The Sunday Times' latest poll has the Tory lead down to 2% which, even if not reproduced uniformly in a general election, would produce a Labour minority government. The change is produced by a drop in the Tories' support from 39% to 37%, and a rise for Labour from 33% to 35%, thus cutting a six point lead to a 2 point lead. The change in each party's standing is in the margin of error (this is how it works, right?), so this probably an outlier. But it does fit into a broader trend of Labour recovery, and it does add to the indications that the Tories' lead was always fragile, and their support reluctant. Polls have shown that 82% of voters want 'change' in the government, but just over a third of voters think the Tories are that change. Some commentators had wondered if the entertaining pseudo-revelations of Blairite gossip columnist Andrew Rawnsley would land a fatal blow on the Brown government. This is possibly because of a natural tendency to overestimate the prestige in which the public hold their profession. But Brown's alleged personality defects probably only register in the public mind as the first vaguely interesting thing that has ever been known about him. And I can't help thinking that it helps Brown to remind people of his long overdue coup against his emetic predecessor.

Another thing to bear in mind is that Yougov has consistently given Labour a better rating than other polls such as Angus Reid and ICM in the recent period. On the other hand, Yougov also has a reputation for accuracy as a result of more closely predicting election results than other agencies, so my suspicion is that the Tory leads have been exaggerated in other polls. Also of interest is the fact that on several important indicators, particularly the economy, the Tories have lost a hard-won advantage. The attacks on Tories as spending slashers, upper class scum, millionaires out to reduce taxes on the rich, etc., is working. 'Class war', though denounced by the Tories, some Blairites, and every respectable newspaper columnist and leader-writer in the land, is an effective electoral strategy.

Interestingly, the Tories may have been following the advice of MigrationWatch in pushing some dog-whistling about immigration, despite strenuous denials that the issue is a central theme of theirs. Essentially, they want to allow the grass-roots to use the issue as much as possible, without tarnishing the national campaign with racism in the way that the disastrous 2005 campaign was. Previous polling shows that this is the one issue on which a plurality trusts the Tories to do what the majority want. They don't trust them to fix schools, look after the NHS or represent all groups in society equitably (whatever that would mean). But they trust them to smack black people around. All these years, all those Cameronite cries of 'change', all the soft focus touchy-feely hug-a-hoody compassionate conservatism sales pitches, and the Tories are still the nasty party. That's not just their Unique Selling Point, it's their only selling point, and they just can't seem to shake it off.

Occasionally, if you open the Economist or the FT, you'll read an argument that runs something like this: people shouldn't be bigoted toward immigrants, because by they do jobs that British workers won't do for pay that British workers won't accept. In a similar way, you often hear members of the Institute of Directors or the CBI explain that 'globalisation' and international outsourcing is an excellent thing because it gives jobs to hard-working people in Third World countries who work much harder, and are much less demanding, than spoilt, recalcitrant Western workers. This is the zenith of ruling class anti-racism, and it's just another argument for exploitation. And it is, of course, deeply racist toward the recipients of its supposed benediction.

I mention this by way of introducing a popular BBC programme that aired the other day, called The Day The Immigrants Left. Featuring the economics commentator from Newsnight:

This programme begins with a series of vox pops involving working class, usually unemployed, white people regurgitating scaremongering headlines. The explicit remit of the programme is to challenge the racism of those workers by proving to them that they couldn't do the jobs that immigrant workers do. It essentially shares the purview of the employers of migrant labour, who explain that they would be out of business if they had to recruit from the local unemployed. Of course there's a heavy selection bias in the programme, because it can only feature those employers of migrant labour who are happy to have their workplaces filmed and have their practises discussed on air. And the programme backs up their claim that the reason they have turned to migrant labour is because, somehow and at some point, local workers just stopped being interested in such jobs and opted for the dole instead. Unemployment, in this light, is voluntary, and arises from some sort of psychic shift in the workforce. The truth behind this convoluted tale is much more simple: the politico-legal oppression of migrant workers makes the cost of their labour (ie, the cost of reproducing their labour) much less expensive, and it usually works to render those workers much more submissive. Employers like that.

Historically, systems of migrant and segregated labour work very similarly in that the costs of reproducing their labour power are reduced by the conditions of oppression. In pre-apartheid South Africa, for example, segregated and migratory labour were combined. African workers were imported from the rural economy, housed in cramped, collective living quarters, fed a standardised diet purchased in bulk, and transported collectively to the mineral mines (where they were admitted only to the most menial jobs on account of 'colour bar' policies). They may have had a family to support, but not in the city centre, and thus the remittance they needed to provide their family with was not elevated by city prices. All of this was much less expensive than the process of feeding, housing and transporting the white workers who lived in individual houses in the Witwatersrand core with high rents, ate in individualised units, had families to support and travelled individually. Hence, the politico-legal oppression of African workers meant that the cost of reproducing their labour was reduced, thus increasing profits.

In today's migration economy, similar principles apply. Migrants often have shaky legal status, even if they have documentation. The TUC points out that even where the legal status of migrant workers is insuperable, they are made unaware of their rights and are usually unable to enforce them short of high-risk militancy. This is a situation that is maintained on purpose as it provides low cost labour to both private and public sector institutions. Most migrants live in cramped, collective accomodation, are transported collectively, eat collectively, and any families they support are based in poorer countries where average incomes and prices are lower, thus reducing the amount of any remittance that needs to be sent. Hence, the cost of their labour is reduced. This means that more jobs are created that otherwise could not possibly have been created. The effect of the last big wave of labour migration in the UK, consistent with this outline, was to increase total employment without decreasing unemployment or job vacancies. New jobs were created because employers could afford the cheaper labour, but the old jobs were not filled because they weren't available to migrant workers and because a set of geographical and skill factors excluded local workers from taking those jobs.

What this means is that British workers could not, even if they were masochistic enough to want to, work in the same conditions that most migrant workers have to accept. To attempt it would be to attempt a perverse hoax in which one abandoned one's status as a British citizen, fled with one's family to a relatively poor country and gained citizenship there, accepted lower living standards, and then left one's family behind to try to get into the UK, legally or otherwise. Oh, and one would have to forget almost everything one had ever learned, because the first sign that one was socialised in the UK might alert any handler or employer that there's something awry. And the only thing that one would learn from such zaniness is that a worker's position in the global labour market is socially produced, maintained by politico-legal institutions and social forces much larger than any individual worker. The cost of labour is determined by all of these factors, and unemployment is not voluntary. The BBC's programme is an argument for exploitation.

