Though Cowards Flinch

It’s not going to achieve much, when it comes to actually preparing the student movement and their allies in the teachers’ unions to take on and beat the cuts the Tory government demand, much less give them the class consciousness needed to take their struggle beyond a win for Labour (and their little better “graduate tax”) at the next election.

It was a risky proposition in that it may have ended up hurting people who have done nothing wrong, per se. But I bet bricking that Rolls Royce felt bloody good to those involved – and from even a cursory glance at the imagery involved, one can see why, when elected politicians are simply disregarding what they were elected promising to do.

Bad enough that wealthy men who are sucking ever so hard on the public teat themselves – whilst having enjoyed free university educations for the most part – are preparing to let university students get into massive debt, this was the monarch-to-be travelling in a car that is the last word in luxury to a gathering of immeasurably wealthy and self-satisfied celebrities who will never have to worry about such trivialities as paying for university education, blissfully unaware as the mere plebs created disorder.

Until that brick.

Some other imagery to consider. In parliament, the vote to raise top up fees passed by 21 votes. Twenty-seven Lib-Dem MPs voted to raise the fees. So the Lib-Dems are essentially responsible for the rise in top-up fees. An impressive feat for a party which promised – all 57 of its elected representatives promised – to vote against top-up fees. Let’s have a look at some of them.

Danny Alexander, educated at St. Anne’s College, Oxford – for free.
Norman Baker, educated at Royal Holloway – for free.
Alan Beith, educated at Balliol College, Oxford – for free.
Tom Brake, educated at Imperial College, London – for free.
Jeremy Browne, educated at Nottingham University – for free.
Malcolm Bruce, educated at Queen’s College, St. Andrew’s – for free.
Paul Burstow, educated at South Bank Polytechnic – for free.
Vince Cable, educated at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge – for free.
Alistair Carmicheal, educated at Aberdeen University – for free.
Nick Clegg, educated at Robinson College, Cambridge – for free.
Edward Davey, educated at Jesus College, Oxford – for free.
Don Foster, educated at Keele University – for free.
Stephen Gilbert, educated at University of Wales, Aberystwyth – for free.
Duncan Hames, educated at University of Oxford – for free.
Nick Harvey, educated at Middlesex Polytechnic – for free.
David Heath, educated at St. John’s College, Oxford – for free.
John Hemming, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford – for free.
Norman Lamb, educated at the University of Leicester – for free.
David Laws, educated at King’s College, Cambridge – for free.
Michael Moore, educated at Edinburgh University – for free.
Andrew Stunell, educated at the University of Manchester – for free.
Sarah Teather, educated at St. John’s College Cambridge – for free*.
David Ward, educated at Bradford University – for free.
Steve Webb, educated at Hertford College, Oxford – for free.
Read more…

Direct involvement with politics almost always results in a move away from the man in the street and a move towards a rather specialised environment with its own vocabulary, its own points of reference and its own intrinsic assumptions. This isn’t a criticism; the same is true of joining a book club or a rugby team.

Yet it’s helpful to go back and look at some of the assumptions and points of reference every so often. For example, media bias. Almost everyone involved in politics considers the media to distort the truth; whether it’s the anti-BBC privateers or the Murdoch conspiracy theorists. So let’s look at this subject again.

For me, the explanatory power of Marxist analysis is its major attraction. A major bone of contention I have with the media, however, is the increasing prevalence of reporting for the sake of it, without any attempt at explanation, or sense of proportion for that matter. A recent BBC article about Italian politician Nichi Vendola highlights what I mean.

It states, ‘[Vendola] has been criticised for how he has managed Puglia’s health budget, which runs a deficit, and for his opposition to the privatisation of the water supply system.’

The article does not tell us who criticised him for opposing water privatisation. Nor does it set the attempt to privatise water supplies into either a national or global context. In fact it explains nothing about this criticism but uses it anyway. Such unattributable remarks are unacceptable in a Wikipedia article, so why is it acceptable in our national news and broadcasting service?

There are other parts to the article which seem to me objectionable. For example, in discussing Mr Vendola’s homosexuality and Catholicism, it states:

‘He is also a devout Catholic, and has no problem combining his faith with his sexuality. “Catholicism is like my homosexuality, like my political beliefs,” he says, “All these things are part of my identity.”

