Though Cowards Flinch

During an interview, in a recent book by Rowenna Davis, Jon Cruddas MP describes himself as a socialist, but not a progressive. This chimes with the recent set of political ideas, called blue labour for brevity, which notes that not everything to do with change is necessarily a force for good.

Indeed, when we imagine a world where far right politics are at large, we can all concur that change is not necessarily good. In the early nineties, Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, described the party’s first “modernising” (which seems to mean anyone afraid of having an anti-Semitic image) leader John Bean as a true nationalist “always part of the progressive movement drivng [sic] nationalism forward to electoral success”.

When it comes to the BNP, some on the conservative right (such as Dan Hannan) will always try to suggest that given their protectionist economic views, they are left wing. John Bean, who Nick Griffin looks up to every bit as much as Le Pen in France, described himself as an anti-capitalist and in response to the reactionary BNP leader John Tyndall’s anti-Semitism, said that to blame the Jews for the world’s problems was to forget “gentile involvement” in “the drive for world government”.

When someone like Hannan suggested that the BNP were on the far left economically, the left itself would counter that by saying protectionism isn’t necessarily left wing, and neither is anti-capitalism, for that matter. In fact what define the fascist BNP as right wing are their appeals to a conservative imagery, and such reactionary categories as nationhood, race and family. But though many on the left rightly champion alternative family lifestyles, multi-ethnicity and internationalism, few are pro-actively against those former categories. Moreover, non-progressive socialism actively campaigns for more emphasis on family, flag and faith.

Serious question: Blue Labour is a million miles away from the crass, fascism of the BNP, but if those things that once defined the BNP as right wing can be incorporated into non-progressive socialist politics, what does this do to the political category “far right”?

What will fill the space left by Third Way politics?

A tabloid editor in 2006 once told John Harris for the Guardian “Britain is booming.” This message, widely accepted by politicians, encapsulated two things:

1) that some were able to pretend “walled-up factories, Poundstretcher shops, [and] low-paid service-sector jobs” didn’t exist or matter, and

2) metropolitan politics was the order of the day, and perpetuated in the mainstream press.

Well, as the ideological spending cuts begin to pinch, and metropolitanism starts to lose the electoral power it once had during the boom years, the target political audience has shifted.

While the Liberal Democrats have created their own demise, Labour and the Tories have both been on a soul searching mission for a post-third way, post-New Labour politics (which they both appealed to) and have come to the conclusion that communities in decline are the new target.

For Cameron, addressing the problems of immigration and multiculturalism was the way forward, while for Ed Miliband (who yesterday said people “lost trust” in Labour over immigration) the squeezed middle needed representation (aware, as he is, that according to a survey by BritainThinks seven in 10 Britons identify as Middle Class).

Think tanks and academics are showing the same findings. For Respublica, whose recent report on the dominance of four supermarkets and forthcoming report on how community social capital can replace the state in the protection of children, empowered communities, not multinational corporations that concentrate too much wealth, will be the bedrock of a big society.

For Maurice Glasman, whose ‘blue labour’ idea has caught the attention of Ed Miliband, “family, faith and flag” and the reintroduction of working class social conservatism in mainstream politics will counter the hegemony of liberal elite politics, so embedded into Blairite politics, and be a major deterrent against far right politics in vulnerable communities.

But don’t we need metropolitanism?

As David Aaronovitch put it in 2000:

“I am, of course, a member of the metropolitan, liberal elite. I am for gay rights, asylum-seekers, the euro, metric measurements, devolution, feminism, dearer petrol, fewer cars, intervening in Sierra Leone, change, reggae and experimenting with exotic foods.”

The problem for the Left, particularly the socialist Left, is that they are for some – perhaps most – of those things too, as well as the reintroduction of vulnerable or forgotten communities back into the political mainstream. Do I have to forgo one to allow for the other? By supporting families, do I have to sacrifice support for gay rights?

The answer is no. Broadly speaking – which is all there is of Glasman’s big idea so far – I am blue labour, in so far as I am opposed to New Labour and neoliberal individualism, but my social attitudes profess inclusivity and not prejudice.

Politicians, in seeking to empower communities, should not shy away from their duty to dispel myths about asylum seekers, homosexuals, or indeed reggae. During Britain’s transition away from Third Way politics, we would do well to remember that the working class do not have a monolithic set of politics and what might be called metropolitianism – for want of a better word – can co-exist with community empowerment.

As a young man I was a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party – until, that was, I gained my senses and left. In Southend, Essex, where I was at college and starting to get politically active, it was the only organisation taking to the streets nearly every week, and certainly were a notable presence campaigning against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I remember thinking how much I hated the navalgazing, spending weeknights listening to the same old lines on General Pincohet or the Poll Tax riots with a room full of other people who all knew the story, but felt they had to do something under the swappie banner they’d erected upstairs in The Railway Pub function room.

Among us common lot we’d do down on the Middle Class whenever we could – no matter our own backgrounds we knew our enemy, it was all those people not suffering, not cleaning the streets, not emptying the bins. We were decidedly bitter about the petit-bourgeoisie – we had an image in our heads of them we didn’t like, and we found the right company to share that in.

But come conference time, in London, among the Alex Callinicos’ and the other aristos bankrolling the newspaper production, we’d drop the Middle Class hatred like it was hot. Instead we did the dirty on the bourgeoisie proper; we sided with the squeezed middle before there was even such thing as a squeezed middle, it was the owners of the means of production – a significantly smaller percentage of people – that were our bugbear then.

