Though Cowards Flinch

“When I get older, I will be stronger, they’ll call me freedom just like a waving flag.” This is the chorus to K’naan’s anthem to the 2010 world cup – and no one who is a football fan can fail to be moved both by the sentiments and the stunning visuals set to the music, from the tear-jerking moments to the high drama to the comradeship of players and fans.

Sport is and always has been intensely political. Whether the question is how the world cup affects South Africa, especially the poorest - put to no few interviewees by white European journalists – or the fact that commentators around the world were forced to remember the Soweto uprisings through their anniversary, World Cup 2010 is no different.

Interlaced into the above song are images of Nelson Mandela’s march to freedom, set to lyrics which are quite political in context: “Give me freedom, give me fire, give me reason, take me higher”. What all this obscures is that in reality this is a marketing campaign by Coca-Cola. It is not an artist celebrating his joy at the meeting and friendship of nations through sport.

In fact there is an ‘original’ version of K’naan’s song, from his recent album, Troubadour. It contains lyrics like the following snippet:

So many wars, settling scores
Bringing us promises, leaving us poor
I heard them say, love is the way
Love is the answer, that’s what they say,
But look how they treat us, make us believers
We fight their battles, then they deceive us
Try to control us, they couldn’t hold us
Cause we just move forward like Buffalo Soldiers

It’s basically a song about racism, war, poverty and a fight against these things. Coca-Cola, on the other hand, have diluted all this content to as little as they could without basically getting rid of the song entirely. In place of the most political lyrics, there is chanting and words about football.

Marketing magazing Billboard Biz recorded that Coca Cola “loved the song but noted that lyrical references to ‘a violent prone, poor people zone’ and people ‘struggling, fighting to eat’ didn’t fit the campaign’s themes”. Despite these things all being true about the continent of Africa, which in 2010 is the centre of the vortex of wealth and media attention coat-tailing the World Cup.

I’m not saying that K’naan is somehow ‘pure’ and Coca-Cola is somehow the anti-christ, having unfairly taken this song and basically prostituted it. Even the distorted ‘celebration mix’ contains sentiments which are worthwhile. In fact what Coca-Cola have done makes perfect sense.

They have taken something liable to strike a cord with popular sympathies, diluted it to taste and then utilised it to promote a product. It’s brilliant. It’s so common we don’t even think about it these days; humour, solidarity, love – basically every human emotion and expression worth having and with general applicability is used like this.

In this case, the song is even translated into languages other than English (for which it was originally written) to give it global appeal. In short, a global corporation intent on profiteering from a cynical marketing campaign can also appear as the guardians of diversity and local identity, from a certain point of view.

Mostly this disgusts me. And yet…there’s something good to take away as well.

Outside of the West, the cry ‘give me freedom’ resounds and ruling classes tremble. Whether it’s Iran, Burma, Thailand or Greece, the basic message explicit to the original version of this song is that one day we will shake off parasitic leaders and be free – and the political actions of these countries give the force to this message.

In Western Europe, we’re all too often inclined to think that the age of a redemptive politics is dead – that we’re consigned to basically tinkering around the edges and that there is no room for a panoramic vision of change. Even the mass movements of the last thirty have contained only a minority of those people with genuine aspirations for wholesale political change.

Yet across Europe this song, which is basically about that, is getting airplay, with a message attempting to tap into a persistent sense of solidarity, of wanting to belong as an equal and wanting others to belong as equals. If these beliefs weren’t widespread and waiting for a real movement to utilise them, Coca-Cola wouldn’t bother with them. 

However vacuous a gesture, whatever echoes of a Live8 style (without the advantages of raising money for charity, though minus the disadvantages of tits walking round with their armbands believing concerts change the world) it all may seem, that thought is still enough to make me smile.

Periodically I have so many blogposts lined up in my head that I can’t work out which order they should come in.  This means that none of them get done til I’ve forgotten a few. 

This is where you come in, dear reader.  you can help me out by telling me what you’d like to read about first, or at all.  The TCF polling station is open now, and for your consideration are titles along the lines of:

1) Why fears of hyperinflation in government deficit situations are bollox

2) Being charitable to our prospective leaders: assessing the prospects for real change in the Labour party under Balls or Miliband D

3) The World Bank has decided the poor are to blame for the fiancial crisis

4) Your Labour leadership contest scoring wallchart

5) What does resisting cuts actually mean?

