The Far Left Vs Starmerism

The problem with motherloads of news (and a mountain of work) is certain items of interest get buried. Such as latest development's on Britain's far left. In September, the Socialist Party announced it was dusting off their vehicle of electoral convenience, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, ahead of next May's round of elections. And then, the coup! Last week, the SP press released the news that former Derby North Labour MP Chris Williamson had joined TUSC's steering committee and affiliated his proto-party, the Resistance Movement to TUSC. The Morning Star also reported Chris met with Arthur Scargill about cooperation with the Socialist Labour Party (remember them?), and it's worth recalling he has a good relationship with George Galloway who, while not ranting about how Donald Trump had the election stolen from him, doubles up as the leader of the Workers Party of Great Britain.

This is interesting for left trainspotters for two good reasons. Firstly, it interrupts the duopoly the Socialist Workers Party and the SP have exercised over left-of-Labour mobilisations since the early 00s. The Socialist Alliance, Respect, the short-lived and ugly-named Socialist Green Unity Coalition, No2EU, and from 2010 TUSC were/are "unity" projects cobbling together already-existing left groups, but revolved either around the SWP and SP as Britain's largest and most visible Trotskyist groups. The Corbynist interlude interrupted their electoral adventures, leaving the field clear to the more "interesting" elements of the far left. With Chris Williamson's departure from Labour and the formation of his group, his alliance with the SP certainly boosts the profile of TUSC, but arguably more significant is Galloway's party. Now claiming 56 branches and 4,000 members, on paper the organisation is larger than the SP and, perhaps, the SWP. At that size, its big fish in a small pond status means it could ignore the rest and do their own thing. Possible given the WPGB core are congenitally anti-Trotskyist, and happily oversaw purges on Scargill's behalf in the SLP before they fell out of favour. But the good relations between Galloway and TUSC's best-known figure might result in a non-aggression pact of some description and potentially foreshadowing a challenge wider than the 131 candidates TUSC rustled up in 2015.

On the Workers' Party itself, projection of significance and dynamism in the age of social media is super easy: what matters are the number of activists a party can mobilise. The cadre of the WPGB are the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), a very small Stalinoid Westboro Baptist Church with its leadership based around the progeny of Harpal Brar and fidelity to the revealed truth of Uncle Joe's Collected Works. Quite how an ideologically circumscribed sect whose shibboleths fly in the face of the historical record are going to cohabit with refugees from Corbynism is anyone's guess, but we'll find out in the fullness of time. But this does speak to something, which is the second point of interest: the generalised growth of the left.

Labour's NEC elections show the party has lost 57,000 members since Keir Starmer assumed the leadership, and the turnout suggests disengagement on the part of others. Most of these are going to be on the left, and a good proportion of them are on the market for some sort of alternative. The heft the WPGB claims isn't necessarily another case of revolutionary inflation: there are real opportunities for the parties of the far left to intersect with and put on a few thousands members each. This doesn't suggest any electoral challenge the WPGB and TUSC decides to mount, with or without one another, is going to do better than the sub one per cent scores such outfits can normally expect, but this isn't the point. For once, "putting down a marker" might actually help grow their organisations.

I say might, because the appeal these organisations have are quite limited. The SP/TUSC for its part fetishises and is trapped within an obsolete class politics, WPGB has Galloway, Stalinism, and his alliance with Scottish Tories, and Chris Williamson just can't stop sailing close to the wind on matters antisemitism. A subset of Jeremy Corbyn supporters might find this compelling, especially those who defined their affiliations in terms of fealty to his person than a political programme or attachment to a wider movement. And those who do wash up, how permanent will their new homes be? I can't imagine many taking kindly to being guilt tripped into the treadmill of paper selling and permanent activism while expecting to show deference to petty apparatchiks and, in Galloway's case, the Glorious Leader.

Until that day comes, there is some danger a far left election challenge might pose Labour. Not existential by any means. Whatever the fantasy, they are not about to become a new left party/workers' party with mass roots or an episodically significant "left UKIP" that might do to Labour what Nigel Farage did to the Tories. But around the edges, a few hundred votes for a candidate here, a couple more for a paper candidate there could make the difference between a Labour gain/hold and a Tory or Liberal Democrat sneaking through the middle. And, if 2024 is going to be a tight election powered by polarisation, every vote and every seat counts. The more Starmerism reveals itself as an authoritarian managerialist project in the Milibandist mode of a "good" capitalism, the more the risk is run as more disgruntled former Labourists jump ship and help build the far left challenge. This far out from the election Labour's leadership can elect to do something about it, but as Keir and co. don't understand Labour's own base I wouldn't put the house on it.

