The world may have changed since the 1980s but there is something static and stubborn in the mentality of those leading Exeter Labour Party.
Three decades ago, in the 1980s, when the Thatcher Tory government had begun the process of impoverishing working people, there was, then as now, a “Devon against the Cuts.” Activists back then heard Chester Long, the then leader of Exeter Labour Party, yelling at them that doing anything apart from polite official moaning about the cuts would be merely “tokenism” and “gesture politics.” And today, we hear exactly the same language from the current leaders of Exeter Labour Party. Anything anybody wants the Labour Party to do is dismissed with the same words. These rote phrases of dismissal, first taught to them while junior councillors under the tutelage of Chester Long, are as meaningful as a set chess move played in each game irrespective of the configuration of pieces on the board.
The dinosaurs of Exeter Labour Party would be on stronger ground if they said the following: “We will do what we can within the law inside the council chamber to limit the cuts and their effects. That will amount to very little, but that is all we will do.” Of course that is a pessimistic message, but after the Blair/Brown governments, such a Labour response would be almost revolutionary.
Labour has spent the years since 1994 promoting market fundamentalism, so it is utterly ill-equipped now in the 2010s to be an effective vehicle in opposing public sector cuts under the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition.
Add into that the dinosaurs of Exeter Labour Party, whose political goals do not extend beyond being seat-warmers on the benches of Exeter City Council, and we see just how little one can expect from them – not even token gestures it would seem.
The main job for the left is to mobilise people and fight the attacks on working people. The second task – either from inside the Labour party or out – is to investigate the facts and then show to people the shortcomings of these Labour leaders.
5 April 2014
A police spy in Exeter in the late 1980s
In the second half of the 1980s, the people involved in Devon Labour Briefing met regularly in our house in Exeter. There was plenty of planning to do preparing for Labour Party meetings; attempts to expel me and two of my colleagues from the Labour Party had required court action; and there was a perennial need to discuss politics. Into one such meeting came a new alleged supporter of Briefing, a young man in his late twenties, fit but prematurely balding and overflowing with enthusiasm. My clearest memory of him was his squatting under the window in our front room and trying to chat with everybody present.
Before the start of the meeting, I had a short chat with him. Where had he heard of Devon Labour Briefing? Well, he had bought our magazine in a town bookshop, had become overwhelmed with interest, and so had decided to come along. Great! No, he was not a member of the Labour Party yet, but was very interested in joining. How exactly he had got hold of my address was left unsaid, but of course he was welcome to come in and meet the group.
I did not denounce him to the meeting because, although I thought he was a police spy, I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure at that point. I went out into the kitchen with a senior Briefing colleague and I discovered that we both had the same opinion. The last thing we wanted to do was insult someone wrongly who might go on to join us and boost the strength of the group. My knowing that he was probably a police spy allowed the tables to be turned at least half way: we could observe him, too.
I can’t now recall the flow of discussion in the meeting, but I do remember thinking about him during the meeting. In fact there was very little reason for concern: nothing that we did was illegal and most of our actions and pronouncements were in the public domain anyway. He could report what he liked to his superiors; and I supposed that he had only been sent along because there was little worthwhile undercover work to do in the south-west of England. How long would his infiltration last? What would happen if he were denounced? The danger, it seemed to me, was not what he would do in the group, but how to handle the fact that he was there. Should we state publicly the fact that Briefing had been infiltrated. What were the dangers involved in doing so?
If we published the information in Briefing, the news would spread immediately to Exeter Labour Party. For the right-wing Labourites who were tryring to expel Briefing supporters from the party the fact that the police were interested in Briefing would be a publicity coup. “Ah,” they would say, “Look, these Briefing people don’t just cause us problems, but they are criminals. Why else would the police worry about them?” I didn't see any advantage in letting that happen. The news would hardly help Briefing internally, either. By the mid 1980s Briefing had recruited supporters among Exeter University staff and other professionals, mostly in the education sector. I had always detected in many of them a desire for respectability, and telling them about police infiltrators might give them grounds for moving away from Briefing.
