June - Present Editorials

Latest: Wealth and Hellbeing

New Labour's latest push towards further impoverishing the poor and the sick, while simultaneously propping up a corrupt and discredited City already giving Itself bonuses again in spite of 'timid' nationalisations

Apparently, given in part the current worrying trend in longevity and an increase in the elderly population in this country, the ever-reactionary British government are now planning a latest cull on ‘Attendance Allowance and disability benefits’ in order to shore up new funds for a proposed new flagship branch of the NHS, the National Care Service. A nice idea in name alone, a titular echo of Nye Bevan one might think: but as ever under New Labour the reality will be far from pleasant and threatens to hit the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in society. As per usual, the government dresses up callous benefit sanctions under the spurious disguise of a compassionate initiative: a new, more interventionist system of national care – though no doubt to still fall foul of the gerrymandered regional lottery that already checkers ‘choice’ in NHS care – to specialise exclusively in treatments and therapies for the elderly, and the physically and mentally disabled. Of course such a comprehensive overhaul of the presently threadbare and inconsistent social care sphere is indeed needed. But it seems the cost of this will be the possible cessation of Attendance Allowance – which currently keeps many elderly persons and their carers just the right side of poverty – and even a vague threat of reallocating other ‘disability benefits’ (possibly DLA and SDA) to new Local Authority arbiters to mete out to the disabled through another machination of the patronising, controlling Nanny State of New Labour. Not one which, oppositely through such social visionaries as Nye Bevan (do see my review of Austerity Britain by the way, in which Bevan features heavily), in the late Forties, brought in a new compassionate health and welfare system in a seismic ideological and literal shift in society in favour of the poor and sick – the kindlier, truly progressive form of State intervention, socialism basically, that typified much of the Attlee era – but the New Labour take on Selective Big Government, which, while pussy-footing round a scandalously corrupt banking sector that has plunged us into deep recession through unregulated greed (under this government), even in the wake of a Chancellor’s nationalised powers (who still can only ‘bleat’ at the Banks, who we have bailed out, to start reimbursing our taxes through lending again), is only ever interventionist where it is expedient and easier for them: robbing from the poor and the sick. A subverted Robin Hoodism largely typical under New Labour, which has only so far been broken once – and then due to such radically abject circumstances as a capitalist crash and, later, an expenses scandal that’s brought Brown out in a canting Presbyterian rash of sudden ‘conscience’ – with the 50% tax rate on top earners, but even then with an apologetic nod to the super rich, as with the avowedly ‘temporary’ nationalisations of some banks.

No such apologies to the disabled of this country in the new quid pro quo offer to give greater social care assistance on the one hand, only to take back disabled citizens’ rights to self-budget their disability benefits with the other. For many currently managing to exist above the poverty line thanks to benefits such as AA and DLA, this is a potentially catastrophic policy that threatens to create a new ‘disabled underclass’ (if that’s not too tautological). It may be one which as yet is only at green paper stage in Parliament, but recent sore memories of the swiftness of the draconic Welfare Reform Bill – which has basically summoned in a new Dickensian age of enforced ‘community work’ or ‘job apprenticeships for the under 25s’, in return for already paltry sums of benefits (in effect, a national workhouse without walls) and, in potential contravence of the European Bill on Human (and Working) Rights by making citizens work full time (oh yes, full time) for below the National Minimum Wage, which this government introduced (of course, only the government has the power to disobey one of its own policies; again, taking away with the other hand) – do not bode well for the fates of those under threat by this new jargon-coded proposed legislation.

I have read the document in full on the new ‘Care Debate’ website, on which we are invited to contribute our opinions (I have already contributed mine, and it has been ‘under moderation’ since I posted it about three days ago, so has presumably not yet appeared, subject to the bowdlerising eyes of official censors that may in the end simply omit it as perceived agitprop no doubt), and typically of this government, it is ambiguously worded, with only Attendance Allowance spelt out in full as a benefit prospectively under threat. But the vaguer sub-clause of ‘and other disability benefits’, without spelling out DLA or SDA, has naturally caused legion current recipients of such state provision to post frantic messages on the debate website, and literally thousands to already sign up to a petition entitled No More Benefit Cuts (over 5,000 signing in just the first 24 hours!), which I urge all of you presently reading to add your names to via the link at the bottom of this editorial.

With Obama on the other side of the Atlantic currently fighting on his knees in the wake of reactionary Republican-fuelled resistance to his oh-so-heinous compassion in trying to bring in an exhaustedly belated health insurance system for the US – sixty years after our own NHS was brought in under the True Labour of the late Forties, and, of course, with the then-breathtakingly self-centred opposition of the self-aggrandizing Doctors, who had to have their mouths ‘stuffed with gold’ (Bevan) before conceding to the new system – which could potentially save hundreds of thousands of citizens from premature deaths, it is with some bleak and tragic irony that simultaneously our government are currently continuing to dismantle their own health and social care sector, though by duplicitously waving the banner of ‘radical reform’ in its breadth and scope. New Labour has a distinctly reactionary interpretation of the term ‘radical’ it seems. Mind you, given that in its own perverse, retrogressive sense, Thatcherism was a sort of ‘starchy radicalism’, I suppose our government mean such a term in the same vein.

My own manifesto for a National Care Service would be based on the fundamental principle that It should be brought in in addition to the current disability benefit system, not instead of it, which is basically what we’re being offered. The government apparatchiks are stating, again, that there are ‘tough decisions to be made’, especially given the current economic climate. Of course, you can bet your bottom dollar that these ‘difficult decisions’ won’t be affecting any of the decision-makers in any way, no doubt half of them already paying into future private health and social care for themselves and their families. The tough decisions will only affect those of us who can’t play a part in them, even if the government likes to pretend it is giving us a forum in which to contribute to the shape of its eventual policy. Apparently they are offering the sick and disabled greater ‘freedom’, ‘independence’ and ‘choice’. It’s a funny way of showing it by threatening to take away their current ‘freedom’, ‘independence’ and ‘choice’ in budgeting their own benefits.

[Germane digression: during 2001 I temped as an NHS medical secretary. I recall during the World Cup of that year,

one Social Care and Health Department’s meetings being painstakingly scheduled to not clash with any of the England matches – this gave me a less than inspiring insight into the priorities of some of those who make the ‘tough decisions’ that affect the most crucial sector in our society].

Oh, and the second caveat to my Care manifesto would be that in order to fund this new Service, the government set up a standing order from the City and banking sector, at a rate of 50% of the boards’ and top earners’ salaries there for the foreseeable future. It’s only fair and just, Mr ‘Presbyter’ Brown, that those responsible for our country’s crippling hardship through their own very un-Christian sense of avarice and greed (two of the major sins remember), who are already starting to award themselves bonuses in spite of their financial and moral failures (nay crimes), and in spite of the so-called ‘laissez faire limitations’ of nationalisations – bonuses which are in affect creamed from taxpayers’ bail out monies, and should be at least pooled into lending for struggling small businesses – should be contributing a sizeable portion of their gratuitous wealth into the public sector. A few less yachts for them, a bit less poverty and a bit more dignity for the sick and disabled.

True Labour, pre-Blair, might well have argued this, even implemented it, given the direly abject economic climate of today; New Labour, buffers of the super-rich’s shoes, can only wax shallowly about their ‘social conscience’, while oppositely inflicted yet more cuts and misery on the poor and disadvantage of society. Oh, and apparently it is now predicted that up to 120 MPs from this ‘socially conscious’ government are planning on standing down at the next election so that they can realise their ‘full earning power’ rather than have to make the terrible sacrifice of relinquishing their profitable second jobs, used to bolster their impoverished £64,000+ a year, in the calling of public service! This is hardly a surprise from a party now partly made up of ex-Blairite property moguls, I suppose. But nevertheless, it makes the red blood boil.

Shame on you, Labour. And shame, in advance, on the future Tory government, who will no doubt punish the poor and sick even more, though perhaps less duplicitously than Labour. God help us all in the event of either party getting in at the next election.

To sign up against the proposed erosion of current disability benefits, please go to the following link: http://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/disability-living-allowance-(dla)/dla-aa-cuts

Keep the faith.

Alan Morrison, August 2009

Preston Circular

I’ve just got back from the Lake District’s stunning scenery, a three day stay in a rented cottage overlooking the rolling patchwork eiderdown of Coniston vale, brilliant green crinkled hillsides, and of course the might of Cumbrian hillocks and tors. Spectacular stuff and a much-needed antidote to the throbbing stucco of grimy Brighton. A visit to Dove Cottage – once home to William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and a number of frequent sojourners including Coleridge and opium-eating Thomas de Quincey – left me soulfully replenished with its circa 1600 dark wood-panelled interior, rather like the inside of a barge reflecting green shallows of trees outside its deep-set, almost lightless windows. Equally inspiriting were walks by babbling wooded brooks that put me in mind of Wordsworth’s richly meditative nature imagery (especially in the likes of ‘Lines on Tintern Abbey’). Some sun-bashed climbs up bald hills and escarpments near the mountain known as the Old Man of Coniston, led to ever more breathtaking views of rugged Tolkienesque countryside, and, yes, quite a few embryonic poems in my own mind. Nights in a slant-walled cottage bedroom reading Hazlitt’s colourful accounts of the young Lake poets completed the beatification of the stay.

  This idyllic retreat high in the Cumbrian hills was contrasted abjectly by a one night stay in a B&B in Preston, Lancashire, something of a ghost town. We toured the ghostly post-industrial town by night, taking in its boarded-up buildings and rust-coloured featureless terraces that looked to my Southern eyes like a film set for a 1930s/40s social drama (cue Love on the Dole et al), or early Sixties kitchen-sink (A Kind of Loving et al). The town centre was eerily empty, but its gloomy grey Museum and Town Hall buildings exuded a grit and gravitas all their own, a bleakly imposing heritage of thwarted industry, and this was most baldly illustrated by the town’s dearth of occupied factory buildings, derelict high-stacked moth-brown chimneys and shadowy, almost funereal atmosphere of a long-eroded identity and demography. Looking up at a faded Labour rose on a russet-stone Council building, I felt quite moved, being for the first time in a long time touring the urban graveyards of the materially betrayed North, the old Labour heartlands; it felt like a sort of spiritual pilgrimage in a way. I was struck by the abundance of animated Methodist Halls throughout the town, this seeming to be a place sufficiently isolated, meteorologically oppressed and architecturally austere as to still impel the mind to a more nuts-and-bolts belief in God.

  It goes without saying that the people up North seem far friendlier, down-to-earth and more genuine than we more guarded Southerners, with our social pretentions and peccadilloes; and I found it particularly refreshing to listen to a variety of landscaped accents from the Lancashire drawl through to the chalky Yorkshire accent and the Cumbrian medley of the two. Not for the first time I wondered what on earth I’m doing living in the South at all. But I suppose ultimately most of us stay rooted to our regions, even in spite of ourselves. The North does seem in so many ways like

a different country to the South, from its more dramatic and rugged landscapes through to its unadorned houses and more puritanical architecture, to, of course, its still palpably entrenched political loyalties – one only has to see the sheer commonplaceness of dowdy-bricked Labour and Trades Union Clubs in many of its towns to see this tangibly; the faded heartlands of the British Left, ideologically eroded no doubt as much of the country has been since Thatcherism, but still palpably more defiant, albeit pennilessly, in remembering its Old Labour heritage; the South’s down-at-heel cousin, doggedly loyaler to its roots and traditions.

