Understanding the new Conservatism
(Long post alert: 2,700 words)
What is and where is the Conservative party now?
Those are the questions that a number of left blogs have been starting to explore, as the reality of Conservative rule sinks in, and the need first to understand what we’re up against.
I started my own exploration, briefly almost by accident, here, and this has been brewing since then.Richard Seymour at Leninology has given the fullest recent account (in a blog), and well worth a read it is too, not least as it includes this little gem:
The Tory front bench, for example, is dominated by members of the capitalist class, especially the financial bourgeoisie, as this New Statesman article shows. David Cameron claims to be ‘middle class’, but by this he only means that he is a normally adjusted member of the capitalist class and not some toffee-nosed aristo who warms his feet in the stomachs of slaughtered peasants.
Patrick at The Great Unrest has also started out on what may be slow-burning series (part 2 here) on how we resist the cuts, by stating first:
If we are to oppose austerity, we must understand and oppose this logic.
In this he reflects my own thinking in a three part series that I probably produced too soon for it to be noticed, as questions about what’s really going on and why are only now being explored properly.
And there’s an interesting early contribution from our own Carl Raincoat, who extrapolates to a UK setting commentary on American Conservatism, which suggests that the Right over there has reached a point of ‘epistemic closure’ which for the time being at least means Conservative thought is institutionalized as head-swivelling, froth-mouthed Tea Party lunacy.
As I make clear in a comment on Carl’s piece, while I don’t agree that you can compare American with British Conservatism in this way, because of their very different traditions, I’m glad that the question of what point Conservatism has now reached is being asked, and am keen that TCF should lead the way on exploring that and related questions; it is only, as Patrick intimates, by understanding the enemy that we can combat it effectively.
What the three articles referred to share, and what distinguishes them from other critiques of Conservatism, is a willingness to examine not just the new Conservative ‘project’ as it is stated by the Conservatives, but to start to explore the institutional settings in which the project is now being developed and implemented.
More negatively, there is something of a tendency to reification. Carl’s account in particular seems to see Conservatism as a sum of fairly slow-moving (and now, he’s say, stagnant) movement in ideas, relatively uninformed by the traditions/cultures (national through to personal) within which they are set.
Even in Richard’s lively, dialectically aware, account of the way British Conservatism has developed through the 20th century and into the 21st in response to the rise of mass democracy, and how it is now threatened by a narrowing of support base, there is little analysis of how the Conservative leadership and those that influence it see these changes for themselves. Core beliefs and attitudes are attributed to Cameron without any particular evidence:
Cameron, though basically a Thatcherite in his small black heart, was selected by capital…..
For my own account of where Conservatism may be going, and consequently how the Left might react best, I prefer to start from a somewhat different theoretical position.
This isn’t the place to get too far into that theory (though for those already or newly interested in this kind epistemological stance, I think Rhodes’ & Bevir’s Interpreting British Governance (2003) is still the best account of competing theoretical views). In brief, though, I think the challenge for the Left is to seek explanation of different political and policy actions by the new government both in the pressures of government and in what we know of the traditions and ‘operational’ codes of Conservative decision makers.
Such an approach may lead us, I suspect, to some surprising conclusions about what is really driving Conservative policymaking/implementation, and how different this is from the solely ideology-based explanations being provided by much of the commentariat (that of the return/enhancement of Thatcherism). While a consciously developed ideological frameworks for government undoubtedly plays a part, I am not convinced they are THE key reason for much of what is now going on.
So what do we know about the way the Conservative leadership thinks and acts?
Well, we’re not insiders so we don’t know a huge amount for ourselves so it’s handy to look at what insiders tell us.
First, we know (just as Richard Seymour suggests) that the social make-up of the Conservatives’ inner circle is much narrower and old-school elite than it has been for some time. Eton and Oxbridge dominate in a way it wasn’t able dominate under the premierships of the daughter of a grocer and the son of a circus entertainer.
As Andrew Rawnsley says, Cameron and Osborne have a small number of trusted advisors and people they really bounce stuff around with, and I suspect that even people like Andrew Coulson, inculcated in the promotion of the party as they are, are not the ones that really drive the way in which policy is made – they are simply there to ensure that it is sold properly to the great unwashed.
The real inner circle are those, from a very similar background to Cameron and Osborne, who made up what Rawnsley calls ‘sofa cabinet’ that Cameron had before coming into government; he may have expanded his range of decision-making activity because of the necessities of government, but that doesn’t mean that his core attitudes have changed, and it is an ‘Oxford set’ from 25 years ago that defines the way the leadership see its world. As the Sunday Times said in January 2010:
[T]he shared history of this “brazenly elite” group will shape more than just their own future.
This inner circle of decision makers may even be further immuring themselves from the outside world from a desire to exclude the elements of the Coalition they have had to subscribe to in public in order to take power in the first place, and Political Scrapbook’s scoop on Nick Clegg’s seemingly desperate efforts to develop some kind of coherent and audible voice for himself in the coalition may well reflect that immuring process as much as it reflect the LibDems’ weakness of position in itself.
Second, we also know that in what I’ll term social policy – and especially that policy being developed subsequent to the election – is marked both by what often appears to be rank ignorance of what’s happening ‘in the real world’, and inconsistency with the supposedly innovative (though contradictory) ‘Red Tory’, ‘nudge’ and ‘ black swan’ and thinking undertaken before the election.
