Against the Single Market, for internationalism

So I advocated voting to leave the EU. In some left-wing circles this admission is rather like owning up to necrophilia, but for all that I stand by it. In particular I stand by my judgement that the Leave vote would have caused major upset in the Tory government, possibly bringing it down, were it not for the fact that the Parliamentary Labour Party decided to buy a reprieve for the Tories, deflecting attention from them by attacking the Corbyn leadership and forcing a second election.

Be that as it may, we're now on track for, what people insist on calling, Brexit. Much left-of-centre opinion is now advocating a 'soft Brexit'. This is often taken to involve ongoing membership of the Single Market and Customs Union. To this end the SNP have invited Corbyn to a 'summit' apparently intended to focus the fight for Single Market membership.

It is certain that some Labour members will be tempted to advocate Corbyn's taking up the invitation. They are wrong for at least two reasons.

First, the invitation is a trap, intended to put Corbyn in an impossible position, trapped between Leave and Remain supporters in his own electorate. The proper response to it is to say that Labour are the largest opposition party and don't need invitations from anyone.

Second, the Single Market is not a good thing. Leave aside discussions about free trade and protectionism. Built into the rules governing the Single Market are a barrage of neo-liberal measures which would tie the hands of a future radical Labour government. In particular they would prevent it from seriously reversing the privatisations of the past three decades (the lazy response here, that plenty of EU countries have nationalised railways (say) is beside the point - the issue is about returning railways to public ownership, outside of exceptional - East Coast -circumstances once they have been privatised, as they have in Britain). It is unconscianable that the Labour front bench would want to frustrate its own programme by lining up behind the Single Market.

So far, so good. And Corbyn agrees. But does this mean that Labour should simply line up behind the right-wing Brexiteers? So, and for a tediously left-wing reason, class. For whilst we - the great majority of people - have nothing to gain from the neo-liberal regime of the single market, large sections of British capital, including crucially the City of London, do. And whilst we shouldn't place too much faith in those mainstream economic forecasters who failed to predict the 2008 financial crisis, the 'experts' the British electorate were chided for ignoring at the referendum, we have to realise that disinvestment on a massive scale is likely to be the default result of the UK exiting the Single Market. The consequences of this for working class people would be catastrophic.

This means that the parliamentary left can't afford to be passive spectators in an EU exit process steered by the right. There needs to be an alternative programme, and it has to tackle questions of ownership and control, particularly in the financial sector. This, to my mind, is the only way a Labour government could secure a decent basis for a radical programme and protect the living standards of ordinary people in the next few years.

Nor ought Labour to buy into the lie, which I'm afraid has been encouraged by some on the front bench, that the Single Market and free movement stand or fall together. There is no reason that a UK outside of the Single Market couldn't open its borders to EU migrants and negotiate free movement for British citizens throughout the EU. The Labour Campaign for Free Movement is necessary.

There are weeks when decades happen

There's nothing like a popular vote to remind you where power lies in society; spoiler - not with popular votes. Thus, the hands of any British government wanting to operate within broadly mainstream economic constraints were today tied, not by the electorate, but by the ratings agency Standard and Poor, who cut the UK's credit rating. Expect others to follow. More generally, those most curious of creatures known as 'the markets' have not responded well to Thursday's Leave vote.

It would have been possible for a determined Leave campaign with a co-ordinated economic plan, prepared to stray beyond both mainstream constraints and the interests of capital, to manage a Leave vote in a way that didn't promise widespread poverty and public spending cuts whilst keeping the, uncertainty averse, forces of global credit capital and those irksome markets sufficiently content to spare it the coup de grace. However, that is not the Leave campaign we had: that was a monstrous concotion of xenophobes, British nationalists, economic reactionaries, and oddballs: an assembly of grotesque misfits wrapped in the Union Jack, who could only appeal to anyone on the basis of a widespread discontent, disaffection and desperation in search of an outlet. They had no plan, other than to 'Take Back Our Country' and 'Make Britain Great Again', all the while defending the sectional interests of a narrow part of British capital with no sense of a broader picture.

