Archive
The early institution building of a new NHS
The NHS is dying, pretty well exactly as I said it would some two years ago now:
Some scandals may emerge in time over ‘backhanders’ paid by the private hospitals to the private commissioners, and in some circumstances it will turn out that the people doing the commissioning are simply commissioning themselves in another name – the whole inefficiency of which the provider-purchaser split was supposed to stop – but it will all be a bit esoteric and complicated for people to understand, and there won’t be much of a fuss.
In fairly short order, we may get these new commissioners creating two tiers of provision from within GP surgeries, with one level of care for those not paying, and those who just happen to have signed the relevant insurance policy forms, which just happen to be in the GP surgery.
Insurance-based healthcare, and the exclusions that this brings, will come not through a government announcement, but by the surgery backdoor……
The consortia [now called CCGs] will end up being led by two or three ‘movers and shakers’ in each area, whose job will be simply to negotiate a decent deal for their colleagues and let the private commissioners get on with the rest. There will be no revolt in primary care, and in secondary care no-one will actually notice till it’s too late.
Two years on, it’s being more widely recognised that, as of 1st April, the NHS privatisation will being quietly but in earnest, as the section 75 regulations kick into gear, Clinical Commissioning Groups with often overwhelming direct financial interests in private providers put services out to the market, public provision withers on the vine or simply goes bust, and private insurance arrangements start to become the norm, initially for (the more profitable) elective healthcare, and then for the rest. As Lucy Reynolds from the London School for Hygiene & Tropical Medicine rightly notes, what comes next in this wildly ‘imperfect’ market is market abuse and health cost inflation. This inflation around the ‘cherry-picked’ services, Lucy might also have noted, will lead to the stripping of resources from the less profitable services – no health budget ring-fencing will protect that.
So what is to be done? By 2015, if and when Labour regains power, the promise of a repeal of the Health & Social Care Act (and the accompanying Section 75 regulations) may be a welcome statement of principle, but it will not significantly change the way in which services have already been privatised, seemingly irrevocably. In many cases, there simply won’t be the public services to transfer them back to, and the incoming government is likely to consider the full-scale implementation of NHS II a little too much of a fiscal challenge, even if the recreation of the cumbersome institutions of 1948 were desirable.*
What Labour can do, though – and needs to start thinking through now – is to tackle the local institutional architecture, in a way which creates the platform both for the establishment of local democratic control of both the type and quality of provision. If it gets this right, this might actually lead, in the medium term, to a better health service than we currently enjoy - as I’ve noted before, it does not become Labour to gloss over the very clear health and social care failings caused by the managerialist ideology that has held sway for the last thirty years.
More specifically in terms of local institutions, the Labour government-in-waiting should first consider retaining the Clinical Commissioning Groups. but diluting the power of GP practices within them by making theirs a minority voting position, through the introduction of members of Foundation Trust governing councils (increasingly focused on quality standards if the Francis Inquiry recommendations are carried through) along with elected councillor representation in keeping with Councils’ new public health function. The immediate impact of this is likely to be presumption against private sector provision where other options still exist (they won’t in many places).
Second, the Labour government in waiting should commit to ensuring that these new-style CCGs adhere both to the letter and spirit of the Public Service (Social Value) Act 2012 under which all CCGs (and the NHS Commissioning Board), have a duty to consider:
(a) how what is proposed to be procured might improve the economic, social and environmental well-being of the relevant area, and
(b) how, in conducting the process of procurement, it might act with a view to securing that improvement.
(Oddly, this is Tory legislation, aimed primarily at breaking the perceived monopoly power of local authorities, but can be used to the same effect against private sector dominance in healthcare provision. That will really piss off the Tories….)
These two relatively simply steps will set the direction of travel back against wholesale privatisation, although of course attempts to terminate contracts are likely to result in lengthy and quite likely unsuccessful legal battles, so early progress is likely to be quite slow.
Nevertheless, institutional change at local level by government, especially if accompanied by moves within the Labour party and the broader movement to re-energise Trade Councils, in a move away from the vapid Tory ‘consumer localism’ and towards a quality-oriented ’worker localism’**, could provide early impetus for the creation of a properly socialist health and social care system – a system fit for the 21st century (whether or not this is tax-based or progressive social insurance based doesn’t really matter as long as it provides for equitable provision) , with private operators increasingly steadily cleared out in favour not just of direct NHS Trust delivery, but also a new surge of worker co-operatives (although charities and social enterprises may also play a valid part).
* It is always worth remembering, in the context of the fetishisation of the 1948-style NHS, that until very late in the day a radically different – and I would argue preferable – NHS structure was being argued for. This was a much more decentralised and locally accountable system, rather than the monolith we grew to love despite it tendencies to managerialism (and I would argue that this is why service standards have declined in the NHS faster than in local authorities, say). See Rudolf Klein’s seminal The Politics of the NHS for more (the later edition is called The New Politics of the NHS but the early chapters are the same).
** This is not to argue for the introduction/retention of localised terms and conditions. Trade unions should of course be encouraged to negotiate at national level, and a properly brave/strategic Labour government would use the need to ‘renationalise’ the NHS, and to invest quality in the hands of its staff (as opposed to its bosses) as a rationale for the relatively painless (in terms of reactionary public opinion) repeal of restrictive trade union legislation. Frankly, I’m not holding my breath on this one.
On Habermas, Islamism and the great Left divide (part 1 of 2)
The Secular Respectable Left
‘Why on earth do some left-wingers side with Islamists, when Islamists are so evil?’ is an on-going question-cum-accusation, levelled at people like Nick Cohen at people like…….well, people like me.
