Well, here we go

It would be an obvious lie to say that the timing of the general election announced today is good for Labour. That said, given that it has happened we need to fight.

And there is a lot to fight for. It has been a long time since such a clear choice has been put before the electorate. The Tories, hot on the heels of crushing attacks on the welfare state (including the barbaric extreme of forcing raped women to detail their attack in order to claim child benefit) and intent on using EU exit as an excuse to curb migration are hoping to take advantage of a poll lead, before economic downturn and internal divisions over Europe become visible. Labour meanwhile has a solid raft of policies which will make life better for millions of people. The recent pledge on free school meals for primary school children is especially welcome.

I'll say more by way of analysis in the coming days. For now, though, every socialist in Britain ought to commit themselves to helping get a Labour government elected. Get in touch with your local Labour Party or Momentum to see how you can do this.

Defending repetitive beats

This weekend 6Music have been celebrating twenty years of rave. I do not like rave music. It took me a couple of decades to admit this to myself. You see I was politicised by the Major government's Criminal Justice Act. I'd been brought up in a left-wing family, had the right kind of ideas about things and had read the Usborne Guide To Politics. But the first time I did anything political was in response to the then Criminal Justice Bill.

In part this was because my then girlfriend was a bit of a hippy and cared deeply about hunt sabbing and roads protests, both threatened by the Act. Eager to impress, I followed her to meetings and lapped up leaflets condemning governmental attacks on things I dimly understood. Quite apart from this youthful romance, however, my own indignation was fired by the news that the Bill would effectively ban rave parties. I had no idea what a rave party was, but they sounded fun, and I was not going to allow the Tories to stop them.

As it turns out, I feel about rave music much as I do about repeatedly banging my head against a block of concrete. Add this to the list of my contrarian views about the music of the period. Yet this really isn't that important. There are plenty of things that I don't like, from Coldplay through to those disappointing wrapped up chocolate biscuits you get in Christmas assortment packs; I don't think the state should ban them. Not even Coldplay.

So I'm proud of my inept teenage activism. The CJA was a nasty, repressive piece of legislation, targeting not only partygoers, but protesters and travellers. It strengthened police powers - the power of arbitrary stop and search, racist in effect and too often in motivation, and the power to retain intimate body samples. For all the campaign against it was a failure, it brought together a wide range of people - from the music industry to grassroots campaigns, environmentalists, travellers' rights groups, and the organised left. Those at the present time who talk about transforming Corbyn's Labour into a social movement could learn a lot from it.

A tale of two leadership contests

So the waiting is over; Angela Eagle has declared that she will stand for the Labour leadership. Unkind commentators might comment that if one of the problems with Corbyn is supposed to be his lack of charisma, viewing Angela Eagle as the solution is like pushing for Wayne Rooney to host Mastermind on the grounds that John Humphrys lacks intellectual gravitas.

This would be to misunderstand what is going on. Eagle is either a stalking horse or a sacrificial lamb - pick your favourite zoological metaphor. Her function is to instigate a contest. There is no thought amongst those who are presently cheerleading her that she will actually end up being the Labour leader. Instead, the plan is that some equally dull, but better known and supposedly member-friendly figure - Alan Johnson or Tom Watson - will be the benefactor from the coming bloodletting.

All of this is actually pretty boring. There is little to say about it that hasn't already been said. Eagle's statement makes it clear that she doesn't understand the Labour Party as extending beyond the bounds of the PLP. The same can be said about the widespread bluster about 'Party unity' from within the PLP. The present composition of the PLP is a boil that needs lancing for the Corbyn leadership to prosper; but this has always been the case.



More fascinating is the Tory leadership race. The party of Family and Order not only use women to bring about leadership contests, they are even open to having a woman as leader. Whatever one might say about the authoritarian Teresa May or the gibbering idiot Andrea Leadsom, they are undeniably both women.

This was enough to get Guardian columnists excited and have people chattering about 'feminism'. It is good, they argued, to have women in prominent positions. To be indifferent simply because one such position is that of being Tory leader is to be unflinchingly dogmatic, to prioritise other concerns over women's liberation. Similar sentiment lurks behind the insistence that Margaret Thatcher should be admired as a 'strong woman' or campaigns to get more women onto the boards of FTSE100 companies.