There is much still to say about the campaign, the EU, and the British economy. There is even more to say about what the referendum result shows about class. And there is still more to say yet about the petulant arrogance of much liberal reaction to the result. A strand of opinion in broadsheets, academia, and the Waitrose-shopping end of social media thinks that what last Thursday showed was that the swinish multitude should not be trusted with big decisions.

I will write about those things at some point. More urgent than any of them is the foul upsurge in open racism that has followed on the referendum campaign and result. Make no mistake, it wasn't that these things caused racism. Britain is, whatever the panglossians who inhabit Guardian columns might imagine, a racist society through and through. However, racism often lies buried - waiting nervous and Gollum-like in the shadows, consumed with self-hatred and unwilling to show its face. That it does is one of the greatest political achievements of recent decades. Yet, it's still there: hidden behind the remark that 'the area has changed', disguised as patriotism (if the two can ever be disentangled), implicit in a choice of friends. Once mainstream political discourse gets racialised, as it was by the immigration-focus of both main referendum campaigns, racists gain confidence. Things usually unsaid are spoken aloud. Combine this with the jingoistic upsurge that followed the result, the general flag-waving feel of Jubilee year, and most noxiously the ever-present threat of the far-right, and you have a toxic mix.

Jo Cox was its victim. There have been others. Since Thursday, racial abuse soared. Eastern Europeans were a particular focus: with cards reading 'go home Polish vermin' distributed outside a Cambridgeshire primary school. In West London, a Polish cultural centre was attacked. In East London two Polish men were beaten unconscious. The list of incidents goes on and horribly on:

But at least there's a political party in Britain, committed to equality and anti-racism, that will make the case strongly against racism, and build a cohesive movement in solidarity with its victims, right? Enter the Labour Party, glorious and ready to do battle against injustice and bigotry. Well, ordinary party members have been doing this. The PLP, however. Well, as the far-right roars and the economy falters, their priority is obviously to try to topple a popular leader who has increased Labour's share of the vote and presided over modest, but real, by-election successes.

The line is, of course, that Jeremy's weak leadership was responsible for the Leave vote. This is nonsense on several levels. Never mind the fact that Corbyn is not a weak leader - although this would not appear obvious to those whose idea of political leadership looks as though it has been cobbled together from a few evenings watching The Thick Of It - but that the bulk of the PLP don't want to be led by him, or by anyone with political ideas remotely similar to his. Never mind the fact that Corbyn was not in a position to persuade key Labour constituencies to vote Remain: one of Blairism's besetting sins is the reduction of politics to campaigns and soundbites, whereas all of those Leave votes in the north-east of England were about decades of feeling forgotten, being stripped of hope, crushed economically, and mocked culturally; not matters that can be set right with a broad grin. Never mind the fact that the only thing that would have been achieved by Corbyn going in all guns blazing on behalf of Remain would have been a Scotland-style meltdown in Labour support in parts of the north of England. None of this matters.

It is irrelevant because the coup is not actually about the referendum campaign or Corbyn's leadership style. It is about politics. A sizeable chuck of the PLP, Blairite clones imposed during the years when Labour had the imagination of Jeffrey Archer and the conscience of Dr Crippen, do not want a left-wing leader. You understand nothing about New Labour until you understand that it is about making the Labour Party permanently safe for capitalism. Most of its warriors, not being the most cerebral of souls, would be a bit hazy about what the word 'capitalism' means, preferring instead to wax lyrical about 'a dynamic, modern, economy'. For sure, New Labour is about winning elections, but not at any cost. Their lord and master Tony Blair let the cat out of the bag in this respect when he said that he would not take the 'route to victory' if it were a left-wing one.

