It's been a bit of a rough start for our new coalition government as far as its personnel is concerned and it didn't look to be getting any better at the weekend. Firstly, Tory leader David Cameron was handed a personal kick in the teeth when Sir Anthony Bamford, the chairman of the JCB construction equipment firm and Mr Cameron's personal nomination for elevation to the House of Lords, was blocked from becoming a peer because of apparent concerns on his tax affairs. Sir Anthony had his nomination rejected by the House of Lords Appointments Commission when the tax authorities declined to support it, although neither they nor anyone else has made any suggestions of improper conduct. He had been a generous backer for the Tories, with his firm contributing to the tune of a cool £1.5 million and the knight himself coughing up £86,000. So no seat in the Lords for him, then. And it left the Tories even shorter in the upper house when Lord Laidlaw, another of the Tories' big backers, who has contributed more than £3 million to the party's coffers, forfeited his seat in the Lords because he was unwilling to lose his non-dom status and face the resulting tax bills. The noble tax exile apparently promised to become resident in Britain when he took the title in 2004, but has never honoured that pledge. Mind you, it's not surprising, because he's worth £700 million and would face a £50 million tax bill if he had. And, of course, we're still waiting with bated breath to see if Tory donor Lord Ashcroft follows suit or if he values his Lords seat enough to come back and cough up.
But it's not just the nobility or would-be nobility that is giving the coalition problems at the moment. The new austerity seems not to have sunk in with the new ministers in the Commons and that's left egg on a few faces. Defence Minister Andrew Robathan raised more than a few eyebrows when, instead of following the new ministerial guidelines about using public transport wherever possible, he took a chauffeur-driven government car across the Channel to attend the veterans' anniversary assembly in Dunkirk - a means of transport that he described as "appropriate and inexpensive." 'Nuff said. And now, as if all that wasn't sufficient, Treasury Chief Secretary David Laws has had to resign after it was revealed that he had paid £40,000 of public money claimed as expenses to his partner James Lundie for renting rooms in Mr Lundie's home, in clear breach of the Commons rules on expenses. The expressions of support for him have been effusive, from both Tory and Lib Dem sources, but he has admitted his guilt and is repaying the claimed cash. That won't give him many sleepless nights, of course, since he is, like so many others in this government, a millionaire in his own right. But it really can only be in this coalition that you can cheat the taxpayer out of £40,000 and be described by the Prime Minister as a "good and honourable man." Mr Cameron was joined by Business Secretary Vince Cable in his appraisal of Mr Laws, saying that "it is a big loss, but he has done the right thing." The right thing? Ripping off £40,000 of our money and only owning up to it when exposed by the press? And to cap it all, Iain Duncan Smith says that he "has the talent to come back." Words fail.
So, when you next hear that we're all in it together, that a new age of austerity has dawned and because of it your wages are cut or your job vanishes, bear in mind that the "all" who are in it together excludes Tory donors, tax-dodging multimillionaires, filthy rich "sex addicts," coalition ministers and all the rest of the rag-tag bunch of money-hungry parasites grouped around this disreputable coalition of profiteers and big business stooges. We're not all in it together. They are in power and in the money. We're in trouble and being squeezed until the pips squeak. It's a great world in Cameron's coalition. Once again, this government has announced new policies - and, once again, they have proven to be just old Tory policies dragged out of storage, dusted down and prepared for use yet again, a couple of decades later than their last airing. This time it's unemployment and the benefits system that comes under the coalition's scrutiny and, appropriately, it's a recycled Tory laying out the recycled policies. But, since Iain Duncan Smith, yet another unsuccessful Tory leader who has popped up in this Cabinet of all the failures, has spent the last few years developing policies to deal with worklessness and welfare benefits, you might have hoped that he would have come up with something new. No such luck, unfortunately, it's just the same old Tory whinges about benefit scroungers and the same old attacks on the least well off in our society. On he spouts about people becoming "parked" on incapacity benefit, whose 2.5 million recipients face a status review in the coming months designed to force them off benefits and back into work. Just what work he means isn't made clear. The 2.5 million people already fruitlessly searching for non-existent jobs are soon to be joined by as many others as the Tories can bully off incapacity benefits, presumably to take the millions of jobs that they have accidentally overlooked in the meantime.
And that's without counting the tens of thousands of civil servants and local authority staff who are destined to join them on the dole queues once the coalition gets into the swing of cutting the services that the unemployed and benefit recipients rely on for survival. It's all so old hat, really. It's the Tories falling back on the same mantra of beating up those least able to defend themselves that they have always employed.There is nothing new about it and nothing of real substance, either. And this supposed concern for those trapped on benefit it doesn't sit terribly well with the announcement in the recent Queen's Speech that the coalition is to scrap the regional development agencies. Not much help there in solving something that is a heavily regionalised problem and one, incidentally which dates back to the last time the Tories held office, when they decimated whole communities in their attacks on the coal and steel industries. Mr Duncan Smith makes great play of the fact that 1.4 million people in Britain have been on an out-of-work benefit for nine or more of the last 10 years and that income inequality in the UK is now at its highest level since comparable statistics began in 1961. But he gives little hope that any government in which he participates will do anything to improve matters. He highlights that people are better off claiming dole rather than in a job paying £15,000 a year or less.
But, unfortunately for all concerned, the problem is seen by Mr Duncan Smith and his Cabinet allies as benefits being too high and easily available, rather than wages being so bloody low that bare subsistence benefits can overtake them. "One of the biggest problems is that, for too many people, work simply does not pay," says the Tory gentleman. So make it pay, Mr Duncan Smith. Force your mates in the boardrooms to forgo a few billion out of their bonuses and jack up the minimum wage to a decent level. That will do a bit to solve income equality and it will give you clear blue water between wages and benefits. It will also inject some much-needed spending power into the economy and boost demand. But, for God's sake, don't fall back on battering the claimants again. Haven't you learned anything in 13 years out of power? Then again, you're a Tory, so perhaps you haven't. It is to be hoped, however, that your Lib Dems allies are getting a feel of just what they've allied with.
Showing posts with label anti-capitalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anti-capitalism. Show all posts
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
Youth job lambs to slaughter
The latest unemployment figures saw those looking for a job top 2.5 million, unemployment of 16-17 year olds rise by 4.4%, and the number of economically inactive reach its highest ever levels. But neither the Conservative nor the Lib Dem wing of the new government has proposed serious measures to provide jobs for workers and young people facing the brunt of this ongoing crisis. Instead the headlines are £6 billion cuts in public services to reassure the 'markets', code for multi-billionaires like George Soros and co. But why is it a priority to reassure the wealthy fat cats and not unemployed young people? During the election campaign, an unemployed young woman called Vicky Harrison committed suicide because of the hopeless situation she felt confronted by, after receiving over 200 job rejections. How many more young people feel in a similar situation? How much more are they in need of reassurance than wealthy hedge fund managers who only noticed the recession because their bonuses were five figures rather than six. We were abandoned by Labour during the onset of the recession, and the Tory/Liberal coalition is not going to change that situation.
