Though Cowards Flinch

Here’s a BBC reporter on Radio 5 Live (around 47 mins and 30 secs in) quizzing Ian Gray, Scottish Labour Leader, on the political response to Diageo’s decision to a) slash 900 jobs in Kilmarnock and b) turn down flat alternative plans put forward. (This is the same Diageo plc which posted £2bn profits on August 27th).

Get that? Remember it well, because it’s a new interviewing tactic thought up by those clever BBC journalists in the wake of Labour’s admission that it’s planning spending cuts as well as the Tories.  I’m sure we’ll hear it lots more.

And just marvel at the logic that lies behind it:

a) International capitalism screws up bigtime, and a massive crisis and recession ensues;

b) So governments bail out international capitalism with billions of pounds in taxpayers money in order to keep international capitalism going;

c) Governments, cowed by international capitalism and their handy international credit agencies into thinking there that the absolute priority is to cut the national debt caused by international capitalism, decide that the only way to pay back the debt is to cut public spending and massively reduce welfare and public services;

d) The decision to massively cut public spending means that governments and their politicians can no longer validly questions the decisions of international capitalist, who are in fact only seeking ‘efficiencies’ through their decision not to use any of the £2bn profit to stop the lives of thousands of people in a Scottish town being ruined.

Yes, that makes perfect sense to a journalist from the notoriously ‘leftwing’ BBC.

As a result of the BNP being invited on to a BBC debate show, there is a lot of discussion in blogoland about how best to combat fascism. A recent online poll by Metro newspaper, which was twittered and blogged by people of different opinions, showed a large majority (76%) against allowing the BNP on Question Time. Those in favour often voice the opinion that the best way to beat the BNP is to take them apart live on air, so that their lies may be exposed once and for all. Richard Seymour amusingly dubbed this a demand not for Question Time but for show trials.

On one level, it seems a fair enough demand. The BNP flagrantly lie – any cursory examination of their electoral material proves as much – and there can be no harm in letting them repeat these lies explicitly for the purpose of proving them to be lies. As intellectually satisfying as that might be – and I’m among those who go positively purple when I hear porkies being told and no one challenging them – I’m not entirely sure the broader point is correct. Who, exactly, is going to be convinced even if representatives of each major party gangs up to ‘expose’ the BNP?

Nine hundred thousand people voted for the BNP in the European elections this year; is it them we’re aiming at? We don’t know how many of them will be watching, we don’t know why they voted BNP and we don’t know if – no matter how much evidence to the contrary – they will change their views or their votes. Without clarifying these variables, I don’t really see that there’s an argument to be made in favour of allowing the BNP a platform simply for the purpose of putting up people who will attack whatever they say – whether the platform is the Oxford Union or the BBC.

The broader question I’m getting at here is this; does rational argument, on its own, change minds? Like me, many inhabitants of blogoland will have experience debating. Whether with friends, relatives, in formal debating tournaments, as part of political parties or in response to comments on blogs, debating is common in the blogosphere. Many of us too have experience of people changing their minds – but what we can’t say is that we know it to have been in response to rational argument – we simply can’t narrow down all the variables to one.

Friends and relatives will naturally be more susceptible to what we say, because we have a personal relationship with them – a bond of trust. People may not change their opinions solely based on the ties of family and friendship, but as a factor it can’t be ruled out. Secondly there’s the old chestnut of how someone says something. If you have two people stating essentially the same argument but in two different ways, and one ‘persuades’ more people than another, can we really say that it is as a result of rational argument rather than rhetoric?

Thirdly, the concept of persuasion by rational argument need not take into account experience. Someone can watch a national figure citing statistics and examples to back up their point, but when it comes down to it remain unmoved. Their own personal experience of discrimination against white people (or whatever) colours their judgment – just as our own experiences, and the experiences of the notional speaker, colour our judgments. Marketing in politics makes the argument that it is possible to co-opt this experience to the advantage of the speaker.

Yet to invert that position, perhaps it is more important that we change the experience than change our argument. Then there is the concept of hegemony; what is referred to as ‘common sense’ is part of a wider system of ideas. These ideas are selected and endorsed with a given context of material and power, widening or narrowing their reach according to laws that take no account of the inner rationality of the argument. Indeed arguments can be openly contradictory and still pass relatively unscrutinized – for example the Nazi conception of the Jew.

As Slavoj Zizek puts it: “This is also why fascism definitely is a populism: its figure of the Jew is the equivalential point of the series of (heterogeneous, inconsistent even) threats experienced by individuals: the Jew is simultaneously too intellectual, dirty, sexually voracious, hard-working, financially exploitative…” (In Defense, p279). The victimization of Jews did not pass unchallenged by German society – both intellectually and in activist terms. Yet rational inconsistencies didn’t prevent Der Sturmer publishing its bullshit nor people from lapping it up.

