Demonstration outside Hove Town Hall against the Budget, 22 June. Photos © Matilda Persson
BLITZKRIEG ON THE PUBLIC SECTOR: THE BIG SOCIETY'S CON-LIB CON
THE NEW 'FAIRNESS': THE UNEMPLOYED, SICK AND DISABLED TO PAY FOR THE CRIMES OF THE CITY SPECULATORS AND BANKING CHEATS IN A BUDGET THAT DISMANTLES WELFARE IN ORDER TO PROP UP BILLIONAIRES
BUT THE UNIONS, SOCIALISTS AND GREENS ARE PREPARING TO TAKE THE FIGHT TO THE GOVERNMENT IN WHAT PROMISES TO BE THE BIGGEST PUBLIC RESISTANCE TO A BRITISH GOVERNMENT SINCE THATCHER'S TYRANNY
So, the bombshell landed today in the most draconian budget in living memory, under the utterly spurious window-dressing of 'progressive': what Osbourne actually means to say is, 'progressive Malthusianism'. The retention of the 50% tax rate, the belated - though still pitifully low - hike on capital gains tax, and some reductions in universal benefits for the better off, are unfortunately the only three remotely 'fair' or 'progressive' ingredients to what is otherwise a Thatcherite budget whose actual impact will hit the poorest in society almost as much as the wealthiest, who of course have all the resources they need to ease the pain of one less yacht a year; meanwhile, those currently subsisting on inadequate welfare benefits are about to have even that slashed mercilessly over the next three years, to the tune of £11 Billion! Housing Benefit to be capped - even though New Labour was already busy clamping down on eligibility for it before the Coalition came in - and
the most shocking and frankly nasty bombshell of them all: the introduction of new rigged tests for those in receipt of DLA, where inevitably Government-guineapig medical professionals will be keen to knock off as many chronically sick people from their benefit as possible so as to get their little bonuses - though what else would we expect from our wonderful medical professionals, particularly Doctors and GPs, who have historically fought tooth and nail against healthcare reforms, Nye Bevan once famously admitting he'd had to 'stuff their mouths with gold' in order to get them onboard for the new NHS back in the late Forties; and who have been pretty much the same ever since, expecting exorbitant salary increases while insisting on reduced surgery hours; and don't get me started on Dentists, those profiteers of pain!
Meanwhile, as one would expect from any Tory administration - which it quite clearly is now, with or without the Lib Dem poodles, who have sealed the death of their unscrupulous party by gutlessly supporting this immoral and devastating Coalition budget - the current deficit of the UK is being used, yet again (remember 1979?) as an excuse for a Blitzkrieg on the Public Sector, a culling of public spending and essential services, which of course is inextricably linked in with the approaching Holocaust on the Welfare State. Not even under Thatcher has this country faced as brazen and ruthless an assault on its core social bastion, as it is facing now; what a great pity that the UK has chosen to stop aping the US once 'missing link' Bush has left power and a true social democratic replaced him: just as the US is belatedly building its own equivalent of an NHS and Welfare State, the UK is rapidly dismantling its own! After the sell out and sell off of New Labour, we now have the Tory wrecking-ball swinging in to finish the job off, and most of our future prospects and security with it. This, added to the debacle of BP and its intransigent and distinctly unapologetic - such is seemingly the modern British way i.e. the Bankers and expense-fiddling MPs - gargoyle yachting mascot having finally struck the last nail in the coffin of an already withering Trans-Atlantic relationship, plus the xenophobic Little Englanders of our new Tory administration busy making ever more clear blue water between our sinking island and Europe, things couldn't look much bleaker.
But obviously the biggest CRIME, since it is a CRIME, of today's absurdly unfair budget, is that while the poorest in society have had the Welfare State they desperately rely on - which has already been failing many of them under New Labour as
it is - targeted for the biggest spending cuts of all, a titanic £11 Billion over three years, while the City and Bankers, who, let's not forget - even if the current Government has! - CREATED the economic mess we are all now in, get off relatively scot free with a measily £2 Billion levy! Apparently they are presently feeling 'quite releaved', while the people whose lives they have devastated are about to suffer yet another wave of punishments: THIS IS CAMERON'S FAIR SOCIETY! Satanic more like.
Far from a Robin Hood Budget, this is a Sheriff of Nottingham Budget with knobs on! Osbourne's definition of the term it will be hitting the poorest in the country almost as much as the very richest, and far more than all the many and varied income scales between those two polarities. In effect, far from the 'middle-classes' being hit the hardest as has been predicted,
it is the working- and under-classes who are being culled into even greater poverty and despair - so why New Labour's Opposition are so up in arms with this budget is anyone's guess. Having said that, it was with some feeling of optimism that I watched what has to be the best and most impassioned speech of Harriet Harman's career, in her absolute condemnation of this budget - and her turning of the tables on Vince Cable by subverting his old trope against Brown - 'from Stalin to Mr Bean' - into a Cable-targeted one of 'from National Treasure to Treasury Poodle', an inspired repost to the ex-Lib Dem stalwart whose breathtaking volte face on everything he previously stood for is even more disillusioning than Old Nick's transformation from loud-hailing neo-radical to capitulating hypocrite in only a matter of weeks.
But this is an even more horrendous time, since, unlike the dark days of Thatcherism, there is no clear-cut and emphatically left-wing Opposition in place to battle against this new open Class War unleashed through the Pandora's briefcase of this most reactionary of Chancellors. While a new Rainbow Alliance of all left-wing parties and campaign groups is now direly needed, even more than before the mandate-less cobbled-together Coalition deal was sealed, the bitterness against New Labour's 13-year betrayal of its core values and supporters, of the poor, the sick and the unemployed, and its shambolic gambling away of our economy into their own buy-to-let portfolio, flipped property and fiddled expenses pots, and, most crushingly, into the hands of the City Thieves, is even more tangible than before this apocalypse of a budget.
And such justifiably lingering resentments were noticeably alive and vocal during a generally highly positive, defiant and well-attended demonstration which I took part in outside Hove Council today, organised by a punctual conglomerate of
left-wing parties, campaign groups and Unions, including the PCS, Unison, the Brighton Benefits Campaign, the Socialist, Socialist Worker and Green Parties: sticking out like a sore thumb in the throng of palpably furious and radicalised protestors, were a small group of red-rosette brandishing Labour councillors, whose presence was not exactly wholly welcomed by the majority of campaigners pitched there.
After a series of rousing tub-thumping speeches from representatives of the aforementioned groups, a Labour councillor took to the microphone to a wave of 'Boo!'s and heckles; but, although still, as the party as a whole, self-deluded as to the horrendous mess their 'New' brand has left the country in, demonstrated, as well as sheer temerity, a considerable courage in standing up and calling on all gathered to work together, particularly in opposing the budget impositions at the local Council level, and openly offering the hand of friendship to the Greens who were abundantly present. Nevertheless, the general feeling at the demonstration was that Labour has long lost the plot, not to mention emptied the pot, and judging
by the flushed and harassed faces of their number there present, especially as they were jeered and shouted at by the many socialists, the feud on the Left of British politics looks set to spark into an all-out ideological showdown over the coming years. The reason being quite simple now: this country desperately needs a true Left-wing Opposition to the New Thatcherites we have in power- there is simply no room anymore now for the usual New Labour pussy-footing round the business classes; no room now for Blairite clones as Party Leaders - and if Labour cop out once again by sticking stubbornly to the centre-ground in Parliament, it will sign its own death warrant - as the Lib Dems have already done several times over - for posterity and necessitate a new party of the Left to take its place.
My own hope, indeed, is that out of this will emerge a new Rainbow Opposition - comprised of those left-wingers remaining
in Labour, the LRC, the Greens and Socialist factions - to the oncoming storm of Tory dogma and cuts; if not at a Parliamentary level, then at least on an issue-by-issue campaigning level, which will bring politics back out into the streets of this country and drag the MPs kicking and screaming into the only true FAIRNESS for one and all: a Budget Against the City.
Ultimately, UNITY was the mantra of this peaceful but furious demonstration: that, in spite of all past differences, it is now time for ALL who are opposed to this Government's new War on the Welfare State and the Public Sector to UNITE under the unequivocal banner: WE WON'T PAY FOR A DEFICIT WE DIDN'T CREATE!
the Recusant urges all those interested in signing up to the new wave of petitions, protests and campaigns in defence
of the Welfare State and the Public Sector to add your voice and support to the efforts made on all our behalves by the following parties and pressure groups who are now coming together under the banner of a peoples' Rainbow Opposition:
Labour Representation Committee
The Great Libertarian Con: Our Coalition Government Tighten Their Belts – Round Our Necks!
Anticipating a Blitzkrieg Budget against the Poor, Vulnerable and Sick
After enduring 13 years of the worst and most ideologically compromised Labour Government in our history, whose unscrupulous and shambolic deregulation of the financial sector has helped plunge the UK into its worst recession in living memory, we are now about to be met full on with the next sting in the tail of George Osbourne’s neo-Thatcherite Budget that, if all broadcasts so far are accurate, looks set to birch the poor and sick of society even further still with a Blitzkrieg
of cuts against the already diminished Welfare State.
We’re all in it together goes the mantra of our new Big Society, Tough but fair, carps Head Boy Osbourne, as, apparently, he isn’t prepared to put up with a Britain plunged into financial ruin. I’m sure none of us are, especially the majority who actually will have to put up directly with the oncoming storm of Tory cuts, while the likes of Osbourne and his multi-millionaire Cabinet chums sweat it out in their private saunas, insulated from the day-to-day plight of the masses.
'Workfare-ness'
One man’s austerity is another man’s luxury, and what we are seeing now is a new rich, right-wing administration penny-pinching from those with no money and so no recourse to resist their imminent skinning, just so they can prop up the corrupt capitalist system that generates the usurious profits that keep their privileged classes ticking along nicely. To think how so many of the Tory Aristocrats and Lib Dem property tycoons must be sweating at the prospect of shaving a little bit of capital off their portfolios and investments. In the meantime, for the ordinary person, these imminent cuts in Welfare and the public sector means unemployment, and subsequent punishment for being unemployed by a Government and State which has actively caused it and who will force millions onto the slave labour schemes of ‘work for your benefits’. Not so much ‘Fairness’ as ‘Work-Fareness’. [Wither Vince in all this?].
It really does all read and sound like a very bad and very sick joke: you couldn’t make it up: we, the common people, are being 'invited to join the Government' in our compulsory martyrdom for the sake of keeping a failing capitalist system afloat, by taking the brunt of the cuts design to bring down a deficit created by tne Banking and Political Classes. The City culture of banking gamblers, who have already robbed all of us in broad daylight and plunged us all into recession and were then bailed out by us, and who have got away almost scot free from their crimes and the consequences of them – where are the imprisonments for these, the true benefit thieves of society? – have, on top of this, only continued to make profits on the backs of our bail out, and if that’s not enough, we are now being told that we have to have a large chunk of the Welfare State – never needed as much as it is now in a period of escalating unemployment – simply axed, our benefits and/or options to benefits cut or significantly reduced, our public services slashed, and are expected to just take it on the chin! Meanwhile, the City and the Banks continue to profit at all our expense – in the RBS case, on the backs of our State’s unreturned bail out – and apart from paltry – and no doubt heavily loopholed - bonus caps and extra taxes, have still not as yet been asked to contribute any significant amount of money towards reducing the State’s deficit, even though they literally OWE money to the State and to the people more than any other societal agent.
Yes, we are being granted some diversions from what is effectively a rapacious capitalist and anti-progressive broader picture of a like not seen in living memory (i.e. more brazenly ruthless and ethically hypocritical than even Blair or Thatcher ever managed): the dropping of the tax break for the richest (which presumably, if it had still been pursued, would almost definitely have led to public riots), the £10,000 tax exemption for the lower-waged, the caps and taxes on the City and Banks, the raising of capital gains tax, and the retention – for now – of the 50% tax rule. More controversial, though possibly justifiable, is a break away from the naive and arguably counter-productive universalism of Welfare with a push in the direction of means-testing, to result in the reduction and, presumably on a sliding scale, axing of much benefit entitlement for families on higher earnings (the Recusant has argued previously that the Achilles’ Heel of all Labour administrations, no matter how well-intentioned, has been a stubborn and almost contradictory resistance to means-testing for benefits and the NHS, which, sixty or so years ago, resulted in blanket entitlements for deeply diverse sets of circumstances, and in many cases, benefits for people who didn’t really need them and free healthcare for the wealthy, thus proved unsustainable financially, and led to the introduction of prescription charges, again, on a universal footing, thus re-disenfranchising the millions of families the Welfare State was brought in to relieve) – shorthanded as ‘middle-class’, that sacred cow of Brown and his cronies, who long deserted their traditional working-class core vote. Only if the latter measure is done on a sliding scale, however, would it be in any way justified.
But these concessions to any ‘progressive’ agenda in the Con-Lib Coalition are as paltry alms compared to what they are now seriously threatening with the other hand: slashing the public sector, making thousands on thousands unemployed, then forcing them – and all the other unemployed - into slave labour via the new workfare proposals (which would work out at £1.60 per hour!) – it’s one thing (though still in our view highly unfair) telling the unemployed to work for their benefits proportionate to the minimum wage – i.e. the equivalent of £5.80 an hour for 11 or 12 hours a week – but to propose enforcing 30 hours, a full time working week practically, but for the same pathetic amount of benefit, is simply beyond belief! Especially when one considers the likes of George Osbourne wouldn’t roll out of bed for less than £60k a year minimum – and even Iain Duncan Smith admitting recently that if he were unemployed (in some parallel universe), he wouldn’t take up a job that made him worse off than being on benefits.
