Archive
Oh go on then, just one more
Just one more Labour poster competition entry then:
Stability
Stabilizers?
Labour poster competition thing
My quick go at the Labour poster competition thing. All I could think of, but it is late. Sorry.
BULLINGDON BRITAIN
Off Blond
Paul Sagar at the increasingly impressive Bad Conscience has a long, erudite but funny post up debunking Phillip Blond and his pretensions as a proper philosopher.
I agree with pretty well all of it, apart from a) the bits I don’t understand because they’re too erudite for me; b) the bit I disagree with.
What struck me most though, when reading Paul’s post and the post from Giles Wilkes that inspired him to sharpen his hatchet, is that Blond and his think-thank ResPublica has apparently been completely abandoned by the Tories.
Why else would Blond be hawking his pseudo-intellectual wares around the US just a few weeks before a general election which he hopes will bring a party into power over which he has the same intellectual influence as Anthony Giddens had over New Labour.
The reason for him being dropped like a stone is obvious enough, and has been commented on widely; the Tories, taking fright at their narrowing poll lead, are ignoring Blond’s protestations, lurching back to the right, back towards their core vote, and there’s no room for Phillip Blond there.
What interests me more is the way in which Blond is being sidelined, and the extent to which Tory HQ is intentionally silencing him.
Back in July 2009 I noted that:
One of the hottest topics of debate at the moment is Phillip Blond’s influential new book ‘Red Tory‘. Everyone out there read it?
No? Well what are you waiting for?
Oh yes, one problem. It’s current set for publication in January 2010, according to Amazon.
Dave Osler, in his drippingly sardonic review of Blond’s Guardian piece about Red Toryism, can be forgiven for putting it on his summer ‘09 reading list; there’s been so much coverage of this notion of Red Toryism over the last few months that, if you weren’t anal enough to check, you’d think something a bit more substantive than a strangely jumbled few hundred words to the Guardian and an interview or two with current affairs magazines might be available.
January 2010 has been and gone, of course, with no book.
When I looked at the Amazon site the other day, there was a note saying that the book was not yet available, but when I checked again today, the publication date of 02 April 2010 had appeared.
As of yet though, a quick Google search suggests, there is no publicity about the impending release of the book emanating from any Conservative-supporting source whatsoever, other than a fairly downbeat review from Benedict Brogan in the Telegraph.
Things may of course change this week, but the very start of a general election campaign does seem an odd time to choose to publish a book which should have been informing the Tories’ manifesto, had Blond’s star been as bright as it once was. (Giddens’ Beyond Left and Right, to which Blond’s book cover pays intentional or unintentional homage, was published in 1994.)
Back in Summer 2009, Blond was the great new Conservative thinker. Even as late as November 2009, Cameron still had time to drop in and see him, though as Brogan says:
Cameron attended the launch, but only briefly, in what looked like a staged dalliance rather than a long-term marriage.
Now he appears to be on American ‘gardening leave’. Was he pushed onto the plane or did he jump?
I bet he’s pissed off, though he’d put it more pseudo-intellectually to Cameron if he could get into see him now.
And Cameron might respond accordingly:
‘Consistent, moi?’
Who owns the streets?
One year on from the death of Ian Tomlinson, after what has been widely understood as assault by members of the Territorial Support Group of London Met, during last year’s anti-G20 protests his family are still waiting to hear what action will be taken against the officers suspended as a result of the evidence presented to the IPCC.
Serious levels of complaint against the Metropolitan Police are to result in a guide to policing of protests, published next week, and a new code of practice for police officers. I look forward to both of these with interest, but I doubt they’ll solve some wider questions thrown up by police actions in France and Greece particularly, over the last while.
Such as, if protesters occupy an area, should the police have the right to move them by force? Greece has witnessed fierce riots following examples of police brutality – including shootings. Even such minor issues as ordering the police to clear a road that is occupied can become a big issue, and one wonders where governments have to draw a line?
After what point does the government simply have to concede that ‘the people’ – for we’re not talking a minority in Greece – have more right to bring the country (or even just Panepistimiou Avenue) to a halt than the government have to use force against a civilian populace bent on exercising extra-parliamentary control over that government?
