Where Now for the Left?

A perennial question for our movement if there ever was one (and one asked here plenty). But instead of contemplating it through a long read of the grey beards, or zero-summing it with tankies on social media, why not come along to this series of public discussions in London town? On 26th September, 10th October, and 24th October at Pelican House in Bethnal Green we have three sessions exploring this vexed issue.

The events are free (donations welcome) but they are ticketed. Please secure your place here. Hope to see you there!

26th September: What’s Left? Is this moment of national decline a political opportunity?
Nandita Lal / Owen Hatherley / Dan Evans / Fiona Lali / Phil Burton-Cartledge

For decades, Britain’s working class has been battered by falling wages, rising poverty and gutted public services. The Starmer government is offering them austerity and authoritarianism, while the far right are attempting to capitalise on the atmosphere of discontent. The left, atomised and fragmented in the wake of Corbynism, seems ready to re-emerge as a national political force. What are its current power bases? Where is it strong and where is it weak? What type of organisation is needed to challenge Labour’s fragile hegemony and remake our rotten system? Join with other comrades who have been asking these questions for the first in a series of three events exploring left strategy today.

10th October: What is to be Done? Organisational forms and the prospect of a new party.
Andrew Feinstein / Ash Sarkar / James Schneider / Keir Milburn / Hilary Wainwright

In 2017, nearly 13 million people voted for Jeremy Corbyn’s radical left-wing programme, demonstrating the viability of a popular mass politics opposed to inequality at home and war abroad. Since then, the establishment has tried to erase that result from public memory. Yet the election of nine Green and independent MPs this year shows that they have not succeeded yet. To capitalise on this historic breakthrough and rebuild our strength at the national level, socialists need a new political organisation. But what form should it take? How should it relate to left parliamentarians, trade unions, social movements and the broader working class – especially outside the major cities? Should it be focused on the electoral sphere, or should it play a more expansive role?

What Next? How can we take on the far-right and the extreme centre to remake national politics?
Jeremy Corbyn / Richard Seymour / Ashok Kumar / Halimo Hussein / Grace Cowan

The long-simmering threat of the far right has now burst into the open. Reform UK elected five MPs this year and came second in 98 seats. Racist riots have erupted across the country, fuelled by an ecosystem of migrant-baiting politicians, media outlets, funders and influencers. With Labour more than willing to mimic the toxic politics of Farageism, a new left electoral project will have to challenge the xenophobia of the entire political class. How can it rise to the challenge? How can those interested in national organisation move forward collectively? What should we do next?

Residual Welfare Vs Universal Social Security

It's now abundantly clear what Tuesday night's Winter Fuel Allowance vote was about. It wasn't, according to the cynical and dishonest household budget metaphor, a money saving measure. Showing the political establishment that, like in opposition, Keir Starmer's Labour would carry on being strong on the weak was a useful by-product, but not the main reason. Nor was it an exercise in a twisted notion of fairness, where pensioners are going to have to suffer because it's "their turn" - following 14 years of attacks on younger, working age people. No, what Rachel Reeves really set about doing was abolishing an example of universalism, of rubbishing the idea that social security should be accessible to all.

How do we know this? The new Labour government have told us in not so many words. From the beginning, Reeves said stopping the payments would be mitigated by a campaign to get more eligible pensioners on to pension credits. My friend Pete Nicholls has roughly calculated that the take up of pension credits by an extra 800,000 eligible pensioners would cost over £2bn - wiping out the £1.2bn it would contribute to closing the famous £22bn black hole. Regardless of what one thinks of Reeves, Starmer, and the rest, they are not stupid people. They know this is the case, which ineluctably points away from fiscal prudence towards a different objective: universal provision.

In this respect, Reeves truly is the heir to Blair. Universalism is not "progressive". It costs a bomb and is "inefficient" because people who don't need it get it. I'm sure His Blairness would have performatively disavowed his Winter Fuel Payment, if the government was in a bit of a spot and they asked him. But this is ideology masking interests. Since the battles successfully waged by Thatcher in the 1980s, her aim of stripping back the welfare state and public services to the barest minimum has largely succeeded. Residualism is the common sense. This was a strategy in her class war to permanently tip the scales away from labour to capital. I.e. Clawing back benefits, introducing conditionalities, holding them down at barely subsistence levels, was an effort to centre the wage as the primary, if not the only means of income for millions of people - giving capital the whip hand. In Thatcher's scheme, it sped up labour "flexibility". By cutting social security, she made sure any job was better than no job, even if the pay was poor and the conditions abysmal.

