labour

Look like you mean it

Riot season arrived on schedule.

Far-right protest on 3 August 2024 in England

Back in the old days…

…lefties used to say things like “the forces of reaction – the capitalists and their proxies – divide us in order to control us, in order to disempower us and better exploit us. We should work to unite working people, to bring black and white – immigrants and the communities they live in – together, to overcome oppression…” and so on.

And the thing is, of course, this still makes perfect sense. There’s no new argument. Nothing has come along to supercede this worldview (capitalism didn’t become a benign force when it adopted chill-out rooms). Working class communities across the history of capitalism have been divided and set against each other for a reason.

It’s pretty simple: for capital there could be nothing more threatening than a working class that recognises itself in others – across borders and races. Imagine: a single working class – absolutely terrifying for the owner class. Racism is a deeply-ingrained aspect of the system. It’s not an incidental effect of migration, there’s nothing innate or natural about it (and it’s definitely not a pathology of white, working class communities).

And everyone who used to say this kind of thing understood that this would be hard, that persuading everyone that their interests are best served by uniting against the powerful elites that tolerate and encourage hatred and division is a very tough sell. Bringing communities together is hard – and it requires material interventions, not appeals to compassion or fairness or love for others.

More to the point, we can’t ‘fact-check’ our way out this. Explainers, ‘open-source journalism’ and all those forensic investigations of mis- and dis-information on social media can’t help. Only concrete action: investment in housing and public services; community-building – and in democratic institutions – can help.

This will be doubly hard in the teeth of poverty, soaring inequality and a collapsing public realm. It would, in any circumstances, take years and huge, focused effort – especially when organisation and solidarity are at a low ebb and the racists are so deeply embedded and so confident.

But, guess what, a new government has just come to power in Britain. And this government has a huge majority and an uninterrupted five years (some people reckon it’ll easily be ten) to act. This new government comes from what is still the only mass political party in Britain and has activists and organisers in every council ward and every Parliamentary constituency on the mainland. It’s the best possible platform for bringing together an anti-racist coalition, for animating communities and people against despair and hatred.

So far, of course, what we’ve got from the new government is hardly encouraging. I don’t know how to put it. When I’m looking at a contemporary politician – any of them, really, with a few obvious exceptions – it always comes back to aesthetics. There’s something so dour, defeated, hedged, circumscribed… about the ministerial mien (and the recently-defenestrated ministerial mien, for that matter), about the serious-face podium manner. I’m sure you know what I mean. I don’t expect the political class to use this scary eructation as an opportunity to roll out a new vision of unity for Britain. I do, though, expect an explicit plan, some enthusiasm for the project, some hope about its outcome.

These are desperate times. But they’re also cynical times. Realists dominate. I’m a realist most of the time myself. So I feel like an idiot saying these things: but we’re right at the beginning of a new regime. The new regime is meeting its first big challenge. It has everything it needs to respond. It must at least look like it means it.

End of the line

The Conservative Party is, famously, the most successful political party in history.

The party is a shape-shifting cockroach that’s survived the whole industrial era, the expansion of the franchise, the growth of the cities and the urban middle class, revolution all across Europe, secularisation and the erosion of the power of the gentry. It shouldn’t be here – it should have died in a country house in Hampshire in about 1920. The Tory party is obviously indestructible. But it has its moments – usually right at the end of a long period in power. Like now for instance.

I’m a bit geeky about the fantastic Nuffield Election Studies books; fat retrospective reference books, full of data and scholarly description, published a year or so after each election since 1945. For many editions, the books were very much the domain of celebrity psephologists David Butler and Anthony King. I’ve got a pile of them, going back to 1966.

The data’s mostly redundant, of course, since you can get it all on Wikipedia now but the essays are the main thing anyway. And often a useful reminder that there’s not much that’s new even about the present political polycrisis (clusterfuck? Imbroglio?).

I was looking at the 1997 edition, mainly because I was getting all sorts of weird deja-vu vibes from the conduct of the present government. The same kind of end-of-the-line feeling that haunted the Major government swept away by Labour in 1997 clings to the current lot. Sunak and his crew of millionares, spivs and bullies seem to have got stuck at the tawdry end of the conservative policy spectrum, much as Major and his awful cabinet did.

