Though Cowards Flinch

Shakespeare would have appreciated politics today. The combination of tragedy, the evisceration of the remaining strands of the welfare state, with the comedy of the Westminster bubble would have provided fertile ground for plays.

Had the playwright been conversant in modern culture, it couldn’t have been long before we had satires of Baroness declaiming hysterically of Labour, “There’s Klingons off the starboard bow, scrape ‘em off Dave!” But this is not satire; it’s all too real.

“The only thing [Ed Miliband] knows for sure is that he is a socialist and will stick up for the trade unions.” [BBC]

Meanwhile the whole media would inevitably be cast collectively as Titania, from a Midsummer Night’s Dream, awaking from slumber to see a Nick Bottom that looks suspiciously like Oona King. Alas there’s no Puck to “restores amends”.

We can watch for real this sad troops of failed politicians trooping through the House of Lords, with nary a critical brow raised from a media that should be scathingly critical of such creatures. Compared to this, the now infamous Lord Young looks almost as if he should be taken seriously with his Supermac-cum-Marie Antoinette impersonations.

As for Ed Miliband, who knows what the bard would have made of him. Certainly no socialist, the strongest words to come out of his mouth have been a demand that Labour ‘reclaim’ the Big Society model from the Conservatives. Evidently all the hot air expended by the blogosphere on tearing apart the claims of Big Society have been lost on Miliband, who is also walking a very Kinnock-esque line as regards the violence of student protest.

We know where that line ultimately leads – and Miliband’s inability to escape the Blairite paradigm is already a step further down his road than one might wish. All the comments about how Labour must listen, to become a “people’s party” is the most watered-down tosh and ignores the strong and steadfast role a socialist political party must play if it is not merely to bow and scrape with each demand placed on it by “the market” (i.e. the capitalist class).

Of course Labour is not a socialist political party. The delirious (if politically shrewd) rantings of various Conservatives to one side, it’s fairly obvious from the banal witterings about “hopes and aspirations” that the Labour Party has not moved on from Blair. It has no definite programme, no concrete economic or social aims, no critique of its opposition beyond the populist emotive or cynically managerial – and nor is it likely to acquire such.

Thus the parade of people to the Lords will continue to be fairly inoffensive worthies and party cronies. Labour need merely tread water until people’s resentment of the Conservatives outweighs their demoralisation. In some cases that will happen fast, in some cases slow, but it will happen. Then the populist and managerial aspects to Labour will once more begin to unravel and we’ll have a Conservative government again, unless we interrupt this cycle.

Resentment is not a political programme, it is a reaction. Thus were people slow to cast off Thatcher and Major, thus were people slow to cast off Blair, despite his great and growing unpopularity leading up to the 2005 election. Nor is anger a political programme; the occupations of universities, the demonstrations and – potentially – the strikes of the next few years will not bring down the Conservative government by themselves.

They might bring down the Coalition, depending on how panicky the Lapdogs get, but a subsequent general election would almost certainly see a Conservative outright victory or a renewed Coalition unless much wider sections of the working class are moved into joining hands with those in struggle. The battle to do this will be at once emotive and intellectual; the appeal to solidarity and collective, class interest. There is no possibility of Miliband doing this, or letting it happen within his Labour Party without a moment like the 1985 Party Conference.

Perhaps the kindest minds of posterity will judge Mr Miliband a sort of Hamlet. Caught between the ghost of his father, alive in the presence of the demonstrators (though not the hack SU and NUS officials who ostensibly lead them), and what he sees as pragmatism, he’ll wander the bland halls of Victoria Square slowly going mad. Or will vanish with a whimper, like Kinnock, to take his place as a working peer, like so many of the dignified, restrained worthies he himself has and will elevate.

There’s a lot of interest at the moment in the anti-poll tax campaigns of the late 1980s and very early 1990s. This has been reflected in various articles in Socialism Today and other publications. Yesterday, the local Socialist Students group held a meeting at which one of the organisers of the Kent anti-poll tax union came to speak about his experiences.

He brought with him some fantastic resources; a book of minutes from the Kent APTU and a collection of pamphlets produced by the group, and newspaper cuttings from the time. Of particular relevance to Canterbury students was a letter he sent from prison, having been jailed for non-payment, to the student newspaper as it existed back then.

Several things stood out to me, through his narrative and through the resources. The first was the sheer weight of opposition to Thatcher and the poll tax. Kent at the time still preserved some heavy industry and in areas like Aylesham, which are unheard from today, 30 out of 43 streets were recorded as sending people to local APTU meetings.