This contrasts with how the architects of thw welfare state saw things. Whether one was Labourist, one nation Tory, or Liberal, it represented a social wage. Universal social security provided a floor designed to catch anyone who fell on hard times. Welfare was never a luxury, despite how the unchanging propaganda of the last 45 years styles it, nor was it a product of high-minded enlightenment by clever, compassionate politicians. It was a gain extracted from capital by labour as the cost of avoiding social unrest and certain kinds of events. The fact of universalism gave other layers in society a stake in the social security system. Better off families might not have needed child benefit, for example, but it gave them extra spending power they could splash on extra clothes, treats for the children (and treats for themselves). But by extending them a stake, it was hoped opposition to their losing an entitlement would protect those who really needed it - families crippled by low wages and debt, mums financially controlled by abusive husbands, and so on. And as imperfect as it was, universalism was a bureaucratic expression of solidarity. Universalism, as a product of heightened class struggle when our people were politically ascendant, went into retreat as the tides of battle flowed in the bosses' favour. As class consciousness eroded it was easy to characterise universal entitlements as largesse/symptoms of administrative inefficiency, and the axe fell on them in due course. Unsurprising that getting shot of Winter Fuel Payments, ironically introduced under the otherwise anti-universalist Gordon Brown, fits the Starmer project like a hand in a glove.

As we noted the other day, this was not a "tough choice" for the government. But one, from the standpoint of Starmer's statecraft, a politically necessary one. Universalism raises the idea of everyone getting something, of building on collective aspirations that lie outside the class alliances and type of capitalism the Labour right want to build. This is a capitalism that offers steady, stable growth, is run by Treasury-brained technocrats like Reeves, has a re-legitimated state that works, a pacified work force interested in consumer durables and coffee shops, and returns a semi-permanent government of centrist sensibles at election time. There is no room for alternative ways of doing things. Hence universalism is anathema not just to the nuts and bolts of this dismal project, but to their very conception of politics.

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Labourism's Cruel Contortions

According to a report from Monday night's PLP meeting, there was "prolonged cheering and clapping" for Rachel Reeves after she'd outlined her argument for scrapping winter fuel payments. Avoiding charges coming from all political quarters against her attack on pensioners, the chancellor apparently stuck to principle. i.e. That voting against the policy is to oppose means testing per se. This won over some of the doubting thomases because no one thinks millionaires need £200-£300 extra. And those millions of edge cases who don't qualify for pension credits but will suffer when the payment is revoked? They either don't matter or exist in changed Labour land.

As recently argued, this "tough choice" is about demonstrating the new government's reliability where capital is concerned. Yes, some wealth taxes might be in the offing, but there are class politics to be managed. For every move most of the left would be on board with, such as settling the NHS and rail workers strikes, extending workers' rights, ending right-to-buy, each has to be tempered. Pay deals now mean "reforms" later. A better deal at work comes after significant dilution. The subsidised council house sell-off continues with properties built before an arbitrary cut off point. Aspirations have to be shaped and framed, and that means not letting them get out of hand. Putting a lid on things is the sine qua non of Labour politics.

That requires regressive moves too. Pushing their attack on the elderly as a "progressive" move against the well off is an assault on universalism and an affirmation of the residual welfare state. It sends a very clear signal. Under Keir Starmer, there will be no return of social goods that were curtailed in favour of conditionality. And it also tells capital that similar moves in the future are possible. Ending the single person council tax discount, raising tuition fees, and even means testing the state pension are not ruled out. Residualism suits because, in the round, it makes labour more dependent on capital for its income. It disciplines by encouraging working people to save for their old age instead of thinking about collective action, creates more markets for new pension "products" and insurance and as per the Tories limits expectations on what the state can and should do.

Coming back to Tuesday night's vote, chances of a substantial backbench rebellion are low. Rachel Maskell, who's led the charge in "opposition" to the cut, says she will abstain. With perhaps 30 other MPs too, lest they lose the whip like our pre-recess Magnificent Seven. It will be interesting to see who among them file through the no lobby in the hope of returning to the fold. What the promised abstentions and uncertainties underline, as per the character of Labourism, is its variability and unreliability. Anger at Labour MPs who vote with the government or fail to oppose them is justified, but speaks to the weakness of the left outside of Labourism. Their vacillating and shilly-shallying is a political problem and not a failure of backbone. Until an alternative centre of political gravity is established that presses Starmerism from the left, we can look forward to being in this position many times over the next decade.

