Boris and Keir dissolve the remnants of British democracy

Only two British newspapers regularly criticise the new British government. But an overwhelming majority of the international media, including the Scottish and Irish papers, share a less starry-eyed view. Most of the British media are still hanging on hard to the Prime Minister's tails. Trying here to blame the PM's top advisor (especially now he and his mate have been sacked) - claiming there that 'world beating' Covid management has inevitably prevented other proper government initiatives, except that the UK has the worst health results in the West, behind only those of the US. So Boris is still presented in most of the English media as a potential knight in shining armour. Nowhere else.

The reality of the British Tory leadership is the inevitable, hopeless extension of the previous 11 years of Tory austerity government. Boris is saying that they are different from the previous Tory governments; 'we are not going for austerity' he bellows. The rest of the world looks at Britain's mess. They pick up the hints from the Government's Treasury; they turn to the history of Britain's post war economy from 1945 to 1960, consider, and then say - oh yes? 

The political alternative to Boris? The second Keir, in his own second-rate way, has already collapsed. 20 Labour MPs have called for Corbyn's re-establishment as a Labour MP. 13 members of the National Executive have walked out. The leadership of Labour is now involved in the narrow business, primarily designed to kill off Corbyn - an expected conclusion of the ruling class's relentless attacks on Corbyn after he nearly won the 2018 General Election. Social Democracy always seeks contracts with the powers that-be. The political death of Corbyn and his supporters was and remains paramount to them. Sadly for Keir mark 2, even if he dumps Corbyn's 20 MPs and his National Exec., supporters, he will have no base outside the Labour Party from which he could push the ruling classes for any sort of contract, because he is trying to dismantle the 10 million who voted for Corbyn. Most of that base do not want and will not support, another, adenoidal version of Blair.   

The two main parties demonstrate the spectacular failure of British politics in the 21st century. Here is what the failing parties will do and what they will not do. Starting with the government; it is the most personally corrupt since the 19th century. (See blog on corruption; 13 November; now covered across many media.) It is going to fail spectacularly in its fight with Scottish national independence. It is going to set up a new austerity of desperate proportions. Mass action will turn to revolt - by students, the unemployed and workers who are going to have their wages cut yet again. All this will redouble the Tory Party factionalism that previously ripped across Brexit, in the government efforts that will be used, by state borrowing, in order to keep Boris's connection with the working class split that he fought for in 2020. 

The government's main opponents in Parliament will also fail - and carry on Blair's destruction of the UK's social democratic party. It will reject the most radical part of the working class action and its demands - despite the context of direct and desperate struggle against the government's program. It will seek a Wilsonian offer, to 'calm things down', that will be unacceptable for most people and which would offer the opposite in the Scottish and Northern Irish radical developments. 'We are not as bad as them' already failed with Miliband in 2012.        

What neither of the two main parties will not do is approach the key crises that are expanding fast in British life. They will trip away; denying the driving significance of poverty and the untouchable wealth of the rich, the British nations requirements and their bubbling future, the direct responses (except via the police) to direct action, the breakdowns and the new, critical decisions of the people. Why? Because the main Parties are rotten. Because British democracy has less and less of a role in Britain's current politics. 

Here's at least one version of what could be done.

First, Corbyn, with his 20 MPs and his 13 National Executive members, should take the step of founding a Socialist faction in Parliament. The new faction would stand for all of the 2019 manifesto; a minimum wage as direct support for all unemployed after Corona; increased wages for all, based genuinely on reversing austerity; opening up and supporting critical referendums required by all sections of the UK and organising social conferences across Britain to deeply reform the basis for a new type of democracy. 

Of course various well meaning but narrow ideologues will shiver at the thought of 'undermining the unity of Labour.' But this particular and ancient notion has run its course - if it ever had one. The single Green MP carries more political weight in society than lorries full of the two main parties of MPs. There is no foreseeable future for any decisive development towards socialism unless a core of millions, already utterly disgusted people, who reject the status quo, can associate themselves with the ideas and policies that they can really fight for. Corbyn and his current supporters can begin to help building that movement: Inside and outside the current but decrepit British Parliament. 

questions from socialists about the 'new wave of socialism' (29 October)

A Few Questions

1. Why is a new social democracy ‘an ancient proposition’. I agree instinctively but not sure of why. Is it because the capitalist class don’t need to make concessions of that order because they are so strong, or can’t afford to be so weak/ needing to centralise? Or not able to because capital reorganised multi nationally ?

