How to understand the rise of populist politics? In a time of unprecedented social peace, how can large numbers of people turn away from the sensible, managerial mainstream and find the simple answers of crackpots and charlatans beguiling? How is it a third of French voters supported a fascist last Sunday? How did we get President Donald Trump? All kinds of explanations are in play, but the one that's done the running is anxiety, which is usually (and unhelpfully) separated out into economic and cultural anxiety. This has spawned an interminable zero-sum debate over what matters the most and, as per political debates, there are other stakes in play. If the economic argument is correct, then the Clintonian/Blairist and the still-shiny Macronite Third Way is wonky flimflam and the socialist critique, including emphasis on the importance of interests, is substantially correct. And if cultural anxiety is the explanation, then all the pundits and leading politicians are on the money, we have to carry on listening to them, and the horrible stuff about class and things can be boxed away.
There is nothing the social world throws up that can't be analysed, explained and, if needs be, critiqued. Indeed, we need to understand the world in order to change it, and that means taking it as we find it. That must be the starting point of any kind of progressive politics, or it's something else. That in mind, I'm interested in the latest intervention in the anxiety debate, covered here by Emma Green of The Atlantic. According to research by the Public Religion Research Institute (original findings here), the best predictor of support for Donald Trump after self-identified party affiliation is cultural anxiety. According to the research, some 68% of white working class Americans from the mid-western states believed the American way of life was under threat by foreign influences, and 79% of this group were set on voting Trump. 62% of the same group believed immigration represented a cultural threat and they are sceptical, by 54%, of the merits of a college education (rising to 61% among the men).
This refutes the claims of economic anxiety how? Well, quoting direct from the PRRI piece:
Despite the conventional wisdom that Trump attracted financially depressed voters, white working-class Americans who report being in good or excellent financial shape are significantly more likely to say that Trump understands their problems than those who report their financial condition as being fair or poor (48% vs. 39%, respectively). A majority (55%) of white working-class Americans in fair or poor shape say Trump does not understand the problems facing their communities well.
This is incredible and revealing. Incredible because the entire claim of the research that cultural anxiety matters more than economic anxiety hangs on this passage. Revealing because they reduce the question of economic anxiety solely to being poor. Despite themselves, they confirm the relevance of class, of the better off who disproportionately helped Donald Trump to victory, just like some of us have argued from the beginning. It is, for example, entirely possible to be poor and not feel insecure. Millions of people run very tight budgets but secure in the knowledge that their wages are due to be paid on x day of the month. Insecurity however will set in when their job is under threat, or whether the firm wants to introduce flexible/reduced hours, and so on. Meanwhile, a well paid manager whose remuneration is fixed to continual monitoring performance reviews, a successful small business person who frets over her competitors, the megabucks professional worried about the drying up of their consultancies, all these people are much better off than low paid working class people, but are likely to also suffer higher instances of economic anxiety. Their default setting is an existential craving for stability and certainty. And who can blame them, they are human after all. Yet that can, and has, taken them down some very dark paths. Generations of socialists have known that these demographics disproportionately fill out the support of reactionary parties and movements, confirmed again by the PRRI in the case of Trump. Economic anxiety therefore isn't just a matter of being poor, it's about the content of your relationship to the means of existence and how that frames your outlook. Or, if you prefer, your relationship to the means of production, and that the content of that being conditions consciousness.
In addition to the conceptual muddle, there is a strange issue with how the report is presented as well. For all the stressing of cultural anxiety, we have vignettes culled from interviews that capture the working class experience quite succinctly:
"It’s that kind of mentality with the businesses that we work for these days that they know they can get away with paying us nothing half the time because they know we have nowhere to go."
"The middle class can’t survive in today’s economy because there really isn’t a middle class anymore. You’ve got poverty level, and you’ve got your one, two percent. You don’t have a middle class anymore like you had in the ’70s and ’80s. My dad started at Cinco making a buck ten an hour. When he retired he was making $45 an hour. It took him 40 years, but he did it. You can’t find that today; there’s no job that exists like that today."
“I feel enslaved by the student debt that I have, and I don’t have a degree, and I feel that any job that I may get I will never pay it off in my lifetime.”
“My fianc矇’s worked for the same company for 21 years, and it’s a union [job], and they are hiring Mexicans. And I don’t want to be racial, but that’s all that they’re hiring. He makes like $31 an hour, and they’re coming in at making like $8 an hour.”
“I’m tired of the minimum wage being offered so low it makes it impossible to provide for your family no matter how hard you break your back."
Not the quotations I would have chosen if I wanted to prove cultural anxiety mattered and the economic was phooey.
Despite itself, the report establishes a link between economic status and interest. For instance, asked about whether the national minimum wage should be more than doubled from $7.25/hour to $15/hour, by 53% to 44% respondents agreed. Split by gender, however, we find that men oppose it by 50% to 45% while women support it 60% to 37%. It also notes support rises to 82% among black workers and 77% for hispanics. Cultural issues? Or the fact that the latter three groups are more likely to work minimum wage jobs than white working class men and would, therefore, directly materially benefit from a raise?
As we have seen, there are some findings here that are useful, but what absolutely isn't is their steadfast failure to place them in a social context. While the sampling is pretty robust, their conclusions are on dodgy ground because their variables are not connected with one another. Each is set up as an independent variable without any relationship to the others. So the view that the American way of life is under threat only tells us that people who believe that are more likely to vote for the candidate who shares the belief. How does that help? It does not explain how this works with other variables, of who believes this, nor offer hypotheses as to why they might believe it. It's a bit like stating people voted for Brexit because of immigration without trying to explain why that was a powerful motivator. And the quotes, why? These strike something of a Freudian note as the repressed breaks through to put question marks over their argument.
The biggest problem with the report is their failure to define what they mean by economic anxiety, which they simply identify with being poor. And because poor people tended not to vote for Trump, (which, as any Marxist would have said, like duh), they conclude economics has nothing to do with it. It's almost as if the data was written up with a determination to prove the culturalist argument. That it would be blandly passed off as fact rather than interrogated by journalists. As far as I'm concerned, this is an opportunity missed for a few petty Beltway points. The truth is with a bit more care and intellectual honesty, a complex, interesting, and accurate picture of how anxiety works, of how the experience of economic realities - which goes beyond wages and jobs and combines with culture - can be gleaned from the data. It's just that, instead, the PRRI have given us a hatchet job.
Thank you Theresa May for confirming my argument. When she took to her favourite podium this afternoon and denounced the European Union for interfering in the General Election, the cynicism scale on my sideboard broke. Just like her predecessor, who frequently put the short-term electoral interests of the Conservative Party above all else, the Prime Minister's (contrived) paranoia is putting the Brexit negotiations in jeopardy just so she can grub a few ballots from the four or five per cent of voters stubbornly sticking with UKIP. If that isn't Conservative Party decadence in its purest elemental state, I don't know what is.
The sad fact is May will probably get away with it. She and Crosby know full well the character of the anti-politics vote that underpinned last year's Leave vote. For many leave voters, it was a protest against an intangible sense of 'them'. And 'them' could be coded any which way. Politicians (of all parties, especially the LibLabCon), bankers, Eurocrats, cultural Marxists, brown people, immigrants. It was a protest against globalisation, but in exactly the same way Marine Le Pen articulates such a sentiment. When the labour movement is down and not articulating a positive alternative to the status quo, other sentiments and ideas rush into the vacuum. Across the Middle East, religion is the basis of opposition to corrupt and dictatorial establishments in too many Arab countries. In the countries of Europe, a yearning for community in a fragmenting and rapidly changing world finds crumbs of comfort in the flag. After all, things ain't what they used to be but we're still bloody British, dammit.
