A new version of the Western World

A 'new' right wing politics has seized the anti-globalisation momentum building up in a large section of the European and US working classes. The traditional left, classically the US Democrats and the British Blairite Labour Party, saw globalisation as inevitable, defended the banks in 2008 and, to all intents and purposes, dissolved themselves into the mainstream right. They face the same shattering future together.

Globalisation in the Western world had the opposite effect to its impact on Asia (barring the Japanese disaster.) Industrial labour was created for the first time for millions and compared with their prior dependence on agricultural labour the mass of the people's living standards rose dramatically, particularly in China. In the West industrial labour declined and working class living standards were substantially reduced. In both regions a new, supra-national, super rich emerged. But this had a different impact in the West and the East due to the reverse experience of millions of workers and their families in the separate regions.  Finally, the Western banking crisis of 2008 and the use of state funds and society's resources to bail them and their owners out brought the failure of globalisation in the West into sharp relief. 

The US and the EU had enthusiastic but different economic and political approaches to globalisation. In Europe the most advanced countries organised the EU specifically as a means to challenge US supremacy in the number and size of international / global corporations. At the level of technique (creation and application of new technology) and Capital formation (accumulation of profit via increased productivity) the US won this particular contest hands down. But in the end both models are failing. Huge social layers face declining living standards and are mounting an expanding wave of resistance in the US and in Europe, while the giant corporate creations have simultaneously detached themselves from business taxation or any national regulations of significance as they float above the world they control. Indeed, they have created specific parts of the world where they are above any law or social obligation whatsoever. (The British response to all this, via the hegemony of a half-baked rightwing leadership over Brexit, is the biggest piece of wreckage so far in response to globalisation. Britain is on course to become the largest tax haven in the world. And, it is worth reminding supporters of the Brexiteers that none of these super rich ghettos have state health services, labour law or democratic rights.) 

Leaving aside the pitiful British example, and despite Trump, it is the EU model that is currently most vulnerable. Led by Germany, the EU's management of globalisation has created a complex and contradictory confection, simultaneously trying to create a national economy, a national bank and a national currency - out of a collection of utterly unevenly developed nations. These conditions are more than simply contradictory. They are already smashing Greece to pieces and have escalated the refugee crisis, as Germany, which as a nation seeks a huge number of young workers to ensure continuing labour investment and productivity in its own manufacturing, but which has tried to impose its requirements across the EU board. The paradox is that only Greece, the most fragile part of the EU, emerges with any decency from a great humanitarian failure in and by most EU countries. The EU is a dead end for 90% of its people, not just in its relations to the impact of globalisation, but also in its ability to deal with the most elementary international disaster. 

France is now the European, not to say Western, pivot in the mobilisation of a new right wing political project across both Europe and the US. Le Pen claims her party is not from the right or the left (after all both the traditional right and left have been synonymous for decades). She claims she is for the 'patriots' and not the 'globalists.' She denounces the 'cash rich right and the cash rich left'. She will reduce the pension age and increase welfare. She tied globalisation with the 'universal ideology' of Islam. Le Pen adopts many phrases from Trump, Farage and the British Tory right wing leaders but as Le Pen begins her campaign for the French Presidency, as the crisis of globalisation deepens, so a broader and deeper set of propositions are emerging from the right, who are planning for a new world for the West.

The new right, based in the West, are preparing for international war.

They have two targets, neither of which are the multi-nationals. New right leaders will make all necessary concessions to big Capital consistent with access to wealth and resources required for their true goals. The fundamental engine of the new right in the West is fear. Fearing that the West's historical domination of the globe is ending, the aims of the new right are, first, to destroy all potentially insurgent forces emanating from the Middle East (and at home). This has several critical aspects including the obvious alliances which the new West wants to build up to exterminate ISIS, but in a longer term perspective it is to isolate and make dependent all of the Arab and wider Middle East regimes, mostly through taking whatever means are necessary to guarantee Western energy sources. Initially Russia will be feted as a potentially military vanguard against 'terrorism'. Latterly, an exhausted Russia will take its natural and subservient place in the new Western hierarchy. The US will remain in charge of this operation, but the new right of Europe will be expected to recreate 'their historical crusader role in holding the gates of Vienna against the infidel.' The new Europe will need its own wall, a European initiative for its own patrolled walls, not defined by an economic bloc but by a new grand military alliance against immigration. Second, and this goal is already explicit in US military and security circles where it is at the very top of the strategy table, there will need to be a 'defensive war' against China.

