The New Realpolitik

Two speeches about changed geopolitical realities. Ahead of his visit to see Donald Trump on Thursday, Keir Starmer has announced an acceleration in the government's plans to raise military spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027 and 3% after the next election. This will be funded by cuts to the foreign aid budget, reducing it from a "protected" 0.5 to 0.3%. It was a "hard choice" said Starmer, but with uncertainty abounding ("a dangerous new era") and an aggressive Russia on the edges of Europe he maintained there weren't any other options. But there is the happy by-product of this boosting jobs as war industries are expanded.

There was also a speech by Kemi Badenoch, who readers might recall is the leader of the opposition. Trying to pre-empt whatever Starmer was going to announce on Tuesday afternoon, the Tory leader demanded an increase in military spending to 3% of GDP by gutting foreign aid entirely. She also doubled down on a suggestion made by James Cartlidge, the shadow defence minister, on Sunday's Laura Kuenssberg. He floated the idea of cutting more from social security for disabled people specifically to buy bombs and bullets. Badenoch confirmed that further "savings" could be made from the welfare bill, one of many "painful decisions on government spending" she would find morally wrenching in an unfortunate world where she becomes Prime Minister.

She went much further than Starmer did on Britain's place in the world. Badenoch said Britain believes rules are important because it is a trading nation. "... other countries are breaking the rules and we need to get serious about that and not pretend that those things aren't happening ...". Is she saying that the UK should take rule breakers to task for flouting global obligations, or is she suggesting we should be prepared to discard them ourselves? The implication tends toward the latter as she attacked Britain's membership of the European Convention, saying the ECHR should not stop this country from doing what is right for its people. This is "conservative realism". Not the "progressive internationalism" supposedly characterising Labour's approach to world affairs (a demonstrably stupid charge).

"It was so bland, formulaic, and unsurprising that it would have made Chat-GPT blush" went Conservative Home's scathing review. Quite. But Badenoch's address wasn't without politics. Because the Tory leadership are desperate, desperate to court Trump's administration they are in their own pathetic, twee way pantomiming US unilateralism and prostrating themselves as doormats and supplicants. Ironically, the US strategy they're kowtowing to was the stock-in-trade of the Tories themselves for the latter half of the last government. This was sovereignty without limits, or to put it more baldly, power without checks. Having seen off the encumbrances of the labour movement and institutional autonomy within the state during the Thatcher/Major years, and then extricating the country from the very limited checks on executive authority represented by the EU via Brexit, the Tories want to set Britain free from any remaining obligations, including those enforced by treaty, allowing it to pick and choose. For what purpose? To give them maximum flexibility to manage class relations at home in an uncertain world where unexpected, unwelcome upsurges happen.

But this is so very academic considering how Badenoch is exceedingly unlikely to see the next election as leader, let alone be within a shout of capturing Number 10.

Starmer, however, must be eagerly awaiting how this militarist turn lands. Yes, it will go down well with with the Donald on Thursday - especially the move to cut foreign aid (which is equally as stupid as the USAID cuts, considering how much soft power is bound up with the disbursement of funds). But domestically, more military spending might cut the mustard with the Reform-curious reactionary Labour voter. It's Britain standing on its own feet and not being reliant on America any more (therefore being implicitly anti-Trump), while being framed as against Russia - something that Nigel Farage and the other bad boys of Brexit have an ambiguous relationship with. Starmer is pummelling Reform exactly where they have a significant weakness and are in a position to challenge its patriotism, and without Reform having a convincing counter-argument. Starmer, therefore, is well positioned to reap some much needed political capital from the changed circumstances and reverse Labour's mediocre polling position. Badenoch? Not so much.

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The Radicalisation of Young Women

"Why does 25% AfD among young men spark a thousand "what is going on with young men?" posts yet Die Linke 34% among young women generates...nothing at all? Yes, young men voting for the radical right is an important phenomenon. But so is young women going rad left *at even higher rates*." So writes Rob Ford, reflecting on the marked gender split among 18-24 year olds at Sunday's general election in Germany. The reasons why few if any have remarked on this trend probably has something to do with politics never taking women that seriously. But what is driving the gender divergence - also seen in this country - that sees younger women bolshevising at the rate of knots?

Three quick and dirty interlinked hypotheses.

