Guest Post by Jen Izaakson and Ross Speer : Blairism killed Labour, it cannot revive it

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.

And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race - part I

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.


Coming next: English nationalism 

Election campaign going well, and then there's Scotland

I thought I'd take a few moments out of my Easter holiday to share my thoughts on the election with you all. It was either that or continue watching my way through Buffy on Netflix, and to be honest I can take or leave the middle seasons.

These thoughts are, perhaps uncharacteristically, positive, at least from a UK-wide perspective. Labour has moved ahead of the Tories in key polls, with the Tories negative campaign against Ed Miliband seemingly backfiring. Labour's welcome attack on non-dom status has proved popular, confirming the position beloved of this blogger that more clear red water will not damage Labour's electoral standing. On that basis, the Tories' latest bung to the wealthy will do no harm at all.

There is, of course, a but. Scotland.

Labour will be slaughtered up north. To be frank, we deserve it. Annihilation has been on the cards since senior Party figures shared platforms with Tories as part of the Better Together campaign. It has been assured by the collective backtracking by the Westminster parties on devo-max.

Like a wounded beast in its final throes, Murphy-led Labour are fighting a vicious campaign. Mud is being thrown at the SNP in the hope that some of it sticks. There was the claim that Nicola Sturgeon wants David Cameron as PM. Then there is the disgraceful tabloid attack on Mhairi Black, a pleasingly straight-talking young SNP candidate, being shared on Facebook by Scottish Labour campaigners and their English supporters. There are a raft of attacks on the SNP policy, largely from the right, regardless of the nominal position of those making them. Such are the contradictions of post-referendum Scottish politics, with Labour forced into a position of opposing the SNP from the right. To my mind, it is highly doubtful that anything like labourism will survive much longer in Scotland. The best hope would be if Labour were to neutralise the national question, by officially admitting a plurality of views. Yet it is too tied into a unionist logic to make that likely.

This matters outside Scotland. Why? Because Labour is likely to be the largest party, yet without an overall majority in May. This means the leadership will be looking for someone with whom to do a deal. There are basically two options here: the LibDems and a rainbow coalition of the SNP and others (SDLP, Plaid, Greens). Such is the level of anti-SNP animosity that has trickled down south, that the latter option doesn't have the level of grassroots support than it deserves. Left MPs were more hostile than they needed to be at the suggestion of an SNP pact recently.

This should be a no brainer. Socialists in the Labour Party want two things: working class representation and left-wing policies. The LibDems offer neither, and any kind of deal with them should be ruled out. The SNP are qualitatively different in both respects. The grassroots left should prepare now to exert pressure in favour of the more left-leaning option in the days following a close election.

In good old tub-thumping left-wing fashion, that pressure ought to be exerted on MPs with two demands in view:

No to a deal with either Coalition party.

No to austerity.

Now, Buffy.

Friday Video Corner

To pun tastelessly on the previous post, this is not safe for work.

The rise of the political wife

The woman the media are calling "Justine Miliband", married to Ed, is not standing for election in May. She just happens to be the spouse of somebody who is. Why, you might then wonder, is she being subjected to pre-election interviews?

The political wife, and it is always a wife, has been a feature of the American political landscape for years. She exists to stand beside her husband, to express concern for him and stick up for him-  "I think over the next couple of months it's going to get really vicious, really personal, but I'm totally up for this fight," Justine told the BBC's James Landale. Above all she reassures us of the persistence that most feminine of spheres, the domestic, which lurks behind the front doors of even the most powerful. In possibly the most banal caption ever published on a reputable news website, the BBC tell us that "The Milibands share the family chores, such as loading their dishwasher". Look here, they are:

Notice that in order to make the, apparently weakly feminist point, that Ed does some housework, his wife is required. For the domestic is her sphere.

