We Should Investigate Links Between Tories and Putin's Russia

Another strong leader, and another
coalition of chaos.

A while ago, I drew attention to the connections between the kind of right-wing populist policies being pursued by the UKIP/Tory party, with those being pursued by Trump, as well as by other right-wing populists such as Le Pen in France, Wilders in the Netherlands and so on, and with the bonapartist regimes in Turkey and Russia. Since then we have seen Tory Minister Liam Fox, visit the dictator Duterte in the Philippines, and talk about their “shared values.” In that previous post I traced back some of the ideas involved with these right-wing populists, around the claims to be “workers' parties” etc. to the ideas of Strasser in the German Nazi Party, and its development in the ideas of National Bolshevism, a centre of which is now Russia. The connections between Putin's Russia and Trump's campaign in the US are under investigation by the FBI and other agencies. And the link between Putin's regime and others of these right-wing populists are fairly apparent. We need an investigation into Putin's Russia, and the British Tory Party.

James Comey, a Republican, as head of the FBI, was criticised for having sprung an October surprise, by revealing that he was looking at more of Hillary Clinton's e-mails, just a week or so, before last year's Presidential election. It turned out that there was nothing to investigate, and the intervention may have cost Clinton the Presidency. The information about the e-mails came from hacking of the Democrats servers by what the US intelligence services unanimously believe were Russian hackers. The information was released via Wikileaks. At the time, Donald Trump called on the Russians, if they had any more leaked e-mails to publish them.

At this time, Trump thought that Comey was doing a great a job. In the last few weeks, however, with the US state clearly getting concerned at the maverick in the White House, and the role of Putin's Russia in intervening in the US political system, the FBI and other security services began to investigate and to expose the connections between members of Trump's election campaign and Russia. It led to the sacking of Trump's Defence Secretary, General Mike Flynn. But, the investigations have widened and deepened, with Comey asking for more resources to continue the investigation. Now, it appears, Trump has decided that Comey was not great after all, but that he was terrible, and that he was showboating and grandstanding, and so just had to go.

This also seems to be a common approach of the regimes of Trump in the US, and of May in the UK, of trying to remove any possibility of scrutiny of their actions, and reacting to close down any such scrutiny or criticism. It was seen with May's attitude to the requirement for parliamentary scrutiny and oversight over the Brexit Bill, and the howls of anger that were raised by the Tory gutter press against the judiciary for doing its job, and insisting that the government operate within the constitution.

Two strong and stable leaders,
this time failed to create a
coalition of chaos in France.

Attempts by Russia to interfere in the French Presidential Election also appear to have taken place, but without success. Yet, there have been quite clear links between the Front National, and Putin's Russia. And, these international links appear to spread across Europe, and wider in respect of these right-wing populist forces. A common theme for all of them, in line with Putin's own strategic ambitions, has been focussed around the break-up of the EU.

Given the extent of this external intervention in elections by Russia, it would be interesting to know exactly what intervention may have occurred with the Brexit vote, which was the first success that the forces of this right-wing populism achieved. 

Trump, in his election campaign, for example, had close links with Nigel Farage, who himself is another admirer of Putin. Back in 2014, even the Daily Express discussed these links between Farage and Putin's regime. Trump said that his election would be Brexit Plus Plus. And Trump then threw his weight behind Le Pen's campaign in France.

Some of the links were also discussed by The Atlantic magazine. Trump like Farage, like Le Pen, like Wilders and all the other right-wing populists across Europe, and like Putin, is seeking the break-up of the EU, and now they have a powerful ally in that, in the Tory government of May, which has moved quickly on to the ground previously occupied by Farage.

Last year, Labour MP Jon Ashworth asked questions about the links of a major Tory donor to Putin's regime in Russia. The Times has also carried stories about Putin's connections with true blue Tories.

Details of further links between the Tories and Russia were set out by The Australian. Yet, ask anyone in the street today, and you are likely to be told that if anyone is connected to Russia it would be Jeremy Corbyn, because many people still live in that old mindset, whereby Russia is still considered to be some bastion of left-wing ideas and activity, rather than what it is, which is a centre for political reaction, for nationalism as a global ideology, which appears to be a contradiction in terms, and yet nevertheless is what the links between all of these various right-wing populists amounts to.

Even the right-wing Daily Telegraph was led last year, to ask questions about the role of the Kremlin in financing and promoting these right-wing populist forces across Europe.

The evidence for the links between right-wing populists, whether it is Trump's campaign in the US, UKIP and the Tory Party in Britain, Le Pen in France, Wilders in the Netherlands and so on are more than apparent. The US has begun to uncover the extent of those links, and nature of their activity, via the investigations by the FBI, which Trump's actions will only intensify, but so far no similar official investigations by the police or other agencies appear to have been undertaken in Britain. Given the way the Tory gutter press acts like the UKIP/Tory party stormtroopers, we can expect no revelations to come from them, but now is a time, when all those sections of the media that prize liberty should be working to uncover and reveal to the public all of the connections with Putin's Russia to the Tory Party, and the threat it poses to our democracy.

Rise Up, Reject Nuttall's Nutters. Resist Brexit

If Paul Nuttall fails to win, on Thursday, in Stoke Central, it spells the end of UKIP. It will represent a part of the process of social-democracy, across the globe, beginning to fight back against the wave of reactionary nationalism that has developed in the last decade, and the conservatism that dominated the last thirty years. Tony Blair was right, last week, to call for an uprising to resist Brexit, of which Nuttall and UKIP are the standard bearers, but such an uprising requires, also, a rejection of the nationalism inherent in the current Labour position, and of the conservatism that was inherent in the politics of Blair and Brown.

There ought to be no problem in Labour winning in Stoke. For the last century, from the time the TUC conference met in Hanley, in 1905, and took the decisions that set up the Labour Party, Stoke has had Labour MP's. For as long as I could remember, Labour held 57 of the 60 council seats, with the Tories being holed up in the Trentham Ward, where the small and medium sized business owners, the higher paid professionals and the like were concentrated, until the 1960's, when the construction of new estates, opened the door to sections of better-off workers.

The right-wing Tory policies of Paul Nuttall, and UKIP should then have no appeal for the workers of Stoke. Nuttall had one advantage. He is, as he has repeatedly stated at his press conferences, and on hustings, a national figure; he is, to be fair, a competent speaker and media performer. Moreover, given the near 70% vote for “Leave” in Stoke, he had a simple message to convey. He only had to keep hammering UKIP's only real political message, which is “It's all the fault of foreigners and immigrants.”

That is the message that won a majority for Brexit; it is the message that won a majority for Trump; it is the message that has built up support for Le Pen, Wilders etc. But, Nuttall seems to have thrown away that advantage. There was no reason for him to have stated his address to have been in Stoke, and the consequence of him doing so was to distract from his message for a week or so. Nor was there any reason for what now appears to be a series of Walter Mitty like claims about himself that he has made, which not only distracted from his campaign, but now seems to have led to him going into hiding. But, we shouldn't place too much store in that having an effect. After all, the same could be said about Trump, and it didn't stop him winning.

Labour should be winning in Stoke Central by a huge margin. At the last election, Labour secured nearly double the vote share of UKIP, who came second, with the Tories slightly behind them in third. But, a marked feature of the poll was the turnout of barely 50%. It reflected the fact that Stoke, as an industrial area, based on three dominant industries – ceramics, coal and steel – had been hollowed out during the 1980's, 90's and 2000's, by the conservative policies of Thatcher and Major that were essentially continued by Blair and Brown. The only other major employers were the NHS and Local Government, both of which suffered from policies of austerity. Tristram Hunt was a personification of those those politics, and its no wonder that voters were not enthused by them. But, since 2015, a dramatic change has happened in the Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn became Leader, and the party membership soared to over half a million.

