PHILLIP Blond has been hailed as David Cameron’s ‘new favourite intellectual’. It’s news to me that Cameron actually has favourite intellectuals; British politicians usually abjure that sort of thing as some unspeakable vice generally associated with the French.

Nevertheless, the Lancaster University theologian has secured considerable publicity for his book Red Tory, in which he reportedly makes the case for twenty-first century Disraelism.

Oddly enough, Blond didn’t always associate with the right. I am told by a friend who was a contemporary of his at Hull University in the 1980s, at which point he was very much on the left and was possibly even sympathetic to the views of anarchist publication Class War.

I intend to get round to reading Red Tory over the summer, and obviously would not presume to comment on his ideas in any depth until I have done so. But we get a taster of what he is about in the Guardian this morning, in which Mr Blond argues that ‘the new Conservatism can create a capitalism that works for the poor’.

The headline proposition alone is enough to inform the reader to expect momentous silliness ahead. Capitalism is an economic system premised on the exploitation of the working class. No variety of capitalism ‘works’ for the poor, except perhaps in the sense of funding a welfare state that can ameliorate some of its worst effects. But let’s take a quick run through the stall Blond sets out.

Over the last 30 years the Anglo-Saxon world has adopted the most disingenuous of economic systems. Under the guise of capitalism for all, we have produced an extraordinary amount of capital but an ever diminishing number of capitalists. Rather than trickling downwards, wealth has leveraged upwards – denying increasing numbers of people the ability to truly own, trade and prosper.

In 1976, excluding property, the bottom half of the UK population owned 12% of the marketable wealth; by 2003 that had fallen to just 1%. Economists at Société Générale recently calculated that in the United States, the income of the highest paid fifth rose by 60% after 1970, while for all others it has fallen by 10%.

From the pen of a Tory – ‘red’, true blue or pink with purple spots - that is quite an indictment of the free market. It is, moreover, spot on. The thing is, Mr Blond seems genuinely surprised by all this, as if an ever growing disparity between rich and poor is some sort of anomaly, or ‘externality’ in the jargon, rather than a sure sign that the system is working well in its own terms.

Through monopolisation of capital markets, deployment of unprecedented leverage capital has centralised around a model of debt-financed speculation that – without any due diligence – has been transferred wholesale to the taxpayer, more than doubling the entire national debt.

Yeah. Some German guy – a contemporary of Disraeli, as it goes - analysed all this in some detail back in the nineteenth century. The concentration and centralisation of capital is nothing new. Nor are state bail outs.

Note to Mr Blond; the capitalist state is not called the capitalist state for nothing. One of its functions is to defend capitalist property relations, if necessary through measures of state capitalism.

The average citizen now suffers twice over. Since ordinary incomes were too low to support desired standards of living, personal debt financed the gap. Desperate to secure an asset base against which debt could eventually be redeemed, those without capital herded en masse into debt-financed property bubbles that were always going to burst, leaving many with no equity and a hugely enhanced personal debt. That debt has returned by many multiples on the public balance sheet – leading to tax increases and service cuts. No wonder people, full of furious contempt, are willing to challenge the accepted economic orthodoxies.

No leftie could put it better. But why did this happen? Largely so that employers could increase the rate of exploitation by holding down wages, while simultaneously maintaining the consumer spending necessary to sell their products.

David Cameron recognised all of this …

A prime example of what Private Eye used to call Arslikhan.

… and spoke at Davos early this year of the need to recapitalise the poor and create a capitalism that works for all. The key political aim of this truly transformative conservatism must be the generation of an asset effect for the decapitalised bottom half of society.

Recapitalise? They never had any capital to begin with.

Assets must, however, come from somewhere …

You can see why he’s considered a top-notch intellectual, can’t you?

… and since redistribution and expenditure via the state has such a poor record in alleviating dependency …

Except when it comes to bankers, of course.

… a fresh approach is required. Welfare or public expenditure should move from a spending to an investment model. The aim must be to free the poor from welfare subsidy through the generation of asset independence.