But there was another reason, too, for keeping all this quiet. Discussion of police infiltration, spying and surveillance in small close-knit groups often becomes a fascinating topic for its members and can lead to all types of paranoia and silliness. The focus of Briefing had to be our own survival in the Labour Party and our continued promotion of the issues that mattered. Getting excited about spying and police infiltration was a distraction.
A few years earlier a supporter of Briefing, who was not in Exeter Labour Party on the grounds that he was a member of the Party elsewhere, had offered to arrange to put one particular right-wing Labour opponent of ours in hospital “if it was useful.” I had heard first-hand accounts of his work with violence and disapproved strongly. We stuck firmly to the view that in the struggle inside Exeter Labour Party, we would not be the first to use violence.
Now it occurred to me that if anyone associated with Briefing in the past had been a police agent, it would have been that practitioner of violence himself. Had we accepted his poisoned ‘invitation,’ we might well have been entrapped. Additionally, if we had possessed a department which concerned itself with violence and other forms of illegality, this current infiltration by police would have caused a problem. The end result would have been that everything we did became concerned with undercover activities with the result that our political purposes would have suffered under the weight of such distractions.
At the end of the meeting the police spy expressed his continued interest in Briefing and asked whether we had any political literature for him to read. Genuine new recruits need it pushed down their throats. I had duplicates of nearly everything we had published and I handed them to him. He offered to pay for them, but I refused the money, telling him he could return them at a future meeting. Surely, he saw the importance of saving trees! Quite obviously, he had been told to pay for anything he took away, so was quite put out by my refusal to accept money.
A few days later the postman delivered a large A4 envelope containing all the propaganda material I had given him. Everything was in order and neatly clipped together. Inside the envelope was a scribbled note saying that he was no longer interested in Briefing. I have to admit that I felt a little let down because we hadn't warranted a more serious police investigation.
A week or so afterwards, I was walking down Exeter High Street when coming towards me was the young police spy. I put on my friendliest smile and greeted in him the warmest terms, giving every indication that I wanted to speak to him. He abruptly told me that he was in a hurry and almost ran away.
The 1980s were a time when the Thatcher government were interested in curtailing the rights of trades unions and restricting the powers of left-leaning local councils. They had little interest in attempting to control and repress the rest of civil society; that had to wait for the arrival of New Labour. No doubt, had that meeting in my house taken place twenty years later, FIT police officers would be openly filming everybody attending. But in those days we didn't see ahead to what our right-wing opponents in the Labour Party would do when in office.
2 March 2014
Religious censorship in British public examinations
The British government endorses the religious censorship of public examinations
One disturbing development in Britain today is the collusion of the government (now the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition, but previously New Labour as well) in permitting religious bigotry to trump equality and universal standards.
It is bad enough that children, at state expense, can be channelled into schools which propagate religious bigotry, but worse that examination boards, with government consent, allow public examinations in religious schools to be censored on religious grounds. What happens is simply that some questions - the answers to which conflict with religious dogma - are blacked out. Such religious censorship (1) restricts examinee choice and makes what purports to be a public examination different for candidates in religious schools, and (2) acts as an utterly indefensible form of censorship for teenagers, cutting them off from public knowledge.
In lending its weight to religious censorship, the British government is yet again turning its back on universal secular values. Fear of confronting organised religion is obviously one factor, but much more important is the alliance both New Labour and the Coalition have forged with organised conservative religion in deny young people knowledge and psychologically imprisoning them in ethnically divided so-called communities run by traditional authority. The divided, ignorant and unfree are easier to oppress.
One disturbing development in Britain today is the collusion of the government (now the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition, but previously New Labour as well) in permitting religious bigotry to trump equality and universal standards.
