Capitalist power conquers Labour

Labour’s original purpose was to overcome capitalist power. The reality is that capitalist power has overcome Labour.

Falling sterling & the suggested collapse of the Euro

Some have argued that the falling value of sterling will not have an inflationary effect. I do not believe this to be so because import led cost-push inflation is compatible with recession in the British economy.

It is sometimes argued that the Eurozone will collapse in the current economic crisis. Yes, it will come under severe strain, but two things will probably hold it together. First, there would be the will to avoid the political humiliation of being forced out of the zone. Second, departing the zone would be an economic disaster. National public debt for the leaver would be denominated in euros and would therefore inflate against the ‘new currency’, while the whole population would hold euros in the transition period to make a gain at the time the ‘new currency’ floated free of the euro.

The Liberal Democrats offer no solution

Some have argued that progressive politics, briefly defined as personal freedoms protected and rampant capitalism curtailed, could be carried forward by the Liberal Democrats. I do not think so.

The nub of the problem is this: New Labour has lurched to the right in attempt to deny the Tories anywhere to pitch their tent. For the Liberal Democrats to adopt progressive politics, they would have to place themselves to the left of Brown and Cameron. Such politics could never be imposed on the Liberal Democrats across the country where often the local party is a catch-all surrogate for protest or tactical voting Tories or Labourites.

Believing that the Liberal Democrats can become a consistently progressive party will only lead to disappointment.

Censorship of the net

It is a statement of the obvious that free expression is under attack when a self-styled Internet Watch Foundation can censor the web at will.

Many things have been wrong in the past decade, but one positive aspect has been a very real expansion of individual freedom especially for those with specialised sexual tastes. The net has allowed the more-or-less free exchange of information and the semi-autonomous creation of virtual communities. (I am speaking here of the exchange of sexual fantasy and portrayal of consensual activities, not of crimes such as the abuse of children which I believe are rightly the object of the criminal law)

We now live in an era where those in power fuel moral panics and seek to demonise unorthodox sexual fantasy, including images even remotely resembling it. They seek to transfer the understandable revulsion at child abuse into areas which have nothing to do with paedophilia. Fear is a means of controlling a society in crisis.

Brown is not moving leftwards

Against those who argue that New Labour’s response to the financial crisis of October 2008 has sifted the party leftwards.

Brown et al have moved to part nationalise financial capital in Britain, not because they are moving leftwards, but because they need to stave off a meltdown of British capitalism.

It is wrong to define left politics simply in terms of borrowing and spending. A polity moves leftwards when three things happen: first, a significant lessening of social and economic inequality; second, a strengthening democracy and working class power, and third, the power of capital and traditional elites are reduced.

None of these things are happening in Britain.

A dose of pain is needed?

Against the journalist Max Hastings who argues that a dose of hard government and pain, akin to that inflicted by Mrs Thatcher, should follow a probable Cameron victory at the next general election.

Mr Hasting casually talks about a British society which is pampered and unaccustomed to pain.

The truth is that since 1979 under Thatcher and her pupils Major, Blair and Brown many working people have been plunged into and never lifted out of pain: pawns in a flexible workforce, unaffordable housing only available on credit, insecurity over financing their education and retirement.

These, too, are the people who will suffer most in the current crisis.

If Mr Hasting believes that salvation can only occur through pain, then lets have an equality of suffering; an appropriation of the better off (for funds to invest in the collapsing economy) until their pain equals that of ordinary working people.

Totalitarian logic as a propaganda tool

The totalitarian minded Home Secretary deployed the same propaganda tool in her justification of the arrest of Green as with 42 day detention.

In the case of six week’s pre-charge incarceration, the argument was: “perhaps it’s not necessary now, but there are possible circumstances in the future which would render necessary this oppressive measure.”

In Green’s arrest, the argument became: “though the leaks in question do not threaten national security, repressive police action is required because there might be leaks in the future which do.”

