Elliegate and the Media Bubble

I was tickled to see my Twitter chum Ellie Gellard plastered across a couple of right wing rags this morning. As something of a celebrity in political tweeting circles, Ellie was chosen to front Labour's manifesto launch yesterday.

But intrepid investigative reporting at the Mail and Telegraph has unearthed some of Ellie's old comments that were less than complimentary about the great helmsman. But even worse she said some nasty things about Thatcher (the Mail article is particularly special thanks to rent-a-quote outrage from the ever-execrable Tory Bear). Horror of horrors!

The poor man's Guido reckons this is proof positive Ellie is a "PR disaster waiting to happen". For the Daily Fail "the row ... threatened to overshadow Labour's manifesto launch." And not to be outdone, the Torygraph thundered "and photographs have emerged of her drinking champagne." Desperate, desperate stuff.

Those responsible for writing this nonsense probably think they've landed a blow for the Tories. The right wing press and desperate Tory wannabes still think what gets medialand (which includes blogging and tweeting) excited resonates in the real world. But it increasingly doesn't, and particularly not when the media cycle is running at full pelt during a general election campaign. For example, remember the Labour cancer leaflet scandal? Two days ago it was all over the news. Today there's nary a mention, and who will remember come May 6th?

This isn't to say the media has zero effect on consciousness - its influence is most keenly felt where audiences have little or no direct experience of the people/organisations/phenomena the media are targeting, and where it chimes with long held prejudices and values. But ephemera like the Ellie "scoop" is a complete waste of time. At best most will see it for the election season silliness it is, but for others this and stories of its ilk will feed into the generalised anti-politics mood and could widen the gap between political and media elites on the one hand and everyone else on the other.

While this is not a healthy situation for socialist politics, it can't be all bad if it helps drive down the circulation of a couple of hateful Tory rags.

Blogging Mojo: Absent

I'm bereft of blogging inspiration at the moment. Not even a post about the good meeting Stoke Compass had on Thursday night can shake me out of my torpor. Perhaps the excitement of tomorrow's unveiling of Labour's manifesto will stir the embers somewhat.

In the mean time enjoy this little ditty from 2004:

The Origins of the Slate System

In a contribution to the ongoing debates in various left wing forums about the Bolshevik tradition and the far left in Britain, Pat Byrne has produced the following article, 'The Origins of the Slate System'. For readers unfamiliar with the slate system, this is the method of leadership election most commonly practiced in Britain's Trotskyist organisations. Without exception, this has produced semi-permanent leaderships who are impossible to remove short of an organisational split. In some cases, even today the odd comrade can be found who's served time for four or five decades. Pat looks at the roots of the slate system "tradition" in the post-revolution Bolshevik party.

The Origin of the ‘Slate System’ used in elections for the leadership of Leninist Groups
The leadership-recommended slate system for internal elections to the national leadership is used in most leninist groups. It is not a natural system arising from the workers own experiences and democratic instincts but something artificially imported into the workers movement. In theory, the slate system can be used to recommend a list that consciously includes a good balance of talents and personalities. In practice, it gives the existing leadership a temendous advantage in elections and experience has shown that it has allowed leaders to secure their continuous re-election along with a body of like-minded and loyal followers.

Let’s examine how the ‘slate system’ arose. As the leninist movement supposedly bases itself on the example of the Bolshevik Party, we need to start our process of discovery here. The following information comes mainly from a study made on how Communist Party internal elections were carried out in Revolutionary Russia. The study, ‘The Evolution of Leadership Selection In The Central Committee 1917-1927’, was written by the well-known sovietologist and academic Robert V. Daniels who drew most of his information from the official records of Bolshevik and CPSU party congresses. His essay was published in a fairly obscure academic study of Russian Officialdom which covered Russian society from the 17th to the 20th centuries.

The first thing that may be surprising to state is that the Bolshevik Party did not operate slates. By Bolshevik Party we mean the party that led the Socialist Revolution in October 1917. This party, the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (majority), used the normal system of electing its leadership that has naturally emerged in every workers movement across the world – voting for individual candidates in a competitive election. Thus those successfully elected to the Central Committee (the leading body of the Party) had to receive higher votes than the unsuccessful candidates. Of course, unofficial slates did exist based on political questions and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But there was no official list of candidates recommended by the outgoing leadership with all the advantage and status that would have conferred on a candidate.