The examples of these ill-considered ‘policy-on-the-hoof’ decisions are growing weekly, but include:
- Proposals to scrap Primary Care Trusts and require GP consortia to purchase care through their own (no doubt, privatized) management arrangements, despite clear evidence from the last PCT reorgsanisation and the development of GP commissioning that this approach simply will not work;
- The diversion of public funds for the Swedish Free School experiment, rushed through without proper thought and at the direct expense of existing education and planned improvements;
- Contradicting the apparently carefully thought-through and much vaunted Big Society policy by suggesting that people getting a well-paid enough job should move out of council accommodation. The inference seems to be a) that houses are not really homes, but assets; b) only those on benefits should live in council housing;
- Being apparently unaware of existing provision for refererenda on local matters of concern before setting out proposals to allow communities to vote on local housing plans, in a move highly likely to exacerbate local tensions and in a manner wholly out of keeping with the Big Society plans;
- Easy acquiescence to the car lobby over the removal of speed cameras, despite the jury being out, to say the least, on whether they save lives;
- Support for local authorities to introduce minimum alcohol pricing, despite such an approach being totally out of keeping with the ‘nudge’ theories advocated and apparently accepted by the government’s own advisors;
- An announcement presaging the end of Asbos, desirable in itself (I would argue) but taken with no consulation whatsoever with Tory (or any) local authorities who to date have made much of their use;
- Unimplementable plans for 5,000 community organizers now replaced by high-cost, civil-service backed ‘pilot schemes’ which will lead to nothing because the expense involved means that the promised ‘no cost’ approach (ridiculous in itself) is not actually being piloted;
- Broader, vacuous talk of the voluntary sector and volunteering (and the two sometimes confused) being the way forward for mainstream public service delivery, with no apparent grasp of the funding needs of the sector or the reality of volunteering.
Now, its fairly early days, but what I suggest is happening in this set of examples is start of a longer term trend for the Conservatives simply to abrogate responsibility for detailed political administration of the country, and the development of a laissez-faire attitude to what actually happens in the country beyond the Westminster village purview.
While much of the new Tory social policy agenda is being cast for public consumption in terms appropriated from New Labour – responsibility, mutuality, localism – and as a rebalancing from the years of New Labour’s invasive micro-management in the interests of renewed civil liberty, what I suspect will become more apparent as time moves on is that central government is actually abandoning its erstwhile role as mainstay support for (and controller of) the periphery in respect of many functions.
This trend, I suggest, will be driven principally not by a Thatcherite desire to slash the state – though this ideological stance will play its part.
Rather, I contend that it will be driven by a return to an older Tory tradition which has never been erased from its High Tory/high society wing that Cameron and Osborne have emerged from to lead the country.
This is the tradition, set out most fully in the 1960-1980s by the recently ‘rediscovered’ political scientist and early ‘interpretative’ historian Jim Bulpitt (1937- 1999), of the ‘dual polity’, rooted in even earlier ‘court vs. country’ traditions, but still very much alive as an operational code of government well into the 1960s (and I would argue even beyond that).
This the High Tory tradition, reflected in Lord Hailsham’s words (1954):
To the great majority of Conservatives, religion, art, study, family, country, friends, music, fun, duty, all the joys and riches of existence of which the poor no less than the rich are the indefeasible free-holders, all these are higher in the scale than their handmaiden, political struggle.’(The Conservative Case, 1959, pp 12-13; quoted in Henry Drucker, Doctrine and Ethos in the Labour Party, 1979, p24.)
It is the tradition still reflected in government in the 1960s in The Crossman Diaries, when Crossman talks of his own Permanent Secretary , Eveyln Sharp:
[A] tremendous patrician and utterly contemptuous and arrongant, regarding local authorities as children which she has to examine and rebuke for their failures (p.28)
Suggesting an emerging distinction between the ‘high’ politics of defence, foreign policy and other choice matters coming under a generic heading of ‘statecraft’, and the ‘low’ politics of administration in the regions, may well seem a little extreme at this early of the new government.
Against the argument, there will of course be many countervailing factors, and indeed traditions, working against any such ‘laissez faire’ trend from central government, and there is evidence of these already e.g. the debate over whether Eric Pickles’s (not from the Oxford set) announcement on street clutter on English streets constitutes an instruction to local authorities or simply a view on the matter.
Such tensions are likely to emerge even more clearly as the Coalition progresses on its manifesto commitment to the Powers of General Competence legislation (on which I have blogged a good deal).
The strongest countervailing tradition, indeed, is likely to be Thatherite/New Labour propensity to micro-management and ‘initiative-itis’ which has already developed a strong element of path dependency within the departments, given the local power interests that are associated with target setting and monitoring. We need only look to the changing of ‘targets’ to ‘goals’ within the NHS for some evidence of that.
These may be traditions of the lower reaches of government rather than the leadership, but as Lipsky demonstrated 30 years ago, (and New Labour ignored at its peril) the fact the leadership sets policy doesn’t mean it is implemented as leadership wants (and this is a weakness in Bulpitt’s focus on elite/centre traditions to the exclusion of the traditions held at the periphery of government).
