Labour people have a simple way of separating those worth listening to from those who aren't on social media platforms. If someone says "it wasn't because of Jeremy Corbyn, it was Brexit that killed us", they very obviously knocked on zero doors. Likewise, if a post claims the referendum was irrelevant and Corbyn was responsible for doing us in, then the author's experience of canvassing was limited indeed. I suppose then the Labour Together report is welcome for backing up the evidence of activists' senses. There's nothing especially revelatory in the report - Ed Miliband's summary flags up long-term issues various Labour folks have banged on about for years, including this blog. Therefore, I don't think it's necessary to revisit them as we've talked about them before and, given the character of our present leadership, will doubtless be talking about them again. That said, there are a few things missing in this account. The report tells us about the popularity, or lack thereof of Jeremy Corbyn, and provides graphs aplenty covering 2017 and the lead up to the 2019 election. While true, this was not some Durkheimian social fact warranting neutral observation and notation: Corbyn's ratings started off bad and for the following four years he was systematically screwed by the press and the broadcast media. You don't have to take the word of an embittered factionalist as gospel, repeated contentanalysesprovesit. This matters. The power of the newspapers is thankfully waning, but broadcast media takes their cue from the editorial offices and in turns determines what are the main political issues of the day. Not addressing this basic point, which the authors know is true, does undermine the scientific creds of the report. Perhaps this is related to the second thing that goes unexplored: "factionalism". When this is bandied about by mainstream commentators and politicians they're talking about the left. Everything from blocking right wing trolls on Twitter to asking people to vote for a left wing NEC slate is not on. What factionalism never refers to how the right behaved, from its apparatchiks to Labour MPs who, from day one, did everything in their power to destroy Corbyn's leadership. They said it was a going to be a disaster, and worked tirelessly to make it one. What the report's authors mean by factionalism is something of a symptomatic silence, so let's spell it out. The media was stacked against Corbyn's leadership, but it was Labour MPs from the Deputy Leader down who gave them the attack lines, leaked the documents and highlighted the weaknesses: they enabled the onslaught, and were the ones cheering when Labour seats fell - if they were able to save their own skins. There is a ridiculous school of thought that suggests none of this matters, as if voters would look upon the political equivalent of a chimps' tea party with indulgence if it wasn't for Corbyn. Why then did Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell obsess over media management and used carrots and sticks to make sure MPs toed the line, particularly before 1997? Perhaps it has something to do with fractious parties not winning elections? Labour Together's assumption of a diplomatic silence gets in the way of reckoning properly with the impact of Brexit. In 2017 Labour deftly killed it as an issue and denied Theresa May the election she wanted to fight. Had the party adopted the 2019 positioning then, she would be the one presiding over an 80-seat majority, with Boris Johnson a high profile and annoying back bencher. Following that election Corbyn should have moved quickly to affirm Labour's backing for a negotiated settlement, such as Norway Plus. This would have anchored Labour to an exit, but the softest possible exit. Instead it was left ambiguous which gave the second referendum/remain-at-any-price crew room to start driving Labour's policy. This was a failure of his leadership, and easily his most catastrophic mistake. Yet he does not bear this cross alone. No one forced Labour MPs, including the current leader of the party, to bang the drum for remain. Nor were they forced into backing a referendum campaign that not only aimed at driving a wedge between Corbyn and EU-friendly Labour voters, but in fact later split over the issue. Brexit was a battering ram, alright. Johnson wielded it to collapse the so-called red wall seats, but not before the remainers had used it repeatedly to pulverise the party's standing. The appalling EU election results and the panicked adoption of the second referendum was the result, and the Tories got the election they wanted on the ground of their choosing. We'll look at what the report says about future strategy tomorrow, but I'm not holding out much hope for keen insight. The reason for looking at politics as it really is, for soberly and honestly addressing our achievements and failures even, no especially if they upsets and makes for uncomfortable reading for those who would prefer delusions is so we don't repeat the past. While the Labour Together report is right to point out the failings and mistakes Labour made and stress the importance of long-term processes, it lacks an explanation of why the party expended so much effort struggling with itself. It's understandable: Ed Miliband, Lucy Powell and friends don't want to point fingers and their diplomacy is an effort to present something that cannot be dismissed lightly. Indeed, they were not entirely innocent parties in the nonsense of the last few years. But if your analysis misses the one thing that ate away at Labour for over four years, destroying its coherence and its electoral chances, then you're not preparing the party adequately for when it comes back. Because it will. In their own ways, Blair, Gordon Brown, and Ed were each destabilised by elements of the Labour right. What's going to stop them from doing the same when they think it's Keir Starmer's turn?
Ah, racism. How Stoke has missed thee. Nine years ago the British National Party were banished from the council chamber when, prior to the 2010 general election, Nick Griffin had proclaimed Stoke the jewel in the BNP crown. Well, sucks to be them. But the stench has never fully gone away. Every so often there's an unwelcome waft of the recent past when some councillor or another says or does something. For instance, the City Independents - when it was (ostensibly) the senior partner in the coalition running Stoke - put forward one Melanie Baddeley for the office of Deputy Mayor back in 2015. The problem was she sat for the BNP during their height and, at that point, had never accounted for racist past deeds. A one off then? Perhaps. If you was feeling charitable, you could put this down to political naivete. There was never anything much holding the City Independents together, apart from the desire to be the Big I Am and antipathy toward the local Labour Party. Not long after Baddeley's appointment was derailed her co-councillor in the Abbey Hulton ward, one Richard Broughan of the United Kingdom Independence Party, made his presence felt after tweeting a "joke" about the deaths of 71 refugees in Germany. Can you guess what happened next? UKIP decided he was too much of a racist liability for them, and out the door he was pushed. Only to wind up sitting for the City Independents. He lasted until finding further controversy as a sex pest and a drunkard. He ended his political career as the sole elected official for Anne Marie Waters's For Britain. Thankfully Labour's Jo Woolner had the satisfaction of taking his seat last May. Lightning sometimes strikes twice, okay? But how about three times? Cllr Jackie Barnes entered the chamber at a by-election in 2012 after issuing the most ridiculous manifesto I've ever seen. It fulminated against cervical smears, plagiarised crap Facebook memes, and had nudge nudge, wink wink innuendoes about "proper Stokies" littered throughout. Still, it got them the seat and I suppose it was logical it would serve as their programme for the 2015 local elections. Success breeds success, right? Five years on we're still awaiting the promised tea set and package tour. But hey, madcap peccadilloes and weirdo policies are no barriers to getting elected in Stoke-on-Trent. Anyway, to pull things back from this necessary tangent Cllr Barnes, who is presently the Lord Mayor of our fine city has added herself to the City Independents' ignoble record on matters racism. Our so-called first citizen has excelled herself reposting fake news, sharing the "White Lives Matter" statue bullshit of the self-proclaimed 'Proud to be British' Facebook group, and the meme that did the rounds exploiting the memory of Lee Rigby - one that has been publicly attacked by Lyn Rigby, his mum. The Mayor's feed is peppered with this sort of nonsense, the usual "immigrants should be grateful" and whites under siege idiotics. Again, if one was charitable you could put this down to stupid boomer edgelording flipping the bird to the "you can't say that!" liberal in their heads, but then we have stuff about the golliwogs. When you consider all this together, the manifesto she stood on, and the dubious record of the City Independents on racism, the conclusion is obvious: she is racist. The question is what the ruling coalition are going to do about it. This is not the first time racist posts and endorsements on Jackie Barnes's Facebook feed have been flagged up, but the City Indies don't care and neither do their Tory coalition partners. There is no electoral price to be exacted one year on from a famous victory, and so the eyes stay shut and the pall of silence seals independent and Tory lips. Pathetic. Damning. And for both parties, most revealing. Image Credit
