INTRODUCTION
Dead end for the Tories - for now
The nemesis of the British Tory government grows nearer. It is a reality that looms in sharper and sharper outline as efforts to cobble together a Brexit deal, 'fix' the NHS, to apologise for the insult to black citizens, to cover economic failure, to deny desperate poverty and homelessness, to ramp-up foreign wars and lose a Cabinet Minister every six weeks, are all demonstrating failure. The clock is ticking towards March 2019. A vote in Parliament which might dump any Tory Cabinet deal with the EU is becoming a reality. An emergency General Election (before March 2019) seems the only means for the Tory leadership to get themselves out of the line of fire and start sorting out their mess.
A shift in mass politics
As a result of the dangerous impasse created by the Tories shambles, where the traditional Tory ruling-class party is politically dislocated, the nation is pounded by relentless attacks on Corbyn's Labour Party (led by the BBC). Meanwhile, and despite wave after wave of mainstream media attacks, at deeper levels, core aspects of the Corbyn Manifesto of 2017 and some deeper reforms are still surfacing as a new 'common sense' in majority parts of the voting population.
This is an historic 'moment' in the evolution of Britain's prevailing political crisis. Large scale shifts in the relationship between British society and its political system are now emerging. The most significant of these shifts in the short term is the end of the idea that a British General Election will simply swap its allegiance from a Tory government to Labour in the 'normal' way. The standard creation of yet another Labour Government-led class-consensus, the main pattern of British politics in the past 60 years, is now dead in the water.
PART ONE
A decisive shift in the Labour Party
And here is the potential dilemma that is facing a future Corbyn-led Labour government. A possible Labour Party victory in the next General Election in Britain will not be able to recompose yet another temporary alliance between today's disappointed and worried ruling elite and the angry and unsettled working class population that has begun to act against the system and to vote for change. In fact a Labour victory in the polls will not even unify the Labour Party in the current conditions. It will instead open out Labour's own, internal, class differences, that have haunted the British Labour Party since its foundation.
Looking deeper at Labour
It would be an error to judge that Corbyn has taken total control of Labour. Certainly, most Corbyn supporters in the ranks of the Labour Party do not believe that for one minute. If Corbyn had truly 'won' the battle with Labour's right wing inside the party then, after a successful General Election, it might be possible to imagine a serious retreat and substantial concessions accepted by Britain's dominant class - while it tried to reorganise its way out of its political mess. But the facts of the Labour Party point otherwise. To begin with, despite the massive influx of hundreds of thousands into the Labour Party - and despite the advances that these new party members have made in the local Constituencies and on the National Executive (let alone with the younger electorate) - they do not rule the party. On the contrary, large parts of the trade union leadership and a big majority of Labour MPs, and a decisive part of Labour's day to day structure, remains profoundly hostile to Corbyn's politics and remains dedicated to his removal.
PART TWO
The Corbyn leadership; the critical factor for both main classes: first for our rulers.
Yet despite the battle still to come in his own party, Corbyn (along with Macron) remain the most significant mainstream political leaders in western Europe. (Indeed the Corbyn/Macron contrast is becoming the critical political battle there.) Not surprisingly, both the British left and the right are reorganising themselves in respect of that fact. Far from the hints in the Financial Times, that aspects of Corbyn's programme would be bearable and could be lived with, Britain's ruling class is developing a series of contingency plots and plans designed to minimise the damage to the Tories, while at the same time trying to break up Corbyn's advances. For example new parties are being conceived, not in order to create another stab at Britain's (reactionary) political system; far from it. The creation of another UKIP or the Social Democrat Party of the 1980s is not on the cards, and still less is there any idea of promoting the Liberals. The new-party talk is instead designed to recompose the next Parliament.
The creation of a new political 'force' in Parliament is the British ruling class's favoured Macron miracle. The deepening social and youthful support for Corbyn's leadership of Labour and the polarising rightward shift of the Tories, plus the British voting system, prevents a Macron style election. The British version of Macron, designed to 'fill the space' left by the absence of the 'Liberal centre' in the UK Parliament, is to be a mainly post election operation. It is nothing less than the rigging of the next Parliament. Tony Blair and the mini-Blair, Chuka Harrison Umunna, are already lined up for the purpose.
Parliament - versus Labour
Disassembling MPs from their loyalty to the traditional parties in Britain could initially have a wide appeal. The new cohort of MPs after the next General Election would, thereby sound as though they were a democratic advance in a society sick of its traditional politicians. In reality what it would mean is a large group of right-wing Labour MPs and some Tories would, in effect, follow the dictates of Britain's billionaires. In this model, Parliament begins to look like the US House of Representatives, where votes are bought and sold. Pardon. Where votes are (regularly) counted according to individual consciences. These conditions would for example allow 'wise, EU 'remainers' in such an 'open' Parliament to make their move, which would be a very big and successful deal for British big capitalism indeed. And this is only one of the emerging political tactics being constructed to defeat a possible Prime Minister Corbyn leading the country.
Labour - versus the people: some views of the left?
For some of the organised far left of British politics, the Labour Party's future is often defined only by its limits. Sectarians go as far as presenting PM Corbyn as a future Kerensky, and the Corbyn LP government as a lame and defeatist project, so tied will it be to the need for unity of the party. And so lame is its program. Therefore no real advances for the working class people of Britain can be expected under Corbyn, as concessions to right-wing Labour MPs and to big Capital are inevitable.
Today, this point of view is entirely abstract. The key question is still - can Corbyn win the Labour Party? Arguing about the priorities of a future government program and putting the fire to the Labour leader's feet is one thing, especially if a key reform represents a direct demand from a section of people who are battling for a half-decent life. It is quite another if we are actually discussing the general preconditions for a socialist future! Such arguments are broadly necessary in the scheme of things, but the concrete reality of people taking action against the system that oppresses them and winning results, is the most profound argument of all. And it is in this movement and in those actions that the pressure will come into Corbyn's leadership in Parliament both in numerical terms and in the potential radicalisation of his government's policy.
The rebirth of 'The British Road to Socialism.'
Another left view of a possible Corbyn led Labour government has also become significant. After WW2 the British Communist Party, in collaboration with the then Soviet CP, developed a strategy called the British Road to Socialism. While the British CP declined into a tiny formation after the war, its strategy had a huge impact in the wider labour movement for decades, and still has weight inside the much of the remains of the official labour movement today. The BRS argued that the unions could produce a left wing Labour Party that would be able to create genuine socialism in Britain. A sort of super-plus Attlee government. The weight and strength of a powerful labour movement and the social movements that could be built, united by a Labour Government, could, in British conditions, breakthrough against the capitalist system. Virtually the whole of the Labour Party, including its MPs could be won to the BRS perspective in such conditions.
But this idea does not face (and never did face) the class divide that passes through Labour. The BRS does not answer the opening up of that fissure under the pressure of contending class interests in the circumstance of a Corbyn led government. Some will fall for the theory and argue for a deadly party unity where the left will tail-end a galloping right. Others will ditch the theory and fight it through.
