Though Cowards Flinch

Deep down I know that I’m still bitter that John McDonnell wasn’t able to stand as leader of the party – and I know very well that this view won’t be controversial to writers on this blog.

I knew that I wanted to see at least one socialist in the contest – though when I found out which one would be standing, from the Socialist Campaign Group, I remember thinking, in truth, oh but not that socialist!

I hadn’t the same problems with her as had other members of the Labour party I spoke to over the course of the many hustings I’ve attended. For example, her having been given a leg up by David Miliband didn’t make me think she was a token black/female/socialist (delete where applicable) candidate – we in the party have no reason to be tokenistic about such matters – nor did it make me feel that I should write her off full stop – there were other reasons for me to do that.

Miliband the elder obviously extended his hand to Abbott because her inclusion added to the debate – a worthwhile gesture I felt. For some, this was an obvious impetus to view Abbott as a non-candidate and frankly ignore her.

For me, this was not the case at all.

I did however share sympathy with the view Abbott is a hypocrite. Of course sending her child to a private school lost her credibility among leftwingers and many constituents. Though her reasons for doing so were surely worse (that she is a single Mum with a black son who could get involved with gangs, was part of her justification for her move).

This evokes another reason why one would be cautious of her: sometimes her criticisms of fellow leadership contenders went further than simply saying look at these middle class men, call this change? This was cheap, and was made cheaper when their race had been brought into question, like this means anything at all.

Questions of race ultimately lead sound minded people to conclude that it is no matter, that people are people and so on. Raising questions of race as a means to show change in the Labour party is not possible, is dreadful and not sound minded at all.

People said her campaign wasn’t effective. I imagine it just wasn’t loud enough, and let’s face it; we have all been more interested in the family feuds and Balls’ going forth on the economic illiteracy of Ozzy Osborne.

My own criticism of her campaign was that it was in places rather shallow and base. I had this to say in July:

I know the argument: stroppy teenagers and shop floor Mothers can’t relate to men in suits, yet they end up our representatives every time, and we wonder why people don’t engage with politics.

But hold on, how people related to politicians didn’t spur on the anti-politics saga circa the expenses scandal, but rather the other way around, politicians obviously don’t quite understand the electorate – and subsequently fairness and respect for tax payers’ money.

Frankly, this extends further to what politicians talk like, look like and smell like; if they don’t get, they don’t get it, and that trait transcends class, age, race and gender boundaries.

For this reason, there is a strange element to Dianne Abbott’s recent trouble making, when she called the other four leadership contenders “geeky,” in an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.

We’re used to the disengaged politician now, but it is patent nonsense for Abbott to suggest that she has more chance listening than they have.

I won’t recycle the fact that the only difference between her and her colleagues (apart from her colour, more of which in a moment) is she has never been a SpAd and that she has been an MP for longer. But she has made decisions, and has said things, where you wonder whether the 20 years spent listening to her voters has counted for anything, particularly the type of thing she implies here which is that she knows what people want.

The paradox: give me a middle class former policy wonk who admits to needing more knowledge any time, over a middle class, Cambridge educated, long time MP, who implicitly likens herself to Obama, and thinks she knows what the people want.

I mean that as much as I do today. But yet – and here is the surprise – I voted for her as my first preference.

Ed Miliband, who I felt was strongest to start with, quickly misread his place as unifier (the party being a broad church and all), holding back from laying into capitalism and instead attempting to spell out how he was going to reform capitalism or make capitalism better.

I must admit, I agree with John Gray, the author, when he points out that both Miliband’s wildly miss the point, raised most notably in this country by their Dad, that capitalism will appear to modify in the face of threat – like it did in the thirties, seventies, eighties and now – the point is not to change it, but to understand it (in a reversal of Marx’ thesis on Feuerbach).

In spite of this, I gave Ed Miliband my second preference. Though I’m sure he is serious about transcending the grip of New Labour folderol, I just don’t think he has it in him, nor do I think he knows what it means to do this. It is not simply ridding the party of New Labour architects, but it’s about coming into a new political landscape, and focusing on the politics to fit it. For me this is socialism, but to hear all candidates talk about socialism, you’d think it was a new idea not yet properly theorised or understood.