The victory of Keir Starmer in Labour's leadership campaign was always going to revive a genre of writing on the right: the need to smash the left. In between extolling the virtues of markets and attacking trade unions, former Blair aide John McTernan is a frequent exponent of this school. Just don't call him a Tory. Tom Harris, one of the worst MPs ever to grace the House of Commons for any party, has called on Keir to do the same from his Telegraph berth. And on Monday, Rachel Sylvester took time out from admiring right wing authoritarians to wind up the klaxon in The Times. The message is always identical: reckon with the left, smash the left, bury the left. But why? What does it matter to a hard right cheerleader like Sylvester to give a shit? In short, to stabilise the Labour Party as another establishment party safe for business interests, state institutions, and aspirant careerists who'll guarantee the status quo as they ascend through the ranks. There are a couple of things here. It's no exaggeration to say the liberal side of the political establishment greeted the election of Jeremy Corbyn with a nervous breakdown. Their destructive and scabby behaviour from the very day he became Labour leader was a symptom of the implosion of a world view, of the impossible happening as tens of thousands appeared out of nowhere and charged into the Labour Party. Their trauma of losing to a mass insurgency was compounded by 2016 and the double blows of losing the EU referendum and the election of Donald Trump. The forces of liberalism were swept aside by the very antithesis of a smooth and "grown up" politician in America, and the nice liberal Tories like Dave and Osborne were out of sorts once Theresa May and her commitment to a hard Brexit took the reins, followed in short order by Boris Johnson. For the first time, liberalism as a political tendency was very much subordinate in both the two main parties and had to (incoherently) resort to combinations of parliamentary rebellions, street campaigning, and reinforcing a rejuvenated Liberal Democrats to scramble back into contention. Keir Starmer was part of this tendency, albeit that choosing to engage with Corbynism. This meant he was in a good position when its humbling finally happened, and took advantage of his proximity to Corbyn to present himself as a Corbyn-lite continuity candidate. From the standpoint of their politics and position, this makes obvious sense. If only the left had proven as hard nosed, determined and focused while it had the levers of power in Labour. Winning back control by any means necessary was the first step, purging the left to make space for the party's rightful masters is the second, yes? However, where the right are kidding themselves is the idea a bout of bloodletting against the left led from the top is going to prove popular. I can understand the logics, which come in two flavours. Single out and boot out the troublemakers to improve the party's standing. In this respect, the imminent EHRC report into anti-semitism provides a useful pretext, and would get polite applause from the very press Keir is courting. And also taking on one's internal opposition burnishes the old toughness credentials. When Tony Blair provoked a fight over Clause Four, it reassured the Tory media that here was someone not about to threaten their class interests in the most modest ways, not that the wider public needed any convincing - Labour had held double-digit polling leads since the UK crashed out the ERM. And we saw recently how Johnson's Brexit at any price strategy cohered voters because his picking a fight with remain-inclined MPs in his own party and pledge to flout the law demonstrated determination and, something we don't normally associate with Johnson, seriousness of purpose. In other words, both Blair and Johnson performatively fostered division with a very clear and well framed objective in mind. Keir Starmer hasn't got that. In many ways, nor does he need to. The left are divided, most union leaderships are content with Keir and are happy to see the back of Corbyn, and the right have a majority on the NEC for now. Even more helpful from his point of view is, as forecast, sections of the left decamping out of exhaustion, disillusion, and disgust. This is an issue the Labour right faced a year ago - if members leave, so the possibility for a comeback gets harder. Or, fast forwarding to today, if leftists leave the easier it becomes for right wing candidates to win NEC elections, local council, devolved government, and parliamentary selections. The other issue is a certain amorphousness of the left. Despite Momentum having 40,000 members and ignoring the idiot scare stories, it behaves neither like Militant, nor as a socialist version of Progress or Labour First (sadly). The last four years endowed it with little political coherence, apart from defending Corbyn, and in the wider party it is well thought of thanks to its huge campaign days and matching activists to seats. Any partial action taken against Momentum would not lead to a quick clean victory, but would drag in supportive unions and threaten to paralyse the party with infighting - just as those swing voters are looking afresh at Labour thanks to the leader's coiffured appeal. This is far from the only cost. As noted the other day, steering right has consequences. And in this respect, being seen to purge the groups of people in Labour who've been sticking up for renters against landlords, for black people against coppers and fascists, for emergency workers against a the government, Labour runs the risk of setting off corrosive negative multipliers. We know the Labour right like to project, so they think the average Corbyn-supporting leftist is a social misfit with a well paid job and zero ties to the world outside of the politics ghetto. In fact, disproportionately the left are made up of rooted activists who, in modest ways, help form political opinions and occasionally affect political leadership in their workplaces and areas of activity. They are precious for cohering the party's new base. Without them we wouldn't have done so well in 2017, and last year the result would have been even worse. Going for a wholesale purge as advised by the Tory and Tory-adjacent friends of Keir would collapse Labour's chances at the next election to zero, and severely damage the party as a going concern. Perhaps ... just perhaps this is why they're recommending it? During the leadership election, Keir made a great deal out of being the unity candidate. On that basis a large number of erstwhile Corbyn supporters were brought on board and have gone on to provide a mass pro-Keir base in the party that is mostly soft left as opposed to right, or even soft right. Now, some might think this doesn't matter. He's the leader now and the membership can't do anything to force him out. Which is true. Yet any anti-left moves will provoke a reaction, be it an exodus and the partial disintegration of Labour's vote, a turning of layers of his support against him, increased support for a left under siege, and the risk of damage to the party's image and, crucially, his own. If Keir Starmer has any sense the press cuttings demanding purges should be filed under 'pay no heed'. Image Credit