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Right Wing Bogeys in Lucifer's Hammer

Picking out conservative tropes in science fiction is an interesting sideline. Especially when they normally skip by overlooked and unnoticed in somewhat canonical works. Another case in point is Larry Niven's and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer, their best-selling late 70s thriller about a cometary impact and its aftermath. Spoilers follow.

The book arrives in three acts. The lead up to the impact, the catastrophe itself, and the aftermath as survivors come to terms with their devastated world. The first provides background to our characters, but often these slip into observations that would rile anyone not on board with blokey American conservatism. It ranges from the puerile (a Soviet astronaut called Jackov, which is heavily underscored, and speculation about how female astronauts go to the toilet in zero gravity), to the cynical (Alim Nassor, a former Black Panther and community champion who uses both as a cover for criminality), to the gratuitously misogynistic (Fred, a convicted sex offender, keeps voyeuristic tabs on a neighbour who he sexually assaults and murders, knowing the calamity will scrub out any consequences for him). None of which bring nothing to the narrative.

The second act shows the unfolding disaster from multiple angles. The omniscient narrator dispassionately tracks the explosions and tsunamis as they scrub out millions of lives, while our characters either meet their doom or scramble to safety in the hills above Los Angeles. The silliest moment involves several dozen surfers paddling out into the bay to catch the wave to end all waves. One of them manages to ride it in, until he gets face-planted by a 30 storey building.

But it's the final act where Niven and Pournelle's prejudices are let loose. Trusting to his prepper instincts, Arthur Ellison - a Californian Senator - retreats to his ranch with supplies to see his family through the apocalypse. Safely ensconced in a valley sheltered from the worst, he and his lieutenants make a stab at organising the survivors to see out the coming winter. This means making "tough choices" in keeping others out of his community, lest their supplies won't stretch. Some are let in - technicians and engineers, bourgeois-types - but it's the road for most. Life here is harsh, as most have to work the fields for the barest rations, and are forced to give up supplies they may have hoarded on pain of banishment. But most of the action focuses on what's happening around the senator's table, as local strongmen, his special advisor, and recent arrivals debate the direction the new community should head in. It's an all-white, all-male jamboree where women are trophy daughters or the secretarial help who supply ersatz tea and coffee. A vision of Reagan's America before Reagan's America.

Meanwhile, another force is stirring in the blasted landscape outside the valley. African-American Sergeant Hooker takes over his army unit and turns cannibal to survive. They quickly absorb other forces, including the survivors of Nassor's crew, as well as linking up with culty religious fundamentalists. These are unmistakably the baddies. Black men plus extremist zealots that feast on human flesh, could they get any worse? Why, yes. One of the New Brotherhood's leaders was an ecologist, opponent of nuclear power and, worst of all, previously a labour organiser in the valley. He - along with the zealots - push for attacks on remaining industry as it was responsible for the fall. In other words, the wrong 'uns are all the bogeys that then, as now, gets the right hot under the collar.

The scene is set for the final showdown between the forces of light and dark. Naturally, the advantages lie with the New Brotherhood. As per every conservative nightmare, there's more of them as they swarm over the valley's positions. Booby traps, roadblocks, none of which slow down our ethnically diverse and politically suspect cannibals. They even have tactics that outflank and confound the goodies' strategies, which is most unsporting of them. Before long, we're in another valley. Only one ridge line and its defenders stand between chaos and white America as we appreciate it. The battle begins and the secret weapon is deployed - mustard gas! In scenes redolent of Churchill's enthusiastic advocacy of using poisonous gas to put down colonial revolts, jar after jar of the stuff is catapulted into the New Brotherhood's lines and they're immediately routed. California, at last, is made safe for Republicans.

The novel then judders to a quick finish. One moment, the Valley leadership are debating whether they should send forces to defend the remaining operational nuclear power plant from attack by the remnant New Brotherhood, and then it's the epilogue where the threat was seen off, industrial civilisation is reviving, and Cosmonaut Jackov - who earlier splashed down in neighbouring territory - runs his own gulag populated by prisoners of war from the Brotherhood. It's a restatement of conservative America, a victory over the dread trends unleashed during the 60s and 70s - feminism, anti-racism, environmentalism - where those meant to rule rule, and minority ethnicities eke out a pastoral existence behind watch towers and barbed wire.

