Though Cowards Flinch

Martine Aubry, a big player in Francois Hollande’s presidential campaign, gave a newspaper interview yesterday.  It marked a real step forward for the campaign, but I hope it will also embolden the British Labour party.

Central to the interview is Aubry’s attack on Sarkozy’s scapegoating strategy:

Avec son interview au Figaro Magazine, M. Sarkozy commence sa campagne de 2012 comme il a gouverné depuis 2007: en voulant désigner des boucs émissaires - les chômeurs, les étrangers, les homosexuels, les professeurs, la gauche…- qui seraient les responsables de tous les maux du pays. Une nouvelle fois, il cherche à diviser les Français au lieu de les rassembler.

[Trans:  With his interview in Le Figaro, Sarkozy begins his 2012 campaign as he has governed since 2007: by creating scapegoats - the unemployed, foreigners, gays, teachers, the left - whom he would have us believe are responsible for all that is wrong with the country.  Once again, he seeks to divide the French people instead of bringing them together].

Sarkozy’s interview in Le Figaro (a key rightwing newspaper) does indeed reflect a lurch for the dog whistle, as he tries to shore up his vote against Le Pen’s Front National, which may not yet be surging but certainly isn’t retreating as a threat to Sarkozy even making the second round (assuming Le Pen makes it onto the ballot paper with the 500 nominations she needs).  His suggestion that allowing immigrants from outside the EU to vote would result in “des cantines scolaires hallal” (Halal school canteens) all over France, for example, gives us a pretty good indication of the votes he’s pitching for.

The Sarkozy interview is also notable for the quite bizarre idea that if re-elected he might put vocational education (formation professionelle) policy to a full referendum, and when the interviewer then follows up with two questions about whether other matters would need a referendum, it feels as though he’s mocking Sarkozy.  It’s so odd a move that even the Daily Mail has noticed.

Sarkozy may be getting desperate already, so it can be argued that it’s all easy enough for the Hollande campaign team, and that they can well afford (and need) to court the leftwing vote even at the expense of the few that might go missing as a result of their approach.   Even so, it’s good to see  Aubry, on Hollande’s behalf, calling out Sarkozy so directly on his scapegoating strategy. 

From a British left perspective, there is inevitably a sense of regret that the Parliamentary Labour Party lacks the confidence, as yet, to speak out firmly on the right side of the argument.  As I said back in July:

If Labour keeps on trying to scare the shit out people on things like crime and immigration, as a way of getting Labour votes, it’s making a big mistake; it’s really just doing the Tories’ job for them*.

Hopefully, as Hollande maintains his lead and goes on to become President, Miliband and team will learn that constant rightwards triangulation is less effective as a route to electoral success than doing the right thing.

*George Monbiot made much the same point  last week, claiming that only he and Charlie Brooker had realised what was going on (perhaps he’s just not reading the right blogs):

Confronted with mass discontent, the once-progressive major parties, as Thomas Frank laments in his latest book Pity the Billionaire, triangulate and accommodate, hesitate and prevaricate, muzzled by what he calls “terminal niceness”. They fail to produce a coherent analysis of what has gone wrong and why, or to make an uncluttered case for social justice, redistribution and regulation. The conceptual stupidities of conservatism are matched by the strategic stupidities of liberalism.

When Cameron vetoed the ‘Merkozy treaty’ in early December, it meant that the deal could not be signed off as a variation to the Lisbon Treaty, and that any deal would need to be an intergovernmental treaty of the 26 participating countries.  As such, any deal is separate from the workings of the European Union.

This threw into doubt whether the 26 countries signing up to the Merkozy “non-EU” treaty could legitimately use the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) to police the deal and punish states which failed to abide by the proposed fiscal rules.  At the time, Cameron threatened legal action to stop the other 26 governments trying to use the ECJ in this way.

Unsurprisingly, now that he’s gained cheap political brownie points from using the veto, Cameron’s not bothered about pursuing this threat.  Diplomats are calling it a “heat of the moment” thing, and it’s being dropped as quietly as possible. 