It is a truth universally acknowledged that social movements provoke into being their countermovements. The labour movement and fascism. The third and fourth waves of feminism, and the so-called alt-right. Black Lives Matter and a disturbing, gibbering menagerie of violent cop stans, the KKK, and every two-bit racist from society's effluent pipe. Here, last weekend's welcome action against Edward Colston's likeness has provided the far right a new cause to latch onto. Casting themselves protectors of our precious heritage, a few hardy souls camped out overnight to guard Robert Baden-Powell and Capt. James Cook from the left-wing threats existing in their minds. Hope they didn't get a chill. And then there was London, today. The fighting with the cops, the racist chants, the seig heils by the Cenotaph, the harassment and attacks on anyone who wasn't white, this didn't drop from nowhere. It didn't happen because Black Lives Matter happened. The far right are a persistent feature of British politics, and in recent years there has been much to encourage them. Since the beginning of last decade, hate crimes have more than doubled, with a marked acceleration between 2015-16 and 16-17. What on earth might have happened then? *innocent face* Since, nationalist rhetoric has ramped up, along with overt state racism, scapegoating has become official policy in the Tory manifesto, a uniformly racist Tory press carrying on being racist, a subset of celebrity for whom fame is inseparable from racism and so-called anti-woke politics, and the utter demonisation of parliament's most consistently anti-racist figure by an establishment for whom a poisoned politics and the hardest of exits from the European Union is preferable to a mild redistribution of wealth. As much as the establishment protests their innocence and liberally condemns a white riot, they can't fling their plague seeds hither and thither and not expect them to sprout. The mainstream then have emboldened the far right, and the Conservative Party continues to do so. Why else were the far right, in-between swigging beer, shouting Nazi slogans, and pissing on memorials to dead coppers, voicing their support for Boris Johnson? Why do they think they're on the same side? Johnson overcame his customary torpor to fire off a speedy denunciation, but polarising the electorate and pushing Brexit as an explicitly nationalist project (so much for "Out of Europe and into the world!") has got us to this situation. As recently noted, fascism in the 21st century turns towards identity politics. It offers a performative masculine violence against despised others, a studied and contrived attempt to shock with anti-social behaviour, vandalism and physical assaults, and glories in war, past atrocities committed against subject populations, and a sense of grievance to "the traitors" who condemn this rancid heritage. The fascism of the street is episodic and opportunist, and is the perfect foil for violent men who have something to prove. Theirs is a power politics of destruction, a nihilistic desire to destroy for its own sake. And, as a current on the fringes, it's dying. As Paul Mason reported earlier, those getting beery in Parliament Square were the usual suspects: ageing hooligans, some of whom were likely veterans of the English Defence League travelling circus, a couple of younger footy firms, and the usual fascist riff raff, including Anne-Marie Waters and Paul Golding. What he witnessed, he said, was the outpouring of rage for a world view that is fast evaporating. Considering all that is said about the far right getting enabled by the mainstream, this might seem like a curious point to make, but it is true. The rising tide of hate crime is precisely because society as a whole is slowly growing more intolerant of intolerance, not least thanks to the efforts of comrades like Black Lives Matter and their forebears in the anti-racist and anti-fascist movements. The social cost of prejudice, on the whole, is increasing and they know, every thug who ran amok today knows the game, in the long-term, is up. This is why they lash out, why they attack the defenceless, desecrate the monuments they affect to protect, and find a kindred spirit in a Prime Minister who offers them new wine in reassuringly familiar bottles. Their precious characteristics, their illusory sense of superiority bound to the intertwining of pale and male no longer guarantees them anything. And where does this leave them? Nowhere. Fascism, the postmodern fascism Toni Negri wrote about, is therefore a politics of decay. As masculine and racial privilege carries on evaporating, the residue left is concentrated and poisonous. We need to protect ourselves when coming into contact, but it too dessicates and becomes dust. And it isn't long until the air carries its flecks away.
And the answer to that is ... some do. Every time there is a Labour leadership contest, some Tories come forward and let it be known they're super scared of this or that candidate. In 2010 David Miliband was said to give them squeaky bums. In 2015, it was Liz Kendall who sent the chills running down their collective spines. These were "endorsements" only the most politically naive would take seriously. At the time our David was on board with the "necessity" of austerity and wasn't about to offer the Tories a hard time in the Commons, and in 2015 Liz was even less likely so, given her almost total abandonment of Labourism. However, what was curious about the tediously long contest just gone was the dearth of Tories fighting to endorse any Labour candidate. Perhaps they were too busy dining out on their famous victory to notice or care. Yet some Tories noticed, and some are worried. One of them is Gavin Barwell, known around these parts as the ex-bag carrier of the unlamented Theresa May. Tories are making a big mistake underestimating Labour's coiffured leader, he suggests, which is good news if we want to see the back of Johnson and friends in four years' time. So what are his workings? First up, the opposition are less likely to be divided in the future. This is true in the sense he means it, that Labour and the Liberal Democrats will have a better relationship with one another. The practicalities of an unstated non-aggression pact will force themselves on acting LibDem leader Ed Davey, if he wins their eventual leadership election, but be more likely embraced with enthusiasm if someone from the left of the party is successful. Additionally, Labour itself is not about to be in the same position as it was before December's election, with confused factional messaging and the open rebellion of the parliamentary party. I doubt we'll get to the point of Blairist Borg discipline, but having a party all pulling in the same direction helps campaigning efficacy and perception of competence. After all, if you can't govern your own party you're not going to get enough votes to govern the country. Second, Barwell appreciates the Brexit factor in the Tory vote much better than sundry centrists. This was obvious when May turned in a creditable performance in terms of votes cast in 2017, even though she lost the Tory majority. Brexit was the glue holding their declining coalition together, and helped boost it further when Johnson had a crack at it. What this election showed was how people were prepared to overlook the baggage successfully heaped on to Corbyn's shoulders as long as the party was seen to respect their referendum vote. When it became clear in 2019 it didn't, far from the promised 20-point leads Labour could expect had it gone full remain, the party instead had to console itself with the trauma of heavy defeat. Going into the election with one wedge issue, of leadership, was manageable. Going in with two was suicide. Yet without Brexit, where indeed will the Tories be? Even now after a partial collapse in trust, the solidity of Tory support still rests on the bloody minded fidelity to Brexit. Remove that, remove the Tory majority? On his third and fourth points, Labour's path back to power does not necessarily rest on winning back its former heartland seats and could pick up more Tory seats in the South East, which would be strengthened by Keir's move toward the centre of politics. Leaving that aside for the moment, the jury is out on whether the coronavirus crisis will accelerate population movement trends. If there is any truth in the death of the office discourse, the distribution of jobs becomes less concentrated in London and the supermajorities for Labour we see stacked up in seat after seat can flow out as remote working rebalances the geographic spread of career opportunities and the London property pinch drives hundreds of thousands back to their home constituencies. Fifth and sixth, in the eyes of the Keir-curious his response to the removal of Edward Colston's statue and to the government's handling of coronavirus is where most of the public are: wrong to simply tear down the statue minus the show of due process, but it shouldn't have been there anyway; support the government when they're doing