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Can a learning Labour define a new economics of the common good?

Labour, new economics, New Labour, Occupy Wall Street, on a high, open source No Responses »

Mar 202012

There’s a complex piece over at Al Jazeera at the moment on the subject of the worldwide Occupy movement and the new economics it may help to configure. Till now, Occupy has been generally perceived and criticised as an umbrella group of people who obviously know what they disagree with but find difficulty in saying what they’re in favour of.

Also, till now, Occupy has been seen as a mainly political statement of utter rejection of the more immoral sides of latterday economic practice, without offering concrete solutions or alternatives. But the article Al Jazeera published on the 9th of this month, and which can be found here, points us in a different direction completely. The thesis thus described appears to build on solid and pre-existing process as exemplified by the grand American IT corporations which have already cared to get involved with the ecosystems of open source software (the bold is mine):

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organisationsstresses that companies that work with Linux, such as IBM, “have given up the right to manage the projects they are paying for, and their competitors have immediate access to everything they do. It’s not IBM’s product”.

This, then, is the point I want to make: that even with shareholder companies allied with peer production, the community’s value creation is still at the core of the process, and that the entrepreneurial coalition, to a substantial degree, already follows this new logic – in which the community is primary and business secondary.

If gigantic corporations such as IBM can work out a way of keeping their shareholders onside whilst they work to create libre software, surely it cannot be beyond us to contemplate a society of the common good where that common good is sustained by empowered communities which can choose according to their own particular set of ethical values. From Al Jazeera once more:

[...] Occupy Wall Street set up working groups to find solutions to their physical needs. The economy was considered as a provisioning system (as explained in Marvin Brown’s wonderful book, Civilising the Economy), and it was the “citizens”, organised in these working groups, who decided which provisioning system was appropriate given their ethical values.

For example, organic farmers from Vermont provided free food to the campers, but this had a negative side effect: the local street vendors, generally poor immigrants, did not fare too well with everyone getting free food. The occupiers cared about the vendors and so they set up an Occupy Wall Street Vendor Project, which raised funds to buy food from the vendors.

Bingo: in one swoop, OWS created a well-functioning ethical economy that included a market dynamic, but that also functioned in harmony with the value system of the occupiers. What is crucial here is that it was the citizens who decided on the most appropriate provisioning system – and not the property and money owners in an economy divorced from ethical values.

As I pointed out in my own piece linked to above, the tools of large corporate behaviours can be useful or destructive: it all depends to what organisational purposes they are put and what values are employed to define their implementation. That so many large corporations psychopathically get it wrong doesn’t mean everyone who uses such tools of mass organisation will be tainted by the same behaviours.

Meanwhile, this observation, from the new blog Shifting Grounds, puts the neoliberals of this world firmly in their place:

An ideology that celebrates selfishness and denigrates the common good has been the moral and financial ruin of Britain.

As well as a great many other places around the world.

It may, then, now be the turn of open source strategies and their ilk to allow a protest movement with many relatively passive adherents in a wider society to build on a considerable corporate expertise proven over the a quarter of a century. The challenge, of course, is to find a way of interfacing the powerful with the needy – without losing our moral compasses.

New Labour failed to do the latter.

In the shadow of the moral outpourings of a discarded generation, quite another Labour must not.

Another learning Labour, that is.

What does “getting a grip” mean for us lefties?

in a hole, Labour, LabourList, left, left-wing blogging, left-wing politics, Lib Dems, neo-New Labour, New Labour, political parties, politicking, producer-consumers, Tony Blair, Tories, triangulation No Responses »

Mar 182012

Over at Labour List today, Sue argues we lefties should get a grip:

I don’t like the current Labour position on welfare, I’m almost constantly head-desking whenever they issue a press statement, I do realise they set a lot of these “reforms” up and I worry about the possibility of an election any time soon – they clearly couldn’t run drinkies-in-the-proverbial right now, but on the whole – on the whole - get a grip lefties.

Start defending our record. Accept the bits we got wrong and move on, but for goodness sake, anyone claiming “They’re all the same/Triangulation/They’re worse than the Tories/I’ll never vote Labour again” might want to ask themselves just how long they’d like to keep this cabinet of millionaires. And just how much we’re going to allow them to get wrong before we unite and fight.

It’s funny – or perverse; whenever someone argues we should jack in political parties I find myself beginning to disagree, but whenever someone comes to me saying the primary responsibility of us lefties is to unite … well, I really can’t help reacting rather negatively. Yes. I agree with Sue that we should get a grip – the question is who gets to get the grip and precisely on what.

Unable, in a first instance, to answer this question, I thought I’d carry out a thought experiment to see if that would help. A list of personal positives which I would be prepared to attribute to Labour:

when I came back to Britain in 2003, I was in a serious state of mental ill health – the NHS managed in the end to help put me back together again;
my children received a better education from the time they rejoined me in England than they almost certainly would have done in Spain had they stayed – they are now bilingual, the eldest is studying Mandarin Chinese and Russian at university, the middle one wants to go abroad to study film and the youngest is already considering proactively how she might get jobs once she is sixteen;
my wife regained confidence in herself and her own ability as a teacher due to the then relatively buoyant labour market – little by little, she has achieved a certain degree of stability and self-respect;
I have finally managed to get to a position where I can see I may be able to earn my living from writing via the Internet – something I dreamed of since 2002 and which would make my life entirely fulfilled if I achieve my goal;

These are all good, big and life-changing moments which allow me to see Labour – even New Labour – through a positive prism of perceptions. However, I have to say that at least one of them – my mental ill health – was in part due to the lies and obfuscations which surrounded the process leading up to the Iraq War.

