Shelton Mosque Attack and Racist Violence

At work this afternoon I heard there had been an attempt to blow up the new Shelton Mosque near Hanley in Stoke-on-Trent. According to the mosque committee, the police, and the local paper, the perpetrators tapped a gas main and fed a pipe into the mosque before attempting to ignite it. Needless to say the damage done to the building as well as nearby residences could have been catastrophic. Understandably the police are treating the attempted attack as a racist incident.

There has been a long and tortuous road to Stoke's first purpose-built mosque, and has variously been used as a political football by different players of the city's fractured political game. For the "leftist" Potteries Alliance (now absorbed into the leftish Community Voice grouping) the new mosque was ostensibly opposed on the grounds the Muslim community acquired the land from the council for the peppercorn price of one pound. This rag-tag of former Labour councillors and self-described "Marxists" were outraged the council didn't charge full price for the disused and contaminated site the mosque development has now returned to use. Presumably the PA would have been happier to add another acre of blighted land to Stoke's decaying city scape than see it taken over by the Muslim community.

And of course, our friends the BNP have tried to capitalise on the building of the mosque. As well as exploiting it as "evidence" of the Islamic plot to take over Britain, the fascists argued they had ten donors standing by ready to purchase the land for £100,000 from the council to build an old people's home. Given their organisation is delicately poised on the edge of the precipice, one wonders where these financial sugar daddies are now?

Nevertheless, despite the building having been financed entirely by local Muslims and the land being effectively abandoned by the council, there would be a few Stokies who'd have raised a glass had the mosque been destroyed. Unfortunately, the well of racism runs deep in Stoke. If you take the barely concealed racism of the BNP and the political opportunism of others, mix it with the toxic dog-whistling of the tabloid press and the deep lumpenisation of the city's poorest communities you're left with a stinking brew wreaking of resentment and xenophobia.

When the Tories ripped the economic heart out of Britain's industrial cities in the 1980s, many working class communities were left to sink or swim. Despite New Labour's love affair with neoliberalism introduced some welcome initiatives to reverse the devastating material and psychological traumas of the assault, but in real terms this amounted to tinkering around the edges. Only bold and aggressive plans of state-led investment and job creation could begin to address the long-term problems of joblessness, welfare dependency, anti-social behaviour, crime, drug abuse, and hopelessness. Small wonder many Stokies - like Labour voters elsewhere - felt the party made by the working class had abandoned them.

For a section of this lumpenised mass the message of the BNP made sense. They promised a romantic vision of an all-white Britain, a 1950s Stoke where the only black people about were those workers covered head to toe in soot and coal dust. They bred resentment and created scapegoats, pointing the finger at Asians (coded as Muslims) for the epidemic of social problems the city has experienced. Housing shortage? Blame the Muslims. Can't find a job? Blame the Muslims. Can't get into education or training? Blame the Muslims. Been refused state benefits? Blame the Muslims. It's simple, it's untrue, and yet it appears to chime with some people's experiences.

The BNP fed and nurtured this cancerous tumour on the Potteries body politic. It grew and multiplied to the extent the fascists commanded thousands of votes and returned nine councillors to the council chamber. For once, Nazi Nick wasn't talking cobblers when he described Stoke as the "jewel in the BNP's crown". But that was 2008 and this is now. During the general election their representation fell to six, and then lost an additional councillor to Community Voice(!). Shenanigans over parliamentary selections and fallings outs has decimated their Stoke organisation. They will have their hands full defending their remaining seats let alone contesting more outside their established patches in the 2011 all-out elections. The fascist tide is ebbing and the overall national political situation is less favourable to them.

Or is it? After all the bitter soup of misery and bigotry the BNP's thugs, fantasists and losers drew sustenance from is still there. It's just the window of opportunity for that poison to find electoral expression is closing. With the constitutional road disappearing, some racists and fascists will be tempted to put away their suits and rosettes and take to the streets. The presence of Stoke BNP councillors at January's violent English Defence League demo says all you need to know about their credentials as peace-loving democrats. But the excitement of mixing it up with the police and/or anti-fascists lend EDL-style mobilisations a certain glamour that proves attractive to semi-racist/proto-fascist young men up for a bit of street fighting: it's no coincidence the EDL became a pole of attraction at the very moment the BNP entered its decline.