The reason, implictly, being was that to shun the Middle Class at a Swappie conference is like Turkey’s voting for Christmas or noted Nazi Jews acting as architects for the final solution. For every wire-haired, gravel-voiced trade unionist in the room, there were ten double-barrelled silver spoons from Plumshire.

But while my old comrades carried on disavowing the Middle Classes, I learnt to embrace them, and actually see this embrace as being crucial to the eventual dissolution of the class system in general.

I’ve grown to the idea that inter-class relations within a state socialist system will actually spur the end of the class system far quicker than if Trotskyite groups, behind closed doors, denied their own Middle Class roots and/or embarked on class hatred themselves.

As a socialist, I think it is important to have a strong state, and a strong head of state to keep the Prime Minister, and the First Ministers in the devolved governments, under constant check. It will be of no surprise then to find that I am excited that our future King, Prince William (whose RAF salary is to the tune of £37,170), has decided to marry well outside his class – the lovely Catherine Elizabeth Middleton.

It might seem strange to hear, but the dreadful class system in this country, which has single-handedly ruined true social mobility (and with it the lives of many Working Class families), might be dealt its strongest blow to date by the marriage of William and Kate – for which the Left today ought to be truly grateful.

The nomination papers for the forthcoming council elections are due in 4th April.  It does feel a bit weird not to be completing the Bickerstaffe Ward 0nes, but the die is cast; I won’t be a councillor after 5th May.

I’ve worked bloody hard in my ward as a councillor, and achieved a lot. 

The 50 biggest achievements will be another blogpost (probably at the Bickerstaffe Record) but I’m quite proud of a 300,000 investment in nursery and community facilities, a village school that is burgeoning not declining, 30mph limits on roads where there were none, an HGV ban through the village centre, a popular music festival (though maybe a year off this year), bus services successfully defended and even improved, taking on a big factory over their noise pollution and winning, new bus shelters erected, public housing defended, funding brought in for the footie club, the Parish car park improved, the A577 safety scheme, flooding problems resolved, greenspace defended, a new rail station nearing fruition. 

That’s just off the top of my head. There was lot more when I noted it down, road by road, theme by theme.

There’s also plenty of other quiet case work around ‘difficult’ social services which I can’t talk about but where I’ve really made a difference to people’s lives.

Most of all, perhaps, I’m proud of the fact that many of the things above I can’t take sole credit for.  They’re often collaborative enterprises, but wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t got stuck in and offered the right support at the right time.  I think it’s called community organisation, nowadays, but I just took it as being a councillor.

I’ll miss a lot of this stuff.

So why stop now, many have asked, both locally and nationally.

Here’s five reasons:

1) I want to stay home

I’ve been out 3-6 nights a week, week in, week out, for the last few years.   I’ve missed a lot of bedtimes.  Now the kids are bigger, I want to be around more for homework, for goalie training, for the craic.  My wife wants me back too.

2) I don’t want to become stale

I don’t think councillors should become permanent fixtures, either in their wards or on the Council.  We should be encouraging short, high action, productive stints on the frontline, then letting other people have a go.  My time has come to move on.

I hope Bickerstaffe stays Labour, and I hope my successor brings new ideas, new energies, new talents.

3) Elected local government is important, but not THAT important

Labour labour parties is pre-occupied with local government, because it’s what people vote on and it’s where you beat the Tories/LibDems.  It fits with the national party’s campaigning party identity.

But there’s more to local politics than local government, which after all only controls a small percentage of local spend (and borough councils only a very tiny percentage in two-tier systems).

While many in local Labour parties focus their campaigning solely on local elections, local NHS services are being quietly dismantled under the ‘care’ of non-elected Trust and PCT boards, and the whole Voluntary and Community Sector is being decimated.

So one thing I’ll be throwing my energies into after May 5th is the whole local NHS agenda, and how local groups can work with GP commissioning structures with the aim of retaining and even expanding preventative, holistic services. 

That’s not something I can easily do as a local councillor, but it will use much of the same skillset I’ve developed in local elected politics.

I’ll also be doing stuff around legal challenge to Council service decisions which is better done from outside the Council.

In general, I look forward to becoming a free-ranging activist, unconstrained by the necessary niceties and conventions of public office.

4) Local councillors are too big for their boots

Councillors, especially those in senior positions (as I’ve been) tend to be regarded as the local party bosses.  They shouldn’t be.   This trend has developed because in many areas party infrastructure around policy making have withered in the face of demands from the centre that parties focus on electoral campaigning. 

We need to work harder now to establish routes of accountability to an expanding party membership, and to ensure that councillors are given mandates to act on behalf of increasingly representative parties (and local labour movements), not carte blanche to lord it over their branches.

I’m a bureaucrat by nature, and in time I want to play a part in the construction of a ‘wholer’ local party, which focuses its energies not just on local government but on everything that affects our constituents.  Now is not the right time for me to do this, as space is needed between my current and future roles in the local party, but the need and opportunity will come soon enough.

5) The Labour party is not the Labour movement

This is connected to 4) above, but deserves special mention as it’s where a lot of my post-councillor energies will be directed.

In West Lancashire, as in many areas, the day-to-day link between the union movement and the Labour party has more or less dissolved.   There is no longer a very active Trades Council (well as far as I can see, though some hardy souls have tried to keep it alive), and links are largely limited to some sponsorship of candidates and election campaigns (though I’ve worked at links with the Council trade unions in my time as opposition on the Council).

