Though Cowards Flinch

2011, dear reader, was a really shite year. The right won, and life is worse for billions of people around the world.

In 2012, the organised labour movement will, I predict, make a partial comeback, in Britain and elsewhere, and the foundations for a fuller challenge will be laid, not least through productive engagement with newer social movements.  Though Cowards Flinch will help.  A bit. 

End of message. Now go to the pub, if it’s not closed down.

Yesterday I didn’t go on a march. 

Instead, in semi-journalist mode, I went round pickets in my area, having a bit of chat with those who were left, offering a tenner for the strike fund.  In some cases, no-one was left, and the stray placards stood forlornly by the official picket notices.  Those left behind reported that most had gone off to the marches and rallies, some to Wigan, some to Liverpool.  There were no strike fund buckets.

Those I spoke to on the semi-deserted pickets talked of their grim determination to see it through.  Not just the long hours yesterday, but the whole thing.  They know that the battle lines have now been drawn; if we lose this battle, then we’re likely to lose the war.

The overall impression I took from yesterday is that we may be getting our tactics very wrong for the war of attrition to come, and that we need to pay attention now to the basics of strike organisaton.

I accept that those who marched yesterday generally had a good time, and may have come away from the post-march rallies buzzing with solidarity.  But city centre demonstrations, where we all go to the pub afterwards, will not win us the battle.  Instead, we need to get seriously local, we need to get seriously organised, and we need to get grim.

I say this for several reasons:

1)  In the war of attrition to come, attending demonstrations will be a luxury most strikers simply can’t afford, given the travel costs and the inevitable cajolings to city centre pubs.  To keep on arranging them in light of decreasing numbers will not only look bad with the media, it also discriminates directly against the poorer strikers left to hold the picket line.

2) The strikes will take place at many thousands of different workplaces across the country.  It is important that picket lines are seen (it doesn’t matter so much about heard) whenever people pass them.  If you’re an undecided member of the public, a real life picket line – perhaps with someone you know on it – is much more effective means of attracting your support than watching a large group of jolly people waving banners on the telly.  If you’re a private sector worker going off to an industrial estate, seeing that the maintenance lads with the council base right next to your works are out in force in the freezing cold dispels the myth of gold-plated pensions quicker than any False Economy blogpost can.

2) At the level of senior union organiser too, demonstrations will become a luxury we can’t afford.  The hours and costs that go into orgnanising, publicising and controlling city-centre demos and rallies need to be diverted towards grassroots organisation.

3) The message we now need to get across is that this is for real.  We need to contrast the buffoonish, petulant, childish behaviour and image of ‘senior’ Tories – now starting to get established in many people’s minds – with the grim, silent determination of ordinary people on cold, winter picket lines.  It’s about buy-in.  A passerby who, on the third morning of seeing cold strikers, spontaneously chucks a quid into the strike fund bucket, or even toots her/his horn, has invested in the labour movement; she/he feels part of it, and there’s no turning back.  This initial buy-in is the roots of solidarity, or what we now call community organisation.

4) Likewise, keeping it day/night-long local builds solidarity both amongst the committed and the less committed.  I’m not a great one for scab-calling – I understand that workers have a whole set of countervailing pressures on them - but walking/driving past the steely silence of the co-workers who are out to defend your rights can have a motivating effect.  In public sector workplaces there are many middle and even senior managers who have risen from the shopfloor, and still share the values of their ex-colleagues.  While they may no longer feel able to join the picket themselves, a correctly organised strike fund, for example, can help them to engage, as well as making striking more possible in the longer term.

5) Large scale demonstrations create an environment for confrontation between police and workers/supporters.   The police may well be the agent of a repressive state, but we need to make clear that our enemy is the government, not the police.  It is better, through widespread local action to disperse police resources, so that they are in less of a position to express their own perverted forms of solidarity. 