I lost my faith, during that time, in much of what could be reasonably expected of party politicking – I still resist, for example, at a local grassroots CLP level, to get involved with active politics. In part I do feel it has something to do with this back story. A story of political innocence being taken advantage of by those who know how to manipulate sincere emotions for their own personal benefit.

So many big positives for me in a little under a decade of living under New Labour – even as the primary one which brought me back to Britain was the massive negative of a questionable and bloody political process.

If I, as a relatively unpractised leftie, do need to get a grip as Sue suggests, then I might be inclined – in the light of all the above – to suggest the grip I really need to get is over a political party which doesn’t know how to communicate; doesn’t understand that consultation is nowhere near a proper dialogue of equals; and is riven with the triangulatory instincts she blithely tells us to ignore.

Here, then, is where Los Indignados can teach us more than one lesson: in order to unite around positions and policy, you first have to agree on process and procedures. Without due agreement on the latter, no progress shall ever be sustainably made.

Do not, then, as a leftie who needs to get a grip, simply exhort me to hate the Tories and fight the good fight. I don’t want them to define how my politics will function any more than you want them to define how the country will function. And if we give up on truly empowering process and procedures before we’ve even really started, if we refuse to learn the lessons other groups and organisations springing up across the world can teach us, we shall remain anchored in a past that will become – by itself and not because of the Tories – evermore irrelevant, ineffective and ineffectual to a proactive and generally empowering producer-consumer society such as ours could become.

If the Tories manage to force us to limit our ambitions to creating a New Labour (II), they will have won a long-term political battle without us even having cared to engage. Just as the terrorists of 9/11 created a generation of fearful legislation and terrified citizens, so the Tories may yet achieve their goal of turning us lefties, those of us who supposedly need to get that grip of Sue’s, into a wearisome terracotta army of conservative instincts ready to continue implementing the philosophies which Tony Blair so carefully set up and entrapped us all with.

As a Lib Dem acquaintance of mine (yes, it’s possible for a leftie like me to have one) quite rightly said to me recently, the NHS bill we’re so desperate to get dropped had its foundations laid by New Labour in 2006′s National Health Service Act.

If we really want to get the current bill dropped, and I am sure we can all agree we do, we should surely also campaign to unravel the straitjacket of philosophies which Tony Blair was directly responsible for – and which have led to Lansley’s moment of awful glory.

Meanwhile, dear Sue, we should surely remember that “getting a grip” can just as easily mean subjugation as empowerment.

And remembering thus, act accordingly.

Trying to understand British aid

a con, Coalition, Coalition capitalism, Coalition economics, foreign aid, Ireland, Legal Aid, New Labour, NHS, PIGS No Responses »

Mar 182012

In response to a somewhat rambling post from myself, Paul pointed out the following:

No, it’s not true that 97% of British Aid goes to tax haven domiciled equity funds. CDC is not aid, but the government’s investment arm. Formed in 1948 (as Colonial Development Coporationn, hence the dropping of the full title), it has around 3bn invested at the moment worldwide and is a fund of funds. Sarah is certainly right to say that there are major governance problems with it, and for more detail read her submission to the parliamentary enquiry http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmintdev/writev/607/m01.htm

But CDC is small compared with overseas aid overall, the operational budget for which is roughly 10bn per year. This is managed properly, and increasingly (as it should be) via developing countries’ government bodies. It’s not perfect, of course, but it’s a lot better than is made out by the right wing press.

I hope CDC and the aid budget don’t get mixed up in people’s minds.

Yesterday, at #econ99, I certainly did get the impression that people believed there was essentially very little difference between British aid and what CDC were administering. Perhaps – as Paul clearly indicates – there are finer details which make an essential difference patent. But I still have, as yet, to clearly understand them.

And just to clarify the point I was also trying to make. Kathryn helpfully pointed me in the direction of this myth about donating aid:

Myth 4. ‘Aid is useless due to corruption in the governments who receive it’

The grain of truth:

Corruption is a big problem in many developing countries and it can sometimes lead to aid money being diverted from its intended purpose.

The full picture:

While corruption can lessen the impact of aid, it is important to understand that most aid money gets to its proper destination. This is especially true for money that is not given to a foreign government, but is instead directly spent on an aid project. Even taking corruption into account, you can realistically hope to greatly improve the lives of thousands of people through your donations, especially if you donate to programs which don’t involve any valuable goods for corrupt officials to divert. Moreover, if you are particularly concerned about the effects of corruption, then you can donate to programs which fight corruption in developing countries.

The point I was making wasn’t, however, that there is a big problem of corruption in developing countries. The point I was making was that people in developed donor countries were using instruments such as tax havens to administer government and other funds, many investors of which remained absolutely anonymous, to create massive infrastructure projects which benefited the corporations and funds involved to the long-term apparent detriment of the client countries:

firstly, because the funds refused to carry out sustainability and environmental impact studies – and even, in some cases, attempted to game the system (one example given was the recent construction of a huge coal-fired power station in a southern African state, whilst at the same time a small wind farm was constructed in order to allow an essentially fictitious trade in carbon emission offsets to take place; another example was a mine of some kind which paid zero corporation taxes due to its tax-havened nature and, instead, contributed a highly popular though particularly miserly donation to a local HIV hospital);
secondly, because of their legal figure and nature, these private equity funds exist for the lifetime of their donor projects – after this time, say five or ten years, they close down; all risk and liability is avoided; the investors withdraw their funds and profits to move on to the next project; and any issues with the essence of the project in question – pollution, quality of construction, injuries or deaths which take place in the succeeding years – then fall not on the initiators (ie the private equity funds – for they no longer exist) but on the governments of the corresponding nation states which end up having to pick up the tab for anything and everything which goes wrong;

So the problem – the problem I’m focussing on here at least – isn’t corrupt governments in foreign countries but entirely legal financial instruments which have polluted and invaded the developing global south for decades from investors in the developed world.

