Though Cowards Flinch

This week’s New Statesman interview with Martin McGuinness lets the Northern Irish Deputy First Minister off extremely lightly, allowing him to appear as the romantic Republican, standing astride a bitter past with the promise of a future.

A lot of the interview concentrates on personal questions, such as whether McGuinness killed anyone as an IRA man or whether he lets death threats bother him, but the political part is remarkably weak.

McGuinness gets away with vague answers talking about how he wants to “move forward”, to “work with [Peter Robinson] in a positive, constructive way”, to “end the vicious cycle” and so on, not actually saying much.

Politics in Northern Ireland is much more mundane than a relentless focus on “the Troubles” makes it. Politicians are charged with delivering the same services as elsewhere, within the same constraints. Unbelievably, Martin McGuinness isn’t asked anything about the substantive part of what he does either as Deputy First Minister or as part of the Stormont Executive.

A passing reference to how his faith doesn’t challenge the view that everyone should be treated equally is about it.

The closest the interview comes to a challenging question was to ask whether or not a Tory government might damage McGuinness’ ’cause’. This is an important issue, because the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement, and the functions of the devolved government, operate at the sufferance of Westminster.

To this question the DFM responded:

Well, I’ve met with Owen Paterson [the Conservative shadow Northern Ireland secretary] and David Cameron, and they made it clear that they are prepared to stand faithfully by the agreements that have been made. Being involved constructively in the north of Ireland is a steep learning curve. I hope whatever government is elected will come at this as positively as Labour did in recent times.

Which is nice but rather sidesteps a key issue, which goes beyond the institutions themselves. There is nationalist speculation that the Conservatives are attempting to negotiate some deal between UCUNF (formerly the Ulster Unionists, now allied directly to the Tory Party) and the DUP, as a way to outmanoeuvre the nationalists.

This raises questions over how easily nationalists can deal with a Tory government if they have to watch their back, fearing that each initiative might be aimed at weakening the nationalists rather than furthering peace.

Interestingly, McGuinness’ view on what the Tories are prepared to do flatly contradicts the pronouncements of Owen Paterson, Tory NI spokesman. Called on by Peter Robinson to ratify any potential agreement on devolution of policing and justice, Paterson said;

“We are facing a major economic crisis should we win the next election. We cannot give any guarantees on any spending programmes.”

That’s not even the issue I myself consider important. With George Osborne giving the lie to David Cameron’s softly-softly approach on cuts in spending, in the aftermath of an election, Northern Irish politicians have got to be wondering how this is going to end up affecting them.

Even without immediate spending cuts in the block grant, the Executive needs to find ‘savings’ of some £400 million, in view of pressures like the anti-water charges campaign, which has turned the imposition of the double taxation on water usage into something akin to political suicide.

Predictions by Margaret Ritchie of crisis in the housing department, of shortfalls rising to £100m per year, directly impact upon the stability of Northern Ireland. Whether it’s re-housing people forced out by sectarian, anti-immigrant or even anti-police attacks, or providing for an area with perpetually high unemployment, housing is going to be squeezed and the results may be violent.

There’s talk of increasing the regional rates, which disproportionately affect lower and middle value properties: everything above £400,000 is capped. One hopes this will have eased, following the end of Belfast’s London-like house prices boom, but that in turn reduces the amount that can be harvested.

Capital projects will be put on hold, shelving plans for hospitals, schools and roads (and probably increasing the excess capacity in related industries), to the tune of £170 million. And then there’s the issue of a Tory government whose first priority is to stabilise a credit rating which isn’t under threat.

Perhaps McGuinness should have been asked, with his party touted (however unlikely) to occupy the First Minister spot after the next Assembly elections, how Sinn Fein intends to reconcile this with its rhetoric about how working people are being asked to pay for ‘the greed of the government, bankers and the developers’.

Words can’t describe how horrified I was when I picked up on this story through the BBC last night.

Hinchingbrooke District Hospital in Cambridgeshire is struggling with its budget, having to take a £40m loan from the NHS to stay in the black. The hospital is now being eyed up by 5 different Private firms, that want to take total control over the management on a for-profit basis. Interest arose in the hospital after the strategic health authority put the management responsibilities out for open tender due to the financial issues at the trust. If the deal goes through it will become the first NHS hospital in Britain to be operated by a private company!

In my opinion, private companies have no place in the NHS, profit should not factor into the health service full stop! The primary, and indeed, only objective of a hospital should be to provide high quality healthcare to its patients, not make profits for private investors. These companies don’t want to run a hospital due to some altruistic feeling of duty towards the community, they want to do what all private companies do, make money. As a spokesperson for one of the firms involved said, “this is a very attractive business opportunity.”

