Strong and Stable

Theresa May is talking about strong and stable leadership. A lot. Like some kind of dystopian Tory stuck record she is repeating the phrase regardless of whether it makes any sense in a given context. It runs through the Tory campaign like a motorway through a site of natural beauty. In an admirably ecumenical fashion it is the mantra of the vicar's daughter. It sounds like either the world's worst dating site bio or an advertising slogan for toilet paper. Yet again and again, the Prime Minister says it. If Theresa May were asked whether she would prefer tea or coffee, she would respond that she stands for strong and stable leadership, and that to chose either drink would be to risk handing power to the Coalition of Chaos.

Why is she doing this? The image she wants to present is a classically conservative one - of order and unity, bringing the nation together above the noise of political contest. It is a disturbing outlook for sure: taken to extremes, it feeds into the kind of grotesque fascism represented across the Channel by Marine Le Pen. It cannot be denied, or at least it should not be denied, however that these tropes appeal to no small number of people: leadership, unity, stability, strength.

Not everyone for whom this talk is comforting or uplifting has a pair of jackboots on their shoe-rack. May's values appeal to the anxious, to those whose lives lack shape, community, or apparent meaning. They offer a prospect of having a clear place in the world and of belonging to something along with others. In other words, they promise to undo the unsettling effects of capitalism. Right-wing politics in capitalist society finds itself caught in a constant bind: on the one-hand wishing to unleash the market on society in the cause of profit, on the other needing to restore the order also required by profit in response to the disorganising effects of capital's social rampage.

The Left has to understand the roots and the appeal of language like May's in order to respond to it adequately. It would be a mistake of catastrophic proportions, and a betrayal of the victims of the racism 'national unity' invariably brings in its wake, to adopt May's own themes in the fashion of Blue Labour. Even offering 'leadership' seems to me to suggest a presidential politics to which we'd be better placed to propose an alternative: we are not so much about leading as allowing people to take control of their own lives. This said, in order to counter the 'strong and stable' line, something has to be said that speaks to the uncertainty, vulnerability and isolation that breeds it. Corbyn's programme is good in this respect; in the longer run an explicit class politics is the answer. For now, the task is to get out there and offer an alternative remedy to the disease for which May offers toxic snake oil.

The Empty Chair

I do not like presidential style debates. This is because I do not like presidents. In particular, I do not like presidential politics, descending, as it invariably does into a personality contest, focusing on who is the 'strongest leader' and who performs best in front of the cameras. This type of politics, which was drip fed to Britain during the Blair years, takes politics further away from the grassroots and encourages aesthetics at the expense of policy.

I can't bring myself to condemn Theresa May for failing to take part in a leaders' debate, then. But, more importantly, I think that we on the other side ought to think very carefully before making her absence a theme of our campaigning. We should ask ourselves: why is she doing this?

It is not, alas, because she is frightened of Jeremy Corbyn. She no doubt genuinely believes that his policies are barmy and that she would wipe the floor with him. Such is ideology. No, the reason Theresa May won't participate in the debate is that she wants to appear like the natural prime minister, the default option, the incumbent who is not on the same level as the other candidates. This is the resurfacing of the Tories as the natural party of government. Drawing attention to the phenomenon strikes me as not very helpful to Labour.

Much more generally, this election cannot go well for Labour on the basis of the usual channels - televisual challenges and well-handled debates. We can only win on the ground, at community at workplace level, through the engagement of activists. And we can only win by concentrating on politics not personalities.

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.

The task that remains

...the whole history of the Labour Party has been punctuated by verbal victories of the Labour Left which with some few exceptions, have had little impact on the Labour Party's conduct inside or outside the House of Commons, but which have always been of great importance in keeping up the hopes and the morale of the activists              
     Ralph Miliband - Parliamentary Socialism

Miliband was writing in 1961. Little that has happened since gives us cause to question his account of the Labour Left's victories being pyrrhic affairs. The dust has now settled since Jeremy Corbyn's triumph in the leadership election. It is time to ask the hard question: will the election of the most left-wing leader in the Party's history buck the trend of purely nominal high-points for the Left? Or will something of lasting value come out of it? What could that even be?