PART THREE
The theories - and what is really happening?
In the first place, political, economic and social life in British society are coming together, not as a combination; but rather as a combined set of conflicts and contradictions. And in this melee it is the political that is currently pre-eminent.
Not only has the Tory party lost its prime purpose of defence of Britain's ruling class; not only has the British political system overturned, where the traditional Labour / Tory axis has crashed; but the declining, decaying Labour Party has also turned upside down.
The division of classes in society is increasing. The Tory party, the political expression of the rich, is failing to provide leadership across society. A new political current has created an alternative political perspective that challenges the domination of the rich and they have chosen the Labour Party as their vehicle. To challenge the rich, this new current, led by Corbyn, will have to defeat its own traditional party in order to be able to start changing society. The new working class in Britain on the ground, in the trade unions and outside the unions, building new associations and fighting insecure service work, see the Corbyn leadership as their best chance to get essential changes in their lives. Defeating right wing Labour as it evolves fully into a new ruling class party in Parliament, will take Conferences, Constituency battles to remove MPs and, most of all, the determined movement of the new working class. The next fight, just beginning will involve party splits; more elections; political reform; all to enable the battle for a substantial change in society to begin. It will succeed if it combines this essential process with complete identification with and support for the energy, demands and the action of working class people; the engine of progress against big Capital and Labour's right wing.
The heart of the matter
The heart of the matter, from a working class perspective; what might be called the real 'moment' in Britain's recent political (and economic) history, is the beginning of the maturation of a new, mass, political current that opposes the system that they live in and whose mainstream objective is to secure a new type of government. Their idea is both the expression of an independence from Britain's historical political party rigmarole and at the same time a central focus on one of those old parties as the means by which they can achieve structural change - including the end to the old political system. And the reason why they have chosen Labour is Corbyn - because of the optimistic fact that Corbyn, in the enfeebled, shrinking, post-Blair Labour Party, could win the leadership and therefore turn the party into something else.
The weakness of Labour's Manifesto and a new consensus?
Whatever the weakness and concessions of the Labour Manifesto, in the potential political (and economic) crisis that a Labour victory would exacerbate, from the very first day of a Corbyn led government, there will be major upheavals in the Labour Party in Parliament. Even if we might fantasise about a stable, Keynesian based, Labour 'unity compromise', where Corbyn conceded on soft reforms in the economy, and on the continuation of nuclear 'defence'; where a mutual reconstruction of a single market with the EU was accepted (as a possible first step back to full EU membership) it still will not hold.
The dissolution and failure of the traditional ruling class party, the Tories, not least over the EU, is a seminal problem for the class that they have historically politically defended. But this failure will not be 'solved' for the ruling class, even temporarily, by any version of the Labour Party headed by Corbyn. Britain's ruling class may despair at the Tories but they are for the elimination of Corbyn and more precisely for the destruction of the mass political current in the working and middle classes that he has helped to build and lead. This is more important than their annoyance with May et al. In so far as there is any strategic thinking on this matter among ruling class circles, it is not any version of reliance on a 'soft' Labour government (although they do not manage the future.) It is for the end, as they see it, of the terror of 'left wing populism.'
An (early) conclusion.
In the next period, a period marked in and around the coming General Election, the critical battle for the new, mass, radical current in society is to win a Corbyn led Labour government. However historically limited that purpose might seem, it remains the premise for the the further advance of the most radical sectors of British society, at this moment. It is a paradox that the greatest changes in a rotten society must pass through the gateway of a second rate clash over the future of a corrupt Parliament. Waves of resistance to poor wages, benefits, housing may erupt. In the future, these battles are the platform for a new type of society and its politics. Today, they are the crucial lever to open out the possibilities of a Corbyn led government, and the defence of that gain. The focus on the success and security of those struggles will be the chance of a Corbyn Labour government winning. Politics, for now, will dominate economics. The class struggle inside any new Labour government, which will take the simple form of the battle against Corbyn, will also open the door to a completely new politics. Working class people can then set their own terms - because they will have made the successful fight for Corbyn and thereby won a new, mass, mainstream political formation for socialism, and because they have to, as only the involvement of millions of people in active struggle can fundamentally change society.
Tuesday, 8 May 2018
Sunday, 18 March 2018
Labour, Corbyn and Putin's Russia
The hypocrisy of both of the main players in the current clash between the British and the Russian governments, over the attempted murder of double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in a provincial town in England, stinks to high heaven.
The British mainstream media has, naturally, rallied to the flag and universally damned Labour leader Corbyn for his reluctance to denounce Russia and all its underhand ways.
Prime Minster May has ramped up the Churchillian rhetoric. The poison from Russia is 'weapon-grade' and the attempted murder (which May sincerely hopes will remain for as long as possible 'attempted' rather than completed ) is 'an illegal act of war against a sovereign country.'
But wait a minute. In 2006 the Russian secret service apparently killed Alexander Livinenko. This was what Scotland Yard said at the trial in 2014/15.
'The evidence suggests that the only credible explanation is in one way or another the Russian state is involved in Litvinenko's murder.' Livineneko was killed with nuclear polonium. And the trial wrapped up with the stunning conclusion that Putin himself 'probably approved' the murder. But Prime Minster Blair, nor Prime Minister Brown, nor Prime Minister Cameron thought it necessary to suggest that the lump of polonium was 'weapons grade' (presumably because it was obvious that it was a weapon, given that someone had just been deliberately killed with it.) And neither did this unpatriotic trio characterise the use of a nuclear weapon against a British citizen as 'an act of war.'
Blair, Brown and Cameron were all well aware of Britain's own record here, organising murder squads in Afghanistan, in Libya, Tunisia and in the pre Good Friday days in Northern Ireland. And while the Russian regime was deeply irritating, in the long run, bumping off their own ex-citizens was not a number one priority, especially given the fertiliser provided for the City of London's garden.
But if Britain's previous PMs were hesitant, why is May now so bold?
Because of March 2019.
The issues here are not whether Putin's corrupt regime tries to murder its exiles, especially in Britain. The regime and its allies in the Russian media openly and proudly claim they do. They know that the City of London provides a unique and enriching nest for Russian exiles. They know that a stack of London's top rank buildings are for sale. So they try to make examples of those that have sought the good life in the increasingly dangerous West. The gathering, military and economic 'Cordon Sanitaire' that the West has built around Russia, post the fall of the USSR, drives an historically developed and understandable paranoia across Russia's population regarding a coming war and occupation - that paradoxically fuels Putin's otherwise waining support.
Neither is the issue one of Britain's plucky resistance to the Russian threat. May has not acted like her predecessors. No doubt May and friends are deeply nervous of uncoiling the City of London's golden knots. She will try her hardest not to go there and restrict play to increasingly fatuous tit for tat arrangements with Moscow. But she will sustain her little war as long as possible. (And when it has passed it will be periodically reheated.)
