Mayor of London. "London needs leadership", his text acclaimed, leaving the reader in little doubt that it was Lammy's leadershipthe capital was lacking. The banner-waving crowd forcing their way down Whitehall didn't give the impression of needing leadership. And if they did, they weren't going to be looking to the MP for Tottenham to provide it.
The disconnect between a parliamentary Labour Party largely resigned to austerity and the ongoing movement against the attacks on public services deserves reflection. One thing is clear, however: the anger of those protestors was fully justified. Today's Queen's Speech was the most reactionary for a generation, and it laid bare the anti-democratic nature of austerity.
Austerity, as I like to think of it, is neo-liberalism in crisis mode, ever more frantically proposing the marketisation of society as the solution to the all too evident ills we face. As such, like neo-liberalism in general, it is a strategy to strengthen the power of capital against labour; in other words, to protect profit against the vast majority of people. When stated in those terms, neo-liberalism sounds like it is on a collision course with democracy - as indeed it is.
The self-denying approach to fiscal measures, asking parliament to tie its own hands by blocking tax rises for five years, already signals a commitment to a society where the market reigns supreme. More serious is the all-out attack on trade unions, the organisations through which working people begin to take control of their working lives. A double wammy of an assault on strike ballots and the legalisation of the use of agency scabs has the potential to paralyse unions' effectiveness so long as they remain within the bounds of the law. Proposals around subscriptions and political funds will also make life difficult for the union movement.
Beyond industrial democracy, political organisation is under attack. A draconian bill aimed at that slipperiest of characters, the extremist, promises to increase the state's power of surveillance and to allow it control over the activities of individuals considered extremist. Left-wing activists who do not fear for their freedoms are naive. Yet a democracy that does not allow fundamental questions to be asked about its nature, does not permit people to organise with the aim of transforming society, is a hollow sham.
Today the government declated an all-out war on democracy. And to add insult to injury, they propose to substitute a pastiche of the real thing, a vote with no good options. If we do want a future where our control of our own lives extends beyond the supermarket, now would be a good time to fight back.
In April a judge ruled that 'undue spiritual influence' was exerted by imams in Tower Hamlets in supporting then mayor Lutfur Rahman. The legislation in which this concept appears has its origins in British rule in Ireland and concern about the influence of Catholic clergy. In the latter case racism was absolutely central to the rationale of the law. Many of us feel that it was not absent in Tower Hamlets.
In the years subsequent to independence there has certainly been no shortage of attempts by clergy in southern Ireland to exert influence politically. Past referenda over divorce and abortion have in the past been occasions for church-led campaigns opposing change.
The run-up to last Friday's referendum on same-sex marriage was subtly different. The institutional role of the Church in Ireland having taken a battering over the abuse scandal, the leading role in the 'No' campaign fell to groups of conservative lay Catholics. The extent of the change here has been exaggerated (as here, for example). In a very helpful article on the Irish Church, Jon Anderson notes the high level of lay leadership of 1980s campaigns over divorce and abortion. Either way, it was hardly unclear what the hierarchy thought about same-sex marriage. Each diocesan bishop wrote a pastoral letter, read out in churches, urging a No vote. Some priests added their own thoughts; in at least one case this led to congregants walking out of Mass.
Voters in large numbers ignored the pleas from the pulpit. 62% of those voting voted 'Yes'. In some urban areas this percentage was in the seventies and eighties, with only one consituency voting against. It's fair to say, then, that the bishops did not have decisive influence. An easy inference, and one made by pretty much every British broadsheet commentator (and not a few Irish ones), is that this is evidence of an accelerating process of secularisation.
How much one ought to believe this turns a lot on what is meant by 'secularisation'. Certainly the institutional power of the Catholic Church in the southern state is much declined. No longer can fearful unionists in the north (where, incidentally, same-sex marriage remains illegal) claim with any plausibility that the Republic is a confessional state. Yet the rejection of a certain political role for the Church co-exists with a substantial ongoing commitment to Catholicism on the part of much of the population. 84.16% of the population declared themselves Catholic in the 2011 census; the figure being well over 50% even in many urban areas. In 2013 Mass attendance was 34%. The use of the word 'secular' to describe this population should proceed with caution.
