A response to 'The Force of Labour's Manifesto' (16 September).

I have a different perspective to your comments regarding the Labour Party ( “Labour’s Next Step? – The force of Labour’s Manifesto”)
           
             I have to say that I don’t share the effusive claims for the Labour Party’s 2017 GE Manifesto. Perhaps, as a result of a considerable number of years witnessing Labour’s disappointments and betrayals I have developed a jaundiced view of Labour’s ability to act in any meaningful way on behalf of working people. Having said that however I recognise that some progressive noises of intent have encouraged support for a change of political direction at this time. I don’t regard the Labour Manifesto as being a great radical prospectus as has been proclaimed by some. I suppose that considering where we have been with Labour over the years it will be seen in that overblown context. A further concern I have is the seriously flawed strain of what is described as “Corbynism”. Corbyn appears to be sincere and I welcome the fact that he has prevailed against the “right” in the Party albeit without seeing them off completely; but surely we have learnt the futility of personality politics. So he may be sincere but he can also be sincerely wrong. I give as an example his attitude towards Scotland and the right of self-determination.  The Labour Party is opposed to Independence for Scotland (Labour’s GE Manifesto) but not only are they opposed to Independence they are also opposed to the Scots having a referendum on the issue. They have acted in concert with the Unionist Tories and Lib-Dems in attempting to deny Scots the opportunity of another referendum. Whenever I hear Corbyn speak on the matter it is the same language as the reactionary Better Together allies (Tories, Lib-Dems and Labour).  I would have thought that there is a basic democratic principle at stake, no good saying – they had a vote, it’s over – as Corbyn has been saying recently. I wonder what he has to say about developments in Catalonia where the Spanish Government is using repressive force to deny Catalans a democratic vote on the same issue as Scotland.
          I am writing this as the Labour Party Conference begins,  realising that experience tells me that  moments of positivity can quickly dissipate after it is over. At the same time there is a Labour Leadership contest in Scotland that in itself says a lot more about the Labour Party. One of the candidates (there are two) is a millionaire whose children are privately educated, he is a shareholder in his family business that does not pay the Living Wage to its employees and does not have Trade Union recognition. He stated in a radio interview that he did not receive any remuneration from the company including dividends. It transpires that he had been receiving 20,000 pounds pa in dividends. The reason I mention all of this is because this individual publicly states that he is a socialist. He also says that he is a Corbyn supporter when he was in fact a signatory to a letter in opposition to Corbyn’s leadership.  He has secured a number of Labour MSPs as supporters. He was favourite to win but since the revelations his opponent is now regarded as favourite.
I note that in a desperate act he has stated that he is to relinquish his shareholding and put it in trust for his children !!  That’s another endearing quality he has – arrogance. His opponent is a former GMB Political Officer and current MSP and while he claims an agenda synonymous with that of Corbyn he is fiercely anti Scottish Independence and a Referendum and firmly opposed to any progressive alliance against the Tories if it includes the SNP – how is that working in the interests of working people?
I find his message less than inspiring.  Labour are currently the third party in Scotland, is it their intention to pledge continued resistance to a democratic ballot on Scotland’s future?
The reason I mention all of this is because there needs to be some serious changes. Hercules and the Augean Stables crossed my mind as I write this.

You describe support for Labour’s Manifesto as being a “great breakthrough”, you contend that Britain’s traditional political caste has never been weaker and pointing to different groups and elements in the class struggle you argue that if all this coalesces around the Labour Manifesto (that will itself need revision as the movement and its debates move on) you conclude that in due course “it will need to help create the first British Constitution.”

There are a number of improbables there that would need further examination but let me try to explain why I am not a supporter not just of  Unionist Labour but am opposed to a British Constitution which for me is not a solution.  I contend that our problem is the Westminster System of Government, it has failed all of us in creating a more fair and equitable society, the evidence is all around us.
From Britain’s imperialist past to the present it is designed to and has acted to prop up a system of power and privilege that is resistant to change. You yourself argue that “state-wide political institutions have to be reformed, rebuilt or built anew” and I accept that there has to be a renewal. I believe that can only come about with radical change; that change for me is Independence for the Nations of what is risibly called the United Kingdom. I support the case for Scottish Independence because when it happens it will not only liberate us from the pretence that we are a Union of Equals, it will cause the network and institutions of power and privilege to fall and by so doing provide an opportunity for all working people in these isles (in the nations of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland) to be, as you say, “enabled, through the political institutions that they support, build and have confidence in, to lead the whole of society in the direction that has been chosen.”
The Labour Party wedded to the Westminster system is on the wrong side of history ( in fact it seems to forget its own history and raison d’etre) and as such will therefore be unable to effect the changes needed.