5) My decision NOT to stand for the National Executive Committee of the Labour party

6) Why I AM standing for National Constitutional Council of the Labour party, and why I’d like your CLP’s support (if you have one)

7) A response to some utter liberal lefte gibberish in the new edition of Red Pepper

8) My ‘pitch’ around the development of local media to be made at next week’s Blog Nation organised by Sunny.

The coalition government has announced:

With the unprecedented levels of debt facing the country we have regrettably had to take the difficult decision to end the Free Swimming Programme.

The summary evaluation report published today shows the programme was not providing best value for money, so we could not justify continuing to fund it.

This is bullshit.

First, it is not in the gift of government to end free swimming (for over 60s and 16 and unders).  It is for local councils to decide whether or not they will continue to offer free swimming after the end of the government grant.  Labour-controlled Wigan MBC for example, already provided free swimming before a government grant was made available.  The wording here is designed to make it easier for Tory/LibDem councils to stop the programme, inclusive of any financial contribution they make to it.

Second, at no point does the evaluation by Price Waterhouse Coopers, of the first (and now only) year of government funding say that ‘best value for money is not being provided’.  Of course the evaluation recommends improvements to the scheme in terms of marketing and design, but it is also clear that the main purpose of the scheme is being achieved:

The findings from the latest online survey showed positive changes in the level of physical activity undertaken by those who had participated in free swimming: amongst those free swimmers aged 60 and over, the proportion of respondents who undertook at least 30 minutes of activity a day increased from 66.2% before the start of the FSP to 78.4% since the FSP was introduced whilst amongst those aged 16 and under, the proportion of free swimmers undertaking more than 60 minutes of physical activities increased from 20.7% to 32.9%.

Third,  the full evaluation report for the first year of funding is not published until 23 June.  This is either because the full evaluation will make clear that the programme is good value for money (there is no such measurable thing as ‘best value for money’) and is therefore being deliberately concealed for now until the news storm abates, or because the findings of an expansive evaluation by PWC have not been taken into account before the decision has been made.

In summary, this decision by the coalition government is not only stupid; it is also being ‘sold’ on the basis of outright lies about the Free Swimming Programme and its evaluation.

Now listen up.

I’m a very important and influential political commentator – a bit like Nick Robinson but with smaller glasses and a proper understanding of politics –  so I really haven’t got time to waste writing extra stuff for a medium-sized blog. 

So here’s an article I wrote for Red Pepper earlier tracing the historical dodginess of Credit Rating Agencies, and with an exciting start, middle and end bit.

This one’s for free, but I want you all to give serious consideration to subscribing to the magazine itself, and not just because I have now become its top writer, though that would be justification in itself.

Subscribe because Red Pepper is about the only regular (6 times a year) socialist magazine of its type available, and it’s actually pretty dammed good.  I don’t agree with all the stuff in there - in fact I’ll soon be critiquing one central article in the most recent edition which I think is rampant bollox -  and there’s too much Billy Bragg adoration, but it’s always well worth a good look through. 

It’ s run in a heroic pauper type way on a shoestring by really committed people, including the greatly estimable Hilary Wainwright who did a lot of the setting up in the 1980s and sticks with it even though she could easily tootle off and do other stuff instead.  Hilary, for reference, wrote by far the best book on the Labour left in the 1980s, and I still use it as a source of wisdom and clarity about what the left got wrong in the 1980s, even though I am also very wise.

It costs 20 quid for six editions a year, and you get back copies when you subscribe, which you can do by clicking here and doing the debit card stuff.

If you really get into it, and if you’re a student or something, you could go to your university bookshop and harrass them about stocking it if they don’t already.  After all, many of them already stock Total Politics, and that’s utter shite.

Apart from cutting the odd capital project, a hefty chunk of the money the Tory government claims to be saving comes from job creation funds for young people and the unemployed. From young people, the Future Job Fund (£290m) and the Young People’s Guarantee (£450m) are being taken.

These are meant to contribute to the creation of 150,000 jobs at least (that’s the number designature by FJF, not including its supplementation by the YPG – it’s probably less than half the number of jobs involved. For one year, this is barely a saving – 52 weeks equivalent, on the Jobseeker’s Allowance, £404 million. This doesn’t take into account that one of the funds runs to 2012.