May is trying to ride that wave to a thumping majority, setting herself up as a mother-of-the-nation figure that Thatcher, because of her divisiveness, never accomplished. You might not like the Tories, which is why their name is banished from so much campaign literature, but you can trust May to stand up to Johnny Foreigner. Pompous, stupid, pathetic, but again, she's trying to create a sense that Britain is under siege, that Britain's Brexit decision is in danger, and only by getting behind Theresa May can we ensure that 'they' don't succeed in thwarting The Will of The People.
The irony of this posturing is, of course, that the EU would much prefer to have Theresa May at the head of the British government than the alternative. With Brexit, all May is seeking is a withdrawal, albeit in the hope that some privileged access to markets can remain in situ. A Jeremy Corbyn Brexit, however, would be framed in terms of workers rights, state intervention in the economy, and other Labour left nostrums. Not helpful for a Europe led by the centre right for whom the radical and populist left are a loud and sometimes viable vehicle for discontent. They look at the polls and believe Labour's chances of winning are remote, which is just as well because that prospect terrifies them as much as it does London-based tabloid editors.
As we have seen, May thinks she's got it in the bag. Which is why we have no promises around tax, VAT, and National Insurance rises. Why the Tories have gone all vague over the pensions' triple lock. Why she hides from the public and makes like a Dalek with her soundbites. And why she can engage in the most cynical stirring of nationalism seen in British politics for decades. The more she keeps piling up the absurdities, the greater the chance of getting found out and falling short of her electoral objectives. In that case, perhaps we on the left should be encouraging her to do more grandstanding in bad faith.
Back in the halcyon times of the UK Left Network discussion list, plenty of participants had bust ups with the grandly over-titled Scottish Republican Socialist Movement - a "movement" with more initials than members, one of the slogans often attending its adherents' contributions was "Britain out of Ireland, Scotland out of Britain". Well, it has to be said, that's not looking anywhere as fanciful as it did 15-16 years ago.
Theresa May must be bitterly cursing Nicola Sturgeon's intervention in the Brexit debate and reminding her of the almighty hash she's making of it. A scant 24 hours earlier, this blog happened to raise the issue that Westminster and its media had seemingly forgotten about, the Scottish dimension to Brexit. Indeed, by all accounts Sturgeon's pledge to put a second independence referendum in motion caught the government completely on the hop. While I don't think too much of her politics - palest pink social justice politics plus independence monomania - Sturgeon is much cannier than the flotsam and jetsam of the Tory elite, and that includes our dear leader. For instance, just check out her lame, not to say hypocritical, reply to the First Minister.
Ever since the UK's first near-death experience at the hands of the Scottish independence referendum result, the SNP have been itching to have a second crack at it. After all independence at whatever price is their party's raison d'etre. Expecting them not to advocate for it, strategise for it, and work toward it is like supposing the Tories would not hand perks and privileges out to the already wealthy. With Holyrood in the party's control and as near as dammit a full roster of Scottish constituencies at Westminster, Sturgeon and the SNP have an opportunity they just cannot pass up. You would have thought the presence of so many Scottish Nationalists in clear view from the Prime Minister's seat might have caused her to take some notice of them. Even Hammond thought they were worth a cheap troll. And yet, for all of May's talk about the preciousness of the United Kingdom, for all her sharey carey nonsense, her determination to seriously weaken British capitalism for the sake of preventing a few tens of thousands of Europeans here, a few tens of thousands of Europeans there coming here to work and contribute was always going to put her on a collision course with the Scottish government. Let there be no doubt. Theresa May is responsible for this mess. It is her, no one else, that has gone out of her way to ignore the pro-EU aspirations of a voting majority of Scots.
As far as Sturgeon is concerned, May's stupidity is a gift. Here we have a clear case of Westminster forcing on Scotland a political reality it did not vote for. The promise set out in The Promise - remember that? - that Scotland is an equal and valued partner in the UK is shown to be demonstrably false. Sturgeon and the SNP have a grievance. And, fortuitously for the pro-independence case, one of the key props of Better Together, EU membership, is going to get wrenched away from them. While it is true an independent Scotland would have to re-apply as soon as it leaves the UK, for the SNP and its hegemonic "inclusive" civic nationalism, it has the advantage of aligning more happily with the liberal utopianism that attends the EU than the backward, little Englandism of Number 10. Scotland does and always will carry out more business with the rest of the UK than the EU, but economic realities these days are trumped, sometimes literally, by nonsense nationalism. All Sturgeon is doing is striking while the iron is hot. The forces of unionism are divided and weak. The much-talked about return of Scottish Toryism is little to crow about, and Scottish Labour virtually used itself up in defending the union last time and is something of a shambles, unfortunately. If not now for the SNP, when?
There's also the small matter of the SNP's immediate interests getting served. Scottish local elections are coming up and, surely, the party can expect to do very well indeed. Even if the results are a mere adjustment in toward Westminster/Holyrood levels of support, the SNP can reasonably expect to net hundreds of seats, mostly at Labour's expense. I don't want to be cynical (who, me?), but throwing independence back into political contention has the happy consequence of obscuring the party's record in government. A less-than-stellar performance on education and an outright refusal to effectively use the powers available to it to ameliorate cuts coming from Westminster immediately spring to mind.
Nevertheless, it could turn out that Sturgeon is doing the rest of the UK a service. An independence referendum isn't likely for a couple of years, and she knows the harder the Brexit the easier the SNP's case will be. May doesn't want to go down in history as an even worse Prime Minister than her predecessor. She doesn't want to be the one nation Tory who sacrificed the UK on the altar of border controls and so, yes, it is possible that Sturgeon's ambush, for all the sound and fury, might force her to moderate her negotiating position and make an independence referendum victory less likely. How delightfully ironic.
It's chip wrappings now, but I still wanted to say a few things about Melanie Phillips and her egregious stupidity. In case you missed it, she caused a flap with this article that made a number of tendentious claims. Namely that Great Britain is an ancient nation whose existence predated the Act of Union, and is therefore indivisible while, at the same time, Ireland "has a tenuous claim to nationhood"
This is Mel up to her old tricks. Back in her day as an ideologue-in-residence at, where else?, The Daily Mail, she regularly churned out awful rubbish and racist hogwash. She in fact pioneered trolling in national newspapers as a business model. Why rely on the crusty old Colonel Blimps - for whom the internet is communism, or something - when you can pile up the visits and advertising rates by hooking in lefty audiences outraged at explicit displays of bigotry? It's a lesson the gutter press and its scribblers have long taken aboard, and it works. Would I be writing about this if no one paid her any attention?
Take her points about Linda Colley and Benedict Anderson. Judging by her brief discussion of their analysis of nationalities and nationalism, she never got past the blurb on the back of either Britons: Forging the Nation nor Imagined Communities. She falsely attributes them the argument that because nations were artificial ("invented") they could therefore be declared and dissolved. Um, no. Modern British identity is a contradictory mishmash of the reactionary and the progressive, of a nostalgic paean to a bloody legacy of conquest and empire, and a contemporary tolerance of difference and inclusivity. The bits and the bobs fixing these coordinates in popular consciousness are moments and personalities deemed to embody nationally-inflected values and character. And you know what, Mel? These are argued over constantly. Each generation comes onto the scene and rewrites the national story. Different narratives are conceived (invented, if you like) and consciously pushed by politicians, intellectuals, and movements from above and below. Each rewrite works upon the inheritance of past iterations, which carries material weight among institutions, education systems, modes of habit and thought, and so on. No rewrite is total, but the nation can be significantly redefined. And, of course, Mel knows this. If she believed the British character was an eternal set of values unchanged from Roman times, she wouldn't spend her time fulminating at the liberal turn British national identity has taken, or the cultural "threats" posed by the sundry brown-skinned minorities she despises.
