The Political Cost of a Peppercorn Saving

Here's a quiz. Name one policy brought in by the Conservatives that tangibly improved the lives of the poorest people. It's difficult considering how their list of achievements was a bucket of deplorables, but there is one. And that would be the £2 cap on bus fares. When 16% of Britons don't have access to a car and most of whom among the poorest people in the country, a bus is a lifeline. The Tories' introduction of a cap meant ticket price certainty across most routes in England. It made budgeting easier, allowed for the car-less to venture further afield for work, and afford trips into town or round and about to see friends and family. But that government is gone and now we have "changed Labour", and they want to show how much they've changed by increasing the cap by 50%, unnecessarily saddling bus users with extra expense for a peppercorn saving of £50m.

Announced by Keir Starmer at his pre-budget media address, raising the cap is one of those choices the government can use to emphasise their well 'ard credentials. The cheeky Number 10 press release is written up to suggest that passengers should be grateful for the government's largesse. We're told £1bn is being invested to make "better bus services". This will guarantee that fares "remain affordable" while being "fair to the taxpayer". As if bus users and "taxpayers" are two discrete entities.

As ever with this government, scaling back support for bus services is not a technocratic exercise. The 'why?' lies in the politics. Having spent a lot of last week defending their long planned measures to levy taxes on unearned income, they think the consequent outrage and the media trouble could be offset by attacking things that poorer people depend on. Such as bus fares and winter fuel allowances. I.e. They think an 'all in it together' budget that apportions the "necessary" sacrifices evenly means there will be less of a political price to pay when those with the "broadest shoulders" are asked to cough up.

This might work with the Starmerist base in the professional and managerial sectors. To them it looks equal parts fair and fair-minded, and will fire off much-needed serious vibes after their grown up image took a knock following freebiegate. But if they're hoping to mollify the Tory press, until they retreat on unearned income and wind back the workers' right plans to nothing they will be dogged and dogged and dogged, no matter how much they axe supportive measures for the poor and most vulnerable. And so here we are. For the sake of a tiny amount of money and a barely visible perceived political advantage, Labour is set on demobilising the support of the people they need for it to remain in office. Again.

Labour's Problems with "Working People"

For several years now Keir Starmer has defined his project in terms of serving "working people". It's as well used as "tough choices", and is just as irritating. And so, amid speculation that Rachel Reeves is about to u-turn on the manifesto pledge not to levy new taxes on working people, the thorny question of who counts as working people was an inevitable obsession for the press pack. Take Laura Kuenssberg for example. Well known for concentrating on political fripperies, she wasted half of her interview with Bridget Phillipson this Sunday asking asking questions about what a working person was.

Let's clear this up for the performatively stupid. What Labour is really talking about is unearned income, which was already clear back in June. That is income from dividends, capital gains/share transactions, high value property sales, and rents. As sundry members of the government have tried arguing, working people are, shockingly, people who have to go out to work. Albeit mixed in with ad hoc digressions that includes people who can't simply write a cheque to get them out of trouble. Cue the tedious merry go round of offended landlords, business owners, and so on all claiming the mantle of horny-handed sons of toil.

For Marxists, class is simple and complex. Simple, because it's about one's relation to the means of production. The majority of working age people have to sell their labour power in return for a wage or salary, and the vanishingly tiny minority live off the proceeds of capital. Complex, because there are huge disparities within the proletarian class in terms of income, autonomy at work, and powers invested in their roles at work. And this is before you get to the myriad of contradictory locations, and the not negligible numbers of self-employed and small business people that comprise the work force. Class is never as neat as the categories used to describe and explain it. Class is a process, it's always in movement, but we can identify and consider occupational strata, age cohorts, and those so-called edge cases where income from work is supplemented by the profits extracted from the labour of others. We have to do this if we're in the business of building a politics that can challenge the supremacy of capital, and supplant it. It enables us to get a handle on who might be supportive of this struggle, and who are likely to resist and cling to the bosses to the last.