Marx once famously said that between two rights, force decides – and this is true in the world of events, but it is not true in the heads of the rest of us. We’re called on to decide where we draw our own line.
This can have revolutionary conclusions. Look at Thailand, where this morning demonstrators have mobbed police stations, army barracks and other institutions to peacefully demand democracy. Whilst I don’t impute socialist consciousness there, this is the same sort of fraternisation between populace and the armed forces of the state as exemplified from the Russian Revolution onwards. The people are agitating for democracy.
Greece is little different. People there clearly feel that the austerity measures taken by the new PASOK government are not the measures that they elected PASOK to take. So they are exercising extra-parliamentary actions to coerce the government; strikes, occupations, demonstrations have all figured highly on the streets of Athens for months now.
It is fundamental to democratic government that people have this right, otherwise we’re merely selecting between two quadrennial or quintennial tyrannies. This isn’t even Marxist; English Levellers and Diggers and soldiers of the New Model Army evinced such a radical sovereignty long before Marx was even born.
Even in less clear cut cases, such as France, where tear gas was recently used by police against ‘small groups of youths’ who were ‘burning bins and throwing bottles’, we have to wonder whether the reaction is inappropriate. This occurred on the 19th of this month, as three million people marched together on strike; youths burning bins are small cheese.
Does the sanctity of property justify using tear gas? What about kettling? Or the deployment of riot police, armed with their batons and shields? It’s easy to dismiss troublemakers – such as the people who smashed RBS’ windows at the anti-G20 demo last year in London – but to authorise the use of any sort of force or control methods to contain this strikes at the heart of the right to protest.
We saw that when hundreds and thousands of well-meaning, perfectly civil people were cooped up on open streets in – from what was related to me – some heat, by police who wouldn’t even let them go to the toilet. We’re likely to see it again, especially after the election, when the mood that is sweeping Europe arrives on our shores along with cuts.
Use of the police at Sussex University surely highlights what people will face. Police were observed beating and threatening students who had not used violence against the police.
Following a high court injunction against recent student occupations of university buildings, the police were called in to suppress protests and prevent such occupations, and served also to underline the recent suspension of six students for involvement with previous occupations.
Thankfully determined and co-ordinated action by students and a one-day strike by staff at Sussex made police intervention a failure, and the six were reinstated, but the intention by management was clearly to use police to suppress dissent. This is not a new situation, and it is almost certainly one which will be repeated.
Faced with it, we have the choice to give in or to resist. Resistance is essentially a challenge to the rights entailed upon property ownership. Concerned with where we’re getting the money to pay bills, or buy food, we visit fundamentally political questions: who owns our streets and workplaces, and who determines what we may or may not do there?
That is what question of police use of force ultimately come down to: ownership. Are we owners of the State, and entitled to withdraw our consent to be governed? Or are we owned by the State, alive only to play out economic routines in the name of Progress, and thus subject to compulsion when we deny that ownership?
Cash for influence: why is anyone surprised?
"You're all going to die. Howwibly."
The case of Hoon, Hewitt, Moran and the execrable Stephen Byers in the journalistic sting operation around “cash for influence” is being used as a stick with which to beat Labour. Probably something to do with the seven Tories who steered well clear of the operation. What strikes me, however, is that surprise in any form just demonstrates ignorance.
If we look at the Tory Shadow Cabinet for a moment, Andrew Lansley, in charge of the Tory drive to increase privatised healthcare provision, accepts donations from the chairman of Care UK. Alan Duncan, one-time energy spokesman, took money from the chairman of oil traders Vitol. Osborne is in it up to his neck with hedge funds.
Grant Shapps, housing spokesman, was funded by mortgage brokers. Theresa Villiers, once shadow Chief Treasury Secretary, was backed by investment banks.
And, when they leave office, after a term of government, they’ll be rewarded with positions on the boards of various companies. More dignified than Hoon etc trying to pimp their ‘achievements’ for money, certainly, but no different in principle at all. These companies aren’t recruiting parliamentarians for philanthropic reasons.
