Though Cowards Flinch

Both Ed and David Miliband have begun their rhetorical repositioning for the leadership campaign. The by-line of the Guardian article on Brother David reads, “Former foreign secretary woos the party’s left…” but the reality is probably more accurately exposed by Paul Waugh’s summary over at the Evening Standard. David Miliband has set himself up as the ‘clean hands’ candidate – nodding to the past, nodding to the thousands of activists who had to watch dumbfounded as Labour waddled from mistake to disaster and so on.

Meanwhile, brother Ed has turned to rather naive-sounding guff about New Labour not having a sense of mission, but falling into the mindset of ‘technocratic caretakers’. His pitch is that Labour needs to hook up once more with the core vote, but that New Labour ‘asked the hard questions’ – that something can be saved. Some people seem to think that Brother Ed is appealing to the working class, and he picks out ‘real world’ examples, saying that we should prefer the realities visited upon people instead of abstract economics.

The harsh reality, of course, is both were cabinet ministers (one under Blair and both under Brown). They aren’t reformers, and a latter-day conversion towards Labour members having a greater say is opportunistic in the extreme. When we see concrete proposals on this ‘having a say’ bit, I’ll be sure to return to it, but the ‘feel’ of their speech is that there may be institutional adjustments and gasping policy announcements and lots of talk about ‘renewal’ but that very little will change. This is virtually inevitable if Brothers Ed and David don’t move beyond Blair – and I don’t think they will or can even imagine how to.

Just as interesting as those who have thrown their hat into the ring is who has not.

Jon Cruddas has ruled himself out of the leadership race, which probably removes the only chance the soft Left ever had at influencing the thing, beyond gushing pronouncements in favour of Ed Miliband, who is viewed as the more Left of the two brothers. Wannabe softie, James Purnell, is pushing the same line as Cruddas at the moment; re-connect with the vote (among C2 voters), move slowly, re-energise the Party. This seems to be standard for the so-called centre Left; thus too pressure group Compass’ post-election statement. Evidently Neal Lawson and the rest of that self-admiring cohort don’t think they’ve done enough damage with their urgings to vote ‘tactically’ for the Lib-Dems, to keep out the Tories.

All of this talk about renewal and reconnecting etc, from the centre-Left, is meant to fill the bloody great hole where actually doing something fits in. Around the world, indefinite strikes have been pronounced – here at home, workers (often against the wishes of their trades unions) are gearing up to fight the incoming cuts, whether from private business or the public sector…and meanwhile the lions of centre-left socialism are doing little but mewl in the press. Which is exactly what I and others expect, so that at least is gratifying.

A centre-Left candidate may yet emerge, of course. In the meantime, those who have been casting rather silly aspersions at John McDonnell’s potential candidacy find themselves in the unenviable position of wanting ‘a clean break from the policies and practices of the New Labour era’ while opposing the only leadership candidate likely to achieve it. Former MP Bob Clay’s article on the subject departs from reality entirely, with a mention of Michael Meacher as a more likely candidate (Meacher got three endorsements and crumbled at the 2007 debate).

McDonnell ran in 2007 and though he failed to get enough endorsements, his campaign was like a fresh wind through the often sterile internal debates of the Labour Party. Even a Cruddas candidacy, though more likely to gain enough nominations, would not necessarily provoke this – Cruddas is, after all, basically a Blairite, and support for him would still place the  soft Left in contradiction to themselves – wanting a change from New Labour, a return to an older form of social democracy, while supporting a candidate who wants nothing of the sort. We’re spared making this argument because Cruddas isn’t running. His own reasoning (if such banalities deserve the title) can be read here.

This makes the attacks against John McDonnell seem all the more surreal. Without an alternative candidate of even basic Left credentials, McDonnell is the natural choice for any socialist remaining in Labour. What all the arguments against McDonnell clearly miss, of course, is the chance that a McDonnell candidacy gives the LRC – a group based around members, union branches and CLPs – to get a foothold in Labour around the country, to kick off real debate and to set up mini-groups of supporters who can deepen and broaden LRC support by campaign activities. Only this long game offers a glimmer of hope for the Left; otherwise they should get out of Labour and stay out.

