Guest Post by Jen Izaakson and Ross Speer : Blairism killed Labour, it cannot revive it

Blairism is the sickness infecting Labour. The strategy of triangulation that fueled its electoral success was based on shifting the Party to appeal to wealthier Home Counties residents through an ideology of progressive individualism, whilst assuming its working class base would have nowhere else to go. Permanent majority.

But things did not turn out the way they were supposed to. Since 2001, Labour’s core voters have increasingly just stayed at home. As much was evident again in 2015: voting turnout in northern working class constituencies was generally below those of Tory supporting areas. But, since 2010, those voters have once again come to the ballot box to vote UKIP – who are unafraid to talk the language of class – and the Green Party – who defy the Blairites assessment of the situation to pick up votes in the southern counties on a left-wing platform. Turnout in the former Labour heartlands of Scotland bucked the trend, as voters were finally coaxed back into action by the SNP’s leftwards anti-austerity pitch. Blairism waged war on the Labour Party’s own base in order to attract Tory voters. Now it is reaping what it sowed.

If the left is to rise again it must correctly identify the ills of society. Blair failed to do just that. He gave in to the basic themes of Thatcherism: The state is problem, the unrestrained market the solution. Industry is gone, the service sector will deliver the goods. It did not turn out like that. The transfer of wealth from poor to rich continued unabated, driven by a buoyant property market and stagnant real wages. Austerity was merely the culmination of a long trend; itself possibly amongst the biggest single upward transfers of wealth in history.

Blair’s defenders point to the minimum wage and Sure Start as unambiguous successes. But would it not have been possible to do those things without, say, pulverizing Iraq, PFI schemes, attacking civil liberties, allowing the expansion of inequality and tax dodging, and the fattening of an unrestrained financial sector? And let’s not forget the failure to build new council housing, permitting massive rent rises, letting the Murdoch media run wild, maintaining the anti-union laws, introducing tuition fees, giving up on nuclear disarmament and keeping major infrastructure in private hands. Were those really the price of victory, or were they gratuitous concessions to the right? It is certainly not obvious that the historic capitulation of Britain's premier left party to the dictates of big business was worth £6.50 an hour. The Blairites like to talk about aspiration, and they’re right to do so: We aspire to do better than what they offer.

What the left needs is a vision, a narrative that starts out from policies and positions that are already popular. Fortunately, we have plenty to work with here. From nationalisation of the railways and energy companies, to higher taxes on the rich, to pegging the minimum wage to the living wage, there are numerous ways the public is to the left of anything being proposed by the Labour Party. And that is before the case has even seriously been put, for no major force in England currently makes these arguments. Miliband tried to sprinkle a few vaguely left policies on top of Tory austerity, all infused with a dash of UKIP-style immigration policy. The result pleased no-one. Labour did not lose because the Tories rallied many more people to their crusade than in 2010 – they increased their vote share by a measly 0.5% compared to Labour’s 1.5% - but because the Miliband Compromise between the Party’s left and right failed to sufficiently inspire its natural voters. All the elements exist for a Blairite-free program of the left; we only now lack a cohesive story about what Britain is and could be in the 21 century to bring them all together.

A battle for the soul of Labour is underway. If the catastrophe of Jim Murphy’s election to the Scottish leadership has sunk Labour north of the border, there remains a chance in England. The Blairities have, as usual, been first to the draw. They are eagerly spinning a tale of how Miliband’s illusory left-turn lost them the election. If they succeed, they will turn the Labour Party into the Tory surrogate that they so sorely desire. Their final crime may well be the rise of UKIP, who will eagerly seize upon the working class voters that they are abandoning. Mandelson has already begun a renewed assault on the trade unions. The silver lining may be, if McCluskey & co. finally decide the game is up, that a new social democratic could be set up in Britain. If that comes to pass, then the Blairites can keep their hollowed out brand.

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

This post follows up my previous one.

English Nationalism

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

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

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

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

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




Labour and the crisis of labourism

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

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

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

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

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.