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.
(This is part of the Introduction to Marxism series. See here.)
The most important reason that I think the contemporary left could do with more input from Marxism is that the contemporary left doesn't have nearly enough to say about class, whereas Marxism makes class central. Upon hearing this kind of statement people often worry, "What do you mean class is central? Are you saying that gender, race, and sexuality - for example - are any less important?" But that's to misunderstand what's meant by the centrality of class: it isn't that class matters more than gender, race, and so on. And it certainly isn't that class exploitation involves more suffering than sexual or racial oppression, as though some computer programmer in Woking had a better claim to be numbered amongst the wretched of the earth than a Saudi woman. No, the Marxist claim is that understanding class has a certain priority with respect to understanding over non-class oppressions; you understand a society in a particularly intimate way if you understand its class relations. This is important, of course, if you want to change society, and so class exploitation ought to be of interest not least if you want to fight sexism, racism, or homophobia.
The reason Marx thinks this was touched upon in the first post of this series, historical materialism: the way we reproduce ourselves as a species, that is, the way we produce the things we need, constrains the way we can organise society. And class quite simply is the general way we organise production socially, the way a society contains different groups who in different ways own or control the means to produce the things we need. From this it ought to be clear that class, for Marx, is not a matter of accent, or of what kind of sauce you put on your chips, or even of how much money you have. The question is simply: do you own the means to produce things for human need (beyond your own domestic needs)?
Before capitalism and in the early days of capitalism the answer to this question might well have required a little thought: perhaps you might have your own small-holding, but also work the local baron's land, or perhaps you might do piece-work for a local industrialist in your cottage. Under developed capitalism, however, things are much simpler: the vast majority of the population do not own factories, companies, sufficient shares or other accumulated wealth to be able to survive without working (or receiving state benefits in countries where these exist). Nor do they own land, or significant amounts of tools or resources. These people, most of us, the proletariat in Marx's language, must sell our capacity to work to others in order to survive. The bourgeoisie, meanwhile, own the means of production and lay claim to the profits made in their factories, farms, call centres, and computing labs.
Here's the rub: those profits, to which the bourgeoisie lays claim, result from the labour of the proletariat. Capitalism in other words is an exploitative system; to be a proletarian is to be exploited. Now, I have no intention of going into the details of Marx's theory of value and exploitation, mainly because this is an introduction, but also because it is laid out clearly in the first volume of Capital and explained well by David Harvey's free on-line course. Basically, though, the idea is that value is produced by human labour and that profits are surplus value, the value produced by labourers minus the value returned to them in the form of wages (which will need to be enough in the long-run to allow the workers to survive) and that required to keep firms ticking over in terms of plant, machinery, and so on (all of this being produced by another group of workers, working for another capitalist).
This has a number of consequences. Three seem to me particularly important for the current left:
Economic theory. Marx's account of exploitation is the cornerstone of his economic theory. A systematic grasp of economics is not a strong point on the left, and that is a failure of ours. Yet we have our own tradition of economic thought, and we should get better acquainted with it. Michael Roberts' blog is a good place to start. Immiseration. It needn't be the case that workers are poor, and many are clearly not. There are all sorts of reasons for this. The exploitative nature of capitalist work, however, builds a tendency to make workers as poor as is compatible with them still working into the nature of production. The reason for this is quite simple: value that goes to workers as wages does not go to bosses as profit. Marx's theory allows us to link our proper outrage at sweatshops and zero-hours contracts to the functioning of the system.
Conflict. The fact that value that goes as wages can't go as profits and vice versa means that conflict is built into the capitalism system itself. My interests contradict my bosses' interests, and that is built into the way things are. Class struggle is not something dreamed up by hot-heads or preached by demagogues, it happens in every supermarket, workshop, and college every day of the year. Marxism is not about arguing for class war, it is about recognising that class war is already with us. Once we have done that, the next thing to recognise is that the only way to abolish class war is to win it, to do away with capitalism and with class-based society. I'll say more about how Marx thought that was possible in a later post.
There's a lot more that could and should be said about class and exploitation: what about the sizeable number of public sector workers in contemporary capitalist economies, where do they fit in? What about those members of the working class who are unemployed or undocumented? What about work done illegally? As I said above, though, this is supposed to be an introduction. With that in mind, one further comment - I suggested in the first post that Marx was a therapeutic thinker, whose work is best read as attacking illusions in our self-understanding which prevent us from being politically active or effective on behalf of the working class. One particularly pernicious illusion tells us that our employers provide us with work, that they are somehow doing us a favour by employing us, and that we should be grateful to them (politicians often talk of 'job creators'). Marx turns the picture upside down and the right way up, so that we can see clearly what is the case: it is not us who need the bourgeoisie, they need us. We could produce what the species need without people exploiting our labour for profit. The bourgeoisie could not profit without exploiting us.