It is bad enough that children, at state expense, can be channelled into schools which propagate religious bigotry, but worse that examination boards, with government consent, allow public examinations in religious schools to be censored on religious grounds. What happens is simply that some questions - the answers to which conflict with religious dogma - are blacked out. Such religious censorship (1) restricts examinee choice and makes what purports to be a public examination different for candidates in religious schools, and (2) acts as an utterly indefensible form of censorship for teenagers, cutting them off from public knowledge.
In lending its weight to religious censorship, the British government is yet again turning its back on universal secular values. Fear of confronting organised religion is obviously one factor, but much more important is the alliance both New Labour and the Coalition have forged with organised conservative religion in deny young people knowledge and psychologically imprisoning them in ethnically divided so-called communities run by traditional authority. The divided, ignorant and unfree are easier to oppress.
1 February 2014
Geworfenheit: an inevitable aspect of human existence
Geworfenheit is a concept not only of use in social theory and philosophy, but can be used to express personal experience.
Geworfenheit, a term used by Martin Heidegger, can be translated into English by the rather cumbersome expression having-been-thrown-ness. It is used to describe an obvious and inevitable feature of human existence, namely that of finding ourselves in already pre-created situations. One powerful example of Geworfenheit is the first act of self-consciousness of a child who, at the point of thinking, already finds itself in a particular place and time, has a language, ideas in its head, relationships to other people, etc.
Three points should be made to clarify the meaning and implications of Geworfenheit. First, every aspect of the world that we interrelate with is already pre-articulated when we encounter it, from the computer technology we use, the language we speak and write, the ideas we think. Even if we rebel, we rebel in a way that has already been articulated by others, so we are thrown into a stream of already-existing rebellious behaviour. Second, the human subject cannot be conceptualised independently from his or her environment: what we are is the summation of our acts and thoughts which are inseparable from the situations in which we have lived our lives. And finally, though we are thrown into and are embedded in the world, the notion of Geworfenheit implies nothing about whether we have free-will or not, at least in the sense of my being able choose whether to scratch my nose or my ear.
The concept of Geworfenheit chimes in well with Marx's famous remark in the The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”
Geworfenheit has an obvious affinity with the sociological concept of socialisation in which an individual is socialised into forms of behaviour by the family, education system, etc. Yet the subtle conceptual difference with Geworfenheit can be see by taking the negative form of the socialised individual - that of an “unsocialised” person. That tends to suggest that a person has never encountered social situations, or more likely that he or she has, but has somehow been socialised incorrectly. The idea behind Geworfenheit avoids this difficulty by asserting that the human being is, by virtue of being human, thrown into the world and that the idea of non-socialisation has no meaning.
Geworfenheit, while implying nothing about free will, contains an important methodological point in the study of human beings, namely that it makes no sense to study the human subject and its thought as existing prior to, or separate from, the world, as the whole tradition of philosophy from Descartes onwards does. We are of the world and embedded in it - and it is from there that we must start, and that is true not just in social theory and philosophy, but it is also valid for literary theory, memoir writing and all aspects of personal experience.
Geworfenheit, a term used by Martin Heidegger, can be translated into English by the rather cumbersome expression having-been-thrown-ness. It is used to describe an obvious and inevitable feature of human existence, namely that of finding ourselves in already pre-created situations. One powerful example of Geworfenheit is the first act of self-consciousness of a child who, at the point of thinking, already finds itself in a particular place and time, has a language, ideas in its head, relationships to other people, etc.
Three points should be made to clarify the meaning and implications of Geworfenheit. First, every aspect of the world that we interrelate with is already pre-articulated when we encounter it, from the computer technology we use, the language we speak and write, the ideas we think. Even if we rebel, we rebel in a way that has already been articulated by others, so we are thrown into a stream of already-existing rebellious behaviour. Second, the human subject cannot be conceptualised independently from his or her environment: what we are is the summation of our acts and thoughts which are inseparable from the situations in which we have lived our lives. And finally, though we are thrown into and are embedded in the world, the notion of Geworfenheit implies nothing about whether we have free-will or not, at least in the sense of my being able choose whether to scratch my nose or my ear.