May is looking at March 2019. When she looks carefully at the 'final' deal that the EU will offer on trade AND the commitment she has made for a vote in Parliament before any deal is agreed, AND the legal right of any MPs to propose dropping the famous article 50 altogether, she will do the count and face the reality that she will probably have no majority among MPs in Parliament. So May will need to call a General Election before Parliament's decision (unless the EU were to bail her out and thereby wreck their own fragile unity.) So May has therefore started her own Falklands War. (The war that brought Thatcher back with a vast majority. The war that was backed by the then Labour leader, Michael Foot.)
The best and most direct expression about Putin's latest very public murder and possible responses was made by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell on the BBC news programme 'Today' when he simply said, 'follow the money!' Which, of course, includes investigating vast Russian handovers to the Tory party.
Labour leader Corbyn has raised that point in his Parliamentary statements, but he has added to that argument a series of perfectly correct views on the need for extreme caution (after Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, etc, etc) when the British Intelligence establishment plays 'name that villain!' But in this case there is an underestimation of the degree that the Russian population feels that the country is under siege and the effect of this being used by a current, cynical regime to reinforce its own power. Much the same as May is trying to organise in Britain. In this case it is surely an emphasis on the role of Russian oligarchs in the City of London's economics and in the evolution of Tory politics that needs to be front and centre and fully exposed to prick the 'war' balloon that May and her cronies are blowing as hard as they can.
The British mainstream media has, naturally, rallied to the flag and universally damned Labour leader Corbyn for his reluctance to denounce Russia and all its underhand ways.
Prime Minster May has ramped up the Churchillian rhetoric. The poison from Russia is 'weapon-grade' and the attempted murder (which May sincerely hopes will remain for as long as possible 'attempted' rather than completed ) is 'an illegal act of war against a sovereign country.'
But wait a minute. In 2006 the Russian secret service apparently killed Alexander Livinenko. This was what Scotland Yard said at the trial in 2014/15.
'The evidence suggests that the only credible explanation is in one way or another the Russian state is involved in Litvinenko's murder.' Livineneko was killed with nuclear polonium. And the trial wrapped up with the stunning conclusion that Putin himself 'probably approved' the murder. But Prime Minster Blair, nor Prime Minister Brown, nor Prime Minister Cameron thought it necessary to suggest that the lump of polonium was 'weapons grade' (presumably because it was obvious that it was a weapon, given that someone had just been deliberately killed with it.) And neither did this unpatriotic trio characterise the use of a nuclear weapon against a British citizen as 'an act of war.'
Blair, Brown and Cameron were all well aware of Britain's own record here, organising murder squads in Afghanistan, in Libya, Tunisia and in the pre Good Friday days in Northern Ireland. And while the Russian regime was deeply irritating, in the long run, bumping off their own ex-citizens was not a number one priority, especially given the fertiliser provided for the City of London's garden.
But if Britain's previous PMs were hesitant, why is May now so bold?
Because of March 2019.
The issues here are not whether Putin's corrupt regime tries to murder its exiles, especially in Britain. The regime and its allies in the Russian media openly and proudly claim they do. They know that the City of London provides a unique and enriching nest for Russian exiles. They know that a stack of London's top rank buildings are for sale. So they try to make examples of those that have sought the good life in the increasingly dangerous West. The gathering, military and economic 'Cordon Sanitaire' that the West has built around Russia, post the fall of the USSR, drives an historically developed and understandable paranoia across Russia's population regarding a coming war and occupation - that paradoxically fuels Putin's otherwise waining support.
Neither is the issue one of Britain's plucky resistance to the Russian threat. May has not acted like her predecessors. No doubt May and friends are deeply nervous of uncoiling the City of London's golden knots. She will try her hardest not to go there and restrict play to increasingly fatuous tit for tat arrangements with Moscow. But she will sustain her little war as long as possible. (And when it has passed it will be periodically reheated.)
May is looking at March 2019. When she looks carefully at the 'final' deal that the EU will offer on trade AND the commitment she has made for a vote in Parliament before any deal is agreed, AND the legal right of any MPs to propose dropping the famous article 50 altogether, she will do the count and face the reality that she will probably have no majority among MPs in Parliament. So May will need to call a General Election before Parliament's decision (unless the EU were to bail her out and thereby wreck their own fragile unity.) So May has therefore started her own Falklands War. (The war that brought Thatcher back with a vast majority. The war that was backed by the then Labour leader, Michael Foot.)
The best and most direct expression about Putin's latest very public murder and possible responses was made by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell on the BBC news programme 'Today' when he simply said, 'follow the money!' Which, of course, includes investigating vast Russian handovers to the Tory party.
Labour leader Corbyn has raised that point in his Parliamentary statements, but he has added to that argument a series of perfectly correct views on the need for extreme caution (after Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, etc, etc) when the British Intelligence establishment plays 'name that villain!' But in this case there is an underestimation of the degree that the Russian population feels that the country is under siege and the effect of this being used by a current, cynical regime to reinforce its own power. Much the same as May is trying to organise in Britain. In this case it is surely an emphasis on the role of Russian oligarchs in the City of London's economics and in the evolution of Tory politics that needs to be front and centre and fully exposed to prick the 'war' balloon that May and her cronies are blowing as hard as they can.
Thursday, 1 March 2018
Brexit and change.
Brexit (phase 2) is already creating a lot of agony, most of all for Britain's political institutions. Prime Minister May rails against the EU's latest document which, she claims, could undermine the sovereignty of Britain! Indeed, how to 'solve' Britain's poisoned part of Northern Ireland has been a century long saw. But May's Churchillian hyperbole only results in underlining the real point. The dilemma here is that the Brexit sound and fury currently vented by the Tory Party, Blair etc., just serves to mask the most critical questions for the rest of the British people. And that is the problem that has arisen since Britain's EU referendum. It has stood in as a proxy for the deep changes that are actually required to deal with the UK's failing society.
Following the February 26 speech that Labour leader Corbyn made (which focused on the need for a Customs Union with the EU) the mainstream British media interpreted Labour leader Corbyn's remarks about the EU's role in Britain's future as a political manoeuvre to break up the Tories. (See, for example, 'BBC Reality Check, Labour's Position'.) It may contribute to that end. But Corbyn's comments had a much wider and more refreshing purpose. He said;
'The EU is not the root of all our problems and leaving it will not solve all our problems. Likewise, the EU is not the source of all enlightenment and leaving it does not inevitably spell doom.'
Corbyn is not suggesting abstention from the EU argument. He has now begun to raise the issue in Parliament. And his specific recommendation in favour of a Customs Union with the EU makes no concessions to actual or potential EU regulation which might hinder or prevent key nationalisations or UK government led investments. In other words Corbyn is trying to deal with the EU from the point of view of the needs of a projected British economy; one which serves the people as a whole. Meanwhile Tory Britain rots on every front.
