Though Cowards Flinch

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, the leftist former economist whose popularity and rise to power emerged to coincide with a rapid change in the political landscape of Latin America, is currently under threat from protesting police on the streets of Quito.

Neighbouring ally Hugo Chavez, with characteristic bombast, reported to his followers on twitter that a coup is taking place, and that protestors are trying to kill him.

But Correa looks defiant. From the video of him addressing his supporters, praising them for coming out in the tense streets, and advancing democracy and socialism, to news agency clips of him being wheeled from the hospital, where he was trapped in by police, to a car ensuring his safety.

It is alien to viewers in the UK to see such passion in a politician. In 2007, his relationship with the media was put on rocky roads, to which he, during a press conference, paraphrased Tony Blair by calling them “a group of wild beasts”.

Though, as evidenced by Blair’s recent pullout from touring his autobiography, worried at the implications of rioting protestors, the similarities between them end there. Faced with angry dissenters, Correa is reported to have said “If you want to kill the president, here he is! Kill me!” – as if to anticipate his demise.

The protest is down to money disputes. As part of an austerity package, Correa has put stop to police celebratory functions paid from the public purse, and has extended their promotion period from five to seven years.

Others, such as President Evo Morales of Bolivia, have noted the similarities between this and the recent scare in Honduras. As scenes from inside the hospital show, likening the events to the coup d’état in Honduras is no exaggeration.

Since his re-election in 2009, some have accused Correa of going back on his promises, for the advancement of socialism. His popular revolution, which was helped by his fluency in Quechua, the majority language of indigenous tribes in Ecuador, through to Peru and Bolivia, had been kickstarted by his aim to redistribute Ecuador’s oil wealth to poorer communities. In 2009 he said:

Socialism will continue. The Ecuadorian people voted for that. We are going to emphasize this fight for social justice, for regional justice. We are going to continue the fight to eliminate all forms of workplace exploitation within our socialist conviction: the supremacy of human work over capital. Nobody is in any doubt that our preferential option is for the poorest people, we are here because of them. Hasta la victoria siempre!

Around the same time Correa’s economic minister Maria Elsa Viteri took a trip to Europe in order to re-purchase global bonds, successfully claiming back 91% of the bonds, in order to further commit to a social and economic revolution.

On the current issue, Correa claimed his administration has always been at the side of the police, and expressed outrage that protestors have gone to such lengths to endanger the President’s life.

It is not relativism, but when cuts are administered by the UK Tory government, we tend to look at them as ideological; because that is what they are. It is against received wisdom to draw the axe in the way which George Osborne has been doing so, and there is little or weak evidence to show vindication for his masochism. The quango cull, for example, is very telling; especially since it has been justified as waste cutting – something patently untrue in many cases.

When Correa takes measures to cull waste, to ensure not everyone takes a hit, particularly the most vulnerable in Ecuadorian society, we ought not to draw parallels.

Arguably, the limiting of police ceremonies is one way to ensure not everyone suffers disproportionately for the mistakes of the few, and so it appears as if the police have acted out of hand.

Correa’s “citizen revolution” will not please all the people, all the time, and sometimes protestors can be wrong. This, after all, appears to be a coup attempt.

But the main reason to defend Correa is his heroic fighting talk, almost inimitable in politics today. In the faces of the angered police, armed with flairs and tear gas, the premier said:

I will not take a single step back. I will not sign any agreement under pressure. I would die first. I thank my compatriots for their support and ask citizens to remain calm.

Update 02/10/10 (10.32)

The Guardian are now reporting what Correa, and the foreign minister Ricardo Patino, have been telling the media in Ecuador; that a coup is being organised from within the dissenting police protesters by former president Lucio Gutiérrez, of the centre right nationalist Patriotic Society Party.

The main police chief in Ecuador has stepped down from his position over the disarray.

TVE, the Spanish news agency, are reporting that neighbouring Peru and Columbia – both on the right politically – have closed their borders out of sympathy with Ecuador and Correa, so as to stop coup perpetrators from leaving the country.

Furthermore, the US and the UN have both condemned the coup attempt, while Brazil is the only country in South America which has not taken an official position against agitators.

I have tried very hard to find an online source for the wryly comic quote, supposedly from Che Guevara, saying that all he and Fidel were striving for, in the Latin American countries they fought in, was to recreate the same state monopoly model as was practiced in the United States.

