I won't pretend.  I never believed for a second that George Galloway would win the Bradford West bye-election for the Respect Party, much less that he would win with more than 50% of the vote and a majority of more than 10,000 votes, that the coalition vote would simultaneously collapse (the Liberals lost their deposit) and that all this would happen on a turnout of over 50% (very high for a bye-election).  

For me it opens up many strategic questions for the Left.  Because Galloway seemingly didn't have a huge amount in his favour.  He didn't have a lot of money or a powerful local machine.  He didn't have a sympathetic media establishment.  He didn't have the support of the mosques in Muslim areas, who overwhelmingly backed Labour.  The Respect Party for which he stood is not a well-oiled national organization, able to mobilise activists at short notice.  One thing he did have in his favour was his renown, but that has obvious drawbacks, and there were many, many Labour big-hitters flooding the constituency - including the Labour leader himself.  So, this result is extraordinary and demands explanation.  Both Labour and Tory pundits have colluded in a set of bilious talking points: here comes George Galloway 'stirring up tensions' again, he's going to divide the left vote and let the Conservative in, Big Brother cat impersonator, vain cigar-chomper, doesn't care about the real issues that affect this community, meow, go back to Talksport, indefatigability, fundamentalism, demagogue, Armani suit-wearing attention-scrounger, oil-dealing reprobate, hilarious, sinister, Pat Mustard, etc etc. Even Patrick Wintour of The Guardian participated in some of the worst of this, in a frazzled early morning report which repellently suggested that Galloway won by mobilising the "Muslim immigrant" population around a "fundamentalist call" to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and fight job losses.  I gather that the offending statements were removed from the article this morning.

We can dispense with these morality tales at once.  Anyone trivial enough to be obsessed with them can find many blogs that cater to that particular fancy.  There are even blogs who supported the Labour candidate who will have the cheek to talk about 'communalism', which (if you accept this highly problematic terminology) is arguably one of the things that was defeated in Bradford yesterday.  We can also do without the liberal lament ("how-dare-George-Galloway-win-an-election", and "he's-ruining-it!").  The most laughable retort came from a Labour politician who suggested that Galloway had won because of his Big Brother celebrity.  If he'd lost, that hardly luminous moment in his career would probably have been cited as a cause.  We can drop that stupidity as well.  Nor do I want to argue the toss with those on the Left who have allowed otherwise sensible disagreements with Galloway to obscure what is most important about this campaign - which is that its victory is a step forward for the Left, and particularly for the working class constituencies in Bradford West affected by racism, unemployment and cuts.  I simply take it as read that anyone on the Left with a sense of proportion will welcome this result, and move on.

The major strategic question that the result raises is how the Left relates to Labour in this period.  If it was wrong to underestimate the ability of social democracy to revive itself in opposition, it is evidently just as mistaken to underestimate the real weakness of Labour.  The fact that Ed Miliband has been aware of the secular degeneration of Labour's base, and seemed to have some vague idea of addressing the problem, doesn't mean that that he has been empowered to do anything.  Nor does it mean that his solutions have been anything but feeble.  Miliband's solutions appear to be predicated on the idea that Labour's problems in its previously formidable working class strongholds are mainly organizational.  That is, they can be resolved by incorporating a passive membership base, further reducing union influence and somehow 'reconnecting' with the 'grassroots'.  Either that, or they require better 'communication'.  Ideologically, his leadership is weak and prevaricating.  The thematic of the 'squeezed middle' interests few and excites no one, while the moronic Blue Labour guff turned out to be deeply damaging.  Politically, his leadership has worked to dampen and contain resistance to the cuts within the labour movement.  This is in some ways just the classic mediating function of social democracy - don't struggle, just vote for us and we will bargain a better deal for you.  But when this mediating function is captive to the logic of neoliberalism, the practical difference that Labour can offer is woefully inadequate.

Harriet Harman, who is far from the worst in Labour's leadership, showed the paucity of Labour's analysis when she insisted that 1) this result in Bradford a purely regional phenomenon, with no wider ramifications, and 2) this has nothing to do with Labour's failure to oppose, since "We've had a completely different argument from the Tories, arguing that they are cutting too far, too fast."  The latter, of course, is not "a completely different argument".  It is an argument which accepts the principle of austerity; which is to say, it is an argument which accepts that working class people have to put up with a generation being lost to joblessness, with tuition fees, privatization, service cuts, benefit cuts, and the evisceration of local infrastructure.  The real problem is that Labour has no sense of how to oppose the coalition, because it has preemptively conceded most of the territory.  This is because Labour's leadership knows that if the party wins a general election, they have no intention whatever of adopting a fundamentally different course or of significantly reversing anything the Tories now implement.

And of course, it isn't just Bradford West.  There were regionally specific factors assisting Galloway's victory, above all the local hatred for the managerial, machine politics of the Labour establishment.  But that machine has been in place for a long time.  Nor is it just a question of Muslim voters being disaffected with Labour.  The fact that some of the poorest and most oppressed workers in the UK have also been most willing to vote for left-wing candidates shouldn't even raise an eyebrow.  It is obvious, or at least it should be to marxists.  If it was only Muslims who could be reached on such an agenda, that might be a cause for concern, but Galloway gained more than 50% of the vote by mobilising a multiracial coalition.  This was a working class vote for a left-wing mandate.  It reflects not just polarization over austerity, a generational transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich, but also Labour's thus far hapless response.  The landslide for the SNP and Scottish Labour's ongoing problems, particularly in Glasgow, discloses essentially the same dynamic.  It has yet to be tested, but I think Plaid Cymru's new left-wing leadership could seriously strain Labour's presence in Wales.  And the Greens' Brighton victory in 2010 shows that wherever there is a serious left-of-Labour challenger, Labour has something to worry about.  Galloway had it right in his victory speech: Labour "must stop imagining that working people and poor people have no option but to support them if they hate the Tory and Liberal Democrat coalition partners."  

Of course this opens a space, no more than that, for some sort of left-of-Labour formation.  We should not be thinking purely or even mainly in electoral terms.  Labour's crisis is part of an organic crisis which is engulfing all the parties, and which is changing the relationship between those parties and their social base.  It is not just a question of masses fleeing from old banners and flocking under new banners.  Those parties which temporarily gain from social democracy's paralysis and breakdown only to emulate the social democrats in their basic mode of organization, often find themselves implicated in the same processes of breakdown.  What this crisis is doing is raising the question of new modes of organization, new ways in which masses relate to parties.  We know, for example, that there are going to be intense social struggles in the next few years, and orienting properly to those is even more important than exploiting electoral openings.  A formation of the militant, anti-cuts left is surely a reasonable goal in these circumstances.  

There's another reason why it is important to recognise and act on this opportunity now.  The question of austerity was never going to be resolved solely at the level of industrial conflict.  The lesson of austerity is precisely that it is at the level of politics that "that the contradictions of the economy are concentrated and that their ultimate resolution is decided."  In fact, even industrial struggles aren't won or lost purely at the level of industrial conflict.  Their success is partially contingent on the political 'line' that is won in those struggles, which depends on having a wider network of militants and activists plugged into every form of resistance, drawing and sharing lessons across the different fields of struggle, helping to overcome weakness and unevenness and resist the tendency of the union bureaucracy, particularly its Labour-affiliated right-wing, to retreat.  That requires a degree of coordination and unity on the militant left that has thus far been lacking.  More generally, the struggle against the cuts requires some degree of coordination between different levels and types of activity, and some form of organization that can negotiate a shift from one locus of struggle to another, as events progress.  We have already seen that things can look very bleak in the trade unions, then a student protest comes along and changes the whole calculus.  Likewise, a string of occupations can be winding down, only for a mass TUC-led anti-cuts protest to re-ignite the whole question.  Or, the situation can suddenly be radically re-polarized by a series of riots, and the presence or absence of a left with some weight can make all the difference.  And so on, and so on.  The fact is that 'austerity' is so comprehensive in its targets that its effects are likely to appear in aleatory and unpredictable ways at various points of antagonism.  Negotiating between and unifying these struggles is a strategic imperative, which is why I previously argued that the competing anti-cuts vessels of the Left should merge into a single flotilla.  I would now say there is space for a political organization which is more cohesive and ambitious in its objective; not a re-make of past models, nor a revamp of existing ones, but a new formation which quite deliberately sets out to organize and reconstitute those segments of the working class that are now well to the left of official Labourism.

