Friday Video Corner

I saw this, and thought of this:

Happy Burns Night!

Fareweel to a' our Scottish fame,
Fareweel our ancient glory;
Fareweel ev'n to the Scottish name,
Sae fam'd in martial story.
Now Sark rins over Solway sands,
An' Tweed rins to the ocean,
To mark where England's province stands-
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

What force or guile could not subdue,
Thro' many warlike ages,
Is wrought now by a coward few,
For hireling traitor's wages.
The English stell we could disdain,
Secure in valour's station;
But English gold has been our bane-
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

O would, or I had seen the day
That Treason thus could sell us,
My auld grey head had lien in clay,
Wi' Bruce and loyal Wallace!
But pith and power, till my last hour,
I'll mak this declaration;
We're bought and sold for English gold-
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

Labour for Independence, here

Friday Video Corner

Oppose Vona, don't ban him

London is facing a visit from Gabor Vona, the leader of Hungarian fascist party Jobbik. See more from Owen Jones here.

He should arrive to find opposition, protests and information campaigns about the nature of his party. But it is a mistake to follow the lead of some London Labour MPs and AMs and appeal to the Home Secretary to prevent Vona entering the UK.

Never mind the irony of using border controls against a man who is all too much in favour of border controls, State bans of any sort cannot defeat fascism. They allow the far right to pose as victims, a favourite tactic, and set a dangerous precedent. Once it becomes established practice to exclude political speakers from a country because their words might foster extremism or stir up discontent, we move into very dangerous territory. Do you trust Theresa May to exercise this power responsibly? Even talk of 'inciting hatred' doesn't capture all and only fascists. Everyone from anti-austerity campaigners to fracking activists has been accused of it in the recent past.

No Platform is a reasonable policy. There is no reason the labour movement should provide fascists with meeting spaces or opponents in debates. State bans are something very different, and not the way forward.

Better Together? A note on Scottish Independence and British Labour

The last UK general election won by Labour was, you will recall, that in 2005. Here's an electoral map of the result:

Quite a lot of red in Scotland, right? And thus an argument I've frequently heard within the Labour Party against supporting Scottish independence - "if Scotland gets independence, the rest of the UK will be doomed to perpetual Tory government".

So, let's break down the figures behind the map. UK-wide, we have:

Labour (inc. SDLP): 359
Conservative: 198
Lib-Dem: 62
Others: 28

Now let's look at Scotland's contribution. This is:

Labour: 41
Lib Dems: 11
SNP: 6
Conservative: 1

OK, so let's subtract the Scottish figures from the general UK ones. This gives us:

Labour (inc. SDLP): 318
Conservatives: 197
Lib-Dem: 51
Others: 22

This gives Labour whippable MPs 318 seats out of 588, an absolute majority of 24 (21 if we discount the SDLP). This is an election in which Labour didn't do particularly well compared to its recent form.

This argument is dead, it has ceased to be.

What is interesting to note, however, is that a Labour government for England, Wales, and the north of Ireland, whose majority was not supported by Scottish MPs, could depend of the support of a lower proportion of parliamentary leadership loyalists. With the honourable exception of Katy Clark, the Scots MPs are a supine bunch.

Nano-strikes redux

Further to my post on this, Primyamvada Gopal is well worth reading on the de-escalation of UCU action here.

Meanwhile UCU Left have put out an emergency bulletin about the situation here.

Also, there's a paper petition doing the rounds condemning the leadership's present strategy. Do sign it if it comes your way.

'Friday' Video Corner

Pre-emptive, since I'm out of action tomorrow.

R.I.P. Roger Lloyd-Pack, actor and socialist. Oh for the days when working class people were portrayed sympathetically in TV comedy.

Payday Loans

I wrote this a while back. Still seems relevant in the light of the Archbishop of Canterbury having appointed a failed financial capitalist to push forward competing with Wonga on the basis of unpaid labour...

Payday loans are big news. July's announcement by the Archbishop of Canterbury that he wanted to 'put them out of business' by supporting a network of credit unions follows prolonged scrutiny from politicians and campaigning groups. Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy, in particular, has been prominent in opposing the high-interest, short-term, lenders she calls 'legal loan sharks', and has pressed for tighter regulation of the industry.