But for mainstream politicians, their attempts at defining class has a different purpose. Politics has to create a subject. I.e. Who is it that politics is addressing? It can be an amorphously rendered nation (as per conservatism) or "the people", as favoured by populist politics. While Labour has its roots in the workers' movement, it has long been the contention of Labourism as a whole that it must appeal to the electorate at large and avoid the "sectionalism" of being seen as a working class concern. On the left, this has manifested itself as ethical socialism and moralism. On the right, it's been a faddy procession of different categories. In both instances the consequence is the liquidation of class as a meaningful political category.

The trick Labour and other mainstream politicians have to pull off is to create a subject without mobilising one. It has to be broad to the point of being almost meaningless, but definable so the electorate - as consumers of political product - can identify themselves with them. Hence a formulation like working people. Anyone and everyone is a 'working person', and those who are not are either retired and have done their bit (not that this protects you from Labour's attacks), or are the undeserving poor who need to feel the the lash of hard discipline. In her article for The Sun this Sunday, Reeves aligns 'working people' with "families" and "strivers", call backs to fuzzy categories like 'hard-working families' and George Osborne's 'the strivers vs the skivers'. And while we're here, Nick Clegg's old favourite: "alarm clock Britain" fits as well. They are woolly and wide open, but again have that edge that can be turned against the imagined idle other to support punitive policies and authoritarian welfarism.

The reason why Labour have got into choppy waters over this is because the media have called them on their bullshit. And the media has done this because it's hyper class conscious. The headlines roar about Labour's war on Middle England and billionaires fleeing the country are hysterical considering how Labour's taxes on unearned income are incredibly modest. The point, for the satraps of the ruling class is these measures visiblise the lynchpin of bourgeois power. British capital is notoriously short-termist, but large sections definitely are not when it comes to the stability of class relations. Having already faced political shocks from the brief interlude where the left took over Labour, to the fact a mass street movement emerged unexpectedly to oppose Britain's involvement in the massacre of Palestinians and had an impact on the general election results, and how a lot of bosses are still nervy about the challenge to workplace discipline thanks to Covid, they are worried where this very slight challenge to unearned income might end up. And, as a result, the press attacks on Labour are ramping up. It's therefore reasonable to suppose that getting into muddles about definitions of working people and all the other recent difficulties might be mere warm ups for the roastings to come.

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Speculative Sociology in Children of Time

A book about spiders? Hallowe'en must be approaching. But on this occasion, it's not our eight-legged friends who are the horrors. It's us. Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time might also be scary for those who don't like the contemporary commonplace in SF where postmodern difference sits comfortably with future visions and compelling story. Anyone in that camp are ruling themselves out from one of the best SF novels of the last decade. Spoilers follow.

Children is set several centuries into the future and we've made our way out among the stars. Earth-analogues are non-existent, so we have to make them and terraforming efforts are underway on several worlds. But not all is well. There is a schism on Earth between the relatively enlightened technocracy that runs things, and anti-tech zealotry. An insurgency erupts and civilisation is laid to waste, with saboteurs destroying humanity's off-world presence and vicious malware effectively bricking any advanced technology that is left. The war breaks out as Dr Avrana Kern is about to experiment with accelerated evolution. Her world has been successfully terraformed and has prepared a group of nano-virus infected monkeys that should bootstrap them to sentience within a millennia or two. Unfortunately, her station is destroyed just as she escapes to the monitoring pod. Unbeknownst to her, the poor monkeys are toasted on atmospheric entry but the nano-virus makes it to the surface where it finds an accommodating host: Portia labiata - jumping spiders. As the centuries roll on, civilisation re-emerges on Earth after a war-induced ice age but as the glaciers recede the poisons of the past thaw out and destroy what's left of the biosphere. The survivors are forced to scrape together the Gilgamesh, a generation ship, and head out to find the terraformed worlds hinted at in the 'old empire's' surviving records.