The main obstacle to achieving something here is not the tenacity of Labourism so much as the weakness of the organized left at this stage.  But unlike the former, we can do something about the latter.  We can certainly solve any problems of organization that have dogged us in the past, provided we acknowledge them.  That's why the ostrich-like response of the monomaniacs who can only see Galloway's flaws, and only see the result as a victory for a vanity campaign, is particularly irresponsible.  It is a moralistic abdication of the duty to engage in a concrete analysis of concrete situations, to think through the strategic possibilities, to calculate the relative gains and risks of the courses that are now open to us.   As I see it, the onus is on the Left to act on this opportunity.

Well, since you ask, the ruling class in the UK has been estimated to comprise about 0.1% of the adult population - at the time of this estimate (1991), this would have been 43,500 people.  That is the number of people who would both form part of the capitalist class, and rule politically.  Today, if the same proportions held, the ruling class would comprise about 50,000 people.  However, a caveat.  Quantifying the ruling class in this way can be useful for social imaging, but such figures should be taken with a pinch of salt. The ruling class should be understood not first as a quantity, but as a relation. And since those relations are in constant flux, constantly needing to be produced and reproduced, and since capital (and political power) tends to be progressively concentrated among smaller numbers of people, there will be a tendency for the ruling class to shrink relative to the population.  At any rate, no such quantity is stable.  

Further, in addition to the capitalist class itself, there is a bourgeois penumbra, a set of institutions and agents who rule alongside and on behalf of the capitalist class and whose social power is derivative of the capitalist class - these elites are particularly concentrated in the state.  Which brings us back to the point I left you with yesterday, namely that a ruling class is such when it commandeers the state - it must not merely hold wealth but rule politically by virtue of that wealth, and the most important strategic space within which political antagonisms are resolved is in the national state.  In the historic development of capitalist social relations, the emergence of a distinctly capitalist ruling class results in a distinctly capitalist form of state power.  Robin Blackburn, in the discussion of Hanoverian Britain in The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, describes how after the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688 the new political arrangements favoured the direct rule of capital, inasmuch as a monarch with weak legitimacy allowed the propertied oligarchy to be assertive of its interests in parliament, while dominating most state posts at a local as well as national level - as County Commissioners, Lords Lieutenant, or Justices of the Peace, as well as MPs.  Highly lucrative public offices - such as the Bank of England and chartered companies - were held as private property.  As statesmen, they established corporations; as corporate members, they profited from the enterprise.  As MPs they legislated; as Justices of the Peace they interpreted the law.  Blackburn points out that this system, with its narrow franchise and rotten boroughs, represented bourgeois rule at an immature stage.  As a result of this immaturity, the British capitalist state then had to proceed through centuries of struggle and adaptation, incorporating a franchise for the middle class, then working class men, then women, while also incorporating some popular demands in the form of social democracy.  But the major offices of the state, its laws, its apparatus and its division of labour (social as well as technical) were elaborated under bourgeois domination, thus giving us a concrete example of how a state becomes 'impregnated' (in Therborn's phrase) with the drives of a particular social class, the capitalist class, allowing that class to rule politically.

So, this brings us to the role of the police, whose relationship to News International becomes all the more understandable once the former's role is better understood.  This relationship included not merely the bribing of junior to middle rank police officers, and not merely wining and dining of senior officers, but the constant circulation of personnel between News International and the Met.  There was a confluence of interests and a concert of actions.  For example, when the police murdered Jean Charles de Menezes, it was the newspapers, particularly News International that they turned to to vilify the dead man.  Lo and behold, we discover that News International was hacking the phone belonging to Menezes' cousin.  And the favours were returned.  The police not only failed to properly investigate News International's phone hacking when it was revealed, but actively applied pressure on the competition not to pursue the case.  To say that this relationship facilitated a criminal conspiracy may be an understatement - when all the facts are out, it may prove more accurate to say that it was a criminal conspiracy.

But why should the police force be so available for corruption in tandem with the reactionary press?  To answer this, it is important not to start with too much of a 'police' conception of the police.  They are not merely a repressive apparatus.  Nicos Poulantzas points out (State, Power, Socialism) that even ‘mainly’ repressive apparatuses such as the army, police, courts, prisons etc., all produce the ideological bases of capitalism. The distinction between the repressive and ideological apparatuses can thus only function at a purely indicative level.  To insist on a strict division of labour along these lines leads to a mistaken conception of the state, in which it secures acquiescence either by means of coercion or through 'false consciousness', ignoring the fact that the state must produce a material substratum for consensus, organising aspects of productive relations in such a way as to generate consent.  There is a tendency to see the state's role as extrinsic to the economy, as merely the guarantor of an autonomous, self-sufficient capitalist economy.  This depends on a certain mechanistic 'base-superstructure' model of the relation of political structures to the economy.  It would be more accurate to say that the state constitutes the economy in various ways, in that it condenses, concentrates, organizes and materializes the politico-ideological relations that are already inherent in the relations of production.  The police, by upholding the system's political and legal relations, assist in the reproduction of its productive relations; at the same time, by punishing transgressions (and normally issuing statements explaining the normative basis for such punishment), they assist in the moralization and legitimation of the same productive relations.

Let's take a concrete example.  The police are aware of a protest that is due to take place in Whitehall.  They anticipate what they would term serious violence and disorder.  Part of the reason is that this protest is organised by people who challenge the existing social-property relations, and the police consider any attempt to seriously realise such a challenge, however peaceable and democratic, an affront to their authority.  Anyway, they coordinate a set of responses intended to bring the protest under tight spatial and physical control, until it can be dispersed.  But those responses are not merely technological and technocratic.  They proceed in a very ideologically sensitive manner, careful to produce the political-ideological pretext for each move they make.  Even if this involves nothing more than arresting many people on trumped up charges, the very fact of people having been arrested will certainly be presented in the media as evidence of serious disorder and violence, because the media automatically accept the legitimacy and validity of police claims until such time as they are rendered ridiculous - and sometimes not even then.  That is, the police don't merely exercise a part of the state's monopoly of legitimate violence; they are the authoritative moral arbiter.  And it is only because they are such that their highly ideological, politicised action is treated as neutral.  

We proceed with the example.  The police use a repertoire of violence to coerce and contain the protesters - punches, slaps, baton strikes, mounted charges - and finish the day by isolating a manageable number of protesters and kettling them in a space so confined as to be physically dangerous for a prolonged period of time.  The explicit reasoning is that they are being held to prevent a breach of the peace, and that their detention will last no longer than is necessary to assure a peaceful dispersal.  But this, of course, is an intensely ideological depiction of affairs, and requires a great deal of ideological preparation and foregrounding for its conduct to be coherent.  Certain things must be automatically airbrushed or discounted for.  Hence, the media, and especially the most right-wing and authoritarian tabloids, will be a natural ally in this process, particularly in the subsequent witch hunts.  At every step here, the police have conducted a series of movements along various dimensions - political, ideological, legal, economic, etc - which isn't reducible to the forms of repression deployed.  Even in its repressive moment, the state is enacting ideology - because ideology is not just a field of representation, but precisely a set of material practises, customs, lifestyle etc.  When the police punish individuals (and, relevantly, fail to punish others), they contribute to these practises.