This normal election procedure continued after the revolution and the Bolshevik Party changed its name to the Communist Party:

“Until well after the Revolution the makeup of the Communist Central Committee was governed by genuine elections at the party congresses, however they may have been influenced by factional con troversies and pressure by the leadership (i.e. Lenin). Congress dele gates voted for as many individuals as there were seats on the Central Committee, and the appropriate number with the highest votes were declared elected. Candidate members were originally the runners-up, but by 1920 they were being voted on separately after the roster of full members was announced. Under these conditions the membership of the Central Committee was naturally drawn from well-known revolutionary activists and key figures in the central party leadership.” (pp.357-358)

Thus the relatively small Central Committee was made up of well-known individuals:

Through 1920, at least, the numbers were small enough so that most aspirants were being voted on by the Congress delegates on the basis of personal or direct knowledge. However, or perhaps for this reason, election to the Central Committee was sensitive to personal popu larity and the interplay of the factional controversies that freely ani mated the life of the party during the War Communism period. Some individuals (A.S. Bubnov, for instance) reached, fell, and returned to the Central Committee as many as three times. (p.358)

However, a significant change occurred in 1921. This was a key year in the development of the Soviet Union. In many respects 1921 was the turning point from which we can trace the degeneration of the Communist Party and the Soviet state it ruled. This was the year which saw mass hunger in the countryside and strikes in the cities. A major factional battle ensued between Lenin on one side and Trotsky on the other over how to solve the crisis. The old Central Committee was almost evenly divided. In the elections for the delegates to the Tenth Party Congress Lenin’s more flexible and positive position won a large majority. But the delegate election campaign also reflected the growing ability of the official party bureaucracy to manipulate the party machine with many examples of the packing of meetings etc. Lenin’s victory meant the abandonment of War Communism and the introduction of the New Economic Policy. The latter allowed the partial reintroduction of the market and small-scale capitalism. However, the serious revolt of the sailors at Kronstadt which threatened the whole future of the revolution brought matters to a head. It was in the midst of this crisis that the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party met.

Quite apart from the division within the party leadership caused by the Trade Union Debate, discontent was rife at all levels of the Party. There were two rank and file opposition factions: the Democratic Centralists who protested that the democratic aspect of the party and state life was being lost; and the Workers Opposition who were pushing for direct trade union control of industry. It was in this situation that Lenin introduced his disastrous proposal to ban factions. Although this was only thought to be a temporary measure to prevent the party being torn apart in the crisis, it became a permanent rule within the Soviet Party and was used by Stalin again and again to silence dissent.

The same was true with the proposal to purge the party of uncommunist elements who had joined for opportunist reasons. This had originally been put forward by the Workers Opposition and was taken up and psuhed forward by Lenin. But its implementation was carried out by Stalin and his loyal party apparatus who used it to remove poilitcal dissidents and recruit more ‘reliable’ elements.

The third organisational measure that was to make it much easier for Stalin to assert and maintain control was the introduction of a block slate system in the elections for the Central Committee.

In 1921, at the Tenth Party Congress, the first signs appeared of a basic change in the actual manner of selecting Central Committee members. This was the practice of making up a semiofficial slate of aspirants, to be voted on de facto as a group by the Congress delegates. The occasion happened to be the most acute crisis ever experienced by the Soviet leadership, when it came under attack both externally from peasant rebels and the naval mutineers at Kronstadt, and internally from the left and ultraleft factions represented by Trotsky and the Workers' Opposition. Having decisively defeated his critics within the Communist Party in the pre-Congress delegate se lection, Lenin evidently decided to use his influence not only to oust several key oppositionists from the Central Committee but to expand the body from nineteen to twenty-five, thereby creating in all nearly a dozen openings for new people.

The fact that a slate of recommended official candidates was pre pared for the Congress delegates to vote on is made clear by the totals of individual votes announced after the ballot. Lenin was everyone's choice, with 479 votes. But nearly unanimous votes were received by numerous other people, tapering down to 351 for the twenty-fourth member, the newcomer I. Ia. Tuntul, "... far ahead of the next contender, the deposed Trotskyist party secretary Krestinsky with 161.” (p.357-358)

In addition to the ‘old Bolshevik’ leaders, Lenin promoted less well-known figures who he thought would be more supportive of his position:

Basically Lenin's slate making to curb the opposition fac tions that so plagued him in 1921 relied on the award of Central Committee status to loyal but not widely known provincial functionaries who would have stood little chance in the earlier style contest for a smaller body of stellar personalities. (p.359-360)

At the Eleventh Party Congress in 1922, in which Lenin was unable to play a major role due to illness, the individual figures for the elections to the Central Committee were for the first time not even announced. Presumably because it would have appeared strange and embarrassing to see the unofficial leadership slate all gaining similar votes, way ahead of the rest of the candidates.