To give a different example, people are presented with concepts that challenge specific items of religious faith pretty regularly. Most of them simply filter out those arguments they dislike and continue along their merry way. This makes it especially irritating to debate with these people, who often display the most glaring inconsistencies and hypocrisies – and yet they have millions of followers, and not for want of being exposed, shamed, challenged and so forth. Ideas continue in circulation not merely because of their rational content but because of how their content (rational or not) interacts with a variety of other factors, material and ideological.

Straightforward rational argument, as I hope I have demonstrated, will not affect the factors which ultimately determine the success or failure of the BNP argument. People sympathetic to the BNP will find ways around open confrontation with the evidence presented to them: the arguments of mainstream politicians can be dismissed as self-interested twaddle. There is thus no reason to allow the BNP to consolidate their support with an invitation to be oppositional pricks at a mainstream political debate and the subsequent pep rally that would certainly result.

At the very least, even if I find that my disavowal of rational argument alone is ultimately unsupportable, I think that we can beat the BNP without giving them a national platform. Someone appearing on the doorstep of a voter’s house, supporting a candidate who has just called into the house next door, is a stronger statement than anything a professional politician can say to refute the BNP whilst on television. It combines the experiential and the ideological – and offers scope to involve people in changing the material, if the candidate has the right policies.

Here is the key problem; it’s not that the BNP haven’t been called out or exposed, or that the media has given them an easy ride. As a political party, the BNP are really quite villified, even by the right-wing press, which loves salacious and criminal gossip about them. The problem is a) that the mainstream alternatives aren’t offering the chance to change things and b) that the context of political debate is being framed by people who are hostile to the BNP but buy into a lot of their preconceptions – and who don’t care if they are objectively wrong.

This is why the fight against the BNP is ultimately Labour’s to win or lose. Labour is the only political party founded on the basis of the organisation of workers, in the workplace as well as in communities, and the formulation of a political programme on their behalf. The mass organizations implied by this are the basis on which people can be incited to engagement, to force the pace of change rather than passively reacting to it. The growth of fascism is essentially a reaction to change, an expression of powerlessness resultant from the collapse of mass politics.

The growth of fascism among workers is little different from the growth of terrorism. People see a problem, they look for a way to fix it – and if we aren’t offering better ways to fix things, then they’re going to choose the extreme options. And make no mistake, Labour and the trades unions aren’t offering an alternative; in this gap between the rhetoric of leaders of the party and the experience of the members, disillusion, anger, frustration and irrationality find perfect breeding grounds. If this doesn’t change, no ‘debate’ will halt BNP support.

Labour Party leaders – and no doubt leaders of the other parties too – use their national platforms to ask people to get involved. Thus grows the belief that it is people themselves who are changing, and that the era of mass politics has passed, that people are more interested in other things. With one hand this encouragement, with the other the systematic centralization of power and the persistent failure to give actual power to the representative organs that survive from the era when millions of people were members of political parties instead of less than a million between all of them.

No wonder then that ‘debate’ takes on the appearance of a colossus astride the national political scene – because it’s not backed by anything. Certainly not by any political activity except its lowest common denominator: delivering leaflets. This is as much true for the debate with the BNP as it is for the debate between Nick Clegg, David Cameron and Gordon Brown – just as it is true for the speechifying of Jon Cruddas and other semi-popular figures on the Left. Whatever the configuration of national politics, everyone knows what needs to be done on the ground – but none of them are actually doing it.

Enter the BNP.

I’m bored writing about Jon Cruddas. Every time that he opens his mouth, several sections of the chatterati trip over themselves to do homage, yet behind his veneer of radicalism there is not just a hollowness but a little Neil Kinnock waiting to burst out. So, instead of writing about Cruddas again, I’m going to link to my greatest hits collection.

“If Jon Cruddas is the future of the Left, we’re fucked” – a critique of Cruddas’ position following an interview he gave. In the interview, Cruddas basically comes across as Blair-lite and this is my attempt at debunking him.

“Events, dear boy, events” – part of an extended riposte to Tom Miller demonstrating the structure/agency and tactical disagreements of radical liberalism and Marxist materialism in trying to formulate ideas about what to do next.

“The widest possible movements and hegemonic strategy” – a discussion, with the aid of Raymond Williams, about Gramsci’s hegemony (which Cruddas is often talking about) and how Compass reduces such a revolutionary concept to electoral strategy.

“Cruddas is all piss and wind…” – an article which discusses Cruddas and the history of th soft-left, and how supporting them will simply involve re-running the 1980s, with the soft-left supporting the bad guys and emerging as another New Labour.

Other people have been considering Cruddas’ most recent words. Sunny at LibCon has a ten point plan to save Labour; HarpyMarx is not impressed with Cruddas, nor is Ten Percent, but Raincoat Optimism is. The Guardian on the other hand manages to write the most asinine post in the universe, making my case for me that political commentary should not a professional enterprise, but left to the amateurs who are just plain better at it.

