Politically Exploiting the Low Paid

Leading the polls and without the other parties laying a glove on him, on Tuesday Nigel Farage made a play for what should be the bedrock of Labour's coalition: low paid workers. He committed Reform to scrapping the two-child limit on child benefit and making the case for a more generous marriage tax break. He said these measures would not promote dependency on social security, but make life easier for the lowest paid. When was the last time a front bench Labour politician stated such an aspiration as plainly and clearly? For good measure, Farage also wants to reverse the cuts to Winter Fuel and increase the basic rate threshold to £20k.

The replies from the Tories and Labour have been predictably pathetic. Mel Stride accused Farage of abandoning "hard working families who live within their means", in what likely signals a renewed Tory interest in scrounger discourse and trying to put Farage on the wrong side of that. Unfortunately for them, the public appetite for more welfare spending lies in the opposite direction - guaranteeing the hole the Tories are in will only get deeper. Ellie Reeves accused Farage of promising a Liz Truss-style gambit and the chaos that entails, failing entirely to challenge Farage on his promise to raise the living standards of the worst off.

Looking across the continent, a small but significant part of the appeal of the extreme right is what political scientists call authoritarian welfarism. I.e. Talking up the usual divide-and-rule drivel one would expect of these formations, but buttressing their construction of the in-groups with material benefits that the out-groups are excluded from. And as they make such promises, for some who are hard-pressed by decades of rich-friendly, anti-worker policies the promise of more money, be it through social security transfers or tax cuts, and/or better/more housing is a tantalising offer. These parties are offering punters a rational choice that many can ill-afford to turn down. It's also more concrete than the nebulous promises of GDP growth raising living standards, as proffered by the centre left and centre right.

We've had experiments with the exclusion of "undeserving" recipients in this country. Following the Tories, New Labour scapegoated imagined cohorts of the feckless and the idle, with myths peddled about families who've shirked work for three generations. It was this that led to Labour developing the hated Work Capability Assessment for disabled people. This rhetoric shifted into high gear during the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, where old people were shielded from their cuts programme and everyone else were dealt new hands of exclusions, sanctions, and payment freezes. Under Boris Johnson, after the initial impact of Covid the first emergency measures rolled back were the suspension of welfare conditionalities, and now with Keir Starmer the government want to take social security away entirely from young people who "refuse to work". Whoever these are. And, of course, there are disability cuts too. If anything, what Farage is proposing is more generous than the skinflint policies that have characterised Tory and Labour approach to welfare - save the break from this during the Jeremy Corbyn interlude.

I'm not about to suggest Reform is outflanking the other parties from the left. The centrepiece of their platform - raising the tax threshold - is something of a tell. While more of the low paid have been drawn into paying income tax thanks to increases in the minimum wage, lifting the threshold is a nice bung for better off taxpayers too. Indeed, they are the ones that receive the full benefit from doing so. Second, minimising tax on the lower paid is a hidden subsidy for poverty pay employers. I.e. Why have businesses shell out more to their workers if abolishing PAYE sees pay packets go further? And how might Reform affect to pay for this? By stripping back other state responsibilities. Farage has occasionally ventured comments about wanting to see the NHS replaced by an insurance scheme. Undoubtedly, chopping down the civil service, wiping out non-statutory public services provided by councils, gutting preventative health budgets, crushing further and higher education, abandoning plans on transport and energy infrastructure, and borrowing for day-to-day spending are ways one might expect Reform to meet its new commitments. A true robbing Peter to pay Paul trick, a reactionary attack on the state's capacity to do things no different in kind to Tory attitudes toward the state. But with 'helping the poor' providing this reactionary, authoritarian project political cover.

Image Credit

Labour's Money Woes

A small item in a week full of big stories. LabourList reported that the party's finances have plunged into the red. Actual figures weren't given, but £4m is needed to fight next year's local elections - the ones Keir Starmer's political future increasingly hinges on. How has the party got into this predicament? There was the small matter of last year's general election, but apart from that nothing else is said. It's as if fluctuations in the bank account are simply natural, with the party going through endless cycles of heavy spending and retrenchment. The great unsaid is this model of financial precarity is quite deliberate.

There's only one 21st century Labour leader who did not face a party funding crisis, and it was old unmentionable himself, Jeremy Corbyn. In fact, despite splashing the cash at the 2019 general election the party was still in the black when it was handed over to Keir Starmer. And this, some readers might recall, was because of the huge membership. The subscription base alone secured Labour's finances, and the enthusiasm they generated fundraised millions more. Add in the trade union fees and donations and, for four years, the party was awash with cash. It disproved the "common sense" that parties needed rich donors. Clearly, if enough people get on board, they do not.

When Starmer took over, he immediately went to war with the membership and, unsurprisingly, hundreds of thousands of them voted with their feet. Including, eventually, your scribe. Contributing to Labour's current woes are further falls in party membership, with the rumour mill suggesting 10% of those on board during the last election have upped sticks. But this is how Starmer and the bulk of the parliamentary party like it. Crowd-funded monies for workers' parties is good, because it provides the economics underpinning their political independence. But for the careerists who make it to the top, this is a barrier to their integration into the establishment. Starmer's jettisoning of members wasn't just a case of reversing the democratic gains made in the party under Corbyn, but a concerted effort at making Labour amenable to bourgeois interests - and what better way than making it financially dependent on the largesse of the rich?