Investors who travel the globalised economies of the planet and own every piece of real estate they can.

Not only in the south but now in the Icelands, Greeces, Spains and Irelands of the north.

And so the circle comes full circle. Private industry has been paying off political parties since time immemorial. The results of New Labour’s compromises with such industry are now bearing full fruit. From the 2006 NHS act to PFI-funding exercises everywhere, the Tory-led Coalition is only putting into practice the philosophies which New Labour helped to properly enshrine in law and UK political culture.

As I grapple inexactly with the concepts of British aid, I begin to sense that the financial chicken comes home to roost. Whilst our own economies sustained an illusion of economic strength, we felt ourselves relatively safe from the self-interest of the rapacious tax-havened private equity funds. But now many of the developed world economies find points of reference and similar sadness to the global south, perhaps the time is coming when the development injustices apparently imposed on struggling democracies in the south will become part and parcel of our northern European mindsets: our English NHS, Legal Aid and education systems, welfare benefits, police services and a whole raft of other taken-for-granteds we used to believe we had a right to.

For this is nothing more nor less than the total financialisation of civic society.

And as we pay homage to the benefits of driving a world economy exclusively in terms of profit margins, 99.9 percent of us will become not richer in the least but evermore poorer because of these selfish and anti-human ways of seeing and doing.

Today is when we truly remember Labour’s "scaremongering" party election broadcast …

a con, New Labour, Orwell, PEB, Tories, YouTube No Responses »

Feb 012012

The owner of the YouTube channel I’ve embedded the video below from describes it as the “most scaremongering of all of New Labour’s election broadcasts”.

The election broadcast used a kind of Orwellian group of grey-suited state apparatchiks to frighten voters into voting for Labour. It talked about how the Tories would cut child tax credits and other benefits just weeks after getting into power. This clearly didn’t happen. And perhaps it never would have done. Even if they had won the election fair and square.

http://youtu.be/IiRhdzorfQA

But after the government decided tonight to ensure support was cut for cancer patients, can we honestly say with our hands on our hearts that the thesis outlined in the video was so very out of the trolley?

Labour got the timeframe wrong. It got the details wrong. But it didn’t get Tory instincts wrong.

Now did it?
____________________

Update to this post: today, the morning of the 2nd February, the Herald Scotland website has published this damning assessment of how the political class is either looking to recreate Dickensian Britain (the Tories), is right but relatively ineffectual (Labour) or is ending up being downright two-faced (the Lib Dems). As it so cogently summarises:

The true face of the Welfare Reform Bill is wheelchair users losing mobility benefits, terminally ill cancer patients being assessed for work and accident victims who have always worked being driven back on to basic means-tested benefits after a year. Thousands genuinely unable to work will be forced into unsuitable jobs or dire poverty. (In yesterday’s debate one Tory backwoodsman seriously described being sick or disabled as “a lifestyle choice”, to the righteous fury of Scots wheelchair-using MP Anne Begg.) These changes are being forced through without any evidence base to suggest that they will work at a time of lengthening dole queues with the long-term unemployed stuck at the back, furthest away from meaningful employment.

Well worth your time in its comprehensive description, criticism and deconstruction of the wider Tory strategy.

Ed is losing it on nationalism because New Labour lost its soul to Middle England

Alex Salmond, civic nationalism, Ed Miliband, in a hole, nationalism, New Labour, progressive beacon, progressives, Scottish independence No Responses »

Jan 312012

This is poorly judged:

Speaking in Glasgow, the Labour leader singled out the first minister’s claims last week that Scotland was a “progressive beacon” for the rest of the UK by implying that Salmond’s form of nationalism was reactionary and divisive.

“There is nothing progressive about a brand of politics which is based on dividing people with the same needs, living on this same small island,” Miliband said, in his first major speech on independence since Salmond set a referendum date for autumn 2014.

Claiming Salmond had no interest in the fate of pensioners in Liverpool, poor children in east London or a person with disabilities in the Midlands, Miliband continued: “That isn’t a progressive vision: that is shutting the door on the problems of your fellow citizens.”

Especially when Ed goes on to say:

“What is the most urgent task facing us today? Putting up a border across the A1 and M74? Or the task of creating a more equal, just and fair society?” Miliband said.

In the light of the current actions emanating from Westminster, to claim both the above and the following would be laughable if the reality wasn’t so painful:

Despite Salmond’s claims that Scotland can best realise its egalitarian politics as an independent country, said Miliband, “Britain is united in its diversity, by shared values and common interests; not an island divided by borders on the basis of nationalities or nationalisms, but one brought together with the strength drawn from multiple identities; bound together by common ties.”

The truth of the matter is that the tendentiously conceptualised Middle England – along with its racist and divisive prejudices – set the agenda for New Labour’s “New Labour, New Britain” branding. And it was Middle England’s newspapers which controlled how the Union flag was used to wrap us all up and hide the incongruences of that bubble which – even today – sees everything from the perspective of Britain’s capital city before it is able to see it from anywhere else.

Yes. New Labour did plenty for the Salfords of this world. That is undeniable. But where it failed was in its inability to do all those good things honestly and irrevocably. Money was thrown, much of it usefully, at a necessary amelioration of existing problems. But amelioration doesn’t change societies for good. Nor does doing things by stealth help to cement their futures.

And we can see, right now, how easy it has become for the Tories to shatter all that good.

So Ed, you’re quite wrong when you say: “Britain is united in its diversity, by shared values and common interests; [...] bound together by common ties.” For there is absolutely nothing, right now, that ties me to a City of London which cares little for the sensitivities of the recently homeless and destitute; absolutely nothing that ties me to wealthy swathes of England which are seeing growth even amongst a more generalised despair; absolutely nothing that doesn’t make me feel that the ties which you say should bind us in brother- and sisterhood won’t actually end up throttling us all.