Here’s the wannabee Tory chancellor Phil Hammond telling lies on live TV last night (go to 14mins 50 sec in to listen):

“We need to send a clear signal to the markets. Two of the credit rating agencies have already warned us that the government’s triple A credit rating will be at risk if the next government does not show greater determination than this government has so far demonstrated.”

How is this a lie? See this, this morning from Bloomberg:

“The UK and Spain are unlikely to lose their top credit ratings even after being ‘severely hit’ by the global economic crisis, Moody’s Investor Service said.

“Germany and France, other Aaa-rated countries which had been more affected by the crisis than Moody’s expected, remain ‘resistant,’ Pierre Cailleteau, managing director of sovereign risk at the ratings company, said in a statement today. The U.S. doesn’t face any ‘downward rating pressure’ in the next few years even as its balance sheet expands, Moody’s said.

“The global economy is emerging from the worst recession since the 1930s, supporting governments’ decisions to increase debt levels to finance spending. Officials from the Group of 20 nations this month expressed caution on the world economic outlook and judged it premature to start unwinding record-low interest rates and about $2 trillion in fiscal stimulus.

“‘Almost all aaa-rated sovereigns have been hit more severely by the global downturn than we expected earlier this year,’ Moody’s said. ‘Nevertheless, all Aaa countries now have stable outlooks, indicating that we do not expect rating downgrades over the near term.’”

The media is personality dominated. This is sort of expected these days when it comes to celebrity gossip, music and entertainment. When it comes to the news, however, you’d think that it would be less personality obsessed. There are individual politicians to talk to, men and women at the height of political power in this country – and those who want to be – but surely the commentators, pundits, columnists and journalists don’t need to be elevated to ‘personality’ status as well?

Polly Toynbee yesterday, with her latest attempt to refloat the New Labour corpse currently decomposing in Westminster, and David Marquand today with his paean to the potential for Cameron’s Conservatives, are examples of this. Polly Toynbee hasn’t said anything worthwhile since I’ve been reading the Guardian; it’s a continued rehash of the same arguments, which, by now, could be demolished by an A-level politics student – not even a top level one, one of the D-grades sitting sleeping at the back of the room.

“Labour should do this, and this, and this”. Yes Polly. “Labour is DOOOOOMED!” Thank you Polly. “Gordon Brown sleep walks to defeat”. We know, Polly. “Only PR will save Labour!” Shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down you malodorous wind bag. My patience has been slowly ebbing away under the constant deluge of content-free witterings from this ‘personality’. Anyone can draw up a list of things they want done in the dying days of this Parliament – the tricky part, the bit that should earn a salary, is telling us how to go from list to actuality and then doing it.

Which, of course, Polly can’t do – her weekly proclamations are self-evidently the maunderings of someone long since given up on achieving anything for Labour, or with Labour members.

David Marquand, on the other hand, is looking forward to the Conservatives, not backwards to Labour. Cameron could be the next Tom Paine! Cameron could finish Tony’s mission of devolution and set up the British State to meet the 21st century, casting down the ghosts of the ancien regime that currently walk the marble corridors of Whitehall. Oh what a dusty laugh must have emanated from that cadaverous relic of the Labour Right when he thought of the reaction such an article would provoke, for it must be a joke.

Alas.

“But the flood of illiberal measures unleashed by the Blair-Brown regime since 9/11 shows that, beneath the accoutrements of a civic democracy, the ancien regime is alive and well.

We live under a government that has almost certainly been complicit in torture; given state officials unprecedented power to snoop; undermined local democracy in England; eroded trial by jury; continued the Thatcherite assault on the public domain; presided over growing inequality; and sustained London’s ignoble role as a happy hunting-ground for the world’s ultra-rich. The gap between the state’s proclaimed civic values and its oligarchic practices is becoming too glaring to miss.”

Scarcely can such political illiteracy have graced the wide streets of Oxford, at least since the Oxford University Conservative Association’s last racist binge. It takes a Visiting Professor of the university, however to be able to conflate the sort of anti-democratic measures described with the ancien regime. After all, the democratic republics aren’t doing anything remotely similar to this; no torture, no snooping, no assaults on public services, no growing inequality. No Patriot Act. Whoops. I appear to have given myself away.

All this because once upon a time Toynbee and Marquand were prominent Labour figures, before becoming prominent SDP figures before eventually and by circuitous routes returning to Labour in the vanguard of Party Saviour Blair. It really causes one to question the qualifications needed to become part of the ‘liberal’ commentariat. And for the Right? Well, you can’t go far wrong with “fascism is left wing, hur hur” jokes, plus the odd reference to piccaninnies, the evils of promiscuity (double points if you’re having it away at the time) and so on, and you’re home free.

For politics, life seems to have become about getting one’s name in the byline – never mind what you’re actually saying. So here’s a thought. Nationalize every single national media outlet and instead of having paid commentators to write the “views” section of each paper, articles will be written by members of the public. Each article will be scrutinized for spelling, grammar and racism…I mean punctuation…and since papers won’t have to write cheques to Phillips, Hitchens, Toynbee, Marquand etc there should be more money for tea and biscuits for the office.

