It is time to judge the British Labour Party (LP) in the context of modern British and European political history. Why? Because the last General Election in the UK was a catastrophe for Labour and because social democracy is on its knees in Western Europe.
Among the (many) distractions of Brexit, included in the heap of arguments about why Labour did so badly in 2019, is that Labour under Corbyn did well in 2017 - and that showed the possibility of future success. In this scenario, it was the cliffs of Brexit that blocked Labour's progression. In reality in 2017 Labour (despite a high vote) fell behind the Tories (with a higher vote) who had to rally behind Teresa May, the worst Prime Minister since Alex Douglas Hume, and who proposed to carry on austerity - after 7 years of Tory cuts. In reality, despite the crisis of the Tories caused by austerity and then the upheaval of a referendum to leave the EU, Labour lost four General Elections in a row. Messrs Brown, Milliband, Corbyn and Corbyn again failed to win the the majority of the British electorate - before and after Brexit. These are the stubborn facts.
There is no doubting that Corbyn's leadership of the LP, coupled with an enormous and young membership, was something very new in Labour's history. And Corbyn was subject to scathing attacks, both inside Labour and out. But to fully understand the context of Labour's defeats in general requires an historical and international approach. It also helps provide a fully coherent understanding of the Corbyn exception.
The British Labour Governments
The first LP access to Parliamentary political power in Britain was 1945. Forty five years after its birth, Labour enacted the most dramatic reform program inside a capitalist system that the world had ever seen. And that was despite war hero Winston Churchill calling Attlee's Labour 'the Gestapo'. (Corbyn's sluice of venom is nothing new.) Attlee's project has never been echoed or expanded ever since. Across Western Europe the 'welfare state' policy emerged as dictators fell, as economies were rebuilt and as the labour-force found its strength. In the UK it was the period between 1945 to 1948 that was the height of social democracy's advance. From that point onward the Labour Party, including the key component of the Trade Union leadership, saw their duty as the defence of the gains of 1945-48.
Naturally over time, these various defensive gains - via Labour Prime Ministers Wilson, Callaghan, Blair and Brown - were scrabbled and, occasionally, pumped up in different parts from the Attlee heritage. PM Wilson led a house building policy that was needed, providing 400,000 new houses a year during his tenure. But the essence remained. Labour, in office, was methodically reduced to the defence of its original 'Welfare State', but experiencing less and less of the original successes and accepting more and more policy manoeuvres designed to win over capital, through more and more compromises.
Under Labour PM's Wilson and Callaghan, British capitalism was already reorganising against industrial development, drawing away from any national investment, still moving from the remnants of imperial wealth to the creation of international finance and tax havens. The response of Wilson and Callaghan was to force a reductive compromise on to unions and workers and their pay. It was the central part of both of their main policies in Parliament.
Under Prime Minister Blair, British social democracy moved again, first by solidifying the downward trend of an increasingly powerless Labour Party membership. A 'middle' direction had already been constructed for Labour's Parliamentary leadership by Anthony Giddens's 'Third Way'. In 2009, Blair publicly declared support for a 'new capitalism'. Labour in Parliament sought its base from public sector workers and managers and new technology capital emerging in the US's West Coast. It offered 'Tory lite' to a declining electorate (who could not tell the difference between the main political parties.) Blair finally fell following his Iraq war debacle and his tangle with the US right.
Prime Minister Brown, who was known mainly for his hatred and envy of Blair - not in a good way - had already made his major 'social democratic ' measure by hooking up crooked, minor firms that had emerged out of the lowest Thatcher swamp, on to key parts of the health and welfare services. His Premiership forced him to buy the world's largest bank in the 2008 crash and was shortly bumped out of office by the next 'Tory lite' PM - who did not hate Blair but admired him.
This is the bones of the social democratic Labour Party in government in the UK. Besides Attlee it has mainly been an unsuccessful failure.
Britain's decisive politics since 1945/8.
Meanwhile massive shifts in British society have occurred since 1945/8, but the politics of these shifts have been adopted by the Tories (with a little help from their friends) who either created some of these shifts or promoted their arrival.
Labour PM Wilson might have argued for 'the white hot heat' of new technology but it was the Tory PM Heath, despite his flagging imperial grandees, that successfully pushed the 1975 UK referendum into the European Common Market. Heath opened its membership while in government in 1973. This was the beginning of a massive effort to remove government taxes as the main means of industrial investment in Britain. Labour's leading ministers supported entry as well as the Tory dream of private investment. The European market would re-create Britain's industrial base, without state dependence, stimulated by Britain's remaining advanced technology which was required by the most developed European nations (advanced technology in aircraft engineering, nuclear energy and high grade vehicles, technologies and 'brain drains' - that had been otherwise been pouring away to the US.)
In the 1980s Tory PM Thatcher destroyed the militant leadership of the trade union movement, sold off state utilities and opened the new, dominant centre of British capitalism, by unleashing the City of London and its access to international wealth. Thatcher also divided the working class socially with the sale of council housing, creating in the south of England a vast new industry of the building, buying and selling of housing, which remains today. Thatcher, long before Trump and now Boris, embedded a section of the working class as part of her political base.
Meanwhile, the enormous reorganisation of the nature of work across the UK, from the 1980s onward, was part of the change of international capital and the growth of the movement of finance seen throughout the European west. The process was rapidly encouraged by a succession of Tory governments in Britain. The mobilisation of international wealth, 'service' industries, the relatively dwindling public-sector and its 'outsourcing', selling property and building development, particularly in the south of the UK, all of them defined the new types of jobs. The new jobs were unskilled, with low wages, no unions, and self-paying contracts. This continental wide process was never grasped by social democracy either across Europe or Britain. Instead social democratic parties largely sought yet more new compacts with capitalism, a new capitalism that had little interest in the increasingly desperate offers of the social democrats, barring the opening of access to crooks and the nouveaux riche wide-boys.
Decline of Social Democracy's purchase
These great events and associated movements in the economy and politics that have rolled through the second half of the 20th century and the first third of the 21st in Western Europe, have been broadly untouched by social democratic parties. It is a simple fact that the social democratic proposition, that capitalism and its associated systems can be cajoled, pressurised, influenced or won-over, had its last success in Britain 75 years ago. (Which is not at all the same thing as the huge sacrifices and struggles that erupted as capital's offensive became more and more trenchant. In Britain alone millions actively backed the Miner's strike in the mid 1980s; overthrew Thatcher via the Poll Tax rebellion, and ruined Blair's political future in the movement against the Iraq war.)
The concessions made to social democracy by capitalism in Western Europe have progressively lessened for two main reasons. First, capitalism in Europe and across the world has not just globalised in terms of the extraction of raw materials and forced labour across the globe. They have industrialised global labour and made ownership and sale of wealth the main value of the global system. Naturally this reduces most access by national governments to force concessions (if they are so inclined) from the most substantial capitalist companies, even when these companies are nominally based in their own country. 'There's no alternative' became the dominant slogan of modern political economy.
Second; the decline of traditional political structures and instruments in Western Europe and the weakness of the political institutions when faced with the supposed inevitability of the economic system, produced cynicism among voters - particularly with working class voters. A recent survey led by Cambridge University, involving 4 million people and 3500 surveys across 154 countries, has spelt it out. In 2005 the proportion of those dissatisfied with democracy in the UK was 33%. In 2019 it reached 61%. (The US, meanwhile, has seen a 'dramatic and unexpected' decline in voter dissatisfaction, to above 50%.)
The crash in 2008 showed the only real political intervention that any government could take - apparently, when the various states and governments in the West re-stocked the banks (and the stock markets.) The politicians, especially the social democratic politicians, standing in front of millions whose lives were about to get worse for decades, explained there was no alternative. In other words, when it really came to the crunch, the social democrats were just another shadow of the political right.
(Interestingly, a group of European countries has been bucking this trend, with satisfaction with democracy higher than ever before in Denmark, Switzerland, Norway and the Netherlands. There is a strong argument to connect those results to their highest state social spending over decades by these countries - especially the Scandinavian ones. See Blog 14 January 2020.)
The Corbyn initiative.
Although Corbyn followed the main historical trend of the weakness and decline of social democracy in the 2017 and 2019 General Elections, there was the emergence of a new development based on two new significant shifts in politics and society. In politics, the Corbyn leadership reconstructed the Attlee formula for modern times. In other words they proposed a new balance in society and the economy. This was the first time that British social democracy had acted that way for 70 years. In society, a new youth movement, experiencing the misery of the latest capitalist model in terms of jobs, pay, rights, social-costs, housing, attached itself overwhelmingly to Corbyn's Labour in both General Elections (despite Corbyn's confusion over Brexit.)
It turned out that the two political and social changes were not enough to resist the social bloc created by Boris's Brexit or the deluge of attacks on Corbyn, most effectively from the inside of the parliamentary Labour party itself. Nevertheless, polls consistently support a new model economy - and now there is a majority in the UK for a new type of democracy - something which the Corbyn program barely touched.
Not so much a conclusion ...
The Labour Party is under enormous pressure to pretend it is now unified - as the first step needed to muzzle the Corbyn base. The main candidate for leadership (in the media) is Keir Starmer who tells us he supports everybody in the broad church he is designing. But the political and economic context in Britain forbids anything other than dramatic change in the UK nations, particularly Scotland, its economy (if it is to avoid a satellite of the US, managed by Singapore-on-Thames) and its society, which already echoes a Dickensian quality, particularly for the young. Politics is the first clarifier.
Those that support Corbyn's program need to organise in action for its victory in society. Unifying a fuzzy, silent consensus of the Labour Party - heading for a second rate 'Tory lite' - is an empty goal. If Starmer wins then the base of Labour will need to organise their own faction that is going to fight every battle to establish the new democracy, beyond the traditional, failed, Labour Party of history, a democracy needed to win the breakthrough that Corbyn sought.
Wednesday, 29 January 2020
Tuesday, 14 January 2020
The best future for the UK's people.
The best future for the UK in the next political and economic period is to accept the right of its various citizens to decide the separation of the UK's different countries. It would follow that the English, the Scots and the Welsh could seek a federation together with the other more social democratic countries of Northern Europe. The Northern Irish, happily, are already able to become part of Ireland, should they so wish.
What would this achieve? It would simultaneously dissolve the self-styled 'great power status', of UK/England and make it much easier thereby to focus the separate countries on the conditions and lives of their ordinary peoples. A second 'Hanseatic League' (originally a very successful 13th to 15th century trading arrangement across Northern Europe) could start again on the new basis of defending the social gains made so far in the West, as globalisation smashes up the post WW2 welfare states. It is the Northern European states who are still holding the social-democratic line - against their will in some cases. With a new approach promoting the sort of society that starts from the needs of the people, an England, a Scotland and a Wales could stand with Norway, Sweden and Denmark, holding back the wave of destruction of social support and care which destroyed Greece and is currently rolling its menace across France and Italy.