For others though, a more cowardly and discreet form of activity is available. With a fragmenting and declining 'official' far right some will be attracted by acts of individual violence. Muslims and other minority communities have been no strangers to racist violence during the course of the last decade, but a new wave of "leaderless" attacks on individuals and property could be more likely. With the fascists marginalised but its wellspring remaining, I fear the attempt to blow up Shelton Mosque could be the shape of things to come.

N Staffs Against the Cuts Press Release

Press release for immediate publication, Wednesday 1 December 2010

North Staffs Against Cuts, in association with the North Staffs Trades Union Council, is calling a public demonstration in Hanley on Saturday 4th December. Demonstrators are asked to assemble at 10.30 a.m. at Lichfield Street Car Park, next to the Victoria Hall.

Campaign spokesperson Dr Simon Halstead said:
“North Staffs Against Cuts is a broad-based community protest movement, working in association with the North Staffs Trades Union Council. We oppose all cuts to services, benefits and jobs. We campaign to get our elected representatives to acknowledge their duty to protect the interests of the electorate. We support all protest groups, such as those who are defending the children's centres, education, libraries, leisure facilities, museums and the Buttercups Nursery, among others. Join our rally to defend our services from massive cuts! What we demand is: not one job lost, not a penny cut! Make the bankers pay for the mess they have created!”

Invited speakers include:
Jason Hill, North Staffordshire Trades Union Council
Michelle Hunter-Gray, North Staffs Against Cuts
Andy Bentley, North Staffs Against Cuts
Tony Conway, PCS
Richard Sidley, NASUWT
Gary McNally, Staffordshire University Students' Union
Liat Norris, Youth Fight For Jobs
Colin Walton, Unison [Local Government]
Jenny Harvey, Unison [Health]
Pam Tinsley MBE [Shopmobility Campaign]
Ivan Hickman, NUT
Representative of Buttercups Nursery Campaign

Fiona Weston of the Buttercups Nursery Campaign said:
“Parents have unanimously agreed to continue to fight to save Buttercups Nursery because we feel there are real alternatives to closure that could save this valuable service.”

Peter Rofe of PCS, the civil service union , said
“The UK Tax gap is £120 billion, made up of £25bn tax avoidance, £70bn tax evasion, and £26bn in uncollected tax. Yet instead of hiring more staff Revenue and Customs continues to cut staff. We need tax justice. There are currently less than 500,000 vacancies in Jobcentres, while 2.5 million people are unemployed. Getting tough on Welfare will not work since there are not the jobs available. It will simply cause more misery, which is the only outcome possible from the coalition government's policies to cut £11bn from welfare.”

Jason Hill, President of North Staffs Trades Union Council, said:
“We believe that these cuts are not necessary, as they will harm the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society, and risk plunging us back into recession. We could save billions of pounds by ending the war in Afghanistan and cancelling the Trident nuclear missile programme and a further £30 billion by introducing a Robin Hood tax on City financial transactions.

For further information contact:
Simon Halstead, Press Secretary, North Staffs Against Cuts
07580 805088
northstaffsagainstcuts@gmail.com

Do Politicians Keep Promises?

Of course they don't, well, at least that's what common sense would have us believe. A belief not at all weakened by the Liberal Democrats' self-inflicted wounds over tuition fee rises and higher education cuts. But is it true? Are manifestos and pledges not worth the paper they're written on? Do politicians sell any old snake oil to get elected? Dusting off an old MRes presentation I gave about six years ago, scholarship in political science has attempted to answer this question and has come to conclusions some may find surprising.

