This reminds me of the launch of the People's Assembly in June 2013. There were rallies, there were demonstrations, and as well as having the usual leftist suspects on board mainstream trade unions were signed up. If memory serves, the TUC's Frances O'Grady either spoke at the launch rally or at the London demonstration. My politics at that point were quite melty, but the cynical eye cast over the project were a pretty accurate forecast. A series of set pieces and activism for activism's sake, but nothing more than that. However, I was wrong as well. The People's Assembly did not achieve take off, but what it did was build links between activists in various anti-cuts campaigns and trade unionists, and undoubtedly these networks fed into the Corbyn insurgency two years later - as Alex Nunns argued in The Candidate.
I think the similarities between the People's Assembly and Enough is Enough are superficial in character. Yes, it has been organised "from above" and presented to the left and the labour movement as a fait accompli. Though it's perhaps worth noting the "usual suspects" are conspicuous by their absence. Mick Lynch, currently the country's best known trade unionist, is effectively the figurehead. Reflecting the RMT's pre-eminence in the rail strikes, and his ubiquity on the media rounds, Eddie Dempsey is there too. Zarah Sultana speaks for left wing Labour MPs (no John McDonnell, Diane Abbott, or Jeremy Corbyn), and lastly the CWU's Dave Ward finishes the speakers' roster - undoubtedly thanks to BT Openreach workers taking action for the first time in 30 years, and with a postal strike extremely likely. The CWU is on the list of sponsors, along with Tribune, the Right to Food campaign, and the community union, Acorn.
Different people, same set up? Why might this be any different to what went before? There are several reasons, the most obvious being the political context has entirely shifted. Despite the defeat of Corbynism at the 2019 general election and Keir Starmer's mopping up operation in the Labour Party afterwards, the left as a whole is stronger, more rooted, more experienced, and has many more active participants than was the case a decade ago. Second, the People's Assembly was founded not just when the left and labour movement were weak, but when there was significant support for public sector cuts. The Tories successfully spun the 2008 crash as a crisis of state finances, and at the time Labour fell over themselves to support rather than contest this analysis. If all the official organs of state and the media are putting out the same line, an awful lot of people are going to swallow it. Today, I don't need to say much about today. The energy crisis, the NHS crisis, the economic crisis, the drought and climate crisis, the crisis of state capability, the crisis of the union, and the paralysis of official politics are doing their own work. A wave of industrial struggle not seen since the 1980s with significant public backing, growing support for strategic nationalisations, and as reported on Friday, some polling suggesting large numbers think rioting in the streets would be justified. With millions driven to breaking point, acute distress is finding expressions in sympathy and, as the strikes show, collective action.
Enough is Enough might be able to cohere the despair and convert it into an anger that can mobilise. But it has to become known, which is why the programme of localised rallies are useful. It provides an impetus for people to come together, start planning their own actions, and building a camaraderie - something Corbynism well understood. But again, the difference now is the much wider audience receptive to its message. It's populist in terms of setting up an us and them dynamic, its demands a commonsensical and punitive (where the rich are concerned) politics while steering clear of party labels, and is non-prescriptive. It's down to the local groups to determine what their priorities are, which might range from picket line solidarity, mobilisations against bailiffs (especially important if Don't Pay UK meets its million non-payer goal), through to mutual aid, targeted actions, and so on.
None of this is guaranteed, but we do know the confluence of crises aren't going to let up, nor will the resistance to them. Enough is Enough can give fighting back some coherence and, crucially, integrate layers of striking workers and the newly politicised into left and labour movement politics. Is Enough is Enough enough? No, obviously not. It's a beginning and won't ever stop being a work in progress, albeit one that could really into and catalyse the febrile mood. For this reason comrades should set aside their justifiable cynicism and get involved with their local groups.
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14 comments:
Don't forget Ian Byrne as the other left Labour MP involved !
Ok article, Phil, and of course I , as a now ex Labour Party Lefty activist , for the second time now in my life, have, in desperation) signed up to be informed of any local Enough is Enough ' activity in may area. And it isn't as if there isn't lots to campaign about locally in Shropshire, with our local NHS absolutely on is knees, and of course the ever worse cost of living crisis, for Lefties to rally around.
