Dave's Part

After Pinochet, Töben should be pretty safe

2008-10-06T13:58:22Z

Liberal – and not so liberal - opinion is falling all over itself to defend Australia-based holocaust denier Fredrick Töben, who remains under threat of deportation to Germany following his arrest at Heathrow last week. Töben, of course, was imprisoned for nine months in Mannheim in 1999 for propagating his execrable views, and was one of the star turns at the Tehran holocaust denial conference in 2006. This is a man who considers the claim that Nazi Germany slaughtered six million Jews to be a straightforward ‘lie’, and moreover a lie perpetuated by ‘the holocaust racketeers, the corpse peddlers and the shoah business merchants’. As far as I am aware, such a stance is more extreme than the public pronouncements on this issue of any leading European fascist party leader. In language that parallels that of some publications of the left, Töben also maintains that ‘the current US government is influenced by world Zionist considerations to retain the survival of the European colonial, apartheid, Zionist, racist entity of Israel.’ Yet Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, insists that his arrest runs contrary to Britain’s tradition of free speech. Huhne maintains: I come to this as a good, classic liberal. It is a fundamental part of our system that we believe in freedom of speech and, like Voltaire, I may disparage what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it. As far as I can make out, Melanie Phillips’ opposition to extradition – in a full page article in today’s Daily Mail – is largely motivated more by the hard right’s europhobia than concern for any abstract consideration of freedom of speech. The extradition request, you see, comes on the back of a European arrest warrant. Thus British nationals can in theory be arrested here and shipped to other EU countries that accuse them of committing a crime, even if the alleged crime is not a crime according to British law. Philip Johnston, writing in the Daily Telegraph, makes much the same case. But need those against Töben’s extradition be particularly worried? It’s just that my mind goes back to October 1998, when former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet - in London to seek medical treatment at a private clinic off Harley Street - was arrested on a Spanish provisional warrant for the murder in of Spanish citizens during his free market dictatorship. Five days later, he was served with a second provisional arrest warrant, charging him with systematic torture, murder, illegal detention, and forced disappearances. These are matters incomparably more grave, of course, than the online inculcation of holocaust denial. Spain’s case was largely founded on the principle of universal jurisdiction, which is the idea that certain crimes are sufficiently serious to constitute crimes against humanity, and should thus be open for prosecution in any court, anywhere in the world. The British House of Lords ruled that Pinochet had no right to immunity from prosecution as a former head of state, and could be put on trial. And New Labour’s response? After placing Pinochet under house arrest - during which he received ample visits from many of his Tory fan club, such as Lady Thatcher - the then home secretary Jack Straw in March 2000 ruled that he should be released on medical grounds. To put it mildly, this craven display of cowardice, motivated in part by Straw’s inability to stand up to the pressure exerted by this murderer’s monetarist admirers, was not this government’s finest hour. Just how ill Pinochet was is open to question. On his return to Chile in March that year, his first act on landing back in his native country was to rise up from his chair to acknowledge the loud applause and cheering of his supporters. The caudillo died peacefully in his bed in December, 2006, without having been convicted of any of the undoubted crimes committed during his dictatorship. For the record, I think Huhne is on balance right, and Phillips and Johnston are correct, in so far as the narrow point of law they raise goes. For exactly the reasons they state with varying degrees of eloquence, Töben should not be sent to his country of birth. But after the Pinochet case, that somehow doesn’t seem much of a risk.

Sunday Blogging Notes

2008-10-05T16:30:59Z

(1) American blues harp legend Charlie Musselwhite - for my money, the best damn harmonica player on the planet - has four UK dates next month. I'm intending to show up at two of the gigs. He's an unbelievably good live act, I promise you; if you at all like 12-bar R&B, Chicago style, you owe it to yourself to be there too. In the meantime, here's a clip of Charlie with his current band, doing their signature track 'The blues overtook me'. (2) The other forthcoming 'must attend' event is the debate over Israel's right to nuke Iran, featuring the clash of the Marxist titans Sean Matgamna and Moshe Machover. Yes, it's comforting to know that - at a time when capitalism really is in crisis and the British National Party is winning hundreds of thousands of votes - the far left is making the best use of its resources. Then again, it's been ages since we've had a good old public Trot bunfight. The grudge match takes place on Sunday 12 October at the traditional North London Trot boozer of choice, The Lucas Arms, 245a Grays Inn Road, Kings Cross, starting 5.15pm. Does the League Against Cruel Sports know about this? Most likely it'll be standing room early. Me, I'm turning up outside the pub with a sleeping bag the night before, just to be assured of a place. (3) On a related note, here's four things that are frankly unlikely to be said at the said meeting: * 'OK, we'll just have to agree to differ on that one.' * 'Well, I have to admit that our paper got the line on [insert issue] totally wrong in [insert date].' * 'I'm speaking as a member of the International Bolshevik Tendency. But if want to know what I really think on this one, well, personally ...' * 'Why can't we all, y'know, just share the love?' Similar contributions in the comments box below, please. (4) Meanwhile, the far left blogsphere continues to expand at a rate faster than new recruits are coming through the door. Ladies and gentlemen, will you welcome Britain's greatest living Pabloite, Andrew Coates, who is sharing his vision of centuries of degenerated workers' states with the public at his fabulous new blog Tendance Coatesy. Big up, too, everybody's favourite Stoke Newington teetotal groove merchant Paddy Garcia, sometimes seen in the comments box below. The site is called Latte Leninist.