Key among campaign priorities before the election demanded the full attention of every activist was the People’s Charter, which is solid Left stuff that appeals far beyond the narrow confines of the Labour Representation Committee. This is the sort of thing which could get off the ground, certainly in time for conference in the autumn. What plenty of the nay-sayers also neglect to note is that there are several McDonnell supporters running as the Left candidates for leadership of different unions. Paul Holmes, interviewed here, is a key one, over at UNISON.

This is a chance to energise and mobilise the whole Left – both its union and party elements. Meanwhile those people saying that John McDonnell is hostile to or likely to alienate the unions because of his opposition to union bureaucratisation need to catch themselves on. McDonnell is the only candidate who, as leader, would have any intention of mobilising parliamentary and extra-parliamentary elements of the movement to slam dunk the Trade Union Freedom Bill.

Whatever platitudes we get from the soft-Left, that fear of extra-parliamentary action will always keep them bottled up – that is why we need a candidate like McDonnell. The other regular rebels – like Jeremy Corbyn – will likely fall into line behind McDonnell, especially with the unanimous backing from the LRC’s National Committee put firmly on record, in the aftermath of Saturday’s conference, sponsored by the LRC, whatever remains of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and various unions.

If McDonnell doesn’t win, then Labourites face years of a Tory government whose best friends are the Labour leadership, as under Thatcher and Kinnock, when everything possible was done by the Labour heirarchy to smother mass activism and militancy, in fear that it could damage the credentials of the Party to lead ‘the nation’. Then, I guarantee you, that space outside of Labour for a Left party, which people are saying has closed or is closing, will be blasted wide open in no time at all. Tomorrow’s article concerns just that.

TCF, Dec 2009:

[T]here is any event no guarantee that Field isn’t simply biding his time in a fairly safe Labour seat before switching sides after the election.

Frank Field MP, March 2010:

If the Tories want to talk to me about a job, I will be happy to.

Sunday Mirror, May 2010:

David Cameron has secured his first Labour “defection” by lining up veteran MP Frank Field as his anti-poverty czar.

It’s not rocket science.

And that is why I wrote the following formal letter of complaint to Labour’s National Executive Committee on 18 March 2010:

Dear….

Formal complaint: public statements by Mr Frank Field, MP

I am writing to express my concern about the public statements made by Frank Field MP, setting out an apparent willingness to take a post under any Conservative government.

My own view is that such public statements may be incompatible with his remaining a Labour candidate in the forthcoming general election.

There is now a very real possibility that in the event of the Conservatives forming the next administration either with or without minority party support, Mr Field will be invited to take up a position within it.  In the event of him taking up such a position without the explicit authority of the PLP, this would mean an almost automatic withdrawal of the Labour whip. 

Given this, it is surely untenable for the party to maintain its support for Mr Field as a Labour candidate pre-election, in the knowledge that it might effectively be campaigning for a non-Labour MP.  As you know, such actions would be outwith the constitution of his own CLP, and put it in a very difficult position.

As you also know, Labour members up and down the country have been disciplined or expelled for actions and statements considered by the NEC to be to the detriment of the Labour party’s reputation and electoral chances.  I trust Mr Field’s public profile will not mean that he is treated differently.

I look forward to hearing from you in due course about what action has been taken, although of course it is possible I may hear about it in the press first.

No action has yet been taken in respect of my complaint, although it has been acknowledged.   I wrote a follow up letter to the General Secretary of the Labour party just hours before the news of the offer to Mr Field from the Tories was made public.

Had my complaint been acted upon, it is just possible that Mr Field would have been deselected and that we might now have a Labour MP for Birkenhead who shares some Labour values and objectives.  Instead, if Mr Field does take up the position offered, we will have an MP who will either crosses the floor of the house or continues to be an acute embarassment to the party.

The culture of the Labour party needs to change, so that everyone within the party is treated equally, whatever their public profile.

One indisputable bright spot for left-wingers in the recent elections has been the electoral wipeout of the British National Party.

Not only did the party fail to advance in their electoral ‘strongholds’ of East London and Stoke, where they threatened to take control of local councils, they lost virtually every council seat they were defending.

This includes all 12 in Barking & Dagenham, the ‘jewel in the crown’ according to Nick Griffin.

Despite standing candidates in a record number of parliamentary seats they didn’t come anywhere near to winning a seat anywhere in the country and lost thousands of pounds in deposits.