The crucial meaning to this comment is that on principle they were not opposed to state monopolies, but they were quite open about that. The US, they would’ve contended, had been doing just that, only they were not honest about it, and operated their monopoly under the guise of free markets and open competition.

But nonetheless, the US was, and still is, a capitalist country, despite the stranglehold on free competition and the secret sanctioning of monopolies.

It is hardly surprising that capitalists, particularly small ones, are annoyed at this type of operation. After all, if competition is suppressed from the top, by greedy corporations not wishing to play the game, then the spirit of Adam Smith is being crushed.

More and more, friendly capitalism is winning the argument. And the variants of capitalism in today’s economic landscape testify to this; you have green capitalism, philanthrocapitalism, compassionate capitalism. Capitalism can be against sweatshops, capitalism can be pro-aid to third world countries, capitalism can provide your community with a new civic centre, capitalism can be against bonuses, capitalism can be against city greed, capitalism can be against corporate ‘short termism’ and so on and so forth.

This, in short, though perhaps for one day only, can go by the name of Cable-nomics.

The Left Foot Forward blog says today:

This summer, Anatole Kaletsky published ‘Capitalism 4.0‘ in which he argues that after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, capitalism will reinvent itself and emerge stronger than before

This is the one true thing about capitalism, it will make timid changes to change perceptions of itself, and why wouldn’t it do that today, particularly when it is popular to bash the bankers. 

In political jargon, bashing the banker might be called ‘populism’. And this, as Dave Osler points out, is exactly what Vince Cable is playing at today.

As they have their annual conference, the Lib Dem popularity rating is sinking quicker than a dead dog tied to a brick in a lake, and needs a boost – and who better to administer such a boost than their cross-party hero Mr Cable.

He threatened to tax banks away from bonusing, he criticised city murk, he has attacked corporate short-termism, and has managed to be called a ‘left-wing socialist’ and even a ‘Marxist‘ as a consequence. In fact, what the capitalists at work blog have said about him is particularly amusing:

The thorn in the coalition’s side is Vince Cable. A left-wing socialist is never going to co-exist easily with a Conservative Government.

It’s so black and white to them – but to serious political thinkers it is quite simple to see how a person, who is avowedly pro-market and pro-business, is able to take the view that bankers are “Scargills in pin-stripes” while not being socialist, but a liberal, a free trader and a fan of open markets.

Bloggers have gone to great lengths today to show that if Cable is really “Red Vince” then he has many unsuspecting allies. Left Outside contributes Adam Smith, while Sunder Katwala throws out a myriad of characters including Red Ted Heath and Red Angela Merkel.

Of course what Cable does want, which Richard Seymour has rightly picked up on, is a better regulated capitalism. But, as Seymour elaborates:

he knows he can’t even deliver that while he’s a helpmeet to George Osborne, the trust fund chancellor who is one of the many millionaires in the Tory front bench, and who is committed to defending a robust, liberated financial sector.

There is a massive difference in opposing how the markets work, and opposing how capital operates. As postmodernism triumphs, and ideology as a term is discarded like last night’s leftover casserole, even those naturally on the “anti-capitalist” left seem to be content with the hot air of Cable-nomics 

Those unhappy with capitalism’s green credentials can be rest assured that the green market is obliging companies to head this direction. Those unhappy that capitalism is not fairly trading will be happy to learn that ethical capitalism has won its battle, and companies like Nestle, in order to remain market players in today’s sensitive consumer age, source their ingredients from sound places.

What passes for anti-capitalism today is just speeding up the process where capitalism itself takes a makeover, and ensures the market is filled with big companies committing to the bourgeois politics of the day.

Capitalism, fear not. Vince Cable is your poster boy.

Reading the Economist this week, I noted an article which might provide the opening lines to the epitaph of Sunny Hundal’s idea (responded to by myself and Madam Miaow) that the right-wing Tea Party movement are somehow more successful at taking control of the Republican Party than their leftie counterparts.

The usual ideas (clichés?) are floated by Sunny – we socialists are all too busy fighting amongst ourselves etc, they’re more pragmatic while we’re more idealistic etc – but in actual fact, the seeming drift of the Republicans towards the Tea Party movement doesn’t change the nature of the Republican Party at all. Fiery rhetoric about slashing state powers on the ground, continuing corporate welfare when not stumping.