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Labour's Anti-Vax Social Media Ban

Switiching on the television this morning, up popped Jonathan Ashworth on BBC Breakfast. He was there to explain Labour's latest policy announcement: the need for clamping down on anti-vaxxers online. Or, to be more accurate, introducing a range of penalties to force social media firms to clear this stuff from their platforms. He said this content is "exploiting people's fears, their mistrust of institutions and governments and spreading poison and harm." Can't really disagree. He argued this was not the same as voicing genuine concerns about the Coronavirus vaccine or raising questions of the government's management of the crisis, but with the roll out of a vaccine to begin soon (we'll see) it's imperative something is done to stop the flood of disinformation.

I have some sympathy with the intentions behind Labour's policy. Covid conspriracism is annoying. Its adjacency to QAnon and right wing conspiracy politics makes it worrying. Its mobilisations have undoubtedly spread infections, which is far more dangerous to the mainly middle-aged people attracted to these politics than the summer's Black Lives Matter protests. And, from a public health point of view, irresponsible and potentially dangerous. While the coming politics of vaccination are set to revolve around who should be prioritised, public anger at queue jumping, and how far down the age range the programme is going to reach, Covid denialism and the standard anti-vax "scepticism" is creating a hardened bloc of refuseniks. Some estimates put them at around 20% of the population. They might be protected by herd immunity when everyone else gets their medicine, or they might find themselves hit with another wave of Coronavirus with the added health costs and unnecessary deaths it would bring. And this creates new dangers - Covid-19 is a slow evolving virus, but every infection is an opportunity for mutation and potentially more virulent and deadly strains in the future. This is not idle speculation, as Denmark's mink farm crisis demonstrates. How to prevent this state of affairs?

There are no easy answers, and neither is simply banning anti-vax content. For one, nothing puts rocket boosters under conspiracy theories quite like authorities taking action against their "revealed truth". A social media ban might hinder the denialism, at least intially, but reinforces its key tenets and converts what is stupid into something seductive. The second is, despite the assurances made by Labour's health shadow this morning, we're getting into thought crime territory. The original lockdown was necessary, and it drove the infection rate right down. We'll see what the results of its half-arsed sequel will be, but between March and May the balance between public health pressure and the encroachment on liberty was a mess. Like banning people from visiting the countryside, or the allowance of a single hour outside for exercise and whatnot, or the exemptions enjoyed by recently late of Downing Street advisors. The outcome was more farce than tragedy, but the outcome of a ban might have unforeseen consequences.

For example, if the fining structure accompanying Labour's suggestions are especially punitive your Instagrams, Facebooks, and Twitters are going to introduce pre-screening on a large scale. Done on the basis of key words and key phrases, this means a lot of material discussing the politics of the vaccine are going to get blocked, or held forever in moderation hell until some luckless employee gets to eyeball it. Mission creep therefore is inevitable, embedded in the architecture of compliance each firm devises. With the left in particular having its reach actively stymied by Facebook, we know what this means for critical media. And if the flows of discourse outside the bounds of establishment media is blocked, guess who wins? Why, the traditional news and print outlets.

This is not a conspiracy though. Labour aren't part of the "great reset" or some such nonsense, but it does offer pointers about its political direction under Keir Starmer. Speaking on Desert Island Discs, he reiterated his commitment to retaining Labour as a broad church, despite recent events. Be that as it may, Keir's range and style of opposition versus the Tories is quite limited and technocratic, avoiding substantive issues like the roots of Tory incompetence, the corrupt abandonment of procurement rules by the government to shovel public funds into private pockets (family and friends of top Tories, obviously), and a studied avoidance of talking about the dead. This is not just because Keir is looking at improving his standing and wanting to avoid the charge of point scoring, it says something about his politics: he is looking to preserve state authority.