The Conservatives during the general election talked about abolishing the Future Jobs Fund. Youth Fight for Jobs criticised this scheme because it did not offer permanent jobs, only six month placements, often on the minimum wage. Because of their temporary nature, they were likely to be low skilled, and more fundamentally did not ultimately change the employment outlook. The number of vacancies is dropping (now at 475,000) while the number of unemployed increases. This scheme has already created anger amongst young people forced onto it, many of whom will undoubtedly welcome its abolition. But signs are that the Conservatives will introduce schemes which are less useful than that. According to the Financial Times: "The Tories promise to create 400,000 apprenticeship or training places and give smaller companies a £2,000 bonus for every apprentice hired but have made no pledge to continue Labour's £1 billion in Future Jobs Fund."
During the 1980s, Thatcher's government reacted to mass unemployment with the Youth Training Scheme (YTS), but its inadequacy in providing a real way out for young people provoked mass opposition, including school student strikes involving 250,000. As Seumas Milne, commentator, says: "The prospect of ... Iain Duncan Smith dragooning the sick and jobless into privatised cheap labour schemes is a sobering measure of the new reality." This sort of scheme could provoke a reaction comparable to the protests in the mid-eighties. Benefits are widely expected to be "reformed" ie cut, and used to force people into schemes that will not benefit them. Big attacks are already expected to continue in further and higher education. Many young people have continued in education, or re-entered, to gain skills and avoid the thankless task of chasing non-existent jobs. But cuts in colleges and universities will still go ahead, while many young people are worried about attacks on grants for those in colleges (EMA for 16-19s, ALG for those above 19). Further down the line, the cap on university places remains in place and the threat of university fee increases. Many young people voted Liberal Democrat because they were seen as an alternative to the main political parties, especially because they promised eventually to scrap university fees.
However, the details of the coalition deal make it clear that the Liberal/Tory coalition will definitely not abolish fees, and most likely will preside over increases in charges for students, with Conservative and Labour MPs voting them through. The only thing that would stop them are cynical calculations in order to cling onto power in the face of organised mass opposition. This coalition will implement Conservative attacks on young people and the unemployed - the attacks that were found in the manifestos of Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems. The new cabinet is two-thirds private school, two-thirds Oxford and Cambridge university educated, with multi-millionaires well represented within their ranks. Youth Fight for Jobs will continue to organise for a mass fightback, for a programme of job creation to solve the problems of unemployment, for free education to allow people to develop to the best of their abilities, and for a living wage that will allow those in work to live a decent life.
The Conservatives during the general election talked about abolishing the Future Jobs Fund. Youth Fight for Jobs criticised this scheme because it did not offer permanent jobs, only six month placements, often on the minimum wage. Because of their temporary nature, they were likely to be low skilled, and more fundamentally did not ultimately change the employment outlook. The number of vacancies is dropping (now at 475,000) while the number of unemployed increases. This scheme has already created anger amongst young people forced onto it, many of whom will undoubtedly welcome its abolition. But signs are that the Conservatives will introduce schemes which are less useful than that. According to the Financial Times: "The Tories promise to create 400,000 apprenticeship or training places and give smaller companies a £2,000 bonus for every apprentice hired but have made no pledge to continue Labour's £1 billion in Future Jobs Fund."
During the 1980s, Thatcher's government reacted to mass unemployment with the Youth Training Scheme (YTS), but its inadequacy in providing a real way out for young people provoked mass opposition, including school student strikes involving 250,000. As Seumas Milne, commentator, says: "The prospect of ... Iain Duncan Smith dragooning the sick and jobless into privatised cheap labour schemes is a sobering measure of the new reality." This sort of scheme could provoke a reaction comparable to the protests in the mid-eighties. Benefits are widely expected to be "reformed" ie cut, and used to force people into schemes that will not benefit them. Big attacks are already expected to continue in further and higher education. Many young people have continued in education, or re-entered, to gain skills and avoid the thankless task of chasing non-existent jobs. But cuts in colleges and universities will still go ahead, while many young people are worried about attacks on grants for those in colleges (EMA for 16-19s, ALG for those above 19). Further down the line, the cap on university places remains in place and the threat of university fee increases. Many young people voted Liberal Democrat because they were seen as an alternative to the main political parties, especially because they promised eventually to scrap university fees.
However, the details of the coalition deal make it clear that the Liberal/Tory coalition will definitely not abolish fees, and most likely will preside over increases in charges for students, with Conservative and Labour MPs voting them through. The only thing that would stop them are cynical calculations in order to cling onto power in the face of organised mass opposition. This coalition will implement Conservative attacks on young people and the unemployed - the attacks that were found in the manifestos of Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems. The new cabinet is two-thirds private school, two-thirds Oxford and Cambridge university educated, with multi-millionaires well represented within their ranks. Youth Fight for Jobs will continue to organise for a mass fightback, for a programme of job creation to solve the problems of unemployment, for free education to allow people to develop to the best of their abilities, and for a living wage that will allow those in work to live a decent life.
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
Bitter bite of Tory cuts
We are now getting an early taste of just what Tory Britain will be like and it's a bitter taste indeed. For all of those who argued that there was no point in a Labour vote at the recent general election, it should be a sharp lesson. There is no doubt that new Labour was far too close to the Tories and Lib Dems in its policies and there's certainly no doubt that we were never about to see a social revolution brought about by Vladimir Illyich Brown. But the butchery that we are seeing brought into existence now is far more extreme, far more drastic and far quicker and less thought out than anything projected by Labour, so much so that that tens of thousands of people are facing harm to their lives that could have been avoided or at least postponed and more vulnerable to trade union pressure had there been a Labour government. In a matterof days, Tory Chancellor George Osborne and his Lib Dem henchman David Laws have dreamed up £6 billion of cuts to land on us all within a few weeks in an emergency Budget that shows all the signs of being more like a butchers bill than a logical programme. Lofty talk about not cutting front-line services begs the question of whether such front-line services can function without the administrative and technical backup that allows them to get on with the job and, of course, they can't.
The Lib Dems appear to have undergone a Damascene conversion to cuts that, not a fortnight ago, they were damning as over the top and irresponsible. Evidence of things to come is seen most clearly in the NHS, which has been instructed by the Department of Health to set aside a £2 billion pot to pay for one-off costs such as redundancies. A DoH spokeswoman said that "2010-11 will be the last year of significant growth for the NHS. "The NHS will need to plan now so it can continue to deliver service and quality improvements in the future. But with £2 billion worth of redundancies facing the service, that will be a damned sight more difficult to do than to talk about. Rather than "service and quality improvements," we can expect to see jobs go in the thousands and, when jobs go in a labour-intensive NHS, service standards will inevitably go with them. And that's not even counting the jobs that will have to go to pay for the £2 billion that is to be spent on the cutbacks. It's a downward spiral which will be difficult to halt, because the effects won't only be felt within the service. Taking up to 36,000 staff out of the service and onto the dole queues will remove a huge chunk from the spending power that manufacturing, wholesale and retail trades rely on. Shunting tens of thousands onto benefits will have an equally calamitous effect on public expenditure, which will then result in this cuts-mad and callous government attempting to slash the bill by restricting the amount of and access to benefits. With the same thing happening across the public sector, all the signs then point to the much forecast and much dreaded double-dip recession.