Quite clearly the notion of the “pre-emptive strike” is now to be directed at the “enemy within.”

Two aspects of New Labour Authoritarianism

New Labour authoritarianism has two aspects.

First there is the restriction of individual rights against the state: enhanced police powers, longer pre-charge detention, identity cards, etc. The diminution in these rights means that when the individual or civic groups are in conflict with the state, the balance has been tipped further in favour of the state.

The second strand of authoritarianism limits the freedom of people in the private sphere: buying and selling sex, viewing internet pornography, further restrictions and punishments of drug taking.

Capitalist crisis and New Labour

That capitalism - left to its own devices at least - periodically causes economic crises has yet again been demonstrated. Also proved is that government will intervene to prevent in so far as it can economic collapse and the impoverishment of whole layers of society.

Yet the fact remains that bailing out the banks and attempts to re-mortgage Middle England represents only a shift in tactics and not of strategy for New Labour. In the absence of working class and progressive pressure (now totally lacking) there will be no shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of the worst off in society, nor will anything reign in the growing authoritarianism in Britain.

Community Service Order vests

Punishments (the stocks, ‘community pay-back’ bibs) which are devised with the direct intention - whether admitted or not - of public humiliation are always wrong. Their only purpose is to feed the sadistic impulses in ordinary people and thereby to provide a means for an unprincipled government to be seen to be doing something – however wrong and ineffective – against crime.

That petty criminals lack respect and self-esteem is obvious. To humiliate and belittle them more can only further alienate these people from society and stoke up crime.

What Darling should do

Chancellor Darling is not wrong to increase government debt in this recession in an attempt to increase the money supply and demand in the British economy because today unprecedented levels of private debt, secured against collapsing asset prices, threatens wide scale bankruptcy and destitution for working people interlinked with mass insolvency for companies.

However Darling also threatens to reboot the economy with the same virus which inflicted the recession in the first place, namely private debt for consumer spending. Would you advise a vulnerable, but still solvent, neighbour in the present climate to spend to the hilt or save for the stormy days ahead? Yet Darling’s VAT reduction prompts such people to spend.

Instead, Darling should consider two steps. One is to be far bolder in promoting immediate direct government investment in the economy for which we need a National Enterprise Board. Second, he must consider a huge devaluation in sterling (and yes some inflation) to lessen the amount of debt.

Censorship for teenagers

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The BNP membership list

The online publication of the full membership list of the BNP with addresses, comments and other contact details provides an unaccustomed level of precision in politics. Behind the lists of bland English surnames on the spreadsheet, we have a precise cartography of the purveyors of hate dotted across the country. Now in our hands is concrete proof of the small, yet significant, hold of organised fascism throughout Britain.

I did what everyone else did: I scoured the list for the places where I had lived in England and where my family and friends live. Though necessary - the left needs to know the identity of these people - there is something unpleasant in this kind of voyeurism. The snooping resembles the searches in Eastern Europe to discover which neighbours, colleagues and acquaintances were informers. Vile though the ideas and purposes of these British fascists certainly are, we are nonetheless invading the privacy of neighbours who have personally done us no harm.

The key issue, though, is clear. The information is now in the public domain and the left needs it in the struggle against fascism.

Economic Crisis in Britain

Newspaper commentators make a good job of explaining the current economic crisis, but they fail, naturally enough, to connect their explanations into a class analysis.

Even a reduction of ten percent of UK output would not of itself cause very much hardship in Britain if income and wealth were not so unequally distributed. Only by understanding working class debt can the dimensions of socio-economic crisis can be grasped.

New Labour presided over a regime in which capital flowed into Britain, bolstering the value of sterling, to fund working class spending. The houses, cars, etc. were paid for only in part through wages, but, thanks to credit, the disposable income was much higher. One effect of this high expenditure was to drive up house prices leading many to re-mortgage in order to fund further expenditure, which in turn drove up house prices further.