Perhaps surprisingly, the latter course was ramped up during the eight years of the Obama regime. China is already surrounded by the strongest, best armed and most technically advanced 'Cordon Sanitaire' in the history of war. Trump and his key officials intend to use it. They will force retreats on the Chinese leadership or they will fight a 'leashed' nuclear war (where 'leashed' means controlled!) The US planners see various possibilities in this scenario, from a successful proxy war in Korea to a subsidised upsurge in mainland China in Islamic regions in the north west of the country -  (Muslims live in every region in China. The highest concentrations are found in the northwest provinces of Xinjiang, Gansu, and Ningxia, with significant populations also found throughout Yunnan province in southwest China and Henan province in central China) - moving on to offensive military bases on Taiwan after US domination of the Taiwan straights. This coming war, believe the new right, is a strategic necessity for US led global domination to survive.

At the moment the new right have the political initiative in the West. But it is still fragile. It can certainly not be defeated by any call to a 'return to normal'. Recent history is not a place where most working class people in the West wish to return. Nevertheless, as France showed in the Spring and Summer of 2016 there are still strong and active social forces ready to challenge the new right's agenda. What is missing is a new left. Efforts to reform the EU or persuade the Democrats have already run out of steam. Huge mobilisations against Trump, against war, against austerity are still the order of the day. However, this energy has yet to be bottled; the social strength of the working class has yet to take a decisive political form. The direct fight with the West's new right and its purposes are another platform for such a political regroupment. 

Prospects in France

Between February and September 2016, leading battalions of organised workers, associated with tens of thousands of French youth, definitively put an end to President Holland's vainglorious ambitions as well as the political future of the French Social Democratic Party. Despite losing the battle to defeat Holland's labour law, a regulation designed to roll back the gains of the French working class since the 1980s  - thereby bringing French labour into line with most of the rest of the EU, the mobilisations, the strikes and occupations of the squares destroyed any remnants of the idea that French social democracy represented the youth or the organised working class.

Meanwhile October 2015 was the 10th anniversary of the risings in the Banlieues, still home to 4.5 million people and still ghettos where more than half live below the poverty line and 40% of the youth are unemployed.  These are the areas in France which enthusiastically mobilised behind Hollande following his promises. After 10 years of failure - except for the small social layer who have used state interventions to rise above their neighbour's circumstances - the Banlieues have abandoned Hollande. These areas today have also emphatically turned their backs on French social democracy.

Both these social upheavals have called time on one of the two great parties that have dominated post-1968 France.

As for the Republicans, the other great party of modern French history, the growing incoherence and fear of the EU's refugee policy associated with ISIS attacks following the Syrian war has stimulated a nationalist resurgence to its right. Already the State of Emergency, provoked by the murder of 130 Parisians in November 2015 has been extended 4 times by the Hollande government, and is currently to be ended only by July 2017.

2017 is the year of French elections. The class wide battle of 2016, its retreats and its successes, its novelty, drama and insurgent atmosphere, its popularity in opinion polls, but also its inability to reach out across wider society, the continuing unmet need to crystallise a new political leadership, this underdeveloped revolt, has gone on to shape the chaotic, response of the French left. The failure of the EU economically and in its confused and fragmented responses to refugees, combined with ISIS attacks and the endless, purposeless State of Emergency, has mobilised the right - but yet also without coherent direction.

The far left, the most obvious repository for the activist forces of 2016 to find their home, is riddled with confusion. For example Phillipe Potou, a leader of the New Anti-Capitalist Party, (a split from the Anti-Capitalist Party) has had difficulty assembling the 500 signatures required to mount a Presidential challenge. The major far left hopeful, the long standing Jean Luc Melenchon, has morphed his Communist Party alliance under the umbrella of the Left Party, into an individual based movement called 'Unsubmissive France.' In different ways both show the as yet unformed capacity of the far left to be able to represent even the most progressive forces that 2016 unleashed, let alone the wider reach out to the Banlieues or France's disaffected working class. The mounting tragedy is the lack of their connection with the millions who have finished with Social Democracy. Far left parties are too small and isolated. At a wider, Melenchon level, they are being turned into 'trust' campaigns focusing on the individual 'hero'. But this European version of Chavas in Uruguay or even Tsipras in Greece has already passed its sell by date. 