Sir Ian Blair sacking: since when did Paul Dacre decide senior police appointments?

2008-10-03T12:53:46Z

You wouldn’t expect a leftie to argue that Britain's top cop is a really great guy, and I’m certainly not going to do that. The de Menezes killing happened on Sir Ian Blair’s watch, yet the worst consequence for the Metropolitan Police was a conviction for breach of health and safety regulations, as if the offence was of no more import than leaving packing cases blocking a fire escape. This, despite the fact that Blair breached his statutory duty to refer the incident to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. As to the accusations that he favoured his white mates for promotion over better-qualified black and Asian officers, it’s not my job to take sides in Scotland Yard office politics. On the basis of what I’ve read, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But ultimately the issue will be decided before the relevant industrial tribunals, as is proper in such cases. Then again, it does seem that he bunged another pal a lucrative public money PR contract, which while not necessarily improper, is bloody silly thing to do when you know that the political heat is on. That provided just the pretext Boris Johnson needed to administer the sack. But Blair had plus points, too. The most important of these - in the wake of the 1999 Macpherson report, which blasted the Met’s ‘institutional racism’ - is an apparently sincere commitment to what is known as anti-racist policing Many on the left have got difficulty with the phrase ‘anti-racist policing’, so let’s put it another way. Blair at least made it plain that open racism would no longer be tolerated in London’s police force. That was something that needed to be done. As it goes, the Met is the closest thing I have got to a family business. My grandad and two uncles were all plods. The degree of overt racial prejudice they displayed was shocking. One of them - a licensed firearms officer, now thankfully retired - routinely referred to black people as ‘sooties’. Macpherson didn’t hear the half of it. As a poster child progressive copper, Blair is said to have made inroads into the Met’s so-called canteen culture. Good. Yet his reward was to get himself branded ‘politically correct’ in the Daily Mail. That is one of the worst things that can happen to anybody in public life. Another thing in Blair’s favour is that he succeeded in cutting crime. This or that statistic may be subject to quibbling, but all point in the same direction, and that is downwards. Surely that’s the final yardstick of what policing is all about? In the end, all of the above considerations are irrelevant. Blair was too close to New Labour, which meant that in the new scheme of things at City Hall, he had to go. Ken Livingstone - writing in the Guardian today - holds up Blair as a ‘hard working and impressive public servant’ who fell victim of a sustained hard right witchhunt, and there is enough truth in the suggestion to merit a partial defence in the face of a nasty and reactionary media onslaught that is preparing the way for a BoJo placeman. As ever, the Daily Mail has been leading the way on this one. Melanie Phillips is particularly splenetic this morning. But last time I checked, Paul Dacre wasn’t actually constitutionally entitled to decide on senior police appointments. Let’s just say Sir Ian did himself no favours along the way. All the Tories had to do was give him enough rope.

The class politics of free school meals

2008-10-02T12:22:51Z

A political opponent of the Scottish Socialist Party once quipped: ‘Elect six Trotskyites to the Scottish parliament, and the most radical thing they can come up with is a demand for free school meals’. That jibe was delivered from the right, as it happens. But it’s exactly the sort of sneering remark one can readily imagine hearing in the faux prole tones of that certain breed of public school-educated far leftist who has succeeded in memorising the Transitional Programme word for word. Free school meals? And you lot call yourselves revolutionaries? Actually, when the SSP first started campaigning on the question in 2001, I thought it was quite a politically savvy thing to do. This is just the sort of concrete policy that many working class people will instantly see as making a difference to their lives. It’s not just a question of the cash, as the SSP pointed out; there is also the very real issue among cool-conscious teenagers of the stigma attached to qualifying for a ‘handout’. Growing up as one of only two boys on free school meals in a middle-class dominated Grammar School, I’m well aware of that one. Top that off with increased recognition of the public health concerns surrounding obesity and nutrition, particularly on the home turf of deep-fried Mars Bars, and the case is compelling. What’s more, New Labour and the Lib Dems - parties that would, in another time and place, have come up with exactly the kind of progressive reform the idea of free school meals encapsulates - were forced to oppose such a seemingly modest move. In 2002, they voted down an SSP bill to implement the proposal. It couldn’t possibly be afforded, you understand. As ‘exposure demands’ that highlight the limitations of reformism in the eyes of the class go, comrades, it doesn’t get any better than that. The SSP imploded in 2006 and lost its representation in the Scottish parliament the following year. Some of the circumstances surrounding the break up are shortly to be debated in a perjury trial, so I’ll say no more on this score. But now the SSP are not around in Holyrood to take the credit, the policy is all of a sudden safe, at least in a dramatically watered-down version. So the Scottish National Party has today announced that all Scottish kids will from 2010 get free school meals for their first three years in primary school. I'm guessing that the SNP - ever the opportunists - are doing this to bolster their social democratic standing ahead of the Glenrothes by-election, rather than out of any genuine conviction. Meanwhile, New Labour has established a free school meals pilot scheme in Hull, and unions and even some Labour MP are pushing the call. But the role of the SSP in getting things rolling is systematically being airbrushed out; there’s no mention of it in the BBC’s coverage, for instance. Most unfair, say I. Those SSP members who initiated and pushed the policy should take a bow. And socialists across Britain should be very proud of them. Small as the step may seem to a brand of politics committed to world revolution, it is one of the far left’s most significant practical achievements for many years.