One last point. Ruling class ideology on this subject oscillates between two mutually reinforcing poles. On the one hand, there is a patronising concern for the 'white working class', which scapegoats migrants, black people and 'politically correct' policies for the supposed alienation of white workers from politics. On the other hand, there is a condescending endorsement of the 'work ethic' of immigrants, as if their oppression and exploitation was a fact about their personalities or culture. From a different perspective, this attitude also blames immigrants, in this case for being more available for undignified, hyper-exploitative, low-paid labour than their local counterparts. What neither attitude can admit, what the ruling dogma can never allow, is that workers of whatever status have more in common with one another than with their bosses.

Polls are now consistently showing a reduction in the poll lead enjoyed by the Tories from double digits to single digits, now at about 7%. That's still a big lead, but the assumption of the newspaper headline writers is that the Tories need a bigger swing to win an outright majority. Thus, the spectre of a 'hung parliament' has been raised. Martin Wolf of the FT would be happy to see a coalition government, perhaps styled on Germany's recent experience with the 'Grand Alliance'. One can certainly see why: it would enable the political class to consolidate their minority consensus in favour of some form of fiscal contraction, thus edging out all signs of popular dissensus on the question. But it isn't going to happen, and here's why.

Labour's recovery is based substantially on the germinal economic recovery, which is the number one issue concerning voters - 56% say it's one of their top three issues (see figures). But issue number two is - disgracefully, and entirely New Labour's fault - asylum and immigration, with 43% saying it's a top three issue. That issue will almost certaily be prominently pushed in the marginals, where it might actually trump the economy with some middle class voters. And the marginal constituencies are where the Tories need to make gains, not in Labour 'heartlands' where its support is slightly hardening in response to the naked class aggression in Tory policies. The reactionary think-tank MigrationWatch UK got Yougov to carry out a push-poll in the key marginals for Labour and Liberals in the coming election, and it basically found that most of those voters are hysterical over the issue of immigration, trust the Tories most to handle the issue, and would be more likely to vote for any party that promised severe crackdowns. We will undoubtedly see cack-handed attempts by Liberals and Labour to pander to such bigotry, but only the right-wing parties can benefit from this game, and in the marginals the beneficiaries will be the Tories.

Of course, a lot can happen between now and election day. The Greek general strikes may presage a broader European labour insurgency against austerity measures being pushed through by mainstream parties, as the Indie claims today. Anything that pushes the economy and public opposition to spending cuts to the top of the agenda can damage the Tories - unless, of course, that 'thing' is a speculative attack or a new lurch into negative growth. But at the moment, the figures still point to a Tory majority come 6 May.

It's good to see News of the World get a bit of a leathering over its phone tapping from the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. It's also good to see that some MPs are being a little bit less slavish toward the Murdoch oligopoly than is usually the case. The Sun is suitably outraged. There is presumably an element of New Labour hitting back after Rupert shifted his support to the Tories. Previously, the government would have gone to all lengths to protect this newspaper. This is a marginally healthy development, since New Labour's snug relationship with the Murdoch press has been one of the more repellent symptoms of its political degeneration. And I do take a small measure of personal satisfaction in this, since News International once threatened to sic the corporation's legal dogs on me.

However, the report also implicates the Metropolitan Police and PCC in a refusal to investigate the evidence. The PCC was predictably receptive to the Murdoch paper's official version of events. It is a body run by establishment figures and dominated by the newspaper industry, and even though its rulings have no legal power, it generally interprets its codes to accomodate the interests of big publishers (as per the case of Jan Moir's inaccurate homophobic tirade). Meanwhile the police simply refused to pursue the evidence on unsatisfactory grounds (a desire to protect politicians implicated from unwelcome public scrutiny, and a wish to pursue the most substantive charges), the effect of which was to support NotW's "rotten apple" story. This looks very much like parts of the establishment looking after one of its own. The remit of the report is also much broader than issues to do with the phone tapping scandal. The problem of vexatious injunctions being sought, and delaying appeals processes being engaged, to protect powerful entities such as Trafigura from scrutiny, is raised. There is also the issue of how papers conducted themselves during the crusade over a missing white girl (Marilyn, was it? Maudie? Maudlin? Something like that), especially in light of the papers repeatedly losing libel suits to the parents of the missing munchkin. Various recommendations, bearing on the interpretation of privacy laws, the avoidance of illegitimate injunctions, the strengthening of the PCC, and the upholding of 'standards' are made, some of them positive, most of them actually deferring the issue to parliament.

One hesitates to endorse any process that might give apear to give credibility to Britain's onerous libel laws. Any strengthening of privacy laws will undoubtedly be used to silence legitimate criticism, or engage in vexatious law suits against minor publications, bloggers, etc. And any power that the PCC accumulates as a result of these findings is unlikely to be used to the disadvantage of the major publishers, since the PCC a) only responds to a very limited number of cases, b) usually refuses to pursue complaints by members of the public unless some principals involved in the story support the complaint, and c) usually finds in favour of the papers it represents and supposedly regulates. But a number of real problems with the rabid conduct of the scum British press are at least identified, and the present situation in which newspapers can break the law often with impunity, bully usually powerless members of the public, defame victims, harrass minorities and print fanciful and scaremongering lies about them (consider the recent Glen Jenvey scandal, which was exposed by Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads) is patently indefensible.

I couldn't give a toss about the problems of Gordon Brown. He might be a socially dysfunctional and psychologically impaired bully, as the socially dysfunctional psychologically impaired sociopathic Tory scumbags would like us to think, and he might not be. I can't be more even-handed than that. But I am interested in the fact that an entity that is supposedly an anti-bullying charity has popped up to capitalise on claims that Brown is a bully, claiming to have received phone calls from Number 10 staff, and now turns out on closer inspection to be quite a dodgy enterprise.

The Tory Troll believes that the 'charity' may in fact be run by sympathisers with the Conservative Party, which seems likely, but far more interesting is the information he digs up at this link. The gist of it is that the co-founders of the National Bullying Helpline 'charity', Christine and David Pratt, also run a company called HR & Diversity Management. The two entities appear to be in some way connected. The 'charity' protests that it is in no way a profit-generating enterprise for HR & Diversity Management, arguing that the company in fact funds the charity. The trouble is that the charity promises to help employees who are bullied by arranging for an independent investigation of their claim. Since the charity cannot itself carry out such an independent investigation, it has to direct people to seek the services of HR & Diversity Management. Its "FREE" (mark the bold capitals) step-by-step guide instructs employees to approach management and request that a third party (can you tell who it is yet?) be brought in to conduct an independent investigation, assuring them that a positive approach that avoids employment tribunals will be welcomed by managers.