As noted here many times, Labour play the game of having to constantly reassure capital that it's on their side. And this is because Labourism itself, from capital's point of view, always carries the trace of danger - no matter how supine and pro-business a Labour government. Corbynism reminded the powers that be that, from seemingly nowhere, the B team of British politics can occasionally be the site of class aspirations from below and threaten to upset the prevailing class settlement. The leadership's choice to skirt insolvency is a political one as it keeps them close to the interests Labour was set up to contest. Therefore the elite-courting cash raising plans they implement to keep the lights on, even if it risks accusations of sleaze and cronyism are, as far as Starmer, the PLP, the media, and the business class always preferable, because it keeps a lid on British politics and preserve class relations as they are.

Image Credit

Explaining Rayner Danger

Angela Rayner's in the news. The Telegraph has been in receipt of documents showing that she argued for tax rises in cabinet meetings. These involved hideously Bolshevist measures like upping the back surcharge by five per cent and removing tax relief on dividends. Soon it will be a 100% wealth tax and the nationalisation of the country's cutlery drawers. For the Tory press, this demonstrates how beneath Labour's fiscal responsibility lurks a menace red in tooth and claw, desperate for the opportunity to push class warfare politics.

It's complete rubbish, of course. The threat the Deputy Prime Minister poses British capitalism is daily demonstrated by her going along with everything this government has done since assuming office. All the leak says is that, shock horror, there are different views in cabinet and that occasionally policies pushed by one minister or one faction are sent over to the Treasury for analysis. But because this is politics, everything has significance and is read as such, regardless of intention. Which has allowed for a bit of Kremlinology to work out what's going on.

Could it be that Rayner is positioning herself ahead of a leadership election before Labour goes to the country again? Where the beleaguered membership and affiliated unions are concerned, it's a reminder that someone at the top has an understanding of what Labourism is about. A diet of disability cuts and attacks on the elderly - u-turn notwithstanding - is a performance unlikely to make for happy campers, let alone electoral success. It keeps the soft left reassured and when Keir Starmer gets the heave ho, we can see who's politically best placed to take over. The leak therefore came from her team.

Or did it? We know who has a history of briefing against leading members of the government (a coincidence, I'm sure, that it's nearly always women on the receiving end), and that would be Morgan McSweeney and friends. This fits with a pattern of behaviour aimed at Rayner specifically. To their mind, Labour spending money and taxing the rich is very unpopular, and leaking Rayner's proposals would damage her in the eyes of the public and dent her chances among the PLP. This makes the party safe for Wes Streeting or some other horror to assume the leadership. It's the same kind of genius we saw on show when Labour's 2017 manifesto was leaked by a right winger, and helped ensure its offerings dominated election coverage for a few days - much to the party's benefit.

Regardless of why it was leaked, for the Telegraph it feeds into a Rayner danger obsession they share with the Conservative Party. Her politics are simultaneously chameleonic and Milquetoast, and carry a light stain of Blue Labour drivel. But as far as the right are concerned, Rayner is indelibly part of the trade union movement. Unlike Streeting and Bridget Phillipson, who are also from working class backgrounds, she made it into politics through the unions - Unison specifically. She reminds the establishment that Labour is fundamentally unreliable because Labourism draws its strength from the labour movement, and mobilises, still, the support of workers. This, despite the gyrations by many a Labour politician to play this down or efface it. For the hyper-class conscious leader writers of the bourgeois press, this is always a worry for as long as Labourism retains this base. It is chimerical, and even though Labour's history has been one of stabilising British capitalism, there are interludes where it appears poised to turn on its master - Bevanism, Bennism, Militant, and more recently Corbynism all threatened this country's class settlement, and were occasions for genuine panic in establishment circles. Rayner is attacked not only because of what she is, but because she - despite her own politics - represents to them the threat of what could be.

Image Credit

Todd Terry - Something Goin' On

Earlier on Bluesky, I gave this excellent channel a plug. Its project is the release of taped Pete Tong's Essential Selection from this very week 28 years ago. The memories! The nostalgia! And to mark my return to blogging following a four-day internet outage at home, here's a top tune from that very summer.

Imagining a Farage-Sized Hole

Can you think of British politics with a Nigel Farage-sized hole in it? This is the subject of this week's Bagehot column in The Economist. We learn that Tory and Labour MPs are in a funereal mood, following their effortless drubbing at the local elections. They do not have a clue about how to counter Reform's surge, and are left hoping that Farage's unhealthy habits - the famed boozing and smoking - make an intervention. What a condemnation of them that it's easier to imagine the death of Farage than defeating him politically. As the piece notes, "Each offers a similar slogan: “Nigel Farage is right — don’t vote for him.”"

Supposing fortune smiles on our discombobulated and panicked MPs, would the removal of Farage from the political scene make a difference? We don't have to commune with Mystic Meg and wait for the planchette to point out an answer because recent political history already spells out what we seek. For example, it wasn't that long ago that Reform looked completely washed up. The crucial factor here was Farage himself, who was too busy earning money as a pundit and jetting off to America to give Donald Trump a hand. The party was in the slow lane, and not even the Liz Truss calamity boosted its fortunes. Had Farage not returned to front line politics, it's unlikely Reform would have broken through in the general election and, instead, it would be the Tories now making the running with the anti-immigration posturing.

