Ireland's left breakthrough posted by Richard Seymour

Looks like the United Left Alliance has made a breakthrough in the Irish elections gaining three confirmed seats, with two pending. The formerly ruling Fianna Fail had its first preference votes slashed by 24%, with the surplus distributed among Fine Gael, Labour and Sinn Fein. The Greens got less than 2% of first preference votes and lost all their seats (I hope the Liberals are taking note). Here's the analysis:

Voters have given the main Irish bosses' party a drubbing in the country’s general election. And the radical left has made a breakthrough, getting at least three TDs elected, with more results to come.

The biggest shift is the slump in support for the Fianna Fáil. Its share of the vote fell to less than 15 percent nationally – compared to 42 percent in the 2007 election.

This is the worst ever defeat for the party that has dominated Irish politics since independence from Britain in 1921 and that has been in power since 1997.

Fianna Fáil’s support in Dublin stood at less than 8 percent. They went from 13 to 1 TD in the capital. This is from a party that historically had 100,000 members when the country’s population was 3.5 million. It previously would have expected to get 40 percent of working class votes. Political dynasties that have controlled constituencies for decades are gone and places that have returned Fianna Fáil TDs (MPs) since the 1920s are now looking elsewhere.

The Irish Green Party, which had slavishly propped up the Fianna Fáil government in coalition, was decimated at the polls and now has no member in parliament.

The Irish Labour Party vote rose massively. But its determined lack of radicalism means that it will not look to use that vote to campaign against austerity. Instead, it is likely to go into coalition with the bosses’ second preference party Fine Gael. Sinn Fein gained and looked set to be the biggest opposition party after getting around 18 percent of the vote.

The radical left made a significant breakthrough with the candidates who are part of the United Left Alliance.

Newly elected TDs in the Alliance include Joe Higgins of the Socialist Party, Clare Daly of the Socialist Party, and Seamus Healy of the Tipperary Unemployed and Works Action Group.

Richard Boyd Barrett for the People before Profit Alliance and Joan Collins of the People before Profit Alliance and could both be elected, as the counting continues. Other members of the United Left Alliance polled strongly but are unlikely to win a seat.

The vote was so close in Richard Boyd Barrett’s Dún Laoghaire constituency that a recount has been called for tomorrow.

And here's the essential background.

Labels: bankers, fianna fail, finance capital, fine gael, green party, housing, ireland, labour, neoliberalism, recession, sinn fein, united left alliance

Social cleansing posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, cuts, defend council housing, housing, neoliberalism, spending cuts, tories, welfare

Gordon Brown bossed around by bankers posted by Richard Seymour

Thus spake our heroic leader:

Gordon Brown has admitted mistakes in regulating the banks, accusing the City of lobbying against greater scrutiny before the financial crisis plunged Britain into recession.

Brown had previously blamed the scale of the recession mainly on the international financial crisis and the refusal of other countries to agree to tighter international surveillance of the banks.

In an ITV interview due to be broadcast tonight, Brown admits he had been influenced by bankers' lobbying.

"In the 1990s, the banks, they all came to us and said, 'Look, we don't want to be regulated, we want to be free of regulation.' ... And all the complaints I was getting from people was, 'Look you're regulating them too much.'

"The truth is that globally and nationally we should have been regulating them more. So I've learnt from that."

So, why did he listen to the bankers in the first place? What possessed him all those years? Has he no independent will of his own? Here's a possible explanation: opting to maintain a low-wage economy with a flexible labour market means you have to rely on debt and speculation to drive consumption and growth. The logic of this meant that all governments felt impelled to take down barriers to further speculation-driven profit, especially as the New York stock exchange was being freed from its Glass-Steagall shackles and threatening to leave the mighty City of London biting its dust. The government actually shows no signs of learning anything substantial from the recession. It remains committed to a modified version of the same growth model, as evidence by its planned spending cuts, refusal to strengthen labour's bargaining power, continued commitment to privatisation where possible, and - notably -efforts to maintain the property market as the major source of speculation-driven income and growth in the economy (hence, no big council house building programme, even if it costs them votes). Regulating the bankers, in this context, means coming up with some rules to protect that model from its immanent weaknesses, not abandoning the financialised neoliberal model that the Labour Party so avidly grasped once it had subdued its own left-wing.