The concept of Geworfenheit chimes in well with Marx's famous remark in the The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”
Geworfenheit has an obvious affinity with the sociological concept of socialisation in which an individual is socialised into forms of behaviour by the family, education system, etc. Yet the subtle conceptual difference with Geworfenheit can be see by taking the negative form of the socialised individual - that of an “unsocialised” person. That tends to suggest that a person has never encountered social situations, or more likely that he or she has, but has somehow been socialised incorrectly. The idea behind Geworfenheit avoids this difficulty by asserting that the human being is, by virtue of being human, thrown into the world and that the idea of non-socialisation has no meaning.
Geworfenheit, while implying nothing about free will, contains an important methodological point in the study of human beings, namely that it makes no sense to study the human subject and its thought as existing prior to, or separate from, the world, as the whole tradition of philosophy from Descartes onwards does. We are of the world and embedded in it - and it is from there that we must start, and that is true not just in social theory and philosophy, but it is also valid for literary theory, memoir writing and all aspects of personal experience.
30 January 2014
Britain: the end of recession?
In Janury 2014 the British economy boasted 1.9% growth. What does this mean?
So the British economy has grown by 1.9%. Apparently, the recession following the financial crisis of 2008 is over, and economically the country now stands a shade short of where it was at the end of the boom of the early 2000s.
Marxists always feel happier and more confident when the economy crashes and sinks. But in a recession - now as in the early 1930s or 1980s - low commodity prices and labour costs mean that a point is reached when capital finds new investment opportunities and an upward spiral begins again.
But does the fact that the economy overall in monetary terms is 1.9% richer than it was a year ago mean that ordinary working people are 1.9% better off? Well, not if inequality is rising so that all, or a large part, of that increase just benefits the richest. Indeed, wealth at the top end, rather than trickling down, results in pushing up property and service prices to the detriment of ordinary people.
We have reached a point in the advanced capitalist countries where the overriding problem is not the total amount of wealth in the society, but its unequal distribution and miserable usage. Yet sadly there is no serious socialist project to even highlight the problem let alone rectify it.
So the British economy has grown by 1.9%. Apparently, the recession following the financial crisis of 2008 is over, and economically the country now stands a shade short of where it was at the end of the boom of the early 2000s.
Marxists always feel happier and more confident when the economy crashes and sinks. But in a recession - now as in the early 1930s or 1980s - low commodity prices and labour costs mean that a point is reached when capital finds new investment opportunities and an upward spiral begins again.
But does the fact that the economy overall in monetary terms is 1.9% richer than it was a year ago mean that ordinary working people are 1.9% better off? Well, not if inequality is rising so that all, or a large part, of that increase just benefits the richest. Indeed, wealth at the top end, rather than trickling down, results in pushing up property and service prices to the detriment of ordinary people.
We have reached a point in the advanced capitalist countries where the overriding problem is not the total amount of wealth in the society, but its unequal distribution and miserable usage. Yet sadly there is no serious socialist project to even highlight the problem let alone rectify it.
1 December 2013
Some truisms regarding the police
Here are a couple of points about the police which tend never change.
The police, even in the most liberal state, are the means by which the state physically forces its will onto human bodies. They may carry out subsidiary functions, such as helping children cross the road, but that does not contradict their main role in society.
Police forces everywhere attract authoritarian personality types and attempt to expand their remit. Everywhere and always the police ask for more powers.
In a healthy liberal democracy (which currently Britain is not), government, legislatures, the courts and public opinion together prevent the otherwise inevitable slide into an authoritarian state riddled with police excesses and corruption.
The police can and should have their institutional say although it is widely known in advance what the police will say. They always want more powers, and if they get them they want more. It is up to the people to say no.