Corbyn proposed building a social movement, as opposed to being limited to purely electoral politics. That is precisely what an area like Stoke needed, if Labour was to rebuild all of those communal structures required to activate large numbers of people, to give them hope, and a way out of their immediate situation, and on the back of it, to transform Labour's electoral standing.

I set out, when I first started writing this blog, how such activity was able to succeed in conditions far less favourable than today, back in the 1980's. Back in the early 1980's, the period of sharp conjunctural crisis, typical of that Autumn phase of the long wave (1974-87) was drawing to an end. In the earlier part of that phase, workers had won considerable victories with the 1972 and 1974 Miners' Strikes, with the victories of women workers over equal pay at Ford's Dagenham and so on. Even at small workplaces like Grunwicks, huge mobilisations of the working-class took place. But, by the early 1980's, conditions had changed. The steelworkers had been defeated, and previously strong groups of workers such as those in the print industry went down to defeats, as new forms of technology undermined their industrial position. Eventually even the miners were defeated in 1984-5, having battled valiantly for over a year.

And the Labour Party reflected that change. From a position of being a hollowed out shell during most of the 1970's, and moribund in most of its branches, it began to take on new life by the late 1970's, and into the 1980's. A series of wins for the Left had begun to transform it, but the right-wing continued to control its upper reaches. Having lost the elections of 1979, and then 1983, the right-wing targeted the hard left as a scapegoat for its failures, and it was accommodated by a soft left that tailed behind a rapidly right moving Kinnock, who paved the way for Blair, having failed to dislodge Thatcher after having gutted the party, and shifted it ever rightwards for more than a decade.

From 1980 onwards, barely a week went by that I was not the subject of some local media article about left wing groups in the Labour Party, often accompanied by threats from nearby MP John Golding (Hammer of the Left) about imminent expulsion, and at its height that was more like every day. That experience was shared by thousands of left-wing activists in the Labour Party across the country, during that period.

For me, it reached a peak in the weeks preceding the 1983 Stoke City Council elections, when myself and Jason Hill were the Labour candidates for the Burslem Central Ward (formerly Ward 2). Given what happened to Labour nationally in the 1983 General Election, given the level of opposition from the local media, especially as I had ousted the long-standing former Labour Councillor, Stan Dutton, who stood against me as a “Labour Moderate”, the victory that Jason and myself achieved is all the more testament to the importance of standing on a clear, consistent and principled programme, and of having built up local support networks.

The turnout in Burslem Central that year was 40%, compared to an average of around 25% for previous elections, and was higher than in any other ward. Both Jason and me won over 49% of the vote, whilst our Labour Moderate opposition secured barely half that amount, despite large numbers of the old right - whilst still in the party – lending him their support.

Our platform in the election was “No Cuts, No Rent or Rate Rises”. Both Jason and myself were founder members of the local anti-fascist group back in 1974, and both of us were prominent members of CND, at a time when nuclear disarmament was a prominent issue, and coming shortly after the Falklands War. Our victory showed that the way for Labour to win is not to pander to backwardness, or to opportunistically tail public opinion, but to stand firm on your principles, and to consistently build up your support, year after year, on the basis of them, within the community.

With Corbyn as Labour leader, with Momentum standing behind him, with thousands of supporters, even allowing for the distractions of the leadership contests, foisted on us by the right, this should have been a golden opportunity, over the last year, to have built such a social movement, and organising resistance to Brexit, and the wider nationalist assault should have been part of it. Unlike the 1980's, when a period of economic stagnation was setting in, the world today is in a period of long wave expansion, much like the 1960's, with the global working-class expanding at a rapid pace. It is a period when rank and file labour movement organisation and restructuring should be taking place.

Instead, what we have had is a collapse into the old electoralist politics. And, when it came down to it, instead of a principled position, and a mobilisation of the labour movement to fight for it, the Labour leadership rolled over, and fell in behind Theresa May's reactionary nationalist agenda, whilst trying to justify it with a series of weasel words that necessarily results in a confused and unconvincing message, when it comes to by-elections like that in Stoke.

So, despite the advantages that Labour has had historically in Stoke, despite the fact that Corbyn as leader, and the half million, mostly Corbyn supporting members, should have been a beacon for Stoke's hard pressed communities, despite the disarray of the UKIP campaign, it is still not clear who is going to win. If the Tories all vote for Nuttall then Labour will lose. One hope seems to be that with Nuttall's apparent self-destruction, the Tories have sensed a glimmer of hope, and sent May to the constituency. If the Tory vote holds up, or takes votes from UKIP, then Labour will win.

But, in a constituency like Stoke Central, whose Labour Party members backed Corbyn by a 10:1 majority, winning should not be a matter of hoping that UKIP self-destruct, or that the Tories might come to Labour's rescue by splitting the opposition vote. Labour should already be miles ahead on its own merits.

In the US, Trump's election has already generated a large oppositional movement drawing in many of those who were part of the movement behind Bernie Sanders, and before that the Occupy Movement. Every week, large numbers are turning out to Town Hall meetings held by Republican politicians, heckling them and demanding they answer questions about the promises they made in the elections, as well as demanding that Democrat politicians fight back against Trump. We need workers in Britain to also rise up, and challenge the Tories, and demand that Corbyn and the Labour Party fight back against May and Brexit, rather than acting as her support act.

In Austria, the challenge of the nationalist right was pushed back in the Presidential elections. In France, Le Pen is not likely to win, despite all of the attention she and other right-wing nationalists are being given by the British media. In fact, it is the Left in the shape of Hamon who are more markedly on the rise, as the challenge of Fillon fades. If the rest of the Left falls in behind Hamon, the second round might even be fought out between him and the Blairite Macron.

In the Netherlands, the latest polls show Wilders and his party have peaked, and their support is slipping, partly as a result of the effect of people seeing what having a right-wing populist like Trump in charge actually means. Wilders also has no chance of winning. In Germany, the SPD is seeing increased support at the expense of Merkel. Moreover, across the EU there seems to be a growing recognition that the reason that the nationalist right has been able to grow and to challenge the existence of the EU itself, cannot be separated from the policies that conservative politicians, occupying the political centre, have pursued. The policies of malign neglect that led to the de-industrialisation and decay in the US rust belt, that fed support for Trump, are the same policies that led to the decay of places like Stoke, that led to Brexit, and that led to Le Pen in France, Wilders in the Netherlands, and Golden Dawn in Greece.

If the EU is to survive, then in place of the conservative politics of the last thirty years, that focussed on blowing up financial and property bubbles, that created a delusion of fictitious wealth for a minority, and the reality of poverty, debt and austerity for the majority, it instead will need to adopt the same kind of social-democratic policies that have been promoted by Syriza, Podemos, Corbyn, Sanders, the Left Bloc and so on.

But, for even these social-democratic policies to work, it will require more not less Europe. It will require a much greater, and more rapid integration of European institutions, the extension of the Eurozone, the introduction of a single fiscal policy and so on. In today's world there can be no policy even of social-democracy in one country.

Labour Should Take Nuttall Seriously

Labour should win in Stoke Central. At the last General Election, Labour won 12,220 votes (39.3%), nearly double the 7,041 votes (22.7%) taken by UKIP, and the 7,008 votes (22.5%) for the Tories. In fact, Labour's vote share was 0.5% higher than it had been in 2010. To win then UKIP would need prima facie to double its vote, at a time when both nationally and locally it has been moving backwards. Whatever the pundits say about Labour's popularity nationally, according to the latest national polls they are still standing at more than double the UKIP rating. 

