Though Cowards Flinch

What to make of Ken Clarke’s plans for prisons? His speech later today will apparently denounce the great and growing size of prison populations, call for a focus on cutting re-offending and will imply that it’s Labour’s outdated approach which is at fault; “[J]ust banging up more and more people for longer without actively seeking to change them is what you would expect of Victorian England.”

In actual fact, the Tories have long had what one might call a ‘progressive’ (ugh, hate that word) streak on crime and punishment. In the late 1980s, prison populations under the Tories began to fall as Douglas Hurd and others tried to establish consensus around non-custodial ideas, which would see people avoid prison. But to leave the matter there is to ignore staggering contradictions on the part of the Tories.

Firstly, there’s no proposal to get rid of what has essentially become a people-herding industry of private companies, to whom a lot of services have been outsourced. Clarke’s proposition of pay by performance on the basis of re-offending avoided will not fly – as in other outsourced industries, without cast-iron government guarantees of profit, private companies will avoid sectors that don’t look profitable.

Tory rhetoric here doesn’t escape the New Labourite paradigms.

Secondly, for all this talk about prisons being places of education – a solid and welcome return of a very old liberal idea – this won’t help a great deal if there aren’t any jobs to go to when people get out of prison. With millions unemployed, and Tory plans to slash the State sector to ribbons proceeding apace – and private sector investment not yet prepared to pick up the slack – education won’t stop a slide to crime.

Thirdly, if the answer to the second problem is the social welfare net, then this adds a further contradiction to ‘progressive’ Conservative plans for rehabilitating offenders. Said social welfare net is to face cuts. This, I suspect was one of the key problems with Douglas Hurd’s attempt to reduce prison populations; on his watch, he wanted fewer people in prison – but as inequality rose and communities fragmented under the Tories, crime rose.

Thus the voices on the Tory Right sounded a great deal more authoritative.

Fourthly, Clarke’s proposal is aimed in part at cutting costs – he has said so himself. Apparently the new soundbyte is that sending a man to prison (£38,000) is now more expensive than sending a boy to Eton. Several academics – such as Prof. Malcom Davies – have come forward to suggest that actually leaving potential re-offenders at large (and even with continuing educational measures, reoffending jumped by 8% from 2006-8) costs more than prison.

Since a large number of these people will surely be released to unemployment, this type of false economy can be compared to the Tory false economy of slashing Labour’s job creation schemes and calling it a saving. The upshot is a lot more people claiming various types of benefits, whereas the strategic use of Labour’s funds would have allowed private industry to reduce the cost of employing someone whilst still footing some of the bill.

If the Tories are allowed their own way on the economy, coalition or no coalition, the deeply reactionary hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade on the right of the Tory Party will not be long in re-establishing themselves – something that happened to Ken Clarke when he was last Home Secretary. As privatisation and the attempt to extract ever more labour for less pay from prison staff continues unabated, I worry to think how our prisons will end up.

This is, after all, the same Conservative Party which resoundingly endorsed Labour’s massive expansion plans – worth some £4bn – of the prison system.

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.

I can’t express in words how utterly furious I am that John McDonnell has been forced to withdraw from the Labour leadership contest. After a few days of faux outrage over his comment that if he could, he’d go back to the 1980s and kill Thatcher, and Diane Abbott’s mealy-mouthed supporters saying they think he should be the one to withdraw, despite her pledge to do so if he got more nominations (which he had, at that point), John has rightly judged that her supporters won’t come to him, so he’ll have to give his to her.

Not good enough. Every campaign for the next five years – against library closures, against service cuts, against the attempt to further casualise the public sector – is going to be fought outside of Labour. Only historical revisionists and morons believe that the anti-poll tax campaign was a Labour campaign. And yet the Left has kept the life support switched on, firmly demanding that people exercise the great contradiction at the heart of our democracy: loyalty to a Party the leadership of which does not care about them.

Is it time to pull the plug? Since 1923, we’ve faced the same situation. Labour is elected with high hopes for its success, disappoints those hopes and is then swept from office, leaving the Conservatives to pick up where they left off. Since the end of the great depression, after the war, when the exhaustion of the capitalist system allowed for greater state controls (which had been utilised during the war anyway and rubbed off the red taint they previously had), the journey has been backwards – trying to find a way back before the post-war settlement.

This is the mission of the Conservative Party, and ‘big society‘ is just its latest cover. What has Labour’s leadership done? Nothing. We have been losing the battle, and all the while desperately clinging to what Labour has achieved – scarcely anything new without sacrificing something old. So, of the last three parliaments, we got the minimum wage and a long-overdue rise in benefits (for example) whilst Labour set course towards undermining teachers’ unions and education, through faster deregulation of schools.