It is undoubtedly true that modern capitalist societies place great pressure on traditional understandings of religious belonging and ecclesiastical authority. (For some thoughts on why this might be, see a forthcoming book!) Attendance figures at religious services decline, and the ethical views of religious believers, particularly on sexual ethics, move closer to those of their atheist and agnostic contemporaries. For confirmation from the UK of this, see Linda Woodhead's useful research. Yet all of this is compatible with an ongoing attachment to a religious tradition, as the Irish case shows.
Many Irish Catholics voted 'yes', and it would be utterly wrong to write them off as duplicitous, confused, or insufficiently modernised, clinging to their religious belonging whilst rejecting it in practice - a judgement shared, interestingly, by liberal commentators and religious conservatives alike. Some voters cited their Catholicism whilst advocating a 'yes' vote, attracting the ire of conservative groups. For a genuinely moving case, look at this video by an elderly Catholic couple.
Tokenistic religious belonging is one possible way of negotiating religious identity in modern society, but it is not the only one. People are capable of relating their faith to the experience of life in modern society in sophisticated ways, exercising levels of political autonomy and modifying their ideas, even whilst remaining firmly within traditions. Last week's result demonstrates this.
And, to return to where we began, if this is true of Irish Catholics, might it be true of London Muslims also? The Bengali Muslim community are certainly not, in the succinct patrician phrase of Richard Mawrey QC, an "agnostic metropolitan elite". But then neither are the population of the Republic of Ireland.
...so argued Jean-Paul Sartre. He may very well have been right. But I want to advocate something slightly different from not choosing. I want to make a case that in the biggest political debate that the UK will witness in the next five years, the radical left should actively refuse to choose. That is to say, we should go out of our way to broadcast the fact that we reject either of the options we will be presented with, and use this as the opportunity to engage people in debates about political possibilities beyond the bounds of official sanction.
Rewind. What the hell am I talking about? The EU referendum - the returning of a Conservative majority government in last week's orgy of electoral masochism means that we will see one by 2017. I've been thinking about this question since then: neither of the options seem very attractive, yet many on the left feel will undoubtedly feel obliged to pitch their red flags behind either the 'Yes' or 'No' camps. By inclination, no doubt nurtured by reading a lot of Tony Benn at an impressionable age, I feel the pull of the 'No' brigade more. Yet I'm troubled, not least by the prospect of a debate dominated by the jingoistic right. A very helpful session on the issue at today's They Don't Represent Us conference (organised by rs21) concretised my train of thought on this - the left should actively abstain in an EU referendum.
I'll explain what I mean by active abstention in a bit; but first, the cases against 'Yes' and 'No' votes respectively.
Should I stay?
People younger than myself, a distressingly growing proportion of the population, tend to associate support for EU membership with left-of-centre politics. Those older than myself recall clearly a time when opposition to the EEC, as then was, indicated a suspiciously socialist orientation. We'll return to this latter group presently; for the more youthful, the EU is associated with an outward-looking, metropolitan confidence, an internationalist retort to the Little Englandism of Ukippers. It is upwardly mobile and forward looking, an upmarket brunch in the face of Nigel Farage's beans-on-toast. It stands as the Guardian to the Daily Express. You get the idea.
All of this is so much ideology, and like any successful ideology, contains a good deal of truth (albeit partial and one-sided). The EU certainly is a dynamic, relentlessly modernising, entity - and as such appeals to those liberal-minded bourgeois who have little to lose and everything to gain from change - and in this it reflects the capital whose creature it is. Neo-liberal capitalist accumulation is nothing if not international, generously cosmopolitan in its preparedness to exploit anyone regardless of nationality. It is also a regime of accumulation that is characteristically imposed by international institutions. The World Trade Organisation, the G20, the IMF, and the World Bank are the better known amongst these. The EU is another: from its free-trade origins, it has gravitated towards more explicitly liberalising constraints on member economies, passing competition legislation that renders nationalisation difficult, and imposing tight budgetary constraints within the Eurozone. The organisation is utterly institutionally bound up with liberalisation in the cause of its constitutive capitals, the latest manifestation of this being the TTIP treaty proposed with the US. The EU is no economic friend of the left. It is a unity of states in the cause of big capital. This is not our internationalism; we look for an internationalism of workers.