In actual fact, the quisling tendancy in the PLP may not have to choose between power and principles. It is not inconceivable by any means that we will see some kind of National Government on a somehow-managing-to-Remain basis - composed of Tories, Lib Dems, and an SDPesque rump of Blairites - after an autumn election. Whether the split will come before or after this election will depend on the right's tactics, and whether they have the front to let unions and party activists pay in time and money for their election. (Incidentally: this scenario should be anticipated and pre-empted. Bold thinking about Scotland, up to and including the possibility of an electoral pact with the SNP in exchange for the promise of a second independence referendum, should be considered).

We cannot stop the right being right-wing. Nor can we make them loyal to the leadership: the strategy of a 'kinder, newer, politics' has been tried, in good faith, and has failed. The co-ordinated spotaneous resignations of shadow ministers throughout today put that beyond doubt. Now is the time to fight for the Labour Party. This, to be sure, should not be at the expense of defending communities against racism, nor at that of arguing for an alternative strategy on the economy. However, the remaining strangehold of the 1990s on Labour in parliament is a barrier to doing both these things. Words like 'accountability' and 'deselection' have now to be uttered openly. At constituency level the left has to plan so that the Labour Party in parliament in future looks more like the Labour Party at large.

The immediate priority is to support Jeremy. He is under attack, facing a vote of no confidence as I write. See Momentum here for a petition, and keep an eye out for more ways of offering support. These are desperate times within the Labour Party. Yet there is some hope. Here is Parliament Square this evening:

Corbyn and The Referendum Bind

Richard Seymour's book on the Corbyn phenomenon is well worth a read. Or at least, this is my judgement on the basis of having read two chapters earlier today. His take on the matter, which whilst being utterly supportive of the Labour leader is more pessimistic than is fashionable on the left , corresponds broadly to my own. 

That said, Richard brings out some genuine reasons for hope to which I think I've paid insufficient attention. The mere presence of Corbyn in the public sphere introduces left-wing ideas to a popular debate that has been dominated by neo-liberalism in recent decades. Meanwhile, his position as Labour leader and the related growth of groups like Momentum provides a context for a beleaguered British left to regroup and organise. We have more opportunities now, albeit ones we approach from a position of historic weakness, than we have had at any point in my adult life.

To state the obvious, this remaining the case depends to a large extent on Corbyn staying Labour leader. And there are people who have other ideas about that. From before his election as leader the knives have been out for him within the Parliamentary Labour Party and the structures and staff of the party. If the threat of a coup against his leadership seems less immediate after last month's election results (which, outside Scotland, were not too bad for Labour), this should be understood as a stay of execution, rather than a reprieve. Corbyn knows this; his parliamentary allies and advisors know this.

It is against this background that Corbyn's support for a Remain vote in this month's EU referendum should be understood. Let's be honest about this: he does not support the EU. Nor does John McDonnell. Nor does their most prominent media ally, Owen Jones, who is currently vocally advocating a remain vote. Jones has acknowledged the volte face: his line is that Labour must make the left case for a reformed EU and that the pro-Exit case will be dominated by anti-migrant racism. This does not wash: since last year, when he advocated exit, neither the prospects of a left reform of the EU (namely zero) nor the nature of the anti-EU forces in Britain have changed. Indeed, to the extent the left critics of the EU, like the Jones of Columns Past, have silenced themselves, they have gifted the pro-exit case to the nationalist right.

My point in saying this is not to accuse Corbyn and his circle of hypocrisy. They are in a genuine bind. Their support, lukewarm as it is, for Labour Remain is a calculated concession to the Right, much like their retreat on Britain's NATO membership. The hope is that by deferring to the post-Blair consensus on these issues they can broaden their coalition of support and secure their position. I do not share that hope.

The Labour leadership's advocacy of a Remain vote has been less than wholehearted. This matters because Labour voters could hold the future of Britain's EU membership in their hands and, if recent research is to be believed, hearly half of them are unaware of the Party's official position. Pressure is being put on Corbyn to be more vocal in his support for the Remain cause.