And of course, add to all this rapacious welfare slashing, the proposals to encourage what will essentially be another new species of private education – as if it’s not ridiculous enough that we still have private schools in a so-called 21st century 'meritocracy' – via the ‘parent-patented’ new academies; and hints of rolling back the fox-hunting bans and no doubt some other of the pitifully few decent humanitarian policies of New Labour, we can see the times are head are going to be more
a case of Z Cars than Softly, Softly.
But, the point that the Government and the political class in general are of course continually missing – or choosing to miss – is that it isn’t the common people who have bankrupted this country, and least of all the public sector: it is the City and the Bankers, who constitute a Private Sector! So, therefore, rather than trying to cut a deficit run up by them and the previous administration by slashing public and welfare budgets, this Coalition of Dunces has the moral obligation – not to say practical mandate – to slash all salaries and bonuses of the City and impose compulsory levies on them to reimburse the State and public purses. Then there would be no cuts necessary anywhere else.
There shouldn’t be ANY cuts in the public sector, least of all in the Welfare State, even in the worst of times, because the worst of times, as we are in presently, are specifically reliant on what was originally intended to be – though its true purpose has long been eroded over the years – a safety net for all British citizens, to prevent anyone from being tipped into poverty. Of course, under Thatcher, and then New Labour, our culture has come to support the myth of welfare benefits being simply altruistic State handouts to lazy layabouts, when in fact they are our ‘return’ from tax, National Insurance and labour contributions when previously employed; so not handouts at all. The only handouts in our society are the billions thrown at the profligate Banking Sector at our expense!
In short, if ever there was a time – other than the ‘summer of rage’ last year – that the people of this country, all of us that is, not only the left-wing fringe groups and Unions, had a reason to get out and protest against our status quo, it is definitely now. In fact, the coming months will be the defining moments in our generation as to whether the people of this country still have the radical fire and nerve to resist and rise up against the absolute bombardment against their social rights about to be unleashed by a shoddy Coalition with no moral or political mandate whatsoever; who, after 13 years of our public liberties being assaulted by New Labour, are going one step further by attempting to cement themselves in power for a minimum of five years by fiddling the very – near-as-damn-it – ‘democratic’ nature of Parliament and upping the % needed in a vote of no confidence against the Government.
This writer concedes that while much of his personal energies are taken up with the pen rather than placard, not being an instinctive street-protestor, he feels now that one and all with any socialist conscience, including himself, must start to get more actively involved in grassroots political organisation and demonstration. He will attempt to keep you all posted on the upcoming protests about to hit Brighton and Hove in the next few weeks, and to this purpose, provides below links to a few newly emerging solidarity groups who are organising an active and ongoing resistance of protest to the upcoming welfare and public sector cuts in our communities:
Brighton Solidarity Federation
the Recusant hereby states its utmost support for the ongoing campaigns of Defend Welfare, the Benefits Campaigns
of all regions, the Solidarity Federation, the Green Party, the PCS, the LRC, and the Socialist Party; in short, all parties
and groups who are openly resisting the imminent assaults on the Welfare State and Public Sector, and who each pursue
a genuinely left-wing vision of a truly fair Britain.
AM 21/6/10
THANKS FOR STANDING DOWN DAVID LAWS - BUT WAIT, WHAT'S THIS: A RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY OF THE TELEGRAPH AND MURDOCHRACY TO RINSE ALL THE YELLOW OUT OF THE NEW COALITION CABINET BY SUDDENLY LEAKING DODGY EXPENSES CLAIMS SOLELY CONCERNING LIB DEM MINISTERS!
While it seems only fair and just that, as the 'hatchet man' of new public sector cuts, David Laws, caught with his multi-millionaire hands in the public till, should immediately stand down, it is becoming disturbingly apparent - even if the media hasn't yet appeared to have picked up on this, though I'll check the ever ultra-cynical Channel 4 New this evening to see if they've smelt a rat yet - that the fact that the Torygraph, while, coincidentally, simultaneously running a petition against the new rise in Capital Gains Tax, sees fit to suddenly expose the dodgy expenses claims of two frontbench Lib Dems, smacks of a Murdochratic right-wing conspiracy to discredit the Yellows for the sake of getting more Blues in the Cabinet; or further still, to eventually force a second General Election, hoping that that would finally ensure an outright Tory majority, therefore a sufficiently right-wing government to cancel any pesky progressive taxation policies!
Cynicism? Paranoia? All the signs say not. The right-wing Murdochracy is the biggest threat to our democracy and appears to have some sense of inalienable entitlement to act as a 'shadow government' of our country, with a clandestine and insidious reactionary coup de tat mentality. A not very secret army are they, these foolscap falangists of the front headline? No doubt the main reason for Cameron and Cleg trying to force through a 55% minimum for a vote of no confidence against their administration through the next five years, isn't so much to cover the flanks against left-of-centre opposition in Parliament, but more likely to secure their tenure against the likely constant assaults of the right-wing media, who are psychopathically fixated - against all our interests - with getting the full-blooded right-wing government they all want, to protect their gratuitous financial capitals from being quite fairly and reasonably redistributed.
AM 1/6/10
STAND DOWN DAVID LAWS! The Coalition 'Hatchet Man' Caught With His Hands In The Public Till:
Cue Recourse to Special Sympathy Plea in Another Breathtaking Turn of Cynical Opportunism
You really couldn't make this up could you? That ever effortlessly unflustered Lib Dem Orange Book co-author, David Laws, who negotiated the centre-right coup to drag his left-of-centre party kicking and screaming into a schizoid Coalition with political opposites the Tories, and who has come in to be the 'hatchet man' about to wield massive cuts in the public sector, has been caught pilfering money from that same public purse in order to pay rent to his 'partner' so he in turn could profit on his properties and go on to purchase even more expensive Buy-To-Lets.
Laws' feeble argument, the obscure logic of which I've still yet to get my head round, as to his trying to keep his same-sex relationship secret via funding a clandestine cohabitation via expenses claims is simply laughable: had been so concerned about keeping the media out of his private life, claiming money from public funds to pay the rent for his boyfriend's property hardly seems the obvious way to keep things quiet does it? A man of millions, one might think, would just fork out the £950 a month rent from his own pocket rather than risk it all coming into the public sphere.
Laws of course, being an MP very much of the 'new politics' - i.e. shorthand for a glossed over, still-corrupt political class - is in complete denial of his dishonest and opportunistic behaviour, and is pathetically and cynically using his sexuality as an excuse for his unconscionable and duplicitous swindle of public money. And unbelievably the Guardian of all papers has a columnist today, without any sense of irony, backing up his absurd attempt to divert attention away from what is in any other sphere of society considered as fraud.
Meanwhile, his fellow Lib Dems have rushed to his defence in what is fastly becoming the typically gutless way of the right-wing of their party, not to say utterly divorced from reality, when absurd arguments such as 'Laws is a very private man' are used to somehow justify his dishonestly milking public money to help boost his partner's property portfolio; and that ludicrous caricature of an entity with name to match, Limpik Opik, vociferating a completely vacuous and self-defeating argument by saying that since Laws is a millionaire he 'hardly needed to be on the make', simply makes the case for his critics: of all MPs to fiddle their expenses, a millionaire such as Laws has the least possible excuse or argument for defrauding public money, since he has more than enough cash in his own private bank account(s).
Laws argues that because he and his partner are not in a civil partnership and do not share a bank account that somehow makes them 'not a couple' - but to any unmarried 'couples' out there struggling to survive on the benefit system, they will be able to tell him that Housing Benefit, as with all benefits today, immediately penalise anyone living with a 'partner', regardless of whether they share a bank account or not, as effectively one organism, and uses this as an excuse to pay two people one person's entitlement. Before Laws starts cutting benefits from the vulnerable and needy, perhaps he should now feel a pang of empathy for those he is about to be instrumental in impoverishing?
But what is really disgraceful in all this is that not only is Laws' behaviour between 2004-07 'fraud', it is fraud committed without any reasonable mitigation whatsoever since he is also a millionaire - but then TAKE TAKE TAKE is the mantra of course of those who sustain and accumulate their wealth. If Laws does not stand down immediately then this Coalition Government will live to rue this day: New Politics? Fairness?
Try this for fairness then: if an ordinary and impoverished member of the public did the same as Laws, Housing Benefit would not only show absolutely no sympathy or empathy whatsoever, but would no doubt prosecute the person in question and fine them or cut their entitlements. What happens in Laws' case? He's asked to apologise, pay the money back, and is then canonised by a plastic Guardian columnist as a martyr to homosexuality! Everyone else just gets slapped with a 'benefit cheat' stigma, or even imprisoned.
But let us not forget that in our society, the poor and vulnerable 'cheat' and 'defraud' and are stigmatised and prosecuted, while the rich and powerful simply 'make mistakes' and just have to apologise and pay the money back. That's our new fair Britain! What a fitting start.
It's also interesting to note the almost immediate contempt in which the new Coalition Government holds the media isn't it? Literally the day after the very same David Laws was mysteriously absent from his chair on Question Time, with the full backing of his colleagues' boycotting of the programme simply because Alistair Campbell was present on it, plus today's utterly arrogant and contemptuous rounding on the media's - for once - perfectly justifiable focus on Laws' shameless opportunism, just goes to show that this new Lib-Con administration is every bit as controlling and spin-doctoring as New Labour, their 'old politics' anathema!
I've been the first to criticise New Labour throughout the last three years on this site, but credit where credit is due: it took about three years for Blair and his cronies to show their true colours and start betraying their pre-election principles and attempting to muzzle the media: the Coalition Government of 'the new politics' has taken less than three weeks to prove how thoroughly untrustworthy, duplicitous and morally gerrymandering it is.
Almost instantly after cobbling a highly tenuous mandate together and securing power, it's already contradicted both its parties' claims to be bringing more democracy into the political system and more power to the voters by attempting to entrench itself as an immovable administration until its five years are fully up by meddling with the 50% Parliamentary figure for a vote of no confidence; yesterday it ducked democratic accountability by its boycott of Question Time - for the first time in the programme's entire history; and, today, via various speakers from its ranks, demonstrated an utter contempt for the democratic function of the media for daring to pry into the filching of public monies by one of its Ministers, pathetically citing this as an invasion of his 'privacy' and a tacit assault on his sexuality - while the rest of us might rightly say back to them, well, Mr Laws' fingers in our rapidly shallowing public purse is an invasion of our privacy!
And so far, all he has been asked to do is pay the money back and apologise. Will the benefits system now instate the same rule for all those struggling to survive who get caught out compromising their claims out of financial desperation? Somehow I suspect not.
It is so poignant that this first misdemeanour - or 'mistake' as MPs call this sort of thing - of the new Government is made by the very same Lib Dem front man who so effortlessly and unscrupulously sealed the deal with the Tories to win power.
AM 29/5/10
The Lib Dems' Great Betrayal;
Invitation to Join Unemployment; and
Welfare to Work that Doesn't Exist:
Millionaire Etonians Take Their Canes to the Incapacitated
While poor old Vince Cable licks his leftist wounds at being sandwiched between reactionaries and Etonians in the new schizoid right-left, conservative-liberal, regressive-progressive Coalition Government, Nick Clegg risks political suicide if the ranks are broken, possibly not yet fully accepting his own Ramsay MacDonald volte-face moment, following hot on the loud-hailer of a speech to the voting-system protestors, and when he was so close to the now mythic Rainbow Alliance that will go down in history as a great missed opportunity for the Left, and therefore, for all of us. Cameron too risks future alienation from his own party, having admittedly quite bravely realligned the Tories kicking and screaming towards a centre ground that is their anathema. But in spite of the 'new politics' spin and smiles, this most unlikely union of opposites is politically ridiculous - unless, unlike the ever-admirable Charles Kennedy, the rest of the Lib Dems really are unprincipled opportunists when it boils down to getting their hands on power.
Only time will tell. As it will with the Big Society: will it be a down-up egalitarian model (highly unlikely if the Tories are driving it), which is the only way it could work, or will it be the more likely top-down version? Thanks to the Lib Dems having left the ravenous Tories to do their worst with Welfare, the most vulnerable in society, those on Incapacity Benefit (actually a premium, since it's practically taxed out of existence, so is more an impediment than a benefit), especially the invisibly incapacitated such as the mentally ill, are about to be bullied out of their paltry entitlements by Ministers worth six figure sums - hardly 'fairness' one might think! Volunteering as I do as a poetry tutor on an acute ward in a psychiatric hospital, I anticipate, with grave trepidation, an ever-increasing rota of those under temporary section through the next few months, one which will possibly career into a one-in-one-out policy if things get any more stressful for the psychologically vulnerable (excuse the black humour); not to mention the probably escalation in suicides to come from the oncoming storm of rapacious incapacity cuts. And all so the new Government can get 5 million people back into work that doesn't exist! An aspiration of the ever dreamy-eyed non-entity Iain Duncan-Smith (though I have no doubt he means well, in his silver-spooned, reality-detached, utterly unempirical way). We agree with his view that the absurdly complex and penalising Welfare system needs simplification, but already his and others' trigger fingers are instinctively twitching on their deficit-cutting levers, potentially consigning millions of vulnerable people to the Room 101 of poverty. Hardly the way to mend a broken society one would think.
But the most unconscionable and intrinsically anti-liberal and anti-democratic proposal of all is the new 55% hike for a no-confidence vote against this new and shakey Coalition Government, which smacks more than a little of a certain insecure party of Thirties' Germany who sought immediately to entrench itself as an autocracy. How, Mr Clegg, is such a proposal in any remote way pro-democratic choice by the people? It isn't of course. It's quite the other thing altogether and is the most disturbing and duplicitous thing to emerge so far from the only weeks' old new administration. Plus it was never mentioned at all, even in pure hypothesis, by either the Tories or the Lib Dems prior to the electoral outcome. But then, they would have both blown it had they said so then - now of course, they can say it, since they now have the power they both craved so much. And now they just need to argue among themselves behind closed doors to decide what to do with it.