This does, however, raise an intriguing possibility.

If the 26 member states now do go ahead uninterrupted and sign offtheir economically absurd pact, and include within it provision for ECJ ruling authority, it sets an important precedent for any set of European countries to come together, bash out a deal, and then call on the ECJ to do its thing.

Logically and legally, what could stop Francois Hollande, coming together with other like-minded European countries to sign a pact running entirely counter to the Merkozy pact, and asking the ECJ to be the binding arbiter on that too? 

After all, Hollande has already set out a clear manifesto promise around the need for a new ‘pact’.

Je proposerai à nos partenaires un pacte de responsabilité,de gouvernance et de croissance [growth] pour sortir de la crise et de la spirale d’austérité qui l’aggrave. Je renégocierai le traité européen issu de l’accord du 9 décembre 2011 en privilégiant la croissance et l’emploi, et en réorientant le rôle de la Banque centrale européenne dans cette direction. Je proposerai de créer des euro-obligations [Euro-bonds]. Je défendrai une association pleine et entière des parlements nationaux et européen à ces décisions. Cinquante ans après le traité de l’Élysée, je proposerai à notre partenaire l’élaboration d’ un nouveau traité franco-allemand.

Why would this new pact have any less legal weight than the one now being rushed through before Sarkozy is sent packing?

The  like-minded countries Hollande needs for such a scheme might include Spain, whose (rightwing) government is now calling for a ‘new realism’ about how to manage the economic crisis in light of its descent into economic chaos, and Greece,  fuming at Germany’s proposal to make its government subservient to an EU budget commissioner. 

It might, in 2015, also include Britain (or England/Wales/NI & Scotland) if Labour were minded to push for an entirely new approach to the European economy, something Ed Miliband at least hinted at in Davos this week (though clearly ideas on what to do are not yet formed).  If Labour has its wits about it, it should see jumping on the Hollande bandwagon, in a common drive to reorientate the EU towards the welfare of its people, as a very attractive proposition.

The alternative ‘Holliband’ pact might include shared commitments to investment in jobs, with targets for the reduction in unemployment levels, as a mirror to the stupid fiscal targets advocated by Merkozy, and call on the sanction of the ECJ for countries that failed to meet the employment and other needs of its citizens.

Clearly, two diametrically opposed  intergovernmental pacts, formed outside the EU but calling on the same EU institution for their operative legitimacy, would create a legal and institutional crisis at the heart of the EU that Cameron could never possibly have dreamed of when he stook his foot in his mouth in December, but that might well be better than simply allowing the current rightwingers in France and Germany to carry through their plans for the outlawing of  socialist econmics in Europe.

And what better payback for Cameron’s arrogant but wholly ignorant politicking with the EU than for him, in time, to see it used as the opening for a few Left front for a new Left ascent in Europe.

Guest post by John McDonnell MP

Yesterday, in a parliamentary debate on UK-India trade, I found myself in the somewhat unusual position of quoting Peter Mandelson approvingly.  Writing for the FT in advance of the major IPPR report on globalization (published today), Mandelson argues:

[L]iberalisation of trade and financial markets requires a careful parallel process of building domestic institutions and capabilities. It is not the absolute level of openness in the global market that matters for growth so much as the fact that it is governed by shared rules and sustainable practice.

I agree. 

Sadly, when it comes to the EU-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA), negotiations on which began when Mandelson was still EU Trade Commissioner, the reality falls a long way short of his aspiration. 

As a result, many millions of Indians stand to be driven towards poverty and hunger.

The sudden removal of import tariffs, especially on dairy and poultry products, and the consequent flood of imports from the EU, is likely to have a devastating effect on millions of marginal and landless farmers, who will suddenly find their markets swamped by produce – notably skimmed milk and poultry meat deemed unsuitable for the European market – which remains heavily subsidized through the European Common Agricultural Policy. 