This brutal hacking back of the economy is so potentially damaging that it's impossible to forecast where such a downward spiral would end. The coalition of the ungodly clearly believes that the private sector will somehow recover and plug the gap created by the public-sector massacre, with new jobs appearing out of thin air, created by a market revived and fertilised by government largesse to the rich and the entrepreneurial. But faced with a manufacturing sector that is dying by inches and a consumer market crippled by job losses, how this would happen is beyond the understanding of mortal man. Not, apparently, by the Bullingdon butchers aided by their Lib Dem chums. It's just that no-one has yet explained how the conjuring trick is going to work. While the nation was swept up in the furore of the general election, the local elections sneaked by without a bat of an eyelid. Although some might argue that ultimate power lies at No 10, this doesn't mean local councils are mute when it comes to how to spend their government-allocated money. Just as there's a national budget, each local authority has its own mini-budget too. And many councils make their most progressive changes when coming head to head with an opposition government. So for Labour voters there's hope yet. Not only did left Labour MPs like Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott increase their majority in the general election, Labour fared remarkably well in the locals.
Let's go through some of the statistics. Labour has gained 415 seats on councils since the last election, increasing its number of councillors to 2,945 - its best performance since the party's landslide victory in 1997. Labour has also gained control of 17 councils across the country, 10 of which are in London, bringing the total number of local authorities under its control to 40. Out of the 23 councils that Labour retained control of, it gained seats in 20, made no change in the two local authorities of Manchester and Preston and only lost seats in Stevenage, losing just three councillors. It is also the only party to have complete control of any council in the country, with the two London authorities of Newham and Barking & Dagenham, where it fought off the BNP threat. By contrast, the Tories lost a number of councils, most notably those to Labour in the London boroughs of Ealing, Harrow and Enfield. The latter has long been seen as a young, up-and-coming Conservative stronghold compared with its neighbour Barnet - a traditional stuffy Tory borough that won't be going red for some time. Not only was Barnet Margaret Thatcher's old stomping ground during her time as MP for Finchley & Golders Green, its current mayor and Assembly Member for Barnet & Camden Brian Coleman once described Haringey as a place "where respectable folk have to lock their car doors as they drive through it." And let's not forget the well-publicised comments of Barnet's Mill Hill Councillor John Hart, who said of Marxists that they "were the laziest bastards on Earth."
Former Barnet Council leader and newly elected MP for Finchley & Golders Green Mike Freer defended Hart's comments by saying Hart had formed his opinions "when he used to work with Marxists at his university's student union." The local polls also saw Labour gain control of 13 local authorities which previously had no overall control, including Camden and Islington in London and Coventry and Doncaster elsewhere. What's interesting this time around is, aside from it being far from a landslide Tory victory in the general election, Labour has done extraordinarily well in the local elections, particularly in London," said Keith Flett, socialist historian and chairman of the TUC in Haringey. In 1997 the Tories were practically wiped off local authorities but this time around, at a time when Labour has had a lot of bad press, the party has actually become the ruling party on many councils. I see this as being a key battleground over the next year. Working people have voted Labour because they don't want Tory cuts." In Haringey Council in north London there were just a few seats separating the Liberal Democrats and Labour, which has run the council for over 40 years. In the wake of bad press following the child protection failings that led to the death of Baby P, everyone thought the Lib Dems might just clinch the public vote and rule the council. But Labour support in the poorer east of the borough was unwavering and, instead of the Lib Dems winning three seats to gain control of the council, they lost three. Flett added: "You ask any Afro-Caribbean living in Tottenham how they voted and they will reply: 'We vote Labour' - and that's all there is to it. "People's intelligence goes beyond the expectations of the sensationalist tabloid media to the extent that voters realise that the death of Baby P has very little to do with party politics." The tabloids might think they can bend public opinion at will, but you can bet The Sun was left nursing a bruised ego following the Tories' underwhelming performance.
Despite getting the full backing of the biggest-selling newspaper in Britain, despite the Iraq war inquiry and despite Gordon Brown's howling gaffe of calling a pensioner a "bigot," the Conservatives still could not muster enough support to win an overall majority of the vote. In fact they did appallingly considering the circumstances - showing that local people were not fooled by the tabloids' ranting. Deputy leader of Haringey Council and Tottenham Hale Councillor Lorna Reith believes the local electorate did not buy into the press reports surrounding Baby P. "The issue of children's safeguarding and baby Peter didn't come up on the doorstep," said Reith. I think those residents who were particularly concerned had probably followed the stories in the press and were aware that our Ofsted report in January showed we were making good progress. In 2006 borough turnout for the local elections was just under 36 per cent and this time it was 60.3 per cent. A higher turnout is usually beneficial to us." Even the Lib Dem leader in Haringey Robert Gorrie had to confess he was not surprised that Labour won again. "Disappointing, yes. Surprising, no," he said. "The Greens and Conservatives again won no seats and, as such, the Lib Dems remain the only alternative to Labour in Haringey." Perhaps turnout was a key factor here. Local elections are not normally held on the same day as general elections, which means that in some areas double the number of people voted at the locals compared with 2006. Could this be a sign that the majority of people in the country who choose not to vote would vote Labour if it came to it?
Robin Wales was re-elected as Newham Council's mayor with a staggering 64,748 votes - a majority of nearly 50,000 over the second-placed Tory candidate. The borough is led by the mayor and cabinet and got the largest swing to Labour in the country. "Across London the results show that the Labour vote held up well," he said. "Although the national result was disappointing, winning back London councils is a real achievement. Clearly the general election turnout was beneficial because it made it more likely that our voters would turn out to cast their vote. And London voters have had first-hand experience of a Tory administration through the Mayor Boris Johnson - the results indicate they don't like what they've seen. In Newham we got the largest swing to Labour in the country and this suggests that we benefited from more than just increased turnout. For example, we've got the biggest range of free events in London, we give all primary school children free school meals and last year we made £12 million available for locally directed projects." A Labour Party spokesman added: "We are very proud of the hard work and dedication from our Labour teams across the country, which meant we took back control of a number of councils. Once people see the reality of Conservative or Lib Dem councils, they are keen to return to the progressive policies of the Labour Party." Britain will certainly be seeing the reality of the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition all too soon, as the parties of the right formulate their slash-and-burn policies. Lessons will have to be learnt - but the tragedy is that we'll be learning the hard way.
The Lib Dems appear to have undergone a Damascene conversion to cuts that, not a fortnight ago, they were damning as over the top and irresponsible. Evidence of things to come is seen most clearly in the NHS, which has been instructed by the Department of Health to set aside a £2 billion pot to pay for one-off costs such as redundancies. A DoH spokeswoman said that "2010-11 will be the last year of significant growth for the NHS. "The NHS will need to plan now so it can continue to deliver service and quality improvements in the future. But with £2 billion worth of redundancies facing the service, that will be a damned sight more difficult to do than to talk about. Rather than "service and quality improvements," we can expect to see jobs go in the thousands and, when jobs go in a labour-intensive NHS, service standards will inevitably go with them. And that's not even counting the jobs that will have to go to pay for the £2 billion that is to be spent on the cutbacks. It's a downward spiral which will be difficult to halt, because the effects won't only be felt within the service. Taking up to 36,000 staff out of the service and onto the dole queues will remove a huge chunk from the spending power that manufacturing, wholesale and retail trades rely on. Shunting tens of thousands onto benefits will have an equally calamitous effect on public expenditure, which will then result in this cuts-mad and callous government attempting to slash the bill by restricting the amount of and access to benefits. With the same thing happening across the public sector, all the signs then point to the much forecast and much dreaded double-dip recession.