It’s a fantastic result and people have been celebrating accordingly. According to the Daily Mirror far right politics have been wiped out in Barking & Dagenham, UAF see it as a humiliation prompted by a wave of popular revulsion against the Nazis while this morning’s Guardian raised the question of whether this was the end of the party altogether in an article where academic Matthew Goodwin predicts they will shortly implode.

Add to this yet another bout of spectacular infighting and you could be forgiven for thinking the party’s over.

Memories of what happened to Britain’s last relatively successful fascist party encourage this line of argument. In the 1979 General Election the National Front stood a record number of candidates, overstretched themselves and in 303 seats they only chalked up 191,000 votes. Demoralisation and vicious infighting finished off the party as a functioning political organisation not long afterwards.

Unfortunately, I think the comparison’s a misleading one. For one, it was in 2005 that the BNP polled 192,000 votes. This time they polled 563,743. It’s been a week since the elections and it’s time to stop celebrating and take a sober look at the results (though anyone involved in the campaign in East London has earned the right to feel smug for months to come).

The first obvious point is that anyone with a reasonable degree of familiarity with the British far right will know that the BNP is always having bitter internal squabbles. The recent fracas between former webmaster Simon Bennett who appears to have conveniently lost the plot a few days before the General Election, suspending the website and launching into a rant about the party’s leadership (superb timing Simon), is merely the latest in the ongoing ‘fascists who think Nick Griffin is a slimy con-man’ saga that has been a regular feature of far right politics for some 25 years.

It’s worth remembering that while some of these feuds have hilarious and serious short term consequences, such as the release of their membership list for instance, the impact on support for the BNP has been marginal.

As I remarked recently:

For as long as I’ve been an active anti-fascist (which, in fairness, is not a huge amount of time!) stories about internal troubles in the BNP that could provoke its collapse and the apparently precarious position of Griffin as chairman have been written or circulated by anti-fascists indulging in a bit of wishful thinking every few months….

Griffin will remain BNP leader in the foreseeable future and it’s a safe bet that this will be accompanied by plenty of articles detailing how the party is on the verge of collapse.

Complacent anti-fascists convinced that the BNP are in danger of imploding, and bank on that accordingly, are backing a loser.

The most transparent piece of wishful thinking currently circulating as analysis is this piece from There’s Nothing British About the BNP announcing that the party has split in two so they’re taking a holiday. Job done eh?

There’s no doubt some antifascists deserve a holiday after the election though. In the run up to the election there was a massive mobilisation in Barking & Dagenham by Hope not Hate, UAF activists and the Labour Party. According to Nick Lowles almost 1000 people participated in their campaign delivering an incredible 250,000 leaflets in the borough. I wouldn’t be surprised if the total amount of anti-BNP literature distributed in the area topped half a million.

The Hope not Hate and UAF strategy of mobilising an anti-BNP majority, which generally means the Labour vote, at the polls seems to paid off. The Labour vote increased and BNP representation vanished. What’s there to worry about?

Firstly, this was a mobilisation in response to a specific threat (the BNP taking control of a council) and I’m not convinced this level of activity is sustainable or can be replicated. Would there be  the same amount of resources to mount a simultaneous operation like that in, say, Stoke, Barnsley, Rotherham, Nuneaton and Thurrock in a few years time? I suspect not.

It’s also worth noting that the BNP vote in Barking & Dagenham did not collapse in any meaningful way. If we compare the 2006 results with the 2010 results it’s evident that at best it dropped slightly in numerical terms but mostly remained stable. That’s worrying. Glyn Rhys puts it better than I can to describe why:

What does this now mean in terms of those who, after all the leafleting, after all the door knocking, after all the arguments that the BNP are a fascist party, still voted for the BNP in Barking & Dagenham. Are we to now believe that these voters are all fascists?

There is a very real risk that by not providing any alternative and by continually marginalising those who will not tolerate the likes of Hodge, we actually push those who would vote BNP as a protest into actually identifying with the BNP and starting to think fascism is an answer.

Hopefully, Griffin won’t realise this and will stick to his promise to abandon East London because of demographic changes.

It’s wasn’t only the BNP who posted results in the local elections ranging from disappointing to humiliating. Respect lost almost all their local councillors as did the Socialist Party while the Greens polled votes that, in any other year, would have won them a number of new council seats across the country. Instead, they lost nine seats.

Is this a wave of popular revulsion against minority parties?

In fact, what happened in the council seats the BNP were defending was part of a broader trend in the local elections, a huge swing towards Labour that swamped all the minor parties.