Going back a bit further, we can see what happens if a charismatic figure of the extreme right is taken out. Around the turn of the century, Pim Fortuyn welded together a platform with the classical features of populism, of opposing the good, liberal-minded, and gay-friendly Dutch people to criminals, state bureaucrats, and - crucially - Muslims. This was quickly broadened into attacks on multiculturalism and immigration generally. Fortuyn's positioning was enough to cultivate an audience, and during his brief leadership of the Liveable Netherlands party its polling shot up from two per cent to 17%. Following controversial remarks about immigration, he was sacked and founded his own party, Lijst Pim Fortuyn. This took control of Rotterdam council and was poised to make a big splash in parliamentary politics. Unfortunately for him, in May 2002 he was felled by an assassin's bullet. His party went on to win 26 seats but its impact was blunted with the loss of its personification and fell apart in subsequent years, finally dissolving in 2008.

The problem was that Fortuyn was dead, but "Fortuynism" had laid the groundwork for saying the "unsayable". Within a decade of his death, Geert Wilders and his PVV had seized his mantle and had established itself as the (then) third party in the Netherlands. As unstable extreme right parties are, especially so with their dependency on a charismatic leader, they respond to a constituency. Removing such a figure, in the absence of a successful political struggle and addressing the material roots of the far right, will only ever delay things until a new personality becomes the focal point.

If Farage exits the scene, there isn't anyone who can fill his shoes. And this includes Lee Anderson, despite media and elite efforts trying to make something of him. But the hunt will be on. Perhaps with him gone, Boris Johnson might choose that moment to return to the Tories. Some unknown be thrust into the limelight. Or a reformed (pun intended) Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, assuming he's not doing bird, could be available for media rehabilitation. Whatever the case, a dead Farage does not mean a dead Faragism. He was steadily built up through regular BBC appearances in the 00s, and quickly given the flattering treatment by a right wing press then at odds with the "liberal" conservatism of Dave and Osborne. With more opportunities available now, there's more chances at exposure. But also the greater chance of fractiousness, with GB News, the right wing press, and Reform figures likely to favour different candidates. However, Farage is not a one off. There are plenty of would-be Farages out there, and it's exceedingly likely any chaos as the result of an untimely demise will be resolved with the establishment parties finding themselves back in the same position.

Image Credit

Immaterial Labour, Values, and Voting

Happen to be at a loose end in Derby on Thursday 22nd May?

Why not come to The Quad and listen to me speak about a paper I have in the works. For long time readers, the subject won't come as much of a shock: the talk is called Immaterial Labour, Values, and Voting Behaviour. Here is the blurb.

Phil Burton-Cartledge’s research into the changing character of work and class in the 21st century argues that there are reasons to think the future might be a better place. Phil argues that observations around the values differences between generations, which results in different voting preferences as well as tendency to not vote at all, the emergence of gender splits along attitudinal lines, and the decline of anti-immigrant, racist, sexist, and homophobic prejudices are all part of the same process. In this talk, Phil explains and criticises other approaches offered by political science scholarship that have observed the same phenomena, but offer limited and, at times, contradictory explanations that avoid addressing the significant structural changes capitalism in the West has undergone. In contrast, Phil suggests that analysing these changes in their entirety brings out their political implications – which might mean the present resurgence of extreme right wing authoritarian politics could be its last gasp.

This is at The QUAD at 7pm. It's free but booking is recommended - you can do that here.

The Research Cafe is a monthly event where researchers, activists, academics, artists, and authors talk about their work. If you'd like to sign up for notifications for future events, just drop me a line and I'll get you on the mailing list.

Image Credit

Ambiguity in Lauren Beukes's Bridge

Jo is dead and someone has ransacked her apartment. The scene for Bridge is set, as Bridge - Jo's estranged and bereaved daughter - has to make sense of this mess. Working through the debris of her mother's home, Bridge finds something nasty in the fridge. Thankfully not a mouldy old plot ripe for an unwelcome warm up, but something rare: a treat that is part thriller, part literary SF, and all a nutritious contribution to a genre dominated by the sugar rush of wham bam space opera fare.

What's in the fridge is a dream worm, an elongated spool of edible thread that allows anyone consuming a piece of it to travel to parallel worlds. Or rather, their consciousness shifts from this reality into the body of an alternative version of themselves. Bridge's first trip finds her inhabiting a different Bridge out shopping in a supermarket with a child in tow. She leaps into the body of an outdoorsy social media star on an around the world trip for their YouTube channel. All of them, different glimpses of different lives if different choices had been made, or had history turned out a touch differently.

Unfortunately, as Bridge plunges into Jo's backstory she encounters people who also want the dream worm. And those who hunt down and kill anyone who uses it. Yet Bridge feels compelled to use it to connect with the other Jos in the other timelines. And what motivates the transdimensional sisterhood out to get her?