The Economist mentions the primary race for Georgia, in which all the candidates addressed the local Tea Party group and did a grip’n'grin. Candidates thought to be ‘establishment’ candidates – like Oxendine and Deal – lost out to Handel, who in her leaflets denounced her opponents, dubbed “the good ole boys” as “politics as usual”. Handel was also recognised to be more popular at the local Tea Party convention. So far, so good for the Tea Party movement, right?

Well, we’ll see. Ms Handel was endorsed by Sarah Palin, darling of the Republican grassroots, and surged ahead in polling shortly thereafter. Palin is the darling of the Republican grassroots and the Tea Party movement; her endorsements carry a huge amount of weight (or at least press coverage, which can amount to the same thing in races loaded up on TV spots) and she doesn’t wield them against Tea Party people – such as her decision not to endorse Jane Norton over Ken Buck in Colorado.

But who is she endorsing? In Handel’s case, whatever the candidate says about “the good ole boys” and ending “politics as usual”, she’s no outsider. One time President and CEO and a county Chamber of Commerce, having worked as an executive for companies like KPMG, she was appointed Chief of Staff for a previous Georgia governor, and from 2007 until 2010 she served as Secretary of State in Georgia. This is a full-time careerist politico, who, incidentally, has received numerous endorsements from the rest of the Republican establishment.

So what effect, really, is the Tea Party movement having on Republican politics? It would be easy to portray the Deal v. Handel run-off in August as establishment v. Tea Party-backed outsider, as the Economist does, but it would also be lazy. They are both political insiders, and actually, so the commentary from local sources seem to suggest, Handel is probably more liberal than Deal, but she has endorsements from well-known conservative figures to bolster her reputation.

My point in all this is to suggest that the Republican grassroots are being diddled in exactly the same way as Leftie grassroots activists. As has been noted with regard to the Labour leadership election, since the stinging criticisms a couple of months ago that most of the candidates fudged the question of gay marriage, more candidates have come out to back it – as it’s likely to be a popular position with a large section of Labour’s base (though very unpopular with another section).

It’s a sop – it won’t change anything fundamental about Labour’s approach, but it allows the candidates to appeal for grassroots support. The Tea Party movement is being used in the same way. At the bottom are people with a some genuine grievances – the belief that immigration results in worse employment conditions, or the wish that NAFTA should be scrapped, for example. Yet Republicans aren’t going to curb immigration, and they won’t scrap NAFTA. It’ll hurt economic growth.

Meanwhile, far from being grassroots-run, the Tea Party movement is basically a network of professional pressure groups which can link national political figures and large emailing lists, and which can fill stadiums with people who believe that these groups are the last-ditch American defence against socialism. The sort of hyperbole common to true believers here would be hilarious if it wasn’t so dangerous – but the candidates they’re backing don’t share any of these beliefs. People who have served in state and national politics aren’t that naive. They are using the grassroots, and will then promote their own agenda once in office.

The odd sop will be thrown to the base, of course – that’s just good politics. But the disconnection between Right grassroots and leadership, and Left grassroots and leadership is exactly the same.

It should be a lesson that, after eight years of a Republican President, the grassroots of the Right – the sort who idealised things like the 9/12 campaign – were disillusioned and pissed off. Two years in to a Democratic Presidency and Congress which promised much and delivered little, the implication of Sunny’s remarks (though he might not see it like this) are that Democratic supporters expected too much – that blame should lie with the grassroots, rather than with tenacious corporate lobbying, a massively funded propaganda campaign, or with obfuscating Senators.

The grassroots American left has every right to be pissed off. They were taken advantage of – and the Republican grassroots will likely be in the same position once Obama can no longer be the whipping boy for every frothing congressional wannabe.

In the UK, we should learn this lesson. Whoever wins the leadership election now – John McDonnell having failed to make the ballot – the result is going to be a disconnection between what the activists of the party want and what the PLP and the trades union bureaucracies settled for. That’s not the fault of demanding activists – as in America, it is the fault of the process underpinning Labour Party politics.

At a recent discussion of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, a few interesting points were brought up. When researching the issue beforehand, I stumbled across some figures for the “Yes” and “No” campaigns: the Yes side outspent the No side by just under 4:1. Well over half of that figure came directly from businesses like Ryanair or Intel, or consortia of businesses and celebrities. This was not counting the five million euros spent by the Irish state and the EU itself on “information” campaigns and actually holding the referendum.