Yet – and this was the basis of my choosing Ed for second preference – many trade unions and socialist societies saw in him the man they want.

At a time when the party is moving away from the Fukuyama-type notion that unregulated capitalism has emerged successful and it is non-party political to allow the markets to be unfettered, we need someone to lead who is in debt to unions – who will be at their most pertinent when the coalition government tries to fob off public sector workers with pay freezes while turning a blind eye to outrageous banker bonuses and tax evasion – despite this, too, being a “non-party political” issue.

David Miliband, too, has union backing, and the advocacy of the so-called voice of the intelligent left, Jon Cruddas. But, not only has this Miliband been the most uncomfortable with criticising the record of New Labour, his leadership will be easy pickings for Tories and Liberal Democrats when it turns out – if indeed he was – complicit in the use of torture. Indeed, he has already had his fingers burnt when denying the Britain’s role in torture, and if an investigation turns out evidence of his direct complicity this will be electoral poison for the Labour party – already on its back feet pleading forgiveness for a war gone totally awry.

So at this stage you might be saying: well, Carl, if you dislike your two preferences so much, how much must you dislike your third, fourth and fifth? You’d be surprised at my answer. My third preference was Ed Balls – who I was most impressed by, for all the obvious reasons. He came across the most economically literate, while remaining astute enough to tackle questions on society, particularly the education sector which he still maintains a careful eye on.

So why didn’t I vote for him, in spite of Paul’s well explained reasons as to why I, and you, should? Honestly, for character I find him displeasing – a trait I recognised around the time Sharon Shoesmith fought for and lost her job. But on an economic narrative to counter the one being passed off as orthodox by the coalition government, Balls has it spot on – there is an alternative to cuts in order to reduce the deficit in the quickest speed possible, and he has proved himself totally capable of projecting that – even if some, such as Don Paskini, see this as politically a dangerous move.

In short: I don’t want a Balls leadership, I see in Balls a shadow chancellor; a job he should have probably had anyway under Brown.

So, in sum, I voted:

1) Dianne Abbott

2) Ed Miliband

3) Ed Balls

4) Andy Burnham

5) David Miliband

But to look at that in isolation doesn’t tell you the whole story.

Ed Miliband is the realistic contender and I prefer him to his brother so, realistically, I hope he gets the job, which is why he got my second preference vote. But I desire to see a socialist as leader of the party, and now I think is the perfect time. Abbott is a socialist, and though I think she is a problematic candidate – for reasons spelt out above – it is for this reason she got my first preference.

So for the next five posts I am going to discuss the Labour Leadership race, by discussing each candidate in turn. This week I am going to start off with whom I personally believe to be the most controversial candidate of the whole leadership battle.

Prior to the beginning of the Leadership race, I must admit that I had never heard of Diane Abbott. The only candidate that I had heard of was David Miliband, due to the obsessed love for him by an old school friend. I have to admit that I was in support of Miliband, due to my political naivety and the only one I knew about but decided to check out the other candidates and this saga of posts will help me to come to a comprehensive decision before September comes around.

Diane Abbott, the only female and black women to have entered the race, was elected to the House of Commons in 1987 for the constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington as the first black women to become an MP. Now in 2010, she has been in Parliament for over 23 years and is being called the ‘token’ candidate? As a fellow blogger stated, ‘… tokenism is often the way that otherwise insuperable barriers of discrimination are overcome’, calling Abbott a ‘token’ candidate seems slightly unfair seeing as Diane has been in Parliament and worked her way up the Labour party. Is this not due to her not being a New Labour Minister or does it go deeper to the idea that she is a women and comes from an ethnic background?