The seminal work on this issue is the 1994 book Parties, Policies, and Democracy by Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Richard Hofferbert and Ian Budge. What they set out to do is investigate the importance of party election programmes for policy formation. They selected ten countries - Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, and USA - and coded major party manifestoes taken from over a period of 40 years. This established these party's programmatic priorities. Simultaneously they looked at each country's public expenditure to determine what their actual policy priorities turned out to be. The two were then compared to determine whether variations in party agendas can forecast policy priority, if governments enact policies in accordance with their own programmes (or that of their opponents), and if a government follows an ideology-driven agenda at the expense of the pragmatic positions all parties assume from time to time.

The received academic literature on policy and promise took an extremely dim view of politicians, or at least the mechanics by which decisions are arrived at. C. Wright Mills in his The Power Elite (1956) argued politics was orchestrated by behind-the-scenes elites. Party positions were so much puff because upon the assumption of government a party is compelled to follow the elite's agenda. March and Olson’s 1984 paper, 'The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life' suggests the programme-policy linkage is negated by the irrational behaviour of policy makers, who randomly select ‘solutions’ and then hunt for ‘problems’ to apply them to in order to remain popular. Lindblom's famous 1959 article, 'The Science of Muddling Through' argues policy making is an incremental process guided by pragmatic consideration above all else.

Rational choice theory also rules out a meaningful relationship between programme and policy. Olson in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations argued rational behaviour exercised by individuals will lead to arbitrary and irrational outcomes at the collective level, rendering democratic policy making practically impossible. For example if individual 1 prefers policy A to policy B, individual 2 prefers policy B to C, and individual 3 prefers policy C to A, a ‘voting cycle’ is created resulting in policy making never reflecting majority preferences. Rational policy makers therefore have to abandon the terrain of ideologically-informed political programmes and learn to be pragmatic.

In sum, critiques of programme-policy links say it is impossible because of elite interest, 'irrational' adaptations to the everyday political game, or the subordination of manifesto commitments to pragmatic calculation. These critiques are academic echoes of common sense assumptions.

Klingemann, Hofferbert and Budge think differently and offer their ‘theory of democratic policy making’. It begins with a citizenry who a priori possess interests and concerns. Interest groups and the media articulate (some of) these before they are passed up to the level of ‘interest intermediation’. Here parties aggregate demands and select issues that are re-presented to the electorate as a bundle of issues, i.e. as the party's political programme. If the party successfully persuades enough people to vote for it it enters government and makes policy decisions that are implemented by the state bureaucracy. The citizens are the recipients of these policy outcomes; it helps reconfigure their interests, new issues and concerns are articulated, and the process is cycled through again.

Where does competition between parties fit into this? Anthony Downs’ (1957) An Economic Theory of Democracy suggested parties take positions on the same issues which are assessed by individual voters' preferences, who in turn inhabit a ‘issue space’. Parties therefore arrange their policies on a left-right spectrum and concentrate them where the greatest numbers of voters are found. Therefore Downs' argument implies parties move around the spectrum at will in the pursuit of votes.

Parties however are creatures of the cleavage structures from which they emerged, hence party identity is always distinctive vis a vis its competitors. Furthermore even the most careerist politicians possess some kind of ideological affinity to their party. As far as Klingemann, Hofferbert and Budge are concerned commitment to political ideas precludes the rational-opportunist behaviour predicted by Downs’s model of policy formation. This is not to say party positions are static. Parties tend to avoid outright repudiation of former policies for ideological and face-saving reasons, but can and do selectively emphasise and de-emphasise parts of their programmatic inventory in their push toward voter concentrations. This is borne out empirically by parties offering selective policy agendas to the electorate, rather than detailed policies as part of a wide-ranging agenda.

Downs also argues because elections are fought on the basis of policy differences single-party majority governments must implement its promises on pain of electoral punishment. This position is problematic because it assumes the electorate will always have perfect knowledge of government performance, and overlooks ways in which governments muddy the indicators of policy implementation. He also ignores how portions of the electorate can be mobilised by ideological affinity over policy content. Nevertheless there are costs associated with ‘nonfulfillment’. If electorates miss discrepancies between pronouncements and implementation, it is likely to be highlighted by the opposition. This can be used to undermine confidence in a party’s governing capacities and lead to lost votes and internal strains. Programme also binds government because it has been widely discussed and criticised by party members, opponents, the media, and the public in the run up to elections. These constitute powerful constraining pressures. Thirdly from a purely rational standpoint, a pre-made programme allows incoming ministers to get on with the business of running their departments rather than having to formulate new policy.