As apocalyptic novels go, Lucifer's Hammer makes for a pacey page turner in the airport mode. The catastrophe wrought by the impact is well done, and the debates had about surviving the coming winter and building something that can last are interesting and do a good job at setting out the stakes. But this is inseparable from the inflection of Niven and Pournelle's conservative dispositions. Lumping everything they detested about 70s America into their bad guys was a crass move, but one that is not immediately obvious - like, say, the frequent snarks at "women's lib". It speaks to the subtlety of how regressive views acquire a free pass by framing prejudices in naturalistic or matter-of-fact ways that don't invite comment. Hammer is entertaining, but it's entertainment in the service of an agenda that was out of sorts then, never mind now.

Camisra - Let Me Show You

Ignore the low effort Armin remix doing the rounds and enjoy the original. A thick slice of late 90s Friday nights.

Emmanuel Macron's Cowardly Coalition

After weeks of refusal to appoint a new Prime Minister after losing the French parliamentary elections, the Jupiterean Emmanuel Macron has appointed his representative on Earth. And it's our old friend from the Brexit negotiations, Michel Barnier. For those who haven't followed the farce that French politics has become, on 10th June Macron called a snap election after his party - now titled Ensemble - got a drubbing at the EU elections. This unexpected move, which the clown king of France hoped would confirm him a masterly genius of the political arts, was with a view to bringing the far right to office and have the National Rally's aura dispelled by the difficulties of having to run a government. This being the only scenario that might give his successor a chance at the next presidential election. No, he wasn't thinking about how spectacularly this move misfired in 1933 in France's next door neighbour, but recent experience from Finland. There the far right have held seats in the government since last year, and whose popularity has plummeted - also confirmed by the same EU elections.

Unfortunately for Macron, his scheme came to nought. Following local deals ahead of the second round of voting, the left's New Popular Front and Ensemble formed a "Republican Front" alliance by withdrawing candidates in favour of who was best placed to beat the RN. It proved successful. The far right were shocked by their third place finish and 142 seats, vs the centrists' 159 and the left's 180. Though, like Britain, it was the gaming of the electoral system that ensured this outcome: the RN out-polled both in absolute vote terms.

Not getting the result he wanted, Macron has since played a petulant game - severely shaking the legitimacy of French "democracy" and exposing the reality of the state more effectively than any number of public readings of The State and Revolution. The left's policies, which included ending arms sales to Israel and recognising Palestine, price freezes on essentials, the rejection of neoliberal "fiscal rules", and abolition of the Fifth Republic, are not in the interests of the class forces Macron champions. Instead of appointing a new PM from the NPF, he vetoed their participation in any new government.

This is where Barnier comes in. His Republicans continued their historic decline, having had their base previously shredded by Macron and Le Pen, and limped into the Assembly with 39 seats. With this feeble force allied to Ensemble a centre right government under Barnier's leadership can pick up seamlessly where the old one left off. Le Monde reports that Macron has been on the blower to Le Pen for a week trying to come up with a candidate she finds congenial. She acquiesced to Barnier because he's a "negotiator" and might be amenable to RN's influence, seeing as the Barnier/Macron lash up remains a minority government. But it suits Le Pen for a few other reasons. Playing kingmaker consolidates the motherly, elder stateswoman image she has cultivated in recent years. Vibing sensibility might detoxify her just enough to push her (or her successor) over the line at the next presidential election. Similarly, by staying outside of government the RN can present itself as unsullied - which defeats Macron's reason for calling the election in the first place. And lastly, it keeps the left out of office. Their social programme threatens to undercut the bases of far right support. It would be the kiss of death for the RN to hold out against price controls and social housing building programmes, for example.

What's in it for Macron? Because his alliance with Barnier means more authoritarian austerity, he thinks enough of a cordon sanitaire has been maintained for Macron's successor and Ensemble to try and play the Republican Front card again at the presidentials in the hope they will be in the run off against the RN. At the same time, he will be daring them to vote down his minority government's measures because the alternative - the dread left - is too frightful to contemplate. And as a result become tarnished by the dark deeds Barnier can look forward to overseeing in the coming years, as per his original design.

As far as the left is concerned, the discipline the alliance of the Socialist Party, the Greens, the Communist Party, and Jean-Luc Melanchon's La France Insoumise has demonstrated is remarkable. Macron has failed to break the Socialists from their more radical stablemates - a rare instance of the left realising that it needs to hang together, or it would assuredly hang separately. But this moment of danger is also one of historic opportunity. With the centrists, the right, and the far right manoeuvring to keep the NPF out of office they could capitalise on anti-establishment discontent. Big demonstrations against Macron's constitutional outrages are set for this weekend, and more of the same old from Barnier could, as per Macron's hopes, undermine the RN. But it wouldn't necessarily be the centrists who are best placed to benefit. It could be the left.