Where to start? In Blond’s Disraeliworld, where everyone is an ‘asset independent capitalist’, there would be no workers to exploit. That’s why it can’t happen, Phil.

The following are some ideas as to how this might be achieved:

1 The poor become dragons …

Puke.

The overall level of the UK bank bailout depends on definition, but authorities agree that it represents some £1 trillion. At some point these assets will be broken up and sold back to the private sector. Even at a rough figure of 5% return …

There is no guarantee that the taxpayer is ever going to see that money again, let alone a 5% return. Even if the scenario does pan out, it is decades away.

… this will produce an enormous capital injection of £50 billion. The argument on the progressive right is that since the poor suffer the greatest marginal rates of taxation (the bottom fifth of households also pay a greater share of their income in overall taxation than any other group), this money should be used to repay debt and lower their tax burden.

The argument on the right is that 45% income tax is an abomination unto the Lord and that tax cuts should be directed to the rich, which will maximise over all tax take. Laffer Curve and all that.

But such repayment will generate no asset effect for those at the bottom. A far better idea would be to distribute a substantial proportion of the return to the poor via investment vouchers. These vouchers should only be activated in conjunction with others – creating an associative investment pool.

We’ve had a foretaste of how this might work in the shape of the giveaway privatisations of the 1980s. If the vouchers had any value, most people would cash in rapidly rather than transform overnight into a new race of Siraluns.

With appropriate advice …

Remember the pension mis-selling scandal?

… a whole new class of asset investors can be created at the bottom of society. Further, if they invest in ordinary businesses they will only get a standard return.

I get it. Everybody must get above-average returns. Not mathematically possible, I’m afraid.

If, however, they choose to invest in social enterprises, their investment will generate both an economic and a social profit. Investment in local shops, for example, will give both a monetary and social stake and return. So envisaged, the poor generate a stakeholder economy around a universalised dragons' den that provides seed capital for a new generation of businesses.

Shopkeeper capitalism vs Tescopoly. There can be only one winner.

Right. My lunch break is over. More later.

WE OBVIOUSLY do not know what yardstick Jack Straw uses when deciding whether or not prisoners should be released on medical grounds, but the contrast between his rulings in the cases of Augusto Pinochet and Ronnie Biggs is certainly instructive.

Both of them, after all, flew to Britain from South America in search of hospital treatment for serious ailments. Both were arrested soon after arrival. So how come the dictator gets sent back home to die in his bed, while the low-grade wide boy from Lambeth stays banged up?

Armed robbery is not in any way commendable behaviour, of course. Biggs was a villain, simple as that. He was one of a 15-member gang that brutally beat up train driver Jack Mills in the course of their crime, leaving him with injuries from which he never recovered. For that alone, he should have done custodial.

Yet somehow the public took the perpetrators to their hearts in a way that they never did with the Brinks Mat and Millennium Dome heists, neither of which are likely to end up as the subject of feature films starring Phil Collins.

Biggsy – one of the few crims widely known by a friendly soubriquet – secured folk hero status. Instead of doing the decently British thing and keeping a low profile on the run, he openly flaunted his notoriety.

We watched him cavorting on Copacabana beach with his tasty Brazilian girlfriend, hanging out with the Sex Pistols, and later any random tourist who would stand him a beer. The message – yes, kids, you can get away with crime – was clear, and for that alone the establishment will never forgive him. Hence the undeniable tone of moral indignation in Straw’s pronouncement:

"Mr Biggs chose to serve only one year of a 30-year sentence before he took the personal decision to commit another offence and escape from prison, avoiding capture by travelling abroad for 35 years whilst outrageously courting the media," he said.

"Had he complied with his sentence, he would have been a free man many years ago … Biggs chose not to obey the law and respect the punishments given to him - the legal system in this country deserves more respect than this."

But whatever Biggs did, his misdemeanours are as nothing compared to those of retired Chilean military dictator General Augusto Pinochet, who was plainly guilty of systematic and widespread human rights violations including mass-murder, torture, kidnapping and illegal detention.