On self-contradiction, she says Britain forged a national identity out of fending off successive waves of invaders to these shores. The British national story certainly draws on those experiences long after the fact, but in her addled brain, has she not considered that the Irish might also arrive at a common sense of nationhood through being on the receiving end of invasion, occupation, colonisation, emigration, partition and liberation? Climactic events like the Irish Rebellion, the Potato Famine, the Easter Rising, as far as Mel is concerned are these "improper" to hang a national narrative on? Can only the experience of being a conquering nation, of being at the centre of mighty empires just as the French, Germans, Russians were be the correct conditions under which authentic nationhood is forged? Again, we know she doesn't really believe this. As one of Israel's most fanatical and uncritical cheerleaders, she accepts the official narrative of Jews being a nation prior to the state's foundation in 1948. Experiences of persecution, repression, and genocide are legitimate building blocks for nations that get Mel's seal of approval in this case, but not for countries she dislikes.
The thing is we know Mel really believes her stuff, which makes her so bankable. But what this article betrays is a mindset in which the spark of intellect fizzled out long ago. Putting forward arguments that are self-contradicting at some points, and show her up to be a massive hypocrite in others and all the while indulging wilful misinterpretation of people she disagrees with betrays a deeply stupid, vanishingly dim, petty-minded character. Don't let anyone tell you that her and her like get a national platform on the basis of merit.
Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness resigns and the Northern Ireland Executive tumbles into chaos, again. Though I suppose it's a measure of progress given the history that it was an old-fashioned political scandal leading up to this, and not something bound up with the entrenched sectarian divide. What we have is a tawdry tale. A tale of money and the most incredible incompetence.
While First Minister Arlene Foster held the enterprise portfolio, the Executive introduced the Renewable Heat Scheme, a system of subsidies to encourage the take up of renewable sources of heating. So far, so banal. The problem was this scheme was generous, extremely generous. For example, according to the BBC, a business using a renewable-fuelled boiler over 20 years under the equivalent scheme in Britain could look forward to a government bung of £192,000. The Northern Irish scheme would have paid out £860,000. And so a scheme that had a £15m underspend in 2015 jumped to a budget-busting £400m overspend by the time it was closed around this time last year. If that wasn't bad enough, there is some evidence that it was being gamed by unscrupulous sorts. Thanks to a whistleblower, there were reports of "entrepreneurs" setting up boilers in previously unheated sheds, warehouses and garages and putting in claims. Ouch.
There is absolutely no suggestion that Foster is embroiled with crooked applicants, but there are claims of inept arse-covering. When the improper use of the scheme first came to light to senior civil servants, it is claimed Foster was uninterested in the allegations and fought to keep it open. And when it became too prohibitive, there is a suggestion that her subordinates tried to cover it up and make it look as though she was unaware of the problems. Are there any truth to the rumours? The evidence suggests so, but that's for the inquiry to unearth and, yes, McGuinness and Sinn Fein are right to argue that the DUP arm of government can't pretend business-as-usual. Especially when it's not the first time the party's leading figures have got into trouble with public money. But also, SF aren't entirely masters of their own fortunes here - as 'Cash for Ash' has rumbled on, they too have come in for criticism for appearing aloof from the whole affair. No amount of absurdist Gerry Adams tweets can alibi their quietude.
As the province gears up for an election, it's worth making a couple of points about Northern Ireland's relationship to wider politics. Or, should we say, non-relationship. Coverage of its affairs can be found in the broadsheets, but apart from the occasional trip across the Irish Sea by Question Time, it's not even a sideshow to Westminster's big top. The sad truth is that since SF and the DUP sorted out their power sharing arrangements, leading to the utterly surreal double act of Martin McGuinness and the Rev Ian Paisley, the rest of politics isn't that interested. The Northern Irish office, once one of the toughest briefs in front line politics is now considered a backwater. Small wonder Dave was content to leave it in the hands of Theresa Villiers. For example, back in summer 2015 there were two paramilitary murders - one an alleged commander of the Provisional IRA, and another an ex-member in what was widely seen as a tit-for-tat attack. The Provos, of course, weren't supposed to exist any more and so Stormont was plunged into crisis. The Ulster Unionists withdrew from the executive and Foster came in as a caretaker after the resignation of Peter Robinson. And yet this barely ruffled a Westminster engrossed in the drama of Labour's first leadership election.
Where mainstream politics is concerned, Northern Ireland is considered a settled issue. The bombs have stopped, sectarianism doesn't appear to be as ugly or violent as per The Troubles, so just leave them to it. They're a long way from London, nothing much happens there now and it only becomes useful for EU argument fodder or as a stick to beat Jeremy Corbyn with. But distance is only part of it. For the political establishment, whether its conservative or liberal variants, Northern Ireland is something to be feared and something to be ashamed of. Feared, because from their point of view the intractable sectarian division is primeval and tribal, and that irrationality could spill over into renewed violence on the mainland. And ashamed because Northern Ireland is out of step with the story official Britain likes to tell itself. The idea that not only does religious hatred scar one of the four components of the United Kingdom, but that the sectarian divide is institutionalised in its official politics. It embarrasses and offends a sense of (liberal) British self prided on inclusivity and tolerance. The best way is not to try and understand what's happened and happening in Ireland, but ignore it.
As long as there's no violence, out of sight, out of mind.
When you're a leading politician and especially a Prime Minister, the pressure is on to stand for something. And as the real choices in politics truncated to who could best run the Thatcherite/neoliberal settlement, necessity and expediency dictated that one must pretend to be something more than a manager of that consensus. John Major had his Back to Basics campaign, married to the Citizen's Charter and Cones' Hotline wheeze. His Blairness got no less a figure than Anthony Giddens to cook up "The Third Way", the impossibility of marrying market fundamentalism to half-recognisable social democratic objectives. Even Bill Clinton bought into that one. Dave had his Big Society, a convenient celebration of volunteering just as the Tories committed themselves to butchering public services and replacing them with philanthropy and a committed citizenry. Ed Miliband had One Nation. The exception is Jeremy Corbyn, who is yet to fully define himself despite offering a politics that decisively breaks with received wisdom.
In her own way, at least at the rhetorical level, Theresa May also defined herself differently, and now her philosophy has a name: the Shared Society. Looking forward to a major speech on the matter, we know this is so much guff because of her record. In the six months May has been in power she's prevaricated, delayed, prevaricated, and delayed some more. With a dose of control freakery, as noted by Andrew Rawnsley, she's carried on flogging off strategic industry, and has overseen a budget that barely differed from an Osborne effort. May's shared society isn't looking that different from late period Dave, truth be told. And that's before we start talking about the NHS and the declaration of a humanitarian crisis by the crazed militants of the Red Cross. Her talk of dealing with "the shorter life expectancy for those born poor, the harsher treatment of black people in the criminal justice system, the lower chances of white working-class boys going to university, and ... the despicable stigma and inadequate help for those with mental health conditions" remains just talk as long as these crises carry on without the government appearing to care too much about them.
Still, her original address from the steps of Downing Street was perceived as a master stroke from within the Westminster circus. Talk of dealing with everyday injustices, including economic anxiety and security came like a revelation to folks who rub shoulders with working class people only when ordering a latte. But it would be churlish to deny May's speech had significant cut through. Unlike Dave and Osborne who only pretended concern, May sounded like she meant it, that she understood something about the difficulties of modern life. In an uncertain world, she crafted a message pledging certainty, of a national community that has everyone doing their bit and getting their just rewards. This is where the shared society comes in. She defines it as,
A society that doesn’t just value our individual rights but focuses rather more on the responsibilities we have to one another; a society that respects the bonds of family, community, citizenship and strong institutions that we share as a union of people and nations; a society with a commitment to fairness at its heart ... it goes to the heart of my belief that there is more to life than individualism and self-interest. The social and cultural unions represented by families, communities, towns, cities, counties and nations are the things that define us and make us strong. And it is the job of government to encourage and nurture these relationships and institutions where it can, and to correct the injustice and unfairness that divides us wherever it is found.