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Why Scrap the Winter Fuel Allowance?

Rachel Reeves's announcement to scrap the Winter Fuel Allowance has dogged Labour since the racist riots abated. Scrapping payments for all pensioners save those in receipt of pension credits hasn't proved to be popular. Instead of enjoying a honeymoon in the polls, the latest from BMG has Labour falling to 30%. Just four points ahead of the Tories who, by rights, should be out of contention for at least a decade. Indeed, this is the fastest polling slippage experienced by a new government in living memory. The first lasting achievement chalked up by Keir Starmer in office.

Labour's arguments are well rehearsed by now. Because government finances are exactly the same as a household budget, the nation has to tighten its belt and balance the books. Our income must match our outgoings. Especially with the shock horror discovery of a totally unforeseen £22bn overspend by the Conservatives. And so WFA is deemed a nice-to-have and has to go lest we have another run on the pound and a Liz Truss-style meltdown - so said Leader of the House Lucy Powell at the weekend. Because of the Tory legacy, this is merely the first of other "painful decisions" to come.

Going after help for heating as another round of energy price rises are due is classic bad timing, but even without that this presents more political problems for Labour than it solves. The Tories went out of their way to partially shield pensioners from their cuts programme (partially, because the public services they depend on - above all adult social care and the NHS - got hammered), and while election data suggests the Tories won among the over-65s again it was on a lower proportion than the other outings of recent years. Having gone to the right and, indeed, actively avoided taking on the politics the Tories and Reform use to mobilise their elderly support, there's nothing like scrapping winter fuel payments that could bin the support of older people who have always voted Labour or lately turned to them out of exasperation faster.

We know the hard decisions rubbish is the cover, but why is the Labour leadership happy to make millions of pensioners fear the winter? There are three that jump out. The first is the recent orthodoxy of the Labour right. Because progressive taxation is progressive in the sense those earning the most pay more tax, scrapping universal benefits is also "progressive" because only those who need them get them. The waste of monies going to the well off is avoided. We saw similar Blairite defences of tuition fees during Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. This is really a gloss on the Thatcherite project of residualising social security, one that is inseparable from divide and rule efforts and the stigmatisation of benefits dependency. A far cry from the Labour right of the post-war period who, in the main, extended universalisation to win support for the welfare state among those layers who didn't need it precisely so the floor for those who did could be politically maintained. As solidarity is only a word in the dictionary as far as Reeves et al are concerned, universal benefits are public subsidies for the better off. Funny how that attitude never extends to tax breaks for the wealthy, nor other schemes of state largesse.

Then we have the reversal of the Tories' beggar-thy-neighbour strategy that set the old against the young. Labour knows that "working people" paid the price of successive Tory governments, which is why they made so much of ruling out raising income tax, National Insurance, and VAT during the election - while keeping other taxes on the table. Their view is one of returning the disfavour. Shielding workers from paying for the confected crisis of state and getting pensioners to cough up legitimises the fiscal straitjacket, because they're seeing the layer who "did well" out of the Tories being forced to assist the Starmerite clean up.

Lastly, pensioners tend not to vote Labour anyway. That alone should mitigate electoral fall out. But on top of that, getting this cut out the way in the early days of the new government means no one will remember it five years from now when the corner is turned, the economy is moving, and the state and public services are working properly. Plus, to put things bluntly, a significant number of 2024 Tory voters will have passed on without requisite replacements filling the box in next to Conservative (or Reform) candidates. Why worry?

In sum, plenty on the Labour right think it's the progressive thing to do, it curries favour with what they imagine to be their political base, and the party is shielded from the electoral fall out by a confluence of existing pensioner political preferences and the actions of Old Father Time. Through the frame with which Number 10 sees politics, despite their spinning and rhetoric this "tough choice" is nothing of the sort.

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A Note on Authoritarian Modernisation

In a recent comment on the analysis of Keir Starmer's "tough choices" speech, an anonymous contributor argues that to talk about Labour's "mission" in office is to extend them the kudos they do not deserve. They are straightforward lackeys of capital and puppets of the US state department, and that's all we need to know. This speaks to an attitude I encountered while writing the book. We know the Tories are bastards, we know they are our enemy, so what else is there? That was a profoundly mistaken attitude then, and it's just as wrong about Starmer and co.

