Though Cowards Flinch

"The regulation-monster was this big!"

Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News is a damning indictment of the media – the collapse of journalism in favour of ‘churnalism’, the creeping dangers of corporate PR, the decline of staffing levels and increase in demands for ‘content’ and particularly in the collapse of everything local.

The new Tory-Lib government provides an interesting counterpoint to plans developed under New Labour to challenge this last part. Faced with a serious decline – and resultant bump in unemployment – the National Union of Journalists and other groups lobbied for a trial run of Independently Funded News Consortia.

IFNCs were to be funded in part by the BBC and were designed to pick up the slack in the ‘public broadcasting’ remit left by the decline of regional news through broadcasters holding the ‘channel 3′ license. In short, it was a way to keep local journalism going in a climate where most local radio stations and no few local papers are loss-making, and where national broadcasters are being forced to sacrifice their ‘local’ elements due to costs.

At any rate, the new Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has scrapped the plan. He would prefer to use the money for the rollout of ‘super-fast broadband’ to rural regions. The manner in which Hunt slapped down the idea was refreshingly blunt.

“Fundamentally, they [IFNC] were about subsidising the existing regional news system in a way that would have blocked the emergence of new and vibrant local media models fit for the digital age.”

”They risked turning a whole generation of media companies into subsidy junkies, focusing all their efforts not on attracting viewers but on persuading ministers and regulators to give them more cash.”

Tory attacks government subsidy plan and defends market shocker. Instead what Hunt would like to do is scrap the regulations on cross-media ownership, in the hope that this will allow local media companies to create new opportunities for revenue, to fund the sort of journalistic services which are being cut.

Concomitantly Nicholas Shott, an investment banker, has been given the remit of working out the commercial viability of this plan. That there are commercial gains to be made remains to be seen, but either way those of us who would like to see a workable model of grassroots media are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Labour’s plans carried the advantage of subsidising companies (the majority of which have only a regional and not a national presence, including some independent TV companies) to the tune of £130 million. These are the same companies which are losing jobs all over the place – and so might see a stay of execution, however brief, for the UK’s regional news provision.

Presumably this is why the NUJ and its parliamentary group (like John McDonnell) had lobbied and defended the IFNC idea. The disadvantage, of course, would be that a lot of this cash would end up trousered as profit by private companies, and as with so many public-private initiatives, cock-ups could be expected all along the way.

Meanwhile Tory plans don’t promise anything when it comes to jobs or regional news provision; they merely expand the current way of doing things by rolling back regulations.

So now loss-making local radio stations (many of which aren’t locally-owned but are playlisted up the yin-yang) can also be (potentially profitable?) local television companies, with their radio services parred down as far as possible to minimise loss whilst maintaining multi-media presence. I’m excited, are you?

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.

There are now six candidates for the leadership: the Brothers Miliband, Ed Balls, Andy Burnham, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott. At the time of writing the last part of this series, I had actually figured Burnham for a run at the leadership. He’s the right age and of the correct wing of the Party to make a challenge, though he may lose, to establish his name.

I did not foresee Diana Abbott making a serious run at the leadership. Her television love-ins, her unerring ability to stick her foot in her mouth, her personal hypocrisy and her lack of serious involvement with the unions all mark her down as the joke candidate. Upon reflection, however, it makes perfect sense: now the soft Left don’t have to nominate John.

Faced with nominating Balls, the Brothers Miliband or Burnham (who seems to have started off his campaign on the right foot, ahem, by blaming Labour’s defeat on immigrants) I can imagine a few MPs and their correlatives among the membership being a little despondent. All of the above characters are tainted by association with New Labour, and previous fig leaf Cruddas said he wasn’t running.

What is evident is that Abbott’s run for leader is being welcomed by Labour’s centre and right. Wes Streeting and Will Straw both seemed chirpy on twitter this morning that McDonnell may have to pull out. The innumerable tweets and comments wanking about the ‘diversity’ of the contest just make it clear how apolitical a lot of Labour members are.

It also seems an odd view of politics, from my perspective. Being the first female black MP in the commons is an achievement, but for who? I’d say it was an achievement for Diane Abbott’s dedicated supporters and the labour movement milieu in which they swam, especially when she was less of a media darling than she is now and knew something of being an activist.

Yet the achievement doesn’t mean much on its own. You could fill parliament with six hundred MPs, all ethnically diverse, and they’d still not achieve equality between all the peoples of the UK. Ethnicity doesn’t speak to having the right political programme. This is where John McDonnell and the LRC have Diane Abbott utterly stumped.