There is no doubt that the trust have made some serious errors with their financial management, but what they need is some expert assistance to get past this, not to let the private sector loose on it!

Despite some troubles with the finances, the trusts Chief Executive Mark Millar, has been praised in the local press. A survey by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement rated the trust second in the country for reducing waiting times and received praise for improving a number of other standards of care.

It’s clear that the problems within Hinchingbrooke are solely financial and nothing to do with the quality of care it provides. Now I’m not saying that this isn’t a problem, it clearly is, but this is a problem that the Strategic Health Authority and the Department of Health should be dealing with in conjunction with the hospital staff, not the market.

Allowing private control in this hospital would set a worrying precedent. How long before media-ridiculed hospitals are being lined up for private takeover? As a spokesperson for Unison said yesterday, “this is a dangerous experiment”.

If the Tories win the election, on the back of Labour’s perceived corruption, how are we to regard Conservative Health spokesman Andrew Lansley? Lansley has received £21,000 in donations from the wife of the Chairman of Care UK, one of the firms bidding for control of the hospital. But of course his decisions will be entirely impartial. Gordon Brown himself received £5,000 from the chair of BUPA, and the links between both parties and private healthcare stretch beyond this.

At the moment we have a system of profit-making Independent Sector Treatment Centres, to which the NHS contracts out operations and which are anything but value for money. American private health insurers are already looking for a cut of the pie; how long before they’re bankrolling a selection of politicians to get it for them?

Letting private companies run our hospitals is totally contrary to the principles of the NHS. I bet Nye Bevan must be spinning in his grave! Sadly this is just the next step in the policy of marketisation and private procurement within the NHS, which has flourished since ’97. Numerous organisations such as the LRC, the Socialist Party, Keep the NHS Public, several Unions and Compass, have all been warning against this course of action for some time, and it unfortunately seems that they all might be right.

The government needs to take action now! The Department of Health should step in to prevent private acquisition and help Hinchingbrooke solve its budget issues. The NHS is a public service, probably the most cherished public service. No matter how far privatisation has been allowed to creep into other aspects of our society we cannot allow it here. It is up to those of us who believe in a publicly funded, publicly operated NHS, to resist these attempts at privatisation. It is unclear so far what kind of opposition is being organised, but as soon as it is, we will cover it here.

Lets hope that no campaign is necessary, and that the Department of Health will resolve this issue swiftly and come to a reasonable solution. Unfortunately such intervention doesn’t seem to be forthcoming so I would advise anyone reading this to follow the situation closely. This is not just a problem for the people who rely on Hinchingbrooke, if this is allowed to continue, then one day soon, it could be coming to a hospital near you!

Presumably most people will have heard the remarks of Nicholas Winterton about how terrible it is that MPs should be required to travel in standard class, rather than first class. Paul has already explained some of the factual errors in what he says, such as the argument that parliamentarians would relegate their privileges below that of councillors.

What I wanted to look at was the easy ride Nicholas Winterton has got from the Daily Mail, compared to the repeated headlines and furore in the final part of last year every time Labour MP Quentin Davies made similarly outraged remarks, beginning with the respective titles of the first pieces to come up from a google search.

‘People in standard class are totally different’: Veteran Tory Sir Nicholas Winterton on why MPs should be able to travel first class.

‘It’s all just a joke’, declares minister shamed over £20,000 bell-tower expenses claim.

Tory grandee Sir Nicholas Winterton  today claimed that MPs should be allowed to claim expenses to travel first-class on trains because passengers in standard class are ‘a totally different type of people’.

In an astonishing outburst, Sir Nicholas said that people travelling on cheaper standard tickets had ‘a different outlook on life’ and were unlikely to be working or studying during their journey.

And he claimed that MPs deserved to be treated like businesspeople and senior public servants and should be allowed to claim for first-class travel between their constituencies and London so they can work.

The MP’s extraordinary comments came after he told Total Politics magazine
said he was ‘ infuriated’ that politicians had to travel with ordinary members of the public.

Sir Nicholas spoke of his outrage that he has to ‘stand when there are no seats’.

Sir Nicholas told BBC Radio 5 Live’s Stephen Nolan show today: ‘If I was in standard class, I would not do work because people would be looking over my shoulder all the time, there would be noise, there would be distraction and, I am sorry, if I am doing work I want to concentrate on that. Why do businesspeople travel first class?’