Meanwhile, the Recusant supports in spirit the only true socialist and left-winger among those trying to stand for the Labour leadership, John McDonnell MP (of the LRC). Of course, the media will no doubt will one of the two Millibands into this post, if only because their shared name is more distinctive than the others' standing, even if it will inevitably be Gruaniaded into 'Milibland' in months to come: since neither of the two brothers have the slightest bit of charisma whatsoever. David seems the most superficially leader-like of the two, but his latent Blairism would in our opinion plunge a further right-lurching New Labour into political oblivion: the only point to Labour now is to reallign itself to its left-wing roots, and some think there is a smidgen of a chance of this via the other Milliband, Ed. Unfortunately however, Ed is even less charismatic than his older brother, and although apparently to his Left politically, still gesticulates and struts about at the platform via some grotesque parody of Blairite choreography, as if trying to convince his audiences that he has some shred of vision and personality, only that it's taking an awfully long time to draw it out - hence the corporate-style galvanising hand gestures. Then there's the other Ed, rather pugilistic in approach and not remotely as convincingly left-of-centre as his Bevanite Forties' hair-cut might attempt to suggest. Andy Burnham - though a little distractingly McCartneyesque in appearance and Scousian intonation, is probably the only remotely convincing contender of the four manikins on offer. But the only one worth even considering for a hope of Labour returning to the Left, is John McDonnell; even more so since John Cruddas suddenly and oddly stood down.
Cue this poetic interlude:
Milliband, Milliband, Burnham and Balls
Defend the New Labour brand against all
Those who stand up at the True Labour stall:
Particular Johns: Cruddas, McDonnell –
So into irrelevance the once-New troops go,
Unprincipled wildernesses Foot wouldn't toe.
Whatever happens on the Opposition benches, what is of paramount importance is that Labour keeps the new Coalition Government to account from a left-of-centre standpoint; any attempts to woo back into the fold the disillusioned immigrant-hating and dole-bashing red-top numbers among the working classes - rather than the vast army of disillusioned left-wing voters out there whom one would think by now Labour should have learnt are where its future relevance and empowerment actually lies - will signal the death of the party in our opinion. And with the almost inevitable implosion of the Lib Dems - just as they were on the brink of finally getting a referendum on PR, rather than just AV, via Gordon Brown's last-ditch offer to Clegg - for having sold out on the pretext of 'democratic mandate' through the very First Past the Post gerrymandered sham-democracy system their party has been railing against for decades now as not being remotely democratic since it is entirely disproportional, the very worrying danger here is that BOTH parties of the centre-left, Labour and the Lib Dems, may fade into their own wilful deconstructions, leaving the Tories to mop up further afield. God save us all from that ever happening.
The fact remains the majority of the country voted for centre-left parties, yet now we have a centre-right government. Try and work that one out Mr. Clegg - oh, you already had, but have apparently moderated your view on all this voting business now...!
With the Lib Dems now having sold out so transparently to the Tories for a share of power in the cause of 'the national interest', whatever that actually means in real terms, and Labour still fighting for its soul but likely to simply continue its pointless New Labour brand, it looks increasingly likely now that the only viable left-wing party in Parliament are represented singularly by Caroline Lucas: unapologetically socialist, the Greens are certainly the party to seriously consider voting for next time round, that is, for anyone still on the Left in our ever right-leaning country.
AM 28/5/10
Butch Cameron and the Sundance Clegg: A 'New' Politics Formed from the Rubble of the Sulphurous 'Old',
Largely by a Party Whose DNA is Archaic and Reactionary
How is one to look at this new coalition of opposites? The press conference for Butch Cameron and his tellingly more taciturn Sundance Clegg counterpart was brilliantly choreographed in Laura Ashley garden colours, and admittedly there was a feeling of freshness about it, even if one based on highly dubious backroom deals and ideological volte face - but then, under New Labour's epic betrayal of its heartlands and core support, not to mention of those still 'economically inactive' in society, such unscrupulous shifts are hardly anything that new - except that we didn't expect them from the one leader who claimed to be offering something genuinely different (Clegg), nor that this very musty-smelling political brinkmanship would be packaged as somehow 'New'. And haven't we heard the 'N' word more than enough in the last 13 years? Remember Blair's rose-tinted entrance into power back in 1997, and all the empty talk of 'Newness', the Third Way and so forth? Then look at what we actually got during those 13 years. I won't lapse into rhetoric now, don't worry. This isn't the time. But we are certainly at a truly unprecedented stage in British politics, where the two of the three main political parties most opposed to one another's policies, have suddenly found they have so much in common after all. It's not about New Politics as much as who claims the media-packaged new centre-ground - New Labour are now Old Hat, the two Bs of the boom years are long out of fashion, so time for the yellow and blue alternative of the two Cs (the latter term, I predict, will come to be used much more in the future, not least due to the Cuts ahead).
So now we have the utterly bizarre position where suddenly the last rabble of New Labour are still solipsistically 'partisan' and 'tribal', even though about 80% of their policies are pretty much the same as the Tories. The Lib Dems have managed to capitalise on a trick here, actually, a gap in sanity, since the most logical step after the Hung Parliament is for the two parties most similar to one another to form a Coalition - but due to party self-delusions, mainly on Labour's parts, talks between them and the Tories weren't even on the cards. Ironic really, since in key areas they agreed - not least on continuing to bash the unemployed with scare tactics, while the Lib Dems, or at least, the pre-Coalition Lib Dems, talked more about providing financial incentives to those on the dole to get them into work, a policy which at least didn't talk to them as if they were the scum of society as the two main parties did (though admittedly the Tories were marginally worse than Labour); and yet even more bizarrely it seems that at least the £10,000 tax policy proposed by the Libs is apparently going to come into force next year - while, if we are to believe Simon Hughes on Question Time this evening, Labour absolutely clamped up on this proposal in those shady 'talks'.
If this is the case, it's not entirely unpredictable, since New Labour is ever the party of 'the middle classes', as Brown kept saying during the election campaign, and his own personal Presbyterian attitudes of frowning disdain and intolerance for anyone who is anything other than a completely masochistic automaton-slave to a capitalist Protestant Work (/Profit) Ethic, to a system that still culls people as cattle-like economic units to the grave, without any concern whatsoever for the nuances of individual aspiration and ambition - in spite of lip-service to social mobility and meritocracy over the years, a fundamental 'stick to your station' attitude has sustained itself nevertheless. Brown's latent Calvinism demarcated between paradigms of 'deserving/undeserving poor', but not so much, interestingly, between 'genuinely incapacitated' and 'latent benefit cheats'.
New Labour shot itself in the foot: by creating a new political centre-ground consensus, it was inevitable that eventually the tide would turn, and the party more to the right of that axis would one day capitalise by claiming that ground back from the champagne sophists who had originally heralded it. Once that happens of course, as it just has, the original 'party of the moment' are thrown into irrelevance. But worse even still: an utterly undignified and unprincipled irrelevance, a wilderness not populated by socially compassionate views ahead of their time, but a wilderness for those who sold out, who betrayed their party's core purpose, threw their lot in with the capitalist Murdochracy that was then on their side (which was dubious in itself of course, and when the tabloids deserted Brown some time back, it almost made me think perhaps he was starting to get something right at last), and are now paying the price of such absolute capitulation to a system they were originally committed to radically reforming. Unfortunately too, even the few reforms New Labour did achieve for the better in their earlier years - the minimum wage etc., the fox-hunting ban, devolution etc. - are still relatively paltry scraps for a legacy which otherwise will be known for inflating the coffers of the richest in society, increasing privatisation of public services, deregulating the city and banks, encouraging very un-prudently an excessive credit-culture fuelled on short-term greed,
a Buy-to-Let investment rampage which turned well-heeled youngsters into portfolio landlords and the rest of us into rent-cattle who will never be able to afford our own homes, and ultimately of course helping to plunge us all into economic meltdown.
But the first to suffer from all this - whether under Labour or the Lib-Cons - will the poorest and vulnerable, as always. The most unconscionable and potentially disastrous policy area that the Lib Dems seemed to have sleep-walked into bowing out on, is, in my opinion, the most important of all, especially given our dire economic circumstances: welfare. It was the sheer dread of Cameron's Big Society and its idea of cutting people entirely off benefit, for THREE YEARS for God's sake, if they refuse to take a crap dead-end job in MacDonalds with no prospects whatsoever, that had me in a state of both shock and perplexity when Wednesday suddenly announced the deal with the Conservatives was sealed. Now the prospect of such an absurdly draconian and frankly Fascistic policy still having the chance of coming into force, in spite of Clegg and his party having a say in the new administration, is to my mind the most terrifying possibility of this new government.
Smug and completely out-of-touch as Cameron is, it is not him who is the real concern here, but that bunch of neo-Thatcherite gargoyles assembled behind him - Hague, Davis, Osborne et al. - the Three Stooges of the Apocalypse, who worry those on the Left, and most of all, those still beholden to the alms of a dismantling Welfare State, more than anyone else. Conceivably Cameron could be at heart a well-meaning - if rather vacuous - Liberal-Conservative, and still conceivably, Clegg fundamentally the developing voice of reason and dissent as he played in the debates - but in order to find this out, we all have to take one massive leap into the dark. And in Broken (or Brokered) Britain, a class-ridden, dehumanised quagmire that it presently is, I don't think many of us have the energy to take any more leaps into any more patches of dark, mentally and spiritually shattered as this society now is.
Will we all live to rue the day that the near-mythic Rainbow Alliance was forsaken for pragmatism and political expediency both by the Lib Dems smelling their first whiff of power for generations, and, more surprisingly, New Labour itself, who apparently did most of the snubbing during their talks with Clegg and his middlemen? I predict we probably will. The only hope left is that Cameron - under Clegg's influence? - manages to slowly alienate the far right of the Tory party and shift more in the direction of the Lib Dems' saner and more compassionate stance on social reforms and, well, frankly ALL policies. But with the Tories holding by far the most seats and, more crucially, the main cabinet posts, this doesn't look at all likely. And it'll take a damn sight more than 'Cameron and Wise/Morecombe and Clegg' doing their 'Bring Me Sunshine' routine at their back-garden podiums at No. 10 to convince.
The reality as I see it now is, essentially, the Liberal Democrats have signed their own death warrant: never again will they garner votes from the disaffected Left - so in effect they've destroyed a massive part of what share of the vote they achieved in the election, not that that was that great anyway. They may even have alienated permanently a large section of their own membership, and only time and a seismic positive transformation of society and politics over the next Parliamentary term, as is being vaguely promised, will tell. True, Clegg was caught between a rock and a hard place. But unfortunately, he's chosen the hard place - at least one can cling to a rock! The greater gamble in imminent terms would have been to have thrown in with Labour and the smaller left-of-centre parties, but that would been the most ideologically sustainable in the longer term, in spite of the biggest party's stubborn and belligerent dogmas. The easier option constitutionally and in the short term was what Clegg has pushed through - but ideologically, it seems intrinsically unsustainable beyond a honeymoon period.
But in the end, it was New Labour that created this complete political mess: not only by betraying their core purpose, their roots, their very soul, over the past 13 years, but also by trampling individual liberties, and I have the feeling that it was that attitude of contempt for the ordinary public and their rights and freedoms that made Clegg et al finally come down in favour of the more libertarian Tories. Of course, this is largely superficial in terms of true dialectics anyhow, because as anyone who was on the wrong side of the fence during the Thatcher years will vouch for how the Conservatives' 'libertarian' ideas translated into an unabashed trampling of certain sections of society: the miners, the unions, the poor, the unemployed, the mentally vulnerable etc. etc. Thatcherism was a Malthusian pogrom of the 'economically inactive' and the 'industrially militant', and resulted in the absolute antithesis of what Major hoped would become a 'classless society'.
But Blair and New Labour largely accelerated this anti-society; and Brown, under much pressure, bottled it on several occasions when he could have easily shifted Left again, the 50% tax rate being possibly the only lasting achievement of his premiership, though one constantly apologised for by his men-in-suits as if it was a necessary evil rather than an absolute social necessity, which True Labour would have seen it as. The temporary bank and rail company nationalisations, too, a volte face of expediency back to Keynesian economic principles, but again, resisted by Labour until the last desperate minute, and then apologised for profusely ever since. Not, by any stretch, socialism in action, nor even anything authentically left-wing: did Clement Attlee say at the time of his government's founding of the Welfare State and NHS that it 'wasn't what they wanted to do, but they just had to due to the unprecedented circumstances'? No: there's not much point putting through a radical social reform while undermining it publicly as a necessary evil. This has been the ultimate failure of Brown's reintreptation of New Labour's purpose: ideological insecurity. It's so ironic than one of the few decent things New Labour did do, they then apologised for; whereas the litany of policies they got absolutely wrong, they have yet to come anywhere near to saying sorry for.
Labour's only hope now is to once again realign itself to its original core principles of democratic socialism, as still campaigned for by its internal pressure group, the Labour Representation Committee. Anything else will inevitably throw the party into oblivion, since what point would there be in an Opposition party who are only marginally more left-wing than the larger half of the Coalition government, and actually to the right of the smaller? Absolutely none whatsoever. It would just be yet again a pointless and ideologically fag-paper-thin tussle between two spoilt siblings as to who is the most convincingly 'centrist', 'progressive' and working in 'the national interest' (as if society is some sort of middle-class gestalt).