Between now and 2012, the annual cost of staving off another generation growing up in a culture of joblessness is thus at most £168 million or thereabouts, per year. Pittance. And Tories aren’t willing to pay it, nor are their Lib-Dem lackeys.

This won’t count the cost of additional policing for higher crime, which comes with higher unemployment and the sort of ‘benefits dependency’ and disempowerment that brings. It doesn’t count the housing benefits and national insurance costs of having people out of work. In short, the paltry amount saved by cutting funds for the young will prove to be an expense.

That’s before we’ve even got to the higher costs of having the over-25s out of work, as their funds have been cut too. Well done the Libs.

Local newsletters are a key element to the New Localism in campaign strategies.

Paul has written up a document that has been circulating for a while in different forms, about how he won his election in the Bickerstaffe ward in West Lancashire. In it, he details lots of different ways in which one can build up a personal vote by connecting with and serving voters in a constituency.

Emphasis on a local approach to elections seems to be one of the lessons learned by a certain part of the Labour Party. There’s even a desire for leaflets that look like they are homemade, rather than glossies purchased at great expense from Labour Party HQ (like those sold via godawful MembersNet).

To the best of my knowledge, Oxford still stands out as the constituency to adopt energetic local targeting – and was rewarded both at the last set of local elections and this year’s set and by hanging on to Andrew Smith’s seat in Oxford East, despite a wafer-thin majority in 2005. And this is grand, as it kept the Lib/Tories out.

Yet I can’t help but feel that there’s something missing, despite Paul’s injunction not to leave out the politics, not to smooth out views that aren’t mainstream, and I wanted to investigate that.

My first conjecture is that engagement in this local way can be seen as a more intensive farming of what already exists by way of pro-Labour or anti-Tory sentiment. It turns higher numbers of supporters out to the polls, much in the way that General Election campaigns are a qualitative jump on other elections, and produce like quantitative jumps.

All of the stories referred to above contain details of new people – not previous Party members – getting in contact as the result of political campaigns, of doing things like donating to a paypal account or pledging to give out a leaflet or two. And that’s great, so long as it represents the first of a series of steps towards political practice.

One person joining the Party, so long as they sit at home, or only come out for leafleting and the odd branch meeting is useful if the purpose of all this localism is just to continue to win elections ad infinitum, but as we know from the New Labour years, winning elections ad infinitum is not always a good thing.

The natural response of Labour’s left will be, “Aha, but winning elections ad infinitum is a good thing if the Left control selections” – and I would be the last to dispute the value of having Labour Lefties in office, rather than Tories. But to leave the matter there is to be unnecessarily reductive when it comes to political practice.

For a start, it does not take into account the qualitative changes on consciousness that can be brought about by a) wider political events and b) holding power as the result of election at which the masses turn out and then slink back home, without the continuous presence of mass (i.e. working class) interests exerting themselves.

So, for example, Labour’s path from the high tide of the Left back through different types of reaction until Blairism was reached is one not due solely to the technocratic attitude of Mandelson etc but also due to the defeats of the labour movement and the disenchantment and disengagement that this produced.

Thus there are backlashes both from within – through the creation of a bureaucratic layer of representatives who almost as soon as they are elected become separated from the concerns which elected them – and from without, through defeats produced by the actions of organised capital. This has been acknowledged even by New Labour, with calls for politicians to meet more real people – which may see a wider adoption of this local campaigning style.

But adoption of these campaigning methods can’t combat this, especially because the political orientation of Labour itself won’t remain stable, and the campaigning methods themselves are designed to appeal to people as voters, i.e. as consumers of a political product – a passive role. They are not embedded with an affiliation to the working class nor the combative spirit that leading our class to sustainable victories requires.

Instead we have an organisation fit to give voice to local communities – not a bad thing – in defence against cuts etc, but not ideologically equipped to stop those cuts across whole fronts of activity, nor with the necessary sinews required to mobilise the entire working class – which is the only way to stop such cuts.

Again the Labour leftie says “Aha! But…” This time the objection will be that whether or not to further integrate people whose interest is caught by these methods is the choice of that person, and can be aided by actions on the part of the local Labour organisation – e.g. curry nights after CLP meetings etc. There is also the point that most Labour branches and CLPs at least have the nominal involvement of the trades unions.