If Marx by his writing has stopped one person being grateful to her boss, then his work was worthwhile.
It is easier to say what Marxism is not than what it is. It isn't a quasi-religious worldview, promising guidance for every aspect of its adherents' lives. On the contrary, to the extent that Marxism makes demands on those who follow it, it does so as an emergency measure, in the hope that its demands will one day be no longer necessary (there will be no Marxist politics in a society without exploitation). Marxists can and do disagree on matters of philosophy, religion, art, and much else besides: nothing recognisably in the spirit of Karl Marx claims to have all the answers. Nor, and this will upset some Marxism's more enthusiastic proponents, is Marxism a science in anything like the modern English sense. Whilst Marxism advocates attention to empirical detail, in politics for example and economics, the claims of Marxism itself have the character not of empirically testable scientific propositions but rather of philosophical reminders, drawing our attention to aspects of human life in the world which should be obvious, but for the effects of ideology.
To borrow language from another great and currently unfashionable philosopher, Wittgenstein, Marxism is a therapy, a way of thinking which helps us to get ourselves untangled from the illusions sown in capitalist society. It is not simply a therapy, of course: Marx wants us to get our ideas right in order that we transform the world and abolish the social relations which give rise to illusions in the first place. In fact, we won't even get our ideas right in the first place unless we're engaged in transforming the world. Thought, Marx reminds us in his Theses on Feuerbach, is a practical affair.
As I see it, Marx's philosophical reminders as they lie scattered throughout his work (which, unlike some, I see as a unity) fall mainly within three areas:
An Account of the Human Person: Human beings are social, rational animals, who find fulfillment through collectively working in a creative fashion. On this basis Marx opposes individualistic accounts of human beings and accounts for which we are basically mental or spiritual beings, without sufficient attention to our material nature. Practically, he opposes capitalism which he believes prevents us from fulfilling our natures (a type of what he calls 'alienation').
Historical Materialism: Because of what human beings are, there are significant material constraints on human activity. In particular, human beings need to be able to reproduce themselves as animals as a precondition for cultural, political, and other economic life. I cannot write Wuthering Heights, or even Donald Trump's Twitter account on an empty stomach, and keeping my stomach full typically requires the efforts of dozens of my fellow human beings. On this basis Marx thinks that understanding the ways in which human beings produce goods, and the social relations which characterise that production, are fundamental to both understanding and transforming human societies.
The Critique of Political Economy: Economics cannot explain its own foundations in its own terms, Once we enquire into these we see that the labouring human being, to which our attention is drawn by Marx's account of the human person, is the source of value under capitalism, which is intrinsically exploitative. Marx's account of capitalism shows it to require human alienation for its ongoing existence, which provides an excellent reason to overthrow it. At the same time the account permits a deeper understanding of the economics of capitalism, and in particular of the crisis-prone nature of the system.
I'll say more about these in the weeks that follow.
The mere fact that something is a truism does not imply that it is true. One example is "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger", a thesis it would be interesting to test out on Polio victims. Another is "the pen is mightier than the sword". I'm not actually aware of any historical instance of a writer taking on a fencing master armed only with a Parker fountain pen, but if this did happen, I suspect it did not end well.
The point is, of course, supposed to be about the power of ideas, and to that extent there is a certain truth in it, which is a comfort to those of us who are far more comfortable inserting semi-colons into sentences than we would be thrusting rapiers into a foe. Amongst this legion of geeks I count myself. Still the kind of ideas with which I am concerned here, political ideas, are powerless in the absence of a political movement, and are only formed reliably in close critical relationship with such a movement. This is, understandably in the wake of the SWP rape crisis, the kind of talk which evokes nervousness on much of the left; yet it is often the most vital maxims that require the most careful handling. Whatever is meant by 'a movement', it has to be more than the whims of some central committee. But that is a matter for another day. When ideas come apart from a movement which they can inspire, and which can test them in the crucible of daily life, then they become lifeless things, phantoms and illusions.
Which brings me to Owen Jones. I am, I should say, angry about his intervention in the Labour leadership contest. The Labour left which gave rise to Jeremy Corbyn, and which is currently being tried in his person, also provided Owen with a hand up to his career as a commentator. I remember well him cutting his teeth in the pages of Labour Briefing and his early political days as a co-chair of the LRC's youth wing. He was born of the movement to which he has delivered a timed slap in the face. It is sometimes said that the Left speaks too easily of betrayal, and there may be something to this. Yet a sensitivity to treachery is the flip-side of valuing comradeship. If you are prepared to show solidarity with me, I should be similarly prepared to take you into account in making my own decisions. This might be uncomfortable talk for those for whom individual freedom, or career, or whatever else is the highest conceivable good. Others of us think that the freedom to shout lonely in the desert is no freedom worth having.