Utopia? Behind what might be described as a fantasy, are two hard facts. First is the economics of the next period in the West. Most large European countries spend the bulk of the taxes they receive on Health, Education and Welfare. Their governments have been forced to do that since 1945. The EU countries as a whole use 35.7% of their countries' Gross Domestic Product (the goods and services that the country produces) in government expenditure. France is in the middle of a battle to drastically slice government expenditure by cutting pensions, but the French state normally spends 47.9% of France's GDP. Germany 44.5%. Then there is Scandinavia. There is a battle here too; an endless demand from the corporations, most of the media, the higher classes to cut government spending. But ...
Sweden uses 49.8% of its country's GDP. Denmark 50.8% and Norway 54.8%. And the UK government? It spends 34.4% of the country's GDP. The UK is at the bottom of all the large western countries, thanks to Thatcher and Blair.
The second 'hard fact' is the dissolution of Britain's traditional politics. Boris Johnson's victory at the polls in Britain's 2019 General Election, manoeuvred by the crushing of his EU remainers in Parliament; was created by the defeat of the left-led Labour Party. But Boris's maimed victory is not resolved, courtesy of Corbyn's defeat. It is Boris's 'utopia', as it will unfold under the pressure of his brutal Brexit, the downturn across the the capitalist world, the single economic leverage that he has chosen to use for the UK's future, that will turn the politics of the UK into another fast spin. In essence, Boris has to burn down the current proportion of the UK's education, health and welfare to shore up the tax-light wealth he needs to attract and sustain his contest with Singapore, etc.
How will the politics of Boris's project fall-out? The Borisian dream is utterly bent on the critical role of the British-based banks and finance companies (touched by computer super gaming - expanding as hard as possible - offering a tech substitute for the failure of AI.) This is to be underpinned by the US of course; together with all the other Anglo 'let's go world-wide wide open' countries - that want to hoard wealth and keep the immigrants out. This is not any sort of recipe for stable future, buttressed by well paid and interesting apprenticeships and jobs!
The smoke and mirrors in front of Boris's political success will clear very fast. Indubitably, our UK's mini-Trump will try to hold onto his equivalent of the British rust-bucket that Trump still savours. Hundreds of thousands are 'back to work' in some of the US States that crashed out of their traditional Democratic allegiance in the last Presidential contest. The new work is now some fracking, some metal work, but mainly folding boxes. In the UK, fracking is going nowhere, metal and engineering are escaping Britain almost as fast as cars. And most of the Midlands and the North East are already folding boxes or working in the collapsing social services. Boris has to make a giant leap beyond Trump's 'offer' in the US, in order to set his new rust-buckets screwed Tory tight. That's the real fantasy.
And then there is the nation. Scotland will demand the right to vote again on independence. Northern Ireland are allowed to do it when they want. Scotland is already on the march. This, and the deep dislike of Boris in Scotland, will force the issue after the Scottish elections in 2021. Additionally, the British Labour Party may well by then agree with the SNP's view on a new referendum - as Labour digs deeper when their 2020 leadership election proves nothing like enough to rebuild a victory in a UK election.
And then there are the direct movements that will erupt against Boris's government. The post Brexit times will cause all sorts of certainties to crash. The growing hatred of the current political system among a third of Britons will quickly re-grow. (The Royal family are providing further fuel.) The absolutely essential creation of a new Green deal, in jobs, technology and reorganisation of industries like farming, will become more and more acute. Recognition of the meaning of Britain's separate nations will be unavoidable. New political alliances will be essential. All this will seem to come very quickly. British politics (along with most western politics) is going very fast now. But the new Labour leadership will not solve, let alone lead, these great movements. That is the decisive result of the 2019 election.
What can Labour do?
Starting with 10 million who ignored and who even spat at the attacks on Corbyn that blossomed from both outside and in the Labour Party, a real, tough, practical vision is emerging in a future that will need much more than the standard 'our turn next' from the Labour Grandees.
The ten million Labour voters and the hundreds of thousands of Labour members need to take stock of why the Labour Party failed and what the Labour Party should do now. Now is the time to ask the questions; what sort of Labour Party do we want to be? What sort of Labour Party can we be? The dangerous effect of Labour's defeat is the idea that now is the time for what will be a paralytic 'unity'. The truth is the exact opposite. The would be 'unifiers' have turned reality on its head. There are a potential five years before Boris can be overturned by votes in a General Election. The time for Labour's unity was before and during the election. It did not happen inside the Parliamentary Party - who ignored the members and opposed Corbyn. There was no unity in the Labour Party in the 2019 General Election. That was when there should have been unity. But now is the time to analyse, criticise, debate and consider. The call for 'unifying' now is simply a means by which it will be the wings of the Parliamentary Labour Party that will de facto answer the questions about Labour's future.
Fighting constituency by constituency over the next period for an MP that 'unifies' the Party - in their own terms - is a cul de sac. Boris will rapidly provide battlefields in the economy and in politics which will require the most intense direct action. Boris's inevitable attacks on the right to independence, on pensioners, the unemployed, on Welfare, Health and Education, on worker's rights and on US collaboration, will also decide if there is a future for the Labour Party. The membership and supporters of the Labour Party need to be front and centre in the movements, the marches, the direct actions that stop Boris and, as with PM Heath in the 1970s and Thatcher in the 1980s, bring him down. The other Labour Party - in Parliament - can go along with their membership, or carry on despising them and praying for a wealthy post, as in the past. In effect, two Labour Parties. It is breathtakingly obvious which of the two Labour Parties would win back the Midlands and the North East, open the door to a new, green economy and re-build respect in a separate Scotland and Ireland.
And that is why Labour's membership and Labour's supporters need now to discuss and debate, to consider what is right and what is wrong with Britain's Labour Party, to look around Europe and the world and to set a different course - to make new alliances for a new society and a new democracy.
What would this achieve? It would simultaneously dissolve the self-styled 'great power status', of UK/England and make it much easier thereby to focus the separate countries on the conditions and lives of their ordinary peoples. A second 'Hanseatic League' (originally a very successful 13th to 15th century trading arrangement across Northern Europe) could start again on the new basis of defending the social gains made so far in the West, as globalisation smashes up the post WW2 welfare states. It is the Northern European states who are still holding the social-democratic line - against their will in some cases. With a new approach promoting the sort of society that starts from the needs of the people, an England, a Scotland and a Wales could stand with Norway, Sweden and Denmark, holding back the wave of destruction of social support and care which destroyed Greece and is currently rolling its menace across France and Italy.
Utopia? Behind what might be described as a fantasy, are two hard facts. First is the economics of the next period in the West. Most large European countries spend the bulk of the taxes they receive on Health, Education and Welfare. Their governments have been forced to do that since 1945. The EU countries as a whole use 35.7% of their countries' Gross Domestic Product (the goods and services that the country produces) in government expenditure. France is in the middle of a battle to drastically slice government expenditure by cutting pensions, but the French state normally spends 47.9% of France's GDP. Germany 44.5%. Then there is Scandinavia. There is a battle here too; an endless demand from the corporations, most of the media, the higher classes to cut government spending. But ...
Sweden uses 49.8% of its country's GDP. Denmark 50.8% and Norway 54.8%. And the UK government? It spends 34.4% of the country's GDP. The UK is at the bottom of all the large western countries, thanks to Thatcher and Blair.
The second 'hard fact' is the dissolution of Britain's traditional politics. Boris Johnson's victory at the polls in Britain's 2019 General Election, manoeuvred by the crushing of his EU remainers in Parliament; was created by the defeat of the left-led Labour Party. But Boris's maimed victory is not resolved, courtesy of Corbyn's defeat. It is Boris's 'utopia', as it will unfold under the pressure of his brutal Brexit, the downturn across the the capitalist world, the single economic leverage that he has chosen to use for the UK's future, that will turn the politics of the UK into another fast spin. In essence, Boris has to burn down the current proportion of the UK's education, health and welfare to shore up the tax-light wealth he needs to attract and sustain his contest with Singapore, etc.
How will the politics of Boris's project fall-out? The Borisian dream is utterly bent on the critical role of the British-based banks and finance companies (touched by computer super gaming - expanding as hard as possible - offering a tech substitute for the failure of AI.) This is to be underpinned by the US of course; together with all the other Anglo 'let's go world-wide wide open' countries - that want to hoard wealth and keep the immigrants out. This is not any sort of recipe for stable future, buttressed by well paid and interesting apprenticeships and jobs!
The smoke and mirrors in front of Boris's political success will clear very fast. Indubitably, our UK's mini-Trump will try to hold onto his equivalent of the British rust-bucket that Trump still savours. Hundreds of thousands are 'back to work' in some of the US States that crashed out of their traditional Democratic allegiance in the last Presidential contest. The new work is now some fracking, some metal work, but mainly folding boxes. In the UK, fracking is going nowhere, metal and engineering are escaping Britain almost as fast as cars. And most of the Midlands and the North East are already folding boxes or working in the collapsing social services. Boris has to make a giant leap beyond Trump's 'offer' in the US, in order to set his new rust-buckets screwed Tory tight. That's the real fantasy.
And then there is the nation. Scotland will demand the right to vote again on independence. Northern Ireland are allowed to do it when they want. Scotland is already on the march. This, and the deep dislike of Boris in Scotland, will force the issue after the Scottish elections in 2021. Additionally, the British Labour Party may well by then agree with the SNP's view on a new referendum - as Labour digs deeper when their 2020 leadership election proves nothing like enough to rebuild a victory in a UK election.
And then there are the direct movements that will erupt against Boris's government. The post Brexit times will cause all sorts of certainties to crash. The growing hatred of the current political system among a third of Britons will quickly re-grow. (The Royal family are providing further fuel.) The absolutely essential creation of a new Green deal, in jobs, technology and reorganisation of industries like farming, will become more and more acute. Recognition of the meaning of Britain's separate nations will be unavoidable. New political alliances will be essential. All this will seem to come very quickly. British politics (along with most western politics) is going very fast now. But the new Labour leadership will not solve, let alone lead, these great movements. That is the decisive result of the 2019 election.
What can Labour do?
Starting with 10 million who ignored and who even spat at the attacks on Corbyn that blossomed from both outside and in the Labour Party, a real, tough, practical vision is emerging in a future that will need much more than the standard 'our turn next' from the Labour Grandees.
The ten million Labour voters and the hundreds of thousands of Labour members need to take stock of why the Labour Party failed and what the Labour Party should do now. Now is the time to ask the questions; what sort of Labour Party do we want to be? What sort of Labour Party can we be? The dangerous effect of Labour's defeat is the idea that now is the time for what will be a paralytic 'unity'. The truth is the exact opposite. The would be 'unifiers' have turned reality on its head. There are a potential five years before Boris can be overturned by votes in a General Election. The time for Labour's unity was before and during the election. It did not happen inside the Parliamentary Party - who ignored the members and opposed Corbyn. There was no unity in the Labour Party in the 2019 General Election. That was when there should have been unity. But now is the time to analyse, criticise, debate and consider. The call for 'unifying' now is simply a means by which it will be the wings of the Parliamentary Labour Party that will de facto answer the questions about Labour's future.