In fact, Ed, I think you’re losing it on nationalism because New Labour – before you – lost its soul to Middle England. That, of course, wasn’t really your fault – but it does seem to have become a significant problem for the future.

Labour will never win the nationalist “divide and rule” argument unless and until it faces up to its own strategic errors: its own triangulating cleverness with the casual enemies of progressive politics.

And unless and until Miliband’s Labour manages to achieve this, Scotland will be able to continue sustaining sufficient arguments in its favour to remain a “progressive beacon” for long enough to break those ties which bind so cruelly.

"Osbornomics: political stardust but an economic placebo"

Fraser Nelson, George Osborne, Gordon Brown, in a hole, latterday socialism, New Labour, Telegraph, the Real George Osborne, Tony Blair No Responses »

Jan 272012

A few choice phrases from Fraser Nelson’s latest piece over at the Telegraph:

George Osborne should be having similar thoughts. His old routine is now failing. The embarrassing truth is that, for all his talk about how you can’t borrow your way out of a debt crisis, he is now trying to do just that. [...]

And this (the bold is mine):

Treasury officials who have worked for both men are struck not by the differences between them, but the similarities. Brown was nicknamed Macavity for his habit of disappearing at the first sign of trouble; Osborne is known as The Submarine, surfacing only a handful of times a year. Both see economics as a game of political chess, each policy designed to outwit the opposition. [...]

Not a way of making the world a better place, then – more a tool to batter what the rest of us can only define as a proxy enemy. For the real enemy is what we live from day to day.

Nelson also points out that:

[...] The political narrative thus detaches from the economic reality. And this is why a Government that is widely regarded as radical, and hawkish on the deficit, is making virtually no economic progress, while running up the debt like there’s no tomorrow.

And this:

Even Osborne’s critics cannot deny that, politically, his policy has brought devastating success. He has won the argument on cuts, even though – as the monthly spending figures show – he has hardly made any. [...]

Whilst for Labour the comfort is getting forever colder:

[...] The Chancellor told friends that he expected to be the most hated man in Britain by 2012, but there is surprisingly little hatred. Instead, there is ridicule – and it is largely heaped upon a Labour leader whose skills seem not to extend much beyond solving a Rubik’s Cube in 90 seconds.

Or, indeed, not eating a chocolate orange …

As I sift through Nelson’s piece – as always tightly, pointedly and fairly written (you can tell he worked for a tabloid, can’t you? Nothing better for those with the verbose tendency to write about politics than to have to do so in the context of flashy headlines and tawdry entertainment stories) – I can’t avoid coming to the conclusion that Osborne is actually truly some politician of considerable standing. More adept, perhaps, at the presentational arts than the PR man that is Cameron himself.

What has Osborne – in reality – achieved then? Well. He’s increased the indebtedness of the nation whilst at the same time savaging all manner of social services. “And this is an achievement?” you wonder. Well, yes – mightily so. Because Osborne is a three-dimensional politician who plays the long game. “And what may that be?” you might ask. Why, make it financially impossible – absolutely out of the question – for Labour ever to bring back the socialism by stealth we enjoyed for so many years under the New Labour regime.

Osborne, in his apparent ineptness, has shown himself to be not a son of Blair but a son of Brown. For neither have ever been inept; both are consummate manipulators of the body politic.

This isn’t, after all, a battle between right and left but – rather – between those who would use politics as a tool to do something useful in the outside world – and those who do politics simply to keep the opposition at bay.

The pursuit of power above all is at the heart of Osbornomics. As Nelson so memorably points out in his piece:

[...] Osbornomics: political stardust but an economic placebo.

With one small caveat: whilst the placebo is designed to strategically convince us he’s doing everything he should, in reality it’s there in order for him to have the time to burn all those bridges back to any kind of British socialism. That is to say, on his part it’s not unconscious at all. It’s a deliberate administration of a drug which allows us to die.

And therein my absolute misery this morning.

http://youtu.be/zxg7j6rQDLM

Amazing how modern politicians think choice is important for everything except political parties

a con, choice, Ed Miliband, end-users, New Labour, political parties, Tony Blair, unclassifiable, Unite No Responses »

Jan 172012

Yesterday, I wondered the following:

[...] I really wouldn’t be surprised if the often worthy and positive cuckoo that was the New Labour tendency mightn’t end up destroying the heart and soul of the Tory Party over the next two governments in much the same way as it has already manifestly managed to do to what used to be Labour, its class movement and its society-loving instincts.

The truth of the matter is that our “top-flight” politicians – the ones who lead parties and get to the top of greasy poles in a multitude of hierarchies (organisations, institutions and committees various) - are generally, almost without exception in fact, intellectual hypocrites. The meme that currently dominates our Western societies is that of choice: we are no longer patients, parents, students or victims of crime but end-user consumers of services the state provides. And so it is that our “top-flight” politicians – those who run our lives, those who plan how to win us over despite ourselves – structure our needs in terms of socioeconomic McMenus.

Except, of course, in terms of the political parties they lead. There, it would seem, curiously enough, we have blessed little choice at all.

Another example of do what I say and not what I do:

The Labour party’s chief union backer has accused Ed Miliband of undermining his own leadership, disenfranchising the party’s core support and leaving the country with all three main parties bent on using austerity to save capitalism.

In an article in the Guardian, the Unite general secretary, Len McCluskey, launches a strident attack on Miliband and Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, prompted by the party leadership’s weekend decision to endorse a continuation of the government’s public-sector pay freeze.