the right thing, criticise them fairly where they mess up. Seventh, there's the desire for change, which will be hard for the Tories to affect after 14 years. Though not impossible - Johnson is proof the Tories can renew themselves in office when an (old) new face with new priorities comes to the fore. There's also the taste of the electorate to consider - after a showman, might they want sensible and boring? Lastly, the path to a Labour majority is incredibly difficult without winning back masses of Scottish seats, but what isn't is the creation of an anti-Tory majority in parliament. A progressive coalition of some sort might work where it was a non-starter under Jeremy Corbyn, despite the comforting myths some on the left enjoy telling themselves. And Barwell is right - there has always been an anti-Tory majority in the electorate, but one divided along party lines. If it can be cohered to run in a similar direction then the chances of the Tories securing another term in 2024 diminishes. In all then, quite a perceptive account of where Labour can threaten the Tories. Yet Barwell's focus on all things Westminster blinds him to Keir's biggest weakness. What he sees as a strength - his centrism - could act as the Achilles Heel. Retreading the old 1997 triangulation strategy might scoop up a layer of swing voters and post-Brexit refugees from the Tories, but at the price of alienating the new core constituency. This doesn't mean knocking a few votes off those London majorities, it would suppress the vote of our core support elsewhere, which would be absolutely fatal in the tight contests Barwell thinks could fall to Labour in the south. And with these voters moving/being driven out of London and the bog cities, the positive-for-Labour consequences of their dispersal is bound to be stymied. For a number of reasons, the new base does not habitually vote like the Tory core does and are more mercenary with their loyalties. If Keir cleaves too much to the Tory position on key issues, say backs landlords over renters, is seen to affirm the privileges of business and the old versus the young, or otherwise supports the present political settlement significant sections of this base can disengage completely, or boost fragmentation of the anti-Tory opposition by going Green or supporting the reinvented LibDems. They have somewhere to go, and will not be afraid of going - even if it increases the chances of the Tories getting back in. If following the end of Brexit dominance we revert back to something like the pre-2015 situation, i.e. "normal" politics plus SNP dominance in Scotland, wiser Tories know Keir has a number of advantages that would play well when matters are less fraught and polarised. What they're blind to, however, is how conditional the Labour core is. They won't be forever, though. May and Johnson were sensitive enough to sniff the Brexit discontent in our voter coalition and worked, with differing degrees of success, at exploiting it. Looking at what remains, we should fully expect them to try and set Keir Starmer against the interests his party is supposed to articulate and prosecute. Avoiding their pitfalls means sticking up for what is right and refusing to accept the Tory framing of key issues. On this, he is largely untested but the initial signs, on internal issues, on "slapping down" MPs who talk out of turn, on renting, on confronting racism, on a growing number of little things, the initial signs ... aren't good. As such, if he persists down this line or, worse, listens to the siren voices demanding a reckoning with the left we will have the answer to the fear question: the Tories won't have to worry about a single thing. Image Credit
Our precious history is getting lost! blubbed Sarah Vine in the pages of the Mail. On the contrary, the unceremonious dunking of Edward Colston has done more for a full reckoning of British history than any number of government programmes. Indeed, if Vine was concerned with the warts and all story of this bloodied sceptred isle, she might have a word with her significant other who tried his damnedest to limit the national curriculum to kings and queens. Well, given their bookshelf might we expect anything different? Still, Vine's jitters represent well the unease rippling through Tory England. The Black Lives Matter protests have opened up the possibility of a street movement focused directly on racism and policing, and as those with a memory might remember, the two have come together in riots that play out roughly every 10 years - 1981 in Brixton and Toxteth, 1991 in the Midlands and south, 2001 in northern England, and the 2011 London riots. A bit of urban unrest usually helps the incumbents look tough, but with trust eroding thanks to the Tory mishandling the outbreak there's no telling what the political consequences might be. One reason why Bristol plod took the very sensible decision, from an operational point of view, not to intervene in Colston's bath. The Tories need a story to tell themselves, a narrative that can help cohere the base. Boris Johnson has gone for the old "protestors have a point but violence undermines the message" shtick, which was entirely predictable and, if anything, the standard liberal stock response, but another strand of Toryism wants to concede nothing. Daring to raise questions about the thin blue line, and using mob rule to impose a subaltern order on public space. Well, it's unconscionable, isn't it? Writing for Conservative Home, Charlotte Gill thinks so. For readers of this blog, Sadiq Khan is not a name readily associated with radicalism. He's hardly blazed a trail for local government in the way, say, Labour-run Preston has, and yet the Tories can't stand him. Despite his snoring boring creds and ensuring London is open to business, in both senses of the term, the way the Tories carry on you'd think he's conniving to set up a revolutionary tribunal. Yet, hilariously if you know anything about the man, Gill has Khan at the head of an extra-parliamentary statue-bashing movement, where he's allied himself to "Twitter" and radical left. And now, weeps Gill, after Calston other monuments are getting targeted. She fears a toppling of "male statues" and an intolerance toward past deeds, "Any discussion of moral relativism, an important feature of examining the past, has been abandoned", she writes, channelling her inner postmodernist and demanding the nuance and understanding she;d never concede to others when the record of her class is up for discussion. Perhaps then she might want to think about the actual context Colston's statue was erected in, for instance, and then get back to us. We then devolve into straightforward ranting. Campaigning against statues shows Sadiq Khan's censorious instincts! Don't you know he banned bikini bodies from London Underground advertising hoardings? Doesn't he know some of these statues are symbols of national grandeur? Doesn't like the display of women's bodies and has anti-British tendencies, you say? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. If this mayor-sponsored foray into cancel culture is allowed to carry on, don't you know tourism might also suffer? Heaven forfend. She ends by calling on ministers to "stand up for what's fair." The government, after all have a huge majority, so why don't they use it? Ah yes, the totally healthy hunger for the smack of firm government, as long as others are on the receiving end. Still, even Gill's hyperbolic screed wasn't enough for some, and if you want the measure of the party the comments are always a good place to look. On this one we have one commenting on "the far left" destroying "our heritage." Another whingeing about the "lies about slavery" and, hilariously, the "anti-British communist Sadiq Khan." And topping it off, another commenting on George Floyd's coffin with the oh so funny "The schwarzers love their bling...". No responses, no challenges, it's almost as if the Tories don't really care about racism, especially among their own supporters. Ultimately, this isn't just about public order, it's about who gets to define and control the symbolism in public spaces. Statues of bourgeois patriarchs are there to remind passers by who are the sanctified and celebrated, whose history and experiences are valid and who doesn't matter. An act of erasure and smothering, petrified in stone. Monuments to forcible forgetting. From the point of view of the Tories, if the state can't determine how space is organised and used, if it cannot defend the symbolism that helps confer its power legitimacy then its authority is diminished. For them, these are the stakes - and it doesn't come much more important than this.