So, what is left that is mysterious about the relationship between the police and the media?  Yesterday, I said that the capitalist media operates in a specific vector of class power concerned with the reproduction of ideas and images and that its relationship with politicians was thus very natural as the latter also play a key role in the reproduction of ideology.  The capitalist media's ability to reproduce the dominant ideas and images in society is expressive of the dominance of capital in and over society.  If the state, as we have also said, concretises social relations, then the police in a capitalist state concretise the political and ideological dominance of the capitalist class.  Nothing is more logical than an alliance of mutual dependence between a sector of capitalist class power that is ideologically dominant, and a sector of state power that materializes that ideological domination in its day to day practises.  Such an alliance, even a corrupt or criminal one, merely formalizes the implicit systemic co-dependence of the two.  The fact that it took the form of this kind of criminal conspiracy owes itself to more concrete determinations than we have discussed here - the specific history of the Metropolitan Police, the evolution of the Murdoch empire, the accumulated outcomes of past struggles, the politics of the modern Conservative and Labour parties, and so on.  But those will have to be followed up tomorrow.

I haven't read Owen Jones' new book, Chavs, which is garnering rave reviews in the press, but we know the problem that it addresses. Briefly that, in the last generation or so, there has been a conscious effort on the part of the ruling class to obliterate class as a political-ideological category, and a basis for political action. And, concurrent with this there has been a rise in more or less explicit forms of class chauvinism, some of it expressed in the obnoxious ideologeme, 'chavs'. Only an era which has revived Victorian attitudes concerning 'respectability' and the 'deserving poor', in which poverty is habitually pathologised and 'wealth creators' extolled, could we have a flesh and blood Etonian of royal pedigree in Number Ten. Over the last dozen or so years, there has been a substantial rise in inegalitarian political attitudes, a drop in support for redistribution and, confluently, a more modest but real drop in the number of people who think of themselves as being 'working class'.

It is axiomatic that public attitudes are complex, with clusters of seemingly contradictory attitudes expressed on the same subject. The most recent social attitudes survey (British Social Attitudes, 27th report) confirms this with its mixed bag of results giving socialists reasons to cheer and mourn. But this is banal, what we would expect. The question is in what overall direction does the balance of these composite attitudes tend; in what direction is the trend over time? The authors of the survey find that on such matters as welfare, poverty and wealth redistribution the public has shifted to the right and ascribe this to New Labour's tenure in office. Most interesting for my purposes, though, are the findings on the 'race to the top'. These findings disclose a set of attitudes which in the relevant ideological struggles would tend to favour the right. They find that most people think of themselves as upwardly mobile, and believe that 'meritocratic' factors such as "hard work" are the most decisive in determining one's success (as compared with 'ascriptive' factors such as class, or race).

When you consider that this is not merely debatable but absurd, that hard work is very far from being a more important factor in success than class background (or race, gender, etc), it becomes apparent just how much ideological ground work has had to be done to construct this 'common sense' worldview, and how much the constituents of this 'common sense' had to compete with and displace every day experience. Of course, there are classically reformist attitudes expressed in there, with majorities feeling that the rich are paid too highly (even if they underestimate just how much the rich are paid). This is why, when an actual tax increase on the rich is proposed and implemented (the 50p rate), it is widely popular. But this is still in a context in which only a minority explicitly support redistributionist policies, and in which the tax was represented not as redistribution but purely as 'fairness' - as in the rich paying a 'fair share' of the burden of the recession. A more serious objection, perhaps, is that the answers to such questions would likely reflect aspiration, or self-justification, rather than literal truth-claims. People say 'hard work' got them where they are, or will get them where they want to be, because it seems to validate their efforts. To say otherwise seems disempowering. They don't literally believe such things. Yet, this is precisely the point. If people find validation in rightist nostrums, then to an extent they have come to inhabit the values of the right. In the same way, there are all sorts of reasons why someone might say "we are too soft on crime", but such utterances necessarily belong to the symbolic territory of reactionary-authoritarianism, and the person reproducing them is treading that territory.

So, what does it mean when majorities inhabit this ideology of 'meritocracy', even with qualms? First of all, we are speaking here of a 'common sense', that is a "mass popular philosophy", consisting largely of ways of seeing that are 'traditional' rather than 'organic': people believe it because it is something that people have believed for some time; because people with authority say it is true; because one's peers have born witness to it; because it makes a certain sense of one's efforts; because in the past such beliefs have served 'people like us' well. Not all of these are bad reasons to believe a thing. Common sense is ideological, and ideologies, as Gramsci said, "'organize' human masses, they form the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.". Common sense has an "imperative character", producing "norms of conduct", and is thus formative of the political situations we struggle in. We operate on common sense, some of whose constituents are progressive - "The personality is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of a human race united the world over" - as part of our efforts to develop a new 'good sense'.

The meritocratic 'common sense' is one which we, of course, have to work on. It contains certain tensions, and the reality will never live up to its ideal. So we may occasionally attack layabout Lords and monarchs, 'funemployed' rich kids, and so on, as such things defy the common sense that one does and should get ahead through 'hard work'. Yet we mainly have to work against it. For to believe that, even if one is not well off, then with sufficient hard work one can be, is to believe something about the market, about the creation of wealth and about the relative abilities of one's fellow human beings. It is to believe that market distribution is broadly reflective of effort, that wealth is mainly accumulated by those who contribute the most (thus chairmen work harder than cleaners), and people are naturally very unequal in their abilities. If you believe the system itself is basically meritocratic, even with some significant problems in need of reform, this introduces a bias in your thinking that may lead you to resent scapegoated minorities such as Muslims, single mothers, the unemployed, immigrants and others who appear (because the popular press says so) to get more help than you do, thus partially explaining your failure to enjoy more success than you have. It would also lead you to think that those who do not work are 'cheating' - if they only worked hard, they could get ahead, but instead they choose to waste idle hours while draining taxpayers' money. The bottom 20% of households with no one in employment, no car, no mortgaged property, no savings, etc., are thus pathologised as 'shameless' (tm) wasters, redeemable if at all through missionary work, or police intervention. This is not say that majorities hold the ideas I have outlined as potential corollaries of the meritocratic credo - but significant minorities appear to, and they do so in spite of their basic absurdity and apparent contradiction with other ideas that the same people say they hold.

The 'Chavs' phenomenon condenses many of the themes of this savage creed. It charges poor people with getting ideas above their station, with being feckless and irresponsible with money, tasteless, stupid, drunk, thuggish, and barbaric. In the guise of lewd satire, celeb-bashing and tart social commentary, it gives us a hit of class hatred. It references, and caricatures, the outward signs of social problems such as poverty, alcoholism, bad education and so on, but does so in the manner of a taxonomising anthropologist or zoologist, naturalising these very signs as qualities of a particular social sub-species: here a 'pramface', there a 'Croydon facelift', and mark the Burberry and inauthentic branded wear. The 'chav' is a folk devil, the quasi-satirical subject of the last decade's repeated moral panics about the 'underclass': nightmare neighbours, feral youths, ASBO kids, and so on. It is the byproduct of a neoliberalised social democracy which, in its acceptance of 'free markets', low taxes, and the language of meritocracy, was unable to directly challenge the growing inequality that, as a consequence of the unimpeded operations of the market, reached new peaks under New Labour. And it was under New Labour, rather than under Thatcher or Major, that the meritocratic 'common sense' was effectively popularised. It was New Labour that shifted the ideological terrain to the right, arguing for right-wing ideas and communicating them far more effectively to popular audiences than the Tories ever could.