1922 was also the year in which Stalin was able to decisively take over the party machine. As with other measures introduced by Lenin that were intended to temporarily minimise dissent, the tactic of increasing the size of the Central Committee was seized upon by Stalin who combined it with a leadership-organised slate as a means of securing the election of new more loyal members. This culminated at the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923 (with Lenin absent):

Nineteen twenty-three was the year of Joseph Stalin's signal break through in setting up a personal political organization in the Party, following his designation as general secretary the year before. Turning Lenin's proposal for an expanded Central Committee to his own ad vantage, Stalin persuaded the Twelfth Congress to increase the body from twenty-seven to forty. This substantial expansion, together with three vacancies, gave him sixteen slots to fill. Slate making was in evidence once again when the Twelfth Congress came to the election of the Central Committee, though the mathematics of it were covered up by a motion at the Congress to withhold announcement of individual vote totals. Trotsky led the opposition to the proposed expansion, holding out for a small body that could continue to exercise quick day-to-day decision-making authority. (p.360)

At each succeeding Party Congress up to and including 1927 Stalin increased the size of the Central Committee, thus allowing him to promote yet more grateful party and state functionaries and thereby increase his domination of the leadership:

The Thirteenth Party Congress of May 1924, was the first to come after Lenin's demise and the open break between Trotsky and the party leadership. It was the occasion for another substantial expansion in the ranks of the Central Committee, this time from forty to fifty-two. While practically all incumbents were confirmed in office, one — Lenin — had died; one was transferred to the Central Control Commission, which ruled out Central Committee membership, and one—Karl Radek—was dropped for his activities on behalf of Trotsky.” (p.361)

At the Fourteenth Party Congress, in December 1925. when Zinoviev broke with Stalin and went down to defeat, the Central Com mittee was once again substantially enlarged—this time by eleven men, from fifty-two to sixty-three. In this manner Stalin continued to build his power base while minimizing the head-on confrontations that would be implied in removing his leading opponents. (p.362)

The Fifteenth Party Conference, held in December 1927, a year later than the rules called for, saw the dramatic expulsion of the Left Op position headed by Trotsky and Zinoviev. The unprecedented number of eight Central Committee members were dropped for oppositionist activity... With the seventy-one members of 1927, the Central Committee had reached a level that was to hold constant through the post-purge Eighteenth Congress of 1939... 121 members and candidate members in total.” (pp.363-364)

Daniels concludes his assessment thus : “Within the short span of five years under Stalin's organizational domination the central leadership body (Central Committee members and candidates) was expanded more than two and a half times and almost totally realigned from an elected group of the articulate and politically popular to a body de facto appointed on the basis of bureaucratic constituencies.” (p.366)

Stalin’s peversion of democracy within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union reached the point at the Seventeenth Party Conference in early 1934 where the only way the delegates could express their feelings in the elections was to cross out the name of the people they didn’t want. This they did in the elections for the Politburo with Stalin receiving 267 negative votes in comparison to the more moderate leader of the Leninigrad Party, Sergei Kirov, who only received 3 negative votes. This result was of course not reported to the Congress delegates.

The 17th Congress has also been given the name ‘The Congress of the Condemned’ because of 1,996 party members present, 1,108 were arrested, and about two thirds of those executed within three years, largely during the Great Terror. Of the 139 members elected to the Central Committee in the 17th Congress, 98 would be executed in the purges. And of the remaining 41, only 24 would be re-elected to the Central Committee in the 18th Congress.*”

Kirov himself was assassinated later in the year and much of the evidence as well as the motive points to Stalin as having ordered the assassination against Kirov as a popular alternative. The results of the election at the 1934 conference would have not only marked Kirov as a dangerous rival in Stalin’s eyes but also convinced Stalin of the party’s disloyalty to him. It may explain not only the Kirov assassination but the use of it as a pretext for the Great Purge which saw the removal of 850,000 members from the Party, or 36% of its membership, between 1936 and 1938. Many of these individuals were executed or perished in prison camps. “Old Bolsheviks” who had been members of the Party in 1917 were especially targeted. Additional triggers for the purge may have been the refusal by the Politburo in 1932 to approve the execution of M.N. Riutin, an Old Bolshevik who had distributed a 200-page pamphlet calling for the removal of Stalin and their refusal in 1933 to approve the execution of A.P. Smirnov, who had been a party member since 1896 and had also been found to be agitating for Stalin’s removal. The failure of the Politburo to act ruthlessly against anti-Stalinists in the Party combined in Stalin’s mind with Kirov’s growing popularity to convince him of the need to move decisively against his opponents, real or perceived, and destroy them and their reputations as a means of consolidating Stalin and the bureaucracy’s power over the party and the state.