Do politicians keep their promises? Yes and no. Klingemann, Hofferbert and Budge's argument suggests liberal democracies possess mechanisms that nudge politicians to remain faithful to their manifestoes. The costs of non-compliance are such that governing parties much prefer the sphere of non-punishment to setting their nose against media hostility and public outrage. Politicians always have a choice, but they go against their pre-election commitments at their own risk.

NB Politics, Policies, and Democracy found a high correspondence between policy pledges and outcomes in government.

Stoke as a Place of Beauty

'Stoke' and 'beauty'. There's two words that don't go together, a bit like 'Liberal Democrat' and 'promises'. But in his new book, The Lost City of Stoke-on-Trent, Matthew Rice argues my home of 15 years, blighted as it is by joblessness, derelict property, wasteland and Port Vale football club, possesses a proud heritage and a unique beauty. And this provides the key to the successful regeneration of The Potteries. Way back on 14th November about 80 upstanding citizens and I were invited to his book's launch at Fat Cat's in Hanley. The evening was compered by Stoke Central MP Tristram Hunt and saw contributions from the writer AN Wilson, historian and Sentinel columnist Fred Hughes, English Heritage and the National Trust speakers (whose names I didn't catch). And lastly the eponymous Matthew Rice himself, who spoke first.

His opening set the tone with a lamentation for what The Potteries has lost. We live in a city that is abused and not cared for, an industrial city in a post-industrial age desperately in need of regeneration. For outsiders, he mused, the impression Stoke conveys is a place that's falling to bits. But under the surface still lies the ceramic capital of the world. The pottery industry remains a strategically important employer and driver of the local economy, and it would be churlish to turn our back on it in the name of moving forward. The buildings of the city, at least those that remain from Stoke's halcyon days, offer a framework for collective memory. For good or ill they anchored Potters' identities in place: the factory, the methodist chapel, the pub, the cinema. Leaving them to rot or wiping the slate clean for regeneration projects effaces that memory. With each bottle kiln pulled down Stoke becomes alienated from the history that made it. Every new mini-megaproject makes the past more strange, more foreign. Regeneration therefore should be people-focused. Investment in the people of Stoke will give them the capacity to regenerate the six towns themselves.

Fred Hughes more or less repeated Matthew's argument, but (perhaps inadvertently) flagged up the problems Stoke's parochial culture has bequeathed business and local politics. The pottery industry grew up as family concerns in particular localities where there were already established villages and towns. As the factories expanded workplaces and business were infused with a localist flavour. For instance, Fred said his granny - a proud Burslem resident - prided herself on never having visted Longton (and this attitude is very much alive today). So despite the 1910 federation of the six towns into the glamorous metropolis of Stoke-on-Trent this localism has persisted. But during the 'heroic' period of Stoke's industrial expansion it found an outlet in architectural expressions of civic pride, such as the Telephone Exchange in which Fat Cat's sits. All of it contributed to a sense of place that appears to be absent today.

AN Wilson talked about his family's roots in The Potteries. His grandfather, Tom Wilson, was described by contemporaries and historians as the 'last of the great potters'. And later on his own father was MD of Wedgwood. Stoke's decline however lies not in the whirlwind of deindustrialisation that howled through the city in the 80s but much earlier. The first was the Wall Street crash and the second was the floating of Wedgwood on the stock exchange in 1962. By changing the traditional pattern of outright family ownership Josiah Wedgwood V (apparently a self-confessed Marxist) exposed the firm to the rapaciousness of international capital and imported its dog-eat-dog ethos to North Staffordshire. Family firms folded or were absorbed by big business and then the whole system undermined itself as money was chased to the exclusion of all else. He argued that the burgeoning ceramics industry in China is based on the lessons of what made Stoke an industrial powerhouse, of close-knit family businesses rooted in communities. There was more than a hint that if we can go back to basics, then Stoke has a chance of breaking out its cycle of decline.