Fighting constituency by constituency over the next period for an MP that 'unifies' the Party - in their own terms - is a cul de sac. Boris will rapidly provide battlefields in the economy and in politics which will require the most intense direct action. Boris's inevitable attacks on the right to independence, on pensioners, the unemployed, on Welfare, Health and Education, on worker's rights and on US collaboration, will also decide if there is a future for the Labour Party. The membership and supporters of the Labour Party need to be front and centre in the movements, the marches, the direct actions that stop Boris and, as with PM Heath in the 1970s and Thatcher in the 1980s, bring him down. The other Labour Party - in Parliament - can go along with their membership, or carry on despising them and praying for a wealthy post, as in the past. In effect, two Labour Parties. It is breathtakingly obvious which of the two Labour Parties would win back the Midlands and the North East, open the door to a new, green economy and re-build respect in a separate Scotland and Ireland.
And that is why Labour's membership and Labour's supporters need now to discuss and debate, to consider what is right and what is wrong with Britain's Labour Party, to look around Europe and the world and to set a different course - to make new alliances for a new society and a new democracy.
Sunday, 5 January 2020
Can Labour survive?
1. The British Guardian newspaper has recently conducted a poll revealing support for Labour's new possible leaders. In the poll of 1059 Labour members, taking into account the possible stages of the election, they strongly backed (Sir) Keir Starmer, shadow Brexit secretary, against all other potential candidates.
Starmer (as with a couple of other candidates) has so far been careful not to distance himself from Corbyn's 2019 Manifesto. The large membership of the Labour Party was, until now at least, mainly Corbyn supporters. Ken Livingston has promoted Starmer's candidature. Nevertheless Starmer voted twice against Corbyn as leader and, at one stage, walked out of the shadow cabinet in order to force the Party to propose a new referendum as part of its Brexit policy. He will not be carrying on with any sort of 'Corbynism'.
2. Labour as a whole lost in 2019 but Labour's left has also had a resounding defeat however delicate Starmer's footsteps fall. And the Guardian poll is a very shaky and very early prediction. More significant is the real meaning of the distribution of the votes during the 2019 General Election. Labour polled 10 million and the Tories polled 14 million (a shade higher than ex PM May's vote in 2017.) The data also shows that 18 to 24 year olds would have put 544 Labour MPs into Parliament and 4 Conservatives. The Lib Dems, despite their support for the EU, were basically irrelevant for this group. From 24 to 49, voters would have put 310 Labour MPs as against 240 Tories into Parliament - again, because of the Corbyn program and despite the significant desire that sector had to remain in the EU. The Lib Dems were more successful here. (If only 65 year olds and older voted then Labour gets 35 MPs and the Tories 575.)
3. Labour membership still runs into the hundreds of thousands. And 10 million voted Labour. Most important Labour is still the overwhelmingly dominant mass party of young people. Yet the serious debate in Labour and across Labour voters in general about 'what really went wrong' has yet to be opened up. Most Labour leader contenders (including Starmer) are determined that the MPs should lead and control any real discussion about Labour's future. It is to be through the leadership candidates' votes that any realistic debate will be heard. Starmer's efforts, if he decides to stand, will be just another attempt to close down debate among party members and Labour supporters. 'Let's reunite the whole Labour Party' he will headline, while meaning let's unify Labour's MPs by not opening any real debate among the party: by not opening the most important political debate today in Britain.
4. Aside from the pantomime leadership election, what will happen to Labour?
The answer is discovered through a study raised by wider question. What will happen now to British politics in general - and to British society?
At the end of 2019 the Hansard Society published surprising research which showed that 37% of Britons believed 'the system' needed 'a great deal' of change - 10% more than the previous highest record, in 2010, when MPs were setting up austerity and fiddling about in their expenses scandal. This is how the Economist Magazine 'Predictions for 2020' put it;
'Britain saw relatively few public protests between the arrival of democracy in 1918 and the referendum in 2016. Now it sees marches almost every week. The same could happen with political violence, the relative lack of which made Britain such a peaceful place.'
Although the Economist's correspondent has failed to notice the defeat of the Heath government via the trade union movement in the 1970s and Thatcher's fall after the Poll Tax riots, Boris is not going face any sort of a calm future. Big changes, mass actions and reactions are going much faster than the second half of the 20th Century. There are now many more blocks to any sort of smooth progress in Britain's politics. All of the coming swerves and crashes will also shift society. Britain's fragility is greater now than any time since the World Wars. Britain's society has been captured by its uncertain and incoherent politics. The fate of Labour will only be determined by its political capacity to mark out and lead the shift in society best suited to the working class and its allies.
5. We already know that this year a 'no deal' with the EU may still be possible. A huge political struggle, in society, outside Parliament, could follow at the end of 2020. But there are many other, even more drastic obstacles for the rulers of Britain. Another new British politics that could smash up its society was first hinted in September 2019 when a (small) majority of voters in Northern Ireland stated they were in favour of Irish unity. So far, Britain's mass media have been promoting the coming battle between Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon over Scottish independence. But seeing no further than the 'right' of Westminster, eg Boris's 'right', to refuse another referendum in Scotland, Westminster believes the problem is solved. However the significance of Sturgeon's demand, that the Scottish Parliament should have its own right to decide whether to hold another referendum, starts to break down Westminster's domination. Again politics goes outside Westminster. The point is that another part of the UK already has its own right to independence. If the SNP win a solid victory in the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood in 2021, it is inconceivable that Scots will not demand, and act on their 'right', to vote for their future - just as the Northern Irish can.
2020 in Britain will not only face the next EU treaty and the national question, it will face Trump's election and his drastic measures to prove that 'America is great' again. Trump will do literally anything to defend his slogan, including short term measures that accelerate the West's weakening economy. Britain is exactly in the wrong place in relation to a major economic decline across the globe. Already Boris intends to drop EU law that defends workers' rights. Already the courts have smashed the biggest majority vote for action ever polled by Postal workers. Already Boris has backed one of the worst railway companies that reneged on its deal with Britain's most militant union, the RMT. Already Boris publicises plans to withdraw the right to strike by transport workers.
So far nurses in Northern Ireland, Postal workers, Railway workers, Amazon workers, etc, etc have begun a fightback. Outside Parliament.
6. This is the picture that faces Labour as it now stands. If the 2020 EU Boris deal (or no deal) becomes toxic for Labour, another Labour break is inevitable and not just among Labour's MPs. It is one thing to support Corbyn despite your favourable view of EU membership. It is entirely different when a mini pro-Blair leader tries to concoct a new Labour 'solution' as Boris pushes through his anti-working class objectives in his new deal with the EU.
But the crisis of Scotland's independence is still worse for Labour's MPs. Corbyn's leadership did not resolve the Scottish question in the Labour Party or among its supporters - although a shift had begun. The obvious answer would be to accept the right of the Scottish people to decide their own future and for Labour to actively seek an alliance with the Scottish government on shared core issues.
Labour too will have to face mass action outside Parliament and the probability of economic downturn. Will the debate about Labour's defeat raise the need for the Party to join the battle of workers and their organisations, given a debate that is focussed on the next leader and 'business as usual.' Again Labour finds itself in a two part turmoil.
7. The developing future for British capitalism is being created out of these and other crises. The shape of Britain's social and economic future is emerging out of the leadership of the the most right-wing government since Thatcher. The critical centre of that future is the new structure that needs to be built to maintain and to gain globally accumulating wealth. The EU cliche, now a year old, of Britain's future as 'Singapore on Thames', a global tax haven, has already become more mature and refined. The latest version of the new Britain is emerging as part of the 'Anglosphere', America, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, (as opposed to the Sinosphere; China and its mongrel puppies.) The Anglosphere countries are now all heady market players, they spy together on everybody else (it's called 'five eyes'!) France, Germany and Japan are out of the Anglosphere clique. Its shared intention is the consolidation and control of the non-Chinese world's wealth. And Britain's City of London hopes to become the pearl in the Anglosphere's crown - a prized centre to challenge China's future. And the British people? The successful ones will service this prize and the rest of us will serve the servers.
There will be no real avenue in Britain for the next five years, opening to a new society based on a new green revolution. Work is going to be more tied to service. Work will be more and more unregulated. State health, education and welfare will be more and more polluted by the market. The crown jewels will remain in London.
8. Against this future the Labour Party has so failed to show its alternative - or even, so far, set up the debate required, as the petty-leadership epithets begin to fly, providing substitutes for real discussion and action. There are two fundamentals that the Labour Party must face to survive and have any chance to lead society. First, part of Labour's failure in 2019, including by the leadership of Labour's left, was its virtual silence about where Britain's wealth truly was (including its tax havens in the great corporations and in Britain's islands in the sun) and how they might be taken back to Britain's people. Second, Britain's Parliament no longer serves any real democracy, let alone the needs of society as a whole.
Labour should focus its hundreds of thousands of members, its ten million voters and society's young people on an attack against the billionaires and their wealth. That is the prime question for Britain's society. It is the core of the future. And it will be fought successfully only in mass action as, even in the West, the current unsuccessful democracies fail to provide any platform for that crucial step.
Second, the form that the failure of Britain's democracy takes is that it does not represent the overwhelming majority of the people. Simply look at the proportions of votes for any UK government. Meanwhile the House of Lords keeps expanding. Voting is completely unfair in the bit of Parliament that people can vote for. Two of the four countries that make up Britain are moving to independence because they are not represented. A growing percentage of the population, enough to win a British Parliament's government, regard the 'system' as unsuccessful. To really win an alternative to Boris's crew, Labour needs to attack the current Parliamentary system in favour of a democracy that distributes power to people, not where a quarter of the electorate gives the little bits away that are on offer every five years.
9. What should be done (and what are the new Labour leadership likely to do?)
There are some crises to come that will be shared by Labour and Johnson's Tories. But, as in the case of Scotland, and Northern Ireland, the new Labour leadership is likely to flow in entirely the wrong direction. Then there are other crises which are truly Labour's own. The defeat of the Corbyn left is now beginning to swing back to Blair's love of the 'centre ground'; the 'Tory light' version of the 1990s and early 2000's. The reason why Blair succeeded for 10 years was he replaced the non-functioning Tory Party - which had become no use to either of Britain's two main classes. It eventually failed because it was a version of the Tories. It failed a working class that was dealing with its retreats and defeats across the board. It failed through its half-baked nonsense of the unity of the market (read a collection of Dell-boys sharks) and the UK's public institutions. It failed because the classes (not just in Britain) were polarising without any interest from the Labour leadership, between poverty and wealth. It will not be able to be reconstituted. The polarisation has happened. Any future Labour potential support will not feed from its dismal history. Boris's success proves that.