False hope is a subtle enemy, so let's start by coming down to earth. Things do not look good. The fundamentals haven't changed since May's election defeat: there is not an automatic mass audience out there for the ideas on which Jeremy won the leadership. It simply isn't the case that Labour voters will automatically flock back to the Party now it has a 'proper Labour' person in charge (of course, with a nod to the elder Miliband, we should insist that Corbyn isn't a proper Labour leader; he's much better than that). We need to win the battle of ideas, and that's a job of work. Still less will Corbyn solve Labour's Scottish problem: indeed, the saddening truth is that his attitude towards Scotland has been unionist business-as-usual, an approach which fails to understand either the scale of what happened north of the Border, or the reasons that it happened.

Winning the contest of ideas is not easily done with a substantial proportion of the PLP openly hostile to varying degrees towards Corbyn. Senior MPs are regularly briefing against him, and front-benchers are distancing themselves from policies like nuclear disarmament. The plan is clearly to replace Jeremy as leader before the 2020 general election: I think it's likely the knives will come out as early as next year. Meanwhile, CLPs remain largely in the hands of the right - Corbyn may have won the leadership, his opponents control the party. True, there are thousands of new members who joined to vote for him. But even assuming that their politics are uniformly of the left - a dangerous assumption, I think - they are in the main inexperienced in Labour politics, and their resolve to fight the often brutal, and more often dull, battles that will be a feature of Party life over the next few years is untested. Certainly the failure of Diane Abbott to win the London mayoral candidacy and of the left slate to get elected to the Conference Arrangements Committee shows that we can't simply assume that intra-Party politics will now shift left.

So, two questions. What those on the socialist left of Labour expect from the Corbyn leadership? And how do we go about getting it? Three bullet points in answer to each

• Jeremy for PM! It may be a dream, but it's good to dream, and even better to fight for our dreams. A government based around Corbyn's programme, whilst it would meet with determined resistance from day one, would have great potential to improve the lives of the majority of people in Britain, and to provide a fertile ground for socialism.
• Developing a movement and ideas. The surge of support for Jeremy is a potential new activist base, which could be the foundation of a left movement for the next generation. The established Left can, and should, both learn from it and feed in socialist ideas born through political experience.
• ...which interacts with struggles outside parliament I do not think capitalism can be overcome by parliamentary action alone (there is a danger, which we have to acknowledge, that Corbyn's victory could fuel this illusion). So it's vital that the Corbyn surge feeds back into struggles outside parliament, in workplaces and communities.

Those are the things I think we should aim for. How to get them?

• Get involved in the Party Whether old or new members, we all need to get active in our local Labour Party, support Left candidates in internal elections, and argue for the policies on which Jeremy won. If you're new to the Party, learn about how it works. Join a trade union if you're not a member: unions are crucial to Labour's life, and to the defence of your rights. Subscribe to Labour Briefing which carries, from a Left perspective, news about what's happening inside the Party and how to get involved. Whilst I have concerns about its seemingly top-down nature, I also think it's worth being involved in Momentum, and seeing how it develops.
• Political education The established Left within the Party has to get its act together quickly on this one. We can't lose the new support. In an open and non-patronising way, we urgently need to communicate the nuts and bolts of Labour Party politics as well as putting across our ideas about socialism.  
• Don't ignore extra-parliamentary action. The focus on the Labour Party can't be at the expense of action outside parliament. In particular, the government's attack on trade unions has to be met.

Let's get cracking.

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

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.


Coming next: English nationalism 

Friday Video Corner

The curse of the undead parrot

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. 

Green? Stay red

So, you're considering voting for the Green Party?

I suspect I like you. I suspect, at least, we have a great deal in common politically. I mean there is just the outside possibility that you're some Barbour-clad NIBMYish eco-fascist, in which case I have nothing to say to you. Vote Green, for all I care, they're welcome to you. But you're probably not like that at all.

In all likelihood you're the kind of person who ends up in the bottom left hand corner of those 'what's your political alignment?' quiz things. You are probably anti-austerity, supportive of feminism,  clear about migrants' rights, anti-Trident, and in favour of public ownership of utilities. You, like me, realise that things need to be done to safeguard the environment, but you will want those things done in a way that makes big polluting business, rather than ordinary people, bear the brunt of the cost. You, like me, will have been underwhelmed by the Labour manifesto launch earlier today. Sure there was some welcome stuff - commitments on health, education, zero-hours contracts, and non-doms. But the broader context was set by acceptance of the iron-logic of austerity, and that's before we even get near the horrible, indefensible, pledge about immigration controls. It's not good enough. We agree on that.