On BBC Breakfast, Jonathan Ashworth said the ban was driven by a desire to restore public trust in institutions. A laudible aim for someone entirely inside Labourism's statist traditions, but also hopelessly naive. Covid conspiracism and the irreverenace it feeds off is inseparable from long-term processes of political disengagement. And yet, it's worth remembering structural forces are not mechanical. As the outcome of social relationships the actions of condensed collective actors, like parties acting through democratic politics, the media, and the state, can steer such tendencies and lay the grounds for their evaporation, or their reinforcement. One such driver is parties saying one thing and doing another, like "forgetting" pledges made or backtracking on commitments to referendum results, or working against the interests of the people who voted for you in the first place. Ultimately disengagement and, by extension, anti-vaxxers are a political problem and need to be dealt with politically. The latest "policy" falls short of this. Not only is the game Labour playing potentially dangerous, it's doomed not to work.

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On Labour's NEC Elections Results

Who Will Speak for the Dead?

Thursday 12th November, 563 dead. Wednesday 11th November, 595 dead. Tuesday 10th November, 532 dead. Every one of these deaths is on the Tories. It's this hideous, ichor-soaked government who've shurgged their shoulders over the repeated, blatant failures of Test and Trace. It was they who resisted calls for an earlier lockdown, which might have saved many of the lives lost. It was also this government who prematurely opened everything up, with workplaces and retail approaching some degree of normality. And lest we forget it was the Tories who bribed people back into pubs, bars, and restaurants. It might have helped stimulate the economy into reporting 15.5% in GDP growth in the last quarter, but a blood price was extracted. Yet, as we have recently noted, the government have proven themselves successful in one endeavour: of shirking blame for this awful state of affairs. Folks can talk about their news management, the collusion of establishment journalism, and clever, clever micropolitical strategies working away to depoliticise their crisis, but above all there's one ingredient making all this possible: HM's official Opposition. It's one thing for the Tories to stay quiet about the dead, but Labour?

Consider Keir Starmer's Coronavirus record. His approach to the government has seen Labour, um, shadow the government in most aspects. He quickly grasped calling for a two-week "circuit breaker" during half-term was epidemiologically sensible and politically doable. Not too much damage to kids' schooling, and a quick points win - especially when the Tories would be forced to act by rising infections and hospital admissions, all without straying too far from the government's strategy and remaining entirely faithful to SAGE recommendations. Apart from this, at times Keir has proven even more zealous about opening everything to some level of normality. 30 seconds into the leader's shoes he was demanding a timetable for an exit strategy, and there was the embarrassment of notifying the government that he expected the schools to open on time and sod clinical realities. Where Keir has ventured into criticism, it's been process and details, and the famous focus on incompetence. These are necessary criticisms, but not the be-all and end-all of opposition in the age of Covid.

Limiting criticism to Tory cluelessness is ridiculous for two reasons. It lets whoever succeeds Johnson off for his smorgasbord of sin and foregrounds Conservative reinvention - surely a chief lesson of the 2019 general election no one ever talks about. And second, it's simply not true. Appointing cronies and manifesting incoherence is not a case of Johnson being rubbish, it's systematic, a part-consequence of competing pressures. In other words, it's political. This leads us to asking a similar question about Labour's pitiful opposition. Keir's managerialism is more than a personal quirk, of the UK's leading lawyer seamlessly transitioning into the front rank of British politics without disturbing a single, brylcreemed strand nor any ingrained habits of mind. It's deliberate, and sits within the Labourist tradition.

Consider the latest intervention by way of an illustration. Looking aghast at Number 10's staffing shenanigans, Keir has condemned the affair as "pathetic". Or, to quote him more fully, "We're in the middle of a pandemic, we're all worried about our health and our families, we're all worried about our jobs, and this lot are squabbling behind the door of number ten. It's pathetic. Pull yourselves together, focus on the job in hand." The important part is my emphasis. When Keir confronts Johnson at Prime Minister's Questions, he affects the aspect of an exasperated teacher reprimanding a lazy schoolboy and threatening to send his parents a cause for concern letter. He offers less a critique and more a backhanded form of encouragement to get this right. The pull-your-socks-up discourse makes sense in a pandemic, and meshes seamlessly into Keir's comfort zone of Tory incompetence, but ultimately he's rushing to their rescue. When he says he wants them to do well, he genuinely means it.