The European Commission’s own Sustainability Impact Assessment calculates that the FTA may be of benefit “in the long run to those “who are able to participate in evolving supply chains“, but it acknowledges that  “integrating small farmers and producers into the supply chains is a daunting task which is only possible through domestic policy measures only.”  A subsequent Right-to-Food Impact Assessment, conducted in 2011 by NGOs, came to very worrying conclusions about the impact of the FTA on the Indian poor, some 27% of whom already live with chronic hunger.  

Similarly, if multi-brand retailing is suddenly and without safeguard opened up to EU retailers such as Carrefour, Metro and Tesco, 1.8 million jobs may be created, but at the cost of up to 5.7 million people working as street vendors.

In other words, Peter Mandelson’s condition for good globalisation – well-developed  “domestic institutions and capabilities” which allow the poor to engage on something like equal terms – has clearly not yet been met in the case of this EU-India FTA.

This is precisely why the European Parliament resolved, in December 2010, that the European Commission should carry out impact studies on human rights in addition to those on sustainable development.  To date, the Commission has completely failed to act on this resolution, even though the FTA is due to be agreed and ratified by member states during 2012.

The European Commission currently appears unwilling to listen to the views of its own Parliament, so it is up to the UK Parliament to ensure that the human right are not trampled on in the rush towards global trade. 

I reiterated this call for a full Human Rights Impact Assessment in parliament yesterday, in support of a broad range of EU and Indian civil society organisations (including Traidcraft), who are doing the same.

In his FT piece Peter Mandelson goes on to say:

Globalisation is a means, not an end. This way of seeing things challenges equally the political right and left. The anti-globalisers of the left have always underplayed or ignored what is good about the expanding reach of global markets by focusing on the (legitimate) grievances of the short-term losers. The right has too often shrugged off the negative social effects of global markets as unavoidable or even a price worth paying for the benefits of ‘liquidity’.

Mandelson’s analysis may be astute, but it skirts round the brutal reality – that these “short term losers” are hundreds of millions of men, women and children going hungry for want of a fair free trade policy, and for whom being a “short term loser” can be the difference between life and death.  These people are as much a part of the 99% as those now occupyingSt Paul’s.

Time is short.  I hope we can build a coalition for the defence of the Indian 99%.

John McDonnell is the Member of Parliament for Hayes & Harlington. You can read his full speech in the UK-India Trade debate here.  If you would like to help, please ask your MP to sign John’s Early Day Motion 2645, calling for a Human Rights Impact Assessment on the EU-India Free Trade Agreement.

(This article is cross-posted from Liberal Conspiracy, though we’ve got a slightly fuller version.)

I’ve written a review today of Peter Hain’s autobiography Outside In on the Left Foot Forward website (published yesterday), saying what a good read it was, and what an interesting person Hain is. I’ve also said that he is something of a conviction politician, which is good to see, and that clearly he was in it for changing the world, not careerism – which in spite of how you see his politics, or whether you agree with them, is noble at least.

On the 20th of January he was clearly delighted that Ken Livingstone was leading Boris in the opinion polls for the mayoral election. He said on twitter:

Great London/Ken poll wipes smile off smug Tory faces and caps off great week for Labour

In his book he did mention that in not supporting Ken for Mayor, Tony Blair’s New Labour control freakery was one example of the mistakes which led to Labour losing supporters (p.212).

But elsewhere (pp.159-60) he had this to say about Ken, which I love:

…I wanted to be effective, to be able to make a real difference. And that meant learning what not to do from Ken Livingstone … he seemed to go out of his way to make enemies, for instance on one occasion gratuitously insulting Labour MPs from northern England by falsely implying that they spent their evenings either drunk or in brothels.

Further in that chapter (p.185) he told the story of when Tony Blair asked him to be a whip in 1995,despite of the fact  there was much “suspicion” about him.

Blair, according to Hain, explained:

how he would have wanted to bring Ken Livingstone in too, but that Ken’s behaviour had never permitted that. ‘I may not have liked everything you have said or written, Peter, but you have never been aggressive or personalised your criticisms like Ken has.’