Nor is it, whatever impression the bigoted denizens of UKIP-land might imagine, a soft touch on immigration. Whilst treaties guarantee free movement within the EU (although this can be, and has been, suspended), for migrants from outside the EU, that is - almost universally - from poorer parts of the world, very often ones affected by wars waged by EU member states (and adversely affected by non-preferential trade arrangements with the EU), the story is very different. Hence the term 'Fortress Europe', which doesn't begin to catch the horror of people drowning in the Mediterranean trying to reach a Promised Land that doesn't want them. The EU's response to this relentless human misery has primarily been to increase funding to Frontex, a border agency. Let's be clear, this is not a pro-migrant institution; it simply wants to draw the boundaries of exclusion in different places, and on a different basis, from UKIP and the Tory right.
Yes, but, the left advocate of a 'Yes' vote might urge, doesn't the EU offer benefits in terms of human rights, and in particular workers' rights? Wouldn't exit threaten these? In part, this line of response is based on the misapprehension that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is a creature of the EU. It isn't; the UK is a signatory in virtue of its membership of the Council of Europe, a body to which states can belong without being EU members, as indeed several do. The EU Social Chapter certainly does afford workers certain minimal rights, as does the Working Time Directive. The UK, however, already permits an opt-out from the maximum 48h-hour working week of the latter legislation, and it would be naive to suppose that workers aren't put under considerable pressure in some industries to do just this. Meanwhile, increased international competition in a capitalism still struggling to restore profitability combined with the marked core-periphery development of the EU (and especially Eurozone) economy will create intense pressure from government and business to revoke, modify, or ignore social legislation. In the face of this workers will only be protected by our capacity to organise to fight these attacks. Yet, if we had the strength to do that, the EU would no longer appear as a beneficent safeguard against unscrupulous employers. "No saviours from on high deliver".
Regardless of all this, forget the suggestion that the 'Yes' campaign will be some kind of internationalist counterpart to the xenophobic right. Enthusiasm about the EU is perfectly compatible with member-state nationalism, and Cameron -- having negotiated some no doubt deeply reactionary concessions on migration from the Commission -- will go to the electorate claiming to have 'won a good deal for Britain'. He will line up alongside the Labour front bench and the CBI in a union-jack wrapped Better Together revival, promoting 'Britain's interest in Europe'. It is likely to be as much a poisoned chalice for Labour as its Caledonian forebear. The left should have none of it.
Or should I go?
Nor, of course, should the left line up alongside the other union-jack clad campaign we will have the dubious pleasure of witnessing two years hence. Farage and the Tory right will fight a deeply reactionary front in referendum battle, focused in immigration and a populist anti-bureaucracy directed against the modest provisions of the Social Chapter and similar legislation. It is likely to drag the centre of political gravity further to the right, and may well succeed in cementing UKIP's electoral constituency, winning them new seats in 2020. All the while the hard right will be lurking in the wings; racial attacks will increase, as they always do when the 'threat' of immigration is talked up. In no way can the left do anything other than condemn utterly this coming carnival of reaction; there can be no repeat of the 1975 referendum campaign, which saw left-wingers share platforms with the likes of Enoch Powell. Groups like Stand Up to UKIP will need our support in the run-up to the referendum.