In the General Election, the BNP vote held up better than most other minor parties such as the Greens. In a tight election in which the vote for minor parties was squeezed the BNP stood roughly three times as many candidates 2005 and got roughly three times the vote. Although gratifyingly the BNP has lost a large amount of in deposits in around 200 parliamentary seats the BNP vote was around 4%. A slight increase in the BNP vote brings them into the territory where they can stand in a large number of seats and save their deposit across large swathes of the country.

This election is a setback for the BNP. By wiping out many of the gains they’ve made it’s reset the clock for the party. However, the same factors that have been generating their support will continue to operate and it would take another huge swing to Labour in a few years time to eradicate their progress.

The BNP were defeated by a Labour recovery and the first past the post electoral system. Since the new coalition government has signalled willingness to countenanace some kind of electoral reform I wouldn’t count on either of these remaining a feature of the political landscape in the near future and if we ditch first past the post then the task of mobilising an ‘anti-BNP majority’ becomes near impossible. Working out an alternative to this strategy will soon be crucially important.

Update: The IWCA analysis of the BNP’s General Election performance is spot on.

Labour councillors in West Lancashire have reacted with fury to the possibility that the local Conservative administration may change its constitution in a despicable attempt to remain in power, in spite of voters sending them packing.

Labour group leader, Cllr Paul Cotterill, said:

‘I am absolutely furious at what West Lancashire Conservatives may be planning.  To change the constitution to require that Labour hold more than 55% of seats before taking over control of the council would be simply astonishing gerrymandering by the Tories.’

Cllr Cotterill was making reference to the new national coalition  government’s devious constitutional device to stay in power at all costs even when their deal with the utterly unprincipled LibDems falls apart, as it is bound to do quite soon.  Under the proposed new constitution-busting arrangements, the Tories will be able to remain in government even if every other MP in the house votes against them doing so.  Conservative claims that the the proposals are a ‘big giving up of power’, rather than an astonishing abuse of it, were thought by most sane commentators to be utter, rampant bollox .

Cllr Cotterill, who oversaw a stupendously brilliant local election campaign that saw Labour make four gains in West Lancashire, continued:

‘This constitutional jiggery-pokery, if enacted in West Lancashire, would mean we would need to gain three extra seats from the Tories before restoring sensible and responsible local government to the area. 

While this is not an insurmountable problem given how people really are beginning to realise that the Tories have consistently failed to act in the interests of their citizens, it shouldn’t have to come to this.’

It is thought quite likely that West Lancashire Tories may deny absolutely they are planning such a constitutional coup, as well as rejecting entirely any suggestion that they might give up regular elections totally and only have the odd one when they feel like it.

However, the administration’s capacity for reporting accurately on its own activities has come into great doubt in recent days, after it emerged that they had just been less than forthright with the facts about concessionary rail travel for older people, as well as telling blatant fibs about Labour in their election material in spite of clear and incontrovertible documentary proving that the Tories are either very naughty or very stupid, or both.

TCF thought about contacting famous bloggers Tom Harris and Iain Dale for comment, as they have both expressed their concern about the national gerrymandering situation.  However, it was tea-time, and people don’t like being disturbed during their tea, so we let it go.

Jon Lansman contacted me about a week before Election Day, to ask whether or not I’d be interested in getting involved with a new website, Left Futures. This website has now gone live, and Jon has asked if I’d express the thoughts I shared with him in our email correspondence, where I cast doubt on the idea of a new ‘internet hub’ for ‘those who have no sustainable political vehicle for their aspirations’, but nevertheless agreed to be involved.

Last year, TCF was part of an effort – led by John McDonnell and other LRC figures – to try and make the web work for us. The work both Paul and I have done, as regards issues like “Tory” co-ops, or Tory plans for local government in the aftermath of an election victory, have been the sort of thing that initial effort was meant to bring together on the web. This is the space into which Left Foot Forward (and to some extent, Next Left and LibCon) stepped, as we moved too slowly.

Thus, I’m not certain what another aggregating website can achieve in this regard. Labourhome and Labourlist have brought out a great deal of comment – but to the best of my knowledge have had absolutely zero impact when it comes to re-energising the grassroots of the Party in a left direction, and plenty of those on such sites are left wing. LibCon, further left and bigger than either, despite key interventions on things like abortion rights, has been unable to do much except speak at the odd conference.