Socialists should care about payday loans. Not only do they have a severe and negative impact on some of the most financially vulnerable people in society; the growth of the industry also reveals a lot about contemporary British capitalism.

Supplied by firms such as Wonga and Money Shop, and most often taken out for very short periods ('until payday'), payday loans are unsecured and have extremely high interest rates. Some loans with Wonga have an APR of 4500%, and Which? calculate the average cost of payday loans as being £25 for every £100 borrowed per. month. Exploitative in themselves, these rates can trap people in debt and hardship if the loans are not paid off quickly – and 70% of those who use payday lenders have rolled their loan over at least once.

Payday loans are used to pay for the necessities of life. 78% of loans are used to pay for basics: food, household bills, or housing payments. Very often payday loans are used as overdraft substitutes by people denied credit by banks. People do not put themselves in this situation lightly, in spite of the patronising talk of 'financial illiteracy' from some charities. The context within which this dependence on expensive credit has come about is one of low wages, reduced benefits, and expensive housing.

Everybody needs to feed, clothe, and house themselves and their dependants. If wages, supplemented by in-work benefits, don't provide the means to do this, people will rely on credit. Last month the TUC reported that UK real wages had been falling for 40 months. Combined with high underemployment – around 10% of UK workers according to the UK Labour Force Survey – and the financial insecurity created by short-term and zero-hours contracts, the result is a situation ripe for exploitation by lenders. Add to this the Coalition's sustained attack on in-work benefits, and the sky high cost of housing, especially in London, and it is fair to describe the UK as suffering from a crisis of working-class income.

To be addressed properly this crisis needs tackling at the roots. Credit unions, praiseworthy in themselves, are not a panacea, and the suggestion that they are in a position to force payday lenders out of business is naïve in the extreme. Still less is an emphasis on 'financial literacy' the way forward. There is, of course, nothing wrong with helping people manage their money, and some people from all backgrounds have problems with personal finances. However, the suggestion that there is a systematic problem with lower income peoples' money management is simply a moralising attempt to blame people for their own poverty.

Regulation of payday lenders should not be ruled out by the Left. We do, though, need to be careful. Horrific though this is, people depend here-and-now on these loans to feed themselves. We have to be very careful that we don't give our backing to piecemeal reforms which deny them even this opportunity.

The real solution is to address the crisis of income which allows payday lenders to flourish. We need real action on wages; we should support the Living Wage for all workers, and give our backing to struggles for higher wages in our workplaces and localities. We should push for the reversal of the Government's attack on the welfare state, and for the extension of more generous benefits, guaranteeing everyone a decent level of income. We should act on housing: arguing for rent controls, the building of council houses, and measures to stop the escalation of house prices. And, above all, we should call into question the capitalist system which allows the parasites of Wonga to grow fat on the desperation of others.

Outsourced workers roar, UCU whimpers

Higher Education, traditionally a context favourable to the Left, trade unions, and other such sensible things, currently under sustained attack from the Coalition - this has got to be an important area for the fightback against this government, right? How's that going?

Well, there is some really positive stuff. Whatever else you do, look at the 3 Cosas Campaign - fighting, already with partial success, for sick pay, holidays, and pensions for outsourced workers at the University of London. Disgracefully let down by the branch and regional  UNISON officials, the workers have organised themselves autonomously. Some good stuff is happening that is in many ways a model, and is getting attention. Please support their strike fund.

Elsewhere things are less positive. Faced with real terms pay cuts and declining conditions, there was a move towards co-ordinated action between Unison, UNITE, and UCU, bringing academic and support staff together on picket lines. Retreating from this, UCU have called a series of two hour strikes.

Now, I'm a UCU member. I teach at an evening-based institution, so these strikes will have no impact whatsoever on my teaching. In fact, I think this a pathetic excuse for industrial action, is recognised by members as such, and is causing our union to lose both credibility and members.

This said I believe in supporting collective action - 'don't cross a picket line' is a mantra with good reason. We need a culture that fosters collectivity, solidarity, and confidence when these things are in short supply. So I will not do any academic work during our mini-walkouts. But I'll use the strike times as best I can to argue against the UCU leadership's de-escalation of this dispute. We need proper strikes, lasting at least a day, co-ordinated with other unions.