It's all ridiculous and deeply depressing, and from the point of view of one on the Left who was completely disillusioned by the Labour government, and who thus voted Lib Dem hoping they might either ride on the wave of public response during the debates and have for the first time in decades a real chance at forming the larger part in a government, or of joining with Labour in order to, ironically given their supposed ideologically histories, infuse more radical and left-of-centre energies back into the floundering Third Way approach, I do feel betrayed by Clegg et al, since it was never predictable at all that what has now happened would happen: the most left-of-centre of the three main parties propping up the most right-of-centre. It's beyond belief really, and potentially disastrous for both the Lib Dems and Labour, once again handing the cards back to the most despicable mainstream party in our history, whose unrestrained policies of the Eighties and early Nineties, after all, were what put this country on the road to deeper inequalities and the eventual economic crash we are scraping about in the aftermath of today.
But the British have very selective memories of course, particularly elephantine when concerning Labour administrations; but in many sections of society, to this day, the indelible scars from the mauling of Thatcherism are still there, and are starting to swell up again like an instant allergy now that Tory-blue ties and insincere stares are back around the Cabinet table. Let's just hope with the new Liberal infusion into the Tory ranks, things can only get wetter.
In the meantime, Labour must regroup and get back to their grassroots, otherwise they will be finally consigned to political oblivion. A realignment to the Left is absolutely essential now; certainly a Rainbow Opposition, and I urge the pointless tribalists of New Lab to forego their laughably un-ideological egos, and welcome the likes of Caroline Lucas and the Greens, as well as Salmond and the SNP, into their depleted ranks. There can still one day be a truly left-wing Rainbow Alliance in power, but first the prospective parties must form it.
AM 14/5/10
Is The Chance for True Change To Be Hung Out To Dry For A Political Suicide Pact? Vote Cleg, Get Cameron, Was Not What A Dissafected Left Drift Had In Mind
With the present Hung Parliament, it seems, by a very perverse twist of fate, it now appears that by voting on principle rather than tactically, and casting a vote for the Liberal Democrats, believing that they were the nearest party we had now to the traditional left in Parliament, I - and no doubt thousands others throughout the country who did the same - find my leap of faith might end up indirectly going towards propping up a Tory minority government. This irony is almost physically painful for me, since as readers will be well aware, I am a socialist, and an anti-capitalist; I only voted for the Lib Dems because I believed they might have a viable chance, and have appeared to date to show a much more compassionate and empathetic attitude towards the issues we face in society today; at least far more so than the two other main parties whose constant competition to see which of them can be the most bloody merciless towards anyone in society who is not at this moment 'economically productive' - i.e. the unemployed, long term sick and disabled, and illegal immigrants - makes me feel ashamed to be British. In terms of political and social principles, my heart was more with the Greens, but I knew sadly they had no chance in Hove (where I live); and there was no other alternative, not one single Socialist or Socialist Labour candidate in sight! So I took the leap of faith into uncharted waters - I've only ever voted previously for Labour, and since it became clear they were no longer Labour, for small socialist parties. To my mind, it would be both ideologically absurd, not to say potentially suicidal for their party's credibility, if the Liberal Democrats were to end up joining in a coalition with the Tories. This would be a union of opposites, the Lib Dems wanting thorough electoral reform, greater progressive taxes, a downgrading from Trident, further integration into Europe, and a more human policy on tackling immigration. On the flip side of this potential pact, the Tories want to further enrich the wealthiest in society through tax breaks, keep Trident, further isolate the UK from Europe, conduct, in effect, a Malthusian pogrom on immigration, and, most crucially of all, are absolutely and utterly opposed to reforming our electoral system. Now call me a cherry-picker here, but aren't these in fact diametrically opposed policies and values? All these two parties have in common is that they're both fed up with Gordon Brown and resent his non-elected premiership, and that they both distrust Big Government. And that's about it. Such a pact would also, as I say, be suicidal for the Lib Dems: once the Tories secured a bigger majority in a re-election, they'd boot the Lib Dems out from their ranks without hesitation; entering into such an absurdly ill-matched coalition would probably also alienate the left-half of the Lib Dems; and certainly any left-of-centre voters for the future. Compared to this prospect, it would be far less of a gamble to join now with Labour; in fact, potentially far more empowering, since only Gordon Brown is offering a full referendum on the electoral system. One can only assume from Clegg's snubbing of Brown for Cameron, that he is being slavishly liberal in his instinct for the larger mandates and shares of the vote, putting, ironically, the fundamental proportional principle, in a system of First Past the Post, which thus isn't proportional, in favour of biting his lip and propping up Labour, which would at least give his party far more likelihood of eventually achieving that very Proportional Representation they have argued for for so long. Go with the Tories, and it's goodbye PR, goodbye even vaguely compassionate politics, and conceivably, goodbye further integration with Europe. My advice to the Lib Dems now would be to sleep on it, and then get up more clear-headed and rested, and realise how absurd this almost masochistic bartering with the Tories actually is in the cold light of political reality. I didn't vote Lib Dem just to get Cameron's Big Society/Little State.
It's with some regret now, in light of having seen a surprisingly header on the Morning Star (my usual paper), literally only half an hour after I'd made my gamble on the ballot, urging voters to support Labour - and this coming from a newspaper which has been more rabidly anti-New Labour than practically any other, both before and since the mass abandonment of the party under Brown, as run for some time now, and most deplorably and anti-democratically via the baseless scare campaign throughout the electoral campaign - including attacks on Clegg himself - by our incumbent media Murdochracy. The Morning Star's sentiment was nothing so gauche as genuine belief any more in Labour, certainly not New Labour, but an appeal to floating left-wingers in constituencies where about thirty Labour Representation Committee (the socialist group within the party, of which I am a member) member candidates were standing, to vote for the few good men and women left in the governing administration. But for the majority of us who were not in any of those constituencies, there was only the choice of a broad tribal tactical vote, or changing our arms with the most left-of-centre - in terms of their front bench policies - party left in Parliament, the Lib Dems. Because to my mind - and I have read theirs and Labour's manifestoes quite thoroughly - the Lib Dems, in the main, are the only one of the three main parties who have been arguing for fairness in a form that is actually backed up in the details of their policies: progressive tax hikes on the rich, a softly softly approach to both unemployment - offering financial incentives for people to go back to work rather than just bullying them into it, or forcing them to do unpaid community labour - and to immigration; as well as their admirably humanitarian stance on reducing expensive nuclear defence (not light years away from some of the old CND sentiments), their plans to further tax and cap City bonuses and force Banks into lending again (okay, the Tories give some lip-service to this, but not as convincingly for me), and of course their pivotal drive towards the only truly democratic means of voting, PR.
All those who, like me, are of the Left, and who have put their faith in Clegg and the Lib Dems to attempt a final breach of this absurd two party state system, and bring in a new age of ideological plurality into Parliament again, will regard ANY pact or coalition with the still essentially Thatcherite Tories as a heinous betrayal of our support. So, Mr Clegg indeed has much to think on here. He must also, while considering the deeply disturbing prospect of possibly enabling a dubiously vague and selective Big Society to be ushered in to a society still to this day indelibly scarred by the vicious caste-style system of the Thatcher years, remember also that if he was to turn to the centre-left side instead, this would not simply be his party and Labour, but also most likely include MPs from more left-wing and equally 'Browned-off' parties such as the SNP and the excellent Caroline Lucas of the Greens, George Galloway of Respect (who distinctly stated before the election that his party would support Labour in the event of a Hung Parliament) - a left-of-centre progressive rainbow-collective. Surely such factors should be far more important than what seems to be a more personal dislike of the present Prime Minister on Clegg's part? Surely Clegg should be able to see, once the dust has settled, that whatever animus he has against Gordon Brown, ideologically their parties are far closer together, the Lib Dems in many ways more to the left now than Labour, and so never more distant from the Tories than now.
So what on earth is Clegg playing at? We can only hope it's a bluff, he knowing that any compromise on the essential policy issues is impossible with the Tories, so that he can eventually claim he was forced for the good of national interest to turn instead to Labour, but with reservations, and undoubtedly conditions. That way he would both fend off any perception that he's become simply a prop to a tired government, while also ensuring that a centre-left front protects Britain from the divisive and still out-dated views and vested interests of the right-wing Tories. Otherwise, he will be seen by many as simply opting for the gloss, the mere veneer, of superficial 'change', by allying himself with Cameron, as if for the sake of it, like a publicity stunt. But how can Cameron be seriously perceived as in any way representing 'fairness' and 'change' when everything he and his party [still] stand for is anti-change and intransigently conservative: the preservation of First Past the Post (the core obstacle against true electoral change), the retention of the pound at all costs, cuts in inheritance tax, and a return to a pre-1945 fictive Little England.
The irony too of the Tories, having not won an overall majority, suddenly inventing their own electoral clauses such as 'the divine right to rule' and 'moral authority to govern', stamping their feet in a tantrum at the frustrating loopholes of an electoral system THEY ALONE among all three main parties are so doggedly defending to the death, can hardly be lost on anyone; even David Cameron himself.
But the irony of the Lib Dems, a party who are devout advocates of PR, choosing a pact with the one main party totally opposed to any advance at all in that direction, will be one that won't be lost on any one, and which will in my opinion consign Clegg and his number to the perpetual wilderness that has managed to sustain itself through this, the first election in generations where they really seemed to have a chance to break the trend. Surely in light of Clegg's startlingly poor performance in the election proper – and I must vent some spleen here on my sense of disgust at the mass bottling out of most of the electorate by ultimately still sticking to the two-party voting pattern, in spite of all the talk of a collective will for genuine political change over the past weeks – in contrast to his excellent performance in the debates, is more ringing endorsement than ever before for the absolute necessity of immediate reform of the voting system, if this country is ever to have a true opportunity to have its collective voice heard and reflected in Parliamentary seats, and if the Lib Dems are to grow to be anything more than an impotent knitting-circle of political spectators; kingmakers for a day, backbenchers for tomorrow. And does Clegg really want to give yet another election victory to Rupert Murdoch? To the vested interests of the top 5% over the interests of the ordinary people? Is that change? Is that fairness?
If Clegg thinks this is, he and his party, as well as the rest of us, will live to rue the day.
AM, 8/5/10
Election 2010: A Chance to Smash Our Murdochracy? Or, Big Society/Miniscule Conscience: The Gathering Threat of Cameron's New Thatcherism
As we come into what may prove a testing and unpredictable period in our tottering democracy, the first General Election since 1992 in which the result is not a foregone conclusion, the Recusant hopes that the result will be a Hung Parliament: only this way can our 'democracy' be seriously shaken up and all its corrupt detritus filtered out. And with the sudden surge in support for Clegg and the Lib Dems, the only of the three main parties who offer anything remotely approaching ‘change’ and ‘fairness’ at this juncture, let’s hope we get one, via a direly needed Hung Parliament. Indeed, if ever there was a resounding vindication for the first possibility of a break in the dreadful two party tribalist stalemate we've suffered under for the last thirty years - and which has in any case, thanks to Thatcher and Blair, converged broadly on a paper-thin centre-right consensus - it is the unconscionably corrupt behaviour of both our media Murdochracy and David Cameron's ludicrous posturing as leader of the party of change and fairness, when in reality all he and his cronies represent is the absolute opposite: a return to the Victorian self-help individualism of Thatcherism via a 'Big Society' of bigots and xenophobes, a further battering of those on benefits even beyond New Labour's extremes, Euro-scepticism, Little Englandism, an immoral plan for tax relief for the wealthiest in society, and most hypocritically of all, an utter unwillingnness to change the electoral system from the grossly disproportional and undemocratic First Past the Post system. Does any of that represent change or fairness?
For those of us on the Left, this is a particularly confused time, one in which the only parties existent who appear to stand for a left-wing agenda – Greens, Socialist, Socialist Alliance, Socialist Labour, Respect – are as ever fragmented into small camps unlikely therefore to secure many, if any MPs. It’s the perennial story of fractious pedantry as to what type of Marxism or Trotskyism or just good old-fashioned non-demagogic socialism one signs up to that continually blights any direly needed united Left front to replace the position Labour once held way back before Blair Thatcherised it (even, to many, before both the late John Smith – whose sudden death arguably denied the party what would have been a much more cautious reformation than that of his Murdoch-baiting, plastic successor – and the centre-leaning Neil Kinnock, to the late Michael Foot, last truly socialist Labour leader). Calls for a Fifth International are hopeful, and the Recusant supports this current intellectual drive towards a global collective to oppose the failing amorality of Capitalism – albeit with an element of healthy caution, not wishing to appear too sloganeering or tub-thumping. But now and then tubs do have to be thumped
a bit.
The Socialist Party, among other similar groups, who follow in the semantic tradition of most political parties in massing under a banner of euphemism – they are essentially Trotskyites, and there’s nothing wrong in that, except in its titular demagogy, and the seeming need not to cite it – have been campaigning for some time now, admirably in many ways, to form a new Workers’ Party, a collective of the British Left; specifically, a new party for the ‘working-class’. The only problem with this is the term ‘working-class’ is nowadays arguably a bit vague: who exactly does it constitute? Is this definition based on income, material quality of life, social background, educational background etc.? It’s not really clear. Many of the members, dedicated campaigners, protestors and proselytisers, are from what would be regarded as essentially middle-class backgrounds, many in professions or at the higher end of academia – so do they themselves belong to a ‘working-class’?
The point here, in our view, is that socialism should be about levelling all classes, getting rid of class distinctions altogether, which is no doubt what the SP aim for; but by bandying such terms as ‘working-class’, they arguably alienate some of their own number, as well as some other floating left-wingers, not affiliated to any particular party, but who may feel a little weary of simplistic Marxist rhetoric. What any new Left movement should be about is simply representing the common interest, across all classes, thereby transcending the artificial barriers of ‘class’, something which, though still deeply entrenched in our culture, is however, post-Thatcherism, a continually obscure and shape-changing phenomenon. One may be educationally working-class, but materially middle-class, and vice versa – so which class does the SP call them?