If you're a working class kid, a playground is a sprinkling of swings, a slide. a roundabout, bench, and climbing frame. If you're born into megabucks a playground is, well, something like Monaco. With the world convulsed by economic cataclysm, itself the unwelcome by-product of the health crisis, for the BBC to screen a documentary about the world's most opulent micro-state seems, well, not the most appropriate of timings. Still, there is a curiosity to be sated. What is a place like when the one per cent make up 30% of the people? Insufferable. There's little need to go into the ins and outs of the baubles dangled before the viewers' eyes. Supercars with ostentatious paint jobs, petty competition between billionaire yacht owners for ever larger vessels, palatial rooms at the Hotel de Paris going for 15,000 Euros a night, and the zero income tax that, as the narrator put it, helps "protect the substantial family fortune." Then we have the exclusive parties, the invite-only gatherings up at the Royal palace, and the master of ceremonies himself, Prince Albert II of Monaco - the only absolutist monarch on history in possession of an American accent. It's the sociology matters, the glimpses of the principality's power relationships. Albert affects a patrician if avuncular presence at odds with his and Princess Stephanie's hard-living reputations from the 80s and 90s, but his word is law. There is a no photography rule in Monaco, and professional photos or filming requires written permission - hence no paps, another bonus for harried celebrities considering residence. He also gets to decide who can become a Monegasque citizen, of which there are 9,000. The programme makes much of the elaborate hoops one has to jump through to tick the boxes, but it's very clear the (unspecified) rules are a complete sham - Albert decides all applications, and if your face doesn't fit you're not coming in. Citizenship does confer advantages though. Even a state given over to the indolence of the leisure class needs workers, and a relatively generous system of subsidies are available to citizens. As one air traffic controller observes, his citizenship means he pays 700 Euros per month for his apartment whose market rate would ordinarily be €4,000/month. Monaco however is entirely dependent on the circuits of the globe-trotting rich, as well as the sufferance of the French state. Revenues are funded by the 20% VAT the state levies on everything, which makes spectacles like the Monaco Grand Prix essential money spinners. But there is a problem: with the rise of the likes of Dubai as another luxurious hold out for the rich, how might the principality stay competitive and keep the cash flowing? Princess Camilla, consort of the Duke of Castro and one of the claimants to the long abolished and disputed throne of the Two Sicilies is determined to "preserve tradition" and come up with new ways of making Monaco relevant. Her wheeze? Influencer awards. For a micro state whose social basis rests on discretion, inserting Monaco into the overexposure of the attention economy can bring in the next generation of money bags. By getting the images of the awards and the lavish hospitality out to tens of millions of followers, Monaco hits the aspirational imaginary and the whole grift can carry on indefinitely. Monaco's opulence is grotesque and, not at all coincidentally, showcases the poverty of bourgeois success. The dream of capital is accumulation without workers nor the responsibility for their maintenance. The dream of power is control without accountability, and therefore responsibility. Monaco marries the libertarianism of the super wealthy with the arbitrariness of absolutism, and they are shown to be the conditions for one another. The other two key tax haven states, Dubai and Singapore, have near identical set ups - the only real difference being the degree to which they ratchet up the authoritarianism. And this, ultimately, underlines the pointlessness of wealth. Fortune liberates one from economic necessity, but the freedom excessive money buys is luxury behind closed doors, a berth in a rarefied society of artifice and superficiality. When you consider all the crap the ruling class inflicts and the destruction of human beings their system affects - just so they can recline in the bounded universe of gilded gated communities - doesn't it make you feel sick?
It might not be ideal weather for a swim, but neither was it ideal for a statue of Edward Colston, Tory MP, philanthropist, and dealer in slaves, to have stood in Bristol these last 125 years. And now his copper bottomed facsimile reposes on the bed of the Avon following a Sunday outing with Black Lives Matter protestors, the decades-long debate about the status of the statue is settled. The reaction, as you might expect, has been mixed and we've seen three broad responses emerge within "the discourse." There are those who celebrated the statue's demise - the argument we'll call for the purpose of this post, the right one. Just as the American south is littered with Confederate generals, many a plinth on these islands supports a questionable encumbrance. A slaver here, a pirate there, invaders, occupiers, butchers, the whole gamut of 18th and 19th century conquistadores from Britain's imperial past. Their misdeeds bracketed and their person commemorated by likenesses of granite and cast iron, their continued and unremarked presence in officially sanctified and maintained spaces denotes a society ill at ease with what its forebears have done, and so either likes to pretend it never happened or concentrate on the two World Wars (and one world cup). Even Britain's atrocities since the war, such as Partition, the war in Malaya, the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, and its "police actions" in the late 20th and early 21st centuries barely register as things we should learn from, let alone atone for. Always happy to demand contrition from Germans, and affecting astonishment that Japan adopts a studied amnesia when it comes to its occupation of and crimes committed in Korea and China, the British state, its leading parties, its mass media and press, the entire establishment refuses to consider the global trail of dead as far flung as its empire once was. The George Floyd/Black Lives Matter solidarity protests here in the UK would not have tapped a deep well of resentment and exploded if we didn't have similar problems. The British police are not as overtly violent and racist as American cops, but people of colour are likelier to be stopped, searched, roughed up, and banged up. Black people are twice as likely to die in custody than whites. This is compounded by a division of labour that is heavily racialised, with black people - women especially - disproportionately located in the lowest paid, precarious, and in these Covid times, dangerous occupations. And despite the official ideologies of anti-racism, anti-black racism in particular is not taken seriously. Under the carpet it goes, along with blood flecked sweepings of imperial history. It's time racism in this country was treated as a social and a political problem, a structural feature of capitalist societies, albeit in our case with particularly British characteristics. The unceremonious trashing and dumping of Colston's statue might change the terms of the debate as other statues and historical legacies come under pressure. However, there are people, powerful people, who'd prefer racism to remain a moral issue for, well, very political reasons. The Home Secretary Priti Patel is one such person. As a politician from an Indian background, her overtly right wing takes on issues - like threatening the Irish Republic with food shortages, tough on refugees, egregious chumming with right wing Israeli politicians - are attempts to endear herself to the Tory grassroots, a good chunk of whom very grudgingly accept BAME MPs and ministers. Showing more concern for a rusting statue of a centuries-dead slaver ("utterly disgraceful!" she wittered on Sky News) than any victim of racism, her careerist instinct is to be seen being tough on anti-racism. This is more than her getting accepted and easing a path to future higher office, trying to make the Colston dunking a criminal matter avoids having to address the substantive issue. And for good reason: any reckoning with police racism and imperial history means lifting the lid on Tory racism. Remember, as recently as, well, December's election the Tories promised a crackdown targeting travellers. As the wheels come off the clown car and difficulties mount, an insurgent street movement targeting imperial heroes is an unnecessary distraction, and a potentially damaging one for Tories who might be drawn to the empire's defence. There's another establishment response too, and once seen pushed by assorted Blairy types and paragons of centrist virtue. Rob Marchant Of Labour Uncut, for instance, whinges about "mob rule" and "vandalism", and mentions democracy. This is pretty much the response you can expect from Labour's front bench, if they venture into these waters at all. A wide ranging and thorough discussion of racism and imperialism doesn't suit the present leadership, because party history is up to its neck in it. We like to hear about Clem Attlee, the crusading reformer. We never hear about Clem Attlee, the overseer of Partition, father of the bomb and colonial anti-insurgency, and the man who soaked our African possessions to pay for Britain's post-war recovery. And, well, Black Lives Matter shines an unwelcome spotlight on current party practices. The racism uncovered by the leaked report, the systematic failure to take complaints seriously, the repeated targeting of black MPs by the right of the party, the factional preoccupation with only one form of racism, offering arguments about process and the proper way of doing things avoids having to reckon with what BLM and solidarity movements are saying. Black Lives Matter has a mass following in Britain not simply because racism exists and we're sick of it, but because the establishment in its Tory and Labour guises are complicit. The Tories are happy to whip it up for electoral purposes, and Labour are much happier pandering and addressing "real concerns" than challenging racism, whether it's on the doorstep, in the press, or comes out the mouths of their right wing opponents. This time, however, something has changed. BLM and the solidarity protests will die down in due course like all movements do, but the issues raised are not going away. The days of depoliticising racism as a personal failing are done: its relationship to politics and power are clear for all to see.