Never mind coshing the driver; Pinochet ordered perhaps 3,000 deaths. He subsequently enriched himself and his family on a scale that shows up the Great Train Robbery gang as basically gifted amateurs in such matters.

While on a visit to London in 1998, he was placed under house arrest, on the application of a Spanish magistrate. Leading Tories frequently popped in for a cup of tea. In 2000, Straw allowed him to return to Chile, justifying the release on medical grounds.

Just how ill Pinochet really was is a matter of some dispute, even to those physicians who examined him. But he lived on a further six years, reportedly in some wealth and comfort.

The death of Ronnie Biggs is now not far away. A series of strokes has left him unable to walk or talk, and he is being fed by a tube. There are no good reasons to leave him behind bars. Why should the lenient side of British justice be reserved for superannuated caudillos alone?

JUST before the invasion of Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz famously insisted that US soldiers would be welcomed in with ‘chocolates and flowers’. The prediction didn’t pan out.

So it is ironic, then, that their withdrawal from the streets of the country’s major cities on Tuesday were indeed marked by flowers. Plastic flowers, to be precise.

As several press reports relate, fake blooms decorated Iraqi police and army vehicles participating in parades to note the occasion. Presumably this was unintentional and not some sort of backhanded reference to Mr Wolfowitz’s spectacularly misjudged prophesy.

Hours later, insurgents celebrated what the government of Nouri al Maliki has branded ‘national sovereignty day’ in their own special way. A car bomb at a food market in Kirkuk killed at least 33 people and wounded 90. It was the latest in a series of attacks that have claimed 300 lives since June 20.

The reality is that - protestations of ‘national sovereignty’ notwithstanding – Iraq remains a country under occupation. Less obvious occupation, less visible occupation, but occupation all the same.

Obama is committed to getting the troops out by 2011. But most serious observers believe that an extensive US military presence is inevitable for decades to come. Such are the realities of the aftermath of the invasion.

Whatever position one held six years ago – and I was one of the million or more Britons who took to the streets to oppose the war – the only sensible stance now is to wish for democracy and pluralism in Iraq.

That seems not only obviously preferable in principle to any variation on a dictatorial or theocratic theme, but also the best hope of providing the political space in which a genuine labour movement and socialist political organisations can find their feet.

The obvious question is whether or not the al Maliki government is a vehicle that can bring this outcome about. Those who argue to the contrary can surely marshal plenty of evidence in support of their case.

For instance, many Kurds fear that Baghdad will seek to rescind the semi-autonomy extended to the regions that they control, which include some of the country’s major oilfields.

Recent actions have given grounds to doubt that the shia-dominated administration can be trusted to act in a non-sectarian fashion towards Iraq’s sunni minority. There are also charges of corruption that must be answered.

Meanwhile, insurgents are likely to redouble their murderous efforts, if only to paint themselves as the real reason for the US pullback or in furtherance of a strategy of heightening confessional tension. An overtly authoritarian response may be just what they seek.

But while a long way from perfect on any measure, al Maliki increasingly looks like the least worst option from the singularly unappetising menu on offer.

Whether he heads a puppet government or not, I am not persuaded that blowing up dozens of Kurdish housewives doing the food shopping is in any way a military setback for imperialism.

THE white working class forms the principle electoral base of the British National Party, according to a YouGov survey commissioned by the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight. A large chunk of the left is going to hate these findings.

You see, such a thing really, really should not be happening. We all know that fascism represents the political expression of the most reactionary sections of finance capital, which deliberately seeks to mobilise a mass middle class base as a weapon of last resort against an insurgent labour movement, don’t they? Trotsky and Poulantzas told us that.

And besides, how dare the BNP tread on our turf? The left and the left alone articulates the real interests of workers, in this country as in all countries. They cannot turn to the far right in any number. That’s just impossible.

Well, not according to Searchlight. According to its polling, 61% of BNP voters fall into the C2DE categories on the standard scale of class, even though this layer constitutes just 45% of the population.

Like everybody else who thinks about class in Marxist terms, I have big difficulties with the sociology textbook index being used here. But forget any methodological quibbles; the message is clear enough. There is little point in denying that the BNP’s vote largely comes from the skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled white workers.