But, it would be a big mistake for Labour to fail to take the challenge from Paul Nuttall, in the Stoke Central by-election, seriously. Nuttall, a seasoned campaigner, and accomplished media performer, already has a significant first mover advantage over Labour. Indeed, it has to be said that in terms of acting as a disciplined and professional organisation, it is UKIP that has demonstrated its edge, not Labour. It has dismissed all sentimentality about needing to select an amateur, anonymous local candidate, and gone straight for the jugular by appointing its most accomplished politician to take the immediate fight to Labour.

Nuttall, not a newcomer to media presentation, has already had an article printed in the Sunday papers (though not many Stokies are likely to be readers of the Sunday Telegraph), followed up by lengthy interviews on Peston on Sunday, and other Sunday politics programmes, including the Midlands version of the Sunday Politics. All that before Labour is even out of the blocks to draw up a shortlist, let alone select a candidate!

Moreover, UKIP has a relatively easy task. Like Trump, and like its Brexit campaign it only has to keep repeating, its all the fault of foreigners and immigration. As previous by-elections have shown, its in such low polls that this simple tactic pays off, because the fanatics who swallow that line are far more likely to turn out to vote than are more informed voters, who do turn out in General Elections. By contrast, Labour has to not only counter that simple set of sound-bites with something that offers local voters a reason to turn out, but it has to have a candidate capable of delivering that message in a clear and confident manner, in the full glare of international media attention. At present, I have to say, I do not even myself know exactly what Labour's message on Brexit, immigration, free movement and so on is let alone be confident that any local candidate is going to be able to formulate that message in a way that drowns out the attention the media will, and already are giving to Nuttall.

Moreover, although Nuttall nominally has to double the UKIP vote that is not entirely the whole matter. Turnout in the 2015 election was a pitiful 49.9%, or about 30,000 votes. If turnout drops to just 40%, or around 24,000 votes, UKIP could win theoretically without picking up any additional votes. It would just need the 6,000 fewer votes cast to come more or less from Labour voters not turning out to vote. Given that Stoke voted around 65% in favour of Leave, Nuttall's simple “blame the foreigners” mantra is likely to be a fairly solid core vote.

In the meantime, Labour seems to be repeating the mistakes of the past. Corbyn has rightly criticised Miliband for putting forward a Tory-lite policy on austerity, that enthused no Labour voters in 2015, but today, Corbyn's Labour is putting forward a UKIP-lite policy on immigration, free movement, and Brexit that can enthuse no progressive Labour voters, and which will not win over any Tory or UKIP voters either, who will simply vote for the real thing. By trying to rise two horses to reconcile an irreconcilable electoral dilemma, Labour is simply setting itself up to be torn apart at the groin, as the horses race away in opposite directions.

That used to be the problem for the Tories, and when the Brexit negotiations get properly udnerway, it will be again. But, the immediate issue is the Stoke Central by-election, and not what happens several months from now. In the here and now, and with Nuttall already having a head start, the Tories who have no chance of winning in Stoke, are likely to pick their own nonentity to stand, thereby giving Nuttall a clear run, without officially having done so. That means that on top of the advantage that UKIP will obtain from any low poll, they have the potential to pick up the 7,000 Tory votes, as Tory voters in the area, will be quick enough to understand that they have a perfect opportunity to kick Labour, and in the process to further undermine the position of Jeremy Corbyn.

A 40% poll, in which the UKIP core vote holds up, in the aftermath of the referendum, together with a large chunk of tactical voting from the Tories would take them comfortably over the winning line. Labour might pick up the 1,000 or so votes that former Labour supporter, Jan Zablocki, polled for the Greens in 2015, but that would hardly compensate.

As I wrote recently, the eyes of the international media will be on Stoke Central in coming weeks. Nuttall's high profile in this weekend's media is just the tip of the iceberg to what will come in the next few weeks. A hostile Tory media, out to get Labour, and particularly out to get Corbyn, will grill and challenge everything that every Labour spokesperson, and particularly the Labour candidate says. Every contradiction, every mistake, every mumbled response will be picked up and amplified, whilst a grinning Nuttall looks on like the Cheshire Cat. Anyone who thinks that does not matter has learned nothing from Brexit or from Trump's victory.

Labour's main advantages are its half million members, and the fact that, in the end, Stoke is a working-class area, with a traditional affinity to the values of Labour. Nuttall by contrast for all of his scouse accent, is a right-wing, Thatcherite Tory, who stood several times in the past in elections under Tory colours, and put forward the most vicious right-wing, anti-working class agenda, including his policies for privatising the NHS, and undermining workers rights. Labour needs to get out all of his past statements and record, and use those half million members, not on phone banks, but to walk the streets of every estate in Stoke Central, holding meetings in every community centre, and any other platform to expose him for what he really is.

Anyone who watched the tens of millions of people, who marched on Saturday across the globe against Trump, and what he stands for, should take heart from the fact that from adversity can spring the drive for our own action, and increased solidarity. Nothing succeeds like success, and it has been a mantra of the Labour Movement that our strength lies in our numbers. Its time for those half million members to be mobilised on the streets, and in every community. It is that which will give others the motivation to come out of their isolation, and join us.

In the end, UKIP, Trump, Brexit and indeed the Tories and the Republicans are on the wrong side of history, and the same is true for the nationalist right in Europe. The tide is moving against them, but even as the tide goes out, individual waves may lap closer to the shore. In the short term, we have to deal with each wave as it comes. We have to push back the challenge from Nuttall, just as we have to push back the challenge from LePen, Fillon, Wilders, and the AfD. This should represent the high-point of those reactionary forces, and the beginning of the rise of an internationalist, forward looking, European working-class.

What Next? - Part 2

For The Nationalists – SNP and UKIP

Last year, I wrote that the last EU elections were likely to be the high point of the fortunes of the extreme nationalist parties like UKIP, the FN and so on. The reason for that is that the material conditions are changing so as to undermine their basis. The global long wave boom that began in 1999 remains in place. That provides the underlying conditions that favour growth and accumulation of capital. Its effect has been countered, as a result of the global financial crisis of 2008, and the economic crisis that resulted from it. An indication of the strength of the underlying boom, however, can be judged by this. In 1847, when Britain experienced a serious financial crisis, like 2008, the economic crisis that followed it, resulted in a 37% fall in activity. The 2008, financial crisis was the worst on record, and yet the fall in economic activity was around 7%.

In 1847, the Bank of England suspended the 1844 Bank Act that had caused a credit crunch, and within a year, the long wave boom of the period had resumed, as the huge reduction in the prices of financial assets, that had been blown up as part of the Railway Mania, meant that productive-capitalists were able to buy up capital on the cheap. After 2008, the collapse of financial asset prices, including property prices, that had begun, was prevented from continuing, due to nationalisation of the banks, and massive money printing, to reflate the prices of fictitious capital. That meant that the weakening of the power of the money-capitalists was muted, and, with austerity measures weakening aggregate demand, whilst money printing encouraged resources into speculation, rather than productive investment, the final and inevitable resolution of that contradiction was delayed, for a few years more.

The underlying conditions for growth have been undermined, not just by the financial crisis, but by the deliberate economic policies adopted by some governments, i.e. the policies of austerity adopted in the UK, and the European periphery, which deliberately took demand out of the economy, at a time when aggregate demand was being reduced, as a consequence of the financial crisis. Economists like Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz have explained the failure of the US economy to grow as rapidly as it has during past recoveries, by a failure to adopt adequately stimulative measures. However, the problem is not a failure to stimulate enough. The US economy, when the freak effects of weather are stripped out, has responded adequately to the stimulus it received. What limited the response, was the deliberate political frustration of those measures, undertaken by the Republicans at local and state level, and the repeated political crises they inflicted over the Debt Ceiling, Budget and Sequester.