Tchaikovsky isn't the first to imagine a civilisation arising from another species, but perhaps no one has managed it with such aplomb. The world building is among the best that 21st century SF can offer, but this is much more than a latter day The First and Last Men. The narrative is compelling as the spiders climb to sentience and build a sophisticated society, as setbacks on the Gilgamesh reduce the humans to barbarism and, toward the end, bloodthirsty would-be conquerors of the spiders.

On the spiders, they share their world with several other sentient and semi-sentient aquatic, arachnid, and insect species. Spider cities emerge resembling shifting structures of webbing (what else?) based around matriarchal households. Males are, like their real life counterparts, much smaller and endure a second class existence as discards and, sometimes, post-coital prey. There are also significant evolutionary filters the spiders have to overcome. The first is an out-of-control super colony of mutated ants. The nano-virus has developed a non-sentient collective nest intelligence that works like a computer, and threatens to overrun all spider settlements. They are only defeated by employing chemical manufactories to render the ants docile. Thanks to the manipulation of scent the great nest is programmed to serve spider kin. It also has the happy affect of accelerating technological development as the ants had mastered mining and metal smelting.

The other key factor in their cultural development is The Messenger. A small star that whips through the night sky, this is Kern's life pod/sentry construct. From the ants the spiders learn it is broadcasting radio, and as they decipher the utterly alien human language they are driven to develop mathematics to crack the code. Unfortunately, as Kern by this time is a half-mad composite of human, an AI copy of her personality, and the life support system that sustains her she sets herself up as a god and urges the spiders to follow her message. The results are schisms and wars, with the largest city of Great Nest the seat of orthodoxy and its sometimes rival Seven Trees cast as the apostates. Great Nest's armies carry all before it until a wiley male refugee creates a method for programming ant armies on the fly. The religion is overthrown and, as a price extracted for his invention, Seven Trees and other spider cities concede full personhood status to the males.

Meanwhile, things go from bad to worse for the humans aboard Gilgamesh. As they approach Kern's world they are forced to retreat in the face of the sentry's weapon systems. But not before a crash landing and a rescue reveals the planet is infested with oversized bugs. They head off to another terraformed world but find it's a bust. From pole to pole it's covered by an extremely invasive species of fungi. They are able to salvage some useful ancient technology as a sticking plaster, but their only option is to turn back. After internal power struggles they approach the world with their weapons armed for a war of annihilation ... but are shocked to find the spiders have now mastered sub-orbital space flight and have built an equatorial ring (also out of webbing, of course). Who will prevail?

Tchaikovsky's speculative sociology is more or less on point. While the spiders have developed a class society, the taming of the mindless ants provides a material base that means it's a lot less exploitative and conflict ridden than human communities. There is also a stronger sense of empathy among them thanks to the novel way they can pass on knowledge. The spiders discover that some selective breeding allows for Lamarckian evolution. Experiences, behaviour, and "understandings" can be written into the genetic code and passed on. They are later able to isolate this further so one can go to a library and effectively inject a memory, a skill, or knowledge. This all thanks to the nano-virus's mutations. It's this ability that ultimately saves both species. The spiders lead an assault on the Gilgamesh and overpower its defenders through chemical warfare. But this is a passive technology based on re-engineered nano-virus. Exposure to it causes humans to empathise and recognise the spiders as sentient beings, and that war against them is futile and wasteful. If only questions of war and peace could be settled so easily.