So in the next few months I’ll be getting back to my union roots, working with trade unionists beyond the local Labour party to re-establish the kind of union organisation now lost to many areas, though with a mind to 21st century conditions.

Workplace organisation and expanded recruitment remains the bedrock of the labour movement, and the best Trades Councils use this as a basis for work on local rights beyond the workplace e.g. the TUC unemployment centres which were a source of hope and solidarity for many under Thatcher. 

 This is stuff local Labour parties have trouble with both culturally and legally, but which must form part of the integral offer of the labour movement to our working class constituencies and constituents, irrespective of but not unconscious of how class identity and consciousness may differ from class as an objective capital/labour condition.

Formal affiliation to the Labour party should of course be a part of the Trades  Council development, but I suspect it will only be a minor aspect for consideration initially, as unions-in-the-community and recruitment capacity is developed to the point where both party and wider movement can engage properly on a clearly mutually beneficial basis.

The local media plan is in there as well, though initially it may be a different development strand.

That’s the plan. If anyone else is thinking of similar stuff around this aspect of labour movement organisation – and in the aftermath of March 26th could there possibly be a better time - I’d be happy to compare notes and look at mutual support.

Me, shuffling along carrying some wood

On Saturday, I eschewed the invitations of various strands of the bloggerati to join them for beer and debate about the merits of otherwise of direct action in the context of a mass protest.  I also declined the invitation to ‘get my ass’ up to Oxford Street.

Instead, I marched along with a group of Lancashire trade unionists and Labour activists who do not read blogs, do not have twitter accounts, and do not know who Laurie Penny is.  We arrived in London around 1130am, headed by tube for the back of the march, marched for four and a half hours, got on the tube to Swiss Cottage, had a pint, and came home.  

As a result, I got to witness an extraordinary save by my 11 year old on Sunday morning, plunging low to his right to keep out a volley from five yards and actually holding it.  But fatherly pride would have me digress…..

As Lancashire’s finest middle-aged trade unionists shuffled along Piccadilly around 4pm, it became clear that something was going on at Fortnum and Masons, a well known deli in those parts.

A young man was poking his arms out of  second floor window, waving a flag of red and black triangles.  It wasn’t clear from our viewpoint what was going on, and we had no idea at that stage that the shop floor had been occupied by a 100 or so ‘Uncut’ afficianados.  No police were present at that stage, as far as I could see, although there were a couple of vans parked close by.

But here’s the thing.

All the dull, middle-aged/elderly Lancashire trade unionists I was with roared their approval, waved their placards, and surged – in a midly arthritic way – towards what they thought might be a better vantage point. 

Only I, caught up with this whole blog-driven peaceful protest/direct action dichotomy thing, hung back, wondering for a second what my hitherto staid comrades – for whom the height of excitement on other Saturdays might be a SECOND pint down the Labour club before going home to Match of the Day – were up to. 

What were they up to? 

Well, just for a minute, before they realised time was marching on faster than the march was marching, and that we could do with getting the tube from Green Park if we were to squeeze in the real ale incident before the coach picked us up…. just for a minute, my comrades were well up for it.

On the coach on the way home, before people started to drop off, the coach was alive with jokes about Fortnum and Mason.  I was the only one on the coach with twitter, and they really liked the one about ’15,000 worth of damage in F&M – a jar of olives has been knocked over.’

And that is the thing.  

There was no drama, no police involved, no calls to the wives and husbands to say that the kettle jokes we’d made at 5am the same morning weren’t just a joke anymore. 

Even so, I think this tiny little incident, replicated amongst many small groups like ours as the crowd turned and moved to the day’s high point of excitement, problematises the growing orthodoxy that people can be split neatly into two groups – the peaceful protestors and the others.

Inconvenient though it may be to the mainstream narrative, ‘peaceful’ protestors who are also ‘angry’ at the cuts may not always compartmentalise their peacefulness and anger as they are instructed.

Later on, when I’ve earned a living, I’ll carry through that problematisation, with special reference to Hannah Arendt. 

Obviously.

In the meantime, the most coherent intellectual analysis of the peaceful  protester/the others dichotomy narrative is at Paul Sagar’s Bad Consicience, which I’ll be drawing on.

I’ve said nothing at all to date about the UK regime’s involvement in military action in Libya. 

In keeping with my aid worker background,  I’d count myself as a conflicted ‘liberal interventionist’.  It’s what I was trained for, and getting stuck in where I can be of use is a habit that’s hard to shake off.

Thus, I’ve always tended to steer away from the perils of whataboutery.  This is reflected most recently in my fairly widely derided (on the Left) stance on Councils and illegal budget setting; I’d rather achieve something concrete for a discrete number of people than stand by more radical objectives which, however laudable, cannot be achieved in the absence of the kind of painstaking grassroots organisation that has been lacking so far in the response to the New Conservative regime.

Nevertheless, in the case of Libya, I can see that a good deal of whataboutery is entirely justified given the UK’s and other Western regimes’ inaction over other conflicts in which they might more justifiably have taken an interventionist role.  

Sunder has summed up some of other conflicts well, but those in Sri Lanka, Democratic Republic of Congo and now Cote D’Ivoire stands out as places where the UN’s and by extension the West’s responsibilities have been quietly set to one side.  Sri Lanka, for example, is doing very well in the world cup cricket, and remains a popular tourist destination, despite its regime’s participation in mass murder.

In the end, though, my overriding impression of the Left’s reaction to events in Libya is that its powerlessness in the face of these events is being expressed through frustration with the judgments made by others on the Left.  