  Coming back to the affluent south-east, though to a significantly less affluent quarter of Brighton’s Preston Circus

(no irony intended), I feel again barraged by the sharper focus of bustling modernity, replete with its ceaseless noise and congestion and smokeless natural selection (it might be a cliché, but I think Northerners are also still much more

in touch with their smoking heritage than we are down here, every second person strolling round Preston seeming to have a cigarette tousling between their fingers, so for once I didn’t feel out of place with my rollies).

  Apart from the ongoing blundering of this most right-wing of Labour administrations, further news of the Chancellor pussy-footing round the deceitful Banks who still refuse to lend to those whose tax payments have bailed their irresponsibility out, of the tonal corporate politics of Parliament offering no truly progressive route out of this horrendous financial and ethical mire our society has been plunged into, it is at least gratifying to find that the Recusant has now reached beyond the 100,000 mark of visitors (rising steeply from 97,000 only four days ago!) – a

sign, in part perhaps, of the growing need of thinking minds to find some cultural sanctuary from the daymare of degenerate capitalist sham-culture.

  I’d like to take this opportunity then to thank most of all the contributors to this webzine, without whom it would not exist in its wonderfully rich, varied and challenging form. I hope and intend the site to go on and on, to keep providing a platform for literary and polemical dissent in the UK and beyond, to offer an oppositional movement of poetry, prose and thought, and thereby a particular aesthetic oasis for those contributing who live, like me, in a country besotted with arbitrary prize cultures and stylistic policing, which serves in the main only to obscure those writers and poets in it who write on their own terms, honestly and authentically, and without concern for ephemeral gains of reputation, status and capital – only to follow their true voices and share their valuable work with the rest of us. One would have thought that is what writing should be all about. Maybe sites like ours, and kindred outlets such as Smokestack (Middlesbrough) and The Penniless Press (Preston-based, by coincidence), will manage to reshape these crushing biases and pave the way to a more socially attuned, authentic phase in British literature. Until then, my heart is firmly rooted on the North side of the British regional divide.

Alan Morrison, 14 July 2009

Piratisation of Profit, Nationalisation of Losses

A very astute Guardian blogger has rephrased that odious term privatisation as piratisation, which is so apt, especially in light of the latest National Express debacle that has basically resulted in the nationalisation of losses for the public to take the tab for (a pattern is setting in here isn't it?). While I am completely in favour of nationalisation of all industries and services - especially the rail network - it is a pity that we only get any nationalisations these days at our own expense, and only as apologetic short term measures of sheer non-ideological expediency by our charlatan Labour government, the poodles of big business. But of course we can't expect much more from any party that has its resident double-agent, that wolf-in-sheep's clothing, Peter Mandelson, one of New Labour's unashamedly cynical and pro-capitalist architects. Even his legendarily right-of-the-party Labour ancestor, Herbert Morrison, would balk at his grandson's anti-socialist record in Parliament (Morrison was in the Attlee Government of the late Forties, the most radical incarnation of Labour in power, who nationalised copiously and unapologetically; I'm ploughing through David Kynaston's riveting Austerity Britain at the moment, and back then it was literally a completely different party and movement altogether). Tragically now, Labour has become a name conducive with ideological volte face, cynical policy u-turns, neo-Thatcherism disguised as 'progressiveness', spin, deceit, and, well, Gordon Brown (the most disappointing Prime Minister since, er, well, Tony Blair actually). Labour is quite blatantly no longer the party of socialism, not even pseudo-socialism (arguably hasn't been since Blair eroded the party-defining Clause IV), nor even social compassion (cue the Welfare Reform Bill), but indeed the Tweedledum to the Tweedledee of a Capitalist Parliament. The seal has finally been put on Labour’s class betrayal in Brown’s neo-manifesto of reactionary policies, including new threats to press gang under-25s into – no doubt – unsuitable and non-existent 'jobs', 'apprenticeships' or 'community service' (re slave labour) or have their already pitiable benefits cut. So Brown finally squanders his one golden opportunity to turn his party and government leftwards again, which this country direly needs. The result from such right-wing policy-making - no doubt in order to still pull in more of the 'centre(-right)-ground' from the slight tonal variation of the opposition - will now no doubt be a mass exodus of Left support for Labour at the next election. Once again Labour are relying on middle England to keep them in power. Their epic betrayal of the working- and under-classes has reached its ultimate expression, no doubt brought on by a hypocritical parliamentary consensus on two main areas: that, anyone who is unemployed and on benefits for more than six months is undoubtedly a sponger, and nationalisation is a taboo throwback, except as a pragmatic aberration in extreme circumstances, and must be diverted back to privatisation when things are looking better economically.

You’d expect these appalling views from the Tories, but from Labour? It just shows how long the arms of the Thatcher revolution have extended, to a situation where now the government and the opposition are basically just marginally different wings of what is essentially the same ‘party of ideas’. Trying to squeeze in some influence in the middle are the Liberal Dems, the only significant party left with any remote leaning towards the pre-Thatcher politics of compassion, but who also, bizarrely, bow down too to this broad parliamentary consensus – which flies in the face of all historic evidence – that privatisation is a good thing and nationalisation is a bad thing. I can recall only Vince Cable of their number in recent times past calling for more full-scale and unapologetic nationalisations of banks. But what we need now is nationalisations throughout the sectors on an Attleean scale, and only a ramshackle clutch of Labour bankbenchers, and one or two maverick independents, are in favour of this.

It is, too, beyond belief that apparently the Banks – who largely got us into the recession – are still refusing to lend. But it is even more beyond belief that the government are citing this as a problem while seemingly not doing anything at all about it; as if their nationalisations give them no actual power whatsoever. They should simply ORDER these banks to lend. Simple as that. Darling’s present plans to seriously regulate the banking sector in future etc. etc. falls on deaf ears to Joe Public when He sees that even when the Chancellor's auspices take charge in this sector, they are still seen to not be standing up to the banks. An appalling, pathetic situation. Even more graphically so in the wake of new proposals to freeze public sector pay.

The increasingly anomic atmosphere of BBC’s Question Time just serves to further illustrate how the parliamentary party system has degenerated into just a spread of tonal variations on the same monetarist ideology, spelling potentially the death of true democratic debate in our country now in the post-Blair hinterland of non-partisan politics. On a panel on which the only non-politician, the corduroyish Jarvis Cocker, spoke any remote semblance of real sense, we had Harriet Harman – whose facial composure seems eternally under strain from acting as Brown’s perpetual apologist – trying desperately to maintain some sort of moral high ground in the wake of Labour’s moral implosion, and the distant-eyed Ian Duncan Smith waving his arm in immaculately-heeled frustration at why it is that ‘so many people don’t seem to want to work’, or some such similar unknowing rhetoric: I mentally shouted at the screen at that point something like ‘perhaps it has something to do with the dog-eat-dog Thatcherite society we still live in, which has transparently over the past couple of decades rewarded greed and one-upmanship over genuinely honest hard work, now symbolised in the ultimate expression of social Darwinism with the collapse of our finance system due to unadulterated City greed – all of which was ushered in emphatically under your own party’s government back in the 80s’? So even this apparently slightly more socially concerned of Tories, who has helped set up an actual committee to research into the causes of the underlying problems of the social underclasses, is still chronically missing the point that the government of any particular day set the ethical (non-)standards by which Joe Public gauges His own. Thirty years now of monetarist governments has inspired a culture in which people either trample on their fellow citizens in order to shore up dubious profits and property capital, or simply wave their hands in the air and think, what’s the point of enduring wholly un-stimulating and un-lucrative employment if it leads to sod all social mobility or material improvement in a society which clearly still champions the rich and opportunistic and punishes the poor!? So now both the Tories and Labour bumble on in self-denial of their responsibility for the failure of our society. The failure to protect the poor and the weak and the vulnerable from the predatory sharks of Capital. A moral disgrace which has finally brought Parliament itself into utter contempt of its public, symbolised ultimately by the sheer cheating and profiteering of those elected to represent us. We’re witnessing Parliament’s nervous breakdown spurned on by the collective denial of Its own palpable guilt. Like a child stamping Its feet in tantrum, It now lashes out heartlessly, once again, at the most abjectly affected of its victims.

I say the time is ripe for a new party, one to act as a true left-wing opposition to this parliamentary capitalist consensus, and to protect the interests of the underpaid public sector workers, the poor and socially marginalised, the underclasses and so forth. How about the Welfare Party?

Alan Morrison, 5 July 2009

Better Dead Than Red... Evidently

While disillusioned ex-Blairite progressive newspaper columnists (not naming names Polly) are busy relieving themselves publicly in their onanistic champagne cynicisms, it's down to the growingly mobbish bloggers to keep pointing out to them how only now, with the ever-groaning demise of (New) Labour, and Parliament's rapidly eroding moral authority to boot, they are beginning to see the light just as the dark is setting in. So excuse the subversion of Bertie Russell's famously acquiescent phrase in this header, but really, could things get any more regressive on the so-called 'progressive' benches of the Commons? The death-knell sounds more defeaningly by the day for Brown's Labour as they continue to close ranks against the scrutinous light of day, in chronic collective denial as to their imminent demise. Seemingly nothing will shake them back to the socialism of their distant forebears, and those backbenchers who still rattle their leftist sabres at the ideological inertia of the front bench, remain alienated and unlistened-to as ever: it is indeed clear the Labour Party as it is today would rather be dead than red.

Following hot on the heels of a self-defeating and seemingly un-tactical withdrawal of a burgeoning coup against Brown's increasingly solipsistic leadership of Labour, and the truly spineless and electorally suicidal volte-face on ousting the egregious Blears from her seat, we now have a blatantly untransparent parliamentary whitewash of an Iraq Inquiry. It seems Blair still has very long political arms in his ability to further straitjacket the accountability of Parliament to its people, by persuading the ever-malleable Brown to have as much of the Inquiry as possible behind closed doors, in an obvious symbolic tribute to how the case for war in the first place was cooked up by the still oddly unimpeached, hawkish apparatchiks of the day. How fitting. And, in spite of Miliband's annoucement that the puppet committee set up to make the Inquiry - one or two of whom, involved as they allegedly were in the concoction of the case for war in the first place, will no doubt, to quote Blackadder, be 'asking themselves some pretty searching questions' in the process - will have the remit to apportion 'praise or blame' where they see fit, but that it is emphatically not a judicial Inquiry, and so therefore cannot lead to any criminal charges. So that's like lining up the guilty only to tick them off and then let them go on their merry way again (no doubt to later re-offend).

Great British justice eh? I was personally utterly flabbergasted that in spite of a series of brilliant and empassioned speeches in the Opposition Debate in the tellingly half-empty Commons this afternoon - Clare Short, George Galloway, John McDonnell (of the LRC) and a tub-thumping Plaid Cymru MP being the standout speakers for me - Parliament still opted for the cop out and fob off of an unadulteratedly stage-managed Inquiry, demonstrating yet further contempt for the electorate. So we now have 'the Brown-ing version' of Blairite despotcracy, just to add further insult to injury, and another resounding nail in the coffin for Labour.

It seems truly now that this hubris-stunted, arrogant, deeply undemocratic Trump Parliament has learnt nothing at all from Iraq, from the economy-crushing failure of unregulated capitalism, or from the expenses scandal, and will arguably only learn once it is dissolved, as it should be but of course won't be. As Galloway so eloquently put it today, this can only further ensure the fall of the Labour Government at the next election, and the return to power of 'the rancid hypocrisy of the Tories'. What a truly bankrupt country we now live in.