I'm going to tell you a story about social security. After leaving university I went on the dole. The advisor at the job centre handed over a huge wodge of paper work to fill out. Because I was living with my girlfriend, the advisor told me to put a claim in as a couple. For the next few months I went along to the job centre showing proof of my interviews and job applications, and each month the letter would come through saying my dole was being cut. It went down to £50/week, then £20, then five quid, and finally the utterly princely zero pounds. Thanks to receiving this generous entitlement I didn't bother going to the Job Centre again, and to top it off they sent me a letter saying they were terminating my receipt of sweet Fanny Adams because I hadn't abided by the rules. Why the reductions? Because, occasionally, my significant other would do more than 16 hours a week working in a local pub. The perversity of the system, brought in under the Tories but left alone by Labour, meant zero help for me and the millions of other young people who've experienced unemployment for any period of time. Therefore when a politician, someone like Jonathan Reynolds who holds the shadow work and pensions brief, for example, says they want to do something about social security I'm listening. Because there's no beating about the bush. Labour under Blair and Brown not only failed our people when it came to welfare, they happily kicked those dependent on it in the teeth. The workfare policies they criticised the Tories for wanting to implement when in opposition got a new lease of life with the so-called New Deal of the late 90s, and the demonisation of people on benefits passed into the common sense of Blairism and the Labour right. MPs like the thankfully defenestrated Caroline Flint, who wanted to throw unemployed people out of their council homes, Rachel Reeves who said Labour was not for people on benefits, or Harriet Harman's failure to oppose cuts to benefit caps and child benefit, all of whom would be stains on the parliamentary party if it wasn't already stuffed to the gills with people who are as bad. And in some cases worse. And so we have the first problem when it comes to popular support for social security: the Tories and Labour have spent 40 years thinking up ways of excluding people from the system entirely. This strand of policy thinking, a term used lightly here, on the Labour right is driven by pure triangulation. Kick those on benefits because they don't vote anyway/have nowhere else to go, and we might win over a few Tory voters jealous of the Wayne and Waynetta Slobs living a life of riley on £117/week in their heads. Not the wisest given how the party needs to win back seats with high levels of welfare dependency next time, this approach to social security by the last Labour government compounded the problems of social security: its inefficiency, its failure to be even a residual safety net, its punitive and disempowering character. There is, however, another tradition on the right. Which is where Jonny Reynolds comes in. The much-discussed, to put it euphemistically, interview for The House magazine sees him set out some principles and thinking about welfare. He would like to see the £20 increase to Universal Credit brought in by the government at the onset of this crisis continue and have it apply to Jobseekers' and Employment Support Allowance too. The five-week wait for benefits should also be abolished - a move originally introduced by Dave and Osborne to try and force claimants to accept any job as they suffer an income-free gap between application and receipt of payment. He also thinks the case for limiting child benefit and the cap on support has been destroyed by the crisis. A positive move, albeit one sounding more like the contact with everyday reality seeping through rather than a more principled position. He would also like to see the expansion of statutory sick pay and it increased by an unspecified amount. Where's the controversy?
“When you’re looking at how you design or change the system going forward, certainly I feel if you have made greater contributions to the system, there is an argument that you should receive more out of that system. It doesn’t mean that you will ever be leaving people without support or leaving them destitute. But I simply feel that that lack of a connection between what you put in and what you get out has become a major problem of social security and the political support for it.”
Ah, there it is. There's this thing a bit like the internet's wayback machine called memory, and digging deep you'll find the last time this was floated. In a major speech to try and cohere the Labour right behind a political critique of Corbynism back in 2015, Liam Byrne set out his stall. Among which was the application of the contributory principle to welfare. Leaving the problems with this for a moment, it was something he flirted with under Ed Miliband as part of a limited attempt to rethink welfare and results from trying to stand on two horses. One wants to gallop toward helping people in need by providing a new settlement worthy of the name 'social security', and the other is merrily cantering toward appeasing the (contrived) public appetite for walloping scroungers. Despite their antagonism, the idea was about giving everyone a stake in the system, which is a sound principle for building any welfare system. That's why generous and universal benefits are the way to go. One reason the progressive removal of universalism and going down the route of residual welfare didn't attract major protests or thrust a militant claimants' movement to the fore wasn't just because of the accumulating weight of scrounger rhetoric, but because the payments were pretty poor in the first place. Unfortunately, Jonny's preference for reasserting a contributory principle introduces a division between deserving and undeserving claimants. This would lend itself to a new round of divide-and-rule politicking by the right around benefits, and therefore undermines the universalism of the non-contributory floor. ABC stuff, you would think. And far from simplifying matters, it creates more admin as new sets of means tests are introduced and it stores up rows over eligibility, leaving Labour open to the accusation it wants to impoverish middle class people by setting the criteria too stringently and the payments too low. A whole world of political pain awaits that, in the end, won't do much to build a consensus around the sort of system we need. Again, it's not perfect but a generous and unconditional basic income is the simplest way of building a welfare system in which jobs are under permanent threat from automation and, without a decent programme of state-led investment, where the UK labour market has a miserable history of low paid and insecure jobs. Knowing that the wolf will not be at the door if your job evaporates would transform the life chances of millions, improve the take up of education and retraining, and a whole host of other benefits besides. As an ideas man, Jonny has shown interest in the basic income in the past though others on Labour's right hate it so much they have to lie about it. Yet even if this is a non-starter in these days of ever-so-responsible opposition a Labour position on welfare has to ask itself two questions. Does it adequately support our people because, contra the likes of Caroline Flint, the poorest are our people and, duh, Labour has a clear political interest in consolidating our constituencies. And does welfare help collectively empower our people in the context of a wages system in which the pressure on incomes from employers is structurally downward. A contributions-based system, even if it is grafted on top of a universalist system and affords special privileges to those who've worked longest or have paid more tax thanks to higher salaries cuts against the second principle, and sets the stage for an attack on the first.
Sometimes, other people simply say it better. What the world doesn't need right now is a white bloke miles away from the action offering their take on all and sundry, and doubly so on the American rebellion against police violence and structural racism. We should be hearing from black people. It's their experiences that need centring. It is they who deserve, need to be listened to. In this episode of TyskySour, the Novara team interviews Nelini Stamp, an activist with the Working Families Party in New York about the police, racism, and why protest has exploded right across the the country. Well worth watching.