This brutal hacking back of the economy is so potentially damaging that it's impossible to forecast where such a downward spiral would end. The coalition of the ungodly clearly believes that the private sector will somehow recover and plug the gap created by the public-sector massacre, with new jobs appearing out of thin air, created by a market revived and fertilised by government largesse to the rich and the entrepreneurial. But faced with a manufacturing sector that is dying by inches and a consumer market crippled by job losses, how this would happen is beyond the understanding of mortal man. Not, apparently, by the Bullingdon butchers aided by their Lib Dem chums. It's just that no-one has yet explained how the conjuring trick is going to work. While the nation was swept up in the furore of the general election, the local elections sneaked by without a bat of an eyelid. Although some might argue that ultimate power lies at No 10, this doesn't mean local councils are mute when it comes to how to spend their government-allocated money. Just as there's a national budget, each local authority has its own mini-budget too. And many councils make their most progressive changes when coming head to head with an opposition government. So for Labour voters there's hope yet. Not only did left Labour MPs like Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott increase their majority in the general election, Labour fared remarkably well in the locals.
Let's go through some of the statistics. Labour has gained 415 seats on councils since the last election, increasing its number of councillors to 2,945 - its best performance since the party's landslide victory in 1997. Labour has also gained control of 17 councils across the country, 10 of which are in London, bringing the total number of local authorities under its control to 40. Out of the 23 councils that Labour retained control of, it gained seats in 20, made no change in the two local authorities of Manchester and Preston and only lost seats in Stevenage, losing just three councillors. It is also the only party to have complete control of any council in the country, with the two London authorities of Newham and Barking & Dagenham, where it fought off the BNP threat. By contrast, the Tories lost a number of councils, most notably those to Labour in the London boroughs of Ealing, Harrow and Enfield. The latter has long been seen as a young, up-and-coming Conservative stronghold compared with its neighbour Barnet - a traditional stuffy Tory borough that won't be going red for some time. Not only was Barnet Margaret Thatcher's old stomping ground during her time as MP for Finchley & Golders Green, its current mayor and Assembly Member for Barnet & Camden Brian Coleman once described Haringey as a place "where respectable folk have to lock their car doors as they drive through it." And let's not forget the well-publicised comments of Barnet's Mill Hill Councillor John Hart, who said of Marxists that they "were the laziest bastards on Earth."
Former Barnet Council leader and newly elected MP for Finchley & Golders Green Mike Freer defended Hart's comments by saying Hart had formed his opinions "when he used to work with Marxists at his university's student union." The local polls also saw Labour gain control of 13 local authorities which previously had no overall control, including Camden and Islington in London and Coventry and Doncaster elsewhere. What's interesting this time around is, aside from it being far from a landslide Tory victory in the general election, Labour has done extraordinarily well in the local elections, particularly in London," said Keith Flett, socialist historian and chairman of the TUC in Haringey. In 1997 the Tories were practically wiped off local authorities but this time around, at a time when Labour has had a lot of bad press, the party has actually become the ruling party on many councils. I see this as being a key battleground over the next year. Working people have voted Labour because they don't want Tory cuts." In Haringey Council in north London there were just a few seats separating the Liberal Democrats and Labour, which has run the council for over 40 years. In the wake of bad press following the child protection failings that led to the death of Baby P, everyone thought the Lib Dems might just clinch the public vote and rule the council. But Labour support in the poorer east of the borough was unwavering and, instead of the Lib Dems winning three seats to gain control of the council, they lost three. Flett added: "You ask any Afro-Caribbean living in Tottenham how they voted and they will reply: 'We vote Labour' - and that's all there is to it. "People's intelligence goes beyond the expectations of the sensationalist tabloid media to the extent that voters realise that the death of Baby P has very little to do with party politics." The tabloids might think they can bend public opinion at will, but you can bet The Sun was left nursing a bruised ego following the Tories' underwhelming performance.
Despite getting the full backing of the biggest-selling newspaper in Britain, despite the Iraq war inquiry and despite Gordon Brown's howling gaffe of calling a pensioner a "bigot," the Conservatives still could not muster enough support to win an overall majority of the vote. In fact they did appallingly considering the circumstances - showing that local people were not fooled by the tabloids' ranting. Deputy leader of Haringey Council and Tottenham Hale Councillor Lorna Reith believes the local electorate did not buy into the press reports surrounding Baby P. "The issue of children's safeguarding and baby Peter didn't come up on the doorstep," said Reith. I think those residents who were particularly concerned had probably followed the stories in the press and were aware that our Ofsted report in January showed we were making good progress. In 2006 borough turnout for the local elections was just under 36 per cent and this time it was 60.3 per cent. A higher turnout is usually beneficial to us." Even the Lib Dem leader in Haringey Robert Gorrie had to confess he was not surprised that Labour won again. "Disappointing, yes. Surprising, no," he said. "The Greens and Conservatives again won no seats and, as such, the Lib Dems remain the only alternative to Labour in Haringey." Perhaps turnout was a key factor here. Local elections are not normally held on the same day as general elections, which means that in some areas double the number of people voted at the locals compared with 2006. Could this be a sign that the majority of people in the country who choose not to vote would vote Labour if it came to it?
Robin Wales was re-elected as Newham Council's mayor with a staggering 64,748 votes - a majority of nearly 50,000 over the second-placed Tory candidate. The borough is led by the mayor and cabinet and got the largest swing to Labour in the country. "Across London the results show that the Labour vote held up well," he said. "Although the national result was disappointing, winning back London councils is a real achievement. Clearly the general election turnout was beneficial because it made it more likely that our voters would turn out to cast their vote. And London voters have had first-hand experience of a Tory administration through the Mayor Boris Johnson - the results indicate they don't like what they've seen. In Newham we got the largest swing to Labour in the country and this suggests that we benefited from more than just increased turnout. For example, we've got the biggest range of free events in London, we give all primary school children free school meals and last year we made £12 million available for locally directed projects." A Labour Party spokesman added: "We are very proud of the hard work and dedication from our Labour teams across the country, which meant we took back control of a number of councils. Once people see the reality of Conservative or Lib Dem councils, they are keen to return to the progressive policies of the Labour Party." Britain will certainly be seeing the reality of the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition all too soon, as the parties of the right formulate their slash-and-burn policies. Lessons will have to be learnt - but the tragedy is that we'll be learning the hard way.
Friday, 14 May 2010
Fall from grace of yellow Tories
How far the Lib Dems have sunk is debatable. Some say that they were pretty low on the food chain even before their distasteful deal with the Tories for a seat or two at the big boys' table. But the distance of their fall is measured in the fact that the yellow-blue coalition held its first Cabinet meeting yesterday, but Deputy Prime Minister and groveller-in-chief Nick Clegg is only going to his members to seek approval of the deal on Sunday. Tough luck if you happen to be a member whose last possible ambition was to climb into bed with the Tories, but that's the way it goes with these most undemocratic of democrats. Chairman of the party's federal conference committee Duncan Brack even had the brass neck to claim that, "in holding this special conference, we are demonstrating again that we are a democratic party which listens to and trusts its members." Stable doors and horses, Mr Brack. No harm in getting used to the doublethink that the Lib Dems have to keep working on if they are to keep even a vestige of self-respect, one supposes, but Mr Brack really ought not to be wasting the two-faced flannel on his own members. They can see as easily as him which way the wind's blowing. It remains to be seen if they have any more spine than their parliamentary colleagues demonstrated. And the wind's blowing in a very chilly direction as far as anyone who thought that the Lib Dems had any trace of progressive credentials is concerned.