He suggests that their stance “challenges the whole course Ed Miliband has set for the party, and perhaps his leadership itself”. He also claims Blairites will seek to capitalise on their policy coup and come for Miliband himself, a path he says “will lead to the destruction of the Labour party as constituted and certain election defeat”. [...]

I hate being manipulated by clever political bods such as these. I really do. And I do seriously wonder if McCluskey isn’t right in what he says when he suggests that Blairites might seek to remake Labour in their very own image once again.

In fact, I have to say it wouldn’t surprise me if over the next two governments we didn’t see a new centrist political party in Britain: based around the most Blairite of triangulations; cementing together the UK out of an artificial fear of the unknown; centralising even more the power bases around strong-arm tactics in Westminster, with a trivial agenda of petty localism as a sop to the decentralisers amongst us … all this and more would simply confirm that for Blairites Labour was merely a conditional stepping-stone to “better” things.

Never a certain bet nor fundamentally organic relationship of the altruistic.

A shaky foundation, in fact, to be defec(a)ted on when necessary.

What say you?

The big question isn’t whether Labour minus Blairites equals the wilderness years …

defecting, ideas, in a hole, Labour, Luke Bozier, New Labour, political parties, Tony Blair, Tories, triangulation, unclassifiable No Responses »

Jan 162012

There have been a flurry of tweets over the past twenty-four hours on the subject of a defection to the Tory Party of one of Labour’s most controversial tweeters, Luke Bozier. You may not have heard of Luke, mind – if you want to know more, Mark Ferguson’s short and eventually dismissive piece over at Labour List this morning is probably the best place to start.

Meanwhile, I was minded to respond to a tweet from Anthony Painter earlier in the day on this very same subject of how Labour had to learn to deal with different ideas and people and places, when he wrote:

Labour has to learn that people can disagree with it, vote for others, join others, not vote and not be bad people…..

My response being:

@anthonypainter No. It’s not Labour that needs to learn this lesson. It’s political activism in general.

Something, in fact, we could expand to many relationships and sectors these days.

And then came along this other tweet – which got me thinking further:

Fellow Tories, what are your thoughts on a sudden influx of Blairite/New Labourites into our party?

Two questions immediately arise, of course. The first one, the obvious one, being: could Labour survive as a governing political force? That is to say, would Labour minus the Blairite tendency equal the wilderness years from now on in?

But the second – far more intriguing – one goes as follows: what about the Conservatives? Could the Tories as they currently perceive themselves even survive such a stampede of an influx of potentially overwhelming proportions – if and when, that is, the political dams broke (as they might) and a flood of disaffected triangulators invaded their treasured Etonite playing-field?

In a sense, the right-wing of the Tory Party and the left-wing of the Labour Party are literally mirror images of each other: their relationship with and attachment to much-needed badges of courage – those political markers in the sand they use to auto-define their positions – is a given in both extraordinary cases: signs of tribal loyalty and righteousness, indeed, if there ever were any to behold.

So that’s why the more I think about it, the more I do wonder.

And you know, I really wouldn’t be surprised if the often worthy and positive cuckoo that was the New Labour tendency mightn’t end up destroying the heart and soul of the Tory Party over the next two governments in much the same way as it has already manifestly managed to do to what used to be Labour, its class movement and its society-loving instincts.

From punchbag to punchline – whose fault is Labour today?

Dan Hodges, Ed Miliband, in a hole, Labour, New Labour, Tony Blair, unclassifiable No Responses »

Jan 132012

Dan Hodges concludes thus this afternoon:

That is what’s happening to the British Left. No longer hated, nor ignored, we have become figures of fun. Political jesters. Not a movement or a party, but a punchline.

He speaks as a self-defined “Blairite cuckoo in the Miliband nest”. I assume he means the Ed Miliband nest. He also lays claim to being tribal. I can believe it.

And I wonder if this process of becoming a punchline – that is to say, a laughable footnote to the British body politic – wasn’t started some time ago during the selfsame Blairite times of New Labour. As members were converted into little more than envelope-stuffing and door-knocking cannon fodder; as policy became the preserve of hidden committees and comfy sofas locked away behind Westminster’s closed doors; and as supporter involvement reverted to involving little more than submitting oneself to grandiloquent gesture politics delivered from on high … well, is it at all surprising that the Left in Britain may now find itself becoming a figure of fun for everyone else who might care to hold an opinion on the matter?

Dan, your Blairite friends turned Labour members into a colossal and monolithic punchbag – obliged to take onboard practically anything and everything that Third Way thinkers could possibly think up.

From punchbag to punchline – the distance is really not very far.

And if the situation is as dire as Hodges would have us believe, and if we do need to work out how to eventually move on, blame will need – one day – to be apportioned fairly and squarely.

Not just self-interestedly, as he does at the moment.

Why so many people must be jealous of Ed Miliband’s future

Ed Miliband, New Labour, News of the World, on a high, Rupert Murdoch, sorted, Tony Blair No Responses »

Dec 292011

What would New Labour have looked like if the News of the World had closed in 1997 – instead of collapsing ignominiously in 2011?

This thought comes to mind on the back of a comment of mine which came out of an exchange with Brian at the foot of a previous post:

Yes. That’s true. That the debate [on neoliberalism] wasn’t conducted *was* a serious failing of Blair and New Labour. But Murdoch still ruled the roost. A thought experiment then. What would New Labour’s regime have looked like if the News of the World had collapsed in 1997 instead of 2011? Think that one through and perhaps contextualising Blair might be easier for us all.

Just imagine what might have happened if Blair – suddenly released from his obligations to the man who had helped crown him – could have moved Labour forward in exactly the way he must only have ever dreamt about.

This was before tuition fees had splintered Labour’s faithful; before Iraq had broken the back of the patient church that still constituted the Party, even in 2003; before a whole host of concessions to the rancid right of British politics had distorted and fatally damaged his ability to perceive the real opportunities for a moral democracy.