Thus Nick Cohen in the Spectator, suggests the way the ‘classic’ British left side with the Islamist establishment means they are simply racists:
Other speakers [at the launch of the Centre for Secular Space] were from Southall Black Sisters, Bengali secular campaigns against Tower Hamlets’ Islamist establishment and Iranian resistance groups – classic left wing figures, in other words. Yet they are ignored or in the case of Sahgal fired for speaking out.
All emphasized how many in the British state and British left were racists hiding behind liberal masks. On the left, the racism came in the constant postponement of campaigns to improve women’s lives whether they are immigrants or in the poor world. Their suffering must always be subordinated to the struggle against ‘American imperialism’. This would be bad enough if we did not see from the far Left way into the liberal mainstream supposed progressives allying with clerical reactionaries and clerical fascists. They ignore the victims of theocracy and accept their oppression.
Similarly, Carl Packman at Left Foot Forward, blames the far-left for mix of political immaturity and ‘paternalism’:
And here is where the far-left and the British and American establishment can find harmony. While the latter needs the Muslim far-right in Saudi Arabia for cash, they keep quiet about human rights abuses. For the far-left the comradeship is just as dubious, if not slightly more immature.
Recently I was at the launch of a new book by Trotskyist writer and blogger Richard Seymour, who told a packed audience in Kings Cross that the Stop the War Coalition did not wish to pursue sectarianism, deciding who should and should not be marching against the war, but in any case those religious right-wingers might have had their minds changed through a union with the left……..
If this isn’t paternalist (Muslim beliefs, whatever they are, are only temporary, easily overturned), I don’t know what is.
In the end, goes the core argument of the Cohen/Packman/Harry’s Place nexus, the far left/lefties/liberals [1] are the real right-wingers here, and they either need to change their ways or shut up, while the Secular Responsible Left (my coinage, get used to it) get on with the real job in hand of promoting human rights.
For myself, I think this analysis is at least as ’immature’ as the politics it professes to critique. The suggestion that someone like Richard Seymour (he being a useful cipher for the broad doctrine of the leftist groupings around the SWP/Stop the War), is some kind of closet racist/paternalist, and that he’s “in harmony” with the British and American establishment, is frankly just silly [2]. Such an analysis fundamentally confuses agency with structure, and in the absence of any coherent analysis of why some on the far left/liberal left do seem to get aligned with reactionary Islam, the Secular Responsible Left falls back on the idea that, ultimately, they’re all just bad, wrong people.
In this two part article, I argue that such an approach is not simply politically immature in terms of its failure to distinguish structure from agency. I argue that is also deeply unhelpful as a political strategy for anyone really, really interested in a progressive socialism inclusive of human rights guarantees and the emancipation of the oppressed (and there can be no progressive socialism without that). In the end, accusations levelled at Seymour by Packman look and feel like sectarian squabbling getting in the away of constructive organisation, largely because that is what they are: ‘my integrity is bigger than yours’ political willy-waving fests may fill small halls of the like-minded, but they are not going to change the lives of marginalised women anytime soon.
Indeed the Secular Respectable Left is, I will argue (following John Gray p.125-6), more reactionary, more unhelpful to the cause of emancipation that they profess to espouse than are the far/liberal/mainstream left at whom they throw this same accusation.
Habermas and value pluralism
So what is a more ‘mature’ analysis of how some on the Left come, apparently, to side with the anti-human rights baddies against the goodies?
A good place to start is with the work Jurgen Habermas, who has devoted a large part of his career, from the early 1990s onwards, to resolving the tension that lies at the heart of the current debate: how do modern constitutional democracies best promote respect both for individual human rights and for the rights of groups of people to live by different cultural values (what has been termed the “struggle for recognition“), when such cultural values sometimes are so opposed to a liberal conception of human rights (and vice versa)? It is a resolution to this dilemma – itself a result of the multi-ethnic world that has developed through the 20th century – which forms Habermas’ whole ‘constitutional patriotism’ project, seeking to replace the comfortable majoritarian certainties of ethno-nationalist value consensus (comfortable for those who are included) with a newer commitment to a political culture which accommodates (and in time are, through discourse, adaptable to) different cultures and their value sets [3].
In Remarks on Legitimation through Human Rights (ch, 5 in Postnational Constellations: Political Essays) Habermas gets to the core:
The human rights discourse that has been argued on normative terms is plagued by the fundamental doubt about whether the form of legitimation that has arisen in the West can also hold up as plausible within the framework of other cultures. The most radical critics are Western intellectuals themselves. They maintain that the universal validity claimed for human rights merely hides a perfidious claim to power on the part of the West.
This is no accident. To gain some distance from one’s traditions and limited perspectives in one of the advantages of occidental rationalism. The European history of the interpretation of human rights is the history of such a decentring of out way of viewing things. So-called equal rights may have only been gradually extended to oppressed, marginalized, and excluded groups. Only after tough political struggles have workers, women, Jews, Romanies, gays and political refugees been recognized as “human beings” with a claim to fully equal treatment. The important thing now is that the individual advances in emancipation reveal in hindsight the ideological function that human rights had also fulfilled up to that time. That is, the egalitarian claim to universal validity and inclusion had also served to mask the de facto unequal treatment of those who were silently excluded. This observation has aroused the suspicion that human rights might be reducible to this ideological unction. Have they not always served to shield a false universality – an imaginary humanity, behind which an imperialist West could conceal its own way and interests (p.119-120).