The quote is simply a reformulation of the original sentence. There is no attempt to actually explain how Mr Vendola reconciles these things. Since the article has chosen to highlight this element to the story, about an up-and-coming governor from Puglia and his beliefs, I think it hardly unreasonable to expect this.

Similarly, when attempting to ‘balance’ the article with some people who do not believe that Mr Vendola is the next Obama, rather than actually investigating the criticisms rendered by the chosen opponent, Rocco Palese, it simply gives over space to polemic, which goes unchallenged by the author of the piece.

I am indifferent to Vendola. I suspect that he is just another social democrat with a communist past and a fetish for identity politics, but I don’t know. My point in raising these issues was not to slap the BBC about for being left-wing or right-wing; it was to criticise the quality of reporting and the style of writing. It is my view that such an approach is near-universal when it comes to reporting on foreign countries. Rather than actually explaining, it simply asserts.

This approach to studying history has left us with endless vapid truisms about how Hitler and Mussolini ‘did some good things’ (often a reference to the autobahns and the trains running on time). Addressing foreign affairs in the same way is likely to leave us little better armed with understanding.

I’m not sure how many people consistently read news from abroad, except perhaps for the odd war or famine. My impression is that it isn’t that many. So what does it matter?

Superficiality encourages superficiality. Not everyone is an original thinker (certainly not me). It should surely be a consideration that, imbibed in quantities however small over a period of years, this damages any attempt at a consistent, collective approach to politics? This is how people end up professing love for the NHS and social welfare but joining the far right, whose real record when in office shows them to be more gung-ho privateers than the Tories. Repetition of assertion rather than explanation is plain dangerous.

It is even more dangerous than the annoying and endlessly self-referential witterings of Polly Toynbee, Martin Kettle and Jackie Whatserface, who are at least aiming at an audience already involved in their cosseted little world. Though, it must be said, they are equally dangerous in restricting the political consciousness of the Labour-voting type, not to mention by name any prolific young Labourite bloggers.

We can return to the Marxist trope that being determines consciousness – and in a great many cases that is true. Class background, the conditions of current struggle, how isolated one is from that and other formative influences all have a much greater part to play than the media do, I believe. But that small part is still worth focusing on, just as we focus on everything else – actual injustice, workers’ rights or discrimination – as a means to lay the path to a better future.

Feel sorry for your conservative friends. Like Meatloaf in the video below (whose statement “I’m an actor” made me choke on my cornflakes, having seen 51st State and some of his other films), they’re perfectly willing to countenance the idea of things the public should not know about their leaders and still believe themselves to be upholding democratic values. They are just turkeys voting for Christmas.

Shakespeare would have appreciated politics today. The combination of tragedy, the evisceration of the remaining strands of the welfare state, with the comedy of the Westminster bubble would have provided fertile ground for plays.

Had the playwright been conversant in modern culture, it couldn’t have been long before we had satires of Baroness declaiming hysterically of Labour, “There’s Klingons off the starboard bow, scrape ‘em off Dave!” But this is not satire; it’s all too real.

“The only thing [Ed Miliband] knows for sure is that he is a socialist and will stick up for the trade unions.” [BBC]

Meanwhile the whole media would inevitably be cast collectively as Titania, from a Midsummer Night’s Dream, awaking from slumber to see a Nick Bottom that looks suspiciously like Oona King. Alas there’s no Puck to “restores amends”.

We can watch for real this sad troops of failed politicians trooping through the House of Lords, with nary a critical brow raised from a media that should be scathingly critical of such creatures. Compared to this, the now infamous Lord Young looks almost as if he should be taken seriously with his Supermac-cum-Marie Antoinette impersonations.

As for Ed Miliband, who knows what the bard would have made of him. Certainly no socialist, the strongest words to come out of his mouth have been a demand that Labour ‘reclaim’ the Big Society model from the Conservatives. Evidently all the hot air expended by the blogosphere on tearing apart the claims of Big Society have been lost on Miliband, who is also walking a very Kinnock-esque line as regards the violence of student protest.

We know where that line ultimately leads – and Miliband’s inability to escape the Blairite paradigm is already a step further down his road than one might wish. All the comments about how Labour must listen, to become a “people’s party” is the most watered-down tosh and ignores the strong and steadfast role a socialist political party must play if it is not merely to bow and scrape with each demand placed on it by “the market” (i.e. the capitalist class).