Indeed, take it further. A new reality TV show: everyone in the country can compete for the jobs of Nick Robinson and Jonathan Freedland. It’s not like they do much of use anyway. We can even sell a version to the Americans to replace Michael Tomasky and Justin Webb. Webb, under the new regime, would be remanded to an asylum for the inane. Or, if we don’t want to go down the reality TV route, we’ll simply pick someone at random out of all those people who apply. Watching political news will become like eating a packet of Revels: you never know what you’ll get.

Instead of going live to someone standing in Pennsylvania Avenue to ask for the ‘latest’ on any given situation, we’ll go live to the backyard of a nice girl from Exmoor to ask what she thinks is going on. Let’s face it, it can’t get much worse than comparing David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party to Britain’s property-hating anti-monarchist par excellence. Unless you’re Iain Dale.

I’m likely to cover the role of the big public sector unions in the potential resurgence of the left a fair bit in the next few posts, so reports that UNITE may be taken over soon by ‘leftwing insurgents’ – a rather dramatic way for the Sunday Times Political Editor to describe the possibility of more people voting for two candidates than two other candidates -  are pretty relevant.

But for this post, I’ll just focus on the way the said Political Editor reports it:

‘Westminster insiders believe that Unite, which has almost 2m members, is about to be taken over by left-wing insurgents who will sever the historic financial link with the Labour party.’

I’m sorry. Did I get that right?  Westminster insiders are telling the journalist what’s going on in the grassroots of the trade union movement?  How about checking stuff out with some trade union insiders?

In one fell swoop, we have revealed to us the shallowness of the mainstream political commentariat, as reflected by a Murdoch journo. 

For the commentariat, nothing is of any validity or importance if it’s not told to us by people in the Westminster village – presumably over cocktails.  And nothing is of political importance if it’s not about a political party’s immediate fortunes.

I’m glad there’s a chance of a challenge to the UNITE leadership.  I’m not so glad, for reasons set out here, that this may result in loss of Labour party affiliation, and will argue against such a loss. 

But most of all for the present I’m glad I can understand what politics actually is, much better than the political editor of the Times.

Martin Narey is the Chief Executive of Barnardo’s, and he is all over the front page of the Observer today with his call to ‘Take more babies away from bad parents’ (not that he actually uses these terms).

Naturally enough, in the ‘centre-left’ blogosphere, as defined by Iain Dale, the usual suspect is all over the story in a flash, displaying the highest level of moral indignation he can muster, and revelling in another opportunity to keep his trolls happy. 

His trolls are very happy, rushing in unopposed and unchallenged to condemn poor people in the Gorbals as a pointless underclass for whom sterilisation is by far the best option.

Yes, for this lot condemnation of Nu Liebour’s  ’nanny state’ is great, except when it come to the, erm, nanny state, where the state decides to take your children away if you can’t cope as well with grinding poverty as other people can with nice lives.  Well, not quite the nanny state, as you don’t get them back at night.

All good centre-left knockabout stuff, but let’s get back to Martin Narey and Barnardo’s for a moment.

Anyone who actually bothers to keep up with stuff, rather than just look at the front page of the weekend papers to see if there’s anything to tag along with, will know that this isn’t Martin Narey’s first such call for greater use of social work powers to remove children from their parents.  He made pretty well the same call on 24 January 2009 in the Sunday Telegraph, although there his call was more focused on the need to increase places in residential care rather than, as on this occasion, the need to increase adoption of babies.

In that piece, he writes: ‘It is important not to overreact in the aftermath of Baby P’s tragic death, the horror of Shannon Matthews’s dreadful childhood or the recent concerns over Doncaster.’ 

Yes, that’s the Doncaster case which has been in the news this week, shortly after which Narey chooses to do The Observer interview, and which is fully referenced in that article.  It may be important not to react, but Narey’s certainly happy to time his press coverage to maximum effect.

So why is Narey so keen to press the case in such a public arena, rather than just get on with presenting his evidence to the social work community that they need to be ‘braver’ in their decision making?

Well, I think Harry Fletcher assistant general secretary of the union for family court staff  may have been on to something when he said last time around: ‘Barnardo’s have a vested interest in residential homes because they run some of them.’

This time around, with the focus on adoption, it’s worth noting that Barnardo’s Fostering and Adoption Service  ‘work on behalf of, and in partnership with, a large number of local authorities across the UK. We are keen to develop new services………’

Just for clarity, that means that they have contracts for delivery of fostering and adoption services.   The overall income from contracts and public grants was £119m in the year to March 2008, up by around £8m on the previosu year, and that compares with £51m from fundraising and £27m for trading. 

While the annual accounts don’t give a breakdown between services, it’s fairly clear that fostering and adoption is an important area of Barnardo’s current business, and one itsk een to gorw under its fairly aggressive expansion strategy adopted since Martin Narey came in from the Prison Service in 2005.