Bridge is a more engaging, interesting, and dreamily crafted novel than this violently reduced outline allows, and it raises questions about the health of SF best novel prizes that it did not garner so much as a short listed place. Perhaps one reason why had nothing to do with its quality, but its theme. i.e. It goes against the grain of much contemporary SF. As noted here several times, currently popular, pacey authors often employ a watered down Deleuzianism. For instance, MR Carey's Pandominion diptych also plays with parallel worlds, and uses conceits in which diversity and multiplicity is encroached upon by dangers that would force the beings and the cultures of his multiverse into a repressive, difference-denying unity. Similar is present in Adrian Tchaikovsky and in everything by Peter F Hamilton.

Deleuze and Guattari in their discussions of the molar and the molecular, the arboreal and the rhizome, and deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation said that one was not morally privileged over the other. Rather, their stress on forced unities was because theirs was a communist critique of capital, and were concerned with how molarity was forced upon us. Understandably, the target of Anti-Oedipus was Freudianism and the Oedipus Complex, and this was broadened out in A Thousand Plateaus. But this was context specific, and warned there was nothing positive or progressive in multiplicity in and of itself. They warned against too much deterritorialisation and molecularity as, at its extreme, it results in dissolution.

This awkward space is where Beukes locates Bridge. Bridge escapes her poor but freewheeling existence and lives for a while in the shoes of her alternate selves, but this process of deterritorialising from her reality is deleterious of her mental health - even if the thread tying her jaunts together is a search for a version of her mother. But the dream worm itself is dangerous. When someone ingests a thread, they play host to the worm and it is speculated that eggs are laid in the minds of anyone who receives an extra-dimensional visitor. It can grow and, in some cases, be seen writhing under the skin of the arms and wrists. And if left unchecked the worm can physically infect others with apocalyptic consequences. In so doing, Beukes avoids the simple juxtaposition of multiplicity and unity, resulting in a complex and satisfying story. There are no certainties, only greys. No one in this novel is right or wrong, not even the sociopaths stalking Bridge. The embrace of multiplicity is the condition for the good life for Beukes's SF peers, but there is never a guarantee. It is full of ambiguities that have to be carefully navigated.

Image Credit

More Anti-Immigration Cynicism

Reflecting on the last five years of Tory immigration policy, Keir Starmer said "the damage this has done to our country is incalculable." Immigration has turned Britain into "an island of strangers". "Enforcement will be tougher than ever and migration numbers will fall" with the target of shrinking new arrivals by 100,000/year come 2029. That means care sector vacancies going unfilled, and because Labour hates universities, institutions face a tax on every overseas student the recruit. This performative toughness has won some support outwith the party. Germany's far right AfD have praised Starmer's position. The right here, however, are performatively unimpressed.

While she fights for relevance, Kemi Badenoch said "this is nowhere near the scale that we need". Writing on Conservative Home, Ted Grainger was more downbeat, opining that the Tories had their chance - especially following Brexit - but blew it. Nigel Farage attacked Starmer for "tinkering around the edges" and said Labour were "panicked" by Reform's rise. An observation that is obviously true. Meanwhile, Starmer continues to upset his base in the media with centrist opinion right royally angry about yet another betrayal of the liberal hero image they invented for him.

We know this strategy isn't going to work. Getting into a bidding war with the Tories and Reform on immigration is a mug's game. Getting Starmer to announce the policy in The Sun, and having Yvette Cooper appear on GB News and refusing to challenge the racist questions put to her won't change the equation at all. For the core pf the racist right, only pulling down the shutters will do for a start. And those for whom it is one issue among many, evidence shows Labour would be better off playing to its historic strengths. But, as we know, this government doesn't want to stand up to the few on behalf of the many because it might raise expectations and generate further clamour for challenging established power and wealth.

Let's try a thought experiment. Knowing that similar efforts everywhere on the continent has ended in ruination for the centre left, taking them at their word why are Starmer and friends asking us to believe they will avoid that fate? It seems they are relying on the politics of demonstration. Contrary to Starmer's disgusting rhetoric about "open borders experiments", the big drivers of immigration since 2021 have been the 150,000 who've settled here from Hong Kong. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, over 200,000 refugees have settled here too. Both helped immigration figures spike during the last couple of years and now, very obviously, numbers are going to come down again without any government intervention. They can only migrate here the once. Just like the £22bn black hole fantasy and other data points, this will be spun as the great success of Starmer's "toughness". Therefore, when the Tories and Reform attack Labour they will have the falling migrant numbers ready to whip out to refute their arguments. Genius! It won't convince the hardcore, but Starmer hopes it will assure the Reform adjacent and neutralise the issue, giving Labour political space to showcase their record. Like cutting the NHS, taking money off the disabled, arming a genocide, etc. etc.

The attack on immigration underlines the political vapidity and moral emptiness of Starmerism. If the strategy is expecting that, when push comes to shove in 2029, progressive voters line up behind Labour to prevent the right from getting in, carrying on like this is a sure fire way to replicate the disaster of the American presidential election and saddle us with Farage in Number 10. These are the stakes and, damningly, Labour doesn't give a hoot.