Clearly the ruling class of Ireland had a vested interest in securing a Yes vote. The tactics of the Yes campaign were pretty devious – for example, IBEC’s campaign website promised jobs in massive lettering on the front page, as did plenty of posters. Yet Brian Lenihan, finance minister, didn’t disavow such claims until after the Yes vote had been secured. But capitalism does not produce a monolithic capitalist class – such a class can have divergent interests and it was this that led to a brief consideration of how parties of the ruling class react to such a division.

In Ireland, there are two coalitions broadly analogous to the two-party British system: Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats (a coalition recently including the Irish Green Party)  and Fine Gael-Labour. Broadly speaking these represent the conservative / liberal-conservative and centrist / social democratic wings of Leinster House. Occasionally it gets a bit confusing because Fine Gael, Labour’s traditional partners, are a party composed of people like UK Labour MP Denis MacShane, who is marginally to the Left of the Kaiser. There is significant overlap.

All of these parties – every single one – came out in favour of a Yes vote and spent money on securing a Yes vote on the Lisbon Treaty. The ruling class of the Irish republic seems fairly united on the point. It was left to the Socialist Party, SWP and maverick Declan Ganley, who reportedly spent over a million euros of his own money, including two hundred thousand of which on funding the Libertas anti-treaty campaign in the second referendum, to oppose the Lisbon Treaty in conjunction with UKIP. Ganley denies that his American company Rivada had anything to do with the campaign.

This unity of the Irish ruling class provoked some speculation: if there was to be a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in the UK, would the British ruling class be similarly united? It is a standard media trope that European questions have tended to divide the Conservatives, the traditional party of the capitalist class. Recent unity has been possible because the Conservatives can have the best of both worlds, beating up a Labour government for kowtowing to European federalism run amok, whilst not actually having to give effect to their own utterances. The perfect example of this was the Lisbon Treaty referendum vote.

David Cameron voiced sentiments to the effect that the Lisbon Treaty was a dead duck, that nobody wanted it and that it should be jettisoned. Cameron has also promised a referendum if the treaty is not a fait accompli by the time a Tory government takes office. If it came down to a vote, could Cameron and his pro-EU allies campaign against the Lisbon Treaty without casting doubts over the future of the EU itself? Bearing in mind some recent polling for ConservativeHome, were I David Cameron, I would be praying that Poland and the Czechs ratify Lisbon very soon.

The Tory grassroots, according to ConHome, are overwhelmingly in favour of a referendum, overwhelmingly in favour of a No vote and quite a substantial proportion are in favour of EU withdrawal.

Wealthy support for eurosceptic parties has not exactly been hard to find. Whether from millionaires Paul Sykes, Stuart Wheeler, Alan Bown or David Sullivan, or businesses like Nightech, UKIP seem to have plenty of money to kick around – and indeed they upped their number of MEPs this year even when pitted against a seemingly resurgent Conservative Party. But little of this support comes from the first rank of British capitalism; the recent Conservative Party conference on the other hand demonstrates a totally different world of politico-business intercourse.

“…the real action is on the fringe. In meetings across Manchester this week, corporate money and time is supporting a debate which, it is hoped, will usher in a more enterprise-friendly government. General Electric, BT, Boots, Legal & General, John Lewis, Coca-Cola and BAA are there. So are Vodafone, DTZ, Serco, Standard Chartered, Aviva, Morrisons, T-Mobile, Clifford Chance, EADS, BAE and the tobacco manufacturers.”

All of which benefit from the European Union, particularly from the expanded EU into which companies like Vodafone have moved. Or BAA which has plans for eastern European airports, Serco which has contracts with the European Space Agency and in Poland to name two recent jobs. And so on. All of this investment in European markets is aided by the common framework of the EU, and when it comes to expanding further afield, the status of the EU as a primary trading partner to China and India, and as the world’s largest importer and exporter is useful muscle to keep onside.

The Lisbon Treaty is useful to European capitalism as a whole because it prevents the smaller nations, client states of the larger, from holding the economic and banking policies of EU hostage to its own individual fortunes. The new positions of President of the European Commission and High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy are formulated so as to be able to wield the economic and military muscle of the EU as one bloc, which inevitably will be used to the benefit of European capitalism.