Now I actually like Barnardo’s, and have been directly responsible for bringing in some of the money set out in the annual report.  They are respectful employers and the work I have seen is of a high quality; while I know nothing of their fostering and adoption service, I think some of their more developmental work, and work with young people, around confidence and rights, is excellent.  

I accept therefore that much of what drives Martin Narey to say what he’s been saying in recent months is out of genuine concern for the welfare and human rights of children in the UK, and that there is an acceptable interrelation between this commitment and a business strategy to do more of what Barnardo’s does by getting more local authorities to sign up to contracts for their services.

Nor do I have a huge problem with Martin Narey using the press cleverly, though I think timing his press releases as he does pushes it a little too far in the direction of cynical manipulation.  

The balance between a child’s right and the right of the family is a difficult one to achieve, and that is a big reason why the early articles Convention on the Rights of the Child are so complex.  There is validity, therefore, in seeking to open up debate about that balance.

I do think, in his desire to open up debate, Narey goes too far with his opening salvo, and overlooks utterly the negative conseqences of establishing state mechanisms which are much more keen to take children away.  Indeed such changes would impact negatively on some of the good work his own organization does with struggling, impoverished families, as  fear of the ‘social’ takes hold and all potentially helpful contact is avoided for fear of stigmatisation and removal of the child. 

Such stigmatisation is already a signficant factor in some Children’s Centre settings (this will be the focus of a separate article), and it’s worth noting that Barnardo’s holds major contracts for Children’s Centre delivery in Devon and Cumbria, at the very least.

Equally, and relatedly any move towards a greater willingness by the state to take children into care as an earlier option carries all the obvious risks of class bias amongst the ‘state agents’, of precisely the type that was displayed by the media over the tragic McCann case.

Opening up debate is fine, but it is important to look at all the reasons as to why it is being opened up, and to ensure that the debate once opened up is held responsibly.  I am not convinced that Martin Narey’s tactics meet those criteria.

But that, perhaps, is a judgment call, and one about which I could have a senisble debate with Martin Narey. 

What is much less acceptable, in my book, is for a supposedly serious Labour party politcian to lap up what he reads in the Sunday press, and present it without aforethought for the delight of his trolls and for his own narrow, career-focused  move towards the right in expectation of the gifts that might thereby come his way. 

Such self-serving shite has no place in the Labour party.  Not just my Labour party, anybody’s Labour party.  Tom Harris MP should take a look in the mirror.

The BNP are to appear on the BBC’s Question Time programme, and the Left is suddenly in uproar – divided into those who support the “No Platform” policy of not appearing beside BNP speakers and those who wish to take on the arguments of the BNP on national television. Amidst all this there are accusations that one side is afraid that, faced with BNP propaganda, fascism will conquer the ultimately irrational working class, and on the other there are accusations that people against the “No Platform” policy are soft on preventing the spread of fascism.

It should go without saying that I cast neither aspersion, and I think it is well known that I am a solid supporter of the “No Platform” policy of Left and socialist groups to the effect that a) every effort should be made to prevent the BNP getting a foothold in the public space and b) that if they do, no Left figure should grace the same public space, but that counter-demonstrations and counter-propaganda are the way to go. In this instance, the aim of the latter would be to distract attention from endless media rehashing of what the BNP said on Question Time.

There are a couple of deeper points which I think are being missed in the general debate between pro- and anti- “No Platform” positions.

First, that the media is not some socially neutral forum for disinterested public debate. Who acquires air time is a decision with many moderating influences: the hegemonic ideology (i.e. liberalism), class pressure, ‘political’ pressure, the potential intervention of the State are just some of these. All of these have to interact with the ethics and codes of practice internal to broadcast journalism, but these too are not simply predicated upon disinterested logic. They are socially mediated and subject to ideological and material pressures.

Most obviously this manifests itself in who gets invited to speak on any given show. The last time that the idea of the BNP appearing on the show was talked about, back in 2003, the programme was due to be filmed in Burnley. The rationale given for not inviting the BNP was that the members who would appear were only councillors, they were not MPs or MEPs. Agree or disagree with this, it is a clear ideological determination that privileges status as an MP or an MEP above the role of a councillor or even a person picked at random off the street or blogosphere.

Importantly, the determination is not made on the basis of cogency, truth-telling or any number of other key bases on which we could exclude the BNP (not to mention other panellists) and include people whom the BBC would never think to invite on Question Time.

With this in mind, there is absolutely no reason for Unite Against Fascism and other groups to condone inviting the BNP on to Question Time. There is a clear question of ideological difference involved – as there would be were Nadine Dorries or Phil Woolas or other lying shitbags invited, but the ideological difference is stretched to its most extreme possible when fascists are appearing in the national broadcast media. There is no reason why we shouldn’t make that difference clear and by popular action prevent, if possible, Nick Griffin’s appearance.