Children of Time sits well with Tchaikovsky's SF oeuvre. In The Doors of Eden, only the merging of radically divergent parallel Earths can save the universe. The Shards of Earth sees humanity combining and hybridising with alien species to see off civilisation-ending threats. Dogs of War and Bear Head are about bio-engineered super soldiers that are crossed with animals. And Alien Clay sees an exile from a totalitarian Earth get to grips with the weird diversity of an alien ecosystem. Here, the spiders progress not through the exclusion or extermination of other species but by a benign domestication of their environment. The use of chemicals and scents are central to their symbiotic relationship with the ants, and likewise humans are only able to overcome their declinist, warmongering rut by becoming a companion species comfortable with the oddness of the other. Donna Haraway would approve. The book therefore ends on a hopeful note some decades after the spiders and humans have come together. A signal is received from another world and a multi-species starship crew are dispatched to investigate. Hence the next volume, Children of War, has its jumping off point. Once again, without bashing us over the head difference and multiplicity are shown to be our route to a better future. Those that emphasise oneness, be they closed identities or symptoms of contemporary alienation are dead ends. Children of Time serves as an entertaining reminder of this.

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How the Tories Might Win Again

I read Rachel Cunliffe's review of two books about the general election with interest. The article's title, 'How Labour won - and how they could lose in 2029' is an obvious attractor to someone who spends too much time thinking about the Tories. Unfortunately, there was little here beyond the banal observation that Labour's majority is historically thin.

As long time readers know, I've been banging on about the long-term decline of the Tories for a while. They are not reproducing their electoral coalition, and this process hasn't stopped just because they've suffered a cataclysmic defeat. What is sure to compound the Tories' problems is the inability or unwillingness of their leadership contenders to acknowledge them. But in politics nothing is neat. When a party, a movement, or a politician is ascending the path to winning is rarely smooth. There are setbacks, reverses, and temporary troughs. Decline is no different. False dawns break that promise revival, there are flashes of strength show up here and there, portents and omens of good fortune are seized upon. There is no linear descent. The spiral downward is mistaken for forward motion. A couple of exhibits from the recent past: the huge vote won by Theresa May in 2017, and the absolute maxing out of this approach under Boris Johnson in 2019. Neither of which changed the Tories' declinist course, as argued here at the time.

This means that the fact of decline does not rule the Tories out of contention for 28/29. What makes an election win difficult is the politics. It's doubtful many Liberal Democrat or Labour voters will ever again tick the Tory box in the polling booth. People have memories, after all. And as Cunliffe notes in her piece, only 30% of Reform voters would have supported the Tories had Nigel Farage's "party" not stood, with 26% abstaining. But a very narrow Tory victory is conceivable for a few reasons.

For one, there is a marked tendency for governments to lose support. The Tory performances in 2017 and 2019 were anomalous because of Brexit, Corbynism, soft polarisation, and the successful reinvention of the Tories under new leaders. In five years' time, Keir Starmer will probably remain Labour's leader with all the baggage of incumbency that entails. Secondly, apart from against the Labour left the Labour right don't have a theory of political struggle. Rather than challenge established prejudices or offer political leadership, their default mode is to tail the (media confected) public opinion and hope a record of delivery will convince enough punters to give them another try. A managerial conception of politics that leaves a lot of hostages to fortune because initiative is ceded to their opponents. Say what you like about Kemi Badenoch (there's no use pretending any more), she undoubtedly will exploit the hypocrisy of Starmer's "Mr Rules" briefcase technocracy and might win a few converts. Last of all is a fraying of Labour's vote. This is not structural in the way Tory decline is but is a consequence of Starmer's politics and Morgan McSweeney's galaxy brain strategising. By demobilising and decomposing the Labour vote, it is being scattered to the four winds. This was evident before the election, can be seen in the result itself, and has continued apace afterwards. This leaves the government vulnerable.

It's not difficult therefore to see how the Tories could find a route back. Not because they're popular - Kemi-mania is most unlikely. But because Labour has hitched its project to key performance indicators that won't matter to most people unless they experience a shift for the better in prices, wages, housing, and public services. Discontent is less likely to drift to the Tories, but head in the direction of the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and the left (if it can get its act together). If Badenoch's rightist platform stems the bleed to Reform and attracts some back, there is an outside chance the Tories could become the largest party simply because their opponents' votes are spread even thinner. Whether they could form a government is another matter.