One would assume, essentially, on a Marxian level, anyone who has to sell their labour to survive, to earn a living, is basically working-class. But then that means the ‘working-class’ is such a broad and, in itself, stratified, amorphous mass of different types of people, backgrounds, interests, ambitions, incomes and aspirations, it’s impossible to pin down in any coherent sense. For instance: is a street-cleaner of the same class as a barrister? Hardly. And where do the scavenging City Bankers fit in? Ultimately, yes, we are all slaves to our labours, and bound in the yolks of employment , the profits of which are creamed off by the capitalists. But when one begins making distinctions, it becomes a veritable Russian Doll, more and more nuances popping up each time one doll is lifted.
In the struggle for universal equality, it seems important to both recognise from the outset that we live presently in a state of endemic – and ever-fluctuating – inequality. Where parties like the SP are right to some extent, is in emphasizing the fact that class distinctions still exist; but it is also important that they then extend that awareness to take account of the steep disparities and differences even within the remit of one class, the vague model they seek to cram a myriad of sub-classes into as the vaguely labelled ‘working-class’. To pretend, through some sort of unconscious wish-fulfilment, that we all of us, from the road sweeper up to the barrister, since we sell our labour to live, are essentially in the same boat, is obviously ludicrous. Not that the SP are saying this, but they do need to enter into a more analytical dialogue, more empirically informed and less academically generalising. Only on a macrocosmic Marxist scale are both the road sweeper and the barrister part of a ‘working-class’; but only a closer inspection, they still live in completely different universes to each other in terms of economic power, material assets, education and aspiration. Any broad brushstroke of universalism is liable to lead to a sense of vagueness of aim; and ironically, in spite of Marxism’s more radical tendency towards revolutionary methods – though one might argue this was more a belief in the slow implosion of capitalism over time, which one could argue we are now presently witnessing – the blanket view of universalism, a universal proletariat for example, in spite of its part in the confrontational Us and Them paradigm, can in other ways perhaps blur the more essential and nuanced social class differences of society on a more down-to-earth, relevant level. We can cite Thatcherism’s embourgeoisment of portions of the working-class into the new consumer classes, as one example of how the older Marxist class paradigm was muddied if you like into a more obfuscating heterogeneity; but historically speaking, the first true fundamental move in this direction was as a result of the Parliamentarian victory of the English Civil War, which in turn led to the forming of a new mercantile capitalist class (far from the radically left Diggers and Levellers’ more egalitarian aspirations, several centuries too early), which led in turn to the industrial revolution, and a steady erosion of the feudal system of barons and peasants into what eventually became a society of deceptive nuances within the traditional ‘proletariat’. Marxism can also, if applied too basically, ignore the very real issue of the non-capitalist bourgeoisie/middle-class. Since huge sections of the middle-class are, like their working-class counterparts, also reliant on employment, albeit often more in the sphere of professions. But if the Far Left argue that the shackle of employment – i.e. having to labour to survive rather than subsist on an excess of private inherited wealth and property – is the sole qualification for whether one is part of the universal working-class, then presumably many members of the so-called bourgeoisie are also a part of that same class, rather than a part of the capitalist class: since huge numbers of middle-class people, certainly today, are not de facto capitalists, in that they are not necessarily accumulating wealth on the backs of others. Their tastes and interests might be similar or the same to the capitalistically active of their strata, but this alone does not make them themselves capitalists. Someone might be educationally middle-class, but economically non-capitalist, earning their living like the true salt-of-the-earth working-class person – hence the age-worn phrase ‘genteel poverty’. Educationally speaking of course, Marx was middle-class himself, and Engels was positively bourgeois, an active capitalist and industrialist, though of course a highly enlightened one in terms of his outlook. And many of the active members of parties such as the Socialist Party are by dint of their professional occupations middle-class themselves.
Universalism, then, really has two different meanings: the fundamental and inalienable equal worth of all humankind, as represented in suffrage for instance, and the socialist ideal of a material, social and educational transubstantiation of this – and this essential gap between what is naturally implicit and its as-yet unattained material and economic equivalent reality, must always be emphasized both in ideology and actual political policy by any socialist parties fortunate enough to gain governmental power. Frankly, any accusations of class war in nakedly socialist administrations – and arguably Britain has never even known a full-blooded one, though Attlee’s was by far the closest – must be taken as par for the course since implicitly socialism is class-confrontational; of course it is, as it is essentially about levelling society materially, economically, educationally – and how else can this levelling up be achieved but by an at least temporary legislative offensive on the wealthiest classes, through directly redistributive taxation, asset and property taxes, even caps on individual and familial capital so that the social divide slowly contracts over time. More controversially, many would also suggest that the Welfare State should be entirely means-tested, to ensure that benefits and health care go to those most in need for lack of means, and thereby free up more money to spread around the poorest in society, rather than frankly squandering huge sums on people who simply don’t need any freebies because of their wealth of means. This seems to make complete sense, but operating as they have perennially in capitalist-oriented societies, successive British Labour governments have felt compelled to administer any potentially redistributive services, such as the Welfare State, universally, thus essentially maintaining the class system, but simply lifting it all up together a rung or two in the process; so less extreme abject poverty, but more extreme and gratuitous wealth – as has escalated under New Labour.
This is all hoping to encourage healthy dialectic, not to simply criticise fellow travellers’ manifestos by picking up on contradictions and obscurities. The Recusant certainly doesn’t know the answers, and is anyway primarily a literary forum, albeit with a potent dose of politics. The constant bind of the Left has always been whether to battle for social equality from the ‘class war’ platform – as notable exponents such as the great Nye Bevan once did, and George Galloway now does – basically starting out from the idea that society is deeply split between those who have and those who have not, and thus the former must be forced to redistribute some of their wealth to the latter; or, to take the more soft-Left approach of rather bashfully asserting a drive towards social equality by beginning from the rather absurd and infantile assumption that we are already all social equals, and therefore, any Welfare State or NHS must provide universal benefits and health care for every single citizen, irrespective of financial and material capital. I will never understand why Labour has forever shunned from such a fundamentally necessary and fair method as means-testing for benefits; especially since the benefits system already in effect does this, though with almost grotesque unfairness and far from a left-wing social engineering stance, penalising unemployed couples as if they are one economic unit and thus cheating them of full entitlements, and also the absurd clause that stipulates that Incapacity is not a passport benefit, but actually ‘taxable additional income’, which also impacts on one’s Housing Benefit entitlement. So, bizarrely and unconscionably for a Labour administration, we actually have grossly unfair, impoverishing means-testing on some of the poorest in society by the backdoor, while, equally perversely, scores of more comfortably off middle-class people receive benefits, and free healthcare that debatably they don’t really need. Far from a Robin Hood society, it’s more like a Sherriff of Nottingham fiefdom.
This wilfully naive and self-defeating opposition to means-testing, which sadly has always been pursued by Labour governments, even during their most radical periods in power, has served ultimately to simply provide a hand-me-down culture whereby the poorer are begrudgingly given benefits when unemployed and tortuously loop-holed rations of ‘free’ health care, but apart from these alms have pretty much remained where they are in every other sense, while the wealthier have simply profited further by the added side-dish of optional freebies . The end result, rather different to the old Labour dream of an equal society, has inevitably in the long-term been a half-hearted cushioning of the poorer in society, and an accidental hyper-inflating of the wealthier. No doubt the ideal of universalism as opposed to a more Robin Hood approach – which could have been free health care and state benefits for all apart from the wealthiest, and would have presumably in turn seriously started levelling up society – was an expediency at a time when Labour did not want to be perceived as attacking the rich, even if, in some more minor caveats, they were certainly pressuring them into greater contributions; but as well as this, post-War British society was far more community-oriented than it had ever been before, due to the universal austerities shared by practically everyone during the period of conflict. So perhaps in the late Forties, universalism seemed a smoother step on from the unprecedented sense of national community at the time.
But things began to go pear-shaped very soon after Bevan famously ‘stuffed the GPs mouths with gold’ in order to get them to support the new NHS: an overly idealistic, almost daydreaming notion of an already somehow implicit social equality in British society brought with it a naive universalism of state assistance and healthcare, free to all at the point of delivery, which inevitably incurred massive costs at an economically weak period, and so in turn led to the introduction of prescription charges. These charges of course, inescapably, had to be applied universally as well, and thus meant that the poorest suddenly found themselves struggling once again to get the treatment they needed, while to the wealthiest, it was merely a slight irritation but one which they could easily afford. The result – apart from Bevan’s prompt resignation due to these new socially discriminating impositions – was an only slightly damped-down universal inequality. Logically of course, in order to level up, to equalise, a government has to take on the rich, and there’s just no dodging that; and it’s not mindless class war for the sake of it, nor some ‘envious’ penalisation of so-called ‘success’: what we always have to realise, especially in a society based on the acquisition of profit through someone else’s labour, is that the vast majority of the wealthiest have not literally laboured for their capital, but have by and large idled and speculated on the labour of others to amass their own fortunes, or simply inherited their wealth and then set about building on it to accumulate more. They have speculated and accumulated, swindled and extorted, worked by proxy to cleverly and indirectly filter out the wealth produced by others’ work to enrich themselves. And then, as if that isn’t bad enough, they have employed ‘creative accountants’ to assist them in avoiding as much tax as possible. These are the types of people we are still expected to somehow look up to; to aspire to; and whose self-serving deviousness we are still, even now after the banking collapse, expected to seriously believe is a form of vital ‘talent’ that our society needs in order to ‘create more wealth’. It doesn’t take a mothballed Marxist today to see that unregulated capitalism is purely and simply about cajoling the wealth created by others’ through the timeless con trick of ‘employment’.
Universalism is the easy way, but not the reformative or corrective route. New Labour, although a wholly different entity on practically every level of the debate from true Labour, are still, and perhaps less surprisingly, working on this old short-termist ‘universalism’ of approach through the proposals for a new National Care Service. Again, the massive disparities of wealth in society are simply ignored for the old daydream that we’re all in it together. The universalism is the only one single remote link to the far more ideologically driven mission of Nye Bevan, by whom the apparatchiks of New Labour constantly seek comparison: but there are massive differences between both enterprises, the chief ones being that the NCS is not at all ideologically driven, not remotely socialist in approach, and is fuelled on Brownian expediency and duplicitous spin which claims its Malthusian energies are in some perverse sense altruistic.
But from a Government who tax people for being sick (Incapacity Benefit), who talk casually of workfare schemes whereby people are expected to labour for the pittance they get on the dole (thus also utterly contradicting the point of a minimum wage), who try to socially engineer against unemployed couples being able to live together by penalising them through benefits recalculated as if they have suddenly become one entity, who keep increasing prescription charges, who have singularly failed to clampdown on the immoral profiteering of the dental profession, and who seem quite happy to have vital medications ransomed by private pharmaceutical companies, any sudden proposal for an extension to the NHS should be treated with extreme caution. Especially since to fund it they are proposing to filch a portion of the elderly’s disabled benefits (Attendance Allowance), so, as ever, robbing Peter to pay Paul in the interminable chain of outsourcing and subcontracting. In typical New Labour spin, we are told constantly that we have CHOICES – but more often than not, these choices simply involve being needlessly confused and obfuscated in trying to find the needle in the healthcare haystack, which actually simply adds to the stress and frustration of those who are ill or disabled, and is often simply the difference between one waiting list or another, between one poorly run hospital or another, between one surgery of tortuously inaccessible Wizard of Oz GPs or the other. More choices, crapper services.
Universalism is the aim, but to get to it, a government has to make some truly ‘tough decisions’ and treat a two tier society with a taste of its own medicine; to be cruel to be kind. It’s debatable whether, by citing a ‘working-class’ as those it seeks to represent, the SP is assuming its own universalist mandate within one class of society, or if it is oppositely emphasizing there is no universal class, but still a plurality of them, the working-class being just one, and the lowest and thus most needy. That makes sense ostensibly – but it seems the issue here is more in the use of language, that it is too simplistically partisan for what a more multifariously stratified post-Thatcherite society. There is also the issue of working-class Toryism, that strain of seemingly self-defeating traditionalism which once led Disraeli to coin the curious term ‘angels in marble’. Like it or not, and even more profoundly since Thatcherism, large sections of the working-class are Tory, or at best, New Labour in some of the worst senses. In short, there are many who are anything but left-wing; some who even demonise the Left in their cultural mind-sets as perfidious and unpatriotic ‘Reds’. The red-top-reading, worked-their-way-up, good old Maggie for letting us own our first homes, type of working people, who can be some of the most belligerent and frankly frightening right-wingers of all. Do the SP seek to persuade and recruit these ‘angels in marble’ to their classes’ true cause and ultimate liberation when they have the carrots of houses, cars and foreign holidays? Perhaps through the austerities ahead of us, there is some hope yet that, once deprived of their toys, the Bulldog Breed of working-class Tories might begin to see through the obfuscating blue mists of Thatcherism and Blairism.
If in this very general dialectic, the SP et al are simply proposing an opposition to New Labour’s frankly ghastly espousal of the ‘aspirational middle classes’, then in principle we are of course fully behind a movement which retaliates with a cause more associated with Labour’s origins. But it is the euphemistic language of such leftist parties that does tend to confuse the would-be apostle: if ‘socialist’, in their terms, is basically shorthand for ‘Marxist-Trotskyite’, then where does it end? Russian dolls crop up again. Socialism, in itself, to many, means simply a societal drive towards social equality through redistribution (via tax mostly), public services publically owned – not the duplicitous shambles of privatised brands we have to wade through today – as well as all essential national resources. Socialism means sharing all resources fairly; working, in the truest sense, not scabbing off the labour of others for private gain as the true benefit cheats of society, the City bankers and capitalists, are doing. But to take the semantic line of representing a ‘working-class’, is arguably at risk of reinforcing the very class distinctions a party wishes to dismantle altogether. Or is this its own form of pedantry?