It is this disjuncture between the rhetoric of universality and the practice of exclusion as the key means to establish and expand empire which is so meticulously detailed in Domenico Losurdo’s recent Liberalism: A Counter-History. And it is Habermas’ understanding of this ‘dialectic between subjugation and emancipation’ which provides for his key insight; this is to pick out both the negative and positive features of “occidental rationalism”: a tendency to ascribe any form of enduring inequality and exploitation to imperialism, which can hinder empirical analysis, balanced by a genuine openness other value sets.
The less respectable Left’s (Althusserian) engagement with value pluralism
This is precisely the situation in which some on the British left do now find themselves.
On the one hand, because the left positions itself primarily in opposition to the logic of imperialism (rooted, as Losurdo has set out so clearly, in the exclusionary tendencies of liberalism), it tends to see all events through this lens. Thus, as I set out in my recent anti-war left essay, the empirical evidence that some Western military intervention is not in fact motivated by a rapacious need for natural resources is discounted in favour of a narrative of post-colonial imperialism. In this narrative, the maxim that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ takes strong hold, and the tendency is simply to take the side of any group which also sets itself in opposition to the forces of Western imperialism [4]
On the other hand, there is the ‘positive’ dynamic, reflecting the other side of the coin of Habermas’ insight. This is that left-wing intellectuals of the Richard Seymour type appear to be genuinely motivated by their (Marxist) occidental rationalism to recognise that there are other ways of looking at rights than through the prism of liberalism.
In this reading, what the Secular Respectable Left see as a betrayal of liberal values and human rights can be seen simply as an acknowledgment by some on the left that there are other worldviews, which do not depend on the primacy of the individual, which are potentially as valid.
Take, for example two interpretations of this Harry’s Place article. ‘Lucy Lips’ attacks those she descibes the far left “anti-racists” (her inverted commas) for working with the East London Mosque, who in turn have hosted “Islamist preacher” Khaild Al-Fikri. As evidence, of the far left’s wrongness in its engagement, she quotes Al-Fikri from a previous conference:
Don’t be misleaded [sic] and misguided with those kaffir people who says it is freedom and you are a free man. They are kuffar. And when they say, and poison your mind with the word freedom, they mean there is no God. “Do whatever you want.” Because they are kuffar. … You need to protect your deen [religion] and iman [faith] because there are many things which will affect you, will come against you. Somebody will say to you “democracy, socialism, freedom”………And again for my sisters. Don’t be misguided. Don’t be misleaded [sic] by the kaffir theories and attitudes. You are very free when you are home with your husband and your kids. … Don’t say “I am a free woman, I want to run house, I want to work, I want to get money”. No! This is the duty of your husband.
Now, to my eyes, and to the eyes of most people reading this piece, this is pretty unpleasant reactionary stuff, at least at first reading. But stand back for a minute, strip away the insulting ‘kuffar’ term, and what you’re left with is little more than an expression of what Habermas has suggested: that the concept of ‘freedom’ is some kind of trap; that it is a Western invention aimed at diverting people from the true path of the divine; that Muslims should retain their own core ethical standards, even if they have to defend them against corrupt Western ones. Certainly, it’s arguable that the guidance on the role of women expressed here is, as Saeeda Shah has noted, an expression, of Islamic philosophy “misappropriated by those who have traditionally occupied the spaces of religious interpretation” (p.245), but notwithstanding the question of who, within a community, gets to establish community’s values and notms (and this is something I come back to in part 2), it still possible to recognise it as a valid expression of a particular ethical standpoint. And this, remember, is from someone widely considered so “extremist” that even to meet with a group which has previously invited him to speak under their roof is an indication of betrayal of all decency.
By way of comparison, here’s self-confessed American liberal Jonathan Haidt, talking about the period spent in Orissa (albeit a period I suspect is conveniently reconstructed for his arguments) during which he realised that the concept of freedom and rights might not have singular validity:
I had read about Shewder’s ethic of community and had understood it intellectually. But now, for the first time in my life, I began to feel it. I could feel beauty in a moral code that emphasizes beauty, respect for one’s elders, service to the group, and negation of the self’s desires. I could still see its ugly side: I could see that power sometimes leads to pomposity and abuse. And I could see that subordinates – particularly women – were often blocked from doing what they wanted to do by the whims of their elders (male and female). but for the first time in my life, i was able to step outside my home morality, the ethic of autonomy. I had a place to stand, and from the vantages point of the ethic of community, the ethic of autonomy now seemed overly individualistic and self-focused (p.102).
Haidt’s recognition that different societies might have equally valid moral bases for the way in which their members lives their lives (whilst also recognising that who holds power is a key determinant) is not new. Indeed, Haidt quotes anthropologist Clifford Geertz approvingly:
The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against other such wholes and against is social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us. a rather peculiar idea within the contexts of the world’s cultures (p.126, quoted at p.14 in Haidt)
The challenge that Haidt and Geertz set themselves [5], as academics raised within the Western liberal tradition, is to put aside their preconception about what is morally correct, and embrace ‘value pluralism’. And this, it seems to me, is what those on the Left now prepared to engage with radical Islam are also trying to do. True, they don’t articulate it very well, preferring to explain any such engagement as anti-imperialist agitation rather than as a recognition that different worldviews, however alien to our own, have a validity for the simple reason that people have them [6]. Perhaps I even overestimate here the intelligence of some on the far left, though perhaps such a reliance on ‘tried and tested’ anti-imperialism narrative is understandable in the context of a media (including Harry’s Place) keen to misrepresent a call for the understanding of Islamic values as direct support for extremism.
