Budget Day, a pre-emptive slow hand clap

Well. it's budget day. Expect austerity. More of it. Expect the projection of heavily gendered moralising into the economic sphere by much agonising about 'working families' to the exclusion of lone parents. Expect to have to pay more for a pint or a packet of fags. And expect the Labour front bench to be just a tiny bit better than the Tories in a way that is more disappointing than reassuring.

What would social democratic reforms of a sort that make a difference and throw open debate look like? A favourite of mine is the land value tax. As a replacement for the Council Tax, it would put more money into the vast majority of peoples' pockets and, via its effect on land prices, put downward pressure on housing prices. Which can't be bad.

Also, increase benefits, tax the rich, and so forth.

 Edited to add (14:29): So I was wrong about the beer. But I find myself in pleasing agreement with Stella Creasy:

So people who can afford to save will do well, as those struggling to make ends meet will pay for it … #smartspenders #twonations #budget14
— stellacreasy (@stellacreasy) March 19, 2014

Nine million adults, by the way, have no savings. And, given that growth is predicted to fall in 2017/8, one might on tediously orthodox economic grounds wonder about the wisdom of massively incentivising savings in the manner that Gideon has done. Unless, of course, that wisdom is exercised in the cause of the already rich, with scant regard for anyone else. Perish the thought.

Inheritance tax waived for emergency workers killed in the line of duty? Populist nonsense. What, after all, is the rationale of not including others killed at work? It is tragic when a paramedic is killed (not that paramedics tend to leave vast amounts of wealth, but anyway). Is it less tragic when a train driver gets killed in a crash or a shop worker in a robbery? And what does this have to do with unearned wealth anyway? I note, by the way, that those killed by the police, a considerably bigger number than police officers killed in the line of duty, remain susceptible to inheritance tax. Not that the poor black people disproportionately represented in this group have much to leave.

The real question, of course, is how much of this crap Miliband and Balls plan to reverse.

Happy St Patrick's Day!

"The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour."

James Connolly

On what racism isn't

This from this thing of beauty

Who said this?

Racist jokes can be an important element in the development and maintenance of a cohesive, non-racist society.

Was it perhaps an unusually articulate piece of self-justification from Jim Davidson? Or an offering from Philip Blond or one of his henchmen?

Nope, it was a prominent left-wing blogger.

But he has an argument, here you go:

The concept of utani, a Kiswahili word of Arabic origin meaning something like ‘joking relationship’, encompasses  the complex social system of mutual inter-dependency between ethnic groups, who may pre-colonially have had warring a warring relationship around land and livestock, or who may have come into first contact via newly established trade route to the coast.  Utani was, in effect, a swiftly developed social structure that enabled different ethnic groups to cope with the massive changes brought upon them by the first wave of exploitative, international capitalism.

I take his word for it. But here's the basic problem, what he is describing are not racist jokes. They may be jokes about race. No doubt these can have the kind of socially galvanising effect Paul describes. On other occasions they might be rude, thoughtless, offensive, or whatever. None of this is racism. Racism is a structural relationship of power, which finds expression and is in turn reinforced by racist jokes (and many other things). A joke about race is racist just when a member of a dominant group tells it about a member of an oppressed group in the context of systematic group inequality. Which, let's face it, is exactly what we are talking about in Britain. In as much as namby, pamby, politically correct killjoys complain about racist jokes, which we do, it is because we do not want white people telling derogatory jokes about black people.

It is disgraceful to see somebody on the Left muddying waters that should be very clear. Because, in an odd way, Paul is right. Communities can be brought together by racist jokes. The problem is that it is the job of socialists to destroy those kind of communities and replace them with something better.

Dare to be a Daniel : a note on Benn and religion

A striking aspect of Tony Benn that has escaped much attention (outside the religious press at least) in the past 24 hours is his debt to religious, specifically Christian, ideas and images. This is entirely unsurprising in the present climate, where admission of an interest in, let enough attachment to, religion is, in many left-wing circles, the social equivalent of coming out as the unique possessor of a paraphilia involving Jeremy Clarkson and yoghurt.

It is worth pausing to think about Benn's roots in Christianity. His own attachment to the creed was ambiguous, the son of a congregationalist minister and himself a confirmed Anglican, he described himself as a 'student of the teaching of Jesus'. Again and again throughout his speeches and writings, the incompatibility of this or that social injustice with (Benn's interpretation of) that teaching is asserted. Much more often, biblical images are deployed: a recurrent idea for Benn is that the Old Testament presents us with an opposition between 'the kings', who want order and hierarchy, and 'the prophets', who demand justice. We, says Tony, should be on the side of the prophets. Elsewhere, he describes the name of the right-wing Tory pressure group No Turning Back as "the motto of the Gerasene swine". Famously, he takes as a motto, and names a memoir after a Sunday school chorus:

Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone!
Dare to have a purpose firm!
Dare to make it known.

He once delivered the Tawney lecture to (what was in happier days known as) the Christian Socialist Movement on Christianity and socialism, but Benn was no systematic theologian or original Christian socialist thinker. In fact, he often seemed not to get theological or ecclesial distinctions. He would describe devout Anglo-Catholic Eric Heffer as standing in "the tradition of nonconformist dissent". And whilst his parliamentary and other interventions on the ordination of women in the CofE are powerful testaments to a commitment to equality, he doesn't really ever give the impression of understanding what was at issue.