The speaker from English Heritage said ceramic production in North Staffs goes back to the Roman occupation. Two thousand years on the city is literally built on centuries of pottery waste. When a lift was built onto the back of Burslem School of Art a few years ago, piles of rare 15th century pottery was unearthed. He concluded by saying a successful regeneration process has to incorporate this heritage.

The National Trust speaker said the cultural legacy of Stoke is of national importance. Quite apart from the global contribution the city has made to ceramic design and manufacturing it has made itself felt in literature and scholarship (and music, then again ...). Stoke's home to buildings and sights immortalised by Bennett and Hoskins, and they deserve preserving. She thought Matthew's book offered an optimistic vision of the city, and what policy makers and the city's people have to do is create new stories to animate the space. The NT's contribution is make the case for beauty, which can still be found in Stoke, but it is a beauty that has to be "reclaimed" to find its place in the city's future.

The subsequent questions came thick and fast: how important are ceramics for Stoke's future? What to do about 'generic' new builds? Are Stoke's difficulties cause by the state? Does Stoke need better marketing? Is the obsession with the past preventing Stoke from moving on?

New builds are obviously a bugbear for Matthew. He argued contemporary designers have lots of good intentions but exciting elements tend to evaporate. They require vision, good planning, and the participation of the Potteries public. Unfortunately, AN Wilson couldn't muster much optimism. He believed the fate of the city is governed by forces external to it. But he did speak approvingly of the Potteries Museum, which he felt possibly homes the most aesthetically pleasing collection of pottery in the world. The problem is no one nowhere is coming close to the craftmanship of Stoke's early industrial period today. If ceramics is going to make a big comeback this is where Stoke's heritage offers it an incomparable advantage.

Closing the formal part of the night, Tristram observed that at least where ceramics are concerned the pendulum of competition maybe swinging back in Stoke's favour. Paul Farmer, MD of Wade Ceramics reckons he can come to within 10 pence of Chinese prices thanks to automation. Will the plants shipped out to China and Indonesia make a return to Stoke?

In all it was an excellent evening peppered with free drinks, nibbles and establishment networking opportunities. But what I found very interesting was the nostalgia on display. The platform didn't so much as enunciate a longing for an England of Spitfires and sonnets beloved of home county Tories but a very specific appreciation of the past that maps onto a fraction of manufacturing capital: the fraction that was eviscerated when Thatcher turned Britain into a neoliberal laboratory. The contributions of Matthew and AN Wilson hark back to a time when people did useful things and they, or rather their ancestors, could be sure of their position. The transition from a more "caring" capitalism to one in which all human relationships were reduced the cold cash nexus sundered the intimate ties binding pottery families to their workforce. The ceramics and buildings of bygone eras speak of the talent and patrician pride their class fraction once had. Now heritage is a weapon they wield to try and exert its influence once more as Stoke is remade by public projects and big business. It is a rearguard action to try and convince the next generation of organic entrepreneurs of their validity for the 21st century.

On one level, the battle is won - no one disagrees that Stoke might recapture its civic beauty if the old is restored and the new respects the city's vernacular. But the decisions about how the city looks is taken elsewhere, by remote state and private bureaucracies. To reclaim that control, to realise the vision of Matthew Rice's book demands - as he recognises - the mass participation of locals in the city planning process. His position concedes the day of enlightened local elites is long over. If Stoke is to recapture the glories of its heroic period and surpass them, now the city's working class is the only social force capable of realising it. What this shows is how abstruse debates over art and architecture within elite circles can overspill and become an object of class struggle itself.