With business support largely assured, whatever the grassroots pull, the majority of Tory MPs will work out where their bread is buttered and vote accordingly. There will always be maverick exceptions, like the Labour councillors in Ireland who backed a No vote, but amongst the political establishment, these will be a minority. A referendum, however, might allow the grassroots to shine through – and this is why, I suspect, there will be no Lisbon referendum in the UK unless the Tory and Labour leaderships are fully confident of winning.

A similar referendum, however, has happened before, on membership in the EEC. The Labour and Tory leaderships campaigned in favour of the EEC and won the vote. Despite mavericks like Tony Benn and Enoch Powell, no Tory split emerged. And this time, no doubt, the soothing balm of capitalist consensus will likewise ease the pain that any mavericks cause. UKIP is already losing steam, in that its membership numbers have been cut almost by half; I don’t think a resurgent Tory Party has anything to fear from its Right – unless the capitalist crisis deepens beyond what the Tories can easily retrench by attacking the unions, pensions, social welfare, public sector pay and public services.

Thus we simply cannot count on the Tories being broken and ousted by the issue of the EU, though Cameron himself might be damaged by seeming to speak out of both sides of his mouth. I say this at the risk of contradicting the commentariat, where there seems to be a theme developing that Europe brought down Margaret Thatcher and John Major (not the poll tax and control freakery, or habitual corruption and endless scandal then), so it could bring down David Cameron. It’s possible, I suppose, but I don’t think it is likely – and I certainly don’t think it’s a notion we can base any sort of strategy around.

What we can do is ensure that if there is a referendum, we’re on the right side. As socialists, we seek the overthrow of the capitalist state; the issue of the EU-state should be just as clear cut. No free market of labour, no terroristic capitalism through EU diktat, IMF sanction or the easy ability to relocate capital investment abroad, no to the idea that we can ‘win’ the institutions of the EU to our own ends any more than we can win round the national state – but yes to a socialist internationalism linking the trades unions and socialists of all European countries.

By making these arguments, we’re changing the terms of the debate; it ceases to be about Little Englanders versus the capitalist consensus and could mobilize section of the working classs in their own class interests – as it did in Ireland. Such a campaign, if fought with skill and honesty, could provide a basis for mass re-engagement with politicis – socialist politics that is – and potentially help us along the road towards a reconstructed mass party of the working class. All of this, if there is a referendum. And that’s exactly why there won’t be.

People who wish to continue to believe that, while capitalist systems of finance may have their ups and downs, they are probably the most sensible way of managing the word’s affairs, are advised to look away now.

People who wish to see what the capitalist world of high finance is really about are invited to read some of what Eric Kolchinsky, a whistleblower sacked by international credit rating agency Moody’s had to say on Wednesday,  in testimony before the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:

‘My name is Eric Kolchinsky, and during the majority of 2007, I was the Managing Director in charge of the business line which rated sub-prime backed CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations) at Moody’s Investors Service. More recently, I was suspended by Moody’s as a result of a warning I sent to the compliance group regarding what I believed to be a violation of securities laws within the rating agency.

…………

The conflicts of interest which ail the ratings industry remain unmanaged. Senior management still favors revenue generation over ratings quality and is willing to dismiss or silence those employees who disagree with these unwritten policies.

The Credit Policy Group is a team of analysts whose role is to ensure that the methodologies and procedures used in the rating process are sound and meet minimum credit standards. Unfortunately, the Credit Policy Group at Moody’s remains weak and short staffed. The group’s analysts get routinely bullied by business-line managers and their decisions are over-ridden in the name of generating revenue.

………..

In many ways the incentives for rating agencies have become worse since the credit crisis. There are now more rating agencies and they are all chasing significantly fewer transaction dollars. The new controls put in place by regulators are too weak to significantly alter this dynamic.

As an example of how little things have changed, ABS  (Asset-based Securities) are being rated once again. These are the same products which are responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars of losses at major financial institutions. They were significant contributors to the problems at Citibank, Merrill Lynch and AIG. While the CDOs held by these institutions had the highest ratings possible, they still ended up being nearly worthless. I firmly believe that ABS CDOs cannot be rated with any certainty and especially not during this volatile period in the capital markets.

The ‘new’ methodologies used to rate ABS CDOs have not improved their poor credit performance – many of the recent deals have been downgraded or have had to resort to restructuring to maintain their ratings. This toxic product needs to be consigned to the dustbin of bad ideas, but unfortunately, there are still no incentives for rating agencies to say ‘No’ to a product no matter how poorly thought through.’