These are environments completely removed from those of the average person, the average voter. Basically a lot of this is political activists talking to an audience of political anoraks, most of whom have long since made up their mind where they stand. It’s still useful, for Labour Party members, as it can educate them against the gushing well of platitudes the leadership uses to cover itself, but the actual renewal of the Party – which is far from begun, never mind accomplished – is something that must take place offline.

It can still be reported on, and can still use the web for discussions of direction etc – but someone needs to pick out the course of that renewal first, before seeking out the accoutrements like a website, and then get on with it. If it begins to get traction, its members will quickly set up their own websites and these can then be brought together, if there is a demand for that. That’s down to you and the other members of the LRC National Committee, and to the institutional support that can be provided by MPs like Michael Meacher and John McDonnell, who are prepared to use their full-time staff as lieutenants in such a movement.

Perhaps my problem is in failing, as Paul and I have been accused of, to correctly identify the methods of Web 2.0. The point, on such a reading, is merely to provide the form, while users provide endless amounts of content. This has been the achievement of websites like Comment is Free, LabourList and, much more selectively, Liberal Conspiracy and Left Foot Forward. And these sites are phenomenally successful, from the point of view of gaining readers.

If that is the only goal of the blogosphere, then it seems relatively easy to generate the sort of community which will sustain high viewing figures. It’s merely a question of diversifying in content and contributors. From the point of view of ‘the Left’, however, actually having an effect seems qualitatively different. Blogs can command the same sort of (relatively) passive outrage as the mainstream media, but is that all that can be done?

In short, I think so. Blogs and communities of blogs are sustained ultimately by self-referentiality, of developing one’s own opinions elsewhere and enjoying batting them around with others of similar and different mindsets. Bloggers end up having long running conversations with one another, as can be seen from any of the comments threads on TCF where LibCon editor Sunny Hundal intervenes (see also: Paul Kingsnorth, Susan Press, Paul Cotterill, Tom Miller etc). Names become well known because of these arguments. All you really need to be able to do is string a coherent sentence together.

When it comes to actually wielding power however, a necessary prerequisite of Left regroupment, then I suspect blogs come up somewhat short. Of necessity, power exists in the offline world, and must be wielded there. The key tactical question is, where does this power reside? Thirty years ago, most people in our position would have said it exists at CLP meetings (especially selection meetings) or in their union branches. What about now?

There’s a plethora of think-tanks, pressure groups and professional politicos (almost all based in London) telling us about the myriad ways we can ‘get involved’. Who hasn’t had emails pestering them from 38 Degrees, Compass, Pam Giddy of Power 2010 and so on? But the recipients of such emails are the political activists and anoraks like yours truly, or the politically literate who enjoy the spectacle, like a number of our thread-inhabitants.

When all the chaff is blown away, of course, precious little of this involvement remains. As recently witnessed with the Lib-Dem move into a Tory-led coalition, despite all the protests that a hung parliament would deliver electoral reform and that voting Lib-Dem would help, under the current system, if you don’t directly wield power, then expect to be left out in the cold. This disfranchisement may result on Lib-Dem members moving back to Labour – but likely they will find a similar disjoint between their formal rights as voting members and the reality once someone is in power.

These leaves us back with CLPs and union branches – the direct, organisational elements where we can exert pressure on our not-entirely-self-contained-however-much-it-gives-that-impression political class. As I’m not a Labour Party member – and for good reason as I see it – my view of CLPs is not unclouded by the belief that Labour’s machinery is indefatigably and (shy of some unforeseen event) forever set against the Left, and that the Right-ward direction of this machinery makes Labour’s connection to the working class tenuous and residual.

For this reason, when the Convention of the Left was set up a few years ago, I had high hopes that it could bring together the best of Labour and the far Left for the purposes of establishing a critical mass that would attract new people into the activist circle(jerk?) and would actually have the clout to mobilise far beyond that small group. Instead, much like the blogosphere, it seemed to be little more than talking shop. Fun, but not the point.

Despite the knocks delivered to unions over the last few years, the unabashedly activist role played by union branches – inside and outside Labour – demonstrates how key engagement with unions still is. When it comes to resisting public sector cuts, political pressure groups won’t be the force mobilising hundreds of thousands of people on strike – it’ll be the PCS, RMT or the other unions, if we can ever convince them to get off their ass, as they have skin in the game.