And what therefore should be done? The defeat of Corbyn is not replaceable or reversible. The new leadership of the Labour Party will buttress the current state of society and offer a traditional Tory-lite project. (This is already emerged as would-be Labour leadership candidates start comparing their version of English patriotism with Boris's! No contest.)
What should be done? What has to be done? The membership, the Labour voters and the youth have to be coalesced in a mass-action political current that fights the new Tory government. The two key headlines; 'No rich and no poor! We need Real Democracy.' They would build a Labour faction, 'Real Labour', that organises independently of most Labour MPs and what will be all of its shadow cabinet. They would draw strength and experiences from the battle in France, the new Italian squares movement, the anti-fascist movement in the US. They would continue to fight at Labour's conference. And if necessary, they would form an independent organisation.
Tailending the Parliamentary Labour leadership's direction; compromising the battle that has to be had to shift the wealth in Britain, will begin to turn the Corbyn defeat into the defeat of Labour's members, their voters (who stood by Corbyn and the shaky 2019 Manifesto) and most of all, millions of young people. 'Real Labour' has to be critical of the 2019 faults but bold and most of all practically active in their answers. The first demand that 'Real Labour' should make from Labour's would-be leaders is that Britain's undemocratic Parliament, dominated by a mini Trump, must be brought down and replaced as soon as possible.
Sunday, 15 December 2019
Labour's defeat. Part One.
Labour's defeat in the 2019 General Election is definitive. Labour is the only major party that reduced its votes across all of the UK countries, regions and towns since the 2017 election. Labour took approximately 10 million votes on the 12th of December. In 2017 it had achieved 13 million votes. While the Tories won more seats in Parliament, their overall 14 million votes were not much greater than Teresa May's overall numbers in 2017. But their successful attack on the working class vote in England and Wales in the current election changed their pattern of votes into seats in Parliament. The 2019 election was not 'won' by the Tories, it was 'lost' by Labour.
However Labour's loss of votes is not just the victim of smart footwork in key marginal constituencies, organised by the Tories electoral gurus. Nor was it just Labour's late and lack-lustre approach to Brexit. Its 6% decline in many of the big cities speaks volumes that have not yet been fully understood. The core of Labour's wholesale defeat goes deep; deeper than Labour's obvious weakness about Brexit.
Starting at the very end of the election campaign, an odd contradiction emerged as Labour's left leadership began to re-define themselves and the party that they were trying to build. In the last months of 2019, a new political language emerged on the Labour left. Labour was not now so much a party as a 'movement'. Labour's program was not a Manifesto so much as 'a Transformation.'
It was all meant to reflect the large size and democratic power of Labour's membership and the shift by Labour from narrow politics to a change in society. But two separate and largely contrary ideas began to circulate. The journalists poked away at cultish aspects of Momentum, Corbyn's necessary support organisation that held back the impact of the large right-wing of Labour MPs. At the same time, barriers after barriers were being erected against possible political forces that might have been gathered, including some splits from the more radical parties and movements that were outside of Labour. There were openings to those making a big impact on society, as with the current wave of strikes, Extinction Rebellion and the ecology movement, the Greens, or the Peoples Assembly. Meanwhile the 2019 Manifesto had 'transformed' itself into an ideology, a new way of changing society. Yet it was an ideology that was meant to stand the ground with millions of people because it had a guaranteed budget!
So we had a 'movement' that drew lines against real possible movements - like the left that campaigns for a socialist Scotland; and a 'Transformation' that was defended to journalists as a successful European capitalist model, like Germany. Suddenly left-Labour had become an ideological circus - and utterly incomprehensible to millions. The success of the 2017 Labour Manifesto was in its definition. 'End Austerity now'. And millions understood. They backed the state ownership of services. The NHS proved it worked. By 2019 defending the NHS had become who is offering the biggest money pile, and, and, and... Many voters lost their way between 'Transformation' and their day to day life. In the end they did not believe the 'Transformation.' They wanted it specific and straight.
And that was the weakness. Make the successful 2017 Labour story again, but bigger and therefore better. Not so. The great changes that inspired populations across history, were those that sought for the political and economic ideas that rose to the level of the concrete. 'Land, peace and bread' said the Russian revolutionaries. 'Now, win the peace' said Attlee.
The self-created contradictions of Labour's left have a fundamental origin in the contradiction of the Labour Party itself; in that the party as a whole shelters not one but two classes in society. It is encompassed, as a party, by a state and an economy that clashes against the interests of one of those classes. Most Labour MPs, officers and trade union leaders support Britain's status quo. And that cannot and may not be 'transformed'. It can only be broken out of. Even the left of the party can be soaked by Labour's fundamental history of patriotism, defence of the state and Britain (not the people) first. This class problem at the core of the party, dominated by a big majority of MPs, can only now surface more furiously than ever. It will try to finish what remains of Labour's left - only, of course, trend up destroying the mass support, the energy and the effort that kept any real mass Labour Party alive.
A great deal of the legacy of Blair (and the Milibands) are behind Labour's defeat in 2019. Part of the reason why a large number of would-be Labour supporters sincerely doubted the Labour left's cornucopia (which appeared like a childish competition with the Tories) is the shrieking silence by Blair, then by Brown and then by (both) Milibands as they covered up the seminal role of the banks in the 2008 crash. Instead, the madness of the Tories that Labour caused the crash and created the need for austerity became 'common sense' instead. This idea remained lodged in the minds of millions of British people.
Why did all parts of Labour cut their own party's throats, for more than a decade? Because the banks and finance corporations were (and remain) the centre of British capitalism. And this fact was still only whispered, even by Labour's left leaders in 2017 and now. The 'Transformation' spoke relatively nothing about opening the terrible truth regarding Britain and its financiers. How was the City to be nationalised? How can the tax havens be raided? Instead we had a proposal that state finances would create a new economy from money gathered from the top 5%. Does anybody believe the top 5% would shell out? Where, and most importantly how, would the Labour led state get its money? Would the billionaires really give it all up? This mess was a concession made by the left to Labour's leaders' murky history and their failure to attack the banks. But that meant no fundamental or believable base was created for the 99% to stand on, at least when it came to proving you really can move large amounts of wealth from the billionaires to the poor.
The failure to call-out the core of British capitalism and the need to break it down was yet another reflection of the unresolved contradictions of the Labour Party, including among much of the Labour left.
Which brings us, finally, to Brexit and to Corbyn.
There is a good reason why the Brexit issue and the anti-Corbin offensive combine. Starting with Brexit, the argument that the 2019 election was won by a brave, apparently 'to die for', Boris Johnson 'getting Brexit done' hides the really dramatic decision that was made inside the British ruling class following the extended catastrophe of Teresa May. As everybody knows Boris himself took the route of Brexit because it was his only hope to be Prime Minister. What has been hidden is the determined shift in the City of London and the multi-nationals to wreck Corbyn's Labour Party as the first and most critical priority - if necessary dropping the Tory grandees and accepting for the time-being the Brexit route. After the 2017 General Election, Corbyn's Labour Party was getting stronger and it had to be destroyed at all and at any costs. Ruthlessly reorganising the Tory Party and accepting the maverick Johnson was the cost worth paying. After all, Johnson would happily come into line in a future soft trade treaty. It was this ruling class led, absolutely fundamental step, not Brexit itself, that destroyed Corbyn's Labour.
Johnson was successful in splitting millions of working class voters on the Brexit issue. It should be remembered however that the Tories were not much further in their triumph than the vote they achieved under ex PM May in 2017. It was Labour's failure to marshal their vote from 2017 that gave the Tories their majority. The Labour vote fell most dramatically in the Midlands and the North East of England. But it fell right across the board. Labour made mistakes over Brexit but did not fail only because of its unsuccessful Brexit policy.
The 2016 Brexit referendum has changed its character over time. Leaving the EU itself was, and remains, simply a frame that surrounds different pictures. It was the political and economic context creating an emerging new leadership in society that shaped the real content of the 2016 Brexit referendum.
In 2016 the huge majority of those voting to leave the EU nominated immigration as their reason for their vote. Voter's anger with the establishment was expressed by hostility to immigration as the perceived reason for the collapse of vital services and reducing income. It was not surprising. Immigration was the immediate and daily sight that was new and which was apparently changing daily life. It was Blair who had set up the conditions for that particular social confrontation. In other words the initial wave of Brexit was undoubtedly an attack on the elite and their system - but from the right.
More. The 2016 Brexit mushroomed the significance of the extreme far right - who took the leadership of the Brexit movement under its banner of radical racism. The majority of Brexit voters were not fascists or even radical racists. But their initial leadership was. And you can still hear the echoes of the 2016 referendum when mainly Asian heritage children are told that they have to 'go home' when Brexit comes. Brexit meant an end to 'political correctness gone mad' and a huge eruption of racist slurs, comments and attacks - extended mainly to Asian heritage people. In many impoverished towns and cities the old working class culture, built by communal work and by the effects of the trade unions, had gone. This was the context, the real content of Brexit in 2016. Which meant among other things, that the working class had been split. Millions in the bigger cities, among young people, in Scotland and London, and among virtually all the ethnic working class, voted, holding their noses, to remain in the EU. 2016 was about breaking up the momentum of the national racist right in British politics. Voting 'remain' was anti-racist act and was essential.
Meanwhile, the ruling class in Britain turned away from the social dangers that were emerging. Their main party, the Tories, flew into chaos. Leaders of the establishment bleated about how Brexit would mean poverty. For the poor that had little effect because they were already there.
What began to shift the 2016 Brexit was social impact of the rise of the Labour left and Corbyn. Racist attacks are still higher than 5 years ago but while the new Labour left could not substitute for the missing millions of trade unionists, they shifted the character and the political debate in society through 2016 and 17. First the youth were mobilised and second the growing extreme far right were minoritised and then isolated. During this time the Tory government did nothing to break the far right. In part they absorbed it. PM May continued her extreme immigration measures. But by 2018 even Farage himself denounced the active far right and stated that Brexit was not primarily about immigration. The polls showed that immigration was no longer the main reason to support Brexit. This leap forward, led by the Labour left and anti-racist movements, changed the 2016 Brexit in society, at least its context and therefore its real meaning.
The nature and role of the EU is stark and obvious. It is a global centre of modern capitalism. But Brexit has rarely been about that - at least in its British aspect. Brexit has turned into a mirror of the shape of UK society. As Brexit shifted away from racism so its resistance to the British status quo, always there, became the dominant issue for Brexit supporters. Farage noticed this shift too, a shift that meant a new effort to get on the new bandwagon. The prominent issue became the democratic right of millions to be heard and supported. The tottering May government became the symbol of an elite that had failed.