Lewisham Town Hall Stormed

Like dozens of others up and down the country, it was going to be just another local anti-cuts protest. Lewisham Council, a Labour-controlled authority wants to cut £60m from its budget between now and 2014 (full story here). But no one going on the march to protest outside tonight's council meeting could have foreseen what was to happen. This is best left to Kate B's Twitter commentary, bits of which are reproduced below:

Lewisham council protest 2nite 6pm Catford town hall: fury @ Bullock's huge cuts list for a deprived borough ... Cops losing control at lewisham ... Ppl screaming let us in ... This is mad never seen protest like it ... Ppl have broken past cops into town hall ... Riot cops at a council meeting jesus ... Now ppl fighting riot cops ... Think yr going to need some bigger cops gideon ... Jesus ppl r going for the police theyre fighting back ... Whole street outside lewisham council is closed + full of coppers ... Everyone at this protest sayng theyre inspired by the students ... Gideon youve got a big fuckn problem here Ive never seen ppl take on riot cops ... Lewisham is a Labour council too. Jesus man that's anger ... Lewisham is a v poor borough. What does the govt expect?

When was the last time an attempt was made to storm a council meeting by a 400-strong protest? I don't know but there's a report here and a video here.

Kate's final comment is right. In my experience over the last few years of doing stalls and speaking to hundreds of people on the streets and their doorsteps there has been an undercurrent of anger, but an anger tempered by isolation, impotence and hopelessness. You can strike and protest as much as you like, they'll never solve anything. Indeed when I was in the Socialist Party one comrade called this 'proxy consciousness': a disillusionment with, irreverence toward, and alienation from official party politics married to a fundamental lack of belief in one's ability to change things. Many a conversation took place where someone would agree with your points about class, inequality, New Labour, pensions, banks, NHS and whatever, but after they'd leave with a nod of the head and wish you good luck. They were issues people cared about, but they didn't see them as issues they should take charge of and fight for: that was what we, "the activists" did. And how could it be otherwise after the defeats of the 80s, the throwing back of working class consciousness, the collapse of a world-wide alternative to capitalism (despite its obvious problems and grotesqueries), the expunging of socialism from everyday politics and the successful sell of consumerism to millions of atomised people?

Nevertheless the combustible material was there and now it is being touched off. I can't remember who said students are the advance guard of the working class, but the support and solidarity the 10.11.10 protest and subsequent days of actions and occupations have inspired is bleeding into wider layers of the population. As Kate notes, "everyone on the protest saying they're inspired by students".

It does also mean the labour movement and the left have to up its game. I'm sure it's the same for many others reading this: up until this year really - and leaving aside the build up to the Iraq war - my experience of the period has been a series of small-scale set pieces. A strike here. A campaign against a closure there. Struggles have been isolated with little in the way of mass expressions of solidarity. But now all bets are off. Class struggle, previously subterranean has now exploded out into the open. Confidence is building rapidly, especially among younger people and no one has the ability to shut it down. A new carnival of protest has ridden into town seething with energy and vitality. For many people who've been knocking around the labour movement for years, the sudden explosions of activity are as strange and alien to us as it is to the raw demonstrators and occupiers who are tasting activism for the first time. And while this is an unfamiliar situation to us, it is doubly so for the powers that be. As tonight's scenes from Lewisham repeat themselves over the coming weeks and months ahead, the discomfiture of having a movement breathing down your neck will be felt by politicians from all parties who vote to cut, however reluctantly they may do so.

The left has to adapt and win this new movement to socialism by persuasion, passion and above all politics. That is the acid test the situation demands. It is how we will be judged by the movement before us and the generations who come after us. Are we up to it?

US and France on Russia and Venezuela

You've got to laugh. The US and British government have been falling over themselves condemning Wikileaks for the latest release of diplomatic cables and intelligence reports. I'm not surprised either. The snippets released so far show the movers and shakers in international relations to be venal dummies who base their opinions on received prejudice and caricature. If it were not drawn up in dry language and festooned with the bureaucratic topiary of officialdom you could be forgiven for thinking their opinions were straight out of the Daily Mail's letters' page.

The bits I've reproduced below are from a cable reporting the outcome of a meeting between Assistant US secretary of state Phil Gordon and a clutch of French diplomatic spads on September 11th last year. The full text is available here. This discussion was about the US and French governments' approach to Afghanistan, Turkey, NATO, Russia, Iran and other bits and bobs. This quote is about Russia:

Galharague described Russia as a state with the trappings of democracy but without any mechanisms for the public to influence government decision-making. "The root of the problem is the regime," he said. Presidential advisor Loras added Russian leaders lacked sufficient, long-range vision for their country and instead, focused on a six-month time horizon and their business interests.

