Though Cowards Flinch

One wonders how, growing up in the 1930′s, young Germans who didn’t like the triumphalist nationalism of the right-wing Parties felt to see such groups swept to power. Did they feel helpless? How did that manifest itself? With the complete collapse of the political sphere of social participation after the Nazi victory and the imposition of draconian laws we know that some German youth retreated to entirely apolitical acts of rebellion.

The Edelweiss Pirates, for example, sought refuge in outdoor pursuits and having the odd fight with the Hitler Youth, whom they resented because it was a compulsory part of their young lives. Yet by and large the period of Nazi rule was characterised by an absence of rebellion. After all, the unions had been destroyed, the communists banned and the last gesture of the Social Democrats was to feebly vote against the Enabling Act.

Our government has had a remarkably easy ride in passing some of the most risible, the most authoritarian laws in the history of this country. Yesterday’s passage of 42 days detention without trial is just one more example. I am not foolhardy enough to have Godwin’s Law invoked against me, so I am not comparing the government to the Nazis and their allies. I am merely comparing the lack of effective opposition and highlighting some parallels between the two situations as I see them.

In each newspaper there will be talk this morning about how the government relied on the most reactionary sections of Parliament to pass their Bill, having effectively been deprived of a Labour majority by the 36 MPs who rebelled. There will be talk about how the government has relied upon the DUP, upon the UUP and upon a lame duck Conservative battle axe in order to scrape through the vote 315-306.

What there should be talk about is not this subject. I’m sure that people will be interested to know how the DUP were bought – I certainly am. I watched the whole thing live and there were some unpleasant exchanges with the DUP and the Liberal Democrats as they left the chamber, with one DUP member screaming repeatedly at his LibDem accusers “Don’t judge us by your standards!” filling the hall with his northern brogue.

Yet all that is merely parliamentary manoeuvre; anyone who didn’t expect the government to repeat with another party what it had tried with its own is simply naive. What we should be talking about is the utterly ineffectual ‘civil liberties’ movement amongst left-liberals. We need to know why it failed and we need to know how we can make it succeed in the future – because this is not the end by any means.

Opinion polls leading up to the anti-terrorism law showed that most people were in favour of it. I don’t necessarily accept that opinion polls should be our lodestar, but that’s besides the point. We need to realise that unless we present a radical alternative, unless we develop the means to carry that alternative to people, then they’ll believe whatever they’re told – and most of them have been warned repeatedly about terrorism.

How very rich of the Sun and the Daily Mail and the rest to suddenly come out against the 42-day detention without trial, since every moment prior to that they’d been screaming about terrorist plots which didn’t exist. How many times has the Sun announced that the police have found ricin or anthrax only for the story to be completely discredited as tabloid bullshit run amok? So no credence whatsoever to our media.

No credence to the rest of us either though, for we failed to stop the passage of the law. The real battle to defeat legislation like this wasn’t in calling one’s local MP and demanding he vote against it. No doubt that plays a part, but it ignores the 315 Labour MPs who voted in favour for whatever reason, including one such who was reportedly promised a safe seat by the whips if he didn’t rebel on this vote.

The real battle we lost some time ago: the battle to be able to hold our MPs to account. The battle to be able to hold our Party leadership to account. How thoroughly powerless we are can be demonstrated by the string of “Left” names absent from the list of rebels: Jon Cruddas, Jon Trickett, John Austin, Michael Clapham, Ann Cryer, Bill Etherington, David Hamilton, Austin Mitchell, Dennis Skinner, David Taylor, and Bob Wareing.

There are others from the supposed ‘Compass’ group who should be there too, but they hardly deserve mentioning, barely counting as left wing. Apart from the two at the top of the list, the remainder are Socialist Campaign Group members. That list is an insight into the failure of the Left. I wonder how many voted out of principle, how many were bought and how many saw rebellion as contributing to a Tory government.