Dan Hind makes some astute observations here, on the need to break the coalition before the next election. He argues for a strategy designed to split the Liberals, and in so doing save them from historical oblivion. A few observations, then.

I would guess he rightly judges Labour's position, which is that the last thing they want at this point is political power. The Blairites are convinced that they would have to implement the same cuts as the Tories are doing, (ex-chairman Peter Watts has even bizarrely claimed that opposing cuts is hurting Labour), and that it would be much easier to allow them to get on with it. The Labour soft left doesn't yet have a coherent alternative, or at least not one they're able to articulate or willing to fight for. Neither side really wants to re-open an old civil war, though the Right are better placed to wage it if it comes. So, they are sitting it out, passively awaiting the Tory meltdown and their dream ticket in 2015. Their strategy would involve striking the correct poses in the face of catastrophe, while nonetheless doing little to prevent it. (Dan does not say, but we should note, that this has significant consequences for the conduct of the labour movement's resistance to austerity. If the trade union leadership subordinates its actions to the objective of getting 'their' party in government, then that most certainly entails an attempt to keep the lid on militancy).

Where I think Hind is wrong is in assuming that the Sage of Twickenham is some sort of radical liberal, a Yellow Booker rather than an Orange Booker, who could reconstitute the Lib Dems as some sort of progressive force. The source of this bafflingly, stunningly ridiculous idea is probably Vince Cable himself. Cable has been laundering himself as the 'left' conscience of the coalition for some time, though he has always been a continental 'economic liberal', a privatizing free marketeer, and a primary founder of the 'Orange Book' tendency. He has recently described himself as a 'social democrat', in an interview in which he seemed to vaguely rebuke the finance-led cuts strategy that he has participated in, with some qualms. But by his own account you can't believe a word the man says. More fundamentally, to attempt a rescue of the Liberals as a potentially reformist agency is to miss what is happening here. Dan fears that if the Liberals are wiped out, there will be some horrible stalemate, in which the Tories and Labour compete over an ever diminishing space in the middle ground, prosecuting the same basic neoliberal policies while the balance shifts periodically between social liberalism and authoritarianism. But if enough Liberal MPs can be tempted to break from the Orange Book freaks, then Liberalism can be reconstituted along '1908' lines, and electoral competitive pressures could still force the major parties to adopt beneficial reforms. Hence, save the Liberals.

The problems with this are various - we shall leave aside the disparity between ambitious ends and inauspicious means - but perhaps a good starting point is to look at the current electoral realignments. The haemhorrage of the Liberal vote in England, and the surge for the SNP in Scotland should be considered as parallel elements of the same process. This is not the first time we've seen such sudden, sharp alterations in political composition - consider the rise of the SDP after 1981 and the concomitant contraction of Labourism. It is the sort of realignment that Gramsci spoke of, regarding a period of 'organic crisis': "At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent, and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression ... [this] occurs either because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses (war, for example), or because huge masses (especially of peasants and petit-bourgeois intellectuals) have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity." (Emphasis added) A logical result is "the passage of the troop of many different parties under the banner of a single party, which better represents and resumes the needs of the entire class" at a speed "almost like lightning in comparison with periods of calm". ('Hegemony, The State & Civil Society').

The point here would be that the current recomposition of the electorate looks epochal rather than merely conjunctural to me. This does not mean it is irreversible, but that political solutions based on reversing such trends are conservative and perhaps oriented toward situations that are no longer pertinent. The Liberals' capacity to operate as a sort of surrogate social democracy reached its high point (and what a thrilling zenith that was) in 2005, oweing to the war, Blair's unpopularity, and a load of festering discontents over 'New Labour'. The war isn't over, but it's ceased to be foregrounded at the ballot-box; Blair is gone; and 'New Labour' has lost control of the Labour Party to a union-backed candidate. In the meantime, the Liberals had experienced an internal putsch against the mildly social democratic Charles Kennedy by the Orange Bookers. This process was mandated by the party faithful. In 2011, the Liberals are part of a privatizing, cutting, war cabinet, and show no signs of wishing to be anything but the Whigs to Cameron's Peelites. Beg their MPs, send them letters, petition and doortep them... but with their polling average at 10%, their leader a national hate figure unable to visit a daycare centre without being picketed, and their party mauled in local elections, is there any sign of anyone listening? The great majority of them have already voted for the cuts; they made their decision, knowing what to expect. And it isn't because they're masochistic - it's because they believe that if they hold on until 2015, growth will have resumed, people will feel prosperous, and the electorate will duly reward them.

This brings me to my next point, which bears on the sort of pressure that would be required to compel MPs to shift their position. Parliamentarians, as we have come to know, are effectively insulated from popular pressure by the institutions they work in. The ancient caricature of politicians chasing every vote, greasily promising all things to all people, vacillating to appease a mercurial popular will, doesn't even raise a smirk these days. Political careerism in this era means, above all, clinging doggedly to unpopular orthodoxy ('principle') and representing it as the only game in town ('realism'). Yes, they still worry about losing their seats, but as long as the general wipeout isn't too severe, then the effective ones can always be looked after. Since the Liberals are betting on a revival by the end of this five-year term, and since they almost all accept the argument in favour of cuts, they will calculate that pissing off millions of voters is a short-term risk they can afford to take. They certainly won't be inclined to take seriously the threat that the local anti-cuts committee will turf them out of office. Unless.

The only kind of pressure that could, for example, turn 38 cuts-supporting Liberals into anti-cuts radicals is the kind of disruption that would worry their bosses, and their bosses' bosses. We're not talking about protests, riots, occupying public or commercial facilities, or even big one day strikes. They've planned for that. They're ready to police it. We're talking about a fundamental, enduring and self-perpetuating realignment of leftist, labour and oppositional forces, their emergence as a militant political alliance such that capital began to worry for its ability to maintain control without making serious concessions, and such that the long-term viability of the parties making up the coalition was under threat. The coalition is, yes, highly unstable, fragile, comprising antagonistic components... but its breakdown would not have to work to the benefit of the anti-cuts Left. It could just as easily permit a re-polarisation of the Tory bloc, with perhaps some new Liberal allies incorporated, to the Right. Only if there were an anti-cuts campaign whose 'message' is being communicated with compelling force, and that campaign had something to do with the breakdown, would it benefit the Left. Yet, it is precisely such mobilisation that would hasten the contraction of the centre ground and thus help reduce the popular basis for Liberalism. It seems to me that at this moment in history, the destruction of the Liberals would be an aspect of our advance; and that to attempt to rescue them, even on a radical basis, even through threats and protest, would be a detour down an historical cul de sac.

The NHS has always been a vulnerable point for the Tories. They neither like nor trust what it stands for, how it works, but cannot assemble a viable coalition in favour of its destruction. Today, David Cameron has attempted to justify the present government's privatizing measures by claiming that they are the only way to meet a funding crisis that will hit the service in the next few years. That is, they intend to underfund the system by at least £20bn by 2015, and claim that the dire effects of this can only be avoided through their 'reforms'. But note what they're not saying. This is David Cameron's explanation:

"If we stay as we are, the NHS will need £130bn a year by 2015 – meaning a potential funding gap of £20bn.

"The question is, what are we going to do about that? Ignore it? No – because we'd see a crisis of funding in the NHS, over-crowded wards and fewer treatments. Borrow more so we can chuck more money at it? No – because we can't afford to.

"Ask people to start paying at the point of delivery for it? No – because, as I said, the NHS must always be free to those who need it. There's only one option we've got, and that is to change and modernise the NHS to make it more efficient and more effective and, above all, more focused on prevention, on health not just sickness.

...when I think about what our NHS will look like in five years' time, I don't picture some space age institution, a million miles away from what we have now. Let me make clear: there will be no privatisation, there will be no cherry-picking from private providers, there will be no new up front costs people have to pay to get care."

