The Windbag Spouts More Hot Air

His nickname was “The Welsh Windbag”, because of all the hot air he spouted. It could just as easily have been “The Shitbag”, because he is so full of shit, and because of the treacherous role he played in the Labour Movement during the 1980's. Neil Kinnock is an embarrassment to himself, and certainly to the labour movement. “Well, alright”. What a wanker! Now this political primadonna is at it again, spouting more hot air, and once more trying to undermine the Labour Movement, at a time when the focus needs to be on attacking the Tories.

Kinnock claims that Jeremy Corbyn, who has been elected to parliament election after election, since 1983, is not of the tradition of parliamentary democracy of the Labour Party! This is from a man who never won a single general election as Labour leader, whose commitment to democracy of any kind, let alone the Parliamentary variety, was exposed by his rush to maintain his privileged lifestyle by taking up a lucrative position as an unelected EU Commissioner, and who then maintained that lavish lifestyle, by entering that well known bastion of democracy, the unelected House of Lords!!!!

But, of course, the Tory media swallow this shit from Kinnock whole, one lump at a time, and then regurgitate it as a projectile vomit spread across the pages of their newspapers, and television screen.

Kinnock took over as Labour leader, after Michael Foot stood down, after the 1983 general election. Kinnock was lucky, because boundary changes meant that Tony Benn's Bristol constituency was changed. Benn true to his principles, stuck with the constituency that had returned him to parliament since the early 1960's, even though the boundary changes meant that he was likely to lose. Had Benn been in parliament, he would undoubtedly have beaten Kinnock, but without Benn, Kinnock was able to present himself as a left-wing candidate, to a soft left that was desperate to get back into office.

But, Kinnock never was a left-winger. In many ways, a bit like the fifth Beatle, he was effectively the fifth member of the Gang of Four that went off to create the SDP. The difference being that he was left behind to continue the work of destroying the party, from the inside, that the SDP was trying to achieve from the outside. At a time, when the Tories were launching their attacks on the trades unions, in line with The Ridley Plan, Kinnock instead turned his focus on a witch-hunt of party members; at a time when Labour Councils, across the country, were fighting attempts by the Thatcher government to impose austerity and spending cuts, Kinnock instead turned his attention to attacking those very Labour councils.

His goal was to make the Labour Party acceptable to all those conservative forces that were growing in importance, as the long wave post-war boom came to an end, and the owners of fictitious capital were in the ascendancy. But, history is replete with examples of organisations trying to present themselves as pale imitations of more right-wing parties, purely for short-term electoral advantage, only to find that the result is that those whose support they seek prefer the real thing, and the political centre itself, therefore, is simply shifted further to the right. So it was with Kinnock.

During the 1980's, his attacks on party members undermined the party. He undermined the miners strike of 1984-5, and undermined the fight of Labour Councils against austerity. The result was that the party was disemboweled, whilst the Tories who could have been defeated by a concerted, principled challenge, went from strength to strength. Despite all of his attempts to make Labour into a pale purple imitation of the Tories, when the June 1987 General Election came along, the real Tories trounced Kinnock's fake Tories by 376 to 229. That was at a time when we had the most vicious, hated Tory government, probably of all time, under Thatcher, yet the incompetent Kinnock could make no significant challenge to her.

But, Kinnock continued in his post as leader. One reason was that, having disemboweled the party he was then able to remove some of the basic democratic reforms that had been established in the early 1980's, for example the requirement for mandatory reselection of MP's, as occurs with councillors, and other party functionaries, such as branch and constituency officers. Sitting MP's, are to the right of the party, and less likely to rock the boat generally, because of their positions, and because the party leader is able to bribe them with positions on the parliamentary gravy train, as front bench spokespeople etc. Removing the requirement for mandatory reselection meant they could be kept in their positions more easily, and that acted to maintain the status quo, and protect the position of the party leader.

It opened the door to Blair who continued that trajectory, of making the party into a Bonapartist regime. Contrary to Kinnock's claims, as Lord Hailsham once stated, the British parliamentary system is essentially an “elective dictatorship”. The party leader of the governing party, has huge powers of patronage. There is no real reason why a government should be comprised of more ministers than are required for the main offices of state, in other words, a Finance Minister, a Home Secretary, a Foreign Secretary, an Education Secretary, a Defence Secretary and a Minister responsible for things such as the Environment, Energy and so on. But, governments and oppositions appoint ministers way beyond this, because, as Hailsham argued, by doing so, the party leader has huge powers of patronage, which act as a means of shoring up their own support within the parliamentary party.