But, hang on, you might say: surely nobody on the left is advocating arguing for a 'no' vote on the basis of the xenophobic and socially reactionary positions of UKIP and the Tory right? We remember the days when the most prominent opponents of EEC membership were figures on the Labour left. Tony Benn, Peter Shore, and their ilk argued that the EEC would make it impossible for a radical Labour government to nationalise industries, and impose controls on capital and trade, in accordance with the kind of programme laid out in the Alternative Economic Strategy. As indeed it would*. Be in no doubt, the kind of reformism espoused in Labour manifestos within easy living memory is incompatible with EU membership. Syriza and Podemos may yet discover this if they ride out the immediate impact of the Eurozone crisis with their principles intact.
Allow me at this point to draw my readers' attention to reality, a region the left sometimes has difficulty inhabiting. The UK is not Greece, nor is it Spain, nor do we live in the early 1980s. We cannot argue that EU membership is all that stands between a radical Labour programme and its social democratic fruition. The most left-wing scenario for Labour in the next few years has Andy Burnham as leader - pause and think about that, Andy Burnham. A vote to exit the EU would not be followed by a latter-day Michael Foot imposing controls on capital and inflating the welfare state, but rather by a right-wing Tory closing borders to people whilst welcoming their openness to money, asa revival of the City of London casino combines with further attacks on social provision. This would bring in its wake a further shift to the right in political discourse and popular ideas, from which only UKIP and the further right would gain. In the current British political context a 'No' vote will only fuel the flames of reaction.
For this reason it is also foolish to propose a left 'No' campaign, separate from the official one. This suggestion fails to recognise with due humility the weakness of the left and the hegemonic state of neo-liberalism, combined with a worrying rightward shift on immigration. We could only run a distinct campaign that didn't simply feed the reactionary whirlwind on the basis of significant pre-existing strength. We do not have that; and we can only do politics in the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. In any case, the nature of those elements most likely to push for such a campaign - those behind NO2EU and various Stalinists - does not fill me with confidence that it would be free from chauvinism.
If I go, there will be trouble, and if I stay, it will be double
So I don't think the left should support either the 'Yes' or 'No' campaign. This does not mean I think we should say or do nothing for the length of the referendum debate, tempting though it will undoubtedly be to leave the country as the day draws near. In fact, there's an important message to get out - the inadequacy of these two options: transnational neo-liberalism matched with state-level nationalism, versus Little Englandist reaction married to a more Atlanticist capitalism - points the way towards what I think that message should be, these terms of debate are utterly bankrupt, and this is so because they are dictated by capital. We could argue creatively for active abstention - spoiling ballots, or whatever, the details aren't important - but use the conversations we have and the material we distribute in doing so to argue for a different kind of politics. Against both campaigns, we should argue unabashedly in favour of immigration. Against both campaigns, we should argue in defence of the welfare state, and in favour of orientating the economy to people rather than profit.
Neither is revolutionary. But both are considerably better than anything we'll hear from mainstream politicians, and I think this is probably the best way the left can make a positive contribution to what will be an otherwise absolutely toxic political atmosphere.
-- [ETA] I should add, the above is directed at the English debate, partly because this will dominate the UK polity, and partly because, since I live in England, it's the context in which I have to reach a decision. But let me predict now that the SNP, Plaid, and Sinn Fein - all of whom favour EU membership with varying degrees of calls for reform (about which I'm sceptical, but there we are) find a way to stand back from the fray and thus avoid a Better Together style complicity ('we can't decide for the UK as whole'/ 'we will run a separate Scottish/ Welsh/ Irish' campaign or whatever), I assume that the SDLP will fall behind the Labour leadership.
---
*I don't think the AES-style strategy was perfect in its day, prone as it undoubtedly was to degenerating into fortress-economy nationalism. What a future radical left programme (if that doesn't already sound too utopian) would need to build in would be international alliances (with the likes of Syriza and Podemos, for instance).
Blairism is the sickness
infecting Labour. The strategy of triangulation that fueled
its electoral success was based on shifting the Party to appeal to
wealthier Home Counties residents through an ideology of progressive
individualism, whilst assuming its working class base would have
nowhere else to go. Permanent majority.