Meanwhile, Labour socialists – an endangered breed that I’ll deal with in a moment – ask their comrades and friends to hang on in a party that has been swamped by vapid twits. Anyone who goes to all the events touted by the Fabians, has been to Oxford or hangs out online can’t fail to know who I’m talking about. The twits claiming the legacy of Nye Bevan whilst backing Ed Balls, for example, without seeing the incredible disparity between the politics of the two. Whatever Bevan’s deficiencies and later demoralisation, he was no Balls.

Bevan occupies, as one might notice, the strapline of this blog. His sentiment, that one should not stand in the middle of the road, that one should not be afraid to take a position has been my personal code all my life. It is far from the attitude of the Labour leadership and their coterie. It is a party rotten through and through, corrupt, full of patronage and seeking after patronage, unprincipled. It isn’t really socialist at all. In seeking after patronage, people learn to talk with a certain vocabulary, highly technocratic and bloodless. Totally removed from ordinary people.

Labour socialists of the Labour Representation Committee number somewhere below 1000 people – that’s less than one percent of the total party membership (excluding the trades unions). They are condemned by the Labour Right for being backwards. They are excoriated by those who exist as rootlessly as Labour’s London elite for being too provincial, too unwilling to work with other groups (whatever that means, as every Labour campaign I’ve ever seen has involved LRC members and parliamentarians). But they are the last remaining socialists in Labour.

The last election demonstrated that this clique will not exist forever. The Parliamentary group of the LRC was halved, to say nothing of the destruction wreaked about its bigger, less socialist sister, the Socialist Campaign Group. And even this doesn’t account for the wacky behaviour of a bunch of the members of these groups, like Michael Meacher, supposed Left veteran…who nominated Ed Miliband for leader, even though Ed had cleared the bar and with room to spare. So long as the fortunes of this group are tied to Labour, it exists within a contradiction – urging (critical) support for a leadership that will kick the poor when it’s opportune whilst claiming to represent them.

The leadership contest has demonstrated that no matter how well people like John McDonnell work, no matter how much support they gather, they’ll be outmanoeuvred by Labour’s Right, which can rely on the cowardice and (ironically) the uncooperative nature of Labour’s ‘soft’ Left. Harriet Harman and Ed Ball’s nominations for Diane Abbott play the diversity card but in reality are simply intended to prop her up into a slightly more credible candidate (still not very credible, from a political point of view) and force McDonnell out. All he has done is bow to the inevitable.

Abbott has the nominations – she’s on the ballot – but she’s not going to change the Party. Forgive my cynicism, but I’ve met too many soft Lefts. Despite her feminist credentials, she doesn’t have the detailed critique of the Party that is the remit of the LRC – and that would set free the feminist and radical energies that people were quick to impute to her. Indeed when she does her media appearances – the last I heard in-depth was on a Radio 4 discussion programme on Friday about two months ago – she can even be quite conservative. So good luck to her and her supporters – she’ll be better than the other four, but I don’t have any faith in her, and am rather sickened by how heavily she has stressed the fact that she’s black and female – like these are somehow politically relevant, except as tokenism.

John’s letter to Labour members, in which he announces his decision to stand down, acknowledges that despite enormous grassroots pressure – e.g. Tom Harris’ admission that he and other Labour MPs were deluged with letters and emails to demand McDonnell get on the ballot – the Labour bureaucracy and PLP were unmoved. His final appeal is to the strength of the Labour Left, that the fight against the cuts should be continued and that a Conservative government be denied the chance to have everything its own way.

With this, every socialist will agree – but I will not use my energies to electrify the zombified party that Labour has become, and I am one among many. Campaigns dominated by socialists will come together, and as last time, Labour’s leadership will do what it can to hinder them, so long as they aren’t tied to the apron strings of mother Parliament. They will face no backlash from their members, as the membership have nowhere else to turn. The odd constituency party might endorse the LRC, but even these constituencies can’t seem to get their MPs in line. And this is before the vast and reactionary weight of the trade union bureaucracy is employed by said leadership.

Are we simply to say that time has run out for socialism in the Labour Party? My anger at McDonnell’s withdrawl howls Khrushchev’s famous retort at the PLP and its groupies, “History is on our side. We will bury you!” And yet…

Marxism is not an exact science. Having shaken my socialist eight-ball, the answer comes back “Indeterminate”. This is the truth. The struggle for socialism in Labour is indeterminate. Socialism within Labour may be buried beneath the avalanche of bureaucratic indifference and then made irrelevant by the emergence of an organisation outside Labour that can combine within itself all the loose strings from every campaign the Left fights. The failure to do this after the poll tax campaigns, and after the anti-war campaigns has been the life-support of Labour’s Left.