It was then that Labour left missed the trick. Shocked by the enormity of the gathering onslaught on Corbyn, the new content of Brexit was missed. There were three reasons for this; first 'No Deal' now became the new flag for the far right. It appeared to the Labour left to be another extreme right initiative that had to be defeated at all costs. 'No Deal' offered the end of all positive rules and regulations regarding work and labour. Towards the end of May's premiership 'No Deal' looked like a likely outcome. But it turned out that 'No Deal' was a diversion. Nevertheless many Labour MPs, including even those hostile to Corbyn, could 'unite' to get a new referendum, which seemed a necessary and sensible response to the disaster of 'No Deal'. Second, there was fear that the Labour left would lose millions of young people who were opposed to Brexit unless there was a concession to their original views and third, it was argued that a promise of another referendum might even coalesce both sides of the working class. (There was quite a large aspect of 'uniting' Labour's MPs about this too.) The Labour left had led the move to change the direction of the 2016 referendum. But it began to retreat from any positive policy to break from the EU (which would have been an immediate and essential act should Labour get into power and carry out its Manifesto promises!)
In 2018 the ruling class decided on their main move, even accepting for a time the danger of 'No Deal'. The Labour leadership were thrown into retreat and their defence by the most ferocious attack by the media and large sections of privileged society in modern history. The Labour leadership missed the shifting understanding and depth of the new, democratic question for Brexit voters. Even more importantly, the strength of that fact among those who voted against Brexit was also missed. The Labour left had detached its leadership from the working class both across the Brexit supporters and those non Brexit voters who had decided to uphold the democratic rights of the Brexit voters. Brexit had moved on. The Labour leadership was going in the wrong direction.
Would Labour have won or have at least managed another hung parliament if it had risked 'No Deal' and insisted on maintaining the Brexit result as it stood? Unlikely. By 2018 Labour's new left had lost its momentum in the wider society, bombarded by a focused onslaught set up by the owners and managers of wealth and power in Britain and their allies and mouthpieces. The left were immediately hampered by the structure inside their political organisation where dominance remained with pro-capitalist MPs, despite the Party's membership and supporters. Labour was fighting inside as well as out. Even if the Labour left had retained their 2017 manifesto promise to support the result of the 2016 referendum, Corbyn's attempt to find a version of Brexit that shielded ecological and working class conditions would have rapidly been defined as 'dither and delay' and would almost certainly have lost to Boris's 'at all costs' program. This was the effect of the direct action of a ruling class that put the destruction of the Corbyn-led Labour Party above all other costs, including, temporarily, Brexit.
Corbyn's name emerges well from out of the Labour left's failure. He focused on key possibilities longer and more coherently than many of his team. He stayed as closely as possible to the 2017 manifesto promise to accept the referendum result. At the same time he fought publicly and fiercely against racism (until he was constantly side-winded by the farcical claim that he was an anti-Semite.) He was the best of Labour's left by far. And the assault which he suffered demonstrates, if it ever needed to be demonstrated, that those who genuinely challenge the system of capitalism have to prepare for every possibility thrown at them from the most powerful forces on earth.
Significantly, and yet again, the the absence of nation-wide working class organisation prevented a coherent and widely understood response to the establishment, the elite the political class, the captains of capitalism. Corbyn became remote and regionalised, as his personal authority and sincerity was torn to pieces. A large part of the base of the Labour Party could never be enough. Instead, for millions of people, Corbyn became the very elite that he was desperately trying to defeat.
The next article will address the possible future for socialist organisation on a wide scale now that tens of thousands stand inside the wreckage of Labour's left. In essence, Momentum and those sympathetic MPs that remain socialist need to avoid using their energy and motivation parlaying with Labour's furious right - which intends to smother their colleagues (if they stand firm at all.) The way to use the gains that have been made is to accept the spilt between Labour's two opposite classes. It will come anyway in the form of expulsions of Corbyn's supporters. Instead Momentum and its allies need to work towards a new type of socialist party, with some MPs if at all possible, but most of all together with the working class communities and organisations as they struggle day to day and prepare for action against a (very early) future, run by a dangerous, trapped, right wing government. In other words begin the leadership of the recomposition of the new British working class - with all of its real and actual decisions, in Scotland, Northern Ireland being part of building the new movements, erupting against the goals of Capital across the continent.
By way of a conclusion so far ... The most basic reason of all why the Labour left has failed is because it could never win - not without grasping the new and fundamental political reality of modern capitalism (which is decisively not contained in Britain by any particular stand on Brexit!)
As has been suggested earlier, the left social democratic approach to decisive reform is no longer viable (which is not to say that the effort and struggle for reform is worthless. It remains the most effective activity that humanity can make.) The problem is that the political structure of social democracy is an obstacle to progress. It is part of the delay and is forcibly shared with those who seek the opposite.
Post WW2, after the defeat of fascism and the strength of the USSR vis a vis the US and Europe, millions of workers and their organisations in the West were able to make substantial changes to their conditions and their lives. It was not at all a direct product of the poisonous Stalinist regime as such, but rather the impact of the heroic efforts of the Russian people and the weakness of Western capitalism in a devastated Europe while facing the rise of anti-colonialism. across the world. Social democracy was at its heyday in the West under these circumstances. But such conditions are long gone.
Capitalism has gone global and finds labour across a world among the cheapest conditions. Finance has cut its ties from production and from any particular nation. Nations now are organisations which are safety nets for smash-ups in the disassociated flow of capital. The social democratic route to substantial reform is now closed. Revolutionary action is now the route to reform, and working class organisation in the new societies of the West needs to be redefined. It is virtually impossible to return to the days of Attlee or even Roosevelt. The consequences of the new dispensation are both good and bad, and are already all around us. Syriza (not the Greek people) flopped because they had to take a revolutionary step to win their reforms. Direct and often violent action against the state in France by the Gillet et Jaunes was the means to directly move 6 billion Euros a year back to the French people.
This is not an argument against organisation. A short term positive response by the state to gather time is just that - not any sort of long term change. In France, Macron is now embattled in a bitter and prolonged struggle cut pensions. And the centre of this battle is the French trade unions.
Unfortunately the political use of the term 'betrayal' has now spread widely, from disappointed sections of the far left across the world, to the day to day politics of the western mainstream. If the argument about Labour's left is reduced to 'betrayal, across the whole group, or its leaders or even all those under pressure from the right wing of the Labour Party, it simply tells us that only a tiny expert number can produce the the right way for humanity.
The fundamental issue here is the nature of the structure of Social Democracy. It is a vehicle that had an historic success in the West and now cannot deliver a serious inch of social progress. Accordingly, under leaders like Blair, the social democratic Labour Party becomes the operative shadow of the Tories. In many parts of the West, social democracy has shrivelled. In others it has genuinely transformed into total capitalist parties. Corbyn's new Labour left tried to struggle out of its Social Democratic history. But, as even Brexit shows, it becomes immediately outflanked by the organised action of big Capital. This experience contains many mini 'betrayals' and more mistakes, but that is not the point. Brexit was never going to be a Social Democratic victory. And now the new Labour Party leadership is about to devour its left, its mass base, its challenge to 'the system.' As a consequence the British Labour Party may well end by by devouring itself. Many social democratic parties in the West have done just that.
The melee in Britain will begin with the demand that Momentum be dissolved, as a foreign carbuncle on the now healthy body represented by the Chuka Umunna's of this world. That will start Labour's collapse. The process will happen behind the big news of Boris Johnson's restored honeymoon with the main leaders of Capital in the UK and a fresh wind for Calais.
It is an essential and even desperate purpose to maintain the thousands in Momentum and all the bits and pieces of Corbynism that remain, inside and outside parliament. It is truly unlikely that will happen within the walls of the dieing Labour party.
However Labour's loss of votes is not just the victim of smart footwork in key marginal constituencies, organised by the Tories electoral gurus. Nor was it just Labour's late and lack-lustre approach to Brexit. Its 6% decline in many of the big cities speaks volumes that have not yet been fully understood. The core of Labour's wholesale defeat goes deep; deeper than Labour's obvious weakness about Brexit.
Starting at the very end of the election campaign, an odd contradiction emerged as Labour's left leadership began to re-define themselves and the party that they were trying to build. In the last months of 2019, a new political language emerged on the Labour left. Labour was not now so much a party as a 'movement'. Labour's program was not a Manifesto so much as 'a Transformation.'
It was all meant to reflect the large size and democratic power of Labour's membership and the shift by Labour from narrow politics to a change in society. But two separate and largely contrary ideas began to circulate. The journalists poked away at cultish aspects of Momentum, Corbyn's necessary support organisation that held back the impact of the large right-wing of Labour MPs. At the same time, barriers after barriers were being erected against possible political forces that might have been gathered, including some splits from the more radical parties and movements that were outside of Labour. There were openings to those making a big impact on society, as with the current wave of strikes, Extinction Rebellion and the ecology movement, the Greens, or the Peoples Assembly. Meanwhile the 2019 Manifesto had 'transformed' itself into an ideology, a new way of changing society. Yet it was an ideology that was meant to stand the ground with millions of people because it had a guaranteed budget!
So we had a 'movement' that drew lines against real possible movements - like the left that campaigns for a socialist Scotland; and a 'Transformation' that was defended to journalists as a successful European capitalist model, like Germany. Suddenly left-Labour had become an ideological circus - and utterly incomprehensible to millions. The success of the 2017 Labour Manifesto was in its definition. 'End Austerity now'. And millions understood. They backed the state ownership of services. The NHS proved it worked. By 2019 defending the NHS had become who is offering the biggest money pile, and, and, and... Many voters lost their way between 'Transformation' and their day to day life. In the end they did not believe the 'Transformation.' They wanted it specific and straight.
And that was the weakness. Make the successful 2017 Labour story again, but bigger and therefore better. Not so. The great changes that inspired populations across history, were those that sought for the political and economic ideas that rose to the level of the concrete. 'Land, peace and bread' said the Russian revolutionaries. 'Now, win the peace' said Attlee.
The self-created contradictions of Labour's left have a fundamental origin in the contradiction of the Labour Party itself; in that the party as a whole shelters not one but two classes in society. It is encompassed, as a party, by a state and an economy that clashes against the interests of one of those classes. Most Labour MPs, officers and trade union leaders support Britain's status quo. And that cannot and may not be 'transformed'. It can only be broken out of. Even the left of the party can be soaked by Labour's fundamental history of patriotism, defence of the state and Britain (not the people) first. This class problem at the core of the party, dominated by a big majority of MPs, can only now surface more furiously than ever. It will try to finish what remains of Labour's left - only, of course, trend up destroying the mass support, the energy and the effort that kept any real mass Labour Party alive.