Alan Morrison, 25 June 2009

April - June 2009 Editorials

New Labour Is Dead; Long Live True Labour;

or Red Hope Springs Eternal

 

Is the Labour Party currently in a state of paralysed denial, or is it finally going to muster the guts to stand up for the long-eroded principles it was first voted in for back in 1997? Commentators such as Polly Toynbee and other Guardian doyens seem to be currently locked into their own obsession of wanting Brown out, as if this might magically transform the last vestiges of New Labour back to the Old model, which many of its grass roots supporters and disillusioned floating supporters - myself included - would truly love to see re-emerge from the ghastly sell out of the Blair years. But is this realistic either way? I mean, whether Brown is there or not? Is Brown, in truth, a spent force, a Crookback-like figure whose original ideals have been twisted and subsumed under the resentment and bitterness a decade in the shadow of his more superficial rival has ingrained in those sallow lugubrious looks of his? Is he indeed to end his reign abruptly with an - arguably belated - blindly limping rebellion against his indecisive, misguided, dour-browed leadership? He's avoided his first potential Bosworth field, not losing his kingdom for a stalking horse, because there wasn't one there this time round. Will the once 'iron chancellor' go down in the history books as a misunderstood, skulking John Lackland to Blair's vainglorious, amorally crusading Lionheart? Monarchical allusion aside, who really cares? Because indeed, this is not about egos, or shouldn't be, nor about personalities nor those crowned Leader and Prime Minister

by the brinkmanship of spineless kingmakers, as if part of some undisputed dynasty in what should be that most democratic of parties - and which arguably once was: the Labour Party. The only hope now after the clear failure of the so-called 'Progressive' consensus of a parliament which is gradually betraying itself to be quite the opposite - indeed, reactionary (the Welfare bill) and self-serving (the expenses scandal and other gerrymanderings of moral boundaries) - marked most abjectly by the shoe-in of the Far Right in the European elections, is that the Labour Party finally plucks up the courage to move bravely but advisedly back to the Left.

  There's nothing to lose now for Gordon Brown, nor for his timorous minions, nor for the cowed and battered voices to the left of the party. John McDonnell continues to openly and intelligently challenge the Government to return to their traditional political ground through the Labour Representation Committee (the heart at the centre of Labour's gutted corpus); and one of the party's most convincing left-of-centre voices, Michael Meacher, has expressed some genuine optimism that over the next year Labour can and probably will now pursue far more radical reforms to win back their estranged core voters than they could ever have dared under the ethically damaging tyranny of the Blair-the Mand-and Campbell the Dog. The only thing undermining this new breath of optimism is the still lingering presence of Mandelson as, most worryingly, the Deputy PM in all but title, and a Cabinet increasingly made up of peers and (former) opportunists. I'd be much more convinced of a moral reformation of Labour if Meacher and MacDonnell, to name two, were in the Cabinet instead. But the presently acquiescing left-wingers are making no bones about the fact that Brown is on a kind of probation, and no doubt if he double backs on his promises for a more open debate on policy with his Cabinet and the wider PLP, he will indeed be finally in for the chop.

  The irony in this whole matter is that the transparently careerist and unprincipled resignation of, in particular, Caroline Flint, an arch-Blairite who has accused Brown of having her as window-dressing but the very next day allows herself to be glammed up on the front pages of the nationals, has, if anything, placated the anger of potential left-wing rebels and given them a renewed hope that, finally liberated of the last of the Blairite lemmings - Flint, Purnell, Smith, Hutton, Hoon, Blears - the Labour Party might truly now have a chance of returning to its roots. In fact, these high profile resignations from the Cabinet Ministers I despised the most, has almost started my old Labour-voting finger twitching again (last used in 1997, then switching to Socialist Alliance ,and abstaining, in the last two respectively; flexing most recently towards Lib Dem in the next General, and taking a brief sabbatical with the Socialist Labour Party in the European, forgetting momentarily that the brave though difficult-to-like Arthur Scargill was their leader). The question is, if this does begin to happen, very belatedly, is it too little too late for those disaffected from Labour through the betrayals of the last ten years?

  Arguably it's already too late for a sizeable portion of the working classes who have switched their votes to the BNP - though as we all must hope and pray, this may turn out to be a one-off and highly irresponsible protest vote. But we know historically that when the main party of the Left moves too far to the Right, the Blackshirts come in to scoop up the votes of those betrayed and disillusioned. Not so much Progressive politics as Regressive then. Labour simply can no longer afford to pussy-foot timidly in the shadow of a now utterly discredited City and Banking sector, nor to fawn around Big Business, millionaires and celebs. If ever there was a time and a true opportunity for True Labour to come to the fore and redistribute what little wealth there is left in our post-recession society, it is now. If Brown bottles it again, it's the end for Labour as a believable force for social reform and fairness, possibly for as long as a generation.

  Worryingly though, Brown is already showing signs of renewed weakness by offering a half-way house of electoral reform in the AVS, instead of bringing in a genuine debate on PR. This doesn't bode well. He and some of his fellow so-called Progressives can already now arguably be accused of letting the Far Right back into mainstream politics, and the Centre Right into European victory, largely due with painful irony to their only half-hearted efforts to deal with the devastating consequences of the corruption and greed of the Cities on both side of the Atlantic, even, in Brown's case, apologising to the Banking sector - who got us into this mess - for having to take such drastic measures as part-nationalisations, and to the gratuitously rich, for introducing the 50p tax rate on top earners. This apologism for following what are - or should be - essentially the political instincts of his party, is not the behaviour of a natural socialist or Labour leader, but of a compromised social democrat and free market convert, a stubborn and proud mind that refuses to admit it was wrong in bowing to the dictates of what was previously perceived as the political Titan of its age, Thatcherism (cue his attempt to steal any thunder from the Tories by inducting a withered Iron Lady in through the door of a non-partisan No. 10).

  This pitiful failure of the Progressive (so-called) Centre-Left in the UK and Europe is all the more embarrassing since it betrays itself as actually more cowardly, reactionary and right-wing than arguably the Centre-Right in Europe (which might also explain why Cameron has chosen to side his party with the Hard Right on the continent): both the French and German Prime Ministers, both 'Centre-Right', made no apologies whatsoever for nationalising many of their banks in the wake of the credit crunch, which shows us that there is a much stronger socialist instinct in Europe than in either the UK or (even the new Obama) US, demonstrating that political wings are several leagues to the Left in continental terms. Hence the interesting differentiation between Left and Socialist in their polling categories, which, again, shows how vastly more left-wing European politics is than British or American. Was the EU Election really a victory for Centre-Right politics, or was it a non-partisan applauding of some very brave and unprecedented nationalising moves, basically socialist chastisements of marauding unregulated capitalists, that just happened to occur under otherwise more right-wing administrations? These brave and unambiguous tactics by what we perceive as Centre-Right European governments makes the British Labour Government look all the more pathetic in their apologism for similar though less decisive measures.

  But can Brown swallow his wounded pride and have the courage to finally stand up against the monetarist tyranny of the last thirty years of British politics, that only fifteen or so years ago, he was himself opposing (prior to the curious metamorphosis he underwent as Chancellor)? Will we finally see more red seeping back on that battered old budget suitcase?

  Before anyone starts thinking I'm deluding myself, I'm not: because sadly I don't seriously believe that Brown will do what needs to be done now. At least, not wholeheartedly enough to make it sufficiently convincing to change the almost pre-determined result of the next election. But I sincerely hope I am wrong. What the Government does over the next year will determine everything: but they will need to abandon any further privatisations, re-nationalise many public services (especially the railways), clean up Westminster with a toothbrush, sever any lingering ties with the millionaire classes, shore up a significantly redistributive wave of budgets, and cleanse themselves utterly of the last clinging vestiges of Blairism, before they get my vote.

  You never know, swine might fly.

 

Alan Morrison, 9 June, 2009

Profiteers and Email Smears, That's What Little Madams are Made Of

or, The Political Class and The Poetical Class

We do indeed live in an age of abdicating responsibility and reallocating blame, particularly by those in the public realm. This week alone has seen its fair share of spoilt madams (no sexism intended here, it just makes a good motif) having tantrums and stamping their feet at any suggestions - based purely on ringing evidence - that they have basically behaved badly; and the subsequently absurd theories they or their defenders have come up with in some highly convoluted attempt to blame their actions on invisible oppressive forces. Ordinary persons take note, than whenever any of us 'blame the system' for our troubles, we are shouted down instantly by that system's agents as being 'envious' of those better off than ourselves - frequently at our expense - or for not 'taking responsibility' over our lives. But when anyone in an established position is found out for having contemptuously abused their privileges, it's a different story altogether naturally: 'It was within the rules', 'I should be on a City salary', 'It was silly and naive of me but I've done nothing wrong', 'It's a conspiracy against her by a board of mysognists', 'It's...er...the system, yes, that's it. Oh, sorry, actually I'm a part of that aren't it I? Mmmm'.

While Mrs Kirkbridge MP myopically fights to defend her parliamentary seat in spite of 80% of her own constituent party wanting her out, and petitions in the streets etc., absurdly defending funding a £50k extension on her flat funded by...yes...us, we then get a pathetic attempt by an MPs' 'partner' on a Guardian blog to try and divert the focus from tax-payer-profiteering MPs to those nasty little factions of the public who are becoming something of a vocal mob. Now while I do think there is a certain sadism in the Telegraph's relentlessly protracted campaign of expenses revelations, at the same time this gives absolutely no weight at all to this non-apologist's feeble argument that it is purely down to this newspaper trying to dismantle a Labour government. If so, why then focus as much, if not even more so, on the Opposition? She claims this flagship paper of the centre-right is resorting to bringing down the whole of Parliament, so desperate it is to get Labour out (even though they are also on the centre-right) - by sacrificing its own prefered alternative? Not very convincing. And for her to spout on about how this all threatens democracy and how she is sick of her country: well, courtesy of the innumerable responders to her blog who have already pointed out various facts of reality to her, I'll add also that many of us have been sick of our country ever since Thatcher came to power, and even more so since Blair and New Labour sold out to the Capitalist Lie and, in the process, seriously damaged democracy and politics itself by eroding ideological boundaries under the spurious banner of 'progressive consensus', illegaly invaded Iraq showing contempt for Europe and the UN, and so on, and so on... All this given, it's a wonder this commentator has only now become sickened of her country. It is indeed very hard to have any sympathy for MPs' behaviour, especially when one thinks of the sheer hell those often falsely accused of 'benefit cheating' have gone through in times past for not declaring pitifully small amounts of money when on pitifully impoverishing benefits in the first place: stories of people being hauled into tape-recorded interrogations, being read their legal rights, even before an accusation has been made, let alone any evidence given to proove their guilt - have become a part of common folklore smacking of the days of Robin Hood. And then there was the widespread campaign of socially stigmatising those who 'cheat the benefit system', a kind of abstract tagging, naming and shaming people who are, mostly, just trying to survive. So what possible excuse or sympathy can already wealthy MPs possibly claim from us? It's then down to Plan B of putting up frankly rather naive and starry-eyed 'MP partners' to accuse the public of sanctimony, an anti-virtue which the New Labour government has almost more than any other hypocritically demonstrated through a decade of democratic contempt. Yes, I agree it's easy to cast the stones at those on the scaffold, and it has to subside eventually, but what the so-called 'political class' keep forgetting is that those stones will be replaced at their imminent ousting in the next General Election by the casting of votes. Yes, votes, which are what put them on those benches in the first place - though they've all but forgotten about that little trifling detail of (sham) democracy. More than ever before, PR is desperately needed in order to come any way near to seriously reforming the parliamentary system. As things now stand, the final icing on the cake of New Labour's generally abysmal political and ethical record, will be the repopularising of extreme right-wing parties, while theirs no doubt will be blasted back into a wilderness it took them 17 years to get out of, but this time, for all the wrong reasons.