Asked whether he thought standard-class passengers behaved differently from those with first class tickets, Sir Nicholas replied: ‘Yes, I do. They are a totally different type of people.

‘There are lots of children, there is noise, there is activity…

‘They have a different outlook on life. I very much doubt whether they are undertaking serious work and study, reading reports and amending reports which MPs do when they are travelling.’

Both Davies and the Wintertons have ripped off the taxpayer. Both Davies and Winterton have made extraordinary, selfish, ridiculous remarks in the aftermath of the expenses scandal. For Davies, poor old MPs are being victimised. For Winterton, MPs can’t use headphones so they can get on with their work while travelling, like the rest of the population.

They have to travel first class.

Even the op-ed pieces (for both the above are straight ‘news’) dealing with the Winterton pair are almost gentle. Nice to see our media hasn’t lost its flair for even-handedness.

Nicholas Winterton, Macclesfield MP, in interview:

“They want to stop members of parliament travelling first class,” he said. “That puts us below local councillors and officers of local government. They all travel first class. Majors in the army travel first class.

West Lancashire Scheme for Payment of Member’s Allowances (page12)

Councillors can only claim the costs of an ordinary fare (or special, cheaper fare if available) when using public transport. For all forms of transport, Councillors should only claim the standard or second-class fare.

Nicholas Winterton, eh?  You couldn’t make him up.

(h/t: Tchee on twitter)

I really, really don’t want to spend my allocated TCF time over the next three months rebutting Tory bollox in the cause of Labour upsetting odds in the election. 

I’ve got loads of dead interesting stuff to write about, honest, not least an open-minded response to the increasingly well-read Giles on his colleague’s no-doubt utterly parameterized bollox on wage bargaining, if he ever gets round to sending me the report in the first place.

 Oh, and a Beginners’ Guide for Strike Organizers, based on my experiences of being a surprisingly good strike organizer ages ago (though see below for initial tips if you’re keen to get going).

But heh ho, duty calls, and as it is quite likely that this utter, utter nonsense from Iain Dale will start to be used by the Tories quite a lot over the next few weeks, I feel bound to spend a few minutes rebutting it.

Daley’s claim is, in keeping with his general being, quite simple:

Every Labour government in history has left office with unemployment higher than when it took office. Fact.

Oh gawd, I’m bored already, but I must press on……

Post-war statistics are taken from the ONS tables available here. Estimates for pre-war are as per the links, though data are a bit patchy for early in the century. 

To keep it simple and consistent I’ll focus on claimant data, where that data is available, rather than the more appropriate International Labour Organization method of unemployment calculation that the Tories under Thatcher and Major refused to bring in because it would have revealed much higher levels of ‘real’ unemployment.  (My technical post on this is here if you can be arsed.  The key point is that times of low unemployment these two measure tend to diverge, and come together at times of high unemployment.  Tom has a good post on it.)

Let’s start by looking at each of the Labour governments. 

1924 Only formed a coalition government with the liberals because the Tories refused to form a government despite having most seats.  Coalition fell apart after nine months.  This graph (page 4) suggests unemployment down in from 1923, but we won’t quibble.

1929-31 Yup, unemployment up.  Labour came to power in June 1929.   Little thing called the Wall Street Crash, October 1929, followed by major depression in the world economy.

1945 -51 Yup, unemployment up slightly perhaps, with 1951 figure at 281,000, though a 1945 comparative figure not readily available.  In 1945 there was, as you might have guessed, a war economy with pretty damn low unemployment

1964 – 70 Unemployment up from 413,000 to 640,000.

1974 – 1979 Unemployment up from 487,000 to 1,077,000.

1997 – now  Unemployment up on where it started and won’t get back to 1997 levels in time for general election.  Small thing called massive worldwide financial crisis and biggest recession since 1930s made it happen, but unemployment now coming down at same time as GDP starts to grow.

Now let’s have a look at the Conservative record, shall we?

 1900 – 06 Records (from union membership) too patchy for accurate record, but probably up slightly according to this graph (p.25)

1922 -23 Unemployment down from around 1,900,000 to 1,600,000 according to this (p.4)

1924 -29 Unemployment up from around 1,300,000 to 1,500,000 according to this (p.4)

1931-45 Unemployment up steadily in 1930s after Wall Street Crash, exacerbated by double dip in 1937.  High unemployment stopped by external incident called World War II, which many people consider to have been worse than unemployment.