Had the UK and EU continued to adopt the stimulative measures they undertook at the end of 2008, and which the US continued to follow, rather than adopting austerity, the effect on stimulating global recovery would have been marked. The failure to do so has limited the extent to which the long wave boom has been able to manifest itself, but the fact remains that the long wave boom remains in place. Moreover, the latter part of 2015 marks the start of a new period of upturn in the short run three year cycle.

For the reasons I've set out elsewhere, the conditions are in place, for a shift away from a situation favourable to money-capital and towards one favourable to productive-capital. Money-capital provides the material basis for the forces of conservatism, whereas productive-capital provides the material basis for the forces of social-democracy. As, interest rates rise, the value of financial assets (fictitious capital) declines, and the social power of the owners of fictitious capital declines along with it. As the productive-capital becomes more important, social democracy increases in strength.

The conditions, therefore, are turning objectively against conservatism and nationalism. The delay in the resolution of the above mentioned contradiction cannot continue for long. Financial asset prices have risen so much, and yields on them fallen so low, as a consequence, that even the money-capitalists themselves realise that they cannot simply keep making huge, non-inflationary capital gains, or obtaining even minimal interest, on their money-capital, without profits increasing in the real economy, and, for profits to rise, real productive investment must increase. Moreover, in many parts of the global economy, there has been neglect of large swathes of the economic infrastructure, required for a modern economy to function efficiently. Roads, railways and other transport infrastructure is rotting in many places, and, in many parts of Europe, the broadband internet and telecommunications infrastructure is now way behind that in Asia, and many parts of Africa.

Even Germany is in a poor position, in that regard, reflecting a need for significant capital investment. In the UK, the government's proposals for upgrading the internet infrastructure are feeble. It is proposing, even where it actually does install superfast broadband, to only achieve speeds of around 100 mbps, whereas in Singapore, more or less the whole of the country is already covered by superfast broadband, with 1 gbps speeds. The need to invest large amounts of capital, both to repair and replace vital infrastructure, and to expand productive-capital, so as to increase profits, will cause the demand for loanable money-capital to rise sharply, as the supply of loanable money-capital declines, causing interest rates to rise sharply, and financial asset prices to crash.

The material conditions, resulting from this, favour social democracy. The the role of the “functioning-capitalists”, i.e. the professional production line managers, becomes enhanced; it is real engineering that becomes important at the expense of financial engineering; the need to develop production as a means of increasing profits increases over the requirements to boost share prices; that brings about a changed relation between the “functioning capitalists”, who are themselves professional workers, and the producers; as productive activity expands, workers become more confident, wages rise, trade union organisation develops, and social democratic organisation and ideas are thereby encouraged and strengthened; competition between workers is reduced at an individual, enterprise and national level.

The ultra nationalists never go away completely, but in conditions such as those that are developing, their power continually diminishes, and, in part, that is a reflection of the material fact that capital itself continually needs to be organised in ever larger units, whether at the level of the individual capital, or at the level of the geographic economic unit. The creation of a United States of Europe, is an economic and historical necessity, it is only a question of the means by which it is brought about that is ultimately at issue.

UKIP's electoral support has been flattered in the past.  Those who come to support a party like UKIP are fanatics, people with a bee in their bonnet over something that causes them to stir from apathy or to ditch their allegiance to their former party.  They may not be the sharpest tools in the box, or have serious intellectual arguments backing their beliefs, but it is precisely that fact, as with religious zealots, which makes them cling to their bigotry all the more intently.   For that reason, they are more likely to vote in elections than is the more normal voter, who can only be bothered to vote, when they see the potential for voting on something important, and over which their vote may make some significant difference to their immediate condition.  As a consequence, in local elections, or in European elections, the turnout is always much lower than in General Elections, and the proportion of this low poll made up of UKIP voters is thereby much greater.

That UKIP has once again failed to advance, once it becomes a question of them contesting elections that involve the majority of the electorate, is then not a surprise. Like the BNP before them, when the real chips are down, their actual support, compared to that of the two main parties, remains low. In fact, the vote for UKIP has been flattered, because, as with the SNP, those who voted for them have been deluded as to what these nationalist parties might realistically achieve.

The reality is that, in terms of the reasons that people vote for UKIP – to oppose immigration, to pull out of the EU – UKIP can do nothing about those things via its local councillors, or MEP's, and its single MP can do nothing in relation to those issues either. In terms of the immediate issues that affect those who have voted for UKIP, such as lack of decent housing, lack of decent jobs and so on, which is the real material basis of the fears and concerns that leads them to search for easy answers, UKIP can do even less, partly because its ideology in respect of these issues is more or less identical to that of the Tories. Once that dawns on those that have supported them, that support will rapidly fall away.

But, the same is true for the SNP. The SNP's vote has been flattered, because they have been able to delude Scottish workers about the prospects of what the SNP could achieve. They deluded Scottish workers with the idea that they could vote for the SNP, and get a Labour government in Westminster. Instead, the declaration of political war by the SNP, on behalf of a large chunk of the Scottish population itself, simply and inevitably provoked an equally nationalist backlash from England. Instead of a Labour government, the SNP, as they have done in the past, simply opened the door for a right-wing Tory government to enter in England.

The SNP deluded Scottish workers with the idea that they would be able to blackmail a Labour government, even though they had no leverage to be able to do any such thing. But, the Tories were able to use that threat of blackmail to rally a large enough block of nationalistic sentiment, in England, behind them to win a majority. And, in fact, on purely democratic grounds, that is understandable. The nationalists of the SNP obtained just 1.4 million votes, whereas the nationalists of UKIP obtained 3.9 million votes. On what credible democratic basis could it be argued that the SNP should have a voice in government, but UKIP should not? Rather, the question is why the SNP should be able to claim 56 seats, whilst UKIP with nearly three times as many votes should only claim 1?

Having deluded Scottish workers into a belief that they could blackmail a Labour government, and instead led them into another Tory government, the SNP now have to try to delude them into a belief that this Tory government “must” listen to them. But, of course, the Tory government has no reason to listen to the SNP at all. In fact, what the one-party SNP regime in Scotland has now created, ironically, is a situation where a Scottish voice in government is pretty much excluded. In conditions where there are a large number of Scottish MP's from Labour or the Tories, there is always a good chance that some of those Scottish MP's will themselves be Ministers. In fact, in the last Labour Government, it was Scottish MP's who occupied the position of Prime Minister, Chancellor and other top jobs. Because, today there are virtually no Scottish Labour or Tory MP's, the chances of any of them being in government, is thereby automatically excluded! In more ways than one, the delusions of the SNP have led the Scottish people into a dead end that has also excluded them from any voice in government. SNP MP's in Parliament will just be onlookers.  If they really had the courage of their convictions, they would follow the example of Sinn Fein, and refuse to take their seats.

In just the same way that UKIP take the real fears of British workers, and their concerns over lack of houses, jobs and so on, and blame it on immigrants and the EU, so the SNP do exactly the same thing, and blame it on Westminster. UKIP propose an independent Britain as the solution, whereas the SNP propose an independent Scotland. As nationalist parties, both act to divert workers attention from the fact that the actual problem is capitalism, and seek to unite workers with their domestic capitalists, in opposition to foreigners, and thereby foreign workers.

A look at the actual practice of the SNP, in government, in Scotland, demonstrates the problem for such nationalist parties. Even within the terms of the powers available to the Scottish government, the SNP has performed poorly. It has implemented a policy of austerity just as much as have the Tories in the rest of Britain. And that is inevitably the case, because just as UKIP's nationalistic policies are not only reactionary but impractical, when it comes to resolving economic problems that require a larger rather than a smaller canvas, so the SNP's policies, of confining themselves in an even smaller canvas of Scotland, are even more reactionary and impractical.