Had Ed Miliband defined his One Nationism thus, the Tory press would have dubbed him a proto-totalitarian. Yet, from an ideas perspective, the shared society is interesting for three reasons. We know from her long stint in the Home Office that May is a petty-minded authoritarian who, like her predecessors, happily ramped up the government's snooping powers in the name of terror prevention. All throughout her career, May has never been one to celebrate individual sovereignty. Second, she is riding the wave of (English) nationalism. As Wolfgang Streeck has argued, societies that have seen labour movements broken and discourses of resistance buried turn instead to whatever ideological resources are to hand. In this case, nationalism is resurgent because the nation appears eternal vis a vis cultural, political and economic turbulence. Farage exploited noisy, entitled, frightened English nationalism to his advantage, and now May is doing the same - albeit in calmer, more measured (and respectable) tones. And thirdly, her "active government" promises social reform that will build a "great meritocracy". Forget your Ed Miliband, she's channeling Clem Attlee. Again, we'll wait and see about that as there's been nothing beyond a slight smoothing of social security policy.
It's bollocks, but unlike the wonky visions of days gone by it has a certain simplicity to it, one that even newspaper columnists will be able to understand. It promises justice and security, mainstays that should be Labour's, but have proven difficult to meld together and "own" in recent times - the fact May freely speaks this language and is treated seriously goes to show how far our party still has to go. Yes, May suffers from the triple vices of incompetence, dithering and control-freakery, and Brexit could undo her leadership. But her undeserved reputation as a serious grown up rests on this rhetoric, of knowing and understanding the problems of, shock horror, the working class. And most importantly, her apparent no fuss willingness to do something about them.
As promised, let's talk about the so-called progressive alliance, that Labour, the LibDems, Greens, SNP, and Plaid should come to a non-aggression arrangement to maximise the anti-Conservative vote in upcoming by-elections and the next general election (now most unlikely to be next year). This means unpicking 'tribalism'.
Let's start off with a question. Though it has happened at local level on a number of occasions, most Labour people from all wings of the party would react with horror about cutting a deal with the Tories. Why? It isn't a matter of them being "not us". Politics is not a game of football where someone is wedded to one side and affects hatred for designated rivals. On the whole, the reaction against the Tories is because of what they do. We see their policies hammer our people and protect the privileged, and more often than not regardless of the damage they wreak on the fabric of social life. We know they represent a set of interests that ultimately aren't the same, and indeed are opposed to the interests of the people our party represents.
Let's bear that in mind when we come to the Liberal Democrats. Tony Blair liked to flatter them by pretending their party lies within the radical tradition, but that is to evacuate any sense of meaning from the term. The LibDems, historically, represented the less backward elements of the same class the Tories do. When they collapsed and were supplanted by Labour in the 1920s, they faded away into electoral obscurity. Yet, philosophically and in terms of its core constituency, they were not qualitatively different from the Tories. The Liberals as were had sharp policy differences with the Conservatives from time to time, but these were of degree and not of kind. And we don't need to play thought experiments or dredge up records in local government. They might have prevented some utterly mad Tory policies while in coalition, but their time with ministerial portfolios saw through cuts to social security, the doubling down of market mechanisms in the public sector (especially in the NHS), and a complete abandonment of their Keynes-lite strategy for getting the British economy moving again. They are hostile to trade unions acting politically and, lest we forget, that nice "lefty" Tim Farron is open to the idea of going in with the Tories again. Lovely.
The SNP and Plaid Cymru, on paper, should be better candidates for a progressive alliance. Leanne Wood is a nice centre left-type with a Trot pedigree to her name. Nicola Sturgeon's closet has no Fourth Internationalist skeletons, alas, but apart from independence you could make a case for the Scottish government being more consistently social democratic than the Labour administrations preceding it. What's more, the SNP had its own Corbyn-style surge long before Corbs lent his name to politics-defining membership surges. In one sense, the SNP is entirely different to what it was before the Scottish referendum. Most of the left are there. Most of the progressive vote are there. And yet, two stubborn political realities remain. Despite approaching the same number of members as the Tories, it has made little difference to the SNP politically. It remains pretty much the same outfit with the same people in charge. Scottish radicalism hasn't remade the party in the same way Corbynism has upended everything in Labour. That, ultimately, has something to do with the character of the SNP as a bourgeois nationalist party. The basic political subject it's trying to organise is the nation, and in capitalist societies the interests of the nation are defined in impeccably bourgeois terms: growing GDP, low inflation rates, balance of payments, the successful competition over markets and so on. True, the SNP offer 'nice' civic, left-tinged nationalism and not the ugly rubbish long associated with Britishness and Englishness in particular, yet it too cannot resist defining itself against the backward, Tory-voting xenophobes south of the border. Nor seeking to exacerbate divisions in Labour, its long time rival and potential future nemesis. Perhaps I'm old fashioned for sticking to the view that nationalism is the passage to division and the domination of politics by unscrupulous scoundrels. What an idle whimsy, eh? The same applies to Plaid as well. While seeking more autonomy for Wales in a federal-style arrangement, which seem entirely sensible to me, for PC it's a step toward independence and ultimately they organise on that basis, albeit much less successfully than their friends in the north. For us, interests and solidarity exits across borders. For the SNP and Plaid, that fundamentally threatens their project.
And the Greens. Of the four parties they are perhaps the best candidates for an alliance with Labour. Our party arose to prosecute the claims and interests of working people in capitalism, and green parties respond to the environmental despoliation that same system has accumulated in slag heaps, rubbish tips, and long-term changes to the climate. Both are potentially and imminently radical because of the adversarial position they have vis conventional economics. Where Labour and the Greens differ is at the level of constituency. Labour is powered by working people generally - historically most of the "traditional" working class and the middle class in the professions and public sector, and now increasingly by the networked worker. The Greens by small business and also sections of the middle class. Unlike the other parties, there is a tension between these constituencies but no fundamental opposition. An alliance that wouldn't lead to political catastrophe a la Italy's Democratic Party is possible here. Thing is, it's completely pointless. The Greens didn't cost Labour the general election. A deal would benefit the Greens - Caroline Lucas would remain unmolested in Brighton - but where's the quid pro quo for the much larger would-be partner?
There's nothing wrong with members from different parties working together where interests are episodically aligned, but a tie up is fraught with serious difficulties. There are significant sections in each, particularly Labour and the SNP who wouldn't countenance such a thing. Sinking differences into an amorphous nice-politics-for-nice-anti-Tory-people formation is a recipe for splits. The second problem is, well, the national card. The Tories proved adept at playing it in 2015 and, unfortunately, it did frighten the horses in too many marginals. A full blown alliance unhappily risks stirring the rank politics of English nationalism and anti-elite populism. Remember, the consequences of its recent outing hasn't been positive. And lastly, an alliance between irreconcilable parties won't fly because of the interests underpinning them. So-called tribalism recognises this truism of politics. No matter how crude its expression, such dumb materialism is more advanced than "enlightened" views stubbornly refusing to understand politics beyond free floating ideas.