The only real checks and balances against this really reside with the members of the party outside parliament. Self-serving MP's always claim that they derive their authority from the voters who elected them, but that is nonsense. Since the 18^th century, British parliamentary democracy has been based upon the existence of political parties, not individual, independent MP's. It is the party, which selects the candidate, in the first place; it is the party which sets the principles and programme upon which elections are fought; it is the party which undertakes all of the organisational work required to get its candidates elected to parliament, and all evidence shows that it is the party which voters vote for, and not the individual.

In almost every case, where MP's have come into conflict with their local party, and stood as Independents in General Elections, those MP's lose, and voters elect the official party candidate in their place. That, of course, is why today, the 172 MP's who are rebelling against the half million party members, and Corbyn as their leader, dare not do the decent thing, which flows from their argument. That would be to resign from the Labour Party, resign as an MP, and test their argument in new parliamentary elections against new Labour Party candidates in their constituencies.

They will not do that because they know that their contention that their mandate derives from the electors is bullshit. They know that they would lose, just as they know that if they stand a candidate in a leadership contest against Corbyn they will lose. That is why they have organised an undemocratic coup against Corbyn and the party membership, and why we see organisations like Portland standing in the shadows.

Far from Corbyn acting contrary to the principles and tradition of British parliamentary democracy, therefore, he is acting in perfect consistency with it. Kinnock, on the other hand, by demanding the primacy of a bunch of MP's, in complete opposition to the members of the party they are supposed to represent, is promoting a defence, and advance of the notion not of democracy, but of Bonapartism. His problem at the moment, is that the actual leader is undermining the Bonapartist tendencies that Kinnock and Blair/Brown introduced into the party. That is why their only resort is not to democracy, but to their own Bonapartist coup against Corbyn.

They are in that position, because they were hoist by their own petard. Kinnock's disastrous leadership of the party continued into the general election of 1992. During the period between 1987 and 1992, he continued to hollow out the party, and its ability to resist the Tory onslaught. When Thatcher was dethroned, it was not the result of Kinnock's ineffectual opposition, but the result of tens of thousands of workers rising up against the Poll Tax, and against her increasingly brutal and vicious regime. Yet, even when the working-class had done all the heavy lifting for Kinnock, by its own actions, Kinnock was so bad that he could not even capitalise on that.

Instead, when the 1992 election came along, for all of his gut-wrenching antics, Kinnock once again took the party to humiliating defeat. The Tories won 336 seats (41.9%) as against Labour's 271 seats (34.4%). All of his attempts to gut the party, to place full control and authority into the hands of a Bonapartist leader, and a coterie of MP's, based around an abandonment of any principle, in favour of an opportunist search for votes, around an increasingly conservative agenda had come to less than nothing, much like Kinnock himself.

During the 1980's, UK unemployment soared to over 3 million on official figures, and more like 6 million in real terms. In 1987, the global economy was in crisis, leading to the biggest stock market crash in history, in October 1987. In 1990, after encouraging thousands of council tenants to buy their homes, and encouraging millions of other people to go into huge debt to buy over-priced houses, interest rates rose, and house prices crashed by 40% in just a few months. Many of those who had bought their council houses found themselves unable to cover the mortgage, and lost their homes, whilst millions who had bought overpriced houses, found themselves in negative equity, and many of them too lost their homes. In 1992, the global economy was again in a crisis, and the UK economy as an increasingly sick component of it, even more so. Yet, Kinnock was unable to win the elections in either year.

In the end, after 18 years of Tory misrule, the people had had enough, and voted out John Major. Kinnock's successor, Tony Blair is presented as some kind of political genius, but he is nothing of the kind, as subsequent events showed. Blair was just lucky. He was lucky to be the Labour Leader in 1997, when no one could stomach the Tories any longer. Lucky, because under those conditions, even the incompetent Kinnock could have won an election for Labour. But Blair was lucky for another reason. Shortly after winning in 1997, the global economy entered a new long wave boom. Trade expanded, and even the sclerotic, debt ridden UK economy was drawn along with it. In fact, it was drawn along with it to such an extent that labour shortages started to arise, wages started to rise sharply, particularly for specific jobs, like plumbers, which was why Blair was keen to import labour from the EU.