1. Maria writes "I’m so looking forward to all the articles on why young women are being ‘pushed into the arms of the far-left’ due to their ‘legitimate concerns’ about things like bodily autonomy, rape culture and the hollowing out of state welfare protections, right?". Yes. Young women are encountering misogyny every day among their peer groups and the swill of social media. The election of the misogynist-in-chief in the USA, the antics of Elon Musk, and the widely publicised rejection of the gender equity lip service paid by American tech companies for a dorkish, inauthentic "masculine energy" reinforces the message that women don't matter. This is the background noise to efforts by the far right to politicise young men as incels and misogynists. While this commands the chin-stroking and concerned frowns, political science and political sociology has overlooked how this is politicising women in the opposite direction. Precisely because the far right politics of gender means stuffing women into a narrow straitjacket that comes in two sizes only: pornified objects and tradwives. Young women's embrace of the radical left is not just a reaction against forcing on them a stultifying subaltern identity. It's a realisation by them that contemporary misogyny is inseparable from the politics of oligarchy. That taking on patriarchal social relations is inseparable from the struggle against capital. They can clearly see who is pushing this drivel and why.

2. For well over a decade, concerns with the "new misogyny" has found a ready explanation in the changes to work and configuration of the labour market. Less attention, however, has been paid to the consequences this has had for women. On paper, immaterial labour - the dominance of 21st century work by the production of knowledge, services, care, social relations affords some advantages to those whose childhood and teen socialisation has stressed the importance of caring for others, having emotional intelligence, and developing a more pro-social as opposed to competitive, atomised individuality. Which largely remains the norm for the upbringing of girls. As noted many times here before, for the new working class of immaterial labourers/socialised workers, social liberalism is the practical everyday consciousness. Workers are required to mobilise their social being, their sociality in the service of their employer to collaborate with others and meet the needs of clients/customers. This is a set of tools capital cannot own, though it won't be for want of trying. Therefore efforts that the right use to mobilise its supporters. I.e. Making scapegoats out of vulnerable minorities is one reason why younger cohorts are repulsed by centrists and the mainstream right. However, survey after survey shows women are less susceptible to racism, anti-immigration politics, and transphobia. Why? Because they are more more likely to have been socialised into empathetic structures of feeling than men, which are continually reinforced by the capacities required by contemporary work cultures. And so women are more likely to feel an affinity between the belittling of minorities and their life experiences of becoming women, and draw the necessary (radical) political conclusions.

3. Younger women are more likely to go to university than men. This is partly because the growth areas in the professions - consistent with the rise of immaterial labour - offer a growing array of gender normative pathways to career success. More people with people skills are needed than ever before. However, as Dan Evans has rightly observed, there are not enough graduate positions to go around with many stuck for years, if not forever in non-graduate jobs after leaving university. The outcome of this is downward social mobility and a radical frustration with the world that, inter alia, provided many a shock troop to Jeremy Corbyn's campaigns. This is still true, whether we're talking about the UK or Germany. Because of the gender imbalance in universities, this crisis of the graduate is going to be disproportionately felt by young women. Their expectations frustrated and ambitions stymied, why not a radical politics that provides convincing explanations for why they are in this predicament? Certainly makes more sense than anything the far right and the mainstream have to say.

Two Points on the German Election

Two points. One's big. The other's small. But it might become big.

The German exit polls have mirrored those taken during the election. The CDU/CSU are out in front with circa 30% of the vote, the far right AfD on around 20%, the SPD have collapsed to around 16% - its worst result since the 1880s. The Greens are on about 13%, and the late surge for Die Linke puts them between eight and nine per cent. In political terms, Germany has become a "normal country". The centre has caved in (the FDP are on course to lose all their seats), the centre left have taken a battering, and the rise of the extreme right has grabbed the headlines.

There are obvious parallels between what's happened in Germany and what's unfolding here. A centrist coalition of sensible grown ups have presided over years of economic stagnation and lacklustre investment. Coincidentally, farmers' protests over the cancellation of a tax break was one of the nails driven into the SPD-FDP-Green coalition's coffin. The final straw was the provocative proposal of the FDP to take the axe to social security and public spending, which proved to be so popular that again they find themselves without representatives in the Bundestag. Having learned nothing and uninterested in the lessons of history, the SPD and Greens both pursued policies at odds with their popular constituencies and have paid the political price. As such, it was easy for the AfD to pose as the champions of ordinary Germans against a political establishment tone deaf on immigration, the cost of living, and efforts at undermining German identity.