Nevertheless, when the background of these key leadership actors is taken into account – these are people whose first conception of estate is not council estate – alongside some of the early, more reactive social policy decisions, I think there is enough to suggest that the new Conservatism is not simply a return to Thatcherism, but also to a more ‘primeval’ Tory tradition, in which the concerns of the working classes (in the plural, EP Thompson sense) are not there to be understood, but to be delegated.
Perhaps, indeed, the Left’s quite visceral hatred of Cameronism is in part a realization that Cameron is the worst of both Tory worlds.
What, finally, does all this mean for the Left? Does it change the way we need to deal with the new Conservatism?
Yes, I think it does.
The key attack line to date has been that Cameronism is a return to hard-headed, and economically illiterate, Thatcherism. While there is certainly mileage in that approach, I think there may be more oppositional mileage in the development of a narrative of the Tories top tier as precisely what they are, totally out of touch with the lives of ordinary people, and increasingly dismissive of the need to be.
While there is an undercurrent of this approach in the way the Left has approached opposition, it does often seem that it’s an approach that is adopted half-heartedly, with people almost embarrassed to use it, under the impression that to talk about Tory backgrounds is in some way not ‘decent’ politics.
Thus, the attempts to attack Edward Timpson for being a ‘toff’ in the Crewe & Nantwich byelection in 2008 turned were humorous (though not very funny) and simply looked stupid rather than hitting the target, and the Tories were able to turn the tables on Labour by claiming out ‘class war’ tactics were out of date and made us look like ‘dinosaurs’. (I’m grateful to Tim Flatman for this insight.)
Now, with our fingers burned, it seems that no-one senior within the Labour party (or even the wider Left) feels able to take on Cameron about his claim to be ‘middle class’, for fear of a backlash against Labour as class warriors (or perhaps for fear of offending the Queen and her own middle class aspirations).
What we need to do, I suggest, is to get serious in our attack on the backgrounds of the top Tories, not on the basis of personal criticisms, but on the basis that it doesn’t allow the government to govern responsibly.
Responsibility in modern government, and the fact that the Tories cannot offer it as a result of their core beliefs and traditions, is a theme we should be keen to develop (and in fact at a local level I have been developing it quite effectively already), and this theme needs to be backed by a constant flow of stories about irresponsibility, as well as an ongoing flow of evidence (of the type Laurie Penny has been working on) about the core attitudes and behaviour behind closed doors of the Tory establishment as a whole. In the next two years, as the rich stay rich and the poor get poorer, these stories and revelations will gain ever more traction.
Exposing the Tories for where the come from, what they are, and what they’re doing to us, is perfectly decent politics because of who they are and where they come from, and a decent opposition should be working all three of these factors, not just one.
The parity of leftists and conservatives
Slavoj Zizek has this to say on the subject of a modern saturated form of left wing politics:
Lenin’s politics is the true counterpoint not only to the Third Way pragmatic opportunism, but also to the marginalist Leftist attitude of what Lacan called le narcissisme de la chose perdue. What a true Leninist and a political conservative have in common is the fact that they reject what one could call liberal Leftist “irresponsibility” (advocating grand projects of solidarity, freedom, etc., yet ducking out when one has to pay the price for it in the guise of concrete and often “cruel” political measures): like an authentic conservative, a true Leninist is now afraid to pass to the act, to assume all the consequences, unpleasant as they may be, of realizing his political project. Rudyard Kipling (whom Brecht admired) despised British liberals who advocated freedom and justice, while silently counting on the Conservatives to do the necessary dirty work for them; the same can be said for the liberal Leftist’s (or “democratic Socialist’s”) relationship towards Leninist Communists: liberal Leftists reject the Social Democratic “compromise,” they want a true revolution, yet they shirk the actual price to be paid for it and thus prefer to adopt the attitude of a Beautiful Soul and to keep their hands clean. In contrast to this false radical Leftist’s position (which wants true democracy for the people, but without the secret police to fight counterrevolution, without their academic privileges being threatened), a Leninist, like a Conservative, is authentic in the sense of fully assuming the consequences of his choice, i.e. of being fully aware of what it actually means to take power and to exert it.
This distinction between a true leftist and his liberal counterparts, and the parity between a leftist and his conservative brothers, is made all the more interesting when we consider Ed Burke’s reasoning for opposing the demands of enlightenment thinkers and French revolutionaries in particular.
Jeremy Stangroom had this to say on the politics of Burke:
Society is complex, and human nature unpredictable; therefore it is not prudent to mess around with political and social arrangements that have stood the test of time.
The common view of traditional conservatism from the point of view of the left is that it favoured a strong aristocracy or ruling class on the grounds that this structure had been divinely justified.
Burke, in fact was a deeply religious thinker, and yet his grounds for favouring this system is based more upon the weak basis of theories to the contrary of it.
He did not necessarily feel that political conceptions of natural right, which had emerged from enlightenment values, were wrong, ipso facto, but that the basis for reforming society on liberty, equality and other such predicates, were theoretically weak.
Thus Burke, and many others in the conservative tradition, appealed to a political realism rather than a political idealism – the politics of the day for enlightenment thinking.
Indeed the politics of the left that Zizek is thinking of above – that is to say Leninism – has its own issues with enlightenment thinking in its purest form (if we consider the disparity between scientific socialism and its utopian variant).
Enlightenment thinking had in fact supposed that in the absence of a corrupting modern society, men would become systematically – by their very nature – capable of rationality.
This supposes a rational human nature – of which Marxist-Leninism has no truck.