Really it comes down to a balance of the two; Abbott has not had as much limelight exposure as say David Miliband; unless you are an avid fan of This Week then of course you will know about Diane and her antics on the sofa with Michael Portillo. She was an avid challenger of the New Labour movement, and was a figure of the left of the party but this has all been undermined by her decision to send her son, James, to City of London School, where the fee is £10,000 a term.  As she has admitted, calling her son’s education ‘intellectually indefensible’, this goes against her socialist and left leaning politics. For someone who targeted members of her own party (Harriet Harman and Tony Blair) for sending their children to selective schools, it seems a bit hypocritical.

What made the issue worse for many right-wingers was her comment trying to defend her actions, that ‘West Indian mothers would go to the wall for their children.’

This has caused a ripple effect within the Labour party and the right, especially those from white communities who are aggrieved at the suggestion that they wouldn’t do whatever was good for their children, whatever the personal cost. Such sentiments miss the point. I don’t think this was what Diane was trying to get at; she was just making a statement about a particular cultural view of motherhood, though it may give an opportunity to attack her.

I wonder how this would have gone down had Andy Burnham said something similar about his kids?

Tensions always arise when someone mentions the race card. I am not a fan of the race card, but I do take a guilty pleasure and use the ‘mixed race bombshell’ every once in awhile when around a racist, but shouldn’t we flip it on its head and think about how everyone else who calls her a token candidate is also using the race card in some way?

Next Week: David Miliband

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both Ed and David Miliband have begun their rhetorical repositioning for the leadership campaign. The by-line of the Guardian article on Brother David reads, “Former foreign secretary woos the party’s left…” but the reality is probably more accurately exposed by Paul Waugh’s summary over at the Evening Standard. David Miliband has set himself up as the ‘clean hands’ candidate – nodding to the past, nodding to the thousands of activists who had to watch dumbfounded as Labour waddled from mistake to disaster and so on.

Meanwhile, brother Ed has turned to rather naive-sounding guff about New Labour not having a sense of mission, but falling into the mindset of ‘technocratic caretakers’. His pitch is that Labour needs to hook up once more with the core vote, but that New Labour ‘asked the hard questions’ – that something can be saved. Some people seem to think that Brother Ed is appealing to the working class, and he picks out ‘real world’ examples, saying that we should prefer the realities visited upon people instead of abstract economics.

The harsh reality, of course, is both were cabinet ministers (one under Blair and both under Brown). They aren’t reformers, and a latter-day conversion towards Labour members having a greater say is opportunistic in the extreme. When we see concrete proposals on this ‘having a say’ bit, I’ll be sure to return to it, but the ‘feel’ of their speech is that there may be institutional adjustments and gasping policy announcements and lots of talk about ‘renewal’ but that very little will change. This is virtually inevitable if Brothers Ed and David don’t move beyond Blair – and I don’t think they will or can even imagine how to.

Just as interesting as those who have thrown their hat into the ring is who has not.

Jon Cruddas has ruled himself out of the leadership race, which probably removes the only chance the soft Left ever had at influencing the thing, beyond gushing pronouncements in favour of Ed Miliband, who is viewed as the more Left of the two brothers. Wannabe softie, James Purnell, is pushing the same line as Cruddas at the moment; re-connect with the vote (among C2 voters), move slowly, re-energise the Party. This seems to be standard for the so-called centre Left; thus too pressure group Compass’ post-election statement. Evidently Neal Lawson and the rest of that self-admiring cohort don’t think they’ve done enough damage with their urgings to vote ‘tactically’ for the Lib-Dems, to keep out the Tories.

All of this talk about renewal and reconnecting etc, from the centre-Left, is meant to fill the bloody great hole where actually doing something fits in. Around the world, indefinite strikes have been pronounced – here at home, workers (often against the wishes of their trades unions) are gearing up to fight the incoming cuts, whether from private business or the public sector…and meanwhile the lions of centre-left socialism are doing little but mewl in the press. Which is exactly what I and others expect, so that at least is gratifying.

A centre-Left candidate may yet emerge, of course. In the meantime, those who have been casting rather silly aspersions at John McDonnell’s potential candidacy find themselves in the unenviable position of wanting ‘a clean break from the policies and practices of the New Labour era’ while opposing the only leadership candidate likely to achieve it. Former MP Bob Clay’s article on the subject departs from reality entirely, with a mention of Michael Meacher as a more likely candidate (Meacher got three endorsements and crumbled at the 2007 debate).