The fact, that the SNP currently purport to be pro-European, whilst wanting separation from the rest of Britain, simply exposes the illogicality and contradiction of their arguments and position even more. If, as the SNP claim, their problems arise not from capitalism, but from the fact that decisions are made in Westminster rather than Holyrood, how much greater would their problems be if decisions were made in Brussels rather than Holyrood, and under conditions where Scottish representation in the corridors of power would be even smaller than they are now, in Westminster?

The Tories understood these economic and political realities, which is why Cameron is already rushing to offer the SNP fiscal autonomy.  Jeremy Hunt let that cat out of the bag on Newsnight, whilst Cameron and other Tories have tried to make out that they do not propose to give Scotland fiscal autonomy.  They intend to make the SNP demand it, so as to give it to them as an apparent concession, so the SNP will have to take the blame.  If the SNP have to raise the finance required to cover Scottish spending, particularly in conditions where North Sea oil revenues are declining, and the ability to use them to bolster state finances are likely to disappear completely, the SNP will have little more scope to actually change anything in Scotland than a sizeable metropolitan council in England. It will have less ability to do so than does London. In fact, if any part of Britain has a feasible argument for declaring independence it is London itself.

The days of the SNP are as numbered as those of UKIP, as these realities become reflected in the ideas that determine Scottish voters responses, dividing them once more into the two great class camps of labour and capital. The immediate manifestation of that will be in the same division into the forces of conservatism and social democracy, which the same material conditions will encourage across Europe. Labour as the representative of that social democracy should learn the lesson, and reject all of the nationalistic, diplomatic solutions framed in terms of an independent Scottish Labour Party, devolution and so on. It is not possible to defeat the ideology of nationalism by accommodating to it.  Labour needs to give workers a positive vision of a better future, and that future can only be framed on a European not a national canvas.

Labour's Immigration Policy Is A Mess - Part 3

The history of the Aliens Bill, discussed in Part 1, is significant for another reason. The argument is often put that the problem of racist and other bigoted ideas can be addressed by dealing with the underlying causes of fear amongst workers that leads them to accept those ideas as solutions to their problems. Its undoubtedly true that policies that deal with those underlying causes of fear is a necessary part of that struggle. But, its facile, and to have a totally unrealistic conception of the working-class, and more particularly of its more backward segments, to think that this is in any way sufficient.

Although, 1905 coincided with a period of higher than usual unemployment, itself a sign of Britain's flagging economic power in the world, as new economies like the US, Germany and Japan were beginning to rise, it came in a period of long wave economic boom. From the early 1890's, up to 1914, there was a powerful global expansion, which itself was the material basis for the development of strong labour movements, the growth of trades unions, and the establishment of huge workers parties, of which the Labour Party was only one.

The same is true of the 1950's and 60's. A similar long wave boom ran from 1949 to 1974. It saw the growth of strong trades union movements in the 1950's and 60's, including the growth of powerful rank and file movements, like the Shop Stewards movement in Britain. It saw that translated into a renewing of the workers political organisations, which had been decimated during the 1930's and 40's.

In Britain, the economic growth was such that labour shortages meant that not only did capital seek to bring married women into the workforce, but the Tory Governments of the time sent out to the Caribbean and other parts of the Empire to encourage immigration to Britain. It was a time when huge amounts of money was being spent on developing the NHS and Welfare State, when large quantities of council houses were being built, and when vast swathes of Victorian slum housing was being cleared and replaced by modern houses, and flats. That is not to say that any of this was adequate, there were still large numbers living in poor conditions, and the top down statist methods used to carry out all of this modernisation was bureaucratic, but unlike today, it could hardly be said that there was not large scale public investment taking place.

Yet, despite all of that, there was no shortage of racist and bigoted views across all sections of society, including the working-class. Nor was it just the backward, unorganised sections of workers where that was the case. It was, for example, some of the most militant workers, the London dockers, who marched in support of Enoch Powell.

On 23rd April 1968, 1,000 London dockers went on strike in protest at Powell's sacking, by Ted Heath, over Powell's infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech. The dockers marched from the East End to Parliament, with placards saying "Don't knock Enoch" and "Back Britain, not Black Britain". To their credit Labour MP's Peter Shore and Ian Mikardo, who represented London seats where many of these dockers came from, stood up to the reactionary sentiments.

Mikardo's own parents were Jewish emigrants escaping Tsarist anti-semitisim. Shore and Mikardo were shouted down and some dockers kicked Mikardo. The organiser of the strike, Harry Pearman, headed a delegation to meet Powell and said after: "I have just met Enoch Powell and it made me feel proud to be an Englishman. He told me that he felt that if this matter was swept under the rug he would lift the rug and do the same again. We are representatives of the working man. We are not racialists."

The same kind of approach is taken today by UKIP. In January, Nigel Farage stated that 'the basic principle' of the speech was 'right'. (Quoted in Daily Telegraph 7th January 2014). We have the former Tory MP, and now UKIP MP, Mark Reckless, mirroring the kind of sentiments previously espoused by the National Front in relation to deportation. In a speech in the by-election campaign, Reckless proposed that EU citizens living in Britain would be asked to leave by a UKIP government, if Britain left the EU. We then have the surreal picture of Reckless and Farage, as former bankers and stock market traders, right-wing Tories, putting themselves forward as defenders of the interests of ordinary working people! 

On 24 April 1968, 600 dockers at St Katharine's Docks voted to strike and numerous smaller factories across the country followed; 600 Smithfield meat porters struck and marched to Parliament where they handed Powell a 92-page petition supporting him. By 27 April, 4,500 dockers were on strike.

Back To Part 2

The Idiocy of Tory Immigration Policy

Tory policy on immigration is idiotic. It has now forced David Cameron into a position where he is increasingly backed into a corner of having to argue for Britain to leave the EU, but it is also making Britain into a pariah state as far as the rest of the EU is concerned. The positions being adopted are not defensible.

In his speech, last week, Cameron argued that any EU citizen, coming to Britain, would have to pay tax and National Insurance contributions, for four years, before they were entitled to any in work benefits. Think about the logic of that. National Insurance is supposed to be what it says – insurance. What other kind of insurance is there where you pay your insurance premiums, but are not then entitled to claim under the insurance policy? If people could only claim, from say a car insurance policy, after they had paid more in premiums than they needed to claim, following an accident, there would be very few people who would think that this was reasonable. Yet, that is exactly what the Tories are now proposing. If you want to encourage people not to pay insurance premiums, and to operate illegally, the fastest way of achieving that is to tell them that they cannot even claim against their insurance policy having paid into it!

In the past, such changes have been a means of introducing further restrictions on the ability to claim these benefits by UK citizens. That has to be the case, otherwise, it means that Britain would be discriminating against other EU citizens living and working in Britain. That directly contradicts the principle of a single market. According to the euroseptics, what they really object to is not the idea of a single market, but the political aspects of the EU. That is dishonest, because its impossible to have a single market, without at least political agreements that enforce a set of common rules for that market. A basic requirement of a single market is that the same rules should apply throughout it, but Cameron's proposal amounts not just to different rules, in one part of the market compared to another, but different rules, for some participants, in that market, compared to the rules, applied to others, not just in that market, but even in the same workplace!

Over the last 40 years, the process has been to bring about such a single market by harmonising many of those rules, to create such a level playing field. It has been done by reciprocal tax and benefit regulations between EU countries. The Tories are making Britain a pariah in that context, because, the necessary corollary of these changes will be that other EU countries will impose similar restrictions on Britons working and living in their countries.

The consequence will necessarily mean that existing single markets will be broken apart; participants in each national market will seek various forms of protection, against competition from other national markets, be they lower rates of taxation, the lifting of regulations over health and safety and workers rights, or outright import restrictions; this economic nationalism will fuel nationalistic ideology even further, so that the same kind of process, of increasing division and fragmentation, seen after the introduction of devolution in Scotland, will intensify; the logical conclusion, especially when global economic crises occur, will then be for that economic nationalism to spill over into political nationalism, trade wars turning into shooting wars, as happened, for example with the Cod Wars between the UK and Iceland in the 1970's.  In other words, it is to set in place the same kind of trajectory that was established in the period ahead of World War I.