Right at the heart of Tory decay is PM May's alliance with the Democratic Unionist Party. The privileges and money now showered by Britain's government on one of the most backward, self-seeking, corrupt and unforgiving political formations in Europe is nothing at all to do with Brexit. It has everything to do with Tory (and ruling class) desperation to prevent an early General Election and a victory for a Corbyn-led Labour government.
Equally the Tory failures to maintain the NHS, to provide housing, to shore up welfare, to raise wages have nothing to do with Brexit as such. They are long term political/economic decisions about who should bear the burden of modern social welfare and whose living standards need to be defended and promoted, in the context of globalisation.
These simple truths are constantly covered up and muddled up by the public discussion of Brexit.
What then is the argument about Brexit?
In the 2016 referendum it was picked up in mainstream politics by the right in British society. It started from the impact of the UKIP platform, which argued that Britain lost a lot of money which could be spent on social needs because of the British payments to the EU and that hundreds of thousands of EU workers poured into Britain using services, taking jobs and cutting wages of the British residents. These ideas were predominant in the referendum campaign. Additionally they were initially reinforced by a deep sense of the failure of Britain's long-standing political leadership.
The argument about Brexit today still contains some of its previous racism and jingoism. Certainly the British far right have expanded and racist attacks remain much higher than prior to the referendum. But UKIP has collapsed. The Tory right have failed to shackle the momentum of UKIP and its 4 million voters. Their perspective for the creation of the largest tax haven on earth is currently a damp squib and their enthusiasm for a future under the tutelage of the US has been squelched by Trump. Indeed it is Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party that has created an alternative vision of an anti-establishment mainstream political force already predominant among younger voters. The more the Corbyn leadership identifies Britain's relationship to the EU in terms of the new model economy required in Britain - as he has begun in his identification of the parasitic role of the City of London - so the real meaning of the EU emerges.
Although an undertow of racist strains remain in the population and the far right use it when they can, the major arguments about Brexit in Britain are now moving towards the negative impact of capitalist globalisation and how to resist it. In that context the EU finds its natural place as a European instrument designed to promote globalisation and the interests of European based corporations and centres of wealth, in a contest with the US and Asia. And the Tories find themselves, like Blair, part of a worn out, backward looking and unsavoury British political establishment.
Following the February 26 speech that Labour leader Corbyn made (which focused on the need for a Customs Union with the EU) the mainstream British media interpreted Labour leader Corbyn's remarks about the EU's role in Britain's future as a political manoeuvre to break up the Tories. (See, for example, 'BBC Reality Check, Labour's Position'.) It may contribute to that end. But Corbyn's comments had a much wider and more refreshing purpose. He said;
'The EU is not the root of all our problems and leaving it will not solve all our problems. Likewise, the EU is not the source of all enlightenment and leaving it does not inevitably spell doom.'
Corbyn is not suggesting abstention from the EU argument. He has now begun to raise the issue in Parliament. And his specific recommendation in favour of a Customs Union with the EU makes no concessions to actual or potential EU regulation which might hinder or prevent key nationalisations or UK government led investments. In other words Corbyn is trying to deal with the EU from the point of view of the needs of a projected British economy; one which serves the people as a whole. Meanwhile Tory Britain rots on every front.
Right at the heart of Tory decay is PM May's alliance with the Democratic Unionist Party. The privileges and money now showered by Britain's government on one of the most backward, self-seeking, corrupt and unforgiving political formations in Europe is nothing at all to do with Brexit. It has everything to do with Tory (and ruling class) desperation to prevent an early General Election and a victory for a Corbyn-led Labour government.
Equally the Tory failures to maintain the NHS, to provide housing, to shore up welfare, to raise wages have nothing to do with Brexit as such. They are long term political/economic decisions about who should bear the burden of modern social welfare and whose living standards need to be defended and promoted, in the context of globalisation.
These simple truths are constantly covered up and muddled up by the public discussion of Brexit.
What then is the argument about Brexit?
In the 2016 referendum it was picked up in mainstream politics by the right in British society. It started from the impact of the UKIP platform, which argued that Britain lost a lot of money which could be spent on social needs because of the British payments to the EU and that hundreds of thousands of EU workers poured into Britain using services, taking jobs and cutting wages of the British residents. These ideas were predominant in the referendum campaign. Additionally they were initially reinforced by a deep sense of the failure of Britain's long-standing political leadership.
The argument about Brexit today still contains some of its previous racism and jingoism. Certainly the British far right have expanded and racist attacks remain much higher than prior to the referendum. But UKIP has collapsed. The Tory right have failed to shackle the momentum of UKIP and its 4 million voters. Their perspective for the creation of the largest tax haven on earth is currently a damp squib and their enthusiasm for a future under the tutelage of the US has been squelched by Trump. Indeed it is Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party that has created an alternative vision of an anti-establishment mainstream political force already predominant among younger voters. The more the Corbyn leadership identifies Britain's relationship to the EU in terms of the new model economy required in Britain - as he has begun in his identification of the parasitic role of the City of London - so the real meaning of the EU emerges.
Although an undertow of racist strains remain in the population and the far right use it when they can, the major arguments about Brexit in Britain are now moving towards the negative impact of capitalist globalisation and how to resist it. In that context the EU finds its natural place as a European instrument designed to promote globalisation and the interests of European based corporations and centres of wealth, in a contest with the US and Asia. And the Tories find themselves, like Blair, part of a worn out, backward looking and unsavoury British political establishment.
Saturday, 17 February 2018
New capitalism's politics and the state.
Two small moments (there are millions more) in the web of modern history that seem to focus the future of our system of society; in 1996 the British Economist magazine carried the news that 17% of capitalist enterprise across the globe was illegal. On the 16th of February 2018 the Chiefs of the German, the French and the British Secret Services made a public, joint statement at a European Security Conference (gently) demanding a European secret state.
First, where is (international) capitalism going?
Well, you might start with the fact that 'illegal' capitalism accounts for far more than 17% of global capitalism today. Indeed, the major technical advances since 1996, the ones that have created the biggest corporations in the world, the ones that have defined social advance in the world (if you believe the adverts) have turned their business into a megalith of economic illegality.
In 1996 the Economist was counting up the amounts involved in drug sales, prostitution and slavery, in the secret arms trade. A generally hidden part of the economic system. The new wave of 'human progress' or the 'fourth industrial revolution' shouts its criminal outlook from the rooftops. They are against social taxation. Most of the world have laws regarding tax and most of those laws are broken by the biggest corporations in the world. Publicly. From their own created moral high ground.
The total myth (false news?) that modern capitalism has reduced world poverty (whatever it has done to the working class in the advanced countries) is spun by the breathtaking hypocrisy of the capitalist apologists in the West grabbing Chinese development (the main contributor to poverty reduction in the world) as their own! This has been discussed many times in this blog (and no doubt thousands of others blogs and the media in general). China's development is directly related to the global decline of the West in general and of the US in particular - which has allowed the leadership in China to use capitalism to its own and to its peoples' dramatic advantage. The great corporations and leading capitalist nations intended no such thing. They just could not stop it. (We will see how the latest King Canute, Trump the merciless, manages.)