Because, let's face it - well planned short stoppages in a factory or a railway can be devastating and effective. I am not entirely convinced that the government will be trembling at my threat not to read anything between 11am and 1pm one day.

We have to do better than this. Too much is at stake.

Aha

Thanks to Ellie Mae O'Hagan on Twitter for this gem. Comedy gold.

Last time I compared me trying to talk to the pub to a Jew trying to talk to Himmler. Police told me that was a wrong choice of analogy. I only chose it because I am interested in German history. I think that was the wrong thing to say, because it is actually far more like the situation with Israel and Palestine, or with Syria and the Sunnis or perhaps even the Tamils and the Sri Lankan government. 

PennyOrange?

Laurie Penny gets a lot of stick, much of it undeserved, and a good deal of it downright sexist. But really:

Say what you like about the last guy, but at least he didn’t pretend to be progressive. Right now, I find myself actually missing Benedict XVI, with his snazzy red shoes and squinty evil grin. If you’re going to be Pope, you might as well do it properly. If you’ve waited your whole life to be despotic commander with millions of followers, you should at least enjoy yourself.

Say what? Millions of Catholics worldwide are simply blind followers of a despotic commander. Is the interaction between politics and religion really that simple? Has Laurie been recruited by Richard Dawkins and his ilk? Her piece reads horribly like it:

What the pope says and does influences policy in Catholic countries. One of those countries is Spain, where lawmakers are voting on a plan to allow abortion only in the most extreme cases – where a pregnancy is the result of rape, or is likely to cause death or serious injury. In any other circumstances, Spanish women will be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term and go through the pain and physical risk of childbirth. Similar struggles are going on in Ireland, the United States and everywhere that right-wing politicians are trying to rally support by trampling on women’s rights.

Yep, poor befuddled Roman Catholics are too stupid to think for themselves, and simply act blindly on every word issuing from the papal mouth. Leaving aside the fact that in the US it is certainly not Catholics, whose views do not differ significantly from mainstream opinion, who are making the running on anti-choice politics; leaving aside that both polities in Ireland, including the one not famous for being a Catholic confessional state, have restrictive abortion laws; leaving all of this aside, the tone of Penny's article echoes historic bigotry against Catholics in Britain and damages the pro-choice cause.

I think the stuff about the response to the Pope is also pretty vacuous, betraying an approach to politics (broadly construed) that won't look beyond the narrow cultural confines of the white liberal metropolis, or indeed take culture or 'belonging' seriously as political sites (culture goes deeper than Doctor Who, right?) And I think this matters, not simply for what it makes people say about Catholicism (although that matters, especially once one strays beyond the M25), but because it makes us less able to think through the politics around other, more oppressed, groups in contemporary Britain, especially Muslims, or to have a useful debate about, for example, national questions around Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.

But I guess all that's for another post.

Cost of Cameron

Friday Video Corner

PC Dinsdale

These are the Kray twins. For a good few years they ran a heavily armed gang that managed to kill Londoners with impunity.

These days we have the Metropolitan Police.

"Now steady on", I can almost hear you say, "Whilst I have my problems with the Duggan verdict, you're going too far here. Unlike criminal gangs, the police are basically on our side. They are there to protect us. Yes, things sometimes go wrong, and that is sad, and sometimes demands protest as a response. But you can't make people suspicious of the police, that way lies lawlessness, criminality, and violence".

To which I reply that, in the only sense of those words that matter, the Duggan family have already experienced lawlessness, criminality, and violence. So did the family and friends of Jean Charles de Menezes, those of Ian Tomlinson, those of Smiley Culture; so did Alfie Meadows, so did those still awaiting justice after the death of a loved one in custody.

But I did once agree with you, or at least I think I did.

I am white and was born away from any large urban area in a place lacking any significant ethnic or religious diversity. My left-leaning family would not be averse to criticising the actions of the police in places like South Africa or northern Ireland; but the police here, well they were just there, they were a local service you would call in certain circumstances, one of the options available if you called 999. The friendly local beat constable would come into my primary school from time to time, sometimes to tell us not to talk to strangers (except, that is, strangers in police uniforms), and sometimes to tell us about his work. He emitted an air of general joviality and came across as an avuncular local service provider, on a par with the woman in the sweet shop and the people who held lollipop sticks while we crossed the road. The policemen, and they were always men, in my Lego kits were no less smiley. I used to make them catch the pirates from another Lego kit; retrospectively this lacked something in the historical realism department.