But
things did not turn out the way they were supposed to. Since 2001,
Labour’s core voters have increasingly just stayed at home. As much
was evident again in 2015: voting turnout in northern working class
constituencies was generally below those of Tory supporting areas.
But, since 2010, those voters have once again come to the ballot box
to vote UKIP – who are unafraid to talk the language of class –
and the Green Party – who defy the Blairites assessment of the
situation to pick up votes in the southern counties on a left-wing
platform. Turnout in the former Labour heartlands of Scotland bucked
the trend, as voters were finally coaxed back into action by the
SNP’s leftwards anti-austerity pitch. Blairism waged war on the
Labour Party’s own base in order to attract Tory voters. Now it is
reaping what it sowed.
If
the left is to rise again it must correctly identify the ills of
society. Blair failed to do just that. He gave in to the basic themes
of Thatcherism: The state is problem, the unrestrained market the
solution. Industry is gone, the service sector will deliver the
goods. It did not turn out like that. The transfer of wealth from
poor to rich continued unabated, driven by a buoyant property market
and stagnant real wages. Austerity was merely the culmination of a
long trend; itself possibly amongst the biggest single upward
transfers of wealth in history.
Blair’s defenders point to
the minimum wage and Sure Start as unambiguous successes. But would
it not have been possible to do those things without, say,
pulverizing Iraq, PFI schemes, attacking civil liberties, allowing
the expansion of inequality and tax dodging, and the fattening of an
unrestrained financial sector? And let’s not forget the failure to
build new council housing, permitting massive rent rises, letting the
Murdoch media run wild, maintaining the anti-union laws, introducing
tuition fees, giving up on nuclear disarmament and keeping major
infrastructure in private hands. Were those really the price of
victory, or were they gratuitous concessions to the right? It is
certainly not obvious that the historic capitulation of Britain's
premier left party to the dictates of big business was worth £6.50
an hour. The Blairites like to talk about aspiration,
and they’re right to do so: We aspire to do better than what they
offer.
What the left needs is a vision, a narrative that
starts out from policies and positions that are already popular.
Fortunately, we have plenty to work with here. From nationalisation
of the railways and energy companies, to higher
taxes
on the rich, to pegging the minimum wage to the living
wage,
there are numerous ways the public is to the left of anything being
proposed by the Labour Party. And that is before the case has even
seriously been put, for no major force in England currently makes
these arguments. Miliband tried to sprinkle a few vaguely left
policies on top of Tory austerity, all infused with a dash of
UKIP-style immigration policy. The result pleased no-one. Labour did
not lose because the Tories rallied many more people to their crusade
than in 2010 – they increased their vote share by a measly 0.5%
compared to Labour’s 1.5% - but because the Miliband Compromise
between the Party’s left and right failed to sufficiently inspire
its natural voters. All the elements exist for a Blairite-free
program of the left; we only now lack a cohesive story about what
Britain is and could be in the 21
century to bring them all together.
A
battle for the soul of Labour is underway. If the catastrophe of Jim
Murphy’s election to the Scottish leadership has sunk Labour north
of the border, there remains a chance in England. The Blairities
have, as usual, been first to the draw. They are eagerly spinning a
tale of how Miliband’s illusory left-turn lost them the election.
If they succeed, they will turn the Labour Party into the Tory
surrogate that they so sorely desire. Their final crime may well be
the rise of UKIP, who will eagerly seize upon the working class
voters that they are abandoning. Mandelson has already begun a
renewed assault
on the trade unions. The silver lining may be, if McCluskey & co.
finally decide the game is up, that a new social democratic could be
set up in Britain. If that comes to pass, then the Blairites can keep
their hollowed out brand.
If the austerity project is a relatively old inroad of reaction into popular consciousness, a newer one is a revived English nationalism. I spent polling day and the previous day in Thanet South. The broad left anti-UKIP campaign there did well, and it is fantastic that Farage didn't get elected. However, what Gerry Adams once said of the Provisional IRA applies to Farage's outfit: they haven't gone away you know. The UKIP phenomenon is real. Labour voters switched to UKIP there, elsewhere, and in particular in a number of northern seats, where the party is now in second place. The talk is now of UKIP's 2020 strategy, with the inroads made last night paying dividends in MPs at the next election.