The parity between the left and conservatives – both in their traditional forms, before the purge of postmodern mush in modern politics – is in the role of government being the mediator of rationality, based loosely on a view of humanity that denies its monolithic nature (for Burke humans were the “fallen” in the religious sense of the word; for Marxists humans are mediated subjects through which ideology is transmitted).
From the outset, and in opposition to a modern political perversity, conservativism is the natural political ally of leftism, where liberalism is its political adversary.
Capitalism and contradiction
John Harris said something in the Guardian today which resonated with me. His article is about how, when we question the Liberal Democrats’ free market, orange book clique taking over the party and being further to the right than some Tories, we forget that the party will not collapse “under the weight of its own contradictions” but will continue to fight on – the Labour party is one case in point.
Firstly, we at TCF certainly do not forget that the Labour party organised around the central contradictions of free market, laissez-faire capitalism, and I suspect not many others have forgotten this either.
Secondly, to use the Liberal Democrats being in power, as Harris does, as a sign that they are a working force, and not collapsing “under the weight…” does not add to his argument at all – the Liberal Democrats were mere kingmakers in the coalition, and their downfall has yet to be seen (I’m thinking the snubs they’ve been getting from the electorate locally, and the scheming eye of Simon Hughes).
By comparing them with the Labour, Harris is not matching like for like.
But nevertheless, the thing he said which resonated with me:
Marx and Engels may not be quite the influential titans they once were, but even among some of the most modernised minds on the left, one of their followers’ behavioural tics is alive and well: surveying something you either don’t like or can’t understand, and then loftily pronouncing that it will fall apart under the weight of its own contradictions. So far, it hasn’t applied to capitalism. Neither, I would wager, will it be true of either the coalition or the Liberal Democrats, though that doesn’t seem to have quietened August’s loudest political noise.
Having been to university myself, I too have been a Marxist (a phase that sadly wore off soon after I left), but I always saw this point – made by many – a little stupid. And Marx was not naive to this point. Because an economic model does not fall apart under the weight of its own contradictions, that does not mean it is not a spent force and that the end of history is in capitalism (which is why Francis Fukuyama wrote that book Our Posthuman Future – to show that he was wrong in 1989); it means either that we are playing with rusty goods so to speak (by which I obviously mean its existence is continued only because people are desperately trying to keep afloat a broken system for as long as possible after its sell by date, because it makes them better off) or that it has had to supplement itself with other models so as to sustain itself.
I think it is a cross between the two – a system that is past its sell by date that has saturated itself with liberal or social democratic systems of government welfare to hide that fact that its cracks are enormous (and they quite often fail to hide those gaps).
It was a flippant remark, but it’s not an unusual critique of Marx. The real case is he was right about capitalism, he just underestimated the power of bullshit by capitalists.
Desperate defence
I’m not intending to get into an Iain Dale obsession, but I can’t let this post pass, because it may become a Tory mantra in days to come. He does remain influential in Tory circles, after all.
Iain valiantly tries to deflect this morning’s attack on the Coalition for the now obvious regressive qualities of the June budget, not just by claiming that the report is old (it’s not), but by saying that the IFS doesn’t think VAT is regressive, and that this means everything is just fine.
To be fair to Iain, that’s probably a better line of defence than the Treasury saying the budget doesn’t hurt the poorest most because of reduced Corporation Tax, which is one of the stranger arguments I’ve seen.
Even so, it’s a pretty weak defence, because it’s not correct.
Iain relies on a James Browne, a ‘Research Economist’ at the IFS, for his claim that, because VAT is not payable on essential items, then it actually hits the richer hardest. He refers to what appears to be a telephone conversation on 28th June between Mr Browne and a Total Politics magazine person, although there is no direct quotation:
According to Brown, the Budget is regressive overall, in that it will hit the poorest the hardest, yet its VAT increase is actually progressive. As poorer people tend to spend more money on 0-rated necessities [products without VAT], they will be largely unaffected by the VAT increase: It is the richest, with the higher expenditure, who will actually be feeding the government’s coffers with a VAT increase.
Let’s move on from the statement that the ‘budget is regressive overall’, and even from the fact that Browne’s logic is at fault – the fact there will be higher VAT contributions from richer people (because they’ve got more money overall) is NOT the same as saying VAT is progressive, because such a fact doesn’t mean the poor won’t be hit hardest.
Let’s go straight instead to what Robert Chote, Director of the IFS and James Browne’s boss, said to the government’s own Treasury Select Committee three weeks later:
We asked our expert witnesses whether the VAT increase was a ‘progressive’ or a ‘regressive’ measure. Robert Chote told us that the key issue when assessing this question was whether you looked at the impact of a VAT rise on people “according to their living standards in a particular snapshot as measured by income or over a lifetime period”.
He explained that VAT looked particularly regressive when compared against income because “the poorest decile spend a relatively high amount relative to their income, you hit high spenders hardest and, therefore, not surprisingly that shows it to be regressive”.
Perhaps, then, the Tories have a problem with what ‘regression’ actually means.
Rather than taking it mean what people generally take it to mean – whether or not the taxation in question impact more on the living standards/income of the poorer members of society – perhaps they think it has nothing to do with this relational quality, and simply refers to where most money will come from.