Global capitalism, since 2000, is essentially an illegal enterprise. It will not pay for social welfare. States with social infrastructures are, at best, cash cows. Modern capitalism is not mainly turning some dramatic technological corner (a world full of sex-bots and cars in space?) It is withdrawing from the social compact it was forced into after WW2. More criminal; less social. That is its biggest characteristic. That is what stimulates and then lays down the layers and layers of corruption from senior mandarins in the EU to Spanish policemen. (And, most recently, underpins the moves to political 'consolidation' of the Communist Party in China.)
And western politics?
The political elements that are now all thrown up upon the air by big Capital (amid the eddies of 'new' mini parties, the shrinking of national parliamentary power, the gathering corruption of the political classes etc.,) resolve into two. First the traditional parties, the lost children of the old social contract, redefine themselves around the concessions that they will now make to Capital - or they die. Social Democracy mostly dies as its mediating role between the working class and Capital has no role. But even classical ruling class parties look for large umbrellas in the storm of competition. Either America or the EU are the only routes in the West affording access to big Capital. That's the nexus of the current Tory civil war in the UK. Macron appears (outside most of France) as potentially successful because he claims he can influence Germany and thereby construct an EU centre.
And the western states?
In a brilliant essay by Mark Greif ('Against Everything;' Verso) he draws out the distinction in the role of the police between law and order. From the most basic look at their organisation and behaviour he completely exposes that the police are barely ever used for the purposes of upholding or defending or indeed carrying out, law. They are essentially an instrument of order. Reporters were very surprised at the public emergence of the Secret Services' triumvirate at the EU's Security Conference. And as traditional party-politics dwindles and Parliaments become 'swamps' so the more jagged and less friendly edges of the state emerge and, as with our Secret Service Chiefs, construct their own role in the perturbing times to come. As law fades, so order takes its place. As the Social pact forced on western Capital is torn up so state control - of immigration - of personal information - of acceptable and unacceptable 'values' - of the streets - needs to dominate.
Alliances are being built across the West today between those who can 'supplement' the state's new forward role and the relevant 'services' of the state. In Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Russia and possibly Italy in the next months, photo fascist movements are developing and in many cases conjoining with state forces to help 'manage' order (in the absence of any law.) The future image of these countries leaders are to be found, today, in Russia, Turkey and Egypt. They are the public faces of the new 'order.'
On the other hand in France and Spain and Portugal and Ireland and most of all in Britain, political formations on a mass scale are emerging out of, or separating from (or both) traditional Social Democracy. And new leaderships intend to enact new laws in favour of the working class. The support in these societies (and others) for laws that serve the working class is already mainstream. And there is a growing sense, in Spain regarding the political class but particularly in the UK, that this will involve a major challenge to the powers of big Capital. But the movement for change needs to be aware that big Capital will not seek its traditional, now fading parties, to 'hold the line' against the new laws in Parliament. The left MPs and most of all the movement of the people will need to be solid as the super rich try to cause economic and social chaos and then seek state organisations, with their allies, to restore order, to remove any new laws and lock down a new type of leadership in society.
First, where is (international) capitalism going?
Well, you might start with the fact that 'illegal' capitalism accounts for far more than 17% of global capitalism today. Indeed, the major technical advances since 1996, the ones that have created the biggest corporations in the world, the ones that have defined social advance in the world (if you believe the adverts) have turned their business into a megalith of economic illegality.
In 1996 the Economist was counting up the amounts involved in drug sales, prostitution and slavery, in the secret arms trade. A generally hidden part of the economic system. The new wave of 'human progress' or the 'fourth industrial revolution' shouts its criminal outlook from the rooftops. They are against social taxation. Most of the world have laws regarding tax and most of those laws are broken by the biggest corporations in the world. Publicly. From their own created moral high ground.
The total myth (false news?) that modern capitalism has reduced world poverty (whatever it has done to the working class in the advanced countries) is spun by the breathtaking hypocrisy of the capitalist apologists in the West grabbing Chinese development (the main contributor to poverty reduction in the world) as their own! This has been discussed many times in this blog (and no doubt thousands of others blogs and the media in general). China's development is directly related to the global decline of the West in general and of the US in particular - which has allowed the leadership in China to use capitalism to its own and to its peoples' dramatic advantage. The great corporations and leading capitalist nations intended no such thing. They just could not stop it. (We will see how the latest King Canute, Trump the merciless, manages.)
Global capitalism, since 2000, is essentially an illegal enterprise. It will not pay for social welfare. States with social infrastructures are, at best, cash cows. Modern capitalism is not mainly turning some dramatic technological corner (a world full of sex-bots and cars in space?) It is withdrawing from the social compact it was forced into after WW2. More criminal; less social. That is its biggest characteristic. That is what stimulates and then lays down the layers and layers of corruption from senior mandarins in the EU to Spanish policemen. (And, most recently, underpins the moves to political 'consolidation' of the Communist Party in China.)
And western politics?
The political elements that are now all thrown up upon the air by big Capital (amid the eddies of 'new' mini parties, the shrinking of national parliamentary power, the gathering corruption of the political classes etc.,) resolve into two. First the traditional parties, the lost children of the old social contract, redefine themselves around the concessions that they will now make to Capital - or they die. Social Democracy mostly dies as its mediating role between the working class and Capital has no role. But even classical ruling class parties look for large umbrellas in the storm of competition. Either America or the EU are the only routes in the West affording access to big Capital. That's the nexus of the current Tory civil war in the UK. Macron appears (outside most of France) as potentially successful because he claims he can influence Germany and thereby construct an EU centre.
And the western states?
In a brilliant essay by Mark Greif ('Against Everything;' Verso) he draws out the distinction in the role of the police between law and order. From the most basic look at their organisation and behaviour he completely exposes that the police are barely ever used for the purposes of upholding or defending or indeed carrying out, law. They are essentially an instrument of order. Reporters were very surprised at the public emergence of the Secret Services' triumvirate at the EU's Security Conference. And as traditional party-politics dwindles and Parliaments become 'swamps' so the more jagged and less friendly edges of the state emerge and, as with our Secret Service Chiefs, construct their own role in the perturbing times to come. As law fades, so order takes its place. As the Social pact forced on western Capital is torn up so state control - of immigration - of personal information - of acceptable and unacceptable 'values' - of the streets - needs to dominate.
Alliances are being built across the West today between those who can 'supplement' the state's new forward role and the relevant 'services' of the state. In Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Russia and possibly Italy in the next months, photo fascist movements are developing and in many cases conjoining with state forces to help 'manage' order (in the absence of any law.) The future image of these countries leaders are to be found, today, in Russia, Turkey and Egypt. They are the public faces of the new 'order.'