* ‘The Russian Revolution’ by Sheila Fitzpatrick

The Trotskyist Movement And The Slate System
How and why the slate system was adopted by the trotskyist movement would be a very useful subject for study. It could be that it was just carried over with the rest of the democratic centralist model imposed on individual communist parties by the Communist International. Or it could have been stalinist baggage carried into the trotskyist movement when the international left opposition was formed out of so many splits in the communist parties. Interestingly, there was a reference to its introduction into the British Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) at its conference in 1950:

At this conference Healy introduced another novelty - a slate for election to the National Committee. The EC had drawn up this slate and if any delegate wanted to nominate someone who was not on the slate they also had to nominate someone else to be taken off!” (‘The Methods of Gerry Healy’ by Ken Tarbuck, published in Workers News No.30, April 1991, under the pseudonym of "John Walters" and with the title "Origins of the SWP")

Bear in mind that the 1950 conference of the RCP was the one where Healy was able to overcome all his opposition. The slate allowed him to get a Central Committee entirely to his liking. In previous years the RCP had operated a system where the factions in the organisations automatically had a number of seats on the CC according to the level of support they had among the membership. And the faction’s representatives on the CC were decided by the faction themselves. Compare this to the situation in the rare occasions that factions were allowed in the Militant Tendency. Then whether a faction had representatives on the CC and who they were lay in the hands of the majority leadership when they drew up their recommended slate. A completely undemocratic situation.

Pat Byrne March 2010

Obligatory General Election Post

Did you hear the one about a bloke who went to see a monarch about dissolving parliament? If not, you'll be sick of reading and listening about it by the time polls close at 10pm on May 6th.

I'm not going to rehearse the reasons why, despite having a rotten crabby record, I'll be out campaigning for Labour in this election. Nor why the Tories would be much worse for the labour movement than even a Brown government determined to make the working class pay for the crisis finance capital got itself - and ourselves - into. And there's little point rehearsing why the far left are hurtling pell mell down what Dave Osler aptly calls "the parliamentary road to lost deposits".

Instead, I'm going to talk about what I plan to do with this blog. I might occasionally write something about the big national election stories, especially if there's a chance of showing the Cameroons in a bad light, but something tells me very few readers will be tempted to vote Tory anyway. No, the blog will be concerned with two niches.

First will be the circus that is the election in my constituency, Stoke Central. I don't know if it holds the record for most candidates in this election, but it's got to be in the top five. There are at least 11 confirmed, plus another to declare. If anything, for election anoraks this will prove a more interesting campaign than years where they simply weighed the Labour vote. And there will be posts relating anecdotes from door knocking, local gossip and wheeling and dealing, and maybe interviews with some candidates (if I can be bothered).

The second niche will be the far left. For once you're not buying into official optimism to say Respect have a chance of winning three seats. But outside of that, I doubt TUSC will unsettle many Labour nerves - David Henry in Salford probably has the best chance of causing an upset, and it's one I doubt many Labourites of the centre and the left would shed any tears over.

In total I reckon the organised far left (Respect, TUSC, SSP) are standing in 62 seats, excluding unattached independents and Scargill's SLP. Is anyone the wiser?

Apart from the political ramifications of this election, for once this is an interesting contest. The Greens, UKIP and BNP pose significant challenges in a handful of constituencies. The polls are volatile but still indicate no clear favourite. And on top of all that the wretched and undemocratic first past the post system could finally meet its Waterloo in a hung parliament. It will be messy. It will be tight. But one thing is clear: what happens matters.

Political Science and Social Conflict

In Marxism the struggle between the classes over the disposal of the surplus yielded by the production process is an inescapable feature of all class societies. Marxism's attachment to the working class has nothing to do with nostalgia for the "simpler" politics of the past or anything like that. Instead it is based on the observation that the (subordinate) class relationships an absolute majority of the world's population has to enter into to make a living provide grounds for drawing together the largest numbers possible to pursue socialist politics. i.e. Fighting and building a society free of the class relationships that have characterised history since the dawn of civilisation. Marxist politics therefore has concentrated on building political parties and movements that articulate the interests of workers under capitalism and the trajectory these interests have in moving beyond capitalism.