Two complaints are being made by people against “no platform” – one, that someone needs to challenge Griffin’s bullshit; two, that trying to stop him appearing simply feeds into the persecution and conspiracy narratives which the BNP like to play up.

I think the first complaint ignores the role of the Conservatives. Conservative HQ has put out a statement declaring that they would be “very happy” to field a shadow cabinet member against Griffin. Do we imagine for a moment that the Tories are going to offer a nuanced critique of the BNP? Hell no; they’re going to trumpet their own anti-immigration policies and the failure of Labour in this field. So now we have two people outbidding each other for the right-wing vote.

Will Labour or the Lib-Dems be able to call the BNP and Tories out on their proposals? Yeah, put Phil Woolas on, then we’ll have two Tories and a fascist.

Both Labour and Lib-Dem leadership each buy into parts of the same narrative; stress on resources, immigrants must integrate, ‘economic benefits’ of the free flow of labour etc. So on the one hand you have the genuinely racist parties, on the other you have parties with no solution but tinkering with the status-quo, which is not what people facing massive unemployment, the privatisation of public services, higher taxes and smaller pensions want to hear – rightly so, because the status quo sucks.

So to those people suggesting that the arguments of people like Griffin can be dealt with in a public forum, I’d like to ask, by whom? I think that too many people – especially the liberals I’ve had this conversation with – are liable to judge whether Griffin is ‘dealt with’ or not by whether or not their own views are espoused on air, rather than taking into account how the rest of the country will view things. From the point of view of Labour, the Lib-Dems and the Tories, that’s not heartening because its obvious many voters are unhappy with the answers they’re hearing.

Continuing along this theme that someone needs to challenge Griffin’s bullshit, I don’t see how it’ll happen. Griffin says X, a blatant lie, someone else says “you’re wrong”, Griffin says “no I’m not”. Worse, Griffin says X, someone else says “you’re a liar” and Griffin says, “Accusations of lies coming from a government which sold peerages for cash, which is funded up the arse by big business, of which peers have been suspended for taking cash for questions” and so on. And Griffin’s attacks, populist though they are, will be right – but are being put to the wrong use.

Meanwhile the Lib-Dem and Tory will nod their heads in sage smugness.

The second complaint, that stopping the BNP appearing will play into the persecution complex of the far right ignores two things. First, if people are so far gone as to believe that the far right are the victims of persecution (e.g. Griffin’s comment that “It’s like a fascist state!” was the highest point in the history of irony) then not much rational argument will sway them. Secondly, playing for the remaining sane people who are watching, there are ways to protest and act to make it clear that those against the BNP are not a minority or cranks.

That is how UAF people appeared with their egg-throwing stunt. This will not be the case if Jon Cruddas and all the credible Labour and socialist groups get their supporters together, call out the trades unions and stage a massive protest to demand that Griffin’s participation be shelved by the BBC. Whether it happens or not, at that point, the Left is at least acting to challenge the overriding media theme, which will hang on every word that comes out of Griffin’s mouth – not to mention out of the mouths of however many fascist supporters he manages to cram into the actual Question Time event.

For there will be such supporters, every one of them starting their sentence with disavowals of racism, or claiming never to have supported the BNP (while hastily covering up the swastikas tattooed on their arm). I trust the British working class to see through such charlatanry, but this is despite rather than because of everything that will happen on any political show where Nick Griffin is allowed to present himself as affable, reasonable and defender of everything British. With all this in mind, why do it?

Get the lying racist toerag off the air, off the front page and keep him off.

See also: The sky is not falling down from AVPS, a straightforward “No” from Susan and “No Platform” is good manners from Lenin’s Tomb.

The terrorists, obviously, says Tom Harris, MP, in an article which blasts ‘the Left’ for assuming that the invasion of Iraq might have had something to do with the 7/7 bombings in London. Such an argument is ‘blindingly stupid’, says Harris. Yet I am forced to point out: after Spain withdrew its troops from Iraq, there were no more bombings. It would have been a massive political own-goal for Al-Quaeda or its sister-cells to bomb one of the non-combatant Western states.

No one expects terrorists to be sensible, but they aren’t stupid. To claim that terrorists are solely to blame for their actions is to maintain that they woke up one morning and decided to kill people, for no reason. And we know they had reasons: they told us. The words of the 7/7 bombers themselves should be explanation enough of who the terrorists blame. These are the words of Mohammed Sidique Khan:

“Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security you will be our targets and until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight. We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.”

Whatever ‘objective’ interests might have been served by the bombers, they believed in their own hearts that Britain’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan demanded that they kill fellow citizens. Shehzad Tanweer, in his video, mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan explicitly. So here’s my point: one doesn’t have to agree with the Islamist critique of the United Kingdom to accept the words of these men, that their motivations were British involvement in two wars in the Muslim world.

So on what basis does Tom Harris call us all ‘dishonest’ and ‘craven’ for admitting this?