Whatever the motivations, articulated or otherwise, of those on the Left prepared to deal with value pluralism, the important point is that only those on the (far) Left are prepared to engage with probably the most serious question of our times. That question is:
How, in a world in which capitalism has become the almost universal economic modus vivendi, and liberal values have underpinned the rise of capitalism, do we now best deal with the ‘struggle for recognition’ of a very different value set, in a way which both respects value pluralism but also pay proper heed to the emancipatory ideal that lies at the heart of what it is to be left-wing (whether this be Marxist or rooted in earlier Enlightenment thinking)?
Answering that question, again with reference to Habermas, is the task of part 2 of this article (coming soon). In the meantime, it’s worth noting (h/t @sunny_hundal) that attempts to reach out across the value-divide towards some form of long-term political/constiutional settlement, are not necessarily taking place in one direction only. No doubt the Islamic Society of Denmark are getting their version of Harry’s Place-style accusations of treachery from the Unsecular Respectable Islamists, but I applaud them as I applaud the efforts of those on the Left who are seeking some way forward, even while hampered by their Althusserian (see [4]) anti-imperialist ritual.
Notes
[1] Cohen in particular seems to use these terms interchangeably.
[2] In the accusation that the far/liberal left are operating in ‘harmony’ with the Western establishment, Packman finds himself in interesting company. Here’s revolutionary Marxist Samir Amin, the consternation of Alex Callinicos of the SWP, coming out in support of French intervetion in Mali, on the basis of an interesting argument that “reactionary political Islam” is in reality a support, rather than a threat, to Western imperialism, because its presence allows the imperialist powers to maintain their control over the people of the ‘triad’ (the US, Europe and Japan) in the name of a ‘war of the civilisations’.
Telle est la raison fondamentale pour laquelle les puissances de la triade – telles qu’elles sont et demeurent – y voient un allié stratégique. Le soutien systématique apporté par ces puissances à l’Islam politique réactionnaire a été et demeure l’une des raisons majeures des « succès » qu’il a enregistrés : les Talibans d’Afghanistan, le FIS en Algérie, les « Islamistes » en Somalie et au Soudan, ceux de Turquie, d’Egypte, de Tunisie et d’ailleurs ont tous bénéficié de ce soutien à un moment décisif pour leur saisie du pouvoir local. Aucune des composantes dites modérés de l’Islam politique ne s’est jamais dissociée véritablement des auteurs d’actes terroristes de leurs composantes dites « salafistes ». Ils ont tous bénéficié et continuent à bénéficier de « l’exil » dans les pays du Golfe, lorsque nécessaire. En Libye hier, en Syrie encore aujourd’hui ils continuent à être soutenus par ces mêmes puissances de la triade. En même temps les exactions et les crimes qu’ils commettent sont parfaitement intégrés dans le discours d’accompagnement de la stratégie fondée sur leur soutien : ils permettent de donner de la crédibilité à la thèse d’une « guerre des civilisations » qui facilite le ralliement « consensuel » des peuples de la triade au projet global du capital des monopoles. Les deux discours – la démocratie et la guerre au terrorisme – se complètent mutuellement dans cette stratégie.
For myself, I don’t buy the argument that, just because one political or ideological grouping does or says something than can be argued to be favourable to the interests of another grouping, that both these groupings must therefore have a common purpose.
[3] Casting Habermas’ sophisticated argument as simply as possible, constitutional patriotism acknowledges that in modern culturally plural societies the ethno-nationalism that used to bind people to a shared identity and thereby create the conditions for the legitimacy of the democratic state. That is, the two key underpinnings of the modern state form as developed in the 18th century – a national identity allied with a republican ideal of individual citizen operating in voluntary contract with each other to abide by the laws of the state – have become less firmly connected. Habermas’ believes that the 21st century state must find a new “functional equivalent for the fusion of the nation of citizens with the ethnic nation”, and that to do this we need to create a patriotic commitment to a legal and political constitution, however abstract, while allowing diverse cultures to flourish in their own terms. I’ll come back to this in part 2. For more, see Andrea Baumeister’s essay Diversity and Unity: The Problem with ‘Constitutional Patriotism’ for an intelligent critique.
[4] It strikes me that this tendency on the part of the Left to push aside any evidence that does not fit with the narrative of resource-hungry imperialism is, ironically, a good example of Althusserian interpellation. As Althusser says:
The individual in question behaves in such and such a way, adopts such and such a practical attitude, and, what is more, participates in certain regular practices which are those of the ideological apparatus on which ‘depend’ the ideas which he has in all consciousness freely chosen as a subject. If he believes in God, he goes to Church to attend Mass, kneels, prays, confesses, does penance (once it was material in the ordinary sense of the term) and naturally repents and so on. If he believes in Duty, he will have the corresponding attitudes, inscribed in ritual practices ‘according to the correct principles’. If he believes in Justice, he will submit unconditionally to the rules of the Law, and may even protest when they are violated, sign petitions, take part in a demonstration, etc.
To this set of beliefs, we might perhaps add ‘Marxism’, in which name a large number of ritual practices have also been established. I would argue that, for many Marxists, who enter into that doctrine of their own free will, the act of interpellation is a strong one, with Marx(ism) maintaining all the key features of the (capital S) Subject. I wonder, indeed, whether it is this process of interpellation, and the commitment to ritual, which lies at the heart of the troubles both the SWP and the Catholic Church now face:
Were not men made in the image of God? As all theological reflection proves, whereas He ‘could’ perfectly well have done without men, God needs them, the Subject needs the subjects, just as men need God, the subjects need the Subject. Better: God needs men, the great Subject needs subjects, even in the terrible inversion of his image in them (when the subjects wallow in debauchery, i.e. sin).