For example, Cameron has argued that EU citizens who have not found employment in Britain after six months should be deported. Besides the fact that this is a crazy notion that would require literally tens of millions of pounds to try to enforce, for very little saving, given that most EU citizens, who come to Britain, do so to work, it must also instil panic in the minds of all those Britons who have retired to Spain, Portugal, Italy France etc. All of them could, therefore, be equally told to leave by the governments of those countries, in a tit-for-tat response to the mean spirited attitude of the Tories.

After all, every UK citizen, over retirement age, in accord with those reciprocal arrangements cited above, gets free health and social care in Spain and other EU countries, to the same standard as their own nationals. If Spaniards are told, by the British government, to leave, because they have not found a job, or are told that, despite paying UK taxes and national insurance, they cannot claim the benefits that insurance is supposed to cover, why would not Spain equally ask Britons to leave Spain, why would not Spain insist that Britons living in Spain, had to pay for their healthcare rather than it being provided free by the Spanish state?

There is a very good argument for getting rid of in-work benefits that would remove this problem. The system of in-work benefits is bureaucratic and costly, and acts to subsidise cheapskate, poorly paying employers. If all of these in-work benefits were scrapped, and replaced with a minimum wage that was high enough to cover all of the expenses of the average worker, then not only would this save all workers a considerable amount in tax, but it would remove the issue about foreign workers being paid in-work benefits out of the taxes of British workers.

Another of Cameron's idiotic proposals is that EU workers, working in Britain, will not be able to send child benefits back home to cover their living expenses. Yet, we are told that one of the major objections against immigration is that it places burdens on the UK health and education services. Surely less burden is placed on those services if migrant workers children continue to live, be educated, etc. back home, rather than take up room in British schools and so on.

But, why should not migrant workers be able to claim such benefits for their children, wherever they are living, if those workers are paying tax and national insurance to be able to receive them. The corollary of Cameron's proposal is surely that British workers, who go to work in some other EU country, and who, therefore, are not paying tax to the British government, should also not be able to claim child benefits for their children living in Britain. On what basis is it fair that a Polish worker paying tax to the British government cannot claim child benefit from the British state, but a British worker who is not paying tax to the British government, and may indeed be paying tax to the Polish government, can claim child benefit from the British government?

If all EU governments adopted such a cock-eyed proposal it would mean that migrant workers could not rationally claim child benefit at all, because it would be denied to them by the host government on the basis that Cameron is proposing, and would be denied them by their own government, because they were not paying tax to it, and so had no right to claim benefits from it! This already applies to a certain extent in that if you are out of the country for more than three months, you lose your right to free treatment on the NHS.

The real answer to all of these arguments is to truly have a single market across the EU, which requires that market to have also a single currency, a single fiscal policy and authority, as well as a single set of rules and regulations that apply to all capital and labour operating within it.  Contrary to the claims of the euroseptics, a single market requires the establishment of a political union, of a United States of Europe.  It would require a common set of regulations over retirement ages and so on, as well as of benefits.  If such benefits were paid out of a single state fund that would be a start, but for Marxists there can be no confidence in a capitalist state, including a European capitalist state. A better solution is for workers to create their own social insurance funds, as they began to do in the 19th century, via their trades unions, their friendly societies and co-operatives.  That way they can control those funds, and use them to further their own interests in opposition to the interests of capital and its state.

The euroseptics want to restrict the free movement of labour, but not the free movement of capital.  That is because they are the advocates of capital, particularly small capital, as opposed to labour.  But, even in respect of the interests of small capital, their policy is shortsighted.  Take something like the reliance of British farms on migrant labour.  If that is cut off, the immediate effect might be that crops do not get harvested.  Or to do so, might require much higher wages to be paid, possibly beyond what is then profitable for those farms.  The effect is then not to raise UK wages of agricultural workers, but for those farms to go bust, unable to compete in an EU let alone global market place.

The consequence then is that as the migrant labour could not come to where the capital is in the UK, capital moves to where those workers are.  It means more capital invested in agricultue in Rumania, Bulgaria and so on, and then the agricultural products are then imported to the UK, acting as a drain on the UK economy, both because it has to pay for those imports, and because it has lost the tax revenue it would have received from the labour and capital working on those farms.  The next step from a nationalistic, euroseptic viewpoint is then to respond to this situation by demanding various forms of protectionism for British agriculture, for import controls on European agricultural products and so on, which sets in place the kind of trade wars, leading to shooting wars, cited above.

Cameron and the Tories are clearly running scared, as they haemorrhage votes to UKIP. They are coming out with policies that are totally idiotic and geared to try to out-UKIP UKIP. That will never work. Just as the introduction of devolution strengthened the SNP, and hastened the tendency towards nationalism and break up of the UK, as recent events have demonstrated, so attempting to undermine UKIP by adopting ever more strident nationalism will only strengthen those tendencies, leading down an inexorable road to where the Tories will have to propose an EU exit, that would be devastating for Britain, and even worse for British workers.

Unfortunately, it seems that the Labour leaders also have no backbone when it comes to standing up to nationalism. They showed that in relation to Scotland and the SNP, and they have shown it over the Emily Thornberry fiasco, and now they are showing it in relation to UKIP, and the Tories slide towards nationalism. The Tory Party have reacquired their tag as the nasty party in Britain, but increasingly that is being transformed into a tag for Britain in Europe, as Britain is increasingly seen as narrow-minded, jingoistic, mean spirited and self-serving. That the Tories should follow that path given their history, and given that those characteristics are typical of the small capitalist class it is based upon, is not surprising. But, its time that Labour stiffened itself up, before it slithers along with the Tories into that nationalistic cesspit.

The Thornberry Paradox

Why was Emily Thornberry forced to resign? Why did Ed Miliband say that her tweet showing an uncaptioned picture of a house in Rochester, draped in England flags, in front of which stood a white transit, made him more angry than anything else had done?

The fact is that the Labour leadership are stuffed full of middle class professional politicians. They know it, we know it, the electorate know it. And for that reason, they are extremely touchy about the subject, and any suggestion that they might be out of touch with ordinary working-class people, especially as that is one of the main charges they level against the Tories. So, when the media picked up on Thornberry's tweet, which they interpreted as sneering at workers, they felt an immediate panic that could only be quelled by the most over the top response, of sacking Thornberry, and coming out with the most gut wrenching pronouncements, about how when they saw white vans it immediately instilled in them thoughts about hard working British patriots.

But, the surreal thing is that Thornberry herself grew up on a council estate, unlike many of those within the labour leadership, who flew into a panic and demanded her resignation. Thornberry's tweet, was if anything a far more authentic working-class response, than anything the Labour leadership, the Tories or the middle class pundits, all of whom are cut from the same cloth, have come forward with.

To the extent that her tweet was sneering, it was only sneering in the same way that many genuine working-class people sneer at many of those for whom this picture is emblematic. Ed Miliband when he sees a white van might immediately think of hard working people, but the thoughts that go through many real hard working peoples minds is at best – other than for the colour – Del Boy and Rodney, and more usually it is with rogues who are not so lovable. I can say this fairly confidently, because, at one time, when I ran my own business, I used to drive a big, old, yellow twin wheel transit, and my kids used to hate me dropping them off at school in it.

When Ed Miliband sees English flags draped out of house windows he thinks of hard working patriots, but when many ordinary real working-class people see that in the context they often encounter it, on their estates, they think about loutishness - the same kind of loutishness that Britons are renowned for overseas - and anti-social behaviour.