The chief beneficiary of Keir's "opposition" to the Tories is the principle of state authority. This is why he, and Labour politicians generally, steer clear of structural criticism or taking the Tories to task for corruption and cronyism. It's either about being "mistaken" and having the wrong ideas, or not being up to the job. Talking about interests and the rootedness of the Tories in Britain's broken political economy raises awkward questions, including the wider legitimacy of the state - with all its laws and ideologies. This must be protected at all costs, not because of deep seated parliamentary cretinism, but because Labourism is fundamentally statist. Labourist politics relies on mass passivity, it's an elite project where the masses vote in the politicians, and they make the changes by passing legislation. This basic assumption, this ontology of establishment politics is responsible for commonalities between the parties and why, when all is said and done, MPs across from one another get on, go to gigs, strike up friendships, and wax lyrically about shared values and having more in common. Keir is not only doing Labourism by not encroaching on state authority, he's actually protecting it by overlooking the criminality and overt sectionalism of the Tories. Any honest politics would join the dots, but the only truth that matters here is the power he might enjoy in Number 10.

Who then is going to speak for the dead? Not asking serious questions about 50,000 deceased persons is as much a structural feature of Starmerist politics as recklessness is of the contemporary Conservative scene. Whoever ends up speaking for the lives lost, it's not likely to be Labour's front bench.

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The Grotesqueries of the Hacks

Look at the appalling state of British journalism. This evening the lobby hacks and chief political correspondents are getting excited by rumblings in Number 10. Earlier today Laura Kuenssberg was tweeting breathlessly about the rumoured promotion of long-time Johnson lackey, Lee Cain, from head spinner to Number 10 Chief of Staff. A move reportedly opposed by, um, Carrie Symonds. Tonight, Cain announced his resignation following suggestions the Prime Minister had instead forced him out. Kuenssberg's clueless counterpart across the great televisual divide, ITV's Robert Peston witters on Twitter concerning rumours Dominic Cummings is about to jump ship in solidarity with Cain. "It's 50/50!", according to Tom Newton Dunn, quoting a Number 10 "insider" not at all likely to be Cummings himself.

This is the real meat and gravy of politics for our establishment hangers ons. Watching their twee output, you could be forgiven for thinking political power isn't about power. If politics is showbiz for ugly people, they typify the dominant strand of establishment political journalism: current affairs as Heat magazine, or more fittingly Hello thanks to the gallons of sycophancy they gush over their subjects and sources. What makes this all the more sickening is today, according to the ever-shifting definitions of Covid victims, the number of dead passed the grim milestone of 50,000. For the last 24 hour reporting period, some 595 people - lives as complex and feeling as your own - were snuffed out. The government are making strenuous efforts to deny culpability for their disaster, but it's not like the smiley, happy people of the pro-Johnson press pack are about to make matters difficult for them.

Some folks might put this high drama about low politics down to another Cummings masterstroke. But one should not attribute superpowers to him. He has not fetched a dead moggy from the Croydon cat killer's chest freezer and flung it to the cooing mob, this is a genuine power struggle in the Johnson project. Perhaps Cummings is feeling the pressure a wee bit. The holiday hunger debacle had Dom's inky thumb prints all over it, and even the pit ponies of the political press were forced to neigh in a faintly critical tone. One more idiotic move and his reputation as the sinister svengali is done. With one of his chums heading out the door, why not cut his losses and enjoy cashing in on the notoriety for the next few years? It must be tempting.

It doesn't really matter though. Whether Cummings stays or goes, the same rotten crew with the same rotten politics are carrying on handing rotten contracts out to rotten private providers. It's a national emegency, don't you know, so nothing to see here. And accompanying it all is the soundtrack of a reportage and commentary that elucidates nothing, and greases the wheels of mystification and befuddlement most people find bemusing about the politics shit circus. It's almost as if there's mutually beneficial collusion between the crew inside Downing Street and the tight-knit posse standing outside in front of the cameras.

Labour's Backpedalling on Schools

What a lovely, gushing interview with Wes Streeting. No hard questions allowed, instead the shadow schools minister spends time talking about his background, why he's passionate about ensuring state school pupils aren't left behind, and has a pop at the Tories about their school dinners fiasco. Nothing objectionable or problematic, apart from two comments.

The National Education Service, which was variously trailed under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, is now in the bin. A "slogan" according to the Graun write up of the interview. And then there was this, which is worth quoting in its entirety:

"In my constituency I’ve got local authority schools, free schools, academies, I’ve got a grammar school, I’ve got independent schools that aren’t far away – and the interesting thing is, whether I am walking into a local authority school or a free school or an academy, the name above the door matters less than what goes on inside the building. I think we would all agree that we wouldn’t start from here if we were designing an education system but this is where we are, and we have to make the system work."