1951-64 Unemployment up from 261,000 in 1951 to 413,000 in 1964, despite MacMillan saying ‘we’ve never had it so good’.

1970-74 Unemployment down from 640,000 in 1970 to 487,000 in February 1974.

1979-97 Unemployment up from 1,077,000 in May 1979 to 1,620,000 in May 1997, with a peak of 3,300,000 in 1986.

And that’s the substance of Dale’s argument.  Technically he may be correct (save the lack of data for 1924 and comparative data for 1945), but it is utterly meaningless because since the war unemployment grew fairly steadily under both parties from a very low post-war base, and the pre-war period is largely dominated by the Wall Street crash and an inadequate policy response in a pre-Keynes era.

Since the war the two main periods of Conservative government have been marked by growing unemployment overall, and unemployment grew massively and remained high for years after what was a milder recession than the 2008-09 one.  Along the way major de-industrialisation took place and consequent long-term unemployment patterns were established. 

The only time unemployment went down under the Tories post-war, it did so from a very low base in the first place, and by less than 200,000.  This is massively outweighed by the millions of extra people on the dole, quite needlessly and long term, under the subsequent Tory government.

A much better measure of success around unemployment is how well governments have been at getting the rate down after recession.  The tables I set out here tell that story of two poor Conservative responses, and one more effective Labour one. It’s a story Dale and his ilk would prefer not to hear.

Initial strike organization tips

Initial tip 1 : don’t diss middle management when they’d really like to be on strike with you;

Initial tip 2: hide the superglue from the overly Direct Action-focused comrades;

 Initial tip 3:  if providing emergency cover, make a note of what cover’s been agreed for when you get back to work and find you’re being asked to work with less cover;

 Initial tip 4: avoid picket line romance unless you want to end up as an ageing, slightly frustrated radical with two kids and a very wonderful though not particularly revolutionary lifestyle in a small Lancashire village

 Initial tip 5: If asked to make a big speech with absolutely no preparation to a very large number of people and the TV cameras, probably best to run and hide).

Note: actual post on this will be serious.

Well, alright, not all that is wrong.

But in the context of this excellent ongoing discussion about the future of the Labour party and its membership (to which I’ve not yet contributed sufficiently as result of lack of clear head), I found this little phrase from our friend Tom Harris - in an otherwise harmless enough post – illuminating:

I vividly remember visiting a Network Rail signal control centre as the rail minister and then meeting the local Labour MP and some of his activists and having my photo taken with them outside the station.

‘His activists?’   For fuck’s sake, Tom, it makes the Labour party sound positively feudal.

There’s a lot of good discussion bubbling along about how the Labour grassroots might, or might not, take back control of the Labour party and set it in a more socialist direction.  I’m hopeful.  As part of this, though, we need to get to the heart of what is wrong with a lot of local Labour parties at the moment – a culture of absolute deference to the MP, and more broadly to the PLP.

I’ve got a lot of time for my MP, who does all the things a hardworking local MP should do.  But I know that she knows that I have my own mind, that I am no-one’s property, and that I don’t think any member of the local party should be. 

MPs are (or should be) party delegates; they are people local parties send to parliament, not simply to do all their bidding certainly, because that removes the sense of trust and confidence in their independence of thought and action that you put in them when you select them, but whom you can rightly except to report back to the party, and where appropriate seek views and guidance from that party.

There has been a significant shift away from this conception of what an MP is, and I would contend that it is this cultural shift toward an unseemly (in socialist terms) deference which is one of the most damaging shifts in the party in the last 30 years.

I have set out here how I think, organizationally, a shift back towards member power might be brought about.   But this can only work if, at the same time, all of us in the Labour Party recognise and acknowledge openly that MPs are not demi-gods.

And I’m sure that Tom, with whom I’ve just had quite a civilised engagement over high-speed rail, will think I’m overreacting to the wording of his speed-written post.  And yes, it is just a word. 

But I’m no-one’s activist.  I’m a socialist.

As is well-known enough, I have no sense of humour to speak of.  Indeed, Cllr Bob Piper contends that I am a ‘dour humourless git who can’t take a joke’.  And he’s in the same party, so I must be a right prattish killjoy.

So, as this esteemed member of the twitterati has not been slow to point out, I’m perhaps not the best person to judge whether the Conservatives’ new foray into humorous anti-Labour posters (pictured) hits the spot, or not.

But as a self-important, pseudo-intellectual twat of a leftie analyst, I am in an excellent position to point out the following key aspect to the new campaign.