McDonnell ran in 2007 and though he failed to get enough endorsements, his campaign was like a fresh wind through the often sterile internal debates of the Labour Party. Even a Cruddas candidacy, though more likely to gain enough nominations, would not necessarily provoke this – Cruddas is, after all, basically a Blairite, and support for him would still place the  soft Left in contradiction to themselves – wanting a change from New Labour, a return to an older form of social democracy, while supporting a candidate who wants nothing of the sort. We’re spared making this argument because Cruddas isn’t running. His own reasoning (if such banalities deserve the title) can be read here.

This makes the attacks against John McDonnell seem all the more surreal. Without an alternative candidate of even basic Left credentials, McDonnell is the natural choice for any socialist remaining in Labour. What all the arguments against McDonnell clearly miss, of course, is the chance that a McDonnell candidacy gives the LRC – a group based around members, union branches and CLPs – to get a foothold in Labour around the country, to kick off real debate and to set up mini-groups of supporters who can deepen and broaden LRC support by campaign activities. Only this long game offers a glimmer of hope for the Left; otherwise they should get out of Labour and stay out.

Key among campaign priorities before the election demanded the full attention of every activist was the People’s Charter, which is solid Left stuff that appeals far beyond the narrow confines of the Labour Representation Committee. This is the sort of thing which could get off the ground, certainly in time for conference in the autumn. What plenty of the nay-sayers also neglect to note is that there are several McDonnell supporters running as the Left candidates for leadership of different unions. Paul Holmes, interviewed here, is a key one, over at UNISON.

This is a chance to energise and mobilise the whole Left – both its union and party elements. Meanwhile those people saying that John McDonnell is hostile to or likely to alienate the unions because of his opposition to union bureaucratisation need to catch themselves on. McDonnell is the only candidate who, as leader, would have any intention of mobilising parliamentary and extra-parliamentary elements of the movement to slam dunk the Trade Union Freedom Bill.

Whatever platitudes we get from the soft-Left, that fear of extra-parliamentary action will always keep them bottled up – that is why we need a candidate like McDonnell. The other regular rebels – like Jeremy Corbyn – will likely fall into line behind McDonnell, especially with the unanimous backing from the LRC’s National Committee put firmly on record, in the aftermath of Saturday’s conference, sponsored by the LRC, whatever remains of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and various unions.

If McDonnell doesn’t win, then Labourites face years of a Tory government whose best friends are the Labour leadership, as under Thatcher and Kinnock, when everything possible was done by the Labour heirarchy to smother mass activism and militancy, in fear that it could damage the credentials of the Party to lead ‘the nation’. Then, I guarantee you, that space outside of Labour for a Left party, which people are saying has closed or is closing, will be blasted wide open in no time at all. Tomorrow’s article concerns just that.

Jon Lansman contacted me about a week before Election Day, to ask whether or not I’d be interested in getting involved with a new website, Left Futures. This website has now gone live, and Jon has asked if I’d express the thoughts I shared with him in our email correspondence, where I cast doubt on the idea of a new ‘internet hub’ for ‘those who have no sustainable political vehicle for their aspirations’, but nevertheless agreed to be involved.

Last year, TCF was part of an effort – led by John McDonnell and other LRC figures – to try and make the web work for us. The work both Paul and I have done, as regards issues like “Tory” co-ops, or Tory plans for local government in the aftermath of an election victory, have been the sort of thing that initial effort was meant to bring together on the web. This is the space into which Left Foot Forward (and to some extent, Next Left and LibCon) stepped, as we moved too slowly.

Thus, I’m not certain what another aggregating website can achieve in this regard. Labourhome and Labourlist have brought out a great deal of comment – but to the best of my knowledge have had absolutely zero impact when it comes to re-energising the grassroots of the Party in a left direction, and plenty of those on such sites are left wing. LibCon, further left and bigger than either, despite key interventions on things like abortion rights, has been unable to do much except speak at the odd conference.