I select the NHS to focus on because, apart from the fact that Cameron has made this intervention today, it's the Tories' weakest point, the issue on which we can assemble the broadest social forces. The middle class suburbs are up in arms about what's being done to healthcare every bit as much as working class boroughs. The Tories have already had to retreat on this, and the issue divides the coalition somewhat. We have them beating a tactical retreat before a serious shot has been fired. Yet, if what Hall referred to as the "political-ideological thematics of Thatcherism", which today are concentrated in the politics of austerity, remain in place, then they will be able to continue to come back for more. Even if the Tories do not succeed in getting all that they want, they will gradually get some more of what they want; and more importantly, they will find that their occupancy in power is not disturbed by their losing an election. New Labour, operating within a broadly Thatcherite mode, took the logic of privatization and marketization in the health service further, faster, than the Tories had been able to. Labour's leaders today cannot think or articulate a politics outside of austerity, which leave us with a desperate need for a counter-hegemonic campaign to do just that.

A while ago I wrote of Labour's "aim to represent and convoke the working class as an agency for reform" while also governing in the interests of capital. I received a missive shortly after this, urging me to go further. "This is the sort of thing that could have been written forty years ago," my correspondent suggested (I paraphrase), but "I'm not sure it does exactly this any longer." Indeed, it was written forty years ago - I was quoting more or less directly from Stuart Hall's Policing the Crisis.

Recently, proceeding through a catalogue of Gramscian writing on New Labour, I found a few pieces which might help update the picture. One was by Hall ('New Labour’s Double-shuffle', The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 27:319–335, 2005), another by Will Leggett ('Prince of Modernisers: Gramsci, New Labour and the meaning of modernity', in Mark McNally & John Schwarzmantel, eds, Gramsci and Global Politics: Hegemony and resistance, Routledge, 2009). Both read New Labour as a particular hegemonic project operating within neoliberalism, but with a specific accent that distinguishes it from simple re-heated Thatcherism. This accent derives from the specific social basis of New Labour as "a social democratic government trying to govern in a neo-liberal direction, while maintaining its traditional working-class and public sector middle-class support". New Labour is a "hybrid regime" comprising a dominant neoliberal strand and a subordinate social democratic strand, and the latter is constantly being "transformed" into the former (Hall).

The New Labour vanguard had been forged in conjuncturally specific circumstances, but its import was epochal. So, while New Labour represented an adaptation to a profound, organic, long-term shift in the global patterns of capital accumulation, the agency within Labourism that forced this adaptation through was cultivated in the 'party modernization' process of the 1980s which was ideologically signposted by the sociological arguments progenerated by Marxism Today - ironically, as Leggett points out, the very current of analysis with which Hall was closely associated. This analysis held that the processes at work in contemporary capitalism were rendering traditional forms of social democratic collectivism obsolete. Labourism had to respond to this fact if it was to win another election. Hall was not one of those who uncritically celebrated this situation - far from it, in fact - but the 'New Times' orthodoxy played a key role in justifying Kinnock's purges of the Left, and his rightist lurches. From this tendency emerged some of New Labour's organic intellectuals, such as Geoff Mulgan. 'Third Way' politics is unthinkable without this prior ideological ground-work.

So, what did the Third Way seek to do? A key term in Hall's critique of Third Way politics is 'transformism' (trasformismo), a concept which operates at a certain level of abstraction while retaining a certain concreteness. That is to say, it is a highly descriptive term, referring to a technique of governance employed by the centre during and after the Italian Risorgimento, in which radical-popular social goals are incorporated and 'transformed' by the political centre, enabling a bourgeois hegemonic bloc to carry through a 'passive revolution' without empowering subaltern classes. Yet, it can be abstracted to a limited extent, deployed - with due care - to other situations. In the case of New Labour, transformism takes the form of "a long-term strategy" to transform "social democracy into a particular variant of free-market neo-liberalism". (Hall) This entails efforts to "co-opt, fragment, and dilute oppositional
actors and demands" (Leggett) This can be seen discursively in the energetic New Labour attempts to cast their agenda in terms of the legacy of the Attlee government, the 'socialism' of Richard Crossman, etc. NHS privatization reforms are, pace Blair, "firmly within Labour’s historic battle for social justice", fully consistent with Bevan's original agenda. If this looks like evasive double-talk, it's because it is: spin is not incidental to the New Labour project, but actually central to its hegemonic operations.

The antagonism within New Labour, between its neoliberal leadership and the basis in organised labour, is what explains the tendency to resort to vacillating jargon, queen among whose cynosures is 'pragmatism':

"The key thing to say about New Labour is that its so-called ‘pragmatism’ is the English face it is obliged to wear in order to ‘govern’ in one set of interests while maintaining electoral support in another. It isn’t fundamentally pragmatic, any more than Thatcherism was—which doesn’t mean that it isn’t constantly making things up on the run. In relation to the NHS, Mrs. Thatcher too was pragmatic in the short run (‘‘The NHS is safe in our hands!’’), yet strategically an anti-pragmatist (the internal market). As with the miners, she knew when to withdraw in order to fight again, more effectively, another day. Pragmatism is the crafty, incremental implementation of a strategic programme—being flexible about the way you push it through, giving ground when the opposition is hot, tactically revising your formulations when necessary (having given us ‘the enabling state’ and the celebration of ‘risk,’ the distinguished Third Way guru, Anthony Giddens (2002), now effortlessly slips us on to the forgotten problem of equality (!!) and ‘the ensuring state’—as more businesses absolve themselves of their pensions obligations). Pragmatism requires modestly shifting the emphases to catch the current political wind, saying what will keep traditional ‘heartland’ supporters happy (‘‘It can come across a bit technocratic, a bit managerial’’—the P.M.), whilst always returning to an inflexible ideological baseline (‘‘. . . the fundamental direction in which we are leading the country is correct’’—the P.M.)." (Hall)

Pragmatism, alongside 'modernisation', served to give the impression that New Labour policy nostrums were natural, uncontestable, and inevitable, though they were none of these things. These were hegemonic strategies, designed to give moral and intellectual leadership, and fundamentally alter the 'common sense' of political discourse, rationalising production and producing a new 'collective man' (cf, 'Americanism and Fordism'). This new 'collective man' is "not to expect handouts from the state, but is to be flexible, hard-working, entrepreneurial and a good consumer: a citizen-consumer". (Leggett) Labour could have won an election and governed as a moderately left-of-centre reformist party, but the Blairites were intent on fighting within public opinion, particularly within Labour's base, for their social agenda, which centrally involved turning social justice, poverty-reduction and public service delivery - traditional social democratic concerns - into aspects of neoliberal governance. For that reason, the 'activist state' - involving not Keynesian corporatism, but rather a plethora of marketised institutions that deliberately blurred the boundaries between the state and civil society - was crucial to the New Labour lexicon.

But New Labour's transformism would not have been effective at a discursive level of it weren't for occasional concessions to progressive, democratising values at the level of policy. These included the minimum wage, the devolution of powers, the working families' tax credit, some limited trade union rights, the human rights act, increased maternity leave, and - importantly - the expansion of public services through the very neoliberal means that it sought to normalise in the terrain of social democracy. Without these sorts of measures, the efforts at transforming social democracy into neoliberalism - which, recall, depended on coopting, fragmenting and diluting oppositional actors and demands - would not have been as effective as they were. Such measures disoriented and disorganised opposition, allowing the "fundamental direction" to remain untouched.