Image Credit

Reform's Anti-Asylum Council Wheeze

After sweeping all before it last week, there has been some thinking aloud about what Reform plan to do with its two mayoralties, 10 councils, and 676 new councillors. What Zia Yusuf, the moneybags businessman Nigel Farage has subcontracted the dictatorial running of the party to, has said is that their local authorities are going to lodge legal actions to prevent the dispersal of asylum seekers to hostels. "We have some of the best lawyers in the country working for free to resist this awful Government", he boasted.

The "reply" from centrist supporters of Keir Starmer has been insufferably smug. This so-called parody account sums up their social media outpourings to a tee: local authorities don't have the power to stop government resettlement efforts, and therefore Reform are going to be on the hook for wasting council money on pointless and doomed legal challenges. This is a demonstration of stupidity and ideology getting in the way of the serious business of delivering local services, helping ensure they lose support when the public wise up to their antics. The fools!

Unfortunately, the foolishness sits entirely with the centrists. Yusuf and Farage know legal challenges stand next to no chance. They're not embarking on this campaign because they don't know the limits of local government. It's a wheeze to build the party and keep Reform in the news. Every time a challenge is dismissed, they get to posture as the common sense little guy battling the liberal elites on behalf of hard-pressed Britons. It's a recipe for generating more headlines in the right wing press, getting the rest of the media to dance to their tune, and forcing Labour to follow their lead - because the government are uninterested in challenging anti-immigration and anti-asylum prejudices - and embedding Reform as the only real challenge to the status quo come the next election.

Yes, there will be grumbles along the way in Reform's new local government base. It won't be long before the diktats from the centre clash with what Reform-run councils and local authority party groupings want to do. There will be rows about Yusuf's power, and the usual suspensions, expulsions, resignations, and denunciations. Authoritarian politics breeds dissension. But this won't affect Reform's standing. Those who voted for them in the local elections were not convinced by their pledges on potholes and Special Education Need pupils. They're also aware councils don't have much power nor appear to respond well to residents' needs, regardless of the party who runs it. Farage and friends know this, even if super clever centrists do not. For Reform's campaign is an effort by a party serious about winning power in 2029. Something that cannot be said about the choices Labour has made in government.

Image Credit

New Left Media May 2025

Pleasingly, a few more new media projects have come to my attention since the last month's outing. And here they are.

1. Achamōth (Blog)

2. Back Zack (Website) (Bluesky)

3. Friends in Common (Blog) (Bluesky)

If you know of any new(ish) blogs, podcasts, channels, Facebook pages, resources, spin offs from existing projects, campaign websites or whatever that haven't featured before then drop me a line via the comments, email, Bluesky, Facebook, or Twitter. Please note I'm looking for new media that has started within the last 12 months, give or take. The round up appears hereabouts when there are enough new entrants to justify a post!

Image Credit

Science Fiction Book Haul #1

I have a wee problem. Not to the extent many a booktuber finds themselves in, but my collecting A format SF paperbacks is starting to eat up available shelf space. Does that mean I'm going to stop? No! Instead I'll start posting about hauls on here while weightier pieces carry on simmering at the back of my brain.

Kicking off this first outing is Sheri S Tepper's Gibbon's Decline and Fall. In the futuristic year of 2000 a "ruthless politician is amassing a terrifying fanatical power base" and misogynistic mobs are abroad. Sounds a bit familiar. Among a group of friends, the mysterious Sophy disappears and figuring out why she vanished is key to saving us all. Okay, not the most engaging of premises, but Tepper has written some celebrated works and this fact helped transport this from the charity shop's shelves to my own. Next up an obscurity from an unobscure author. Isaac Asimov's Through a Glass Clearly is a very brief 1967 collection of some lesser known shorts. No idea if they're any good or not, but on to the pile they go.

Michael G Coney's Syzygy is about a colony on a distant world consumed by inexplicable violence. What the hell is going on? Plague from Space by Harry Harrison is, you guessed it, about a plague from space. Can Dr Bertolli save the Earth from a cheesy-sounding 1960s cataclysm?The Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes is another planetary colony mystery. Tau Ceti Four is a lush, pastoral world of bountiful harvests. Yet this ecotopia is surrounded by a heavily fortified perimeter and no one knows why. Is there something lurking beyond the walls? This will probably be a fun read, but as Pournelle is involved there's bound to be unsubtle racism and conservative preachifying.

On to the last three, Pohlstars is a mid-80s collection of 15 years' worth of Frederik Pohl short stories. I thought it would be worth a stab, despite not liking his somewhat celebrated Gateway and its sequel, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon. We'll see if these are better. Then we have Robert A Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold. This tale of nuclear war survival is, apparently, not among his best. It aims to be a polemic against racist attitudes but Heinlein gets a little carried away with the racist and sexist views he puts into the mouths of his characters. Sure to be a fun read. And the last is a modern(ish) B format novel (yes, I habitually pick these up too) and it's Becky Chambers with Record of a Spaceborn Few. The third in her loose Wayfarers sequence, lots of cosy people being excellent to each other in spaceships is expected. I didn't mind her Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, but her work is never likely to push the boundaries of literature or provoke difficult thoughts about the world as is. Unless she turns heel and heads off in a completely different direction in future novels.

That's it for this small collection. The next exciting installment will drop when I've hauled enough to justify a post.