That growth meant that Blair could spend money on public services, boosted further by the conservative penchant for expanding debt even further, based upon the inflation of paper asset values, used as collateral, Blair's case via PFI. That was the basis for Blair winning again in 2001, and in 2005. But, the writing was on the wall of where this policy based upon ever increasing levels of private household debt was leading, as I outlined at the time as a Staffordshire County Councillor. In a number of speeches in the Council Chamber, back then, I warned that it would all end in tears, with a huge financial crash.

Blair was lucky again, because he handed over the reins to Brown in 2007, and so it was Brown who had to deal with the financial crash of 2008, which was itself a direct consequence of the economic policies undertaken by conservative regimes (Republican and Democrat, Tory and Labour), in the US and UK, and Europe over the previous thirty years. Had Blair still been Prime Minister in 2008, and fought the 2010 election, he would undoubtedly have lost, and the myth of his genius would have been exploded. As it is that myth persists alongside his more infamous role in undertaking the Iraq War, a role that in itself should have destroyed any concept of such genius, given its breathtakingly disastrous consequences.

The reality is that the Parliamentary Labour Party today is an artificial construct arising from Kinnock's gutting of the party in the 1980's, and the bureaucratic stranglehold over what was left of the party, introduced by Kinnock's heirs, Blair and Brown, in the 1990's. Kinnock's argument today might have more validity if it were the case that the Parliamentary party was in any way reflective of the Labour Party, or Labour voters at large. But it isn't. In the 1990's, the Blair-right/Brownite control of the party apparatus meant that they could simply impose their own candidates on to local parties. They were appointed not to reflect the party and its principles, but simply to reflect the tribal loyalties of Blair and Brown.

Its no wonder, therefore, that the 172 Labour MP's who voted against Corbyn, and people like Kinnock and co. are so far removed from the party members, and from Labour voters. The obvious thing is for them to go, and go now.

Pure Evil

As a Marxist, and, therefore, a materialist, I do not believe the terms "Good" and "Evil" have any meaning. They imply the idea of a God and a Devil each as the personification of the two traits, and of human beings who stand some way on a continuum between the two. They imply that our actions are wholly a matter of "free will". In fact, human beings like any other animal, are conditioned, by our environment and experiences, as well as by our physical make-up. Just as a dog can be conditioned to be a vicious attack dog, or else a guide dog for the blind, so the conditioning that life gives to us determines how we think and act. To be consistent, we have to accept that even a Hitler is the product of the material world, even if that doesn't change how we respond to him and those like him. But, I was watching the TV last night, and the first thought that came into my mind to describe what I saw was "Pure Evil".

I was watching the last in the series of Alan Davies' "Teenage Revolution". The series has been a recounting of the comedians experience of growing up as a teenager in the 1980's. It is a not uncommon account of a young person from a middle class background who rebels against their upbringing. It is the experience of someone who from that background, and who essentially retained the same lifestyle as an entertainer, rebels as a lifestyle choice, not as a necessity. In other words dilletantism. As part, of last night's programme Davies recalls the point when he joined the Labour Party. It is a time when the working class was in a decisive battle against Capital, its State, and its political representation in the form of the Thatcher Government. From 1979, the Tories had set out to wage Class War against the working-class using the Ridley Plan as their military strategy, and the economic doctrine of Hayek, as the means to force Capital to resist Labour by reducing the Money Supply, and at the same time to undermine the economic conditions that enabled the working-class to continue with simply bargaining within the system. It was one of those moments when that “Social-democratic Consensus” I have described as being the framework by which Big Capital has operated over the last 100 years or so, broke down.

Outside such periods we have the luxury of being able to analyse our condition, to self-criticise, and to engage in similar criticism of the position of others. We can present our own views by means such as this blog, and so on. But, during conditions like the 1980's, although we have a duty to continue to argue our own views, and to point out where we believe others are wrong, the emphasis is different. In such conditions the real question is put in the way Billy Bragg put it, in his song featured in Davies previous programme - “Which side are you on?” Scargill had bad, bureaucratic Stalinist politics. Many miners themselves thought that it had been madness not to have had an overtime ban in place long before the strike to prevent the Government building up stocks ready for the confrontation they were clearly planning. Some thought a national ballot should have been held. But, once the strike began, those questions were secondary to the need to be on the side of the Miners, and all the other workers supporting them. Anyone who refused to do that because they objected to Scargill's politics, to the tactics adopted and so on, quite simply placed themselves on the other side of the class barricades, and became the enemy just as much as Thatcher and MacGregor.