David Cameron isn't the fat cats' only friend

2008-10-01T11:35:35Z

The picture shows a man in evening dress, cropped so that his head isn’t visible, clutching a cigar that Freudians would surely regard as overcompensation for threatened masculinity. The caption reads: Cameron’s cronies cashing in on the credit crunch. As sophisticated political attack ads go, the full page offerings Britain’s biggest trade union has placed in the Guardian and Daily Mirror are not exactly right up there with the finer efforts of Saatchi & Saatchi. But the message is as plain as the alliteration: The hedge funds and short sellers who have made £millions from the destruction of Northern Rock, HBOS and Bradford and Bingley, bank roll the Conservative party. The Tories pop champagne corks at parties funded by city fat cats whilst working families struggle to make ends meet. DAVID CAMERON: CHEESY AND SLEAZY. Now, all of this is true, and Unite are absolutely justified in feeling anger at this situation. Michael Hintze of CQS and Paul Ruddock of Lansdowne Partners both made killings shorting B&B and HBOS; Hintze has given £650,000 to the Tories since Cameron became leader, while Ruddock has donated £259,000. Catherine Lagrange - wife of Pierre Lagrange, boss of the firm GLG Partners, which also shorted B&B - gave another £50,000. That kind of money pays for plenty of Montecristo number fours. To make this point, the union has organised a protest outside the Conservative Party conference today, as Cameron prepares to deliver his leader’s speech, which will feature activists dressed up in pig masks and bowler hats. You can read the rationale for the campaign in full here, by the way. Joint general secretary Derek Simpson argues: The culture of the city is the culture of the Tories. They went to school with the city, they dine with the city and many of them married into the city. You can't rely on them to regulate the city. Again, he’s right. But the problem for Labour-affiliated Unite is that every charge they aim at the Conservatives applies with almost equal force to New Labour. As Unite knows full well, one of the other directors of GLG Partners is Paul Myners, who is politically close to Gordon Brown. Jon Aisbitt - a £1m donor to New Labour - is non-executive chairman of Man Group, another outfit that has done very nicely thank you out of the credit crunch. Sir Ronald Cohen, who has given over £2m, has just launched a new hedge fund. Plenty of Labour leaders went to public schools too. Some of them send their children to such institutions. Labour has been dining with City chiefs since the prawn cocktail offensive. Gordon Brown’s director of government relations Sue Nye is married to Gavyn Davis, the former Goldman Sachs banker that Blair made chairman of the BBC. The simple reality is that New Labour long ago abandoned the Labour Party’s traditional project of acting as the political wing of the labour movement and since 1997 has consistently governed with the interests of ‘the hedge funds and short sellers’ that the Unite ads disparage. The likes of Peter Mandelson and John Hutton are just as much at home in that culture as anybody on the Conservative front bench. The only way to make sure the interests of working class people get much of a look in is to restore some elementary concept of working class political representation to British politics. Both Simpson and his fellow joint general secretary Tony Woodley - read an insider’s account of the tensions between them here - are sufficiently savvy to know that. They are also positioned to do something about it.

Will the left gain from the financial crisis?

2008-09-30T14:57:46Z

It is a minor historical irony that the financial markets crash of 2008 comes about at a time when there is no dissent from the neoliberal consensus at any point on the spectrum of establishment politics. For three decades now, people have been told - by politicians of all parties - that there is no alternative. Understandably, most of them have come to believe it. Young people, in particular, haven’t heard any narrative other than free market ideology. That much has been brought home to me by my recent experiences as a mature student. Last year, I sat what Americans would refer to as ‘economics 101’ for the second time in my life. It’s not that I particularly needed a refresher on the essentials of supply and demand curves, but the course was deemed a prerequisite for the more advanced modules I’m taking this year. In a classroom full of people mostly a generation younger than myself, I was struck by the differences between the students of 1981 and the students of today. Fittingly for kids keen to get a well-paid job in the financial services sector, they are a lot more smartly dressed, for a start. And they take things rather more seriously, too; they don’t tend to skip classes, because they have paid for them after all, and I somehow don’t get the impression they too spend much time hanging around in the college coffee lounge rolling spliffs. That’s probably because they are busy with part-time, or even full-time, jobs. But most striking of all was that most of them tended to think capitalism is great. Where in the Thatcher period we were angry because the Tories had put three million people on the dole, the consensus - in 2007, anyway - was in praise for a system seen as virtually guaranteeing 42-inch screen plasma televisions and two weeks’ annual holiday in Thailand to all but a few unfortunates. In the first week, the lecturer explained about the differences between free market capitalism and Keynesian demand management, and asked students to vote on which they favoured. When I replied that I was a socialist who didn’t favour either, the derision towards the old git in the corner was almost palpable. Put simply, anti-capitalist ideas clearly no longer have the resonance they did when variants of Marxism influenced a sizeable minority in the Labour Party, with substantial parliamentary and local government representation, and when a network of shop stewards was able to popularise such notions in many workplaces. Nor does the left advance a systematic diagnosis of what is wrong with capitalism as it is now, and what can be done about it. Books outlining an Alternative Economic Strategy no longer feature prominently on university library shelves. That brings me back to the current crash. There have been plenty of predictions that meltdown on Wall Street and in the City will generate a revival socialist fortunes. Interestingly, many of them have come from the right, featuring prominently in quality newspaper opinion slots. There’s also renewed optimism from some on the left. Alex Callinicos of the Socialist Workers' Party, for instance, reportedly told a recent public meeting in Tower Hamlets that the crisis represents a ‘moment of opportunity’ for rebuilding the left. He's not necessarily wrong. But the important thing to stress is that any upturn in our fortunes isn’t going to happen automatically. For a start, the first thing we have to do is to articulate a coherent set of counterproposals, and as far as I can make out, work on that task hasn’t even begun. Then we have to popularise our ideas, and that will require a political vehicle to give them organised expression. I’d like to think the British left is capable of doing that, but after the experience of the last period, I’ve got this horrible suspicion that another moment of opportunity is going to just walk on by.