New academic year, a new season with the Sociology Research Seminar Series at the University of Derby. Opening for the semester was Baris Cayli, Research Fellow in Criminology with his paper, ‘Zones of Fragility: Outlaws and the Forms of Violence in the Ottoman Empire’. This was one of a series of interlocking projects spun off from Baris’s work in the old Ottoman archives scattered about its former territory. These range from the Grand Vizier’s office and Imperial decrees on foreign affairs hosted in Istanbul, to smaller collections of correspondence and edicts from governors and local officials. The basic question guiding the paper was how the structure of the empire was shaped by violence, or rather how the sporadic violence undertaken by bandits, outlaws, and rebels – regardless of subjective intentions – contributed to this shaping of the empire.
Received histories of the Ottoman Empire, particularly from the 19th century on to its eventual collapse after the First World War was one of decline and gradual dismemberment by the European Great Powers and newly independent Balkan states. Pressed by imperialism and colonialism from without, the Ottomans faced instability thanks to the spread of national consciousness among subject peoples, and perpetual cycles of tension and revolt around land ownership and tax, the latter varying enormously across the empire’s territory. This was symptomatic of a weak central state and high levels of autonomy for governors. Effectively, they comprised petty states within a state and was seldom in touch with the imperial centre. This itself was a consequence of poor and/or non-existent infrastructure. In TE Lawrence’s First World War memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he notes it was quicker and easier to move reinforcements from London to the Palestine front than it was for the Ottomans to transfer forces from Constantinople to the same.
A consequence of this ramshackle state structure was its lack of immediate presence. There was no social fabric as such to support Ottoman rule, little or no identification with the centre. Issues of hegemony and consent, traditionally bound up with socialist strategy in the advanced countries were absent because the structures underpinning them were absent. This meant in towns and villages throughout the empire, there was no rule of law. Instead there was sporadic and unrestrained violence on the part of bandits. The archives talk about Bosnian outlaws sometimes, but not always, influenced by nationalist ideas who would sack towns and villages. It follows that if a state cannot acquit itself of the very basic function of protecting life and property of subject populations, then its potency, power, and legitimacy becomes much diminished.
This is where Baris introduced his notion of zones of political fragility. These are simply spaces where political violence occurs. Likewise, zones of social fragility are locales in which non-political violence are regular occurrences. Where they proliferate, antipathy towards central authority grows. And the second consequence is that terrorised subject populations may surrender to outlaw groups, form alliances with others, and/or take on a nationalist coloration. In short, fragile zones act as centrifugal pressures that prise away national minorities and territories. This dynamic seems to have been at work especially in the Balkan provinces previously under Ottoman control. However, while political and non-political violence contributes to this fragility, and therefore should be viewed holistically in its consequences for state authority, Baris was clear that this is only a provisional concept and requires refinement through the examination of comparative cases.
In the subsequent questions, Baris was asked about how does one differentiate from political and non-political violence? Especially as criminal enterprise can be carried out for political reasons, as well as sustain political violence (an example that immediately jumped to mind was of a youthful Stalin and his bank-robbing scrapes in the Caucasus that helped fund the Bolsheviks). For Baris, the definition just concerns goals, though in practice they may entail similar consequences. With Stalin, for example, the criminality of his enterprise was wedded to political objectives. For most bank robbers, that obviously isn't the case, but a multiplication of this violence for whatever subjective reason results in the fragility zone problem.
While far from a modern state on the 19th century/early 20th century West European model, I asked if hegemony was entirely absent from the Ottoman Empire and if the central apparatus and the constellation of forces bound up with the empire at least promulgate an official ideology and inculcated discourses of consent? Baris replied that its internal looseness (provincial governors often paid none of their tax take to the central treasury) meant such a project had only a limited scope. Plus for consent to be obtained, it needs to acquit the basic function of providing security - a point long noted by Max Weber and the state as the repository of the monopoly of legitimate force. However, as the empire was officially Islamic, while there were degrees of religious freedom for subject populations Muslims were officially privileged. However, late in the day it did try and introduce citizenship laws that guaranteed all subjects certain rights and obligations. The problem here is that in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith empire in which there was already a legally privileged population, stripping those advantages away stirred up resentment among what would be its social bedrock. It was also difficult to enforce. Given the autonomy of the periphery, different areas were ruled alternately by imperial law, Sharia law, Christian covenants, and other local political and religious permutations of both. Not only were these sources of existing tension, a hegemony-building edict from the outside would do exactly the opposite. The state, rather than placing itself as an arbiter of tension becomes its origin, therefore contributing to the dynamics rending the empire.
Overall, an interesting start to the 2016-17 round of Sociology seminars.
One man is responsible for today's fiasco, and that is the Prime Minister. Or, thankfully, the soon-to-be-ex-Prime Minister. Dave joins Neville Chamberlain and Anthony Eden - coincidentally Tories too - in the hall of notorious failures. For his political vanity, for narrow party advantage over a hard right insurgency that began petering out before he conceded them the EU referendum, Dave has inflicted incalculable damage on the British economy, on the politics of this country, and goes into retirement trailing a bitter legacy of division and hopelessness. Well done that man. Well fucking done.
There's a lot to be written about the referendum - the character of the people voting leave, what it means for mainstream politics, whether UKIP will do a SNP, and the looming no confidence vote in Jeremy Corbyn. But here, while he's still relevant, I want to concentrate on Dave's miserable figure and the trajectory of his career. And there are a couple of things that stand out. As I've argued before, actually Dave is a proven weak leader but his sole discernible talent is to look the part. Hence when politics is aestheticised and image is everything, that is able to cover for his legion of faults. This brings us to his big problem. Dave, you see, is an addict. A gambling addict, and this frame can be usefully employed to think about his career.
Dave's brinkmanship started small. Upon his election in 2005, he put the party in the bath to hose down the muck of ages and the nasty, bigoted toxins the Tories had accumulated. A lot of members didn't like it, and off they went. At the end of it we had a shiny new entity. "Vote blue go green" was the slogan as our youthful PM-to-be preached compassionate conservatism and made out with huskies in the Arctic. It wasn't long before Dave faced his true test. Going up against a wounded and flailing Gordon Brown, he took a chance breaking with the Tory commitment to matching Labour spending and used the window opened by the financial crisis to oppose the measures necessary to save Britain's banking system. Economically, it was as bankrupt as Lehman's, but politically Dave skillfully - with some help from his media friends - turned a crisis of capitalism into a crisis of public spending. Matters were helped by Brown and Darling deciding that the route back to normality meant passing through a period of austerity. Dave gambled by staking out new political ground, and won by setting the terms of the debate.
The next big gamble came shortly after. His "big, open and comprehensive offer" to the Liberal Democrats to join him in a coalition government was a novelty, and commentators - including not a few Labour MPs - were bowled over by this new "cooperative" approach to politics. In practice, there was little qualitatively different between it and any other Conservative government. But Dave reasoned rightly that the LibDems were hungry for ministerial office, and would cling on for as long as they could knowing another chance may never come their way. A recipe for chaos it was not.
Dave's next big stake was the war of equal marriage. Trying to give the Tories a progressive gloss after implementing their first round of cuts, Dave more or less purged the party of its remaining bigots and homophobes. Tory associations folded and UKIP, then presenting itself as a libertarian party, promptly junked these principles and cleaved to the old school to hoover them up as recruits. A risky gamble because a declining Tory party could ill-afford to dispense with activists, and it gave UKIP the shot in the arm it needed.
His gambling appetite was now whetted. While it had simmered away for a while, Scottish independence wasn't a decisive issue then in Scotland. But with the SNP in power, he thought to lance the boil and go down in history as the British PM to see off Scottish nationalism. I don't believe he was far-sighted or Machiavellian enough to believe the referendum would destroy Scottish Labour, but this was the happy consequence as, somehow, the project fear approach of Better Together won the referendum at the price of immeasurably strengthening the SNP and Scottish nationalism in general. It doesn't matter, as what happened in Scotland allowed him to play the English identity card and scaremonger enough voters in swing seats to grant him a slim majority.