Labour could avoid this fate, but it has done the "grown up" thing and bent its knee to capital. The Tories are not in with a shout of winning again because they have a clever strategy that can arrest the declining coalition. Its fate is entirely in the hands of the Labour leadership. By dispersing the party's base, Starmer is offering the Tories a sporting chance.

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On Wes Streeting's Weight Loss Injections

It sounds like a scenario straight out of Black Mirror. Unemployed people who are overweight are forcibly subjected to injections that will shed the pounds so they can get off the dole and make them. Unsurprisingly, Wes Streeting has been forced to deny this is the objective of his weight loss scheme that has exercised headline writers this week. On Sunday's Laura Kuenssberg, Streeting said no one was going to be forced to do anything. Instead, he was defending a five-year trial involving a sample of 3,000 people living in and around Greater Manchester. Participants will receive the weight loss drug Tirzepatide, and researchers will track the rates of obesity-associated conditions and the number of sick days they take. The impact on their employment status is but one measurement the project will be taking.

For once, Streeting is telling the truth. This is not an experiment in dystopic social engineering. The trial's plan wants to find out what care packages are most appropriate to those who receive this treatment, as well as tracking the drug's long-term effects. If it works as advertised then it could be beneficial and life-changing, and will have knock on effects where obesity-related NHS care is concerned. In other words, what concerns is less the trial and more the political uses to which this could be put.

For Streeting, there are obvious political benefits. Cutting the £11bn spent on obesity care by making it increasingly superfluous has its attractions. As he said, he hopes the success will speak for itself and encourage others who need it to take the drug, which ties nicely in with his vision of the NHS as a preventative as opposed to a care service. A couple of wins that will finesse his credibility when the inevitable run at the leadership comes. And there is the other side, of making the NHS a guaranteed market for Tirzepatide and other weight loss drugs. But more importantly, as a tool of governance. For Streeting, the Department of Health is really an economic growth department. He talked about this in relation to boosting the life sciences at his Tony Blair Institute speech a week after taking office, but the obvious implication is that he sees his brief as fixing people so they can be fed back into the labour market. This government's number one priority, heard ad nauseum, is growing the economy so decent public services can be provided for. Everything else is subordinate to the aim of our producing profits for other people.

But it's wider than that. Streeting has jumped on this in the same week Liz Kendall said job coaches would be let loose on the mentally unwell to get them out of clinics and into jobs. She argued that getting into work can improve mental health, which is something that Iain Duncan Smith used to often say when challenged about the axe he took to social security. In context, for Streeting, Kendall, and the rest of them, upping the conditionalities of social security and reducing welfare to an authoritarian instrument comes naturally to them. They (mostly) come from modest backgrounds and made it to the top, so why can't anyone else? Hence unemployment is a consequence of individual poor choices or, in this case, infirmities. Get them fixed and the benefits bill can come down. Never mind the fact unemployment is a structural issue and that the people out of work always exceeds the number of vacancies. Whether they're dealing with obesity or mental health difficulties, the onus is on them to sort themselves out and be available to employers. If they don't cooperate? There are sanctions available for that.

There are differences between Labour and their Conservative opponents. Keir Starmer wants to modernise the state. The Tories want to wind it down. But when it comes to the fundamentals of supporting the most vulnerable in Britain (or otherwise), they are one. Compassion and care are words in a dictionary to these people. But there's another C word that comes through loud and clear: cruelty.

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Badenoch's to Lose

I suppose some words should be expended on the Tory leadership contest as the marathon powers into the final straight. Already an uninteresting contest, the shortlisting of Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick for the members' ballot has proven to be the political equivalent of the sleep of the dead. Jenrick says something right wing, Badenoch says something right wing. It's not exactly appealing to the punters. Compare this to the media interest that Labour leadership elections attract. Even the last one, in which Keir Starmer emerged as the early favourite commanded much more speculation and coverage. Remember, this was at the dawn of what the entirety of British politics punditry thought was a decade of Tory dominance. In the scheme of things there couldn't be anything less pressing.