The same was true of Liverpool and other Councils struggles against the Government. Militant were a pretty abysmal, sectarian organisation. On issue after issue that the left had been involved in, be it fighting fascism, CND, opposing sexism and homophobia, Ireland and many more, the Militant frequently stood aside from any broad movement, describing them as Popular Fronts, in order instead to establish their own activity with the hope of “Building The Party”. In the process they pissed off large sections of the Labour Movement. When it came to the struggle in Liverpool that meant that there was already a reservoir of opposition to them, and the tactics that were adopted, for example, the failure to link up with the Miners, were abysmal too. Yet, despite that the question was still posed in those stark terms. This was just as much a matter of life and death class struggle as the Miners Strike. It was still a question of - “Which side are you on.” In fact, just as with the Miners Strike, it should not have been a question of Liverpool or any other Council fighting the Tories. That fight should from the beginning have been a fight led, and co-ordinated by the Labour Party as the Workers Party. Instead, the reality was that the LP, understood as the vast majority of its members, were supporting those struggles. It was the leadership of the LP, along with its co-thinkers at the head of the TUC, which were refusing to provide such support, refusing to provide any kind of leadership.

It was with the knowledge of that, with the experience of living through those events not as an entertainer for whom these events were a source of material, but as a worker, as a Trade Union militant, who was standing on a Miners Picket line from day one, until the return to work, who was the Secretary of the local Trades Council Miners Support committee, and who through the LP was busy every week collecting money for local Miners and their family that part of what I saw in that programme turned my stomach and provoked that impression of “Pure evil”.

Davies showed the ranting speech of Kinnock at the 1985 LP Conference, where he attacked Liverpool City Council for their struggle against Thatcher's Class War. Throughout the Miners Strike, Kinnock had refused to give support to the Miners, let alone act in any way to mobilise political support. I remember going to a huge rally in Stoke where Scargill and Kinnock were to speak. When Kinnock entered the hall, the response from all of the Miners I was with echoed out in unison, “Mind your back Arthur!” they shouted to Scargill. They were right. Kinnock might have been standing in front of him, but the knife was ready to stab him and the Miners in the back. And, with the Miners defeated, and Thatcher rampant, Kinnock took the opportunity not to try to mobilise the Labour movement to try to avoid a similar defeat, but instead to come to Thatcher's aid once more by attacking Council's like Liverpool who were putting up the resistance that he and the Labour leadership should have been providing. He used it to destroy, for a generation, the LP's ability to act as a means of resistance to the political attacks of Capital, and to make it ready for its domination by the ideas of Thatcherism itself, in the form of Blair and Brown.

Davies says that he was so impressed by Kinnock's speech, attacking workers in struggle, and siding with Thatcher, that he sent off for a copy of it. That tells us just how much of a revolution he was engaged in! It tells us just how little he had in common with those sentiments of Billy Bragg - “Which side are you on?” Davies was clearly not on the side of the workers, not on the side of the revolution, but like Kinnock on the side of our class enemies. In that speech attacking Liverpool, Kinnock sunk to all time lows of hypocrisy. Having failed to support the Miners, and thereby aided in their defeat, he had shown the same degree of class betrayal when it came to Labour Councils. The clear message of his politics, which was echoed by the Soft Left within the LP at large, was that workers should lay down and die, not rock the boat, and thereby facilitate the return of a Labour government. The consequence of that would have to be that labour Council's – as many were already doing – would have to implement the Tory Cuts, and sack thousands of workers. But, what did Kinnock's attack focus on – the fact that Liverpool (as part of a very questionable, but understood tactic) had issued redundancy notices to its workers! Within months, Kinnock was to do exactly the same thing, but not as a tactic, by sacking loads of LP staff!