A great deal of the legacy of Blair (and the Milibands) are behind Labour's defeat in 2019. Part of the reason why a large number of would-be Labour supporters sincerely doubted the Labour left's cornucopia (which appeared like a childish competition with the Tories) is the shrieking silence by Blair, then by Brown and then by (both) Milibands as they covered up the seminal role of the banks in the 2008 crash. Instead, the madness of the Tories that Labour caused the crash and created the need for austerity became 'common sense' instead. This idea remained lodged in the minds of millions of British people.
Why did all parts of Labour cut their own party's throats, for more than a decade? Because the banks and finance corporations were (and remain) the centre of British capitalism. And this fact was still only whispered, even by Labour's left leaders in 2017 and now. The 'Transformation' spoke relatively nothing about opening the terrible truth regarding Britain and its financiers. How was the City to be nationalised? How can the tax havens be raided? Instead we had a proposal that state finances would create a new economy from money gathered from the top 5%. Does anybody believe the top 5% would shell out? Where, and most importantly how, would the Labour led state get its money? Would the billionaires really give it all up? This mess was a concession made by the left to Labour's leaders' murky history and their failure to attack the banks. But that meant no fundamental or believable base was created for the 99% to stand on, at least when it came to proving you really can move large amounts of wealth from the billionaires to the poor.
The failure to call-out the core of British capitalism and the need to break it down was yet another reflection of the unresolved contradictions of the Labour Party, including among much of the Labour left.
Which brings us, finally, to Brexit and to Corbyn.
There is a good reason why the Brexit issue and the anti-Corbin offensive combine. Starting with Brexit, the argument that the 2019 election was won by a brave, apparently 'to die for', Boris Johnson 'getting Brexit done' hides the really dramatic decision that was made inside the British ruling class following the extended catastrophe of Teresa May. As everybody knows Boris himself took the route of Brexit because it was his only hope to be Prime Minister. What has been hidden is the determined shift in the City of London and the multi-nationals to wreck Corbyn's Labour Party as the first and most critical priority - if necessary dropping the Tory grandees and accepting for the time-being the Brexit route. After the 2017 General Election, Corbyn's Labour Party was getting stronger and it had to be destroyed at all and at any costs. Ruthlessly reorganising the Tory Party and accepting the maverick Johnson was the cost worth paying. After all, Johnson would happily come into line in a future soft trade treaty. It was this ruling class led, absolutely fundamental step, not Brexit itself, that destroyed Corbyn's Labour.
Johnson was successful in splitting millions of working class voters on the Brexit issue. It should be remembered however that the Tories were not much further in their triumph than the vote they achieved under ex PM May in 2017. It was Labour's failure to marshal their vote from 2017 that gave the Tories their majority. The Labour vote fell most dramatically in the Midlands and the North East of England. But it fell right across the board. Labour made mistakes over Brexit but did not fail only because of its unsuccessful Brexit policy.
The 2016 Brexit referendum has changed its character over time. Leaving the EU itself was, and remains, simply a frame that surrounds different pictures. It was the political and economic context creating an emerging new leadership in society that shaped the real content of the 2016 Brexit referendum.
In 2016 the huge majority of those voting to leave the EU nominated immigration as their reason for their vote. Voter's anger with the establishment was expressed by hostility to immigration as the perceived reason for the collapse of vital services and reducing income. It was not surprising. Immigration was the immediate and daily sight that was new and which was apparently changing daily life. It was Blair who had set up the conditions for that particular social confrontation. In other words the initial wave of Brexit was undoubtedly an attack on the elite and their system - but from the right.
More. The 2016 Brexit mushroomed the significance of the extreme far right - who took the leadership of the Brexit movement under its banner of radical racism. The majority of Brexit voters were not fascists or even radical racists. But their initial leadership was. And you can still hear the echoes of the 2016 referendum when mainly Asian heritage children are told that they have to 'go home' when Brexit comes. Brexit meant an end to 'political correctness gone mad' and a huge eruption of racist slurs, comments and attacks - extended mainly to Asian heritage people. In many impoverished towns and cities the old working class culture, built by communal work and by the effects of the trade unions, had gone. This was the context, the real content of Brexit in 2016. Which meant among other things, that the working class had been split. Millions in the bigger cities, among young people, in Scotland and London, and among virtually all the ethnic working class, voted, holding their noses, to remain in the EU. 2016 was about breaking up the momentum of the national racist right in British politics. Voting 'remain' was anti-racist act and was essential.
Meanwhile, the ruling class in Britain turned away from the social dangers that were emerging. Their main party, the Tories, flew into chaos. Leaders of the establishment bleated about how Brexit would mean poverty. For the poor that had little effect because they were already there.
What began to shift the 2016 Brexit was social impact of the rise of the Labour left and Corbyn. Racist attacks are still higher than 5 years ago but while the new Labour left could not substitute for the missing millions of trade unionists, they shifted the character and the political debate in society through 2016 and 17. First the youth were mobilised and second the growing extreme far right were minoritised and then isolated. During this time the Tory government did nothing to break the far right. In part they absorbed it. PM May continued her extreme immigration measures. But by 2018 even Farage himself denounced the active far right and stated that Brexit was not primarily about immigration. The polls showed that immigration was no longer the main reason to support Brexit. This leap forward, led by the Labour left and anti-racist movements, changed the 2016 Brexit in society, at least its context and therefore its real meaning.
The nature and role of the EU is stark and obvious. It is a global centre of modern capitalism. But Brexit has rarely been about that - at least in its British aspect. Brexit has turned into a mirror of the shape of UK society. As Brexit shifted away from racism so its resistance to the British status quo, always there, became the dominant issue for Brexit supporters. Farage noticed this shift too, a shift that meant a new effort to get on the new bandwagon. The prominent issue became the democratic right of millions to be heard and supported. The tottering May government became the symbol of an elite that had failed.
It was then that Labour left missed the trick. Shocked by the enormity of the gathering onslaught on Corbyn, the new content of Brexit was missed. There were three reasons for this; first 'No Deal' now became the new flag for the far right. It appeared to the Labour left to be another extreme right initiative that had to be defeated at all costs. 'No Deal' offered the end of all positive rules and regulations regarding work and labour. Towards the end of May's premiership 'No Deal' looked like a likely outcome. But it turned out that 'No Deal' was a diversion. Nevertheless many Labour MPs, including even those hostile to Corbyn, could 'unite' to get a new referendum, which seemed a necessary and sensible response to the disaster of 'No Deal'. Second, there was fear that the Labour left would lose millions of young people who were opposed to Brexit unless there was a concession to their original views and third, it was argued that a promise of another referendum might even coalesce both sides of the working class. (There was quite a large aspect of 'uniting' Labour's MPs about this too.) The Labour left had led the move to change the direction of the 2016 referendum. But it began to retreat from any positive policy to break from the EU (which would have been an immediate and essential act should Labour get into power and carry out its Manifesto promises!)
In 2018 the ruling class decided on their main move, even accepting for a time the danger of 'No Deal'. The Labour leadership were thrown into retreat and their defence by the most ferocious attack by the media and large sections of privileged society in modern history. The Labour leadership missed the shifting understanding and depth of the new, democratic question for Brexit voters. Even more importantly, the strength of that fact among those who voted against Brexit was also missed. The Labour left had detached its leadership from the working class both across the Brexit supporters and those non Brexit voters who had decided to uphold the democratic rights of the Brexit voters. Brexit had moved on. The Labour leadership was going in the wrong direction.
Would Labour have won or have at least managed another hung parliament if it had risked 'No Deal' and insisted on maintaining the Brexit result as it stood? Unlikely. By 2018 Labour's new left had lost its momentum in the wider society, bombarded by a focused onslaught set up by the owners and managers of wealth and power in Britain and their allies and mouthpieces. The left were immediately hampered by the structure inside their political organisation where dominance remained with pro-capitalist MPs, despite the Party's membership and supporters. Labour was fighting inside as well as out. Even if the Labour left had retained their 2017 manifesto promise to support the result of the 2016 referendum, Corbyn's attempt to find a version of Brexit that shielded ecological and working class conditions would have rapidly been defined as 'dither and delay' and would almost certainly have lost to Boris's 'at all costs' program. This was the effect of the direct action of a ruling class that put the destruction of the Corbyn-led Labour Party above all other costs, including, temporarily, Brexit.
Corbyn's name emerges well from out of the Labour left's failure. He focused on key possibilities longer and more coherently than many of his team. He stayed as closely as possible to the 2017 manifesto promise to accept the referendum result. At the same time he fought publicly and fiercely against racism (until he was constantly side-winded by the farcical claim that he was an anti-Semite.) He was the best of Labour's left by far. And the assault which he suffered demonstrates, if it ever needed to be demonstrated, that those who genuinely challenge the system of capitalism have to prepare for every possibility thrown at them from the most powerful forces on earth.
Significantly, and yet again, the the absence of nation-wide working class organisation prevented a coherent and widely understood response to the establishment, the elite the political class, the captains of capitalism. Corbyn became remote and regionalised, as his personal authority and sincerity was torn to pieces. A large part of the base of the Labour Party could never be enough. Instead, for millions of people, Corbyn became the very elite that he was desperately trying to defeat.
The next article will address the possible future for socialist organisation on a wide scale now that tens of thousands stand inside the wreckage of Labour's left. In essence, Momentum and those sympathetic MPs that remain socialist need to avoid using their energy and motivation parlaying with Labour's furious right - which intends to smother their colleagues (if they stand firm at all.) The way to use the gains that have been made is to accept the spilt between Labour's two opposite classes. It will come anyway in the form of expulsions of Corbyn's supporters. Instead Momentum and its allies need to work towards a new type of socialist party, with some MPs if at all possible, but most of all together with the working class communities and organisations as they struggle day to day and prepare for action against a (very early) future, run by a dangerous, trapped, right wing government. In other words begin the leadership of the recomposition of the new British working class - with all of its real and actual decisions, in Scotland, Northern Ireland being part of building the new movements, erupting against the goals of Capital across the continent.
By way of a conclusion so far ... The most basic reason of all why the Labour left has failed is because it could never win - not without grasping the new and fundamental political reality of modern capitalism (which is decisively not contained in Britain by any particular stand on Brexit!)
As has been suggested earlier, the left social democratic approach to decisive reform is no longer viable (which is not to say that the effort and struggle for reform is worthless. It remains the most effective activity that humanity can make.) The problem is that the political structure of social democracy is an obstacle to progress. It is part of the delay and is forcibly shared with those who seek the opposite.
Post WW2, after the defeat of fascism and the strength of the USSR vis a vis the US and Europe, millions of workers and their organisations in the West were able to make substantial changes to their conditions and their lives. It was not at all a direct product of the poisonous Stalinist regime as such, but rather the impact of the heroic efforts of the Russian people and the weakness of Western capitalism in a devastated Europe while facing the rise of anti-colonialism. across the world. Social democracy was at its heyday in the West under these circumstances. But such conditions are long gone.