Or perhaps Iain’s defence is simply desperate.
ps. I also noted this little gem in Iain’s preceding post about language teaching in schools:
Perhaps, however, we are also guilty of being too conservative in our teaching of languages. Maybe instead of sticking to trusty old French and German we should be encouraging schools to offer more courses in Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin and Russian.
Iain sometimes doesn’t seem very in touch with the 21st century. Just as he was at least 10 years out of date on his understanding of nursing, so he’s out of date on what languages are actually being taught nowadays.
As the CILT (The National Centre for Languages) reports in its 2009 Language trends report:
This year for the first time more maintained schools reported offering Spanish than German at Key Stage 4……..
Lesser taught languages are continuing to grow…..The offer of Mandarin has grown in both sectors and particularly in independent schools, where 40% now offer it in one form or another……
Was Iain Dale right on the economy?
Iain Dale’s predictions for 2010, 29 December 2009:
Britain will lose its AAA credit status.
Reuters, 17 August 2010:
Moody’s Investors Service said on Tuesday the top AAA ratings of the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany are well positioned but face new challenges that increase the possibility of a downgrade.
The “distance to downgrade” for these four sovereigns has been reduced, the credit rating agency said in a statement, meaning their credit quality within that top category is declining.
So Iain Dale may end up being correct with his prediction, just not the way he thought.
The key message? Labour left the country ‘well positioned’ post-crisis, but the Tories’ economically illiterate austerity programme is endangering our credit rating.
The bankruptcy of Labour
With the cynical attempt to draw a readership with an ambiguous headline out of the way, I move on swiftly to John Prescott’s warning that Labour might go bankrupt, and that he should be made Treasurer to save it.
It’s an interesting piece, as much for what it doesn’t say as about what it does. It’s mostly about how tough he’ll be on cutting costs, and not as much about creating revenue as I hoped it would be.
Now I know a thing or two about being close to bankruptcy, having helped dig quite a few organisations out of perilous financial holes over the years, so I took up John Prescott’s offer to comment on his plans and wrote to him. Here, tidied up a bit, is what I wrote:
Dear John
I am the leader of the Labour group on West Lancashire Borough Council, and know a thing or two about grassroots politics.
From what passes as my professional life, I also know a thing or two about helping organisations avoid bankruptcy.
While I enjoyed your article on why you want to become treasurer, and the words on possible bankruptcy are laudibly straightforward, there is also an overemphasis on smart, cost-effective campaigning – important in itself, certainly.
Conversely, there is not enough emphasis on how we create bigger revenue into the party. It is on this that I want to have my say.
Most organisations facing bankruptcy must face up to the fact that cutting costs, however radically, will probably not be enough if that is not matched by increased revenue, at least if the organisation is to carry on delivering its main service/product. Of course, if it doesn’t carry on delivering its main service/product because of cuts in expenditure, existing revenue will dry up. Creditors are therefore often more interested in strategic plans for growth in revenue than they are in cost-cutting plans.
The Labour party is no different; if we don’t deliver on our promises to members and to sponsor unions, this income will decline.
I don’t have access to Labour’s books, but I’d hazard a guess that the ‘deficit plan’ of the NEC identifies increased revenue coming in, without detailing exactly how these additional revenue streams will be tapped, and what resources will be needed to tap them in the first place.
This may well be because they are based on projections for larger donations which may or may not happen, or on membership increases/increased union input that we haven’t yet agreed on, or have a plan for agreeing.
I suspect we need to think radically, and soon, about how to generate this additional membership/union income.
There are, I contend, two main ways in which we can increase revenue through the enhancement of party/movement democracy and a consequent increase in our activist/membership base.
Both are radical but logical steps in power devolution of the type all leadership candidates now say they espouse (though details are scant on how this will be acheived), and both will increase membership/union input substantially if they are implemented properly and in good faith.
First, the financial flows within the party need to be totally reversed.
All membership money and donations, barring a very small top slice for absolutely essential national administrative functions, should be distributed to CLPs (and possibly branch level in time) on a pro-rata basis according to membership numbers. The CLPs, thus resourced, will then be open to ‘business plans’ from MPs/PPCs and from regional party structures/the NEC etc. which they can approve, ask to see amended, or reject as they see fit. Under your guidance, CLPs should have a mind to ensuring the smart, cost-effective campaigning you advocate. Initially, the task facing CLPs may seem overwhelming, and some central support from the top slice may be necessary.
In time, all parliamentary monies paid to MPs for running their constituency office should have automatic sequestration by CLPs and this should then be subject to the business planning process indicated above. Beyond this, MP salaries might also be taken down the same route (as would councillor allowances), with local decisions made on how much MPs are worth paying (of course, we would expect to see Labour MPs form their own union to negotiate collectively).
This devolution of power over the party’s resources will, in a fairly short space of time, create a major incentive for people to join the party, in the knowledge that they now have a local say over how the party’s resources are spent i.e. on what campaigns. In effect, local party members become Trustees of their own local party, with the MP and councillors (and other staff) acting as employees.
When back in government, Labour should also consider passing legislation which imposes the same ‘bottom-up’ funding model on all political parties with parliamentary representation in respect of all monies paid by government to parties e.g. Short monies. This funding pro-rata to membership, with memberships of the various parties then having real financial clout, will create a virtuous circle of local input-increased membership of parties-increased local input.
These proposals are set out more fully here , here and (in respect of legislation for all parties) here. There are more thoughts on the localisation of PPC selection here.
