The best future for the UK's people.

The best future for the UK in the next political and economic period is to accept the right of its various citizens to decide the separation of the UK's different countries. It would follow that the English, the Scots and the Welsh could seek a federation together with the other more social democratic countries of Northern Europe. The Northern Irish, happily, are already able to become part of Ireland, should they so wish.

What would this achieve? It would simultaneously dissolve the self-styled 'great power status', of UK/England and make it much easier thereby to focus the separate countries on the conditions and lives of their ordinary peoples. A second 'Hanseatic League' (originally a very successful 13th to 15th century trading arrangement across Northern Europe) could start again on the new basis of defending the social gains made so far in the West, as globalisation smashes up the post WW2 welfare states. It is the Northern European states who are still holding the social-democratic line - against their will in some cases. With a new approach promoting the sort of society that starts from the needs of the people, an England, a Scotland and a Wales could stand with Norway, Sweden and Denmark, holding back the wave of destruction of social support and care which destroyed Greece and is currently rolling its menace across France and Italy.

Utopia? Behind what might be described as a fantasy, are two hard facts. First is the economics of the next period in the West. Most large European countries spend the bulk of the taxes they receive on Health, Education and Welfare. Their governments have been forced to do that since 1945. The EU countries as a whole use 35.7% of their countries' Gross Domestic Product (the goods and services that the country produces) in government expenditure. France is in the middle of a battle to drastically slice government expenditure by cutting pensions, but the French state normally spends 47.9% of France's GDP.  Germany 44.5%. Then there is Scandinavia. There is a battle here too; an endless demand from the corporations, most of the media, the higher classes to cut government spending. But ...

Sweden uses 49.8% of its country's GDP. Denmark 50.8% and Norway 54.8%. And the UK government? It spends 34.4% of the country's GDP. The UK is at the bottom of all the large western countries, thanks to Thatcher and Blair.

The second 'hard fact' is the dissolution of Britain's traditional politics. Boris Johnson's victory at the polls in Britain's 2019 General Election, manoeuvred by the crushing of his EU remainers in Parliament; was created by the defeat of the left-led Labour Party. But Boris's maimed victory is not resolved, courtesy of Corbyn's defeat. It is Boris's 'utopia', as it will unfold under the pressure of his brutal Brexit, the downturn across the the capitalist world, the single economic leverage that he has chosen to use for the UK's future, that will turn the politics of the UK into another fast spin. In essence, Boris has to burn down the current proportion of the UK's education, health and welfare to shore up the tax-light wealth he needs to attract and sustain his contest with Singapore, etc.

How will the politics of Boris's project fall-out? The Borisian dream is utterly bent on the critical role of the British-based banks and finance companies (touched by computer super gaming - expanding as hard as possible - offering a tech substitute for the failure of AI.) This is to be underpinned by the US of course; together with all the other Anglo 'let's go world-wide wide open' countries - that want to hoard wealth and keep the immigrants out. This is not any sort of recipe for stable future, buttressed by well paid and interesting apprenticeships and jobs!

The smoke and mirrors in front of Boris's political success will clear very fast. Indubitably, our UK's mini-Trump will try to hold onto his equivalent of the British rust-bucket that Trump still savours. Hundreds of thousands are 'back to work' in some of the US States that crashed out of their traditional Democratic allegiance in the last Presidential contest. The new work is now some fracking, some metal work, but mainly folding boxes. In the UK, fracking is going nowhere, metal and engineering are escaping Britain almost as fast as cars. And most of the Midlands and the North East are already folding boxes or working in the collapsing social services. Boris has to make a giant leap beyond Trump's 'offer' in the US, in order to set his new rust-buckets screwed Tory tight. That's the real fantasy.

And then there is the nation. Scotland will demand the right to vote again on independence. Northern Ireland are allowed to do it when they want. Scotland is already on the march. This, and the deep dislike of Boris in Scotland, will force the issue after the Scottish elections in 2021. Additionally, the British Labour Party may well by then agree with the SNP's view on a new referendum - as Labour digs deeper when their 2020 leadership election proves nothing like enough to rebuild a victory in a UK election.