Labels: city of london, finance capital, financial sector, housing, neoliberalism, new labour, tories

Defend Council Housing activists occupy empty house in protest at action sell-off posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: activism, defend council housing, housing, militancy, occupation, privatisation

Interventionism of a different kind. posted by Richard Seymour

After the big market melt-down on Friday, oweing to massive job losses in the US, the American government has just formally nationalised the two biggest mortgage firms in the US. Yes, Freddie and Fannie are owned by nanny. In light of this kind of drastic intervention, Gordon Brown's miniature bribe to would-be home-buyers is pretty pathetic. But, of course, that reflects the different magnitudes of the problem as perceived by policymakers. Apart from American homeowners, who were drawn into unprecedented debt by a Federal Reserve policy of driving down interest rates and allowing house prices to soar (thus decreasing the cost of debt and increasing the collateral available to homeowners), much of the world's financial system depends on these two companies staying afloat. Almost half of America's deficit is contained in those two firms. Much of its banking system is heavily exposed to the housing market. In other words, the stability of the empire is at risk. It has nothing to do with protecting vulnerable homeowners, since the government is quite ready to see them expropriated both legally and - as in New Orleans - illegally. But it just goes to illustrate one of the profound paradoxes of American politics, namely the coexistence ultra-free-market ideologies among the political and economic elites with a constant orientation toward heavy state intervention to protect corporate interests.

Britain's housing market slump doesn't have anything like the same significance. While it is clearly a problem for mainly City-based firms, the government prefers to manage bail-outs in a protracted, piecemeal fashion that satisfies no one, so as not to produce a ruling class panic about the crypto-socialism of the administration. The UK housing market is a peculiarity, in that the stimulation of mass home ownership was intended by its authors in the Thatcher administration in part to create a big declassed layer among workers, and hopefully retain their loyalty at elections. It was to create a "homeowners' democracy", much as the liberalisation of the stock exchange was to create a "shareholders' democracy". In fact, what it did was to create a perpetual housing crisis, as high prices and the lack of affordable council houses meant that the mere business of having somewhere to live consumed more and more of people's income. It also contributed to the creation of a chronic homelessness problem, with approximately 79,000 households officially acknowledged to be homeless and about 400,000 people estimated to be 'hidden homeless'. In addition, the shortfall has been exacerbated because high prices encourage property speculators to buy up homes in the hope of making a huge fuck-off fortune. And, as we learned at the beginning of the year, a big part of the housing boom of late has been sustained by rank fraudulence. Now that house prices are plummeting, would-be homeowners don't stand to benefit, because it comes with contracting credit and falling incomes, and is itself the result of a slump in effective demand. The only realistic policy, if the concern is to ensure that people can have affordable housing, is to reverse the marketisation of housing, stop the 'right-to-buy' schemes which are contributing to the shortage, and introduce a big campaign of home-building. Some of this happens to be official government policy north of the border. However, New Labour is committed to making a market-driven housing system work while avoiding scaring business with big public expenditure commitments, which is why we're being offered peanuts. And business opinion would seem to approve. The Economist, just before the latest bad news struck, expressed some relief about the fact that Brown's measures were so piddling, and assured readers that this whole 'crisis' business was being massively inflated, and that America was already bouncing back.

Amid all this economic grimness, the only possible good news is when working people organise to stop the government and business from making them pay for the crisis. In light of which, this is excellent news. Mark Serwotka of the PCS is pledging a far more sustained and intensive battery of strikes than the one-day actions that we've seen to date. It should be pointed out that the CWU has already voted unanimously for further strike action at its conference, although I'm pretty sure the bulk of the union leadership doesn't want to confront Gordon Brown at this point. After all, it's an item of faith among the TUC's best and brightest that the argument is close to being won, the Labour Party is going to be reclaimed, that Brown is basically sympathetic, that if we can only somehow shore up the government enough to keep the Tories out, all will be well...

Labels: empire, gordon brown, housing, recession, trade unions, uk, us economy

Plans, great and small. posted by Richard Seymour

You will be forgiven for yawning at the government's 'shock and awe' policy announcements. An interest free loan for 30% of a home's value for up to five years? Golly. Suspended stamp duty for properties under £175,000 (is there such a thing in London?) for one year? Turn off the charm, already. My thighs are quivering. On the other hand, get back to me when you have a beautiful bunch of emergency council house building programmes for me. These are supposedly Gordon Brown's big guns, the first of a series of stunning policy initiatives that will reverse ten years of decay, unpopularity over the war and the economy, and a series of unworldly blunders over the last year. Altogether too little, way too late. With average household debt at £23,000 and 1.6m people queuing for social housing, the government is tinkering at the margins of a problem built up over approximately twenty years, in order to provide scant protection against a crisis that it assured us for months would be light and brief in its impact.