For it is the strangest matter that the more moral become the discourses of those who would lead nations, the more violent and militaristic become the realities they proceed to deliver.

But let’s imagine that Murdoch & Co were vanquished as now: temporarily at least, without too much room to regroup. Blair could have created a government of an easy three terms – not doing God; not doing triangulation; not doing the Daily Mail or the Sun. Just being what became him most naturally: listening to the wider people and reinterpreting their discourse for the good of a wider voting constituency.

Politics has always produced leaders who know how to crystallise and exemplify the desires of a generation. And where this has not happened, we have had lost generations thrashing about wildly. It would seem, right now, that we are awaiting that moment again. And the generation we form a part of has a grand opportunity to remake the future – with or without the help of the commentariat. As already pointed out:

[...] what if a politician was wise enough to propose pulling – first of all – the wool over the eyes of the commentariat itself? That is to say: let’s imagine that Miliband, in this case, intended not to give too many gobbets of psychological stroking in the direction of self-important observers – observers who had become so used to being seen as astonishing crystal-ball gazers, by virtue of a privileged connection and control over the people we actually wanted to vote into power, that they found it absolutely impossible to contemplate that any politician might wish to play a different more solidly democratic game and at the same time be half-competent.

And so they interpret, supposedly on our behalf but surely far more in their own rank interests, that Ed Miliband can’t communicate; Ed Miliband doesn’t know how to fight; Ed Miliband is in hock to big trades union interests; and Ed Miliband is plain and simply the wrong man.

Plain and simply the wrong man not because he’s wrong for us, the voting public, but – rather – because he’s very wrong for the commentariat.

You know what I think? I think most politicians and commentators in modern politics are actually jealous of Ed Miliband. That he has got so far without owing anything to the media of one sort or another must really frustrate them in their own carefully marketed strait-jackets of thought.

Which is why I do say: “Ed, you still have my vote. The power you can take advantage of, channel and mould is as yet largely untested, untried and unseen. But if you manage your opportunities well and effectively from now on in, if you manage to see them exactly for what they are before the rest of us are able to even sense their wisdom, you will be marking out a new territory: a new territory which will change British politics forever.

“It’s now your only alternative.

“It’s now our only option.

“So understand it for what it is – and take it whilst you still can.”

Another downside of New Labour? It suppressed prejudice

in a hole, inequality, New Labour, prejudice, Tony Blair, unclassifiable No Responses »

Oct 292011

Suppressing prejudice? A downside? You may very well wonder what I mean.

New Labour was a massive exercise in political triangulation:

Triangulation is the name given to the act of a political candidate presenting his or her ideology as being “above” and “between” the “left” and “right” sides (or “wings”) of a traditional (e.g. UK or US) democratic “political spectrum”. It involves adopting for oneself some of the ideas of one’s political opponent (or apparent opponent). The logic behind it is that it both takes credit for the opponent’s ideas, and insulates the triangulator from attacks on that particular issue. Opponents of triangulation, who believe in a fundamental “left” and “right”, consider the dynamic a deviation from its “reality” and dismiss those that strive for it as whimsical.

It allowed Tony Blair to win elections on the basis of being perceived as the only choice available – the opposition was strategically eliminated by arguing that it offered no alternative which would distract as far as policies were concerned, and no alternative which could attract as far as personalities were concerned.

The beast functioned in part along the following lines. You aimed to neutralise anything the voting rich might negatively feel about the non-voting poor by making the former feel included in anything you might care to do for the latter. Thus it was that just as much work was done to improve social services, education and public safety in wealthy parts of the country as it was done in those areas where improvement was really needed. And thus we had the comfort with obvious financial excess expressed by people like Peter Mandelson. I don’t seriously believe he liked the idea: I do seriously believe he felt it was necessary to keep the prejudices of the wealthy under control.

And therein lies the rub. New Labour was incredibly successful at papering over the cracks in our society. But the underlying contradictions were never dealt with – nor even faced. New Labour managed to suppress prejudice but not do away with it. It sat there, mouldering awfully, whilst the public face of Britain moved towards an incredible tolerance and inclusion. It was, however, a grand case of political marketing which ignored the emotional context and the reality of tabloid opinion.

The tabloids certainly have served to impress upon the nation the importance of hatred and envy. But they couldn’t have invented it out of a thin air where nothing of the sort was previously to be found. Over the years, they have worked with that hatred and envy to their financial advantage; even as Blair, quite remarkably, and clearly to his credit, tried to triangulate it out of existence.

So what are we faced with now? Why is this failed suppression something I’d like to draw your attention to? Precisely because I feel it helps to explain what is happening so suddenly to our society. From the grand corporations whose profits increase by forty-one percent to the police authorities who see their resources cut by thirty-two percent … from those company directors who see their salaries rise by almost fifty percent to the broad raft of workers who see a rise of little more than two percent … in all these cases, something is clearly going awry in that national pact New Labour – at one time – managed to forge. As the moral and emotional need to look after those poorer than you – which Blair through the overwhelming force of his personality and his political nous managed to impose on us – begins to dissipate and disintegrate in the face of a Coalition government licking its lips at the idea of using the law to destroy the “workers”, so those suppressed prejudices – which never went fully away, which always lay dormant and ready to ambush us given the chance – are now unleashed and become fully formed once again.

A malevolent genie uncorked from its bottle? A cliché I know – but it describes perfectly what has taken place.

The biggest downside of New Labour, then, was this suppression I describe in the absence of a true resolution: essentially, it would seem, Blair thought if you didn’t see it, it wasn’t there.

And now it’s come back to bite us even more savagely than ever was the case.

Big bad days at this Britain rewound dramatically to the past.