Occasionally you'd hear people moan about the police, usually because of someone having been caught out by a cunningly placed speed trap, but this occurred against the backdrop of a much wider culture of confidence. With the benefit of hindsight, the local police were - and still are - engaged in a low grade war of attrition against the young unemployed (an important demographic in the region) executed through arrests for possession and catch-all public order offences. To the extent that people were aware of this, and awareness could only be had by reading the local paper very carefully, there was a widespread impression that it was a good things. 'Yobs' had to be dealt with, 'respectability' and 'decency' preserved. These sentiments came from normal, working class, people. At this stage in my life the phrase 'divide and rule' was something heard only in history lessons.

The thoughts of @Cwtsh (via Twitter)

I was not unaware that there was a grittier side to the police. We watched The Bill twice a week. And here we saw people with skin colours other than our own, often on the receiving end of the constabulary's attention. We saw knives and guns, and the fictional world constructed for us seemed a very dangerous place. Thank goodness the good men and women of Sun Hill nick were there to protect its inhabitants. To be sure, there were a few wrong'uns amongst the televisual cops. But they were usually rooted out in the end, and anyhow the script writers ensured they were shown in a bad light, as a break from the norm. In as much as these PCs had prejudices they were ones shared with a good proportion of the TV-viewing public. On this point, at least, the series could have been on to something.

My naivety was not total. The bubble was punctured by news reports showing the police evictions of travellers from Stonehenge; as a teenager I got involved in a local campaign against the Major government's Criminal Justice Bill and became more aware of suspicion of the police over their behaviour towards travellers. And hadn't the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six been set up by police in Britain? However, it was moving to London that really changed the way I saw the police.

I got more involved in politics, of a fairly run-of-the-mill Labour Students sort, and this led to me ending up on demonstrations: against student tuition fees, in support of striking workers, and against racism. From the word go I saw heavy-handedness and routine surveillance by Forward Intelligence Teams. I felt a real hostility from those policing demos. This feeling, as it turns out, was not unjustified, since from time to time the police's active dislike of protesters spilled out, denting the image of them as neutral keepers of the peace. On one occasion a police officer shouted "get a job"; given that this was directed at a group of workers striking in defence of their jobs, it didn't suggest a high level of awareness. It did serve to disabuse me of any uncritical belief that the police were on my side.

What I saw then, in the mid-1990s, is - with one exception I will mention later - nothing compared to what I have seen in the way of policing of recent anti-austerity demonstrations. I have seen hundreds of people kettled for hours on end, having done no more than protest against government policy. I have seen people, including friends, people I know and trust, snatched by undercover squads from protest marches. I have seen people punched and pushed to the ground by police without provocation. I have seen the routine deployment of riot police against perfectly ordinary, everyday, protests. The behaviour of the Metropolitan Police with respect to political events in the past four years has been often horrific , sometimes also tinged with absurdity. We have witnessed highly politicised policing, with the police actively taking sides against people opposing government attacks on their livelihoods and communities, acting with impunity and subject to no real accountability.




At this point there is a certain sort of person who will say that if only these people had kept their heads down, not made a fuss, and just got on with life, they'd never have ended up on the wrong end of plod's truncheon. This isn't very adequate, not least because the people in question were fighting for precisely the right to get on with life in the face of governmental attack. For other people, the mere act of getting on with life is enough to attract police attention. The homeless provide one example. Black and Asian people provide another.

If the policing of demonstrations I saw during the 1990s was heavy-handed, the policing of an anti-racism demonstration in Southall was something else altogether. The presence and actions of the police spoke of an assumption of criminality against the, overwhelmingly Asian, participants in the demonstration. Helicopters hovered overhead, riot vans sat on side streets, the main streets being lined with police.


Smiley Culture, killed during a Met raid, 2011.