I’d love the Left to be busy making a clinical assessment of how Western regimes got themselves into/are planning to benefit from the current situation, and then see how the facts behind these regimes’ moral duplicity might be used as a tool to promote alternatives from the bottom up.  I’d love to the Left to f ocus on what we can actually achieve now as part of a longer term strategy.

Instead, much of the Left (or at least its influential commentariat) seems totally focused on a) saying how awful everything is: b) blaming others in the Left for not thinking through the awfulness of everything properly.

So as a counter to this tendency, in the second part of this (inevitable) two-parter I’ll eschew feeling guilty on my own behalf  about what’s going on in Libya.  

The bloodshed in Libya not my fault. It’s not Owen’s. It’s not the fault of those on the Left.  It is the fault both of Gadaffi and of rightwing regimes in the West who thought it was useful realpolitik to embrace him as a buffer against the supposed perils of Islamism. 

Instead, I’ll focus on what our very own regime’s most recent adventurism tells us about the nature of the New Conservative state, and what the Left might do – tomorrow and the next day and the day after that – to counter it. 

Of course meaninfgful change in the UK regime will not come quickly.  It is considerably better embedded than Gadaffi’s, and his looks pretty hard to topple.  But if we spend our time complaining about each others’ integrity and judgment on situations over which we simply have no control, then we’re not really going to get very far.

On this day in 1893 Keir Hardie, the Liberal-Labour MP for West Ham, formed the Independent Labour Party during a conference held in Bradford with other delegates from various labour and socialist organisations. Growing increasingly tired of partnering with the liberals it was his contention that the working classes of Britain would need their own independent political party. This party, socialist in its outlook, was to be rooted in the trade unions, despite being at the time still politically liberal.

Seven years later in 1900 the Labour Representation Committee was formed, which consisted of socialist organisations like the ILP, the Social Democratic Federation (Britain’s first socialist political party), whose aim was to gain independent Labour representation in parliament.

In its early years one didn’t join a body called the Labour Party, it was only possible to join one of its affiliate groups – the ILP being the biggest one. In 1910 42 Labour MPs were elected to the House of Commons, thanks in no small part by Hardie, the Fabian Society and other trade unionists (which given that one year before they could no longer fund political parties owing to the Osborne judgment – passed by the House of Lords – was a major victory; one which was to be short lived however).

As time wet on relations between the ILP and the Parlaimentary Labour Party (PLP) grew rather fractious. The independents, now led by James Maxton, felt they should have a seperate system of discipline than the PLP who did not agree. At this stage, in the 1930s, the ILP started to become very radicalised, heavily influenced in part by Stalinism.

Labour from its outset was a broad church of left wing and working class politics, and so had been used to difference, but with the ILP strategies were very much in conflict. The policy of Clydeside ILP MPs, for example, had been to harass and confront Conservative and Liberals MPs in parliament, especially on the issues of poverty and unemployment. The PLP viewed this as cheapening their standing which led to confrontation, while the ILP accused the PLP of deviating from its socialist principles.

In 1932 the ILP left the Labour Party, along with four of its MPs, evoking a scathing response from Labour leftwinger Aneurin Bevan who described the ILP’s disaffiliation as a decision to remain “pure, but impotent”.

Such, in fact, is the reality for lots of political organisations who supposedly work in the interest of left wing or working class politics – seeing difference and factionalism as a duty rather than a political reality of which to overcome in organised politics.

Take for example Duncan Hallas’ notorious 1985 (published 1987) article, simply called Sectarianism. After disputing the Militant definition of sectarianism (to work towards socialism and the workers’ struggle from outside the Labour Party) and supporting the motion that the Socialist Workers’ Party should support the left inside the Labour Party where need be, he notes that this is by no means the same thing as saying “the SWP ought to dissolve itself into the Labour Party (or to appear to do so whilst secretly maintaining its own organisation)”.

He takes this opinion for three reasons which I shall sum up in brief:

• The struggle takes place first and foremost in workplaces then unions. Links between unions and the Labour Party ought not to oblige one to join that party, and like Lenin – who advocated joining reactionary unions, and partaking in the bourgeois parliaments – did not argue this should take place from within the Social Democratic Party
• Withdrawing presence from workplace, even at low times of struggle, is sectarian; Labour Party cannot claim to be so in-keeping with this attitude
• Revolutionary socialists are better placed outside of the party anyway as they can avoid conflicts over positions, candidate selections etc.

I’m not a revolutionary socialist, so this poses for me no problem. However on a matter of principles, Hallas’ first reason disregards the common knowledge that the world’s problems do not begin and end in a political party – no sane Labour Party member on the left would suggest that advancing socialism can only take place within the party, disregarding the work that takes place in the workplace and by unions. This line seems to produce only a straw man argument, when in fact – and as Bevan was wise enough to take note of – by not working from within the largest socialist party in Britain, the dutybound factionalist only makes his “purity” impotent.

The second reason, more revealing in some ways, can serve as a commentary on the reality of a Labour Party being tilted further and further to the right (or in the case of Ed Miliband, being tilted further and further to total silence). While rejecting Hallas’ straw man argument in his first reason, we can accept that it would counter received wisdom to do anything other than maintain presence of workplace representatives, even if “struggle in the workplaces is at a very low ebb”.

This, for me, still doesn’t explain why a socialist, of whatever variety, is better placed outside, rather than within the Labour Party. Which brings me to Hallas’ last point. First thing to ask is how do the SWP avoid friction over positions? It seems obvious to me that this is a reality of any political organisation, and is no good reason to seperate off from a broad church party.