Punchline: once you've approached this 'charity' with your problem, and been referred to HR & Diversity Management, the company won't even necessarily take your side. You see, they have a pitch for employers, which is to the effect that they can spot a vexatious complaint, know how to bolster a company's legal defence, and can get employees to accept an inexpensive third party agreement. They're being employed by the company, you see. It's their interests they're ultimately looking after. So, is it just possible that these people, who some might characterise as grasping cut-throat bastards, (perhaps unfairly, perhaps not), have contrived to take advantage of 'revelations' about Brown being a bad-tempered weirdo by claiming (perhaps falsely, perhaps not), that staff at Number 10 called them up, in order to get more people to foolishly trust the Pratts' 'charity' and thus the Pratts' business with their problems? I wouldn't dream of declaring my opinion on this matter out loud, but I'm certainly thinking it loudly.

Harvard fellow Martin Kramer has a few ideas about how to deal with those pesky Palestinians:

A fellow at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Martin Kramer, has called for "the West" to take measures to curb the births of Palestinians, a proposal that appears to meet the international legal definition of a call for genocide.

Kramer, who is also a fellow at the influential Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), made the call early this month in a speech at Israel's Herzliya conference, a video of which is posted on his blog ("Superfluous young men," 7 February 2010).

In the speech Kramer rejected common views that Islamist "radicalization" is caused by US policies such as support for Israel, or propping up despotic dictatorships, and stated that it was inherent in the demography of Muslim societies such as Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Too many children, he argued, leads to too many "superfluous young men" who then become violent radicals.

Kramer proposed that the number of Palestinian children born in the Gaza Strip should be deliberately curbed, and alleged that this would "happen faster if the West stops providing pro-natal subsidies to Palestinians with refugee status."

Due to the Israeli blockade, the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza are now dependent on UN food aid. Neither the UN, nor any other agencies, provide Palestinians with specifically "pro-natal subsidies." Kramer appeared to be equating any humanitarian assistance at all with inducement for Palestinians to reproduce.

He added, "Israel's present sanctions on Gaza have a political aim -- undermine the Hamas regime -- but if they also break Gaza's runaway population growth, and there is some evidence that they have, that might begin to crack the culture of martyrdom which demands a constant supply of superfluous young men." This, he claimed, would be treating the issue of Islamic radicalization "at its root."

In a previous post, I gave a terse, tart account of some of the Eurocommunist arguments against left-wing challenges to Labour. You might ask why anyone would take electoral advice from Eurocommunists, since their movement saw two of Europe's largest communist parties in the post-war period, the Italian and French parties, suffer precipitous declines. But these arguments were made when the Socialist Alliance was launched, and repeated when Respect was set up. They continue to have some traction in parts of the Left. I was drawing mainly on the arguments of Eric Hobsbawm against the Communist Party left in the 1980s. Hobsbawm was more nuanced than most of his co-ideologues in that he rejected accounts of the 'new middle class' which claimed that the working class was in a minority. These arguments, as E M Wood has suggested, involved "nothing less than a redefinition of class itself", and thus a revision of the whole marxist conceptual apparatus.

Nonetheless, though Hobsbawm was careful not to entertain this wholesale revision, he did share with the Eurocommunists the contention that the working class alone was not a sufficient social basis for socialism to advance, and that an alliance with progressive sectors of the middle class was necessary. This was because that sector of the working class which was ready to support socialism was too small. The working class, even if it formed a majority, was too conservative in the main to swing behind a more radical alternative, so any attempt to create one amounted to dangerous adventurism. All sorts of left-wing theories have been devised to account for the supposed conservatism of the British working class, but it has been assumed to be real enough. Thus, for example, Perry Anderson maintains that the conservatism of British workers has to do with the mediocrity of its bourgeois revolution, which failed to destroy many of the lineaments of feudalism, the emergence of a proletariat before mature socialist theory emerged to guide its practise, which left it vulnerable to combined aristocratic and bourgeois reaction, and the impact of imperialism on the organised left. Without wishing to demur entirely from the latter point, I wish to establish that two sorts of arguments used to bolster reformism - 'middle class majority' and 'conservative working class' - are in error. The former, I maintain, rests on a conflation of class with status, while the latter makes illegitimate inferences from the outcomes of class struggles to establish the supposed conservatism of workers.

First of all, attempts to establish the contours of class in Britain today are obscured by an over-reliance on income data, life-style indicators, and status indicators. Measurements of class tend to treat classes as objects that can be arithmetically counted if enough appropriate indicators are taken into consideration. For example, the government's annual Labour Force Survey (LFS) breaks down occupation by 'employment status'. This is one of the measurements occasionally cited in the press to discuss class. But employment status does not correspond to class. For example, nurses enjoy 'associate professional' status in the government's classification scheme. This is a compliment to nurses and the prestige in which they are held. However, it is not a class designation. Most nurses exercise no power over other workers, and are themselves subordinate to their employers without sharing in any of their supervisory or coordinating functons, and without exercising mental labour in a way that gives them any control over other workers. They are therefore workers, with only a minority being properly middle class.

Increasingly, this can be said of the teaching profession, also listed under 'associate professional' status. Teachers have in the past had a certain amount of autonomy, a space for creative mental labour, and a real level of social power in socializing children for their coming engagement with the labour market. All of these advantages have been under attack as governments try to routinize what happens in the class room, de-skill and de-professionalise teaching, and subject it to increasing surveillance the better to discipline it. Scheduling is no longer controlled by individual teachers, and the curriculum is centrally dictated. Meanwhile, important school functions are being delegated to casualised teaching assistants. Of course, this varies - teachers in upper crust institutions are less subject to proletarianization, as they are entrusted with the delicate task of socializing the children of the rich. But the majority of teaching staff can't realistically be called middle class these days. And while a number of old professions are being proletarianized, new occupations classed as 'white collar' were de-skilled and subject to more or less intrusive surveillance and supervision from the start. Thus, the temptation to read class categories into 'employment status' categories must be resisted. However, the detailed data on occupations will, with some hefty caveats, be used later to get a rough idea of the relative proportions of the working and middle classes.