Monsieur Galharague could almost have been talking about the British cabinet.

The cable also notes Medvedev has started to chart a course independent of Putin. There's one relationship that's going to end well.

But the (short!) section on Venezuela is very revealing. Despite winning more free and fair elections than any incumbent presently at the helm of a Western power, Hugo Chavez comes in for some stick:

Levitte observed that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is "crazy" and said that even Brazil wasn't able to support him anymore. Unfortunately, Chavez is taking one of the richest countries in Latin America and turning it into another Zimbabwe.

As if the two are remotely comparable. Let me hazard a guess. I imagine Monsieur Levitte finds Chavez objectionable because of his rerouting of oil profits into welfare spending and infrastructural projects rather than Venezuela's wealthy elite (an oil multinationals). How very dare he!

With more releases to come over the coming days there'll be enough material to keep snarky bloggers going 'til Winterval.

NB: No CIA agents were harmed in the making of this post.

Between Protest and Parliament

I can't refrain from commenting on Sayeeda Warsi's letter to Ed Miliband concerning John McDonnell's speech at this weekend's Coalition of Resistance conference. In his contribution, John expressed solidarity with the 15 university occupations and support for students against the ConDems' plans to sink higher education. In other words, he was doing what any decent socialist should be doing. But this was too much for the current chair of the Conservatives.

According to the BBC, Warsi wrote "A member of your party, John McDonnell MP, has been quoted in the press suggesting that he is involved in a 'programme of resistance' which includes the potential incitement of rioting." Actually, Warsi is putting words into John McDonnell's mouth here, and she knows it. But for Warsi and her like any kind of politics taking place outside the rarefied atmosphere of parliamentary constitutionalism is potentially dangerous. You see, it involves people (or, as Tories might see them, 'the mob') getting together and pursuing political objectives independent of their elected representatives. As far as they're concerned, demos, occupations, strikes, protests, rallies and riots are all members of the same species. Tories instinctively sense an essential identity lurking beneath the noisy and colourful stirrings of the dangerous class, and this makes them feel very uneasy indeed. Always and at all times the most timid of protests are only a step away from full-blooded insurrection.

In calling for John McDonnell's head, Ed Miliband should have told Warsi where to get off. If the unelectable fears the ungovernable, that's something she's going to have to learn to deal with. But instead of standing up to this blatant attempt at driving a wedge between Labour and the burgeoning student movement, Ed just rolled over. According to the same report McDonnell "will be spoken to by the opposition whips office". Pitiful.

This episode, which will surely be as forgotten in a few days as this year's X-Factor Christmas number one will be 12 months hence, says a lot about the contradictions of Ed Miliband's position and Labour as the official parliamentary wing of the labour movement. We've been here before regards Ed and the middle ground and much of it remains the case. The everyday political reality Ed and the leadership inhabit is one conditioned by the received political wisdom of the New Labour years and elite opinion expressed through the media. Pressures from life outside are filtered through opinion polls and focus groups, which are then treated as immovable realities to be adapted to, not changed. So unfavourable coverage of student protests in the press = a belief that most people are opposed to the demos and occupations.

Steps can be made to remedy the situation. The weekend's announcement of a two year review of the party offers an opportunity for the left to argue for more democracy and therefore restore the linkage function parties are, according to political science scholarship, supposed to perform between supporters and political elites. But this can only go so far. Ed's attempts to play the Westminster game are rooted in the contradictory location of Labour itself, of being the party of the organised working class which has to appeal to the whole nation to win elections, of the repository of working class interests and aspirations while being one of two parties of capitalist governance, of being sustained by extra-parliamentary movements while its high politics are completely focused on parliamentarism, and of simultaneously being a party of labour and capital. How Labour has negotiated this contradiction historically is to play the constitutional game at all costs, even to the extent of hollowing itself out.