In what does the betrayal consist here? A political writer who views their writing as an intervention, as opposed to, say, a means to a better CV has to consider not only what they want to say but whether this is the right time to say it. There is much that could be said and asked about Corbyn and the movement around him; I have myself been far from uncritical. The time for articulating that is not, however, when the man is seeking re-election as leader of the Labour Party in the wake of a concerted attempt to wrestle the Party back into the hands of the Blairite cabal. There is a question we should ask ourselves before we ask questions of others. That is the question implicit in every picket line, "which side are you on?"; and the answer we give to that provides the context for our subsequent questioning.
Owen has chosen to lay bare his soul on the internet; that is his decision. I have nothing to say about it. Of more interest are the nine questions he asks at the end of his piece - without, one notes, offering much in the way of answers. Marx said that each age asks only the questions which it can answer. He might have added that the way those questions are understood, and for that matter framed, constrains the answers that are considered admissible. Nowhere is Jones' descent into a bland safe parliamentariansim more apparent than here, the sense he gives of what an acceptable answer to each of his questions would look like. I do not consider myself similarly bound by the norms of Westminster nicety, and for what it's worth I think that the primary reason the inhabitants of Westminster's famed bubble (amongst whom Owen must now be numbered) are disturbed by the member for Islington North is that he has refused to play the game of Westminster politics as normal. For all that, Corbyn is still a reformist, and some kind of answer to Owen's questions is probably needed, given that they have now been asked.
Here, off the top of my head, is a first attempt.
1. How can the disastrous polling be turned around? Well, a few of us have been expressing concern about the polls for a good while. There's a lot that I would want to say about the need for forming a movement that works at community level to form 'public opinion', rather than receive it as a passive given. It is the model of politics as an exercise in customer relations, rather than social transformation that needs to be challenged above all else by any Left movement that takes contesting elections seriously. The point is not that we should not want to win elections, but that we need a new approach to how we win elections.
All of this said, Labour's polling really warrants the term 'disastrous' during the period since the EU referendum and the beginning of the relentless attacks on Corbyn from within the PLP. Outlandish though this idea might seem, perhaps Labour might do somewhat better in the polls if those attacks were to stop.
2. Where is the clear vision? I don't really understand the question. There is a reading of "clear vision" on which the phrase is as oxymoronic as "thoughtful Sun journalist". Vision is the stuff of motivating principles, big ideas, and utopian imagining. Vision is not meant to be clear in the sense that Owen seems to demand. The parable of the Good Samaritan presents a vision of how human beings might live, but it wouldn't necessarily be much use on the doorstep. It would certainly be a brave minister who gave it to a civil servant as indicative of the government's intentions. I think anyone who believes that Jeremy lacks vision in this sense hasn't been listening to him. Much of the British population has a good excuse for this, since much of what Jeremy has said hasn't been reported. If only there was, for example, a left-wing writer with a regular column in a national paper who could help on this front.
Perhaps, though Owen is concerned with policy rather than vision. Some of these have been forthcoming: think about John McDonnell's announcements on matters macroeconomic, providing a clear alternative to the Conservative programme. But there have been relatively few detailed policies, this is true. Is this a bad thing? It depends whether you are happy with what one might call the Thick of It model of policymaking: policies arising ex nihilo from the heads of special advisors and the cars of front bench politicians en route to press conferences. Once upon a time the Left argued that policy should emerge from the labour movement, through its democratic structures. If this is right then it is a good thing that there hasn't currently been much policymaking in Owen's required sense. Here we see the double bind in which Corbyn is being placed: if he doesn't do politics as usual, he is criticised; if he does do politics as usual, what is the point in Corbyn?
3. How are the policies significantly different from the last general election? See answer to previous question. Jones does accidentally touch on the interesting area of economics. Here McDonnell is quite right not concede to pseudo-Keynesian nonsense about the deficit. Yet in the background lurks a more troubling issue: capitalism can no longer afford social democracy. It's not simply a question of "the money being there", as the familiar leftist refrain has it, but rather of whether capital views the money being used for [insert favoured social spending here] is consistent with the reproduction of capital. This was the case during the long (and exceptional) post-war boom; this is in general no longer so. That doesn't mean nothing can be done - here again, I have not been uncritical. McDonnell is not, that criticism aside, not without good ideas - to with redistribution, investment, and productivity. Far more importantly, Corbyn's Labour is committed to setting working people free to fight for themselves, to do what the state can increasingly no longer do. The repeal of the Thatcher era trade union legislation is far, far, more important than anything a Shadow Chancellor can do.