NRS social grades are even more frequently used as an index of class in the newspapers, but these are actually even less to do with class than 'employment status'. Category C1, which is taken as a measurement of the 'lower middle class', places clerical workers with no power over other workers alongside junior managers and supervisors, who act as the surveillance and disciplinary limbs of capital. Using this measurement, a middle class majority is usually obtained. Moreover, the data-gathering for such categories is often biased toward the higher end of the 'social class' and income scale, because they gather data only for the 'chief income earner' in each household. If this method is used, then a household which contains more than one adult will only be questioned about its highest income earner. For example, see this breakdown by Ipsos-Mori. By its estimate, the total number of people people aged over 15 years belonging to social grade 'E' (on the lowest salaries and least skilled jobs, on unemployment benefit, on disability benefit, on the state pension, etc.), would be approximately 4m (8% of approx. 50m = 4m). In the year that this breakdown was taken, close to 5m people relied on job-seekers and disability benefit alone. The government had a further 3.25m working in 'elementary' (unskilled) occupations. And a further 1.3m people lived on the state pension alone. In short, in Ipsos-Mori's breakdown, less than half of these who would be classified as social grade 'E' (approx. 9m) were actually detected.

If we treat class as a relationship, not a thing, we won't proceed on the basis of lifestyle or prestige indicators. The starting point for understanding class has to be production, and the relations we enter into when we become part of the labour process. Certainly, the first place you encounter class directly is usually in the workplace. To say 'direct' is not to say 'up close and personal'. One rarely meets a personal entity called 'the boss' these days. Authority is delegated through supervisors, human resources departments, ergonomics experts, IT managers, etc. It is, notwithstanding the occasional run-in with a particularly inept or annoying supervisor, highly impersonal. Most of the people who have some control over your labour, whether in devising your tasks, arranging your working day, or organising the space you work in and the equipment used in it, will never meet you. But nonetheless, the experience of capitalist power is unmistakeable. The people who exert direct power over you, though not themselves owners of capital, share in and exert power on behalf of capital, and their role - as they know very well - is to extract the most from you in order to boost the firm's profits. They identify with capitalist interests.

This layer of supervisors, junior and middle managers, and other overseers of the work process, has grown quite dramatically through the 20th century, and is a direct consequence of efforts by capital to discipline labour and contain militancy. Some have tried to account for their role by revising marxist notions of exploitation, so that - as per E O Wright - supervisors and managers, while not possessing alienable assets, in some sense exploit workers by means of their control over skills and the organisational assets of the firm. This means that exploitation is no longer rooted in the control of productive resources. I see no need to take this step. Supervisors do not directly exploit workers, but they do coerce workers and they have an interest in enhancing the exploitative process for their bosses. For this, they may receive a small share of the surplus, but in that case the exploitation they are engaging in is simply a subsidiary form of classical economic exploitation. This group, which Wright says occupy 'contradictory' class positions, form the greater part of the 'new' middle class, as distinct from the 'old' middle class of independent traders, farmers, smallholding producers etc, which has shrunk considerably over the years and would appear to constitute less than 10% of the working labour force based on LFS data.

What distinguishes the 'new middle class' from the working class is their power over other workers, their ability to exercise mental labour that gives them either direct control of the labour of others or important social power, and their role in enhancing surplus extraction. As a result of the foregoing, they have interests opposed to those of workers and thus can be said to belong to a different class, even though they are employed by capital. My very rough and ready estimate based on the LFS's employment data, bearing in mind we can't subject these to independent scrutiny, suggests that the 'new middle class' constitutes about 30% of the working labour force. Note that I say 'working labour force'. This doesn't include the unemployed, or state pensioners, or those who rely on disability benefits. Of those actually working, a clear majority, certainly more than half and probably close to two thirds, must be counted among the working class. Of the total adult population, including the reserve army of labour, the figure would obviously be higher.

***

What of the reputed conservatism of the British working class which, even at its most militant peaks in the 20th Century, did not break with Labourism? Does this betoken an abiding faith in Britain's parliamentary democracy? Does it suggest a class more at ease with gradual reform and class bargaining than with direct conflict with capitalism? Certainly today's working class does not look like a revolutionary subject, even as Labourism seems at its lowest ebb, parliament is in poor regard, and the gains of social democracy are being rapidly eroded. But the facts of Labour's long hegemony, the failure to establish a viable socialist alternative, and the relative timidity of the working class today, are outcomes that themselves require explanation. Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Cannon's classic study, The American Perception of Class, makes this point with respect to the apparent lack of class consciousness of American workers. The authors point out, based on an examination of past studies, oral labour histories by Terkel et al, and their own data, that American workers are highly conscious that classes exist and are acutely aware of the content of class distinctions. They show that while polls can be devised so that the majority identify themselves as 'middle class', not all polls will show this, and even where they do, people are still far more likely to self-identify as middle class if their position in the labour process does in fact give them authority, autonomy and an interest in enhancing profit accumulation. They also point out that a great deal of the funding and effort that went into creating the doctrinal basis for the 'middle class majority' so beloved of capitalist ideology, viz. a continuous ladder of occupational status and prestige suggestive of constant social mobility, came directly from the American state. Moreover, they indicate that a simple and logically sufficient reason for the failure of socialism to take hold in the American working class is the cohesion and power of the American ruling class. It has the ability to physically overwhelm radical challenges to the existing property order, as demonstrated in its history of violent suppression of the labour movement. It has the ability, which follows from being a ruling class, to organisationally overwhelm political challenges that lack money, ideological clout (newspapers, think-tanks, etc), and political and legal expertise, as most radical and revolutionary challengers do. Quite rationally, therefore, workers responded by putting their weight behind the less radical and more collaborationist unions, and supporting liberal rather than radical political candidates.