But none of this really matters. What is interesting about Benn is his acknowledgement of, and use of, a religious tradition. Drawing in an eclectic fashion on Christian tropes, and displaying an openness to working with religious groups and individuals, Benn's approach to religion is different from those common on the Left. Many, in recent years, have displayed an enthusiasm for the dimwitted philistinism of the new atheists. Others, including the ancestor of the present blog, have attempted more systematic engagements with religion. In contrast to both, Benn's approach echoes that advocated by Marxist biblical critic Roland Boer. In his Rescuing the Bible, Boer champions a `worldly left', comprised of secular and religious leftists alike, that recognises the importance of the biblical text and promotes emancipatory interpretations. It seems to me that this worldly left has just lost its most significant proponent.

Tony Benn - Mourn and Organise

That the author of this blog is cut up at the departure from this life of a notorious tea drinker is a measure of what we have lost.

I still have in my possession a letter from Tony Benn written to me when I was seventeen years old. I had written him a rather pompous missive about, amongst other things, nuclear weapons, the European Union, and the monarchy. He replied by hand assuring me that he agreed with me "100%" (this was underlined) about nuclear weapons, and enclosing the text of one of his speeches on Europe. A few years later, we were organising a campaign at my university to prevent Margaret Thatcher being awarded an honorary doctorate. I wrote scores of formulaic letters to prominent figures asking them to put their name to our cause. Not only was Benn one of the few to reply, he telephoned me personally to assure us of his support. There was a humanity about the man, not just in the kind of genuine, personal, attention to individuals of which I had experience and of which numerous stories are being told today (see, for example, redcathy here), but also in the warmth with which he writes about friends and families in his diaries and above all in his deeply moving love for his wife Caroline. Tony Benn came to believe that politics was a matter of struggle, of taking sides and fighting, but unlike so many he did not allow this to dent his humanity. He was not the kind of left-wing leader to whom Gramsci's self-critical words from the Prison Notebooks could be applied,

How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one's own parents: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn't this had some effect on my life as a militant--has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?

Benn's starting point was that people mattered and this was lived out with a consistency not evident in today's political class.

His commitment to a politics of struggle, and to socialism (in the proper sense of that word), arose out of his experience of government in the Wilson and Callaghan years. The insights from this period caused him to give serious critical attention to the manner in which institutions - both  State and internal to the Labour Party - hinder the implementation of socialist policies. Benn is not always given sufficient credit as a political thinker but this analysis led to the development of a distinctive emphasis on democracy as integral to socialist advance; the Bennite Left focused on the democratisation of the Labour Party (the electoral college was a fruit of this, recently consigned to history by Benn's one-time intern Ed Miliband), whilst Benn himself argued for radical constitutional reform. The young, left-wing, Peter Hain correctly claimed the Bennite movement for 'libertarian socialism'.

Benn's mature politics echoed one of the best lines of Billy Bragg's dubious reworking of the Internationale 'change does not come from above'. His vision was one of a labour movement working in combination with grassroots movements of all kinds, developing alternatives to capitalism-as-usual and demanding of parliamentarians that they act in support of this vision, this demand being backed up by the teeth of democratic institutions. At its height this politics gave rise to a unique moment in Labour Party history. The Bash-Fisher book puts it like this,

The Bennite left... embraced and responded to newly emerging forces - a radicalised left in local government around the Greater London Council, Liverpool, Lambeth and other London boroughs; a feminist women's movement that left a lasting impact on most sections of the socialist movement; and the movement for Black and Asian representation in the Labour Party and beyond.

Now, there are problems with the 'don't mourn, organise' line. It lacks humanity, fails to acknowledge loss. A socialist who tells you not to stand by the grave and weep because the struggle continues is no better than a religious fundamentalist who tells you not to cry because the departed has passed on to better things. But we should at least mourn and organise. And those of us who remain in the Labour Party could do a lot worse than attempt to breathe back some of the life of the heady early 1980s to our local parties. What were once places of intense political debate, connected to local campaigns in communities far broader than the place of meeting, have become in many places little more than convenient holding pens for electoral volunteers. Debate is as absent as the democracy that depends on it, meanwhile the political enthusiasm of a generation is being poured out in numerous autonomous campaigns - around education, housing, LBGTQ liberation, the environment, and anti-imperialism - which seem a million miles away from a Labour Party dressed up in business suits and mouthing empty promises to a sky-blue backdrop.

Tony Benn, by his own admission, made mistakes. He had the humility to learn from many of them. His greatest error was undoubtedly insufficient opposition to the Eastern Bloc regimes. More recently he unfortunately lent his support to Julian Assange. But, when all is said and done, the spirit of Tony Benn is something of which the Labour Party, and the wider world, stands in desperate need.

Friday Video Corner

R.I.P. Tony Benn 1925-2014

"The key to any progress is to ask the question why? All the time. Why is that child poor? Why was there a war? Why was he killed? Why is he in power? And of course questions can get you into a lot of trouble, because society is trained by those who run it, to accept what goes on. Without questions we won't make any progress at all."