Why giving Wall St $700bn isn't socialism

2008-09-29T15:51:49Z

It’s been a good few years since I last attended a Trotskyist cadre school. But from what I can dimly remember of my Marxist training, it’s an odd definition of ‘socialism’ that equates the doctrine with handing over skyscraper loads of dosh to some of the most immensely wealthy people on the planet. Yet it is precisely this fallacy that is doing the rounds in the wake of the Paulson/Bernanke Wall Street bail-out package, expected to secure congressional approval today. Take some recent comments by Texas congressman Jeb Hensarling, for instance. This rising conservative Republican star - an economics major, astonishingly - argues with apparent seriousness that the plan puts America on ‘the slippery slope to socialism’. Come again? The US hasn’t even got as far as universal healthcare provision yet, so I sadly suspect common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange is still some way down the agenda. Meanwhile, for senator Jim Bunning, another Republican, what we are witnessing is nothing short of ‘financial socialism’. Such is the intellectual level of the mainstream right on the other side of the pond these days, it seems. I guess it has been so long since we’ve witnessed a full-on red revolution anywhere on the planet that the US ruling class has quite forgotten what self-respecting Bolshevism actually looks like. But here’s a hint, guys; Marxist theory does not usually regard handing over suitcase after suitcase of high denomination dollar bills to investment bankers as the hallmark of authentic proletarian power. Sorry to have to break it to you, but what generally happens in these cases is that workers get to expropriate bosses. The process is quite the reverse of what Paulson and Bernanke - pictured - are trying to do, it seems to me. But more laughable still, if only on account of her closer geographical proximity, is this nonsense from dear old Janet Daley, a 1960s leftie herself, in today’s Daily Telegraph: The next election - both here and in the US - is shaping up to be a referendum on free market economics. All those old anti-capitalist diatribes are being resuscitated with triumphal delight by the side that definitively lost the great political argument of the last century. The Tories will not just be running against Labour and its current leadership. They will be running against a reinvigorated soft Marxist ideology which will infect the news coverage and analysis. Hang on a minute. If the great political argument of the last century was indeed ‘definitively’ lost, how come the question is still being debated? It can only be that the settlement was not so definitive after all. Capitalism remains open to critique. And if the next general election is to be ‘a referendum on free market economics’, where exactly are those of us all in favour of ‘reinvigorated soft Marxist ideology’ supposed to put our Xs? New Labour certainly offers no alternative; Gordon Brown’s conference speech last week went out of its way to stress the party’s pro-market stance, for instance. So much for any referendum element when Britain next goes to the polls. For clarification, it needs to be stressed that all of the actions so far in this crisis - emanating either from Washington or London, or the other European administrations that are now being sucked in - have ultimately been carried out in the interests of the capitalist ruling classes of the countries concerned. In saying that, I am not maintaining that any given measure was wrong, or that better alternatives were readily at hand. It is true that the economic consequences of doing nothing would be dreadful for ordinary people. But socialism this isn't. People such as Hensarling, Bunning and Daley should have the courage to acknowledge that it is the system in which they are part of the privileged minority that has brought this situation about. They could at least say 'thank you' to the rest of us, who are being forced to foot the bill. UPDATE: The US right is serious on this one; they have put the world at risk of prolonged recession, on a point of doctrine. And I thought that conservatives were supposed to be pragmatic.