The specificities of UK history are obviously different. Britain's working class made its advances much later than US workers did - on the franchise, on union rights, and on the 8-hour working day. On the other hand, Britain's history of labour struggles is not as violent as that of the US. Its ruling class did not stand confident and united after the Second World War as the US ruling class did. Its levels of Cold War repression didn't ever reach the pitch of McCarthyism. Nevertheless, the appeal of Labourism, firsts as a means to socialism and then as a means of attaining social democratic reforms, is fundamentally based on the position of workers with respect to the ruling class. As Vanneman and Cannon have suggested, its is peculiar that the attributes of the ruling class, especially its relative cohesion and power, are rarely factored into explanations of outcomes in class battles. The efforts of British capital to break radical opposition and accomodate limited reforms produced a calculus in which parliamentary pressure and moderate trade unionism stood a better chance of yielding results than outright confrontation. Internationally, the readiness of squabbling ruling classes to unite in opposition to the Russian revolution and crush its exports, contributing to the ultimate corruption and strangling of the revolution at the hands of a new ruling bureaucracy further operated to shut off revolutionary alternatives. This more readily explains the successes of Labourism than does any peculiarity in the development of the British working class and its social psychological expressions.

Alasdair Macintyre, writing in the Sixties, described the basis for reformist socialism, and its eclipse. The conditions necessary for its rise included: a relatively homogenous working class with widespread unemployment and poverty, in which socialist propaganda offered a credible explanation of, and response to, the problems of workers; a credible belief in the independence of the state from class struggle and; a ruling class sufficiently worried about challenges to its control of financial and economic power that it was willing to include the working class in parliamentary processes, the better to limit and contain its demands. In short, reformist socialism was appropriate to a particular phase of class struggle in which enough of the working class was confident enough to pursue socialist transformation, and the ruling class scared enough to offer some reforms. And the evidence is that the ruling class was right to be scared. Paul Mason's Live Working or Die Fighting describes the richness and depth of communist, syndicalist and revolutionary anarchist politics in the British working class movement prior to WWII. Because these were not usually expressed as serious electoral alternatives does not mean they were not a threat to the ruling class. True to form, the ruling class most readily offered reforms following periods of radicalisation and labour organisation, such as had taken place during WWII, during which the ruling class found it necessary to accomodate the left and permit the spread of union organisation, and after which the ruling class was severely weakened.

By the Sixties, the ruling class had recuperated much of its lost power. The working class was far more stratified, and the ruling class had ceased to see it as a potential revolutionary challenger. It had elaborated a set of institutions such as arbitration bodies to manage its transactions with workers outside of parliament. Labour had ceased to express a meaningful socialist commitment and its leadership had attempted, if unsuccessfully, to remove clause 4 from its constitution. Nationalisation, rather than being a baby-step toward sovietisation, had proved to be amenable to capitalist interests. Nationalised firms still operated on the basis of profitability, maintained the same labour discipline and often the same personnel in charge. Even so, Labourism continued to contain (in both senses) a militant socialist component that appeared to offer better chances to the working class than any of the revolutionary parties that emerged and grew during the militancy of the early 1970s. Trade union struggles and left-wing campaigns gained results. Labour proved able to move radically to the Left, and still win elections, even if the state and the ruling class was more than capable of frustrating its most radical promises. The revolutionary left could attract some of the most radicalised workers, but for the majority of workers reform and accomodation rather than outright class conflict was the better bet. And again, it was the proven strength of the ruling class in its ability to deal with workers' insurrections, that led to the Labour Left's ultimate eclipse, as well as the decreased space for revolutionaries. The milestone, or millstone, of the 1984-5 miners' strike and contemporaneous struggles and their outcome undoubtedly made the working class more submissive and timid than it would otherwise have been. The subsequent out-manoeuvering of the left both inside and outside the Labour Party left workers with little choice but to vie for reforms from a right-wing leadership more inspired by Victorian liberalism than by social democracy.

Reformism is not therefore the result of a failure of class consciousness, or an inbuilt conservatism, which would mistakenly infer social psychological attitudes from class outcomes. Nor does it result from the conservative influence of a middle class majority or even a 'labour aristocracy', neither of which entities appear to exist. The overriding factor is class struggle, and the relative strength of the working and ruling classes in a given interval. And the enduring strength of Labourism in its neoliberal phase reflects just such an unfavourable balance of power as to make radical challenges extremely difficult to sustain over a long period. This does not, I might add, entail that such challenges are useless - actually, for reasons I mentioned previously, they seem to be more urgently necessary precisely because New Labour has reached a crisis point in its relationship with the working class. But it does warn against adventurism, and it does direct our attention to the structural limitations within which we operate.

I've been following this developing campaign, uniting charities, NGOs and trade unions, with interest. Politically, it taps into a very good instinct. The bankers got rich pursuing speculative profits through various intricate schemes that placed national economies in tremendous danger (example of which), and have been rewarded with bail-outs. If there is going to be a shortfall in funding for public services, they should pay for it. This isn't the only justification for imposing such a tax. A letter signed by 320 economists addressed to the G20 argued that the tax would "calm excessive speculation". Joseph Stiglitz maintains that it is an excellent idea to tax what is a socially useless and sometimes harmful activity.

The proposed level of taxation, at 0.05% on all speculative financial transactions, seems to be very small. (Though it seems it is larger than the micro-tax [pdf] proposed by the TUC and the Tax Justice Movement). Perhaps that extreme modesty of ambition is one reason why the basic idea has been able to get the support of right-wing governments in France and Germany, by New Labour, by former CBI head Lord Adair Turner, by Nancy Pelosi, Jeffrey Sachs and Warren Buffet. Then there's the pay-off. Supposedly, the tax would raise £250bn each year, with "tens of billions" of that available for public services in the UK. If that could be counted on, and if the measure was likely to be passed over the objections of the Obama-Geithner treasury (not a chance in hell), then there's an extremely seductive riposte to those who say we have no choice but to make deep and painful cuts in the public sector. Nonsense - it's easy! We can raise tens of billions for public services with a minute tax on, not to put too fine a point upon it, a wunch of bankers. That would more than cover the cuts proposed by both New Labour and the Tories.

There are some objections to the tax that are superficially appealling, but don't appear to withstand scrutiny. For example, the banks will only pass on the costs to consumers, some say, thus vitiating the distributive argument for the tax. Well, aside from the fact the consumers of such services are disproportionately wealthy, any form of corporate taxation can potentially be passed on to consumers, assuming that consumers are able and willing to bear the cost. That isn't a case against taxing corporate profits. Put simply, the wages of workers which enables them to be consumers are substantially determined by market forces: higher prices tend to drive up wage claims. Hence, the aggregate effect would be the same: the tax would impact on profits, not consumers. Of course, there's the aspect of class struggle that it seems vulgar to even notice, and it is true that in general companies will try to take every opportunity to externalise their costs onto workers and consumers, but that applies with any cost, not just taxes. That's not an argument against taxes, it's an argument - at the minumum - for having an organised and combative labour force which can use its bargaining power to resist such efforts.