Ken as a whip – imagine that. Rumour has it that Ken recently grassed on the Labour whip when back in the nineties they were encouraging MPs to claim a second-home allowance as supplementary to their wages.

If Ken’s behaviour had been better, he could have stopped that, theoretically.

Still, great intervention by Hain. It’s a great read.

I have decided to stand for a place on 184 member strong Labour’s National Policy Forum (NPF), and if I get the necessary endorsements from my and other Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs), I’ll be asking, nay, begging for your vote in May/June.

My election manifesto is simple enough: I would like to see the NPF abolished.   If elected to the NPF I will campaign for its end within a two year period.   I encourage other candidates to stand on the same manifesto.

I have previously set out my reasoning for the abolition of the NPF, and simply provide a somewhat abridged version here:

1.  Good intentions do not lead to effective policy making, or member involvement in policy making, and the party needs simply to accept that what we have now does not work for the vast majority of members, who feel alienated from the whole policy making process. Relatively few people in the labour movement understand the NPF, and probably even fewer trust it to deliver ‘effective policy’ (even this term is contestable).

2.  The party needs to accept that there are limits to the effectiveness of the kind of deliberative/semi-democratic NPF structure now in place, and Labour – if it really is to engage more members and non-members – needs to embrace the messy, but creative dynamics of contested power, scrutiny of and challenge to authority.

3.  First of all, the often lengthy NPF process is simply unsuited to the demands of modern government and opposition.  The public, through the media, demands on-the-spot policy responses from those at the top of  the national party hierarchy, and media statements about policy inevitably become that policy.  It is pointless to pretend that it can be otherwise.

4.   More fundamentally, the current NPF process lacks accountability. There is no-one within the process to whom ordinary members can go and ask about what happened to their or their branch’s policy submission, whether it was accepted, why it was rejected, and what’s going to happen now.

5.  Ultimately, the problem is that structure has been developed as a way of disguising power asymmetry in the party. To tackle this, we need the complete abolition of current process in favour of one which acknowledges that power is (and should) always contested and contestable, and which puts accountability of senior party people at the heart of the process, rather than allowing them to use a complex ‘deliberative’ NPF structure as shield.

6. We need to build accountability back into the process . The best way to do this, having abolished the NPF, is to invest both authority and accountability in the place where most members of the party see it invested anyway, and where they have a real and meaningful point of contact.

7.  This is the local MP (and MEPs), or the local PPC in places where there is no Labour MP.

8.  To replace the failed NPF we need to establish a process – indeed culture – whereby branches/CLPs/affiliate groups, and perhaps also individual members, can make legitimate policy demands of their MP/PPC, asking them to promote their policy proposals and ideas.

9.  The parameters for this process should not be set out from ‘on high’ as they are at the moment (with pre-defined policy areas), and the power to raise policy ideas/concerns should fit squarely with local parties. It should then be the job of the MP/PPC to feed these policy ideas directly towards the Parliamentary Party hierarchy (and European Labour Party) and to report back directly to local parties on what steps, with what level of success, they have taken.

10.   This whole process should be part of a wider configuration of the MP/prospective MP role, whereby s/he should become answerable to the local party.  Local MPs should start to see themselves as akin to the CEO of a charity, in which the members elect Trustees (in the form of CLP officers) to oversee theMP/CEO, and the MP/CEO presents, say, an annual business plan to the ‘trustees’ for approval of business expenditure) and regular monitoring. 

11.  Where policy matters are expressed in local terms by local parties, it should be up to the MP to extrapolate as need be to develop wider policy recommendations for submission to the Cabinet/NEC, in conjunction with other MPs as s/he feels necessary/useful.

12.   This will create a much more dynamic structure for the policy making process, with accountability back to members built in as part of an MP’s performance by which s/he is judged when it comes around to selection trigger points etc..