Sunday Blogging Notes

2008-09-28T17:37:25Z

(1) Here’s a bit of political rock from the last time Britain stood on the cusp of a Tory government. The clip is dedicated to Janine, because I know she’s a TRB fan. The world we knew busted open wide/in the winter of ‘79. You said it, Mr Robinson. Incidentally, I saw Danny Kustow - the featured guitarist - do a couple of numbers at an Eddie and the Hot Rods gig at the 100 Club earlier this year. It has to be said that the years haven’t been particularly kind to him; he’s got more grey hair and a bigger beer gut than I have. But he still knows what to do with a Les Paul and a Marshall stack, though. (2) Twice now I’ve read online claims that in most towns outside the capital, the Socialist Party is now clearly the largest organisation on the far left, eclipsing its long-term rival, the SWP. This - if true - strikes me as an encouraging development; of the two, the Socialist Party is incomparably more serious, and more working class by both social composition and political orientation. But unfortunately I never get very far outside of North London, except for the odd visit to Stroppy in Brighton. So I’d be interested in reports from around the country. What’s the situation on the ground? (3) Time to update the links. First off, a plug for PoliticsHome, which is now the first site I look at when I log on each morning. Whatever your outlook, it’s indispensable. Joining the blogroll are Bickerstaffe Record, The Social Republic, Coventry Green Party, Some Roses Are Red and It's All Culture..

Cameron: more than Maggie masquerading as Morrissey

2008-09-26T14:59:40Z

Now the spotlight shifts to The Novice; with some recent opinion polls putting support for the Tories at 50%-plus, David Cameron is presumably in a buoyant mood as he gears up for the Conservative Party conference that starts in Birmingham next week. In a set piece interview with Sky – extracts here – he deftly counters the Great Clunking Fist’s accusations that he’s still wet behind the ears, pointing out that for all his experience, Gordon Brown has made rather a hash of things over the last year. There’s even the by now de rigeur sideswipe at New Labour from the left: I just make this argument: who in the last year has thumped the poor and the working poor with abolishing the 10-pence tax rate? That was an appalling decision taken by a Labour prime minister. Quite. Welcome to the world of Cameron’s Conservatives; environmentally friendly, socially liberal and completely at ease with multiculturalism. Not the Nasty Party anymore. This is a development that many on the left are having difficulties in coming to terms with. Most are arguing that the apparent transformation is purely presentational, and that underneath everything, there lurks an unreconstructed Thatcherite authoritarian. That’s a line I have previously argued myself many times. As a student, I wrote long essays proffering Gramscian analyses of the exact composition of the Thatcherite historic bloc. As a journalist in the 1990s, I sustained a minor cottage industry in populist denunciations of the Tories as a bunch of reactionary, racist, homophobic, authoritarian, narrow-minded, anti-European, gin-and-Jag belt golf-club bigots. It was easy copy. And it probably is the case that a large chunk of the rank and file want euroscepticism, they want law and order, they want tougher immigration controls and they want lower taxes. And they want them now. But I’m starting to suspect that attempts to dismiss Cameron - pictured above - as ‘the same old same old’ are as wide of the mark as the Major government’s laughable initial efforts to brand Blair a closet ‘demon eyes’ socialist back in 1994 and 1995. Electoral politics can and do reflect demographic changes; New Labour is the living proof of that. Perhaps we shouldn’t too surprised. An ability to move with the times is one of the characteristics that distinguishes a living political organisation from a cult. The dilemma for Cameron is that there are votes in comfort zone Tory politics. Not enough to win an election, of course. But enough to provide the world’s oldest political party with goodly representation in parliament and plenty of jobs for both MPs and bag-carriers. On the other hand, the ruling class of the 2000s has different needs than the ruling class of the late 1970s. It doesn’t have to undermine a confident and assertive labour movement, and the game plan of liberalising the British economy, as commenced under Thatcherism, was largely completed under Blair. Ironically, it may now be that the time has come for a certain degree of re-regulation. The arrival of Cameronism shows is now possible to combine social liberalism with the retention of a core political project of providing a political vehicle for the minority of wealthy people that control society, in a way that could not have been done three decades ago. In short, the coming Cameron government will of course do lots of execrable and reactionary things that the left will have to oppose. Despite the man’s protestations to be a progressive politician, it is unlikely to do very much that we would regard as progressive. But there is little I can contemplate him doing that would reopen the deep social polarisation that split British society so deeply in the Thatcher years. He will have a different mission statement, if only because a different mission statement is required of him. Simply to present the Tory leader as Maggie masquerading as Morrissey would be a mistake.