The police, even in the most liberal state, are the means by which the state physically forces its will onto human bodies. They may carry out subsidiary functions, such as helping children cross the road, but that does not contradict their main role in society.
Police forces everywhere attract authoritarian personality types and attempt to expand their remit. Everywhere and always the police ask for more powers.
In a healthy liberal democracy (which currently Britain is not), government, legislatures, the courts and public opinion together prevent the otherwise inevitable slide into an authoritarian state riddled with police excesses and corruption.
The police can and should have their institutional say although it is widely known in advance what the police will say. They always want more powers, and if they get them they want more. It is up to the people to say no.
2 October 2013
Electronic Spying: its meaning in Britain
The electronic communications of every political activist and commentator in Britain are probably monitored by the state.
The documents made available to the world in the summer of 2013 by the whistleblower, Philip Snowden, have provided proof that the American NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, have in tandem attempted to harvest every single morsel of electronic communication that they can. To that end, they have inter alia tapped into undersea cables, compelled internet providers to hand over the content of their servers and worked with the commercial providers of encryption to insert so-called backdoors into their software.
Many claim that we knew all this already. I do not believe this is so: we might have believed that the surveillance state had access to our electronic communication, but we did not know the ubiquity of the surveillance, nor the extent to which the US corporations were partners in the programme.
Apologists claim that, even if multiple petabytes of information are seized and stored, over 99.9 percent is of no interest to the security apparatus and is thus as confidential in practice as it would have been if it had never been seized. Yet while it is indeed true that the vast majority of electronic communication is of no interest, the point needs to be made that the state has access to a great deal of information which it should not have access to and in which it is highly interested.
If in the the 1980s I had got up and said that the Metropolitan police had planted over one hundred spies into political and other civil organisations in Britain, spies who would embed themselves into the community with false identities for decades, I would have been described as paranoiac. Yet this kind of infiltration - outdoing the Stasi of the former East Germany - is now a proven fact, with each deployed officer costing around a quarter of million pounds a year.
Let me take another example of the extent of state surveillance of people. Today, everyone who attends a political demonstration or meeting in Britain risks being photographed by so-called Forward Intelligence police and having their names entered into a database of what are termed “domestic political extremists.” No doubt, the thousands of people on these lists are divided into categories: those who merely criticise the regime in Britain in words, those who organise, those who engage in nonviolent direct action of various kinds, and so on.
Philip Snowden, a technician, has been able to tell us what and how electronic communication is intercepted and harvested. We still don’t know how it is processed and what is done with it. But it is more than highly likely that, as the state spends billions on monitoring political activists and commentators, police and security agents will select, identify, categorise and keep all electronic communications among those who are involved in, or comment on, political affairs.
Largely, the political left have resigned themselves to surveillance. We use Facebook and other social media sites and we don’t encrypt our email. Even if the security officers have access to all we say, our online searches, etc. we just shrug our shoulders. Should we?
The documents made available to the world in the summer of 2013 by the whistleblower, Philip Snowden, have provided proof that the American NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, have in tandem attempted to harvest every single morsel of electronic communication that they can. To that end, they have inter alia tapped into undersea cables, compelled internet providers to hand over the content of their servers and worked with the commercial providers of encryption to insert so-called backdoors into their software.
Many claim that we knew all this already. I do not believe this is so: we might have believed that the surveillance state had access to our electronic communication, but we did not know the ubiquity of the surveillance, nor the extent to which the US corporations were partners in the programme.
Apologists claim that, even if multiple petabytes of information are seized and stored, over 99.9 percent is of no interest to the security apparatus and is thus as confidential in practice as it would have been if it had never been seized. Yet while it is indeed true that the vast majority of electronic communication is of no interest, the point needs to be made that the state has access to a great deal of information which it should not have access to and in which it is highly interested.