Whereas class and class conflict is absolutely central to Marxism, this is not the case for political science as a discipline. In this piece (recycled from a presentation I gave about five years ago), I look at the place social conflict, (or to use the preferred term, 'cleavage') occupies in political science and how this position has tried to make sense of the new politics that have come with the restructuring of capitalism that has taken place these last 30 years.

In their seminal 1967 paper, ' Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments', Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan argued that political parties arose in response to and were conditioned by four cleavage structures: the conflict between centre/periphery, state/church, land/industry, and owner/worker. Each of these developed in that order, with the outcome of each effecting the development of subsequent cleavages. The development of these cleavages predated the advent of mass suffrage in Western Europe, meaning that when mass parties did emerge they expressed the various interests rooted in cleavage structures, and were dependent on them for the necessary resources.

Lipset and Rokkan argued that the development of cleavages effectively ended with the employer/worker contradiction. The 1920s-1960s period saw parties more or less reflect existing cleavage structures: that is despite the experience of fascism and war and the dislocations these caused continental party systems, the overall political trend favoured stability: what were the regional, rural, religious and class parties of the 1960s tended to be the same parties 40 years previously. Lipset and Rokkan also suggested that a comparative analysis of parties emerging during the wave of mass suffrage were far more likely to be durable than newer parties built after this wave had receded. As far as they were concerned the cleavages bequeathed by the early development of capitalism had built West European party systems, and were stabilised by the persistence of the four cleavages.

Richard Rose's and Derek Urwin's 1970 paper, 'Persistence and Change in Western European Party Systems Since 1945' set out to verify Lipset and Rokkan's observations by looking at the electoral support of West European parties from 1945 to 1969. If there were no significant shifts in party’s electoral support, then Lipset and Rokkan's stabilisation hypothesis was confirmed. Rose and Urwin concluded that the data showed “the electoral strength of most parties in Western nations since the war had changed very little from election to election, from decade to decade, or within the lifespan of a generation” (1970, p.295).

Maria Maguire's 1983 paper, 'Is There Still Persistence? Electoral Change in Western Europe' used a similar methodology to update Rose and Urwin's results. She looked at the electoral performance of 84 parties (using an inclusion criteria specifying that qualifying parties must have fought at least three elections across her time periods and polled 5% or more on at least one occasion) from 15 West European countries (organised into 'Britain and Ireland', 'Scandinavian', and 'Continental' groupings). The two periods selected by Maguire were 1948-79 to provide a broad overview comparable with Rose and Urwin, and the 1960-79 short period looking at the degree of changes in greater depth. The short period study analysed 80 parties, arrived at using the 1948-79 inclusion criteria.

Maguire subjected produced data using three tests. The first test defined significant trends as swings in support of 0.25% or more either way per year. For Rose and Urwin 70% of parties experienced a ‘nil’ trend, whereas on Maguire’s ‘long’ scale this figure dropped to 64%. This change becomes more substantial on the short measure; here the nil trend only encompassed 51% of the 80 parties, 21 of which experienced cumulative change of six per cent or more over the 19 years.

Looking at electoral fluctuations (scores here computed by the difference between a party’s largest and least share of the vote), median elasticity on Rose and Urwin’s measure was 7.0%. On Maguire’s long measure this had risen to 7.8%. Some 49% of the parties experienced a median score of 8.0% and over, and 29% of the total sample were in excess of 12.0%. Surprisingly, on the short measure median elasticity fell to 6.7%, - parties experiencing fluctuations in excess of 8.0% fell to 38%. For Maguire the problem here is if fluctuation is measured with reference to extremities of range, accuracy may be compromised by atypical election results. Instead Maguire computed another set of figures based on a “normal” range of fluctuation, based on the standard deviation of the mean vote. On her long measure the ‘median party’ had an SD of 2.6, with 56% of parties having an SD lower than 3.0. Reasonably similar figures were obtained on the short measure, with a median party SD of 2.7 and 61% of parties experiencing an SD lower than 3.0. This indicates that any trends occurring were not manifesting themselves via high rates of vote fluctuations.

Maguire then performs a measure of electoral volatility. This measures the net change within ‘electoral party systems’ by looking at individual vote transfers. Used on individual parties, Maguire calculates the percentage change in a party’s vote between each pair of elections over her two timescales. On the long period average volatility ranged 0.4% - 11.8%, and on the short it was 0.4% - 8.3%. In the long 72% of parties had a volatility below 3.0%, while in the short it was 65%.