It's entirely possible that UKIP won't exist in five years time. The British right is famously division-prone; the party has lost its leader, and its solitary MP is a loose cannon. Never the less, the UKIP phenomenon will certainly persist. Populist reaction, with a social base combining abandoned working class communities, the insecure middle-class, and elements of the bourgeoisie proper, is here to stay. Its ideological suture is the standard resentful premise that they are out to get what we have, or had. They want our money, our homes, our culture, our history. Underneath, on suspects, is the nagging fear also that they might being enjoying themselves more than we are.
The nature of them is flexible. They could be the European Union, migrants in general, Eastern Europeans, metropolitan liberals, hippies, benefit claimants, the Rothschilds, the Muslims, or the Scots. As is so often the way with ideology, whether or not they are, in fact, screwing us over is entirely independent of the ideological effectiveness of this pattern of thought. Metropolitan liberals are, as it happens, guilty as charged; Muslims, as it happens, are not. But that is not the point. The scapegoat provides a focus for political opposition, and thereby, like its biblical forebear, carries the sins that justice attributes to another - in this case, capital.
The Scots are the latest lucky targets; English nationalism is on the rise. The Scots, you see, want your money. The SNP, in particular, in a startlingly impolite move want political power. Will the subaltern never learn? UKIP both contributed and tapped in to a simmering English resentment, evident already during last autumn's election campaign. It was the Tories, however, that brought an English identity constructed against a Scottish threat into the mainstream. Indeed, as thought to prompt the political slow-learners who deny that anti-Scots racism exists, Boris Johnson warned of a coming Jockalypse.
The genie of English nationalism has been let out of the bottle. There's a lot of talk of 'English votes for English laws', a proposal which in current political context could only mean a shift rightwards south of Alnwick. There will, inevitably, be noise from Billy Bragg and other elements of the eclectic left about the need to resist the politics of English reaction with a 'progressive' English nationalism. This is premised on a basic misunderstanding of the ideological function of Englishness within the current politics of the UK. The nationalism of the dominant nation of a historic imperial power, currently defined in opposition to national autonomy movements within the same state, cannot be won for socialism by a bit of Morris Dancing. What is needed is a different politics altogether. At the time of writing that is nowhere to be seen.
Labour and the crisis of labourism
Which brings us belatedly to Labour. Labourism is dead in Scotland. It is at crisis point in England and Wales. Labour cannot rely on the votes of even a stable proportion of the working class, and that is only likely to get worse as generational profiles shift. Already the Blairite knives are out; journalists are being briefed that Labour lost because it pitched too left (a theory that, to put it mildly, has difficulty incorporating the data of Scotland), and that a move back to the centre-ground is the only way to restore Labour's electoral fortunes. The Labour left is institutionally weak, dispirited, and increasingly afflicted with cynicism. Intellectually, its Marxist elements are often hopelessly in thrall to a vulgar determinism, for which everything is to be explained by the 'low level of class struggle' (as though this were something independent of human agency) and which counsels riding out the tide, preserving 'the movement', by which is understood the Labour Party and the union link.
This last element is likely to come under attack in the wake of a near inevitable Blairite resurgence. Already the implementation of the Collins Report threatens the link. Meanwhile, the leader of Britain and Ireland's biggest union has openly supported Lutfur Rahman and threatened to form a new workers party in the event of the Labour loss that is now a reality. In any case, if the labour movement doesn't break with the party, it may be that the party breaks with the movement. The link has always been a target for the Blairite right.