[5] It’s worth noting here that openness to value pluralism is not a particular new concept at all. An awareness of the tension between universality and pluralism can be traced back at least as far as Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith, as an early liberal not caught up by the imperative felt by later liberals like JS Mill to justify imperialist expansion (on which see Jennifer Pitts), was not able to resolve these tensions, but the very fact that he – two centuries before Habermas was aware of them suggests that it continues to be an area still worthy of consideration. As Samuel Fleischacker has noted, in an interesting essay which argues that modern political philosophy might benefit from Smith’s implicitly anthropological approach:
Smith is unlikely to offer us any straightforward meta-ethical reconciliation between relativism and absolutism, and his promising hints about how, in ethics proper, to bring together pluralism and universalism, are undermined, to some degree, by his meta-ethical dilemma. But the problems he faces in these regards are our problems too, and thinking with Smith may help nudge us toward a solution to them, even if that solution is not explicitly to be found in Smith’s own work.
[6] Again, this is an ‘anthropological’ formulation, of the type which informs Adam Smith’s work
Sentencing women
The detective who sought to make money from selling information to the News of the World has been sentenced to 15 months in prison. This is less time in prison than the conviction would normally have carried:
[T]he judge said had that not been the case she would have been sentenced to three years. The judge said he was particularly concerned about the child, and admitted that her absence while she is in prison could be damaging. However, he said that, had she not been arrested, the detective would have returned to work by now, and therefore the child would be cared for by others anyway.
I am pleased that she will spend less time in prison than she might, and that assuming good behaviour she will be reunited with her child in a few months. But what strikes me is that the matter of adoption, as opposed to simply having a child, seems to have been given greater weight than it does in most other sentencing of women, in less high profile cases.
The Corston Coalition points out that:
Imprisonment also has a serious impact on women’s children: ninety-five per cent of the children of women offenders have to leave their home on the conviction of their mother.
But, as the Coalition then points out:
The number of women sentenced to custody has increased by more than half between 1998 and 2008. In 2008, 8,862 women, not including those on remand, were sentenced to custody. In the last decade, the women’s prison population has risen by 44 per cent; in comparison, the male prison population has risen by 26 per cent.
Clearly the judge in this case felt the crime was of such gravity that the need for a prison sentence outweighed the needs of the child. I can (nearly) understand that, given the principle of vengeance written into our criminal justice system.
Yet for the vast majority of women sent to prison, there are clear, viable and effective non-prison options, and they still get sent down.
Let us hope, at least, that the judge’s sentence mitigation in this case will create some form of precedent in less high-profile cases.
Small hitch to Cameron’s EU negotiation strategy
The Sun says:
DAVID Cameron wants power to boot out foreign terror suspects as part of a deal to keep Britain in the EU.
The PM’s “bottom line” is to wrest control back from meddling European judges.
He is furious 3,000 criminals and terror suspects are using human rights laws to fight deportation from the UK.
The issue will be his key demand when he sits down to thrash out a looser EU deal.
If that is Cameron’s key demand, it may at least amuse his fellow heads of state when he starts banging his fists at the negotiating tablem given that European Court of Human Rights is an institution of the 47 member Council of Europe, and has nothing at all to do with the European Union.
You couldn’t make it up etc. etc.
Could Cameron land us with two referenda by mistake?
In my main post on Cameron’s EU debacle earlier, I noted how the European Union Act 2011, pushed through by Cameron as a way of deflecting attention from his failure to live up to his “cast iron” guarantee on a referendum, is likely to come back to haunt him.
It occurs to me that one part of his speech illustrates this cock-up perfectly. Cameron asks:
And I would ask: when the competitiveness of the single market is so important, why is there an environment council, a transport council, an education council but not a single market council?
So Cameron apparently wants an addiitional institution within the EU to coordinate single market policy. I’m not sure why, but let’s take him at his word.
Now, the function of the transport council, which he refers to by way of comparison, is set out at Articles 90 to 96 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Similarly, if a single market were to be established as a result Cameron’s negotiating brilliance, it would also require inclusion within a revised TFEU if it were to have legitimacy
But the European Union Act 2011 makes ot very clear that a change to TFEU which entails “the extension of the competence of the EU in relation to cooridnation of economic and employment policies” (sec 4 (f) will require a referendum for its ratification.
So if Cameron were successful in negotiating a new Single Market coordination function, AND if legislation were introduced for an in/out referendum, we’d be stuck, by law, with two referenda, potentially weeks apart.
Cameron opens the way for a triple Labour victory
Update 3.30pm 23/01/2013: Miliband’s seemingly statement that he doesn’t want an in/out referendum, this lunchtime at PMQs, merely highlights the need for the tactic advocated here: that whether Labour want it or not, Cameron’s earlier spineless legislation (European Union Act 2011) means that, if any progress is made to develop European treaties as set out below, a referendum is a legal requirement.
So Cameron has promised a in/out referendum on membership of the European Union sometime in 2017. Far from being “a pretty effective trap for Labour” (@philipoltermann), this should open the door for Labour both to confirm victory in the 2014 European elections, the 2015 general election, and then help change the European Union for the better via the in/out referendum. A Labour triple whammy, courtesy of Cameron. Sounds great? Read on……
Let us assume, for a start, that Cameron follows through on the promise to draft referendum legislation before 2015, with a view to its enactment after the general election. This, some pundits will say, is the main trap, because the Tories will be able to challenge Labour to a manifesto commitment on its enactment, claiming victory if it commits, claiming Labour is denying the people a voice if it doesn’t.