Big bad days, indeed.

Trust

New Labour, Tony Blair, trust, unclassifiable No Responses »

Sep 272011

New Labour always argued it came down to trust. In the corporatist top-down approach to fix-it-quickly politics that best exemplified Blair’s reign at the top, the objective was always to convince the wider public to deposit their full and total confidence in representatives who would then – once in power – exert the widest freedom of action to do whatever was “necessary” to resolve the problems that began to present themselves.

Without any further referral required to the public in question.

But I’m not sure the real problem is – or ever has been – whether we trust our politicians or not. As far as I can see, most of us have been more than ready to repeat the errors of all previous generations – and jump into bed with the first mildly charismatic soul that comes along.

Thus it is I would argue that surely far more corrosive a reality is the fact that they (the politicians, I mean) don’t really trust us (the voters) …

So many things get stitched up behind closed doors – get sorted via ministers’ hotlines and dealt with via furtive text messages, instead of through properly transparent and publicly sanctioned communication processes – that it really does make you wonder if this can be honestly described as anything which even half resembles due democratic process.

And whilst it is most clearly still an issue of trust, I’m really not clear where the most damage is being done. Or who needs to learn how to make the greater leaps of faith.

"The guy who is determined to break the closed circles of Britain"

Ed Miliband, Labour, New Labour, on a high, vested interests No Responses »

Sep 272011

This is what Ed Miliband said most pointedly – and revealingly – about privilege in Britain today:

What’s my story?

My parents fled the Nazis.

And came to Britain.

They embraced its values.

Outsiders.

Who built a life for us .

So this is who I am.

The heritage of the outsider.

The vantage point of the insider.

The guy who is determined to break the closed circles of Britain.

We’ve been hearing a lot about “vested interests” over the past few days. I’ve doubted his ability to deal with all of them as he should – and still do wonder if he has the power base to carry out such a long-term game of what is going effectively to be political guerilla warfare. But these lines I quote from above – not a simple back story – indicate that Miliband is in a moral and existential position to understand the immensity of the job which is ahead of us.

Taking on the “vested interests”, breaking that “closed circle”, doing so in a conversational and not declamatory manner – these are all things I can trust and believe in.

Now, in true New Labour style, I’m looking for him to deliver. And, perhaps quite rightly, he – similarly – will be looking for us to do the same.

Cool-headed intellectualism isn’t enough, heirs to Blair

Blair+, cool-headed intellectualism, New Labour, Progress, The Purple Book, unclassifiable, What next for Labour? No Responses »

Sep 252011

Progress argues that:

We must spend #Lab11 not talking among ourselves like Libs did last wk but talking abt today’s problems @LeicesterLiz #ProgressRally

But this is surely unhelpful – at the very least. Some of the reasons behind today’s problems – and I mean the problems which affect our own very personal lives as citizens in a democracy whose economic certainties are collapsing before our very eyes – exist precisely because during the years of Blair’s intelligent but obstinate reign we chose not to talk amongst ourselves. Instead, we went and ignored the encroaching incongruences. And the result? As Ann Black in the book “What next for Labour?” underlines is now the case:

[Blair's] legacy is a shoe-string operation, with staffing and services slashed, higher charges for local parties, greater demands on volunteers, and a funding mix which is less diverse and more reliant on trade unionists than ever.

Is Progress really suggesting, then, that – in order to convince a wider populace that we have the right to once again take command of their society – we mustn’t try and sort ourselves out first? As “The Purple Book” proclaims:

What The Economist has termed ‘Westminster’s anti-intellectualism’ is, in fact, one important obstacle to Labour’s renewal. Indeed, it betrays a lack of understanding about the link between a party’s intellectual vibrancy – its ability to think about its purpose and beliefs, and how these fit with the country’s future needs and challenges – and its electoral health.

And as I observed:

Agreed. But let’s not confuse intellectualism with McMenu magpie-style pick and mix politics.

Talking amongst ourselves is part of this process of sorting ourselves out. As I said in my previous post, triangulation through the act of invoking the lowest common denominator, whilst surely never the objective of the high-flown New Labour policy-makers, was – essentially – the result of all their rapid footwork. And part of New Labour’s achievements – its ability to convince and persuade a traditionally Conservative voting public – was precisely the reason for its long-term downfall: that rapid footwork which didn’t allow the slower of those amongst us to follow exactly the reasons why.

Too much cool-headed intellectualism without explanation does no organisation any good whatsoever. It doesn’t matter whether this is a corporation or a political party. You have to bring people along with you.

"Suitably limited gentle thrusting"

censorship, commercialisation of childhood, David Cameron, in a hole, New Labour, on a high, unclassifiable No Responses »

Jun 042011

That, apparently, was Ofcom on the subject of Rihanna’s suggestive dancing:

Ofcom has dismissed previous complaints at the way in which programmes like X Factor, watched by millions of children, feature huge stars such as Christina Aguilera and Rihanna wearing few clothes and posing suggestively.

Ofcom ruled that Rihanna’s routine “featured some gentle thrusting”, but it was “suitably limited”.

I’m not exactly sure what – in this context – “suitably limited” means. Sexuality is always going to be a grim matter of profound disagreement for a society such as ours. On the one hand, many of us enjoy it. On the other hand, many of us feel guilty about it. Religious bodies don’t help with their hypocrisies but neither are secular institutions such as TV stations, the music industry, fashion companies and publishing organisations doing very much to help all of us feel entirely comfortable with ourselves.

And whilst I welcome what I believe is probably an honestly-felt thinking behind Cameron’s proposals – that is to say, a desire to deal with what is the manifest commercialisation of childhood – I would be far happier with such ideas if they were couched in far more general terms. There is an industry out there now deliberately designed to hook us all into an addictive relationship with those infamous fifteen minutes of fame. Big Tobacco, now suitably vanquished, at least in the Western world, has, as a result, been replaced by Big Talent (more here).