These tactics and resources can be used to knit the relevant sinews together, and while we Labourites might not approach things with the same all-encompassing methodology of our very rigid Marxist friends, by being local, by being connected, the political ideology intrinsic in everything from our structural position to our methods of engagement performs exactly the same function as your explicit ideology. Only better. And with less silly words.

All of which would be great if the labour movement and Labour Party bureaucracy stood still, or could be simply swept away by one titanic effort at gathering every Left activist together under the banner of the Labour Party conference. Yet these elements of reaction draw a continuing strength and renewal from the confused and contradictory ideas and practices of a great section of the working class.

Including, for example, the section that voted Tory or for other parties. Political engagement on the local model outlined in the various articles cited will not overcome these contradictions. Indeed such contradictions can happily exist alongside them – e.g. the anti-student prejudices of some towns wouldn’t be shifted because students more often than not don’t vote, or vote at home, and only stay in the area of the university for three years or less.

Yet, as has been proved time and again over the last two years, students are a vital key to undoing the attempts by the Conservative, Lib-Dem and Labour Parties to marketise third-level education. In particularly militant areas, they have been the staunchest defenders of trades union rights, of the rights of staff and even the rights of immigrants to work.

Organising and linking these sorts of struggles together requires a particular political perspective – its adoption by Labour would be a positive measure, but there’s no indication that this is what is going on. ‘Localism’ does not apply to this political perspective.

It’s also interesting that not one of these ‘local’ models mentions the ongoing efforts by various Lefts within the unions to retake the leadership of these behemoth institutions. Or mentions people in their single most important capacity: as producers of surplus value. It is here that such confused consciousness will be confronted – and not always at the behest of theoretically aware socialists; more often than not through a simple lense like fairness, as at Royal Mail.

There’s also the contention that intrinsic political understanding can only go so far before we need a valid and all-encompassing critique of the processes which we’re trying to control, whether in the interests of the ‘working class’ or ‘the people’ or whatever constituency one is claiming to represent.

My second conjecture builds upon the first. Taking all the above into account, that the form of engagement advocated is rather narrow, my suggestion is that returns will be yielded a) while Labour is in opposition, or while there is a threat of a Tory government and while Labour is perceived as more interested in ‘people’ than the Tories b) so long as other groups do not adopt the same intensive practices.

As regards a) Labour will not always be in opposition – and what government we get when it moves into power will act to offset local campaigning, however much we think to mitigate it. Similarly, given a Tory victory over organised labour, there’s no guarantee that the political sphere of debate cannot move right. That being so, a rootless Labour Party will tend to move with it, and the advantage of being better than the Tories will diminish all the while.

Likewise condition b) will not always hold. When other parties begin adopting such tactics, it will be politics which distinguishes between the competitors – and the consciousness of the voters, determined as it will be both by the action of opposing interests against theirs and by the efficacy and organisation developed by any defence of their interests. Local action goes some way to providing repositories of resistance – but this is largely defensive, and the point of the socialist movement is to gain things for the working class, not merely defend what there is.

This is the key difference, I would submit, between implicitly having a grasp of theory through practice, and explicitly being able to understand the relationship between the two and the broader processes at work – i.e. the difference between Labourism and Marxism.

Einstein

If we could somehow manage to prevent the purchasing-power of the masses, measured in terms of goods, from sinking below a certain minimum, stoppages in the industrial cycle such as we are experiencing to-day would be rendered impossible (1934).

 Osborne

We’re Tories and we don’t give a fuck about the purchasing power of the masses, and just to prove it we’ll totally fuck the economy (2010, paraphrased).

 Via Warren

Whilst having very little to do with my time today, I just sat and watched a charming little interview on BBC News about the need to cut public spending. The subject of the short piece was the Conservative leader of Nottinghamshire County Council, Kay Cutts (yes that is really her name!), who sat below a picture of Margaret Thatcher (you couldn’t make it up could you?), whilst trying to justify why its necessary to cut such frivolous programmes as the local village Library and elderly care services.

According to the wisdom of Cllr Cutts, the thing the majority of the public is most concerned about, is the “bloated Public Sector“. Yes of course it is Kay, that’s all anyone ever tells me on the doorstep. Obviously at a time when unemployment is still rife the one thing most people are waiting for government to do is send even more people to the jobcentre. Makes sense I suppose.