4. What is the media strategy? Once again, the assumption of politics as usual pervades the question. "Most people", that most useful of demographic categories for a columnist with an axe to grind, don't get their news from social media. They get it from the mainstream print and broadcast media. This is probably right. It does not follow that it is written into the grain of the universe that this is so. What if people had more opportunity to talk about politics through the presence in their communities and workplaces of a real mass movement?
At this point, I feel slightly as though I'm lapsing into John Lennon territory: you may say that I'm a dreamer. So let's allow that what is said in the mainstream media matters. As indeed it does; hence all those books by 80s Marxist sociologists on the press. It is a difficult question what a socialist electoral movement might do to get the best media coverage. Even putting it this way, though, assumes that the traffic between media and politics is one way. The media follow as well as lead; the Scottish Sun at crucial points cannot get away with carrying the same line as its southern cousin - witness the vastly differing attitudes towards the SNP and independence in recent years. Newspapers need to sell in order to survive, and political consciousness determines what they can say and still sell. Allowing even that, there's still some kind of question: how might we get nice things said about Jeremy in the papers? Again I can only express my wish that there was a reasonably well-known left-wing journalist about who could help in this respect.
5. What's the strategy for winning over the over-44s? Well, as the man himself says, pensioner poverty and social care are important issues. And I simply do not believe that the interview Owen describes is the first he has heard from Corbyn on these questions.
6. What's the strategy to win over Scotland? Labour needs a really big rethink on Scotland and the national question. With this proviso, it would be pretty easy to make the ad hominum point that the people who presided over Scotland's reduction to a solitary Labour MP, namely the Labour right are not likely to be the best people to win it back for the party of Keir Hardie. However, it's not clear that Labour needs to win over Scotland. It held a majority in England in 2005.
7. What's the strategy to win over Conservative voters? Liberals can be useful in spite of themselves because, much like stopped clocks, they sometimes tell the truth accidentally. Thus Bill Clinton, "it's the economy stupid". There is good evidence that a good number of swing voters opted for the Tories because they didn't trust Labour on the economy. An economic strategy of the sort McDonnell has in fact crafted is a good start here. The task now is to communicate it, a task from which this leadership contest is an unhelpful distraction.
8. How would we deal with concerns about immigration? It's not because of immigrants that you can't get a hospital bed, a job, a council house... Talk about immigration, but talk about it precisely in terms of its function to deflect attention from the Tories' attacks. To say this is to treat the electorate as agents, who can be engaged politically, rather than as passive consumers to whose "concerns" we need to appeal. I'm terribly sorry, I should say in passing, that Jones' dire liberal baby, the Immigration Dividend, went nowhere, but them's the brakes.
9. How can Labour's mass membership be mobilised? This is the crucial question. I'm not really sure that it's a question for Jeremy Corbyn, though. It's a question for all of us. Over to you, Owen.
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:
So, after a little hesitation, Labour voted against the fiscal charter. Well, when I say 'Labour', I mean 'all but twenty Labour MPs'. And those who heroically abstained did so, not because they thought the fiscal charter - committing British governments to obtain a a budget surplus by 2019 and maintain it subsequently unless GDP growth falls below 1% - is a good idea, but in order to have a pop at McDonnell and Corbyn.
It is, after all, manifestly obvious that the charter is not a good idea. In order to recognise this, you don't need to be a signed up adherent of any specific school of economic thought . In particular, you don't need to buy into the 'Keynesianism' attributed to McDonnell by some of his leftist critics, a doctrine whose relationship to anything Keynes actually said is decidedly minimal. No, to take this view, you just need to think that it's sometimes handy for governments to be able to borrow outside the terms dictated by the charter. You could think this for any number of reasons: deep or shallow, right or left. Thus, for example, the wide-eyed Trotskyists at The Economist. Or, for that matter, some character called George Osborne. To be honest, you don't even need this level of justification for rejecting the charter: the simple empirical observation that governments have borrowed far more freely than the charter allows without the sky caving in ought to suffice.
Now, George Osborne knows all of this. He does not, for one moment, think it is either possible or desirable for a government to abide by the terms of his charter. To understand why he brought it to the floor of parliament, we need to see that it is about politics, not economics. Or rather, it is about economics as politics. He knows that a section of voters think Labour is 'weak' on 'the economy'. Hence all the rhetoric about Corbyn being a 'threat to your family's economic security', and hence the charter, which is designed to mark out the Tories as the tough, responsible, party who can be trusted with 'the economy'. Quite why someone struggling to make ends meet should care much about some abstraction called 'the economy' may not be apparent, but this is where a powerful analogy kicks in.