Let's look at these two points. As the holder of the shadow schools brief, I suppose the previous leadership's life-long education service wasn't of much interest. Readers will recall this was a proposal to open up adult education and ease access to colleges and universities so people could drop in and out of education throughout their lives. This isn't some frippery or the promise of a semi-permanent life as a students' union barfly, but an essential complement to how labour markets are likely to develop over the next half-century. We know advances in robotics and artificial intelligence are going to put a lot of jobs under pressure, and the development of new industries are not likely to generate new occupations in anywhere near the same numbers as previous waves of technological innovation. The aim of the education service was to catch people put into this position of skills obsolescence and allow them, at no costs to themselves, to retrain. A good common sense policy nor one spilling over with the radical potential to overthrow capitalism, so we can only speculate why Wes simply dismissed it. Perhaps the decommodification element with the removal of tuition fees, something latter day Blairites remained wedded to, had something to do with it.

And then the idea of the schooling mix. This whole "all schools must be good schools" stuff is not peculiar to Wes Streeting. Angela Rayner has said as much in the past, but pretending it doesn't matter is itself is dogmatic and, for the Labour Party, utterly mistaken. Again there might be an element of Blairist revanchism here for Wes, who is fundamentally wedded to this sort of politics. The "mix" in school provision began under Thatcher, carried on by John Major, and was enthusiastically taken up by Tony Blair. As far as the Tories were concerned, their restructuring of education was far from the pragmatic "what works" philosophy New Labour occasionally toyed with, but a project to break the strength of the teaching unions, smash teachers' professional autonomy, gut schools of local democratic input and accountability to parents, and centralise the curriculum under state control. This isn't to say the old system was perfect or was without its share of failures, but the Tory approach was a policy offensive aimed at two groups - teachers and local authorities - who stood in the way of their efforts to centralise the state and transform state education into uncritical vocational fodder.

Trying to make this "work" is to carry on with a system that pushes teachers into quitting with stupid workloads, ensures more resources go to "better" schools, allows academy chains - completely without account - to make changes to the curricula and determine disciplinary policies while "chief executives" pocket huge salaries, gives free schools the right to take on anyone who fancies themselves a teacher without qualifications, and, of course, union busting. The issue of "quality" in education is inseparable from these issues, unless one is gormless enough to trust grades as a simple reflection of what is and what isn't a good school experience.

What Wes is in danger of doing here, and I'm sure he's conscious of it, is opposing the producer to the consumer interest - a stubborn characteristic of New Labour theory. Usually associated with His Tonyness's efforts at "public sector reform", this starts out with the assumption workers are lazy and strive to make the service they're employed by amenable to them and their interest, all at the expense of the "consumer" - the hard working taxpayer. We last saw these arguments aired by Jeremy Hunt during his confected dispute with junior doctors over weekend working. Needless to say, opposing producers and consumers is irresponsible politics for any Labour politician. By attacking workers, or being seen to be fine with unjust and dysfunctional systems letting down kids in school and driving teachers from the profession, Labour figures who do so are attacking the party's base and, ultimately, making fighting an election more difficult in the future. This basic fact of political physics shouldn't need explaining, but it does frequently and repeatedly to those who fancy themselves election winning professionals.

Unfortunately, as if confirmation was needed, Wes's interview is another dog whistle to the right wing press and politics opinion formers that the drift away from the platform Keir Starmer was elected on continues.

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Boris Johnson's Hungry Kids Climbdown

What was the point of all that? Amid the hullaballoo and excitement of American politics, the government quietly announced it was climbing down over scool dinners. You'll remember it. Not three weeks ago the Torie absolutely refused to find extra cash to help hungry kids out during the half-term holidays. For some, there was "enough" support already via emergency funding made available to local authorities. Others made a real meal out of the empty plates of others and indulged every scrounger myth their limited, spite-filled imaginations could conjure up. You might recall the government whipped against a holiday hunger vote in the Commons, amid claims issuing food vouchers was the same thing as nationalising children.