If in the the 1980s I had got up and said that the Metropolitan police had planted over one hundred spies into political and other civil organisations in Britain, spies who would embed themselves into the community with false identities for decades, I would have been described as paranoiac. Yet this kind of infiltration - outdoing the Stasi of the former East Germany - is now a proven fact, with each deployed officer costing around a quarter of million pounds a year.
Let me take another example of the extent of state surveillance of people. Today, everyone who attends a political demonstration or meeting in Britain risks being photographed by so-called Forward Intelligence police and having their names entered into a database of what are termed “domestic political extremists.” No doubt, the thousands of people on these lists are divided into categories: those who merely criticise the regime in Britain in words, those who organise, those who engage in nonviolent direct action of various kinds, and so on.
Philip Snowden, a technician, has been able to tell us what and how electronic communication is intercepted and harvested. We still don’t know how it is processed and what is done with it. But it is more than highly likely that, as the state spends billions on monitoring political activists and commentators, police and security agents will select, identify, categorise and keep all electronic communications among those who are involved in, or comment on, political affairs.
Largely, the political left have resigned themselves to surveillance. We use Facebook and other social media sites and we don’t encrypt our email. Even if the security officers have access to all we say, our online searches, etc. we just shrug our shoulders. Should we?
1 October 2013
The Myth of Marxist Ethics
Marx's achievement was in constructing a new way of understanding and interpreting history, not in the discovering a new ethics.
I would argue that there is no such thing – any more than there is a Newtonian ethics or Freudian ethics.
Marx’s achievement was the discovery of historical materialism: i.e. the development of conceptual tools which help us comprehend human history. And Marx himself was of course the first to undertake such studies within historical materialism. The construction of statements of fact which result from these studies cannot of themselves create ‘ought’ value statements.
Now of course Marx himself was passionately associated with a particular politics: namely that of moving towards a communist society, an ideal which was already formulated in Enlightenment thinking. Yet there is no theoretical originality in this: all Marx did was to take the results of his sociological analysis and argue: if communism is to be achieved then X, Y and Z ought to be done and happily for him what ought to be done was what he thought was actually happening in nineteenth century society. Hence Marxist politics was born, which involved an interesting interrelation between what is and what ought to be done.
Marxist politics has however re-entered historical materialism in one sense: the choice of value-laden terminology to describe factual states of affairs. For instance, the more value neutral concept extraction of surplus value is referred to by the value-laden term exploitation, implying that the extraction of surplus value, a fact of capitalism, is morally wrong.
I would argue that there is no such thing – any more than there is a Newtonian ethics or Freudian ethics.
Marx’s achievement was the discovery of historical materialism: i.e. the development of conceptual tools which help us comprehend human history. And Marx himself was of course the first to undertake such studies within historical materialism. The construction of statements of fact which result from these studies cannot of themselves create ‘ought’ value statements.
Now of course Marx himself was passionately associated with a particular politics: namely that of moving towards a communist society, an ideal which was already formulated in Enlightenment thinking. Yet there is no theoretical originality in this: all Marx did was to take the results of his sociological analysis and argue: if communism is to be achieved then X, Y and Z ought to be done and happily for him what ought to be done was what he thought was actually happening in nineteenth century society. Hence Marxist politics was born, which involved an interesting interrelation between what is and what ought to be done.
Marxist politics has however re-entered historical materialism in one sense: the choice of value-laden terminology to describe factual states of affairs. For instance, the more value neutral concept extraction of surplus value is referred to by the value-laden term exploitation, implying that the extraction of surplus value, a fact of capitalism, is morally wrong.
24 September 2013
The Master of the Day of Judgment by Leo Perutz
A short but gripping mystery set in the Vienna of Franz-Jozef
This book (148 pages) first published in Austria in 1921, is still a wonderful short read. Perutz weaves a beautifully written mystery story, set among the well-to-do of pre-First World War Austria. At first, one is put of by the comedy and strangeness of manners of aristocratic society in 1909, but the poetry of the book soon takes over.