Of course Labour is not a socialist political party. The delirious (if politically shrewd) rantings of various Conservatives to one side, it’s fairly obvious from the banal witterings about “hopes and aspirations” that the Labour Party has not moved on from Blair. It has no definite programme, no concrete economic or social aims, no critique of its opposition beyond the populist emotive or cynically managerial – and nor is it likely to acquire such.

Thus the parade of people to the Lords will continue to be fairly inoffensive worthies and party cronies. Labour need merely tread water until people’s resentment of the Conservatives outweighs their demoralisation. In some cases that will happen fast, in some cases slow, but it will happen. Then the populist and managerial aspects to Labour will once more begin to unravel and we’ll have a Conservative government again, unless we interrupt this cycle.

Resentment is not a political programme, it is a reaction. Thus were people slow to cast off Thatcher and Major, thus were people slow to cast off Blair, despite his great and growing unpopularity leading up to the 2005 election. Nor is anger a political programme; the occupations of universities, the demonstrations and – potentially – the strikes of the next few years will not bring down the Conservative government by themselves.

They might bring down the Coalition, depending on how panicky the Lapdogs get, but a subsequent general election would almost certainly see a Conservative outright victory or a renewed Coalition unless much wider sections of the working class are moved into joining hands with those in struggle. The battle to do this will be at once emotive and intellectual; the appeal to solidarity and collective, class interest. There is no possibility of Miliband doing this, or letting it happen within his Labour Party without a moment like the 1985 Party Conference.

Perhaps the kindest minds of posterity will judge Mr Miliband a sort of Hamlet. Caught between the ghost of his father, alive in the presence of the demonstrators (though not the hack SU and NUS officials who ostensibly lead them), and what he sees as pragmatism, he’ll wander the bland halls of Victoria Square slowly going mad. Or will vanish with a whimper, like Kinnock, to take his place as a working peer, like so many of the dignified, restrained worthies he himself has and will elevate.

If, apropos Marx and Engels, the lowest common denominator of a State is a body of armed men, then full-fledged opposition to the State not only warrants violence, it requires it.

A truism this may be, though it seems to have escaped the voluminous ramblings of politicians and pundits after last week’s incident at Conservative Party HQ. Truisms cannot be the end of the story however.

This “body of armed men” do not simply represent naked force, they represent compulsion of all forms. If you disobey the law, the end result is forcible incarceration.

Resistance to this compulsion is a challenge to the legitimacy of the State. This is a violence equal and opposite to the compulsion of the State. Whether actual fisticuffs or property destruction takes place is frankly irrelevant.

To me this makes all the supportive noises around “civil disobedience” seem so disingenuous. If pursued to their logical conclusion, violence is inevitable; the ruling class will not relinquish power willingly. Human history threatens to bear me out on this point.

In critiquing the move towards violence, we must thus be more politically sophisticated than simply stating that violence is wrong, or recycling the truism that it is ‘counterproductive’, as though that answers anything. What the leaders of the NUS and other organisations usually mean by ‘counterproductive’ is that it upsets their pleasant media strategy, so they have to go on breakfast shows and apologise like naughty schoolchildren rather than pontificate.

This wouldn’t mean anything if the campaigns of ‘civil disobedience’ were concerted, sustained efforts dedicated to bringing about a democratic, accountable, mass movement that could override the authority of the State in the matter of education provision.

Attacking Conservative Party HQ was a tactical mistake, and a presumption by a minority of hotheads that they had the right to assume control of the whole march. It was anti-democratic, it served no purpose – but it was not wrong merely because it was violent.

Contra spokespersons for the Green Party (and inevitably the pro-capitalist parties), I believe that the announced plans of the Conservative/Lapdog coalition do justify violence. The question is what sort of violence. If they feel they can strip bare the lives of the least vocal, the least politic, the least able of this country, then they justify our pulling down the government and dancing in its ashes.

This is not a terroristic demand, nor does it take place separate from the political consciousness of the people of this country. It is a goal we realise through agitation along class lines; if workers are to be exploited by the cronies of those who run the State (cronies who at whiles populate the arms of the State), then workers have the right to resist.