2. Do you mean previous efforts to create socialism couldn’t succeed because to beat the imperialists and develop economically / industrially they needed a capitalist state?

And that what they succeeded in was independent national development and shouldn’t be thought of as ‘workers states’ ( ‘deformed’ or otherwise)?

3. So that means that on their own (in one country) movements couldn’t achieve socialism or go beyond national liberation, whoever was leading the movement eg Latin America in the 80s, would always have been limited even if it hadn’t been led by liberal nationalists ?

5. But Scottish and Irish nationalists need to break up the British state, hence are inherently progressive even if not socialist. So if these movements became overtly socialist, could they develop socialist states? 

6. Agree about nature of capitalist state - role to defend class interest even if some of the apparatus - nhs, schools etc - result from concessions, from society pushing back

7. So - and this is my main Q - what are you saying about a socialist state? Do you mean movements need to be seeking to take over the state as it seeks to take over politics? Ie as was starting in Greece with a parallel system then supported by the new Syriza gov? What does it mean for how movements organise now? 

Responses

1. The essence of social democracy (SD) is its contract with the capitalist system. The UK, the second most powerful capitalist country in the world in 1945, created such a contract. All the SD contracts were with developed capitalist countries. There were  no SDs in underdeveloped countries. Today, SD cannot make contracts with developed capitalist countries – regardless  of the working class causing extreme pressure for change -  because, with the exception of the US, capitalist organisation is centralised in three main blocks with global corporations and a banking system concentrating most profit and wealth. Most capitalist nations borrow globally. For some time, SD has been unable to increase significant resources for working class people in virtually all the individual capitalist countries and has therefore declined as a political force. Capitalism now uses splits of the working class or will use police or military force to stop any serious widespread anti-capitalist action – rather than offer any SD concessions. 

2. The first would-be socialist revolutionaries did not create capitalist revolutions. They wanted socialism and they called it so. But their revolutions (with the evolving motors of state bureaucracy) created societies that were completely run by the new state. It was the new state that used everything it could, including state capitalism, to achieve modern development. They were therefore not creating socialist states and neither deformed or degenerated socialist states. They were, and are, brutal, successful, national revolutions that pushed back imperialism but often used state capitalism (of different types) to develop. They were the second wave of the national revolutions that started in 1645. And they broke down some of the most important 20th century imperialism’s barriers to do so     

3. Socialist-named revolutions spread across what was ‘the third world.’ In reality they were fighting western imperialism to win their own development. Spreading several countries might have created possible bases to start building socialism, if they were powerful enough not just to push imperialism back but also the capitalist system of society. The capitalist / imperialist blocks today, the EU and the US, would also be powerful enough to challenge the capitalist system of society – should a wider international revolution develop. Cuba and Vietnam have pushed furthest towards opening socialism, but they are still dominated by the US – and China - preventing any genuine socialist step.

4. If they succeeded, the radicalism of Irish and Scottish nationalism would break up the UK log jam and force a reassessment of a second ‘Scandinavia.’ This would open more possibilities for the working classes, which already have access to modern development, and could understand socialism via new demands for a different sort of society. A general coalition / federation across these small nations could be a first step.

5.-7. In 1917 Russia, dual power (which should have been fully understood as two states) clashed for the leadership of society. The soviets represented exclusively the workers, peasants and most of the army. While the Bolsheviks, eventually, argued ‘all power’ to the soviets in 1917, in practice they did not see the soviets as the exclusive representation of the working class and peasantry. On the contrary, they replaced the possibility of a new leadership based in new soviets with their own party and then with the inevitable bureaucracy of their own party, which in turn pushed exclusively for national economic development.  The creation, as full as possible, of the self-organisation or organisations, created by workers and their allies, as the day-to-day alternative to the capitalist state, must be the engine room of a future socialist society. The socialist parties cannot replace this new state. And in the already developed countries, the goals of the new state must include the earliest possible subordination to a new society – via the peoples’ decisive democracy

 

Boris Johnson makes deep trouble

From the beginning of Johnson's huge victory in the 2019 UK General Election, he has functioned abysmally. Virtually every day he makes public mistakes. He spins his 'U Turns' like a Whirling Dervish. His laddish cohorts infuriate the Tory women MPs. His 'inner team' annoys his 'do as you are told' Cabinet. His advisers, who obviously set up the government's strategy, are in a melee. And now that the US is not going to give the UK a big, fat, trade deal, the EU can make mincemeat of Brexit. The only two advantages that Boris has established are the results from his illness (ahhh) and the (non) effect of the excruciating caution of the Labour leader's opposition (which has been far more devastating in its attack made on his own party's left wing.) 