Social democrats have ended up voting for Benoit Hamon as their presidential candidate. (He is dubbed France's Corbyn - the leader of the UK Labour Party.) In a deeply sophisticated political culture, Hamon was the only social democrat candidate with a genuine program. His utopian ideas (750 Euros a month for all French citizens without jobs for example) are tied to fantasy economics (no income tax increases; state money to the unemployed will free them to create their own enterprises). So, no nasty class conflict. A Silicon Valley solution to globalisation and late capitalism which mobilises the intelligentsia, but which shows no real political intelligence when it comes to the gaping fissures and possible, indeed essential unities yet to be created in modern French politics - that has failed so badly in the hands of social democratic France and the EU's failing versions of globalisation. 

Meanwhile Francoise Fillon won the Republican vote in a classical right wing version of utopia because of his Thatcherite intentions, his religious tempered social programme and, together with his (Welsh) wife, an outstanding, uncorrupted reputation. (Essential after Sarkozy, Christine La Guard, now of IMF, etc., etc,.) Except it turns out he has thieved hundreds of thousands of Euros from the state, paying for fake jobs for his wife and his children. Fillon was the bookies' shoe-in for President. But that was 48 hours ago. 

In the context of the crisis of both traditional French Parties - as well as the unresolved shape of the far left - two apparent oddities emerge out of the mists of history to 'resolve' the French 'problem.' 

The first of these is Emmanuel Macron, who hints at his political legacy in the title of his 'movement' 'Let's Go!' (Or "Forward.') Besides his packed meetings, Macron has powerful supporters behind the scenes. Some years ago he was identified as a member of ‘les Gracques’ — a discreet centre-left pressure group loosely staffed by influential chief executives and civil service mandarins. They are pro-market socialists who long ago gave up on the Socialist party. Macron talks about himself, his wife and his family. He offers a mystery and an absence. The absence is his lack of association with either mainstream party and his mystery is the blank canvas on which voters can write their own desires. Here we have France's technocratic version of Berlusconi; the managerial solution to the failure of politics. Invented in 1930's France, we now have a new generation that despises history and seeks an anti-politician! Macron contests French polls with Le Pen for top billing.  

And finally, Le Pen junior. In establishment circles French expectations regarding Marine Le Pen rely completely on the relatively permanent 77% of the polls that say the French, in the end, will vote for anyone rather than her. French commentators sagely explain the lock on the 2 stage Presidential election, where she would always be up against a single opponent, and she will never get a 50% plus vote in a 2 horse race. Nevertheless Le Pen starts with 25% plus ratings. And decades of voting shows that, unlike the UK, the US, Germany etc., France has 2/3 million solid fascist supporters in their voting population, with their roots in Vichy and Algeria, and who will not always restrain themselves within electoral politics. 

Now Fillon's moral laxity opens another door - to his right. Le Pen leads the most 'traditional' party in France. It is a movement that predates WW2. Fillon's failure means Le Pen can reach out beyond her long-term base in the direction of those in fear over immigration and towards those who seek nationalist solutions to the damage caused by globalisation. Imagine the electoral temptation of a British UKIP, but now in France without the equivalent of a hard core Tory right wing to divert its progress. 

Most international and many French commentators describe the coming elections as a 'right shift' in French society. This is the simplistic conclusion emerging out of the collapse of the Social Democratic Party and the general fear of more ISIS attacks. The reality is both harsher and more significant. Undoubtedly France will be the axis on which the whole European/Western crisis swivels. But the elements that are coalescing and repelling each other, underneath the coming Presidential carnival, include a social revolutionary aspect as well as fear and political alienation. France's left political organisations may well require as great a non-sectarian reformation as the corrupt, 'ancien regime' needs its overthrow. Traditional French politics no longer work at either level. But that does not rule out insurgency and the creation of new, bold progress; not in the most revolutionary country in Europe and not in the absence so far of drastic social defeat. 

Britain is the weakest link!