The left, the right and the 'return of the 1930s' thesis

2008-09-25T14:51:58Z

The idea that the world economy is about to undergo a re-run of the 1930s is becoming so common among mainstream economic commentators that is in serious danger of becoming a cliché. But when likes of George Soros toy with that idea, they do so for express symbolic effect. Resort to any notion of a return to the years of Great Depression is the kind of talk purposely designed to shake people up. It is, in effect, the most serious warning it is possible to give. That decade is deeply entrenched in the collective memory of the free market right as the years in which the wheels nearly came off the capitalist show. We’ve all seen the black and white newsreel footage; the Jarrow March (pictured), the soup kitchens, the Hoovervilles, the rise of fascism in country after country. Many of us will augment those pictures with the stories we heard as children from older members of our families who were caught up in the crosscurrents. In my case, educated men were reduced to shining shoes for a living, or ignominiously deported from countries in which they tried to find work without a work permit. It’s worth noting that this still is 2008 and not 1931; some sections of the left have at times given the impression that they would relish a slump of Great Depression proportions, on account of the effect they imagine this would have in radicalising popular political consciousness. Given the sheer extent of the human misery this would entail, that is unforgivable. It also seems to forget that – at the level of government, at least - the principle beneficiary of hard times is all too often the reactionary right. Little wonder, then, that the ‘1930s in slow motion’ perspective developed by Tony Cliff at the start of the 1990s proved to be wishful thinking during a period which saw the start of sustained capitalist expansion, disastrously wrong-footing the Socialist Workers’ Party for an entire period. What conclusions can we draw? At the very least, the financial markets crisis of 2008 is likely to mark an important political turning point. When governments of the ideological stripe of George W Bush are forced to resort to state intervention on a titanic scale, it cannot fail but to bolster case for tighter regulation of the free market. It suddenly turns out that the very things that globalisation supposedly rendered impossible for nation states in this day and age – the nationalisation of major financial institutions, or a ban on short selling, for example – can be done in no time flat if need be. Deregulation has been an integral component of neoliberalism as it has emerged in the west over the last 30 years. One of the first actions of the Thatcher administration was to scrap wage, price and exchange controls, and it followed through with the Big Bang in 1986. The climate is all of a sudden very different, and could expand the political space available to modern social democracy, and perhaps revive a current that has sometimes seemed at death’s door in recent years. But what if the pessimists are right? Such a possibility must be at least measurable. In that case, the basic underlying question of all economics – which class gets what – is back on the agenda in a way it has not been for a long time. That will mean an audience for radical answers to that question. Perhaps it’s not for nothing that the Archbishop of Canterbury has suddenly taken to favourably mentioning of Karl Marx.

Book review: 'Contemporary British Fascism' by Nigel Copsey

2008-09-24T13:22:33Z

Fascinating as it is endlessly to debate whether a certain Trot outfit leader did or did not excuse an Israeli nuclear strike on Iran, causing a Boy Wonder activist to flounce out and form a three-person micro-microsect, or to ponder the deeper significance of the decision to reassign the political responsibilities of two SWP central committee members, the real world should be allowed the occasional look in. Despite at least six or seven projects designed to build a new united socialist party over the last 13 years, the British left is now smaller, more socially isolated, more middle class in composition, more devoid of influence in the unions and the Labour Party, and generally more ideologically dazed and confused then at any previous point in my adult lifetime. Meanwhile, the far right has combined its forces into a single principle organisation which claims to be several thousand strong. There is no reason to think it is lying, either; unlike some socialist groups, there is no evidence that it routinely inflates membership figures. It has a cohesive project, centred on the need to secure legitimacy through electoral success, without compromising an avowed fascist purpose. This has secured it hundreds of thousands of votes, dozens of councillors and now a member of the Greater London Assembly. The British National Party now has a real base in a number of communities, predominantly among the very social class the left regards as the main agent of social change. Nigel Copsey’s timely book tells us how they have done it. Read it and weep. Then think about what might happen if we do not get our act together. It should be said from the outset that this work is aimed at academics rather than activists, but don’t let that put you off. It is fairly accessible. I sometimes dread having to read academic books - especially those published by Palgrave Macmillan - because of their tedious prose. While Copsey isn’t a literary stylist manqué, he at least writes well enough to keep you awake. I had previously read Richard Thurlow’s Fascism in Britain, which covers 1918-1985; Copsey’s book is the ideal follow up, offering a quick crash course on the Thurlow material, before taking up the story from the early 1980s launch of the BNP. That makes it the most up-to-date book on the market. This second edition came out earlier this year and takes in events up to last year. I do have some problems with Copsey’s conceptual framework, which sees fascism as the revolutionary ideology of the right. I don’t think that this is true; the historical experience shows that fascism classically comes to power through constitutional means, when the ruling class needs street level forces capable of crushing working class militancy. This is an important point; it extents to questions such as whether or not certain brands of reactionary Islamism can properly be dubbed Islamofascist, for instance. Copsey also puts too much stress on the role of the media, especially the local press. That is a mistake, too. In my experience, local newspaper hacks pretty much report what is going on, as they see it. If it is the case that Asian-on-white violence is an issue in some former mill towns, that debate has to be had out and the problem addressed. Suppressing discussion by diktat will only play into the far right’s hands. Likewise, Copsey sometimes seems horrified to record that even condemnation by local clergy, the distribution of 20,000 antifascist broadsheets or ghost-written pleas by Tony Blair do not always put people off the BNP. Surely he must see how anything the establishment does can sometime plays into the hands of an outfit marketing itself as the premier anti-establishment vote. The author’s basic thesis is indicated by the subtitle, ‘the British National Party and the quest for legitimacy’. The far right’s prospects, he believes, hinge on legitimacy at either local or national level. The worry has to be that the BNP is increasingly finding it. He accepts – or at least he seems to; the formulations aren’t always as precise as they might be – that some European far right parties have genuinely evolved from fascist or neofascist roots towards non-fascist nationalist populism. But his contention is that, for all Nick Griffin’s claims to be taking party down this very road, the BNP leader’s personal political formation is very much in the ‘political soldier’ tradition of the old National Front, as mediated through third positionism and Strasserism. Copsey is quite clear that the BNP are a threat to democracy. Yet whatever criticisms I offer in this short review, Contemporary British Fascism is more than worth picking up for anyone with an interest in the subject. If it helps sections of the left to smell the coffee, so much the better.