Yet I am suggesting you don't vote Green, but vote Labour instead. Isn't this madness? Don't the Green Party's policies fit much better with those you and I would both like to see? I don't deny it for one moment. But I don't think elections should be viewed as a form of policy bingo.

More about that in a moment. First, it is at least rehashing one of the tired old objections to voting Green in a First Past the Post electoral system. Like many tired, old, objections there is something to it. Do you really want to help a Tory or Lib Dem candidate? In only a handful of seats are the Greens realistic contenders; elsewhere, in an incredibly tight election, you are in danger, by voting Green, of helping your least favourite parties. Because, and here I will part company with the more fundamentalist anti-Labourites, there is a difference between the Tories and Labour. Not enough of a difference, to be sure, but a real difference. A difference that will be felt most by those in our society least able to afford it. As the local elections last year in the notorious Tory borough of Barnet demonstrate.

But that's not my main argument. I think that the impulse to vote Green often arises because someone, not unreasonably, thinks: there's an election coming up, whose policies most fit with my own preferences? If you're in any way left-of-centre, and live in England or Wales, the Green Party are likely to be the best fit.

Yet there's a basic contradiction here. You are minded to vote Green because you think there is something fundamentally wrong with the world, and that radical change is needed. Perhaps you might go so far as to describe yourself as an anti-capitalist. Certainly, you are likely to be hostile to the individualistic, market-driven nature of our society. And yet you are, I claim, adopting an approach to elections that is a product of that society. You, the isolated individual political consumer, pick the product from the shelf that best fulfils your bespoke requirements.

The politics I am interested in starts from a very different perspective - not with lone electoral consumers, but with the recognition that real social change comes through movements of people, through our collective strength. It is about more than voting once every five years. It is about winning change in our workplaces and local areas; about exerting pressure continuously on those at Westminster and elsewhere who claim to represent us. This has to be a collective endeavour, and so the question arises, which movement of people is best placed to win the change we want to see, and how does this relate to voting?

The trade union movement, for all its imperfections, is the only millions-strong movement of working class people in Britain with the history and present capacity to win any serious level of change. The Labour Party was its hard won creation; and what makes the worst Labour government better than the best Tory government continues to be the pressure to which it is susceptible from trade unions. It was this that made even Blair introduce a minimum wage. It anchors Labour in working class politics in a way that the Greens, ecclectic and unpredictable as they have been in local office, are not. Electing Labour representatives strengthens the union's voice, and empowers us to fight for ourselves 365 days a year outside parliament. A Labour vote is a vote for a movement, for our collective strength - whichever political inadequate standing on a lightly-rewarmed neo-liberal ticket might have the Labour candidacy. (And if you're, rightly, angry about that, why not join the LRC and help to change Labour?)

You may or may not be convinced. But at the very least I want to hear your alternative. Not simply your alternative on voting day. That's one day in five years. I want to hear about your alternative movement for transforming society at the root. That's my truth - the working class and its institutions - you tell me yours.

Election campaign going well, and then there's Scotland

I thought I'd take a few moments out of my Easter holiday to share my thoughts on the election with you all. It was either that or continue watching my way through Buffy on Netflix, and to be honest I can take or leave the middle seasons.

These thoughts are, perhaps uncharacteristically, positive, at least from a UK-wide perspective. Labour has moved ahead of the Tories in key polls, with the Tories negative campaign against Ed Miliband seemingly backfiring. Labour's welcome attack on non-dom status has proved popular, confirming the position beloved of this blogger that more clear red water will not damage Labour's electoral standing. On that basis, the Tories' latest bung to the wealthy will do no harm at all.

There is, of course, a but. Scotland.

Labour will be slaughtered up north. To be frank, we deserve it. Annihilation has been on the cards since senior Party figures shared platforms with Tories as part of the Better Together campaign. It has been assured by the collective backtracking by the Westminster parties on devo-max.

Like a wounded beast in its final throes, Murphy-led Labour are fighting a vicious campaign. Mud is being thrown at the SNP in the hope that some of it sticks. There was the claim that Nicola Sturgeon wants David Cameron as PM. Then there is the disgraceful tabloid attack on Mhairi Black, a pleasingly straight-talking young SNP candidate, being shared on Facebook by Scottish Labour campaigners and their English supporters. There are a raft of attacks on the SNP policy, largely from the right, regardless of the nominal position of those making them. Such are the contradictions of post-referendum Scottish politics, with Labour forced into a position of opposing the SNP from the right. To my mind, it is highly doubtful that anything like labourism will survive much longer in Scotland. The best hope would be if Labour were to neutralise the national question, by officially admitting a plurality of views. Yet it is too tied into a unionist logic to make that likely.