Both parties are in this up to their necks. There’s no use the Tories using the opportunity to make a partisan point – there’s no partisan point to be made. Ex-politicians go to work for private industry. From shadow cabinet to cabinet to PM to the President of the United States himself. It just turns out that Labour hacks are a little more gullible.
I’m just shocked Hoon hasn’t pulled out the “patriotic duty” card.
On Radio 4 this morning, Hoon was queried as to his use of “inside information” to help American arms manufacturers take over European companies that would be made vulnerable by a reduction in EU defence spending.
It seems like there’s an easy answer to that: European jobs and security depend on this American “investment” and “research expertise” if European governments decrease spending, don’tchaknow!
As for Stephen Byers helping price fixing companies to “get around the law”, well there’s two options. On the one hand, he could claim that his is a revolutionary exposition of the basic monopolistic drive of capitalism.
Or he could attack “meaningless regulations” for holding back the spirit of British enterprise and causing British business to fall behind the rest of the world. There’s perfectly acceptable corporate guff public policy narratives for all situations.
John Redwood: champion of public spending growth
Frankly, the world seems a little bit crazy when Labour ministers speak proudly of making cuts ‘bigger and deeper’ than Thatcher did in the 1980s.
It seems even crazier when John Redwood, a right-winger even amongst Tories, defends the Thatcher government in these terms:
One of the myths perpetrated by Labour and the BBC is that Margaret Thatcher came in and cut public spending. She did not – spending on the main services grew rapidly under her control.
She did cut plans in 1981 to help the recovery, but the overall figures for total public spending including capital, current and debt interest were:
1978-9 (last Labour year) £71.2 billion
1980-81 (first full Cons year) £120.2 billion
1981-82 £130 billion
1983-4 £137.5 billion
What to make of it all?
Well, first Redwood is right. Public expenditure did rise in the way he sets out in the early 1980s, and there is a bit of a myth that she slashed public spending as soon as she took office.
He’s also economical with the truth, as his mates in the Commons might term it.
This is shown in the following graph from this IFS report (see also the graph on p.18 of the report):
Composition of Total Managed Expenditure as a percentage of national income, 1948-49 to 2009-10
The graph shows that, while public expenditure rose in the first Thatcher parliament by around about 2% of national income, a significant percentage of that increase was made up of spending on social security, itself a direct result of the huge rise in unemployment, which continued to increase throughout the early 1980s despite the end of the recession in 1981. Conversely, ‘other current spending’ was squeezed.
(If anyone has access to the actual raw data rather than just these graphs, I’d be happy to see it).
Thus, while Redwood is right technically to say that spending on ‘main services’ grew in the early 1980s, he is wrong to imply that what most people consider to be ‘public services’ – health, education, council services etc. - grew significantly in the same period. The spending that grew was only what had to be spent as a result of poor Tory economic policy.
Of course, this allows Alistair Darling and Liam Byrne off the hook, because they will later be able to claim that there cuts in expenditure were greater than in the Thatcher post-recession period, even though ‘real’ public services may not be as badly hit as they would be under the Tories. Why they would want to make the claim in the first place is a different matter, and a matter of regret.
TCF interviews TUSC Cambridge parliamentary candidate
(Below is an interview with Martin Booth, a parliamentary candidate in Cambridge with the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition. I thought interviewing Martin was important as it gives some indication of what sort of people TUSC is pulling in, during the run up to this General Election. The group in Cambridge are also running a slate of council candidates for the elections).
Martin, thanks for agreeing to the interview. Online and on the doorsteps, there’s lots of interest at the moment in the political alternatives to the three main parties. You’re running for parliament in Cambridge as part of a group called Cambridge Socialists. Can you tell me a bit about yourself?
I am a local resident and health worker, having worked in the operating theatres at Addenbrooke’s Hospital since 1980. I have been an active trade unionist ever since I started work, and am currently Chair of the Cambridge Health Branch of UNISON.
And who are Cambridge Socialists, what’s the background to the group? Does it have any union backing?