Capitalism has gone global and finds labour across a world among the cheapest conditions. Finance has cut its ties from production and from any particular nation. Nations now are organisations which are safety nets for smash-ups in the disassociated flow of capital. The social democratic route to substantial reform is now closed. Revolutionary action is now the route to reform, and working class organisation in the new societies of the West needs to be redefined. It is virtually impossible to return to the days of Attlee or even Roosevelt. The consequences of the new dispensation are both good and bad, and are already all around us. Syriza (not the Greek people) flopped because they had to take a revolutionary step to win their reforms. Direct and often violent action against the state in France by the Gillet et Jaunes was the means to directly move 6 billion Euros a year back to the French people.
This is not an argument against organisation. A short term positive response by the state to gather time is just that - not any sort of long term change. In France, Macron is now embattled in a bitter and prolonged struggle cut pensions. And the centre of this battle is the French trade unions.
Unfortunately the political use of the term 'betrayal' has now spread widely, from disappointed sections of the far left across the world, to the day to day politics of the western mainstream. If the argument about Labour's left is reduced to 'betrayal, across the whole group, or its leaders or even all those under pressure from the right wing of the Labour Party, it simply tells us that only a tiny expert number can produce the the right way for humanity.
The fundamental issue here is the nature of the structure of Social Democracy. It is a vehicle that had an historic success in the West and now cannot deliver a serious inch of social progress. Accordingly, under leaders like Blair, the social democratic Labour Party becomes the operative shadow of the Tories. In many parts of the West, social democracy has shrivelled. In others it has genuinely transformed into total capitalist parties. Corbyn's new Labour left tried to struggle out of its Social Democratic history. But, as even Brexit shows, it becomes immediately outflanked by the organised action of big Capital. This experience contains many mini 'betrayals' and more mistakes, but that is not the point. Brexit was never going to be a Social Democratic victory. And now the new Labour Party leadership is about to devour its left, its mass base, its challenge to 'the system.' As a consequence the British Labour Party may well end by by devouring itself. Many social democratic parties in the West have done just that.
The melee in Britain will begin with the demand that Momentum be dissolved, as a foreign carbuncle on the now healthy body represented by the Chuka Umunna's of this world. That will start Labour's collapse. The process will happen behind the big news of Boris Johnson's restored honeymoon with the main leaders of Capital in the UK and a fresh wind for Calais.
It is an essential and even desperate purpose to maintain the thousands in Momentum and all the bits and pieces of Corbynism that remain, inside and outside parliament. It is truly unlikely that will happen within the walls of the dieing Labour party.
Thursday, 7 November 2019
Britain's last General Election?
There is an international frame for all of the various crises that have been rolling across the West since 2008. And these crises (which are constantly unresolved) do have more coherence than is often understood. For example, Trump's America appears primarily to be attacking China's economic rise. China's subordination seems to be Trump's main goal. Less understood and more surreptitiously, Trump is actually at economic and political war with the EU.
More significantly still, both Northern Ireland and Scotland are already politically convulsed, supposedly by Brexit. In reality a decade of austerity, the contradictory issues across Britain around racism and identity and the possible re-opening of the routes to a united Ireland and an independent Scotland will boil over with Boris in charge.
The fact that both NI and Scotland are ahead of Britain as a whole in their opposition to Westminster reflects the alternative political leaderships and the mass political initiatives that have evolved over decades - including through civil war in the case of NI.) Both countries are pressed by the increasingly Little English leadership of the UK Parliament that prefers its own minority political blocks in both countries rather than accept the indigenous politics. The United Kingdom in different ways and with different answers has already failed to accept the democracy of two parts of its united nation. An organised, coherent and thought out Irish nationalist leadership in NI and the experience, the popular movement and the political party in Scotland will act decisively against the minority core in Boris's Westminster should it come to lead the so called UK.
The break up of Britain and worse is the likely result of a Boris win in the General Election. The consequent drive against labour, with a small 'L', essential to British Capital's new rules, will produce anti-parliament or non-parliamentary reaction by tens of thousands, being driven into Britain's new 'third world.' Proto fascist and racist currents, bolstered by state action, are then most likely to be the preparation or the response against any sort of resistance, of the sort which is now emerging across the world in Hong Kong, Iraq, Chile and France. As the shifts in big Capital re-arrange the world, so Britain will echo the battles now emerging.
A victory for Corbyn's Labour, while contrary to the expectations, claims and hysteria from virtually all of the mainstream media, has the potential to mobilise the peoples of Britain, rearrange the UK nations - and wider. It will need to. At the heart of the matter is whether our crazy system inflates another financial ball of empty air in its scrabble for wealth or whether the citizens across the world decide to stick in the pin before their society becomes yet more unliveable...
The 'strange' and 'personal' behaviour of the US President in relation to Putin, often explained by Trump's 'macho male' attraction, becomes more explicable when Russian leverage in the EU is added to the strain and pressure on the EU and its German leadership. Trump wants a decline in the Chinese economic influence across the world. He also wants that in relation to the world's biggest market, the EU. But he needs the destruction of the EU, as opposed to his acceptance of the Chinese regime.
The Trump leadership sees the crisis of 2008, and its invariable recurrence, solved by the simple, straight-forward subjugation of the US over China and the necessary dissolution of the European Union. The total supremacy of the dollar (tied to the US's financial state machinery, starting with the 'Fed') would then be able to 'solve' the world's next financial crisis through US global political leadership and its financial domination.
The great battles of the new capitalism are played across a vast theatre in which the relatively minor disputes being fought out in Britain, for example, are small beer. Nevertheless, Britain's part of the crisis is going to be big enough to reorganise its nation and most of what was the post war British society - in a more substantial way than any time since WW2. Brexit has provided Britain's crisis with its current title. But much more substantial movements than Brexit are underway.
The would-be the next Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has a primary slogan of 'Getting Brexit Done' as he and his extreme right Tory Party fall into the General Election. It is a fatuous fantasy even in its own terms. Boris's main slogan sums up the emptiness of the election he wants to win and believes it works because it is empty, because it covers up the real and rotting politics and economics of British society. Boris's Brexit, if he gets it, will only begin the British agony with the EU - spreading over years and years.
What will actually unfold through and after Britain's election? What is the real British crisis?
Brexit is not and never has been the critical question for Britain's future. The main issue for Britain's future has always been the direction that British capitalism takes. It has been a dilemma over the decades since Thatcher, and in turn it has created a smouldering political crisis. Britain's political crisis did not start in 2008. It was initiated by Labour leader Blair's 1997 election which welcomed American wars and the financial legacy of Thatcherism. And it was Labour's Gordon Brown that pulled away the last restraints that might have limited the the whirlwind of the British-based banks and their epic financial storm. It was the madness of the Royal Bank of Scotland - the largest bank in the world (read the biggest purchase of the largest debts - called its assets) that forced the British state to have to turn its financial resources into propping up international finance in 2009. And it was an election which reflected the disappointment with Blair's Labour Party that duly sent the people of Britain into the depths of austerity in 2010, under the banner of the Tories and the Lib Dems.
The politics of the 2008 crisis and its political ramifications in Britain have now become simple. It took a while to get there but Labour has begun to draw together a leadership and program that challenges the direction of international finance and its associated globalisation. The Tories, the main party of Britain's rulers, has decided for Trump. The relationship to the EU has always been secondary in this battle. (The Tories pretend that Brexit is over if they win the election, whereas years of Brexiting are ahead.)
A new General Election has always been the decisive political issue since the 2016 Brexit referendum vote - not because Brexit itself is the decisive question and not because Britain's democracy is a particularly incisive or any sort of successful instrument for most of its population, but because there is no other effective alternative for change - for either of the two main social classes. (There are the partial exceptions to Parliament's importance, including the extinction rebellion battles and some ferocious trade union struggles - set up by managers expecting a Tory victory.) For the population as a whole, the fight between Labour's program of social democratic reform and the Tory restoration and expansion of British based finance capital - with all of its associated requirements (cheap labour, slashing legal restrictions, sales of state property etc.,) are the only political leaderships and directions that seem to be available.
But just as a genuine, long term Labour victory would require a relentless battle with national and international capital - led in the first place by the EU - so the prospects for a Boris 'victory' are equally shaky
The politics of the 2008 crisis and its political ramifications in Britain have now become simple. It took a while to get there but Labour has begun to draw together a leadership and program that challenges the direction of international finance and its associated globalisation. The Tories, the main party of Britain's rulers, has decided for Trump. The relationship to the EU has always been secondary in this battle. (The Tories pretend that Brexit is over if they win the election, whereas years of Brexiting are ahead.)
A new General Election has always been the decisive political issue since the 2016 Brexit referendum vote - not because Brexit itself is the decisive question and not because Britain's democracy is a particularly incisive or any sort of successful instrument for most of its population, but because there is no other effective alternative for change - for either of the two main social classes. (There are the partial exceptions to Parliament's importance, including the extinction rebellion battles and some ferocious trade union struggles - set up by managers expecting a Tory victory.) For the population as a whole, the fight between Labour's program of social democratic reform and the Tory restoration and expansion of British based finance capital - with all of its associated requirements (cheap labour, slashing legal restrictions, sales of state property etc.,) are the only political leaderships and directions that seem to be available.
But just as a genuine, long term Labour victory would require a relentless battle with national and international capital - led in the first place by the EU - so the prospects for a Boris 'victory' are equally shaky
The political orientation that Britain has had since it gave up its navel superiority to the US in 1921 and the remnants of its Empire in 1956 to 1961 (minus Hong Kong) has been to rely on the US as part of an Anglo-Saxon bloc. As Britain grew weaker it decided to carry the Anglo-Saxon banner into Europe and what has become the EU. This assured, among other things, the continuing global role in the expanding world of finance via the City of London, a seat on the UN's Security Council, shared war materials and wars etc. But Boris proposes to cut away any influence on the EU which, inevitably, diminishes the 'Anglo-Saxon' presence in Europe and increases the reliance of Britain on the direct requirements of the US regime.
This means that Boris will be the subject of Trump in virtually all spheres (attitudes to China, imports and exports, food, health etc) excepting the City of London. And the City will use the opportunity to expand its financial liberties to the detriment of the overwhelming population of the country. 'Singapore on the Thames' as one EU administrator suggested. This is Boris's proposed future for 63 million people.
This means that Boris will be the subject of Trump in virtually all spheres (attitudes to China, imports and exports, food, health etc) excepting the City of London. And the City will use the opportunity to expand its financial liberties to the detriment of the overwhelming population of the country. 'Singapore on the Thames' as one EU administrator suggested. This is Boris's proposed future for 63 million people.
More significantly still, both Northern Ireland and Scotland are already politically convulsed, supposedly by Brexit. In reality a decade of austerity, the contradictory issues across Britain around racism and identity and the possible re-opening of the routes to a united Ireland and an independent Scotland will boil over with Boris in charge.