Whichever way the poll now goes, it will be used against Corbyn. If Britain leaves the EU, he will be blamed, and the indignation of the overwhelmingly pro-EU PLP stoked. On the other hand if, as is most likely, the vote is to stay this will be in spite of Corbyn. The Right will point to the example of the charismatic new mayor of London who, unlike John McDonnell (whose attitude on this will no doubt be that of a 'sectarian dinosaur'), was prepared to share a platform with the Prime Minister in defence of the national interest. He looks, they will say, like a leader in waiting.

Corbyn is in a double bind, and there is nothing he can do at this late stage. He will discover that he will never be able to concede enough to satiate his opponents in the PLP. But nor is he in any position to take them on directly; he lacks sufficient parliamentary support. If there is to be a future for this leadership, the task of fighting his corner rests with party activists and our ability to build a coalition of support for the leadership outside of parliament whilst exerting pressure on MPs.

Why I'll vote for British exit (but don't care very much)

...not, you will note, Brexit. The sullying of our political discourse with this silly coinage manages to annoy me more than pretty much anything else around the sorry excuse for politics that is the current EU debate.

Anyway.

The force for non-chauvinistic internationalism that is the red-white-and-blue clad Britain Stronger In Europe Campaign are putting about the claim that Britain leaving the EU would cause problems for the NHS. Here they are doing precisely that.

They have two reasons for saying this. The first can be dismissed swiftly:

A series of experts have predicted our economy would fall into ‘recession’ if we left the EU, meaning cuts to public services like the NHS.

Now, far be it from me to disagree with un-named 'experts' about the possibility of a post-exit recession (after all, there is going to be a recession sooner or later, quite apart from Britain's relationship to the EU). But it simply does not follow that this would mean cuts to the NHS. That would be a political decision. This is basically what those of us who have opposed cuts made in the wake of the 2008-9 crisis have being saying about those.

Their other claim is straightforwardly true:

And Vote Leave, the campaign for Britain to leave Europe, is run by people with a history of campaigning against the NHS. 

They have campaigned for:

• cuts to NHS spending and ending the NHS ring-fence

• cuts to NHS staff pay

• an increase in prescription charges

• allowing NHS trusts to fail

• increased NHS privatisation

Vote Leave is, there is no doubt about the matter, run by a shower of bastards. The only problem with this otherwise watertight strategy for getting the socially conscious to vote In is that exactly the same can be said for Britain Stronger In Europe. Although the list of members of their board is not displayed on BSE's website, it includes such luminaries as Peter Mandelson, Danny Alexander, and Damian Green. These are people who in various ways have contributed towards the privatisation and cutting of the NHS. The token non-bastard, Caroline Lucas, is not in a position to have much influence. In this respect she epitomises the position of the left more generally in the referendum debate.

As this might suggest, the referendum campaign is being conducted from the right by both sides. As far as I'm aware, nobody is actually running on a 'Our Position on the EU Makes It Easier to Clobber the Health Service' ticket. But both sides are certainly making the case that they are better placed to be tough on immigration and are advocating what is 'best for business'. With the Labour leadership half-heartedly falling behind a Labour In campaign headed up by Alan Johnson, again prioritising business as well as 'security', the prospects of any left voice being heard effectively during the next few months are precisely nil. Not, of course, that the perpetually over-optimistic British left will believe this in any numbers.

Now, I don't care terribly about all of this. Or rather, I don't care very much whether Britain stays in the EU. I care deeply that this debate is pitching politics to the right, and distracting attention from far more important issues. In actual fact I think that the impact of EU exit would be pretty minimal. The debate is basically a family row on the part of British capital, being conducted through the medium of politics. Those sections of capital whose markets are predominantly within the EU want to remain, others take a different view. And, as we saw with the Scottish referendum, the moment there is the tiniest threat that corporate profits might be under threat, out comes the hyperbole, out comes Project Fear. On the other hand, I don't think exit would pave the way for a British road to socialism, as the Stalinism re-enactment societies heading up the 'left' pro-exit case seem to think. Capitalism is a global system, and needs ultimately to be fought at a global level.