These failures are contingent – failures of tactics, rather than of principle – and a success in this field will remove that last remaining leg. On the other hand, the failure of Labour’s Left to conquer the Labour Party (whilst a rather taller order than the first) is equally contingent, one of tactics and not of principle. Everything flows, and there will be more mass campaigns thrown up by the intrinsic processes of capitalism meeting the contradiction of the indestructible basic solidarities of the working class. These tactics will have longer to test themselves out until the impulse either to utterly change Labour or to leave it will move even the conservative behemoths of UNISON and Unite.

Below is a five hundred word article, originally written for Claude Carpentieri’s Hagley Road to Ladywood blog, as part of his really excellent 2010 Election special series.

The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition isn’t going to win the next General Election. It probably won’t even get someone elected. Only forty-two constituencies will have TUSC candidates, all well-known local campaigners.

To put this into perspective, this is far smaller than the ninety candidates plus that the BNP are going to run at the election. Yet if you live in one of those constituencies, you should vote TUSC. Here are some of my reasons for supporting them, on the streets and at the ballot box.

First, no other party intends seriously to fight for workers’ rights. At every turn, Labour’s leadership have bowed and scraped before the Press and the Tories when they demanded a disavowal of workers’ decisions to strike. In fact, based on the consensus at Labour List, workers’ rights won’t even be on the agenda for this election.

Meanwhile, the Labour government has provoked PCS into a strike by trying to cut down on pensions and redundancy remuneration, to make it cheaper to fire people.

Whoever wins the election, workers will fight – for jobs, for wages and against the straightjacket of anti-union laws – and workers will be right. TUSC offers a platform that will tie together demands from different sections of the working class and develop them into a comprehensive political programme.

Second, after the election we’re facing cuts in public services. Perhaps 25,000 council job losses and many more central government jobs besides threaten to stretch service provision to breaking point.

Both Tories and Labour are trying to be as vague as possible – but in education, for example, our final wave of academy-funding was signed off Friday fortnight ago and headteachers are already whispering ‘the R-word.’

That’s redundancies, for the uninitiated. That’s larger class sizes and poorer lessons for your kids.

TUSC won’t have the chance to pass laws preventing this, but we will be out on the picket lines with your kid’s teachers, when they inevitably strike to protect their jobs and the quality of education.

Third, a lot of the cuts are likely to be trumpeted as ‘local democracy’. Concrete Tory proposals for local authorities will free them from the spending ringfences imposed by central government, and allow them to gut funding of the voluntary sector and public services. Unfavourable ‘public consultations’ will simply be ignored.

‘Local democracy’ is the catchphrase being used by Tories to annihilate the universality of public services. Through ‘top-up fees’, Barnet Tories plan to allow rich people to bunk queues and get additional services, while the general public can lump it, and, oh, have staffing levels in public services cut.

Only a socialist alliance, advocating working class solidarity and action from the ground up, can stand up to a class-based attack on what little wealth redistribution and equality remains. This won’t be Labour, still living in the shadow of its capitulation to Thatcherite economics.

It certainly won’t be the racist BNP, to which a lot of working class Labour voters have fled.

It can be TUSC.

On the surface, the Telegraph reports of £18 million in state funds going to Unite, and its predecessors Amicus and TGWU, from the Labour government seem pretty damning. I was outraged; unions are not there to be funded by the State, and taking such funding compromises unions. Their bureaucracies could thence rely on State aid as insulation from having to fight for and fight to keep members’ dues.

There is also the question as to whether or not the unions like Unite have been feeding this money back into the Labour Party. If that could be proved to be the case, then it’s all the more reason to get rid of the current morons at the top of the Labour Party; first the scandal of private donations from millionaires, and cash for peerages, now this.

Lest people forget, if any of this were true, the government was not just using State money to stay in government through a funded political machine. They were using it to retain control of the Labour Party, which is a much greater offence, so far as I and many other socialists would be concerned.

Reality is not so simple, however. There are several funds which have channelled money to the unions, (e.g. Partnership at Work, the Union Modernisation Fund and the Union Learning Fund) and none of them are to do with political donations. The amount gathered from each member for a political fund must be stipulated, only money from the political fund may be used for political activities and money from other accounts may not be used.

That is the law. No one has said that the law has been broken, and the Guardian’s disingenuous chart (shown right, courtesy of Iain Dale) is simply a case of attempting to secure a guilty verdict by very dodgy inferences. All the accusations of money laundering – of this money passing through Unite or the other unions en route to Labour – are silly.

A fair contention, however, is that there is a moral case to answer. A Labour government is channelling money directly to the unions – for admittedly benevolent, non-political purposes. But presumably – as well as reaching difficult to organise workers, and coaching people to get qualifications and training – this bolsters the prestige and attraction of the trades unions. Union Learning Fund projects, for example, seem open only to union members.