Clearly the more a broadly socialist body of politics is split, the more staurated it becomes, and the weaker it is placed to join in the struggle of the working class. This is not the opinion of many on the left, for whom splits and splinters are an obligation, stipulated by the word of zealous, power hungry Russian dictators safeguarding their own corners. But at what price?

Small, inadequate left wing parties shout in the wind, by the sidelines, while the Labour Party, currently in oppositon to a government demanding ideological cuts over jobs and growth, struggles to tell its arse from its elbow. Refusal to work in the Labour Party, from the ILP back in the thirties to the Greens and the SWP now, is the scourge of left wing politics.

Hopi Sen, in his intellectually impure and prosaic manner, said on twitter last night:

Oh-ho, has the new left thingummy reached stage three of all left wing movements then (tedious internal bickering?) / Campaign model for all leftie “revolutionary “groups – Stage 1: Campaign. Stage 2: overblown rhetoric about transforming world. / Stage 3: Internal bickering. Stage 4: Assign blame for failure to achieve stage 2. Stage 5. Appear on Newsnight to criticise Labour party.

Droll, I’m sure. But what has been characterised here as ‘internal bickering’ is a vital component of assessing next stages of any successful movement of people.

Questions on whether applying theory to practice is necessary anymore have emerged (see NLP here, SWP) as well as questions on whether leadership is necessary in such an organised gathering of protesters (see Seymour; Seymour; and Seymour’s apology) – particularly concerning UK Uncut (a better summary of events can be found at The Great Unrest blog).

The argument against discussing theory – characterised by some as meaningless intellectual masturbation – and against leadership – characterised by some as the adoption of old, stale bureaucratic structures – is made while drawing on the current success of the movement (see Laurie Penny and Marcus Malarky on this, then see Owen Jones on the problems of leaderless youth). But to pretend these structures are unnecessary, and that the movement is unique and distinct from other movements, is a grave error, and one which has been host to so many casualties. Take for example the struggle of German labor movements from 1912 to 1923. Paul Mattick had this to say about them in 1947, and it sounds very familiar to the place where the student movement is at now:

In retrospect, the struggle of the German proletariat from 1912 to 1923 appeared as minor frictions that accompanied the capitalistic re-organization process which followed the war-crisis. But there has always been a tendency to consider the by-products of violent changes in the capitalistic structure as expressions of the revolutionary will of the proletariat. The radical optimists, however, were merely whistling in the dark. The darkness was real, to be sure, and the noise was encouraging, yet at this late hour there is no need to take it seriously. As exciting as it is to recall the days of proletarian actions in Germany – the mass meetings, demonstrations, strikes, street fights, the heated discussions, the hopes, fears, and disappointments, the bitterness of defeat and the pain of prison and death – yet no lessons but negative ones can now be drawn from all these undertakings. All the energy and all the enthusiasm were not enough to bring about a social change or to alter the contemporary mind. The lesson learned was how not to proceed. How to realize the revolutionary needs of the proletariat was not discovered.

Mattick recalls the excitement of the actions; I fear the excitement of the actions taking place during current demonstrations and direct actions today make it difficult to see the necessity of assessing next steps, theory and leadership. But so as to ensure nobody today is “whistling in the dark” internal dialogue must remain – even if Hopi Sen and the other New Labour Dinosaurs laugh about it.

1.  Time for praxis

It’s the New Year, and time for action.  

The Christmas debate about the student movement leadership/generation has been healthy, but it’s time for ‘the movement’ (a term I’ll use as an uncritiqued shorthand for the rest of this piece) to move on.

These are my thoughts on what actions might come next. 

They are offered as part of a ‘menu’, and are based on my areas of semi-expertise.   Other parts of the ‘menu’ are currently being offered up (all three articles somewhat confusingly ‘What Next?’.  

The premise for what I suggest is simple.  The movement to date has been at its best when it has identified targets which a broad range of people has seen, or has come to see, as legitimate.  The two obvious examples are Vodafone/Top Shop, and Parliament/Millbank, but at a London level there has also been the targeting of the LibDem conference, and in Birmingham the sit-in at John Hemmings office.

Interestingly, what has not been needed as a part of these actions is a specific list of coherent demands. While some observers have tried to ‘call out’ the movement on this it has not been an impediment to the popularity or, in its own terms, effectiveness of the action; while specific demands for Top Shop to pay his taxes might be technically incoherent on the basis that Green has not broken the law, the fact that this simply reveals a deeper structural problem has actually been an advantage. 

Similarly, while Paul Staines/Guido Fawkes may bleat on that the Guardian avoids tax through its legal status, the argument may be technically correct, but is an irrelevance to the broad but as yet unspecified demands for change.

It is not the specific demands, or the specific alternatives which matter.  It is the visibility and legitimacy of the target which makes for effectiveness.  As such, the momentum created is greater than it was with the G20 protests, for example, when the target was just a bit too diffuse (‘world governments’) and much more than the broad anti-capitalist demos of the early 1990s. 

2.  Time for targets

It seems to me that there are three pretty obvious legitimate targets for the early part of 2011:  local councils, the private providers that have major contracts with those Councils , and Primary Care Trusts (PCTs).  This is because such targets:

• Have both clearly identifiable decision-making points coming up in the next few weeks;
• Allow for a, what is widely acknowledged as desirable, broadening of the movement to encompass the wider ills being visited upon us by the Tory-led government;
• Allow for at least some greater geographical decentralisation of the movement away from the main urban (and university) centres, although some capacity constraints will remain;
• Create an environment in which the movement and trade unionists (or at least public sector ones) can move beyond the welcome rhetorical expressions of mutual solidarity and start to plan grassroots action together;
• Also create an environment in which the movement can engage with nascsent Coalitions Against Cuts, and in particular those groupings of people standing up for/representing public service users and others who will be hardest hit by the public sector cuts.