   John Milligan

“Instead of seeking to reform the individual the wisdom of a Nation should apply itself to reform the system”
Thomas Paine  -  The Rights of Man

No middle-way for the UK!

In the UK a body called the Electoral Commission monitors Party Political Broadcasts which appear on the traditional media (mainly TV and Radio). On September 20th the Liberal Democrat Party -  12 MPs now led by Vince Cable - were allowed one of the seasonal offerings available to all parties with representatives in Parliament. It was a dreadful piece in that it tried give viewers a comedic vision of the Party' strengths and appeal particularly to the now very active youth vote. It was neither funny - nor appealing. (Lib Dems trying to be funny with the Metro youth!)

The broadcast failed on 2 fronts. First it patronised and mocked the very youth that it was designed to win over. It implied they were stupid. In the June 2017 General Election the radical youth vote was a dramatic new feature in Britain's political life. The vote for Corbyn's Labour Party was not, as the Lib Dem broadcast suggested, a half-baked search for 'real' personalities. The youth vote stood against a tidal wave of mainstream attacks from all sides on Labour in general and Corbyn in particular. Labour's Manifesto featured as a major deciding point for many younger voters as indicated in several surveys. It has been half a century since any British Political Party's election manifesto has been studied with such attention. Against the tide, and with an unprecedented participation in the arguments and debate, the British youth vote, 3 months ago, was a tremendous breakthrough against the grim prospect of a mountain of Tory MPs, topped by a humourless and insecure Tory martinet.  

Second, the broadcast tried once again to open up the 'middle way.'

Labour peer Lord Adonis, ex Labour PM Tony Blair and various leading commentators like Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian newspaper have set up the symbol of a second referendum on 'the Brexit deal' as the means to avoid Corbyn's radical Manifesto on the one hand and the impact of the Tory's ever more fractious Brexit on the other. The Lib Dems want to be its Party and Vince Cable has said he will be its Prime Minister. Whatever else is missing in the increasingly shaky and malodorous British Parliament, there is no lack of ambition! (With all proportions guarded, a dire political psychology we have seen before in the Wiemar Republic, the end of the Soviet Union, in John Major's Cabinet and in the current scramble for influence among President Trump's coterie.)

Brexit is undoubtedly accelerating Britain's political and economic fragility. But is Brexit causing this lurch? And would the restoration of Britain's status inside the EU reverse these trends? Is there an EU based middle-way out of Britain's crisis?

The key weaknesses of the British economy have been evolving through decades. Nearly a century ago (as Will Hutton quoted in an Observer article, 10 September '17) Churchill and Keynes said that in Britain 'finance is too proud and industry too humble'. France's new President Macron may be buffing up Paris's financial centre but the American banks, the Hedge Funds, the Wealth Investors, the Insurance Companies and all the rest of the gang that make up the City of London are slavering at the prospect of being at the centre of the world's largest tax haven. Indeed it one of their conditions to remain in London and to resist Mssr. Macron's blandishments. The City of London is not interested in a middle-way. Another opportunity has opened up. But the fundamental point remains. The City continues to be the enormous parasitic growth in the belly of the British economy and it is now, as it has always been, squeezing the life out of its host. The biggest bank in the world, with its glittering name projecting solidity and 'gentlemanly' behaviour, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Britain's biggest international investment in 2008, turned out, like all the rest, to be a den of liars, spivs and thieves. These people still dominate Britain's economic life.

The pitiful and declining productivity of British labour is another, critical long term, feature of Britain's economy. Why? Britain lacks serious long term investment. Finance Capital dominates. PM Harold Wilson in the 1960s was one of a long list of post WW2 PMs that tried to take on the task - and failed like all the others. His 'white hot heat of the technological age' fizzed out, along with all the other efforts to win over an insatiable ruling elite away from their sumptuous, instant, share dividends and huge managerial pay, and instead use resources for future investment.