Higher union membership means more money for the Labour Party. Or does it?

Actually I don’t think this moral case holds up. Since every member of a union chooses whether or not to pay into the political fund, people who don’t want to support Labour can benefit from these programmes. There’s also the numerous cases of unions which have political funds that don’t contribute to Labour – such as the National Union of Teachers, the RMT, University and Colleges Union or the Fire Brigades Union.

The actual programmes involved, through which all this money is channelled, break down the moral case further still.

On a political level, programmes like Partnership at Work were not designed as vehicles for left-wing policy – they were the opposite. Their whole purpose was to suppress open conflict in the workplace. It’s my view that this type of thing directly led to a harmful increase in the pressure put on staff, in an environment free of the danger of industrial unrest.

On a practical level, programmes like Dignity at Work had the support of employers, employees, unions and the State – and these channelled large sums to educate on and prevent workplace bullying and other issues which are not just Left issues, since bullying affects productivity. Similarly with the Union Learning and Union Modernisation Funds.

Far from being bungs to union allies, this money was to serve a purpose that was not so crassly ‘political’ as is being made out and which gave little succour to “the Left”, unless we’re to recycle and adjust Harold Wilson, “Socialism is what unions do”, regardless of what they actually do.

By all means, people should object to unions being used as the vehicle for such policies – and I haven’t made up my mind yet, though I’m leaning towards a separation of unions as agitational bodies of workers from educative and training bodies paid for by the State. They can object to the specific policies as being inefficient or poor uses of money. But they can’t reasonably object that this money is a bung to union allies of a Labour Party.

The last refuge for such an accusation is whether all the money allocated for these purposes was spent on what it was supposed to have been spent on. The suggestive comments in the media – and the near-hysterical comments in the Right-blogosphere – betray ignorance over just this. So audits should be done, and we should see how it was spent.

None of it will have found its way into the political funds; I take that as a given. If it has, an offence has been committed and the guilty individuals responsible should be punished – but I doubt union officials are so stupid.

It is more believable that money left over may have been spent on more general concerns or union administration not necessarily relating to the projects mandated by the specific aims of these funds. To allay concerns, turn over the books. Open government is our friend. What is not acceptable is the high pitched screeching before any facts are known.

In responses to my recent postings I have encountered scepticism about the validity or   relevance of Marxian economics today. So I thought it would be worth explaining a few reasons why he has to be taken very seriously as an economist.

It feels a bit like summarizing Proust in 100 words to say this but, the two most important things that Marx wrote about the economy were that labour is the source of exchange value, and that the incomes of the propertied classes derived from the exploitation of labour.

He was not the first to make these points, they were an established  strand of early 19th century thought, but Marx made the points more clearly and with greater cogency than any of his predecessors.  Nowadays, these ideas are absent – not only from the economics curriculum but even from Communist Party policy.

Why? Have they been proven wrong?

Well orthodox economists are pretty confident that the labour theory of value has been proven wrong, but if you follow up the literature, their proofs are of a type peculiar to contemporary economics. In most sciences, hypotheses are evaluated by confronting their predictions with empirical data. In economics proof is rather different. It is mathematical proof of the form: Let us assume the following axioms, and then see what must be true about the economy.

Using proofs of this sort, Samuelson for example claimed to have demonstrated that the labour theory value provided no useful information about prices.

The problem with this is that if the axioms are wrong, the proof is worthless. By a judicious choice of axioms one can prove all sorts of things.

Then in the 1990s Marxian economists started to apply the normal scientific method to the labour theory of value, for example here or  here or  there. What did they find?

They found that the predictions of Marx and before him Ricardo had been spot on. Market prices were actually correlated with labour values to the remarkable degree of 95% or more. That meant that 95% of the variation in the prices of goods is explained by the labour cost of making them.

More strikingly, it was shown that the more capital intensive an industry was, the lower was its rate of profit. This is exactly what one would expect if labour rather than capital was the sole source of value. This explains why railway projects like the Channel Tunnel are almost always unprofitable. They involve a lot of capital but employ little labour on which to make a profit.

Marx had said that : “Very large undertakings, such as railways, on the other hand, which have an unusually high proportion of constant capital, do not yield the average rate of profit, but only a portion of it,“  Those in favour of rail privatisation in other countries take note, they will never be profitable.

Capital itself creates no value.

Once it is realised that the determination of value by labour is a well proven scientific theory, then Marx’s analysis of exploitation follows – with all sorts of disturbing moral consequences for the established order.

It gives moral strength to Unions opposing exploitation and it undermines any claim of capital to a share in the national income.