This, though, ignores the European Union Act 2011, enacted by Cameron as a panic measure to deflect from his early ”cast-iron” commitment to referendum. While the press have made the Act out to be a safeguard against powers being handed over to Europe without a referendum, section 4 of the Act covers a wide range of European treaty changes which, if agreed at intergovernmental level, will, by law, have to be presented to the British people in a referendum. some of the changes requiring referendum have nothing to do with transfer of powers Yet Cameron has today told us that he supports treaty change before an in/out referendum, in the context of his argument that such an in/out referendum needs to be delayed until the EU has got its house in order:
I agree too with what President Barroso and others have said. At some stage in the next few years the EU will need to agree on Treaty change to make the changes needed for the long term future of the Euro and to entrench the diverse, competitive, democratically accountable Europe that we seek. I believe the best way to do this will be in a new Treaty so I add my voice to those who are already calling for this.
Remarkably then, Cameron may find himself either having to use his veto on what he may consider to be good treaty changes, or being required, through a law made of his own spinelessness, calling a treaty-change referendum before an in/out referendum.
So far, so good. Labour can simply argue that it is compelled by Cameron’s weakness on Europe to enact the draft legislation so as the avoid a farcical situation whereby a treaty-change referendum required under law becomes an in/out referendum by proxy, with a no vote on treaty change meaning a further vote becomes inevitable.
As I’ve set out earlier, a referendum on membership is, in any event, not a bad thing for Labour (on this I agree with Will Straw from IPPR). The tactical battle won via Cameron’s own incompetence, Labour becomes free to engage with European partners post-2015 on the development of a social democratic alternative/revision to the Lisbon Treaty, and to flag up this pre-general election, and pre-2014 Euro elections, in a way which more clearly distinguishes it from the Tories on Europe than it has managed to date. Francois Hollande will still be in office in 2015/6, Merkel may be in a weaker position to negotiate, and Spain, Italy, Portugal, Denmark and others have a more than 50% chance, I’d say, of having governments with whom Labour can do business on the development of a centre-left treaty to replace/modify Lisbon. It is on the basis of a clearly better-for-the-people Treaty that Labour would then call the in/out referendum.
What would a revised, social democratic Lisbon Treaty look like? Space/time does not permit a full exposition here, but I think six things should be top of the list, reflecting how different a social democratic Europe post-2019 (ie. after the 2019 Euro elections and a leftist majority might look):
1) The treaty should establish the primacy of the European Parliament as decision-making agenda-setting body, with the European Commission removed from its role as one of the three key bodies involved in the current co-decision making process, and developed into a ‘neutral’ civil service operating under democratic command.
This will set Labour and its fellow European parties aside from the Tories, who under Cameron have stated clearly (see PMQs in early January, and repeated again today) that the sole legitimate democratic voice in Europe is the intergovernmental European Council of heads of state, currently presided over by van Rompuy. Labour should argue that the Parliament, as long as it reforms its election system away from the current regional list system towards one where each MEP represents distinct constituency, is now the body with the expertise (and Commission support) and legitimacy that is needed to govern the European Union, albeit with due reference to intergovernmental institutions (not just the European Council but also the strangely similarly named Council of the European Union).
This is not just the right thing to do, as it brings into play the importance of parties working across Europe to establish a majority and then coherent policy within the Parliament; it is also tactically useful, because it allows Labour to go into the 2014 European elections on the basis that the Tories and UKIP are actually just putting up ‘gravy-train’ candidates to be members of an institution they don’t even believe in, while Labour candidates actually want to get some work done.
2) The new treaty should create the legal conditions in which the frankly absurd Stability and Growth Pact and the accompanying ‘six-pack’ directive, are subsequently abolished. These directives are the ones which effectively outlaw Keynesianism by imposing ludicrous constraints on surplus/deficit spending. The treaty should then set out an alternative framework under which member states are required to use their spending power to maintain and enhance levels of social security, employment and income equality. Whether this should include numerical targets and some form of sanction for non-compliance, mirroring the surplus/deficit targets/sanctions set out under a neoliberal EU, is open to debate (currently I would favour such).
3) In keeping with this significant change in emphasis to the EU’s role and the legitimacy of the European Parliament, the new treaty should reverse the decision under Lisbon to remove democratic control of the European Central Bank from the Parliament.
4) The treaty should enhance the existing, but ignored provision in Lisbon, to vary single market conditions on a temporary basis so as to allow for a form of artificial devaluation in countries running behind the EU’s economic leaders in terms of citizen incomes in a way which promotes convergence without the self-defeating austerity measures currently being used for that task. EU structural funds should be used to make this happen.
5) Reform of the Common Agricultural Policy in a way which a) gears subsidy to low wealth producers rather than to richer landowners who are able to use the income-based mechanism to rake in the cash; b) creates both long-term sustainability/reliability of supply, in a time of adverse climate change, and affordability i.e. the CAP should effectively become part of universal welfare provision around decent food.
6) The restatement of the principle of free movement of labour, but with protection from exploitation enhanced by the enactment of something similar to the UK’s Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012, but broadened to encompass existing EU procurement law and to cover multi-nationals.
If the Labour leadership gets its collective head round both the short-term tactics of using Cameron’s own reckless 2011 legislation against him, and then starts setting out its distinctive view of a new social democratic EU shaped by it and its fellow leftist parties, it stands to win the 2014 euros, then the general election against Cameron and then (best of all) a referendum Yes against a Tory party led in 2015 by Gove, or a Gove acolyte, which is campaigning for No vote.
Of course, if Labour doesn’t do that, I guess Philip Oltermann may be right…..