They are a long-term political movement, trying to create from the grassroots up the sort of political accountability which the Labour Party needs. Diane Abbott  has not been involved with this. Her leadership campaign, though better politically than the Balls, Burnham or the Milibands, takes place in the same vacuum of accountability.

It is just as disconnected from the working class, a disconnection which virtually all the candidates hitherto have attempted to appropriate as their issue. Hopefully the men will be separated from the boys by being quizzed on their response to on-going struggles like the Brutish Airways dispute.

Down to brass tacks though. Diane Abbott, though probably not much to the left of people like Margaret Beckett, who have long since demonstrated their ideological, um, flexibility, is still to the left of the other candidates and (though I am not a Westminster insider and must judge from outwith) more likely than John McDonnell to get backing from the PLP.

Should he therefore stand aside, in the hope of getting the ‘most’ Left leader possible?

I don’t think so. Winning the vote to be leader is not the key premise on which the John4Leader campaign is based. It is certainly an aim, and I imagine John and his staff are even now trying to work out where they might get the 33 nominations from, in order to get his name on to the ballot. But as I outlined previously, there must be more.

This is where the LRC is key. A membership based group, with several MPs (chaired by John McDonnell), it is based on branch and CLP affiliations, union branch affiliations and a layer of socialist activists who see the vaunted ‘pragmatism’ and ‘compromise’ as friendly words used to sideline any sort of socialist policy within Labour, and to keep isolated those who seek to rebuild the mass movements on which such socialist ideas were predicated.

An organisational basis like the LRC is vital around which to build democracy, build a political platform (which even within itself has many differences – ranging from revolutionary to reformist) and agitate for increased organisation and militancy both among activists in and out of Labour, and amongst workers and the people generally.

There is no corresponding organisation for the ‘soft’ Left, which is frequently why so many of their MPs chart their own course off into ways of thinking more acceptable to parliamentary leaderships. They have no roots, no movement behind them to correct an errant judgment and no connection to the practical demands of the people they’re meant to represent. This is the value of mass politics, which is the goal of the LRC and John McDonnell.

As this election has demonstrated, the half-way houses, the pressure groups, think-tanks and the semi-professional cadre of Westminster-orientated politicos are no substitute. For this reason McDonnell should not stand aside; if he does, it will be a capitulation to the personality politics of Westminster, even if he and other LRC members see it instead as a move to secure the best deal for the Left possible.

The bottom line is, there are no good deals for the Left going. Choosing the best out of a bad lot is not good enough this time. The only option is to work and build for the future, as outlined in Paul’s four demands of the John4Leader campaign. Whether or not that future is within Labour should then be determined by how the LRC invigorates itself for the fight against Labour’s bureaucracy and the coming cuts.

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.

Party affiliation is a key organisational question for a Marxist, not one of sentiment. This is why, when New Labour published a sentimental campaign video hijacking half a century of social democracy, the reaction from many was disgust. We could not believe that New Labour saw itself as part of the pro-welfare state tradition even while dismantling it. Processes like this define the primary question for socialists: in or out of Labour?

Social processes and Labour’s role
There are two struggles worth speaking of and in both of them the Labour Party has played a negative role. The first is in the marketisation and privatisation of public services, essentially redistributing public funds into private coffers, with the added bonus of undermining workers’ rights. The second is in the prevention of a class based response to these and other pressures of capitalist retrenchment, resulting in an impetus towards right-wing populism and anti-politics.

I think these things are pretty obvious, so I’m not going to dwell on them. Equally evident, however, is the desire of many Labour Party members to oppose their leaders. There are several dozen MPs who signed the EDM demanding a TU Freedom Bill, who’ve opposed privatisations, illiberal terror laws, protested the dissolution of the welfare state and the victimisation of claimants as being lazy reprobates deserving of our moral judgment.

These MPs, and the number of internal factions which advocate certain policies, have failed to achieve them and on the vast majority of occasions failed even to moderate New Labour’s agenda. The choice to join the Labour Party is thus the choice to be considered part and parcel of a Labour government widely seen as corrupt, unaccountable and actively working against the material interests of the vast majority of its members.

As Labour moves towards opposition, the contradiction here will lessen and finally disappear. Labour will not be the Party demanding sacrifices from the electorate, on behalf of business, nor imposing tax rises and service cuts. If the 1994-1997 period is anything to go by, whatever survives of New Labour will roll around in radical rhetoric and proceed to criticize the Tory government for things they will do themselves if elected.

This can make membership of Labour easier to consider, but the realities of power within Labour won’t have changed.