Now this is all so much sexist claptrap. It is no doubt a by-product, along with those wretched leaders debates we're hearing a lot about, of the presidentialisation of British politics during the Blair era. It is encouraged by a collective flight to the maternal and homely, of proportions large enough to keep Freudians in PhD theses for a generation, in response to the anxieties of the age. There may be recessions, Ebola, and the growth of ISIS, but at least we have cupcakes and the option to watch people decorating their dream homes on TV (even if we can't actually afford homes of our own).

Anyhow, the indignity of Justine Thornton, as she in fact calls herself, a barrister, having to talk to journalists about household chores is by no means the worst effect of the rise of the political wife. When Sally Bercow, married to the Speaker, did a photo-shoot for the Evening Standard, her husband is reported to have "read the Riot Act" at her. Certainly the none-too-subtle subtext of right-wing sniping about Bercow's Twitter activity and appearance on Big Brother is that the Speaker can't control his wife.

Welcome to Britain in the 21st century.

You have nothing to lose but your van

Phraow. Look at him. He's a real man. Not like Ed Miliband.

Well, if nothing else, Britain now has its very own version of Joe the Plumber. Dan the Van, the emblematic man (and, really, notice he's a man - a manly man at that) on the street. He'd be the man on the Clapham omnibus, were it not for the fact that he has a van, and therefore doesn't need to get the bus. But not just any old man, oh no. He's a common-or-garden salt of the earth working class man. And if you diss Dan, and don't you dare diss Dan, you hate the working class. You're a snob. And probably a member of the metropolitan elite. So don't diss Dan, OK?

There is, of course, a metropolitan elite in Britain. It does indeed make up the social base of New Labour, whose rejection of its core electorate partially explains the exit of a minority of that electorate to UKIP.  Emily Thornberry, a decent soft-left sort from a working class background, isn't really part of it. But then car salesman Dan isn't really part of the working class on any reasonable definition either. Core reality isn't important here. This is about narrative.

Richard Seymour here is good on the details of the class issue here; and this blogpost, which I promoted yesterday, is definitely worth a read. I'd just like to make one observation - the reason the forces around the Labour leadership have been so rattled by Vangate is that Thornberry's tweet upsets their preferred class narrative. This issues from the bowels of Blue Labour, and finds expression in the whole One Nation brand. It surfaced around the debate on Scottish independence, is a nationalistic ally orientated, culturally homogenising story about what it is to be working class. It is deeply reactionary in content, and its effect can only be to cede political terrain which UKIP will work more effectively than Labour.

And Ed Miliband's wedded to it. We're screwed.

Johann Lamont resigns

Last month's referendum certainly has the politicians dropping like flies. The latest to go is Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont. See the Graun here. George Eaton's analysis here deserves a perusal as well.

Much quoted are Lamont's scathing words about the Westminster leadership:

The Labour Party must recognise that the Scottish party has to be autonomous and not just a branch office of a party based in London.

She's right, and the criticism of over-centralisation is all the more telling coming, as it does, from someone who is a long way from being a left-wing rebel. The lording it over Scotland by Westminster Labour isn't utterly unique: absolutely definitive of New Labour was a paranoid centralism and utter fear of any public Labour figure saying anything that lacked the imprimatur of the leader's office (Lamont herself was apparently prevented from criticising the Bedroom Tax). This centralisation in the cause of the New Labour project is a good part of what lies behind Miliband's tethering of Lamont, and is equally apparent in dodgy selections, on-the-hoof policy decisions bypassing Conference and the NPF, anti-democratic 'reforms', and a good deal else on top of that.

This having been admitted, the Lamont saga cannot be entirely explained as the fallout of UK-wide institutional power-grabbing by the Labour leadership. There is a distinctively Scottish element to the tale. And with this in mind, I leave you with a question: might it not be the case that it is inevitable, for as long as the Union persists, that the London offices of UK-wide parties will be forced, by the logic of union itself, to severely restrict the autonomy of their colleagues north of the Border?