A footnote at this point. The most persuasive 'left' argument on the In side might seem to be based on the impact of the Social Chapter and similar instruments. So, Labour In For Britain, have this to say:

British workers benefit from EU agreements on workers’ rights, including the right to holiday pay, paid maternity and paternity leave, anti-discrimination laws, equal pay and protection for agency workers.

There is a seductive, but damaging, picture of the history of workers' rights at play here. These were not handed down from on high through the generosity of commissioners. They were fought for by workers themselves, organised into unions, in Europe and elsewhere. "No saviours from on high deliver".The struggles of unionised workers established norms for treatment in the workplace and in statute, which could not be transgressed without industrial strife. When standardised minimal conditions across the then EEC began to be discussed, these being needed for the smooth functioning of a single market, those norms had to be incorporated. They were, none the less, won from the bottom up, not the top down. In the presence of strong unions in Europe, the guarantees provided by the EU are irrelevant. In the absence of strong unions, those guarantees will be eroded in coming years.

Now, last year I blogged arguing for an abstention in this year's vote. Read it here. I agree with my reasoning in that post, but I now find myself disagreeing with my conclusion. I will, with little enthusiasm, and more that a little ennui, vote Leave. My reasons are two. First, far too much hope has been invested in the EU: from soft-leftists worshipping before the Social Chapter, to irritating liberals thinking they are a bulwark of cosmopolitan intelligence against their brutish inferiors (who all, you understand, hate foreigners). Illusions need to be laid bare, so that a better politics can thrive. Secondly, exit would precipitate a crisis in the Tory party, and that is no bad thing.

At the end of the day, however, all of this matters a lot less than people seem to think. So please don't spend hours agonising over how to cast your vote. If you want to do something useful, spend that time thinking about how you can support the junior doctors when they strike next month, and about how you're going to get to the Peoples' Assembly demonstration against austerity on 16th April.

A crisis of the Euro project

Continuing my thoughts from earlier. First up, here's Costas Lapavitsas on the Varoufakis resignation and much else besides:



He clearly sees no prospect of a satisfactory outcome within the Euro. This seems right. It's worth reflecting on the extent to which what Greece is facing is the product of a crisis of the Eurozone as a monetary framework.

The Euro was always a tall order. Orthodox economic theory speaks of optimal currency areas (OCAs): these being regions within which a single currency would be a good idea. OCAs possess a number of features, none of which are obviously features of the Eurozone. A striking example is labour mobility. Here's how it's supposed to do. Suppose there is, as is the way with capitalist economies, a crisis. Suppose, moreover that this impacts disproportionately or exclusively on one member state economy (we have, as the terminology has it, an asymmetric shock). Unemployment increases within this economy. Unemployed workers from this country then, on the assumption of labour mobility, move to higher performing countries within the OCA, reducing the unemployment and preventing wages from soaring in their new homes. This, along with price and wage adjustments, smoothes out the shock and we all live happily ever after.

The assumption that prices and wages will 'adjust' is, as New Keynesians will not be slow to point out, far from unproblematic. But compared to the assumption that labour is mobile within an currency area like the Eurozone, that is nothing. Think about it: the Eurozone covers a large area and is divided by language and culture. I cannot easily look for work as a teacher in Germany if I only speak Portugese. Nor can I, if I am a lawyer trained in France, go and work in the distinct legal system of Italy. This is before we consider such barriers to labour mobility as attachment to loved ones, friends, communities, and the like, not to mention the human desire for stability of life.

So what happens when these adjusting mechanisms - labour mobility and price/ wage flexibility don't kick in after an asymmetric shock? The government of the state subject to the shock increases spending, as it has to fund unemployment benefits and the like to a greater extent, plus maintain its normal spending on the basis of diminished tax receipts. It borrows. The scene is set for a debt crisis - higher interest rates are needed to attract funding for increasingly risky debt (owed by a government in a currency over which it has no ultimate control), this reduces demand further in the beleagured economy. Meanwhile there's a liquidity flow from the down-at-heel economy to more prosperous countries within the zone, further magnifying the disparities within it.