Every party develops an approach to statecraft before and during their time in government. This is their strategy to achieve whatever their goals are, which (among other things) always involves staying in power. Consider the lately departed Conservative Party. Their five Prime Ministers had an approach to governing within the shared problematic of managing existing class relationships and tilting the balance of power further away from labour to capital. For Dave and Osborne, deficit determinism and cuts to the public sector picked apart workers' freedoms and subjected ever more social life to the demands of capital accumulation and profit. It was an atomising strategy, and one designed to force millions more into the insecurity of temporary, part-time, and low paid work. Theresa May was most concerned with keeping her party together as the most reliable political vehicle of bourgeois rule under the contradictory pressures of Brexit. For Boris Johnson, it was a chaotic blizzard of half-arsed modernisation, bluster and boosterism, division and authoritarianism, and outright lying. Liz Truss didn't get much chance, but slashing taxes for the rich and hoping it would unleash an investment boom had a governance logic to it. And lastly, Rishi Sunak's depleted state approach was designed to manage political demands with lashings of egregious, Johnson-era scapegoating.

What is the point of knowing this? So oppositions can plan accordingly. If you have a handle on statecraft, you can try and exploit the tensions within it, the blind spots, and those parts of it that could succumb to mass opposition. It's the ABC of any radical or socialist politics.

"Starmerism", or authoritarian modernisation, is no different. Our new front benchers like being front benchers. They want to keep the perks and the ministerial motors. This requires strategy, giving us the approach that has come together during the four years of opposition. Except because they are the Labour Party with different constituencies and different relationships to capital, their approach to their self-preservation cannot be a simple cut and paste from the Tories. Hence instead of running down the state and its authority, Starmerism wants to improve it. Rather than trying to rule what's in and out of politics by undermining the state's capacity to do things, Starmer and Rachel Reeves have set about - via their "missions" - to renew national institutions with a seemingly apolitical and managerial accent. Managing the relations of production is the priority (the Starmerist state is a capitalist state after all), hence the monomaniacal emphasis on "economic growth" - the end to which all aspirations are subordinate. This is not a grand narrative, or even a pseudo-intellectual exercise along the lines of 1990s Third Way piffle. Though if you must the Fabian lines of descent are noticeable. Authoritarian modernisation - the continued evacuation of accountability from our politics, in lockstep with arbitrary and elitist decision-making married to a project of refurbishing the legitimation functions of state and making its institutions "work" - is the strategy of the Starmer government. And understanding this allows its opposition to prepare for where this could lead.

Some more discussion about authoritarian modernisation on this short (£) episode of Politics Theory Other.

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Five Most Popular Posts in August

Considering I wasn't blogging like the clappers last month, audience-wise this place did quite well. More of the same please! Here's what did the wellest among the well.

1. Why Does Labour Hate Universities?
2. Keir Starmer's Reluctant Anti-Fascism
3. The Defence of Douglas Murray
4. Rachel Reeves's PFI Enthusiasm
5. Coddling the Far Right

The refusal of Labour to do anything about the crisis in British universities came out on top. What are they thinking? Why has it said they're relaxed about seeing some institutions go under? In at two was a consideration of Keir Starmer's strategy at the beginning of the month in putting down the far right riots and banging up participants. Note that the instigators, without which none of it would have been possible, haven't been held to account. Speaking of one of them, the pathetic arguments mustered in defence of Douglas Murray's respectable racism came under scrutiny in August's third placed post. And finishing it off, Rachel Reeves's resort to wasteful but capital-friendly PFI-style schemes for insfrastructure and the Tories' (remember them?) indulgence of far right argumnents make up the final two.

Thinking of who to wheel out on the in-case-you-missed-it cart, it's the Chancellor again and her not-at-all clever political strategy informing her warnings about a "painful" budget, and let's be having something else about the Tories. This one looks at our leadership candidates' divided responses to the racist riots.

Thinking ahead for this month, perhaps I'll get round to writing about science fiction again. But I can see pieces on the Tory leadership contest, Labour's governing strategy, scrapping Winter Fuel Allowance, and sundry other things that events throw up. As ever, if you haven't already don't forget to follow the occasional newsletter, and if you like what I do (and you're not skint), you can help support the blog. Following me on Twitter and Facebook are cost-free ways of showing your backing for this corner of the internet.

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