The problem with problem gamblers is, unfortunately, they don't know when to stop. Fresh out of the Scottish referendum, Dave sought to neutralise the UKIP vote in the marginals by offering the in/out EU referendum. Fully expecting it to be negotiated away in subsequent coalition talks that didn't happen, the majority landed him with a promise he'd be hard pressed to wriggle out of. What raised the stakes even higher is Dave went away to Europe with the promise to renegotiate the UK's relationship, and came back with thin gruel. He gambled this would be enough, along with a project fear-style 'it's the economy, stupid' campaign to win again and secure his place in the pantheon of all-time greats. His gamble failed. For the sake of a small number of votes from a minor party in decline, he was happy to risk everything. With the risks so high for a stake so small, why didn't someone make an intervention earlier? It's too late. He lost, and - ironically - it will disproportionately be those who voted against him who will pay the cost of exiting.
Dave's career is one gamble after another, gradually growing in risk and increasingly marked by personal vanity. I always knew Dave would get found out one day, and when that happened he'd be finished. He has, and a dislocated and dysfunctional country is what it took.
Dave and co were hoping a spot of economic determinism would see them through the EU referendum. Unfortunately for them, and all our people who stand to lose should Britain exit, this is proving not to be the case. Drawing deep from a poisoned well sunk by tabloid after politician after demagogue, Leave have doused the referendum campaign in xenophobic and anti-immigration toxicants. As my comrade Lawrence Shaw puts it:
EU referendum debate round-up of the last six months in case you missed it:
Immigration. Immigration. Immigration. Foreigners. Muslims. Immigration. Taking all "our" jobs. Immigration. Immigration. Two whole aisles of Polish food in Tesco's. Immigration. Country is too small. Immigration. Immigration. Foreigners. Immigration. Changing our culture. Immigration. Immigration. Immigrants. Asylum Seekers. They can do anything they want. Immigration. Immigration. Terrorists. Immigration.
And don't forget political correctness. I mean you're not even allowed to talk about immigration these days.
How has this come to pass? Unfortunately, it goes back to this blog's old warhorse: labour movement weakness. The reason why blue-on-blue dominates the airwaves and are hegemonic in their respective camps isn't because Jeremy Corbyn is rubbish at media, it's because - pound for pound - the social forces underpinning big business and finance are so much stronger, cohesive, and assertive. It's a political situation arrived at after the breaking of the labour movement in the 1980s, the promotion of economic and domestic policy designed to continually disperse the sorts of solidarities that underpin socialist politics, and the letting loose of free market fundamentalism across ever greater areas of social life have eroded relationships and replaced them with impersonal transactions. The election of Jeremy to the Labour leadership has shifted the terms of debate, arguably contributing to the government's litany of U-turns and defeats, but underneath the question remains whether a counter-movement to the further weakening of our constituency is occurring. Doubling the size of the party and getting another trade union aboard is but a baby step in the direction socialist politics must travel.
Because our movement is marginal, there was no chance of leading Remain or Leave on our terms. You just have to look at the grotesqueries of your John Manns and Kate Hoeys peddling unvarnished Farageisms, and the idiocy of Alistair Darling lining up with Osborne - again - promising to kneecap pensions and public services. Our people, at least nominally, doing the do on their terms. The question flowing from this is what would be best for our people and the rebuilding of our movement. Or, using the logic of lesser-evilism, what would be least worst.
Here, I think so-called "Lexit" comrades have been cavalier with the dangers pregnant in the situation. Okay, assuming Remain wins, little would change domestically. The Tory Party would carry on, albeit damaged and its government crippled for the foreseeable, and stagger along its path of collapsing membership. UKIP too, also on a downward spiral, would also carry on, albeit under reduced circumstances. The stock market and the pound rallies, and it's back to politics as normal in all its mendacity and beggar-thy-neighbouring. What an inspiring vision to rally around! Though it is worth noting one thing. A Remain vote in the minds of millions, whether they're for or against, is a climax of a culture war. The EU is not an internationalist utopia or anything approaching the sort, but nevertheless and no matter how mistaken they are it is perceived as a repository of hope, a modernity beyond Europe's tragic history of belligerent states, and is a symbol of cooperation across nationalities. It is also these same reasons that motivates opposition to the EU among kippers and the Tory hard right. To this technocratic futurity we find opposed Germanophobia, empire nostalgia, libertarian fantasy, insularity and, of course, the fear of Johnny Foreigner. We've recently peered down one wormhole, so lets go through another: Leave are pushing Britain toward a mini-America with gun controls.
Just think about it for a moment. If Leave wins, who wins? The most backward forces in British society do. The Europhobic Tory right, UKIP, and every two-bit racist outfit. The most socially useless, noncompetitive, and regressive elements of British capital. A strengthening of nationalism - and I'm not talking the fluffy civic kind pushed by the SNP - is likely. Increased hostility to migrant workers. More scapegoating. More blaming the EU for our failings because they presume to "punish" the UK for leaving. These are the self-same forces who cry foul about Osborne's kneecapping budget today, but will be the ones implementing it with relish tomorrow as they squeeze the cost of exiting out of the remaining social wage.
Some comrades of a more economistic bent think exit would destroy the Tories once and for all. We watched Amber Rudd smacking down Boris Johnson. We've seen Michael Gove rubbish his chancellor's claims about the economic dangers. The campaign has played out as an internal party feud with intervals staffed by the other mainstream parties. Yes, an exit would mean no more Dave and the thwarting of Osborne's ambitions, but would that necessarily mean the end of the Tories? Just because the Conservatives are the stupid party doesn't mean they're stupid. Remain Tory MPs are as likely to leave their party as Progress-types are Labour for as long as First-Past-the-Post rules the day. Yes, they might be pains in the arse for an incoming government headed by Johnson, Gove, IDS, and Farage, but the party is likely to limp on in much the same manner as it would after a Remain victory.
Oh, did I just mention Nigel Farage in the same breath? Yep. Because one lesser-spotted dynamic in play is what happens to UKIP in an exit scenario. With a Tory Party dominated by Leave and, in all likelihood, led by Johnson after a perfunctory leadership contest, there is a good proportion of UKIP members for whom the purple party is no longer required. How many would come back and how many voters would follow ex-Tories returning to the fold? I don't know, but far from weakening the Tories they could re-emerge from the chaos of the referendum campaign as a populist, self-consciously patriotic party. Stranger things have happened, and this is more likely than a Tory split fantasy.
And then there is a further, darker scenario. Everyone who pays attention to politics and the European Union know that whatever deal post-exit Britain is able to get, access to the single market will be contingent on accepting the free movement of labour. There is not one single member state that would countenance Britain having the rights of access without the responsibilities attending it. The promises Johnson et al make about immigration now are not worth the air drawn to utter them. Mass migration will continue, and then what? With the promises abandoned and politics seemingly unable to do anything about it, there opens a space for the kinds of forces who are presently marginal but have mass followings on the Continent. Leave the EU to become more like the EU?
The old politics are dying. The constituencies of the previous order are dissolving, but the same ugly politics are as pernicious as ever. Ultimately, this referendum is a choice between what we have now with its problems and opportunities, or a "crisis" trending toward the further empowerment of the hard right, of xenophobia, of nationalism and hate politics. There is no "left exit", only a step into the abyss.
It caters for all tastes. The smells appeal to some and turn others off. It can and is served up overcooked and underdone. What's baking in the oven? Ideology. In a Britain-shaped tin.