Mainstream, self-styled, 'liberal' capitalism (and its social democrat hangers on) are under tremendous, and what seems in the Anglo-Saxon part of the West at least, terminal pressure, from an anti-global political movement - from the right. Trump is making his mark in the US. Britain has gone right-wing Brexit. Now France has become the next critical cockpit of what still remains a struggle for political leadership in continental Europe between two factions of the ruling class: Merkel versus François Fillon, or conceivably LePen. The Dutch elections on March 15 will give a significant (but not a determining) momentum to the north and west European right. We will begin to know then if the nationally based sections of the ruling class in Europe are really intent on destroying the 'unrooted', as the UK PM charmingly calls the managers of the EU, echoing in her chauvinist way Stalin's deadly epithets against Bolshevik leaders he murdered.

After Syriza's terrible retreat in Greece, it is the new right, particularly in the US and northern Europe that have made political progress - and have been the first to mobilise key sections of a previously quiescent working class with a nationalist and racist interpretation of opposition to globalisation.

Yet it would still be a mistaken and harmful exaggeration to see this as a new, social defeat of the working class as a whole. We are not (yet) rerunning the 1930s. First Brexit, then Trump are best characterised as successes for a new right that emerged out of the deepening political crisis created out of the failure of social democracy, the fragility of the old right, where both were underpinned by the increasing burden of globalisation on the western working class - especially following the 2008 crash. But these conditions have not established permanent political allegiances. Indeed, despite Trump's victory and opinion polling success for British PM May, the main characteristic of the coming year will continue to be rapid political change.  Trump's ratings are the worst for any newly elected President. May is unelected - even by her own party. And huge crises are on the horizon for both. 

Inevitably social upheaval is also on the cards in the West and is building up. (The Economist dubs 2017 as the 'year of revolutions.') And the extreme right are using the prolonged political crisis in the West astutely. But the political crisis in the West has not yet worn itself out. Its (rapid) evolution will, in the end, set the terms of the ensuing social crises (do we overthrow governments or defend them?) but we are not there yet. It has a lot of ground to travel before the political crisis arrives at a full stop.

Although the political fracture of the ruling class in the West has created a new right that is a successful (so far) answer to working class hostility to globalisation, its grip on the future is fragile and tenuous. It does not arrive as a result of any significant social upheaval, and with the exception of Greece, any defeat of a radical left position. The new right is scrabbling to get a political grip on the future as it prepares for social upheaval. In Trump's case it is acting as though there had been such an upheaval already. In that sense the new right is not drawing its real policy objectives from the past, (bring back the 1950s; Make America Great Again) but rather from the future social crisis it is sensing. A lot of birds have to fly up, and many dogs have to howl before there is an earthquake; the future is creating the past. The social base of the political right has yet to be built.              

At least up to the March and May events in Holland and France, the main questions that have to be answered in the West are; can a progressive, active mass movement be built in the US that fights, toe to toe, every order Trump signs to destroy the planet; to overturn abortion laws; to criminalise and expel immigrants; to remove safety and security at work; to make the rich richer? And how can the left in Britain make sure that the coming destruction of the Labour Party will lead to two new mainstream parties and not just one.

Of the two, the British situation is most urgent. It is long understood by most Labour MPs that without Scottish votes and with no real answers to UKIP's appeal in the North of England, Labour is finished as a government party on its own. The collapse of traditional Labour might have waited to the scheduled 2020 General Election, but the political crisis in Britain is  speeding up. The bleak reality now is only the creation of a new, class struggle Labour Party can overturn the political victory that the right have won via Brexit. With the Dutch elections in March and the French elections in May and June, with gathering economic storms and an emergency British election in prospect, Corbyn's leadership of the current Labour Party has months to live, not years. 

Any combination of these events or the arrival of some unforeseen Trump adventure, or even the loss of the Len McLusky's leadership of Britain's biggest union UNITE, will finish British Labour Party 'unity' as it currently exists. The de-facto, already self-organised, centre party of Labour MPs, the mini Liberals and the Tory 'remainers' are aching to regroup in public. They are all aware they need to wait until some shocks and shudders hit the economy to make their move (towards some sort of national coalition government of the great and good.) Most Labour MPs have long lost any serious commitment to the party membership or its nominal leadership. The Corbyn leadership, the Labour Conference, mass movements and key unions need to act first. They need to do nothing less than re-found a new Labour Party based on anti-austerity, repudiation of debt, anti-war and anti-nuke internationalism, free movement of all workers, fair trade not free trade, deep reform of political life and an economy for the people.