Then we move neatly onto a topic I initially really couldn't be bothered to even comment on, because it was so transparently predictable and typical of the sneaky politics of the contemporary British literary scene that it really came as no real surprise to me, but mention is indeed more than germane by way of parallel to the duplicities and conceits of the defenders of devious MPs, and even more so, the email smear campaign of one ex-New Labour apparatchik of recent times: the Oxford poetry professorship debacle. Unfortunately for Miss Padel - even more so as it is her great-great-grandfather Darwin's anniversary this year - the evidence is fairly damning, at least, in terms of her trying to claim she played no part in any campaign against Mr Walcott I mean: even if she was not a part of the anonymous letter campaign against him, and there's no reason to doubt that, naturally her rather explicit emails to an Express reporter alluding to previous harrassment allegations was obviously going to fan the flames already flaring up around his reputation. She calls this 'naive', as if she was completely unaware that a gossip-salivating journalist would in turn think to investigate this matter and write about it in the newspaper that employs her to do just that. And Padel's turn-of-phrase, that it 'might make good copy', rather damns any of her assertions that she wasn't seeking adverse publicity for Walcott. If it's all just a case of literary tittle-tattle, then why the need to involve journalists directly in that? It's splitting hairs basically in order to abdicate responsibility for what was most probably a calculated action (no doubt Ms Padel is currently wishing she'd never pressed that blasted Send button at all). It's a pity for Padel, since unlike many of her equally careerist poet contemporaries, she has at least had the humility in times past to expend much energy on examining the work of others, and that is to be commended, even if those 'others' are, arguably, her closest pre-eminent rivals, other members of the 'poetical class' if you like. Still, undoubtedly she will go from strength to strength from this, as is often the way in our anti-meritocratic society; the unprecedented media exposure of the affair at least giving her the unusual honour of being shown 'half-apologising' on prime time BBC news bulletins. Just a pity a poet's face is only famed when it is shamed (bar that well-behaved breed of Laureates of course).

It's not so much Padel's air of denial at her own point-scoring tactics in the race for the Oxford poetry professorship that riles, but the utterly pompous and ridiculous assertions of one of her defenders, an Oxford academic, when John Snow dared to cross-question her on the Channel 4 news the other day. I have to say Snow was unusually ineffectual in dealing with this indignant Oxford fossil, failing to point out to her near the end of her irrelevant feministic rant, that she was completely missing the point of the whole issue by suggesting that some invisible board of mysoginists at Oxford had had it in for Miss Padel just because she was the first female holder of this traditionally testosteronic office. Again, an arrogant diversionary argument with nothing but tedious institutional 'sour grapes' to substantiate it. She seemed to be blaming the media for dishing up gossip to sell their papers - as if the media or the public could really gives a damn about literary tittle-tattle anyway (would that they did, rather than celebrity sagas). This showed the typical media-contempt some circles in the literary establishment nurse, except of course when their writing or friends' writing is being published or applauded in various supplements of a weekend (though this contempt arguably cuts both ways, I'm certainly the last person to defend the media in general, who do most of the time like to muck-rake and focus on reader-grabbing superficialities in the cultural sphere). But certainly this was no argument at all and it was surprising John Snow was not more indignant in retaliation to this blatantly barbed assault on his own camp. What this Oxford don kept skirting round of course was the transparently evident fact that Miss Padel had - 'naively' of course - blatantly emailed a journalist directly and unambiguously, reminding them of previous allegations against Mr Walcott of sexual harrassment of students in the past; and if it was in the public domain already, the question remains even more so,why then Padel's need to flag it up again? And to a journalist? Come on! If you don't want the media to get their hands on distracting gossip, then why in the Muse's name volunteer the bait for this to a journalist and suggest it 'might make good copy'? Again it's like the MPs' attitudes: the media's great when it circulates damaging stories against our political rivals, but not when it's against our party, and by the same token, here's some damning info on my academic rival, but don't you dare use my disclosure of this subsequently to generate more scandal after the fact. Hypocrisy, duplicity, double standards - those great British peccadillos, proverbial as pie and chips, warm beer and footie.

It was also rather cringe-inducing to hear Miss Padel utter at the end of her non-apology at the Hay Festival that she hopes her successor will also be 'a woman'. Well, she's done about as much as Margaret Thatcher did to ingratiate the male chauvanists of the British Establishment in that direction. While the worm is indeed turning of late, with the belated inaugaration of the first female Poet Laureate (not before time, though it's a great pity we didn't see this decades ago in the more unique guise of Stevie Smith), it seems it's doubling back on itself temporarily.

Alan Morrison, 28 May 2009

A Parliament of Pigs - or, The Flipping House of Commons Swine Epidemic

Updated comment:

Now we are seeing many mainstream MPs and Ministers for the swine they truly are in the wake of the inexorable expenses revelations. While moats and duck houses simply betray what most of us already know about the Tory party, that it's still largely made up of fossils from the landed classes, in spite of the reforming spin Cameron has tried to have us swallow since he became leader, and the absurdly arrogant reaction of one of their rumbled number that the electorate are 'just jealous' of his Balmoral-sized mansion - completely missing the point in that classic Conservative way, and harking back to the politics of greed of the Thatcher era - the electorate are also now incredulous to the even more heinous and morally corrupt hypocrisy of Ministers such as James Purnell, whom, after spearheading a pretty merciless campaign to bully the incapacitated back into work and intensifying sanctions on so-called 'benefit cheats', has now been exposed as the worst kind of benefit cheat of all. He doesn't even have the excuse that many long-term unemployed have of being so badly off that some of them may have from time to time been driven to manipulating a benefit system which intrinsically manipulates them anyway. But what possible excuse does a high-salaried Mr Purnell, or Mr McNulty, have for abusing their parliamentary privileges? The amount they have claimed in expenses alone constitutes over £14,000 per year more than someone on JSA and Housing Benefit is likely to have to live on - though of course, according to such sages as Purnell and McNulty, a measily £8-9k a year is 'the amount a person needs to live on'. That coming from persons who moan about eking out their £69,000 plus per annum, who no doubt wouldn't roll out of bed in the mornings for anything less. Was it just that the temptation was too great, that they just couldn't resist a little tinkering to further replenish their already inflated coffers? It's really nice to know that front-bench members of a government now (mostly) openly scornful of the City swindlers who have ruined our economy, were spending much of their own time capitalising on expenses loopholes and using taxpayers' money to fund property flipping and Buy-To-Let profiteering. The word 'disgrace' is too weak a term to use here, for MPs such as Purnell and McNulty, and the interminably unapologetic and pathologically grinning Miss Blears, are, after all, Ministers in a Labour government. If Keir Hardie, Nye Bevan or Clement Attlee were alive today, they would have unreservedly called for their expulsion from the Parliamentary Labour Party, I have no doubt. But then this is a different party now altogether and we should expect this sort of swindling from them.

Original comment:

As MPs frantically scratch out their belated repayments of excessive expenses claims in a desperate bid to – literally – cash in on public forgiveness in time for the upcoming local and European elections, it seems we truly are now living in an Italian-style cash-corrupted post-democracy. But I think it will take a lot more than cash and shamed apologies – both clearly only now forthcoming due to the public scandal rocking the green benches of the Commons and threatening respective seats, and not through any genuine sense of ‘shame’ or repentance at abusing the ‘spirit’ of parliamentary privileges – to make a blind bit of difference to the ordinary man on the street struggling to keep a roof over his family’s head, in the wake of a cataclysmic failure of unregulated capitalism. As one political commentator mentioned today, the current situation of British democracy, steeped in corruption as it is, is similar to the Weimar Republic of 1930s Germany (too, also, in the wake of global financial crisis, the Wall Street Crash), and even dared utter the terrible possibility that in this parallel democratic meltdown, the extremes, most worryingly of the Far Right, may well be on the ascendant again, with the UKIP and BNP rubbing their grubby hands on the margins, anticipating spilling in to the political mainstream come the next General Election. Heaven forbid, but it’s certainly more possible now. Well done New Labour!

For me however, the real villain of the piece is the blatantly partisan and openly un-neutral figure of porcine Mr Martin, a Speaker who clearly has taken his title far too literally in abusing his position the other day by a completely unmitigated and transparently self-serving outburst at the two MPs who had the guts to question the highly dubious regime that had allowed the police to swarm back into Parliament, in a Stalinist Secret Police-style raid, to sniff out its mole (arguably the public's last link to democratic accountability). Meanwhile Mr Martin – who has certainly been very ‘truncheon-happy’ of late in his transgressions of parliamentary freedoms – might serve his office and House more properly by extending similar tactics to rooting out the source of the Commons’ expenses corruption. Oh, but of course, he’s been pivotal in the very committee which has overseen such excessive abuses of privileges. What does a guilty party with no argument do in such circumstances? Well, if you poke a pig, it grunts back, in a swill of defenceless abuse. Mr Martin should be ousted from office with immediate effect – that is, objectively, the correct thing to do now that his obvious contempt for MPs' right to question the running of their House has been betrayed and captured for posterity, both in the Hansard, and that shameful footage (that no doubt will be replayed for decades to come as an example of ‘how not to behave as Speaker’ to future generations of Politics students). But of course, Brown ineffectually backing his position, and, too, somewhat surprisingly, Mr Cameron, Martin will probably remain clogging up the trough for some time yet. At least, for long enough to secure his £100,000 pay off from office and awaiting peerage. The fact he may very well even escape significant disciplinary reprimands for his abuse of office, arguably the most pivotal to the democratic running of the Commons, just shows what a true sham our British Parliament really is. We must now even question, truly, whether we live in anything even remotely representing a democracy anymore (it’s been tenuous at best during the last thirty years, but not it seems to be tipping beyond the pale).

This country is presently gripped in two metaphorically complementary epidemics: the MP expenses scandal, and swine flu.

 

Alan Morrison, 13 May 2009

Dennis Pottersville

(Anyone who’s seen It’s A Wonderful Life will possibly appreciate this title, albeit in the pessimistic spirit it’s intended)

The recession hits deeper and deeper by the day, as the scorch marks of old WOOLWORTHS shop-tops are becoming a common feature to every British high street, and £1 and 99p shops are given a new lease of life. But it’s not an issue to be curt about, even if it does have its blackly farcical aspects; almost as if we are gradually sliding into a true Dennis Potter-type dystopia, well, sans the macabre musical interludes that is).

The Government’s latest attempts to nanny us (in all the wrong ways) focuses now on drinkers, specifically unemployed alcoholics (with an implied assumption that all alcoholics are by nature unemployable), who are now being threatened with having their benefits withdrawn if they do not agree to enter rehabilitation for their imbibing sins. This, from the same Government which cynically introduced the 24 hour licensing law – at almost exactly the same point they brought in the smoking ban in public places, including, oxymoronically, pubs – and who have arguably contributed more than their fair bit to the burgeoning binge culture rapidly escalating out of all proportion. (Not to mention the same Government who also encouraged the growth of casinos where bingo halls would have been a less insidious option).