  As one contributor to the discussion on Phil's blog put it,

“These right-wing journos were never in Goldenhill on one of the nights when an excuse is found to let off fireworks when most people (Sun-readers included) are in bed.

They wouldn't be eulogising people like Dan Ware if, like me, they actually had them for neighbours. That's what I'm saying.”

As I said last week, there is nothing unusual about seeing England flags, or Union flags draped on houses, but nor is it ubiquitous, or a characteristic trait of being working-class. Often, even when it is just a temporary phenomenon, like putting up overdone Christmas lights, associated with some event, like a big football or cricket match, it reflects the extent to which that flows over, or is itself an expression of nationalistic sentiment. But, its also often an expression of the character of the individual, who wants to always be able to impose themselves on everyone else, by having the most visible manifestation, just as often, as with Asquith's comment, they have to have the most, the noisiest fireworks, let off whenever they choose, irrespective of their neighbours, or who must always have loud music emanating from their house, or car speakers.

This kind of individualism, has nothing in common with those aspects of working-class life that are a rejection of such selfish individualism, and which by contrast, are founded upon collective solidarity and mutual respect and concern. The former characteristics are usually found, not amongst the real working-class, but amongst all those peripheral layers whose outlook is based on their ability, as individuals, to make their way in the world, be it as some kind of wide boy trader, or those that live off the proceeds of less savoury aspects of the black economy. That individualism was reflected in the kinds of elements who came on to the streets to burn and loot in the riots of 2011, whereas the latter are reflected in those workers who came together collectively to defend their communities from them.

As Phil put it in his blog post, 

“Knowing a thing or two about theSun-reading working class - it's where I come from, after all - I can tell you what their army of readers are likely to think. They see a skinhead with a thuggish appearance, a first impression they'll probably stick with when they learn he's a some-time cage fighter. Compounding the unfavourable vibes is his occupation - he owns and runs a used car dealership. And last of all, Ed Miliband might feel respect when he walks by a house festooned like Dan's. Most Sun readers on the other hand would barely notice, or at best think the resident is a bit of a nob. Contrary to what the hacks and the politicians think, the majority of working class people feel that showy displays of patriotism outside of European/World Cup tournaments is tacky and vulgar. So stick that in your pandering, patronising pipe and smoke it.”

And nor is that just the Sun reading working-class. I grew up in the same Goldenhill that Asquith refers to above.  My parents would never have read the Sun. But, like most of the other people who lived on Goldenhill, as a former mining village, you could not get much more real working-class. One of my grandads worked in three foot seams in the pit with hand tools, the other was a colliery fitter. My father was an engineer who as a 20 year old, in 1939, worked in the car factories in Coventry, Rugby, West Bromwich and elsewhere, being continually moved from one to another, and eventually had his cards literally filled with black ink, to prevent him getting further employment, because of his trade union activities.  But, they and the other people in the street, had a similar viewpoint, as well as a disregard for all those in the street who were considered to be shirkers of one form or another.

After all, the basic principle of Socialism as set out by Marx and reiterated by Lenin is "He who does not work, neither shall he eat."  That applies to all those who would leach off the working-class, not just the rich.  In the 19th century, when workers were setting up co-operatives, one of the principles was that they would be a means for finding work for their unemployed members.  There is nothing wrong with the principle that a social insurance fund, such as that established by the co-operatives, should not operate on the basis of expecting its members to take whatever work it is able to provide for them, in return for payments out of that fund.  The whole problem with workfare schemes is not that principle, but that national insurance funds, are not established by workers, nor run by workers for their benefit, but, like the whole of the welfare state, are established by capital for the benefit of capital.

The problem for Labour in dealing with this is that their entire perspective has become bifurcated. On the one hand, as far as their macro-economic strategy is concerned, it has accepted all of the nostrums of free market conservatism, that have been developed over the last thirty years. They have failed to even confidently advance those aspects of social-democratic strategy that are in the interests of big industrial capital, which is why they have even retreated in the face of the conservative attack over immigration and Europe. The policy put forward by Rachel Reeves to prevent EU migrants being able to claim benefits for two years, is essentially to oppose the free movement of labour, because no worker is going to take the risk of selling their existing home, moving their family, settling their kids in a foreign school etc., in order to move to employment in another country, if they do not have even the guarantee of a degree of social insurance should they lose their job, having done so!  If we had worker owned and controlled social insurance funds, they would have no such national restrictions, but would bind workers together within them across the globe.

On the other hand, having accepted conservative macro-economic policies that favour small capital, Labour is only able to offer workers some modicum of comfort against the consequences of that, by focussing on welfarism. In this way they fall between two stools. The small capitalists and backward elements will not be convinced by the conservative economic policy, and will vote for the real thing in the shape of the Tories and UKIP, especially as they see the welfarist policies as being paid for out of their pocket, without any control over them. On the other, real workers themselves see no prospect of a dynamic industrial economy being reconstructed, and instead see their own wages frozen, and cut in real terms, as taxes continue to expand to cover the expansion of welfarism.

But, the irony is that the so called revolutionary organisations, ought to be able to make hay, and offer a real revolutionary alternative to workers under such conditions. Yet, the reality is that these micro-sects are themselves made up, and led by the same kind of sociological layers that make up the Westminster elite, and the chattering classes. Instead of a revolutionary alternative to social democracy, they offer up only left-wing Fabianism, dressed up with radical phrases, and packaged in Trotskyist verbiage.

For these organisations too have only a limited vision of the role that real workers are to play. For the labour leaders it is to vote periodically at elections, for the micro-sects, it is to throw themselves periodically over the barricades in strike actions out of which the sects hope to recruit a few more members, or even less periodically to come out on to the street in open revolution to displace the existing order, but only for long enough, of course, to ensure that the new “revolutionary” leadership is put in its place.

As Simon Clarke put it many years ago,

“For the working-class the Party is a means of mobilising and generalising its opposition to Capital and its State, and of building autonomous forms of collective organisation, while for the intellectual stratum it is a means of achieving power over capital and the state... As soon as the party has secured state power, by whatever means, it has fulfilled its positive role as far as the intellectual stratum is concerned. The latter's task is now to consolidate and exploit its position of power to secure the implementation of the Party's programme in the interests of the 'working class'. Once the Party has seized power, any opposition it encounters from the working class is immediately identified as sectional or factional opposition to the interests of the working class as a whole, the latter being identified with the Party as its self-conscious representative.”

(Crisis of Socialism Or Crisis Of the State?, in Capital & Class 42, Winter 1990) 

For the sects, the solution for the immediate problems of workers is for the capitalist state to nationalise their industries, and thereby maintain them in unproductive employment, much as the Stalinist state did. It thereby means other workers subsidising those workers through an ever increasing tax bill to maintain this burgeoning capitalist state. It is to continue to build an ever increasing welfare state as a means of providing opium for the pain of the people rather than dealing with the cause of that pain itself. And again, the consequence of that is to make those workers in employment bear an ever larger cost of that maintenance. As Clarke put it,

“The distinction between the Bolshevik and social democratic variants of state socialism should not be ignored, but it is more a matter of degree than of substance. The 'degeneration' of the Russian Revolution was not a matter of Lenin's intolerance, nor of Trotsky's militarism, nor of Stalin's personality, nor of the economic backwardness nor of the relatively small size of the Russian working class, nor of the autocratic character of the Russian State, nor of the embattled position of the revolutionary regime, although all these factors played their part in determining the extent of the degeneration. The degeneration was already inherent in the class character of the revolution which underlay the statist conception of socialism which it adopted as its project.” 