For years now it’s been all VIP lanes, complicated tax avoidance schemes, highly-remunerative second jobs, huge secret loans and preferment for old pals: the whole shopping list of cheesy political misbehaviour. It won’t have escaped your attention that we’ve even got a full-blown ‘cash-for-access’ scandal brewing.

So let’s catalogue some correspondences between the end of the Sunak period and the end of the Major period:

Sleaze, sleaze and more sleaze

Photograph taken at a party held in Number 10 Downing Street during the pandemic lockdown. Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds up a glass in a toast. — “Hold my beer“

To state the obvious, Major’s five years in office were marked, like no other government of the modern era, by scandal and impropriety (enter Boris Johnson from stage right: “hold my beer”). Major’s government was beset by domestic, sexual, financial and propriety scandals – and they kept coming. It seemed that every time Major sought to reset the government’s standing with electors, there was another one. Cash for questions, Jonathan Aitken at the Paris Ritz, David Mellor’s holiday in Marbella, Asil Nadir’s watch… So many scandals that they’re now literally on the curriculum in British schools.

Of course, in comparison with the record of the current Tory government – especially over the last five years or so – the offences of Michael Mates and Neil Hamilton and Alan Duncan begin to look almost quaint, especially when you consider just how difficult it has become to dislodge an offending Minister or MP. Surely time to update the A-level Politics sylabus.

The chicken run

A still from the animated film Chicken Run showing a terrified chicken n close-up — A chicken, running

As the Major government ground on, Tory MPs – conscious of the polling and of their already-dwindling majority – began to seek safer seats to stand in. Boundary changes announced earlier in the Parliament that were hitting smaller, Tory-held constituencies, contributed to the spectacle. Today’s polling, even after the Rishi bounce, continues to look grim for the government – the Tories could be reduced to an all-time low of 113 seats in 2024 (or worse). Boris Johnson’s Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat certainly can’t be considered safe, and, although his constituency party reselected him last month, it must be likely that he’ll be switched to a safer seat in time for the election (Johnson must be regretting that he didn’t become MP for Hertsmere – 172 places further up the table of safer seats – when he had the chance). The thoroughly Darwinian shuffling and selecting and deselecting has already begun – and they’re calling it a chicken run again. It will certainly be unedifying but probably quite entertaining.

And a public health crisis

MP and Conservative Minister eats a hamburger made from British beef with his daughter Cordelia during the BSE crisis in 1990 — “Hold this burger“

It was no pandemic – less than 200 people in Britain have died from the human variant – but the BSE crisis was a classic of the genre and now looks spookily like a preview of the Covid-19 catastrophe. It was very much a Conservative creation – first when the Thatcher government loosened regulations on animal feeds, permitting the feeding of infected brains and spinal chords to beef cattle, and subsequently when the Major government first ignored and then played down the nasty effects of BSE before being finally obliged to admit the grim connection with human CJD in 1996. The impact of the crisis rattled through the UK economy for years – over four million cattle were slaughtered and the final international bans on British beef were not lifted until 2018.

It’s not just the Tories who seem to be re-living the early nineties. Starmer’s Labour party has made a close study of the successes of his party while in opposition and hopes fervently that he can reproduce them.

The Nuffield books are textbooks and they’re often, obviously, out of print, so they’ll usually be stupidly expensive. Amazon has the 1992 edition for over sixty quid, for instance. But if you dig a bit you’ll usually find a second-hand copy for cheap. Here’s the same book for £16.95 on Abe Books, for instance.

Things are getting better

Will Hutton’s a pretty stern critic of the Blair project but you’d be hard put to read this article from The Observer as anything other than an endorsement of Labour’s record on public services. To quote the standfirst:

“Things are getting better in health, education and the fight against crime – we’ve got the figures to prove it.”

Constitutional vandalism

Neither side of the row over Universal ID cards is free of contradiction, neither has a monopoly on logic or morality. The pros are (depressingly) allowing narrow political contingency to shape legislation that will inevitably compromise important freedoms. The antis are (predictably) overstating the fragility of the mess of historic accident and random mutation we call a constitution. I’m pretty sure that the deep waters of British legal and constitutional custom will swallow up entitlement cards with barely a ripple. That doesn’t mean I like the idea. It’s an ugly, compromised piece of constitutional vandalism and should be stopped. Happily, the cheeky cyber-gerrymanderers at STAND have set up an easy way for you to submit your comments to Lord Falconer’s Home Office consultation. Get over there and make your voice heard.