All of this may start to sound like I’m denigrating the efforts and commitment of those who turned out to march yesterday.  I’m not, and I have no big problem with a one-off like yesterday, but our tactics now need to change.

The key question is where does this leave the nascent solidarity between the mainstream trade union movement and the newer, potentially powerful student/occupy movements.  

There is no doubt that the new movement has brought colour, life and energy, and this is something for us all to value and foster.  As Mil rightly says this morning:

Playing games was once the preserve of professional politicians.  Now the expertise has been massively acquired by whole swathes of amateur aficionados.

But, just as I said last December with reference to the Heinz strike, I do think the new movement needs to face the uncomfortable truth that its message has not yet reached out to the working class, despite laudable efforts to make some of those connection.   What the coming war of strike attrition offers is an opportunity to take some of the ‘expertise’ refers to places where the working class actually congregate.  The mountain will not come to Moses.

For my part, I’ll be doing my own little walk into the lion’s den on Wednesday 14th December when I do a workshop at the Bank of Ideas a  (partly) on how my old-style trade unionism can and should meet new-style rebellion through engagement in dull-sounding things like Trades Union Councils (where wider community and unions are supposed to come together, but mostly don’t).

ps.  If you’re interested in what this post has to say, please also do have a look at a post from 2008  by my blog comrade Dave Semple Student strategies and the carnivalesque, which was good then, but now looks very far-sighted. 

At PMQs the other day in parliament Cameron said (5 mins 10 secs):

This is one of the schemes to ensure that banks are lending alongside the Merlin scheme, which is actually seeing an increase in lending to small businesses.

This gave me cause for concern. I’d only recently read the October 2011 edition of the Bank of England’s quarterly Trends in Lending, and I knew from the figures given there that the rate in the growth of the stock of bank lending was negative for all sizes of business, but that it was most negative for small businesses.  In addition, just the day before the Daily Telegraph had also reported on more recent Bank of England figures showing reduced lending to small businesses.

I therefore assumed that Cameron was simply telling lies, and said so.  Well he does have form.

I was puzzled, though, that no one else had picked this up, and emailed Jim Pickard at the FT to query the issue with him.  Jim came back to me within minutes, saying the figures he’d seen suggested lending was indeed rising.  Further puzzled but busy, I decided to have a proper look this weekend.

It turns out Cameron has used data from the five banks signed up to Project Merlin, and provided to the Bank of England specifically for the monitoring of the Merlin agreement, signed in February 2011.  The most recent report under this agreement indicates that  ‘gross lending facilities’ to UK businesses increased from £47.3bn in 2001 Quarter 1 to £ 53.0bn in Quarter 2 (of which lending to SMEs was £ 16.8bn in Q1 and £ 20.5bn in Q2).

All good so far for Cameron.

However, in the very same report the Bank of England states that, by ‘an alternative measure’, gross lending by these same banks (plus Nationwide) FELL from £ 26.7bn to £ 25.1bn in the same quarters.  This fall is compatible with the (negative) rate of growth figures set out in the Trends for Lending report that I had read, and is clearly from the same source data (note 5 of the Project Merlin report for confirms this).

Two questions then arise.  First, why is there such a discrepancy in the two measures, both in terms of trend and actual amounts.  Second, why are banks going to the expense of providing separate data for the Project Merlin report when they already provide the same data to the Bank of England for the longstanding Trends in Lending report.

The answer lies in the footnotes. Note 2 of the Project Merlin report says that for Project Merlin purposes:  

Data include ‘rollovers’ of facilities, though the extent to which rollovers are included varies across banks.

Note 7, however, reports that for the  longer standing Trends in Lending reports:

Data generally exclude gross lending resulting from rollovers of facilities.

This is a vital distinction, because from this it appears that rollover lending (actually called ‘refinacing’ in the Merlin agreement) makes up around half of all the banks’ lending.  Rollover lending happens for a variety of reasons, but in general it’s about maintaining business stability, and enabling businesses to cope with continued bad trading times in the expectation that things will pick up. 