Some socialists reject the very concept of a ‘white working class’- separate from the working class in general and with a distinct identity, often regarded as implicitly reactionary - out of hand. Indeed, it is important for the left to stress the common interest of all sectors of the exploited.

But simple observation suggests that outside of a relatively limited number of melting pot areas, an undeniable white working class cultural exists in many parts of Britain today. What is more, they are not usually shiny happy people.

Political commonsense over the last two decades has insisted that elections are won and lost in a small number of key marginals, and manifestoes have been geared exclusively to swing voter concerns.

If there are millions of ordinary people out there who think that New Labour has written them off as mere voting fodder with no viable electoral options, they are not far wrong. That, of course, potentially represents a colossal opening for the far right.

Let us avoid the all too frequent romanticisation of ’the workers’ to which upper-class and middle-class lefties are sometimes all too prone. It has always been the case that many proles are politically rightwing and viscerally racist. I don’t have to go outside some – a small minority, thankfully - of own family to know that.

On the other hand, there is something new in today’s situation, something different about today’s racism, that has made the growth of the BNP possible. It is no longer a racism based a deliberately-inculcated mass ideological basis for imperialism, which I noticed in an uncle sent to Korea in the early 1950s to shoot at gooks, for instance.

This is instead a racism rooted in the collapse of social housing, a racism born of the disappearance of blue collar employment and grassroots trade union organisation, a racism of benefit cuts, a racism centred on the perception that nobody in a position of authority really gives a shit. You might even want to call it a racism of desperation.

But whatever you call it, it is ugly and festering and dangerous, and Labour’s conscious decision to snub the white working class in favour of Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman is no small part of the explanation. In her heart of hearts, I suspect many in the cabinet know that.

via

TOM Paulin - the sixtysomething ex-Trot poet who features regularly on late night arty-farty telly slots - reportedly charged Newsnight Review £90 for having his hair dyed, on the grounds that a boy just has to look good for the camera. The BBC allowed the claim.

I’ll spare the Marxist component of my readership the obvious in jokes about how such behaviour has its objective roots [geddit?] in the Healyite degeneration of the International Committee tradition, and simply note that that on the sporadic occasions I am on the box, all I get is a courtesy cab and a modest appearance fee.

Actually, I did find myself in the Newsnight Review green room one Friday evening a few years back, immediately prior to doing a live piece on some news story - the death of over 1,000 people after an Egyptian ferry capsized, nothing remotely important really - before the programme moved swiftly on to matters rather more highbrow.

Luckily, I was able to make small talk with Ian Hislop, swapping anecdotes about the late Paul Foot. Meanwhile an immaculately-quiffed Mark Lamarr understandably ignored me and concentrated on chatting up two stick-thin identikit long-haired blondes that I probably should have recognised but didn‘t.

But anyway, back to the former Socialist Labour League rhymester with whom I started this post. For Liz Hoggard in the Independent, Paulin’s resort to artificial means of banishing grey hair is indicative of something she calls ‘the male beauty crisis'.

Fellas, on this line of reckoning, are becoming as hung up about their looks as women have traditionally been, thanks to the rise of pretty boys in movies and on magazine covers. Well, I was arguably a pretty boy myself, back in my glam rock days of three decades ago. I confess to the use of Grecian 2000 and Clinique for Men even now. By bloke standards, that makes me something of a metrosexual, I guess.

But a ‘male beauty crisis’? Really? Oh well, it’s a safe bet that it will never reach the far left. This is a milieu where 1990s Marxism T-shirts, faded from hundreds of washes, still constitute a fashion statement, a decently-sized beer gut is not considered anything of which to be ashamed, and facial hair is de rigeur after 50.

Until we get substantiated reports of leading male comrades trying on alternative outfits before meetings and then asking their partner whether or not their bum looks big in them, we will still be a long way away from the birth of Botox Bolshevism for boys.