Even in areas considered a little intimidating and no-go by some of the organsiers, in parts of Thanet, a public meeting organised on the off-chance of people showing up was packed out. From Ashford to Ramsgate, Medway to Dover, Kent was represented in force in the anti-poll tax movement; even towns like Deal turned out for protest marches.

If I appear shocked at some of this, I ask the reader’s forbearance. Living in Kent, where Labour strongholds survive only in industrial areas like Medway, South Thanet and Dover, it’s strange to think of the leagues between thronging with angry and embittered workers, prepared to protest, demonstrate and ultimately refusing point-blank to obey the law.

The second thing that stood out was the role of the Labour bureaucracy. At the time, the Labour Party nationally had utterly failed to push for the type of campaign that would have derailed Thatcher’s unjust poll tax, whether her party had occupied six hundred parliamentary seats and Labour none. It was much after Militant had decided to make the centrepiece of Thatcher’s ’87 re-election a target that Labour began to wake up.

Stories from the ground are interesting too. Delegates, chosen by local community meetings under the banner of the anti-poll tax unions, reported to Kent meetings of the country APTU that Labour Party organisers dug their heels in wherever possible, opposing the calling of public meetings, opposing having Labour speakers on the platform and so on.

This was repeated in unions like NALGO, where the Right fought tooth and claw against donating money for leaflets to APTU campaigns, and when that didn’t work, attempted to water down the political content of the material that was published. Yet included amongst the many documents was a NALGO-backed leaflet calling for non-payment.

So much of this seems familiar to our struggles with the union and labour bureaucracy today. The same short-sighted attempt to confine struggle as much as possible to parliament, or at least within the Labour Party, exists today. Neither bureaucracy was overthrown by the poll tax struggle, but at a local level, legions of activists were won over and there are records of majorities in specific streets displaying anti-poll tax signs in their gardens or windows.

This exploded the attempt to confine the struggle to a parliamentary one, and John Major was ultimately forced to admit that the ‘community charge’ was providing too little milk for far too much moo.

Bearing in mind that public service cuts are another attempt to do the same thing – eliminate large chunks of the redistribution of wealth from rich to poor – the anti-poll tax campaign has serious lessons for us today. By patiently agitating and building a campaign, while posing questions of class and solidarity as key to winning the struggle, we can stop the attempt to cut public services. A simple refusal, from millions of voices, will topple the government.

It was significant, therefore, that the meeting went on to resolve that the anti-cuts campaign should continue. No one present believed that the University of Kent’s recent climbdown over the redundancies of eleven staff in Biosciences is an end to the attempt of the university management to inflict the cost of a HEFCE grant cut on to staff and students.

Proposals were also accepted that stalls be organised and staffed on the campus of Canterbury Christ Church University, as they too will likely be facing serious cuts – all the more so since the university is not a dedicated research university but the home of many vocational courses, like a nationally-renowned centre for Initial Teacher Training.

Since it seems that none of the three major parties, including Labour, are prepared to voice on a national level the need to keep public services running, to support benefits especially at a time of mass unemployment and to end and reverse privatisations that are always a prelude to attacks upon workers, we’ll have to do it ourselves.

Hopefully this is just a beginning.

Allegations by the Sunday Telegraph that there are “Islamists” at work in the Labour Party won’t come as a galloping shock to anyone who regularly reads Private Eye. That organ has contained plenty of juicy gossip about Lutfur Rahman, leader of Tower Hamlets’ council, and the goings on in that area. The Telegraph simply attempted to put a name and formal structure to the influence peddling and dodgy politics.

That name is, allegedly, the Islamic Forum of Europe. The scoop was in getting Jim Fitzpatrick, Minister for the Environment, to denounce them as “entryists” and to say that they are, “completely at odds with Labour’s programme, with our support for secularism.” Hereafter everyone will be able to talk about the process like it’s a conscious infiltration rather than part of a broader trend that requires no secret conspiracy.

Islamisn and Labour
Read through the Telegraph articles and comment pieces on the subject. This group, the IFE, have only gained ground as people “moved away from secular, Left politics”. This move shouldn’t surprise anyone; the secular Left has been caught in an impossible position between a Labour government waging war on Muslims and a Labour Party that would prefer its genuinely Left members to shut up and gormlessly pound the pavement, rather than expect to have any say on policy.

By ‘genuinely Left members’, I mean those who still hold to all the old chestnuts: redistribution, universal public services where corporations don’t turn a profit,  liberal values of free speech and civil rights and so on. The splitting of this Left across Greens, Labour, the Socialist and Socialist Workers Parties and a welter of independents, plus the crushing weight of bureaucratic power in Labour that prevents a coagulation of the Left within the Labour Party, leaves the way open for fundamentalist groups to win people to other avenues.