And then there are the direct movements that will erupt against Boris's government. The post Brexit times will cause all sorts of certainties to crash. The growing hatred of the current political system among a third of Britons will quickly re-grow. (The Royal family are providing further fuel.) The absolutely essential creation of a new Green deal, in jobs, technology and reorganisation of industries like farming, will become more and more acute. Recognition of the meaning of Britain's separate nations will be unavoidable. New political alliances will be essential. All this will seem to come very quickly. British politics (along with most western politics) is going very fast now. But the new Labour leadership will not solve, let alone lead, these great movements. That is the decisive result of the 2019 election.

What can Labour do?

Starting with 10 million who ignored and who even spat at the attacks on Corbyn that blossomed from both outside and in the Labour Party, a real, tough, practical vision is emerging in a future that will need much more than the standard 'our turn next' from the Labour Grandees.  

The ten million Labour voters and the hundreds of thousands of Labour members need to take stock of why the Labour Party failed and what the Labour Party should do now. Now is the time to ask the questions; what sort of Labour Party do we want to be? What sort of Labour Party can we be? The dangerous effect of Labour's defeat is the idea that now is the time for what will be a paralytic 'unity'. The truth is the exact opposite. The would be 'unifiers' have turned reality on its head. There are a potential five years before Boris can be overturned by votes in a General Election. The time for Labour's unity was before and during the election. It did not happen inside the Parliamentary Party - who ignored the members and opposed Corbyn. There was no unity in the Labour Party in the 2019 General Election. That was when there should have been unity. But now is the time to analyse, criticise, debate and consider. The call for 'unifying' now is simply a means by which it will be the wings of the Parliamentary Labour Party that will de facto answer the questions about Labour's future.

Fighting constituency by constituency over the next period for an MP that 'unifies' the Party - in their own terms - is a cul de sac. Boris will rapidly provide battlefields in the economy and in politics which will require the most intense direct action. Boris's inevitable attacks on the right to independence, on pensioners, the unemployed, on Welfare, Health and Education, on worker's rights and on US collaboration, will also decide if there is a future for the Labour Party. The membership and supporters of the Labour Party need to be front and centre in the movements, the marches, the direct actions that stop Boris and, as with PM Heath in the 1970s and Thatcher in the 1980s, bring him down. The other Labour Party - in Parliament - can go along with their membership, or carry on despising them and praying for a wealthy post, as in the past. In effect, two Labour Parties. It is breathtakingly obvious which of the two Labour Parties would win back the Midlands and the North East, open the door to a new, green economy and re-build respect in a separate Scotland and Ireland.

And that is why Labour's membership and Labour's supporters need now to discuss and debate, to consider what is right and what is wrong with Britain's Labour Party, to look around Europe and the world and to set a different course - to make new alliances for a new society and a new democracy.

Is a Corbyn government possible?

(This blog is exclusive. It is not a section of the on-going series on Revolution. The fourth part is shortly to be published.)

The significance of the intensity and length of the 'anti-semitic' charge against Labour in general and its leader Corbyn in particular suggests the obvious point that should Corbyn's Labour win a General election and come into government it would face the greatest and most venomous hostility of any previous British government in the modern age.

This fact alone gives pause for thought regarding suggestions from some of the left that a Corbyn led government, perhaps parallel to Syriza, is actually seeking a new settlement with the country's ruling classes via a meek Brexit and some economic reform! Indeed Corbyn's 2017 Manifesto is a a temperate document. It is not as radical as Attlee's 1945 program. But, despite the nod in a reformist direction offered by Britain's Church of England's Arch Bishop, an ex oil executive, Britain's (remaining) ruling class do not sense that the relation of social forces in society requires even the most gentle reform. On the contrary. They are opposed to Corbyn's Labour Party in order to prevent the current shift to the left in the working class becoming, in anyway, dominant. Indeed, rather than accept a Corbyn government they are doing their best to destroy the Labour Party - at least as a Parliamentary and thereby as a governmental, force. They are much more frightened that a Corbyn government would, whether officially recommended or not, build up a new social tidal-wave, and that is of greater concern than the prospect of big British Capital missing out on a half-baked Labour Brexit. For now.