Unions and the Labour Party
Labour is, or should be, in hock to the unions. This should be extremely evident from the progressive collapse of New Labour’s base of personal donors and loan merchants. Yet the unions themselves look preposterous. In 2004, the Warwick Agreement was negotiated between Labour the the unions, as being key to what the unions wanted from this parliament: the demands themselves are pitiful, and some, as with Royal Mail, were plainly ignored.

Bureaucratic conservatism has been a key arm of the New Labour ‘coalition’. Within those unions, impressive heads of steam have built up specifically centred around moves to disaffiliate from Labour. In at least one union, combative non-Labour activists have been specifically targeted for expulsion. The fragmentation of the Labour-union link is also evidenced by the disaffiliation of the RMT, the FBU and the recent strong call from the CWU.

These moves are class-driven: if the unions and Labour cease to adequately represent the working class, then there will be moves first against union bureaucracies and the Labour Party, then away from unions and/or politics in general or worse, towards fascist politics. This is not going to be corrected merely by skilled political argumentation; it must be corrected by a change in the objective anti-working class processes sustained by Labour in government.

Here too, of course, there is an element of confused consciousness. Once the Tories get into power, unions will simply blame all the world’s ills on them and advocate a vote for the opposition – Labour – a position not open to them when Labour is in government. Yet this dissipation of pressure will serve to cement the union bureaucracy and centrist panderers rather than take the challenge further.

The only ray of hope I can spot is that at an Electoral Reform Society poll of TUC delegates back in late 2006 resulted in a majority supporting John McDonnell over Gordon Brown for leader of the Labour Party. It would be interesting to see how this has developed since then, so we have some idea of the direction political consciousness is going in.

Composition and Constituencies
My most intense experience of Labour was while at university in England. Particularly considering that one of my two fields of involvement was Oxford, this may not make for the most representative sample. Yet my experience of these young people, supposed to be the future of the Party, was almost universally negative, up to and including the point where I actually had to argue with one person that inequality was a bad thing.

There are reasons beyond my own parochial experiences for assuming that all is not necessarily well in Labour constituency organisations. Most obviously, the Labour heirarchy has recently felt free to assert its authority, ousting people selected as candidates by local parties, suspending local parties and continuing practices of ideological vetting for national selection lists. It’s difficult to see what a small trickle of activists back to Labour can do.

We should bear in mind that a large number of people (including former members) now refuse to have anything to do with Labour, and when even openly socialist Labour MPs can worry about the collapse of a 10,000+ majority, because of New Labour’s policies. For all the ‘resilience’ of Labour’s core vote, these aren’t the faces in charge of local constituency parties. Many CLPs are dormant in any case, lacking engagement beyond Voter ID.

Returning to my own experience, over vast swathes of the country, Labour simply isn’t competitive. It has no engagement (nor empathy for) local union needs, though it bears saying in turn that local union organisations have largely atrophied as well, and are maintained or established in many cases by the force of will of individuals whose dedication is not to the Labour Party. Local unions aren’t everything, of course, but Labour’s disengagement from collective community politics, rather than the occasional nimbyism, is visible round ‘ere at least.

Inside CLPs, it also seems that the party is visibly ageing.

Anti-fascist work
A lot of Labour members are engaged with groups like Love Music Hate Racism and Hope Not Hate, or supporting Unite Against Fascism. Yet even Labour members fully acknowledge that it’s Labour government policies which currently sustain the atrophy of Labour support and the concomitant growth of BNP support in areas like Dagenham.  Lee Walker, a Labour councillor in the area, has a lot to say on the subject.

Though Lee is part of Labour (and presumably advocates socialists joining) and though he attests that Dagenham is ‘very firmly Old Labour’, he reaffirms the view that with the wrong type of politico ensconsed in Westminster, the practical effect even of conquering the council is relatively small compared to what needs to be done to hold off the BNP, and provide the jobs and housing which that part of London cries out for.

Lee is convinced that through arguing the toss, that Labour members on the ground aren’t represented by their parliamentary cadre and national policies, we can stem the BNP and cites his own ward as evidence. I think there’s some evidence, such as from Nuneaton, to support this. Plenty of Labour members are also involved with counter-demonstrations against the BNP and the English Defence League, which help to mobilize local sentiment.

Yet even while some Labour members are doing this, there are Labour MPs, and the elements of the Labour Party they represent, which essentially buy into the BNP narratives on issues like immigration, calling for tighter laws, and fewer benefits, rather than advocating a massive house building programme, universal provision of services and jobs (to everyone, including the “white working class”).