Second, and closely related to the first radical step, the new Treasurer and the NEC should commence work with trade unions to encourage them to disaffiliate from Labour nationally and to re-affiliate to local parties.
Funding should be allocated to these local parties on the basis of satisfactory ‘business plans’ (an extension on the way in which unions already fund specific campaigns with MPs).
Again, this will enhance local input into decision making and increase party/union membership in time, creating scope for additional revenue into the party.
Clearly there will be a need to agree a transition plan which caters for the fulfilment of exisitong obligations to creditors and reassures them that this move towards localised funding arrangements will provide better guarantees of debt repayment because it creates both better revenue and better understanding within the membership of the party’s current financial obligations, leading to an enhanced willingness to contribute, fundraise and recruit.
More details are here.
Membership and union involvement needs to increase dramatically. This is the best way towards long term financial stability and further growth. Empowering the existing membership and union supporters is the way to do this.
A small socialist irony
In May through to June of 1994 a civil war broke out in Yemen between the Yemeni government in Sana’a and Yemen Socialist Party (YSP) supporters. As Ghaith Abdul-Ahad noted in the first of his Guardian articles yesterday about time spent in Yemen, fighting that war with the government of the time were Islamists who ended up bagging much political achievement in southern provinces of Yemen during the nineties.
When the socialists of the YSP, whose neighbourhoods and market places they created can still be seen, were defeated in the civil war the Islamists were handed authority of Jaar – a town in the province of Abyan, South Yemen.
Abdul-Ahad’s report shows that radical Islamist presence in the town grew from there, enjoying sums of money from Saudi Arabia and now being a hotbed for al-Qaeda.
The report interviews one man who remembers the time well; “Faisal”, a former Socialist party member and head of the Young Artist Association in the Abyan. He remembers that the:
socialists were defeated on 7 July 1994 [and] on July 8 a group of Islamists came and picked me up, blindfolded me and took me to the HQ of political security. I was handcuffed and beaten there. They wanted to know if I was a communist and their commander declared I was one. Then they tied my arms to a tree and hung me there and started beating me up with a stick.
Al-Qaeda has grown significant influence in the area and has claimed responsibility for attacks such as the attempt to assassinate the British ambassador to the capital of Yemen, Sana’a – the site of socialist defeat in the nineties.
It has been told that the Yemeni Socialist Party was key to establishing multi-party democracy when the Soviet Union collapsed and the country had been marred by previous civil conflicts and the tail end of British imperialism.
One of the mentors of this surge in extremism lingering in today’s Yemen is a man called Anwar al-Awlaki. As the Guardian report notes: “In Yemen, recruits can study ideology and take guidance from militant leaders, including the Yemeni-American cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been described as “terrorist number one” by the Democrat chairman of the House homeland security sub-committee, Jane Harman.”
Indeed al-Awlaki is infamous among those who follow terror politics. His reported links include the US Army Major Nidal Hassan (“gunman suspected of carrying out the 5 November 2009 attack on Fort Hood, Texas”) who attended the same mosque in Virginia Falls that al-Awlaki formerly preached in; two of the three 9/11 hijackers and Omar Abdul Rehman, “who was convicted for his role in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York.”
Awlaki has praised US designated Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab, was the inspiration for the so-called Toronto 18 cell, who were planning civilian attacks, supports armed jihad, where he is explicit that the “hatred of kuffar [non-Muslims] is a central element of our military creed” (see page 12), and talks of “driving the Jews of Palestine to the sea”.
It is a fair assumption to say this man is not the bastion of progressive thinking.
In 2006 the campaign group against Guantanamo Bay and registered charity the Cageprisoners requested that their supporters write to the Yemeni ambassador of the UK to seek the release of al-Awlaki. Here the relationship between the Cageprisoners and al-Awlaki grew strong, and he was invited to broadcast a live message to an event held by the Cageprisoners in 2008.
On October 2 2009, Cageprisoners republished on their website a defence of Awlaki by Cageprisoner member Fahad Ansari that first appeared in Crescent magazine. The report continues:
In the piece, Ansari was highly critical of the council’s decision and referred to Awlaki as “the inspirational Imam”
[...]
Mr. Ansari is also a researcher and spokesperson for the Islamic Human Right Commission (IHRC) which also supported the CP campaign for Awlaki’s release.
The IHRC is registered as a charity and limited company which Cageprisoners have demonstrable connections with through Fahad Ansari.
There have been a number of instances where Cageprisoners have claimed to be unaware of Awlaki’s extremist background. This assertion may be questionable if you consider that the group republished an article by Andrea Elliott of the New York Times which says “Mr. Hassan and another university student searched the Internet for jihadist videos and chat rooms, the friend said. They listened to “Constants on the Path to Jihad,” lectures by the Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is suspected of inciting Muslims in the West to violence.”
To bring this back to the point, the director of the Cageprisoners, Moazzam Begg, has given plenty of uncritical time to al-Awlaki rendering it extremely dubious to think he has no idea of the kind of character he is. If you heap as much praise as Begg does to al-Awlaki on the interview below, you would check your sources – and a glimpse at some of the sources show al-Awlaki to be an ardent jihadist and supporter of al-Qaeda.