On my own street in Brighton, it’s now a common aural feature every Friday and Saturday evening – and night – to hear the shouts, screams, hysterics, swearing, aggressive behaviour and vandalism of legion – often teenage and twenty-something – young people letting rip around the pumping visceral nihilism of inebriated weekends. They may very well need to start bringing in curfews in my area so soberer citizens know when not to venture outdoors into deluges of broken bottles and vomited kebabs. But in a way, who can blame these kids of today for mindlessly binging in such a morally bankrupt society? Even during the day recently, I saw a young girl screaming and laughing manically on some steps outside a house opposite, presumably either drunk or on drugs, what was most disturbing about this incident was that no one came out of their houses to see what was wrong with her and why she was behaving so bizarrely (ok, including myself, over-cautious recluse that I am).

What a wonderfully imaginative and healthy culture we have! And then there’s that ubiquitous addiction of the ‘Brits’: ‘the footie’. Football has now even earned its own specially prefixed definite article, ‘the football’, as if of some cultural sacredness all of a sudden. Well, one supposes it increasingly is, since on ‘match’ days the streets tumbleweed with an eerie post-nuclear-holocaust silence until sudden blasts of shouting, cheering, whistling and faintly Neanderthal gorilla-like ‘ooo ooo-ing’ holler out from all directions when there’s a goal. Again, a visceral, spiritless Pottersville.

But even as we plummet ever deeper into the new slough of post-capitalist austerity (would capitalism remain forever in the past tense from hence on, and the austerity take us to a better state of non-materialist consciousness!), there are some darkly poetic little ironies along the way. Only this afternoon, two small boys offered my partner Matilda some wild flowers – how sweet, we thought, presumptuously: ‘That’ll be 10p’ said one of the diminutive florists as Matilda accepted a small manky bunch of pilfered fauna. Who says entrepreneurialism’s dead? ‘Er, I mean, 2p’, haggled the boy with a sudden dose of revisionist conscience. Well, maybe it’s almost dead. Let’s hope so.

St. George's Day: When the Economy Fails, Bring Out the English Flag

St. George's Day should be renamed George Orwell's Day, since in the light of the economic troubles our country is presently facing, such out-dated flag-brandishing smacks of Oceanian diversion - though certainly our current Ten

Minute Hate will almost unanimously be focused on the City bankers who got us into this mess. That red cross now perfectly echoes the colour of our national reminder that we'll all be paying back the vast debt that's plunged us into the mire for a good few years yet. Dr. Johnson was very right on one thing: 'patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel' - even if he (surely) got it completely wrong with: 'if a man grows tired of London, he grows tired of life'. Rather that should have been: 'if a man grows tired of life, he moves to London'. Anyhow, I leave it to Kevin Saving to have the last word on St. George's Day, in his neatly topical poem, 'Pro Patria'. (Except to add for those on the Far Right, who often hijack St. George's Flag for their own atavistic causes, perhaps they should take note that the patron of their nation's flag wasn't actually English at all, but most probably Greek or Turkish. That should put a spanner in the works).

This week Labour MP for Halifax, the diehard left-winger Alice Mahon announced she was resigning from the Party because it "has betrayed many of the values and principles that inspired" her "to join" in the first place. Why this has only just sunk in for her now is a little mindboggling after a decade of New Labour sell out; but one gets the impression she was among many backbenchers hoping Gordon Brown would bring back some of the spirit of Old Labour. While I respect her principled departure from the party, it is arguably a little oddly timed, just as, finally and belatedly, this Government has had the guts to raise taxes for the 1% of the population earning over £105,000 per year. Peculiarly extreme economic circumstances and arguably sheer political expediency that have brought this empty-hearted Government to its free market knees aside, the recent nationalisations, and now the tax hike on the richest in society, are nevertheless the nearest New Labour has come to date to a shadow of its old, more socialist self. Sometimes I fantasise that perhaps Gordon Brown did know full well all along that we would hit this catastrophic bust and that it would be so catastrophic that finally the British public would be so outraged at the capitalist

betrayal of their interests as to not bat an eye-lid at a socialist antidote, thus repopularising the Left in politics. That's probably just wishful fantasising, and in any case, it shouldn't have had to take this depth of catastrope just to bring about a return to more compassionate politics in the UK. That it - accidentally - has doesn't say much about the English, and certainly doesn't make the St. George's flag any more appealing to the eye.

Now those of us firmly on the Left in this country are put in an agonising position coming up to the next General Election: do we abstain as a protest against Labour's punishing of the poor and unemployed? Do we vote Liberal Democrat, the only parliamentary party visible who seem to show an ounce of social compassion (with Vince Cable)?

Or do we grit our teeth, swallow our anti-New Labour bile, and vote purely tribally to keep the worser of the two

evils out of power, hoping, perhaps hopelessly, that Labour will learn its lesson of failed party 'reform' and finally

cleanse our country of the Thatcherite cancer its pointlessly incubated in its own ranks during the past three terms? Because even during the absolute worst of New Labour's various bastardisations of their party's original ethos, even through the scandal of Iraq, for many of us nothing still compares with the true pits of despair waded through during that interminable seventeen years of Tory rule. That New Labour shamefully sold out to the Thatcherite lie aside, we mustn't ever forget where all this vicious monetarist degradation of our country started, which inevitably led to this horrific economic crisis: with Thatcherism. I for one will never trust the Tories with power, and their own plans for the Welfare State are even more draconian than the present Workfare Brigade. Is it to be the final irony that just as this charlatan Labour Government finally start to see that an economic move back to the Left is the only route out of our troubles, as even many of the public are now galvanised through direct material sufferance to start seeing through the capitalist con, and, most importantly of all, as a more egalitarian-minded US President is in power trying to reverse as much of the Bush poison as he can, that the UK is going to relapse back to an Etonian Tory Tyranny?

What is one to think of that flag? Is it finally the red of Old Labour bleeding back in through that cross? The Telegraph of today, with its front page cartoon of Charmain Gordon Mau Brown foisting Socialism on the rich, would like us to think so - and of course, many of us would like to think so, contrary to the Telegraph's own ear-trumpeted constituency. (For a split second, trying to believe this Tory reactionary hype, I almost felt suddenly proud to be English, though more inclined to wave the Red Flag than St. George's cross - but then the moment passed, and I felt comfortably ashamed of my country again, as I'm more accustomed to). One columnist was even - without any shame at all - bemoaning that 'it's as if Thatcherism never happened'! Oh dear! Again, many of us would that that were the case. And certainly now there seems a chance to prove that awful philosophy as the nasty fallacy it was. And know this, many of us have been bemoaning just the opposite, ever since Thatcher stormed monstrously to office back in 1979: that it's as if the Attlee Government, the Welfare State, the NHS etc. never happened. Let's not return to the Intransigent Blue of the I'm-Alright-Union-Jack, nor make do with the thin strip of red of the English flag. Let's just all move up to Scotland (if they'll have us).

Alan Morrison, 23rd April 2009

January - April 2009 Editorials

Slave Labour

It’s with some poetic irony that before I went up to the National Theatre yesterday to watch Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters (reviewed on this site), I received a reply on House of Commons portcullis-headed note paper from one Tony McNulty to a copy of a mass petition letter by the Labour Representation Committee which I had, among many others, put my name to.

McNulty was writing in response to the LRC’s concerns about the draconian nature of the recent Welfare Reforms, and, unsurprisingly, any reassurance as to misinterpretations about some of the more menacing details to the new policy were not forthcoming from said Minister. Only some rather vague attempt to assert that the Government isn’t privatising the Welfare State (as such), but is going to use ‘outside providers’ to ‘assist’ Jobcentre Plus in its ‘efforts to help people back to work’. The use of the word ‘help’ here is of course highly subjective in this context, as is ‘work’, since increasingly it seems there isn’t any.

As if to somehow soften its razor-edged extremeness, McNulty goes onto say that ‘The ‘work for your benefit’ scheme forms only one part of the new support which we intend to introduce with the Flexible New Deal’. Oh, ok, that’s fine then; and again, a highly subjective use of the word ‘support’. And for those of you who might have thought you just imagined a certain phrase which I have before me in black and white and signed by said Minister,

I repeat it again: ‘work for your benefit’ (this along with another extract I paste above, replete with McNulty’s signature, by way of proof). So there it is: a blatant stating of the Government’s unashamedly exploitative intentions. Soon to follow the sweatshops of forced labour no doubt will be the return of the workhouse; that’s the next logical progression. Such a policy goes even beyond the Thatcher years’ YTS debacle in its unapologetic exploitation.

McNulty goes on to wax about the new ESA (Employment and Support Allowance) and that over time all Incapacity Benefit claimants will be moved onto it; its intention being to move even the sick and mildly disabled back into work

in order to ‘improve their standards of living’ – again, a corruption of the true meaning of ‘occupation for wellbeing’, which specifically refers to meaningful activity (often with some creative aspect to it) and emphatically not wage labour, and certainly not slave labour as in the new ‘work for your benefit’ scheme. More to the point, a large percentage of mental health sickness issues are due to the excessive stress involved in much modern employment.

So as usual the Government’s approach is arse about face and employing their usual spin and Newspeak in order to justify an abominable policy.

Most telling of all in this letter is McNulty saying that ‘Of course, there will always be some people in this group

whose disabilities are so severe that they will clearly never be able to do full-time work’. Let’s say that again, shall we: ‘never be able to do full-time work’. So here the implications are a) that all other sick people will be expected not only to go back to some form of work, but it has to be full-time as well, and, b) those considered severely disabled or ill will still be expected, by implication, to entertain, if not pursue, some form of part-time employment. So no one is let off the hook here.

And that this comes at a time of skyrocketing unemployment and corporate collapse, makes it all the more darkly laughable as it is deeply disturbing that new Labour are pushing ahead with these Fascistic proposals. That a Labour government should be responsible for this completely reactionary subversion of the Welfare State is beyond the pale (Nye Bevan must be spinning in his grave by now). That Mr McNulty himself is currently being investigated for an arguably ‘over-zealous’ claiming of parliamentary ‘expenses’, hardly puts him in a position to start preaching to the impoverished of society that they should be working for the pittance in benefits they receive each week – well, of course, he is in that position, which makes everything seem all the more farcical.

So this will be forced labour for something way below the minimum wage, imposed on us in part by someone who probably wouldn’t roll out of bed for less than £60k a year; who apparently finds this £60k per annum parliamentary wage insufficient to subsist on and so is compelled to claim a further £40-odd k a year for ‘expenses’ in staying overnight at a property he allegedly doesn’t stay overnight at. If found to be in breach of Parliament’s already

overly generous expenses system, one might in turn argue this sort of behaviour is a far more unjustified manipulation of ‘benefits’ than anyone on the dole has ever committed: done without the motive of financial desperation but simply the irrepressible compulsion to claim for something just because it can be claimed. Or worse still, an inherently dubious and excessive margin of fiscal ‘privileges’ for MPs. I ask Mr McNulty if he might donate

the significant sum he has over-zealously claimed as ‘expenses’ to the Social Fund of the Welfare State. I’m quite sure, what with the new slave-making hurdles he and Purnell are about to put in place, the needs of the unemployed will be far greater.