I've lost count over the years of the things that have made mainstream politics a laughing stock. It's good to know then, in serious times like these we can still find something that beggars belief. Take Jacob Rees-Mogg's insistence that the Commons returns to normal, for instance. Westminster watchers know how parliament has, sensibly, been ticking over at reduced capacity for the duration of the lockdown. No more than 50 MPs in the chamber at a time, two metre physical distancing, screens so other MPs can participate from home and electronic voting. The latter has raised a few eyebrows as technical difficulties has seen Rishi Sunak vote against the government, and Rachel Reeves rebelling twice against the party whip. This for Rees-Mogg is too much, however. These emergency measures must be dropped forthwith. Under the cloak of democratic accountability, the Leader of the House believes parliament's functions can only be discharged properly if honourable members are there in person to challenge the government. After some pressure, he put forward a motion that would allow MPs to ask urgent questions and make statements remotely but rule out electronic voting. The result? An easy win for the government's plans to open parliament by 261 to 163 votes, but not before the absurdity of over 400 MPs standing in a socially distanced queue snaking its way around the estate. The vote took 36 minutes and, again, made a mockery of the so-called mother of parliaments. Obviously a stupid scheme, plenty of MPs have talked about their unhappiness. Tory MP Robert Halfon on BBC Breakfast Tuesday morning said Rees-Mogg was uninterested in his own difficulties - he's presently shielding due to underlying health conditions. Margaret Hodge has complained for the same reasons, and Valerie Vaz has criticised the plans for being discriminatory. You have to ask why the government are so wedded to this absurdity. We know accountability is poppycock. If Boris Johnson took it at all seriously he wouldn't dive out of Downing Street Covid updates at every given opportunity. Nevertheless while this is farcical for everyone concerned, with potentially deadly consequences for some MPs, there are real political logics behind the move. Moves that will advantage the government. The first is keeping up appearances. With MPs spread about the chamber, Johnson looks isolated and all at sea when he addresses the assembled. Even though Keir Starmer's questioning is quite restrained the Prime Minister has had trouble coming up with convincing answers. With most workers still at home and more watching PMQs than usual, Rees-Mogg knows having his boss floundering without the encouragement of his satraps, the look is not a good one. To enhance the optics, as they say, the government are happy to risk the health of hundreds of others. Well, it's all of a piece. Then we have the issue of authority. The standing of the government has come under strain of late thanks to the Cummings affair, opposition to easing the lockdown, and U-turns on NHS charges. There was also a mounting rebellion of MPs against Johnson's refusal to let Cummings go. Picking a fight to enforce something petty, pointless and going against all reason is a useful reminder of who is in charge. It won't do anything to restore the government's good fortune, but a quick Commons win will assure some jittery supporters worried it's all starting to run away from them. And then we have the main reason, at least where Rees-Mogg is concerned. The move to remote sitting and electronic voting is something of a Trojan Horse. Not because he's fondly attached to parliament's absurdities and mind-boggling traditions, though he's more than happy to cultivate the country gentleman fondly attached to custom and ancient ritual. This is all about power. The convenience of something as basic as push button voting would speed up proceedings, meaning more time for debate and a pressure for more private members' bills - plenty of which are never to any government's liking, and has potential to put it in difficult positions. But more than that it's the thin end of a wedge. If electronic voting, where might the change-minded end? Sittings at reasonable hours? More powers for back benchers and select committees? Electoral reform? Someone as hyper class conscious as Rees-Mogg wants to preserve parliament as is because it is a bastion of class privilege. The stupidity has the consequence of framing British democracy and its constitution, such as it is, a strange and alienating beast. The building and its rituals affects the private school/Oxbridge atmos, a home from home for generations of bourgeois politicians. The accent on tradition comes before democracy, underlying the political habitus of the British ruling class. It's almost as if representatives of the popular will are unwelcome in the corridors of power and everything about the House contrives to remind MPs of this. Naturally, some find this charming and others the pinnacle of democracy. Labour MPs in particular are prone to this parliamentary cretinism. Tories, especially so Tories from bourgeois backgrounds, aren't stupid enough to fall for these transparently obvious illusions. Nevertheless, Rees-Mogg understands the smallest of changes challenges the established way of doing things, and with it comes a host of unforeseen dangers - as the Tories have found out with their two recent experiments with referenda. Keeping the arcane traditions going throws chains of procedure and pomp around the dangers of the democratic impulse and harnesses it to innocuous and often useless ends. The government then have had their way on this, but again they are storing up trouble. 24 MPs in the current parliament are 70 or over, 11 of whom are Tories. And of those who shielding, we are talking dozens from all parties. By bulldozing its way through opposition in the Tory ranks, Johnson and Rees-Moog are sowing the seeds of ill will. We saw how that undid Thatcher in the long-run and more recently, Theresa May following her imperial phase where she rode roughshod over dissenting voices. Could we yet see a case of history repeating? Image Credit
Worried about the consequences of the coronavirus-induced depression? The next few years are going to be very difficult and are sure to polarise further the class and generational differences that have ripped apart British politics these last few years. But in a number of ways, the developed world is lucky. It has the health infrastructure, strong institutions, and the expert knowledge to pull through the crisis relatively undamaged in the long-term. Assuming their government's aren't incompetent or borderline psychopathic. The challenge in the developing world, however, is much greater. A number of countries lack the technical base or resources to mitigate the consequences of the pandemic and their efforts are further weakened by the debt burden and, if they happen to reside in an oil producing region, the geopolitical games of the great powers. In this interview with Alex, Adam Hanieh looks at the impact of Covid-19 on the developing world and sketches out a bleak picture the mainstream media are simply refusing to cover.