Today's version of this most regular feature of the British economic helter-skelter is illustrated by the recent fate of one of Britain's most successful tech companies, ARM Holdings. As Private Eye (No 1452) pointed out, PM Teresa May's joy as she applauded Japan's foreign investment in the UK on her recent visit, included plaudits for 'SoftBank.' Their 'investment' amounted to buying up ARM Holdings - helped by a 10% fall in Sterling. This discount on the £24bn price was expanded when 'SoftBank' sold on 25% of ARM Holdings to a Saudi Government company. So, a large British company provided an enormous payoff to its British shareholders, and world standard British Tech is now divided up between Japan and Saudi. From the fantasy that 'my word is my bond' to the generations of rapacious greed, Britain's ruling class, fostered by the golden days of Empire, is the least functional element in modern, Western capitalism. That is to say, it plays little or no productive role within its own system. It has an almost entirely parasitic relationship to its own means of production. Brexit's role in this malaise is marginal. Brexit speeds up Britain's economic realities. But neither would continued membership of the EU stop it, let alone reverse it.

On the political level the latest revelation that over a year 115 Lords claimed £1.2 million of expenses without saying a word and £4 million was handed to the 277 who spoke five times or less in Parliament, shows where Britain's mainstream politics finds itself. MP's expenses; constant movement between Ministers, big corporations, banks and lobbyists; illegal arms trade; choice international trips and post Parliament jobs have created a nouveau riche political class, but this too is over decades. Brexit will not stop it. But the EU certainly nurtured corruption within in its nation states and between them.

The conclusion from these facts of life is that it is not true that Brexit, at the level of British capitalist economics or British political rule will make things worse. Here and there it will speed things up. At a social level, there is no doubt that Brexit continues to stimulate (already existing) racism into new activity. At the political level of international corruption and lack of accounting it may slow things down. Equally, a return to a Blairite age through reapplying for membership of the EU is neither feasible nor available. And the EU does not challenge racism. On the contrary Shengen is great crime against large parts of humanity. Individual nations that are responding positively to refugees are not doing that through any agreed EU framework.

The trends that are changing Britain's capitalist economics and politics are fertilised from domestic roots and do not stem, fundamentally, from the EU and nor from Brexit. Those two particular choices simply make change more stark. Britain's domestic roots are undoubtedly entangled internationally in a globalist jungle - but even that aspect is neither 'solved' positively by Brexit nor by its reverse. Britain has been building great change in itself for half a century and more.

In that context there is no (longer) a middle way for Britain. Radical change is coming in all major departments of economic and political life. The choice here is straightforward. Who will plan for the radical change that the people of Britain already want, and who among their political leaders will be able to act on that and win?

The force of Labour's Manifesto

There are manifestos that have led to constitutions, dramatically changing politics in many countries, but never, since Magna Carta (June 1215), in the UK. Roger Scruton, the well-known, right wing philosopher in Britain, imagines this is a result of UK common law. In other words, practical, detailed, day to day judgements are made by judges, 'on the strength of the case', and they become precedents for future decisions. Scruton also imagines that this process has 'protected' British law from ideological schemes that are fomented often in extreme circumstances and which are driven by dogmas. Hurrah!

Scruton naturally loathes European Human Rights legislation. Indeed he rejects the necessity for any conscious, strictly political decision making of state-wide laws that are designed to roll back the oppression of groups, including majority groups across the world - as in the cases of working class people, of people of colour and of women. He is also blind to the historical political and economic interests of the judiciary itself and to the social class, gender and ethnic group from which judges almost inevitably come. He has therefore no answer to oppression because, in his own circle of life, he does not see it. This point of view ends up with the ruthless defence of the status quo and even his risible notion that the 3 or 4% of people who live in the British countryside constitute the real definition of 'Englishness.'(sic)

The tragedy in Britain is that Scruton's self-serving dogma has been the prevailing view for Britain's ruling elites for centuries. And most British institutions, including the Judiciary, reflect that. There are some notable exceptions like the NHS. But such exceptions have been under the hammer almost permanently - in the front line of 'reforms' designed to extinguish their principles and their functions. The Labour Party has experienced a century-long, class-based, civil war - where union bureaucracies and state managers have held fast their pro-system domination - up to now. Parliament itself has long been squeezed into the margins of any real decision making about who should hold wealth and power.