BOTH the prime minister and the leader of the opposition have been quick off the mark to offer their condolences to the family and friends of Michael Jackson. Never mind that most of the people who fall into these categories will have no idea who these creepy limey guys are anyway; what I want to know is why politicians feel the need to have an opinion on the death of an American pop star in the first place.

I mean, I can just about see why comment is called for in the event of a national disaster on the scale of Aberfan or Hillsborough. It is probably appropriate to issue a few lines of tribute on the demise of a prominent politician of one’s own party, although I expect Brown and Cameron will strive to out-do each other in nauseating eulogy, encomium and panegyric when Thatch finally kicks the bucket.

But why come out one way or the other on Michael Jackson? I know the guy’s fans tend to be pretty dedicated. But can there really be anybody on any electoral register anywhere in Britain whose vote at the next election depends on what party leaders have to say about Wacko Jacko?

All of this puts me in mind of the time New Labour spindoctors sort to convince the nation that the Brown listens to the Foo Fighters and the Arctic Monkeys during his early morning workouts. It later transpired that the contents of his iPod are rather more bland, tending towards the Beatles and popular classics.

I loved that Guido Fawkes post that included footage purporting to be a long-haired Cameron at a rave somewhere off the M25, circa 1988. But while the Tories insisted that this was a case of mistaken identity, Cameron’s image makers did set up a photoshoot of their man posing outside Salford Lads’ Club, in emulation of a Smiths album cover. Even Conservatives are allowed to like dad rock these days.

Given what we know of the two men’s musical tastes, I’d put money on the proposition that neither of them ever attended a Jackson gig. The likelihood is that neither ever owned any Jackson music on vinyl or CD, either. A simple ‘no comment’ from their respective press offices would have been rather more dignified.

OBAMA has been widely criticised for his tardiness in openly backing the pro-Mousavi protests in Tehran, although on balance, STFU probably was the best course from a diplomatic point of view.

But as far as I know, not one Arab government has yet pronounced on the situation in Iran, either for or against. That strikes me as rather more interesting.

Remember that the Iranian regime plays a pivotal leadership role for shi’ite communities across the entire Middle East, not least in Iraq, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

In addition, it has been an article of Ahmadinejad’s foreign policy to back selected armed organisations irrespective of creed, including shia Hezbollah and sunni Hamas.

As a result, he enjoys a substantial level of backing in the Arab as well as the Persian Street. So while many regional governments resent Iranian intervention in what they regard as their internal affairs, they nevertheless need to stay in Ahmadinejad’s good books.

But what must make tyrannical monarchs and military strongmen even more cautious is the television pictures of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets.

Oppositional groupings such as the Muslim Brotherhood will be watching with extraordinary interest. After all, there ever were to be free elections in Egypt, for instance, there would be little doubt about the outcome.

As I argued in an earlier post, the western left should back neither Ahmadinejad nor Mousavi, but stand with the Tehran protestors, if only because they represent the best hope for greater democracy in Iran.

But I should just note that in politics, it is important to think your positions through. If democracy were to make gains in Iran - even of a partial character - the example might well prove contagious.

I suppose there is a sense in which the rule of a theocracy with popular backing is preferable to the rule of an air force commander without it. But neither option is anything socialists would particularly want to celebrate.

THREE news stories from the last fortnight or so have really brought home to me the extent of the current disconnect between the establishment and the rest of the population of the United Kingdom.

First came the initial announcement that Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the Iraq war would be held being closed doors. Yes, I know the government rapidly had to backtrack on this one. But how could Gordon Brown have possibly imagined that the level of secrecy he wished to ensure would be acceptable to the public, not least the one million and more of us who participated in the big anti-war demo in February 2003?

Then came publication of heavily censored – sorry, I meant to say ‘redacted’ – details of MP expenses claims, weeks after the Daily Telegraph had filled its pages for days on end with the most damaging information it could extract from this raw material. Too little, too late.

Did the parliamentary authorities have the foggiest idea how evasive, tokenistic and half-hearted this made the entire exercise look? If all we get to see is thousands of chainstore receipts defaced beyond recognition by marker pen, when the press has already delivered up all the juicy bits anyway, the abiding impression is not one of disclosure. Instead, we are inevitably left with the idea that these guys have got something to hide.