A month has passed into the history books, a month that might finally be seen the beginning of the end for this Tory period in government. Hope springs eternal, so for now let's see what posts troubled the internet-travelling public. 1. Why do the Tories want to Cut Furlough Payments? 2. Yvette Cooper's Miserable Capitulation 3. The Dim Wattage of Thangam Debbonaire 4. Is Boris Johnson Losing It? 5. The Class Politics of Easing the Lockdown May has been a month of Tory failure. They're determined to raise the lockdown while transmission is high, but have suffered important reverses on their initial attempt to cut the furlough scheme - so thankfully May's top post is now superseded by events. For the time being. Then we have a couple of faux pas from leading figures in the Labour Party. The sort of missteps sure to become increasingly common as they try and warp reality to fit their nostalgia-tinted views of the world and the dogma of an obsolescent creed. Remember, opposition is only effective if you engage with how our declining press frame it. And then we have two more pieces zeroing in on the pressures besetting Boris Johnson, pressures culminating in the rapid collapse of the government's polling position. It will go lower. Time for some second chance saloon picks. Who qualifies this month? I'd quite like to see the summation of Tory coronavirus woes get a few more clicks, mainly thanks to the account of Tory statecraft it contains. A useful heuristic in understanding why Johnson is clinging to Cummings (and no, the latter doesn't have to have anything on Johnson) and one I'm finding very useful as I'm writing the jolly old Tory book. And the second? It has to be a look at what militant political science is, a post that came about after chancing upon a tweet from New Socialist editor, Tom Gann. It doesn't pretend to originality, but every so often the basics have to be restated. And, bugger it, here's a third. On the death of the office. What gives next month? You'll have to ask Nostradamus, but I can have a go at forecasting more appalling Tory stories, the public health and political fall out of easing the quarantine early and perhaps, just perhaps, a post on another ancient video game. Image Credit
It's hard to recall now, but there was a time the UK looked on top of Coronavirus. In the very early days as the outbreak was raging in Wuhan, Iran, and northern Italy, we were treated to a reassuring show of covid-19 victims getting tracked down and carted off to hospital. The people they had been in contact with were traced, tested, and told to stay put. For once, the Tories were on the edge of ... doing the right thing. As the rest of Italy succumbed and Spain fell under its pall, there was a smidgen of possibility the UK might weather the storm with fewer infections and fewer deaths than the countries across the Channel. Two months is a long time in epidemiology these days, and here we are at the end of May leading Europe with the highest incidence of disease and the greatest number of dead. And we take this grisly trophy for one reason. Despite their best efforts at trying to blame the public for not obeying lockdown rules, the Tories' tardiness at implementing the measures necessary to save tens of thousands of lives is responsible. This disaster is on them. There is no one else to carry the can. Yet, as with all political things, fortune contrived to smile kindly on the Tories. With the initial shock of people being forced to stay home, combined with record job losses, significant cuts to the income of millions of others, and the fear covid-19 has struck into our collective hearts, this sheer incompetence wasn't much noticed. Labour's new leadership also fought shy of trying to highlight it fearful of Keir Starmer being seen playing politics with a life-or-death crisis. Therefore, many were prepared to forgive the government their innumerable sins because we needed them to get it right and, well, no one had been in this situation before. See, the Tories are lucky. The wrong choices could be put down to exceptionalism. Nothing lasts forever, not even polling honeymoons facilitated by a deadly disease. In this last fortnight, the Tories have appeared determined to do everything to take their immense advantage and throw it around like non-functioning testing kits. We saw the imbecility of forcing open the schools while picking fights with teachers and their unions, retreats on ending furlough early and on NHS charges for foreign-born NHS workers, and a collapse in support thanks to the eternal Dominic Cummings crisis. And the government's response to this state of affairs couldn't be worse. Mindful of the u-turn-if-you-want-to nostalgia of the Tory imaginary, and the barrelling approach to Brexit, they've decided to hunker down and go through with school openings and further lockdown relaxations, with arbitrary dates set for the resumption of sports and opening of non-essential shops. This despite infections and death rates standing many times higher than the next worst afflicted European country. That's what they think of the science they're supposedly led by. Over the coming decades the awful decisions of this government are sure to be pored over. They're going to be a factor at the general election in four years time and be scrutinised with a fine tooth comb at the upcoming round of trials. Well, you can't blame a guy for dreaming. But what is the root of this bloody-minded idiocy? We know Johnson is lazy and would know a brief if one came to get him out of jail, but it's more than having a personality indifferent to the suffering of others. Remember, this is someone entirely driven by self and the desire for popularity - you couldn't find a politician more appropriate to the age of the attention economy. The government's psychopathy isn't thanks to the personality traits of its Prime Minister and chief adviser, it's the collective property of the dominant wing of the Tories. Before the fall out of Dominic Cummings forced the right wing press to reflect the anger of its readers they were strongly agitating for lockdown restrictions to be eased. Whence does this will-to-psychosis come? There are two intertwining aspects to understanding the Tories here. The first barely needs much rehearsing because it will be familiar with anyone reading anything to the left of the liberal press: class politics. The history of the Tory party is of its being the preferred, but not sole, arena for the political articulation of ruling class interests, for organising those interests, and representing these sectional interests as if they're identical with those of the country/people. The Tories' hesitation over implementing quarantine measures, their being forced by the measures already taken by the public was, transparently, about keeping the UK's stagnating economy from seizing up. How they've supported people through the crisis by tying subsistence to employers, keeping Universal Credit low, propping up landlords and issuing loans to businesses demonstrated their first concern was maintaining the disciplinary complex underpinning waged labour and market competition. No matter how many old people are shipped back into coronavirus-riddled care homes to die, no capitalist relations of production will be harmed by the pandemic. Even if some changes to the workplace are accelerating. Therefore the lifting of the lockdown is about putting profits before people, reasserting employer authority over employee, and starting the bounce back from the viral depression. The second is about authoritarianism, which has been the ingrained common sense of British state craft since Thatcher. This is different to what we see in Russia, Hungary, the US, and elsewhere but is driven by the same sorts of processes. As Andrew Gamble observed in his 1988 book, The Free Economy and the Strong State, Thatcher's roll back of the post-war social order was not possible without the state tooling up. Famously it did so to see off the labour movement in the key disputes of the 1980s, but the authoritarianism ran deeper than handing the police more powers and carte blanche to do as they pleased. The Thatcher project was about positioning the government as the absolute authority within the state system. Her attacks on the civil service, the restructuring of education and health, the gutting of local government, and her overall disdain for expert knowledge (except when it was in accordance with her prejudices) reinforced Downing Street as the seat of command to which all other institutions cleaved. Tony Blair settled very well into this practice of government - the rows with the BBC, enforcing more marketisation on public services, and so on. Ditto for Dave's lash up with the LibDems and their programme of austerity in defiance of economic sense, and doubly so with Johnson first on Brexit and now with coronavirus. The parading of SAGE is just there for show - Johnson has no intention of abiding by their advice not because he thinks they're wrong and he's right, but because it goes against the entirety of his political socialisation. There cannot be room for alternative bases of authority in government if, crucially, the Thatcherite settlement within the state apparatus is to be maintained. I therefore fully expect the government to declare victory over the virus some point this summer while infections head toward a second peak and deaths accumulate at a greater rate than present. I doubt Johnson consciously see things this way. His modus operandi is opportunism, not ideology or an appreciation of the interests of his class. As such, he's also well suited to the government machine bequeathed him by his predecessors. He doesn't have to be held to account, no one in the civil service is going to say no, experts and critics are rubbished as activists with political axes to grind, and they have zero authority in the state system anyway. Whether an active authoritarian like Thatcher or a couch potato authoritarian like Johnson, they want to maintain government privilege - hence also the outright refusal to sack Cummings, even at the risk of diving poll ratings. In the 1970s, right wing columnists and rent-a-quote Tory MPs used to regularly describe Britain as the sick man of Europe because of rising inflation, sclerotic growth, strikes, inflation, and a generalised malaise. With an unenviable record and a rate of transmission higher now than when we entered quarantine, more people are going to be getting ill, getting incapacitated, and dying as other European countries start easing things and begin the slow journey back to something approximating the normal. Our continued morbidity contrasts unfavourably with their recovery. But our sickness is deeper - the illness of the social body is exacerbated by a disease of the mind, of a governing party and a Prime Minister prepared to sacrifice the many to conserve the profits and power of the few, and a practice of government that encourages him to do so. Image Credit