Therefore the leadership's capitulation to Warsi's whinging is rooted much deeper than shallow analyses of the "latest betrayal" would have you believe. While it'd be fantastic if Ed Miliband came out explicitly for the occupations (in much the same way the NUS leadership has been shamed into doing), he is unlikely to do so because of the gravitational pull received practice and Labour's contradictory location exerts on him. Given the choice of supporting students, winning tens of thousands of radical new adherents to Labour, and placing the party firmly on the side of opposition to the cuts on the one hand; and the prevarication of politics as usual on the other, he will plump for the latter every time.

Stoke Protest Against the Cuts

DEMONSTRATE AGAINST CUTS!

Organised by

North Staffs Against the Cuts and North Staffs Trade Union Council

SATURDAY 4th DECEMBER

10.30am – LICHFIELD ST CAR PARK, HANLEY

All banners and placards welcome.

Downfall: Dave Reacts to Student Protests

ConDems: A Lasting Marriage or Heading for Divorce?

The grey man of British politics has let go the reserve former prime ministers usually keep to venture forth his opinions on the Coalition. Unlike Thatcher's embarrassing interventions, since leaving Number 10 John Major has occasionally chipped in with bits and pieces of advice for his successors. In this tradition I can't see his latest musings upsetting anyone's applecart.

Major argues that it makes sense for the Tories and LibDems to cuddle together for now because they have a sufficiently large electorate between them to ram through their programme of "necessary" cuts without paying too heavy a political price. But in the event of the wheels coming off the legislative timetable the two parties should consider extending the coalition arrangement beyond the lifetime of the present parliament (there is also more than a hint that Major would like it to continue regardless).

There are two things going on here.

During the election and after Little Dave's impressive performance in the leaders' debates, quite a few Labour people and the odd LibDem thought a liberal-left coalition could happen, and as such it became the repository of all manner of fantasies. The most common was a vision of government evolving in a more Keynesian direction minus New Labour's baggage of petty authoritarianism and the bolting on of decent electoral reform. It would be a government determined to tackle the deficit and prepared to make cuts, but not as savage or as deep as those favoured by Dave and the gang. And what is more it would constitute a 'progressive majority' that might keep the Tories out in perpetuity.

As we know now its possibility was rendered null and void by the electoral arithmetic of the hung parliament and Dave 'n' Nick's whirlwind bromance. But the argument underlying Major's praise for the coalition follows the same logic. LibLab becomes ConDem. A long government of the progressive majority is supplanted by a (hoped for) semi-permanent centre right Coalition, an arrangement what would use state power to reshape British society even more completely around neoliberal dogma. BigSoc is the philosophical garnish sprinkled on this explicit class project.

Second is the marginalisation of the hard-right Europhobe/dingbat wing of the Tories so ably represented in parliament by Bill Cash and the increasingly erratic Nadine Dorries. As Andy argues (and noted here before), building an alliance with the Orange Book'er LibDem leadership puts clear distance between Dave and the uncaring and the unacceptable. The Coalition has been the means for strengthening liberal Tories and "sensible" patricians in the party, and it's this that has caught John Major's eye. From the pound's messy retreat from the Exchange Rate Mechanism on the Tories were plagued by incompetence, scandal and backbench unrest. Let's face it, the right wing "bastards" of the 1992-97 school make today's clique of grumbling Blairites look like nodding dogs. Major's not muzzling them himself, but he must be feeling more than a little schadenfreude to see his former enemies getting slapped about and ignored.

Major's comments come at a time the Coalition faces its first major test. The size and militancy of student protests and demonstrations have put the LibDems under severe pressure. More protests next week plus rumours of NUS legal action against LibDems will keep them sweating - and deservedly so. To be sure the rebellion of sufficient numbers of their MPs plus the odd recalcitrant Tory could bury this awful government as surely as its insidious plans for higher education.

So what are we looking at here? The normal ups and downs of the average marriage or the beginning of divorce proceedings? Whatever it is, the future of the relationship will be decided over the coming weeks.