The split in the British Labour Party is coming. The question is will it be productive? Will it engender a significant reply to the right's political victories? Will it win the social base and allegiances that, post Brexit, currently stand in the balance?

Note: Next, a look at some global trends for the left

Women in the West and Africa take on Trump

A million women, perhaps millions, marched against misogyny and to maintain key, civil rights, on the day after TV host and three times bankrupt Trump became US President. And so is born both the Trump era - and its antidote.

When half a million women turn out in Washington, tens of thousands in London and thousands in Nairobi - facing down the most powerful man in the world and the vast, international machine that serves him - something very important has happened. The world learns at a stroke the means by which to force Trump into his own defeat. 

All sorts of schemes and plots are bubbling away in Capitol Hill and other capitals to check or reform or threaten or impeach the new President. His strange liking for Putin and his Moscow antics will cause impeachment. His inability to launch a massive government spending plan at the same time as 'massive' tax cuts will be blocked by a republican right in Congress and bring his downfall. And Mrs May will speak firmly to him (especially if he calls her 'my Maggie' as we are told he is given to do!) But none of these optimistic speculations get to the heart of the 45th US President's grip on his power. 

Trump's view is that he has won. To him that means everybody else should follow what he says. In the end the Republican Congress, the media, the establishment, the military, and the US based billionaires who decide things, will make their peace. The official Democratic Party already has (with the exception of John Kerry perhaps). Barring the starting of a war with China - which is now the most dangerous possibility in world politics - see 'The Coming War with China' a John Pilger film on the UK's Channel 4), Trump will be able to enact watered down or spiced up versions of programme. They will undoubtedly produce a succession of mini to large scale crises, but Trump believes and his coterie believe, that he can ride it all.  

His campaign against the public media will continue to pour greater authority into the snake oil news found on the Internet. The billionaires will make more billions from Trump's spending plans, either directly through contracts to build infrastructure or indirectly as the stock market rises. The 'hard men' of the US military are in a state of revengeful, orgasmic bliss as Trump talks of China's 'rape' of America. 

And now comes the women' marches. Women were the first to mobilise in the West against WW1. The suffrage movement in Britain split on the matter, but women's anti-war leadership was a prominent political fact. In the event 1917 and the Russian Revolution brought the US into the war full heartedly and that decided the early outcome. The mobilisation of women in the Glasgow rent strikes prefigured Red Clydeside. Most recently in the UK the anti-nuke / anti war movement, women's mobilisation has been a prominent and leading part of that struggle. Now women have shown the world how to challenge Trump. Only a mass movement of the people, countering Trump's assertion of his own 'mass' following, drains the spurious legitimacy that he claims - regardless of Trump's 20 million Twitter followers. The women who marched have now laid down a challenge to the Western and hopefully the African world. Onto the streets! Onto the streets! We will put an end to the new age of cant! 

What is the real future of Brexit?

UK Prime Minister Teresa May has spelt out the cost of 'controlling' the flow of European migrants into the UK. (It is now surely absurd to continue to imagine that Brexit in the context within which it was spawned had any sort of progressive aspect. Britain's right wing have successfully made the control of immigration the main principle of international relations and that cause is expanding rapidly into the domestic sphere - with loud echoes across the whole of the western world.)

It appears that if the EU does not agree to May's demand for free trade arrangements, under one title or another, then Britain's economic 'model' will be changed. The UK will become a tax haven for major banks, finance houses and corporations and set itself up as an entrepot on the western margin of the European Continent. Buccaneering globalisation would have triumphed in Britain. (May, who was entirely aware of the symbolic impact of making her speech in the same hall as Thatcher used, to announce and praise the single European Market, is now leaping backwards over Thatcher's head to model herself on Elizabeth 1st and her pirates!) Given the fact that Germany and the EU are not going to tear down the rational for their own existence, May's plans are very likely to be initiated, and while they are certainly a serious threat to the EU, the real tragedy is that they would would also be a drastic blow to labour in Britain and internationally.

The UK's large scale and dubious links to tax havens from Jersey to the Cayman Islands now come into their own.