As that resistance is a challenge to the legitimacy of government and State, it will ultimately be violent if we are to carry it through to its end – the reversal of these policies and the destruction of the class system which produced them.

Today’s continuing anti-fee protests and occupations might perhaps be a tentative first step along that road, beset as it will inevitably be by wrong turns, misjudgments and the fork-tongued.

Future address of the entire Tory parliamentary party, when their houses are requisitioned by local councils

A few further words to Paul’s previous post, entitled “Home truths about public housing”,  his counter to any Right-wing bloviation that the State or “taxpayers” shouldn’t be subsidising public housing rents for those who can afford to pay.

His premise rests on the notion that the Housing Revenue Account (the balance of income from rent and expenditure on stock and services) currently turns a profit.

That the profit is tiny compared to the amount spent on housing (£194m to £5.9bn, thus Iain Wright on 2008/9 figures) is neither here nor there. It should be nothing short of a scandal that the New Labour government was quite prepared to use money extracted in rent not to improve services or reduce rents for those who produced it, or even to public housing tenants as a whole, but to plug gaps in spending elsewhere.

Complaints about this begat New Labour consultations on what to replace the HRA with. Thus when New Labour were themselves replaced, the Tory/Lapdog-coalition minister responsible arrived to find the “localism” spiel of his boss, Dave Cameron, nicely dovetailing with New Labour’s pre-existing plans, announced in March 2010, to begin allowing local authorities to opt out of the Housing Revenue Account.

While this sounds like a good idea – what could be better than local councils being able to gain popularity by holding rents steady or improving services? – it’s only a small part of a much larger picture. For a start, the “self financing” plans announced by the DCLG involved councils paying the government a one-off fee for the right to opt out of the HRA (p4, DCH March 2009), which they would presumably earn back by increasing rents.

Not only this but a large proportion of councils – under the proposals outlined in Section2 of the previous government’s “Council Housing: a real future” prospectus – will inherit debt from the previous arrangement with the Housing Revenue Account.

Secondly, it puts council housing tenants at much greater risk from their own local authority. The urge to drive down costs by an attack on the jobs, terms and conditions of those who labour to provide services to tenants, or by increasing rents (even while right-to-buy still goes on siphoning off money from public housing, and maintenance and major repair costs continue to be below rental costs, channeling money away from housing) will always exist.

It will exist all the more in difficult economic circumstances – such as when councils go playing in financial markets, where my own Canterbury City Council lost £6m, and this is not the largest figure by a long chalk. In these circumstances normal sources of revenue like car parking fees drop too, but the need for secure, publicly subsidised housing actually increases. What then? For this none of the parties have made allowance.

Meanwhile, undermining the security of tenancy (in blatant contradiction of pre-election statements by Cameron’s “compassionate Conservatives”) is a neat attempt to exploit ignorant prejudices regarding public housing as a cover for the retreat by the Tory/Lapdog-coalition from tentative New Labour steps to build a new council house or two per year, squeezing as much money as possible from the guarantees any civilised society owes its citizens.

One wonders where the Tory battlecries of “choice” and “flexibility” are when it comes to providing a service to those who, thanks to Tory and New Labour reforms, depend on short-term work and a fluctuating income as the best deal they can get? Such smug wonderings on the part of the political class belie just how desperate the situation might very well get, if Guy of Osbourne really is planning to shave billions off what is spent on benefits and public housing.

Recent commentary by Liberal Conspiracy and the New Statesman on the Con-Lib “u-turn” over whether or not to abandon free milk for nursery school kids seems to have missed how suspicious the whole thing looks. Or maybe I’m being overly cynical.

Why do I think it was a stunt? The evidence is circumstantial at best, and requires the addition of a deep sense of skepticism as regards the government’s relationship with the press. But I’ll do my best to present it.

The letter that health minister Anne Milton sent to the Scottish executive is declarative, that there is a Tory proposal to scrap free milk for the under-5s. It doesn’t waffle, it doesn’t suggest this is a trial balloon. It says that the Tories want to press ahead with it and want the opinion of the other three home-nation governments.

A timeline for the transmission of information from government to government is as close as August 18th.