For the first time last night, the residents of Chateau BC turned the dial to BBC One for the grand final of The Great British Bake Off, a phenomenon that's less a popular TV programme and more a cult for the 13.4m people who watched it. Having studiously avoided it, as a (former) non-watcher GBBO is impossible to escape. The show plays a fantastic Twitter game, the press are obsessed, and the News at Ten and Newsnight both featured the victorious Nadiya Hussain on their roster of the day's newsworthy, um, news.
Once we had it on, I couldn't help but be drawn in. Like the Sidebar of Shame, but without the foul aftertaste, watching the contestants hurrying hither, scurrying thither as they produced the most sumptuous food porn imaginable was compulsive. You couldn't taste the layered pastries or the cornucopia of cake, but it was almost as good. The camera work was every bit as explicit as the infamous M&S adverts of old. This was filth for foodies. But like all good game shows, for that is what GBBO is; tension and drama is the hook. The fun is rooting for your favourite and investing their travails with your hopes (and everyone was backing Nadiya, right?). So before we take the cake knife to the show, the first rule to peeling back the sugary layers of ideology is to note that above all GBBO works because it's entertaining.
Of course, entertaining itself is a loaded term. What we consider entertainment is fully loaded with cultural codes of acceptability/unacceptability and, of course, has a history. The experience of being entertained is underpinned by what the PoMos used to call intertextuality. To get a text, in this case a beloved TV programme, it demands the reader/viewer has a familiarity with genre, the cultural codes the show draws on, and something of the wider zeitgeist - fashionable structures of feeling and popular cultural practices currently enjoying wide affirmation and participation.
Let's lose the cultural studies babble. There are two important matters GBBO addresses. One almost banal and done-to-death, and the other less so. For right wingers, Bake Off was a manifestation of the dreaded PC culture. Even Ian the LibDem was treated like a human being, for crying out loud. This is socialist propaganda through the medium of chocolatey noms, a meringue-tipped missile threatening the last bigoted redoubts with tolerance and respect. How awful. And what really riles the right is the show's appropriation of the quintessentially English garden fete. The marquee is redolent of tombola, brick-a-brak sales, Hoopla with the vicar, and definitely no non-white people. Of course, Bake Off isn't cooking up full communism or anything of the sort. It articulates the contemporary sense of Britishness, a multinational identity that tries to include everyone who identifies as British, regardless of their background. It's pointless to speculate whether the inclusivity of GBBO is intentional. The point is that it reflects the experiences of increasing numbers of people. Hence why the unreconstructed xenophobic right hate it. It's less a statement of intent than a representation of what really is. Seeing a Muslim woman win by out-Englishing "proper" English people over 10 weeks rubs them up the wrong way. It reminds them that they've already lost.
The second key GBBO prop is that structure of feeling that, want for a better phrase, you might call 'cupcake conformity'. Back when I was a horny handed son of toil doing working in a factory, we had a peculiar tradition of birthday boys/girls bringing in cakes on their special day (shatloads of doughnuts when it was my turn, if you must know). It was a nice gesture of sharing that helped bring the twilight shift a ripple of harmony inbetween the effing and blinding, the bitching, and fallings outs. Fast forward, the provision of cake - usually of the cuppy kind - at managerial meetings/large gatherings is so ubiquitous that HR manuals surely must contain chapters on confectionery provision. It knocks the sharp corners off bad news. Discussing the possibility of redundancies and/or increased workloads seem less worse if the meeting papers are accompanied by a plate of fairy cakes. Food, of course, is often an accomplice of sociability. By giving cake, we can pretend the power structures that rule our lives at work are as fluffy as the delicious sponge. The employer/employee relation, an inequitable and exploitative fact of life for all capitalist societies, tastes much sweeter wrapped in a paper case. The better the cake, the duller the pain.
With its ubiquity in the workplace, it's little wonder we're living in the age of the March of the Cake. Going through a break up? Have some cake. Bricking it before the interview? Have some cake. Depressed? Have some cake. It's not just that human beings are sugar-loving beasties (which we generally are). The cake has moved from just being a treat to a therapeutic treatment. Huxley's Brave New World had soma, we've got chocolate gateaux. And because cake's ubiquitous, it would be shocking had GBBO never taken off.
GBBO works because it marries genuinely entertaining drama and suspense to a sense of inclusiveness, of reflecting and promoting British unity around a cake tray of goodies.
We now know what happened, but why did it happen? How was it that an election campaign characterised by two different approaches, one upbeat, one defeated-looking; one that had momentum and enthusiasm and the other little more than desperate personal attacks, climaxed as it did? The result, which was unexpectedly very bad for Labour, is going to be scrutinised and analysed for years to come. But over the coming months dominant narratives about what happened will emerge in labour movement circles, and the story we tell about the shock catastrophe of 2015 will heavily condition the stories the leadership contenders in waiting tell and the subsequent trajectory of the party. A lot turns on getting this right - not merely the outcome of the next election, which will be difficult after the coming boundary review anyway, but also the viability of the party itself. Here are some thoughts that are not exhaustive by any means. If I don't mention some issues, that doesn't necessarily mean they're being ruled out.
First things first, we have to look to ourselves why things went wrong: the political technologies of modern campaigning, and the huge strategic blunders. There's no use blaming the Greens or the SNP - that way lies the road to avoid asking tough questions. Neither will blaming the media do, though of course there is a huge democratic and accountability deficit when so much is concentrated in the hands of wealthy right wing tax dodgers. Nor do I think changing the programme Labour stood on, whether to the left or to the right, would have got different result. There is something about our tactics and our strategy that was off.
The size and efficiency of Labour's ground game was impressive, even to the extent of contacting more voters in Scotland than the mammoth-sized SNP. 200,000 members, five million contacts, a campaign that, if you were close up, fizzed with energy. And there is the problem. I think Labour had a very good campaign. More or less everyone who actively participated probably feels the same. From the outside though, not so much. Turnout was at 66.1%, a measly one per cent greater than last time. If it wasn't for the "special circumstances" in Scotland it might have proven less than 2010. Yet again, a third of eligible adults completely tuned out from what mainstream politics had to say. The messaging, more of which shortly, didn't cut through. The greater range of more viable electoral choices failed to engage. Even hitting areas notorious for low turnouts produced little in the way of joy. Yet none of this registered in the campaign at the time. On the day, my impression of the campaign in Stafford (where I'd mostly been volunteering this year) was excellent. Turnout in Labour areas looked good. Speaking to comrades elsewhere gave me a sense that the same was true everywhere else. Social media provided similar anecdotes. And yet, we were wrong. As insiders speaking to other insiders, listening to other insiders, and following Twitter feeds plastered with encouraging words from, yes, more insiders, we got caught up in a campaign bubble of our own.
This leads to the second technical problem. The best antidote to self-referentialism is to talking to people outside that little enclosed world. And activists did that in their tens of thousands. So never mind the polls failing to pick up the Tory/UKIP swing, why is it that the largest sustained canvassing operation for many years didn't catch the vibes that must have existed out there. It it simply shy Tory syndrome? I'm not buying it. Sure, some people might say Labour to just get rid of an annoying doorstepper, but in such numbers? There has to be something about the questions we ask when activists go and bother voters. Our database, Contact Creator, records information (with regional variation) about voting intention, previous votes, and - sometimes - whether the punter prefers a Labour or Tory government. Experienced activists are able to to glean this information using whatever talking and listening strategies they think appropriate at the time, but others - including some who should know better - jump in with both feet. "Hello there madam, it's general election time, are you going to vote Labour?" The party used to record the strength of the pledge which, for reasons unknown, was done away with. Maybe the powers that be believed this was too subjective and so dispensed with it whereas it seemed like a potentially useful tool for identifying soft supporters and the level of hostility - time for a comeback? Nevertheless, we need to look at the quality of our "conversations" and work out why accurate information was not getting relayed, and why it didn't pick up a turn away from Labour.