This contradiction hinders the grassroots Labour attempt to stop the BNP, even if that effort mitigates them in some areas some of the time. As the Hope Not Hate map (left) shows, it’s in working class areas that the fascists really gather support – and its working class areas that do now and will continue to bear the brunt of New Labour and Tory attacks, for which some Labour figures and supporters prefer nationalist rather than class-based answers. Short term, joining Labour will not change that.

The argument from the Socialist Party, that standing ‘proper’ socialist candidates from independent parties can bring in votes unreached by Labour, potentially denying the BNP votes, is one I regard as unconvincing. What I do consider important is the intervention in local strikes and struggles, to force the unions to act against harmful council decisions and to give the working class confidence in its own power to drag change kicking and screaming out of local government.

In some areas, Labour is pretty good on this, and we should respect and support their efforts – but these efforts will pale when it comes to disrupting the agenda of a Tory government that will decimate social spending and push deprived former manufacturing areas towards fascism all the quicker. Labour is institutionally opposed to such efforts, preferring instead the straight-jacket of parliamentary activity.

Labour and the alternative
In recent struggles however, it is groups outside Labour which have been playing the key role – whether it’s the Socialist Party at Lindsey or engagement with the National Shop Stewards Network, the SWP’s Right to Work Conference, independent greens and socialists at Vestas and ClimateCamp and so on. Labour, on the other hand, seems to vary between declining to a slow ‘death’ and the determination to kill itself by squeezing out its last drop of left-wing credibility.

This inclines me to think that what pull on the working class that Labour exercises is residual, a phenomenon readily evident in countries like Germany, where ‘newer’ social-democratic parties have emerged to challenge the neo-liberal capitulations of the older parties. On the current trajectory, Labour may end up a model of the old Liberal Party remade for the 21st Century with ‘social justice’ as the new non-conformism.

I do not believe that the Labour Left, even impelled by a surge in working class militancy as a result of a frontal Tory attack on the last remnants of the welfare state, has numbers to rival the days of the height of its power in the 1970s never mind to bodily seize control of the Labour Party from New Labour, which has had years to entrench its favourite sons in ‘safe’ parliamentary seats.

Class struggle proceeds regardless of party affiliation of course. Labour is no longer in a position to be the sole – even the main – beneficiary of a new impetus towards class struggle, of workers linking up. I may be wrong, or the Labour Left fightback may be so impressive – bucking the trend hitherto – that our calculations are upset, and we’re called on to join Labour and battle even for the social democratic redistributive policies of old, in a climate of still further global capitalist retrenchment and greater demands for deeper neo-liberal reforms.

My impression, however, is that the Socialist Party is well positioned amongst activist elements in the unions and working class, and that most of the Labour Party will simply act as a conservative deadweight to those elements of the Labour Left who are similarly positioned – putting a brake on potential change coursing through CLPs, selection processes and so on. This is a direct refutation of a stance I held a few years ago.

With all this in mind, I don’t quite understand the decision of Phil, lead blogger at A Very Public Sociologist and long-time Stoke Socialist Party member to resign from the SP and join Labour, especially since he was a key person who I consulted before joining the SP myself.

I share his sentiments against standing candidates against moderate Labourites, and on the dismal prospects for the Socialist Party’s rather silly and opportunistic-looking Trade Union and Socialist Coalition electoral front. I can even surmise that, with him being in a very heavily Labour area and me being in a very lightly Labour area, our respective views on the ‘smaller links’ between Labour and the working class should be added together and divided by two to come to a proper appreciation.

What I can’t understand is how Phil reaches the conclusion that Labour’s direction of travel is an improvement on what it is currently. My generation has grown up not knowing ‘Old’ Labour, one element of which is more attracted by the flashy political campaigns of Bono and “Make Poverty History” than by the government, and another element to which is the product of persistent refusals to engage with real social ills: joblessness, poverty, terrible housing and crime, and couldn’t be more disillusioned if it tried.

If ever there was a time to explode the old trope that Britain hasn’t had a revolution because the British character is too moderate, now is the time to build the organisation for it.

Forty Labour MPs have put their name to a document which lays out five key areas in which the government is deviating from the wishes of most Labour members, and calls for the restoration of party democracy as a means to ensuring that the voice of its members is heard in future. The signatories range from the MPs of the LRC and the Campaign Group to Compass and a couple of unaffiliated people added in.

The key recommendations are as follows:

A. The recession should be tackled not with cuts in essential public spending, but by massive public investment in house-building, infrastructure and the de-carbonisation of the economy.