Subsequent years confirmed in me this awareness of an assumption of lawbreaking from which I, because of my skin colour, am free. There are the 'random' stop and searches in London railway stations I have seen target young black men, and more recently anyone of obviously Muslim appearance. There are the, similarly 'random', vehicle checks which happen regularly on a road near my house, which almost always seem to involve black drivers. Less abstractly, there was the elderly black couple who attended a church I used to attend, as everyday and 'respectable' in their lifestyle as anyone I'd met in childhood, who said they would never phone the police because they simply didn't trust them. There are the young black men for whom being stopped and searched is a normal part of life. There is the young mother to whom I was supposed to be delivering a food parcel on behalf of a local charity. She wasn't in. I phoned her mobile. She said she was hiding in the bathroom with her children, because she was scared I was from the police. What kind of experience does that to someone?

None of this should surprise us. Racism and other prejudices exist in our society. They inevitably exist therefore in the police force. It is not as though donning a blue uniform magically does away with bigotry. Yet the police don't simply reflect the prejudices of the society in which they exist, they reinforce them, every stop-or-search or violent arrest of a black person reinforcing, via the lies that 'there is no smoke without a fire' and 'those with nothing to fear have nothing to hide' the racist narrative that sees black people as a threat. It is this narrative, for instance, that has convinced so many people that Mark Duggan had a gun with him in the taxi, in spite of no evidence having been presented to this effect. As the police find themselves under attack for racism, the spirit of collegiality, of looking after one's own, kicks in, toughening their resolve, embedding stubbornness, and reinforcing racism. A similar process takes place when the police are deployed against protestors - and the police are structurally positioned within capitalist society such that they will inevitably be deployed against protests from time to time, especially in times of economic crisis when wider ideological narratives seek to deflect blame from governments and the ruling class (onto 'scroungers', 'extremists' etc.), and that buoyed up by these narratives and by group spirit, officers will see themselves as 'us', fighting against 'them'.

The problems with the police are not the result of a few bad apples, of residual 'institutional racism' that is in the process of being sorted out, nor even of tragic but inevitable human error, resulting from false 'honestly held beliefs'. No the problems are systematic, and structural, issuing from the way the police function in a fundamentally unjust society. That is to say, the problems of the police, the polis, are political. And they demand a political response.

So in conclusion let's talk about the Labour Party in London. A good proportion of its electoral base does not view the Met, unambiguously at least, as protectors. Yet, in the face of government cuts to local authority spending, the party has consistently headlined opposition to police cuts as a priority, including during Ken Livingstone's last unsuccessful mayoral campaign. Let's be clear - the Met is well resourced, in spite of its present attack on its civilian staff. Its well-resourced nature reinforces its sense of immunity from accountability or consequence and makes it practically easier for it to act in an oppressive fashion - cash-strapped public services rarely turn up to small protests with dozens of vans, use several helicopters to police peaceful marches, or deploy paramilitary-style TSG units to make arrests for minor crimes, as happened in the aftermath of the 2011 riots.

Boris Johnson is an ally of this bloated force, and wants to buy them water cannon even while closing fire stations. As NWA so very nearly put it, cut the police.


ETA: See also Mark Fisher here.

Duggan : Twitter speaks its branes

Now why would you say something like this,

6 innocent people killed in the #duggan riots, and the media is obessing over death of this gun-toting drug dealer. #wato
— Edward Catflap (@Edward_Catflap) January 9, 2014

given that no evidence was presented in court to the effect that Duggan had a gun? Well, one reason would be that you are a massive racist who assumes that all young black men are drug-dealing gangsters.

Now, although they are evidence for a diseased society, Twitter trolls are one thing.  The quoted tweet is one of hundreds along similar lines - look at the #duggan hashtag. What is altogether more concerning is that a similar process of reasoning seems to have gone on inside the heads of eight jurors.

Friends who kill

This was posted a few weeks ago on UK Cop Humour - a Facebook page that deserves your attention as a unique insight into the, well, interesting mindset of our constabulary.

I wonder if, as a child, Mark Duggan ever encountered anything like this.

The Analysis of Blairism (i) - A Class Project

Long Post warning

A couple of days ago I had things to say about the position of the Left in the Labour Party, and this got me thinking about Blairism. It seems to me that we can't understand where we're at properly unless we begin to understand what happened to Labour under the Blair leadership, and how Blair's project continues to work itself out in the present day Labour Party, especially as we approach March's special Conference and possible modification of the Party's relationship to the trade unions.