These are environments completely removed from those of the average person, the average voter. Basically a lot of this is political activists talking to an audience of political anoraks, most of whom have long since made up their mind where they stand. It’s still useful, for Labour Party members, as it can educate them against the gushing well of platitudes the leadership uses to cover itself, but the actual renewal of the Party – which is far from begun, never mind accomplished – is something that must take place offline.

It can still be reported on, and can still use the web for discussions of direction etc – but someone needs to pick out the course of that renewal first, before seeking out the accoutrements like a website, and then get on with it. If it begins to get traction, its members will quickly set up their own websites and these can then be brought together, if there is a demand for that. That’s down to you and the other members of the LRC National Committee, and to the institutional support that can be provided by MPs like Michael Meacher and John McDonnell, who are prepared to use their full-time staff as lieutenants in such a movement.

Perhaps my problem is in failing, as Paul and I have been accused of, to correctly identify the methods of Web 2.0. The point, on such a reading, is merely to provide the form, while users provide endless amounts of content. This has been the achievement of websites like Comment is Free, LabourList and, much more selectively, Liberal Conspiracy and Left Foot Forward. And these sites are phenomenally successful, from the point of view of gaining readers.

If that is the only goal of the blogosphere, then it seems relatively easy to generate the sort of community which will sustain high viewing figures. It’s merely a question of diversifying in content and contributors. From the point of view of ‘the Left’, however, actually having an effect seems qualitatively different. Blogs can command the same sort of (relatively) passive outrage as the mainstream media, but is that all that can be done?

In short, I think so. Blogs and communities of blogs are sustained ultimately by self-referentiality, of developing one’s own opinions elsewhere and enjoying batting them around with others of similar and different mindsets. Bloggers end up having long running conversations with one another, as can be seen from any of the comments threads on TCF where LibCon editor Sunny Hundal intervenes (see also: Paul Kingsnorth, Susan Press, Paul Cotterill, Tom Miller etc). Names become well known because of these arguments. All you really need to be able to do is string a coherent sentence together.

When it comes to actually wielding power however, a necessary prerequisite of Left regroupment, then I suspect blogs come up somewhat short. Of necessity, power exists in the offline world, and must be wielded there. The key tactical question is, where does this power reside? Thirty years ago, most people in our position would have said it exists at CLP meetings (especially selection meetings) or in their union branches. What about now?

There’s a plethora of think-tanks, pressure groups and professional politicos (almost all based in London) telling us about the myriad ways we can ‘get involved’. Who hasn’t had emails pestering them from 38 Degrees, Compass, Pam Giddy of Power 2010 and so on? But the recipients of such emails are the political activists and anoraks like yours truly, or the politically literate who enjoy the spectacle, like a number of our thread-inhabitants.

When all the chaff is blown away, of course, precious little of this involvement remains. As recently witnessed with the Lib-Dem move into a Tory-led coalition, despite all the protests that a hung parliament would deliver electoral reform and that voting Lib-Dem would help, under the current system, if you don’t directly wield power, then expect to be left out in the cold. This disfranchisement may result on Lib-Dem members moving back to Labour – but likely they will find a similar disjoint between their formal rights as voting members and the reality once someone is in power.

These leaves us back with CLPs and union branches – the direct, organisational elements where we can exert pressure on our not-entirely-self-contained-however-much-it-gives-that-impression political class. As I’m not a Labour Party member – and for good reason as I see it – my view of CLPs is not unclouded by the belief that Labour’s machinery is indefatigably and (shy of some unforeseen event) forever set against the Left, and that the Right-ward direction of this machinery makes Labour’s connection to the working class tenuous and residual.

For this reason, when the Convention of the Left was set up a few years ago, I had high hopes that it could bring together the best of Labour and the far Left for the purposes of establishing a critical mass that would attract new people into the activist circle(jerk?) and would actually have the clout to mobilise far beyond that small group. Instead, much like the blogosphere, it seemed to be little more than talking shop. Fun, but not the point.