Gordon Brown speech: a fair Britain for the new age?

2008-09-23T18:01:23Z

Of course it's never enough to judge a speech simply from reading the text on a PC screen. You have to be in the hall, or at least watch the whole thing on television, to get some idea of its impact. So I cannot offer a definitive verdict of Gordon Brown’s address to the Labour Party conference this afternoon. Instead, I’ll confine myself to a few observations on the main themes. I lost count of the number of times the prime minister - pictured above in full flow - used the words ‘fairness’ and ‘fair’. I expect somebody out there is even now totting up the final figure, but even without a tally, most of us will have got the message. The word fairness has become a New Labour staple, and with good reason. It represents the bare minimum defining value to which everybody from the far left to the centre left can subscribe, while remaining entirely ideologically open-ended. A speech that very largely trades on the concept is at high risk of either banality or simply meaninglessness. No-one in politics openly advocates unfairness. Nor did the repeated insistence on Britain’s standing as the best country in the world go unnoticed. As one of those who has never quite understood what it means to love a country, the markedly patriotic subtext left me cold. And while no-one questions Brown’s insistence that New Labour remains ‘pro-enterprise, pro-business and pro-competition’, couldn’t he have found it in himself to utter the words ‘trade unions’ just once? But let’s forget the rhetoric. I suppose it is up to a prime minister to choose the benchmarks he or she wants to be measured against. Let us compare the vision to contemporary society. It’s all very well proclaiming that being on the side of hardworking families is the only place you ever want to be, and then go on to praise NHS cooks and cleaners, porters and paramedics. But how fair is it to expect these very people – along with millions of other public sector workers – to take a pay cut at a time of rising inflation? How fair is it that British workers still have the poorest employment rights of any industrialised countries? How fair is it to allow employers to sack staff by text message? How fair is it that cleaners pay a higher marginal rate of tax than hedge fund bosses? How fair is an education system that allows the de facto systematic purchase of class privilege? How fair is a health service still subject to post-code lottery and queue-jumping by the rich? How fair is a society with sweeping differentials in life expectancy between those living on sink estates and the more prosperous parts of the country? How fair can it be that 22% of the population live in poverty? How fair are Britain’s undemocratic electoral mechanisms that leave perhaps millions of voters without adequate representation of their political beliefs? Don’t get me wrong; Labour remains fairer than the Tories, in many of the small but important ways that Brown emphasised in the better parts of his oration. Far, far better a nugatory minimum wage than no minimum wage at all. It’s just that with the requisite political courage, Labour could and should be somewhat fairer still.

WTF is a 'Heseltine Moment' anyway?

2008-09-23T13:39:40Z

David Miliband may – or may not – have spoke of his wish to avoid a ‘Heseltine Moment’ in a Manchester hotel lift last night. That cryptic remark is widely being interpreted as implying a deliberately destabilising attack on a prime minister of one’s own party. But is that necessarily the case? Given the many notable incidents that studded Hezza’s long and illustrious career, many connotations are surely possible. Let me offer a number of alternative suggestions. I think we can safely discount any desire to flounce out of the cabinet in a hissy fit over whether European or US interests are best placed to bail out a floundering UK helicopter operation. Not only is this now a dead issue, but since 2004, Westland’s successor came 100% under the control of Finmeccanica of Italy. Ironically, then, Tarzan ultimately got his way on this one. Nor can it mean the institution of a mass programme of pit closures, simply because there is no longer that much of a UK deep mining industry left to butcher. Perhaps it indicates a barely suppressed desire to pick up the mace and swing it threatening in the general direction of Labour leftwingers innocently singing the Red Flag, forcing the speaker to suspend a parliamentary session, as Heseltine - pictured above - did in 1976. But ultimately, I seem to remember that our man suffered a serious heart attack in Venice in 1993, leaving him temporarily wheelchair-bound. And where did this cardiac infarction take place? In a hotel, of course. And that is a moment any of us would understandably want to avoid. Seen in that light, Miliband must be cleared on all charges of insubordination.

Labour conference: will anyone put the socialist case?