Gone is the opposition to any "like-for-like" Trident replacement. In its stead is a commitment to the continuation of Britain's nuclear weapons status, with just the sop that Trident replacement will be judged on value for money. No matter how much the posh chaps at the top wriggle and writhe, that certainly wasn't the rank-and-file Lib Dem understanding of the position. As far as civil liberties are concerned, ID cards are certainly going and good riddance to them, but new blue-yellow Home Secretary Theresa May's first utterance was "more police on the street and less paperwork for them to fill in." Suggestions of the old "sus" laws spring immediately to mind, with all that implies for black youth in the inner cities. In the new Cabinet, the cracks have started appearing even before the first week has ended. New Business Secretary and Lib Dem economics guru Vince Cable has taken a public slapping down by George Osborne. No sooner had rumours started circulating in the City that Mr Cable was to take responsibility for the reform of Britain's banks than the phone calls were made and Mr Osborne leaped in to quash the rumours. The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills had said that Mr Cable would jointly chair a Cabinet committee which is to determine the shape of the UK banking industry.
But Mr Osborne put an end to all that nonsense, briskly stating that the Treasury was going to remain in charge of banking policy and the financial services sector and that he would be chairing that key committee. That was a short old rise to glory, wasn't it Vince? To cap it all came the coalition's so-called accord on National Insurance. The deal worked out put paid to any pretensions that the Lib Dems might have had to positive policies. Under it, the bosses won't face Labour's proposed rise in National Insurance contributions, but the workers will. Progressive, it ain't. And it's all put into perspective by the suggestion that the coalition will legislate to raise the threshold for a successful no-confidence vote in Parliament from the traditional 50 per cent-plus-one level to a new 55 per cent mark. Not a lot of trust there between the so-called happy partners, it would appear. It's not difficult to discredit this lot. In fact it's rather like shooting fish in a barrel. But it remains to be seen if Labour can ditch its new Labour losers and reform itself into a fighting progressive force to oppose a new generation of warmongering, cutback-obsessed profiteers, this time outside their own ranks. We live in hope. So it would appear that the people have spoken and the Tories and Lib Dems have not listened to a single word they said - as is usual. For it is a completely and absolutely reactionary government that now holds the reins of power. The Lib Dems, who made such a play of being neither Tory nor Labour, but something completely different, have shed their protective coloration and come out in the open for what they are, at least in their national leadership, just plain old closet Tories.
The tens of thousands of people who voted Lib Dem in this, and indeed in many previous elections, just to keep the Tories out, have been discarded and their views ignored by a Lib Dem leadership which, sniffing at a couple of seats at the top table, jettisoned everything that they claimed to believe in to get a taste of it. And in country constituencies, many of which have seen resounding battles between Liberals and Tories and in which the Labour Party regularly comes a poor third, what choice now faces the Lib Dem voter? The answer is, precious little. They can now vote for the yellow Tory or the blue Tory and that isn't going to please them in the slightest. And what of the thousands who voted Lib Dem because that party's policy on Trident was better than anything else on offer? That particular policy hasn't been exactly prominent in the posh chaps coalition's utterances so far and merely including it in a spending review will convince no-one. Then there's Europe. Granted that Tory scepticism on Europe wasn't for the best of motives, how will William Hague sit with the Europhiles in the Lib Dem fold? Again the answer is brief. Not very well. All in all, it would seem that the Lib Dems have just committed a very public act of hara-kiri in the pursuit of a few seats in the second rank of a Tory government. Not that that need concern us very much.
They were always the acceptable face of Toryism anyway, and their pronounced anti-trade unionism will probably be a good fit with the Tories as they nestle into their new blue-yellow brotherhood. And brotherhood it most definitely is. The lack of little except white men in suits - with the exception of Theresa May, whose policies seem to be more anti-women than pro - is the most evident thing about the Cabinet line-up so far. So what does this mean for Labour? Well what it should mean is that the battle for the centre ground, which was always new Labour's flagship strategy, has failed dismally and that should mean the unmourned end of the dismal new Labour project. It should mean a return to policies to benefit working people and an end to the nonsense about being the "natural party of business" and all the class-collaborationist drivel that was spouted during the Blair-Brown era. But the new Labour clique don't give up that easily and there are already signs that they are regrouping and preparing to put up yet another set of candidates for the vacant leadership slot who will dance to the City's tune whenever the bell rings. This quite simply cannot be allowed to happen. With the new unity of declared and previously undeclared Tories that this improbable coalition represents, it would be unthinkable to to try to approach Parliament with anything other than a progressive platform of policies clearly differentiating Labour from the Libservatives.
New Labour has failed, even in its own limited terms, and it is time for the trade unions and the other organisations of the working class to flex their underused muscles and warn that only a radical and progressive opposition will succeed in toppling this government. It's time for Labour to remember its roots, to rebuild its relationship with the labour movement and to abandon the pale impersonation of a government for suburbia that it has adopted for so long. There is a huge fight on cuts and jobs coming and it has to be won. And if Labour hasn't the belly for that fight, it will be fought without, or in spite of, them.
Gone is the opposition to any "like-for-like" Trident replacement. In its stead is a commitment to the continuation of Britain's nuclear weapons status, with just the sop that Trident replacement will be judged on value for money. No matter how much the posh chaps at the top wriggle and writhe, that certainly wasn't the rank-and-file Lib Dem understanding of the position. As far as civil liberties are concerned, ID cards are certainly going and good riddance to them, but new blue-yellow Home Secretary Theresa May's first utterance was "more police on the street and less paperwork for them to fill in." Suggestions of the old "sus" laws spring immediately to mind, with all that implies for black youth in the inner cities. In the new Cabinet, the cracks have started appearing even before the first week has ended. New Business Secretary and Lib Dem economics guru Vince Cable has taken a public slapping down by George Osborne. No sooner had rumours started circulating in the City that Mr Cable was to take responsibility for the reform of Britain's banks than the phone calls were made and Mr Osborne leaped in to quash the rumours. The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills had said that Mr Cable would jointly chair a Cabinet committee which is to determine the shape of the UK banking industry.
But Mr Osborne put an end to all that nonsense, briskly stating that the Treasury was going to remain in charge of banking policy and the financial services sector and that he would be chairing that key committee. That was a short old rise to glory, wasn't it Vince? To cap it all came the coalition's so-called accord on National Insurance. The deal worked out put paid to any pretensions that the Lib Dems might have had to positive policies. Under it, the bosses won't face Labour's proposed rise in National Insurance contributions, but the workers will. Progressive, it ain't. And it's all put into perspective by the suggestion that the coalition will legislate to raise the threshold for a successful no-confidence vote in Parliament from the traditional 50 per cent-plus-one level to a new 55 per cent mark. Not a lot of trust there between the so-called happy partners, it would appear. It's not difficult to discredit this lot. In fact it's rather like shooting fish in a barrel. But it remains to be seen if Labour can ditch its new Labour losers and reform itself into a fighting progressive force to oppose a new generation of warmongering, cutback-obsessed profiteers, this time outside their own ranks. We live in hope. So it would appear that the people have spoken and the Tories and Lib Dems have not listened to a single word they said - as is usual. For it is a completely and absolutely reactionary government that now holds the reins of power. The Lib Dems, who made such a play of being neither Tory nor Labour, but something completely different, have shed their protective coloration and come out in the open for what they are, at least in their national leadership, just plain old closet Tories.