Socialists need to recognise socialism as something that is done by workers not done to them. It requires a perspective such as that advanced by Marx which focusses on the collective aspirations of workers to create something better, to lift their eyes to the sky, not down to the gutter. It is what is expressed in his writings on the Civilising Mission of Capital, in the Grundrisse. That is the opposite of characterising the working class by its most backward layers, still less by those that fall beneath it. Our task is to build a better world, not to have as the limit of our vision only the generalisation of the most moronic aspects of the current one.

Lessons Of Rochester

On the basis of the numbers, UKIP are bound to lose Rochester at the General Election. They had a majority of only 3,000. The turnout was only 51%, which means that with a normal general election turnout of 70% plus, there are another 20,000 votes to be had. That is not only enough votes for the Tories to win the seat back, but it is enough votes for Labour to win the seat, with a 10,000 majority!

Its unlikely that in a General Election all of the UKIP votes would stay with them. Some of those votes will be disgruntled Tories, who have stuck with their sitting MP, but who will return to the Tory fold come the real election in 6 months time. There are numerous instances of such turnarounds. One of the examples always given to politics students is that of 1970's rising Labour MP Dick Taverne, who stood as an independent, because he thought Labour was moving too far Left.

Taverne had risen quickly in the ranks of the Wilson Governments of the 1960's, serving as a Home Office Minister and Financial Secretary to the Treasury. He fell out with his Lincoln CLP, and set up the Democratic Labour Association, under whose banner he contested the seat in a by-election in March 1973. He won the seat, and even managed to retain it in the General Election of February 1974, but at the October 1974 general election, he was thrown out. Despite all the media hype about the breaking of the mould of British politics, we've seen it all before – at least those of us older than 40 have.

Taverne was an outrider for the SDP, which split from Labour in 1981, and which he joined. They too, in the guise of the “Gang of Four” of Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, William Rodgers, and David Owen, had some sizeable by-election wins. But, in the blink of an eye, they were gone, merged with the Liberals into the Liberal Democrats. Remember them?

They were the outfit, who rather like UKIP were scrupulous about having no scruples when it came to opportunist politics, dropping policies like hot potatoes if they thought they might lose them votes, and pushing one policy in one constituency to gain votes, whilst arguing its direct opposite in another constituency, where it was seen to be electorally advantageous. They too were the outfit who were set to break the mould.

As recently as 2010, the media were orgasmic in their fawning over Nick Clegg, just as they have been over Nigel Farage. Farago was preceded by Cleggmania. They once all wanted to “agree with Nick”. Now Nick's bunch have lost their lustre, for the media. In Rochester, they could barely beat a dominatrix standing as an independent candidate. The Liberals have been reduced to a level where they have no more political significance than the SWP, or one of the other irrelevant sects. No wonder the media are scraping around trying to find the new story that will break the mould. Even UKIP seems to be becoming a bit stale for them, and their sights are shifting towards the Greens, and the SNP.

Some of UKIP's vote may have come from Labour, as tactical voting, with Labour voters voting UKIP to defeat the Tories. But, its also likely that the drop in Labour's share of the vote, is itself simply an indication of the fact that 20,000 voters who would normally vote in a general election, didn't bother in this by-election. Labour was not likely to win, so why bother. At a general Election, that is less likely to be the case. The General Election, whatever the media hype, and Farage's bluster will be between Labour and Tories, even the distraction of the Liberals has now been removed as their rotting corpse has been put firmly under ground. Under those conditions, the Labour voters will turn out, and any who had voted for UKIP will quickly return.

That is the other lesson. In the last three big by-elections, two were in Tory seats, and they lost both of them to UKIP, the third, in Middleton was in a Labour seat, and Labour held it comfortably. Despite all the media hype, Labour held Middleton, in the face of the Tory and Liberal vote collapsing to UKIP. Again the turnout was low, and in a general election, Labour's majority in the seat will be back at least to where it was at the last general election. UKIP continues to be a right-wing split from the Tories, just as the SDP were a right-wing split from Labour in the 1980's.

UKIP will no more break the mould of British politics than the SDP did, but like the SDP undermined the Labour vote, allowing the Tories in, in the 1980's, so UKIP will split the Tory vote next year.

The other lesson from Rochester is that MP's should ditch Twitter. The Internet is in general prone to encouraging people to say things they would not if they were saying them in public. That is why there are so many trolls out there. But, even for people writing things with the best of intentions, its easy for words to be misinterpreted, let alone misrepresented, unless and even if, you write reams of clarification. That is because no one can hear your tone of voice, or see your facial expression, which are vital parts of non verbal communication. Its one reason I never use Twitter, and why I've never understood why anyone would want to. The risk of saying something stupid, unintended, or just open to being misrepresented in an instantaneous tweet is simply to great.

Having said that, I'm a bit non-plussed about what all the fuss is about over Emily Thornberry's tweet. The main thing I take away from it, is what it says about the Westminster elite for whom the sight of England flags hanging from windows is “extraordinary”. For most of us, such a sight is not at all unusual. But, does the fact that its not unusual change the other underlying sentiment. On the estates where I have lived, there was nothing unusual about seeing such flags, but nor was it the case that every house was decked out with them. It was also not unusual to see houses groaning under the weight of Christmas lights and decorations, sometimes from as early as October.

But its equally true that most of the people who lived on those estates, not snobs, but ordinary hard working people, themselves saw the flags and the overdone decorations as a bit lowering of the tone. The trouble is that the Parliamentary Labour Party has become so stuffed full middle class professional politicos that they are susceptible to the charge of snobbery. A Dennis Skinner, or an Eric Heffer could have got away with Thornberry's tweet without any problem, because it would have simply been an example of what can be seen every day, of ordinary workers being prepared to poke fun at themselves, and the idiosyncrasies of some of their number.

But at also reflects something else. We don't know what the politics are of the person whose house was pictured in Thornberry's tweet. We don't know whether they were a UKIP voter or a voter for the “People Before Profit” candidate. We do know that the profile of UKIP voters, like the profile of BNP voters in the past, is one of people who hold some pretty reactionary ideas, and who may well be a part of that social strata that Marx described as the lumpenproletariat. The kind of picture often created that such elements represent the working-class is dangerous, because the other side of this, is to present a picture whereby the real working-class is then thought of as being the middle-class, rather as is done in the United States.

Those elements of these lower strata have never been the ones that have formed the back bone of the labour movement. On the contrary they have always been the ones used as a driving ram of reaction against it. The equation of poverty and socialist radicalism is a false one, and a dangerous one. When Labour MP, Chris Bryant, appeared on BBC News, therefore, and complained about Thornberry's tweet that “we should respect the voters”, he was completely wrong.

The idea of respecting the voters is one that electoralist parties must adopt, because for them politics is a commodity to be sold. They are only interested in winning as many votes as possible, so as to get elected, and necessarily that means elected on almost any basis. Such parties have to show respect to the voters, no matter how reactionary the views of those voters, no matter how ludicrous or unintelligent the views of those voters, for fear of upsetting them, and losing their vote. But how patronising to those voters is such an attitude?

The Labour Party should not respect the views of racists, and other bigots. They had no problem, in fact, in supporting the decision of the Home Secretary in banning such a person from entering the country last week. It doesn't mean we have to treat everyone with racist or bigoted views as being the same as a hard core fascist, but it does mean we have to tackle the reactionary ideas they have, and not simply pussy foot around the issue. But, that again reflects the problem that the Parliamentary Labour Party has with its social composition, and with trying to pander to liberal sentiments on the one hand without alienating workers scared of being left behind on the other. It is what has left Labour policy on immigration in a total mess for the last 50 years.

Labour should argue clearly against all immigration controls, but to do so would mean also arguing for policies that really tackle the problems of insufficient decent jobs, of lack of security, or inadequate housing provision, inadequate educational and health provision etc. You can't do that whilst simultaneously agreeing with the Tories on the need for policies of austerity. Those are also lessons Labour needs to learn from Rochester.