This matters outside Scotland. Why? Because Labour is likely to be the largest party, yet without an overall majority in May. This means the leadership will be looking for someone with whom to do a deal. There are basically two options here: the LibDems and a rainbow coalition of the SNP and others (SDLP, Plaid, Greens). Such is the level of anti-SNP animosity that has trickled down south, that the latter option doesn't have the level of grassroots support than it deserves. Left MPs were more hostile than they needed to be at the suggestion of an SNP pact recently.

This should be a no brainer. Socialists in the Labour Party want two things: working class representation and left-wing policies. The LibDems offer neither, and any kind of deal with them should be ruled out. The SNP are qualitatively different in both respects. The grassroots left should prepare now to exert pressure in favour of the more left-leaning option in the days following a close election.

In good old tub-thumping left-wing fashion, that pressure ought to be exerted on MPs with two demands in view:

No to a deal with either Coalition party.

No to austerity.

Now, Buffy.

The rise of the political wife

The woman the media are calling "Justine Miliband", married to Ed, is not standing for election in May. She just happens to be the spouse of somebody who is. Why, you might then wonder, is she being subjected to pre-election interviews?

The political wife, and it is always a wife, has been a feature of the American political landscape for years. She exists to stand beside her husband, to express concern for him and stick up for him-  "I think over the next couple of months it's going to get really vicious, really personal, but I'm totally up for this fight," Justine told the BBC's James Landale. Above all she reassures us of the persistence that most feminine of spheres, the domestic, which lurks behind the front doors of even the most powerful. In possibly the most banal caption ever published on a reputable news website, the BBC tell us that "The Milibands share the family chores, such as loading their dishwasher". Look here, they are:

Notice that in order to make the, apparently weakly feminist point, that Ed does some housework, his wife is required. For the domestic is her sphere.

Now this is all so much sexist claptrap. It is no doubt a by-product, along with those wretched leaders debates we're hearing a lot about, of the presidentialisation of British politics during the Blair era. It is encouraged by a collective flight to the maternal and homely, of proportions large enough to keep Freudians in PhD theses for a generation, in response to the anxieties of the age. There may be recessions, Ebola, and the growth of ISIS, but at least we have cupcakes and the option to watch people decorating their dream homes on TV (even if we can't actually afford homes of our own).

Anyhow, the indignity of Justine Thornton, as she in fact calls herself, a barrister, having to talk to journalists about household chores is by no means the worst effect of the rise of the political wife. When Sally Bercow, married to the Speaker, did a photo-shoot for the Evening Standard, her husband is reported to have "read the Riot Act" at her. Certainly the none-too-subtle subtext of right-wing sniping about Bercow's Twitter activity and appearance on Big Brother is that the Speaker can't control his wife.

Welcome to Britain in the 21st century.

Selling Labour versus Being Labour

Over the weekend I had an altercation on Twitter with a man in his twenties who seemed to hold me personally responsible for the actions of the Blair governments. "How can you condemn what's going on in Gaza - you gave us Iraq?". I am, the argument seemed to be, a member of the Labour Party. And Labour was responsible for Iraq. Therefore I was responsible for Iraq. Bastard.

What I find interesting about these kind of debates, and I have a lot of them (generally with activists younger than myself), is that they quickly reach an impasse. I say things like, "I was utterly opposed to Iraq. I am on the Left of the Labour Party, and oppose the leadership on many things. Within the Party I vote, argue, and organise against the kind of things you - left-wing activist - dislike". And my interlocutor says things like, "No, you're wrong. Labour supported the Iraq war. So if you're in Labour, you must support it. Otherwise you should leave."

The problem here is that two basically different conceptions of political parties are going head-to-head. I believe that an electoral party like Labour is a coalition of interests, a movement and a site of struggle. To be sure, it is one in which the Left is at an historically low point, but that doesn't alter the fact that what Labour is, or stands for, is constantly contested - and not in a vacuum, but within the broader setting of the labour movement and Labour's electoral base. Against me is posed a passive, consumerist, version of electoral politics. Political parties are brands; I pick the one that suits me (my lifestyle, my values, my economic interests) most exactly, perhaps after perusing a few manifestos. If I'm very enthusiastic, a brand junkie, I might even join a party. My role within the Party, on the current model, is as an electoral footsoldier, a volunteer. Labour and its policy are just there, prior to and independent of me. My role is to sell them to a wider public.