Zack Polanski's Green-Left Populism

Zack Polanski's announcement that he's standing for the leadership of the Green Party has set the hares racing. Over the last couple of days, he's done the rounds of left media, had write ups in the Graun, and - predictably - attracted hostile commentary from the right wing Jewish Chronicle and Jewish News. My Bluesky feed, which heavily leans on left and progressive-types has witnessed an outpouring of support and not a few signing up to the Greens to back his candidacy. Could it be that we're finally seeing something positive happening on the left?

There's certainly the space for it. For a variety of reasons, which you can put down to sectarianism, foot dragging, and the continued fealty to Labour on the part of those MPs who've already been chucked out of the party, there is a void to Labour's left dying to be filled. So wide it is that even Nigel Farage has said opportunist things about nationalising steel and liking trade unions. Therefore, as a socially liberal party that has been pushing a radical left platform for a while now, it would be a dereliction of political duty to not tread where Jeremy Corbyn and the independents and sort-of groups around him fear to go.

What has ben encouraging about Polanski's pitch is a recognition of the Green's weaknesses and the kind of politics that have to be pushed to wrest the radical mantle away from the extreme right. He says the Green Party is "too nice", which reflects dominant sections of its base among the middle class. I.e. Professionals and the highly educated, tending to cluster in the public and third sectors. The moment however demands a left populism that centres wedge issues around class, inequality, wealth, and environmentalism. You might say an approach owing more to Marx than Malthus. And there is an appetite for this politics. On a larger scale, Corbynism has twice demonstrated it has more popular appeal than Starmerism at its height, and so there is a constituency for the taking. Next year's metropolitan local elections across Labour strongholds are going to be very interesting.

The question is can the Greens become the left alternative if Polanski wins the leadership? One can look around at the, to put things euphemistically, patchy record of the party's co-thinkers across the continent. In the UK, Brighton council, Mid-Suffolk council, and the Greens' performance in the Scottish government hardly heralded red dawns. But neither were they worse than your average Labour council, for whom attacking workers and slashing services have long been the norm - even before the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition imposed ruinous cuts on local government after 2011. The alternative path away from that trod by establishment green parties is that taken by the green-left parties of Denmark, the Netherlands, and the Nordic Green-Left Alliance. There are no insurmountable reasons why taking a Scandinavian turn is impossible.

But there are two difficulties an explicitly left wing party faces. The first can be more or less ignored, and that's the scepticism many on the established left - your writer included - has toward political organisations not explicitly based on class. This is unlikely to prove an electoral obstacle, but puts a ceiling on the numbers of established left wing activists a Polanski-led Green Party can attract. Though, to be honest, he's not waiting around for any of their approvals. Perhaps the politics of the electoral deed might sway them. The second is more substantial: the Greens' non-radical wing. This is best represented by the local government inroads made before Reform was anointed the establishment's anti-establishment party of choice, and was recently highlighted when current co-leader Adrian Ramsey went off-script in an interview with the BBC's Nick Robinson and equivocated instead of pushing the party position on trans issues. There is a possibility that some of this layer could do a reverse Polanski and move from the Greens to the Lib Dems.

That said, there is undoubtedly a prize to be seized. With the extra-Labour left unwilling to move beyond marches and rallies, a radical Green Party that speaks to the interests of the rising class of workers, reflects the dominant socially liberal outlook of tens of millions, and is starkly posed as an alternative to the extreme right and what Labour are selling, could chime with the vibes of the moment and build that elusive left-populist insurgency this country's politics has so far lacked. Therefore, while I won't be joining the Greens, there's a good chance the tidal surge of a Polanski leadership could lift all our boats.

Image Credit

Scapegoating Badenoch

No one reading this will be shedding tears over the Tories' poor election performance, nor Kemi Badenoch's forlorn efforts at putting on a brave face. It was inevitable questions would be asked about her leadership, and on Monday the Westminster rumour mill went into overdrive. According to The Indy, unnamed (of course) MPs are doing the rounds organising huddles about how to get shot of their leader. "We cannot continue as we are and she is just not up to the task", moaned one of them.

Their beef is about Reform. There are complaints that Badenoch hasn't taken the threat from the extreme right seriously, ignoring efforts at setting up an anti-Farage attack unit and resistant to developing a strategy for dealing with them. Her lieutenants are clueless, and according to one of our anonymous interlocutors, she lacks charisma. The pollsters estimate she has a year to turn the ship around, but for impatient Tories yesterday isn't soon enough.

Never has a parliamentary party been more out of its depth in comparison to the impasse facing it. The Tories are confronted with what might be their final, terminal crisis and after years of denial, the rise of Reform has shocked some into panicked action. But what to do? In October, the parliamentary party decided that they wanted an out-and-out right winger and that's what they got. Badenoch has not set out any detailed plans, but she's on board with the natalist, nativist obsessions of the online right. The Tory membership liked the cut of her anti-immigrant and anti-trans jib which, you might think, would leave the Tories well positioned to stymie the desertions to their right. The always-awful Robert Jenrick is no different, even if his right-wingery comes from cynicism rather than conviction. And yet the disintegration continues apace.