I included the Social Democratic Party poster because it portrays the SPD as equally opposed to Communism, Nazism and Monarchism. It expresses for me precisely how bankrupt the idea of the ‘centre-left’ is, based on how they see themselves as counterposed to, um, the actual left. It strikes me as an important lesson, bearing in mind how some people voted last night and to which ‘faction’ of the Party they are aligned.

Straight away one can see the abscess where grassroots accountability should be. Had the Left had the organisational power to hurt these people, this law wouldn’t have been passed. Yet even had we had such power, many of these names are often on the right side of the issues and we’re so desperately wedded to punching above our weight in parliament that we’d have done nothing because we needed their vote.

A lack of grassroots networks, however, is not the alpha and omega of this cancer which is afflicting us. All the supporters in the world are fairly useless if the programme isn’t tightly defined and principled so as to allow concrete methods of analysis, rather than opportunistically changing tack from fight to fight. No such unity of purpose or understanding exists amongst the agglomeration known as the ‘liberal-left.’

Our idea of radicalism is to call for a more left-wing parliament, which we think we will achieve by the democratisation of the Labour Party machine because that will allow us to pick left-wing candidates. Ultimately there is no workable strategy to ‘reclaim the Labour Party’ as it’s a catch 22. We need to conquer the levers of power to open up the system and we need to open up the system to claim the levers of power.

Where does 42 days fit into all this? I couldn’t bring myself to care about it terribly much. It’s what passes for normality these days. It’s not ‘the thin end of the wedge’ as some have it; no, we passed that point quite some time ago under another government. With the passage of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, we graduated to the middle chunk of this now rather stretched metaphorical wedge.

With that law, our own Party leadership has managed to tighten another seeming catch 22 upon the labour movement. It needs to win victories to attract members, but needs to attract members to be able to win victories. Now the government is threatening to invoke the CCA 2004 to break the UNITE oil tanker strike, presumably on the grounds that it constitutes the emergency situation mentioned in the bill.

I feel about this in some sense like the young people of Nazi Germany must have felt about their government; I want to rebel but the methods of rebellion seem utterly pointless and ineffective and all we seem to wind up with is either annoying right-wing politicians from our own Party taking victory laps or annoying right-wing politicians from the other lot taking victory laps.

Maybe I should get into a raft and make a beeline for Sweden? Yossarian would be proud.

Of course I’m not likely to actually do that, nor am I likely to retreat from politics. Watching the carrion crows like Neal Lawson circle the still-living carcass of the government is sickening for me, with his triumphalist whoops about the need for a centre left restoration, but if we’re to get rid of the flighty and instead recruit the doughty, it has to be endured for the present time.

Parliamentary politics is like theatre going; you watch it for a couple of hours then you write up a witty review. The foppish Lawson is as good a one as any to satirize.

If we were serious about thwarting the government’s anti-civil liberties agenda, then we’d be preparing for solidarity action the moment the government invoked any of the range of their civil liberty-destroying measures. We’d have got together political parties, pressure groups and trade unions, and we’d talk about where to blockade, what cities we could potentially shut down, what protest to make. Then we’d begin organising.

We wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the StWC, we’d learn from them. We’d force the government to back down by a display that the popular opposition to these policies runs into the millions but we’d link that to the much more forceful and physically demonstrated point that these millions control society and that without them there is no government! We’d hold the line til the government caved in.

That isn’t what is going to happen of course, and the underlying reasons why it isn’t going to happen are why I ever bothered to get a blog in the first place. People are too caught up to see that potential power doesn’t lie in the direction of parliamentary melodrama. It lies in building up a movement with the backbone to carry out its threats. If we pick up parliamentary muscle along the way great – we can put it to good use. It remains secondary however.

The only people who can maintain otherwise simply don’t understand the historical significance of the Thatcher-Major-New Labour years.

Anyway, I’m done: have a look over the following articles for other random pieces of commentary: Don Paskini, John McDonnell, Paul Smith, Marsha-Jane on Coward Cruddas and Tricky Trickett, Marsha-Jane again, with a list of the rebels, and HarpyMarx with a wonderful article topped by Jon Cruddas’ shit-eating grin, which I have pinched.