The remaining question is exactly how much success New Labour enjoyed in this hegemonic mission. It has been noted by pollsters that the experience of New Labour government moved the electorate to the right on a whole series of social questions, on egalitarianism, wealth redistribution, welfare, and - not the least of these - nationality, immigration and citizenship. The limits of this shift, however, are clear when it comes to popular attitudes regarding the core institutions of social democracy which New Labour sought to fundamentally restructure. Privatization did not become more popular with the electorate, and the Left organised some decent, effective public campaigns on this issue, around the railways, the tube, housing and hospitals. New Labour worked most effectively here where it divided and coopted the opposition. Pro-imperialist ideology, and support for the thermonuclear-tipped Anglo-American alliance that was central to New Labour's mission, sharply declined. Any Labour leader who advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament in the 1980s would have been crucified; today, he might be feted by a decent majority of the electorate. Dirigiste sentiments seem to have remained relatively stable among Labour voters, probably increasing as a result of the crisis. Most importantly, New Labour's electoral viability, and thus its ability to make its programme effective, is at rock bottom. Labour might be able to win another election as New Labour, but this would only be effective for as long as no strong opposition emerged. It certainly couldn't work in Scotland or Wales, where alternative reformists forces are already able to run rings around any Labour leadership that disappoints its base.

An emerging trend in New Labour thinking that is not quite Blairism, and doesn't entirely pivot on the moral and political individualism typical of the latter at its apex, is this 'Blue Labour' trend. Its key spokesperson, Lord Maurice Glasman, is a student of Karl Polanyi, and among its supporters are communitarians like Jon Cruddas. It remains, for that, a trend within New Labour, supported by pro-market ultras like James Purnell, which aims at upholding the basic New Labour assault on traditional social democratic collectivism: the language of mutualism, for example, provides a way of doing so without departing from neoliberal nostrums, and indeed any trend that comes from within New Labour will uphold a variant of neoliberalism. (Here I can't assent to Leggett's suggestion that New Labour possesses the intellectual resources to provide an alternative to neoliberalism). In an era when the majority are expected to accept severe reductions in their living standards, the figure of the acquisitive, self-interested individual that motivated Blairite transformism is no longer adequate or even minimally realistic. Instead, we are required to do more with less, to be self-sacrificing for what is ostensibly the greater good, to hold society together even while the mechanisms of social solidarity are de-funded and eviscerated. Hence, any potentially hegemonic formation within New Labour would have to proffer some 'Third Way' between atomised individualism and social democratic collectivism. It would have to go further, however, as it could not secure consent for a modified austerity project without offering some targeted concessions and relief, and without some modest encroachments on the wealth of the richest. Yet, to even state this is to underline just how weak and unstable such a project would be, how much more obvious its antagonisms would be, and how much less efficient its hegemonic operations would be as a result.

We are exhorted by politicians of all major parties to cherish and embrace ‘British values’ - against which, reportedly, stands 'Islam'. We won’t have much to say about 'Islam' here, except to note that for the purposes of this conversation, ‘Islam’ bears roughly the same relationship to the religion of Mohammed and one billion adherents as ‘the Jew’ in anti-Semitic discourse does to actually-existing-Jews. In fact, both components of this doublet seem curiously lacking in definition. Attempts to define ‘British values’ yield statements resembling, not a logical exposition, but a tag cloud consisting of nebulous themes, grandiose claims and euphemisms. Here is Tony Blair attempting a definition of ‘British values’ in 2000:

“Qualities of creativity built on tolerance, openness and adaptability, work and self improvement, strong communities and families and fair play, rights and responsibilities and an outward looking approach to the world that all flow from our unique island geography and history.”

It would be tempting, but mistaken, to characterise this rhetorical soufflé as meaninglessly pneumatic. It is easy to point out that ‘tolerance, openness and adaptability’ are complex attributes that don’t attach themselves to nation-states much less to just one nation-state, while ideas of ‘work and fair play’ mean different things to a postal worker, Jamie Oliver, a GP, Prince Charles, a call centre worker or a self-employed plumber. This is not the point. Blair’s tribute is a meaningful construction, but its meaning works through allusion and condensation. It indirectly mentions the material modes of existence of polyglot social layers, retaining its ability to do so precisely through its indirectness. It thus universalises (within its parochial national purview) experiences which have a particular social origin.

For example, the appeal to “strong communities and families” most directly touches on the experiences and aspirations of those inhabiting small towns, villages, and enclosed urban spaces. There, the very compactness of social organisation, the miniature scale of societies contained therein, and the spatial allotments of wealth and status within them, create highly localised identities – this street, that estate, our household. In the posh, prim looking terraces populated by small families, often with both parents in full-time, ‘skilled’ employment, and Neighbourhood Watch schemes on the go, the strong community and family is a by-word for the social facts – interpreted as cultural, behavioural qualities – which seem to set them apart from the sink estates. ‘Race’ penetrates this psychic terrain in complex ways, inasmuch as the social facts adduced above can be seen by some as traits of a possessive ‘whiteness’, so that this respectable looking little street with its white families and smug lower middle class conservatism, can be opposed to that dirty little conurbation at the other end of town where Asian or black citizens live with disproportionately high levels of unemployment, poverty and crime. Such social facts give the appeal to ‘strong communities and families’ a charge that it lacks in the flux of big metropolitan areas where people are as likely to live alone, communally, or with lodgers or friends, as they are to inhabit a traditional nuclear family unit, and where the delineations of race, ethnicity and culture constantly give way to hybridity.

And yet, few who have grown up in nurturing families would object to the idea of ‘strong families’. Even with all their usual patriarchal tyrannies and exploitation (there will be parents reading this who treat their kids as a source of bonded labour – their punishment awaits in the maelstrom of adolescent rebellion), functional families seem to be a source of security, love, mutual care and, not insignificantly, economies-of-scale. It is not strictly relevant here whether this perception is even accurate. The point is that it resonates with widespread experience. Similarly, the community is just that loose company of friends, acquaintances, busybodies, and helpful, moronic or batty individuals that one has known on one’s estate, terrace or flat block. Few would reject the idea that such communities are a ‘good thing’, needing strengthening. As the BBC frequently reminds us, “everybody needs good neighbours”. Strong communities and strong families can be claimed as ‘British values’ not because the UK is distinguished by such aspirations, but because only a minority are likely to object to them.

Politically, New Labour mobilised such ideas in support of a variety of objectives – providing tax credits to working families, coercing single mothers to seek waged labour, imposing curfews and ASBOs on working class children, installing CCTV on estates, boosting two-parent families, and so on. This brew of modest social democracy and strident social authoritarianism is hardly unobjectionable, or lacking in opponents. But it is embedded in a hegemonic language whose ideologemes, originating largely in the experiences of the lower middle class, were universalised and could thus provide a normative basis for such policies. Yet, this is no explanation in itself as to why such affirmations should be drafted in support of a notion like ‘British values’, or why politicians felt compelled at the turn of the millennium to assert the existence of this elusive creature, even as the irresistible winds of ‘globalization’ were supposedly laying waste to passé conceits such as nations.

For, if the tempo and urgency of such attempted interpellations – ‘Britain needs YOU’ – escalated in the poisonous atmosphere of the ‘war on terror’, the ‘Britishness’ bug was doing the rounds in Westminster well before the évènement of 9/11 and its ensuing wars. To answer this question is to say something about the “unique island ... history” that Tony Blair adverted to, particularly the shift from colonial white world supremacy to a defensive white nationalism signposted by Powell and Thatcher, the breakdown of racial comity in some former industrial redoubts, the state of British social democracy in the wearied, cautious, conservative dog end of the twentieth century, and the caesarist mode of the British executive under Blair.