Cross tabulating volatility with trends data (with scores organised into low = 0 - 1.5%, medium = 1.6 - 3.0%, and high = 3.0% +) shows that on the long period 45% of ‘nil trend’ parties had low volatility while 18% had high, while those registering significant trends (whether decline or rise in support) were 40% high and 10% low. In the short period 55% of ‘nils’ experienced low and 13% high volatility, whereas ‘significants’ were 54% high and 3% low. Thus while high fluctuations were a minority in nil trend parties, their status as ‘nil’ did obscure the fluctuations that did take place.

Finally a more accurate picture of volatility must take party size into account. Maguire does this by expressing average volatility as a percentage of a party’s average vote, with results grouped under low (10% or less), medium (11-20%), or high (20%+). In both Maguire’s periods 30% of parties fall into the low category, with more ‘nil’ parties experiencing high volatility (48% and 40% on the long and short measures respectively) than those undergoing significant trends (27% and 38%).

What role did party characteristics play in unfreezing the cleavage foundations of party systems? Looking at the parties, those originating in the ‘interwar’ (1914-39) and ‘new’ (1939+) periods experienced less instability than pre-1914 parties (only 50% of ‘old’ parties registered a nil trend, as compared with 73% and 70% respectively for the others, with 39%, 10%, and 19% experiencing significant downward trends). In the short period the respective figures were 54%, 48%, and 43% experienced significant trends, with 43%, 21%, and 26% of the total sample in receipt of downward trends indicating the 1960-79 period was very unstable. Maguire also looks at party family and electoral strength to see if they have any bearing on trends.

Overall Maguire concludes that while there is no apparent relationship between electoral fluctuations and trends, electoral change within party systems appears long term and gradual. The freezing of cleavages described by Lipset and Rokkan appeared to be undergoing a slow thaw, but why?

New Cleavages?
In their 1987 book, Elections and Voters, Martin Harrop and William Miller suggest additional cleavages may account for parties’ growing experience of significant change. These are grouped under two headings:

1) The impact of the state: the growth of the (welfare) state divides employees along public/private sector lines, consumers between the consumption of public and/or private services (typically transport and housing), and between net recipients of welfare benefits and net contributors. Harrop and Miller speculate that those tied to public services in some way are politically predisposed toward non-conservative values, or in the case of those who depend on the state for income, apathy and disengagement from politics.

2) Post-industrial influences: if we accept the thesis that manufactured “material” commodities are increasingly displaced by knowledge and service production; in conjunction with growing affluence these structural transformations will have significant impacts on the electoral performances of parties. Goldthorpe et al's seminal 1969 study of growing affluence among workers investigated whether these changes were affecting working class self-identification, and whether this impacted on the traditional working class attachment to the Labour party. Abramson and Inglehart (1995) tested whether there was a relationship between economic security and the adoption of postmaterialist values, finding that this was indeed the case.

There are other approaches that look more to the changing characteristics of existing cleavages rather than hypothesising the existence of new ones. Colin Crouch's pessimistic exploration, Post-Democracy (2004) argues recent changes in the class structure have fed into “post-democratic” developments. Identifying the manual working class as the working class per se and opposing it to the “middle mass” of “diverse and heterogeneous groups of professionals, administrators, clerical and sales workers, employees of financial institutions, of public bureaucracies, and of welfare state organizations” (p.57) Crouch is able to bring out important sectional divisions within this differentiated non-manual strata: the horizontal division into the public and private sectors, and the vertical split between senior managers and professionals who are structurally closer to capital, and routine workers likely to experience proletarian conditions of employment. The political amorphousness of the subordinate levels has allowed politicians to identify “lower middle class” concerns with business interests, and “encouraged to seek no means of improvement other than for themselves” (p.60). In terms of political impact, if this is the key constituency campaign managers are aiming for it means adopting more of a catch-all kind of politics.

However for Crouch this group represents a difficult problem for democrats – they are most susceptible to manipulation owing to the absence of an autonomous political profile and tend to be the most politically passive of groups, whilst being the most rapidly expanding sector in Western societies. Mainstream parties however have failed to acknowledge let alone address the real conditions of its everyday existence. For example, contemporary politics have shown a remarkable inability to grasp how downsizing, growing workloads, and mounting pressures on free time are common experiences of the workplace, meaning discontent around these issues could escape ‘official’ political frames. Such grievances could potentially lead to progressive politics animated by the “objective political agenda”, or find a populist rightwing expression - as the emergence of formations like the Lijst Pim Fortuyn, UKIP, and Veritas suggest.

Therefore, in sum there is a long term tendency toward the fragmentation of political systems. But parties themselves are not passive actors. In an earlier period mass parties, particularly those of the left, served to integrate people into political systems that, prior to the achievement of mass suffrage, excluded them. Is it possible for parties to perform a similar role again and counter act disintegration?