What rollover lending  not, in general, is lending aimed at investment, growth, and job creation.

What appears to have happened, therefore, is that the banks have struck some kind of deal with the government which allows them simply to carry on as before, while looking as they are meeting the responsibilities they accept under Merlin, namely:

In entering this agreement, the banks explicitly recognise their responsibility to support economic recovery (Merlin Agreement, summary).

The banks have managed this this by agreeing to what is, technically at least, an entirely superfluous monitoring regime (see para 1.6 of the agreement), which allows for the inclusion of data expressly excluded from the statistics which are already gathered by the Bank of England under its existing Statistical Code of Practice.     

This is how, in a nutshell, Cameron is able to say, with a straight face, that bank lending is up under Merlin, while in the real world businesses are being starved of the credit they need to drive real growth, something even the Daily Telegraph recognises when it seizes on more reliable Bank of England data:

According to the Bank, lending to small businesses fell by 5.1pc in August, against an overall decline in corporate credit of 3.4pc.

It’s why, in the real world, most businesses will have seen absolutely no change in the way their bank’s relationship managers go about their business, despite an express commitment by the banks at para 1.4 of the Merlin agreement:

The above statements [about commitment to lending] will be transmitted to the five banks’ UK relationship managers indicating the banks’ desire and intention to increase lending to viable borrowers and to deliver increases in both gross and net lending.

The final question is why the government is letting the banks get away with this.  Is it just another example of simple incompetence, of the type identified by Chris Dillow?  Are the banks simply pulling the wool over the government’s eyes? 

Or perhaps there a more sinister interpretation, more in keeping with Sunny’s thesis:

We’re in this economic mess because Corporatism reigns. Companies have far too much power and are deemed ‘too big to fail’. They work with and bribe (sorry, ‘lobby’) politicians to draft legislation in their favour.

It’s often difficult to decide what is cock-up and what is conspiracy.  The key thing about secret deals is they are secret, and even when the details of the deal are exposed, the motivations can remain hidden. 

Even so, in the same week when it was discovered that Osborne has been telling the banks in secret that he’s opposed to the Financial Transaction Tax, while stating in-principle support in public, I think the most likely explanation is one of deliberate connivance between banks and government to arrange the Merlin deal in this way.  The apparent duplication of data collection, alongside the fact that Bank of England staff seem so keen to highlight the two different measures in their Project Merlin report (perhaps frustrated at what’s going on while their civil service position means they cannot speak out more openly) are two giveaways.

As Sunny says in his piece, ‘perfect competition’ capitalism depends on perfect information.  Under the post-neoliberal New Conservatism, where naked class power has come to the aid of a broken neoliberal ideology, the information citizens are being provided by the state is not just imperfect. 

It’s a deliberate tissue of lies.

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”?

Chris Dillow has a really good post up on ‘the revenge effect’, taking as its hook the discovery of the CIA/MI6′s torture outsourcing to specialist firm Gadaffi Inc.:

An apparently humanitarian policy by the west has, therefore,  exposed its earlier lack of humanitarianism. Pessimists might add that this could mean that in supporting the overthrow of Gaddafi, the west has helped install a regime which has a grudge against us. These are examples of what Edward Tenner called the revenge effect - how our actions can rebound to bite us on the arse.

Chris gives us several other examples of arse-biting policy decisons, with his main focus on economic policy, but he left out the most salient recent example.

Back in the 19650s and 1960s, both Conservative and Labour governments, in collaboration with willing councils, pursued overtly racist housing, employment and education policies towards the people then immigrating from South Asia and the West Indies.