But, what wrenched my gut, was what happened as Davies watched this speech with Mr and Mrs Kinnock. On the platform behind him was the late Joan Maynard, who was shaking her head in rightful disgust at Kinnock's open betrayal of the workers in struggle. His comment, “Look at Stalin's Nanny shaking her head", was said with all the bile of someone who has been on one side of a war. Worse, was his and his wife's comment in response to the late Eric Heffer's subsequent walk-out during the speech - “Welcome to oblivion.” But, of course, Kinnock and his wife were on one side of a class war, so it is no wonder they should exhibit such grotesque bile. They were on Thatcher's side in that Class War, whereas Maynard, Heffer, Scargill and the Militant, for all their faults, were on our side. Eric Heffer who was certainly no Stalinist, had more principle, let alone socialist principle in his little finger than Mr. & Mrs Kinnock have ever had in their entire bodies.

Of course, Kinnock and the Soft Left's argument might have had some validity if the idea of “not rocking the boat” in order to get a Labour Government, would have given workers any confidence that such an eventuality would have saved them from the iniquities of Thatcherism. But, it was a Labour Government, of which Kinnock had been part, that had begun the process of Cuts in the 1970's. It was Labour under Healey that had abandoned Keynesianism in favour of Monetarism. It was a labour government that had imposed a Pay Freeze on workers that eventually led to the winter of Discontent, and Thatcher winning the election. Moreover, as a tactic it wasn't even working. After 1979, Thatcher became the most unpopular Prime Minister on record, and it appeared that even then the party might have ditched her. Although, we hear all of the stories today about Michael Foot, and his donkey jacket, the reality is that even in 1981, when he was leading mass demonstrations in cities across the country to mobilise opposition to the Tories, and the rising levels of unemployment, he and the LP were at 51% in the opinion polls. Had an election been held then a landslide Labour Victory dwarfing 1945 would have been achieved.

What had undermined that was the fact that Labour began to pull back from such activities. Worse, when Thatcher embarked on her adventure of the Falklands War, Labour backed her. After Thatcher defeated the steel workers, and moved on as part of the Ridley Plan to other groups of workers, whilst Labour failed to provide the necessary leadership, she began to look like a winner, and Labour to have no answer. When the SDP split, the writing was on the wall for Labour's immediate electoral prospects. But Kinnock and the Soft Left's cringeing approach rather than seeing Labour win increasing support, simply saw them have to concede more and more ground to the Tories, politically and ideologically.

Ironically, the clearest refutation of Kinnock's approach came with the removal of Thatcher. It was not Kinnock and the Soft Left's “Don't rock the boat” approach, which led to Thatcher's dismissal, but the very opposite. It was the eruption of that same kind of mass grass roots movement that had developed in response to the attacks on Liverpool and other Councils, and the Miners Strike, in the form of the anti-Poll Tax Movement, again ironically due in large part to the Militant and its inheritors, which undermined Thatcher and led to her being removed by the Tories. Even then, when those who stood on the right side of the Class divide, had done the heavy lifting for Kinnock and the Soft Left, they could not seal the deal. In the most cringeing piece of television footage available Kinnock sealed Labour's fate at the 1992 Election, with his repeated shout of “Well, Alright” at the Sheffield Rally, where he appeared like some kind of Southern Evangelical Preacher selling his own brand of snake oil. It made you want to cringe, because like the snake oil salesmen it was so obviously fake, but that is what Kinnock is, and always has been – fake.

He could not return to oblivion as he wished upon Eric Heffer, because in reality, at least as a socialist politician, he had never emerged out of it. Even as a bourgeois politician he was a rank failure, and, like all such failures, his main role, today, is to act as a cameo in the kind of programmes as this. In Christian burial services they say “Ashes to ashes”, but in Kinnock's case it would be more appropriate to say “Shite to shite”. Of course, in his and his wife's personal terms, none of that matters. They may not have achieved the earning potential of Tony and Cherie Blair, who inherited the devastated LP that Kinnock created, but, unlike the tens of thousands of Miners and other workers, whose lives were devastated as a result of the Class War waged against them by Thatcher and Kinnock, they were sure to be provided with a lucrative reward for the betrayal of the workers. Whereas all the SDP'ers were given Peerages from which to draw an easy and large income, Mr. and Mrs Kinnock were simply provided with lucrative jobs in Europe.

Those miners were right in their warning to “Watch Your back”. Workers should bear that warning in mind today in response to today's Kinnocks. Then, perhaps, we might be able to bring them all to account for their sins.