Stoke Compass Meeting

This should prove to be an interesting meeting in light of recent events. I'll be going along - as should anyone who cares about the future of Labour in Stoke. This comes from local Labour activist, Olwen Hamer;


Dear Friends,
Please make some time to attend this meeting. All Compass Members will be invited in Staffordshire. All Welcome.

COMPASS MEETING in Stoke

Drink, chat and discuss ‘the way forward for the Labour Party’...


WHEN: 7pm Thursday 8th April 2010

WHERE: Jolly Potters Pub

296 Hartshill Road

Stoke on Trent

Staffordshire

A room has been booked for an evening of informal discussion. Please come along and meet others and share your views. Bring a friend if you like!

All Welcome.


For further information contact:

olwen.hamer at googlemail.com

New Blog Round-Up

There's a bit of a bumper crop this month! With the general election almost upon us I wouldn't be surprised if we see a mushrooming of left, Labour and Green blogs between now and polling day.

Here are the new(ish) blogs (defined as less than a year old) that have caught my notice.


1) Birmingham Resistance (Socialist Resistance/Respect)
2) Support Caroline Bedale (Unaligned)
3) People's Republic of Hove (Socialist Resistance/Respect)
4) Hazel Must Go! (TUSC)
5) Paul Couchman for Spelthourne (Socialist Party/TUSC)
6) Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition: Portsmouth North (TUSC)
7) Heart of a Nation (TUSC)
8) Greenwich and Bexley Socialist Party (Socialist Party)
9) Somerset Socialist Party (Socialist Party)
10) 32 CSM Scotland (32 County Sovereign Movement)
11) Miss Suffragette (Unaligned)
12) Rarely Wears Lipstick (Unaligned)
13) You Call Yourself the Moral Majority (Unaligned)
14) Ben Folley (Labour)
15) Ipswich Unemployed Action (Unaligned)
16) Tank the Tories (Labour)
17) Max Clark (Unaligned)
18) Not Wrong For Long (Unaligned)
19) St. George's Labour (Labour)


If there are new blogs I haven't mentioned before or you're about to enter the blogging fray, let me know via email or comments and you'll be featured in a month's time.

Dudley Anti-EDL Carnival

Despite what some might think, it would appear today's multi-cultural carnival against the English Defence League in Dudley was a masterstroke. While the Unite Against Fascism-sponsored event milled about and listened to speeches and music, reports suggest the EDL entered their mobilisation point chanting "If you build your fucking mosque we'll burn it down"*, as well as fighting among themselves and having a bit of argy-bargy with the police. What a way to "peacefully" demonstrate against Islamic extremism.

Brother S was at the UAF carnival. He tells me there were approximately 500 people present (these are the real numbers, expect them to be subject to revolutionary inflation), and the atmosphere was generally peaceful and convivial. Like Stoke but unlike Bolton, the police on this occasion were tolerant and not looking to ape their Greater Manchester colleagues. They did however confiscate some of the placards from a trade union delegation, presumably because they could be broken up and used as weapons (does that mean placards will be banned from future demos?)

Most of the left were there. The SWP were out in force but had left their 'smash the BNP/EDL' type placards at home. The UAF's slogan was much less confrontational too, preferring "EDL + BNP = racist Nazi thugs". Other lefts spotted by Brother S included a TUSC banner, a solitary Socialist seller, and the Communist League - whose raison d'être these days is turning up at anti-EDL mobilisations to flog tatty old books from Pathfinder Press.

If there were political lessons to be taken from Dudley, Brother S felt that keeping the two sides so far apart and having it heavily policed injects a certain artificiality to the situation, which could dampen turn out at future protests. However, I would add that given the contrast between the EDL's and the UAF's behaviour, it is not always necessary to seek confrontation with the EDL to inflict a moral and political defeat on them.

*See comments.

Inside Stoke Central's Selection Meeting

Thursday night's selection meeting was always going to be a fraught affair. While shenanigans are a feature of all the mainstream parties, especially where the last minute placement of candidates are concerned, in Stoke Central's case the stitched-up shortlist comes on top of the soured relations with the regional organisation and the National Executive Committee. It's a situation that has seen party members fall out, activists barred from standing for election, and the administrative suspension of the entire CLP. And so when I turned up at Equality House in Shelton for the meeting, the air was thick with ill-feeling and rebellion.

Eventually the 71 voting members plus the dozen or so ineligible members and assorted hangers on took their seats to hear what the hopefuls had to say.