The tens of thousands of people who voted Lib Dem in this, and indeed in many previous elections, just to keep the Tories out, have been discarded and their views ignored by a Lib Dem leadership which, sniffing at a couple of seats at the top table, jettisoned everything that they claimed to believe in to get a taste of it. And in country constituencies, many of which have seen resounding battles between Liberals and Tories and in which the Labour Party regularly comes a poor third, what choice now faces the Lib Dem voter? The answer is, precious little. They can now vote for the yellow Tory or the blue Tory and that isn't going to please them in the slightest. And what of the thousands who voted Lib Dem because that party's policy on Trident was better than anything else on offer? That particular policy hasn't been exactly prominent in the posh chaps coalition's utterances so far and merely including it in a spending review will convince no-one. Then there's Europe. Granted that Tory scepticism on Europe wasn't for the best of motives, how will William Hague sit with the Europhiles in the Lib Dem fold? Again the answer is brief. Not very well. All in all, it would seem that the Lib Dems have just committed a very public act of hara-kiri in the pursuit of a few seats in the second rank of a Tory government. Not that that need concern us very much.
They were always the acceptable face of Toryism anyway, and their pronounced anti-trade unionism will probably be a good fit with the Tories as they nestle into their new blue-yellow brotherhood. And brotherhood it most definitely is. The lack of little except white men in suits - with the exception of Theresa May, whose policies seem to be more anti-women than pro - is the most evident thing about the Cabinet line-up so far. So what does this mean for Labour? Well what it should mean is that the battle for the centre ground, which was always new Labour's flagship strategy, has failed dismally and that should mean the unmourned end of the dismal new Labour project. It should mean a return to policies to benefit working people and an end to the nonsense about being the "natural party of business" and all the class-collaborationist drivel that was spouted during the Blair-Brown era. But the new Labour clique don't give up that easily and there are already signs that they are regrouping and preparing to put up yet another set of candidates for the vacant leadership slot who will dance to the City's tune whenever the bell rings. This quite simply cannot be allowed to happen. With the new unity of declared and previously undeclared Tories that this improbable coalition represents, it would be unthinkable to to try to approach Parliament with anything other than a progressive platform of policies clearly differentiating Labour from the Libservatives.
New Labour has failed, even in its own limited terms, and it is time for the trade unions and the other organisations of the working class to flex their underused muscles and warn that only a radical and progressive opposition will succeed in toppling this government. It's time for Labour to remember its roots, to rebuild its relationship with the labour movement and to abandon the pale impersonation of a government for suburbia that it has adopted for so long. There is a huge fight on cuts and jobs coming and it has to be won. And if Labour hasn't the belly for that fight, it will be fought without, or in spite of, them.
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
Democracy is dying
So that’s what “democracy” means. Every five years or so we vote – and that’s the end of it until the next election. Of course, having a vote is certainly better than not having one. But the hung parliament has led to backroom discussions – and we are all as excluded as the thousands of people who couldn’t get into polling stations after 10pm on election day. The truth is that what we voted for bears little resemblance to what we got. The Tories have far more seats than can be justified by the number of votes they got. In this situation, many, including myself, are calling for a change to the voting system, in the shape of proportional representation. The first-past-the-post electoral system, which allowed Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair to win election landslides with just two fifths of the vote, is indeed unfair. The last time there was momentum for PR on the left was when the Tory election victories in the 1980s and 1990s looked like they would never end. Then it was out of desperation – a belief that only by changing the voting system could the Tories be beaten. Now it is out of frustration that all the parties are so similar. After the Second World War, the Labour and Tory parties completely dominated British politics, sharing around 96 percent of the popular vote between them. Last week they got just 65 percent between them. Yet parliament is still dominated by the two biggest parties.
That’s why socialists support electoral reform although we need proper debate about what form takes. The strongest argument is that it would help break the dominance of two increasingly unrepresentative big parties, opening up a space for the left – and this is true. Voting systems like multi-seat constituencies or alternative votes and a list system are more democratic than what we’ve got. But the left should not obsess over PR and get trapped in a debate about constitutional reform that in many ways serves the interests of the big parties. For example, Southern Ireland has a “fairer” electoral system – yet politics is dominated by right wing parties and corruption. The Northern Ireland Assembly was structured after enormous care and effort to provide proportionality and parity of esteem, yet it has copper-fastened sectarian division and put the bigots of the DUP in charge. Greece has PR – but this has not prevented the government trying to impose swingeing cuts. In Britain, the radical left is fragmented and electorally very weak. The collapse of the existing party system could even make things worse if the only alternatives come from the far right – racist parties like UKIP and the BNP.
The problem with today’s democracy, and with the dominant view of democracy in our society, is that it is far too limited. To address that we need to go far beyond which type of voting system we want. To make democracy truly relevant to the majority of working people, what is needed is not just political democracy but also economic and social democracy. The capitalist class can live with political democracy alone – the election of parliaments and governments – because the decisive levers of power are not in parliament. Control over society really lies first in the boardrooms of industry and the banks, and second in the permanent institutions of the state, above all the armed forces. The capitalists own and control the former directly, and the latter is bound to it by a thousand economic, social and ideological ties. By these means they can turn parliament into a talking shop and bend governments to their will. We got an insight into the real base of power when the media with demands to reassure “the markets” that the new government would be formed quickly. Marxists call what we have now “bourgeois democracy” – democracy that is based on and enshrines the rule of the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie.
To move beyond this to a system based on real power for the masses, it is necessary to extend democracy to production and work, and then other areas of social life. This means democracy in every factory, call centre, supermarket, school, university, hospital and post office. It means workers’ democracy. That cannot be achieved without overturning capitalist property ownership, law and the state – with a workers’ revolution that will enable the working class to run society. In the full glare of publicity the three main parties jostle and manoeuvre over power. But, in the background, there is a much more fundamental assertion of power.This is, of course, by the famous “markets” that hover threateningly over the politicians as they negotiate. The process began even before the general election took place. At the beginning of last week the Financial Times reported that the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange was planning to open at 1am that Friday morning, three hours after voting ended. This was to allow traders in gilts—British government bonds—to start buying or selling them as soon as the result of the election began to become clear. It was clear that there was only one outcome that was really acceptable to the bond markets—a majority Tory government that would immediately implement unprecedented cuts in public spending.This announcement amounted to hanging a sword of Damocles over the heads of the British electorate.