Unfortunately I have to disagree with your optimistic assessment, that despite the(actually easily achieved) utter rout and defeat of Corbyn, and 'Corbynism' (actually representing the entire Labour Left strategy since the Labour Party's foundation) , the Left is stronger than it has been for years. It is true that hundreds of thousands of people were enthused and to a much more limited extent, mobilised, during the 2015 to 2019 'Corbyn Insurgency'. But the people of this 'Left Surge' mobilised into activity, particularly as Labour members, were very largely of the middle class , professional, class, a largely metropolitan subset of the much wider proletariat , with a quite distinct ideology, class interests, and hence politics, cutting it off from most of the poorer working class voter , and non-voter. This middle class 'Corbynista' Left , was, and is, largely, actually bereft of serious traditional socialist politics, and instead are really merely well-meaning , virtue signalling, 'Left Liberals', imbued with a scattergun diffuse politics, obsessed with identity issues, sloganised 'issue, campaigns, loving the neoliberal EU uncritically, and actually profoundly non-understanding of the impact of EU-promoted realities like unlimited labour supply on those millions of despised ('gammon') working class voters who voted for BREXIT.
And that is the core weakness and tragedy of the attempt to pull together
a serious, focussed, mass movement against the current economic crisis, (since Labour is now simply kaput as a vehicle for resistance), ie, the 'Left' has never been so POLITICALLY and IDEOLOGICALLY weak in the UK as it currently is, in terms of a mass understanding of even the basics of socialist theory, history, and class politics. Such is the fate of a population now living in an almost entirely post industrial parasitic financialised and service industry 'back office' component economic unit of the integrated global capitalist economy, with the well organised 'old big battalions' of working class organised labour almost entirely expunged. Difficult to build a serious , class-based , distinctly socialist, mass movement with such a historically peculiar population base. WE gotta try, but it is more likely that the ever-worsening impoverishment of the poorer of our citizens will very soon , come winter, result in sporadic mass riots, and rising support for divisive Far Right populist politics than the creation of a serious mass socialist Left with a comprehensive , believable, socialist programme to offerr both hope, and a real chance for radical change..
«the people of this 'Left Surge' mobilised into activity, particularly as Labour members, were very largely of the middle class , professional, class, a largely metropolitan subset of the much wider proletariat , with a quite distinct ideology, class interests, and hence politics, cutting it off from most of the poorer working class voter , and non-voter.»
I think that is quite wrong, and based on the "leftoid" delusion that the "proletariat" is defined as "blue collar working class", when our blogger keeps reminding us is that it includes everybody who depends on an employer for a salary or a wage.
A lot of salary earners (white collar working class) are also rentiers via property and pensions and stocks, but most purely as proletarian as the blue collar working class.
In particular many of these professionals not only depend utterly on their employer for the living, they also depend utterly on their landlord for housing, or are upgraders who have strong class interests against asset rentiers that align with similar interests from the “poorer working class”.
In politics building coalitions of similar interests is essential, even without being fans of stalinism's "popular front" strategy, and in first instance the renters and upgraders (and occupiers in the "pushed behind" areas) of both white and blue collar proletariat should be allies, just as the propertied upper-middle and upper classes are allied.
«This middle class 'Corbynista' Left , was, and is, largely, actually bereft of serious traditional socialist politics»
But let's first build an anti-rentier coalition, and then perhaps socialism will evolve later. The question is: when "one last heave" will happen and socialism will come into being?
«and instead are really merely well-meaning , virtue signalling, 'Left Liberals'»
Those are the propertied upper-middle classes, whose politics are woke rentierism.
There is an example that I sometimes make in chat:
* Junior (whether younger or less paid) national journalists vs. senior national journalists and columnists (there is a similar distinction between lower and upper academics).
* They are both middle-class professionals, but the junior ones cannot afford property and are getting shafted by landlords, and the senior ones bought in London etc. in the 1970-80s-90s and have had 1-2 millions pounds of equity redistributed to them from the lower classes by Thatcher, Blair, Osborne.