That's by the by. Never let it be said the Conservatives are incapable of learning. Aware of the evident damage and bad feeling the last round of public debates did the party, this time the apparat has thrown every obstacle in the way of a TV clash going ahead. The Telegraph reported that the Tories had set several conditions on it taking place on the BBC. They demanded that the Question Time special's audience be made up entirely of party members, and that they should pay a £10 admission fee to "make sure they turn up". It is well known that studio audiences for public broadcast attract no charge in this country. Furthermore, where Question Time is concerned the production team do try and fill out a politically balanced audience based on voting intention, and the BBC were not going to compromise on this. This was to Jenrick's chagrin. Miles behind Badenoch, he can only gain from a head-to-head. He said he would be "delighted" to debate Badenoch at the BBC. For her part, she said she would abide by the party board's ruling. The cheese is hard for some.

Yet one public debate did take place. On Thursday, GB News broadcast a two-hour long programme. To call it a debate would be a misnomer. Both had an hour each to set out their stall and take questions. There were to be no repeats of the clashes that brought a little colour to proceedings two years ago. The Conservative Home headline said it all: "Two hours of our lives that we’re never getting back". Jenrick opted to go first and spent half his speech banging on about immigration and how we need to leave the European Convention. He set fire to the Tories' record in office, and accused "foreign courts" of letting terrorists into Britain. It's obvious what Jenrick is trying to do. He's hoping muscular posturing will cause the right wing party members - the overwhelming majority - to give him a second look. The problem is that Jenrick's a dweeb. Despite quitting the government over the issue, that looked less like a principled stand and more a contrivance to give his run at the Tory leadership some credibility. But it's fallen flat. Apart from a charisma bypass, he's just not credible on these issues with the membership. They remember his past life as a Dave-era A-lister who was gifted his Newark seat in 2014, and as someone who loyally campaigned for remain in the EU referendum. Then there is the small matter of his being the immigration minister up until last December. That he did his damnedest to make new arrivals feel unwelcome and defended protests outside hotels hosting refugees (well before the riots) counts for nothing. For the Tory membership, he's a briefcase just saying and doing what he thinks will work. Being well inured to dishonest politics, they know a cynic when they see one.

The same can't be said for Badenoch. Introduced to public prominence at the last leadership contest, apart from the culture war cliches she did then have something interesting to say about scrapping the Treasury and spending being a direct competence of the Prime Minister's office. Unfortunately, in the two years since she has become more acquainted with the way the state structures class relations and how central the Treasury-Bank-of-England-City nexus is to the whole set up. Not that the Tory membership care about this. For someone who apparently hates the culture wars, she has fought them with alacrity. As Women's and Equalities minister she has assuredly used the position to oppose a better deal for women, and has come out with clangers about maternity pay, the minimum wage, and carers. And there was the small matter of demonstrating sympathy with far right street thuggery. For the membership though, as a Brexiteer and as a politician who's never been backward about being forward she's the real deal. So during her speech for GB News, she didn't have to flex with attacks on the ECHR and other such performative nonsense. The membership feels Badenoch is one of them, and she is. By way of demonstration, at the end of the GB News "debate" Christopher Hope asked for a show of hands about who the Tory audience would be backing. Let's say the result for Jenrick suggests he can look forward to a Liz Kendall-style outcome.

And so it's Badenoch's to lose. It's difficult to see how she can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, short of an earnest conversion to Corbynism or was found to have previously been in secret defection talks with Labour (why not?). If there is one smidgen of hope for camp Jenrick, the latest poll on what the public thinks puts him ahead of Badenoch. Yes, a massive 14% versus her 13%. Combined, that is less than the 31% who indicated 'none of the above'. I suppose the Tories ought to be thankful for the unseemly power struggles and amateur dramatics that have marked Labour first few months in office. Because if Starmer had had a smoother start and avoided the stupid own goals, this poll would be even worse and the Tories even more of a marked irrelevance where most people are concerned.