Why does this have an impact? Something as controversial as this will have had higher approval. It doesn’t have the feel of an errant minister floating tentative ideas, which is what Tory spokesperson Stephen Dorrell subsequently claimed. So either the Tories were genuinely proposing this or it was floated in order to be smacked down.

There are plenty of reasons to do this. Importantly, it defies a Thatcherite precedent of cutting school-age milk, and is a sop to legislation that formed part of the original welfare state (a fact mentioned in both the letter, where such a mention feels oddly out of place and in the subsequent retraction by more senior Tory figures).

Anne Milton’s letter presents justifications typical of both Tory Right and Tory Centrist thinking. Fiscal discipline must come first, runs one line of argument, and it would be cheaper to do something else (the efficacy of which, the letter admits, is untested). The second is that universal measures are inherently unfair – what money is spent should be targeted only at the poor. This is a principle New Labour held to also.

David Cameron slapping down these arguments is a bone to the Liberal Democrats at a time when their members and backbenchers are unsettled, as the impact of cuts become clear and economic perspectives are revised downwards.

This is why the program’s status as part of the original welfare state is key, and, if one had a suspicious mind, why it is mentioned prominently by Milton and Dorrell: Lib-Dem figures (e.g. Ms Featherstone) like to make a song and dance about the fact that Beveridge was a Liberal and it was his eponymous report (not Labour’s massive landslide victory) which was the basis for the welfare state. Left-Lib-Dems have the same affection for this as the actual Left. Defending it is a Good Thing, in their eyes.

Dorrell’s phrasing in explaining the u-turn seems to endorse this view; it is heavy on allusions to protecting the least well off etc. If it does bolster Lib-Dem support, it’s a tactically smart move – and incidentally, from the point of view of any Lib-Dems inclined to take this view, allows them to continue pretending that they can blunt the worst Right-wing excesses of this government simply by being visible on Cameron’s political radar.

I certainly don’t buy Mehdi Hassan’s view at the New Statesman that the reversal was a “humiliating…climb down”, and that is one reason why. Another reason is that the climbdown happened too fast, it was too pat. The BBC article was up for maybe an hour before it was amended to include the turn-around.

Perhaps I give the Tories too much credit, but without a whiff of opposition having time to develop, this policy is suddenly dropped. I don’t think the Tories are gun-shy just yet. The long list of protests currently in planning stage will prove that. Thatcher’s approval ratings see-sawed with the wind but that government pushed onwards.

Milton’s letter even mentions that opposition is expected from “media, parents, nurseries, childminders and the dairy sector” as though lining up exactly the justification that Dorrell subsequently uses to explain the u-turn; too much moo for too little milk, as it were. It feels too neat to be the sort of gaffe which Labour figures like Ed Balls are jumping up and down about.

The only element that I can find to substantiate the view that it was a gaffe was the reaction of David Willetts, who was described by the BBC as “floundering” after being informed live on air that the measure had been ruled out, just while he was defending the measure as one of “a whole range of option”. Far from floundering, Willetts too made an appeal that would likely sound good to Lib-Dems, affirming the retention of free milk as “progressive values”.

On the other hand, the vast weight of the political class disagrees with me, it seems, and they know this stuff better than I do.

"You want me to what now?"

All through this year and last year, as strike after strike was brought down by employers’ opportunistic legal attacks – on any grounds they could possibly muster, whether those grounds had any material effect on the situation or not – I said that laws governing strike ballots were draconian and poorly constructed, failing to fulfil their stated aim of protecting the democratic rights of workers in trades unions.

Employers’ group, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, have underlined my point with a recent demand that the government tighten laws on strike ballots, and consider banning strikes altogether and introduce compulsory arbitration in “key” industries. There’s no pretence that tightening laws will respect the democratic rights of workers now, it’s simply naked aggression towards anyone who disagrees with the cuts and will act to stop them.

Naturally the CBI, the Confederation of British Industry, is not far behind. In a document with a title that would make Orwell worry, they’ve announced that the government should impose a 40% quorum for strike action on the balloted workforce. Making Britain the Place to Work also, ironically, proposes to shorten the statutory consultation period for firms making more than 100 people redundant from 90 days to 30 days.

Here, of course, there is the usual pretence at defending the interests of ordinary people – as John Cridland, CBI Deputy Director-General stated when launching the document, “Strikes cause misery. They prevent ordinary people going about their daily lives, whether it’s getting to work or getting the kids to school.” To which the obvious answer should be, guess what? Mass unemployment and encroachment into the terms and conditions of a workforce cause misery too.