2008-09-22T14:18:09Z

It's almost amusing to read predictions that leftwing rhetoric will be in ample supply at the Labour Party conference in Manchester this week. One poor minister has even reportedly resigned himself to a ‘retreat into the comfort zone of kicking capitalists’ on the grounds that this would be an obvious and easy populist response to the financial crisis. That possibility – outside the fringe meetings organised by the usual suspects, of course - strikes me as fairly unlikely. The whole event is so carefully stage managed these days that anybody suspected of harbouring latent socialist sympathies will be kept well away from the lectern. The truth is that the Labour Party – after 14 long years of over-compensating for its Clause Four past by constantly stressing its born-again believer ‘pro-business’ credentials - has simply forgotten the requisite verbal flourishes. Such is the extent of this linguistic self-denying ordnance that it cannot even debate the events of the last ten days in the meaningful grown-up English that characterises serious economic thinking. Read the comment pages in the Financial Times; contributors there openly use words such as ‘the capitalist system’, ‘the ruling class’, ‘nationalisation’ or ‘neoliberalism’ if that is the most direct way of saying what they want to say. Sometimes the authors are attempting to justify the free market, sometimes proposing steps to strengthen it. Occasionally, they even acknowledge that, yes, capitalism does have certain downsides. But at all times they are unafraid to call it how they see it. Tellingly, no mainstream Labour politician would use such frank language in a conference speech, for fear of being branded a retro-Trot or worse. And we wouldn’t want the folks watching at home on telly to get the wrong end of the stick, right? Because the ruling party cannot even bring themselves to think in such analytical categories, it thereby effectively rules out discussion the problems facing the financial markets in the terms that would be deployed in an intelligent pub argument. Hopefully, City minister Kitty Ussher was joking when she parodied one famous yuppie soundbite with the comment: ‘Greed is bad, I think, maybe, in some ways.’ But whether she was joshing or not, that just about sums up the level of the debate. Over the weekend, prime minister Gordon Brown even ventured mild criticism of ‘irresponsible’ bonus culture. Spin doctors are letting it be known that legislation is not likely, although the Financial Services Authority may tamper with the regulations. This very morning, chancellor Alistair Darling has promised to avoid ‘kneejerk’ actions. And, for kneejerk, read ‘anything that promises to be effective’. Facilitating the Lloyds TSB takeover of HBOS and imposing temporary restrictions on short-selling financial stocks are both reasonable interim measures in as far as they go. But there can be no adequate policy agenda that does not start with clear definitions of what the problems we face are, and what should be done about them. The tragedy is that – at a time when a democratic socialist critique of the last three decades could win considerable popularity - the British left does not have anyone capable of articulating it.

After the financial crash: who benefits from the backlash?

2008-09-19T14:21:27Z

The Financial Crash of 2008 – or whatever posterity eventually decides to call the events of the last week or so – is potentially an event of era-defining historical significance. It will not fail to have massive long-term political and social consequences, many of which we cannot even guess as yet. You’d never guess that from the reaction of Britain’s political class, for whom it is pretty much business as usual. Wakey, wakey, guys! That giant sucking sound you might just faintly perceive in the background is the noise major financial institutions generate as they implode, destroying tens of thousands of jobs and making many people homeless in their wake. To be charitable, the Lib Dems have half an excuse, as it is their conference week. Unfortunate timing or what? Meanwhile, Labour is wrapped up in personality-based internecine squabbling over Brown’s leadership, which is of little import to anyone outside certain somewhat selective coteries. The Tories are pretty much keeping their mouths firmly shut, perhaps dumbstruck that their entire free market ideological framework is unravelling before their eyes. Then again, many Tory MPs have yet to return from the desirable sunspot in which they spent their summer. But in the popular consciousness, the quasi-religious veneration of ‘wealth creators’ is right now evaporating, possibly for good. To the extent that the taxpayer picks up the tab for sorting out the mess, a backlash is on the cards. It may even amount to widespread anger. Such a sentiment is something savvy politicians will seek to exploit. In the past, the Tories – the party chiefly associated by the public with finance capital – could have expected to take a pasting. Labour’s left would have had a field day, with Labour Research pamphlets detailing the links of senior Conservatives to the investment banking sector selling like hot buttered collateralised debt obligations, circa 2006. It speaks volumes about the erosion of the political space between Britain’s two major parties that this scenario will not happen. Sadly there is currently no Labour left MP of sufficient stature, support base, or intellect to act as a figurehead to promote a twenty-first century equivalent to the AES. Thus the door is left open to populist politicians. The far right may start dropping devious hints about the rootless cosmopolitan character of the speculators. Many of them are from a certain ethnic background, don’t you know? What of the far left, traditionally the most trenchant critics of monopoly capitalism? Look at some of the main far left websites and you can already read triumphant claims of the vindication of correct Marxist analysis, even if the correct Marxist analysis in question is in complete contradiction to the correct Marxist analysis advanced by the other sects. This is difficult to take too seriously. At bottom, the most that such groupings have been saying is that at some point, financial capital would inevitably take a nosedive. Given that the existence of a credit cycle is hardly in doubt, that is not much of a boast. It could, of course, have been different. A serious socialist party with real labour movement roots could have developed an analysis of where we are now, both in terms of Marxist categories and in more readily understandable outline for agitational purposes. If such an organisation had worked steadily for years to popularise these ideas, it would surely have been able to gain support in the months to come. But because we don’t have an adequate left in Britain, this cannot happen, either. If conspiracy theories about 'Jewish money men' do start to gain a wider hearing, the irresponsibility of the left over the last period will have to take some of the blame. UPDATE: Three wonderfully revealing paragraphs from the Financial Times, discussing the government’s ban on short-selling financial stocks. The quote from shadow chancellor George Osborne deserves widespread repetition: The development has left the opposition party on the backfoot, as City regulation becomes a new political dividing line. "No one takes pleasure from people making money out of the misery of others but that is a function of capitalist markets," Mr Osborne said. Alan Duncan, the shadow business secretary, rejected Lib Dem assertions the Conservative stance was linked to the substantial funding the party has received from hedge fund operators. "The suggestion our thinking is influenced by the origin of party funding is cheap and silly," Mr Duncan told the FT. "Vince Cable talks total tosh about speculators . . . Every buyer has a willing seller and every seller has a willing buyer - that's a market."