The AfD have been assisted in this by Friedrich Merz, the Union's leader and incoming chancellor. Like the Tories his party have banged on about immigration, legitimating and amplifying an AfD that can easily outflank their positions. Indeed, if Merz has achieved anything long-lasting in toppling a decrepit opponent on his party's second lowest federal vote share, it is to confirm the Christian Democrats as the main right wing party in the west while allowing AfD to monopolise "real concerns" in the east. Merz has already courted notoriety by effectively cooperating with them in the Bundestag vote on a vote about immigration, and undoubtedly further such "accidental" alliances will be forged over the course of the next parliamentary session. As the party appears to have lost a million supporters to the far right, Merz will be hoping his "tough" approach will ensure further AfD-curious Union voters will stick with them, and that the old east/west border will confirm his partitioning of the right and stop them from setting up shop in his heartlands.

No one should not be complacent about the rise of the AfD. A fifth of the popular vote is only going to inspire more extremism and with it more violence against immigrant communities, sexual minorities, women, and political opponents. A Merz-led government doesn't care. Defeating the AfD and driving them out of politics will not come from above.

Which makes the small story of Die Linke's resurgence significant. First, they saw off the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, a reactionary split from the Left that embraced Blue Labourism with German characteristics. Going right on culture and left on economics is on-paper smart politics, since the AfD are effectively the FDP plus open racism and overlaps with fascist groups. But then again, none of the far right's supporters have voted AfD because they think free markets and neoliberalism are very good actually. Here, as there, it was a hiding to nothing and Die Linke have squelched them. Quite the turn around since BSW were beating them in the polls a few months ago. Some might put this down to the viral anti-fascist speech of co-leader Heidi Reichinnek, and there is some evidence - thanks to the largest turnout since 1987 - that a mix of this, its socially liberal pro-working class messaging and policies struck with the rising generation. Die Linke were by far and away the most popular party among younger voters.

Obviously, Die Linke are not perfect. The self-removal of the anti-woke, pro-Russia right has undoubtedly helped the party, but divisions remain between those elements who are soft left and want a slice of the government pie and those wanting more radical social change, and criss-crossing this are divisions about Israel and Palestine. Undoubtedly, given the unexpected successes, German media actors and others looking to rebuild the shattered SPD at their expense will try using these divisions to sap the party's energy and drive new supporters away. Because having a mass fascist-adjacent party as the second party in the Bundestag is a trifling concern versus a left wing insurgency. Nevertheless a harbinger of good things to come, one hopes.

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Norman Spinrad and Radical Science Fiction

What's in a title? For something like The Void Captain's Tale, Norman Spinrad's 1983 confession of one such, you would be forgiven for expecting space opera fare with little to differentiate it from the post-Star Wars gold rush of star fighters, blasters, and explosions. Albeit with a darker tinge. Void, after all, is not just a synonym for space but for negative absence. Likewise, after learning the main conceit of the book - that interstellar travel of the future is powered by women's orgasms - one might expect the tacky, questionable sexploitation that is the hallmark of low rent science fiction, and of which there was plenty around at the time. Happily, on both counts, these assumptions are wrong.

Spoilers follow.

The titular void captain, Genro Kane Gupta, is looking forward to journeying on the Dragon Zephyr. This will be a routine flight transporting cargo and 10,000 passengers in cold sleep to a far-flung destination. In this future, instantaneous FTL is possible but this can only happen in short hops of three to five light years. The technology, which was salvaged and retro-engineered from a precursor race of sentients referred to as We Who Have Gone Before requires a living component - a pilot. They are inserted as a node into the star drive's circuitry, and they have to be willing. It won't work if someone is forced in against their will. Unfortunately, experimentation has adduced that only a vanishingly tiny population of women are capable of the rigours of piloting and only 200 out of untold billions were in service. At the moment of the jump, the instantaneous translation of the ship from one point in real space to another is experienced by the pilot as a moment of bliss and release whose nearest approximation is sexual ecstasy. Typically, the pilot is left inert and unresponsive and requires at least 24 hours to recover before the next jump. This experience also exacts a physical toll. The career of a pilot is not a long one.

Star flight abides by strict social etiquettes. Genro oversees a very small crew such is the ship's automation, and the captaincy is largely ceremonial. While responsible for the ship, the main duties on a flight are to press the jump button and be active in the shipboard society of awake passengers. The captain is expected to partner with the Honoured Passenger, the ship's social lead who spends their time contriving entertainments, occasions, and fitting out cabins and decks to fit the travellers' moods. It is typical, as the ship's two points of authority, that their relationship is sexual. The purpose of this is not just to entertain, but to overlay and suppress how the interstellar arteries of this far future society are effectively dependent on the (ultimately fatal) sexual labour of a minority of women.