London Mayor Boris Johnson has written to Michael Gove, to protest that Latin is not part of the national curriculum. The idea of writing to the shadow Education minister is the result of a hissy fit between Balls and Johnson, in which BoJo said he wanted to headbutt Balls after the latter was very dismissive of Latin.

Lest we forget, however, it was the decision of a Tory government to create a National Curriculum and leave Latin off it that did for Latin in schools. Uptake dropped from 16,000 to 11,000  in the following ten years. Since then Latin has actually been recovering as a subject. This is not a side issue, it is central to Boris’ complaint and he misses it.

Instead Johnson invokes the spectre of class war in his Telegraph column, written as a reply to Ed Balls’ comments, quoted below. What would Geoffrey de Ste. Croix have made, says Boris, of the attempt by Labour to restrict study of the ancient world to the bourgeoisie?

De Ste. Croix was one of my heroes at university, and I loyally pitted many of his theories against all comers when essay time rolled around. But Boris’ focus on class bypasses the key issues.

Fetishizing Latin

‘Speaking on the radio, Spheroids dismissed the idea that Latin could inspire or motivate pupils he said that headteachers often took him to see the benefits of dance, technology or sport but added:

“No one has ever taken me to a Latin lesson to make the same point. Very few parents are pushing for it, very few pupils want to study it.”’  (Boris Johnson quotes Ed Balls, in the Telegraph)

Let me begin by saying Balls is wrong and shamefully offensive to the hundreds of dedicated teachers, academics, pupils and parents who have fought for their subject, which has steadily gained ground. I can only thank the stars that this attitude wasn’t in evidence when OCR threatened to cut subjects like Ancient History from their range of A-levels.

Boris Johnson’s attitude, however, is prejudiced towards a subject he loves, and with no solid basis. The following is the crown of his arguments to Michael Gove, echoed almost word for word in the Telegraph piece;

“We cannot possibly understand our modern world unless we understand the ancient world that made us all and there is simply no better way than to make young minds think in a logical and analytical way.”

There’s nothing there that’s incorrect, it just doesn’t prove that we need Latin as part of the national curriculum. Young minds can think in logical and analytical ways in a range of subjects. All of them, come to that. And as for needing to understand the ancient world that made us all, there’s the question of which ancient world.

If we’re going to study Roman civilization, what about Greek? That isn’t covered by Latin. If Roman and Greek, what about Chinese? Egyptian? Central American? All widespread civilizations which shaped the world. Even if we remain Eurocentric, what about the years between the fall of Rome and the arrival of the Normans?

As I make it, we’d need Classical Greek, Near-Eastern Greek, Byzantine Greek, Old Latin, and Old and Middle English to grasp all the relevant sources – and that’s just from the point of view of the dominant literary trends. What about Old and Middle Irish and the perspectives of the other minorities for which extensive writings survive?

Johnson fetishizes Latin, which is not unusual for someone of his political persuasion and education. If Balls’ mistake is to dismiss Latin, Johnson’s mistake is equally as bad, if less offensive; it is to elevate Latin out of all proportion. When trying to sell the idea to Heads, it’s the prestige people think goes with offering Latin that often counts.

This is a hangover from the days when Classicists ruled the British Empire and the world. It is class based. Just not in the rather petty way that Balls’ suggests, with the subtext of his comment being that Latin is elitist, or in the way Boris Johnson makes out, that it’s the gateway to all higher things and that the plebs should get their turn.

How do you solve a problem like the content of the national curriculum?
More important than this is that the debate highlights the problem of an overly-centralized education system. Parents and pupils should have a much greater degree of input into what subjects local schools offer, based on the needs and preferences of the catchment area. Beyond English, Maths and Science, choice should lie with parents.

In reality, Boris Johnson’s solution is no solution; adding Latin to the national curriculum just squeezes time for other things, for everyone, regardless of whether they want to study it or not. Eventually there’ll be others with similar arguments that a given subject is so central, everyone should be forced to study it at some point up to KS3.

What we should be demanding is a mechanism whereby parents can gather enough support to prove to LEAs that their area can sustain a certain subject, and a mechanism for parents to ensure the LEA takes steps to increase provision to meet requirements.

Details such as how this localised decision making would relate to national planning for teacher training are needed, but ultimately it kills two birds with one almighty headbutt: first, the centralised nature of decision making, second, the inadequate provision for popular subjects such as Latin. Everyone wins, and Boris’ class war is averted.

At least until the Tory cuts kick in.

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Orwell’s ‘Notes on Nationalism‘ is one of his most interesting, most confused, essays. It attempts to assert the existence of a phenomenon in English society of 1945, “the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’”.

Specific ideologies are identified as exhibiting this trait: “Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism.” Orwell goes on to separate these fanatic nationalisms from ‘patriotism’, love of place and way of life, unrelated to the morality of a people, and purely defensive in sentiment.

“Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception,” remarks Orwell, and nationalists will decide every question prima facie, in the interests of a competitive prestige for the entity into which they have sunk their individuality, rather than on the basis of evidence gathered by the disinterested, which should prove more accurate.

It should be obvious that Orwell’s methodology is confused and bears its own ideological connotations. The conflation of all these ideologies, ignoring their material context or aims, establishes by elimination a ‘normal’ world where everyone is rational and not prepared to die or kill in the name of ideas, rather than cold hard facts.

The ‘normal’ man exists in a value-free world where ideology is not ingrained into the very practices which make up one’s daily routine – not to mention the more obvious kind contained in the written word. Far from his consciousness being impacted by the conditions in which he lives, making him more or less amenable to certain facts and political ideas, man, in this vacuum-world, can stand apart, tally up all facts and select a political view accordingly. It is philosophical idealism.

Needless to say, of course, that ‘normal’ man doesn’t exist except in Orwell’s head. Nor, I would contend, does that pure “way of life” that Orwell argues can sustain a non-nationalistic ‘patriotism’. There is no borough, city, county, region, nation, federation or continent in the world which can draw a line around itself and declare that all the people on one side of the line share a “way of life” and all the people outside it do not share that way of life.

This is contrary to many of Orwell’s claims in ‘the Lion and the Unicorn‘, about the differences between nations. But cultures, national or otherwise, like religions or any body of shared ideas, traditions and practices, are syncretic – and in any one geographical location, there will be a polyglot of ideas and practices, some shared with people to the north of the dividing line, some with people to the south and so on. This polyglot cannot itself be defined as a “way of life”, for many reasons.

Seeing as it does not exist in a vacuum, no culture is stable. It changes over time. Seeing as it is subject to real, material pressures which limit or extend the capacity to engage in certain practices, no culture is shared universally in a society that permits inequality. Seeing as a culture is a combination of ideas and practices, and that these ideas and practices are unlikely to have set or shared boundaries, no culture escapes geographic amorphism.

I’ve dealt with this essay before, as it was once approvingly quoted to me over at Labour Members’ Net, but my views on the subject appear to have been deleted and, moreover, I have recently read Raymond Williams’ excellent short account of Orwell’s life and politics, particularly this patriotism, which deserves to be reproduced.

“England, whose England? In the Road to Wigan Pier…Orwell is describing the ‘two nations’, discovering how (in that middle class phrase) the ‘other half’ lives. He is at once compassionate and indignant, drawn and repelled. He is describing a country in which two-thirds of the population are working class people at a time of depression and wide-spread unemployment. All his active arguments and images are of contrasts, intolerable contrasts.

“‘England’, as any simple idea, has been destroyed by these contrasts. The single image of his childhood has been replaced by the particularities, the variations, the inequalities, of mine and mill, slum and council house, caravan site and slagshop, teashop and Tudor villa. This is an active England, an England to move through.

“The England of the later essays, written in wartime is different…leading to a particular climax which comes ‘as near as one can…to describing England in a phrase’: a family with the wrong members in control. Now Orwell was neither the first nor the last to say something like this. The statement’s interest is in where it comes on the scale of his development.

“There is not much sense of a family or of emotional unity in the depressed and suffering England of The Road to Wigan Pier. The emphasis there is on the realities and consequences of a class society. What happens, I think, is that Orwell first moves through two phases of response to ‘England’: the myth of his boyhood – the special people, the ‘family’ – is succeeded by the observations of his return – a scene of bitter and bleak contradictions.

“But then, in a third phase, he creates a new myth which until quite recently has remained effective. Qualifying the original image with the facts of the economic and social inequality, he creates the sense of an England of basic ordinariness and decency, a ‘real England’, ‘an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past’, in which it can be seen almost as an accident, or at least as an archaism, that the ‘wrong members’ of the family are in control.”

This is an image obviously lacking in historicity. It is easy to mine a selective past for features exhibited in the present, and to weave them into a narrative that sets up the present context in a way that recommends itself. This is what writers from the Levellers to Tom Paine did with the ‘Norman Yoke’, to embed a theory of lost rights into English history, and grant the commonweal an equally ancient lineage to the divine right of kings.

In reality, evidence for the ‘Norman Yoke’ is hotly contested, and even when the term was first coined in 1642, citations of biblical precedent were more often heard for the equality of man, than was a Saxon golden age. Christopher Hill reminds us of John Ball’s words from the 1381 Peasant Revolt, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the Gentleman?” This mining of the past – any past, real or imagined – is a recurrent motif.