Government accounts, for this analogy, are our household budget. And, as the less than feminist Margaret Thatcher put it, 'every housewife knows' you can't spend more than you earn. Even as an approach to personal budgets this is simplistic at best. It's an image born in a time before mass consumer credit and student loans, one of the insufficiently told stories about debt in advanced capitalist societies being the extent to which it has shifted from the public to the personal. But as a picture for government borrowing and spending it is grotesquely misleading. Still, it is powerful: not only simple, but comforting, it ties the abstract and economic to the homely and familiar, speaking of collective responsibility (being 'responsible' with 'our' finances) in a world that can seem both atomised and amoral. It is ideology in its pure, brilliant, form.
And the picture has captured hearts and minds. I've lost count of the number of conversations I have had where the household analogy has been flung back at me when I've opposed cuts or one sort or another. This audience member on Question Time is a good example of the phenomenon:
Varoufakis is obviously correct; his answer is quite literally a textbook one. But I doubt very much that the questioner was convinced, and I'm not too sure about viewers at home, beyond the echo chamber of the already-converted Left, who shared the video clip with gleeful abandon on every social media website known to humankind. The man is speaking common sense, which is one way of describing successful ideology. Varoufakis is speaking economics.
The function of the household analogy is not so much as to build up support for near-perpetual budget surpluses - I've said already that this is not Osborne's purpose - but to render a section of the population suspicious of public spending, and to thereby gain consent for the dismantling of collective provision, privatisation and welfare cuts.
The household analogy is not the only manner in which an image, picture, or cluster of ideas serves to reconcile people to economic attack in Cameron's Britain. Think of the what has been called the business ontology, the way so many of us view the world as one big interplay of consumers and individual entrepeneurs (rather than as, say, a site of conflict between workers and capital). The language of entrepeneurship is endemic: what might once have been thought of as terrifyingly insecure short term work might now be presented as an opportunity to advance one's CV in the cause of career entrepeneurship. Then consider all those television programmes inviting us to view our homes as investments (rather than, for example, shelters), and murmuring suggestively that we too might make big on the property market.
This stuff is long-standing and deep-seated. Unless and until the Left can establish some kind of counter-hegemony, a socialist common sense as well-entrenched as that visible in the wide grin of the Question Time inquisitor, until we can communicate clear and attractive accounts of the world to rival that of it as one big market place, we will not make progress. We can have all the correct arguments about the economy we like. We can explain how Osborne's policies are wrong, as indeed they are. We can even make the case that capitalism itself is a barrier to human flourishing, as indeed it is. But politics is about more than arguments, however much those of us who are most at home in the world of facts and figures might wish otherwise. It is about pictures, broad-brush ideas, hopes, fears, and dreams. As any housewife knows.
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.
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.
The pervasive immaturity of the left is nowhere more evident than in the emotionally frigid aphorism "don't mourn, organise". In saying this I am criticising myself as much as anyone; I resorted to it during those endless hours last night. But mourn we must, mourn for those who have died alone and starving, for those who will yet die, for those who will be denied an education. We should mourn for the lost hope and the lost futures. Mourning is good, because it speaks of persisting humanity, as well as of the extent of our loss. Mourning is also productive, for it is very close to that precious emotion, anger. Nothing is more revealing of the class nature of our political system than the convention that those who have lost should be gracious in defeat, as though a contest for state power were a public school cricket match. Anger is the refusal to be polite, to let bygones to be bygones, and to wait five years. Anger is the recognition that the bastards who now have a parliamentary majority in this country are indeed bastards. If anyone doubts this last point, evidence will, alas, be forthcoming quickly enough.
We have to direct our anger. In order to do that we need to understand what just happened. I was disastrously wrong about the direction of the election campaign. In fairness to myself almost everybody was wrong, a notable exception being Richard Seymour here. I'll come back to his thoughts below. Meanwhile, less adept minds on the left are currently demanding PR. In itself this is a striking instance of the failure to grasp the immensity of what we're up against; as though a bit of tinkering with the electoral system will undo the pervasive social sadism about to be unleashed with renewed vigour. In any case, in an ironic disconfirmation of the traditional leftist objection that PR builds in a centrist majority, were seats distributed on the basis of share of the vote we'd be looking at a Tory-UKIP alliance. No doubt there is a certain type of liberal who, when confronted with the reality of this fact, is cretinous enough to insist that the outcome would be 'fairer'. There is no helping such people.
Something more fundamental expressed itself yesterday, not merely the idiosyncrasies of First Past the Post. This was about popularised reaction, hegemony, and the evolving politics of the Union. Understanding this, and grasping as a consequence the awfulness of the situation, is a first step to doing anything useful about our plight.