Cambridge Socialists has just been formed, as an alliance of anyone in Cambridge who considers themselves socialist and is prepared to support our campaigns, whether they are members of existing organisations or whether (like myself) they are not. We are seeking backing from any unions willing to support us within their rules.
From what I gather, Cambridge Socialists have agreed to run for parliament under the aegis of the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) – why that particular group?
We feel is is important to join forces with others around the country mounting a socialist challenge in the elections to the main parties, all of whom are threatenjng big spending cuts after the election.
On your website, you’ve explained your opposition to the policies of this Labour government. However, the Greens are also running in Cambridge; was there anything specific which convinced you not to support a party with a pre-existing base of support in elections, that touts its left-wing credentials, and to run as an independent instead?
Whilst we can support many of the Greens’ aims, they are not a socialist, working-class-based organisation. Without a firm socialist foundation, they will not be able to realise their aims on the environment, climate change and so on. You cannot persuade capitalists to save the planet rather than their profits!
As chair of the local UNISON health branch, you have been a key part of campaigns to ‘Defend the NHS’ – such as at Brookfields Hospital and more recently with the scandal over at Hinchingbrooke Hospital. For our readers, can you explain what’s going on at Hinchingbrooke and what you think should be done?
Hinchingbrooke is the district hospital for Huntingdon, and has suffered constant financial problems for several years, mainly due to underfunding. A successful campaign was waged a couple of years ago to stop it closing, but now it faces being taken over by a private company under a ‘franchise’. The recently-formed Cambridgeshire Against the Cuts (which Cambridge Socialists was instrumental in forming) is joining forces with local activists in Huntingdon to fight to defeat this unprecedented attack on an NHS hospital.
Even aside from Hinchingbrooke, Cambridge seems to be on the front line of cuts and privatisations – and you’ve helped lead local marches opposing cuts, you’ve held petitions and stalls on Cambridge streets. Outside of elections, can you see any way to forcing Cambridgeshire County Council to hold off on the cuts they plan to make?
As mentioned above, we have led the way in forming Cambridgeshire Against the Cuts, with a successful open meeting, march and rally. CAtC is pledged to unite local service users with public sector workers in a real fight to defend services against cuts and privatisation. The election campaign is just the start!
Cambridge Socialists, in their election manifesto, have formulated a comprehensive series of national demands which, no doubt, voters will be interested in. For example, on your website you call for the use of banks in the “interests of the people” – what does that mean exactly?
It means nationalising the banks under the democratic control of the people, so that the banks serve the people and not the other way round.
One of the street stall chants Cambridge Socialists use is “Hey, ho, investment banks have got to go” – are you proposing the abolition of investment banks (rather than commercial or retail banks) altogether, or the illegalization of the financial instruments often blamed for the recent crash or something else entirely?
As mentioned above, we are for the nationalisation of the banks as an essential part of the development of a planned socialist economy. This would mean the abolition of the parasitic private investment banks which have dragged us all down into the mire in their frantic drive for profits.
You propose cutting the working week to 35 hours; what do you hope such a measure would achieve?
It would improve the quality of life for millions of workers, and free up time for more jobs to be created, especially for the young people.
Lastly, what future do you see for Cambridge Socialists? Do you think they’ll be Cambridge’s equivalent of Oxford’s Independent Working Class Association or do you see the need to establish or join a nationally-organised socialist party?
I think we have a big future as what we are, a coalition of socialist forces in and around Cambridge. We will link with any and all parties and organisations nationally which fight for the same aims as ourselves.
The BNP, James MacIntyre and the Tiger Woods strategy
Tiger Woods, a golfer of some renown, was unfaithful to his wife and crashed his car into a tree. You may have read about it in the newspapers.
He took some time away from golfing. He has now decided to return, but many people consider what he has done to be despicable, and he is afraid that he will be unpopular with the golf-loving and wider public. He is therefore pursuing a careful media strategy, which involves saying he regrets greatly what he has done in very controlled circumstances.
This is a clever strategy, because when he comes to do a more open press conference, he will , as and when asked about his behaviour off the golf course, be able to say that he has spoken about these matters in previous interviews, and is keen instead to talk about his chip shot at the 13th.