On the other hand in France and Spain and Portugal and Ireland and most of all in Britain, political formations on a mass scale are emerging out of, or separating from (or both) traditional Social Democracy. And new leaderships intend to enact new laws in favour of the working class. The support in these societies (and others) for laws that serve the working class is already mainstream. And there is a growing sense, in Spain regarding the political class but particularly in the UK, that this will involve a major challenge to the powers of big Capital. But the movement for change needs to be aware that big Capital will not seek its traditional, now fading parties, to 'hold the line' against the new laws in Parliament. The left MPs and most of all the movement of the people will need to be solid as the super rich try to cause economic and social chaos and then seek state organisations, with their allies, to restore order, to remove any new laws and lock down a new type of leadership in society.
Tuesday, 23 January 2018
A western catastrophe in the making
A great inspiration could die.
The British people's unique contribution to the conditions of the western working class in the 20th century is on the edge of collapse. The fragile construction of the National Health Service is only sustained by the efforts, self sacrifice and commitment of its 1.7 million workers. The fifth largest employer in the world, the NHS, has been turned into a honey pot for private capital, reorganised to the edge of extinction, starved of funding by successive British governments and has turned front-line working conditions into a war-zone.
The Prime Minister and Health Minister's 'Winter Plan.'
The farcical commentary by the PM and the Health Minister Hunt, who forced himself back into his job, that the NHS had never been so well prepared for the effects of winter, has created an angry explosion of disbelief as national media exposed the truth to all. This state of affairs has a history. In the last 25 years, the only government measure that changed, even reversed the relentless expansion of work and the tighter and tighter rationing of health services to the public in the winter was the brief period in the early 2000s when the Labour government decided to match NHS funding to the EU average. That stopped before 2008. Since 2010, 15,000 beds have been cut in England alone. Again in England £6 billion has been cut from the Social Care budget and there are now 100,000 NHS Social Care and NHS vacancies.
We know the reasons, don't we?
From 2000 to 2011 the number of people over 85 has increased by 40%. (It is a matter for concern that gains in life expectancy were concentrated between 2005 and 2010, since then life expectancy has improved little for either sex. See 'Age Concern' Report Feb 2017.) Many NHS managers tell the population that social care is, nevertheless, the great problem. Old people are in Hospitals and should be in care homes. Fix that and the NHS problem goes away. Increased funding for the NHS, yes, but let's also have greater increases in funding for social care system!
Who is that saviour?
Presenting himself as the hero of the hour, it's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnston, who tells every media hack (before mentioning it to the PM) that the Tories should find an extra £5 billion a year from Brexit for the NHS. This is Boris's 'big idea' to stimulate the anxious and stunned Tory faithful, inside and outside Westminster, as health headlines dice the PM's 'Winter Health Plan' into mincemeat. And as Boris is as interested in the health service as the Pope is about children, it might be guessed that as the PM May's leadership slides into the political gutter, it is Boris who could arise and take on Corbyn's Labour Party in an increasingly inevitable early General Election.
What is the real issue here?
Ed Miliband, Labour's failed Prime Minister in the General Election of 2015, criticised himself in a Radio interview for not projecting 'big enough ideas.' (BBC Radio 4 'Today' 23 Jan.) One that he has now chosen is that the funding of the NHS should be ring-fenced. He has not decided what particular chunk of government income would carry that weight. More progressive 'thinkers' have already made proposals, from the restoration of 'National Insurance' to set proportions of the Gross Domestic Product. But all taxes and the GDP go down as well as up. And (currently soft) right wing voices murmur from behind the wall that increasing health and care expenditure could be endless ... Perhaps it is only the market that might resolve this long term dilemma?
Start from the other end.
The reality is that a combination of steps are required to rebuild the NHS. A proportion of GDP and comparison with other developed countries health and care expenditure would be a popular transitional funding measure. But the fundamentals start from the other end of the argument. The Age Concern report (see above) and the Nuffield Trust report (December 2017) reveals astonishing facts. Starting from the health needs of the population they have discovered that the rich in Britain live a decade longer than the poor. Nevertheless, the poor can expect 20 years' more suffering from chronic diseases than the rich. School-aged children from the poorest areas are two and a half times more likely to be admitted to hospital in an emergency for asthma than those in richer areas. And the gap across a wide range of chronic disease in older age (diabetes, dementia, heart-failure etc) has been expanding in the last ten years. In Britain it is poverty that is the driver of the health and care crisis. Just as it was before the NHS was founded.
Don't do nothing; do something; we can win; we have to win!
On Saturday 3 February the Peoples Assembly and 'Health Campaigns Together' (see Dr Louise Irvine on 'You Tube' - NHS Emergency Demonstration.) have launched a mass demonstration, starting at 12pm on Gower Street London WC1. People have to show their anger at the destruction of the greatest institution that the British people, the ordinary people, have ever built. And where else will come the support for those on the front line in this battle? How can the million plus workers in a fundamental service keep their morale, their skills and their faith and hope intact if they do not see that the rest stand with them?
The British people's unique contribution to the conditions of the western working class in the 20th century is on the edge of collapse. The fragile construction of the National Health Service is only sustained by the efforts, self sacrifice and commitment of its 1.7 million workers. The fifth largest employer in the world, the NHS, has been turned into a honey pot for private capital, reorganised to the edge of extinction, starved of funding by successive British governments and has turned front-line working conditions into a war-zone.
The Prime Minister and Health Minister's 'Winter Plan.'
The farcical commentary by the PM and the Health Minister Hunt, who forced himself back into his job, that the NHS had never been so well prepared for the effects of winter, has created an angry explosion of disbelief as national media exposed the truth to all. This state of affairs has a history. In the last 25 years, the only government measure that changed, even reversed the relentless expansion of work and the tighter and tighter rationing of health services to the public in the winter was the brief period in the early 2000s when the Labour government decided to match NHS funding to the EU average. That stopped before 2008. Since 2010, 15,000 beds have been cut in England alone. Again in England £6 billion has been cut from the Social Care budget and there are now 100,000 NHS Social Care and NHS vacancies.
We know the reasons, don't we?
From 2000 to 2011 the number of people over 85 has increased by 40%. (It is a matter for concern that gains in life expectancy were concentrated between 2005 and 2010, since then life expectancy has improved little for either sex. See 'Age Concern' Report Feb 2017.) Many NHS managers tell the population that social care is, nevertheless, the great problem. Old people are in Hospitals and should be in care homes. Fix that and the NHS problem goes away. Increased funding for the NHS, yes, but let's also have greater increases in funding for social care system!
Who is that saviour?
Presenting himself as the hero of the hour, it's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnston, who tells every media hack (before mentioning it to the PM) that the Tories should find an extra £5 billion a year from Brexit for the NHS. This is Boris's 'big idea' to stimulate the anxious and stunned Tory faithful, inside and outside Westminster, as health headlines dice the PM's 'Winter Health Plan' into mincemeat. And as Boris is as interested in the health service as the Pope is about children, it might be guessed that as the PM May's leadership slides into the political gutter, it is Boris who could arise and take on Corbyn's Labour Party in an increasingly inevitable early General Election.
What is the real issue here?