Corbyn's Labour Manifesto is a modest document, in relation to the structure of Britain's modern capitalist society, which it nevertheless challenges. But in June 2017 millions of people, especially younger voters, engaged with Labour's latest General Election Manifesto. This novelty was partly a product of Tory leader, Teresa May's Manifesto disaster. But most mainstream commentators now seem to agree that the main reason that Labour's Manifesto attracted wide-scale support (despite the howling ridicule of 99% of the traditional media at the time of publication) was that it offered a fresh approach to Britain's seemingly endless political and economic failures that were experienced by the overwhelming majority and especially by younger people.

The heart of the Manifesto is a positive end to austerity (i.e. precise additional funding plans for ransacked public services rather than the Scottish Nationalist Party's 'end to austerity' meaning no more cuts.) The Manifesto demands a redistribution of wealth to pay for the new spending, including taxing the top 5% incomes. The economic centre of the Manifesto is a new £250 billion state investment bank, with regional offshoots, to renovate investment in infrastructure. A list of reforms include a limit of 20 to 1 in relation to salaries and wages; the socialisation and nationalisation of Energy, Water, Rail and Royal Mail, 100,000 social homes a year, rent controls, Health and Care to receive an additional £39 billion, etc. Brexit should be friendly and defend workers' rights. The weakest parts of the document (beside inadequate housing targets and vagaries about immigration) are the vague, solely symbolic warnings to private finance and the City of London, the support for Trident, the maintenance of UK support for NATO's dangerous antics and the shadowy shape of Britain's future Constitution.

The latter weakness is, in the end, most telling. Lots of Labour's new Manifesto's implementation will be bitterly resisted by private finance and the City, as well as the major corporations, the EU, the US, and the mainstream political organisations in the UK including the majority of Labour MPs.  Each of these opponents, and others not mentioned, will have their own parts to play in the upheaval. There is only one way to manage this deluge. State-wide political institutions have to be reformed, rebuilt or built anew that are democratically constructed to carry out the program that British people, in their large majority, want to see carried out. In other words, a big majority needs first to be built for the Manifesto and then that majority must be enabled, through the political institutions that they support, build and have confidence in, to lead the whole of society in the direction that has been chosen. Nothing less will be enough to breakthrough even to the partial reforms laid out by Labour. Albeit in a different context, Greece's Syriza's collapse demonstrates the weakness of reliance on simply traditional political institutions in the campaigning for substantial reform.

At the moment, Labour's Manifesto suggests that the House of Lords could become democratic in 5 years; that voting should be available to 16+ year olds; that Britain should become 'more federal' and that there should be a Constitutional Convention. In the first place the organisations of workers and youth that are fighting austerity must have representation in its dismantling and its replacement with something better. (Just as the Grenfell inhabitants need to lead the Public Enquiry on the safety of the Grenfell Tower.) Where is their place in the new Constitution? The Labour Party itself needs to prepare its democracy for its Manifesto. The half million members are its sovereign body. It needs to be a model for all those who want and need to be heard in a society where they are currently silenced. How do NHS workers at all levels want their service to work? Where do experienced track maintenance workers get to explain their experience of a proper Railway safety scheme? Where is it, and how do all Briton's decide whether they want Trident?

The interest in and support for Labour's Manifesto is a great breakthrough for the big majority in their experience of Britain's insecure, grim and declining society. Jacob Rees-Mogg is the the MP most supported by members of the Tory Party for leadership. This Victorian buffoon reeks of the stale, shambolic, self-parodies that most of the current Tory leadership reveal. Britain's traditional political caste has never been weaker. The potential political strength in the country lies elsewhere. It will be seen in the Peoples Assembly-led protest at the coming Tory Conference in Manchester; in the strikes of the fast food workers; in the coalition of unions preparing to blow away the cap on pay; when the tenants speak in the Grenfell Enquiry and all of this and all the rest can be brought together by Labour's Manifesto. And the Manifesto itself? It will need to be revised, rewritten, argued over, revised again as the movement and its debates move on. And in due course it will need to help create the first British Constitution.

Blair tries another 'big move'.

Ex British Prime minister Mr Blair has resolved his little difficulty trying to launch a new 'political centre' from what he hoped would be the burning embers of a left wing Labour Party. The 2017 June General Election result was not only a surprise to Blair, it destroyed his immediate plans to rebuild a centre (as he calls it) to the polarised politics represented by a Corbyn led Labour Party on the one hand and the extreme Tory Brexiteers on the other. But Blair has recuperated. He now wishes to to use the Brexit arguments to force a longer term re-composition of British politics. He is aware that Prime Minister Teresa May is hunted and haunted, becoming more and more a puppet of the Tory right and, at the same time, he is determined to crush the political momentum behind the Corbyn Manifesto as it assumes the status of the alternative answer to Tory drift and failure. It is the gathering collapse of Tory Brexit and the response to it that Blair now sees as the turning point of British politics.