If Cameron is truly looking to do something more than just capture cheap headlines – if he is looking, in this campaign, to truly re-engineer modern society – he needs to show us he’s not out simply to ghettoise the lads mags (an easy thing to achieve, by the way), but that he’s also looking to change the way we buy and sell almost everything else. And that includes how his friends in the newspaper industry, who make the business of celebrity sex an available-to-all daily bread and butter, act out their prejudices.

A thought does occur to me, though – if New Labour had ever dared to face up to such a powerful group of interests on this kind of an issue, the entertainment industry would surely have, a priori, crucified them. It either takes guts to take such an industry on – or it’s a massive miscalculation. So it is that I honestly wish Cameron well in this matter – but, even so, simultaneously find myself fascinated by exactly how far he intends to run with it; how coherent and cogent he intends to be; and how much real success his sponsors in very different matters will end up allowing him to reap.

For it does seem very New Labour-ish, don’t you think? And as I wish Cameron well, at least in this matter, I also wonder if other forces around him – or, indeed, he himself in a moment of political expediency – mightn’t use this initiative to lever a degeneration into another kind of world altogether: a world of thought police, censorship and mind control we thought we might have escaped from long ago.

PLEBS, "referred politics" and other examples of sensible socialism

David Cameron, Ed Miliband, in a hole, Margaret Thatcher, New Labour, PIGS, PLEBS, PMQs, referred politics, sensible socialism No Responses »

Apr 302011

Takes one to know one, mate. The other day I kind of berated the sensitive left for allowing David Cameron to so easily bait them with his “Calm down, dear” remark – and thus allow media attention to be diverted from the underlying news of import: this being that the NHS is going to be required to make savings of 37 percent over the next few years.

Today, however, I’m inclined to think I ought to have sided with the sensitive left from the start. A pattern is beginning to emerge, methinks. Don’t believe me? Well, the Mirror has another story, coming my way today via Brian’s Facebook profile, which makes me wonder if this political incorrectness is actually designed – whether in a coordinated manner or, alternatively, much as an intuitive flock of casually evil birds changing direction in mid-flight – to destroy the niceties of British life from the top-down. From “dears” and “sluts” to “PLEBS” and “PIGS”, Cameron, Osborne and company’s main responsibilities now seem to reside in generating a barrage of disrespectful language and prejudices – presumably softening us up and preparing us for far worse things to come.

But I think it goes deeper than that. I think this is actually turning out to be what we might call an example of “referred politics”. In much the same that “referred pain” may confuse us as to its source, so “referred politics” deliberately aims to confuse us as to its true focus. Easy targets are as old as the history of politicking itself, of course. So calling women “dears” and “sluts” and the unskilled “plebs” (historically speaking, rather inexactly it would appear) is actually par for the course.

What does seem to me, however, a far more serious matter is how the right in Britain appear to have finally realised that the Labour Party and its wider movement is just too resilient, just too big, to be brought down with a frontal assault. Let us be clear, here: the Tories have a long-term strategic objective to destroy Labour – just as New Labour aimed to do the same to the Tories. But where New Labour was generally quite honest about this as a goal, the Tories have decided they must first – quite indirectly – destroy institutions and structures that may be interpreted (consciously or subconsciously) as representing socialism as its best and most effective. And thus we come to the “referred politics” I mention above.

This they have been doing in fits and starts ever since they came to power last year: selling off publicly owned woodlands didn’t work because, with all the land already in private ownership anyway, this was just one brazen step too far for even the patient and long-suffering British public to accept. Increasing tuition fees by a multiple of three got through, however, because New Labour had already foolishly initiated the slippery slide towards prior wealth determining future opportunities to learn beyond compulsory education – and in any case we were talking about students here: subjects of this unhappy realm who every tabloid-reading repository of facile prejudice knows generally have it easier than the rest of us …

Meanwhile, the disabled clearly live off both the state and the rest of us; don’t do a decently productive stroke of work from day to day; and don’t deserve – in this Darwinian arc of economic practice – the support of anyone lucky enough never to have been touched by disability.

And then there’s the NHS.

A clearer example of “referred politics” we cannot find. Whilst Ed Miliband and his team put up a decent fight at most PMQs, even finding time to grin at the foolishnesses of the opposition, the Labour Party as an organisation is as resilient and coherent, as broad a broad church, as it has ever been. So. Down that way we cannot dismantle. As I pointed out earlier, frontal assaults will achieve nothing here. Far more effective, surely, as a way of undermining Labour positivity, is the slow but inevitable grinding down of recognisable achievements such as the NHS, such as the Forestry Commission, such as the BBC (once hallowed arbiter of “objective” journalism but now little more than an appendage to official government agendas) – all examples of sensible socialism, all to be wounded fatally not because they are broken but simply because the right now can.

This is the politics we now have to deal with and understand. As the right gratuitously aim to deconstruct, simply because gratuitous signals and equals the victory of raw power over sense and sensibility, we must work out a way of understanding that Labour as a political entity is the object of all their unhappy antics – yes, the right wish to destroy institutions like the NHS, I don’t deny that; but not primarily because they want to destroy the NHS: it is, rather, far more likely that their final and ultimate objective is to wipe the Labour movement off the face of Planet UK – and this they can achieve far better through the soft focus of this “referred politics” I describe.

In a sense, we only have ourselves to blame. New Labour’s avowed aim was to exact the same terrible revenge on the Tories for all the ills of Thatcherism.

If only our politicians could follow their voting publics a little more closely: live and let die a little less cruelly, live and let live a little more kindly.

The world would then be a much better place.

Don’t you think?