Scotland
Labour got slaughtered in Scotland, and deserved it. This is the simplest aspect of what happened last night. This was not the artefact of nationalist reaction. A good amount of the SNP's support came from a class based vote for a party standing on an anti-austerity ticket. Seats in the West of Scotland held on derisory turnouts by parachuted-in Blairites dripping with entitlement fell to the SNP, as people enthused by the referendum campaign went to the polls, sometimes for the first time in their lives.
We can admit this much without having any illusions about the nature of the SNP. It is a bourgeois nationalist party, with left elements, pushed to a social democratic programme by circumstance. Alliances with, and appeals to, the better elements of the SNP have to be part of what the left does next, on both sides of the border. The longer run has to involve an alternative politics for Scotland, a project whose last flourishing was sacrificed to Tommy Sheridan's libido.
Anyway, I've written at some length about the emerging politics of Scotland on this blog before. So I leave this topic with possibly the best speech of last night from probably one of the best MPs now in Westminster:
Popular Austerity
If the overwhelmingly best thing that happened last night was the election of a nationalist party on the basis of a manifesto broadly akin to the kind of thing Roy Hattersley would have signed up to c. 1989, it must have been - to use a technical phrase - a fucking terrible night. And so it was.
Labour lost seats to the Tories outside London. Before the sneery London is more sophisticated/ intelligent/ generally all round intelligent and liberated brigade get over-excited about the relatively good results in the capital (which didn't extend to unseating the Tories' pantomime villain in a target marginal), let me put it on record that I put Labour's London gains down to the issue of house prices. Its a swing that speaks more of desperation than enthusiasm. Across the country, 33.9% of those registered didn't vote. That inevitably hit Labour more than the Tories. Cameron's party increased majorities in a swathe of seats. Already the various 'Why I voted Tory' surveys are showing clearly that those who decided to vote Tory at the last minute did so, in the main, because they trusted the governing party on the economy.
There is no reality-based way of making sense of this results that doesn't recognise that a significant section of the working class is committed to austerity. I say this because a damaging myth persists on the left, in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary, which says that faced with cuts the working class will shift left. The opposite has been the case in the past five years. People want 'the economy' to be 'safe'. As, in a certain sense, it is:
Thatcher, of course, won popular working class support, and in so doing set in motion a hegemonic austerity project whose fruits we are now reaping. Council house sales were the most obvious sweetener under her governments; it may yet turn out that the promise of right-to-buy for housing association tenants was a cause of yesterday's Tory victory. More pertinently yet, she established with brilliant success an analogy between the national economy and a domestic budget in popular consciousness; 'Why don't you look at it as any housewife has to look at it?'
This, patently false, parallel already explains some of the appeal of the Tories' call for a balanced budget, and of the trust placed in the party. In isolation, however, it doesn't suffice. It's not as though the problem is simply that people have a number of wrong ideas about the macroeconomic facts, as if simply making A-level Economics compulsory would usher in a Labour victory. Popular austerity is as much a matter of the heart of the head. The left loves to talk of 'false consciousness'. In order to understand why voters opted for the Etonians against their own material interests, we need other categories, 'false emotions', 'false values', 'false aspirations'. From childhood onwards we now learn business studies, we are taught to view ourselves as entrepreneurs. Even the act of compiling a CV to apply for an oversubscribed minimum wage job is an act of personal entrepreneurship. If we fail, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. We should be more competitive. Once considered a vice, competitiveness has become a virtue, again inculcated in the school system.
We are, then, to identify with those who cherish competition. Out go solidarity and collective solutions, in comes individual self-advancement. If the affective pull of the entrepreneurial dream weren't enough, there are financial disincentives to stepping out of line: student debt is now 40k-50k per. student, whilst mortgages burden those lucky enough to have them in the first place. Who'd go on strike, or get a reputation as a trouble-maker? Yet, there's apparently hope -- if we are all players in the game of life, we are tempted to believe that we might win. Thus the cultural politics of aspirational identification: perhaps if I vote like Richard Branson, perhaps one day I might be like him. Meanwhile property porn gives us a voyeuristic glance at lives beyond our purses and encourages us into the masochistic idiocy of treating our homes as assets. Who knows, one day we might be hit by the Mansion Tax?