Only a fool would take any delight in this. The Labour Party, for all its contradictory nature and in spite of the multiple betrayals of its leaders, is a substantial achievement of the British working class. If labourism were finally to die, even though the more excitable leftists will no doubt wax lyrical about 'great new opportunities', over a century of struggle would be laid to rest. Whether that happens, or whether another narrative plays out, the task that falls immediately to the left is the difficult one of at the same time resisting the assault of the Blairites within the party, whilst looking outwards to unions, the new community-based groups, and the extra-Labour left (the unpreparedness of Labour leftists to work with left groups outside the Party has been a serious brake on the British left). It has to become less white, less male, and less prone to mood swings between despair and pollyannaism.
I have to say, the current Labour left is not well equipped to carry this burden. But then we can never make history in circumstances of our own choosing.
The pervasive immaturity of the left is nowhere more evident than in the emotionally frigid aphorism "don't mourn, organise". In saying this I am criticising myself as much as anyone; I resorted to it during those endless hours last night. But mourn we must, mourn for those who have died alone and starving, for those who will yet die, for those who will be denied an education. We should mourn for the lost hope and the lost futures. Mourning is good, because it speaks of persisting humanity, as well as of the extent of our loss. Mourning is also productive, for it is very close to that precious emotion, anger. Nothing is more revealing of the class nature of our political system than the convention that those who have lost should be gracious in defeat, as though a contest for state power were a public school cricket match. Anger is the refusal to be polite, to let bygones to be bygones, and to wait five years. Anger is the recognition that the bastards who now have a parliamentary majority in this country are indeed bastards. If anyone doubts this last point, evidence will, alas, be forthcoming quickly enough.
We have to direct our anger. In order to do that we need to understand what just happened. I was disastrously wrong about the direction of the election campaign. In fairness to myself almost everybody was wrong, a notable exception being Richard Seymour here. I'll come back to his thoughts below. Meanwhile, less adept minds on the left are currently demanding PR. In itself this is a striking instance of the failure to grasp the immensity of what we're up against; as though a bit of tinkering with the electoral system will undo the pervasive social sadism about to be unleashed with renewed vigour. In any case, in an ironic disconfirmation of the traditional leftist objection that PR builds in a centrist majority, were seats distributed on the basis of share of the vote we'd be looking at a Tory-UKIP alliance. No doubt there is a certain type of liberal who, when confronted with the reality of this fact, is cretinous enough to insist that the outcome would be 'fairer'. There is no helping such people.
Something more fundamental expressed itself yesterday, not merely the idiosyncrasies of First Past the Post. This was about popularised reaction, hegemony, and the evolving politics of the Union. Understanding this, and grasping as a consequence the awfulness of the situation, is a first step to doing anything useful about our plight.
Scotland
Labour got slaughtered in Scotland, and deserved it. This is the simplest aspect of what happened last night. This was not the artefact of nationalist reaction. A good amount of the SNP's support came from a class based vote for a party standing on an anti-austerity ticket. Seats in the West of Scotland held on derisory turnouts by parachuted-in Blairites dripping with entitlement fell to the SNP, as people enthused by the referendum campaign went to the polls, sometimes for the first time in their lives.
We can admit this much without having any illusions about the nature of the SNP. It is a bourgeois nationalist party, with left elements, pushed to a social democratic programme by circumstance. Alliances with, and appeals to, the better elements of the SNP have to be part of what the left does next, on both sides of the border. The longer run has to involve an alternative politics for Scotland, a project whose last flourishing was sacrificed to Tommy Sheridan's libido.
Anyway, I've written at some length about the emerging politics of Scotland on this blog before. So I leave this topic with possibly the best speech of last night from probably one of the best MPs now in Westminster:
Popular Austerity
If the overwhelmingly best thing that happened last night was the election of a nationalist party on the basis of a manifesto broadly akin to the kind of thing Roy Hattersley would have signed up to c. 1989, it must have been - to use a technical phrase - a fucking terrible night. And so it was.