The EU has just refused to accept the US 's ten year efforts to get a Continent to Continent free trade deal. Britain would be a natural place for European exports to find their way, without tariff or regulation, to the US. The EU refused the American deal because the US demanded the right of decision over whether goods were regulated properly, were safe, were legal under both EU and US jurisdictions. But US officials could be based in the new British Hong Kong without oversight. BMW could send their cars there without EU jurisdiction or even build them, in nominal part, in Britain. Big Pharma, the second biggest big Pharma in the world, would deepen mutual ties to their US friends. A British backdoor into the US market would be opened. And that is just dealing with the EU and the international crooks who want to own the NHS. In reality Britain would become the biggest tax haven in the world.

British labour would enter this deregulated paradise too.

To carry the May plan out would involve the crushing of virtually all rights of the organised labour movement and most of the social wage available to the working class. Labour organisation is an anathema to unregulated international Capital. This is not a theory. The proposition has been tested over and over again across the globe in the last quarter century. Second, health and welfare spending is the first target of a strong state that is managing the freedom of Capital. Today the City of London is responsible for £67 billion per year in tax. They are going to have to be bribed to remain in May's new world. May has nothing to bribe them with except reductions in taxes. Privatisation of all social services, based on the cheapest possible labour, has only just begun.

What are the obstacles in the road that May wants the UK to follow?

There are those forces in the working class, in places like London and in countries like Scotland, who already reject the idea that immigration is the cause of low wages and poor services. A great majority of the young are opposed to the right's agenda for Brexit. More widely and crossing the different directions of the referendum vote, organised labour has started up in the 'Gig economy' and partial victories have been won by food deliverers and Uber drivers. Struggles continue across health and education services as well as in transport. A large, effective movement and non sectarian campaign against austerity continues to build mass actions under the leadership of the Peoples Assembly.

 It is clear that the right's still fragile grip on mainstream political leadership (an unelected May, without any popular mandate, who is yet to face major economic crises and political fractiousness in her own party and wider) is not yet, in any sense, a victory over the whole of society. The examples of resistance mentioned are all positive and essential developments in breaking up the fake choices that the referendum posed in Britain (guess what; both 'leave' and 'remain' gives you ... globalisation) and denying the further success of the right in mainstream politics. But the key to the next stage in this struggle is the Labour Party led by Corbyn.

It is still possible to challenge and defeat the right's political advantage achieved by their grip on Brexit and their successful political mobilisation of those worried by immigration. It is certainly true that the focus on immigration as the reason for rationed housing, low paid jobs and declining services has been successful. But a bold Labour leadership could slice that manufactured coalition into much more favourable proportions with a direct, credible 'New Deal' type plan to boost wages and house building and save services. This would isolate real racism in society.

But such measures depend on a laying a course for a class struggle leadership at the heart of British political life. Broad coalitions around such a centre are possible, in relation to a green economy and across an anti-war, anti-nuke, anti-austerity spectrum of political forces. Such political coalitions are essential for the left's political future. In Scotland for example, the political focus is the demands of the people on a genuinely social democratic SNP government, and the direction of travel is a renewed relevance of the national question as at least a transitional answer to May's aspirations.

And it is inevitable that the left's appeal to the working class will also have to drive through the Labour Party itself, particularly its MPs. Many of them will sheer away, either to pursue their ambitions in other spheres or prepare a wretched posse available to the highest bidder should the need for a new 'National Government' emerge out of the coming crises. Nevertheless, a minority force in Parliament, coupled to a mass movement both inside and outside the base of the party would signal the breath of fresh air that the mass of Britain's working class population are desperate to breath. Under such circumstances the initially small political presence in Parliament would be the tip of a social iceberg, with immense weight for the future of the country.

President Trump is crazy. Like a fox?

Jonathan Freedland, a British journalist writing in the Guardian newspaper (14 January) had his article on Trump titled 'Do not treat Donald Trump as if he's a normal president. He's not.' His piece is fairly typical of a lot of liberal, rational, political commentators, and their puzzled hinterland, as he explains to (a no doubt grateful) UK Prime Minister Teresa May that Trump IS a self-absorbed nutcase. May is advised not to try the normal UK slavering subservience to new presidents. Trump is too self serving, too unpredictable to soak up the UK establishment's normal, urgent, peons of praise and adulation offered so generously to every new president. There is no 'instead' offered' by Freedland. He simply seems to suggest Trump is best left seriously alone.