* So we seen in the press articles written by junior journalists (including for example Petronella Wyatt...) about the enormous cost of housing, and other articles by senior journalists about the outrage of expensive wallpaper and beers at "work" meetings. They are both talking their books of course.
Traditional "leftoids" are stuck on the noddy-marxist idea that the main exploiters are the business rentiers and they mostly exploit the blue collar working class, but times have changed.
Can "old Trot" please provide one single practical example of how their beloved Brexit has actually benefitted working class people?
«In politics building coalitions of similar interests is essential»
I sometime worry about my foolishness in being one of the few with the delusion that voting is most influenced by interests, chiefly property, rather than by earnest debates as to values like integrity and ideas like diversity.
BTW as always I worry that I am also a fool to regard as relevant and important that rents and house prices are rising by 15% per year, CPI is 9%, and mortgages rates are 3%, giving (wrt CPI) +6% real housing cost increases and -6% real mortgage interest costs.
Also apparently nobody cares that while CPI is "just" 9% we have RPI, which is much closer to a cost-of-living index (and is used to index rents and mobile contracts and many other costs), going strong at 12%.
I also am so silly to wonder whether the big price increase in energy bills due to USA sanctions against cheap russian gas and oil can be cured simply by subsidizing energy consumption or whether there is a going to be physical scarcity regardless of how much money is used to avoid reducing consumption.
To me Starmer's proposal on energy bills look like pure demagoguery (probably targeted at "red wall" pensioners like is plastic nationalism) because I reckon that he knows full well that there is zero chance of that working or being adopted, but I note that he made no proposal to subsidise rent payments, which would benefit indirectly his other target constituency of southern property owners by driving up rents even more. I guess 15% per year is good enough for "Middle England". But is he serious about winning their votes?
«articles written by junior journalists (including for example Petronella Wyatt...) about the enormous cost of housing»
Here is the fabulous article I was thinking of, complaining about the cost of living in 2013 already:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2308344/Petronella-Wyatt-Its-hell-posh-poor.html
«I, too, earn between £80,000 and £100,000 a year, yet a rejected credit card is only the start of my financial woes. I’ve even come to the point where a visit from the bailiffs is a very realistic prospect — a troubling predicament I’d lived with for years. But how did I, a privately educated, privileged Oxbridge graduate come to be part of what I call the Broke Generation? My friends come from similarly well-heeled backgrounds. We work hard. Ten or 15 years ago, this would have guaranteed financial security, yet it has become increasingly difficult for us to make ends meet. [...]
‘I can’t afford to have sex at the moment,’ says my former school friend Rosamund, a slender, 40-year-old lawyer who broke up with her banker boyfriend after he demanded she pay half the rent on his Mayfair flat.She’s now ended up in a rented flat in a not-so-nice part of town — and men are an unrequired extra while she battles to pay the bills.[...]
Recently divorced, he had two sons to educate (privately of course) and was paying maintenance to his ex-wife. In order to foot the bills, he had been forced to sell his house in Knightsbridge and move to a flat in the less-salubrious Wandsworth. He despaired of ever having enough money to move back to Central London. [...]
Friends of mine who are single or divorced hope, like me, that they will meet a rich potential partner. Yet all the rich men seem to be over 60 with body odour, double chins and a Slavic-sounding accent. [...]
A handsome surgeon friend recently walked down the aisle with someone with a nose like the Shard and the temperament of a shrew. He explained his decision thus: ‘I’m poor, she’s rich. I have a four-year-old daughter and I don’t want her to grow up without the things I had.’»
Didnt Petronella Wyatt used to be a f*ck buddy of Bozza? How the mighty fall...