Another objection I have seen, from a liberal economist, is that the tax is actually not as small as it appears to be. He maintains that a 0.05% tax on currency speculations would be about six times the current broker's fee. "No industry survives that," he suggests, comparing it to a sudden increase in the cost of a cinema ticket to about £50. But this is a ridiculous, illogical comparison. The booking fee isn't the cost of the product to be consumed in this case. The product is currency, for which you pay with your own commensurate currency. And when you trade in currency, you expect to both consume the purchased product and gain a premium - the profit. A cinema ticket, in contrast to a booking fee for currency transactions, just is the cost of the product. And no cinema-goer expects to both consume the product and get a cash bonus at the end of it. (Unless they stick the place up, which might make the comparison slightly more apt). Currency transactions levied at 0.05% are thus expected to pay a fee that is proportionate to an expected return, so they would still have a motive for engaging in speculation.

He goes on to add, however, that it could wipe out all transactions where the anticipated profit is smaller than the transaction tax, thus eradicating the proposed income that would be gained from it. It's a very intimidating argument, with graphs and talk of pips and spread and so on. This is difficult for those with no specialist knowledge to assess, but let us not succumb to our natural phobia of numbers and argot. We are mere autodidacts, but we have a duty to struggle on, you and I, and try to understand what is at stake here. Perhaps one way to approach this is to consider known examples of similar practises already taking place. It has been noted that the UK already imposes a 0.5% stamp duty on share trading, which gathers £7bn in revenues and could be extended to other transactions. It doesn't seem to have had a catastrophic effect. A number of countries have already imposed a financial transaction tax. Brazil has imposed it since 1993, at an initial rate of 0.38% (this was reduced in 2008), much higher than the proposed rate of the 'Robin Hood' tax. It didn't result in a collapse in currency trading or speculation, but it did result in significant additional revenue to cover the costs of maintaining the country's healthcare system. Moreover, the information gleaned from imposing it enabled the government to prevent other forms of tax evasion. There are also a number of financial transaction taxes already imposed in Australia, India, South Korea and elsewhere. These examples don't appear to bear out the idea that a financial transaction tax would be a sufficient, sudden shock to the system to wipe out most speculative activity. The burden of evidence suggests that such taxes are actually very bad at constraining speculative activity, but quite good at raising money.

There is a problem, though. The aims of the tax are apparently contradictory. One is to throw a bit of grit in the wheels of speculation, thus reducing the chances of harmful high-risk transactions taking place. The other is to raise a lot of money with a relatively insignificant tax that wouldn't really make any difference to the scale of speculation. If it does affect the scale of speculation, then the anticipated revenue would have to be revised down in precise proportion to its effifacy in doing so. If, on the other hand, the main aim is to raise and redistribute money, then the idea of damping down speculation can be dispensed with. But that would leave an apparently progressive tax complicit in what we are agreed is an often dangerous speculative system, and one that we ought to be discouraging or dismantling. But this comes back to the objection that the tax lacks ambition. It does. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a good start, and there's no reason why the government could not extend existing taxes on financial transactions to help fund public services.

Serious question. Will Hutton likes Cameron's ideas. The current editor of the New Statesman says he takes Cameron's claim to progressivism seriously. The centre-left Prospect magazine has been carrying puff-pieces for Philip Blond's 'Red Toryism', the bland mood music for Cameron's leadership. Some liberals really want to believe the best about Cameron's conservatives.

Yet we have a man who is an ardent royalist, an opponent of multiculturalism and immigration, a supporter of war and an Atlanticist, a supporter of cutting taxes on the rich (he is particularly moved by government impingement on the unearned inheritance of rich kids), a friend of Murdoch, an ally of the most ferociously reactionary forces in Europe, a supporter of increased restrictions on abortions, a fairly traditionalist proponent of marriage (married couples will get tax breaks), and the current high priest of the small state. His shadow chancellor is an unreformed Thatcherite and union-basher. His closest allies in the Conservative Party are neoconservatives. He has, when opportunity arose, engaged in some fairly obnoxious baiting of ethnic minorities, specifically Muslims. Himself a descendant of royalty and child of a City stockbroker who got his first job with the Tories on the recommendation of someone at Buckingham Palace, his front bench is stuffed with venal millionaires. And he's basing his campaign on a line about a "broken Britain" which channels the most socially authoritarian Victorian moralising.

This has involved, among other things, disingenuously talking up the violent crime rate and massively exaggerating the rate of pregnancies among disadvantaged minors by a factor of 10. This article at the Economist systematically demolishes, with some detailed statistical analysis, Cameron's arguments about "broken Britain". But the Tories won't fret too much if their claims are shown to be fraudulent. After all, crime is an issue very akin to immigration in the sense that you can talk it up, bluster, lie, bully, and create a general sensation of crisis and deluge, with the assistance of the scum British press. Then you can deflect criticism by contending that you are merely articulating popular concerns that have so far eluded politicians living in the Westminster bubble. So, they won't mind if the liberal papers point out their little fibs. What is important to note is the ideological basis of the Tories' arguments. This is how Blair Gibbs, a senior Tory analyst and Chief of Staff for Nick Herbert's shadow environment office, explains the problem [pdf]:

The problem is cultural. The root cause is a combination of changing philosophical ideas . . and the long-term fundamental decay of conservative ideas and institutions in Britain. This includes an historically unprecedented collapse of belief in marriage and a consequent epidemic of illegitimacy and unsocialised offspring who, contra the expectations of our post-war intelligentsia, have not justified the age-old hope of Rousseau (that the absence of restrictions on humans produces happy peace) but have instead illustrated the truth of Hobbes (that the absence of restrictions on humans produces violence and despair.) The consequence of this collapse is welfare dependency, a rise in violent crime . . . .
There exists a large and increasingly violent underclass, because Britain suffers from a vicious circle: the collapse of belief in values (of family, marriage, self-responsibility) has now spread from the elites (where it has done philosophical and political damage) to the working classes (where it has done real physical harm). This is what has bred the underclass and the welfare system sustains it. Through the benefits system the welfare state pays the underclass to grow; poor state schooling cannot compensate for the harm caused by broken homes and absent fathers; inadequate policing cannot suppress the symptoms of crime and disorder.