What the boot Badenoch brigade have got to explain to their withering membership and declining support is how removing her would make the job of seeing off Reform any easier. The only political advantages Jenrick has over Badenoch, apart from being of a gender and skin tone more congenial to the dyed-in-wool racist core of Farage's coalition, is he might be better at Prime Minister's Questions. But that will not shift the dial. Time and again, surveys of Reform supporters show a deep antipathy toward the Tories and what, for them, was a failure to keep their promises on immigration and asylum. The problem they now have, out of office, is an inability to demonstrate their seriousness and efficacy on this and much else. Faced with a much more formidable communicator in the Reform leader, it's hard to see either the character-free voids that are Badenoch and Jenrick successfully wrestling the limelight away from Farage.

Where does this leave the Tories? It's long been my contention that the Tories can escape their doom loop by building a new coalition of voters, but that this is not an easy project because it means dumping the hard right rhetoric and with it the near entirety of their parliamentary party and a chunk of their existing base. As they can never win a bidding war with Farage, unless Boris Johnson was somehow tempted back, a more moderate conservatism that actually conserves instead of destroys is key to clawing back their heartlands lost to the Liberal Democrats, and challenging Labour to rewin the seats they lost by thin margins. This is the prospectus offered by no would-be successor to Badenoch, and even the so-called "centrists" like James Cleverly are chained to the same politics - as his run at the leadership and vocal support for the Rwanda scheme amply demonstrated. The Tories then are seemingly in an impossible position. Unable to diagnose the problem of their declining voter coalition and by blaming Badenoch, as per the politics they know very well they're dodging the complexity and going for the scapegoat.

Image Credit

What I've Been Reading Recently

Time for a catch up on the book front, seeing as this featurette has gone monthly. Here are the books read since last time.

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett
The Star Road by Gordon R Dickson
Timescape by Gregory Benford
Polaris by Jack McDevitt
Seeker by Jack McDevitt
Bridge by Lauren Beukes
The Volunteers by Raymond Williams
The This by Adam Roberts
Starfarers by Vonda N McIntyre
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
Synthajoy by DG Compton

As per the science fiction kick, April saw a boatload of skiffy and nothing else. In the good camp sits Chris Beckett and Lauren Beukes, both of whom have a good chance of making it into the ten best reads of this year. Dark Eden follows the tribulations of a marooned tribe of humans who've descended from a single pair of astronauts, and eke out an existence on a habitable but sunless world. Life is sustained by Eden's internal heating and the local wildlife make liberal use of bioluminescence. That's the premise for an excellent and literary study of group dynamics vs individuality, and the emergence of patriarchy and class in a pre-industrial society. Bridge is completely different, and concerns journeys through parallel worlds while marrying dreamy SF tropes to hunter/prey thriller writing. I still hope to write a post about it, so there might be more to come. Both are strong recommends for the science fiction curious who appreciate good writing.

Perhaps the most potentially interesting for readers of this blog is Raymond Williams's The Volunteers. Yes, he wrote an SF novel. Set in the late 1980s (this was published in 1978) during an intense period of class struggle, after a picket is shot by army strikebreakers a Welsh politician survives an assassination attempt launched by 'the volunteers' - a shadowy left wing organisation that has infiltrated the institutions of state to use the apparatus against itself. Imagine Socialist Action with guns and a bit of dynamism. Despite forecasting the coming of 24 hour rolling news, I didn't find The Volunteers compelling - though the occupation/shooting scene was brilliantly written.

Also of interest was the Adam Roberts. I blow hot and cold with his work, but I'm happy to say The This sits on the like/appreciated side of my ledger. Deleuze and Guattari wrote about conceptual personae in What is Philosophy?. Here, Roberts has not only turned Hegel's Absolute into a character, it's the hinge around which the novel hangs. A quick shout out to the McDevitt books too. I've always found our Jack's novels straightforward uncomplicated fun, and these two - in his Alex Benedict sequence - are no exception. I was also looking forward to Martine's A Memory Called Empire, seeing as booktubers generally rave about it and the book bagged a Hugo. But, in all honesty, it was very, very average. I think the vibe was trying to be Game of Thrones-style shenanigans on the imperial home world of an interstellar empire, and as Martine is a Byzantine specialist in her day job, she was better placed to carry this off than most but ... no. It lacked genuine urgency and has none of the compulsive pacing a political thriller requires to be successful.

But we do have a contender for the bad books for this year, and that's A Half-Built Garden. It wasn't badly written as such, and it does offer a different take on the first contact staple of SF. But where this goes awry is the massive deal she makes about recognising people's pronouns. Other writers, like Beukes above, seamlessly integrate non-binary characters into their narratives. In Garden, Emrys signposts and shoehorns pronoun clashes in to the detriment of the story, leaves them sounding unconvincing, and it looks too try hard and preachy. Not a favourite.

What have you been reading recently?

After the May Day Massacre

A bad night for Labour. A terrible night for the Conservatives. A parliamentary by-election that should have been routine for the government lost to Reform by six votes. 16 councils held by the Conservatives, all gone. 186 Labour and 676 Tory councillors looking for new ways to spend their evenings, May Day will rightly go down as a massacre. Nigel Farage's extreme right insurgency blew through council halls up and down the country and, with little effort, swept aside the established parties. The polls pointed to such an outcome, and these losses are the consquences of the strategies Labour and the Tories have chosen to pursue.