What happens if the facade breaks down? This is the domain of the Void Captain's Tale, and as such should be approached as an SF novel of manners. For the ship to work as per convention, there must be strict separation between them and the pilot, with their only being attended to by the three medical crew in-between jumps. This is broken within the first few pages as, on the shuttle up, Genro has an awkward encounter with Dominique Alia Wu - the assigned pilot. Having already stumbled over the contact taboo, following the first jump Dominique breaks protocol by shrugging off the usual medical ministrations and taking up a place in the officers' restaurant. Not only is this shocking, her plain appearance, workmanlike uniform, and buzz cut hair outrages and offends. Which does not deter Dominique from demanding the privileges she, as an officer, is entitled to. Genro is called in to negotiate a compromise that would please all parties, but in so doing begins nurturing a sexual obsession with her. Partly because she's taboo, but mainly because she speaks to his sense of sexual inadequacy. He wants her precisely because her sexual experience far exceeds his own. Dominique has touched something he can never experience, and he becomes haunted by how no matter how expert his technique or attentive his lovemaking, this will only be a faint shadow of the ecstasy that explodes through her at the moment of the jump.

There starts the unravelling. Genro stops being able to perform his conjugal duties according to expectations, suffering the dysfunctions of impotence and premature excitement in equal measure - forcing a rupture between the captaincy and the Honoured Passenger, who is quick to communicate her displeasure to the other tourists. He steals away for private liaisons with Dominique, which only affirm his feared inadequacies. He appears distracted, he goes for a space walk while the ship is travelling at relativistic speeds, and all this is draining him of authority. And when his affair with Dominique is found out, there is uproar. The man charged with veiling the grim reality of FTL travel not only fails in his task, but by his obsession he has eroticised it. However, worse is to come. In their tete tete, Dominique tries to describe the ineffable experience of the null space that enables the transmission of the ship. She requests that Genro does not input any coordinates prior to the next jump. She argues the technology the star drive is based on was not meant for fast travel but was for the precursor race to transcend and inhabit the next layer of reality she has had glimpses of. Jumping blind would enable her to shed her body and inhabit this realm. The only problem is that should the ship survive, there's no telling where it might re-emerge into reality, there's very little chance of any other female passenger being able to become the next pilot, and at relativistic speeds it would take years to reach the nearest inhabited system. And that's without taking the supplies situation into account. Will Genro run the risk of sacrificing all to free - and satisfy - his lover?

Spinrad's book is what you would expect from something sat at the intersection of the transatlantic new wave. There is the concern with literary sensibility it shares with the British school, and the punkish tear-it-all-down attitude of the Americans. It also bears witness to a distinction Spinrad makes in his 1990 book of SF criticism, Science Fiction in the Real World. Here, he posits "sci-fi" as a specific sub-division of science fiction, which he associates with the space operas of the Golden Age. These are swash-buckling adventures with heroes, villains, space weapons, and clear story arcs in which everything comes good in the end. This, he argues, is the way the mainstream sees science fiction and why they are wary of ever trying it. Science fiction proper, however, is about experimentation, future visions, imagining new ways of being and becoming, and pushing literature's envelope. Good SF should provoke and unsettle, while avoiding the temptations of neat narrative resolution - something that might comfort publishers and readers, but serves to undermine the innovative or revolutionary character of the work. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is singled out as an example, with its academic-sounding epilogue closing down the ambiguity of the ending and the idea the horrors of Gilead persisted for any length of time. The same could be said for Keith Roberts's Pavane, on the end of which is appended an explainer which is very sci-fi, unnecessary, and a touch cringe.

The Void Captain's Tale is a contribution to the revolutionary SF tradition. Its society is post-scarcity and sounds much better than ours, but here it is a foil for critiquing the vanities of bourgeois culture in its high and mass forms. For the former, ritual, manners, and "high art" species of cultural capital paper over the brute realities of economic necessity. For the latter, it's the immediacy of the commodity as one among many purchasing decisions to be made that divorces that separates if from a biography produced under a determinate set of production relations for profit. Dominique is of a minuscule cohort of pilots, but without sexually exploiting their talents Spinrad's interstellar society would crumble. It is a way of thinking through masculine sexual anxiety, and how it might lead to individual behaviours that impact on and endanger the community. And a meditation on radical action, that a politics guided by an understanding of how the world really works is by no means a guarantee of success. This novel confounds and challenges, it plays with and dumps on the space lasers and pervy sex beloved of more conservative-inclined SF authors of the time, and while trashing the tropes tells a compelling story that does not shy away from ambiguous conclusions. A book that, over 40 years on, still deserves a wider readership.