Ed Miliband, Labour's failed Prime Minister in the General Election of 2015, criticised himself in a Radio interview for not projecting 'big enough ideas.' (BBC Radio 4 'Today' 23 Jan.) One that he has now chosen is that the funding of the NHS should be ring-fenced. He has not decided what particular chunk of government income would carry that weight. More progressive 'thinkers' have already made proposals, from the restoration of 'National Insurance' to set proportions of the Gross Domestic Product. But all taxes and the GDP go down as well as up. And (currently soft) right wing voices murmur from behind the wall that increasing health and care expenditure could be endless ... Perhaps it is only the market that might resolve this long term dilemma?
Start from the other end.
The reality is that a combination of steps are required to rebuild the NHS. A proportion of GDP and comparison with other developed countries health and care expenditure would be a popular transitional funding measure. But the fundamentals start from the other end of the argument. The Age Concern report (see above) and the Nuffield Trust report (December 2017) reveals astonishing facts. Starting from the health needs of the population they have discovered that the rich in Britain live a decade longer than the poor. Nevertheless, the poor can expect 20 years' more suffering from chronic diseases than the rich. School-aged children from the poorest areas are two and a half times more likely to be admitted to hospital in an emergency for asthma than those in richer areas. And the gap across a wide range of chronic disease in older age (diabetes, dementia, heart-failure etc) has been expanding in the last ten years. In Britain it is poverty that is the driver of the health and care crisis. Just as it was before the NHS was founded.
Don't do nothing; do something; we can win; we have to win!
On Saturday 3 February the Peoples Assembly and 'Health Campaigns Together' (see Dr Louise Irvine on 'You Tube' - NHS Emergency Demonstration.) have launched a mass demonstration, starting at 12pm on Gower Street London WC1. People have to show their anger at the destruction of the greatest institution that the British people, the ordinary people, have ever built. And where else will come the support for those on the front line in this battle? How can the million plus workers in a fundamental service keep their morale, their skills and their faith and hope intact if they do not see that the rest stand with them?
Tuesday, 16 January 2018
The real Brexit bombshell
Whoever ever thought PFI would work?
The decrepit British government's latest struggle is with the Carillion smash - another giant outsourcing junket that threatens jobs and pensions and more than a £ billion of taxpayers money. Among the list of Carillion scandals, as ministers poured more tax money into a collapsing, wealth-creation machine, it is easy to see the company as a metaphor for the whole government's course. And still the British people continue to experience the virtually self-confessed eight year disaster of its government's main policy of austerity - for all except the rich. They watch as the Tory/Ulster Democratic Party produces failure after failure. Social and political anger and contempt is regularly registered in polls as growing. But the particular origins of this insane idea, where government money, social infrastructure and key public services were all to be tied to the spinning lottery-wheel of private capital, belongs to Labour's long-serving Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. His Private Finance Initiative, PFI, launched the initial wave of 500 public/private 'arrangements' amounting to a bill for the public of £250 billion.
Carillion is just the latest.
Teresa May's Tory / Democratic Unionist Party government will be seen in the earliest history books as a calamity. From the latest collapse of the UK's ridiculous 'special relationship' with the US, to the Cabinet de-shuffle, to the National Health Service crisis, they appear to get nothing right. Undoubtedly, Britain is the major weakest link in western capitalism today and its traditional politics are in deep crisis. Only the dread and fear of Corbyn holds the hapless, factional, sack of cats that comprises May's government together. Corbyn calls for the reverse of May and of Brown's drastic PFI experiment, mixing social services with private profit. And the polls show that the British public overwhelmingly support him.
Danger looming
The government has generated a storm as a result of its domino failures. Some critical news in the last week has thereby not received the attention that it might. The turmoil of Tory led Brexit has blown up new political weather system on the horizon and not just one but now two ghosts from the past have loomed into view. Blair, Labour's general in the Iraq war, has already called for a new referendum over Brexit. Now ex United Kingdom Independence Party leader, Farage, has reconstituted himself, as the government's muddle over Brexit becomes more and more critical. He too wants another Brexit referendum. At the same time a legal lightening bolt has clarified how the Tory's broken down Brexit will certainly come to a bitter end by March 2019 (if the government has not already collapsed.)
Lawyers talk
The legal opinion of Lord (John) Kerr, the leading UK former diplomat who designed the part of the treaty that allows countries to withdraw from the EU, Article 50, stated that the UK retained its option of withdrawing its notice to leave the EU. He argued that May can rescind her 'Article 50' letter on withdrawing from the European Union at any time before 29 March 2019 – with the consequence that the UK would remain a member of the EU. No other member state would be able to stop the UK’s withdrawal of its Article 50 letter. And now three leading Queen's Councillors (top lawyers) have confirmed Kerr's view and sent their findings to the Prime Minister.
Implications for May
The point here is that there is no doubt Britain's Supreme Court would support the right of the option for a Parliamentary vote on a return to the EU if such an option was proposed by any party in Parliament. But the point is that this vote will inevitably emerge given that the Government has already stated that there will be a vote on the 'deal' before 29 March 2019. Up to now May has said the vote in Parliament will simply be a vote to accept the deal or a vote to leave the EU without a deal. Now it is guaranteed that the vote in Parliament would have a third option - to remain in the EU.
The party-political crisis of all crises
What would happen if Parliament voted on what would become the three options? The Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party would call for the Kerr option to be attached to the Parliamentary vote on the final deal and they would vote, under all conditions, to stay in the EU. Labour would face the choice of an anti-working class deal, no deal or remaining in the EU. In this context the 'retainers' in Parliament would be likely to hold the largest bloc of votes. It is certain therefore that May's government would call an early General Election. How early? As the disasters unfold, from Grenfell to Carillion, the pressure for an early General Election becomes irresistible.
And Corbyn's Labour Party?
At the moment Corbyn and the Labour Party have deliberately stepped back from giving priority to Brexit. Up to the end of 2017 it has been ten months since Corbyn posed a question about Brexit in the PM's question time slot. Instead he has laid down some principles, based on working class interests, designed to carry out the referendum. The Labour Party is opposed to another referendum on the EU. As the Tories become embroiled in their struggle for no EU tariffs on British exports but a closed shop on immigration and no legal sharing of conditions for trade, Labour will criticise Tory proposals that harm jobs or risk key benefits for the majority of the population. And it is virtually inevitable that Corbyn's Labour Party will reject the Tory version of Brexit. When the inevitable early General Election comes, Labour will fight the election on the new future needed for Britain and the Tories will fight it on the premise that they are the only Party that stands for any 'real' sort of Brexit.
And the consequences?
The Tories are in a disastrous position. Factional from top to bottom and incoherent throughout, they stagger through a succession of domestic disasters. Paradoxically it is only their association with Brexit that keeps them afloat. As March 2019 gets closer and the second fantasy, this time of an EU 'special relationship' with the UK dissolves in the mist so the Faragian spectre will loom larger for the Tory Trumpeteers as will the unavoidable need for a General Election as opposed to the frightening vote on May's EU deal in Parliament.