It doesn’t bade well for anyone promoting Moazzam Begg, a former detainee in Guantanamo Bay, as a pillar of human rights and an example of human rights gone awry, when he gives uncritical, and even praiseworthy platforms to somebody like al-Awlaki. But indeed recently that is what Amnesty International did, causing the resignation of Gita Sahgal, a feminist, who used to work for AI, when the human rights group made Begg their poster boy.
Furthermore, from the 1-5 July central London was host to the Marxism festival of 2010, held by the Socialist Workers Party. On the Saturday they held a panel discussion which included Moazzam Begg, Gareth Pierce and Gerry Conlon.
Conlon was one of the Guildford Four, wrongfully accused back in the seventies for the Guildford and Woolwich bombings, and Pierce, a human rights solicitor, was instrumental in the case of Moazzam Begg.
You can tell from the set up of the debate what the producers of this discussion had in mind; Conlon being a victim of a miscarriage of justice, Pierce acting, as far as possible, to counter, with human rights, miscarriages of justice. But with Moazzam Begg – surely his feature on issues of human rights should have been put into jeopardy by the connections and suspected connections with some of the worst terrorist, pro al-Qaeda, pro-Taliban and pro-extremist characters this country and others have to offer.
Yemeni Islamists destroyed Yemen and reduced socialism in that country to nothing, where once it was strong and created a sense of stability where that had been absent since the destructive history of the Soviet Union. Islamism continues to be a presence in the country in the form of al-Qaeda. One of the chief ideologues of this presence, al-Awlaki, is held as an “inspirational imam” by a group fronted by a man who receives uncritical praise from the audiences of Socialist Workers Party organised events – now there’s something to think about.
Perhaps that is the reason the SWP won’t mind publishing articles that say this:
Yemen is indeed a country ravaged by war and instability – but this is the result of decades of imperialist interference in the region. And the ratcheting up of Western intervention will only make things worse.
Without even mentioning a single word about the destruction brought about by domestic terrorism, extremism and fascism.
The working men’s club and the age of austerity
Dr Ruth Cherrington works in the department of translation and comparative studies at Warwick University where her research focus is identity and representation in multicultural society. A few years ago she was the subject of much interest for research she had carried out on the rise and decline of working men’s clubs.
Image courtesy of the wesbite for Bishop's Stortford and Thorley - A history [http://www.stortfordhistory.co.uk/
The subject for Cherrington has personal significance; she grew up near a working men’s club which she described as being her second living room. Since then she has noticed the gap which the demise of those institutions have created in society.
As homage to this dying institution she set up the club historians website in May of 2008 which provides a detailed history of the club, and gives people the opportunity to share photographs and memories of their times.
Cherrington reminds us in her history that the clubs came to prominence in the nineteenth century as a means to fill a gap; there wasn’t a lot for people to do other than work. Options to go to the pub, watch music and other leisure activities were usually very expensive, rather somewhere was needed that people could call their own, and not simply lined the pockets of landlords.
Cherrington is open about the problems posed by the working men’s club. The name itself suggests there may be problems of exclusion. Throughout the twentieth century the club was seen as somewhere largely dominated by white males, which suggested a strict exclusivity.
That there had been limited or no female membership in the nineteenth century had not been a point of contention; women enjoyed limited rights as it was and people’s attitudes in the men’s clubs – as can be imagined – were not perturbed by this.
Even by the middle to late twentieth century when women enjoyed more political rights the clubs were still very slow to adapt to a changing societal picture, and even though it was not unheard of to have female members, the exclusiveness was certainly a barrier that needed to be reconsidered.
The same must also be said about multicultural society. The national executive insisted that they could and would not tell individual clubs what to do or who to admit as members, but after the 1970s when anti-discriminatory laws were introduced, and society as a whole changed vastly, so too did the face of the clubs.
One of the more attractive elements of the club had been the so-called “club scene” and the “free-and-easy” nights, which were open microphone sessions for budding musicians and entertainment acts to try their luck among a listening, but generally not an easy audience. It has been said that the audiences of the free-and-easy’s did not suffer fools gladly.
Another overlooked part of the club, which Cherrington is very keen to point out, is the community activity and charity attachment. Cherrington makes note of the notion that charity begins at home, a sentiment embedded into Victorian values, which working men’s clubs utilised and reappropriated as charity beginning in our clubs – in what Cherrington calls acts of “mutual self-help”.
Examples of which can be seen by looking at work achieved by the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union (WMCIU). An example of their work was to set up convalescence homes, some time before the creation of the welfare state, which afforded men who may have been recovering from surgery or couldn’t afford to go on holiday, to stay for a week or two by the seaside funded through their subscription.
The clubs were once the hub of local charities who donated good sums of money for special schooling or operations for children where they were not available on the NHS. Cherrington recalls there always being someone passing by in the clubs requesting money for a local charity, alongside someone else selling bingo tickets.
What is worrying about the wide demise of the club is the question of what it will be replaced with, and never has that been a more relevant question. The severe package of cuts has hit community activity rather hard, local sporting centres are either being drowned by expensive private gyms or costs are increasing to keep the centres open at all. Modestly priced places for families to congregate and socialise with friends are all but gone and institutions that bring whole communities together are slow to gain traction – which, I imagine, has a lot to do with how time consuming it is, and how little time people have.