The problem here is that Councillor Cutts is confusing her own narrow ideological beliefs with the will of the public. I think if we probed a little deeper than the Nottinghamshire County Council chamber, we might just find that people are actually concerned about their

Some of the lovely pensioners Councillor Cutts is intent on punishing.

children’s schools, whether or not they’ll have a job at the end of the year, or whether they’ll be able to pay all the bills this month.

The idea that there is some massive consensus about cutting public spending is simply laughable, especially as seen as the majority of the electorate didn’t vote for the Party that put slashing the budget at the center of their manifesto. This is just another prime example of a politician (and I’m not hinting just at Tory ones here either!) that really isn’t in touch with any of the “real people“, outside her close group of political insiders.

Anyway, kudos to the BBC cameraman who made sure the picture of Thatcher remained in the frame during the interview. Combined with the interviewees’ name, it really did make an otherwiswe laborious few minutes of video quite enjoyable.

TCF is proud to announce its exclusive guide to scoring the Labour leadership contest in a socialist manner.  

This is a ‘must have’ for all Labour party members, and will soon be available in wall chart form to replace the World Cup one you’ve got in the kitchen.

The idea behind the guide is simple but innovative.

Instead of just deciding who they like, or who they think it’s acceptable to like, and then making up reasons why they support them, Labour party members can use the scoring guide to assess what each of the candidates say and write, and the extent to which their track record backs them up.  Points will also be awarded for learning potential evidenced during the campaign, and scoring will be scientifically weighted according to the importance of each policy and organisational area.  Points are also deductible for empty rhetoric and rampant bollox.

By using the chart, custom-designed by our in-house experts of Proper Socialism within the British Labour Movement, Labour party members will, collectively, be able to select the most properly socialist candidate as their next leader. 

This will be a big step forward for the Labour party, which has a tendency to get such decisions horribly, horribly wrong, and leads to the working class getting totally screwed again.

If the elected Labour leader fails to meet the minimum threshold for Proper Socialism within the British Labour Movement, then Labour party members may justifiably consider sodding off to another more socialist party, if they think the position of leader is really that important, and not a relative distraction from the real job in hand of local level grassroots organisation.   TCF’s team of experts is currently working on wall-charts for these parties also.

Details of the full scoring guide will be revealed tomorrow, or when our team of experts gets back from the pub.  In the meantime, pre-orders can be made by sending a cheque for £12.99, made payable to Paul Cotterill, Editor-in-Pub, Real Socialism in the Labour Movement Leadership Contest Scoring Guide Wall-Chart Division, Though Cowards Flinch, Bickerstaffe, Lancashire, or to Dave Semple, c/o Any Picket Line or Demo That’s Going, Canterbury.

This wasn’t supposed to appear here. It was supposed to appear at Labour Uncut.  However, I made a total balls up around saying what I’d do when, and by the time I’d written it they’d already posted this edited version of what I’d already said here.  They are now so bored with me they’ve stopped answering my emails.

But I’ve written it, so here it: the TCF definitive guide to being good at campaigning and winning in unlikely settings, and then getting really bleeding grouchy at no bleeder in the Labour bleeding hierarchy ever listening to a word I bleeding say.

The TCF guide to winning elections

Three years ago, I won my council seat. 

I added 600% to the Labour vote, on a turnout amongst the highest 1% in the country, and became the first ever Labour councillor in this rural area, hitherto put unthinkingly on the ‘unwinnable’ list.  Local Conservatives were, quite literally, stunned to silence on election night.  Mind you, you could have knocked me down with a feather.

The election campaign I ran was, until the last month or two, a ‘single-hander’ because my local party thought I was wasting my time.  No resources were pulled in from the wider campaign, during which we lost two seats to the Tories anyway.

Until May 2010, I was the only Labour councillor in a ward other than the ’heartland’ of Skelmersdale new town.

In May 2009, I had won a tightly contested elected to become leader of the Labour group.

In May 2007, we had held Tanhouse Ward – just about the ‘safest’ seat you can get in Skelmersdale – by 26 votes.  In May 2010, our ‘old warhorse’ councillor Bob, who had reluctantly submitted to my newfangled ways, won by 984 votes against the same Tory candidate, a local woman who’d spent three years campaigning.