This does exactly what it appears to do. It blames the poor for their situation because they have abandoned conservative values. By becoming liberal, by having abortions and the pill and free love, by not marrying or marrying less frequently, by having "illegitimate" children - illegitimate, mark you - they have caused their own downfall, and are now suckling at the welfare teat when they're not robbing, stabbing and raping their way through Broken Brittania. And it is precisely this kind of ideology, couched in more carefully selected terms no doubt, that were being invited to believe is progressive.

When David Cameron speaks of progress, he is consistent in equating it with attacks on the welfare state, support for 'stronger families', support for 'enterprise', etc. Asked by his would-be hagiographer-cum-amanuensis Dylan Jones about his position on Thatcherism, he ejaculates the following keyword-laden discourse: "[T]here were still big questions. Are we going to have a progressive amount of freedom and responsibility and independence and choice, or are we going to have a state knows best, know your place, rigid, class system? I thought that in all the big arguments, Thatcher and Major were on the right side, and Labour was on the wrong side." It's an idea that comes up a lot. Thatcherism is "progressive". To attack unions, cut welfare and bait immigrants is to mount an assault on the "rigid, class system". A high-handed social authoritarianism under the rubric of integration and cohesion is also progressive. And so on, and on.

The question is how did such claims even become vaguely intelligible? How did 'progress' as a discourse become a byword for reaction? The obvious answer is that New Labour made this possible. On every theme I've mentioned above, every objectionable facet of Tory policy, there is a New Labour counterpart - not exact, and not necessarily as extreme, but very real nonetheless. You want a party that baits immigrants, cuts taxes for the rich, allies itself with European reactionaries, trucks with neoconservatives, and calls all this progressive? It's been the ruling government for thirteen years. You want a party that prefers free markets and 'meritocracy' to 'the old structures', 'the old class systems', etc? You want a party whose matey populism abets an elitist agenda that adulates the rich and the unelected, pampered, scum royals? You want a party whose approach to crime is to sensationalise, and blame the poor, and ethnic minorities? You want a party of moralising and social authoritarianism, hedged with a modest concession to gay rights? And calls all that progressive too? Yeah, well, I think you've got the point by now. Tony Blair and New Labour systematically marketed every crackpot Tory idea they could lay their hands on as "progressive". And now David Cameron is a "progressive".

Today's Unite Against Fascism conference was excellent, strategically useful, analytically incisive, and just the right side of argumentative. It did admittedly have some most peculiar moments. For example, Margaret Hodge MP pleading for support and solidarity from a room full of anti-racists angry about her recent Daily Mail article. I have little time for Hodge, as previous posts on this blog make abundantly clear. However, there is no question that the main issue in Barking this coming election is to stop the fascists. The BNP have gained some of their strongest votes in Barking and Dagenham. In the 2009 European elections, during which the fasicsts gained almost a million votes, their highest number of first preference votes were attained in Barking and Dagenham, almost 20% of the total. Boundary changes and disaffection with Labour could be enough to give the BNP control of the council in the local elections and possibly even give Griffin a parliamentary seat. As Martin Smith pointed out, this is part of the BNP's explicit strategy, and we cannot afford to be as complacent as some anti-fascists were before the Euro elections. So, while I'm not going to go out asking people to vote for Labour, or advocate for Hodge, I am going to do what I can to make sure the BNP are driven out of that borough.

Another oddity was Yasmin Alibhai-Brown swerving suddenly from excellent points to, in my opinion, very poor ones. She fumed about condescending middle class liberals urging her to 'understand' racism and fascism, and somehow come to terms with and deem acceptable the fact that growing numbers of people would like to get rid of her. Quite right. But then, seemingly contradicting herself, she made some appalling arguments about Muslims not sorting out the "hotheads" within their own ranks, and stated that they shared some of the blame for the rise of the far right (thus rendering it more 'understandable', you see?). She rightly argued for unity among the oppressed, recalling the great anti-fascist mobilisations against the NF in the Seventies, but allowed this to segue into a rant against the term 'Islamophobia'. Still, she was not among those liberals vacantly defending the promotion of the BNP on Question Time or pretending that there was anything to 'debate' with fascists. She rightly pointed out that many on the right hate the BNP because of some idea of 'Britishness' they have, but then made the bizarre further inference that perhaps the right hated fascists even more because of their identification with Britain's role in WWII. Oh, I think not. I think all the evidence shows that it is right-wing voters who are most susceptible to the BNP's message. And I think Yasmin is torn between some very decent anti-racist politics, and the very dubious conclusions that her liberalism leads her toward.

Perhaps the most surreal moment of the whole event was near the end when someone tapped my shoulder to inform me that members of the English Defence League were outside. It transpired that 25 of the scum had gathered outside in the hope of kicking some heads in. They were massively outnumbered and eventually the police arrived and they didn't manage to batter anyone. So it was a quixotic bid on their part - but it does show how confident and arrogant some of these filth are becoming.

The conference also had some extraordinarily inspiring moments. I found Leroy Rosenior, the ex-footballer who runs Show Racism the Red Card, very personable and moving. Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the NUS Black Students Officer, stood in for NUS president Wes Streeting and made a fantastic and incisive speech, tearing into mainstream politicians who made excuses for racism and conceded territory to the BNP. And one could not but admire Assed Baig who has just faced down an extremely nasty, vitriolic, racist campaign against him in Staffordshire University instigated by BNP activists. That campaign centred on an attempted vote of no confidence in him as Student Union president, and though the opposition attempted to pretend it was about something other than racism, it quickly degenerated into accusations that Baig was the first step toward Sharia law, etc.. In the last days of the campaign, racist graffiti and swastikas appeared on the university exterior, with "Fuck off N*****r", "No P*kis" and other similarly improving sentiments spraypainted on the walls and pavement. The opposition leader, contacted about this, claimed that the signs weren't swastikas, but actually Hindu love symbols. Baig won the vote, but it was clear that the atmosphere of intimidation and racism had been a horrible ordeal.