 While the Labour posters posted at mydavidcameron.com tend to satirise the policies and baser motives of the main opposition political party, the first attempt at humour in this vein by the Conservatives is not a direct and poltically legitimate attack on the opposition party.  Rather it is reflective of the party’s general attitude to those members of society that it considers to be ‘beneath’ them, and is redolent of a general conception, on the part of the Conservatives of the ‘feckless poor’.  

This makes them unfit to govern, as they do not have the interests of a large section of society at heart.

I trust that was dour enough for you all.

It also suggest that Mr Dale, who presented the poster and commented on it in a favourable light, is  – along with his Tory colleagues – more open to a class-war strategy than he might care to admit openly.

The newspaper comment pages and think tank websites have been alight for the past couple of weeks, with discussion on the Wright Committee and it’s recommendations for reform of Parliamentary procedure. Praises are being sung and accusations made and the consensus seems fairly clear, those in favour of the recommendations being made by Labour back bencher Tony Wright, are not happy with the Government’s course of action. Upon ascending to the comfort of no. 10, Gordon Brown proclaimed that he wished to see massive reform of Parliament, he reaffirmed this at the height of the expenses scandal, but now it would seem this appetite for change has fizzled out.

These reforms are exactly what the House of Commons need, for too long the executive has had free reign over the business of the House, the ability of backbench MP’s to hold the executive to account are vastly overrated. The Presidential manner in which Tony Blair’s Government operated only perpetuated this inefficient culture, and sadly despite the optimism of many commentators, Gordon Brown hasn’t been much different.

This subject raises fundamental questions about how our system of Government operates in practice and how we believe it operates in the ideal. Anyone who has ever studied Law or Politics will remember the arrow laden charts used to explain the virtues of our bicameral legislature, the limitations on the will of the Executive. The basic idea being that the Government is not the supreme force in British governance, the House of Commons is. While this simplified analysis is basically correct, when we study the practical implementations we soon realise that the ability of the Commons to effectively scrutinise the Executive is blatantly flawed.

The fact of the matter is that many pieces of contentious legislation that we have seen over the years have made it onto the Statute book without ever being fully debated, and without much chance of being stopped. Under the current arrangements, the Government of the day has complete control over the business of the House, and whilst the Commons does have some limited oversight over this process (they are allowed to ask some questions once a week) the final say always rests with the Government, so inconvenient legislation, like that proposed by backbenchers, can be smothered, whatever support it has.

It was in the latter part of the 19th Century, that Standing Order 14 was introduced, it was this rule that has allowed the dominance of the Executive to continue unchallenged today, almost 130 years later. Since then, the Executive arms of the government have been expanded by policy groups and consultants directly responsible to No. 10. This has reflected broader moves away from the representative arms of government, towards bureaucracies like Primary Care Trusts – ultimately responsible to Ministers, only nominally responsible to a supine parliament.

So what are the proposals for change? The Wright Committee has made several recommendations that could vastly alter this state of affairs. Firstly, election of Select Committee members by secret ballot, diverting the task of appointing people to these extremely important positions, away from the Party Whips transferring the power to the House of Commons as a whole.

The second, and in my opinion the most important, of these recommendations, is the abolishment of Standing Order 14, and the establishment of a Business Committee, comprised of backbench MP’s from all Parties, that would acquire the duty of scheduling debates and votes in the House. The benefits of this could be far-reaching, the Government would lose the ability to force important parts of its programme through the Commons without the scrutiny that any self-respecting democracy should demand.

These recommendations are nothing new, the Hansard Society, amongst others, have been calling for such changes for some time now. Gordon Brown at one point before the summer recess seemed determined to realise it, demanding that the Wright Committee speed up its work to ensure their recommendations would be available for a slot on the Parliamentary schedule before the General Election, which they kindly did. But unfortunately, the tune seems to have changed and this where the criticisms have originated.

The Government have decided to table the proposals as a set of non-amendable resolutions for a vote, ironically using the powers the reforms aim to remove to do so. The drawback here is that the proposals cannot be properly debated and just one objection from any member of the house could derail them, which there is certainly a possibility of. Not that these proposals aren’t welcomed, they are, just the manner in which they are being introduced may anger some MP’s, who may seek to vote against simply because of the process by which they are being presented to the house.

If the Government is serious on these reforms, and really want to “seize the moment to lift our politics to a higher standard”, (so said GB), then the course of action should be clear, if we are to avoid defeat and blatant hypocrisy. The resolutions should be tabled as fully amendable, for an open debate. Obviously this needs to be done quickly, the vote is currently scheduled for the 4th March, so we are faced with the prospect of these vital reforms being crushed by just one MP in just a matter of weeks.