If there were a General Election before March 2019, despite the solid domestic ground Corbyn's Labour has made through its 2017 Manifesto, offering as it did real alternatives to the current shambles of British capitalism, it would be a serious mistake by Corbyn's Labour Party to step away from the EU issues. The weakness of the Tory's leverage in the EU becomes more and more apparent, so Labour has to begin to state its own policy on the EU and the major allies that it seeks across the Continent against austerity; the collective need to challenge racism and to resist the right wing upsurge in Europe that echoes the 1930s; how fair trade, with equal wage levels, going global, overturns so called 'free trade'; how common resources and mutual support opens a new chapter in Europe's relations with the Syrian, the North African and Central Asian peoples. Corbyn's new Labour Government can offer a new European Charter offering the alliances that can win equality.
Standing against Macron's vision of a puffed up, re-centralised, 'core' EU, Corbyn's Labour Party in government has to reject a turn backwards and offer European people instead, as with Britain, a new vision of a different society to the benefit of the many.
The decrepit British government's latest struggle is with the Carillion smash - another giant outsourcing junket that threatens jobs and pensions and more than a £ billion of taxpayers money. Among the list of Carillion scandals, as ministers poured more tax money into a collapsing, wealth-creation machine, it is easy to see the company as a metaphor for the whole government's course. And still the British people continue to experience the virtually self-confessed eight year disaster of its government's main policy of austerity - for all except the rich. They watch as the Tory/Ulster Democratic Party produces failure after failure. Social and political anger and contempt is regularly registered in polls as growing. But the particular origins of this insane idea, where government money, social infrastructure and key public services were all to be tied to the spinning lottery-wheel of private capital, belongs to Labour's long-serving Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. His Private Finance Initiative, PFI, launched the initial wave of 500 public/private 'arrangements' amounting to a bill for the public of £250 billion.
Carillion is just the latest.
Teresa May's Tory / Democratic Unionist Party government will be seen in the earliest history books as a calamity. From the latest collapse of the UK's ridiculous 'special relationship' with the US, to the Cabinet de-shuffle, to the National Health Service crisis, they appear to get nothing right. Undoubtedly, Britain is the major weakest link in western capitalism today and its traditional politics are in deep crisis. Only the dread and fear of Corbyn holds the hapless, factional, sack of cats that comprises May's government together. Corbyn calls for the reverse of May and of Brown's drastic PFI experiment, mixing social services with private profit. And the polls show that the British public overwhelmingly support him.
Danger looming
The government has generated a storm as a result of its domino failures. Some critical news in the last week has thereby not received the attention that it might. The turmoil of Tory led Brexit has blown up new political weather system on the horizon and not just one but now two ghosts from the past have loomed into view. Blair, Labour's general in the Iraq war, has already called for a new referendum over Brexit. Now ex United Kingdom Independence Party leader, Farage, has reconstituted himself, as the government's muddle over Brexit becomes more and more critical. He too wants another Brexit referendum. At the same time a legal lightening bolt has clarified how the Tory's broken down Brexit will certainly come to a bitter end by March 2019 (if the government has not already collapsed.)
Lawyers talk
The legal opinion of Lord (John) Kerr, the leading UK former diplomat who designed the part of the treaty that allows countries to withdraw from the EU, Article 50, stated that the UK retained its option of withdrawing its notice to leave the EU. He argued that May can rescind her 'Article 50' letter on withdrawing from the European Union at any time before 29 March 2019 – with the consequence that the UK would remain a member of the EU. No other member state would be able to stop the UK’s withdrawal of its Article 50 letter. And now three leading Queen's Councillors (top lawyers) have confirmed Kerr's view and sent their findings to the Prime Minister.
Implications for May
The point here is that there is no doubt Britain's Supreme Court would support the right of the option for a Parliamentary vote on a return to the EU if such an option was proposed by any party in Parliament. But the point is that this vote will inevitably emerge given that the Government has already stated that there will be a vote on the 'deal' before 29 March 2019. Up to now May has said the vote in Parliament will simply be a vote to accept the deal or a vote to leave the EU without a deal. Now it is guaranteed that the vote in Parliament would have a third option - to remain in the EU.
The party-political crisis of all crises
What would happen if Parliament voted on what would become the three options? The Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party would call for the Kerr option to be attached to the Parliamentary vote on the final deal and they would vote, under all conditions, to stay in the EU. Labour would face the choice of an anti-working class deal, no deal or remaining in the EU. In this context the 'retainers' in Parliament would be likely to hold the largest bloc of votes. It is certain therefore that May's government would call an early General Election. How early? As the disasters unfold, from Grenfell to Carillion, the pressure for an early General Election becomes irresistible.
And Corbyn's Labour Party?
At the moment Corbyn and the Labour Party have deliberately stepped back from giving priority to Brexit. Up to the end of 2017 it has been ten months since Corbyn posed a question about Brexit in the PM's question time slot. Instead he has laid down some principles, based on working class interests, designed to carry out the referendum. The Labour Party is opposed to another referendum on the EU. As the Tories become embroiled in their struggle for no EU tariffs on British exports but a closed shop on immigration and no legal sharing of conditions for trade, Labour will criticise Tory proposals that harm jobs or risk key benefits for the majority of the population. And it is virtually inevitable that Corbyn's Labour Party will reject the Tory version of Brexit. When the inevitable early General Election comes, Labour will fight the election on the new future needed for Britain and the Tories will fight it on the premise that they are the only Party that stands for any 'real' sort of Brexit.
And the consequences?
The Tories are in a disastrous position. Factional from top to bottom and incoherent throughout, they stagger through a succession of domestic disasters. Paradoxically it is only their association with Brexit that keeps them afloat. As March 2019 gets closer and the second fantasy, this time of an EU 'special relationship' with the UK dissolves in the mist so the Faragian spectre will loom larger for the Tory Trumpeteers as will the unavoidable need for a General Election as opposed to the frightening vote on May's EU deal in Parliament.
If there were a General Election before March 2019, despite the solid domestic ground Corbyn's Labour has made through its 2017 Manifesto, offering as it did real alternatives to the current shambles of British capitalism, it would be a serious mistake by Corbyn's Labour Party to step away from the EU issues. The weakness of the Tory's leverage in the EU becomes more and more apparent, so Labour has to begin to state its own policy on the EU and the major allies that it seeks across the Continent against austerity; the collective need to challenge racism and to resist the right wing upsurge in Europe that echoes the 1930s; how fair trade, with equal wage levels, going global, overturns so called 'free trade'; how common resources and mutual support opens a new chapter in Europe's relations with the Syrian, the North African and Central Asian peoples. Corbyn's new Labour Government can offer a new European Charter offering the alliances that can win equality.
Standing against Macron's vision of a puffed up, re-centralised, 'core' EU, Corbyn's Labour Party in government has to reject a turn backwards and offer European people instead, as with Britain, a new vision of a different society to the benefit of the many.
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