What an entirely non-socialist Liberal the obsessive house price poster, 'Blissex' is, with his monomania about 'rentiers' and the property market. He says, "let's build an anti-rentier coalition, and then perhaps socialism will evolve later " ! Rentier capitalists aren't the only capitalists, Blissex, and the entire capitalist class are the class enemy , not just the 'rentier' segment, daft lad. This obsession with the old concept of 'economic rent' (as an affront to free enterprise capitalism) and the rentier section of capitalism places you firmly in the ideological sphere of the classical capitalist economists like Adam Smith, not Marx, or socialist politics/economics generally. Only one step further and we are in " it is only the parasitic financier class who are the enemy of workers , not the 'productive ' national capitalists. Smash the financiers " ! Yep - it's Strasserism , Blissex !
I may not agree with everything Phil writes, but he IS a socialist. You, Blissex , are a diversionary non-socialist Liberal, with a profound conptempt for the working class, - monopolising and buggering up this potentially useful discussion site for socialists
Dearie me , Jim Denham, you need to get out more away from the Left Liberal theory, lad. The end of unlimited labour supply from the EU , has in recent years produced labour shortages in many sectors of both skilled (heavy goods vehicle drivers for instance) and unskilled labour - resulting in significant wage increases by workers previously unable to bargain for their wages because of the unlimited nature of labour supply in their industry . Look at the recent wage stats for 'blue collar' jobs in the private sector Jim, and the major ongoing rise in worker militancy in sectors previously trapped in the 'gig economy' , from Amazon warehouses, to fast food outlets, to zero hour delivery drivers/bike riders. That militancy, predating the current mega inflation/cost of living crisis , is a feature of rising worker confidence when the EU labour supply 'tap' is turned off.
Secondly, none of the Labour Manifesto renationalisation and state aid policy commitments of 2017 or 2019 were possible within the state aid and competition rules of the EU. If you don't understand this, Jim - then DO SOME READING beyond your AWL publications. No serious socialist advocate of LEXIT thought a BREXIT under a viciously neoliberal Tory government would have been anything but awful. But it was the daft uncritical pro EU Labour 'Left' in alliance with the cynical Labour Right who buggered up Labour's electoral chances in 2019 by losing us our huge numbers of vital old 'Red Wall' working class voters via Labour's daft, slippery, equivocal, Brexit 'policy' betrayal. Own it Denham. Starmer could only shaft Corbyn and the entire hope of the 2015 'Corbyn Insurgency' because the middle class Left Liberal Labour 'Left' chose their politically naive love of the neoliberal EU over socialist policies and politics
"The end of unlimited labour supply from the EU , has in recent years produced labour shortages in many sectors of both skilled (heavy goods vehicle drivers for instance) and unskilled labour - resulting in significant wage increases by workers previously unable to bargain for their wages because of the unlimited nature of labour supply in their industry . Look at the recent wage stats for 'blue collar' jobs in the private sector"
So 'Old Trot''s mask slips: he blames foreign workers (presumably and logically, not just those from the EU) for driving down wages - a thoroughly reactionary and even semi-racist theory that has long been discredited and is demonstrably untrue, except ina very few isolated cases. Working class solidarity drives up wages, not national isolation and anti-migrant rhetoric. And, of course, at present -post Brexit - real wages for our class as a whole are going down at a rate not seen for more than a decade. 'Old Trot' finally exposes the nationalist, anti-working class bankruptcy of supposedly "left" Brexiteers.
«So 'Old Trot''s mask slips: he blames foreign workers (presumably and logically, not just those from the EU) for driving down wages - a thoroughly reactionary and even semi-racist theory»
I think that this is a gross hallucination, because "Old Trot" in does not blame the foreign workers themselves, but the deliberate (according to both Mervyn King and Ivan Rogers) policy of using them to create a vast "reserve army" of labour supply in the UK.
«The end of unlimited labour supply from the EU , has in recent years produced labour shortages [...] resulting in significant wage increases»
That is quite a bizarre inference, because there have been significant worker shortages in places like Vietnam and the USA at the same time as the UK, and I doubt that brexit was so powerful to result in worker shortages in those places too.
What has happened is that COVID caused worker shortages, and anyhow net UK immigration has been booming since 2016, even if net EU immigration collapsed, because the government allowed third-world immigration to rise a lot.