So what does he do?

Like all underwhelming strategists he tries first to steal his enemies main argument. Blair is not an ideological racist. To be frank he could not care less about immigration from EU countries except in terms of the impact that it makes on the political life of 'his' nation and his status within it. His recent discovery, that unskilled, low paid labour that flooded into the UK under his government, is no longer just a great boon to the small and medium businesses that paid no premium for training, holidays, sickness, pregnancy or pensions, has turned his previous policy into its opposite. The new immigrants were used by UKIP and various Tory leaders as the reason for over-stretched services and the virtually universal 'pitiful pay levels and no workers' rights. So Blair, who does not focus on a decade of impoverishment and austerity, but on the immigrants, casually flicks his own racist card on the table.
'That was then' he commented to Andrew Marr, a BBC reporter who asked him why he had allowed wide-scale immigration during his period in office; 'and this is now.'

Blair never supported the 'free movement' of labour in the EU as such. His choice was a political one, made to widen Labour's 'big tent' in the direction of Britain's novel and expanding entrepreneurs in the early 2000s. He waves the anti-immigrant flag today because he wants his tent to cover ex UKIP voters while maintaining the free movement of Capital in the EU, plus the UK, summed up by the EU's 'free' market. And this is what he means by building the centre in UK politics.  This, in the greatest crisis of the Tory Party since Edward Heath, is his alternative to the Corbyn Manifesto.

Unfortunately for Blair, and despite Tory despair over both PM May and the set of half-baked assassins around her, most Labour supporters and a large part of society in general would rather have warts than witness the return of Blair. The collision now shaping up about living standards, led by organised labour on the one hand and a weakened fractious government on the other, does not primarily turn on Brexit and least of all on Blair's formula for the UK and the EU. The battle emerging has, paradoxically, much more to do with the gathering storm in France against Macron's 'reforms' than any particular British singularity. It is a true European initiative, which really represents the freedom of labour. The freedom, exercised in practise, to resist the domination of Capital and overthrow austerity.

Labour and the EU.

On September 7 the MPs in the British House of Commons began their debate on the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill. Acute divisions remain among Tory MPs about the terms of Brexit. Over summer, Tory Chancellor Hammond claimed that a Cabinet consensus had emerged and there would be at least a two year transition period following the technical end of Britain's membership of the EU in March 2019. This transition period would allow the continuation of the single European Market (and therefore, by implication, the right of all EU citizens to live and work in Britain during that time.)

At the beginning of September a convenient leak of a draft civil service paper assured the country that March 2019 would mark the end of the current rights of EU citizens to live and work in Britain. Instead, a draconian regime would operate in favour of 'British workers'. The document promoted a sack of measures all to the detriment of EU workers who might have the temerity to wish to come to the UK for work after the March 2019 deadline.

As soon as the civil service draft document came to light Teresa May's government asserted that there were 4 other new drafts covering the same ground. Nevertheless there was far from the normal government outrage about the leaking of 'draft 1.' Instead May took the opportunity to lecture her fellow MPs on the fact that closing down EU immigration to Britain remained the critical objective of her regime.

Leaving aside May's pathetic determination to overturn her 'failure' as Home Secretary - when she was completely unable to reduce immigration - May understands, in the way a fox's cunning works, that racist attacks on immigration have the best chance of solidifying a political force in Parliament and rebuilding a social bloc in parts of British society.

The leadership of the fight for Brexit in Britain (the Tory right and UKIP) moulded a new identity for the right in the UK in 2016. But Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party campaign in the June 2017 General Election overwhelmed the new right's momentum and recomposed the political leadership in society placing the decisive emphasis on mounting inequality, social solidarity through the defence of social services and international cooperation. The General Election contest gave a first victory to the Corbyn leadership, but the war is far from over. On the contrary, led by a desperate May, Brexit with a right wing face can re-emerge.