I want to understand these things better. So I'm going to think out loud, or at least begin to think out loud, in a series of three posts on Blairism, of which this is the first. I've been helped a lot by Graham Bash and Andrew Fisher's excellent little book on the history of the Labour Party, as well as by (Ralph) Miliband and Cliff/ Gluckstein (oh for the blissful days when SWPers wrote useful things).

One response, which is pretty common on the Labour Left, to the phenomenon of Blairism is to deny that there is any such thing. To be sure, the Blair (and subsequently Brown) governments betrayed the hopes invested in them by many Labour voters and did lots of bad things. But this is hardly unparallelled; to a greater or lesser extent the same can be said of every Labour government. Nor is it even clear that Blair's governments were uniquely bad: privatising air traffic control may be deplorable, but it's not obviously worse than supporting the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And before there was Iraq, there was Vietnam.

If Blairism is to be considered interesting, and of enduring significance for labour movement politics, there has to be more to it than a succession of right-wing policy moves, however individually distasteful. I think that there is something more; I think that Blairism can be understood as a move to decisively reorientate Labour's class representative role. In outline, I believe that Blairism ought to be regarded as an attempt (by no means exhausted) to reconstitute Labour as a party of 'progressive' European-orientated capital.

Labour and Reform

It's something of an old Trot commonplace that Labour is a 'bourgeois workers party'. Being an old Trot commonplace is not incompatible with being true, and this is a case in point. British Labourism is a curious affair. On the one hand, we have a party with a solid working class base, born (in Nye Bevan's words) "from the bowels of the TUC", and over which the trade unions can exercise a degree of influence. Yet, on the other hand, we have a party wedded to the norms of the liberal state, to a divide between the economic and the political (to such an extent that, for the greater part of the Party's history - until the Bennite reforms of the early 80s - the PLP was completely independent of the wider movement), and to the class compromise that all of this entailed. The outcome of these tensions, present from the beginning, is that Labour has functioned to represent the working class politically within capitalism. Labour's existence both encourages class politics and tends to place limits on the imagined scope of those politics. The Party has both delivered historic reforms that have transformed the lives of working class people and, in the very act of doing so, bound them more closely to a system that survives by exploiting them.

All of this is workable for as long as Labour governments can deliver reforms benefiting the working class, thereby justifying their continued existence to their core electorate and the union bureaucracies. A standard narrative, widely believed on Left and Right, holds that Labour governments can no longer do this. In Cliff and Gluckstein's neat phrase Labour now has to offer "reformism without the possibility of reforms". The point of inflexion here is usually seen as the crisis of the mid 1970s, associated with the OPEC price shocks and culminating in Britain with the IMF bail-out of the Callaghan government and the resulting implementation of austerity measures. Before things got to that point, in 1976, Callaghan himself sounded the death-knell for the 'Keynesian'* macroeconomics that had been the power-house of post-war reformsim

we used to think you could just spend your way out of recession... I tell you in all candour that option no longer exists and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked... by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment.

Shifting Phillips curves were the order of the day in the world of economic ideas. And in the hard cold world of institutional reality, new ties appeared for the hands of reformist governments. The Bretton Woods framework, which had provided a secure international context for the British post-war settlement, ended in 1971 when the US terminated the convertibility of the dollar into gold. The UK's 1973 membership of the Common Market, confirmed by the 'yes' victory in the 1975 referendum, tied UK policy-makers to a "free market economics" and posed long term problems for public ownership (particularly in terms of  reversing privatisations). The growth of transnational corporations seemed to pose problems for planning - left economist Stuart Holland's 1975 The Socialist Challenge expressed well the nature of this concern in the labour movement; he spoke of a 'mesoeonomic' sector of corporations interposed between government policymaking and the desired effects in working peoples' lives.  In the next decade, the Thatcher governments' deregulation of finance and foreign exchange foreclosed further on the options for a future Labour government.

An undoubted result of all this is that Labour governments can no longer run reformism after the exact model of the post-war consensus. I am not myself convinced that reformism as such is not longer possible. The relative continued effectiveness, and undoubted effect, of macroeconomic policy, particularly evident since the 2008 crisis, surely places a question mark over some of the more extreme claims about governmental impotence. But that isn't what matters here: what matters is a widespread collapse of belief in reformism since the mid-1970s. This was summed up quite nicely by Tony Benn in his 1981  Arguments for Democracy: the post-war consensus was spent, the options facing the British electorate were "monetarism, corporatism, and democratic socialism".