We’ve witnessed it with the BNP, and every time a genuine take-no-shit socialist runs against the BNP, with a sufficient campaign to back them, the BNP get hammered back. This will be much more difficult if the link between the Left and minority communities is broken by religious extremists, and in turn this will create a feedback loop that polarizes the white working class away from uniting with minorities to the good of all.

Andrew Gilligan, in his piece, compared the Islamic Forum of Europe to the Militant Tendency, a revolutionary socialist group that picked up thousands of members due to agitations against the inaction of Labour’s leaders over the Miners Strike and the other Thatcherite attacks on the working class. The irony here is that only groups like the Militant can win people back from religious extremism, because only those groups can be unambiguous and forthright in their class politics and class demands – but Labour’s leadership does its level best to kill those groups.

In the case of the Militant, this was done through expulsions – but for those who survived the Labour Party purges of the 1980s, it has continued in the bureaucratic attitudes and structures of the labour movement that sees union leaders act as New Labour backscratchers, leaves the Party NEC as a puppet for the parliamentary leadership, and leave Labour conference as a figleaf democracy.

Hypocrisy and ignorance in the Telegraph
Beyond the immediate concerns of preserving Labour’s secularism (for which the leadership’s first recourse won’t be a change in policy, to quit alienating Labour votes, it’ll be expulsions or NEC control of local selection procedures), I found the holier-than-thou attitude of the Telegraph Op Ed piece on the subject to be really quite amusing:

“If the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) was open and frank about its aims, voters would be able to make up their own minds about whether they wanted to see its members in any form of government in Britain. It is part of any democratic system worthy of the name that those who abide by the rule of law are entitled to campaign in elections, even if we find their beliefs objectionable. But some members of the IFE demonstrate in private that they have an agenda that they are not willing to share with the electorate.”

Hypocrisy! Both the Labour leadership and its Tory counterparts quite happily hold off on announcing policies and plans because they might alienate voters. The Tories are especially guilty of this at the moment, with their loud claims that they can’t really say anything definite until they are in office and can see the book-keeping. Which is precisely why this “Change” guff is so all-pervasive. The Op-Ed continues:

[The IFE] would be more credible if, in public, the IFE was not presented as simply a “social welfare organisation” committed to “community cohesion” and “tolerance” – while in private, it shows itself to be committed to replacing democracy by a theocracy based on Islamic law.

This type of sentiment displays a staggering ignorance. The reason extremist organisations gain influence is precisely because of their roles as ‘social welfare organisations’ – in the absence of a State prepared to step up and fulfil its responsibilities. Has no one noticed the proliferation of extremist Christian churches in the shittiest parts of this country, with their Bible groups and focus on helping the sick, the old, mothers etc? It’s the same principle – and whilst not especially violent, can be just as antithetical to liberal secularism.

All talk of community cohesion and tolerance is to Brit politico-speak what “Freedom”, “Truth”, “Justice” etc are to US political discourse. Who the hell is going to admit to being against them? There’s a fair argument to be made that with their emphasis on nuclear family values, harsher sentencing, less redistribution and the odd slip back into anti-immigration rhetoric, the Tories aren’t exactly contributing to community cohesion and tolerance – but damned if the Telegraph spends pages arguing about that, because they agree with Tories.

Part of the problem
This rise of ethnic extremism is the precise counterpart to the continuing nationalist, xenophobic diatribes of the Waily Mail, Telegraph, Sun etc. If the conditions of the British working class are presented as being the result of mass immigration, and disenfranchisement a result of individual corruption or ‘political correctness gone mad’, then we’re pushing for the rejection of the big minority communities that form a part of the UK, and capitulation before the hysterical “cultural Christianity” of Melanie Phillips et al.

By doing so, we’re inviting others to take advantage of the resentment stoked up in both majority and minorities. And still nothing will be solved; disenfranchisement will continue, declining public services will continue. The ‘British’ far Right are interested in the same harmful privatisation and cut backs as the mainstream – they vote for them in local councils like Kirklees on a regular basis. The ethno-nationalist Right – as demonstrated across the Islamic world – is equally little interested in social welfare and the liberation of the individual.

The socialist answer – one that has an immensely powerful pull when talking to people of all races, cultures and creeds on the ground – is simple: we fight extremism and we fight the indifference of our political class by the same methods. Building the democratic organisations for a fighting working class, to secure the most basic demands; employment, housing, universal healthcare, education and public services and a government form which does not breed an unaccountable political class.