This week Harriet Harman warned of a resurgent BNP. Well, that is rather inevitable if the working classes’ only political hope, Labour, have moved so far to the right that they’re barely visible anymore. This is a classic social pattern when options for socially transformative governments disappear: a shift to the extreme right among many

of the underprivileged in society. And we must also remember that one A Hitler soared to popularity in similar economic circumstances to those we face today. So Ms Harman, be warned: if you are really worried about the BNP muscling into some parliamentary seats, perhaps you and the rest of your apparently charlatan front bench should in that case consider an urgent move back to the Left again before things get really unpleasant for all of us. Again, this gormless flagging up by a Government Minister of an obvious repercussion to their own party’s further polarisation

of the poorest voters, in turn betrays a breathtaking hypocrisy and delusional self-denial as to new Labour’s markedly absent sense of responsibility for the social anarchy they have helped create.

So there it is, we live in an Us and Them wealth gap vaster than before the Second World War, with a capitalist new Labour Government suddenly piping up with a puzzling sense of surprise at a resurgent Far Right in the society they’ve so shamefully betrayed by a pointless continuation of Thatcherite policies for the past decade. Mmmm.

I can only end by congratulating the ever-insightful Archbishop of York for pointing out this week that the pursuit

of unadulterated Thatcherism way past Thatcher’s own time, and through new Labour, has inevitably created the extreme economic crisis we are all currently facing. Only a public figure of the cloth seems to have the cassocks to stand up and rightfully accuse this country of a sickening greed over the past thirty years, the rotten fruits from which we are all now reaping; the poorest the most, naturally.

Alan Morrison, 13th April 2009

Virtual Revolution

As I was drafting this earlier today, thousands of justifiably angry citizens were pounding the grand slabbed vistas

of Whitehall in rightful protest against the greatest debacle of the capitalist system since the Wall Street Crash of

the 1930s. They were congregating outside the – appropriately – boarded-up Bank of England in one of the most unprecedentedly attended demonstrations against the deregulated greed of city bankers and capitalists in our country’s history. Would the Bank of England remain boarded-up for posterity after this, and the wealth of this nation, created by our labour and embezzled by profiteers - to be rationed out to us like mealy bags for us to painstakingly regain paltry scraps of our common birthrights back from snatching hands that lambast us from cradle

to grave under the spurious banners of ‘business’ and ‘enterprise’- be properly and proportionately redistributed

to end poverty throughout the UK once and for all. While it has taken a bankruptcy on such a massive scale to bring the City’s reputation to its knees, a global crisis that has affected rich and poor alike – though obviously the poor most of all, as usual – we might only hope that this vast demonstration of solidarity and common purpose will today strike a symbolic wound to the gluttonous belly of the capitalist Leviathan, one which will never fully heal. The

writing seems to be on the wall now, finally, for the termagant of Thatcherism that’s blighted and dispirited this nation over the past thirty years; that has, worse than anything, almost killed the very spirit of this country, and

of the ancient cause of socialism. Not since the Iraq marches of several years’ back has the UK seen such a mass protest against its Establishment, and, although like that movement this one is also coloured by many hues of the political and social spectrum, today certainly there has been a palpable symbolic move against the hitherto-unquestioned tenets of unregulated free market capitalism, bringing a more definite Leftist character to its motivation; and one we must hope and pray will be fully absorbed by the up-coming generation in a seismic shift

back to the long-exiled Left of politics in this country and throughout the world. Today could very well spell the beginning of the end of capitalism as we have known it for the past couple of (de-)generations, and its timely gradual erosion, for the sake of the people and of the planet itself. But this will mean a time of unprecedented individual sacrifice, especially in material terms, and one hopes that the majority of today’s protestors have it in mind that it will take a complete re-writing – and writing off – of previous property grabs and asset claims of the now waning Buy-To-Let ultra-capitalist generation, to seed a fairer and more levelled ground for all of our futures.

May we mark this day as of particular significance also since it is something like the 450th anniversary of the

setting up of Gerrard Winstanley’s Digger commune on St. George’s Hill in Surrey in 1649. Though short-lived and cloddishly indeterminate in terms of its political and spiritual successes, it struck a reverberating symbolic moment

in our country’s history which even today still resounds among those long-dormant gatherings of disaffected left-

wing thinkers in draughty East London halls who have kept the socialist faith alive in their hearts and minds for centuries since, in spite of the most overwhelming psychological odds; Thatcherism and its all-encompassing cultural poison the mightiest barricade of all to true social and spiritual transformation. Of course, Winstanley and his felt-hatted, tilling disciples were rapidly dispersed from their peaceful common ownership by the local vigilantes and Commonwealth soldiers – under the auspices of arguably new Labour’s historic progenitor, Oliver Cromwell, whose class-betrayal and Christian cant bore much in common to the duplicitous sanctimony of leaders Blair and the glowering, puritanical Brown. But there was a true lesson to be learnt with the Diggers: not only that the only true society is one shared for the common good of all, but also that rooted in the British tradition is possibly the earliest manifestation of European socialism. Ironic, since this ideology has been something perceived traditionally as a more continental threat, by those on the British Right; but it was seeded here, though arguably too prematurely, thus leading to the whitewash and spin of a ‘Commonwealth’ which was capitalist in all but name – indeed, was the beginnings of modern British capitalism. And so the UK never quite got round to revolution, as its politically more immature continental cousins – France, Germany, Italy, Spain – in time, did. Not that revolution is necessarily the solution, for it’s inevitably driven on a wave of violence and more often than not, ultimately sabotaged by another army of political and social bullies who simply ride the crest of the revolutionary wave to further oppress the people and pursue their own interests (cue Soviet Russia). But certainly, with more symbolic protests as that in the City today being punctuated by almost self-immolating jeers and provocation from some City workers out of their high-rise windows, things could eventually turn nasty, openly violent, and the prospect of bankers being hounded and lynched in the streets, arguably not too far away at this point. This is, for the nation who historically stops everything for tea, and who has been politically apathetic now since Thatcherism truly set in to the national consciousness around the late Eighties, certainly the nearest the people have been radicalised for at least a generation. For capitalism to fall, it has to finally disappoint the majority, including particularly the middle classes, and we are seeing this happening around us today. Could Karl Marx, after all the deterministic revisionism over the last century claiming he was wrong in his prediction that capitalism will ultimately fail and consume itself, paving the way for socialism, be ultimately proven right after all?

This will depend on how deeply and thoroughly this new wave of ‘mass radicalism’ and ‘anti-capitalism’ is absorbed

by the next generation, and, most challengingly, our own that has lived to see the last vestiges of Parliamentary

socialism sapped out of the party we originally voted in to turn back the vicious Thatcherite tide, who against all our hopes and aspirations, betrayed us for the Vanity Fair of unregulated capitalism and so in turn and not without some tragic irony, are almost bringing the country itself to a financial standstill for their political sins. Indeed, it remains

to be seen just how far this – as one commentator has coined it – ‘velvet revolution’ will go: will it domino into an

anti-capitalist reformation of this nation – and indeed world – or will it simply be an aberration, a brief gasp of collective conscience, a rogue gash on the punishing brow of capitalism ignited simply to bring attention to the fact that the majority of the people, the aspirational middle classes, the disappointed Buy-to-Let neo-yuppie generation, want the state of things to be rewound just a little bit back to the pre-crash days, at that crucial point when their self-centred investments were just beginning to bear fruit? I hope sincerely it will be the former, but only time will tell. For the moment though, there’s no doubting that the majority of us would probably not wince much at the bankers being whipped out of their offices to the scourge of small cords, and certainly at the very least, be unceremoniously stripped of their bonuses. The reported goading of protestors by some of the more foolhardy city workers coupled with the intransigent greed of one Sir Cliff Goodwin do, at the very least, give some justification to a collective fantasy of lashing the lot at a cart-tail through the streets of the city they have indelibly tarnished with their unprecedented avarice and inhumanity.

the Recusant unequivocally supports the demonstrations of today and all those continuing throughout the week and lends its virtual – though hopefully resonant – voice to the cause presently in progress. For all those who could not

be there in person in London today, we can at least offer our own sonorous Virtual Revolution. And it is indeed a revolution in thought that this country and the world desperately needs, one historically informed with the fundamental socialist (some might say, Christian) principles of equality, collectivism and most vitally of all,

compassion for one and all. Only this way can we make a truly wholesome and fulfilling future for ourselves and our planet. We need to once and for all cast off absolute capitalism, learn again our common purpose and value as creative human beings as opposed to economic units and commodities, and finally say to the Money God: get behind us, Moloch.

Alan Morrison, 1 April 2009

Take A Leaf Out Of The Swedes' Book

I've just come back from three days in Sweden, three days in civilization away from Barbarianland, or as some still laughingly refer to it, Great Britain. Three days free of unarticulated street tensions, smothering congestion and traffic din, iPod-plugged solipsism, appalling public services, dance-blasted cafes, inexorable queues and – that

growing British tradition – indefatigable culling of the demonised breed known as ‘smokers’. The Swedish, preferring

a more civilised, gradual and lackadaisical approach to ‘change’, at least allow the nicotine-starved small air-conditioned smoking booths in their airports – whereas in old Blighty, now they are even herding them into small designated areas outside the airports, while ozone-guzzlers continue to chug about unabated in their behemothic 4x4s. Britain has always got things the wrong way round in my view, as if we suffer a national topsy-turvy logic

(which makes our baiting of the ‘lateral thinking’ of the Irish more than a little ironic).

Excuse my customary rant on returning to Mother England after an all-too-brief sojourn abroad, but I’m afraid it’s become an instinct now. There’s very little I really miss from home, sadly, when abroad – the countryside and tea are about it. While I do sometimes feel perhaps a little sedated by aspects of Swedish culture – its almost pathologically laidback inhabitants, its gapingly vast space that at times dwarfs one’s sense of place in the universe, though not entirely a bad thing – there’s no doubt that it is a vastly more civilised and even-minded country than my own.

There’s a palpable sense of everything being for the benefit of everyone over there: an endemic, national character of empathy and consideration, of the greater good over individual interest, which I’ve also detected while spending time in France and Spain – but its most noticeable, for me, in Sweden. This is also goes to show that a country doesn’t have to have been through countless social revolutions to have developed a collective social conscience: Sweden is, after all, still a kingdom (as opposed to a republic), but one seemingly far more enlightened and people-centred than our own distinctly un-United one.

This sense of a society working for all, of a sense of solidarity and humanitarianism is highlighted in very telling details: the very conservative speed limits, dearth of congestion, lack of litter, cleaner public amenities (and most notably, partitioned urinals in male toilets), cleaner air, cleaner water (which makes for the tastiest coffee I’ve ever had in any country), cleaner everything basically. What’s more – and rather similar to Berlin – there’s not the sense as in Britain that everything takes second place to cars: municipal city centres are much more pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly, and motorists stop instantly one attempts to cross a road – invariably, in central areas, cobbled roads rather than the vast tarmac-tracks we get over here. In a way, Sweden reminds me of how England was about thirty-odd years ago, when I was, admittedly, only just out of my toddler years. But still I can recall a less congested, money-driven England, back in the late Seventies; a less vain, avaricious time before Thatcherism crashed in with its false idols and shamelessly damaging materialism.