Those are just the highlights of his statement.  The whole day’s witness testimony merits a thorough read, including the Chairman’s closing statement in which he compares the credit rating agencies’  secretive practices with those of ‘Soviet Russia’.

Of particular interest, though, is the historical perspective provided by Lawrence White of New York University:

‘A major change in the relationship between the credit rating agencies and the U.S. bond markets occurred in the 1930s. Eager to encourage banks to invest only in safe bonds, bank regulators issued a set of regulations that culminated in a 1936 decree that prohibited banks from investing in “speculative investment securities” as determined by ‘recognized rating manuals’.

……..

In the early 1970s the basic business model of the large rating agencies changed. In place of the ‘investor pays’ model that had been established by John Moody in 1909, the agencies converted to an ‘issuer pays’ model, whereby the entity that is issuing the bonds also pays the rating firm to rate the bonds.

…..

Regardless of the reason, the change to the ‘issuer pays’ business model opened the door to potential conflicts of interest: A rating agency might shade its rating upward so as to keep the issuer happy and forestall the issuer’s taking its rating business to a different rating agency.’

So what does all this boil down to?

Essentially, the story goes like this:

1) A crazy, technology-based stock trading bubble driven by the desire for quick profits on the part of the new ‘high finance’ part of the ruling class brought about a massive crash in 1929, and millions of the working class suffered.

2) The investment banks were allowed by a compliant US state to outsourced their credit rating operation in 1936, thus providing a temporary ‘fix’ in public.

3) Over time the credit rating agencies empowered by the 1936 decree came to be so far in league with the ruling financial class that they became a prime mover in the crazy, property-based stock market bubble of the 2000s, legitimizing ever stranger structures of finance in order to make ever higher profits themselves.

4) A massive 1929-style stock market crash ensued, billions of dollars were used to bail out financial institutions who had caused the crisis, but a massive bonus culture soon returned to the financial ruling classes and states worldwide  that the best way to restore financial balance was to attack the living and working conditions of the working classes by allowing unemployment to soar and reducing public services.

As a result of what the credit rating industry did, between 28,000 and 50,000 babies in Sub-Saharan Africa will die this year.

5) International credit rating agencies, which were complicit in the making of this latest financial disaster, thought it perfectly in order to issue stern warning to governments that they must reduce public spending and impoverish the working classes or risk losing the trust of their investor colleagues, and their moves were welcomed warmly by governments and wanabee governments acting in happy complicity with the ruling financial classes.

6) Meanwhile, the credit rating industry is unfettered and is right now assigning corrupt credit ratings to new structured finance products, so that both they and the issuers of these products can make large profits until such time as the next bubble bursts.

You couldn’t make it up.  But capitalism did.

But perhaps there’s a crack in the façade.  Even Newsweek has noticed what’s going on and is complaining.

Why, I wonder, is the report on international credit rating corruption a headline in the Guardian, or the Mirror.  Where’s Jon Pilger when you need him?

Phil at AVPS brought this short article by Douglas Carswell to my attention. In it, Carswell claims that we don’t need to import the American revolution, but  “we need to complete the English one.” This seems to follow a line of thinking on the part of some academically aspiring members of parliament (and their liberal intelligentsia luvvies) wherein the Tories are the natural successors to the Levellers and Thomas Paine, and, in the reckoning of Daniel Hannan and David Cameron, Anthony Wedgwood Benn the younger.

It’s easy for the more urbane Conservatives to make such pretences. For example, religious tolerance, a key demand of the Agreement of the People, is a well-trodden path these days. Of course lurking behind the urbane exterior of the Conservative Party are those who would violate everything the Levellers asked for and would force their moral judgments down the throat of the people of this country. That is true from such decaying relics as Norman Tebbit all the way to David Davis or the Cornerstone Group of Family, Faith and Flag.

It was the conclusion of the Leveller Agitators ‘that  matters of religion and the ways of God’s worship are not at all entrusted by us to any human power’. So much for an established church! Will we be seeing proposals to abolish it from this incoming Tory government? Unlikely. Perhaps the abolition of the House of Lords? We managed it, on March 19th, 1649 – and the Levellers were in the vanguard of that decision. No? The execution of the monarch and dissolution of the monarchy? No I thought not – but again, the Levellers were to the front of such a demand.