This really is a no brainer, despite the obvious democratic benefits, the Parliamentary Labour Party should see this as a serious boost to their ability to oppose an incoming Cameron Government, no matter how weak such a Government may be. So now it is in the hands of Harriet Harman as leader of the house to stand up and do the right thing! I can’t for the life of me imagine why there has been such a reckless handling of what could turn out to be the legacy of the Brown administration, now all we can do is wait and see what happens.

Party affiliation is a key organisational question for a Marxist, not one of sentiment. This is why, when New Labour published a sentimental campaign video hijacking half a century of social democracy, the reaction from many was disgust. We could not believe that New Labour saw itself as part of the pro-welfare state tradition even while dismantling it. Processes like this define the primary question for socialists: in or out of Labour?

Social processes and Labour’s role
There are two struggles worth speaking of and in both of them the Labour Party has played a negative role. The first is in the marketisation and privatisation of public services, essentially redistributing public funds into private coffers, with the added bonus of undermining workers’ rights. The second is in the prevention of a class based response to these and other pressures of capitalist retrenchment, resulting in an impetus towards right-wing populism and anti-politics.

I think these things are pretty obvious, so I’m not going to dwell on them. Equally evident, however, is the desire of many Labour Party members to oppose their leaders. There are several dozen MPs who signed the EDM demanding a TU Freedom Bill, who’ve opposed privatisations, illiberal terror laws, protested the dissolution of the welfare state and the victimisation of claimants as being lazy reprobates deserving of our moral judgment.

These MPs, and the number of internal factions which advocate certain policies, have failed to achieve them and on the vast majority of occasions failed even to moderate New Labour’s agenda. The choice to join the Labour Party is thus the choice to be considered part and parcel of a Labour government widely seen as corrupt, unaccountable and actively working against the material interests of the vast majority of its members.

As Labour moves towards opposition, the contradiction here will lessen and finally disappear. Labour will not be the Party demanding sacrifices from the electorate, on behalf of business, nor imposing tax rises and service cuts. If the 1994-1997 period is anything to go by, whatever survives of New Labour will roll around in radical rhetoric and proceed to criticize the Tory government for things they will do themselves if elected.

This can make membership of Labour easier to consider, but the realities of power within Labour won’t have changed.

Unions and the Labour Party
Labour is, or should be, in hock to the unions. This should be extremely evident from the progressive collapse of New Labour’s base of personal donors and loan merchants. Yet the unions themselves look preposterous. In 2004, the Warwick Agreement was negotiated between Labour the the unions, as being key to what the unions wanted from this parliament: the demands themselves are pitiful, and some, as with Royal Mail, were plainly ignored.

Bureaucratic conservatism has been a key arm of the New Labour ‘coalition’. Within those unions, impressive heads of steam have built up specifically centred around moves to disaffiliate from Labour. In at least one union, combative non-Labour activists have been specifically targeted for expulsion. The fragmentation of the Labour-union link is also evidenced by the disaffiliation of the RMT, the FBU and the recent strong call from the CWU.

These moves are class-driven: if the unions and Labour cease to adequately represent the working class, then there will be moves first against union bureaucracies and the Labour Party, then away from unions and/or politics in general or worse, towards fascist politics. This is not going to be corrected merely by skilled political argumentation; it must be corrected by a change in the objective anti-working class processes sustained by Labour in government.

Here too, of course, there is an element of confused consciousness. Once the Tories get into power, unions will simply blame all the world’s ills on them and advocate a vote for the opposition – Labour – a position not open to them when Labour is in government. Yet this dissipation of pressure will serve to cement the union bureaucracy and centrist panderers rather than take the challenge further.

The only ray of hope I can spot is that at an Electoral Reform Society poll of TUC delegates back in late 2006 resulted in a majority supporting John McDonnell over Gordon Brown for leader of the Labour Party. It would be interesting to see how this has developed since then, so we have some idea of the direction political consciousness is going in.

Composition and Constituencies
My most intense experience of Labour was while at university in England. Particularly considering that one of my two fields of involvement was Oxford, this may not make for the most representative sample. Yet my experience of these young people, supposed to be the future of the Party, was almost universally negative, up to and including the point where I actually had to argue with one person that inequality was a bad thing.