Also, we must be weary of fetishising activism. Turning out thousands of members and supporters every weekend is important and necessary, but it is not sufficient. No amount of door knocking is going to turn Bill Cash's Stone constituency red. Political strategy is key, and this is where we made a catastrophic mistake.
Going all utilitarian and starting from the premise of the greatest good for the greatest number, one strong argument against Scottish independence was 'what about England?' The fear - and I certainly feared it - was that a yes vote in Scotland would have galvanised a poisonous English reaction that could have blighted politics in the rest-of-UK for years to come. What were the needs of five million vis a vis a population 11 times larger? Independence didn't happen, but the SNP took off for reasons. The Tories, eager to seize anything to shift polling in their favour, started hammering the spectre of Scottish nationalism for all it was worth. "The gravest constitutional crisis since the abdication!" wailed Theresa May. The SNP are going to rinse the English taxpayer. They threaten our security and promise full communism. You've seen and heard the nonsense pouring from Tory mouthpieces. They would stop it. The Tories would save the union from the bag-piping Bolsheviks and tartan Trots, and keep Britain. As one woman put it to me on the campaign trail, "I think Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon are dangerous people ... he has some really silly idea on getting rid of our nuclear subs in Scotland." This woman was a low paid residential carer for disabled children. She didn't follow politics, but it was a message that cut through, a message that played up the fears one falls pray to when living a precarious existence fraught with insecurities.
Here was the problem. The SNP not only stole Labour's social democratic wardrobe, they added to it swish items like hope. They allowed its supporters leeway to project their own desires onto their canvass. Labour's response in Scotland was basically "don't let the Tories in". The Conservatives whipped up English nationalism, suggesting the SNP were purveyors of existential terror. If you wanted to save the union and get a fair deal for England, vote Tory. Labour? "Save the NHS!" We had nothing to say, nothing to counter it. And the evidence? Look at those UKIP vote shares. Long held to hurt the Tories more than us, in seats Labour should have easily picked up Tory majorities increased, and this was because blue leaning voters supporting UKIP returned home in number while red-tinged kippers stayed put. To use the old vernacular, Labour lapsed into economism. The Tories took hold of the question of how we're ruled while Labour neglected it completely. And we need to. It's not as if Labour has nothing to say on this topic. Not only was the party responsible for a more inclusive 'official' Britishness during its time in government, it saved the union. Ed Miliband (remember him?) once made a great deal of fuss about One Nationism. He did it in a wonkish way, but at least it indicated an understanding of the emotive power national identity has. Yet, where was this? Where were we as champions of the union, as the people responsible for securing a popular mandate for a voluntary union between Scotland and the rest of the UK? Nowhere. Labour, the party that saved the UK, was easily painted by the Tories as the party that wanted to destroy it. And the fear mongering worked.
We need to start thinking seriously about England and Englishness. It is seen as something backward, thoroughly imperial, small-minded, a little bit racist by the left. I know, I'm of this view myself. However, Englishness doesn't have to be like this. It needs to change and we have to be the people who shape it for the better, because if we don't the Tories and UKIP will continue monopolising it. In British politics, where Scotland goes England tends to follow. The struggle against the poll tax and the breaking of the political mold into multi-party politics. In both, the latter followed the former. My worst nightmare is this. We elect a new leader and carry on carrying on framing policies, whatever they may be, as technocratic. If values come into it, fairness is about as far as it goes. England and Englishness gets ignored because, after all, it's the economy, stupid. And come 2020 Labour gets steamrollered because, again, the Tories and UKIP exploit the fear and insecurity of the many by appealing to English nationalism.
Our biggest misstep since the Scottish referendum was this. Let's not do it again.
There's not much left the Tories can do to turn the polls in their favour. Attacking Ed Miliband personally hasn't worked, and the more it's done the more credible he appears. Neither has spraying around the cash in what, at best, can only be described as a series of fiscally incontinent pledges. With the momentum appearing to cohere around Labour, and the party in front on the key indicators health, immigration, education, and social security, you can see the desperation emanating from Dave and co's TV appearances. Patriotism, as Samuel Johnson exclaimed, is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Lo and behold, it's that our Tory friends now turn to in lieu of anything else.
The thing is, their attack lines of the last few days, the 'coalition of chaos' nonsense, of a lefty party being propped up by an even leftier party isn't even new. Back in early March, which seems like a foreign country already, Dave was mouthing off about a Labour/SNP deal. "You could end up with an alliance between the people who want to bankrupt Britain and the people who want to break up Britain", says the man waving £25bn worth of unfunded promises. However, the Tories think they're on to a winner this time. After spending time with focus groups (which is a problematic method for finding out what "real people" think), they've come to the conclusion that sufficient numbers of voters would be concerned if the SNP were to use their leverage to fleece the English taxpayer. If you put it to your focus groups in those terms, it's hardly shock, horror.
There is something to this though. Nationalism by its very nature is divisive. Our friend Nicola Sturgeon, for example, might hold to a nice civic nationalism in which anyone identifying as a Scot is welcome (in itself, not different from the contemporary recasting of British nationalism) but it still creates an in group and out group that pays no respect to the class underpinnings of social democratic/labourist politics, which the SNP have adopted with no small success. As the Scottish independence party, its 'other' is the multinational state that lays claim to majority of these isles. That implicitly means the majority shareholder of that construct: England. It's a politics whose vision of the good society is contingent on separating from us down in the warmer climes. Unsurprisingly, it feeds the deeply anxious beast that is English nationalism. The very idea of the SNP extracting special favours for Scottish budgets at the English taxpayers' expense is something the Tories are banking on. They talk up the SNP to stoke a resentful Englishness - never minding that they're imperilling the very union they profess to love. The main question, however, is will it get traction?
Undoubtedly it will get some sort of an echo. Those tending toward UKIP might be tempted. Voters who were in the habit of giving electoral time to the BNP by way of a protest too. Also layers of people who don't pay close attention to politics, but occasionally pick up a bit of messaging. Among those who have been softened up by years of propaganda against benefits cheats and immigrants, it addresses the interplay between hard-done-to taxpayer and workers-as-martyrs. It will niggle and nag at people, snap at their thoughts, and make them think twice about voting Labour or supporting UKIP. Is that really the case though? So far, painting Ed Miliband as the dolewaller's champion hasn't worked, nor have the dire warnings of economic catastrophe. Also, if you want to get into the scaremongering business, Labour has a much bigger weapon in the Tory record on the NHS than the blues have with constitutional jiggery pokery.
Nevertheless, to their credit the SNP and Labour both moved to quash this attack before Dave reheated it this week. In the leaders' debates Nicola Sturgeon has somewhat successfully detoxified English expectations of what the SNP are about. And for his part, Ed Miliband continues to rule out a coalition - it looks like his favoured approach, assuming Labour forms a minority administration, will be to forge his own policy agenda and dare the other parties to vote it down. There's no way, for example, the SNP would not support those recognisably social democratic aspects of Labour's programme, nor would the Tories say no to Trident replacement. Also, if the Tories want to play the narrow nationalist card they could lose as much as they gain. Their esteemed lordships Norman Tebbit and Micheal Forsyth are of this opinion, and it cedes crucial 'one nation' ground to Ed Miliband too - a point not lost on the Labour leader. And if they really want to throw in the nationalist card, UKIP can beat them at that game every time.
In all, there are not many more places the Tories can go. As Labour runs with the NHS this week and living standards the next, as their village idiot is embroiled in another scandal, time is running out for the Tories. And if they lose, their appalling campaign merely prefaces the death agonies to come.