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Drawing the Battlelines

At moments an exercise in hagiography, The News Agents' profile of Morgan McSweeney is interesting and worth a listen. It goes into his history and explores, such as one exists, his theory of politics. They characterise him as less Blairite and more old Labour right, because of an apparent concern with working class politics. There is discussion of him as an operator, but his skulduggery is diplomatically passed over. We learn he replaced Sue Gray because she was not political enough. Again, there is no suggestion of untoward shenanigans. Sources need protecting and lthe grapevine into Number 10 has to be maintained, after all.

About McSweeney's politics, he impresses the easily impressed because it's all about winning. And what Labour needs to do now it's won office is make good its promises and deal with the people's priorities. This, the piece argues, is where he believes other centre left governments in Western Europe have gone wrong. For example, their support do not want mass migration and yet that's what they get. The result is their chances going down the tubes and the far right piling on electoral weight. From our point of view, McSweeney is an instantiation of Labourism's most backward characteristics - office for careerism's sake, an absence of the possibility that things might be better, a commitment to a model of leadership that tails, rather than leads, public opinion, and hostility to wedge issues, regardless of how popular they might be. For all the hype, under his political direction Keir Starmer is already treading the same steps that has undone social democratic parties on the continent. It remains to be seen whether the outcome will repeat history as tragedy or farce.

This post, however, isn't just about McSweeney. With the Labour left back in its box and the left outside wondering what to do next, the sort of bickering and jockeying we saw during the Blair and Brown years is never far away the surface. Already, there is disquiet that Starmer passed over time servers to appoint newbies to plum positions. Some are unhappy that key ministerial roles have gone to unelected appointees. With a bloated parliamentary party and only so many jobs to go round, what work might the Devil make for these idle hands once the new cohort have got over the novelty of office? Clearly, Starmer is already worried hence the immediate suspensions following the benefit cap rebellion, and we learned last week about the Labour whips' ham-fisted efforts to curb dissent. Does this look like a strong government confident in its politics to you?

While McSweeney appears not to have a hand in these moves, he does have a side-project that could exacerbate inner party struggle. This can be summed up in three words: stop Angela Rayner. Over the last four years, the apparat has gone out of its way to clip her wings and, to be frank, humiliate her. There was the not-at-all dodgy disposal of Sam Tarry, the blocking of Rayner's supporters from shortlists across the North West, the pettiness of refusing Andy Burnham a platform at Labour's conference, the concealing of information from Rayner and her allies in the cabinet, the endless consultations and watering downs of the workers right agenda she's made her own, and last week's brutal mugging of Louise Haigh. McSweeney and mates are on a mission to keep Rayner from getting the top job. It's partly political: her journey from enthusiastic Corbyn ally to enthusiastic Starmer stooge suggests a fundamental political unreliability. If she becomes leader, her soft left Labourism not only differs from the Milquetoast managerialism McSweeney and Starmer prefer, like Ed Miliband she might inadvertently open the way for a left revival. Then there is the personal. Rayner and her allies have not forgotten nor forgiven the slights against them, and there will be a reckoning if she lands in the driving seat. It follows this preoccupation with Rayner will continue with her being cut out of decisions, her allies presented with trays full of fait accompli, their policies spiked, and efforts at making the party safe for a right wing successor to Starmer. McSweeney is counting on the services he rendered scores of new MPs for when the moment comes.

The beginnings of Labour's new psychodrama is there, and for a man who is reputedly political to his finger tips McSweeney will have a hard time leaving off his vendetta against Rayner and the soft left. What else might one expect now the adults are in charge?

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New Left Media October 2024

A little bit late, but four new projects have come to my attention and it didn't make sense waiting another month to give them a push. So please check them out, they're all worth taking a look.