The CBI document contains a lot of other worrying ideas as well. A key one is the attack on TUPE – the transfer of undertaking (protection of employment) regulations, which essentially protect workers’ terms and conditions if a company is transfered from one owner to another. The CBI want any new owner to be able to ‘harmonise’ a newly acquired business with a previous one, paying workers the same; i.e. less.

Contained in the document is also a demand for the American system of workforce voting for union recognition instead of the Central Arbitration Committee having the power to simply grant workplace recognition to a union, if that union has gained over 50% of the members of the workplace. This takes place in the context of businesses which simply refuse to negotiate with unions, even when their whole shop is unionised, provoking strikes simply to get recognition – which is not in the interest of workers, who lose pay.

Ballots introduce a plethora of questions. Would it only be held once? Could it be forced any time employers were having difficulty negotiating with a particular union? Would there be a particular threshold to trigger union recognition? In the US, these laws are used to stymie union recognition – even to the point of employers creating and promoting their own unions for workers to join, just to screw with the recognition of other unions.

The CBI document states:

“People at work should always be empowered to decide for themselves if they want to be represented by a union or take the opportunity to use other routes to communicate with their employer. The law should be amended so ballots should always be held to enable employees to demonstrate whether or not they support recognition of a trade union to speak on their behalf.”

People at work are always empowered to decide for themselves if they want to be represented by a union; they can join one or not. The problem here is not with the accurate representation of workers, it’s with the voluntary nature of union recognition. And I don’t see the CBI bemoaning the failure of businesses to accept the decision of their workers to be represented by unions.

This leads me to suspect that the CBI have other motives than empowering workers.

With the (half-) victory of a Conservative government, it would be surprising if employers’ groups weren’t gearing up to attack unions and further impose regulations on the one area of employment law where regulations seem tolerable to bosses; that area where the worker gets to give force to his opinion. We need to be aware that a victory in this field will make life all the harder later on, when unions are finally forced into action against the cuts.

We should also recognise that these are only opening salvoes from bosses’ organisations. As with Thatcher’s government, once they know they can get away with this, they will try and take away much more.

Staff on strike at HMP Elmley

In 2008, following Gordon Brown’s announcement of severe inroads into the public sector workforce, and the services which people depend on, the TUC meeting in Brighton declared that there would be co-ordinated action to stop the cuts. Two years later, this demand is again on the lips of members – and again little is likely to be done.

Unions likely to be involved in strike action aren’t looking for pay-rises, they’re looking to defend the services they operate against pay cuts. In services like prisons, where a Damoclean sword hangs above Senior Officers and where recruitment has been frozen, the attitude of the government to spending puts lives at risk.

It also puts crime rates at risk; as Brian Caton, one of the leaders of the Prison Officers’ Association, has said, crowded and understaffed prisons mean retreats from the good practice outlined by previous reviews – such as at the enquiry following the death of Zahid Mubarek in custody. The worry on the ground is that somewhere in Whitehall there is a figure of increased deaths in custody which government officials are prepared to accept.

This is reflected in the official response to Sunday’s death of a prisoner following assault in his cell. The government have simply dismissed objections from staff on the ground that their workload is increasing, as it will, to encompass good practice, while staffing and support levels are decreasing.

There could not be a starker example that politicians, isolated in their Westminster haven, could not care less about the effects of these cuts on people. Whether it’s less housing for the estimated five million people (Local Gov’t Association figure) on council waiting lists or the people whose benefits are in the firing line, the Con-Lib government is prepared to put the pain of economic recovery on them, whilst Cameron preens about ‘fair’ cuts and future jobs.

And does nothing at all about the 7.8% of working age people currently unemployed. Well, actually that’s not true. He and his government are prepared to label them all workshy – thus Chris Grayling,

“What concerns me in today’s figures is that while there are more jobs in the economy there is too little evidence of them being taken up by the five million people who were stranded on out-of-work benefits under the previous Government.”

So, naturally, workers are looking to their unions and to the TUC to solve problems. Is the TUC going to ride into the rescue with co-ordination of strike action? Not likely. Determined action has been put off until next Spring. The most we’ll see this year are demonstrations in Brussels, at the Tory conference and some assorted lobbying and activist activities.