At the time, a sociologist who did have the “cognitive resources” needed to ”anticipate revenge effects” (which Chris says policy makers lack), said:

We have just about ten years to break down our ghettoes and to see to it that all men have the same opportunities in education and employment…The difficulties we face do not arise from our ignorance about how the problem should be tackled.  They arise from a lack of will or from opportunist electoral fear.  Yet trying to placate the electorate with semi-racialist policies, or keeping quite in the hope that you won’t be called a nigger-lover hasn’t paid off, while a deliberate assault on the ghettoes with a view to clearing them would eliminate one of the most important of all the secondary causes of racialism….. 

If we can now deal with those problems which are the secondary causes of racialism we may still be able to go on to create an unprejudiced generation”.

That didn’t happen, and 10 years later the same sociologist said:

[T]here are clear difference of life-chances between them and the white British…….Such differences of life-chances, if they were sustained over a period, would undoubtedly mean that consciousness of a common identity, common exploitation and oppression, and a common conflict with the host society would emerge and find expression in some kind of ethnic-class-for-itself.

But if this is true for the immigrant generation it is much more true for its children……Not merely is it the case, therefore, that immigrant class-consciousness will be reinforced with time by the mere repetition of the same experiences, but it will also be related to the consciousness which emerges amongst the young who have rising expectations not shared by their parents, and who are likely to be more fiercely frustrated by the experiences of discrimination.

That was in 1979. In 1981 these frustrations led to the summer riots.  30 years later, the frustrations were expressed differently both by grandchildren of immigrants and by a newer set of young people who have been at the receiving end of systematic discrimination.

None of this will be a surprise to John Rex, the sociologist who told us what would happen.  However belatedly, Cameron and (more likely) Miliband would do well to read Rex’s work and then address the real root causes of the recent “pure criminality”.

In a major step forward for the Though Cowards Flinch think-tank, we are pleased to announce our first Oxford Symposium (1), to be held in the Bookbinders Arms, Jericho (2) on Friday 26th August at 8pm. 

Entrance is free (3).

The Symposium is largely aimed as a response to the 2010/11 London-Oxford seminars which led to the publication of the ‘Blue Labour’ Politics of Paradox, and will cover the following themes:

Recapturing Cole: how the Left can respond to the way in which the ‘Blue Labour’ school has used to its own narrow ends the work of early 20th Century thinkers like GDH Cole and RH Tawney;

Professional pride: how the Labour movement can seize back the initiative over the quality of public services from  New Labour managerialism and New Conservative destruction;

The Race Relations Catastrophe: how the Left can build on the work and insights of sociologist John Rex to develop a coherent new approach to working class race relations in the UK

Local power: how the Left needs to go back to basics on ‘localism’, to strip away New Labour and New Conservative rhetoric and build a new localism based on devolution of power, not blame. 

The 1980s, let’s not go there: an analysis of the Labour left’s approach to opposition in the 1980s, with a fresh assessment of the mistakes in ‘New Left’ thinking which led to short term gains but long-term loss within the labour movement.

Findings from the symposium will be considered for publication (4).

In a special innovation, the Symposium will avoid the constraints of the usual conference-style organisation, where people are expected to listen for hours on end to so-called experts droning on about stuff we already know and then taking ’questions’ from people in the audience which are in fact rambling statements unrelated to the matter at hand while totally ignoring or dismissing the ones which actually matter.

Instead, the Symposium will operate to the following basic rules:

a) A regular TCF author from Lancashire will chair the Symposium.

b) Anyone wanting to say anything on the topics above should come prepared with a statement of not more than two minutes, but preferably about 20 seconds.

c) That statement will be allowed once the Chairman has been bought a pint by the person wishing to make the statement.

d)  The Chairman will drink his pint quite slowly if the contribution is considered good and worthy of further debate, but just knock it back in one if it’s total bollox and/or sounds like it could be from Progress magazine.

e) This mechanism, functioning also as a clever psychology experiment in group incentives, will filter out the rubbish contributions, because if the contributions are rubbish the Chairman will become increasingly drunk, power-crazed and abusive to everyone in sight.  This would not be a pretty sight, and creates a strong incentive for participants to talk sense. 

f) The Chairman reserves the right to stop the Symposium at any stage, either if he gets bored or he doesn’t understand the clever people, and instead just talk about cricket and beer and general shit.  In such an event, he should still be bought pints right through to closing time.  This is in fact extremely likely to happen.