Labour lost seats to the Tories outside London. Before the sneery London is more sophisticated/ intelligent/ generally all round intelligent and liberated brigade get over-excited about the relatively good results in the capital (which didn't extend to unseating the Tories' pantomime villain in a target marginal), let me put it on record that I put Labour's London gains down to the issue of house prices. Its a swing that speaks more of desperation than enthusiasm. Across the country, 33.9% of those registered didn't vote. That inevitably hit Labour more than the Tories. Cameron's party increased majorities in a swathe of seats. Already the various 'Why I voted Tory' surveys are showing clearly that those who decided to vote Tory at the last minute did so, in the main, because they trusted the governing party on the economy.
There is no reality-based way of making sense of this results that doesn't recognise that a significant section of the working class is committed to austerity. I say this because a damaging myth persists on the left, in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary, which says that faced with cuts the working class will shift left. The opposite has been the case in the past five years. People want 'the economy' to be 'safe'. As, in a certain sense, it is:
Thatcher, of course, won popular working class support, and in so doing set in motion a hegemonic austerity project whose fruits we are now reaping. Council house sales were the most obvious sweetener under her governments; it may yet turn out that the promise of right-to-buy for housing association tenants was a cause of yesterday's Tory victory. More pertinently yet, she established with brilliant success an analogy between the national economy and a domestic budget in popular consciousness; 'Why don't you look at it as any housewife has to look at it?'
This, patently false, parallel already explains some of the appeal of the Tories' call for a balanced budget, and of the trust placed in the party. In isolation, however, it doesn't suffice. It's not as though the problem is simply that people have a number of wrong ideas about the macroeconomic facts, as if simply making A-level Economics compulsory would usher in a Labour victory. Popular austerity is as much a matter of the heart of the head. The left loves to talk of 'false consciousness'. In order to understand why voters opted for the Etonians against their own material interests, we need other categories, 'false emotions', 'false values', 'false aspirations'. From childhood onwards we now learn business studies, we are taught to view ourselves as entrepreneurs. Even the act of compiling a CV to apply for an oversubscribed minimum wage job is an act of personal entrepreneurship. If we fail, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. We should be more competitive. Once considered a vice, competitiveness has become a virtue, again inculcated in the school system.
We are, then, to identify with those who cherish competition. Out go solidarity and collective solutions, in comes individual self-advancement. If the affective pull of the entrepreneurial dream weren't enough, there are financial disincentives to stepping out of line: student debt is now 40k-50k per. student, whilst mortgages burden those lucky enough to have them in the first place. Who'd go on strike, or get a reputation as a trouble-maker? Yet, there's apparently hope -- if we are all players in the game of life, we are tempted to believe that we might win. Thus the cultural politics of aspirational identification: perhaps if I vote like Richard Branson, perhaps one day I might be like him. Meanwhile property porn gives us a voyeuristic glance at lives beyond our purses and encourages us into the masochistic idiocy of treating our homes as assets. Who knows, one day we might be hit by the Mansion Tax?
It's entirely beside the point to object that none of this is rational. Of course it isn't, but then neither are we. We are complex, contradictory, beings, often strangers to ourselves, half in control of emotions and desires which, far from being private, are precisely the point at which ideology grabs us by the throat. Austerity is written into our very being. Knowing a few more facts will not expel it. The only writer on the British activist left who in any way understands this is Richard Seymour. I urge you all to read his Against Austerity as a matter of urgency. In an odd way, the other group of people who understand the extent to which austerity as a project dominates working class life and thought are the Blairites. Their solution, of course, is to give the people what so many of them seem to want. Even in the narrow terms dictated by electoral politics, this approach is likely to fail. If Labour don't challenge the economic narrative offered by the Tories - as, indeed, the unlamented Ed Balls basically didn't - there is a real possibility people will opt for the real thing - as, indeed, they did.
Nor will the 'build an alternative' cheerleaders set things right by a few public meetings and a new electoral front. Our enemy is inside peoples heads and written in their hearts. The ghost of Margaret Thatcher has possessed the souls of millions. Exorcism, the construction of a counter-hegemony will take a generation and in order to succeed must be as all-pervading as the austerity project it seeks to displace.
We haven't even begun to realise the immensity of the task we face.
.jpg)