Keir Starmer, Labour's shadow minister for Brexit, has called for a deal which allows the UK's access to the European Market until 2023, coupled, as the EU insists, to free movement of EU citizens. This caused some on the left (see letters in the Observer 3 September etc.,) to attack the Labour leadership for prolonging the 'single market' rules that dominate the UK and EU economies. They also raised the possibility of the alienation of many potential Labour supporters who voted for Brexit.

Certainly the free movement of labour does not require the anti-socialist restrictions that form the main headings of the EU's 'free' trade arrangements. And the Labour Party leadership insisting that British business needs the time and space to continue its low wage, poor conditions approach, cuts against its own stated fight against austerity and poverty. The free movement of workers across their own Continent is a fundamental right of all of the citizens of that Continent. Where the EU ties the free movement of labour to anti-social (and rabidly anti-socialist) trade rules is exactly the point at which Continental labour becomes unfree. The EU market rules are designed to drive down the cost of labour. A lot of British business is based on huge tranches of cheap labour spawned and maintained by the EU's 'free market' rules. What the European, indeed the world needs, is fair trade. The absolute right of the majority of the world to move where they want and need is simply the extension of the 'rights' that the wealthy have always enjoyed.

Labour is right to oppose the European Union (Withdrawal) bill. It is, if nothing else, the means by which a lame and minority government can change vast swathes of legislation, including laws about safety, workers' rights, ecology etc., without Parliament's agreement. But Starmer has bundled this up with a confused version of the free movement of labour together with the EU's market rules, which is wrong. He did it (and received Labour support for it) because he believed that this would create a cover for allowing continued EU immigration tucked behind the 'requirements' needed by a lot of British employers. This mistake will rebound as May seeks to rebuild the new right.

First May and others will separate out immigration from their own version of a 'sweet' market deal. Hostility to immigration (including refugees and families) will have to be faced and fought on its own terms. Second, even employers who now use EU cheap labour will never support Labour - as the attitudes of most farmers and brewers already show.

Brexit is not and has never been, in itself, a decisive step to the right or to the left in Britain. It was initially used successfully by a new right that sought a US style future and who manipulated a new wave of racism to try and build an ultra capitalist political bloc against the remains of Britain's social welfare. After Corbyn's huge advance it has become a battlefield about the need for the maintenance of workers standards of living and the opening of a debate about what sort of society should be built in Britain. Grenfell Tower inhabitants dealt with disaster by becoming a vocal community of ethnicities, races, religions, immigrants and spoke in a new way for the common people. The momentum for defeating radical capitalism and constructing ideas among Britain's population about a different sort of country (ies) has been powerful. The new Labour leadership is a seminal part of that process. Be careful. Starmer is confusing the EU issue, as well as who are friends and who are foes.

Britain at a turning point

The Tories

As Brexit begins to open out Britain's long-term economic and social weaknesses (and Britain's PM, Teresa May, reveals that, following the instigation of her interviewer, she had 'shed a tear' when she realised her Tory Party had not won its expected landslide victory - but no tears over the Grenfell Tower tragedy) it is now time to draw an initial balance sheet of the UK's blossoming political crisis.

May should be weeping daily. Her attempt to dominate British politics via the June 8 General Election turned into its opposite. And the latest wave of Britain's political crisis starts from splits within Britain's ruling class over the EU, which are now overt. Top companies, most especially a section of the financial sector, are desperate not to find themselves marooned in the British Isles as their access to the EU ebbs away. The uberite service sector see their pools of cheap EU labour dwindling. The major cartel that is now 'further education' watches the drop in EU based applications just as their fees have been hyped to dramatic levels. Only export driven industry, responsible for a tiny proportion of the UK's GDP, welcomes sterling's fall.

The cracks are now even cutting through single sectors. It is only one section of the financial sector that fears Brexit. Other globally based sharks, particularly US based investment funds, see a more than viable financial future (read pumped up profits) if Britain is outside the EU. Britain, as many commentators and leading politicians have now stated, might have to become the largest tax haven in the world. No deal is better than a bad deal said May. And for some, no deal is better than any deal. The US finance wizards have formed their own political bloc in the UK parliament led by Trade Minister Dr. Fox. His main work since June 8 has been to destroy his party's Chancellor, Hammond.  

These splits (and others - see below) are registering themselves front and centre in the limping minority Tory government. They currently take the form of arguments (in the Tory Party) about 'soft' and 'hard' Brexits, about possible 'transition phases', about the continuing role of the European Court of Justice and even whether the UK can manage its atomic energy via 'Euratom'. The so called 'Great Repeal Bill', designed to put all of the EU laws that the UK has adopted into solely British legislation, is already under siege right across Parliament.