It's entirely beside the point to object that none of this is rational. Of course it isn't, but then neither are we. We are complex, contradictory, beings, often strangers to ourselves, half in control of emotions and desires which, far from being private, are precisely the point at which ideology grabs us by the throat. Austerity is written into our very being. Knowing a few more facts will not expel it. The only writer on the British activist left who in any way understands this is Richard Seymour. I urge you all to read his Against Austerity as a matter of urgency. In an odd way, the other group of people who understand the extent to which austerity as a project dominates working class life and thought are the Blairites. Their solution, of course, is to give the people what so many of them seem to want. Even in the narrow terms dictated by electoral politics, this approach is likely to fail. If Labour don't challenge the economic narrative offered by the Tories - as, indeed, the unlamented Ed Balls basically didn't - there is a real possibility people will opt for the real thing - as, indeed, they did.
Nor will the 'build an alternative' cheerleaders set things right by a few public meetings and a new electoral front. Our enemy is inside peoples heads and written in their hearts. The ghost of Margaret Thatcher has possessed the souls of millions. Exorcism, the construction of a counter-hegemony will take a generation and in order to succeed must be as all-pervading as the austerity project it seeks to displace.
We haven't even begun to realise the immensity of the task we face.
So the Liberal Democrats have released their manifesto. If you want to know what they won't do if they are in government after May, wags might add, read it.
Because of their two-faced jumping into bed with the Tories and, in particular, their back-tracking on their promise not to raise tuition fees, the LibDems are on target for electoral homicide next month. Never the less, if polls are to be believed they might hang onto about twenty seats, and in a tight parliament, that is enough for them to be potential power-brokers. Nick Clegg, who, morally backward engineer of human misery as he might be, is not stupid realises this. Hence his jaw-droppingly arrogant claim that the LibDems will be "the heart of Tory-led government or the head of a Labour-led one". The reference is to the Wizard of Oz, which - you may recall - is a story about deceipt.
The LibDems have said that they will prioritise five policies in any deal:
A £12,500 personal tax allowance.
•A balanced budget on current spending by 2017-18 which would be achieved “fairly”.
•£8bn extra spending for the NHS including equal status for mental health.
•A real terms increase in education department spending in line with increase in pupils by 2020.
•Five green laws including decarbonisation of electricity.
The second pledge is the one that rings alarm bells. The LibDems want zero current spending deficit two years earlier than Balls' - already in my view unobtainable - target this spells souped-up austerity and, as the economy teeters on the edge of deflation, serious consequences for jobs and wages.
The danger is that the LibDems on the basis of this commitment will be the favoured coalition partners of the Labour right, who will be strong in the next PLP (although, hopefully, a little less so than last parliament). Government alongside the LibDems would cement Ed Balls' austerity-lite economic strategy, and provide a basis on which to sideline the left.
We need to say now that the LibDems are not a coalition partner. Email your Labour PPC and let them know your feelings. And, if you're able, attend the post-election Left Platform. The message there has to be clear. If Labour needs to talk to someone after the election, we should talk to the SNP.
Whilst everyone's been fretting about which privately-educated white person will succeed David Cameron as leader of the Tory party, a significant economic statistic was published. The Consumer Price Index was 0% p.a. in February, down 0.3% from January, raising the spectre of deflation, falling prices.
This is the first time on record that the CPI has been zero. George Osborne's response was upbeat:
Osborne said zero inflation was “a first for the British economy” and good news for family budgets.
Is he right? Well, suppose the downward trend continues - you'll be able to buy more stuff in British shops for the same amount of money. In this very minimal sense Osborne's clearly correct. It's also pretty clear that interest rates aren't going to take a hike any time soon. So credit where credit's due, there's two positives for every family budget*.
But whenever I hear a multi-millionaire talk about something being good for 'families', I ask myself 'which families?' Suppose your family isn't so rich that no member of it will ever need to work or claim benefits in order to maintain a non-destitute standard of living. That is, suppose you are one of the vast majority of people in Britain.
You have good reason to be worried by the inflation statistics. First, employers are far less likely to make wage concessions if prices are falling: they have an excuse handed to them on a plate by the economy - "you are already better off on the same amount of pay". Deflation weakens the bargaining power of labour. Likewise, political pressure to increase benefit payments, already minimal, will be muted.
More alarmingly, deflation can wreak havoc on an economy in a way that threatens jobs themselves. If deflation settles in, people defer purchases, in the hope that prices will fall. Why should I buy that new TV this month, if I think that it's likely to be cheaper next month? Demand for goods and services falls, and so does output and employment. Similarly, firms defer capital investment, and those structural weaknesses of British capitalism, investment and productivity, will take a hit they can ill afford.
Now imagine you're in debt - like most people, and for that matter most corporations. If prices are falling, the purchasing power of a fixed amount of money increases. In particular, the real value of debt increases. Once again, hardly good news for most families.