Thus, he hopes to re-integrate himself into golfing society, and that everything will become as normal as possible thereafter.
This is also the basic strategy of the BNP, and in particular their racist leader Nick Griffin.
Nick Griffin has, in the past, been very publicly dismissive of the holocaust, suggesting that it is a convenient fiction invented by, presumably, Marxists. Or Zionists, or perhaps black people. The details need not detain us, because what is important is that most people regard this as a wrong, even abhorrent thing, to have said.
So Nick Griffin has adopted a ‘normalisation’ strategy, akin to that of Tiger Woods.
This strategy is being unwittingly aided and abetted by some parts of the media/blogosphere, such as John Harris of the Guardian or Iain Dale of Iain Dale.
It has also been partially aided and abetted this evening by James MacIntyre, who has written a well-meaning but confused piece on his New Statesman blog in praise of Iain Dale, and his rigorous interviewing technique.
James MacIntyre describes his general position towards the BNP as one of ‘non-engagement’, but then goes on to set out a different position, in which it is acceptable to engage with the BNP as long as it is done well and their lies are exposed. He praises Iain Dale, therefore, for the rigour of his interview.
This, unfortunately, misses the point.
It does not matter how well Iain Dale conducted the interview, not least because in a small magazine like Total Politics, very few people will read it.
What does matter is that Nick Griffin, by allowing himself to be interviewed on the matters on which he is most controversial and from which he now seeks to distance himself as part of his normalisation strategy, will be in a position to say to other interviewers that he has already covered these matters fully, and would prefer to talk about other matters – perhaps about his chip shot at the 13th, but more likely about how the BNP is being victimized by Marxists.
It does not matter that Iain Dale, and indeed John Harris, are ‘fundamentally decent’ people – I do not doubt that they are. What matters is that they, and now James MacIntyre, have assisted the BNP in their normalisation strategy.
James MacIntyre in particular, as a self-professed ‘non-engager’, needs to think through the logic of his position, and ask himself honestly why he is making these exceptions to his rule.
Is it really all about the BNP, or is there just a little bit of a media love-in going on, where he is keen to show how open-minded and noble he is, noble enough even to praise one who has apparently crossed him previously.
More importantly, he needs to look at what ‘no platform’ or ‘no engagement’ means in the real world, where one small, awkward platform leads to another bigger, more comfortable one.
The racists at the BNP are clever as well as evil, and we need to be as clever back.
Budget 2010: Alistair Darling’s elephant in the room?
In the commentary on the BBC this morning about the budget and the prospects for reducing the deficit there was an important unmentionable – the trade deficit.
On Tuesday I was listening to Blunkett speaking in Glasgow. In the course of this he mentioned how in ’47 Keynes was sent over to Canada and the US by the Attlee government to negotiate a loan to carry the country over the cost of post-war reconstruction. Blunkett said how difficult it would be to imagine Churchill in 1952 promising to eliminate the government deficit by ’58 and pay it off by ’62, saying that in fact it was not until 2003 that the UK finally paid off the loan from Canada.
But these loans did colour the politics of the Attlee and Wilson governments. The pamphlets that Wilson wrote as a minister during the Attlee government show him obsessed with how to rebuild industry to get the exports needed to pay off these loans. The recent obsession with Britain’s ‘high tech’ industries mirrors this in some ways.
As Prime Minister, Wilson continued to focus on the balance of trade and the need to foster export industry, as indeed had the intervening Tory administrations. But post Thatcher, the trade balance vanishes from politics. It ceases to be an issue.
Thatcher had the advantage of North Sea oil. That allowed her to destroy manufacturing industry in order to destroy the social poser of the industrial working class. Manufactured exports and those who made them were no longer vital.
United Kingdom Balance of Trade, 1948-2009
Oil allowed the return to dominance of the financial interest in Britain. It had been dominant in the ’20s and ’30s, but post-war indebtedness brought the manufacturing interest back to the fore. Even the Tories led by Macmillan, an MP from a northern constituency whose formative political years had been during the industrial depression, went along with the priority of manufacturing.