The first matter of interest is how the scheme, backed by Marcus Rashford and Labour, was projected to cost just £22m. 18 days on, the government has decided it can afford £400m to see the poorest through Christmas. Indeed, it goes beyond what was being asked for by offering more help with utility bills and assisting families through Easter, the summer holidays, and next Christmas. Another £16m is to be given to foodbanks too. It's not very often the government completely capitulates to progressive demands, but this is something else. The support for charities is a bit on the lean side, but making sure holiday hunger is banished for the next year shows the Tories' belated recognition of how damaging the episode was for them and a determination to avoid the same in the future. No accident then Labour has started posting polling leads in the aftermath of the school meals farrago.

For the Tories, however, the damage is done. After grandstanding and being seen to vote for the status quo in the Commons, unveiling the U-turn is not going to be a comfortable experience for a lot of Conservative members. Take my own occasional MP, for example. Plenty of anger there in the replies, none of which are put up jobs from local Labour Party types. If you're naive or a fool, you might say the government were going to do this all along. And then I might ask why MPs were allowed to go out in public and megaphone their belief figures on Dishy Rishi's spreadsheets were more important than filling empty bellies.

Still, a belated Halloween nightmare is now upon Boris Johnson. As this blog has argued many times, an abiding characteristic of the last 40 years is the authoritarian state. It complements, permits, fosters, and protects the marketisation and commodification of everything, from the contracting out of the local council's catering department to the privatisation of DNA strands. Politically, the programme of selling off state assets or shaking them up with the introduction of marketised relationships between public institutions (see the NHS, for example) has the consequence of centralising authority in the executive. I.e. the government. After Thatcher, despite the piety shown to neoliberal nostrums, the "small state" is the heavily centralised state. This is simply accepted as the case and no subsequent Prime Minister has set the flow of governmental power into reverse. In practice, this has made government big, overly dependent on governance mechanisms, unwieldy, and structurally incompetent.

These developments have made them quite vulnerable, politically speaking. Without alternative bases of authority, and despite their best efforts at depoliticising government failure, bad things ultimately stick. The problem with centralised systems is it's easy to apportion blame, and so the received wisdom of neoliberal statecraft is to head this off by providing resolute leadership. Authority is accepted the more it is seen to be accepted, of leaders saying something and sticking with it. Ironically, for a time, despite his affected buffoonary Boris Johnson fit this template to a tee. He demonstrated his seriousness about getting Brexit done by offending liberal sensibilities, splitting his own party, promising to trash the law, and making theatre about refusing to extend Article 50. Johnson built authority among Brexit-minded voters because he demonstrated a seriousness of purpose, and readers will also recall when Covid hit and the first national lockdown came in Johnson was posting huge, war time-style polling leads. Since, this has whittled away. The Tories' own venal and pitiful performance has a lot to answer for, but also corrosive has been the half-dozen high-profile U-turns executed by Johnson. Most recently, the refusal to countenance another lockdown and, hey presto, another lockdown. There is this on school dinners and hungry children. And another is coming, thanks to the outcome of the US presidential election. If an authoritarian governmenr can't show authority, trouble is around the corner.

Bit by bit, Johnson's authority is bleeding away. There won't be a set piece event that will finish him off, like Thatcher's poll tax, Major's ERM fiasco, Brown's election-that-never-was, Dave's referendum, and May's double disaster of the election and the Article 50 extension. His trajectory is similar to Blair's, with a nibble taken here and a bite taken there. Not helped by his own cackhanded approach to party management, and unconcern for MPs who've expended goodwill and capital defending his lines, such as on food vouchers, only to have their stand trumped by a panicky and generous cave-in. Once Brexit is finally done, Johnson's going to have a very difficult time recouping what is lost - if the point of no return hasn't already been crossed. Just perhaps historians will come to the view it was hungry kids that marked the beginning of Johnson's end.

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New Left Media November 2020

For whatever reason nothing crossed my desk in October, but new media product has certainly made up for the dearth with this cornucopia of projects. Please check them out!

1. Anti-Capitalist Resistance (Twitter) (Facebook) (Group site)

2. Black Friday Podcast (Twitter) (Podcast)

3. Gouch Hard (Twitter) (YouTube channel)

4. In Too Deep (Twitter) (Blog)

5. It Came from the Sea (Twitter) (Leftist oceanography podcast!)

6. Jacobin Radio (Twitter) (Podcast)

7. Nommo Mag (Twitter) (Magazine)

8. Owen Jones (Twitter) (Video channel)

9. Red in the Face (Twitter) (Podcast)

10. Slava Zilber (Twitter) (YouTube channel)

11. Witches of Scotland (Twitter) (Podcast)

If you know of any new(ish) blogs, podcasts, channels, Facebook pages or whatever that haven't featured before then drop me a line via the comments, email, Facebook, or Twitter. Please note I'm looking for new media to have started within the last 12 months or thereabouts. The round up appears hereabouts when there are enough new entrants to justify a post!