First up was Tristram Hunt, who was always going to win thanks to the shortlist fix. Nevertheless he gave an excellent performance. He began by evoking the history of the Potteries and moved on to his role in securing funding for the Wedgwood Museum and helping keep the Staffordshire Hoard in the West Midlands. His priority is education, which he believes can challenge long-term unemployment and the associated evils of poverty, ill-health and anti-social behaviour. He also pledged to use all of his connections to attract investment, including getting Stoke connected to the much-vaunted Glasgow-London high speed rail link.

But his politics proper came out in the questions from the floor. He criticised the recent court decisions against industrial action ballots as politically motivated, and he likened them to turning the clock back to the Taff Vale judgements. He said he was for the democratisation of regional regeneration quangos, which have only really been interested in inputs from business elites. Tristram was also critical of Academies, being especially worried about their large size. Finally on local internal politics, he said regional and national levels of the organisation only feel confident enough to intervene if a CLP is weak. While he was for the reconfiguring of the relationship between different parts of the party, the best way to resist such attempts in the future is to recruit and rebuild.

Saj Malik's pitch struck a rather different tone, which can be best summed as 'I'm working class, me'. He argued this background made him ideally suited to a proletarian constituency like Stoke, and made welcome noises about fighting the BNP and opening a proper constituency office. He said Labour had let working class people down, but the government still managed to do plenty of things to be proud of regards schools, hospitals and so on. Unlike Tristram's pitch however, Saj's accent was more on the need to "protect" working class people and doing things for them. His opponent was more of the school of helping people to help themselves.

In the questions, he thought court interference in industrial disputes was shameful, especially under Labour. He described Academies as a "mixed bag". Refreshingly, but perhaps unwisely, when confronted with a question he couldn't answer Saj often replied "I don't know". He appeared unfamiliar with local issues, but was clear that he'd need to learn a lot on the job. Saj did however receive the biggest laugh of the night. Asked how he would feel if the selection process foisted on Stoke had been imposed on his home constituency, he said "I'd be pissed off"!

Joe Ukemenam was by far the weakest candidate. To put it bluntly, his opening remarks were more suited to a panel at an academic conference than a selection meeting. He rattled off his record as a self-financed student from undergrad to PhD level, helped deliver "capacity-building" initiatives and policy development in Stratford and several African countries. He led the UN mission to Liberia in the early 90s and, rather immodestly, said he'd been described as "one of the unsung heroes of his generation".

But it was the questions that showed him up as a poor choice for a traditionally labourist constituency party. When the same question about the courts and the unions was put to him, he said he had no problem with their interventions (in fact, he said "why not?") On his specialist subject he didn't come across well either. Asked what he did about the use of Liberia as a flag of convenience during his time there, he said his brief was about demobilising armed factions and organising an election. Of the issue itself he said there was need to look at the interaction between international organisations and the third world. On Academies, he said "there is a debate in the labour movement ... and I will continue to be involved in the debate" without once saying where he stood. But most damning of all, asked what he would like to see done about tax loopholes exploited by nondoms Joe replied "there's no point a soldier answering a general's question" - it was up to those who make the relevant decisions to make the decisions.

If proof was needed of the contrived nature of the shortlist, Joe provided it.

Due to some lacunae in the Labour party rule book, a motion had to be moved so the selection meeting could go to a vote (I may have heard wrong, but by doing so in this instance some sort of precedent has been set). The chair, Barry Stockley, was very clear that if the motion fell the CLP ran the risk of having a candidate imposed. It was fairly close - the move to the vote was passed only by 41 to 30, and as everyone knows Tristram went on to easily win it.

However, there are now two interrelated problems. While Tristram will no doubt be a very capable MP and one that will find favour among the city's elite, there is a big question mark hanging over the legitimacy of his selection. Everyone in the CLP knows this, not least Tristram himself. Second is the news that this legitimacy is already being publicly challenged by the party's secretary, Gary Elsby. Yesterday he announced he will stand as an Independent Labour candidate. In other words, the election in Stoke Central has gone from being a dead cert for Labour to an open contest.

Tristram Hunt Wins Stoke Central Labour Contest

At the selection meeting of Stoke Central Constituency Labour Party this evening, Tristram Hunt was selected by an overwhelming majority to be Labour's candidate in the general election.

The vote breakdown was:

Tristram - 50
Joe - 6
Saj - 7
Spoiled - 8

The vote to enable the selection was passed with 41 votes for.

So congratulations to Tristram.

Full report to follow, and expect more on Newsnight later.