Conservatism and the Decline of the West

For the last couple of days, London has hosted Jordan Peterson's ARC jamboree. Standing for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, it was touted as and proved to be a conservative wingefest. From moaners peddling the thinly disguised cultural Marxism conspiracy theory to decriers of the imagined progressive authoritarianism, not a single scintilla of original thought was on show. Instead, we got a catwalk show of ignorance, stupidity, and bigotry. Not that this prevents them from getting recycled and amplified by the billionaire owned and aligned media, or responded to by "sensible" governments bent on adapting to them.

It says everything about the wretched state of the Conservative Party that Kemi Badenoch not only spoke, but a long conversation with Peterson himself. To save you the bother of listening, it was the usual gubbins. The evils of multiculturalism, the destruction wrought by immigration, the perils of net zero. Yawn, yawn, yawn. Her actual speech was little different, but tried striking an urgent tone. Western culture is "under threat". She goes on, "This is not a crisis of values. It’s a crisis of confidence that has set in at exactly the same time that we face existential threats on the left." Assuming Badenoch hasn't crossed the floor, I guess she meant "from". She also said everything good comes from the right. But what's destroying the West now is a lack of "self-belief", when the moment requires assertiveness and confidence. Just like our friend Donald Trump who, for the Tory leader, is setting about "fixing" America's problems. We need to "get off our knees" and fight for our values, which inevitably means "tough decisions and bravery".

I think that's quite enough of Badenoch's drivel.

Lurching further right and puckering up to Trump are not the politics that are going to get the Conservatives back into the game. But this is more than just another rhetorical move to win back Reform voters. The declinist sentiment is common among (right wing) bourgeois circles because it speaks of something that is true. The West is declining.

In population terms, Western Europe, North America, and Australasia are in long-term decline. The story is the same in economics, with China, India, and sub-Saharan Africa increasingly becoming the engines of global growth with each passing year. This is well known and remarked upon. Attracting less attention, until recently, is the long-term decline of conservatism and therefore the political pull of an important section of the Western ruling class. The process of value change has long been tracked by political science, which tends to attribute the growth of social liberalism to growing affluence, mass education, and demographic turnover. There comes a point when the disproportionate advantage among older people turns into its reverse. The right can change to adapt to the rising and broadly liberal-left generations, or decline. We're at that moment now, so goes the argument, and the diminishing mass base of the right has unleashed a backlash against the values of the increasing majority of Western populations. This "postmaterialist" argument is partly true - it doesn't tell the whole story. The rise of social liberalism is inseparable from the recomposition of the working class and the restructuring of how strategic sectors of capital exploit our labour power. The problem is that as the "new" primary force of production are our brains, personalities, and sociability, the hold that workplace discipline has over us is also in long-term decline. Hence the panics about working from home and the constant refrain of returning to the office, and the ridiculous amount of boosterism around artificial intelligence.

The right do not openly say what they're about, so like Badenoch they go after stand-ins and substitutes - tropes they've come to recognise as symptoms of their declinist predicament. The Tory leader's railing against how "universities ... poison minds" is a recognition that cultural trends are against her party, and that she'd rather adopt Canute-like obstinance instead of adapting to new circumstances, which previous Tory leaders have managed to do. We see the same with the Trumpist approach to global power politics, with the bearing of American teeth the chosen strategy - among several - to mitigate the effects of decline. But if the extreme right get their way, at best all they succeed in doing is consolidating the power of their class for a little longer before something new has to be tried to arrest the demographic and cultural erosion eating away at them.

And at worst? It's obvious that if Western capitalism is to thrive in the new world of immaterial labour and growing Eastern dominance, it is by investing in its work force, throwing money at renewable energy, advanced biotech, computing, and space technologies, building up the capacity of regional and national governments as industrial activists, and ensuring the proceeds of growth are better distributed across classes and between regions. A renewed social democratic road map, in other words. But it is utopian precisely because none of the capitalist parties in Western polities, including actually-existing labour and social democratic parties are interested. They're happy to manage the decline, whereas the bleed of the extreme right into the mainstream right means their "solutions" can only accelerate the West's decline. What the Tories did to Britain during their 14 years in office made the country poorer, less productive, and weakened in the face of international competition. But the primacy of commercial and financial capital, and of capital over labour was asserted in the face of a new left and new demands placed on the state following a global pandemic - and that's what matters most. Across the sea, we see Trump dismantling the federal state. It might strengthen the American oligarchy domestically for a few years but it's only going to accelerate their decline as the world's economic and military leader over the long-term.

Badenoch talks piffle like the rest of them, but her politics are anchored in a class strategy and a class on a declinist trajectory. It's up to us - the left - to get our collective acts together and help the Tories and their ilk along the happy road to irrelevance.