Admittedly, the feminist credentials of one of the candidates have taken a bit of a knock since it became clear that she believes having had sex with a man and having functional ovaries makes her better suited to being Prime Minister than her opponent. Yet there are more fundamental reasons to worry about the trend towards seeing examples of liberation amongst the ranks of the powerful. For one thing, it's not clear where the limits lie: would the election of Marine Le Pen as French President be a step forward in the war against sexism? But more fundamentally, whenever you hear that something is 'good for women', you should ask yourself which women?

It is perfectly true that the relative absence of women from the Tory benches and the boardrooms is a product of patriarchy. Tory MPs are disadvantaged because they are women: however that disadvantage expresses itself and is experienced in a way that reflects their typical class, racial, and religious backgrounds, and their prominent position in a right-wing political party. Compare their situation with that of a lone mother, going without food to feed her children on ever-reducing benefits. Would the ascendence of either May or Leadsom - both enthusiasts for austerity - be good news for her? What about a woman who gets paid less for doing the same work as her male colleagues? A black woman facing deportation? A Muslim woman victimised by anti-terror laws? Should a lesbian, bi, or transwoman rejoice at the election of either homophobe?

The power feminism that celebrates the Tory leadership contest allows basically reactionary political ideas to clothe themselves with a bit of post-60s diversity. In this respect it is analogous to campaigns for Muslim leaders or gay CEOs. It provides an easy option for those who want to feel the world is changing for the better without having to exert any energy to make it do so, as well as for those who fear that if the world actually did get better this might not be good news for their bad balance.

This should not be news to anyone vaguely on the left. If anything it is the kind of question which marks out the boundaries of the left. Most people, however, have no fixed politics of any kind. And there is a debate to be had with them about how best issues around gender, race, and sexuality are addressed. And here the argument has to be made and won that the only way to make progress in these areas in a way that actually makes life better for the bulk of the population - rather than holding out the largely illusory hope of 'making it' to a place amongst an elite - is as part of a movement that recognises the way these concerns intersect with class, and which organises and campaigns on the basis of all of them.

Which is why, of course, the battle for the institutions of the labour movement matters.

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.

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[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.


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*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).

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

This post follows up my previous one.

English Nationalism

If the austerity project is a relatively old inroad of reaction into popular consciousness, a newer one is a revived English nationalism. I spent polling day and the previous day in Thanet South. The broad left anti-UKIP campaign there did well, and it is fantastic that Farage didn't get elected. However, what Gerry Adams once said of the Provisional IRA applies to Farage's outfit: they haven't gone away you know. The UKIP phenomenon is real. Labour voters switched to UKIP there, elsewhere, and in particular in a number of northern seats, where the party is now in second place. The talk is now of UKIP's 2020  strategy, with the inroads made last night paying dividends in MPs at the next election.

It's entirely possible that UKIP won't exist in five years time. The British right is famously division-prone; the party has lost its leader, and its solitary MP is a loose cannon. Never the less, the UKIP phenomenon will certainly persist. Populist reaction, with a social base combining abandoned working class communities, the insecure middle-class, and elements of the bourgeoisie proper, is here to stay. Its ideological suture is the standard resentful premise that they are out to get what we have, or had. They want our money, our homes, our culture, our history. Underneath, on suspects, is the nagging fear also that they might being enjoying themselves more than we are.

The nature of them is flexible. They could be the European Union, migrants in general, Eastern Europeans, metropolitan liberals, hippies, benefit claimants, the Rothschilds, the Muslims, or the Scots. As is so often the way with ideology, whether or not they are, in fact, screwing us over is entirely independent of the ideological effectiveness of this pattern of thought. Metropolitan liberals are, as it happens, guilty as charged; Muslims, as it happens, are not. But that is not the point. The scapegoat provides a focus for political opposition, and thereby, like its biblical forebear, carries the sins that justice attributes to another - in this case, capital.

The Scots are the latest lucky targets; English nationalism is on the rise. The Scots, you see, want your money. The SNP, in particular, in a startlingly impolite move want political power. Will the subaltern never learn? UKIP both contributed and tapped in to a simmering English resentment, evident already during last autumn's election campaign. It was the Tories, however, that brought an English identity constructed against a Scottish threat into the mainstream. Indeed, as thought to prompt the political slow-learners who deny that anti-Scots racism exists, Boris Johnson warned of a coming Jockalypse.

The genie of English nationalism has been let out of the bottle. There's a lot of talk of 'English votes for English laws', a proposal which in current political context could only mean a shift rightwards south of Alnwick. There will, inevitably, be noise from Billy Bragg and other elements of the eclectic left about the need to resist the politics of English reaction with a 'progressive' English nationalism. This is premised on a basic misunderstanding of the ideological function of Englishness within the current politics of the UK. The nationalism of the dominant nation of a historic imperial power, currently defined in opposition to national autonomy movements within the same state, cannot be won for socialism by a bit of Morris Dancing. What is needed is a different politics altogether. At the time of writing that is nowhere to be seen.