I shall restrict myself here to the following observations about that. National identity, as with other identities, is relational, dependent on its situation vis-a-vis Others. Britishness was historically defined first in its imperial capacity, as the union between the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland in 1707 provided the consolidated strategic base from which two aggressive colonial powers could make an undivided bid for world power. Together, Perfidious Albion and Imperial Caledonia set out to create a new world order. Linda Colley makes the case that British identity was decisively formed through Britain’s imperialist extensions into the Americas, Africa and South Asia, and its encounters with various Others. Imperialism obviously does not represent itself as predation, but rather as a wider moral and social mission which should engage the whole of the society, direct its overall efforts, orient its sense of identity. So, performances of Britishness took place in relation to the Indian, the Chinese, the African, and the Arab. Britishness was also, for as long as Ireland was seen as a property of the British crown, bound up with Protestant chauvinism, which provided much of the working class base of support for imperialism and Toryism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the latter half of the 20th Century, Britishness was reproduced through constant, historically disembodied 'memory' of World War II. Yet as that cachet lost its persuasive power amid colonial retreat and relative decline, a newer sense of Britishness emerged through Powellism and the search for a culturally pure, white Britishness. Britishness thus shifted from its orientation toward a global white world supremacism to a defensive white nationalism.

In the Thatcher era, a brief festival of British revivalism harnessed the remaining energy behind this decaying idea on a series of spectacles from the royal wedding to the Falklands jubilee. These dramas of rebirth and tradition helped to congeal the policy mix of Thatcherism - White Brittania was defended through immigration controls, Ruled Brittania through intensified policing and public order crackdowns, Ruling Brittania through imperial reassertions and Atlanticist hyper-globalization. But by the end of the 1980s, the potency of this revival had been discharged. Partly, this was because the class alliance that made Thatcherism viable was breaking up under the weight of Thatcherism's social consequences. Partly it was because the world order was changing as the Cold War ended, and the Tory base divided over Britain's future global orientation - toward Europe, entrenched Atlanticism, or toward a garrisoned island-state? This was not something on which the manufacturers, financiers, and small traders who made up the Tory base could agree on. Obviously, 'Islam' comes into this, having played an important in British Aryan identity in the colonial era, both explaining anti-colonial revolts as 'native fanaticism' and justifying their suppression. For contemporary purposes, 'Islam' begins to become relevant to the formation of an anxious-aggressive 'Britishness' at the tail end of the 1980s, as 'black' political identities begin to break down into localised constituents and Thatcherite 'Britishness' is increasingly exhausted.

The British Labourist tradition had always incorporated the pro-empire Left, represented signally in the Fabians, and in the post-war period had developed a pronounced Atlanticist strain, which favoured managing imperial decline through the ‘special relationship’ with the United States. If Labour had a pacifist, internationalist tradition, it also boasted a monotonous parade of establishment sycophants, imperialists, race-baiters and opportunistic patriots. New Labour comprised in essence an alliance with Whiggish Liberals and social conservatives. Its turn of the millenium attempt to reflate and re-define 'Britishness' derived more from the managerial, Whiggish ideas dominating British social democracy at the depleted, dog end of the twentieth century than with major global antagonisms. The Blair administration attempted to pioneer a centre-left nationalism that would provide a basis for social cohesion (if necessary, helped along by social authoritarianism), a mobilising discourse for social reform, a competitive rationale for social democratic acquiescence to 'globalization' (Britain must punch above its weight), and a hegemonic doctrine underpinning Blair's autocratic executive style.

These ingredients were already evident in the 1997 election campaign, but Blair's caesarist moment came with the Kosovo war, through which he proved his mettle not as a daffy airhead 'Bambi' figure, but as a hardened ideological warrior, someone capable of whipping public opinion into line. Following this venture, which won him many ecstatic plaudits from journalists and the political establishment, he began to articulate more clearly his brochure for Britishness based on international competitiveness and military assertion. Following the riots in north-eastern towns and cities in 2001, New Labour ratcheted up those aspects of its Britishness agenda concerned with social cohesion, scapegoating Asian minorities for allegedly failing to integrate. Minorities were ordered to internalise a 'core of Britishness', which meant being politically compliant, quietist, lawful and generally effacing those culturally specific excesses that supposedly made them unacceptable to their white counterparts. But as of 9/11, Britishness was destined to have its run in with 'Islam'.

From the Rushdie affair onward, 'Islam' became an object of official ideological interrogation, as the media increasingly devoted attention to 'Islam' as a security threat, a source of political instability, and particularly a menace to the nation's values. In relation to the 'war on terror', Britishness was aggrandised through the constant belabouring, surveillance, harassment and outright repression of Muslims, even as the British state itself underwent dramatic changes, and its constituents loosened in centrifugal fashion. 'Islam' is seen as at one and the same time, too radical and too rooted; a source of instability and of exaggerated, embarrassing cohesion; revolutionary and reactionary; a politicised religion, or a pseudo-religious politics; a de-nationalised revolutionary creed, or a smug, conservative, violent upholder of 'family values' in their worst sense. Its very ability to be represented in such a shape-shifting manner makes it the ideal foe, the perfect foil for Britishness. This 'Islam' can accumulate enemies on the Left as well as the Right, among secular liberals as well as religious conservatives, among feminists as well as patriarchs. Through negative contrast, it gives 'Britishness' a force and attraction that it would otherwise lack. 'Britishness', thus defined through the encounter with 'Islam', has been routinely performed routinely by squaddies in Afghanistan, as well as by police squads, and belligerent journalists, for almost a decade now.

So, where do we stand today? The Cameron executive is, like its caricature in Steve Bell cartoons featuring the Prime Minister suited in a pink condom, slippery, soft-edged, and impossible to pin down. It lacks definition. Sitting at the apex of a weak, fractious neo-Thatcherite government, slowly pulling apart over the unlikely issue of AV, Number Ten seeks to re-deploy the elements of 'Britishness' through renewed imperial bloodletting, more tough talk about immigrants, and of course an incredible amount of bullshit and insincere sentimentality over the royal wedding. But, as polling data has more or less consistently shown, there's little enthusiasm for more war, and this one doesn't have a narrative capable of engaging 'British' sentiments even if the nation's imperial appetites hadn't been exhausted by the alliance with Bourbon Bush. And while the media, police and local councils will probably succeed in cutting out most expressions of republicanism on the day, the royal wedding is a topic of satire or bored indifference for most. Only the immigrant-baiting, which is a divisive issue for the coalition, actually seems capable of summoning the requisite temper, and even there the evidence is mixed. Yes, polls do show that the constant propaganda about immigrants and minorities has a pronounced effect on popular attitudes, and encourages a vicious minority to engage in racist violence. But on the other hand, there's no sign that talking a lot about immigration makes the Tories popular - far from it, in fact. There seems to be no doubt that a re-organised 'Britishness' could potentially provide a rightist counterpoint to social struggles against austerity, but the present signs are that 'British values' have lost touch with some of the material bases that gave them their peculiar charge and universal validity.

I've heard some pathetic electoral pitches in my time, but this is bordering on self-slander. Lord Maurice Glasman, the pathfinder for a newer, Bluer Labour, argues that a successful Labourism of the future must be one that incorporates supporters of the English Defence League. Yes, apparently, the Labour Party, the historic party of the organised working class, frequent party of government, creator of the welfare state, and the outright poll leader du jour, needs the ordure, the fascist, semi-fascist and pre-fascist residues, the most outright reactionary, thuggish and ignorant shit in the country. Without appeasing the scum, it seems, Labour will never be a winner. Well, why does he stop there? There's barely a week that passes without a number of assaults on Muslims, often Muslim women wearing the hijab, or attacks on mosques, or vandalism on shops and houses presumed to be owned by Muslims. Surely it can't be beyond the capacity of Labour canvassers to find the perpetrators and explicitly bid for their support. In fact, if Labour are actually this desperate, perhaps they should consider an entryist move on the BNP, with the aim of subtly persuading Fuhrer Griffin or his successor to adopt some mutualist thinking on welfare and service provision.