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Explaining Insanity

That Donald Trump, coming over here and tearing up the post-war international order, putting a question mark over the United States' support for Europe and chumming up to Vladimir Putin. His second coming has continued as it started: unsettling friends and upsetting certainties while turning everything the new administration touches into chaos. Who can disagree with Keir Starmer that, from the standpoint of great power politics, this is a "once in a generation moment"?

The calling of an emergency European summit sans the US in response to the Trump "peace plan", that freezes Europe and Ukraine out while he and Putin draw new lines on the map is the biggest breach in the Western alliance since the Suez crisis. Then, in no uncertain terms, the Americans said the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt was a no and that overseas military adventures without Uncle Sam's blessing were over. With talks between the US and Russia to start as early as Tuesday in Saudi Arabia, it appears now that Trump wants to break with seven decades of foreign policy common sense and let Europe do its own thing. Suddenly, the talk is about Europe ramping up military spending and huge numbers of soldiers being shipped to Ukraine to act as peace keepers to police the eventual peace. Starmer was quick to volunteer British troops for any such force, with estimates for the combined mission topping out at 100,000 soldiers. But also Starmer as the "bridge" between an aggressive US and an appalled EU/rest of NATO has carried on talking up the need for US security guarantees to back an armistice and a permanent end to the war. Which will probably come to pass, seeing as Trump has made no bones about his desire for Ukrainian mineral stocks. Though it is worth noting the bulk of these materials are in the eastern Russian-occupied zone of the country.

For liberal internationalists, the supporters of the fictional "rules-based order" it's enough to drive them into despair. The rights of a small nation trampled on and disregarded as the big players sit down to haggle over its fate is a grotesque spectacle. But what Trump is demonstrating is the naked truth of global politics. The US is the (declining) hegemon, but is dispensing with the usual protocols and politesse about "allies" and "partners". But what is the game plan here? Not normally known for his political insights, on Sunday's Laura Kuenssberg Reform's Richard Tice said this was the hardball way of ensuring Europeans meet a long-held Trumpist aim: a collective increase military spending so the continent's security is no longer bankrolled from the Oval Office. This take is fine as far as it goes. It would allow for more tax cuts at home, which Trump can then crow about. But it only goes part of the way.

As forecast before the election, Trumpism wanted to shake down the state for the benefit of the billionaires. Not just so capital can pocket more tax cuts and enjoy a freshly enfeebled regulatory environment, but to ensure the balance in class relations is tilted further in their favour. Cutting the state reduces the checks and encumbrances placed on capital by generations of workplace, court room, and legislative struggles. The prize here is the sovereignty of unfettered class rule - a project identical in intent, but much larger in scale than the obsessions of the Conservative Party in this country.

Trump's rude antics overseas are an extension of the domestic project. Never mind the international order he's seemingly intent on smashing up was constructed by the US for America's benefit, Trumpism here is the extrication of the US from obligations to allies (if they're not deemed in the White House's immediate interests), and a decisive move away from soft power operations so the US can bestride the world as a military colossus. The peace-through-strength impulse of Trumpism is really strength-through-fear, of the presidency openly and clearly declaring that it alone is sovereign and nothing can stop US capital from getting its way. This is not a new isolationism, as the talking heads on respectable podcasts keep saying, but a shift in the US's imperial orientation to the world. An overly aggressive posture rather than diplomacy, a readiness to rely on threats and cajoling if not force to get its way. The limits of such an approach are not infinite, but they are distressing for anyone unused to seeing international power politics for what they really are.

In other words, Trumpism - despite its chaotic outbursts, upending of custom, and seemingly self-defeating decisions - is not an expression of insanity. Its actions over Ukraine and the rapprochement with Russia are the open politics of the American oligarchy. Once again, it comes back to interests. Class interests.

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Crescendo - Are You Out There?

No time for posting tonight, so here's a tune that's almost totally forgotten today but was quite big at the time.

Rachel Reeves and Dishonesty

The Chancellor might have delivered a budget that won wide support among the wealthy and, crucially, has done nothing to upset the class settlement bequeathed Labour. But you can't please all of the people-who-matter all of the time, and the knives are out for Rachel Reeves. Not so much in her own party, but a section of the media would like her scalp. And today, it's the BBC's turn to have a pop.