Finally, there was the little matter of the all-but-£10m package that Royal Bank of Scotland has deemed necessary to ‘incentivise’ chief executive Stephen Hester.

Pick me up if I am missing something here, but isn’t RBS a financial sector basket case that is 70% owned by the taxpayer, and therefore a nationalised industry in all but name?

Has UK Financial Investments – the government body that controls ‘our’ stakes in several leading banks – stopped to think how word of Hester’s remuneration package will play with Honda staff forced to go onto short time, or BA employees being asked to work a month without pay?

In the normal run of events, perhaps none of these three matters would excite more than passing resignation. But when they come thick and fast like this, the voters are going to start to notice.

Such is the extent of Labour’s complicity and the left’s impotence that the chief beneficiary can only be the populist right.

THE exigencies of the day job preclude pontification today. Instead, I invite readers to hold forth with their opinions about developments in Iran. To get the conversation started, here's a sample what is being said on some other British (and Irish) leftie blogs:

AVPS

Shiraz Socialist

Socialist Unity proffers this little gem:

Within their ranks [the opposition] are undoubtedly many who see this as the opportunity to challenge the very foundations of the Islamic Republic, determined to end the political, social, and cultural restrictions which are part of daily life in Iran, ushering in a new system of government altogether.

Note how John Wight says this like it's a bad thing.

Splintered Sunrise

Stroppyblog [scroll down for Carnival of Socialism with Iran theme.]

The Daily (Maybe)

LONDON PROTEST TO DEMAND RELEASE OF JAILED IRANIAN TRADE UNIONISTS
Friday, 26 June 2009
12:30pm to 1.30pm
Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 16 Princes Gate, London SW7 1PT
(parallel to Kensington Road, not far from the Royal Albert Hall).

[via]

MY ENTIRELY apolitical buddy Nick – we played in a band together in the early eighties – puts the fact that I am a socialist down to some inexplicable quirk I picked up while I was a wanky student and he was already doing a proper job of work in a bathroom supplies warehouse.

While I subsequently swanned around doing non-jobs and trying to foment world revolution, he knocked his bird up, secured a council flat which he was then able to buy ridiculously cheaply courtesy of Shirley Porter, climbed the property ladder and eventually established his own bathroom supply business, doing a roaring trade knocking out plush bog seats to the Bishop’s Avenue set at two grand a time.

The inevitable divorce cost him a few bob, but I assume he is still a millionaire, at least on paper. Not bad for a council estate boy, right? Such a story is of course indicative of what happened to a certain layer of the working class in the Thatcher, Major and Blair years.

Although Nick is where he is as much by luck and political design as the graft he undeniably did put in, he naturally believes that he is entitled to what he has got, and that the trouble with bloody lefties like me is that we want to take his dosh away and give it to other people.

The thing is, basically that is what we do want to do. It is an engrained aspect of socialist sensibility to be horrified by poverty, to be outraged at extreme wealth, and to see wealth redistribution as the obvious solution.

We do our best to come up with analytical justification for this stance, endlessly monitoring the ever-expanding ratio between the salary of the average chief executive and the average employee, and memorising the trend line for the UK Gini coefficient and Lorenz curve.

Our logic seems so compelling to us that we find it difficult to believe anybody can see things any other way. Yet the majority of the population still think like Nick, as the latest empirical research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Fabian Society seems to underline.

Regardless of where they actually do stand in the income rankings, most people consider themselves as somewhere close to the middle. Over two-thirds believe that everybody has at least the opportunity to get on in life.

Attitudes are more likely to be negative towards the poor than towards the rich; common sense dictates that the bosses deserve their huge remuneration, although that seems to be changing slowly in the wake of meltdown in financial markets last year.

Consequently, few are convinced by abstract arguments in favour of social equality. Indeed, inequality is considered fine, so long as it is ‘deserved inequality’.