Cameron’s euro rabbit
Cameron will be giving his big European speech this Friday, then.
In anticipation, Kev Peel at Labourlist has set out the five questions he’ll have to answer. It’s quite good. Kev’s one of the relatively small bunch of Labour insiders who’s bothered to get to grips with the detail on Europe, and it shows.
However, in assessing Cameron’s likely answer to “Exactly which powers does he wish to repatriate?”, he’s missed the possible rabbit out of the hat. Mind you, so has everyone else. Media memories are so short…….
Go back to Spring 2012, and this was aTelegraph story:
The Government is drawing up plans for emergency immigration controls to curb an influx of Greeks and other European Union residents if the euro collapses, the Home Secretary discloses today.
As I set out at the time, the mainstream response to this – that it isn’t possible to do this under European law – was plain wrong. Article 45 of the Lisbon Treaty said then, and continues to say, that there can be exceptions: to freedom of movement:
1. Freedom of movement for workers shall be secured within the Union.
2. Such freedom of movement shall entail the abolition of any discrimination based on nationality between workers of the Member States as regards employment, remuneration and other conditions of work and employment.
3. It shall entail the right, subject to limitations justified on grounds of public policy, public security or public health:
(a) to accept offers of employment actually made;
(b) to move freely within the territory of Member States for this purpose;
(c) to stay in a Member State for the purpose of employment in accordance with the provisions governing the employment of nationals of that State laid down by law, regulation or administrative action;
(d) to remain in the territory of a Member State after having been employed in that State, subject to conditions which shall be embodied in regulations to be drawn up by the Commission.
Cameron’s team has had months now to think through the logistics on this one, and while I doubt there’ll be an announcement on its immediate of this get-out clause in the Treaty, I would n’t be at all surprised if Cameron makes an announcement about a big step forward towards its use, under the guise of repatriating powers.
Unless of course this blogpost is read by Labour policy types, and they get in ahead of the speech. Here’s hoping.
The SWP meltdown, institutional legitimacy and the broader lesson for the left
Laurie Penny thinks the SWP’s handling of rape allegations reflects badly on all of us, and that the SWP are only different because they are more open about their misogynist structures:
Other groups are not so brazen as to say that their moral struggles are simply more important than piffling issues of feminism, even if that’s what they really mean, nor to claim that as right-thinking people they and their leaders are above the law. The SWP’s leadership seem to have written it into their rules.
Actually, there’s no “seem” about it. The leadership being above the law is written into the rules of the SWP. That’s what makes it a self-declared Leninist revolutionary socialist party. As SWP head boy Charlie Kimber makes clear in his comments at Harry’s place:
We live in what remains a profoundly sexist society, as is shown by the sex abuse scandals and cover-ups in mainstream institutions such as the BBC and the police. However, the SWP is not an institution of capitalist society but fights for the overthrow of the system. Our party has a proud tradition of fighting for women’s liberation, as is shown, for example, by our consistent campaigning over the decades to defend abortion, and by our criticism of George Galloway for his remarks about the Julian Assange rape accusations. Reflecting this tradition, our internal structures seek to promote women to leading roles and deal rigorously with any action by any member that is harmful or disrespectful of women (my emphasis).
That is to say, the SWP is committed, as a point of founding principle, to not engaging with the criminal justice system, but to handling “harmful or disrespectful” actions through its “internal structures”, which it regards as inherently superior to the legal institutions of the capitalist state. Phil at AVPS makes the point very well:
[T]his crisis was precipitated entirely by the SWP’s own actions, but from the off they were caught in a bind provided by their own revolutionary conceit. If you’re in the business of prosecuting class struggle to the point of the overthrow of capital, and you believe it is your party’s destiny to lead the working class in revolt, as far as behaviour, misconduct and crimes committed by party members are concerned the party is the sovereign body for pronouncing on questions of truth and guilt, of sanction and punishment. Within the terms of party morality and the closed-loop universe of the SWP’s particular form of revolutionary identity politics, they did the right thing investigating the allegations.
To be honest, I’ve never quite got how this works in practice, as there seem to be an awful lot of capitalist institutions that the SWP membership does engage with. Rumour has it that it’s got a large property portfolio, and I’m pretty sure SWP members get around on Virgin Trains and the like. Which institution it’s legitimate to engage with while organising for its downfall does seem a bit selective.
The key point, though, is that the SWP is not falling apart now because it didn’t call in the police; it’s falling apart because the justice system it used instead of the capitalist one apparently proved to be completely useless, in both senses of the term. That is, it apparently wasn’t very well run (I won’t repeat the contended details here) but, even if it had been, the problem would still have remained that, in the event of a guilty verdict, there’d have been no way to mete out appropriate justice; the usual sentence for one of rape is one of imprisonment, but as far as I know the SWP don’t have any prisons.
In other words, the SWP has set out its stall as being a kind of state, operating within and against the capitalist state, but lacks most of the things that go to make up a state.
Now you can argue (as Laurie Penny might if she understood a bit more what does make the SWP different from other groups), that it is the very selectivity about what bits of the capitalist state to opt out of which betrays its misogynist heart - and I do wonder whether the party would have the same courage of its own institutions if the accusation had been, say, child abuse rather than rape. That’s fair enough.
But I also wonder if there’s a wider learning point for the radical left in its anti-capitalist struggle, whether it be via “revolutionary” or “evolutionary” means.
What this sad episode, and the likely fall out shows us clearly enough is that, unless credible institutions which command widespread respect and are therefore seen as legitimate are in place before the borgeous institutions are torn down (or bypassed), then those same bourgeois institutions are likely to return in strengthened form, and with increased popular support. There’s a glimpse of that in Laurie Penny’s own appeal to the sanctity of the law – not something you’d normally associate with her radical leanings – when it’s juxtaposed to the SWP’s own tawdry process.