There are reasons beyond my own parochial experiences for assuming that all is not necessarily well in Labour constituency organisations. Most obviously, the Labour heirarchy has recently felt free to assert its authority, ousting people selected as candidates by local parties, suspending local parties and continuing practices of ideological vetting for national selection lists. It’s difficult to see what a small trickle of activists back to Labour can do.

We should bear in mind that a large number of people (including former members) now refuse to have anything to do with Labour, and when even openly socialist Labour MPs can worry about the collapse of a 10,000+ majority, because of New Labour’s policies. For all the ‘resilience’ of Labour’s core vote, these aren’t the faces in charge of local constituency parties. Many CLPs are dormant in any case, lacking engagement beyond Voter ID.

Returning to my own experience, over vast swathes of the country, Labour simply isn’t competitive. It has no engagement (nor empathy for) local union needs, though it bears saying in turn that local union organisations have largely atrophied as well, and are maintained or established in many cases by the force of will of individuals whose dedication is not to the Labour Party. Local unions aren’t everything, of course, but Labour’s disengagement from collective community politics, rather than the occasional nimbyism, is visible round ‘ere at least.

Inside CLPs, it also seems that the party is visibly ageing.

Anti-fascist work
A lot of Labour members are engaged with groups like Love Music Hate Racism and Hope Not Hate, or supporting Unite Against Fascism. Yet even Labour members fully acknowledge that it’s Labour government policies which currently sustain the atrophy of Labour support and the concomitant growth of BNP support in areas like Dagenham.  Lee Walker, a Labour councillor in the area, has a lot to say on the subject.

Though Lee is part of Labour (and presumably advocates socialists joining) and though he attests that Dagenham is ‘very firmly Old Labour’, he reaffirms the view that with the wrong type of politico ensconsed in Westminster, the practical effect even of conquering the council is relatively small compared to what needs to be done to hold off the BNP, and provide the jobs and housing which that part of London cries out for.

Lee is convinced that through arguing the toss, that Labour members on the ground aren’t represented by their parliamentary cadre and national policies, we can stem the BNP and cites his own ward as evidence. I think there’s some evidence, such as from Nuneaton, to support this. Plenty of Labour members are also involved with counter-demonstrations against the BNP and the English Defence League, which help to mobilize local sentiment.

Yet even while some Labour members are doing this, there are Labour MPs, and the elements of the Labour Party they represent, which essentially buy into the BNP narratives on issues like immigration, calling for tighter laws, and fewer benefits, rather than advocating a massive house building programme, universal provision of services and jobs (to everyone, including the “white working class”).

This contradiction hinders the grassroots Labour attempt to stop the BNP, even if that effort mitigates them in some areas some of the time. As the Hope Not Hate map (left) shows, it’s in working class areas that the fascists really gather support – and its working class areas that do now and will continue to bear the brunt of New Labour and Tory attacks, for which some Labour figures and supporters prefer nationalist rather than class-based answers. Short term, joining Labour will not change that.

The argument from the Socialist Party, that standing ‘proper’ socialist candidates from independent parties can bring in votes unreached by Labour, potentially denying the BNP votes, is one I regard as unconvincing. What I do consider important is the intervention in local strikes and struggles, to force the unions to act against harmful council decisions and to give the working class confidence in its own power to drag change kicking and screaming out of local government.

In some areas, Labour is pretty good on this, and we should respect and support their efforts – but these efforts will pale when it comes to disrupting the agenda of a Tory government that will decimate social spending and push deprived former manufacturing areas towards fascism all the quicker. Labour is institutionally opposed to such efforts, preferring instead the straight-jacket of parliamentary activity.

Labour and the alternative
In recent struggles however, it is groups outside Labour which have been playing the key role – whether it’s the Socialist Party at Lindsey or engagement with the National Shop Stewards Network, the SWP’s Right to Work Conference, independent greens and socialists at Vestas and ClimateCamp and so on. Labour, on the other hand, seems to vary between declining to a slow ‘death’ and the determination to kill itself by squeezing out its last drop of left-wing credibility.

This inclines me to think that what pull on the working class that Labour exercises is residual, a phenomenon readily evident in countries like Germany, where ‘newer’ social-democratic parties have emerged to challenge the neo-liberal capitulations of the older parties. On the current trajectory, Labour may end up a model of the old Liberal Party remade for the 21st Century with ‘social justice’ as the new non-conformism.

I do not believe that the Labour Left, even impelled by a surge in working class militancy as a result of a frontal Tory attack on the last remnants of the welfare state, has numbers to rival the days of the height of its power in the 1970s never mind to bodily seize control of the Labour Party from New Labour, which has had years to entrench its favourite sons in ‘safe’ parliamentary seats.