Notes

(1) Oxford has been specifically selected for this first event because of all the clever people there.  It is absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the Chairman happens to be in Oxford that day and fancies wheedling some free beer out of naive young socialists. We’re calling it a Symposium because it’s a new word we just learned and it sounds more academic than ‘conference’ or ‘seminar’. It’s from Greek.

(2) Jericho is Oxford’s premier residential area, where the really clever people live, and where the pub is.

(3) We would charge loads but we’ve made absolutely no arrangements with the pub and we think they’d get pissed off if we just stood outside the pub with a bucket.  It’s free to socialists.  Tories can just sod off and play darts or something.

(4) Caveat: Findings will be published if anyone brings a pen, writes it all down, types it up in some kind of sensible form finds a publisher willing to go with it, and does all the necessary marketing and stuff.

As I sat in the holiday sun this week, far from the British State’s thuggish post-riot clampdown, I re-read EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. 

The dynamics of an increasingly embittered population living on the margins of late eighteenth century ‘respectable’ society, creating its own legitimacy of action through the looting of consumer goods, seemed very relevant:

The distinction between the legal code and the unwritten popular code is a commonplace at any time. But rarely have the two codes been more sharply distinguished from each other than in the second half of the eighteenth century…..

In urban and rural communities alike, a consumer consciousness preceded other forms of political  or industrial antagonism…..

Such ‘riots’ were popularly regarded as acts of justice’…..Actions on such a scale indicate an extraordinarily deep-rooted pattern of behaviour and belief……

The final years of the eighteenth century [had seen] a last desperate effort by the people to reimpose the old moral economy as against the economy of the freenmarket….Thereafter the total breakdown of customary controls contributed much to popular bitterness against a Parliament of protectionist landlords and laissez faire commercial magnates.

And Thompson concludes:

In considering only this one form of ‘mob’ action we have come upon unsuspected complexities, for behind every such form of popular direction action some legitimizing notion of right is to be found.

Maybe there’s some more coherence in the young woman “getting her taxes back” than is being given credit.

What Laurie Penny thinks of Charlie Gilmour, and what Jacob Bard-Rosenberg thinks of Laurie Penny for thinking what she thinks of Charlie Gilmour, is a matter of indifference to me.

However, the conclusions Laurie reaches in today’s Independent about the nature of the Labour party do interest me greatly. 

Laurie is likely to be a significant voice in the commentariat in years to come; at the moment it is a troll-joke to portray her as a Polly Toynbee mini-me, but in all likelihood as her career develops she will want, and be expected by her editors, to comment at length, a la Toynbee,  on matters she has to date not really focused on in her writing, including the stances of political parties. 

It is important, therefore, that she gets the basics right, and that even from an early stage that she be challenged respectfully when she does not. 

In today’s Indie piece, in which she reviews the rise and rapid fall of Blue Labour, she gets it badly wrong, when she concludes:

With Blue Labour, the Labour Party has demonstrated that it is quite willing to play on a knee-jerk politics of reaction, and to do so openly, on the assumption that its own re-election is the greatest possible social good.

This is, frankly, a nonsense extrapolation.

A few Labour party academics/’political thinkers’ writing an e-book after some cosy seminar in Oxford and London do not create a demonstration of anything by the Labour party.  There has been no endorsement of anything Blue Labour at any formal level in the party, and Blue Labour’s advocates to date have been careful to note that they are not making policy recommendations.

Moreover, it has been gratifying to see the extent to which some in the Labour party has reacted against Blue Labour, both before and after Glasman’s most recent comments. Even I’ve had a go.