Shifting the focus from the national polity to the labour movement, it looked like the reformist project's day had passed. The contradictions of Labourism needed to resolve themselves. Labour could no longer represent the working class within capitalism by offering reforms. It had to either become a socialist party, or else - in the language of two decades later - a party of business.

Resolving the Contradictions? Benn, the SDP, and Kinnock

An increasingly militant constituency Left in the early 1980s favoured the socialist route. For the Bennites this meant not only socialist policies - Labour Conferences had been voting for these for a good few years - but structural reform of the Labour Party to favour the implementation of these policies when Labour was in government. Thus democratisation of the manifesto, mandatory reselection of MPs and similar measures became priorities. Trade union influence on Labour politics increased, for example with the introduction of an electoral college for leadership elections (a measure which also sounded the death toll for a key feature of traditional Labourism, the independence of the PLP). In other ways, boundaries prescribed by Labourism were transgressed, for instance by policy proposals advocating roles for trade unions in industrial management. None the less, the 1980s Left had no intention of weakening the link between Labour and the unions; to that extent the Party's heritage as a trade union party was unthreatened.

One might have expected a threat to come from the Party's Right. If they offered no policies which union leaderships could sell their members - and recall that this was a period of intense pessimism about the possibility of reforms - wasn't there a possibility that unions could become a thorn in the Party's side? As it happened, there was no real antagonism between unions and the rightward drifting parliamentary Party during the Kinnock years. Partly this was because the most right-wing elements of Labour had exited to the SDP, partly because the overwhelming priority was the defeat of Thatcher and Labour (however bad) provided the only electoral hope here, partly because the union movement was - as unemployment increased, the sectoral balance of the UK economy shifted, and especially after the defeat of the 1984-5 miners' strike - on the back foot, and under right-wing leadership, and partly because unions were an important source of finance for the Labour Party.

Whilst the union link remained intact, the Kinnock years did witness a clearing of the ground for a later rightward shift away from traditional Labourism. Left-wing policies adopted during the 70s and 80s were quietly abandoned, and the possibility of a leftward break was weakened by the defeat of Bennism, the anti-Militant purges, and the failure of the leadership to support the GLC and other local government struggles. Of more enduring importance, as the leadership took on board fashionable sociological claims about the changing nature of its working class support, its basis for appeal to that support changed, becoming less collective, and more directed at atomised self-interest, adopting rather than challenging key ideological tropes of the Thatcher era. As Benn's diaries describe a seminar presentation as reporting a survey of Labour voters, "it's nice to have a social conscience, but your family comes first".

In all of this the Kinnock years served as a kind of John the Baptist, a forerunner for the Blairite messiah.

A saviour from on high. Blair and Blairism


The tragically cut-short leadership of John Smith provided a temporary respite for Labourism, whilst the Tories sunk under internal divisions and the ERM fiasco. Then things changed.

The fundamentals of Labourism remained unchallenged at the start of the Blair era. The union link was unbroken and, however weakened Party demoracy might have felt, the labour movement was still capable of translating demands into policy - hence genuinely welcome policies of the Blair governments, such as the minimum wage and the restoration of trade union rights at GCHQ - as well as of applying brakes on excessive rightward drift. Yet there was a malaise in the air. Labour had lost four successive general elections, and for all its compromises was beginning to look like a party of perpetual opposition.

At the same time, by the early to mid 1990s, the role of the Tories as the unrivalled political representatives of British capital was looking shaky. Divided on Europe, but increasingly shifting in a Eurosceptic direction, the appeal of the Conservatives to capital focused on EU markets was limited. Moreover, a basic contradiction in the Tories' relationship to the capitalist class reared its head. Capitalism brings its wake relentless social change - "all that is solid melts into air". It has embarrassingly slight intrinsic respect for hierarchy, it cares little for morality and order beyond their capacity to secure profit. Family structures, national boundaries, ethnic identities - all are up for negotiation as eagle-eyed entrepreneurs seek out the next market. Since the 1960s, even as the industrial world had been opened up more completely to the ravages of capital, attitudes had grown more liberal on a range of issues: homosexuality, the family, race and racism, sex and sexism. And a good proportion of the bourgeoisie took this shift in attitudes on board, to a greater or lesser extent. Meanwhile they were represented politically in the UK by the historic party of order, the party of Section 28 and 'Hang Nelson Mandela' t-shirts, the Party which one of their own ministers termed 'the nasty party'.