On the other end of the leftist equation, we have the equally frustrating case of the Labour Representation Committee. This writer is a member of this group – scoffed at as a deluded irrelevance by members of the fractious socialist groups – simply because all the arguments and principles laid out in their recent manifesto, The People’s Agenda, seem absolutely right and fair and a clear setting out of undiluted democratic socialist ideas for the modern age. The Recusant fully supports and agrees with the details of this excellent manifesto, and provides a link to the pdf download of it here. The LRC are currently campaigning for their members to be re-elected, all essentially left-wing MPs, True Labour old guard, and the Recusant supports this sentiment. But thanks to our gerrymandered system and FPP, for all those sympathetic to the LRC who do not live in the constituencies of these left-wing Labour MPs, there is no choice but to vote for an alternative left-of-centre party. And in all these instances the Recusant is inclined to suggest voting for the Lib Dems, not out of some zeitgeist notion sparked by Nick Clegg’s sudden historic rise in the polls following the Leaders’ Debate, but mainly because a vote now for them seems as if it will truly count for the first time in decades, partly as a means to further ensuring what this democracy direly needs, a Hung Parliament (currently being pathetically scare-mongered by the two major parties, though mainly of course by the Tories), and also because many of the Lib Dems’ current policies are effectively representative of the nearest any main party has come to a genuinely fairer, more compassionate agenda. In mainstream political terms, the Lib Dems seem to be the only major party now which has at least one foot on the left side of the Parliamentary centre ground – and let us not dismiss the seminally progressive historic Liberal administrations of Asquith (with Lloyd George as redistributive chancellor), and of course the blueprint for the Welfare State, the Beveridge report). As well as this, and in spite of a Cameronian makeover quality to Clegg, he has come across as the only leader of the three main parties to be genuinely fired up by a convincing mandate for proper change in British politics, and is of course flanked by the ever-reassuring presence of Vince Cable, who appears to act as his left-of-centre redistributive arm.
Caroline Lucas of the Greens seems like one of the most capable and sincere politicians around, and her proud rebuttal of the needling teases of David Starkey on Question Time, that many of her members have socialist principles, only cast her in an even more admirable light (would the plastic automatons of New Labour have the cojones to salute that noblest of political doctrines, rather than their pathetic ‘progressive’ vagary), effortlessly wrong-footing the irascible, Tudor-fixated historian – hardly a surprise then that Lucas has yet to get a seat in Parliament, since being so intelligent and capable, she’d stick out like a sore thumb among the current crop of plastic career-politicians.
The Greens are a possibility. So too, in the mainstream, the Liberal Democrats, who are the only larger party in Parliament to espouse even remotely left-of-centre ideas, especially regarding tax. The frustration with the Lib Dems is, however, that they are still essentially a little soft on capitalism, and have their toes in the Parliamentary centrist consensus, albeit more critically than the almost indivisible Tories and New Labour. Recent speeches by Nick Clegg and Vince Cable have added much to their left-of-centre credibility of late; Cable has been famously vital in his narrative on the banking crisis and beyond, and, in spite of one fatuous lapse on the recent Chancellors’ debate, when he alluded to the bankers as ‘pinstriped Arthur Scargills’ holding the country to ransom – not a very obvious nor frankly fair comparison – he has all the likeableness and understated charisma that his leader singularly lacks. Perhaps at this time, for both our economy’s and democracy’s sakes, a National Government would be best, with Cable as the Chancellor. Something along these lines may yet happen, but frankly, the Lib Dems will be strait-jacketed in their more genuine sense of ‘progressiveness’ by the Parliamentary bind of having to ally themselves with one of the two ideologically moribund bigger parties, neither of whom, in the Recusant’s opinion, deserve to be in power.
So, again, the problem swells, grows more obscure and insoluble. Which party does a socialist support today? This writer is as passionate about the True Labour principles of the LRC as it is frustrated, even slightly antagonised by its members’ seeming refusal to believe that there is any political future for the British Left outside of the Labour Party. But it is almost now, and sadly, beyond all reasonable belief that somehow New Labour can be wiped off the face of the political map and the party return to its true socialist roots. There are simply too many cancers in the Labour Movement now; it is riddled with so many truly awful and self-serving pinstriped opportunists – most of whom have long been exposed as thoroughly corruptible to an almost pantomimic extent: Mandleson, Hoon, Blears, Balls,and of course Blair himself – that it seems impossible now that Labour will ever be Labour again. It would be an absolute dream for this writer if there were a genuine push towards True Labour, with someone like Michael Meacher as leader. But it simply doesn’t seem to be on the cards.
The LRC want all its members to vote for genuine socialist Labour candidates – but with FPP, how can this be done? It seems like a losing battle.
In the meantime, this writer is forced to be tactical: while he is a member of the LRC, he is going to be forced to vote for either the Greens or Lib Dems. There can be no tribalism without a tribe, and sadly, as yet, the LRC are simply a small pressure group within a party that won’t listen to them. This is why it seems most logical for the LRC to form a True Labour party, outside of New Labour, and to swell their numbers by finding common values among the splinter parties of the Left – many of whom are descended from the Militant Tendency who were basically exiled back in the early Eighties – and the Greens, and the supreme orator George Galloway of Respect. Together, they could have a good run at getting a substantial body in Parliament. This could further mean that at the next election, if the Lib Dems were able to gain more ground, there could be the chance of a true alternative government if they were to join with a True Labour party, and finally kick the two Thatcherite alter-egos of Tory and New Labour into the long grass.
Historically speaking, what we have today is many ways a parallel to the two main Parliamentary rivals in Parliament leading up to the English Civil War: the Tories, who represent the vested interests of the landed classes, the Cavaliers, and New Labour, who are uncannily Cromwellian in many respects (both Brown and Blair before him demonstrating risibly sanctimonious religious piousness regarding their personal Christian convictions somehow justifying social policies), very much the Roundhead/Puritan party, ostensibly ‘progressive’, but underneath, every bit as reactionary as the older more traditional party they oppose, and essentially simply wishing for a marginal shift in power in society, as Brown now openly says, giving more to the middle-classes from the upper-classes. But both parties are intrinsically capitalist, anti-socialist, and committed to a stratified and unequal society.
Wishful thinking? Delusional? Quite possibly. But this country simply has to get away at last from the terrible democratic disease of the tribal two party system, if it is ever to truly be transformed along even vaguely socialist lines. The Left also has an obligation now, more than ever before, to join forces in the formation of one new movement: the truly disturbing rise of the BNP and other far right friends. Small Fascist parties are on the ascendant, even if only nominally at this point; but worsening economic conditions could still lead to further anti-immigrant aggression among certain sections of the populace, and most especially, if there appears to be no viable left-wing alternative to guide them out from the dark, obfuscating and dehumanising labyrinth of capitalism’s moral apostasy.
It seems however, to come full circle, that the very brandishing of the term ‘working-class’ by the fringe Left parties, is ultimately probably the way to approach things at present. This is because, so far, they are the only ‘class’ of people – and those, after all, who contribute most of the labour that keeps society going and who are unsurprisingly the first to have their jobs put on the line due to the recession – are singularly un-championed in the centre-right scrabble for power between the two main parties. While it comes as little surprise that the Tories are still closet Social Darwinists and guardians of the Rich, with their suggested tax break for society’s wealthiest jostling contradictorily with their other priorities which include protecting the great socialist Nye Bevan’s NHS (try and work all that out!), it comes as a last minute final slap in the face from all who used to vote Labour before it became the neo-Thatcherite party with token though highly selective ‘social conscience’, which it is today, that Gordon Brown, during a frankly risible speech at the launch of his party’s election manifesto today, continually asserted that New Labour – note he repeated this mantle at least two or three times throughout the speech – is the party of ‘the middle-class’; or, more specifically, ‘those on ordinary middle-class incomes’, with a tacit sub-clause added a bit later after being cornered on such Blairite language by a journalist, ‘and low-incomes’. The irony then of a manifesto cover design aping the art deco campaign posters of the 1920s Labour Party, so basically back in the days when Labour was still socialist, has not been lost on the more incisive reporters (particularly Channel 4 News and its indefatigable, Gandalfian host, John Snow).
Of course, those basically read in British political history will know what a contentious and ideologically compromised, not to say almost totally split, Labour administration resulted a bit later on, in 1929, during the second premiership of Labour’s first Prime Minister, the subsequently maligned James Ramsay MacDonald – a tragic political figure in many ways, but one who nonetheless carried the can for what was then perceived as a betrayal of his party’s core values by forming a coalition with mostly Tories in order to be able to form a government once he was deserted by a disaffected section of his own party. Parallels to Labour’s fourth premier, Blair, are detectable though not entirely deserved, since MacDonald was in some ways a victim of circumstances, whereas the latter chose the more cynical subterfuge of getting his party elected on a since grossly mutated mandate.
But the fact remains that if there is any smell of ‘class war’ in this election campaign, it is not the traditional Marxist paradigm we’re dealing with here: in a post-Thatcherite society embourgoised materially, the battlegrounds are now between the party propagated on the ‘playing fields of Eton’ and the party who presently represent those who relate to ‘the elevenses of the manse’ – hardly the stuff of Keir Hardie is it? Nowhere in this dynamic does the working-class, the old proletariat, have any representation, and Brown today put the seal on this frankly disgraceful symbolic abandonment by New Labour of its traditional heartlands, by completely counting out the working and under classes from the equation altogether. No doubt to Labour, such classes, disenfranchised and penalised to the sidelines of society, are not a relevant factor in oncoming election campaign. Or are they pretending that they have embourgeoised them into a new universal ‘middle-class’? This is not only ideologically Satanic of Brown and New Labour to posture like this, it is also grossly neglectful of the fact that thanks to their incompetence in deregulating our economy, and the resultant Bank crash, they have indirectly assisted in condemning a vast amount of their citizens at the bottom of the heap to unemployment and in many cases homelessness. So it’s a bit rich, not to say delusional, to champion the middle-class precisely at a time when their administration is responsible arguably for creating a far wider underclass in the last two years.
So where do these untouchables of Britain’s self-applauding caste system go for their representation now that Labour has once and for all abandoned their interests? Well, cynics would say the educationally deprived will instinctively switch to the BNP – and this argument was proven highly plausible following the horrendous results from the last local elections. New Labour has learnt absolutely nothing from this clearly, and still tub-thumps for Darby and Joan of the Great British Greenbelt. Instead of shifting more to the Left in order to reassert they are the party of true social mobility and equality and thus encourage many sections of the disaffected working and under classes back into their fold, they take the right-wing reactionary route and instead come down viciously on immigration, with a breathtakingly unapologetic utilitarian zeal, determined now to turn away all but those specifically skilled in work the UK needs done, thus filtering out the perceived chaff (along, no doubt, with their other cultural scapegoat, the ‘Chav’). Thus making the ‘tough decisions’ on immigration, they no doubt hope, will rein back in those who had started drifting over to Nick Griffin’s blackshirts. Right is Might would be a better title for New Labour’s manifesto than the hypocritical ‘A Future Fair for All’; which should continue to read ‘...Apart from Unskilled Immigrants, the sick and unemployed, and Anyone Else who Just Isn’t Quite British Enough for Us’.
Then, appealing to the middle-class flank, Brown came heavily down again on ‘anti-social behaviour’, more zero tolerance in a society increasingly earning the right to show just that against its Bank-propping leaders, and of course some further Thatcherite-style hammering of the unemployed, Brown stating unconscionably that anyone unemployed for more than six months will HAVE TO take ANY job that is offered them. Is that New Labour’s fairer society? One in which people are forced into crummy short-term jobs for barely the minimum wage just so a government can shave a few more figures off the unemployed list? So with further intimidation of the unemployed, the poor and the under classes on the cards – by both the two main parties – bashing those at the bottom of the heap and with such glaring temerity in the wake of the worst capitalist-driven recession since the 1930s, where jobs are being cut left right and centre, New Labour are clearly not even remotely attempting at this stage in proceedings to pool back votes from the disaffected Left – but instead, as per usual, waving the old Blairite purple – as opposed to red – flag and wooing the middle-classes. Well done Gordon! Another final ideological cop out from this most grossly disappointing and inarticulate of Labour leaders (and in all that second only to his old friend Tony ‘I charge six figures for doing a speech’ Blair).
The ‘working-class’ then, as a social concept or motif, incorporating those on low incomes, the unemployed, the sick and socially marginalised, the homeless, and so on, does indeed need championing more than ever in this current campaign; so semantic quibbles aside, my heart is entirely behind any left-wing parties who campaign under their abandoned banner – but my only qualm is that they cannot all join together as one single party so as to offer a viable voting alternative to the three main centrist parties. In Fantasy Politics, I would suggest a new party, called True Labour, comprised of all the left-wing sub-parties and the Greens, and, most crucially of all, the Labour Representation Committee who I would urge at this point to split finally from New Labour and form their own socialist coalition.