No doubt however Britain's mandarins and Her Majesty will do their usual thing, convinced that the deep traditions of what remains of the British ruling class can overcome the mistakes of foreign electorates and their champions. They are used to looking the other way in the palaces of bling that decorate many London addresses - courtesy of the Russian mafia. The offer of complete, uncritical support with all the baubles looks like an irresistible prize, from the British end of things. 

Which begs the question; who or what is Trump, the politician?

When political systems start to fail huge 'personalities' begin to flourish. They are marked by the conditions of their age of course. Rasputin emerged out of the grotesque mysticism and privilege that had underpinned the Orthodox church for centuries. He adorned the Czar's family as a means of communication with the ocean of peasants who had begun to fall out of their medieval swoon for the landed aristocracy. Father Gapon (a Czarist agent) had already played his role in the 1905 revolt, taking the insurrection to the gates of the 'little father', the Czar, over the heads of the bloated aristocracy (and into the arms of the secret police.)

Mussolini, who made his office into a Parthenon and who turned his lights on through the night, was another showboater who emerged out of WW1 to deal with the fragile, impoverished and novel Italian government on the one hand and the popular revolution on the other. He defined himself (and his movement) as the new Romans, a version of Italy's greatness which implied radical change at the same time as a dictatorial means to rebuild the floundering state while stamping out any genuine working class political alternative. He placed himself between the people and the ruling class and then reorganised the state around himself.

Although both cast a long shadow down the 20th century,  Stalin and Hitler were of a qualitatively different character from each other, and from the examples already described. Stalin was the centre of a counter revolution in the heart of a revolution, the offspring of gathering bureaucracy using murder, state crime and famine as its means of survival. Hitler first constructed and then spearheaded imperialism's most savage military offensive against 20th century revolution as a whole. But both men were more symbols of great historical movements in full flood rather than marking out their own original political territory. Accordingly their political personalities emerge more as poisonous bureaucrats, sitting impervious at the centre of great machines, full of secrets and without charisma.  They have a connection to political crises, one to the collapse of Soviet democracy in the face of war, the other to the collapse of Wiemar and the defeat, both externally and internally, of the German Communist party. But both of them are the prodigy of complete social collapse and political defeat and not simply of a political crisis of the status quo.

Churchill was an outsider as far as the British ruling class was concerned. A poor record in WW1, an unhealthy obsession with the US, a bellicose view of Germany, he was catapulted into office by the collapse of Chamberlain's peace with Hitler. A similar ruling class outsider, General De Gaul, was not so lucky. But both stood against the mainstream as the political leaderships of their respective countries rotted into fear and insignificance. Both saw themselves as saviours of their nations. And both were brought down to their real stature by popular movements that changed the political reference points for decades; (the post war Labour Government in the case of the UK and the impact of 'Les Eventements' in '68 in France.)

Where does Trump stand in all this?

'Drain the swamp', Trump said. In the absence of a mass political movement able to take on the US's political crisis, the crisis that Obama was completely unable to resolve to the left, so enter entrepreneur, TV star, multi-billionaire and showman, the aptly named Trump. He carries all the decorations (including his little bad boy, misogynist antics) of a modern celebrity. But what is sure is that he will not 'drain the swamp.' He will not take big money out of US politics. He will make US politics dance more to the tune of big money.

The Republican extreme right have coalesced around Trump to fill in the huge spaces that he has left on his agenda. They imagine that they will be able to lead him into their particular version of utopia. But it is Trump that has 20 million followers on Twitter in the US. He can speak over the heads of the swamp directly to the people. While he has no intention of draining the swamp, it is completely impossible that Trump will give up his main leverage or the technique he has settled on to apply his influence. The establishment, including the Republican establishment, hate him. He could fail very quickly. But the immediate sword of Damoclese that hangs over history's latest charismatic clown is whether he can release a new, multi-billion dollar investment into the US's domestic future or not. Can he drown everything else out with the sound of cash pouring from the two armed bandit? That would be enough to keep Trump afloat for a couple of years. But something else entirely will need to be built to 'drain the swamp', including the finishing off of the swamp creature, Trump.