When the voters failed to deliver the result the markets had demanded, the latter’s spokespeople were absolutely furious. Sir Martin Sorell, chief executive of the advertising empire WPP, spluttered on Radio Four’s World at One on Friday last week that a hung parliament was the “worst possible” result. Alan Clarke of Paribas pontificated to the Financial Times that “the UK could lose its top triple A credit status because of its failure to deliver a majority government with the authority to tackle the country’s public finances immediately”. Arnaud Mares of Moody’s, one of the three agencies that rate the credit status of states and firms, said he assumed that “the incoming economic team could muster convincing parliamentary support for a fiscal adjustment that was no looser or slower than outlined by all three political parties during their respective election campaigns.” All this reminds us that Jimmy Carville, one of Bill Clinton’s advisers, said in 1993 that, “if there was reincarnation... I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” Let’s remind ourselves of what’s really going on here. Less than three years ago, the banks, hedge funds, and the like precipitated the biggest financial crash and the worst economic slump since 1929. The ratings agencies were condemned only last week by the French and German governments for their contribution to this disaster by giving triple-A ratings to various financial instruments that are now mostly worthless.
To prevent a repeat of the Great Depression of the 1930s, states increased their spending. They found that money largely by borrowing. This was a good thing because it helped to maintain demand for goods and services. But, as a result, budget deficits have risen. Now all the banks and other financial institutions that were saved thanks to this spending and borrowing are denouncing the rise in deficits as an economic scandal that can only be expunged by the most savage cuts in public services. To get an intimation of the kind of suffering that this will cause, look at Greece. The austerity programme extracted as the price of the country’s “rescue” by the International Monetary Fund and the eurozone will slash wages, pensions, and services. As a result the Greek economy is projected to shrink by 4 percent this year and by 2.6 percent in 2011. In other words, slashing the deficit is economic nonsense. Its only justification is to increase the profits and bolster the power of the very forces that unleashed the crisis in the first place. But, at the same time as demanding austerity, these same forces are scurrying back to the state to rescue them again. Last Sunday’s New York Times anxiously reported: “The fear that began in Athens, raced through Europe and finally shook the stock market in the United States is now affecting the broader global economy.” The European Union emergency package agreed at the weekend is designed particularly to bolster the bond markets. The sacred “markets” that sit in judgement of mere voters and elected politicians are themselves deeply fragile, riven with deep fractures.
That’s why socialists support electoral reform although we need proper debate about what form takes. The strongest argument is that it would help break the dominance of two increasingly unrepresentative big parties, opening up a space for the left – and this is true. Voting systems like multi-seat constituencies or alternative votes and a list system are more democratic than what we’ve got. But the left should not obsess over PR and get trapped in a debate about constitutional reform that in many ways serves the interests of the big parties. For example, Southern Ireland has a “fairer” electoral system – yet politics is dominated by right wing parties and corruption. The Northern Ireland Assembly was structured after enormous care and effort to provide proportionality and parity of esteem, yet it has copper-fastened sectarian division and put the bigots of the DUP in charge. Greece has PR – but this has not prevented the government trying to impose swingeing cuts. In Britain, the radical left is fragmented and electorally very weak. The collapse of the existing party system could even make things worse if the only alternatives come from the far right – racist parties like UKIP and the BNP.
The problem with today’s democracy, and with the dominant view of democracy in our society, is that it is far too limited. To address that we need to go far beyond which type of voting system we want. To make democracy truly relevant to the majority of working people, what is needed is not just political democracy but also economic and social democracy. The capitalist class can live with political democracy alone – the election of parliaments and governments – because the decisive levers of power are not in parliament. Control over society really lies first in the boardrooms of industry and the banks, and second in the permanent institutions of the state, above all the armed forces. The capitalists own and control the former directly, and the latter is bound to it by a thousand economic, social and ideological ties. By these means they can turn parliament into a talking shop and bend governments to their will. We got an insight into the real base of power when the media with demands to reassure “the markets” that the new government would be formed quickly. Marxists call what we have now “bourgeois democracy” – democracy that is based on and enshrines the rule of the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie.
To move beyond this to a system based on real power for the masses, it is necessary to extend democracy to production and work, and then other areas of social life. This means democracy in every factory, call centre, supermarket, school, university, hospital and post office. It means workers’ democracy. That cannot be achieved without overturning capitalist property ownership, law and the state – with a workers’ revolution that will enable the working class to run society. In the full glare of publicity the three main parties jostle and manoeuvre over power. But, in the background, there is a much more fundamental assertion of power.This is, of course, by the famous “markets” that hover threateningly over the politicians as they negotiate. The process began even before the general election took place. At the beginning of last week the Financial Times reported that the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange was planning to open at 1am that Friday morning, three hours after voting ended. This was to allow traders in gilts—British government bonds—to start buying or selling them as soon as the result of the election began to become clear. It was clear that there was only one outcome that was really acceptable to the bond markets—a majority Tory government that would immediately implement unprecedented cuts in public spending.This announcement amounted to hanging a sword of Damocles over the heads of the British electorate.
When the voters failed to deliver the result the markets had demanded, the latter’s spokespeople were absolutely furious. Sir Martin Sorell, chief executive of the advertising empire WPP, spluttered on Radio Four’s World at One on Friday last week that a hung parliament was the “worst possible” result. Alan Clarke of Paribas pontificated to the Financial Times that “the UK could lose its top triple A credit status because of its failure to deliver a majority government with the authority to tackle the country’s public finances immediately”. Arnaud Mares of Moody’s, one of the three agencies that rate the credit status of states and firms, said he assumed that “the incoming economic team could muster convincing parliamentary support for a fiscal adjustment that was no looser or slower than outlined by all three political parties during their respective election campaigns.” All this reminds us that Jimmy Carville, one of Bill Clinton’s advisers, said in 1993 that, “if there was reincarnation... I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.” Let’s remind ourselves of what’s really going on here. Less than three years ago, the banks, hedge funds, and the like precipitated the biggest financial crash and the worst economic slump since 1929. The ratings agencies were condemned only last week by the French and German governments for their contribution to this disaster by giving triple-A ratings to various financial instruments that are now mostly worthless.
To prevent a repeat of the Great Depression of the 1930s, states increased their spending. They found that money largely by borrowing. This was a good thing because it helped to maintain demand for goods and services. But, as a result, budget deficits have risen. Now all the banks and other financial institutions that were saved thanks to this spending and borrowing are denouncing the rise in deficits as an economic scandal that can only be expunged by the most savage cuts in public services. To get an intimation of the kind of suffering that this will cause, look at Greece. The austerity programme extracted as the price of the country’s “rescue” by the International Monetary Fund and the eurozone will slash wages, pensions, and services. As a result the Greek economy is projected to shrink by 4 percent this year and by 2.6 percent in 2011. In other words, slashing the deficit is economic nonsense. Its only justification is to increase the profits and bolster the power of the very forces that unleashed the crisis in the first place. But, at the same time as demanding austerity, these same forces are scurrying back to the state to rescue them again. Last Sunday’s New York Times anxiously reported: “The fear that began in Athens, raced through Europe and finally shook the stock market in the United States is now affecting the broader global economy.” The European Union emergency package agreed at the weekend is designed particularly to bolster the bond markets. The sacred “markets” that sit in judgement of mere voters and elected politicians are themselves deeply fragile, riven with deep fractures.