Class struggle proceeds regardless of party affiliation of course. Labour is no longer in a position to be the sole – even the main – beneficiary of a new impetus towards class struggle, of workers linking up. I may be wrong, or the Labour Left fightback may be so impressive – bucking the trend hitherto – that our calculations are upset, and we’re called on to join Labour and battle even for the social democratic redistributive policies of old, in a climate of still further global capitalist retrenchment and greater demands for deeper neo-liberal reforms.

My impression, however, is that the Socialist Party is well positioned amongst activist elements in the unions and working class, and that most of the Labour Party will simply act as a conservative deadweight to those elements of the Labour Left who are similarly positioned – putting a brake on potential change coursing through CLPs, selection processes and so on. This is a direct refutation of a stance I held a few years ago.

With all this in mind, I don’t quite understand the decision of Phil, lead blogger at A Very Public Sociologist and long-time Stoke Socialist Party member to resign from the SP and join Labour, especially since he was a key person who I consulted before joining the SP myself.

I share his sentiments against standing candidates against moderate Labourites, and on the dismal prospects for the Socialist Party’s rather silly and opportunistic-looking Trade Union and Socialist Coalition electoral front. I can even surmise that, with him being in a very heavily Labour area and me being in a very lightly Labour area, our respective views on the ‘smaller links’ between Labour and the working class should be added together and divided by two to come to a proper appreciation.

What I can’t understand is how Phil reaches the conclusion that Labour’s direction of travel is an improvement on what it is currently. My generation has grown up not knowing ‘Old’ Labour, one element of which is more attracted by the flashy political campaigns of Bono and “Make Poverty History” than by the government, and another element to which is the product of persistent refusals to engage with real social ills: joblessness, poverty, terrible housing and crime, and couldn’t be more disillusioned if it tried.

If ever there was a time to explode the old trope that Britain hasn’t had a revolution because the British character is too moderate, now is the time to build the organisation for it.

Watching the unfolding events in Greece, it seems sporadic action is escalating to the point where the only remaining move of the union bureaucracy will be to call for an all-out unlimited General Strike. Teachers, taxi drivers, customs officials, doctors, municipal workers and others have one by one announced a series of strikes stretching from the rolling 24 hour strikes to three- or four-days out at a time.

The strike waves have unfurled as a response to the announcements of the Greek government that biting cuts must be imposed, in order to qualify for foreign assistance. The IMF has already announced its view that Greece should undergo the infamous ‘structural readjustments’, and the European Union has demanded spending cuts and threatened sanctions if by March the Greek government hasn’t announced such plans.

PASOK was elected on the back of a desire to stem the tide of cuts, but is pushing them through all the same. It will be up to the unions and the radical left to provide the political direction necessary to stop them. The new government has proposed taxes on fuel, alcohol, cigarettes, an extension of the working day, a roll back of the pensionable age and a raft of other measures that drop the cost of recovery on the working class.

It is my fervent hope that the Greeks can draw the line in the sand – but it will be futile if Greece is the only country to seize the opportunity.

Closer to home, slowly we’re remembering what things were like during the 1980s. Unemployed Workers Centres are gradually reopening around the country. Action Groups are springing up. Links between different groups of workers are being quickly reforged – as between students and UCU up and down the country. This process began in earnest last year over cuts and, judging by Sussex Uni, doesn’t seem to be letting up.

At Sussex, a ‘flash occupation’ of a few hundred students took over one of the university buildings for twenty nine hours, to remind uni authorities that students weren’t going away. This was well received by some of the local UCU branch. This sort of thing is encouraging. Resistance to cuts at the point of their delivery will be the key to fighting back against the attempt of the government to lumber average people with the cost of recovery.

For a while, spending can be sustained by a passably Keynesian economic orthodoxy (h/t Giles) but once private investment does pick up, and inflation becomes a real concern once more, the time will come when the government attempts to slash deficits. This will be achieved by exactly the same measures then as it might under a Tory 2010 government that continued to believe George Osborne’s rhetoric about immediate plans for deficit reduction.

Even if it isn’t, even if the government simply reverses all the measures it has undertaken (some through new taxes on items like cars, to recover money expended on car scrappage schemes, for example), we’ll still be back to the current pressures of marketization, slashing the welfare system and eventually the break up of socialized medicine in this country, the haunting words of Dave Nellist: “In one, two parliaments, one of these parties is coming for our NHS.”

Resistance, and the sinews we’re building right now, are the only things that will stop it.