3.  Local councils as targets: actions and issues

Local councils will, in general, be setting their 2011-12 financial year budgets between mid-February and mid-March. 

The budget setting meeting clearly creates a focal point for demonstrations, just as the mid-year cuts decisions taken by some councils did in November/December, though on a more widespread scale.

To make action around this decision as effective as possible, however, and take it beyond the ‘big demo’ on budget day/night, there are some preparatory steps that might be taken in the next few days/weeks.

First, contact might be made with the local public sector union branches to discuss how best to work together in the coming period. 

At one end of the action spectrum, this may simply be to ensure that demonstrations on budget day/night are co-ordinated.  At the other end lie two possibilities for more direction. 

The first lies largely within the gift of the union, and boils down to arranging either official or unofficial strike action on the day of the budget decision, and then ensuring a picket line at the Town Hall/Council chambers. 

In general, it might be expected that Labour councillors will refuse to cross any such picket line, especially if this course of action is agreed as the most tactically astute one, in general this being where Labour is in opposition on the Council (see below for further detail).  Indeed, as a Labour Group secretary I organised just such a refusal to cross a picket line to a Council meeting in 2008, by prior agreement with the unions. 

In these cases, a visible picket line, combined with a visible refusal by Labour (and of course Greens and assorted other anti-cuts councillors, perhaps stretching as far as the odd maverick LibDem, might make for good protest material, with pro-cuts councillors appropriately highlighted.

The important thing is to get moving quite quickly on this, especially if one day strike action, on different days across the country, is to happen at all.  If such action is to remain within the current law, ballots will of course need to be held and this take time to organise.  Such steps do provide union members with the reassurance of official sanction, and the position of many public sector workers at the moment, both in terms of risk of job loss and general confidence, means that this should not be scoffed at. 

Of course unofficial action is possible, but time will still be needed for workers to go through the issues that these entail, especially if one day’s action is being flagged up as the start of something bigger (and that rhetoric is likely to be forthcoming if the broader movement is bringing its enthusiasm towards the union movement in the way I suggest). 

What the anti-cuts movement does not want are days of industrial action which are only partially observed by union members; that is probably less effective than eschewing all such action in favour of simpler-to-organise demonstration activity. 

Conversely, if the coming together of the new movement, nascent service user resistance groupings and trade union can instill in each other the sense of solidarity to make it all happen without recourse to official sanction then so much the better, not least (and in passing) the December 2010 report by the European Committee of Social Rights, which states that the government’s current legislation against unions’ rights mean that

the scope for workers to defend their interests through lawful collective actions in excessively circumscribed.

The second line of more radical action lies more within the gift of the broader movement (and any extant Coalition Against Cuts) rather than with the unions, and includes the imposition of physical (though non-violent) measures to try to stop or delay the budget decision.  It doesn’t need the likes of me to give advice on how this might be done, either within the Council Chamber or by seeking to restrict access to the Chamber. 

It goes without saying that in the end such measures are likely to be overcome by a resort to force on the part of the Council administration, but it also goes without saying that such confrontations, if they do come to pass, are at the very heart of  what resistance is, whether or not it is accompanied by the laudable sense of theatre and public engagement that the movement has brought to direction action to date.

As a technical matter, however, there may be something to be learned from Kate Belgrave’s recent endeavours, retold at her blog, in which a Council not too far from me tried to stop her recording Council proceedings, with no obvious justification for such restraint on individual freedoms in a public place.   Attempts at mass recordings (and dissemination) of events might make for interesting theatre, at the very least.

4.  The elephant in the room: Labour Councils and the cuts (revisited)

There remains, of course, the elephant in the room: how the movement responds to and engages with Labour-run councils planning to implement job and service cuts because of draconian cuts to their funding from central government.

I have covered in some detail, in a previous post, the technical issues surrounding the situation in which Labour councils now find themselves.  They are, in short, between a rock and a hard place.  There are no easy solutions.

Essentially, given the law as it stands under the Local Government Finance Act 1986, it is not technically feasible to defy the government on budget setting, by the setting of a clearly ’illegal’ budget because of the additional powers accorded to Chief Finance Officers simply to manage the Council’s coffers in themselves if, in their judgment, councillors are setting a budget which outstrips resources.

The main course of action open to councillors therefore is to take decisions on the spending of reserves and balances which, in more stable financial and political circumstances, would be seen as imprudent.   This creates more of a difficult judgment call for Chief Finance Officers (with, I suspect, recourse to audit opinion).

This has been fairly widely touted as a reasonably radical way forward, although in some Councils even draining reserves and working balances to near zero will not cover the new budget gap.

The other option that has been suggested, here for example, is for Councils to use powers set out in the Local Government Act 2003 to borrow money on the open market, commonly known as ‘prudential borrowing’ in keeping with the Treasury’s Prudential Code.  These powers have never, as far as I know, been used to borrow money to provide ongoing services, as it is designed for capital works which create revenue streams/savings down the line for loan repayment.