Orwell’s monolithic England, of past, present and future, is no less unhistorical, no less unable to accept a dynamic model of society – subject to all sorts of pressures and consisting of all sorts of processes, which themselves change over time, some of which are exerted or expressed in contradiction to one another.

Raymond Williams is more gentle than I:

“Orwell’s great influence since the 1940′s owes as much to this powerful image [of a family with the wrong members in control] as to any other single achievement. And it would not be so powerful if it did not contain some truth. Orwell’s emphasis on the depth of civil liberties in Britain and on the feelings that support them is, in the world as he knew it, and as we continue to know it, justified.

“His furtherness of the gentleness and mildness of much ordinary English life, on these qualities being positive achievements in a world of much killing and anger, is again reasonable. Certain kinds of informality, friendliness and tolerance in much of every day English life support his emphasis on ‘decency’ as a virtue. But it is possible to know and acknowledge all these things and still, in analysis, go either way.

“Orwell is nearest to what I believe to be the truth when he describes these characteristics as part of a genuinely popular culture that ‘must live to some extent against the existing order’ (CEJL, II, 59). Or again when he speaks of a ‘subtle network of compromises’, of adjustments through which certain virtues, certain achievements, are maintained alongside certain evident and radical injustices. (…)

“It can never be enough to say that certain virtues exist alongside certain injustices, as if they were contrasting facts of the natural world (on which, in his social imagery, Orwell so commonly draws). In a society, these facts are relationships of an active, historical, developing kind. And it is this kind of reality which Orwell’s image of England obscures.”

I don’t necessarily agree with Williams that Orwell’s views must contain some degree of truth in order to be powerful, or at least they need not necessarily be true in the ‘patriotic’ way in which Orwell understood them.

Rather I think Orwell’s views were and are socially acceptable, and it is no accident that Orwell’s later, less radical work, garnered more publicity than his earlier writings. Here Orwell identified traits which some people like to see in themselves and in their country, certifying these as in some way English much in the way that the English character is often cited as the reason for England’s relative passivity in the face of tumult and revolution in Europe.

We should remember that Britain, at this time, had just fought a war for its own independence and the freedom of other nations from the tyranny of Nazism. The order of the day – which firmly tied one end of the mainstream Left to the national Establishment – was national unity in the face of opposition. The election of a Labour government belied the national unity a little, ditching the face of that unity with indecent haste.

Yet it should come as no surprise that, with ‘nations’ very firmly a part of national discourse, people liked to feel that theirs had been worth defending; that it had consistently stood up for civil liberties at home and abroad, that the war had been a principled opposition to Nazism, rather than an opportunistic war brought on by inability of the British ruling class to reconcile their interests with the ruling class of Germany, Italy and Japan.

In reality, that is to say in documented history, civil liberties in this country have ebbed and flowed. From the days of the militias, when habeas corpus could be suspended, to the Official Secrets Act to the emergency war powers used by governments in the inter war years while the country was nowhere close to being involved in a war, civil liberties have fallen and risen and fallen again, and popular sentiment has often had other things to think about.

Similarly the gentleness and mildness of the English character, and the contrast with other nations. I’m sure much gentleness and mildness did and does exist in the English character – civility and kindness and generosity of spirit in the most unlooked for places. But that is not to say that one can separate these off from other, less admirable qualities, which are evident throughout the shared history of these islands. This is Williams’ key point.

Nor, a point which Williams misses, is it to say that these qualities or even a certain combination of them, is exclusively English and therefore something which makes England an actual entity rather than an ideological rallying call to a self-selecting group of people, a group much smaller than the sum of all the English. The overall point at stake is the validity of nation as a useful analytical category and on all counts, I think it fails the test.

Since I read in Private Eye that Andrew Rawnsley had a new gossip column book coming out, I’ve been looking forward to it. The examination of politics on a personal level is a fundamental part of English political discourse.

Whether pen portraits in the manner of John Maynard Keynes on the world leaders at Versailles, or anecdotes like Ernest Millington (Commonwealth Party MP 1945-1950) sticking it to some stuffy Tory MP and RAF officer, they illuminate a human drama.

One of my favourites is George Dangerfield’s record of behaviour in the Commons between 1908 and 1914, in his Strange Death of Liberal England. He records fisticuffs on the floor, a book being flung by an honourable member and a PM in tears over a strike.

Whatever one’s political views, these sketches connect us in a very personal way to history, to people and to an atmosphere created by the manner in which the players in this drama comport themselves, with which we can identify or be repulsed by. As befits a drama there are heroes and villains, hubris and nemesis.  With the revelations of Rawnsley’s new book, one might be forgiven for thinking that Nemesis is stalking Gordon Brown.