Frank Field MP, whom I do not like, has a 10 minute role motion in parliament on Tuesday 24th January:

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the Secretary of State to make provision for the system for social housing allocation to give priority of choice of social housing to those with an exemplary tenancy record; to place a duty on housing associations to inform potential tenants about conduct of existing tenants in neighbouring properties; and for connected purposes.

Logically, this means that local authorities and social housing providers would be required to keep behavioural league tables on all the people who rent their homes from them, so that the ‘exemplary’ ones can go to the top of the list. 

Of course, a 10 minute rule motion has little chance of making its way immediately to law, but Field is sowing the seeds for his weird surveillance state, where if you want to rent a home you’ll have to not just stay out of trouble, but conform to his idea of an ‘exemplary’ way of life.

Will we get extra points for going to church, I wonder?

Is there any reason to believe Ed Balls supports the Tory-led cuts agenda?

No. He said that he accepted the cuts, not agreed with them. He also said “I cannot make commitments now for three years’ time. I won’t do that. It wouldn’t be credible.”

So does Ed Balls have ideas to the contrary to the coalition government?

Yes. According to the Guardian, he said that “he was not abandoning his belief that the cuts programme was too deep, and he was willing to remain outside the political consensus on the relevance of Keynesian demand management.”

What does Ed Miliband think?

He told Andrew Marr this morning that: “If Labour was in power now we wouldn’t be making those changes. We wouldn’t be cutting as far and as fast as the government.”

He didn’t say they wouldn’t be making cuts at all, and that’s important.

What do both Ed’s really think about the public sector pay freeze?

Ed Miliband said this morning: “It’s a hard choice, but when you are faced with the choice between protecting jobs or saying the money should go into pay rises I think it’s right to protect jobs.”

This is an indication that if Labour were in power now, while they wouldn’t be cutting so hard and fast, they would effectively cut the pay of public sector workers. Owen Jones, at the Fabian conference yesterday, said that given the rate of inflation, a pay freeze effectively amounts to a cut. It is clear that this reality has Labour’s backing.

Is it political disaster?

Left wing voices from Owen Jones to Bob Crow have mentioned electoral and political disaster. This is because it looks as though Labour support the cuts agenda unreservedly – but what Ed Balls is really to blame for is talking about this in a kind of quasi-managerial way, rather than talking about this in a way that says the coalition government are making a set of irreversible mistakes.

Oddly, in an attempt to make the party’s economic message credible, they are allowing the press – from the right wingers to the left – to paint them as supportive of austerity measures that aren’t working.

So are Balls and Miliband being as bad as left wing critics are making out?

They are obviously playing the long game, which is fine, but they’ve come out looking confused. This could be the fault of the Guardian, under the political control of Patrick Wintour, who has been very tough on Labour of late.

But even judging by Ed Balls’ keynote at the Fabian conference yesterday (a watered down version of the previous day’s interview with the Guardian), he is trying to earn credibility by “accepting” a set of cuts that are not credible.

It’s true that he cannot yet promise to reverse every cut the coalition makes, but why has he not framed this in a discussion about how irreversibly damaging the government is being on the economy?

It’s always a tricky one asking difficult questions of one’s own party leader, but while we’re talking about Wonga, it might be worth just bringing an old one up again.

In October 2011, the Guido Fawkes chaps were brimming with delight that they’d uncovered information of Ed Miliband meeting with the PR man Roland Rudd – the chief executive of Finsbury.

What makes things rather tricky is that Mr Rudd, back in April 2011, made Wonga a client.

Courtesy of Guido Fawkes

According to the TBIJ, Robin Walker, the Conservative MP for Worcester:

tabled an amendment that watered down a backbench bill which proposed imposing a cap on the cost of taking out an unsecured loan. Two months later Finsbury started working on behalf of Wonga, an online lender that charges interest rates of more than 2,600% a year.

According to his wikipedia page, Walker had an advisory role in Finsbury, which raised eyebrows given the proximity of his amendment in parliament to the introduction of the new client.