As the poll tax federations, and various smaller scale campaigns since then, have showed us, there is also always room for community-orientated campaigns, which can be explicitly socialist in tenor, especially bearing in mind the ramifications an unchained capitalism has for the built environment, and thus for the context in which our social and community cohesion must exist.

But what role in any of this for so-called new media? New media may have a role in persuading people, but if it does, then that doesn’t say much for the strength of the Left in the real world. People are not rootless just because they’re online. They exist in definite contexts: they have workplaces and communities. If we haven’t already snaffled their support through such arenas, then we’re focused too much on presentation and not enough on organising.

Consider the recent straw poll done by Alex Smith over at LabourList of Labour leadership candidates. John McDonnell, who wasn’t one of the original options in the poll, came fifth on the basis of write-in votes. That’s encouraging – but it’s not a win, and it’s never going to be a win on the basis of the internet. What it does show, however, is the lamentably backward political consciousness of the Labour Party, where David Miliband is wildly popular.

Miliband, as we know, is a dyed-in-the-wool New Labourite. His leadership, much like the transition between Blair and Brown, represents hardly any change at all – and yet Twitterers already see him as the ‘change’ candidate. This is reminiscent of David Cameron lining himself up as the British Obama. It flies because the Left has not succeeded in challenging the context of people’s lives. Information – getting our knowledge and arguments out there – undeniably has a role to play, but mere information does not positively identify a political alternative.

Hence the limits to Cameron’s attempt at identifying himself as an Obama figure. He came up against the lived experience of Tory policies, still extant amongst the working class of this country. Labour may not be a party for the working class any longer, but policies like the minimum wage and investment in the NHS (ignoring the privatisation for a moment) are a far cry from the state of schools and hospitals by 1997. The problem for the socialist Left is that there is very little ‘lived experience’ of the type of political alternative we advocate, and too many groups – like Compass – aren’t especially bothered by it, sustained as they are by a revolving door of those who believe in the pressure group approach.

Where it does exist, there’s the ever present danger of fatigue setting in, of it being isolated to a particular sector of the workforce, and of it thus falling to contradictory demands by different political factions. Nevertheless, this experience, and its concomitant political education, is what we’ve got to establish. When public servants inevitably come under attack from the Cameron-Clegg love-in, the opening will be there. Setting up a website which will report material from the strike lines is good and useful, but it will not complete the political education of workers.

You need to be on the pickets. You need to be pulling together threads from disparate struggles and tying them.

Even that isn’t going far enough. Sooner or later, purely economic – for the sake of our bread and butter – strikes have to cross the line into politics. If we’re to stop Cameron, Clegg and whoever Labour next elects as leader in those elements of the agenda they share, then the debates at the front line need to expand beyond what we’re paid to encompass who controls the economy, in whose interest it is run, and how we can best intervene to shape it in a manner favourable to the millions who are about to have tax rises, wage freezes and service cuts slapped on them.

These debates happen in the real world, and even there, they don’t stand alone, and aren’t merely academic, as many online debates can often become. They happen in the context of a struggle won here or lost there. A strike successful, or an exhausted workplace not turning out and working on as usual. Sustaining this type of activism is physically exhausting; leafleting, meetings, trips to hotspots, knocking on doors, more meetings, stalls and petition gathering and did I mention the meetings? The potential for none of which exists online.

Online is merely where we can compare notes and strategies, and perhaps butt heads over what our long term goals are. But the ‘we’ in the real world is the whole of the working class, the ‘we’ online is merely a self-selecting group no more representative of those we aim to devolve power to than that bunch of twits sitting in the House of Commons.

I think the LibCon coalition may look back on today and wonder: ‘how did we screw up the first day of government quite so badly? It was all going so well.’

The proposals set out in the coalition agreement for legislation on ‘dissolution if 55% or more of the House votes in favour ’ will seem so staggeringly dismissive of basic constitutional tenets, and so immediately insulting to the population at large, that the reputation of the coalition government may well already damaged beyond repair, whether or not the legislation ends up going through.

‘These are the parties who, on day one, tried to stitch up democracy on their own interests’, people may say.  And they’ll be right.

People on twitter and across the media are already picking up how staggeringly biased to the Tories these proposals look, including the possibility that they will actually be able to carry on in government without LibDem support once the legislation is through. 

There’s already a dedicated website for the #noto55 hashtagged campaign. 