In May 2010 we took back four seats for Labour all told, the first Labour gains for nearly a decade, other than my own.  We also held the constituency comfortably enough in the general election, with a swing of less than 2% against Labour. 

Last month, I was re-elected leader of the Labour group by unanimous vote.

That’s a reasonable record of electoral success, I think. 

You might think that the Labour party hierarchy might be quite interested in what I got up to before 2007, and whether or not there’s anything to be learned from the way I’ve done my bit to heal old wounds in the local party since then.

Unfortunately, that’s not been the case.  When I wrote up a 10 page report on ‘how the ward was won’ (available here as a pdf) just after my election in 2007, the regional office wouldn’t even acknowledge it. 

 My face, and my approach to winning elections, didn’t fit.  At HQ level, they still don’t fit, though the personal criticisms of my supposed motivations for increasing the Labour vote so markedly have now abated.

 So it’s very refreshing now to see Labour Uncut do what it’s doing about campaigning.  

It was interesting to read Gisela Stuart’s account of how they tore up the top-down instruction book on how to conduct a campaign, and got on with what was locally appropriate.  It was good to learn a bit about the efforts to keep Broxtowe Labour. 

It was especially good to read my local colleague Jude’s piece about locally made decisions to do away with the ‘glossy’ material provided by the party and go for deliberately ‘homemade’ looking material as part of a successful campaign, which took two of the four seats we won off the Tories.

These reflections from good grassroots activists fit with the emerging picture of the general election, where candidates who laid more emphasis on political organization and proper engagement with electorates did much better than those content to ‘deliver the party message’ to an electorate sick to death of being treated like voter fodder.

That’s why people like John McDonnell defended wafer thin majorities, while New Labour clones up and down the country lost once handsome leads.

The Labour leadership candidates would do well to look at this evidence, and recognize that local activists often know best.  For too long head office and their regional delegates have been seen as the experts, and for too long millions of pounds have been wasted on glossy material that heads straight for most people’s bin at election time.

If you want to win elections, you could do worse than stick to the following basic principles:

1) Voters like to be treated like adults

Give people the full story. So many Labour leaflets are obsessed with getting pretty pictures in that there’s no room to tell people anything.  People appreciate news of what’s going on, not whether you’ve just met a minister. 

I don’t deliver leaflets; I deliver newsletters.  They are often 12 pages long, have no pictures, and have up to 50 times as many words as the ‘traditional’ leaflets that Labour HQ would have you put out.  Yet I know that most people read it because a) they know it’s going to contain relevant news; b) it does.

2) Not everything is a ‘Labour achievement’

Too many leaflets only cover what the local Labour party has been obsessing about.  Try to cover a wide range of news, and celebrate the achievements of others (check with them first that it’s ok).  This approach will generate more news as more people come forward for inclusion, and ‘their’ news become ‘Labour news’ by osmosis.

3)  Stay political, stay challenging

 Just because you aim to please doesn’t mean you have to follow the mainstream. Stick with your political principles and ensure that theyshow through in your written material. 

Lots of people in my own ward have a bit of a thing about gypsies.   That’s not stopped me writing articles sticking up for their local rights, and criticising the Tory council for its underhand behaviour.  People respect honest comment.

4) Glossy presentation counts for little if there’s no substance

 Don’t worry about gloss.   My newsletters, seven years after the first one, are still in ‘Word’, and printed in black and white.  No-one minds, and some people appreciate the fact that it’s clearly a local effort.

 5)  Every voter counts

Go to everywhere in the ward/area.  No house/flat is a no-go area just because it looks like it.  Don’t try to second guess where people are coming from; you’ll probably be wrong.   If people live half a mile up a track, get on your bike.  It’s those votes that’ll win it.

6) Voter ID is important to us, but not the voters

Don’t be scared to leave your voter ID quite late.  You’ll get a warmer welcome and a straighter answer if you’ve already been in contact about something else that actually matters to them. 

Do you like cold calls?  Of course you don’t.  Warm your cold calls up.  I spent my campaign introducing myself as ‘the –  you know - the bloke with the Bickerstaffe Record’.

All this worked for me, and is starting t work elsewhere in my borough.  I added 600% to my local vote, and I’m a desperately boring middle-aged fart with a face like mouldy pizza. Just imagine what you can do if you’ve got talent and looks as well.