In the absence of legislation that allows unions to be more effective (can you imagine Starmer or Davey introducing it?) it is likely that increasing the supply of labour, including from abroad, does have an effect on wages. At least that's what New Labour believed, and for example at one point ultra-blairite Hutton argued that immigration was vital to keep down the wage costs of the NHS in the interest of taxpayers.
That policy attitude has resulted in the Treasury keeping the funding for medicine degrees so low that currently 59% of newly registered doctors in England have a foreign degree, funded by foreign taxpayers, so that many qualified third-world doctors have realized the ambition to have an upper-middle class lifestyle in England.
A strong case could be made that government funding of UK tertiary students is unnecessary as all the needs of UK employers for graduate workers can be satisfied from a vast global oversupply of graduates, and it could be argued that it would be discriminatory to favour UK graduates (85% white in the UK and EU) over non-EU ones (85% people of colour globally).
«Rentier capitalists aren't the only capitalists»
It is a question of priorities in the big scheme of thing:
* The UK ruling elites, supported electorally by "Middle England" workers, have decided to adopt a "low wages high costs" model, instead of the "high wages high costs" model of some nordic social-democracies or "low wages low costs" of some southern and developing states.
* Should workers fight first "low wages" or "high costs"? In the UK context I think that fighting "high costs" should be the priority. The distant precedent is the Corn Laws, which were about rentierism of agricultural land, rather than residential or commercial land, where the business rentiers fought for a "low costs" model.
«and the entire capitalist class are the class enemy»
Another priority to discuss is about political tactics. Some people might want to take on all the anti-worker factions at once fighting *both* "low wages" and "high costs", helping the anti-worker factions to ally with each other. After all if "one last heave" succeeds it will vanquish all of them at once. :-) Some others might want to take advantage of the divergent interests of business and land/finance rentiers to win a better deal for workers.
The rentier classes seem to me to have benefited quite a lot from splitting the workers and allying themselves with the middle classes, using property profits as the wedge. The electoral problem I see is that while employers are few, property owners are many more, and they are the electoral block enabling policies to achieve both higher housing costs and lower wages. If one dismisses electoral politics because "one last heave" will make that irrelevant that obviously is not a problem, but if for the time being one still wants to play the electoral politics game then it may be useful to have temporary alliance with business rentiers to remove the property bribe that makes a large minority of the workers side with big land/finance rentiers.
Yet another priority is about the actual tactical interests of workers, and as to that I was particularly struck by a story about Amazon warehouse agency workers living in tents near the warehouse where they worked. Obviously their employer is paying them badly for a hard job, but their main issue is that they live in a tent, because even in the low-cost areas where Amazon puts warehouses housing inflation has still been bad relative to wages.
I actually know lower-middle and lower-class workers, and what they tell me is that while the wages are bad (and they have not yet realized that their future pensions will be much worse), their number one problem is the relative cost of housing, they could be a lot better off if only they could get housing at a relative cost like in the past.
«their number one problem is the relative cost of housing»
As to that I keep reading articles about how much of a renter's income she pays for rent, which are seem to me designed to mislead, because there is no reference to the size of the dwelling: a worker can usually keep the percentage of their income they pay for rent lower by doubling up: if the rent of a 2 bedroom house costs 60% of their income, they can reduce it to 30% by renting a studio, etc.
For many workers wanting to be nearer their workplace, sharing their house or flat with many others, or getting squeezed into ever smaller dwellings, is a big problem that substantially reduces their quality of life. But "Middle England" voters usually bought their properties in the 70s-80s-90s when prices were a much smaller multiple of wages, so they bought bigger "old standards" houses and gardens, and they have plenty of space.
It is similar to the other articles about the average cost of a house about the average rent, which also seem to me designed to mislead because there is no reference to the size of the dwelling, and dwellings are constantly shrinking, both because they are being built smaller, and more people double up to a greater degree.
If they were not designed to mislead, housing ads and articles reporting on housing costs would report prices and rents by square (or even better, cubic) foot/meter, not by number of (ever shrinking) bedrooms, as it is done in other countries and for commercial space.
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