Of course, Glasman does not mean to target the EDL and its thousands of supporters with this intervention. He means to mobilise the ideologeme of 'the white working class' as a sort of puppet boxer with which to belabour the left in the party. As he complains: "working-class men can't really speak at Labour party meetings about what causes them grief, concerns about their family, concerns about immigration, love of country, without being falsely stereotyped as sexist, racist, nationalist". As you will see if you peruse that link, Glasman uses 'working class' to describe any silly idea that he likes the sound of, particularly if - as will usually be the case - it is a right-wing idea. Don Paskini rightly points out that this latest is a libel on the working class, the vast majority of whom detest the EDL. But that's almost to miss the point. Of course Glasman is mobilising a (deeply patronising) image of "working class men" to hammer the anti-racists and feminists in the Labour Party. But V N Volosinov argued that the word is the most sensitive index of social change, and we should be very attentive to the changes that such terminological nuances advert to. There's something very important going on when the Labour Right, which worked so hard to end the class war, are anxious to be seen and heard evoking class.

Recently, there was a very useful analysis of the BNP and the 'white working class' by James Rhodes in the Sociology journal. It took issue with the idea, circulated by politicians and journalists alike, that the BNP's support comes from the most deprived among whites. In this respect, he points out that while the BNP have made real inroads into working class areas, there is no natural affinity between the BNP and white workers, and nor is it the poorest they appeal to. The two class fractions most likely to be represented among BNP supporters are 'skilled workers', and the lower middle class. The journalistic accounts are led astray by the 'ecological fallacy' - that is, if BNP voters can be found in a known industrial heartland, then they must be the traditional supporters of Labourism. In fact, Rhodes points out, the BNP support is typically found in the poshest areas of these towns and cities, a fact that has a huge impact on far right politics. BNP supporters and members tend to articulate their sense of class location indirectly, by reference to locality. Their scale is extremely small, as they tend to focus on this street, that area, etc. They are "rooted" and small town, rather than metropolitan; parochial rather than urbane. So, interviews with fascist voters and activists disclose that struggles over resources and entitlements are refracted through particular geographical references - ie, that street is filled with poor people who behave like animals, and the council throws all the money at them; while this street is respectable and well-maintained but gets nothing. Through such spatial distinctions, they carve out a moral and cultural economy, based on authenticity and respectability.

Authenticity merely consists in 'being from here', not merely being British and white, but being of this particular small community. Try leafleting in a BNP target area and one of the challenges that fascist sympathisers are likely to throw at you (assuming they aren't numerous enough to kick your head in) is that you're not from the area. Respectability consists of two intersecting aspects: employment, in which one can be said to be contributing something to the pot deserving of entitlement to services and funding; and conformity to certain social mores, in which one can be said to be integrated. The fascists and their supporters view the poorest of the working class with utter horror and disdain, as being almost as bad as immigrants. For them, 'welfare dependency' is an utter scandal, allowing people to be lazy and parasitic without ever contributing to society. They do not favour more money being spent on poorer areas, even if they do happen to be 'white', and in general don't support big state expenditure. They believe that only a sturdy police intervention can stop poor whites "from behaving how they've always behaved" and compel them to integrate and contribute, while "Asians" and "Muslims" can never be integrated as they aren't authentically "from here".

Of course, those BNP supporters who are themselves dependent on benefits must have their own way of asserting their respectability, and thus entitlement, within the context of fascist ideology. And they stake their claim principally on the fact of their being British and white: "locals first" as they are wont to say. But this merely defers an antagonism within the fascist constituencies - between, if you like, the petty bourgeois and lumpenproletarian elements - over entitlement to resources. And moreover, it's an antagonism where the latter are at a decided disadvantage, since fascist ideology, as is made abundantly plain in the newspapers, magazines and pamphlets of fascists, does hold the unemployed, the poor and the disabled in particularly low regard. Indeed, far from channelling the latent fears and resentments of the 'white working class', it's clear that the far right trade on a language very different from that of class, and mobilise an unstable alliance of localised constituencies often on the basis of hostility to much of the working class. Recall that Nick Griffin dubbed the people of the East End "stupid" and "decadent". This is because they comprise just those sectors of the working class - who are representative of the majority - who are either poor, 'unskilled', black, gay, leftist, culturally liberal, or in some other way not the right side of 'whiteness', of 'Britishness'. One thing James Rhodes' article doesn't discuss is the fascists' relationship to trade unionism. Perhaps this is because it's too obvious, but it's worth just saying that the BNP's long history of hostility to working class militancy has included their participation in major scabbing operations during the Miners' Strike, during which epic battle they called for the army to be deployed against striking workers.

If it is striking just how closely the apparition of 'working class' authenticity invoked by the Labour Right resembles the notion of 'white' respectability circulated by fascists, this is because there are elements of the petty bourgeois weltanschauung which have resonate with other social experiences, and which the Thatcherites in both the Conservative and Labour parties worked so hard to univeralise. The fact that some in the Labour Right want to go farther in this direction, trying to construct an electoral bloc by pandering to the most backward elements in society, who would never vote Labour anyway, is not the issue here. Rather, it is the fact that they have felt the need to do so using the language of class in a racialised way. They could just stick with standard Poujadist talk about 'ordinary decent people', 'the little man in the street' and so on, but they feel compelled to phrase it in 'class' terms that the far right are actually less comfortable with using, even if 'class' is heavily racialised.

It could be argued that this is a hegemonic operation within Labourism. The evisceration of several of Labour's working class 'heartlands' throughout the 2000s as a result of New Labour's commitment to warmongering, privatization and aggressive social authoritarianism has cost the party 5 million mainly working class votes. The pseudo-explanation, the way this can be incorporated without anything too significant having to change, is that the 'white working class' became fed up with immigration and in a world of increasing insecurity, become ever more committed to the security blankets of nation and ethnic identity, which politicians did not sufficiently articulate. This manouevering has been going on since Blair went and it became clear that Brown would not stay on for long. As the bye-election losses piled up, the Right leaked to the papers that Harriet Harman was responsible, the weasely line being that "we've got a problem with white working class males, and Harriet Harman wants to pass a Bill to help the gays, blacks and women!" But the losses still came, even harder when Labour tacked to the right on immigration and criminal justice. Labour voters didn't respond well to this sort of campaigning and boycotted the election. But it didn't matter, just as it doesn't matter now that Blue Labour or whatever it is called tomorrow won't actually win back all of those lost voters - they already know this perfectly well. Revulsion against the Tories will, they are betting, throw an election victory their way soon. The 'Blue Labour' stuff will, if anything, lessen the scale of any comeback. But the narrative provides a seemingly compelling reason why the Left, who would naturally be expected to make some small advances in the case of a big social struggle against austerity, must be kept out of the way, disenfranchised and neutralised at all costs. This also explains the tendency among the Labour Right (and centre) to favour reforms which either demote the trade unions within Labour, or give votes to largely passive groups outwith the party. But the language of class also provides a raiment of insurgency to what is actually a continuity exercise, a matey populist facade for an elitist politics. By adding the word 'white', moreover, the 'working class' becomes de-odorised, neutralised, cleansed of menacing cadences of militancy and leftism. It becomes an object of pathos and melancholia, inherently reactionary, and typified by the middle aged white male emoting about family and country, and probably organising one of the mythical millions of street parties to erupt in spontaneous planned celebration over the royal wedding next week. This sort of 'working class' is tame, dull, conformist, and deferential, but also vicious, sadistic, and vindictive. It is in this, and so many other ways, the ideal alibi for the Blairites. The actual working class will be a more fissile, combustible and less manageable matter in the coming months and years.