Only in the last few days, and partly as a kneejerk reactionary reflex action to the unexpected triumph of Clegg and the Lib Dems in most of the post-debate polls, Cameron has slowly unpeeled his ‘moderate’ veneer to reveal the true nasty little Tory underneath, with the highly insidious doublespeak of ‘Big Society’. What Cameron is now proposing here – as emphasized today by his frankly disgustingly right-wing, Malthusian campaign poster, LET’S CUT THE BENEFITS OF THOSE WHO REFUSE TO WORK, juxtaposed against an image of himself, which is rather ironic given his being an MP and one of a breed now of expenses-cheats – is a volte-farce back into unadulterated Thatcherism, by duplicitously sloganeering the complete opposite to what that Iron Lady once said, that ‘there is no such thing as society, just individuals and families’. But of course this is also what Cameron means. Couched in vague, almost provincial motifs, this Big Society is presented on the surface as a sort of new Shillingbury Britain, where everything is devolved outwards so that the UK returns to a sort of honeycomb of close-knitted self-governing towns and communities, but ones that promote very British middle-class agendas under a Union Jack of paternalism, where social outsiders – the poor, unemployed, homeless, mentally ill – are hounded out by knitting-circle vigilantism, turning the Shillingburys more into Midsommers. Village on village, town on town, of tea-rooms and Fascists, is essentially what we’d be getting if Cameron got into power now. That highly judgmental and un-empathic Victorian-style society championed by Thatcher, where self-help is the mantra, Samaritans are castigated for their gullibility, and ‘be cruel to be kind’ is the watchword of the day. A Big Society, as Cameron absurdly and blatantly has stated, without any hint of irony, or concession to the fact that people need to also earn money to live, especially in the country he’s proposing, volunteers are encouraged, along with charities, to basically keep communities going, so as to save the Government the job of actually governing! Sounds absurd, and it is absurd, antediluvian, and potentially catastrophic for this country. The Big Society is basically Thatcherism in disguise of thatched cottages. Cameron’s deeply inappropriate – given the current lack of jobs post-banking collapse – of a pogrom of the unemployed and those who are sick and disabled on benefits, is unbelievably reactionary and, well, unfair, and sparks images of wooden stocks in every village and town where Tories in tweeds and deerstalkers gather to pelt the unemployed with rotten vegetables. That Cameron should be duplicitously campaigning under the banner of ‘change’ and ‘fairness’ while simultaneously proposing a scorched earth policy on the unemployed, is unconscionable and frankly Fascistic.
The predictable attempts of the Murdoch-driven right-wing press to try and smear Nick Clegg on the most absurdly remote and convoluted of charges – the most ludicrous misrepresentation being that the latter’s frankly enlightened and singularly courage in criticising post-War British anti-German sentiments and warning of the insidiousness of overt national pride under the cross of St. George as somehow implying he is saying the British are Nazis – is unconscionably biased, vindictive and deeply undemocratic journalism (if you can even call it that), rather, right-wing propaganda, and the Tories’ pathetic attempts to scaremonger against the apocalypse of a Hung Parliament, is as spurious as it is politically barrel-scraping. So much for Cameron not going in for negative campaigning.
In order to stop the march of Cameron’s blue-eyed white-skinned silver-teaspooned Big Society, and to once and for all smash the Murdochracy we’ve all had to live under for decades now (and remember it was as operative under Tony Blair as it usually is under Tory governments), I’d strongly advise any floating voters out there to vote for ANY reasonable left-of-centre parties – the Greens, the Lib Dems, any Socialist groups, Respect et al – and to make sure NOT TO VOTE FOR either of the two main parties (unless you have a True Labour MP in your constituency, then possibly vote for them), or any even further to their right. Our only hope is a Hung Parliament with the more moderate and Lib Dems having the chance to regulate the bigger party in government – hopefully with Vince Cable as Chancellor. But at the end of the day, what a bloody mess the electoral map is in 2010. God help us all.
Alan Morrison, April-May 2010
17 March 2010
I'd like to bring all your attention the following inspired and well-timed proposal for a Fifth International. Now more than ever, with the global discrediting of free market capitalism, the threat of rising nationalisms, and, in the UK's case, a near-extinct Labour Movement and no viable left-wing alternative in Parliament, it certainly seems more than time for all nations to build towards an international socialist opposition to the world's exploitative powers who are not only increasingly impoverishing most of us, but are also gradually eroding our very planet through the culmination of generations of land-grabbing and mineral plunder. the Recusant fully endorces and supports this movement towards a Fifth International - now, a planetary necessity.
Appeal for a Fifth International
On November 20th 2009, at an international meeting of left wing political parties in Caracas, Hugo Chavez appealed for the constitution of a Fifth international, defining it as a “realm where socialist parties, movements and tendencies will be able to devise and coordinate a common strategy against imperialism and for the overthrow of capitalism by socialism.”
According to Chavez, given the crisis of capitalism and the dangers of war and destruction that this entails, the creation of such a new International is indispensable, if we want to respond to the expectations of peoples and in order to save “Mother Earth”.
Taking stock from lessons of the previous Internationals (which undeniably have played an important part in the development of the working class and revolutionary movements of the 19th and the 20th century, without, however, accomplishing their initial program as summarized in the famous formula “workers of all nations, unite”), he conceived of an organizational form “without manual or obligation and where differences are welcome,” an International allowing for exchange of information, the coordination of fights and for solidarities, for the development of a “socialism of the 21st century,” that is.
The idea of a Fifth International is not new…Mayakovski already used it in 1922 as a title of one of his most visionary poems…More recently, this idea has been referred to in different places, like by activists and intellectuals in France, for example the economist Samir Amin…Hugo Chavez’ initiative, proposing an international constitutional meeting already for coming April, gives to this idea a crucial impulsion.
The four previous Internationals have been born in Europe. If the Fifth is launched in Latin America, this expresses the actual changes in the world and the real movement of peoples.
We appeal to the organizations of the French and the European working class movements, to political groups related to Marxism or Socialism, to the anti-capitalist fight, we appeal to critical, progressive and revolutionary activists and intellectuals not to stay beside. The political thought must not lock up itself in euro centrism; neither should action be confined to the institutional voting game. In order to save the democratic future of humanity and the planet, we have to build another world and to resume internationalism. There is no other solution than to merge the fights in the North and in the South.
Our motive is not nostalgic (even if we know that imagining the future cannot dispense with the images and the dreams of the past)… It’s not just about respect for our history; above all it’s about the rising from the ashes of a real left, up to the problems and the hopes of today.
First names:
Francis Combes (poète et éditeur ; France) – Patricia Latour (journaliste, membre du conseil national du PCF; France) – Pascal Acot (Historien de l’écologie scientifique; France) – Jean-Louis Lippert (écrivain ; Belgique) – Yvon Quiniou (philosophe; France) – Yves Vargas (philosophe, communiste, France/Pologne) – Jean-Pierre Bastid (écrivain, cinéaste ; France) – Bertrand Duffort (président d’Athéisme international ; France) - Bruno Drweski (universitaire ; France) – Jean-Luc Despax (poète ; France) – Bernard Noël (écrivain ; France) – Stathis Kouvelakis (universitaire ; France) – Samir Amin (économiste, président du Forum mondial des alternatives, directeur du forum du Tiers monde – Marc Viellard (écrivain ; France) – Tony Andréani (historien ; France).- Roger Bordier (écrivain ; France) – Maurice Cury (écrivain ; France) - Bernard G. Landry (écrivain ; France) - Jean-Pierre Page (syndicaliste, ancien membre du CC du PCF ; France/Cuba) – Marie Noël Rio (écrivain, communiste ; France/Pays bas) – Gérald Bloncourt (journaliste, écrivain ; Haïti /France) – Paco Pena (enseignant, Université Paris 1; France/ Chili) – Gérard Requigny (enseignant ; France) – Adamante (artiste ; France) - Yannick Bedin (France) – Slimane Doggui (médecin ; France/Tunisie) – Jean Ziegler (universitaire ; Suisse) – Marcel Parent (écrivain; France) – Marie-Jo Jacob (ingénieur EDF ; France) – Monique Houssin (journaliste, écrivaine ; France) – Hernando Calvo Ospina (journaliste – Colombie/France) – Georges Hassomeris (poète ; France) – Caroline Andréani (Gauche communiste ; France) – Alan Dent (poète ; Royaume Uni) – Maxime Vivas (écrivain ; France) – Tahar Ouettar (écrivain ; Algérie) – Karim Lakjaa (syndicaliste ; France) – Noël Coret (écrivain d’art ; France) – Jack Hirschman (poète ; USA) – Agneta Falk – (peintre et poète ; Suède/ USA)
to join the Appeal : send your name to franc.combes@orange.fr
23 January 2010
Hello fellow Recusants and welcome to the new look site - a slight cosmetic uplift I felt was required in order to mellow the experience of traversing the webzine while not in any way mellowing its content. The same ideals behind the webzine are, I hope, still implicit in its content and tone. It's as well heartening to note just how rapidly the visitor figures for the site go up, often at least by 1,000 a week; we're now not far from a quarter of a million, which is surprisingly good going for a webzine that's only just over two years old. Thanks again to all of you for your enthusiasm in continuing to visit and contribute to the Recusant.
Donations
But the times being as they are, it is slowly becoming clear just how much of a round the clock commitment it is to be running as thriving a webzine as the Recusant, zealous though my application still is, even when it puts me slightly out of pocket, with it costing £8.99 a month (since 2007) to pay the site maker company to keep the ’zine alive. Subscriptions are of course a necessity for hard copy journals with printing costs to cover – webzines fortunately do not have such outgoings but obviously do need to pay for themselves to keep their site space and domain names ticking. To which, I will simply be giving anyone reading this webzine the option, should they feel particularly altruistic at any point, to donate any sum, no matter how nominal, via a Paypal link which will be up in the next couple of months. That way, the choice is entirely up to you, and it makes not a jot of difference whether you do or not in terms of having full access to all the writing on the site.
Caparison – the Recusant’s imminent e-book imprint
I’ll take this opportunity too to announce what will be, I hope, an ongoing addition to the Recusant for the future, our new and imminent e-book imprint, Caparison (the logo of which will be a horse silhouette). The first flagship e-collection under this imprint, Red Shift by Peter Branson (a regular contributor to Recusant), has already been designed and will be available via the site very soon, once the rather tortuous process of finalising a Paypal account for the imprint is sorted out.
To which, due to the extensive labour and time involved in producing what is hoped to look basically like a full print-ready (pdf) book manuscript, replete with full colour cover, I am forced to ask for nominal payments via Paypal to download the full length collections. Samples of poems from within the collections will be available for all to peruse on the website. But there will necessarily be a nominal charge for those who wish to get the entire collections. This will either be through the option of paying the relatively small sum of £4 (which is on average a little less than buying a printed pamphlet of less than half the length) via a Paypal link; or, perhaps further down the line, depending on interest, I may think about asking for emails from all those wishing to order a potential hard copy publication of a particular author - and there is sufficient number of interest from readers, I could then in theory afford to pay for a print run from pre-orders. It's a pity it has to be done in such a circuitous and makeshift manner, but unfortunately printers demand payment and as this webzine makes no money at all as yet (actually makes a slight loss in real times, but what the Hell), we're not in the position to pay out for productions. But I anticipate, or hope, that this will be a true possibility in the future.
I’ve done extensive research on all this, and as a poetry book designer myself (a freelance sideline to my own poetic pursuits), am fully conversant in the minutiae of production costs, and I feel this is a fair deal all considered. I hate to have to charge a penny for anything in principle, but as I say, the time and effort involved in producing what are essentially full poetry collections does justify some minimal remuneration, which, if anything, will enable me to cover website costs. This will all be non-profit making I anticipate; if it were to ever bear any significant financial fruit, I would then consider short on-demand print runs if at all affordable, and if at all possible, negotiate percentages for authors.
So, keep your eyes peeled in the coming weeks for the first Caparison title: Red Shift by Peter Branson. Other poets to follow in like guise further into 2010 will include two other regular Recusants, Sally Richards and Kevin Saving. I also plan, and have been for ages now, to publish a new selection from David Kessel (whose 2005 Collected Poems, O the Windows of the Bookshop Must Be Broken, I edited, prefaced and designed when I worked at Survivors’ Poetry some years’ back). There are other poets I am currently considering for possible future e-books, so this is a not full list by any means, but I am canny as to the time it takes to produce e-books to good standards, and so it is prudent at this time to cite only the bare minimum in advance. I am of course open to submissions from anyone reading this, especially of course other Recusant contributors, but please bear in mind that if eventually accepted, there will be a sizeable timeframe before publication on the site.
Posthumous Press – a wing of Caparison
It is also my intention to publish some posthumous e-book collections, those from poets under-published and neglected during their lifetimes (so copyright issues shouldn’t be a problem), the first of which will be a selection from the late Harold Mingham, an intriguing poet whose unpublished work David Kessel, a friend of Mingham’s, first introduced me to. David will, in a sense, act as executor of Mingham’s estate, and will also provide a preface to the collection.
Another potential e-book may be a selection of some of the fugitive poems of the late poet and critic Derek Stanford, thanks to the co-operation of Julie Whitby, poet and Recusant contributor (who is also working towards a Caparison e-book), and who is his surviving widow. This I anticipate to be a longer-term project since there are literally stacks of Stanford's oeuvre to sort through (and a more substantial posthumous collection of his work is as well a long-term project for Waterloo Press, one of my own publishers, so the two projects will have to be carefully tallied). But if this materialises, it will, as with Harold Mingham's work, be a genuine collector's item.
If any of you reading this know of or have access/rights to any manuscripts of late poets or authors unpublished during their lifetimes, please do get in touch via the Contact link on the Welcome page and I can consider them for future titles. It's been one of the passionate convictions of the Recusant since it started that there are potentially numbers on numbers of gifted poets and writers neglected during their lifetimes and who probably very well deserve posthumous exposure. This is one of the main missions of this webzine and movement, so please do bear this in mind if you have anyone in mind. Although we would not be in a position to pay anything for copyrights, we would automatically copyright all work published here to the executor of each literary estate.
Phew. Now onto more ranting matters. I may do a word play soon for this perpetual section from the letters in the Recusant - ecus the Rant perhaps?...