In November, Guido ran several stories picked up by the media about how Reeves had "massaged" her CV prior to entering the Commons. The right had fun exposing her claim that she worked as an economist for HBOS as bogus and delighted in reporting that Reeves was actually a manager of a retail banking complaints team. Thursday's BBC report looks into her career further, finding that Reeves also exaggerated the amount of time she worked at the Bank of England. Having previously said on several occasions that she'd worked there for a decade or the "best part of a decade", her BoE period was actually five-and-a-half years. Shorter than the six Reeves had put on her LinkedIn profile. Potentially more serious are allegations that while at HBOS she and her colleagues were accused of fiddling expenses by signing off on each other's claims. This was no idle tittle-tattle - it resulted in an investigation in which dozens of pages of evidence was submitted. This was, apparently, to "fund a lifestyle". The submission was compelling enough for the Internal Audit department to conclude there was enough evidence of "wrongdoing" and was referred to the next stage of the process. But there the investigation stalled and Reeves was not interviewed, which was at odds with procedure. Reeves left afterwards but there's no evidence this was because of the allegations. Indeed, the BBC report indicates she was not aware that a suspicious eye had been cast in her direction, and far from leaving under a cloud HBOS allowed her use of a company car for a further six months beyond the end of her contract. Also, in the interests of accuracy, it does appear that spending the bank's money on gifts for subordinates and superiors was part of the works culture. Her infractions were not that she'd done wrong per se, but that the cash was splashed a little too readily.

Considering Covid procurement and how Boris Johnson normalised institutional corruption during his tenure, Reeves palming a few gifts here and there before she was an MP is the smallest of beers. But that isn't to say this doesn't matter, because with the Chancellor it fits a pattern of behaviour. She's lied about her career, lied about political opponents, and has lied about her latest book - which is full of other people's work. Her political approach to matters economic is an exercise in deceit, and her elevation to Number 11 is off the back of the most dishonest Labour leader since ... forever. Reeves, Keir Starmer, and the rest of the lying bunch are well suited to one another. And will undoubtedly come undone together too.

Let's not kid ourselves that those having a pop at Reeves are motivated by ethics in political life. It's interesting that the BBC decided to publish their expose on the day the revised growth figures for the last quarter were published. News that was expected to be bad but were, in fact, just about positive. An attempted hit job you might say. But why when Starmer and friends have done everything to bend over backwards for capital? It's still worth noting that while most of the British ruling class are on board the Starmerist project, such as it is, there are those who are not - a nexus of the disgruntled rich that parasite off labour intensive, landed and financialised interests. For this hyper class conscious section of British capital, whose views are usually amplified by the right wing press, Reeves has committed the deadly sin of taxing unearned income. Closing inheritance loop holes and increasing employers' NI contributions have shattered the taboo of looking in this direction for revenue raisers. And conceding improvements to workers' rights, as watered down these commitments have become, opens the door to a slight tilt against capital's collective class interests. For them, at a minimum Labour need curbing to ensure they don't go any further down this road. What they perceive today as a slightly edging out of their interests is extrapolated forward to further grabs at the expense of their wealth and class power. If preventing this means destabilising a fundamentally weak government by blowing up low level misdemeanours into full on felonies, this is among the least of what they'll do.

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The Politics of Noticing

Comrades on the left call it the Great Noticing. This is where observations and arguments made in public fora by absolutely awful beyond-the-pale left wingers and are customarily ignored (if not denounced as tinfoil hattery) by the great and the good of sensible, grown up politics. Yet there comes a point when something cannot be blanked any longer. The crisis of the Conservatives and the confessions of right wing Labour factionalists are a couple of recent examples. One where the reality became too obvious to deny and now a cottage industry has sprung up about the long-term problems of the Tories, and another when the players themselves candidly admitted to all the things they were denying with straight faces a few years ago. Naturally, the left gets no credit for being right on these things.

Another noticing is happening right now. Unsurprisingly, the over-hyping of Nigel Farage from all quarters of pundit opinion has helped put Reform in the lead in several polls. And now commentators from The Sun to mainstream political science are writing about how Keir Starmer's strategy is undermining the Labour Party.

Take Rob Ford for example. Discussing the rise of Reform, he notes that for Labour "wooing back Reform voters with red meat on Farage’s favourite issues is a strategy with low prospects of success and high risks." And what is the nature of this risk? "A populist Labour campaign for Reform votes may be the last straw for many in this socially liberal, viscerally anti-Farage group, putting at risk hundreds of marginal seats where Reform is out of the running, but where Labour needs a united progressive front to prevail next time." At the risk of tooting the old horn, the problem Rob identifies was something I identified in a 2021 special issue of Political Quarterly. A more respectable organ where polite opinion is concerned than this corner of the internet. But I'm not pretending originality. Plenty of other left wingers were making similar arguments at the time.