It’s easy for such a small-minded little twerp as Harris (who, in his article attacking the thoughts of a New Statesman journalist can’t resist such snide comments as “[He's] not nearly as funny as his brother”) to live in the Westminster bubble and regard other people’s lives as necessarily sacrificed for a greater good. But exactly how does that make him different from the Islamist terrorists? Both sides treat Afghanistan, Iraq and the UK as a chessboard over which to move their pieces, never mind that they worsen each society by playing so.

To have endorsed this state of affairs with their votes and their silence is the crime of Tom Harris and his colleagues – and they should be under no illusions: we cannot pin the rise of terrorism on them, but with their gung-ho militarism, they brought it to these shores.

See also: The Logic of the Suicide Bomber.

1.  The local

The other day I wrote (at my local blog, the Bickerstaffe Record) about the failure of my local Conservative council, in West Lancashire, even to approach Serco Operating Leisure Ltd, to which it has contracted out the management of its leisure facilities, about a reduction of the contract price to help the council through what it considers a difficult financial climate.

In brief, the council has tied itself into a 15 year contract involving a £1million subsidy a year to Serco.   Now it says it needs to make savings of around £1.5million per year, is cutting 57 jobs and a load of services, and while all other divisions of the council suffer, Serco’s contract price remains unaffected.

Of course legally the council can do nothing, because a contract is a contract, however badly negotiated it is – and this one’s really badly negotiated by the council – but a refusal by the council even to approach Serco to see if they can ‘do the right thing’ reveals a lot about both partners in the contract.

Now comes the news that the Serco share price has risen some 27% and revenues are uo 31% (hat tip: Flipchart Faiy Tales and Vino).   As the Daily Telegraph reports it:

‘Holes in public finances mean governments are seeking to outsource services in order to lower costs while maintain the quality of services and this has helped Serco to secure a record number of contracts so far this year, £4bn, and revenues of £1.95bn.’

2.  The logic

In the way the Telegraph sets this out, of course, lies the assumption that the private sector can magically maintain service quality at a lower cost – an assumption which is  symptomatic of a wider ‘private good/public good’  kneejerk reaction amongst Conservatives.

This  is a convenient rightwing fiction, and one which has been accepted without critical examination by the Labour government in its drive for ‘modernisation’ of public services, but which conceals an obvious truth – a truth ackowledged in an unguarded moment of clarity by Shadow Minister for Education Nick Gibb:

‘The trouble with allowing companies to make a profit from providing schools is that it take money out of the education system, significant sums of money out.’ (hat tip: Angela, offline)

In the case of my own council’s transfer of services to Serco, the claim that services have been unaffected or even improved has been proved palpably false (by me), as usage of leisure facilities has plummeted, prices have soared (though Serco has tried to conceal this through mathematically flawed ‘average’ price rise figures), and deliberate efforts to starve poorer areas of investment in favour of richer areas have taken place.

Such is the cost of the profit margins, the payments to shareholders, which drive private sector firms like Serco to expand their business with the public sector in the way they now do (hat tip: Duncan, offline).

None of this is rocket science.  What comes out as profit must necessarily go in as cost somewhere.

Of course private operators can reduce costs by seeking to lower the terms and conditions of staff, following their transfer from the local authority (or offer reduced terms to new staff joining), although the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations (1981) (TUPE) (revised in 2006) still offer a level of protection.

However,  such cost reductions take time to work through and there are operational difficulties in developing two tier payment structures, and many private operators will prefer in the shorter term to combine such measures (e.g. pension changes) with the running down of services, and alongside contract negotiations which exploit local government middle management without the expertise to develop contracts that guarantee long term service quality standards for service users, let alone guarantee anything ressembling equity of provision.

Such niceties of quality and equity of service provision matter little to Conservative councils like mine, of course, and many have developed ruthlessly efficient PR machines (and the effective corruption of scrutiny processes) to ensure that real cuts, and real developing inequities, go unnoticed by the media, and are difficult to pin down as such by information-poor residents.

Residents  may complain singly and even occasionally loudly about price rises and reduced services, but lack the power to do anything substantial in the absence of  solidaristic support from councillors and local parties, whose roles have been moved away from this area of real political  involvement by compliant New Labour diktat (not a subject of this post, but an important dimension).

Increasingly, also, Conservative councils such as mine are seeking to use these PR machines to jockey for position as the most ‘innovative’ players in the service reduction and privatisation game, in expectation of the credit and the baubles their political masters may receive from an incoming Conservative government.

Leading the Conservative pack on this at the moment is Barnet EasyCouncil,  but many others aspire to this position of Conservative cutting edge profile.

3. The legalities

Lurking behind this new rhetoric of ‘service redesign’ and ‘refocusing on priorties’ lies the full, dark  agenda of a prospective Conservative government – an agenda revealed by the quiet but determined work now going on, largely behind the media scenes, to change the whole legal framework within which local government operates, and to do ‘within weeks’ if they come to power.