Political Comment 23rd January 2010
As we come in to what is arguably the most ideologically moribund pre-election period in living memory, in a manageably despairing political frame of mind, I feel I must concede at this point that I feel the only viable voting option left to those of us still doggedly of the Left is with the Liberal Democrats, who seem the only party of three main contenders in Parliament who have the ideological guts and basic moral common sense to uncompromisingly lambast the Banking Sector's unconscionable behaviour, and thereby show up New Labour's cowardly half-way-house approach to 'capping' bonuses and taxing profits - which seemingly has achieved absolutely nothing being as full of loopholes as a figurative Swiss cheese. Clegg isn't the most compelling orator or most charismatic leader admittedly, but his recent campaign speech, to my mind, hit all the right issues bang in the face and was demonstrable of the fact that out of the three main political parties, the Lib Dems are indeed the nearest thing we have now to a left-of-centre party; one might even go so far as to suggest, a left-wing party (as much as we can expect from any significantly sized party in a still essentially capitalist Parliament anyway).
Party names are indeed now fairly nebulous, and have been ever since the banner went up for Nu Labour and its Third Way anti-partisanism (surely an oxymoronic - not to say moronic - approach to a Parliamentary system based in the very essential differences that make political parties what they are in the first place). But just as presently even the Tories are sometimes feeling their way along the edges of views way outside their tradition - most particularly their harsher and more statist stance than Labour on the bankers, as evidenced, albeit with the usual scent of Cameron opportunism, by their applauding Obama's blatantly socialistic clampdown on public-funded US banks - and New Labour, bar the occasional equally populist-motivated nod to one or two core Old Labour ideals (though clumsily miscommunicated in Brown's frankly crass 'playing fields of Eton' quip), are now unequivocally going into the next election under the now utterly discredited New Labour banner, Brown having bottled it once again with his deeply disturbing mantra of their being the party of the 'middle-class' and 'aspiration'. So yes, Brown is fighting a class war, but one on behalf of the aspiring middle-classes against the continually hounded and harangued working-classes and underclasses, and with a token sniff in the face of the tax-dodging upper brackets whom his own party have nevertheless further enriched over the last thirteen years. Maybe now they've lost the Dark Lord Murdoch's tabloid support, they feel they can risk a little inverted snobbery - even if it is rich coming from a government who have more than their fair share of public school/Oxbridge-educated Ministers. Mandleson still has his hands on the reins of the party. Meantime, Edd Balls, for all his brassy posturing as the nearest thing the party has to a remotely left-wing influence in the Cabinet (replete with consciously (?) Nye Bevan-esque Forties’ style haircut), hasn't, it seems, really got any. The basic fact remains that – as Clegg and the Lib Dems constantly bring up to Brown at PMQs eliciting no obvious response whatsoever – New Labour preside, after thirteen years, over a country in which the wealthiest pay less in tax proportionate to their wage than the poorest. Under a Tory government this would be par for the course. But under a Labour government, this is about as unconscionable as it could ever get.
So, the party names are now nebulous. In spite of having hoped for the last couple of years that the Labour Representation
Committee, the only left-wing faction left in the party, might begin to pressure things a bit more to the left under Brown, it's seemed doomed from the outset, ever since their new leader started posing for the cameras outside No. 10 with Margaret Thatcher. It went downhill from thereon in, as we all know. Brown’s now completely bottled out of any obvious return to the party's roots, stubbornly still trying to believe that the fantasy politics of New Labour could bear genuine fruit for our society, even as it all crashes down around him; and probably, apart from countless other calumnies during his still brief premiership, he is possibly also responsible for finally shattering the nerves of the Guardian's ‘left-ish denial tribe’, thus potentially driving several Labour-apologist columnists (Polly Toynbee et al) into apostate crises for some time to come. In
a very different way, I am questioning whether to renew my LRC membership, feeling rather flat about anything 'Labour' anymore, and beginning to start seeing some of the historic flaws of administrations of that name (bar the Attlee government, still the only true socialist/Labour government I think we've ever really had), all too often dominated by the overly pragmatic right of the party in the past, a sub-lineage within the movement who also tended towards a strange sort of grassroots patriotism which, for me, tends to undermine much of the point of socialist ideas which should be intrinsically a politics sans frontiere. Many on the Left would argue Labour diverged the wrong way at the outset of the Cold War, banishing its far radicals and pseudo-communists, and drifting ever further to a compromised centre that would inevitably have to accommodate the broad church of capitalist methodology. In these dark days of hyper-diluted ideology in the party, I’m inclined to agree.
But the past aside, what we seem to have now is a seemingly a One Nation Tory party (more in the Blimpish Macmillan sense than the more intellectually-grounded Disraelian), a New Labour government who are more Thatcherite than the Tories, and a Lib Dem party who should be called the Social Democrats, since of late much of their arguments have been not so much liberal as socialist, even if in some of their policies there are still nuances which tie them in part to their middling tradition. But, as on Question Time last night, possibly the worst ever instalment of the programme, in which practically the entire panel seemed to agree that it was fine to chase a burglar out of one's house and nearly beat him to death with a cricket bat, the only voice of compassion and reason – unless you include the faceless Lyam Byrnne with his constant allusion to ‘the British way’ in practically all his answers – was Sara Teather MP, a Lib Dem. And after all, Vince Cable, probably the best Liberal Leader that never was, would arguably be the safest and most reasonable pair of hands on that battered red suitcase as Chancellor of a coalition government. And a coalition government is precisely what we now, when our Parliamentary system is steeped in corruption, one-upmanship and pinstripe politics, almost devoid of any ideologies any more; it would be the best thing for our so-called democracy if for the first time in over thirty years, we had something other than the perpetual two-party system.
At this stage, based on the current stances and arguments of the parties, the Lib Dems to me seem the best option at the moment. Given a hung Parliament, they will inevitably form part of the next government, and I'm hoping this will happen, and not the utterly despairing result of a return to a Tory Britain. Though I would guard against any sense of tribalism at this election in just voting Labour to keep the Tories out of power, I will however admit that there is still something particularly terrifying about the possibility of that woefully out-of-touch and reactionary party ever getting in again (I’m not talking about New Labour at the moment). We need to remember that our broken society was pretty much created under Thatcherism, under a Tory government; New Labour just bottled out of reversing that damage and sold its soul to the
Money God.
One last note is that at least Obama has the guts to face out the City in the US, a refreshingly brazen state intervention against the shameless greed of the bankers that makes Brown's paltry loopholed concessions to public grievance by just slapping his bankers on the wrists look pathetic in comparison. Jobs are being lost, homes repossessed, and the British bankers are still handing out their bonuses on our money. That is the British way is it Mr Brown? That is Labour's way now too? A party originally founded to battle capitalism and create a fairer and equaller society out of its decadent foundations, is now the party that has fought doggedly, even in the face of financial collapse, to maintain it. As it stands, Labour is dead. New Labour is too, but its deluded apparatchiks won't yet admit it. And they'll be taking the party down with them under its banner.
[Stop Press: It is encouraging, though far from tangible as yet, that Brown is apparently considering a similarly radical clampdown on the British banks and markets as that currently being levied by Obama in the dumbstruck US. Albeit quite obviously informed by a blend of pre-election cribbage by 'his nibs' the PM in order to appeal to popular feeling and the laborious though theoretically welcome scramble by the two main party leaders in the UK to boast some sort of ‘progressive’ bond with Obama – who, though apparently losing popularity in the States, hearteningly seems ever popular over here in the UK – it still bodes well in a moral sense for the UK, and is once again another unexpected neo-volte-face from cribbage Brown which will probably jump-start Polly Toynbee again into re-revisionist nostalgia-waxing about that same lugubrious pretender whom she originally thought, or hoped (admittedly like a lot of us), would shake Labour a little bit back to its roots. Of course, it will be no such thing, not with Mandelson at his shoulder; but nevertheless, whether it will turn out simply to be another neo-Old Labour repost to Cameron’s bizarrely un-Tory statist stance on the City, its social and moral effects on the direly embittered mood of a country that has been forced to bail out wealth-sapping bankers who have then kicked them in the teeth all over again by unscrupulously profiteering on said public assistance (in spite of Brownite disdain and ineffectual tax hikes), it can only be a good thing].
To continue on a lighter note, here's a more satirical take on the current political meltdown in the UK, with a certain Western theme...
Satirical Comment
Cowboy Brown Bottles it in Labour’s Last Chance Saloon
Cowboy Brown had been in the Last Chance Saloon for so long now that he’d forgot he potentially had one more last chance to take before the upcoming election. In order to retain his highly prised and long-sought Sheriff badge, a dynastic silver star he’d been handed by his predecessor – Sheriff Cool-Hand Blair, fastest Spinner in the West – Brown now had one final shot at the can before his rusty badge went back up for grabs: either he cut his left-side some slack at last after nigh-on thirteen years of ideological betrayal and put his finger back on the trigger of the old neglected Lab pre-’97 revolver and face the folks with a genuinely fresh radical mandate to wipe the last decade’s tarnished politics clean, face out those pesky God-darned City Slickers and make sure as Hell they never get a chance to profit on the public purse again (just as Marshal Obama out further West was currently doing in a true left-wing progressive sense); or, he could simply crawl yella’-bellied back on all fours to the spurred feet of that hired gun of his, Three-Shots Mandelson, and choose to keep in with the Slickers, Moguls and mean-spirited Lab post-’97- slinging sons of guns, those of the cheatin’, yella’ bellied, God-darn Neo-Liberal Third Way, and keep that battered and discredited banner of ‘New’ Labour a-fluttering in moral tatters into the last gunfight. (Spit in tin-can). And yes, you guessed it, the yella’ bellied Brown did just that, and was led out by Three-Shots through the swinging saloon bar doors, past the dishevelled and disgruntled party horses (not one of ’em willing to stalk their sold-out Sheriff in order to get the Saloon back on its ideological feet again), and there to stand up, hands sweating either end of his gun belt, to take his shot at the Conservative Kid, sneakiest opportunist in the West.
Both shots fired, it seemed that neither Brown nor the Kid had hit one another, but their bullets had: turned out they had so much in common with their God-darn near-identical centre-ground policies and pandering to those aspirin’ middle-class folks, that they had no other quarrel other than who got the most seats to secure the more power and better salaries. The real gunfight wasn’t going to be there! It was going to be down at the Lib Dem Corral, where Butch Cable and the Sundance Clegg were standing on their lonesomes, waiting perpetually for their opponents to show up. But, until now, Brown and the Kid had never thought to go down there, thinking instead that the fight was between them alone, seeing as they were both leaders of the two biggest parties in town.
In fact, things had gotten so dog-garn confused of late, what with the party once of the left-side, now and for some time a New version of their selves, movin’ so far to the right-side they could hardly remember where they’d tied their horses; and the party to the right-side, apart from some of their usual loyalties to those rich folks way out of town, startin’ to take up some attitudes more associated with the old left-side folks – state intervention in the banking sector, higher caps and taxes on City slickers, ‘n’ no more tax-Dodge City, all of which Brown and his Cowboys seemed to oppose, in spite even of Marshall Obama taking on those similar outlaws way out in the Wild West... But all in all what Brown and the Kid wanted for their parties was one simple arbitrary thing in itself: power. N’ they would do anythin’ and say anythin’ to get it.
Meantime, far out on the left-side, a rag-tag band of Labour outlaws, still fightin’ their corners within the New party that governed the town, were finding increasingly that their cause was lost: there weren’t no way that Sheriff Brown and his hired gun Three-Shots were goin’ to admit their mistakes of the last nigh-on thirteen years in power and go back to the Old and fairer ways. Not even when it was so clear now they’d been mistaken all along in thinking they could use those City Slickers and gold-runners to fund their social programmes, to agree to let some of the nuggets trickle down to the poorer folks while they kept filling their rich tooths with gold. (Those two-bit sons of guns had seriously believed that the very same Bullion Boys whose instinct was to grab at other folks’ money and make more from it for themselves and more on top of that, a duckin’ n’ a –divin’ n’ a-speculatin’, would also have some deep down sense of social compassion and redistributive conscience, and agree wholeheartedly, with no promise of a fiscal return, to share out some of the wealth they’d been a-creatin’ – or rather, a-baggin’).
Now the last opportunistic horses of the New way had bolted straight outta’ town, hot on the hooves of the Banker Brothers, the whole town’s bullion swinging from their saddles in pouches, and more to come their way besides the latest Crash! No, not even all of this could stop Cowboy Brown snivelling at the spurs of Three-Shots Mandelson who had his beady black eye on the Sheriff badge, and his other on the rich folk out of town who’d promised him long back a ranch of his own out in the tax-dodging prairies.
But still those mangy old party horses, the ones at the back with their hopes in a return to the fair old ways, stayed shufflin’ and a-steamin’ in their seats, just waitin’ for the darkness to fall.
Meantime, the Conservative Kid dodged this way and that, as if at flying bullets, anticipating every twitch of the trigger, tryin’ to keep up sayin’ what he thought the voter folk wanted to hear. This way he was dog-garn certain he’d wind up with that rusty old Sheriff badge come the next ballot.
The Sundance Clegg was still waitin’ n’ sweatin’ n’ cursin’ at the Lib Dem Corral, until all of a sudden, both Cowboy Brown and the Conservative Kid, still not exactly friendly to one another, stood facin’ him in a ring of wagons. Both their guns were spent of bullets now, but they had one last card to play each: if this God-darn ballot winds up a hung one, which of us will you come on side with Clegg? they both implied with furtive gestures.
The sweat beadin’ down the face of Sundance, he started a-thinkin’ as to which of the two he should saddle up with, and which of the two he should shoot down with his one bullet...
To be continued...