Cherrington sees the closure of Coventry working men’s club – the oldest one of its kind – as a symbol of a dying institution with nothing in its place. She praises charities such as Age Concern and Help the Aged, but notes that with an ageing population these organisations are pushed to bursting point, and are unable to resource for all who need its services. The problem of elderly social mobility, amid the demise of clubs and bingo halls, reduces many elderly people to experience their twilight years secluded and without the social purpose they once enjoyed.
Furthermore, little is available to reconcile the young and the old. In comparison to many countries, there is a noticeable conflict between youth and their elders that really wasn’t apparent in communities brought together by institutions such as the working men’s clubs. The absence of community cohesion is fairly recent and few inspirational ideas have emerged from think tanks and government departments on how to restore it – particularly between the generations.
I’m sure many would have you believe institutions such as the clubs are redundant in today’s society, and closures are not a product of community cohesion in decline, but of people finding different ways in which to entertain themselves. But I’d dismiss that. However my concern about the way in which many of the cuts have been organised, and our rapid descending into mass joblessness and increasing poverty, is that something like the club will be a necessity and not something to fill the hours with at night and at the weekend – and yet such institutions will be absent.
Many commentators and critics are starting to get the impression that what was meant by “cutting waste in public spending to reduce the deficit” was actually a means to, as the saying goes, “starve the beast” that is to say reduce the budget through cuts and breaks which subsequently weakens the role of the state and the social welfare programmes it funds, thereby appearing to strengthen the argument that cuts are necessary and private institutions do things better.
The club, for all its problems concerning who became members and who it excluded, promoted an ideal of “mutual self help” where in society such help had not yet been institutionally founded. We may return to a state where mutual self help is the only alternative – and despite its altruistic good, should not be relied upon since the function of the state, for any decent person, should be to ensure the inalienable right of citizens to welfare.
The return of the club should only be to restore communities and families, the element of the club which preceded the welfare state should be guaranteed by the state alone – since this is its primary function – and this current government is almost certainly trying to creep away from serving its primary function.
Update: On this very same subject Neil of Bleeding Heart Show has his own obituary of a social on his website
Balls vs Prescott
John Prescott, 18 August 2010 (twitter)
#100days down – it’s the remaining 1758 days of the ConDemNation we need to worry about #countingthedays
Ed Balls, 21 August 2010 (contract with Labour members)
I will lead from the front and ensure the whole party from the shadow cabinet and PLP to every councillor and party member plays their part in shortening the life of this coalition and exposing the unfair decisions they are taking.
The details on how the life of the coalition will be shortened under Ed Balls’ leadership are scant, but at least he’s talking a better game than John Prescott, who seems resigned.
Funny, because in terms of the profile that Balls is seeking to project, I often get the sense that Balls is going after the ‘pugnacious’, which Prescott made his own a few years ago with a handy left jab. The jutting jaw, that kind of thing.
Is Balls the new Prescott? I don’t know, and I was bored of the question before I’d finished typing it.
Contempt for the law: A Conservative Councillor case study
I see the right-wing media and blogosphere is very keen to bring us the story of the Labour MP who has pleaded guilty in her absence to using a mobile phone at the wheel and driving without insurance.
The Daily Mail is keen to let us know in the headline that she’s the first Muslim woman to become an MP, as this is clearly highly relevant to the case, and Iain Dale is so enthusiastic to tell us the news that he doesn’t have time to check any of the facts.
The trolls are quickly to work too:
[O]ne would think such carelessness and contempt for the law would render her entirely unsuitable as a member of parliament – sorry, an “Honourable” member of parliament.
So I wonder what the right-wing media and blogosphere will make of a Conservative councillor in my area, who happily forwarded this email to her/his Parish Council and various other people (a concerned person passed it on to me), explaining in detail how to use an administrative loophole in order to avoid been given points on a licence for speeding or other offences:
Sent: 26/07/2010 10:33:24 GMT Daylight Time Subj: Fw: Fwd: Avoid points on licence! VERY USEFUL MAKE SURE YOU READ ITVERY USEFUL MAKE SURE YOU READ ITOnly accountants could come up with this onePay your fine, but, NO POINTS DEDUCTED, !!
Read on :-
This is how the points get added to your licence:
If you get a fixed penalty notice through the post which also carries penalty points the computer system first sends you a demand for the cash.
(Four paragraphs of detail left out here so that I cannot be accused of forwarding the details of how to avoid the decision of the courts myself)
The computer will then automatically generate a refund cheque for the over-payment and send it to you.
**** Do not cash this refund cheque – DUMP IT.
(Two paragraphs of further details omitted for safety)
As there is no human intervention, the system will leave you alone …… which is the primary objective!
CIRCULATE THIS WIDELY !!!!!!!!!!!!
Brannans Chartered Accountants
For this elected Tory at least, it seems the law is for others to obey, and for those with access to the right information and know-how to bypass.
Nb. I’m not giving out the name or location of the councillor who sent this email, unless her/his local Tory party/group actively accuse me of making it up. It’s real enough, but I think it’d be a waste of taxpayer money to be complaining about her/his conduct to the Standards Board etc.. I wouldn’t lodge such a complaint, but others might if the name were revealed.
I raise the matter simply to point out the hypocrisy of Tories talking about’ contempt for the law’ in the case of a Labour MP who pleaded guilty at the first opportunity and took her punishment without complaint, while here here we have one of their own actively promoting actions designed to frustrate the decisions of the court.
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