This is not, of course, a novel insight. We see fine solidaristic principle, followed by failure of legitimacy, and then mutual recrimination and lessened solidarity, everywhere we look. The power of financial capitalism has been strengthened-by-scapegoat since the crisis, because there was no alternative system ready to replace it. The anti-cuts campaigns have failed to date because there is not sufficient legitimacy in an alternative decision-making process to ensure that both elected representatives and officials have both the duty and the backing to deliver an alternative that sticks. People going to job centres are treated poorly because unions have not yet been able to make their calls for solidarity with the workless more legitimate than the managerial directives imposed on staff.
All of which leads me to conclude that, ultimately, the left will only be any use at the grand scale if it gets over the self-imposed distinction (and accompanying hatreds) between revolution and evolution, and accepts that the quiet building of legitimate socialist institutions* in parallel with capitalist institutions, ready to replace them when the time comes, as just as much part of the struggle, and that the devotees of GDH Cole and RH Tawney are just as revolutionary, in their way, as those of Trotsky and Lenin.
*As a quick personal note: I was a member of the SWP briefly in the mid-1980s, taken in by the convincing rhetoric and (to me) new analysis of some very eloquent speakers and writers. I left when I was told that I needed to move my trade union stewardship focus away from the nitty-gritty of supporting workers in their workplace to defend their terms and conditions, defend them at disciplinaries etc.., in favour of more “revolutionary” activity. When the time came to strike, the hospital I worked and organized at had a much bigger turnout than other places supposedly more under SWP inflluence.
A short history of variable benefit rates
Economist commentator Daniel Knowles seems surprised:
This is bizarre – do Tories not understand that housing benefit is ALREADY determined by geographical location? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/9782816/Tory-manifesto-blueprint-lower-benefits-for-Northerners-and-longer-school-days.html …
He’s referring to the Telegrpah’s coverage of new report to Osborne from the Tory righwing 2020 group Agenda for Transformation, in which:
One of the report’s most controversial suggestions is introducing different levels of welfare payments around the country. House prices, travel fares and some other living costs are significantly higher in London and the South East than elsewhere.
I’m not sure why Daniel’s so suprised, other than the obvious reason: he’s not been taking much notice. The proposals for variable welfare payment rates across the board date back at least to 2009, when Tory Essex County Council submitted a formal proposal under the Sustainable Communities Act 2007 for devolution of benefit eligibility- and rate-setting powers to local government level. They submission argued:
As this proposal seeks to tackle worklessness it will be essential that control over the eligibility criteria and payment rates for Job Seekers Allowance, Income Support and Employment Support Allowance be transferred to ECC. This would put us in a powerful position to tailor the most important work-related benefits to local market conditions and ECC skills and training programmes.
The 2020 group’s recommendations are simply an attempt to push through this long-desired localisation of all benefits. As Carl has predicted (though I think he might have been copying), 2013 will see the rise to real power of the far right within the Conservative party, as electoral defeat looms, and Gove and his allies set their agenda for opposition.
This shouldn’t be a surprise: it’s been coming for a while.
One Nation Leveson
A week or two ago John Cruddas, Labour’s newest guru, edited One Nation week at Labourlist. I understand he commissioned everything himself (apart from my contribution, which I snuck in under cover of darkness), so I think it’s safe to assume that the article have at least a rough fit with emerging thinking in Labour HQ.
Most the articles were so-so, but I quite liked the two pieces on how workplace democracy needs to be established as the sensible way to run things. There was Sonia Sodah, Ed Miliband’s erstwhile adviser, on Building the institutions of economic democracy:
Giving employees representation on company boards is important but it will achieve little unless it is accompanied by a revitalisation in workplace democracy, through employee associations supported in their work by modern trade unions.
Then there was Sue Ferns of Union 21 on What kind of trade unions we need for the decade ahead
So our agenda must be about fairness at work, investing for good performance and contributing to economic efficiency. And to produce real change it has deliver against all three objectives, not cherry pick……..Times of crisis of necessity impact on trade union priorities, and it is right of course that we stand up for and defend the living standards and job security of our members. But we need both tactics and strategy to build a better future and, whilst understandable, there are dangers in focusing too closely on the tactical response to the day-to-day challenges that confront us.
All very promising. Come Thursday, though, normal service was resumed.
Ed Miliband’s response to Cameron’s statement failed to make any reference whatsoever to the potential for the people who actually create newspapers – the journalists – to be involved in maintaining press standards. It was left to old-fashioned leftie John McDonnell to build on the excellent work of the National Union Journalists as part of the Levenson Inquiry, and put Cameron (and later Clegg) on the spot:
I wonder whether we could achieve consensus on one of the recommendations in the report, where Leveson recommends the consideration by proprietors of the introduction of a conscience clause to protect journalists who refuse in any way to go against the code of practice. Will the Prime Minister join me in urging proprietors to meet the National Union of Journalists and whoever else to start working on introducing a conscience clause in contracts?
Cameron agreed immediately.
This is of course an important step forward, as it potentially opens the door to the NUJ’s re-recognition by News International, and I suspect the News International hierarchy will be quietly fuming at what they may see as Cameron’s cavalier acceptance of this particular Levenson recommendation.
So it’s hats off to John McDonnell for this victory for the union he has worked so hard to support, but a warning that there may still be quite a gap between One Nation theory and One Nation practice when it comes to the Labour leadership.
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