As Parliament staggers into its summer recess May becomes less popular (Labour is five points ahead of the Tories at 46 per cent, stated the Sunday Times - 25 June. But May’s approval rating is at minus 17, a mirror opposite to Mr Corbyn’s plus 17.) May is significantly less popular than her party in all the polls since the General Election.

There is little doubt therefore that with Brexit getting harder and the economy weakening, that with May's descending popularity, Britain's teary PM will be first to go. An early election will then be forced by a Parliament that cannot agree on any of the key Brexit steps, also by a bumpy economic decline and by an anti-government mass movement that has already started and which wants to defend the majority against another potential economic and social disaster delivered by its rulers.

However it would be a mistake to overestimate the fragility of the Tory Party's political life. Since the 1800s the British Tory Party has regrouped itself in the historic memory of a ruling class that came out of the 17th century revolution. And the principle in all of its various twists and turns, from the expansion of the franchise and the repeal of the Corn Laws onwards, has been to create and recreate a sovereign bloc that can resist insurgency and insurrection from 'beneath'. The Tory Party took a tremendous blow on June 8. And it has lost the political and social initiative in society. Millions of voters have taken a significant turn to the left. Nevertheless, at this moment of terrible weakness, and tortured as it is by its seething factions, the Tory Party scored 42% of the popular vote (out of the 69% of the electorate who voted.) Thatcher scored the same in 1982 and 1987, and with it destroyed the trade union movement and reordered society.

The political right in British society has not gone away. No doubt part of its general defeat in June was spun out of the initial victory of the far right in its identification of Brexit with racism - a shock across society that crystallised a left response that in turn changed the terms of the country's direction on several fronts. But the left's alternative remains untested. And as Europe's refugee crisis deepens so British racism (now led by PM May rather than the remains of UKIP) will be encouraged to rise again, if not to prevent Uber et al recruiting their workhorses, but rather to break up the momentum and coherence of the new Labour leadership's base in society - as a means to prevent radical change.

Labour  

The triumph of Labour's new leadership has been, if anything, underestimated in the mainstream media. Corbyn's vote was the same as Blair's victory in the 2001 election.  It was 11% higher than Gordon Brown's Labour vote in 2010 and 10% higher than Ed Miliband's Labour scored in 2015, meaning Corbyn would have won both elections. (This is not as abstract and fanciful as it sounds. For instance, imagine if Labour had fully and frontally confronted the banks in 2010 and refused to force austerity on working class people as the 'only way' to save the economy?)

Corbyn's election is aptly named. The bulk of Labour's MPs, after 18 months of hostility to Corbyn and two Party leadership elections, 'decided' that they would turn off their venom towards their Party leader while the election was on, 'to show' as several MPs explained to a cheerfully cynical media, 'that Labour's coming catastrophe was all Corbyn's fault.' When Corbyn and shadow Chancellor McDonnell left their election counts in the late evening of June 8, they went to Labour's election HQ only to find their electronic entry cards to the building no longer worked. (See the BBC's Political Editor on the BBC's election night programme who referred to the plan by Party staff to remove Corbyn et al immediately following what they still believed to the bitter end would be a Tory landslide.) The bulk of the parliamentary Labour Party were more hostile towards Corbyn than to a victory by the Tories. A decisive defeat of Corbyn by the Tories meant success to most Labour MPs and was to be the signal for the proper Labour Party to re-emerge.

Instead Corbyn, and more significantly his Labour Manifesto, mobilised millions of voters and has set the political direction in the country for a different future.

The paradox here is that while the modern Tory Party is riveted with factions, intrigue and malice, is currently exhausted and totally unable to give a lead to society, it is the Labour Party that faces a real seismic breach. The divisions in the Tory Party are divisions that echo internal ruling class differences. Those between the two wings of Labour, the bulk of the membership and the Corbyn leadership on the one hand and the Party apparatus and most MPs on the other, is not an internal class matter. Labour has always uneasily represented both main social classes. Now Labour's virulent internal argument sums up nothing less than the division between those two main social classes. The Labour Party faces the clash between classes, with contradictory interests, that cannot be healed.