The attacks on Corbyn's Labour confirm two other realities.

First is the direct appeal to Jewish and now to Black voters not to vote for Corbyn's Labour Party. The 'anti-semitic' row is not an internal battle. The self-styled leaders of the campaign are speaking as far as possible to millions of voters who are a large part of Labour's political base in the country. Their message could not be clearer. Don't vote for the Labour Party led by Corbyn. The (Labour) MP Chuka Umunna has tried to extend the anti-semitic insult to a Labour Party that in his words has become 'institutionally racist.' Umunna hoped this was an abuse designed to move another, much larger, section of the traditional Labour constituency among people of colour.  (Consequently his clever little move has bounced back at him and Umunna has had to scrabble around with letters to his constituents claiming that he has no intention whatsoever of supporting an alternative party to Labour. Apparently he is entirely dedicated to stay with an institutionally racist party.)

Second is the difference between the arguments in the two main parties as we go to an impeding General Election.

The gung-ho Tory Brexiteers held a recent meeting to explain their approach to the Irish conundrum. They were at pains to avoid ex Foreign Secretary Boris Johnston's assault on Prime Minister Teresa May. They insisted that they were not (yet) for a change of Tory leadership. Of course the battle will come over leadership if/when Parliament fails to vote for any Brexit 'solution' - or a General Election is called because that has already become clear. But despite the historic implications of removing Britain from the EU (or fudging it) the fight in the Tory Party is not a class struggle. It is a faction fight within a class about the general interests of that class: whether to turn the UK into the biggest (capitalist) tax haven in the world or join the EU bloc in the (capitalist) fight with the US and Asia.

The fight in the Labour Party is a class struggle. (Albeit by proxy.)  A hundred serious Labour MPs want to break, even from Corbyn's relatively timid Manifesto. Further; if elected they will form their own party in Parliament against Corbyn's Labour and join together with others that seek to defend their version of liberal capitalism and its associated restraints on the working class and their services.

Is a Corbyn government possible? Yes. But the crisis of government is only just beginning. If it wins (as the polls still show it should) Labour (unlike the Tories) will split in Parliament - albeit with the split keeping away from a definite alternative party in the country - for the moment.  A Corbyn Labour government will then depend on two factors. The movement of the working class and its allies across the country mobilising around the the critical requirements that society needs. Unlike President Obama, the mobilisation of the people comes first, not just before, but most importantly after, a formal government takes office. If Corbyn's Labour wins then it is the people who will achieve and force their democratic victory on Parliament. Parliament will have to follow the action of the people in its stalemate.

There will of course be more elections, more crises as Britain's ruling class deepens their already long term investment strike and begins to fiddle around with the new Alt Right as a political 'solution' for 'stability'. And then second aspect emerges in its full and urgent course. It will be nothing less than the building of a new (Labour?) Party  - and a new political system. A system that is willing and able to decide and act on whether decaying and failing capitalism is to be our future rather than a system that takes the economics of the country for granted.

Brexit and Labour's crisis

The paradox of political crises is that they are rarely resolved - unless they are broken through by the new. Efforts directed at simply re-establishing the status quo invariably fail. The existence of the original crisis does not itself create a new reality. It is only human interaction, with and inside the existing crisis that has that potential. The British Labour Party is exactly in that position today.

174 Labour MPs have voted 'no confidence' in Labour leader Corbyn. (40 voted in favour of Corbyn's leadership.) It is obvious that by this means the right wing of the Labour Party, concentrated in the parliamentary section of the party, was trying to lever Corbyn out, starting by trying to avoid a vote by the whole party on who should be its leader, but which the rebels have now to face. (This is a maneuver fraught with dangers as a big vote to keep Corbyn as Labour Party leader would mean that those Labour MPs who have struck their blows at his leadership instantly become a group identified as anti Labour Party as a whole.)