Reform did well, but no triumph is ever unqualified. The only party that benefits from hyping the result is Farage himself. In a reverse of last July's election result, in many council seats Reform won where Labour and Tory votes splintered and, like that election, turnout was low - though not historically so in local government terms. The second point is the character of Reform's vote. As has been argued here since time immemorial, over the last 15 years local elections and by-election have had an inbuilt Tory advantage. I.e. As a party heavily dependent on elderly voters, it has benefited from their disproportionate commitment to turn out and vote. Pollsters' data tables repeatedly demonstrates how Reform has a very similar voter profile, though with a tendency to appeal a bit more to older working age people than the Tories managed. Farage's success is dependent on a certain amount of clout the party has among these cohorts, and that it would be diluted in a general election where greater turnout, to a degree, depresses the influence older/retired voters exercise. Thirdly, how deep is Reform's support? In a conjuncture where Labour has made itself repulsive to older people, and the shambles the Tories have become speaks for itself, how much of this is driven by middle finger/burn-the-house-down nihilism? Immigration has always been a stand-in for a bucketful of grievances and is a condenser of concern. Therefore, if there are improvements in living standards and services and are seen to be improvements and are felt as such by the constituencies disposed toward Reform, Farage's support could prove temporary. At least that's what the data suggests.

But are we going to see movement in this direction? Labour, I suppose, are in a better position because they have the levers of government to hand and can pull on them to make the necessary differences. Unfortunately, while you even have awful right wingers like Jo White of the self-proclaimed Red Wall group dubbing the scrapping winter fuel payments Labour's "poll tax", Morgan McSweeney and Labour's big strategy brains are likelier to take notice on her call to get tough with grooming gangs. There are idiotic MPs punting for a watering down of Net Zero, and Keir Starmer himself says "he gets it" (gets what?) and that he'll go "further and faster" on his policy agenda. A politician acting in good faith and genuinely concerned about the results would have paused to think that perhaps it's those priorities that are the problem.

For the beleagured Kemi Badenoch, the task of turning it around for the Tories is much harder. How can she demonstrate change when the means for doing so are much more limited? Dave and Osborne had their fights over the Tory logo, and the superficial rebranding of the Conservatives as a socially liberal, pro-environment party. Badenoch and her stalking horse are boxed into a strategy where the Tories are trying to be more credible than Reform on the issues that Reform voters care about. It does make some sort of sense that they'd want to consolidate their base after a shattering defeat and an unprecedented challenge to their right, but going hard on immigration and anti-woke posturing cannot work because they have few means of demonstrating their efficacy. And while they do the Liberal Democrats carry on making inroads, turning what were their rural heartlands across England into new bases for a more moderate, inclusive centre right politics that the Lib Dems could well embrace. However, on Sunday's Laura Kuenssberg Badenoch said that, yes, people are angry with the Tories for their 14 years in office, but politically nothing needs to change. She even said twice that Britons needed to be having more children, referencing another social media obsession of the very online right.

While politics has changed, for both parties nothing has. Every election victory and defeat over the last five years has been interpreted as either vindication of a rightward turn or the outcome of not being right wing enough. Until their strategies are informed differently, more pain lies ahead for Labour and the Tories.

Image Credit

Five Most Popular Posts in April

That's the fourth month of 2025 done. Doesn't time fly when you're enjoying yourself? As per tradition, here are the top five by audience numbers.

1. Whingeing and Hand Wringing
2. The Lure of the Racist Self-Own
3. Communing with Dead Voters
4. Hard Talk from the Soft Left
5. The Class Politics of Trump's Tariffs

I wanted to bump up the blog posts this month, but ironically life, the universe, and cats conspired to keep the tally down. Next month hopefully! But what did well? At the top was a quick look at "Raf" Behr and his droning whinge about how nasty and hopeless Keir Starmer is. I would like to enjoy some schadenfreude at his expense, but unfortunately he and his privileged media ilk aren't going to suffer as a consequence of Labour's policies. In at second is the non sequitur that is 'Labour strategy', and why using the state for racist scapegoating is tempting for right wing middle class politicians, like Yvette Cooper, but is electorally self-defeating. Parking itself at three are the dead voters who live an active afterlife in the big strategy brains of the two main parties. Coming in at four are the recent criticisms of the government uttered by the soft left. And last is an effort at making sense of the seeming insanity of Donald Trump and his dysfunctional economics.

The second plug award this month is conferred on Data as Bourgeois Morality.

As previously said, I'd like to start ramping up posting again to a respectable level. Allowing for life and my evil feline (I'm convinced she's a reactionary conspiracy to stop my writing), there will be a lot more to look back on at the end of May. Takes on the May elections, Labour and Tory shenanigans, and the typical stupidities of politics are sure to provide plenty of material. I'll get round to penning something on a science fiction novel or two too! As ever, if you haven't already don't forget to follow the (very) occasional newsletter, and if you like what I do (and you're not skint), you can help support the blog. Following me on Bluesky, Facebook, and for what it's worth, Twitter, are cost-free ways of showing your backing for this corner of the internet.

Image Credit