The boom ended when finance capital saw the value of its security (the house, earning potential of the worker) could not guarantee the credit advanced. By the autumn of 2008 the withdrawal of credit (its sterling value secured by the tax payer through bank bailouts) led to a Britain characterised by recession, growing unemployment and falling house prices. Workers face mortgages and other credit bills they can’t pay as their income and assets decline. The end of the road is re-possession and destitution.

Let us be clear: today and in the coming years many working people have, and will continue to have, absolutely nothing, or less than nothing. How is any of this the outcome of Blair’s stakeholder society?

Credit for consumption makes little sense unless you believe that your income will keep on rising. The myth of eternal economic growth was peddled by New Labour in the 90s and early 2000s who argued that a flexible workforce and low wages were boosting the economy. What in fact was boosting Britain just as much was the inflow of capital to finance consumer credit. Two illusions of wealth were rising house prices and cheap holidays; Mediterranean holidays paid for by an overvalued pound caused by the purchase of sterling to lend to consumers. (Buying property at home and abroad along with foreign holiday were the topics of endless TV programmes ‘Brits abroad’ and the like)

Blair pulled it off for a while. Profits rose and capital had the additional ability to secure interest from workers as they bought their houses and partied on credit. For all but the poorest in Britain it seemed as if the country were booming. Everything could be had on the ‘never-never’ housing, education, holidays and through PFI even hospitals and the London Underground.

The Glenrothes by-election in Scotland

Labour’s success in the Glenrothes by-election signals a profound change in the configuration of British politics.

The summer of 2008 marked the nadir of the collapse of the New Labour coalition which came to office in 1997. I earlier analysed the death of that coalition in the following piece:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=d88xqxn_141dgqxtxhh&hl=en_GB

By the summer of 2008 Labour had relinquished much of its working class support, not simply on account of Brown’s continued focus on the concerns of Middle England, but because of hostile economic measures which directly impacted on the working class: removal of the ten pence tax band and inaction in the face of rising fuel bills and corporate profits. Across the working class the question was posed: what does New Labour stand for? Labour support plummeted and votes dissipated in all directions. The low point was another Scottish by-election, Glasgow East, lost in July to the SNP.

The financial crisis of October 2008, ushering in recession, altered the pieces on the chessboard. Brown after his habitual dithering rose to the occasion and used public money to nationalise banking debt and reliquidify finance capital in order to prevent a financial meltdown, an act taken to bolster capitalism and in the immediate interest of all social classes.

Two consequences result. First, in the face of recession, rising unemployment and repossessions, the working class is moving in a pro-Labour direction for self-protection, though whether Labour will offer more than cold comfort is debatable. For vulnerable working people gambling with dandy Cameron in England or Salmond in Scotland is now less of an option. Hence Brown’s success in the Glenrothes election.

Second, the perception that the London government could ‘solve’ the banking crisis undercut the nationalism of the SNP. In the ongoing identification battle of Scotland whether a nation in its own right or a sub-unit of a greater Britain, it was the latter that was strengthen against the former. Hence Brown’s success in the Glenrothes election.

That Brown prevented a meltdown of support in the working class does not mean that he has yet convinced Middle England to vote for him over Cameron in 2010. Much depends on how Cameron re-orients his propaganda in the next two years of recession.

Brown, New Labour and the Banking Crisis

It is far easier to comment on the underlying structures of society than it is to predict the consequences of a crisis in the system.

The current disintegration of world banking is the most significant event in the history of capitalism since the collapse of historical communism in 1989. While 2008 may well be as influential as 1929 in reshaping the cartography of capitalism, one myth peddled by some on the left needs knocking down. A financial collapse, with whole layers of the population losing their savings and pensions, would do nothing to promote socialism; indeed, apart from being painful and heralding in bottomless recession, such a crisis would release the political forces of the nascent far right across Europe, just as it did in the 1930s.