One of Tony Blair's crowning achievements was to popularise the consumerist model of politics, and to partially restructure Labour on the basis of it. A generation of left-wing activists has unconsciously taken it on board. It is entirely pointless for the Labour Left to attempt recruitment to the Party from among activists of this sort unless we are prepared to address, and argue against, basic assumptions about the nature of party politics itself.

Things can only get better?

Those Newark election results in full, lovingly pilfered from the Grauniad website:

Robert Jenrick (C) 17,431 (45.03%, -8.82%)
Roger Helmer (Ukip) 10,028 (25.91%, +22.09%)
Michael Payne (Lab) 6,842 (17.68%, -4.65%)
Paul Baggaley (Ind) 1,891 (4.89%)
David Kirwan (Green) 1,057 (2.73%)
David Watts (LD) 1,004 (2.59%, -17.41%)
Nick The Flying Brick (Loony) 168 (0.43%)
Andy Hayes (Ind) 117 (0.30%)
David Bishop (BP Elvis) 87 (0.22%)
Dick Rodgers (Stop Banks) 64 (0.17%)
Lee Woods (Pat Soc) 18 (0.05%)
C maj 7,403 (19.13%)
15.46% swing C to UKIP
Electorate 73,486; Turnout 38,707 (52.67%, -18.69%)

Contrary to the line that we reached peak-UKIP a couple of weeks ago, the beyond-yucky prospect of UKIP sex scandals doesn't seem to have done the acceptable face of electoral racism any harm whatsoever. And that UKIP swing didn't just come from Tory voters, and I strongly suspect that the true extent of Labour's trouble here is concealed by 2010 Lib Dem voters switching to Labour.

Labour won Newark in 1997.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That London

Nurtured in the bosom of that most talked about of fictional entities, the white working class, away from large urban centres, I have spent my entire adult life in London. I therefore straddle the electoral divide of the moment, in the eyes of the commentariat, that between London and, um, absolutely everywhere else in England.

London, which is "educated and civilised", doesn't vote for UKIPers and returns Labour councils. Everywhere else is brimful of racist yokels who hang on Nigel Farage's every word, have abandoned classical political allegiances, and who would no doubt be described using the phrase "sea-change" if journalists hadn't stopped using the phrase "sea-change" about a decade ago.

Now, don't get me wrong, against the Pollyannaish line being pushed by the liberal-left, the UKIP results yesterday are significant. As I said. But the whole "it's a crazy world outside London" explanation of Farageism is less than adequate. For reasons including, but not limited to, the following:

• The rush to paint London as some kind of leftist paradise that inevitably keeps its head whilst the rest of the country wraps itself in the union jack has to reckon with the fact that Boris Johnson twice beat Ken Livingstone in a straight contest.
• It is pretty much to be expected the Labour will do proportionately better in (a) large urban centres, and (b) places with significant minority ethnic populations. Thus, not just the results in London, but also in Manchester and Liverpool.
• It is absolutely true that there is disillusionment with Labour, and a widespread sense of abandonment amongst its traditional working class base. The factors giving rise to this are equally present in London. The difference in London is that there are counteracting forces preventing a peel-off to UKIP or apathy: notably more radical Labour programmes in key boroughs (Camden, Islington), strong left/ green alternatives and/ or community groups to absorb dissent in places where Labour are shit (Newham/ Lewisham). None of these things are entirely unique to London.

There remains a serious crisis of working class representation in England, and the rest of the UK. It is compounded by an immediate housing crisis and an economic 'recovery' that is having zero impact on peoples' actual well-being. These are the issues Labour needs to address; sidelining the persisting reality of class in favour of a supposed fissure between London and the provinces is the kind of politics that belongs in Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch. It has nothing to offer.

First thoughts on the great rush to UKIP

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

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

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

What to say about this? A few quick things.

UKIP : Racist Eurosceptic Tories

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

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

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

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

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

UKIP voters : neither racists nor stupid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Disillusion versus smug liberalism

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

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

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

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