Even Iain Dale agrees it’s wrong, and he likes the Tories being in power.

Yes, of course – as the New Statesman says - dissolution at 55% will not necessarily that the Tories will last the full five years; a combination of the Tory right and LibDem withdrawal may do the job on dissolution.  There will also be some dissection of the precise difference between a vote of no confidence and ensuing dissolution.

But that’s not the light in which this agreement will or should be seen.  It should and will be seen by the public as a deliberate strategy for clinging on to power at all costs, precisely what they were accusing Labour of just days ago.

I simply cannot fathom how so many politicians and party staffers, at so many levels of the the two parties, have allowed this part of the agreement through.  Are they really that detached already from any sense of public opinion that they didn’t think through the implications?

I am, for once, pretty well dumbfounded.

In the wave of commentariat enthusiasm for the LibCon love-in, it’s as though the economy isn’t as it used to be.

There was a time, back yonder, when sensible LibDems thought there were real problems with the Conservative plans to cut the deficit had really taken hold.  Demand would sink, businesses would close, and a spiral of deflation would set in.  The risk of inflationary boom was greatly preferable to a 1930s apocalypse.

It’s different now. The LibDems have signed up to the Tories’ plans for immediate fiscal reduction, and apparently a double dip is not a problem anymore.

Now, they have cabinet posts, likely responsibility for electoral reform, deputy PM, likely four year fixed terms, possible AV at the next election, the Tory manifesto compromised in many ways ….

Oh that’s all right then, bits of the manifesto have been ‘compromised’, so there’s clearly no need to worry aboutv what Danny Blanchflower again argues (on telly tonight) could be a death spiral.

For gawd’s sake, even the markets look a bit worried now that they have their preferred choice in Downing Street, and now that they’ve seen what they’re planning to get up to.  Then here’s Mervyn King praising the LibCon plans for cuts at 10am today, and here’s what happens to sterling:

                                      Yesterday                                                                    Today

Not perhaps as dramatic as Blanchflower makes out, but at least someone’s keeping an eye out. 

Meanwhile, unemployment is up again. 

Yesterday wasn’t the time to take £6bn out of the economy.   There is no reason why today there suddenly should be.

"No I didn't, did I? I must have been well drunk last night!"

So the Lib-Dems have not only put a Conservative government into office, they’ve gone into coalition. Clegg is to be Deputy Prime Minister and Cable may end up as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. What’s evident is how all the holier-than-thou Lib-Dems are getting to sleep at night, however: blaming Labour for the whole thing.

Now, don’t get me wrong, senior Labour MPs were quite vehemently opposed to talks of a coalition between the Lib-Dems and Labour. I hoped something might be worked out, and look forward to finding out in future memoirs what was offered and what was unacceptable, but that’s politics. What the Lib-Dems didn’t have to do was accept a coalition.

It could have been a Conservative minority government – which, incidentally, would not have been able to inscribe marriage in the tax system. Whereas now, the Lib-Dems have apparently pledged to abstain on such a vote. Likewise, private members bills could have pushed through the Lib-Dem mansion tax, which they’ve now dropped.

No, evidently the actuality of power was much too attractive for principle to hold out. Not that I ever believed the Lib-Dems to have much of that. It’s only on the strength of people like Evan Harris – now gone – that I’ve believed the Lib-Dems to have any left-wing credentials at all. But Orange Book will out and all that.

What’s surprising is that the Lib-Dem leadership abandoned proportional representation so fast. That must have been quite a shock to the army of semi-professional politicos who have been campaigning for it, whilst saying the Lib-Dems were the party to deliver it. We get a referendum on AV, which is what Labour was going to deliver anyway.

Anyone want to take bets that a new election will wipe out the need even for that, if the Tories win?

I thought the best way I could mark Labour’s move into opposition is to collect together into one essay all the pieces I wrote a while ago about how the party might renew itself as it moved towards what seemed like inevitable defeat.  For a while just recently, it didn’t seem so inevitable, but here we are.

So here it is all tidied up into The Fifth Tradition, How Labour can renew itself for the 2010s’, all 20,000 words of it.  Does any of it still make sense?

I was asked the following questions after my last posting.

a) we have a structural deficit which requires fresh debt to be raised and b) a lot of debt repayment is met by refinancing i.e. by issuing more debt to pay the holders of gilts reaching maturity.