What is this division in Labour based on? The first thing to note it has little to do with Corbyn's efforts, or lack of them, on behalf of the 'remain' (in the EU) campaign - or his supposed inability to win elections - or his mild manners and 'poor show' in Parliament. (Attlee who led the country into full employment, the welfare state and the state ownership of basic industry was generally described as modest and shy. ('He has a lot to be modest about' scowled the post war election loser Churchill.) In fact Corbyn has presided over a couple of good results in by-elections; a great result for London Mayor and, according to polls, 'won' 63% of Labour voters to the 'remain' cause (much more than several of his most prominent opponents managed in their own constituencies.) This attack has been planned by Labour's right wing and started by Hilary Benn, in an organised, last ditch effort to remove Corbyn, as right wing Labour MPs realised that they might have to go into an early General Election as a result of Brexit. Their original timetable for their coup was premised on the time they had available given a 2020 election.

But Britain's political crisis exposes in detail the real dynamics of the Labour Party. Close to the time of Labour's foundation a minority of the international left analysed the British Labour Party as a 'bourgeois, workers' party; supported by the working class at its base; led, organised and politically operated by those who supported the system. The friction, contest and finally the battle between these two forces would, in the end they surmised, seal Labour's fate.

This original class character of the British Labour Party has moved on from the time of Lenin's considerations. Most recently, Blair's efforts destroyed the traditional loyalty of millions of working class people for 'their' party. And the removal of the famous Clause 4 of Labour's constitution, which called for the workers 'by hand or by brain' to have control over the means of production, duly replaced by liberal managerial drivel, marked the point where the British Labour Party had abandoned the seminal idea that it stood for a different sort of society than that which was offered by capitalism. Accordingly, the active base of the Labour Party shriveled and virtually died. This of course followed the halving of trade unionism as a result of a decade of terrible defeats.

Nevertheless, despite the SNP's victory in Scotland and despite UKIP's 3.6 million votes and despite taking the blame for the Banker's crisis, the Labour Party still mobilised 9 million votes in the 2015 general election. Among millions of blue and white collar and service workers and their families, Labour was still the choice made against UKIP, the Liberals and the Tories in England and Wales. Meanwhile an enormous anti-austerity movement had grown up and it rolled forward, dramatically confronting a weak Tory victory in 2015. Realizing that the political system must change to block austerity, tens of thousands of mainly young people and those disgusted by Blair's warmongering then flooded into the empty Labour committee rooms under the new rules to vote for the new leader. Naturally they wanted an anti-war and an anti-austerity Labour leader.

This almost entirely new base of membership of the party suddenly reproduced some of the internal conditions of the Labour Party at its origin. A new contradiction between the classes roared up, bottled for the moment inside the Labour Party. From a position of almost unassailable (if empty) domination of the party by a post socialist, rich-loving cabal, the Labour leadership found itself under siege from its own membership. The roots of the decaying post Blairite leadership in the British ruling class were always temporary and proved utterly fragile at a single assault from several hundred thousand young people who had walked through the Party's door. From the point after the 2015 election where they made a lot of sound and fury about the need to restore Blairism, those would-be leaders toppled, almost without a push, in the party leadership elections.

Now, this time perhaps as 'farce', Labour's right wing MPs, still scared of the future, still aching for a quiet turn back to the 1995 status quo, have launched an all out assault ... on the party membership! And the historic friction and ultimate class contradiction of Labour re-emerges, as the remnants of a bourgeois, worker's party fight out which sections of society should be represented by the Labour Party. But this time there is no 'Imperial preference' to pay off a vast labour bureaucracy and the aristocracy of labour, there is no Keynsian compromise to be made with globalisation, there is no forced 'consensus' between the wealthy and the rest on the requirement for a social wage. Therefore this has turned into a fight to the finish for Labour.

The British Labour Party has lost Scotland. Even the critical left that is (rightly) emerging in Scotland sees Scottish Labour as part of the problem. Large sections of Labour's traditional vote, especially in the North East and in Wales are on the cusp of losing the remnants of their loyalty to Labour. Part of the Labour right wing MP's enervation, even hysteria is spawned from the dawning realisation that Labour has little chance of forming a government in the foreseeable future - outside coalition - whatever they manage to do with Corbyn and the left. The truth of it is that 'traditional' Labour has run its course. It is done. That is the unbearable vision of the future, opened up by the current crisis that has terrified 174 Labour MPs, who, up to now, were full of ambition and their own sense of entitlement.