*

Today, the debate revolves around predatory and producer capitalism – this was scoffed at by David Cameron once upon a time, now, the Tories are running around like headless chickens in order to do battle with Labour on the latter’s turf.

Wes Streeting, for LabourList, today said:

The mood music in Westminster is shifting. Ed Miliband was mocked for talking about predators and producers last autumn, but now every party leader is trying to stake out the ground of ‘responsible capitalism’ as their own. The behaviour of legal loan sharks like Wonga are an indication of the tough times we live in and why students – as well as hard pressed families – need more than warm words.

Government has a role to play: offering practical help in tough times. It must act.

But how can Ed operate on Wonga? And what is the proximity between Ed and Mr Rudd? Should we be concerned?

“It was a dead cert”, Richard Seymour told us “that the media were going to search for a way to restore White victimhood”. Well, as far as that can be proved, we could well say that black victimhood has been restored by Ed Miliband today.

Of course I think neither true – to say so almost suggests the whole thing has been fabricated or designed this way. That Abbott was made to send out that tweet at a time when racism towards black people is being discussed.

Irony of this variety will not be lost today. At a time when the video of Ed Miliband giving a telephone grilling to Dianne Abbott is clocking up the meme-o-meter, so the wisecrack behind his tweetbox goes and posts a 140 characters of gold.

Saying blackbusters instead of blockbusters in a tweet mourning the loss of Bob Holness is the Freudian slip of all slips. Freud himself no doubt would have seen this slip of the tongue as some sort of Nirvana scene.

What we await now is the Guardian (now Ed’s black dog on his shoulder) article saying how this is symptomatic of the wider failures of the opposition leader. Though of course what happens now cannot be ignored out of hand.

It has been noted that Ed Miliband has no discernible support from any mainstream media outlet – the best he can hope for is sympathy, and from the usual crowd he is unlikely to get it.

I think that Ed would see how silly this is. To concentrate on a clear typing error (as opposed to Abbott’s error of judgement) is nitpicking. But that hardly matters does it. The press are in a constant race to the bottom. The stupid things people say, in the 24-hour broadcast media, counts as news. Even today, for example, a story in the Mail saw a photo of MPs on the green benches checking their blackberries and iPhones.

Shite is the order of the day – hacks swoon over it.

Obviously what is comedy about what Ed has done is how classically facepalm-y it is. He could have come out of this “fighting week” unscathed, showing Abbott that she’d embarrassed the top brass and that idle use of twitter is probably a bad idea.

Instead he has demonstrated perfectly the reason why David Cameron chooses not to tweet, saying too many tweets might make a twat.

However this probably shouldn’t give cover to the people who will use this episode – blackgate, if you will – to their advantage. The headlines this will get cheapens journalism. Further, the political capital this will raise for Cameron during next PMQs cheapens politics.

Lastly, what will happen now cheapens Freud. What he didn’t anticipate, when studying the peculiar reaches of the unconscious, and how it might affect the relationship between our thoughts, our will and our words, is that one day, when all eyes are on politicians all day, that it might come to influence the jobs of elected representatives.

Poor Ed. Before the storm happens, let’s remember shit also happens.

The obstacle to redistribution of income on any meaningful scale  is identical with the obstacle to explosive, never mind expanded, growth; to overcome it is to defeat the basic interests of neo-capitalism as a corporate structure. 

It will be impossible to generate the kind of pressure which can effectively sustain Peter Townsend’s priorities [around poverty] without mobilising a really substantial campaign within the Labour and Trade Union Movement.  Only a mass movement can have the effective force to override the bankers’ insistent and effective lobby.

It is necessary to evolve a coherent strategy, a policy which will integrate the extremely valuable findings of these Fabian researchers with an overall plan for the socialist reorganisation of the economy, based on structural and anti-capitalist reforms, and an extensive development of trade union powers through workers’ control.

Ken Coates (1967), Dismantling the Welfare State, in The Crisis of British Socialism: Essays on the Rise of Harold Wilson and the fall of the Labour Party (p. 157-8)