The line amongst orthodox economic opinion about the possibility of development in this direction seems to be relaxed. The line is that low unemployment will put upward pressure on wages, and thus prevent persistent deflation setting in. The problem with this way of looking at things is that 'unemployment' isn't simply a number in an economic model, which correlates in a law-like fashion with the bargaining power of labour. Behind these abstractions lie real human beings, in real jobs, in real power relationships with their employers. And the nature of the jobs that have decreased unemployment in recent years does not look encouraging for wage settlements - they are insecure, often part-time, zero hour contracts proliferate. This is not a situation that lends itself to confident wage demands. Once a general lack of confidence, low unionisation, low levels of strikes and successful (from a trade union perspective) wage settlements is factored in, the picture looks bleak.
Or at least bleak for families unlike Osborne's.
*And for the budgets of people who don't happen to have families, who seem to have fallen out of the political picture of late.
Harry Leslie Smith is the author of Harry's Last Stand, an engaging book calling - on the basis of his experience of the Great Depression and the Second World War - for the preservation of the Welfare State. He is the face of a politics of social democratic nostalgia, tinged with a certain 'progressive' British (or perhaps, these days, English) nationalism. This is not without severe problems - see Owen Hatherley here, or comments in Richard Seymour's latest book. That said, there is a dignity and conviction about the man, and he serves as a living reminder of the horrors that devastated lives before the 1945 settlement.
Earlier this week, Harry Leslie Smith gave a speech at the Labour Party Conference:
His role in the conference, carefully carved out for him by Party managers was to speak about the NHS. Notice, however, that at key points he goes beyond this brief. He talks about "welfare cuts" and "austerity". And what he says about these things is spot on.
But here's the problem. The Labour leadership is committed to both austerity and welfare cuts. Ed Balls has pledged repeatedly to constrain a future Labour government with current Tory spending limits. Not only is there precious little sign of Tory benefit cuts being reversed, but this week Balls promised more - announcing a policy of real terms cuts in child benefit.
Austerity destroys lives. That is indeed the message of history. Is it one that the Labour front bench is prepared to hear?
And so, Labour's National Policy Forum votes in favour of a future Labour government sticking to Tory austerity spending limits, promising instead of increased spending a lukewarm brew of structural reform and 'redistribution of power and opportunity'. The thought that power and opportunity tend to follow money seems not to have occurred. The constraints this self-limitation will put on policy wiggle room might, of course, mean that 'future Labour government' has for the time being the ring of 'future World Cup winning England team'. There has to be a risk that, posed with a choice between two versions of the Tory party, the electorate (a good proportion of whom, it has to be said, actually accept the 'need for austerity' line) will plump for the original and the best.
Now of course this is terrible. Of course it is indicative of the triumph of austerity ideology. Of course it is similarly indicative of the weakness of the Left, a sign of how much work we have to do. And yet there is worse; it looks like a good number of trade union reps, sitting on the NPF for unions with clear anti-austerity policy, voted in favour of accepting Tory spending limits. If you need evidence of the depressing hold that the Labour leadership continues to have on the politics of trade unions, look no further.
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.
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.
Pete Firmin has a good piece on housing in the latest Labour Briefing. One paragraph in particular hits home about a very live issue in London,
Even when housing is built by local authorities (still a scarcity) or planning permission granted for housing associations or private builders, it is more expensive than it need be. There is much debate around terms like "affordable housing/ rents" and "social rents". The irony is that "affordable" means around 80% of market prices. So even when local authorities insist that developers include "affordable" housing in their schemes - something that happens less and less often - it is far from affordable. Much housing being built in London is built specifically with foreign investors in mind, some being advertised in Singapore before London!
On that last point, the trend towards properties functioning as global speculative investments rather than anything as crudely passe as homes has been helped along by London's own mayor.
That there is a housing crisis in Britain, and especially in London, is widely recognised. As Pete points out though, there is a high level of general political uselessness in proposing solutions. This is an area on which the Left needs to focus attention. Developing joined-up thinking on housing will require analysis, requiring an understanding of how land prices, the low potential for efficiency gains in the housing industry, a culture of home ownership (in turn tied up increasingly with the demonisation of socially housed people), government support for house purchases, and the global exposure of the British housing market give rise to a situation where, on the one hand, ordinary people cannot afford to live in urban centres and, on the other, the effect of the bubble-prone housing market is disastrous, with much of the much-trumpeted current growth being the fictitious creature of housing demand.
This analysis, and policy arising out of it, is a job of work. But, with an eye cast towards this year's local elections and next year's general election, if you want two popular and effective policies that are a vast improvement on the present bi-partisan alliance with property developers and the 'regeneration' agenda, here's two: rent control and council housing building. Now, come on Ed, you've been asked to think boldly.
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