In a case where an attempt was made to borrow without an accompanying business plan showing repayment from revenue/savings generated therefore, it is most likely that the Chief Finance Officer would find her/himself in much the same position as with a more direct setting of an ‘illegal’ budget (see above).  On balance, therefore, I simply cannot see prudential borrowing being brought to the table by Labour councils as a realistic way forward for the 2011-12 financial year, though I’d be delighted to be proved wrong, and it may be an option in subsequent years.

In tune with this view, prudential borrowing does not feature in the list of suggestions set out in the recent letter to the Labour Leader of Liverpool City Council from Militant ex-councillors who were surcharged in 1987 for setting an illegal budget.  

Indeed, they also seem to recognise that the legal potential for defying the government through illegal budget setting has changed, and their direct demands are limited to the spending up of reserves and balances in the way I have indicated above.  (The scope for Council action may change with the introduction of the Powers of General Competence set out in the localism bill, but this will have to remain beyond the scope of this article, which is focused on the shorter term).

Use of reserves aside, and despite the headlines about the nature of the letter, the main ‘demand’ made by Tony Mulhearn and his ex-councillor colleagues is not that councillors should try to do what is simply impossible, but that:

A campaign could then be launched to oppose the cuts with the specific demand that £50million be restored to the Liverpool City Council as a means of defending jobs and services.

You could issue a call for all local authorities to embrace the same strategy, and call for support from the local authority trade unions and the wider Labour movement, in concert with community organisations which are planning to resist any cuts in their own localities.

In other words, ex-Militant are advocating a political campaigning strategy which has the formal Labour movement and its councillors as part of it but (arguably) not seeking to subsume other forces. 

This is, I suggest, not just in tune with where the broader movement is coming from now, but is also  a more valid and sustainable approach than, as has been suggested, expecting Labour councillors simply to abrogate their responsibilities  either by voting against ANY budget put on the table by its own leadership, or simply resigning from the Council. 

Such tactics, while they may look good in the shorter term, risk allowing even more punitive budgets to be set by opposition groups (or in extremity by the Chief Finance Officer), and also ignore the fact that even a 15% one year cut still leaves 85% of money to be spent, and that it is important that this remaining money is spent in way which minimise the effect of the cuts/protect the most vulnerable.  This is the core of Liverpool Labour leader Joe Anderson’s response to ex-Militant.

What does this fairly lengthy (though I would hold, necessary) exposition of the position for Labour Councils mean, then, for the way in which the broader anti-cuts movement targets Councils up and down the country, often in the strategically important metropolitan centres?

Well, clearly there will be more difficult matters of judgment for the movement around to what extent it is strategically useful to target Labour Councils trying to do create the ‘least-worst’ outcomes for jobs and services in their area, but that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be protests.  Councils are, in clear legal terms, simply an executive arm of the national Tory-led government, irrespective of which party is in control locally; Labour councillors do sign up to that idea when they become councillors, and ultimately it is simply a cross they have to bear if they become the butt of protestors who are seeking, through their actions, to disrupt the function of what they consider is an illegitimate government. 

At its most extreme, direct action to disrupt this function of government might include attempts to stop the budget vote taking place at all, and it is to be hoped that in such circumstances of civil disobedience, that Labour councillors might at the very least bear proceedings with equanimity; the kind of utterances we have had from the likes of the leader of Lambeth Council do, unfortunately, little to suggest that Labour councillors and movement activists may all broadly be on the same side. 

Conversely, it would be good if, when protesting in whatever way is appropriate/possible, the movement does recognise that, at a personal level, Labour councillors are unlikely to be the scum of the earth, desperate to cut services to the poor; that is not, generally, why they became Labour councillors.

To facilitate such understanding, in a manner close to the one suggested by ex-Militant in Liverpool (notwithstanding any different emphases on who is leading whom in the campaign), it would be good if members of the movement can, probably via links established with the local trade unions (see above) engage in some of the detail about the budget.  This doesn’t mean the movement should seek to become quasi-councillors, but it might at least seek to check out the extent to which Labour groups are, for example, making appropriate use of reserves and balances where these are available to maintain services. 

Where necessary, it should be pressing for more radical action to conserve services, and taking up the standard for those most in need. Such pressure might include seeking invitations to lobby the local Labour party membership, which in theory at least (practice is mixed) should be able to hold its councillors to account either directly or through its Local Government Committee. 

In ideal circumstances, such pressure from the local party on councillors might actually be interpreted as solidarity support for those councillors to take a more radical approach than they might otherwise feel comfortable with. If this is to happen, though, arrangements will obviously need to be made quickly so that the various party discussions can take place in late January/early February.

Frankly, if Labour groups are unwilling to open up to this kind of dialogue with an important potential anti-government ally, then they deserve whatever ‘sell out’ accusations may be levelled at them.  Similarly, Labour-led councils (and there are some) which are not engaging properly and rigorously with the trade unions about their budgeting plans for this and subsequent years do deserve any mud that gets thrown at them.

Ultimately, then, the movement should not (and I’m pretty confident will not) hold back from legitimate protest and action in the face of cuts proposals being proposed in February/March by Labour-led councils, though a prior understanding of the somewhat different dynamics within the controlling group will be useful.  In such circumstances, working with the trade unions, who will have more of a feel for the those dynamics, will be vital.

5.  Private Council service providers

In their letter to Labour leader Joe Anderson, the Liverpool ex-Militants also talk of another possible area where money can be saved:

In addition you could take Liverpool Direct back in-house thus saving a reported £29million a year.

I’ve written about the joint venture contract between Liverpool City Council and BT previously. 