Now, some of this is true of single currency zones with which we're more familiar, such as the UK economy. An economic event - say, one affecting a particular industry - might have a disproportionate impact in a certain region - say, the north-east of England. Workers in the north-east might, quite reasonably, not feel minded to set up their stall in Surrey in response to increased unemployment in Newcastle. Nor might prices and wages adjust. In this case, however, central government spending can act to cushion the shock - transferring, to some extent redistributing, funds within the UK. In particular, the north-east of England does not accumulate a public spending deficit (although, we should note in passing, the story as regards private debt in the region might be quite different) - the cost is born by the UK state as a unit. And there's the difference with the Eurozone: there is no fiscal union, no pan-Eurozone tax and spend mechanism remotely equivalent to that possessed by states like the UK. In this sense the Eurozone is an incomplete monetary union.

In other words, the Eurozone is structurally set up for something like the Greek debt crisis to occur. The bail out of banks in response to the 2008 crisis was the tipping point and the rest, as they say, is history.

The temptation here is to conclude that the Eurozone is bad for some national economies (like Greece) and good for others (like Germany). It is here that the Marxist tradition in economic thinking sounds a note of caution. Behind the front of the national economy, lurk a horde of competing interests. In particular, European capitalism and nation-state capitalisms are divided on the basis of class. Talk about what is good or bad for 'the economy' ignores that what is good for some classes, or groups within classes, may be bad for others. Hence, incidentally, the banality of the slogan 'austerity isn't working' - it's working fine for some people. This matters, in the present context because it goes some way towards explaining what might otherwise seem inexplicable: how so many interests in Greece were keen to secure a 'Yes' vote given that austerity policies by any reasonable indicator - employment, output, wages, even profits - are not helping 'the economy'. If the alternative is a threat to the rights of property, of the capitalist class' medium-term ability to pursue profit without interference, then  it is in the interests of that class to see austerity pursued. Class power trumps even the bottom line.

Class interest also explains some of the persistence in Greece of Europeanism, attachment to the EU and, in particular, the Euro. It is straightforwardly in the interests of a significant section of the capitalist class, represented in the media and other opinion-forming institutions, to support structures that support policies favourable to it and minimise the costs of transactions within key markets.

But it is not simply the Greek capitalist class or its representatives in the political centre-right who buy into Europeanism. The left, including the Syriza leadership, share that commitment. Here, however, the commitment is to Europeanism as a political project. Europe as imagined on the left is a respository of the humane desire for peace on a continent ravaged by two world wars. It is an internationalist project, Greece's membership in which signifies its having put behind it the years of the colonels and having irreversibly made the transition to democracy. Those British leftists who grapple with the difference in attitudes towards the EU in states with thriving new lefts (Syriza, Podemos) - generally pro-EU - and the UK itself, where the left has traditionally been hostile to EU membership, forget the very different histories of the countries. The dictatorships that blighted southern Europe produced by way of reaction a favourable view of the European project.

There is Europe, the economic project. And Europe, the political idea. In Greece the tension between the two is nearing breaking point.

The clock ticks steadily towards midnight

However necessary it is to adopt a sober realism towards the immediate prospects in Greece, yesterday's resounding 'No' vote was an example to the rest of Europe. Uncowed by relentless pressure from creditors and the mainstream media, Greece's electorate sent a clear message that they reject austerity. Whatever happens next, they deserve our admiration and solidarity.

Since the result was declared last night, events have moved at sometimes breathtaking pace (see the Guardian liveblog here for updates.) Yanis Varoufakis resigned, giving as his reason that some Eurogroup participants would prefer his absence from talks. This was not before making his feelings known about the No vote - he wrote of the Troika having been confined to its lair. He has been replaced by Euclid Tsakalotos, not obviously more well disposed towards an austerity-based 'rescue' for the Greek economy than was Varoufakis. Meanwhile, Greek banks remain closed and capital controls in force. There appear to be splits amongst the Eurozone leadership, with Merkel opposed to compromise with the Syriza government, and others better disposed. The ECB, as all this goes on, has increased the haircut required of Greek banks (that is, the difference between the amount loaned to Greek banks and the price of the assets required as collateral for these loans, expressed as a percentage of the collateral price: for example, if I lend you £90 but require a £100 IOU as collateral, then I have imposed a 10% haircut) - a sign that Greece is considered an increasingly risky prospect. One thing is certain: things cannot continue without resolution of some sort for much longer. If nothing else, these are interesting times.