There are a few key points to come out of the conference. The BNP are organising electorally, and they are shipping in all their activists to areas of local strength, especially to Barking and Dagenham. Experience shows that the BNP are adept at toning down their message and softening their racism in pre-election periods. They use low-key forms of racism to mobilise the broadest possible layers of voters before the election, then afterward harden their position. With members in the European parliament, they now have a lot of money to invest in this propaganda facelift. And their activists are known to mobilise by the dozens, and do have a go at their opponents if they get the chance. So, it is necessary to outnumber the BNP's activists. It is necessary, through doorstepping and leafletting, to challenge their racist lies and also undermine their attempted dissimulation about who they really are and what they represent. They want to mainstream fascism, and take it upmarket, but they're never that far from their neo-Nazi roots, or their street-fighting milieu. And hammering that message home is a very effective first step in attacking and breaking up the BNP's voting base. It isn't enough, though, for reasons I will come to in a moment.

At the same time, the EDL are organising another challenge. The EDL works something like this: organised Nazis provide the funds and the ideological and organisational spine; right-wing football casuals and sadistic thugs provide the footsoldiers to attack and terrorise Muslims, Asian communities, and - as today's abortive siege demonstrates - antifascists. They are rehabilitating a tradition of racist street violence that hasn't been seen on any scale since the 1970s. As Ken Livingstone pointed out, they have repeatedly engaged in riots and organised racist violence that would result in screams of bloody murder if the culprits were Muslims - but they are largely ignored. And the same media which has been puffing the BNP has a way of dismissing opponents of these thugs, claiming that antifascists are 'just as bad' and that it would be best just to stay away. Events don't bear this out, as the EDL tend to be only more violent when they aren't out-numbered - a point that Dawn Butler MP underlined. At any rate, the old 'just as bad' chestnut won't be available now. Because as a result of today's conference, several Labour MPs including ministers, and a number of trade union leaders, have given their backing to the important anti-EDL mobilisation in Bolton on 20th March. Butler also committed to seeking to ban EDL events on account of their repeated and demonstrated propensity to end in waves of ultra-violence - and if she couldn't achieve that, she would support the largest possible mobilisations against the EDL. Not an insignificant statement, I thought, from a cabinet minister.

The size of the combined electoral challenge and street mobilisations amounts to the largest fascist threat that the UK has ever seen. In the short run, this will be met by mobilising the broadest possible coalition against the fascists on whatever terrain they organise. But it isn't enough. There is a broader climate of racism that New Labour has been encouraging since it took office in 1997, beginning with Jack Straw's attack on Roma gypsies. That slow drip of poison into the national political atmosphere, encouraged by the government and whipped into a frenzy by the press, has seen concerns over immigration and race shoot to the top of polls as an important concern of voters, whereas before it wasn't even an issue. The constant stream of invective against asylum seekers, Eastern European migrants, gypsies, and Muslims, has resulted in the kind of climate that fascism can grow in. And these different forms of racism are mutually reinforcing, not competing. A speaker from the Jewish anti-racism group, JCORE, pointed out that while antisemitism is not at the same level of intensity as Islamophobia, it is shown in research by Pew that those who one of the biggest predictors of anti-Muslim racism is anti-Jewish racism. Those who are most hostile to Muslims are also the most likely to be antisemitic. That's true right across the board. So, a sustained ideological attack on the kinds of officially mandated racism that are providing the fascists with their alibi is long overdue.

This climate of racism, though, catches on the way it does because at some level it helps explain people's experiences of the world. Far right voters are disproportionately lower middle class rather than poor, but that doesn't mean they are not frightened of poverty, unaffected by economic insecurity, and not stressed out by harder working conditions and a more competitive labour market. They interpret these problems in a racist fashion, by blaming immigrants for taking jobs and driving down wages, and by blaming Muslims and ethnic minorities for making Britain a less pleasant place to live. Their dream of petit-bourgeois respectability and upward class mobility is threatened by economic insecurity, and their ideological preconceptions makes racism an attractive response. Neoliberalism is thus the practise that produces conditions which make racism a more comprehensible point of view for many people. It is also the stultifying neoliberal consensus that turns people off politics, causes them to stop voting, and gives fascist votes increased weight as a result. So, it is necessary - as one speaker said - to fight fascism with the sword as well as the shield. Yes, fend off the immediate challenge, but also provide a hopeful alternative that can provide a real answer to the failures of the system.

I was busy working some other material (forthcoming), but this is all over the internet now, in glorious drool-spattered hypertext, so I might as well dip my oar in. As of yesterday, several blogs hosted the partial leak of an e-mail exchange between Lindsey German, former member of the SWP central committee and current convenor of the Stop the War Coalition, and Martin Smith, the national organiser of the SWP. The e-mails were leaked to the 'Military Families Against the War' mailing list by a member of the SWP. My view is that he would not have acted in such a way unless he was specifically asked to. The exchange culminated with Lindsey German resigning her membership of the SWP after some 37 years. The occasion for this was that she was asked, as a leading member of the SWP and an elected member of the National Council, not to speak at a meeting of a branch of the Stop the War Coalition in Tyneside.

I will not get bogged down in ephemera, but suffice to say I do not believe that this was a resigning matter. It was a local dispute that would have been easily resolved through further discussion, which was also made quite clear in the e-mail exchange. It would have done no damage to the StWC or its local branch for Lindsey to have withdrawn this once, until the matter was settled. And Lindsey, as a former central committee member, would be well used to the expectation that members accept the decisions of its elected bodies. I see no good reason for Lindsey to have declined to meet with members of the CC, and to have instead tendered her resignation. Of course I lack the psychic prowess of some of my online cohorts, but it is my view that the resignation was intended for some time.

It is no secret that differences in perspective opened up in the SWP last year between the majority and a minority faction called the Left Platform. This was a faction led by Lindsey German among others. Among its supporters was the SWP member who leaked a redacted version of the e-mail exchange containing Lindsey's resignation. The issues were debated at conference, and voted on. The Left Platform accepted that it was defeated, and agreed to wind up its faction and support the agreed strategy. Since then, a number of supporters of the Left Platform have resigned their membership of the SWP, and Lindsey is the latest of these. They evidently believe that their differences with the current agreed perspective of the party make it impossible for them to remain in the party. That is unfortunate. The party has been committed to including them in future discussions and decision-making. They have been fully represented in internal party bulletins, and at conference. Lindsey herself was elected to the National Council at conference, and indeed would have remained on the central committee had she not opted to withdraw last year. Whatever their ongoing disagreements, then, these members would have continued to have a voice within the SWP.

I am sorry to hear that it has come to this, and particularly that a comrade of such standing as Lindsey has left us, but I am cautiously optimistic that the current orientation of the SWP is the right one and that the loss of a relatively small number of members is unlikely to detract from that.

Update: No surprises here.