Despite the knocks delivered to unions over the last few years, the unabashedly activist role played by union branches – inside and outside Labour – demonstrates how key engagement with unions still is. When it comes to resisting public sector cuts, political pressure groups won’t be the force mobilising hundreds of thousands of people on strike – it’ll be the PCS, RMT or the other unions, if we can ever convince them to get off their ass, as they have skin in the game.

As the poll tax federations, and various smaller scale campaigns since then, have showed us, there is also always room for community-orientated campaigns, which can be explicitly socialist in tenor, especially bearing in mind the ramifications an unchained capitalism has for the built environment, and thus for the context in which our social and community cohesion must exist.

But what role in any of this for so-called new media? New media may have a role in persuading people, but if it does, then that doesn’t say much for the strength of the Left in the real world. People are not rootless just because they’re online. They exist in definite contexts: they have workplaces and communities. If we haven’t already snaffled their support through such arenas, then we’re focused too much on presentation and not enough on organising.

Consider the recent straw poll done by Alex Smith over at LabourList of Labour leadership candidates. John McDonnell, who wasn’t one of the original options in the poll, came fifth on the basis of write-in votes. That’s encouraging – but it’s not a win, and it’s never going to be a win on the basis of the internet. What it does show, however, is the lamentably backward political consciousness of the Labour Party, where David Miliband is wildly popular.

Miliband, as we know, is a dyed-in-the-wool New Labourite. His leadership, much like the transition between Blair and Brown, represents hardly any change at all – and yet Twitterers already see him as the ‘change’ candidate. This is reminiscent of David Cameron lining himself up as the British Obama. It flies because the Left has not succeeded in challenging the context of people’s lives. Information – getting our knowledge and arguments out there – undeniably has a role to play, but mere information does not positively identify a political alternative.

Hence the limits to Cameron’s attempt at identifying himself as an Obama figure. He came up against the lived experience of Tory policies, still extant amongst the working class of this country. Labour may not be a party for the working class any longer, but policies like the minimum wage and investment in the NHS (ignoring the privatisation for a moment) are a far cry from the state of schools and hospitals by 1997. The problem for the socialist Left is that there is very little ‘lived experience’ of the type of political alternative we advocate, and too many groups – like Compass – aren’t especially bothered by it, sustained as they are by a revolving door of those who believe in the pressure group approach.

Where it does exist, there’s the ever present danger of fatigue setting in, of it being isolated to a particular sector of the workforce, and of it thus falling to contradictory demands by different political factions. Nevertheless, this experience, and its concomitant political education, is what we’ve got to establish. When public servants inevitably come under attack from the Cameron-Clegg love-in, the opening will be there. Setting up a website which will report material from the strike lines is good and useful, but it will not complete the political education of workers.

You need to be on the pickets. You need to be pulling together threads from disparate struggles and tying them.

Even that isn’t going far enough. Sooner or later, purely economic – for the sake of our bread and butter – strikes have to cross the line into politics. If we’re to stop Cameron, Clegg and whoever Labour next elects as leader in those elements of the agenda they share, then the debates at the front line need to expand beyond what we’re paid to encompass who controls the economy, in whose interest it is run, and how we can best intervene to shape it in a manner favourable to the millions who are about to have tax rises, wage freezes and service cuts slapped on them.

These debates happen in the real world, and even there, they don’t stand alone, and aren’t merely academic, as many online debates can often become. They happen in the context of a struggle won here or lost there. A strike successful, or an exhausted workplace not turning out and working on as usual. Sustaining this type of activism is physically exhausting; leafleting, meetings, trips to hotspots, knocking on doors, more meetings, stalls and petition gathering and did I mention the meetings? The potential for none of which exists online.

Online is merely where we can compare notes and strategies, and perhaps butt heads over what our long term goals are. But the ‘we’ in the real world is the whole of the working class, the ‘we’ online is merely a self-selecting group no more representative of those we aim to devolve power to than that bunch of twits sitting in the House of Commons.