1. Data Vampires (Limited podcast series) (Twitter)

2. Galaxy Burn, a 40k Podcast (YouTube channel) (Twitter)

3. Marx's Dream Journal (Substack) (Twitter)

4. Red Bird (Bulletin) (Twitter)

If you know of any new(ish) blogs, podcasts, channels, Facebook pages, resources, spin offs of existing projects, campaign websites or whatever that haven't featured before then drop me a line via the comments, email, 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!

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One Hundred Days of Sod 'Em

To celebrate its hundred days in office, the Labour Party has produced a neat little site. You can find out "what Keir has done for you so far" by clicking on a region. As I'm back in my home town these days, we find out that the East Midlands can look forward to 1,000 more GPs, councils taking over bus services, no fault evictions, the warm homes plan, and more. What about my previous abode, Stoke-on-Trent - the pearl of North Staffordshire? The West Midlands list of achievements is ... very similar to the East's. There's a bit of local colour thrown in (The Potteries are checked by name), but it's broadly the same. In reality, it doesn't mean much. It's tractor production figures, and this spin cannot go unanswered.

I'm not unreasonable. Even the most radical of reforming governments wouldn't be able to implement its full programme in its first 100 days (coping with capital strikes and facing down a coup might prove to be distractions). Starmer is not offering anything like this. His programme is one for restoring the legitimacy of governmental authority and modernising the state. Tilting the balance away from capital toward labour is definitely not on the cards. We can't well have "working people" getting ideas above their station. The issue therefore is not pace, it's content.

Consider these two exhibits from the last week. Angela Rayner's bill of workers' rights was unveiled (again) a few days ago. And, what do you know, we have yet more watering down. How long before they become purely homeopathic? The "rights from day one" now allows bosses to impose a nine-month probationary period on new employees. Introducing the single status of worker, which had already been weakened to allow for two different statuses "as a step toward one" is ... subject to further consultation. As is the right to switch off from employer harassment outside of working hours, ending pay discrimination, and strengthening parental and carers' leave. A fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families this ain't. And on top of that we have to wait another two years for this to take effect anyway. Labour: never knowingly urgent in helping the workers it was set up to represent.

And then there's the row about P&O ferries. When they sacked 800 workers a couple of years ago to bring in scab labour on much lower wages, it was so outrageous that even the right wing press and Tory ministers condemned them. Nothing came of it, because Tories are always going to Tory. It is verboten to encourage the slightest expression of class-based collective action around workers' interests. As recently as three days ago, Labour was singling out P&O as a bad employer. This was following transport minister Louise Haigh rightly describing the firm as a "cowboy operator". But not any more! In the world of Starmer and the new guru of politics, big business exists and it's there to be kowtowed to. So with the threat P&O's owner, DP World, was going to pull out of a Downing Street business vanity summit and put a £1bn investment on hold, Starmer stuck his foot out and sent Haigh tumbling under the nearest bus.

It's almost a pattern of behaviour. Starmer likes to talk about working people as if they're the salt of the earth, but if they are looking for support from this government and/or relying on them to strengthen their hand in the workplace, he's more interested in salting the earth. Perhaps the Prime Minister would change his mind if P&O workers clubbed together and bought him a spa weekend for two in the lake district.

Over the last hundred days the only thing Starmer and his cronies have fought for with any conviction is their right to trough freebies. We've seen his back office helpers boasting about how they stitched the Labour Party up, the attack on Winter Fuel Payments not to "save money" but to wind back universalism, the renewed fondness for the PFI scam, the decision to not give needy kids immediate relief, and fog-horning from the roof tops about clamp downs on social security support for the disabled and the mentally ill. Labour took office because voters wanted to see the back of the Tories, and an end to Tory policies. Instead, these hopes have been cast aside. We've had one hundred days of sod 'em.

Nalin & Kane - Beachball

Walked by a car on the way to work that was banging out this classic.