B. Banks should be split up with their casino investment arms hived off. Publicly-owned retail banks should be required to meet new social and community objectives and support manufacturing, with lending to businesses and homeowners restored to 2007 levels. Pay and bonuses should be tightly regulated.

C. A clean break must be made with market fundamentalism – deregulation and privatisation. Public provision should be expanded – in health care, education, housing, pensions, energy and transport. Royal Mail must remain wholly in the public sector.

D. In the face of huge and unacceptable growth of inequality, a big redistribution programme must swing resources away from the rich to provide sizeable increases in pensions, the minimum wage, the lowest benefit levels, and to fund job creation and improved public services. Union rights must be restored – it is in economic crisis that workers are most in need of that protection.

E. To achieve the 80% carbon emission reduction target by 2050, renewable sources of energy should be promoted on a far bigger scale, industry (including airlines) should be required to reduce its climate change emissions by at least 3% per year, household carbon allowances should be introduced, and the UK targets should be fully met by domestic action and not by carbon offsetting abroad.

We also believe that if Labour is to revive its membership in numbers and activity, it must fully restore its internal democratic procedures so that the voice of its individual and affiliated members is listened to and taken account of. This process has begun with the adoption of all-member voting rights for the National Policy Forum.

But we believe that several further reforms are needed, in particular to restore to the elected NEC full supervision and control over the party’s operation and finances, to introduce a charter of members’ rights and a Party Ombudsman to enforce them, and to renew for all party employees the core civil service values of impartiality, integrity, honesty and objectivity in the development of party policy and selection of party candidates.

I broadly agree with all of this, though it’s easy to quibble over language. It’s easier still to say that it doesn’t go nearly far enough. The type of state-led banking sector advocated by B, when tied to the increase in state-operated enterprises, is almost guaranteed to go disastrously wrong – taking the UK back to China c1980, where loans were used, via bureaucratic planning, to ‘support community objectives and support manufacturing’ such as the agricultural communes and heavy industry in the northern rustbelt. These were the least efficient parts of the Chinese economy.

Let’s be absolutely clear; there is nothing here which directly and finally challenges capitalism. However, there’s no point calling for the maximum programme when one has to fight even for the minimum programme to get a hearing, so I’m content with what is said, particularly about wealth redistribution and the restoration of trades union rights. These two things alone would go a long way towards strengthening the labour movement and provide the means to halt and reverse the fragmentation of working class power.

Reorganising how finance capital works in the UK involves reaching out to other labour movements internationally, so breaking up banks and attempting to impose a new settlement (think of it as Bretton-Woods II perhaps, though I’m not a Keynesian or neo-Keynesian) would have benefits in terms of providing impetus towards the construction of a network of globally planned, democratic, interdependent economies the premise of which is not the accumulation of wealth by the individual and its transformation into structural advantage for the individual.

What concerns me most about this document, as fabulous as it is to see Labour figures who have previously attacked each other lining up behind it, is that I think it is essentially hollow. What happens when it is ignored? This is something these forty MPs need to sit down and work out with each other, as representatives of whatever passes for the Labour Left these days. They need to get their CLPs involved with the discussion, and various Labour-orientated membership based groups like the LRC, Compass and so on.

If the government ignores the document entirely, and carries on its merry way, and no response is forthcoming from ‘the Left’ (however broad), especially one geared towards actually creating a coherent plan for government on the basis of these tenets, then it sends a very bad signal to the Labour activists and politically interested Labour voters on the Left.

In those circumstances it would instead provide a barometer of the ability of the government to use the Left as a figleaf for its less popular policies, like privatisation, because Gordon Brown et al are safe in the knowledge that on the doorstep the key line for activists is, “I know they voted for that, but us members didn’t support it. Plenty of Labour MPs didn’t support it. Our local guys didn’t support it.”

Wording about a members’ charter, and an ombudsman to enforce them, hides from the core problems; declining numbers of activists, the inability of the membership to rein in the Parliamentary Labour Party, the ability of the union leadership to throw their New Labour cronies a rope every single National Conference through rigidly whipped delegates (and as a side note, the impotence of conference anyway), the damage that Labour in government does to the reputation of the Party and how this is only even partially salvaged by the continuing unpopularity of the Tories.

Simply put, I’d have signed the document too, if it was put in front of me – but a signature on a piece of paper doesn’t mean anything. Building associative links between CLPs and the internal Left-wing campaigning organisations can flesh it out, so I wait with baited breath to see Step 2.

See also A Very Public Sociologist for another Labour outsider’s take.

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