The focus of the novel is the explanation for a string of suicides and the accusation that the narrator, a wealthy army officer, is morally responsible for one of them. Towards the middle of the book it is hard to believe that there is a rational explanation, but Perutz provides one in the final chapter.
Despite the magic of the text, I was struck by the emptiness of the narrator of the story, Baron von Yosch. Yet, if the explanation of the suicides is the first 'sting-in-the-tail,' the editor's postscript is the second. The narrator is laid bare. Do not on any account read the last page first.
Three nights of in-bed late night reading will finish this novel of psychological analysis, gruesome ingenuity and metaphysical horrors.
PERUTZ, Leo - The Master of the Day of Judgment, Harvill 1994
This book (148 pages) first published in Austria in 1921, is still a wonderful short read. Perutz weaves a beautifully written mystery story, set among the well-to-do of pre-First World War Austria. At first, one is put of by the comedy and strangeness of manners of aristocratic society in 1909, but the poetry of the book soon takes over.
The focus of the novel is the explanation for a string of suicides and the accusation that the narrator, a wealthy army officer, is morally responsible for one of them. Towards the middle of the book it is hard to believe that there is a rational explanation, but Perutz provides one in the final chapter.
Despite the magic of the text, I was struck by the emptiness of the narrator of the story, Baron von Yosch. Yet, if the explanation of the suicides is the first 'sting-in-the-tail,' the editor's postscript is the second. The narrator is laid bare. Do not on any account read the last page first.
Three nights of in-bed late night reading will finish this novel of psychological analysis, gruesome ingenuity and metaphysical horrors.
PERUTZ, Leo - The Master of the Day of Judgment, Harvill 1994
23 September 2013
German Federal Elections 2013
Andrea Merkel only continues in office after the September 2013 German federal elections because of disunity among the left of centre.
So Angela Merkel has won the German elections by a landslide – or so the media are telling us. It is indeed true that Merkel’s CDU – along with its Bavarian sister party the CSU – have won just under 42 percent of the vote. But under Germany’s system of proportional representation, they are five seats short of an overall majority.
Merkel’s liberal coalition partner, the FDP, failed to re-enter parliament, and a newly formed right-wing eurosceptic party also just failed to reach the five percent threshold, thus leaving Merkel’s party as the only party of the right in the Bundestag.
The SPD scored a miserable 26 percent of the vote, aping Labour’s 2010 General Election performance. The Left Party picked up just under nine percent, losing a quarter of its percentage vote compared with 2009, but taking third place, and pushing the Greens (8,5%) into fourth.
Yet look at the maths. Merkel has 311 seats in the Bundestag. The SPD, Left Party and the Greens together have 319, and seen like that the left side has actually won, yet the Left Party’s commitment to socialist policies makes them untouchable for the SPD and Greens.
So Merkel will carry on - either with a minority administration or with the SPD as its junior coalition partner.
So Angela Merkel has won the German elections by a landslide – or so the media are telling us. It is indeed true that Merkel’s CDU – along with its Bavarian sister party the CSU – have won just under 42 percent of the vote. But under Germany’s system of proportional representation, they are five seats short of an overall majority.
Merkel’s liberal coalition partner, the FDP, failed to re-enter parliament, and a newly formed right-wing eurosceptic party also just failed to reach the five percent threshold, thus leaving Merkel’s party as the only party of the right in the Bundestag.
The SPD scored a miserable 26 percent of the vote, aping Labour’s 2010 General Election performance. The Left Party picked up just under nine percent, losing a quarter of its percentage vote compared with 2009, but taking third place, and pushing the Greens (8,5%) into fourth.
Yet look at the maths. Merkel has 311 seats in the Bundestag. The SPD, Left Party and the Greens together have 319, and seen like that the left side has actually won, yet the Left Party’s commitment to socialist policies makes them untouchable for the SPD and Greens.
So Merkel will carry on - either with a minority administration or with the SPD as its junior coalition partner.
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