So really the Conservatives can only lay claim to such radical heritage when it has been denuded of everything that made it radical to begin with. There is not a scholar alive who would claim that the Levellers, or even the Diggers, were radical through and through. Within the Leveller tradition, there were those who argued that English government should be based on the Bible, or natural law or ‘common right’ – and there were those argued against, but to predicate a Conservative-Leveller affinity on any of this is to ignore all the history in between.

In effect, it is to ignore the radical praxis of the Levellers during the English Revolution; a radical praxis, we should note, that was clearly recognized by the Army Grandees during the debates at Putney. “If you admit any man that hath a breath and being…why may not those men vote against all property? … Show me what you will stop at; wherein you will fence any man in a property by this rule.” Thus begetting the entire history of Tory opposition to the popular franchise, of Old (i.e. Tory) Corruption and so on down through the centuries.

At the time, Colonel Rainborough himself made an apposite remark. “Sir, I see that it is impossible to have liberty, but all property must be taken away…but I would fain known what the soldier hath fought for all this while? He hath fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him a perpetual slave.” Sexby was angrier still. “It seems now, except a man hath a fixed estate in this kingdom, he hath no right…I wonder we were so much deceived.” Despite its couching in terms of natural law, here are two sides – one showing its true regard for property and lack of regard for democracy, one showing its true regard for democracy against all comers.

This, I think, is a good idiom for the modern Conservatives – except it is the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats who now take on the role of the Grandees. What’s different, is that three hundred and fifty years later, the parties of the propertied classes have learned a trick or two about couching their intent. Hence we have the liberal intelligentsia confusing Tom Paine – one of the greatest English Radicals – and David Cameron. We have Dan Hannan, capitalist superhero, citing Tony Benn on local democracy.

Missing from each of these paeans to English historical heroes, however, is any mention of the propertied, material basis out of which real power grows. What do we hear about democratic checks on the wealthy? Only complaint!

In their book, “The Plan”, Douglas Carswell and Dan Hannan say, “The elites have altered in character and composition. The citizen is far less likely to be impacted by the decisions of dukes or bishops than by those of Nice or his local education authority.” And they are right – but it should be fairly obvious that they neglect to mention other instances of elites. More likely still than imposition by the elites of Nice or the LEA are impositions by local supermarkets and the concomitant corruption of our local planning laws – wilfully aided and abetted by both Labour and the Tories. And it bears mentioning that these new elites pull the old ones around them – dukes and bishops rub shoulders with the capitalist elites at benefits events, Oxbridge colleges and all sorts of venues.

Yet these new elites can have much greater effect than the old one. Mass unemployment, the devastation of whole regions, the decking out of towns and cities like garish prostitutes while the muscle and sinews of civil society that keep people (workers!) together are under attack from the most sophisticated industrial enterprise all the way back to the farms that ultimately sustain them. Neither Nice nor the LEA have much say here. Local government should be devolved – but the last time local government disagreed with the Tory consensus on letting the rich get richer while the poor remained poor, local government was eviscerated, centralised. And so everything done by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown with that power, the Tories have only themselves to blame.

If in truth the poorest he that is in England hath a live to live, as the greatest he, then in the modern era there flows from that all sorts of corollaries: the conditions of life, a productive job, a home, safety to live and bring up a family. And if that’s what the Tories are after, then I want to hear a little bit less about their comparison to the Levellers and a little bit more about how Thatcher, the icon of both Carswell and Hannan, fucked things up so bad – mass unemployment, rising homelessness, rising crime, rising inequality and so on ad infinitum. Talk about bad judgment – but then this is the same Dan Hannan who managed to miss the glaring racism at the Washington march against universal healthcare.

We won’t, of course. And in truth the opposition by the Right of the Tory Party to centralisation and bureaucracy is opportunistic. They oppose these things only insofar as these things hamper the growth of business – never mind the welfare of workers! Where huge government spending and excessive bureaucracy is conducive to business, the Right support it, either by letting it pass unremarked upon or by railing against it in word and going the other way in deed. Such as Thatcher and government spending.

Which, to bring us back to our starting point, is what this talk of the Levellers, Tom Paine amounts to (I’ve got to ask, what next?  The Jacobins? David Cameron on his love for Robespierre? Osborne on Lenin?) – a wily ploy, likely to fool those who want to be fooled, due to their total disillusion with New Labour, illusions which they should never have had to begin with. It’s unlikely to carry much weight with the average voter – but I suspect that such hollow claims will ring true in the hollow brains of the liberal commentariat. Pity.