Good commentary, from various left-wing perspectives, includes Michael Roberts here, Alex Douglas here, and the inimitable Paul Mason here.

I'll stop there for the time being. Later on I'll say something about how what is playing out in Greece is a crisis of the Eurozone as an experiment in monetary union, complicated by the political ideology of Europeanism.

Not to choose is to choose

...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).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First thoughts on the great rush to UKIP

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

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

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

What to say about this? A few quick things.

UKIP : Racist Eurosceptic Tories

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

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

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

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

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

UKIP voters : neither racists nor stupid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Disillusion versus smug liberalism

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

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

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

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

Neither London nor Brussels

Since Margaret Thatcher shuffled off to the great free market in the sky it seems a credible guess that Nick Clegg is the least popular politician in Britain. Therefore, to state what should be blindingly obvious, there is no achievement in winning a public debate against him. In the face of all the 'UKIP comes of age' hype to which we've been subjected since Clegg and Farage locked horns on Wednesday, it needs to be stressed that the public considering that you've won against Clegg in debate is only a victory in the fashion that being voted a better GP than Harold Shipman would be.

On UKIP I have nothing really to say. The best analysis I have seen came last year from Lenin, and I refer the inquisitive reader to him. I think Miliband is pretty stupid to call for him to be excluded from leaders' debates. These debates are a depressing marker of a descent into presidential politics, so I really shouldn't care too much about what happens at them, but there we are.

What I do care about is the lack of any serious Left voice over the EU. What we witnessed the other evening was an internal row within British Capital. To over-simplify a little, Clegg (and 'progressive' opinion more generally, including the Labour front-bench) speaks for an alliance between those elements of the bourgeoisie proper whose profit depends on access to European market, Farage for more Atlantic-orientated Capital and those parts of the petty bourgeoisie who can't be tempted into the Brussels club by Guardianista noises about the bright new international peaceable future.

The section of the population who don't find representation in this otherwise admirably inclusive dichotomy are the vast majority - those dependent on wages to survive. Confusion abounds in this area, it is not unusual to hear people claiming the Social Charter (the role of which as a kind of insurance policy for competing national Capitals deserves more analysis anyway) as a great victory for workers handed them by the EU, in spite of it having nothing to do with that institution, instead being a treaty of the distinct Council of Europe. Less obviously inaccurate advocacy of the EU as good for workers has a more delusional character. Billy Hayes here seems to think that neoliberal policy is accidental to the developed EU, as though sufficient will-power on the part of social democratic parties could bring about some kind of continent-wide analogue of the post-war consensus. He's not the first person to suggest this, the only problem being that the institutions he envisages being claimed for Beveridge and Keynes were set up precisely to drive a stake through the heart of those thinkers.

A Left voice on the EU is lacking. We have to start saying loudly, more clearly, and less nationalistically (*cough* No2EU), that neither Clegg nor Farage have anything to offer the workers of Europe. The EU as a project serves to sustain profit, not the workers who produce those profits. Even moderate ameliorative measures are ruled out of court by EU legislation - in particular, any government seeking to reverse privatisation would find itself severely constrained. The Eurozone crises following the crash of 2007-8, with austerity imposed centrally on the poorer periphery of the Union, give a taste of the direction in which further integration on the EU model leads. Workers nowhere in Europe have a long-term material interest in the EU, nor in any country's continued membership of it.

A socialist and internationalist alternative is needed - that much is just a trite slogan, but true in spite of that. At no time since the 1975 referendum has advocacy of any such alternative been weaker in Britain. Given that the EU as an issue is likely to dominate increasingly in coming years, this should concern us.

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.