Unite, the single biggest union in the country, has at least made a head-bob towards preparing a determined campaign by calling together groups of activists for each area. This is a forward step, though the attitude to union organisers is often that they are jobsworths who take bungs from management, and of union NECs that they couldn’t find their bumhole with both hands and a flashlight.

That can only be addressed through an earnest engagement and responsive attitude that is often lacking from union proceedings, naming none in particular.

The TUC and the various unions will have to shoulder the responsibility for opposing these cuts; the alternative is another decade of Cameron, as a demoralised working class is a recipe for Conservative election victories.

Continuing what seems to be this week’s Economist-watch, there was an article on Cameron’s Big Society ideas, and how, despite myriad flaws with the concept, this part of the Tory manifesto simply wasn’t going to go away.

What the Economist doesn’t note, of course, is that with regard to public institutions such as libraries, this ‘renaissance of voluntarism’ (I kid you note – that’s a direct quote) basically means trying to replace paid experts with ‘volunteers’, to do the same job – thus killing jobs and strong unions in one go, and getting rid, incidentally, of the one way in which anyone other than the government could determine how our libraries are run – by trade union action.

That’s by the by.

What interested me was the way in which the Big Society is presented as regards democratic theory. Everyone knows how representative bodies work. We elect people on the basis of what we think they will do. The Economist presents Big Society as aiming to push one step past this, devolving power to “nano” level.

“Traditionally, [giving powers away] meant beefing up Britain’s important local authorities. But Mr Cameron wants to push power further down, to the ‘nano’ level. This vision sees parents helping to set up new schools, public-sector workers running their own services as co-operatives, and small groups of people volunteering on local projects.”

I would like to take a shot at arguing that this method is far from more democratic than the alternative of strong local authorities. Tory Co-ops and the small groups (or large groups, as Paul has taken to pieces the Tory ‘5000 community organisers‘ policy, billed before the General Election) of volunteers, this blog has dealt with at length. What about the parents helping to set up new schools?

Beyond basic educational concerns (e.g. the integrity of the scientific method, or preventing History relapsing into a paean to Empire, with the concomitant racism), I fail to see that allowing different sections of the community to hive off their children is especially democratic. Certainly in theory it gives a great deal of power to the parents, though as Fiona Millar rightly said in a recent Guardian debate, in reality this usually translates to devolving power to some charity or private provider, with parents unlikely even to be involved in choosing or supervising the headmaster.

But in order to do this, it’s directing resources away from other state schools in the area. So the plan risks creating excess capacity at the expense of other children. There’s also the point that each school has an optimum number of pupils; enough to make economies of scale, few enough to render the school environment safe and manageable. Free schools make this impossible to plan for.

The argument, made by Anders Hultin, chief executive of Gems UK, a private company intending to step into this scheme to start opening schools for profit, is that if the market was allowed to handle the Tory policy, schools would only open in areas with pre-existing demand. I find fault with this argument – demand doesn’t just exist, it can also be whipped up artificially. This is what advertising is for.

So there are ‘externalities’, if you like, to allowing for the willy-nilly creation of new schools (and Cameron’s talk of the actual buildings these free schools might use makes my toes curl). There’s also the more vague externality of permitting further segregation of the school-age populace. Further privatisation of education will be felt in the opposition created between the success of ‘my child’ and the success of every child.

Rather than fix the state system, which should also be much more accountable, via elected school boards and local education authorities, there’s the impetus to simply jump ship. Better education requires more money, intelligently spent, and high-quality teaching. But no more money is being offered and it should be a warning bell that the Dept. of Education is advertising free schools in the same way as Academies: as being exempt from the national collective bargaining agreements with NASUWT and the NUT.

If democracy is the theory that every person should have a say in decisions which affect them, then allowing people to hive themselves into free schools or, or be scaremongered into hiving themselves off, violates that principle. The effects of that decision run far beyond any parents who might be involved, to the whole teaching profession, to the whole of the education system and to whole local areas where allocation of funding must be altered.

In fact, if Academies are anything to go by, and Gove seems to think they’re a useful parallel, then the very parents and teachers responsible for free schools might end up feeling just as excluded.