This change comes in the form of the Conservative-dominated Local Government Association’s campaign, explicitly backed with the ‘in weeks’ timetable by David Cameron at its annual conference in July, to introduce a new ‘General Power of Competence’ to local government.

Such legislation is being proposed, say the Conservatives, because the current Local Government Act of 2000, which gives councils the power to act in the interests’ of their citizens’ well-being (and a duty to develop a community strategy to that end), does not go far enough.

As evidence of this, they cite the recent ruling by the Court of Appeal that the Local Government Act does not empower a number of local authorities to form London Authorities Mutual Limited to provide its mutual insurance and risk management.

That’s pretty dull stuff, and the precise reasons for the Appeals court judgment need not detain us here, since in any event it is clear enough that other powers already exist which could carry forward the mutual insurance idea without the need for new legislation.   As the Local Government Chronicle report I link to above, and written by a specialist lawyer in the area, says:

‘Councils do not have to wait for Parliament or the courts to revisit the wellbeing power’s breadth. Parliament has already provided a wide range of other powers which allow complex and pro-active endeavours. These include: Best Value (section 3 Local Government Act 1999), which enables councils to improve efficiency and participate in joint venture companies; Section 12 of the Local Government Act 2003, which enables councils to invest in any purpose relevant to their functions; Sections 93 and 95 of the 2003 Act, which enable councils to respectively charge and trade……’

What should concern us instead is that this technical issue (of the relationship between UK legislated well-being powers and EU procurement legislation) is being used as a pretext by the Conservatives to introduce brand new legislation, and that this legislation – in an area of government which is a closed book to much of the media –  is being earmarked as top priority by Conservative HQ.

It should concern us because, under the guise of a general power of competence for local councils to do what they want to do for their populations, we will get legislation which allows councils like Barnet, and West Lancashire, to get away without doing much less for them, and doing it much more inequitably.

Of course, we haven’t seen a draft of the bill they propose to rush through yet, and of course what will appear if the Conservatives come to power will be a very short bill with an awful lot of Statutory Instrument detail to follow - trickery the Conservatives worked out how how to use with the NHS legislation in the late 1980s.

But you can bet your bottom dollar that what will appear in time, if the Conservatives come to power, will be the green light for councils to stop doing many of the things they have to do at the moment, and to palm off as many of their responsibilties to the private secotr as they can, with even less imposition of uncomfortable things like democratic scrutiny (i.e. the stuff I try to do) than there is of ‘outsourcing’ arrangements right now.

In the shorter term, you might, then ,expect to see Tory councils use this new freedom to do as little as they can and to, for example, abandon their current statutory duty to provide emergency housing for the homeless, or to undertake proper food premises inspection, or even bother to make any kind of plan for the wellbeing of their residents at all.   All they’ll need to do is give a reasons why such things are not needed, and bob’s your uncle – that’s that service cut.

Of course, the PR machinery of Conservative councils will not be cut, and a compliant media will lap up stories of how these ‘progressive’ Tory councils are suddenly able to slash costs and council taxes, and the race to the council tax/service provision bottom will being in earnest.

Soon enough, the hard won really progressive gains won by generations of local government activists, from the Poplar councillors onwards, will be eroded in the name of new efficiencies and, quite perversely, the name of ‘general competence’.

While the Thatcher government couldn’t achieve its total demolition of the local government function, Cameron’s cuddlies will achieve it by the back door, and Nicolas Ridley’s wish, set out in his 1988 pamphlet ‘Local Right’, that local councils should ‘meet just once a year to award all the council service contracts to private firms’, will come much, much closer to reality.

Democratic overview? Equality of provision? Who would need that in this brave new world of local government?

4.  The Left

And if that sounds a bit scary and out of leftfield for the left, that’s because it is.

Our compassionate Conservative HQ has done a very efficient job to date at keeping the reality of this agenda under wraps, even as its favourite Tory councils scrabble for position to deliver that reality for them.

And of course if what I set out here gains wider coverage, the Conservative will say that they intend nothing of the sort, and that I am some kind of wild-eyed conspiracy theorist leftie.  That’s only to be expected.

Where does that leave the left, and especially the left that understands this kind of thing?

Well, it leaves us with a challenge, and it’s the same kind of challenge I set out here in relation to the little-known, less understood, but far-reaching corrpution in the international credit rating agency industry.

The challenge is to draw together the various types of activism within the left – from direct to indirect – and raise the profile of what is being planned so that effective action can be taken to combat it.  It is rising to this challenge, incidentally, which will be a key theme in parts 4 and 5 of my current ‘in development’ 6 parter on the future of the left of Labour party.

This obscure area of local government legislation should be one of the (Labour) left’s tactical areas of engagement, because if we get it right we stand a chance of winning, and sticking it to the right in a way which also develops our credentials as a force of socialism to be reckoned with.

If we don’t bother, or if we get it wrong, the consequences for those who actually depend on the services of EasyCouncils, up and down the land, will be large.