Reclaiming the modernity mantle
To talk of "modernisation" is to speak the language of neoliberalism. To be radical and revolutionary, to transform this, reform that - to anyone under 40, these terms evoke the rhetoric of what Peter Mandelson called "the Blair revolution" of 1997 as much as the Russian revolution of 1917. While it couches itself as the very thrusting edge of modernity, neoliberalism harks back to an earlier, allegedly better time, that of neoclassical economics, the system of the workhouse and "self-help." Nonetheless, the actual effects of neoliberal capitalism - the destruction of working-class communities, of entire countries' economies, of the very notion of "society" - are extreme in their effects. Bertolt Brecht once claimed that "communism is not radical. It is capitalism that is radical." Capitalism is the system that makes all that is solid melt into air, the furnace of all traditions - while communism, at least as he imagined it, tries to slam on the brakes and to take control of a relentlessly accelerating, unmanned vehicle. Today, where the remains of the welfare state that have survived the last 30 years are facing even more extreme attacks in order to repay a "deficit" created by the bank bail-outs, the right is again posing as fearless, unsentimental and radical. How should we respond?
For historian Tony Judt, the left must assume its mantle as the new conservatism. He claims that social democracy, as a counter-movement both to laissez-faire capitalism and communism, was a movement against insecurity. As generations got further and further from the Depression and the war, the security of the new social infrastructure was carelessly, thoughtlessly discarded. Politicians like Gordon Brown bizarrely argued that their speculative boom meant "an end to boom and bust." Judt argues that such arguments only seemed credible because, by the 1980s, "few in the West are old enough to know just what it means to watch our world collapse." Yet he implies that we will do, sooner rather than later. Judt says that the welfare state and social democracy are still viable, more so than the seamless fantasies of neoliberalism. But his argument goes further than this. "The 20th century narrative of the progressive state," he writes, "rested precariously upon the conceit that 'we' - reformers, socialists, radicals - had history on our side ... if social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear. Rather than seeking to restore a language of optimistic progress, we should begin by reacquainting ourselves with the recent past ... the left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project."
We can leave aside Judt's occasionally glib anti-communism and the conventional amnesia over social democracy's record of grim political conformism. From the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht in 1919, to collaboration with colonialism and imperialist wars, to standing idle in the face of Hitler, social democrats have a far less impeccable a moral record than they think they do. His central point is intriguingly counterintuitive - the left should appeal to the memory of the recent past rather than the imagined future. Frankly, it sounds preferable to smashing in the windows of McDonald's. But what does this mean for those who have no memory of social democracy? What use are memories of Nye Bevan to those who can't remember Thatcher? Curiously enough, the main outlet for this yearning for the recent past is not in party politics, which - with some Marxist-inflected exceptions which Judt no doubt disdains, such as Die Linke, France's Nouveau Partie Anticapitaliste or the "pink tide" in Latin America - remains overwhelmingly neoliberal. It can be found instead in much contemporary art and music. Here, over the last few years something often described as a "nostalgia for the future" has obsessed over the lost gains of the post-war settlement, to often brilliant effect. The Ghost Box record label, for instance, shows an obsession with the public modernism of an earlier era - the egalitarian spaces of comprehensive schools and council estates, the unearthly sounds of the BBC's avant-garde Radiophonic Workshop or the minimalist design of cheap Pelican paperbacks.
This isn't at all a phenomenon localised to the "democratic" side of the ex-iron curtain - east European artists have spent much of the last two decades playing with the futuristic dreamworld of "actually existing socialism" as if to reimagine its collective spaces without its petty brutalities. This nostalgia is not for the recent past itself - it is a yearning for the future that it promised. Such artists hold up yesterday's examples of social democratic modernist design as a quiet protest against the crassness and barbarism of postmodern capitalism. But it is also as a reminder that it failed to bring about a new society. The social democratic welfare state was, for many, not so much a settlement as a step on the way to something else - socialism. Yet it seems unlikely that socialism can be rekindled by appealing to past hopes and dreams that few can remember. Nostalgia for lost dreams of the future only has value if it can actually help create a viable path forwards - otherwise, it's English Heritage with spacesuits. The left would do well to remind people that poorer societies than ours spent more on health and welfare than we do and that they considered education a right, not a product. But such lessons from history must be combined with a new modernism of the left. To hand the mantle of "modernity" to the right is to give it a powerful weapon against which halcyon memories, real or imagined, are powerless.
For historian Tony Judt, the left must assume its mantle as the new conservatism. He claims that social democracy, as a counter-movement both to laissez-faire capitalism and communism, was a movement against insecurity. As generations got further and further from the Depression and the war, the security of the new social infrastructure was carelessly, thoughtlessly discarded. Politicians like Gordon Brown bizarrely argued that their speculative boom meant "an end to boom and bust." Judt argues that such arguments only seemed credible because, by the 1980s, "few in the West are old enough to know just what it means to watch our world collapse." Yet he implies that we will do, sooner rather than later. Judt says that the welfare state and social democracy are still viable, more so than the seamless fantasies of neoliberalism. But his argument goes further than this. "The 20th century narrative of the progressive state," he writes, "rested precariously upon the conceit that 'we' - reformers, socialists, radicals - had history on our side ... if social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear. Rather than seeking to restore a language of optimistic progress, we should begin by reacquainting ourselves with the recent past ... the left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project."
We can leave aside Judt's occasionally glib anti-communism and the conventional amnesia over social democracy's record of grim political conformism. From the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht in 1919, to collaboration with colonialism and imperialist wars, to standing idle in the face of Hitler, social democrats have a far less impeccable a moral record than they think they do. His central point is intriguingly counterintuitive - the left should appeal to the memory of the recent past rather than the imagined future. Frankly, it sounds preferable to smashing in the windows of McDonald's. But what does this mean for those who have no memory of social democracy? What use are memories of Nye Bevan to those who can't remember Thatcher? Curiously enough, the main outlet for this yearning for the recent past is not in party politics, which - with some Marxist-inflected exceptions which Judt no doubt disdains, such as Die Linke, France's Nouveau Partie Anticapitaliste or the "pink tide" in Latin America - remains overwhelmingly neoliberal. It can be found instead in much contemporary art and music. Here, over the last few years something often described as a "nostalgia for the future" has obsessed over the lost gains of the post-war settlement, to often brilliant effect. The Ghost Box record label, for instance, shows an obsession with the public modernism of an earlier era - the egalitarian spaces of comprehensive schools and council estates, the unearthly sounds of the BBC's avant-garde Radiophonic Workshop or the minimalist design of cheap Pelican paperbacks.
This isn't at all a phenomenon localised to the "democratic" side of the ex-iron curtain - east European artists have spent much of the last two decades playing with the futuristic dreamworld of "actually existing socialism" as if to reimagine its collective spaces without its petty brutalities. This nostalgia is not for the recent past itself - it is a yearning for the future that it promised. Such artists hold up yesterday's examples of social democratic modernist design as a quiet protest against the crassness and barbarism of postmodern capitalism. But it is also as a reminder that it failed to bring about a new society. The social democratic welfare state was, for many, not so much a settlement as a step on the way to something else - socialism. Yet it seems unlikely that socialism can be rekindled by appealing to past hopes and dreams that few can remember. Nostalgia for lost dreams of the future only has value if it can actually help create a viable path forwards - otherwise, it's English Heritage with spacesuits. The left would do well to remind people that poorer societies than ours spent more on health and welfare than we do and that they considered education a right, not a product. But such lessons from history must be combined with a new modernism of the left. To hand the mantle of "modernity" to the right is to give it a powerful weapon against which halcyon memories, real or imagined, are powerless.
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