Labour and the crisis of labourism

Which brings us belatedly to Labour. Labourism is dead in Scotland. It is at crisis point in England and Wales. Labour cannot rely on the votes of even a stable proportion of the working class, and that is only likely to get worse as generational profiles shift. Already the Blairite knives are out; journalists are being briefed that Labour lost because it pitched too left (a theory that, to put it mildly, has difficulty incorporating the data of Scotland), and that a move back to the centre-ground is the only way to restore Labour's electoral fortunes. The Labour left is institutionally weak, dispirited, and increasingly afflicted with cynicism. Intellectually, its Marxist elements are often hopelessly in thrall to a vulgar determinism, for which everything is to be explained by the 'low level of class struggle' (as though this were something independent of human agency) and which counsels riding out the tide, preserving 'the movement', by which is understood the Labour Party and the union link.

This last element is likely to come under attack in the wake of a near inevitable Blairite resurgence. Already the implementation of the Collins Report threatens the link. Meanwhile, the leader of Britain and Ireland's biggest union has openly supported Lutfur Rahman and threatened to form a new workers party in the event of the Labour loss that is now a reality. In any case, if the labour movement doesn't break with the party, it may be that the party breaks with the movement. The link has always been a target for the Blairite right.

Only a fool would take any delight in this. The Labour Party, for all its contradictory nature and in spite of the multiple betrayals of its leaders, is a substantial achievement of the British working class. If labourism were finally to die, even though the more excitable leftists will no doubt wax lyrical about 'great new opportunities', over a century of struggle would be laid to rest. Whether that happens, or whether another narrative plays out, the task that falls immediately to the left is the difficult one of at the same time resisting the assault of the Blairites within the party, whilst looking outwards to unions, the new community-based groups, and the extra-Labour left (the unpreparedness of Labour leftists to work with left groups outside the Party has been a serious brake on the British left). It has to become less white, less male, and less prone to mood swings between despair and pollyannaism.

I have to say, the current Labour left is not well equipped to carry this burden. But then we can never make history in circumstances of our own choosing.

Sunday Quicky - Answer this

A question for you. The London Borough of Barnet has one of the nastiest Tory Councils in the country, intent on privatisation and social cleansing. The Tories have just held it by the narrowest of margins*. Here are the results from the key Childs Hill ward:

Local election results 22 May 2014- Childs Hill

Name of candidate	Description (if any)	Number of votes recorded
AJAKAIYE Ade	Labour Party Candidate	1408
COHEN Jack Bernard	Liberal Democrat	1509 (elected)
DAVIES Jonathan Maurice	Liberal Democrat	1198
GROVER Rohit Roshyan	Conservative Party Candidate	1500
HENRY Charlotte Alexandra	Liberal Democrat	1222
MARASCO Francesco Edoardo	Green Party	501
PATEL Nila	Labour Party Candidate	1381
RYDE Shimon	Conservative Party Candidate	1544 (elected)
SMITH Andrew	Labour Party Candidate	1463
ZINKIN Peter	Conservative Party Candidate	1536 (elected)

You'll note that the difference between the highest Labour vote and the lowest Tory vote is easily less than the Green candidate's vote.

Now, tell me this - I'm particularly interested in the views of those leftists who advocated a Greeen vote - what was achieved by voting Green in this ward? Or indeed by the Greens standing at all?

This post is really just a forerunner of a more thorough discussion of why I think it is still right for socialists to vote Labour, and for that matter to be in Labour, but this kind of thing really annoys me.




*One seat. Voting in a safe Labour ward was delayed because of the death of a candidate.

Come and get hot sex, says schools minister

Some years back we suffered the mental indignity of being haunted by the image of David Mellor getting back to basics in a Chelsea Shirt. Now - and a do advise my more sensitive readers to look away now - we have Michael Gove uttering the words 'hot sex'.

Insert risque caption here

There's ample room for justified outrage at this city being marketed as an erotic playground for the rich at a time when average workers find it increasingly difficult to live here. And there's proper concern to be had about the education system being run by a man who seems more and more like a Harry Enfield character every day. 

Right now, however, I'm positively salivating at the thought of all the Youtube spoofs that will appear over the next few days.