Biden, BoJo, and Brexit

As Donald Trump drowned his considerable sorrows in a round of golf this Saturday and the rest of the Republicans miserably lamented, spare a thought for someone outside Team Trump hoping he'd pull off another win. Yes, Boris Johnson finally said something about the US presidential election. As world leaders lined up to condemn Trump's transparent and pathetic attempts to derail counts and claim them fraudulent, this most incontinent of gossp mongers, leakers, and opinion peddlers was uncharacteristically mum. That is, until the result was finally declared. There were good reasons for his welcome period of quiet.

Over at Business Insider, there are several explanations why Johnson is apprehensive about a Biden presidency. Apparently, the president-elect sees Johnson as cut from the same Trumpist cloth, which is fair enough. His lies aren't as egregious, but they come to Johnson just as easily. He has form hanging around with and taking advice from Steve Bannon, and has stirred the same populist pot that powered Trump to victory in 2016. And while readers here aren't likely to be Biden's biggest fan, he's certainly shown more circumspection treating with Johnson than former Labour politicians now sitting in the Lords as reward for backing the "mini-Trump" over their own party.

There's also the issue of racism. Johnson might like pointing to his multiracial clique of well-heeled ministers and occasionally his own distant Turkish heritage, but there was the time when, as London mayor, he accused Barack Obama of having an "ancestral dislike" thanks to his "part-Kenyan" background. Characteristically Johnson refused to apologise or back down, cheered on as always by his mates in the media. Unfortunately, Joe Biden apparently remembers sleights - especially where close friends are concerned. Another strike against Johnson.

Much more important than all this is what Biden's victory means for Brexit. Westminster watchers have noted how the return of Donald Trump would have seen Johnson more willing to walk away from discussions with Brussels, and plunge the country into further calamity by defaulting to EU trade on WTO terms, partly mediated by the thin protections of his withdrawal agreement. Regardless of the damage this would cause, Johnson hoped Trump would ride to the rescue and serve him up a political triumph in the form of a trading deal. It wouldn't replace what was lost from tearing up trading relations with the near abroad, but for Johnson this was never the point. Now a Biden White House won't play to this nonsense. Not because they think Brexit is stupid (it is) and diminishes the UK's status and usefulness as a bridge into Europe (it does), but thanks to some very stupid game playing.

Introduced to dragoon the EU into accepting UK demands, the threat to break an international treaty was destined to blow up in Johnson's face. It was idiotic because no putatative trading partner would want to strike a deal with a state who tears up treaty obligations for posturing purposes, and utterly reckless given, as Johnson knew, the polls were in Biden's favour in the race for the White House. This incoherence and extreme short-termism, also a characteristic of the Covid strategy among other things in recent years, now finds Johnson's Brexit scheme jeopardised by an incoming president who will not accept unilateral alteration to the Good Friday Agreement. Indeed, this five second clip from earlier today might be interpreted as a shot across Johnson's bows. Especially as Biden is keen to repair relations with the EU Trump at best neglected, and at worst worsened.

The pressure is now on Johnson. With disruption inevitable in Dover even with a deal, he now has a political imperative to move toward an agreement quickly. The negotiating context has shifted. There's poltiical capital to be made from thumbing one's nose at Brussels, but certainly not at the president-elect. And with polls finally turning and reporting consistent leads for Labour, there is nothing to cushion him: a hard Brexit means a hard fall out, and one he might never recover from. The odds of a deal have substantially increased as Johnson's Get Out of Jail Free card might end up in pokey once he leaves the White House. If it looks like Johnson is being pushed into a deal by changed US realities, then his position grows more precarious. If the UK are forced to swallow something or even compromise and his followers notice, his authority is gone. The "Global Britain" as an independent trading nation is for the vapours, and the Prime Minister lives on borrowed time.

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Kill the Noise & Feed Me - I Do Coke

Scenes from several Democrat gatherings today. Another top notcher just missing out on last decade's Hot 100.