Ironically enough, in the town where I was staying, Norkopping, a pleasantly updated ex-textiles town in South Sweden, all trickling canals, colourful wharves and spacious walkways, in its distinctive custard-yellow Museum of Labour – known locally as the Iron for its triangular shape, that seemingly stands on the very water – there was a photographic exhibition on entitled ‘No Such Thing As Society’ (brittiskt fotografi 1967-1987). This is a striking collection of chiefly black and white bromide pictures charting the ups and downs of a politically turbulent period in our recent history, some of the events during which seem all the more alarming now that they are past. The riots,

the strikes, the bombs – all sensitively and grittily depicted by some of the best social photographers of the times in question. The postcard flyer for the exhibition depicts three Seventies’ council estate kids scowling in the weak English sunlight, the middle kid holding up a racing pigeon to the camera in a Kes-like gesture. But in spite of the picture’s grittiness, the undernourished pallor of the three council estate kids, scruffy-haired, skinny in garish jumpers and wing-like shirt collars, all I felt on gazing into this snapshot of the times was a deep sense of sadness at what Britain has degenerated into since. Of course, things always needed to be improved in our country, and it’s

easy to idealise the past when gazing back at a distance, but all I could think of was how much I missed that period

in our history, particularly the late Seventies, and early Eighties – before the full unadulterated poison of Thatcherism had set in to our collective consciousness – and how tragic it seemed that any post-Sixties hippyish ideals of how society should be, from the cradle to the grave, had disappeared to mere flashes of vague nostalgia by the mid-Eighties, as our lives were fatally taken over by materialism and all its superficial and insipid accoutrements. The Eighties being, of course, the decade during which Society was finally axed – that is, Collective Society, which to me

is a tautology, since surely Society is meant intrinsically as a Collective state? Not so since Thatcher, and even more disturbingly, through over a decade of New Labour.

Significantly and appropriately, for a hitherto Collective Society as Sweden, one as yet untarnished by the politics of greed and pathological monetarism which has devastated the UK to a post-imperial anomic wasteland without any binding values, over the past twenty-odd years, but one which is frighteningly under the sway presently of a conservative administration that’s already putting out the feelers of privatisation (though un-popularly, which gives some hope yet) and is on the brink of potentially socially divisive policies, the exhibition provides a stark warning to the Swedish to heed the turbulence of Britain’s past two and a half decades of right-wing dehumanisation. As if to

say, IT COULD HAPPEN HERE TOO IF YOU DON’T WATCH OUT, SO FOR THE LOVE OF GOD KEEPING VOTING IN THE

LEFT. Because as it stands up to this – hopefully and most probably brief – interval of conservative government, Sweden has and continues to enjoy a more egalitarian sense of national identity (the Swedes don’t understand the British concept of class, nor arguably have for a century or more, nor like it either), a far fairer and more authentic welfare system (where benefits are often equated with salaries lost, for a set period of time anyway), brilliantly efficient and clean public services (especially the trains, which are decked out like IKEA-living rooms, quality coffee

on tap), and a fundamental principle that, to quote one Swedish acquaintance I made, ‘every Swedish citizen has the right to a roof and decent living conditions’, and, as he implied, irrespective of his/her employment status at any given time. Coming home to a damp, farcically maintained agency flat in ramshackle, slummish Brighton from the well-insulated apartments of Norkopping, this smacked particularly resonantly for me.

Not only poverty, but homelessness, is also a far rarer thing in Sweden: even in Stockholm's sprawling multi-coloured metropolis of spired and minareted islands, one has to look very hard to find anyone begging or foraging from bins – now a customary feature in any British town or city. Indeed, once, when I was staying in Stockholm with Matilda and wanted to get rid of one of my jackets and furnish a homeless person with it, it took literally a good half an hour to track down anyone who seemed shabbily dressed or unkempt in the locality; eventually we plucked up the nerve to offer the jacket to the only shabbily-dressed individual we could find, a bristly-bearded rubicund man who seemed almost affronted by our assumption he was of no-fixed-abode and who instantly declined our offer, though thanked

us, albeit a little irritably. Perhaps he wasn’t homeless after all.

From the levelled vistas of urban Sweden to the chiaroscuric iniquities of Brighton's mean streets, where the stark polarities of the wealth divide accost one every day and practically at every minute: the picaresque clashes of destitute cider-sippers hunched on park benches surfed past by elongated tinted-windowed limousines. It’s as if I’ve been wrenched out of civilization and back into a dystopian hinterland of facile commercialism, aggression and binge-drinking. Of course then it hits me: I have. And not only does all the injustice, unfairness, cruelty of my own country make my blood boil, make me feel almost nauseous with anger and irritation, it also makes me feel achingly sad, sad that out of all the great social leaps forward of our shared past – the Attlee government’s vision, the creation of the Welfare State, the NHS, the truly progressive and humanitarian ideas expressed during the Sixties, the tantalisingly nascent, never fully articulated radicalism of the Seventies, and even the ‘alternative’ counter-culture in popular song-writing, protest groups and politically charged arts as an antidote to Thatcherism in the Eighties –

we’ve come to such a pathetic and apathetic state of – junk – culture today, one which idolises empty ‘celebrity’

and sport over anything of true intellectual, artistic and spiritual substance. One can only hope that our ‘a-society’, finally, after the worst economic crisis since the Wall Street Crash, might start to wake up from the nauseous

nihilism of Thatcherism and unregulated capitalism, and perhaps begin to turn that long-inhibiting corner into the wider vistas of a true society, one which was starting to take shape half a century ago but which was brutally aborted before it could fully form. But to get anywhere near to this return to form, as it were, we have to still wade through the current reactionary social holocaust about to blast us all, from those who have been sick or unemployed for some time through to the now vast numbers being put on the shelf by corporations too avaricious to cut their profits to retain their labour: the scabrous neo-Dickensian Welfare Reform Bill, currently oozing its poison through Parliament, but still being vehemently opposed by, among other groups, the Labour Representation Committee (the defiant soul at the core of a Thatcheritised ‘Labour’ administration). Just as the city speculators, the bank and big business men, the succubi of society, get off scott free from their pillaging of the global economy, obese bonuses intact, the poor are spat at and trampled on by the very Party which came into being to do precisely the opposite.

And, truly, when I come back to England after only a few days’ gasps of civilised air abroad in Sweden, back to this surveillance-riddled, deeply undemocratic society, its insidious form of soft fascism, I feel like packing my things and shipping back out again, like Tony Hancock in The Rebel, to finally stick two fingers up at those deceptively white Dover cliffs. If Britain won’t change into the fairer society is should already be, then we have to make it change before it well and truly sinks into its silver sea.

Alan Morrison, 15 March 2009

Is Compassion Back In Fashion?

Dear Recusants,

With so few answers forthcoming to current global economic and political problems, it seems as good a time as any

to be asking some questions. The one titled above is perhaps more sardonically intended that it may first seem: for

the moment, and it is very early days admittedly, I think we can still safely say that at least in the US, President Obama has yet to put a foot wrong in terms of trying to turn round the catastrophically damaging policies of his predecessor and appears to be making no bones about his complete opposition – at least ideologically – to the ‘failed ideas’ of the pugilistic Republicans. Having said this, it is way too early to call, and I concede that some of the evangelising about Obama as a progressive world saviour even prior to his actually being in power to do anything, would have been sufficient pre-cognitive hyperbole to put off the more hair-shirted of the Left as boding a

disturbing parallel to the radical expectations when one Mr Blair first smarmed into power back in 1997.

But there is, I think, a key difference here: Obama cuts, at least on the surface, and already to an extent in his actions, a far more convincing leveller than the fidgety, darting-eyed Blair did, and also thankfully lacks the latter’s endemic sanctimony. I’m hoping it’s just a politics-weary cynicism that makes some of us on the Left look for faults

in his speeches and demeanour – I for one don’t mind a certain stateliness of poise in the glare of the cameras if it is indeed genuinely felt on Obama’s part. I suspect, and hope, it is. Time will tell. My cynicism comes in here though

with a fear that this new move towards Compassion ('the Obama effect' as the media puts it) – mixed as it is with rightful burning rage – in the wake of the irresponsible behaviour of the world’s speculators and bankers, could be more of a fashion of the moment, rather than a genuine counter-evolution away from the Social Darwinism of the

past thirty years.

But nonetheless, the hope now gapes before us, at least, for the Americans, that a new dawn of Compassion in

politics might be finally surfacing, and the only thing we may in the future have to thank the speculating culprits of the current global recession for is their ultimately showing us all – more specifically, those who couldn’t see it before

– just how damaging, deceitful and corrupting unregulated global capitalism is. The protectionist measures currently on the cards in the US may to some seem a little like a typical US 'fingers up' at the rest of the world, but it can also

be viewed in terms of an at least national nod to Leftist tactics. This is open for debate of course and again only

time will tell if it actually happens and what the effects may be if it does.

In Europe, there is a definite swathe of radical energy erupting in many areas of society, particularly through industrial strikes and protests, as well as, for the first substantial time since probably the early Eighties (bar the

Iraq War marches, which, however, crossed many colours of the political spectrum and was not particularly

partisan), that students have started demonstrating again and, one might argue, largely from a left-wing stance.

Only last Thursday, for example, I was popping into Deptford Town Hall to pick up my register for the poetry class I was tutoring that evening at Goldsmiths, to be told by two taciturn security guards that the staff room was locked because Gaza protestors were occupying the building. I had noticed two large banners laundered out the front of

the building, one in white letters on black reading OCCUPIED and another in white letters on red reading DON’T PANIC, ORGANISE, but had interpreted them metaphorically (I was in my pre-poetry-class mindset) until discovering they were literal and that an occupation was indeed in progress within the subterranean shadows of the chequered floored Victorian building. Indeed, I noticed another OCCUPIED banner barricading the central stairway immediately opposite me as I walked in. Coming out of the building and passing a student who was entering to join the protest, I wished him the very best of luck with such a good cause, and, rather than feeling inconvenienced, went on my way

to my class feeling lifted by this resurgence of radicalism among some of the young of today.

So, with protests against Israeli atrocities in Gaza and wild cat strikes – not, as some of the media has tried to imply, against ethnic minority workers, but – against callous job-cutting by corporations and, arguably, Union corruption through complicity with the bosses; at the very least, workers and the less privileged of society are starting to protest and fight back against the last slaps in the face of new Labour’s betrayal of social justice for the sake of keeping in with big business, bosses and bankers. That said, Compassion will take longer to fully bloom in terms of

how Western societies think and feel; it will be a lengthier process than simply the initial reaction to the fallout

from transparent greed and corruption among bankers and governments. It will need to keep pulsing through the bloodline of society for such substantial amount of time that it truly ebbs into our collective consciousnesses – and consciences – so we may at last begin to think and feel as a proper society should; not just as a collection of opportunistic individuals as Thatcherism tried to mould us to be, but as a collective of mutually dependent

communities who all need to work together for the greater good. It’s all about hearts and minds. But it still remains

to be seen whether or not the ‘Obama effect’ will prove in the long term to be full-blooded and ongoing, and also, if

the case, which I sincerely hope, we get a good dose of it over in the UK. There’s sadly no sign of it presently, with the ever-lugubrious Brown appearing to be having some sort of political nervous breakdown before our eyes – both pitiful and enraging in equal measure, nibbled at for all its worth by the Harpies in Opposition – and stubbornly still apologetic to the big business new Labour acolytes for being forced to instigate pseudo-Keynesian economic

measures and sporadic nationalisations. But why on earth is he so apologetic and embarrassed about this? The only thing Brown should be embarrassed about is the final damning fact that the deregulated free market he ‘converted’ to and championed as Chancellor, has completely backfired on him while holding the premiership (Brown lacks the

luck and bounce of his media-savvy predecessor). And you never know, he may now be regretting – though probably for all the wrong reasons – his photo call chaperoning Mrs Thatcher into No. 10 a couple of years back, in the likely abrupt end to his tenure and the possible future epithet of ‘Tumbledown Brown’.