So Laurie is simply wrong – and dare I say sensationalist – to claim that the Labour party has moved in anything like a Blue Labour direction, and in so doing she displays an ignorance of what the Labour party actually is; for all its ills, it is not the personal plaything of megalomaniac academics, but an organic institution in which power, albeit asymmetrically, is regular contested.

Perhaps more worrying, Laurie appears not to have understood a central point in Glasman’s own argument, as she finishes her piece with the admonition:

It is far too easy to mouth the mantra of “tradition”, and far harder to offer a positive, inspiring vision of modernity, but that, if it is still a party of principle, is what the Labour Party needs to do.

Glasman’s key point in his Politics of Paradox essay is to contest whether the Labour party should in fact be a party of principle:

Labour values are not abstract universal values such as ‘freedom’or ‘equality’. Distinctive labour values are rooted in relationships, in practices that strengthen an ethical life (p.14)

For myself, I think this is nonsense on Glasman’s part; to create a false dichotomy between tradition and principle/abstract value is to neither historically accurate or helpful.  Yet for Laurie now to suggest that Labour is betraying its principles because an eccentric academic has suggested that Labour doesn’t have or need principles is an equal nonsense on Laurie’s part.

Laurie’s writing is vivid and entertaining.  For this reason alone I am confident that she will fast become a respected commentator who does ‘opinion form’.  It’s important that she refines her methods of analysis in line with political/historical reality, and in keeping with that developing respect, and that she guards against a tendency to sensationalist reductionism*, which in this case smacks of the kind elitism that she rightly aspires to despise.

If she gets the basics right, she will in time be broadly an asset to the Left, as Polly Toynbee has (despite the odd slip from TCF grace). If not, she could damage it.

* Can you be reductionist through extrapolation?  I’m not sure. Chris Dillow can probably tell me.

Sir/Madame, tell me you can look at the cabinet without wincing emphatically and I’ll show you a liar.

Sir/Madame, must we not send these shreaking swines back to the decade from whence they came?

Sir/Madame, look at this one. Lansley. Using the parlance of the modern day this wretched would prefer the day working men and their wives sought donations from the club house to afford operations, or where one was sick you kept your trap shut if you were to eat for the next month.

Sir/Madame, look at this other. Gove. Does he aspire to return all schools to the ethic of the three B’s, common knowledge of all public schoolboys of a certain age: bullying, beating, and buggery. The headteacher is less a patient confidant, and more an authoritarian dictator. But times have changed dear Gove. If everything is above board then what you call bureaucracy is little more than an audit towards reaping success. Keep up Gove.

Sir/Madame, are you aware of who the British Generals would denigrate as ‘gippos’ first? It was the Eyptians, during the Suez Crisis in the fifties. Do you suspect Generals today curse the Libby’s, or the Gaddy’s? Gaddy’s boys, the Gaddy Arabs? Sir/Madame, look at this one. Hague. Do you think he ever sniffs Anthony Eden’s draw box? Or do you think he ever wanted to delineate Anthony Nutting?

Sir/Madame, look at these two. Clegg and Cameron. Are you surprised? Do you wince? Do you think their compassion consists in wanting to share, nay impose, the worst of the lifestyle of the ruling class upon us grounded, not landed, folk?

Sir/Madame, are these conservative men ripping down our institutions from inside? Did they not realise we must desist from change if its success rests upon luck?

Sir/Madame, did they not realise that it was private interest and interference that slowed down and frustrated the national health service during the terms of the last cabinet. Are they aware this service, free at the point of entry, is an inscription of welfare as a right of citizenry, there to stop anyone from falling through the net, commissioned only through donations of that grandest of traditions the state?

Sir/Madame, look at this one. Duncan-Smith. Does he not acknowledge welfare as a right of citizenry?

Sir/Madame, I am under little doubt these thugs understand nothing of what they are doing. But quite why we should tolerate them while they do it is beyond me. Are we yet fit for revolt?

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.