Given that state of affairs, if:
i) The Gov prints Sterling to meet payments causing inflation to rise to deliberately erode debt (if that is the proposed policy) – why would an investor the period after buy debt from a country who does that? (except perhaps at a stonking yield).
ii) We whack a massive tax on savings. It instantly becomes less profitable to but government debt – cue mass sell off and fall in demand for future gilt offerings.
iii) The markets crash and value of sterling drops significantly. Why has that happened? Because investors have pulled their cash out – no more demand for gilts.

Why wouldn’t these things happen?

I think that these questions show a misunderstanding of the role of the Crown in the financial system of the country.
The impression is that the Crown is dependent on the financial system, whereas historically the whole financial system
from the foundation of the Bank of England grew up to service the tax and spending activities of the Crown.

The early English taxation system  well described in   Peter Heather’s recent book and in Menninger rested on a system of tallies. The Lords Lieutenantof the shires initially had to render taxes in kind to Crown in return for which the exchequer gave them split tallies which recorded their payment.

One side of the tally was kept by the Exchequer and the other by the person rendering taxes. Later it was found that the tallies could be used to pay directly for Crown expenditure – the purchase of naval stores etc. The merchant delivering the stores to the Crown would get a tally which they could then sell to somebody else who could render it in lieu of tax. The birch sticks having been split down the middle were proof against forgery, since only the twin of a divided tally would match it.

After the establishment of the Bank of England these wooden records were replaced by paper ones, but the essential principle has remained the same. If you are paid by the Crown you get a slip which looks like a cheque but isnt. A cheque is drawn on a bank. The Crown makes payments in the form of drafts on the Queen’s and Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer in Scotland or the Paymaster General in England. These drafts, which now go through the automatic bank clearing system with a Bank of England sort code, can be used by the banking system to offset taxes falling due. The banks also use them as the foundation of their whole lending system. Payments by the banks are drafts on private a bank that are only ultimately valid so long as they can ultimately be translated into drafts on the Paymaster General.

At times the banking system creates more private liabilities than it can back up with drafts on the Crown – when this happens as it did in 2008, there is ultimately no recourse but for the Crown, via the Bank of England to create additional such drafts, a process with now goes under the term quantitative easing.

In the normal course of events drafts are continually being created by Crown expenditure and anulled by tax payments. If the Crown expenditure exceeds tax liabilities falling due, it offers to annull the drafts for a period in return for interest. Barney asks what will happen if there is no more demand for gilts? What will happen if investors pull their cash out?

This is to confuse the position of an individual holder of government bonds with the position of the financial system as a whole. The banking system can not ‘pull its cash out’. Its monetary base exists purely in the form of records of credit with the exchequer, managed via the Bank of England. The only thing it can do with these is use them to settle taxes, or to lend back to the Crown. And in recent months, the problem has been not a superfluity of these credits with the Crown, but a lack, hence the need for quantitative easing.

An individual firm can decide to sell UK gilts and buy US Treasury bills, which, if pursued by sufficient firms, may push down the exchange rate of Sterling relative to the Dollar, but the UK banking system as a whole has no option but to go on buying Crown instruments of debt. But as I argued before, a fall in the value of Sterling is sufficiently necessary that the Bank of England would be better to engineer it if it fails to happen spontaneously.

The banking system today hides and mystifies what was transparent in feudal society – that all are subject of the Crown and liable to duties on its behalf. We no longer have to do duties in person in Britain except in time of war. Instead we render to the Crown that which is the Crown’s: money. Because a vast private bureacracy has grown up to manage this process the illusion arises that that bureacracy – which we now call the banking system – creates money.

ii) We whack a massive tax on savings. It instantly becomes less profitable to but government debt – cue mass sell off and fall in demand for future gilt offerings.

I did not prescribe a tax on savings, but on the saving classes. The Crown, appropriates a large part of the social surplus product. In Commercial Society, the real appropriation of the surplus — real consumption of labour and goods by the Government, becomes separated from the symbolic appropriation in tax payments. The public debt is the resolution of the contradiction between real and symbolic appropriation. It is a matter of politics and administrative capability to resolve how effectively the symbolic appropriation matches the real appropriation. Those classes currently saving, predominantly from the higher income groups, are symbolically appropriating part of the social surplus product whose real appropriator is the state. A change in tax rates on higher income groups will help bring symbolic and real appropriation into alignment.