The fact that both NI and Scotland are ahead of Britain as a whole in their opposition to Westminster reflects the alternative political leaderships and the mass political initiatives that have evolved over decades - including through civil war in the case of NI.) Both countries are pressed by the increasingly Little English leadership of the UK Parliament that prefers its own minority political blocks in both countries rather than accept the indigenous politics. The United Kingdom in different ways and with different answers has already failed to accept the democracy of two parts of its united nation. An organised, coherent and thought out Irish nationalist leadership in NI and the experience, the popular movement and the political party in Scotland will act decisively against the minority core in Boris's Westminster should it come to lead the so called UK.
The break up of Britain and worse is the likely result of a Boris win in the General Election. The consequent drive against labour, with a small 'L', essential to British Capital's new rules, will produce anti-parliament or non-parliamentary reaction by tens of thousands, being driven into Britain's new 'third world.' Proto fascist and racist currents, bolstered by state action, are then most likely to be the preparation or the response against any sort of resistance, of the sort which is now emerging across the world in Hong Kong, Iraq, Chile and France. As the shifts in big Capital re-arrange the world, so Britain will echo the battles now emerging.
A victory for Corbyn's Labour, while contrary to the expectations, claims and hysteria from virtually all of the mainstream media, has the potential to mobilise the peoples of Britain, rearrange the UK nations - and wider. It will need to. At the heart of the matter is whether our crazy system inflates another financial ball of empty air in its scrabble for wealth or whether the citizens across the world decide to stick in the pin before their society becomes yet more unliveable...
Monday, 30 September 2019
The Boris Brexit is over.
Yes. Because something else is about to start.
UK Prime Minister Boris has turned the final key and truly Trumped himself. He still holds, now at its height, a bloc of 39% of voters that support 'No Deal.' But Boris shares that 39% with Farage's Brexit Party. And the minority 39%, that Boris has been using to lead the whole of society - denouncing the Brexit 'surrender', fuelling active, public anger - is fraying.
A small part of it is the new Supreme Court ruling which stops Boris shutting Parliament. 49% of voters supported the court and 30% did not. The court was determined to keep the 'remain' door open on behalf of the City, the large corporations etc - but for the time being the court cuts down Boris's charge for outright victory.
Second, Boris's next ploy, which was to set up an immediate General Election, is now in the slow lane and in any case cannot happen before the October 31st. The number of voters that wanted an immediate election before October 31 was always well under 50%.
Finally Boris promised to 'die in a ditch 'if he did not get an exit from the EU by 31 October. And that too looks pleasingly possible. It certainly breaks Boris's main promise that he swore to his core support. That 39% core would not go away if there was a failure on the 31st, but they would split to Farage and, most importantly, they would cease to provide the political lead, behind Boris, across society in general.
There will be tricks and slights of hand before October 31 but the problems that have surfaced for Boris means that he is now desperate to get a 'deal'. Boris's secretive pals have always seen the possibility that getting a 'deal' is different to exiting the EU. They have always known that the bargaining with the EU could start after Britain's exit. But now that a quick election is probably delayed until later November - at the earliest. That would mean a lot of rough weather in the economy before the Election. An early 'deal', pre-November, now looks like it could delay the economic mess of a full Brexit and therefore provide a good chance of a Boris victory in the coming election.
Boris's 'deal', 10 pages of waffle if he's lucky, would have to shove the backstop over Northern Ireland and other key problems to 'guaranteed' futures. A great hullabaloo around Boris's plan, carefully keeping trade issues for the future, would try to re-set all those extreme brexiteers back together with the wider population that is completely exhausted with the Brexit argument, bringing them together as a new bloc that could back Boris and his made-up deal. If the economy still hangs on for a few months, a General Election over Xmas might then provide a Tory victory. Boris is out of his ditch and can then set about his version of Trumpington.
Or so he imagines. Times are changing and views are shifting.
Most of Britain's people are certainly exhausted with Brexit and want the whole mess to go away. Recently however, a there is a growing sense that new politics in Britain are desperately needed. Its first reflection is seen in the wide sense of failure of Britain's political class as a whole. Paradoxically, this has been picked up by both the Tory Party and by Labour. For example there is complete denial from Boris and the Tory Party in general that the negotiations with the EU will still be front and centre whatever happens or does not happen on October 31. The Tories are trying to win the race against Labour based on the prominence of their policies on the NHS, policing, and infrastructure. The difference with Labour is that they have begun to put a further proposition to the population on Brexit. The Tories lie and say that Brexit will be over by November 1st. But now Corbyn has yet again won over the Labour Conference, on a different plain. His proposal, besides the social reforms set out in the Labour conference, is a proposed reunification of the working class over Brexit.
Boris to a large degree, Farage, and now the Lib Dems both in total error, are deeply inclined to continue to ramp up the Brexit hysteria and are thereby beginning to miss a growing mood. The most obvious evidence of this shift is the reaction to the Lib Dems now that they intend to bypass a referendum if they get into government! Their own grandees are faltering. Amongst other things, if the Lib Dem leaders press the Brexit button, and only the Brexit button, then they will need to explain on the doorstep why they are the Party who rejects the 2016 referendum without a vote! A significant point now often accepted by many of those who voted for Remain.
The Brexit pantomime is a wearing distraction.
What is really the main political issue in Britain today? It is surely the question, can a radical socialist party win the government? That is the real next period in British politics and it begins only weeks away. Frankly, the upshot of Brexit, so long as a temporary compromise can be settled, is neither here nor there, in that context. The number one issue is the unification of the working class, centred on the need for a shift in wealth and power in society. The fight with institutions, like the EU, can wait.
To win radical government, real and immediate dangers must be overcome right now. Boris must not become a settled PM. Otherwise a soft Brexit, another vote, deals after Brexit, none of it will count. The softest possible landing with the EU either way, through a friendly deal, a new vote etc, helps most, for the time being. But Boris's 'heroic' platform; 'out by Halloween - at all costs'; has to be stopped with or without his fake deal - not because it will mean lorry jams at Dover but because it will secure a Boris victory. Boris must be broken and his faction in society isolated. To do that Boris must fail and the unification of Brexit built.
Can the Labour Party carry through a radical socialist program? That's another question entirely.
UK Prime Minister Boris has turned the final key and truly Trumped himself. He still holds, now at its height, a bloc of 39% of voters that support 'No Deal.' But Boris shares that 39% with Farage's Brexit Party. And the minority 39%, that Boris has been using to lead the whole of society - denouncing the Brexit 'surrender', fuelling active, public anger - is fraying.
A small part of it is the new Supreme Court ruling which stops Boris shutting Parliament. 49% of voters supported the court and 30% did not. The court was determined to keep the 'remain' door open on behalf of the City, the large corporations etc - but for the time being the court cuts down Boris's charge for outright victory.
Second, Boris's next ploy, which was to set up an immediate General Election, is now in the slow lane and in any case cannot happen before the October 31st. The number of voters that wanted an immediate election before October 31 was always well under 50%.
Finally Boris promised to 'die in a ditch 'if he did not get an exit from the EU by 31 October. And that too looks pleasingly possible. It certainly breaks Boris's main promise that he swore to his core support. That 39% core would not go away if there was a failure on the 31st, but they would split to Farage and, most importantly, they would cease to provide the political lead, behind Boris, across society in general.
There will be tricks and slights of hand before October 31 but the problems that have surfaced for Boris means that he is now desperate to get a 'deal'. Boris's secretive pals have always seen the possibility that getting a 'deal' is different to exiting the EU. They have always known that the bargaining with the EU could start after Britain's exit. But now that a quick election is probably delayed until later November - at the earliest. That would mean a lot of rough weather in the economy before the Election. An early 'deal', pre-November, now looks like it could delay the economic mess of a full Brexit and therefore provide a good chance of a Boris victory in the coming election.
Boris's 'deal', 10 pages of waffle if he's lucky, would have to shove the backstop over Northern Ireland and other key problems to 'guaranteed' futures. A great hullabaloo around Boris's plan, carefully keeping trade issues for the future, would try to re-set all those extreme brexiteers back together with the wider population that is completely exhausted with the Brexit argument, bringing them together as a new bloc that could back Boris and his made-up deal. If the economy still hangs on for a few months, a General Election over Xmas might then provide a Tory victory. Boris is out of his ditch and can then set about his version of Trumpington.
Or so he imagines. Times are changing and views are shifting.
Most of Britain's people are certainly exhausted with Brexit and want the whole mess to go away. Recently however, a there is a growing sense that new politics in Britain are desperately needed. Its first reflection is seen in the wide sense of failure of Britain's political class as a whole. Paradoxically, this has been picked up by both the Tory Party and by Labour. For example there is complete denial from Boris and the Tory Party in general that the negotiations with the EU will still be front and centre whatever happens or does not happen on October 31. The Tories are trying to win the race against Labour based on the prominence of their policies on the NHS, policing, and infrastructure. The difference with Labour is that they have begun to put a further proposition to the population on Brexit. The Tories lie and say that Brexit will be over by November 1st. But now Corbyn has yet again won over the Labour Conference, on a different plain. His proposal, besides the social reforms set out in the Labour conference, is a proposed reunification of the working class over Brexit.
Boris to a large degree, Farage, and now the Lib Dems both in total error, are deeply inclined to continue to ramp up the Brexit hysteria and are thereby beginning to miss a growing mood. The most obvious evidence of this shift is the reaction to the Lib Dems now that they intend to bypass a referendum if they get into government! Their own grandees are faltering. Amongst other things, if the Lib Dem leaders press the Brexit button, and only the Brexit button, then they will need to explain on the doorstep why they are the Party who rejects the 2016 referendum without a vote! A significant point now often accepted by many of those who voted for Remain.
The Brexit pantomime is a wearing distraction.
What is really the main political issue in Britain today? It is surely the question, can a radical socialist party win the government? That is the real next period in British politics and it begins only weeks away. Frankly, the upshot of Brexit, so long as a temporary compromise can be settled, is neither here nor there, in that context. The number one issue is the unification of the working class, centred on the need for a shift in wealth and power in society. The fight with institutions, like the EU, can wait.
To win radical government, real and immediate dangers must be overcome right now. Boris must not become a settled PM. Otherwise a soft Brexit, another vote, deals after Brexit, none of it will count. The softest possible landing with the EU either way, through a friendly deal, a new vote etc, helps most, for the time being. But Boris's 'heroic' platform; 'out by Halloween - at all costs'; has to be stopped with or without his fake deal - not because it will mean lorry jams at Dover but because it will secure a Boris victory. Boris must be broken and his faction in society isolated. To do that Boris must fail and the unification of Brexit built.
Can the Labour Party carry through a radical socialist program? That's another question entirely.
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