While there is public support for progressive taxation and income redistribution, much of this is premised on fear of the negative consequences of poverty. Put crudely, those surveyed regarded income support as the price society pays to keep burglary and mugging down to acceptable levels.

All of this represents a major problem for any left that is actually interested in expanding it base. Capitalism - and the inequality it creates - continue to enjoy moral legitimacy in the eyes of an overwhelming majority.

While the unfolding recession has generated popular outrage aimed against those at the apex of the banking system, clearly general purpose ‘tax the rich’ fat cat-bashing will most of the time have little purchase.

I’m not suggesting any retreat whatsoever from the underlying principles involved. No socialism worthy of the name can be anything but redistributive in nature. But we need to come up with a more effective way of selling the message to the public, and sooner rather than later at that.

WHENEVER an ostensibly centre-left pundit uses the magic words ‘think the unthinkable’, don’t expect the ensuing thought experiment to encompass such genuinely radical possibilities as scrapping British nuclear weapons, pulling out of Ireland, coming off the UN security council, abolishing the monarchy, or renationalizing public services.

The same stipulation applies when the summer in Tuscany brigade starts talking about ‘hard choices’. This is almost always introduces an argument for further cuts to the welfare state.

True to form, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown offers readers of the Independent a double whammy of this sort of stuff this morning, alongside an unintentionally hilarious self-description of London middle class lifestyle that would be dismissed as overly stereotypical were it the work of a third rate chick lit writer:

I have been thinking the unthinkable lately. I started doing so after sitting next to Frank Field at a dinner party …

Oh, please, Yazz. Where exactly was this? Don’t tell me, Islington. Just has to be Islington. Why not go the whole hog and tell us who the hostess was, what wine you took along, what was on the menu, and whether or not any of the guests simply had to ask for that delicious recipe, darling.

…. a chap who brings chill into a room and propagates many reactionary views I fear and despise.

Fears and despises that is, unless she happens to agree with them. Which in this case Ms A-B - a woman who apparently fancies herself the victim of 'leftwing McCarthyism', by the way - certainly does.

Yet one grave concern he raised that evening made absolute sense: without some serious economies, Britain will not be able to recover from the effects of this downturn. We are stuffed unless we take heed.

It all kind of depends on who exactly is included in the first person plural, doesn’t it? The bankers who are responsible for the global economic downturn, but who have been bailed out with no personal consequences, are hardly ‘stuffed’, other than perhaps with the finest food and drink money can buy on a £342,500 pension.

How to cut public spending? That is the question to which we need honest answers. Only don't expect them from our elected leaders, busily playing politics even while our land turns hopeless. Instead of sober deliberations over hard choices, we get adolescent baiting and biting between the Tories and Labour.

Just in case you haven’t got the message, Yasmin repeats the hard choices mantra, in a mode befitting the La Pasionaria reincarnate of the London N1 dinner party circuit, suddenly switching on the red rhetoric in much the manner of an old-time commie stump speaker:

Remember how the Left reacted when the number of workless reached 2m under Margaret Thatcher? Well comrades it is much worse today. Choices will have to be made that will be agonising for us on the Left, like the extraction of wisdom teeth. But needs must.

So comrades come rally, and the last fight let us face! Universal child benefit cuts unite the human race!:

I think to pay out for 18 years to every child is something that can't be sustained nor defended when the children in the bottom 20 per cent have fallen so far behind.

What about bus passes for OAPs? An unaffordable luxury in our straightened times, I am afraid, as Yazz realised over yet another meal away from home:

I was lunching with an old school friend in a restaurant near the Royal Court Theatre …

... as you do when you are entirely out of touch with the lives of the vast majority of people in this country …

… when an attractive, slim, blonde woman interrupted us. She thought I was the Indian TV chef Madhur Jaffrey and said she adored my programmes. Not me, I said, and we got chatting.

I got mistaken for Marc Almond once. True.

She was obviously well-heeled, looked in her late forties but told me she was over 60 and had her bus pass. Why? Because that is her right, as it is for all of us in the middle classes.