Compassion certainly isn’t present by any means in the British halls of power, in the Commons itself, where there seems to be a truly frightening, arguably neo-Fascistic – certainly at the very least Malthusian – cross-party consensus on slamming the unemployed, sick and disabled with the utterly absurd and almost blackly comical (if it weren’t so potentially crippling to so many people) Welfare Reform Bill. I was dumbstruck to see no one during the recent debate about it in Parliament even giving so much as a whiff of opposition to its morally scandalous contents and proposals – bar one or two mild criticisms from the only true Opposition left in the House, the Liberal Democrats, or more specifically, Vince Cable. Sadly though, the ever-gimlet-eyed and plain-talking Cable is not actually the Lib

Dem leader, though does a much better job of it than the increasingly invisible Nick Clegg. Cable, particularly throughout the current economic crisis, has been the only high profile MP to have the sheer cohones to blatantly

call for the government to push for full-blooded nationalisation of the bailed-out banks i.e. to demand of them to

start lending again, thereby properly reimbursing the tax payer for propping them up. This is absolutely and unequivocally fair and right, yet it remains to be seen if new Labour are going to have the spine to once and for all stand up to the banks and tell them what’s what. Otherwise it’s just nationalisation purely for the benefit of the bankers and not in any way for the rest of us. You have to hand it to the bank bosses, they don’t miss any opportunity to profit at everyone else’s expense, even, bizarrely, through the - - apparently porous - constraints

of 'nationalisation'. Capitalists manipulating neo-socialist economic tactics to their advantage really is the ultimate irony of all.

But I did detect some flickering of doubt in that Oxbridge Arthur Daley, James Purnell, and actually, compared to

some of the assertions from the hollow men on the other side that the Bill wasn’t going far enough (no doubt the

Tories would also like mandatory birching for the sick and disabled to be administered simultaneously while they're made to insulate lofts), the new Labour benches, for the first time in a long time, seemed to almost faintly bristle

with long-repressed allergies to right-wing reactionary politics which, apparently, they originally came into power

to reverse. What on earth has happened since, in that case, is open to the future to work out but new Labour has remorselessly streamlined British politics not only into the centre ground, but now even beyond it, and fairly far to

the right. A Nanny State in the Bette Davis sense, as directed by Seth Holt in 1965: pathologically controlling. It may not be long now before they bring out special ASBOs for ‘Chavs’, also making it mandatory for them to pass tests in the Queen’s English akin to Citizenship protocols currently in vogue. Basically, the UK has to beware now of a possibility of a dreaded surge to the far Right in wake of the economic downturn. Despairingly, this even more on

the cards now than a much more welcome surge to the Left, with the Tories likely to get in again; once in power, no doubt to peel off their Cameron makeover masks revealing deep-blue reptiles underneath. The warning signs are already here: the token tycoon architect of a horrendous Welfare policy having just switched sides to the

embryonic government on the opposite benches.

At this stage, various commentators on the Left – from the Morning Star through to the front ranks of the Labour Representation Committee (now the only hope for the Left in the Commons, apart from Vince Cable that is) – are urging Labour to dig back to their roots and swiftly dispose of the Welfare Bill while there’s the chance to make a

final stand against what is essentially Tory ideology, and the Recusant also adds its voice to that. But then, sadly,

pigs might fly.

I’d just like to end by commenting on the rather ludicrous and breathtakingly flawed right-wing hypothesis of one Jonah Goldberg, author of the polemic Liberal Fascism. It’s not really any surprise to see such a reactionary book coming out at this time, due to the global insecurity of capitalist ideologues in the wake of a new rage against their abysmal machine. While I concede that one can argue historically that Fascism can emerge, in extreme circumstances, as some rogue twisted offshoot from the more coarse and misanthropic brand of Leftist thought

(the Malthusian kind in particular which sprung among some early 20th century intellectuals and writers who should have known better, and arguably evolved into the eugenics of Aryanism later on), which later mutated once again

into the extraordinarily perverse extrapolation of National Socialism (Nazism), this is really a pretty rhetorical assertion, not particularly original, and painfully biased towards the Right, from whose vantage point this author is writing. History has of course shown that extremes either end of the political spectrum tend to be pretty much the same sort of thing once in power, in all but name or label. Yes, Stalin used equally atrocious tactics as Hitler, but I don’t think any true socialist would seriously argue now that Stalin, a brutal ruler, was in any true and practical

sense one of their number. For those of us who equate socialism with Compassion, someone like Stalin is as

antithetical to its true ideas – that is, social equality, freedom of expression, and freedom from monopoly and exploitation – as Hitler, Hussein, Mugabe et al.

Goldberg is not wrong at all in asserting that it is politically naïve and unbalanced to assert that all forms of

Fascism intrinsically sprout from the Right of the spectrum – though many do and have done historically – but

where he goes seriously wrong is in pushing the argument to its opposite extreme by arguing that Fascism has historically sprouted from the extreme Left. That really is arse about face and even more unbalanced than the arguments he is opposing by this polemic. How, then, would Mr Goldberg like to explain the Spanish Civil War for instance? A conflict openly fought between the extreme Right Francoists and Falangists – militaristic, traditionalist, and tyrannical – and the Left and extreme Left Republicans and Communists – democratic socialists through

anarcho-syndicalists to full-blooded Stalinists. If Goldberg’s arguments were indeed correct then why the need for

the Spanish Civil War at all? If essentially the Far Left leads to Fascism, why didn’t both sides just join together? Presumably Stalin and Franco had much in common so could have settled it all quite amicably. Ok, one might argue

that essentially this conflict was really a fight for democracy and freedom (the Republicans) against the imposed

coup of tyranny (Francoists). That said, this might also partly explain the internecine issues between the POUM

and the International Brigades and the Stalinist betrayal of the Republican movement. It is indeed a deeply complex area. So perhaps one might assume from Goldberg’s stance that he thinks Franco wasn’t a Fascist at all, but actually just a slightly more pugilistic type of Conservative, and that the real Fascists of the conflict were actually the Stalinist International Brigades? Oh dear, it is getting complex.

To my mind, ultimately, there is one essential difference between the Left and the Right, between Conservatism/Capitalism and (Democratic) Socialism, and that is simply that the latter sets out to fundamentally change things and – depending on one’s own view – for what it perceives as the betterment of all, while the former seeks simply to keep things as they are for the benefit of their affiliated monopoly-holders. For the Left, this means that drastic mistakes have been made (Stalin onwards in Russia; some aspects to Castro’s reign etc.), but also monumental achievements for the betterment of humankind (collective corporatism in Sweden; the Welfare State

and NHS in the UK – now all but eroded to a part-privatised carcass by new Labour of course). Where new Labour

fits into all this is open to debate, but my argument would be that they used the bare bones of similar State tactics

to their party’s previous governments, and have certainly been proactive, if not too much in some areas, but

without any of the actual flesh and sinew of their party’s former socialist (or Compassionate) ideology. So in a way, they may prove in the long term to be the nearest Goldberg’s thesis comes to showing a mutation to near-Fascism from an original left-of-centre grounding than anything historically has.

Oh dear. Obama, we're banking on you to bail us out from corrupt global capitalism! (No pressure).

the Recusant urges readers to check out the Labour Representation Committee’s website and to sign up to their petitions against the Welfare Reform Bill, the proposed privatisation of Royal Mail and other equally disturbing government proposals; and to also subscribe to the Morning Star, the UK’s only non-capitalist newspaper.

A Good Time Coming...?

Dear Recusants

Well, 2009 has certainly begun with a number of bangs, not all good, but certainly the belated ascendancy of

Barrack Obama to the US presidency brings a detectable ray of hope to the billions across the globe who have

suffered from the fallout of the hawkish Bush tyranny – Iraq, Guantanamo Bay (which Obama on his first day in

office has already targeted for closure in around a year’s time), and the last sting in the tail, the collapse of the

global financial system. The latter vicissitude, one hopes and prays might in time bring some good to the globe in possibly marking the end to the devastatingly unregulated hold of absolutist capitalism and globalisation the world over. Already there is an international atmosphere of nascent radicalism in both thoughts and acts beginning to pollinate globally: in the UK alone, in the past couple of weeks, there have been protest marches (near riots in some cases) against the Israeli occupation and destruction of much of the Gaza Strip (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a

whole set, should clearly be the Israeli motto it seems); hints of growing dissent in the minds of common people from the transparently unethical governments on both sides of the Atlantic (Bush’s now being, thankfully, a post-administration, just as a glut of the US banks go into administration) in evidence, such as that quoted by Socialist Alternative (US): ‘Merriam-Webster reports that socialism was the third most searched-for term (bailout was No 1) during 2008’ - and that apparently seminal works of the Left, including Karl Marx's Das Kapital, had record sales last year in Germany; even just in the news today, a story about a commune of artists squatting in two empty £15

million mansions in London’s salubrious Park Lane area (as bald attempt at reclaiming the land grab and the tyranny

of ‘property’ as Winstanley and his Diggers at Cobham in the 1650s?), pricks up the hairs of repressed dissidence on

the backs of many a socialist’s neck. As does, though in a very different sense, the spread of those old terms 'nationalisation' and 'Keynesianism', albeit retro-measures only implemented through expediency by a transparently capitalist new Labour government. Nevertheless, the lesson seems to be here that once unregulated capitalism and ham-fisted privatisation meet their inevitable implosion, socialist measures are called back in from the cold to sort

out the mess; no doubt to be swiftly abandoned, without so much as a thank you, once the markets kick back in

again. But one does begin to wonder whether Marx had longer arms than economic revisionists over the decades

have supposed: he did predict, after all, the eventual collapse of capitalism. Many of us are still praying for this as if for some secular second coming.

But the short term effects of the global recession are increasingly disturbing to say the least; for some, even devastating: the rate of repossessions is on the rise, unemployment is sky-rocketing by the day – in the middle of which, Mr Purnell is going to rehabilitate the sick and disabled back into work which doesn't exist, demonstrating

how completely out-of-touch and deluded, not to mention mean-spirited and draconian, this shambolic new Labour government has become (community work; no doubt workhouses soon to follow in a society in which one isn't permitted to be ill for more than a couple of months).

But what really makes my blood boil in all this, as no doubt it does for most of us, is the seeming invisibility of the

City speculators who created this world-wide situation: where are they? Who are they? Why are they not being impeached and brought before the courts over what they have done? Why have they been allowed to walk away

with their bonuses into the xanadus of their hoarded assets accumulated directly at the expense of billions of

people? This just goes to show that the motto of planet Earth – though hopefully not for much longer – is, and has

been now for most of my own living memory at least, ONE RULE FOR THE RICH, ANOTHER FOR THE POOR.

With Obama now in the White House, a man who – inevitable political compromises in reaching such a high office

aside – is to my mind one of moral integrity, of principle, whose fast dark eyes teem with an egalitarian energy, who has from day one begun radically accelerating a plan for change in the US – largely involving, naturally, as many reversals on Bush policies as is politically possible at such an early stage – we can at least hope with more optimism than ever before, that a new dawn in human co-operation and compassion is at least about to seed itself via the biggest global power; and this much-belated seeding might, we must all hope, act as a final moral antidote to that

of the socially divisive monetarist philosophies of the Reagan-Thatcher era, now finally being shown for what many

of us have been arguing for years it really was: a behemothic con.

Alan Morrison, 22nd January 2009