It was signed off by the LibDems when they were in control, and there are some reports that it costs the Council many millions a year in additional charges because of the poor initial contracting and weak contract management.   However it is clear that Labour, now in control, have found that disentangling the Council from the contract is likely to be simply too costly in terms of contractual obligations and costs for bringing the various ICT/customer-services back in-house .

The detail of this particular horlicks of a contract, though, is less important than the idea that, perhaps even more so than Councils and councillors themselves, the big private firms that make a lot of their profit from delivering public services under contract to Councils might become legitimate targets for protest and non-violent action. 

In this respect, it should be remembered that the Ian Livingston, Chief Executive Officer of the BT group was one of the people who signed the Daily Telegraph letter in October supporting Osborne’s public spending cuts. 

It would therefore make sense for the movement to think about orchestrating some kind of TopShop-style action at selected BT offices demanding that BT take at least the same level of cuts to their contracts as the various councils they serve are facing, without reducing the level of service.

And of course it’s not just BT.  The CEO of facilities management outsourcing company MITIE also distinguished herself with her call for cuts to public expenditure at the very time she was planning to increase her firm’s profit margins from that very expenditure:

McGregor-Smith said government spending cuts created uncertainty over how local authorities would manage contracts and procurement but sounded a bullish note about Mitie’s medium-term prospects.

“We’re currently having a very positive dialogue with the cabinet office. We believe in the private and public sectors, in the medium term, we are bidding a number of opportunities that would really help the growth rate,” McGregor-Smith told Reuters.

Perhaps a salutory occupation of MITIE’s offices around the country, enquiring after the ethics of ‘more for our shareholders at the expense of others’ business model might be appropriate.

And there is also Serco, a major provider of local authority outsourced services, whose Chief Finance Officer wrote to all their suppliers demanding at least a 2.5% reduction in contract price from his smaller supply chain providers, or risk losing the business.  Perhaps this charming approach might be reciprocated.

6.  Primary Care Trusts as targets

The final legitimate target area is, I would contend, the decision-making process that will be undertaken over the next month or two by Primary Care Trusts (PCTs). 

PCTs are, until their proposed abolition in 2013, the main fundholders for all NHS spend, but while they make budget decisions on levels of spending which outweigh Council spending, their ‘depoliticised’ nature means that the public board meetings tend to avoid the level of scrutiny given to Council meetings.

Of course, any notion that NHS budgets have been ringfenced against cuts has now been pretty well put to bed; the cuts, whether or not they are expressed as required savings, are here now, and movement resistance to them is as important as it to so local councils – perhaps even more so given the way in which increasing percentages of overall PCT spend is likely to be channelled towards maintaining secondary care at the expense of primary and especially community-based preventative health.

In many ways, what I have set out above about action towards councils applies also to PCTs, except that it is much more straightforward.  There needs to be the same engagement with the unions, and the same kind of planning to engage around the key decision-making point: normally a budget setting board meeting.  What the targeting of the NHS like this may do, however, is create an element of surprise at the broadening of the movement’s scope to encompass an area in which, to a large extent, the radical privatisation plans of the government have gone unchallenged other than in the press.

The strength in the anti-cuts movement, emanating from the draconian and dangerous agenda of cuts from the existing government, and led in many ways by students and trade union activists, has increased greatly in its current form – and as a consequence further questions are being raised inside it, that extend further than merely “what is it we are against?” (as Tom Miller has rightly written about here).

As the movement grows even stronger, numbers increase and demands start to be met, it is inevitable that questions will get tougher: “Yes, we want change to government policy, but what will that change look like?” and “Yes, the government should crumble, but how do we promote and help form a credible government in its place?”

Many people have been fairly scepitcal of entering into debates on theory, saying things like “save this waffle for the dinosaurs at the branch meeting” – I’m not of that opinion, and I’m also glad of the reference Miller, mentioned above, makes about Lenin (I myself used the Spanish Civil War, for example, to illustrate a point on so-called “left unity” ).

A common criticism of Marx is that while he critiqued and criticised capitalism expertly, he spent less time mapping out what Communism would be like operationally or morally. Perhaps he needn’t have. This, people will say, allowed Communist leaders to do some pretty drastic things justifying their means by their ends, while public intellectuals could excuse killing if it meant a Communistic outcome. It’s no surprise to me that in the periods from WWI to the end of the Cold War the left were not only carved up into Reformists, democratic socialists, revolutionary socialists, utopian socialists, Communists, and Anarchsists, but each of these were carved up in the form of libertarian socialists, Bolshevists, Menshevists, Council Communists (you get my gist).

The left is a broad spectrum, inevitably it will fall out on issues, and at points one faction will wonder why another is being compromised with (why, for example should a statist reformist, work with an an anti-statist libertarian socialist, while he compromises with a civic republican on certain matters). It’s good to belong to a broad church, but differences should be rationalised, and difficult conversations should be engaged – and they should be done earlier rather than later. It is not an option to put off this conversation, no matter how difficult, and no matter how inconsequential it seems at the time, particularly as some of the activism is so exciting and so all encompassing.

In order to steer clear of in-fighting later on, difficult conversations are a must – now.

The movement of students, workers and sympathisers of whatever stripe, with continued energy, focus, and direction, will start to see differences; there was a feeling the night before the tuition fee bill vote that Lib Dem MPs were on their backfeet – we may have lost that battle, but there is a war to be won (a cliche, sure, but you see my point). Unity can bring this disgusting and ideological government to its knees, but as that other cliche establishes, action without theory is aimless.