All these fun and games cover up an extraordinary and historic shift in British politics.

You could cover this shift from a number of angles. There is the deep drama of Scottish independence and Northern Irish radical nationalism. More alive in Scotland since the 18th century and in Ireland since the 1970s and 80s. There is the utterly impossibility now of an Eastern Asian / British deal or deals, which was the main lever in the economic argument for Brexit. As the US are trying to shut down China, which Biden will maintain, UK business in SE Asia will be 1, American and 2, in direct contest with the much praised digital capacity of Britain, (read Cambridge and Shoreditch, a patch in London). Moving on, the UK, and especially Boris's bit of England, have among the worst results dealing with the Corona virus. The UK is projected as having the worst economic results from the end of the virus, in comparison of all main European countries. 

But the 'heave' now moving UK politics is not always obvious. And there is another angle that needs to be surfaced. British government's leading personnel are creating a monumental mountain of corruption. For example 'Public First' is a small, new PR firm, run by Rachel Wolf, who co-wrote the 2019 Conservative Manifesto and James Frayne who is a long standing ally of Cummings (the PM's first advisor.) It was given contracts worth a £ million for running focus groups to 'urgently' manage communications around the government disaster of the school's exams failure. There had been no competitive tendering. It has been dropped in favour of using 'emergency provisions'.

Competitive tendering has been suspended by the Tory leaders. In late March the accountants Deloitte were called in to run a crisis unit to sort PPE. (The result, of course, was utter chaos.) The Cabinet office has not published the contract. The Cabinet office minister, Chloe Smith was a Deloitte consultant before she became a Tory MP. Deloitte (again - an accountant firm) went on to screw-up contact tracing, and their thousand consultants to work on Test and Trace included 'imports from Boston' that were paid £6250 a day. 

£12 billion went on Test and Trace according to Rishi Sunak. (SERCO got £410 million of it.) And, so far, the government have tossed out non-competitive contracts worth £100 million. (Mate rates.) SERCO provided a batch of 500,000 test tubes including leaking vials and contamination with hair and blood. It's ok. The Department of Health did not include any penalty clauses. SERCO profits are still mounting. And the chief executive, Rupert Soames, told staff (in a leaky Email) that the pandemic is 'going a long way in cementing the position of the private sector companies in the public sector supply chain'. Soames should know - as a grandson of Churchill and a brother of the Tory grandee, Nicolas Soames. And so it goes; on and on. (See many more details, LRB, 5 November.)

Corruption, in the sense of MPs and Ministers pocketing irregular money from Parliamentary benefits as was seen in the early 2000's appalled the British public. But Boris's crew are doing something else. They are using 'emergency provisions' to provide businesses that want large public funds - on an industrial scale. And this is the most poisonous aspect of the new politics. 

What is the impact of this cesspit? 

Spraying public money from the government to your private company friends, without the tiniest indication of any questioning from the opposition parties, shows how desperately sheltered the democratic centre of British politics is today. This is a democracy which does not challenge some of the greatest self-seeking so called 'political' decisions that are now in full display. If anybody wishes to answer the question; 'why does the British government fall so far behind similar European (and not to mention East Asian) when it comes to the Pandemic? Why do the British government have failures in PPE, in Track and Trace, in Care Homes and in the numbers of deaths from Covid-19? Why? Because the structure of British politics today is incapable to manage, let alone lead any serious crisis. It is organised to prevent any real democracy. 

The corruption of modern political life in Britain is seeping into the whole of society. Parliament, with its hundreds of giddy Lords and its criminals in the Commons is promoting a real revolt where millions directly challenge their leaders. In Germany in the 1930s the Nazis smashed up a similar, bent democracy. In the USA, in France and Italy, in Poland, in Belarus, Hong Kong, the left (just about) have the momentum and the chance, not to re-vamp a dubious history, but to start now and build a real democracy of the people.