By way of an example; Labour Peer, Lord Sainsbury, ex supporter of Labour's last right wing split, the SDP, who has given more than £3 million to 'Progress', the Blairite wing of Labour since 2004, also provides 'core funds' to 'Policy Network'. This operation, led by Blair supporter Mandelson, runs on over £900,000 a year and reaches out beyond Labour MPs like Chuka Umunna to Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable and Tory Nicky Morgan. Umunna led the first break from Labour after the June 8 election, rounding up 50 of his fellow Labour MPs and 51 others from the Tories and the Liberals to vote for the 'EU's single market'. (In reality this vote had no other significance than the establishment of a distinct alternative 'political platform' in the new parliament.)

Blair has re-entered the British political stage with an explicit goal of the recreation of a centrist political bloc in Parliament. Jonathan Freedland, the British Guardian newspaper columnist, has published a call for a second referendum on the EU.

A clear statement has now been made. And while the British ruling class may be at odds with itself regarding the future physiognomy of Brexit, one thing remains inviolable. No British government can be allowed to challenge ruling class rule. The key object in the here and now of any 'centrist' regroupment in Parliament is first and foremost to block Corbyn (and the mass membership of the Labour Party - and the growing movement in the country to end austerity.) While Tories hammer away at Corbyn's 'extreme' programme, the emerging Labour 'centrists' will use the call for a new referendum to split Corbyn's new base in society.

Prospects

Taken as a whole, both the main parties, for different reasons, are unable yet to 'solve' or even moderate Britain's political crisis, and there will be further, convulsive evolution across all mainstream parties and political movements throughout Britain in the next year.

The 2016 EU Brexit referendum is now ancient news as history and Britain's political crisis speeds up. A mainstream rightwing coalesced around Brexit in 2016, using racism to build its influence and carve away traditional Labour voters within society. The new right was rapidly absorbed by the Tory government and then the new right wing's leading personnel knocked themselves to pieces in their craven ambition to 'take it all.'  May emerged as Tory leader and the saviour of the the far right's agenda. But the 2017 General Election 'over-determined' the political impact of the 2016 EU referendum. May found herself facing a reunited working class movement behind a radical Labour manifesto and, at the same time, a centrist push by big capital and its political allies to stop a tax-haven Brexit.

The potential economic restructuring emerging from Brexit will create further alarm among Britain's capitalist class. This will emerge either cautiously, with a growing number of calls to re-run the referendum (a new referendum which would now have the effect of entirely preventing radical answers to an already sick system in favour of a return to an enfeebled, failing and unwanted status quo) or instead offensively with the demand to launch the US (read tax-haven) option, where all basic work takes place under the old, Third World type conditions. Meanwhile austerity's strain on, and sometime disintegration of, public services will deepen - with increasingly dire results in larger society.

The fight among the Tories will ebb and flow while it retains its core purpose. The paradox for the Labour leadership and its party members is that they have to promote their battle within the party apparatus and break the new 'platform' emerging in Parliament. The Labour leadership and the party's membership has their 'real enemy' presiding among many of their own MPs. The struggle inside the Labour party, led by the leadership, is a crucial part of Labour's way forward if it is to guarantee Labour's radical promise to survive as an option, as an alternative choice to austerity and impoverishment.

The arrival of the Corbyn campaign, currently in the established lead of the Labour Party, combined with mass action and huge movements in the population for basic rights and an end to the plague of inequality, are potentially the new political factors that can break the mainstream political logjam. The political moment of now, of one month, of one year, of two years, is fraught with both danger and possibility.  However history ticks away, the initiative taken up by the left must be acted on instantly. May and her sack of Tory cats must be torn away. A new election must be held. Another election cannot win for the people unless it is accompanied by an emergency Labour Party Conference, with its own internal election, that must ring the party changes needed to carry through Labour's Manifesto.

The SNP experienced a retreat in Scotland on June 8. They had fought the 2017 election on the call for another independence referendum. They were pushed back because, like the EU vote in 2016 being repeated now, it has already become the wrong referendum. Scots did not see in 2017 the overwhelming need to have a country based on a timid SNP future. But Britain and all of its nations do need new referenda, a new General Election, not on the EU, not on the prospect of an eternal mediocre SNP, but rather on the sort of society, the sort of countries that people want to have in England, Scotland, in Wales and in Northern Ireland - after facing a decade and more of living in a Britain that is progressively and rapidly and angrily - not what they want.