The question then is why now? Why are sections of establishment opinion not only waking up to Labour's counter-productive positions, but are fretting about it? On the one hand there is the government's refusal to do much to forestall the crises in state institutions. The utter indifference Labour has shown universities has become emblematic of their high-handed neglect, as they hide a lack of leadership behind vague and indefinite reviews. As the professional base of Starmerism was divided going into the election and largely stayed on board to see the Tories defeated, this is an exasperation in frustration. But more than that, Donald Trump is giving a chaotic lesson in what could be visited on the British state if a Reform/Tory coalition won office in 2028/29. Not just a flagrant disregard of the law, but the tearing up of state institutions, NGOs, the charitable sector, environmental protections and sustainable energy projects, and an evisceration of whole swathes of the economy present themselves as a real possibility. It appears significant sections of establishment opinion have learned the lessons of the Democrats' complacently dismal campaign, understand how Joe Biden's administration paved the way for Trump, what that could mean for their future and are - rightly - worried that Starmer's government is on an identical path.

This isn't to say this layer ae champing at the bit for radical solutions to deep seated problems. But they want to see the government prioritising the fixing of institutions, putting money in people's pockets, and going for a sensible economic strategy instead of prioritising the same old interests. More reforming zeal, less scapegoating of people desperate enough to brave the Channel in a dinghy in the winter. Starmerism, if it means anything, was for this layer a take over of the state by the state. In other words, professionals, experts, and technocrats motivated by public service were in charge at last. Tackling problems and presenting solutions was their jam - in marked contrast to the cynical, reckless mess that preceded them. This Labour government therefore comes as a shocking disappointment, best typified by Starmer's defence of the institutionalised acceptance of bungs.

If Labour carries on as they are doing, it won't just be the bulk of the working class that will be deserting the party, the Prime Minister's core constituency will do too. Which makes the nightmare outcome they fear the most more likely. And the blame for this would lie entirely at the feet of Starmer and his lieutenants.

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The Sacking of Andrew Gwynne

News that Andrew Gwynne's been done for sending sexist and racist WhatsApp messages came as a surprise for those who didn't know him. It wasn't long ago that he was affecting a Mr Nice persona on social media, and that the strongest expletive he'd ever use would be "crumbs". Unfortunately for him, he was caught red-handed making fruitier comments by the Mail on Sunday. These included looking forward to the death of a constituent complaining about her bins, dropping the F bomb, messaging antisemitic banter, and bad mouthing a local Tory council leader. And because this is the Labour Party, racist comments about Diane Abbott and sexist comments about Angela Rayner were in there too. Rightly, Gwynne has been given the heave-ho pending an investigation that will ... slap him on the wrist and readmit him because his politics are the right politics. The obsequious apology won't harm Gwynne's chances either.

Once again, the culture uncovered by the Forde report is open for all to see. And the reaction is a performative recoil of disgust by the party's establishment. Performative because they well know this is the culture they encourage, preside over, and participate in. Racism, sexism, callous attitudes, cynical language, this is the meat and gristle of informal Labour Party communication. And it has always been thus, though what was once said behind people's backs is now written down and shared among hundreds of informal groups of chummy insiders. Unhappily for Keir Starmer and the Labour right, all it takes is for some local notable or a disgruntled MP to share these contents with the likes of the Mail for more WhatsApp scandals to erupt. The more senior the messenger, the more juicier. Savvy MPs know not to do this, but when the parliamentary party is stuffed with nodding donkeys whose inflated self-opinion is in inverse proportion to their lack of nous there are plenty of liabilities for the right wing press to swoop on.

And this is a headache for party management. The forced resignation of Louise Haigh, ostensibly over a conviction from years ago that the leadership already knew about lowered the bar for accountability and ministerial resignations and sackings. IF, for instance, another round of freebie gate visited British politics and a minister was caught improperly troughing on corporate "hospitality", Starmer would be under real pressure to sack them. Or a trusted lieutenant was caught in a spotlight on other improper conduct, because the Prime Minister lacks a stock of political capital very little can be expended to defend them. Especially with polling in the doldrums and a range of backbenchers jostling to make their mark as ministers sooner rather than later. Perhaps more worryingly for Starmer, the press now know they can bring pressure to bear and cause him to act, meaning they're likely to sit on further revelations until they become strategically useful.

The government must be hoping more Gwynne-style incidents aren't going to surface. Unfortunately for them, considering how the party's culture is riddled with a hierarchy of racism and a preponderance of mouthy blow hards, chances it won't happen again are slight to non-existent.

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