Based on ‘eye witness accounts’, the allegations include Brown’s use of physical intimidation and yelling, throwing things when upset and the occasional paranoid outburst. I have a few things to say about Mr. Rawnsley himself in a moment, but it cannot be stressed enough: If Brown is guilty of any of these things, he should not be Prime Minister. His personal conduct in a working environment is political, and this type of thing is unconscionable.

How many feminists would be prepared to stand for such threatening, masculinist behaviour? How many trades unionists would be willing to stand for it in any other work environment? I don’t want to idealize the past or overstate Rawnsley’s case, but these allegations suggest to me that Blair and Brown have done nothing to challenge the political culture of bullying that is well documented from John Major’s government.

As I say, I don’t wish to idealize the past; perhaps prior to that it was just as bad or worse in some ways – but all one needs to add to the account, to complement the paranoia, the explosive rages, the attempted bullying for political ends by people holding high office, are the marital affairs and the perjury and we’ll be right back to Toryland of the 1990s. That is a damning indictment of 13 years of Labour government, which arrived amidst a celebration of renewed ethics and morality in government.

One would think that a Party whose cornerstone is supposedly the idea of human rights and individual dignity should have the capacity to put itself beyond reproach. Whatever one thinks of the specific allegations made by Rawnsley, on the back of witnesses only some of whom are identified and each of whom may have their own political agenda, Labour has clearly failed to do this, even if, as the New Statesman maintains, the allegations are simply wrong.

Meanwhile, Labour’s politics have done little but make suspicions all the easier to harbour, with blunder after blunder, seeming to be against the working class, whether the poor or middling components, against our liberties and so on.

A note on Andrew Rawnsley and political journalism
All that said, my unease about all this goes beyond smacking the Labour Party, or the electoral connotations.

First, I don’t trust anyone who claims to be ‘unpartisan’, as Rawnsley has. Rawnsley, presumably, is clever enough to admit that no one is unbiased and that we all approach every situation with certain assumptions. Yet if someone said to me that they were personally disinterested in the outcome of the election, I’m afraid I would not believe them.

At one level, this denial of partisanship clouds more than it reveals about Rawnsley’s political prejudices. At another level, I resent people who comment on the process without getting their hands dirty. The British Isles can boast a fine tradition of pamphleteers and writers, from Tories like Defoe and Swift to William Morris and the socialists – but they all had a personal interest in what they were doing.

If what Rawnsley has described is accurate then it needs to be brought forth, but publishing a book and waiting for the controversy to arrive is the equivalent of a boyish ‘ring-and-run’ prank. Rawnsley can piously stand back and say he disapproves of all such behaviour – and assure us that his documentary on Cameron is on the way – but he hasn’t changed anything. He hasn’t left the situation better than when he found it.

Tories might say that it will be better, if it results in the election of a Tory government, but – despite my political convictions making this an obvious thing to say – I don’t think that’s true. I suspect there are much deeper issues at work than simply one man’s temper, even if that man is the Prime Minister. These issues won’t be addressed by see-sawing first to one party and then the other and vice-versa, though that’s about the only option left in a party system which has exchanged deep roots for the mass media.

Andrew Rawnsley is not to blame for the state of British politics, but he is profiting from it, rather than being engaged to rectify it and I find that objectionable.

Secondly and relatedly, the proper time for these allegations to come out into the open should have been some time in the last thirteen years. Rawnsley’s last book on the subject was in 2000, when he wrote Servants of the People, dealing with similar themes. Brown took over in mid 2007. There’s been almost three years of this type of thing, not including Blair’s final years, or the leadership contest in the Labour Party.

So I don’t trust the word of ‘witnesses’ who have prepared to hold their tongue until it is politically convenient to smear Brown / reveal the truth. If true, these allegations reflect just as badly on the witnesses as they have been content to lay low while other people continued to be subject to the types of behaviour Rawnsley outlines. They are answerable ultimately not to the Prime Minister, but to Parliament and to the people.

On the innumerable occasions these senior civil servants sat in the comfy chairs of the Commons’ committee rooms and drank their tea, they should have raised these issues – put them on record, forced the Labour Party and the media to deal with them. I can’t speak to the truth of the allegations themselves, but if true, the men who have withheld such revelations are black hearted indeed.

Rawnsley shouldn’t have reduced himself and his trade to be the mouthpiece for such people. If they are as damning as Rawnsley makes out, the accusations should have been made publicly. They should have challenged Parliament to hold the Executive to account. Instead they’ve been reduced to a pantomime of “Yes you did ” / “No I didn’t”, with the added obscene melodrama of Gordon Brown citing his dead father and his upbringing as a defence against the accusations.

This is not what political journalism came through hanging, pillorying and censorship to do and Rawnsley has a share of the blame.

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

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

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

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

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

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

To this question the DFM responded:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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