If I remember correctly, the last time I bought a one-year London bus pass, it cost around £550. Let’s get that sum in perspective. By my maths, Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension – even in its newly reduced magnitude - would pay for 622,000 OAP bus passes. Including one for Fred the Shred.

Ms Alibhai-Brown’s argument that tinkering around with a few minor aspects of welfare provision, which may seem of little import to the kind of people who lunch with old school friends in restaurants near the Royal Court Theatre, will do much to fix Britain’s £1,000,000,000,000 and rising public debt is nonsensical.

Whichever party wins the next election, the prospectus is one of cuts in the welfare state on a scale that will make Thatcherism look like the very model of Beveridgean virtue. By treading down the road advocated by Field, the centre left thereby ceases to be a centre left at all, and becomes indistinguishable from the neoliberal right.

Why should there be any cuts whatsoever in future welfare entitlement to pay for a mess that the creation of a select few? It is the rich that pocketed the handouts and it is the rich that should pay the money back. That much should be axiomatic for the genuine left.

WHEN they counted the votes in the French presidential contest of 1851, it was plain that the incumbent had secured a landslide victory. Louis Napoleon - who clearly had never seriously contemplated relinquishing power after his earlier term in office - had the support of around 7.5m people, out of an electorate of just 8.0m.

Clearly, affirmation on that magnitude shows up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a lightweight in the ballot-rigging stakes. These things need to be done properly, or not at all.

Sections of the British left are obviously finding it difficult to orientate themselves to what is happening in Iran right now. But it seems to me that Marxists - well, those of them that actually have read some Marx, anyway - have an excellent ready-made guide to the political dynamics of a situation in which a rabble-rousing right-populist demagogue, basing himself on the poor peasantry and urban déclassé layers, manipulates an electoral process to secure continued political dominance.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is the work in which Marx comes up with one of his most frequently quoted aphorisms, namely the observation that when history repeats itself, it does so the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.

The events now unfolding on the streets of Tehran are anything but farcical, of course. But elements of the situation are palpably parallel to a process that has been repeated many times before. Although they have no excuse not to know the script by heart, much of the left is failing to get a handle on the situation.

Some ostensibly leftist MPs stress that Ahmadinejad has substantial backing from the rural poor, for instance. That is true, as far as we can tell. But as Marx notes, Napoleon III also enjoyed the support of the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat. Indeed, if he did secure anything remotely like 7.5m votes, many workers must have voted for him. Yet rightly, Marx does not find this sufficient reason to extend political support to a reactionary.

Are the demonstrators CIA stooges, as some allege? Doubtless all the various wings of the US foreign policy establishment have analysed the situation and are exerting whatever influence they can to bring about a resolution favourable to Washington.

But for socialists, imperialist support for this or that faction of the Iranian bourgeoisie is both only to be expected and not decisive. Our opposition to Ahmadinejad does not mean we line up with Mousavi, either. We stand with those demanding democracy, both because we favour democracy over tyranny, and because of the space democracy opens up for the left.

I’m also bemused that some of those posting on leftwing blogs counter criticisms of Iran as ‘culturally universalist’, the basic idea here being that we in the imperialist heartlands have no right to disparage the actions of third world ruling classes, especially where they seem counterposed to the interests of our own ruling classes.

Like all projects located within a Hegelian problematic, Marxism is necessarily a culturally universalist doctrine par excellence. Its hugely ambitious aim is nothing less than to remake humanity completely, obliterating all distinctions of class or race or religion. We can argue about whether this is possible or desirable, or to what extent history is taking us there, but that is very clearly what it says on the can.

Marx’s journalistic writings on India, for instance, do not excuse suttee - the Hindu practice of burning widows to death on the funeral pyres of their late husbands - as somehow 'equally culturally valid' to giving an old biddy a decent pension.

So why should his followers be so intent on making excuses for Iran’s ‘semi-democracy’? There are impeccable Marxist grounds for suggesting that they should not be doing so.

UPDATE: Seems that Alan Woods of the International Marxist Tendency has beaten me to the title, which I did come up with independently. Great minds think alike, I guess.