Time to create a new fact.

To create a new political fact it is necessary to see clearly the existing ones. No wonder Lenin described facts as revolutionary. First, the historic shift of the Scottish working class and intermediate layers of society away from the Labour Party and towards the SNP is unlikely to change back outside of an entirely new social convulsion. Certainly Brexit shows no signs of signaling such a convulsion among the Scots. On the contrary, it is taken as further underpinning the argument for independence. The Labour Party has lost at all three levels; the leadership, the membership and the social base of support, in Scotland.

In the North East, the East Midlands and in Wales a measure of the traditional Labour vote had already deserted to UKIP in the 2015 election. This was consolidated broadly in a nationalist and racist direction by the 'exit' vote in the EU referendum. Unlike the call for Independence in Scotland, the Johnson, Gove, Farage perspective does not constitute a general political project with a new version of society and remains very contestable especially in the very likely context of worse austerity, more rationing of services and no change in the gap between the rich and poor. But, so far, that contest has not been had and the consequences of denial of the current reality grow larger for the Labour Party as the 'return' to a fantasy British history festers.

If Labour's 174 anti-Corbyn MPs had an SDP to join (the party that emerged in the 1980s to defeat Labour led by Michael Foot and Tony Benn) they would join it. Even so their attack on Corbyn takes place despite their secret knowledge that the traditional Labour Party may never again be able to form a government (and therefore they will not get a government post and the ladder into the City of London etc., will not, after all, be let down for them and therefore Lord Mandelson and his hero Blair are to be the last of the golden Labour spiv generation accepted by Britain's real rulers who hold wealth and power.)

If these people nevertheless win Labour's husk and defeat their own new Party membership, they will not confront racism in the Welsh Valleys or in Sunderland; they will avoid it and then concede to it. They will not be able to open the door to a new left in Scotland, accepting the right of independence, making alliances with the SNP on Trident and austerity and driving that through in ways that expose the limits and concessions that the SNP leadership constantly make. Instead they will try to tackle the SNP from the right! Their vote will drop substantially from the 9 million that Labour scored in 2015. In the final analysis they will become a wing of a 'national government' to 'defend Britain' together with the new Tory Party right wing, either by a worked through agreement, de jure, or in day to day practice, de facto.

But it also has to be accepted that Labour's left, even should it win the present battle and isolate its new right, will not be able to form a new government autonomously. A new government from an early General Election is more than possible against the reeling Tories. A freed up left would be able to reach directly into some of the traditional Labour heartlands with a bold new emergency programme - completely unavailable to their opponents in the Party. However, the old certainties are over and Labour's left leadership, even were it to hold the 9 million, will still need to face some of its own MPs opposing its measures, it will need to build a government in alliance with the SNP and the Greens and Plaid Cymru on its radical programme. Old Labour, and its false unity, circa 1950s to 2007, is dead. Blair, Brown, Miliband and the current battle have made sure of that. In other words, a new type of working class based political formation is required in mainstream politics and Labour's left leadership can be in a position to begin that construction. Better smaller, but better.

This is the end for the Labour Party, as it has existed since 1900. The choice is how can its best elements, its membership against austerity, poverty, war and racism; its leaders who will fight for the disadvantaged; its voters in the past and in the present, can win out over those who would serve the system first. Of course it is better if all of the Labour Party can be won to challenge the failures past and the failures to come from a system that just doesn't work and has not worked for years for the majority. Unfortunately (and from its birth) that schism has run through Labour. Now it has broken wide open. It may well mean a smaller group of MPs and Labour leaders have to speak to the largest classes in society after this battle. But the words will be heard if they are clear and sure. No more austerity: New wealth taxes: End poverty: Protect the poor: Build our services and communities: No foreign war and no nukes: Get rid of racism: Houses for all; and, after the power of the referendum, let us continue with - Fair Votes. This would be how to build a potential new fact that can break through the crisis.