Though complex, the basis of the current crisis is clear. Banks, as a consequence of lax regulation, lent money in return for dodgy securities; their lending produced a credit boom whose deceptive glow was the allure of first Thatcherism and then New Labour. Blair and Brown from 1994 onwards exchanged Labour’s social democracy for that gloss and so brought us down the road to where we are now.

That said, Brown’s resolute decision to acquire the power to part-nationalise British banks is a welcome and decisive measure to deal with the problem even though tougher restrictions could have been imposed. Chalking up this success (supposing it is successful) may save Brown from the potential meltdown awaiting both him and New Labour in 2010.

Gordon Brown: his personal failure

Whatever the content of Gordon Brown’s character and mutterings in private, he remains a doubly failed politician. First, he has failed in the obvious sense that he is now leading New Labour to a seeming electoral obliteration in 2010. Second, as junior partner and ‘yes man’ to Blair’s for a decade, he nodded in agreement inter alia for the Iraq War, faith schools, privatisation and benefit cuts. In 2008 he cannot get off the tiger he has been riding.

New Labour faces two years of purposelessness and powerlessness, and with active membership of the party having haemorrhaged, a new leader could only emerge from shuffling the cards at the top. The one manoeuvre that might save the Labour Party, unlikely but still possible, would be a sudden conversation to, and rush to implement, proportional representation for Westminster Elections.

Die Linke in Germany: a case for optimism?

I have been overwhelming pessimistic about the prospects for the left in Britain, seeing the implosion of New Labour resulting in either depoliticisation or else the strengthening of parties to the right of New Labour. George Galloway, Tommy Sheridan and the SWP together serve to show only the intellectual poverty, self-marginalisation and irrelevance of the left in Britain today.

Though no expert on German politics, I have been impressed with the recent growth of the Die Linke and their chalking up of electoral success across Germany. A few brief words of background.

By 1990 the former ruling party of Eastern Germany had cleansed itself of its Stalinist leaders and was largely a party led by former East German dissidents, such as the writers Stefan Heym and Christa Wolf. Rechristened the PDS (the party of democratic socialism), it scored a miserable 2.4 percent in the 1990 all-German national elections. That figure rose to 4.4 (1994) and 5,1 (1998) before falling back to 4.4 percent in 2002. Throughout this period the PDS vote came almost exclusively from the territories of the former East Germany where in regional elections the party was a major player.

In July 2005 the party formed an electoral alliance with dissident left-wing SDP members led by Oskar Lafontaine and some west German trade unionists, creating a new party Die Linke. In the national elections of that year the party scored 8.7 percent of the vote. The party also entered the western regional parliament in Bremen. By 2008 it has also entered the western regional federal parliaments in Lower Saxony, Hessen and Hamburg. Any attempt to see Die Linke as merely Stalinist old-timers from the former East Germany is clearly no longer valid.

It seems to me that the experience of Germany is well worth studying by people attempting to rebuild a British left. The policies of Die Linke in English can be seen in the link below.

http://die-linke.de/fileadmin/download/international/programmatic_points.pdf

A short existential comment

When you think about it, our life logically consists of three parts:

•what you are doing right now (i.e. looking at a computer screen)
•your memories from the past, partial, selective and decaying.
•your thoughts about what you will, won’t or might do in the future.

As we get older, though, our memories of the past increase while our futures are inevitably on a steady countdown to zero. That thought has from time to time propelled me to tap away at the keyboard.

Gordon Brown: a failure

Gordon Brown always liked to present himself as the man of substance behind the glitzy Tony Blair. However as prime minister in the last twelve months he has revealed only weakness.

First, he dithered and then lied over his reasons for not holding a general election, making him look cheap in the public eye.

Second, the ten pence band tax fiasco destroyed any image he retained of being a friend of the working class.

Third, his stubborn instance in pushing through 42-day tore to shreds any support he had amongst the liberal left.

Brown was crowned leader in 2007 without election because around 95%of Labour MPs endorsed him. Brown’s failing, therefore, are not his alone, but those of the whole New Labour apparatus.