Wasn't their room for a more modern, more progressive, more pro-European party of capital? Enter Tony Blair. Speaking to the FT in early 1997, Blair said (quoted in Bash/ Fisher),

I want a situation more like the Democrats and Republicans in the US. People don't even question for a single moment that the Democrats are a pro-business party. They should not be asking that question about New Labour.

New Labour courted business, and its flirtations were well received, with high profile donations from corporations and wealthy individuals. The gory details of the romance are well documented in Dave Osler's book. At the time, the long-term prospect of a New Labour lacking financial dependence on the unions seemed real. New Labour's policies remained a matter of negotiation between the representation of labour and of capital, I've already mentioned a couple of significant pre-existing labour movement policies that were implemented. Yet there was a definite shift in political economy towards acceptance of neo-liberalism. The rewriting of Clause IV had a symbolic importance here. Meanwhile the relationship between the PLP and the widered movement was negotiated. Party democracy withered (in rather the same way that plants wither after being sprayed with weedkiller), National Policy Forums were introduced, Conference decisions on policy routinely ignored, and candidate selections fixed. Blairism exerted itself as a force through organisations like Progress. Meanwhile, front bench spokespeople appealed over the heads of the movement, to individual electors, understood as consumers. This was the age of political advertising and 'spin'.

In all these ways there was a shift away from Labour even attempting to represent the working class, in however a mediated fashion, and towards it being simply another party of capital, offering itself to the electorate periodically as perhaps the least-worst alternative. Voices around Progress were quite clear that they would like to make the break with Labourism permanent and institutional, eyeing up the union link. Others, prior to the May 1997 landslide which rendered the question irrelevant, mooted working with, or forming coalitions with, the Liberal Democrats, another move which would have undermined the relationship between a Labour government and the labour movement.

Neither of these attacks on Labourism came to pass, and Blair is now redirecting his messianic energies beyond the bounds of the Labour Party, setting himself the modest task of bringing peace between the worlds' religions.  Yet the Blairite assault on Labourism is still warm. Coalition with the Lib Dems remains a live possibility after the next election. And, of course, the union link is a live topic, discussion of which is due to come to a head this March.

And that will be the subject of my next post in this series.



 *It's not really fair to Keynes to attribute to him the view that you could "just spend your way out of recession" but that's another post for a special type of geek.

Friday Video Corner

From a few years back. Stunning video.

Coming over here

Just a quick one, before I return to the urgent business of Christmas leftovers.

Today the UK's borders were opened to Bulgarian and Romanian workers. The prolonged scream from the sewer press was to be expected, and needs to be seen in the wider context of a culture of political discussion of immigration conditioned by the challenge from the Right to the Tories by UKIP. Alas, the Labour front bench is part of the problem, witness David Hanson's comments reported today.

The response to all this from the internet Left has been an interesting one. The line seems to be that there is nothing too much to worry about, since not many Romanians and Bulgarians will come to the UK anyway. This point can be made by ridicule,

Oh no, I can't even get to the shop, the pavements are stuffed full of Bulgarians.
— Mark Steel (@mrmarksteel) January 1, 2014

Or by fact-checking,

Perspective alert: More Brits like to work abroad than Bulgarians or Romanians, shows @D_Blanchflower http://t.co/cnqF0RLdgY
— Kevin Maguire (@Kevin_Maguire) December 30, 2013

This last tweet echoes a campaign by the Southwest TUC. Example:

I suppose my worry about all of this is that it seems to inhabit same framework of debate as the Right. If there were lots of Romanians and Bulgarian workers coming to Britain, there would be a problem.

For a long time a good few people have been saying that the Left needs to talk about immigration, and not leave the field wide open to racists, whether besuited or boneheaded. That is true. But I think it matters how we talk about immigration. I'm not convinced at the moment that we're all free from our opponents' assumptions.