Under Brown the trade deficit was forgotten, even though the oil was running out. When he gave independence to the Bank of England, the goals of the monetary policy committee were just about inflation. There was no obligation on them to maintain an exchange rate compatible with balanced trade.
There was a myth about in those days that central banks could not manage exchange rates – the Tories debacle over the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was cited. But this was one sided. The Bank of England may be unable to maintain a consistently overvalued Pound, but it can reduce its value.
China’s example shows that a central bank can even keep an undervalued currency low.
We have had 30 years of neglecting the balance of trade see figure. The balance of payments deficit is a major contributor to the budget deficit. Basically it means that there is an outflow of funds abroad, and either private individuals and firms or the government must borrow to offset this. So to reduce the deficit there would have to be a major structural change in the economy to regenerate export industries.
It is remarkable that this basic reality is not better acknowledged. The Tories go on about the danger of the UK losing its AAA rating and what a disaster that would be. Well if it does happen then so what? The UK government borrows in Sterling. It is not taking Dollar loans as in 1947. It can go on doing that, but the consequence might be a significant fall in the Pound.
This is precisely what is needed to make manufacturing exports from here viable again, in the face of high labour costs amongst a well-unionised and demanding workforce.
Whichever government comes to power will be eventually forced to address this, and in the long term the necessary regrowth of industry can only benefit the Labour movement.
PCS Budget Day strike report
David Miliband passes London pickets...
Yesterday a planned strike by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) was carried out, with 200,000 staff mostly staying at home rather than come into work. I was down on the picket line here in Canterbury to offer support for the local Job Centre staff who came out, in protest at cuts across the board – to regular staff, temps, pensions etc.
Compared with last time, the picket was poorly attended – but still people were being signed up to the PCS by militant workers. I heard that this has been replicated elsewhere in Kent, with nearly a dozen signed up in areas around the east of the county during and in the lead up to yesterday’s strike alone. Clearly these issues resonate amongst DWP staff.
News from Leeds yesterday was that some 1700 people have joined the union since the industrial dispute began.
Active pickets tend to do very well at this, pulling out more workers who may ordinarily have just ducked their heads and gone inside and persuading members of other unions not to deliver services to the workplaces in question.
Given the number of workplaces without pickets, PCS’ national executive needs to take in hand a programme that will deliver elected representatives in every workplace who are schooled and willing to organise such pickets when the members vote to strike. Such representatives are useful points of contact around which can be built support networks that reassure striking workers that they do have a great deal of general support.
It would certainly help the DWP and HMRC staff who often seem to be the backbone of any dispute. It would also solidify strikes right along the line. Evidently, for all the ‘union modernisation’ money that our right-wing counterparts are complaining about, little of the state’s money has been used to strengthen the basic sinews of unions.
Today, the PCS national executive is meeting to discuss what further action to take. ‘Targeted action’ seems to be the expectation of PCS members, that the union will ask the Contact Centres to come out on strike rather than generalising the action. It’s hard to see what effect this can have other than to fatigue workers.
The strikes have held up well, to the point where management from regional centres were sent to outlying offices to cover for staff who were on strike. The Guardian reports that crown and county courts have been massively affected, as well as certain museums throughout London, and several job centres that I’ve seen have been clearly affected.
Against this, however, we have to measure the willingness of the government to simply wait out the strike.
We can’t take seriously Tessa Jowell’s Comical Ali routine, of the sort wheeled out every time there is a strike: “Across the country services to the public are largely unaffected – all job centres and benefits offices are open, border entry points are working normally and court services are being maintained.”
Yet it would be a mistake to underestimate the government. Now, with the first planned national rail strike since the mid-1990s and several other unions involved or considering serious industrial action, it could be time to consider an organised series of national days of actions, bringing out all services on their separate grievances.
Should this be done before or after May 6th? I have no real opinion; either way, the unions and their workers are going to get a hammering from the government – red or blue. If steps aren’t taken to hook up different union grievances, the government – 0f whatever party – faces being able to ride them all out, one by one, as fatigue sets in.
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