I am willing to bet that among Brown's upcoming feats there will be no job creation package, no relenting on public sector pay, no serious expansion in public expenditure to sustain growth, no substantial relief for those kicked out of work, no reversal on planned cuts to benefits, no improvement in what the ECJ has described as our "inadequate" pension protection systems (because a whole a bunch of pension schemes are having to be rescued at the moment), no substantial debt relief for millions of people who have been driven to borrow just in order to keep spending enough even during the period of growth, and are now faced with the prospect of unemployment and big arrears hanging round their necks - nothing, in short, that will seriously alleviate the burdens being placed on ordinary people by the economic crisis. What could compel the government to act differently. Last night on Channel 4 News, Derek Simpson, head of the Unite trade union, was urging the government to adopt a whole range of measures to combat poverty pay, improve workers' rights, raise public sector living standards and so on. All perfectly modest and reasonable demands. Then at the end of the segment, the reporter stated that because Simpson had been given a "fair hearing" by the Prime Minister at a meeting some weeks ago, the unions are still shoring up Downing Street. Say what? Gordon nodded for an hour or so and then shuffled him out the back door, and he takes that as some form of encouragement? We need the unions to act, and act far more decisively than they have done to date. In fact, this is part of Brown's strategy for keeping the unions on-side, especially as the party risks going bankrupt without union donations. Last year, Brown wrote to Brendan Barber, head of the TUC, to promise regular meetings of the kind that Simpson attended. And since, as Mark Serwotka has pointed out, some union leaders are more interested in defending 'their' government than in defending the interests of their members, the invite has been welcomed and the money duly stumped up without any change in policy. So much for the bragging that "We own Labour". No, I'm afraid the relationship is quite the reverse.

Meanwhile, the latest Tory plan to help people through these difficult times is to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £2 million. Apparently, raising it to £1m (which the Telegraph preposterously claims would save "nine million families" from the tax), was not enough. This, in addition to planned cuts in business taxes, is 'compassionate conservatism' for you. After all, they can't see their rich friends and their offspring lose money in a recession. How the hell else do you think they're going to afford all those ivory back-scratchers with profits tumbling like they are? Still others have different plans, older plans. For, although the Home Office is apparently worried that the recession will increase the appeal of Islamist parties among those who experience racism and economic deprivation, I personally am more concerned about terrorist training camps.

Labels: debt, economy, gordon brown, housing, new labour, recession, tuc

My house, Our home. posted by Richard Seymour

Guest post by Dave S.

On the one hand, there are just too many houses. We've had to put up with a booming decade of TV egging us on to buy and to let and to become rich beyond belief, but big capital has gone one further than that distant acquaintance of a distant acquaintance who packed in his job to do up old flats. They've been on a building spree, throwing themselves into mill conversions and futuristic towers that have all come onto the market at the same time. And so, flooding the market after a decade of pushing up prices, they can't sell them. In Manchester and Birmingham it's the same story, one of those crises of over-production that make capitalism so absurd. Now, says the editor of Building magazine, "what they tend to do is to get to a stage and make the buildings watertight so they don't deteriorate" and cut their losses there.

One the other hand, there are just not enough houses. George Monbiot reckons we need another three million, based on research from Shelter and from testimony like this:

Wendy Castle moved into her flat in the Trellick Tower in west London when her eldest child was a baby. He?s now 16, and she has three others between 13 and 2. But her flat has only two bedrooms. She sleeps in one of them with her two youngest children. The room is completely filled by beds. On one side they are jammed against the window, which no longer shuts properly. On the other they are pressed against the heater, which can?t be used because of the fire risk. Her two oldest boys share an even smaller room.

The lack of "affordable" housing was one of the main issues in the London mayoral election, and it's also one of New Labour's principle motives for immigrant-bashing. Margaret Hodge MP earned the censure of even the Tory press last year for asserting "the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family" over the needs of spongeing immigrants. This, in the heartland of "no Dogs, no Blacks, no Irish", in a target constituency of the BNP neo-Nazis, who are surprising no-one by doing quite well out of the housing crisis despite hating council homes and their tenants.

Behind the familiar tidal-wave-of-immigrants scapegoat lurks a familiar enough culprit for the dilapidation of council housing. Just as private companies are being more and more closely "involved" with health and education, so too are large scale stock transfers moving social housing into the private sector. The associations taking over our council houses - such as New Charter where I grew up, and Eastlands where I'm living now - tend to be ostensibly not-for-profit, at least for now, but this changes nothing when they operate in a market driven by profitability. They still have to give a return on investments - a profit for the banks - and accordingly run their homes just like a private landlord: lowering standards, increasing rents, evicting undesirables.

However, this goes beyond the standard neoliberal pillaging of the public sector. Shelter identifies the right-to-buy as a major driver of the housing crisis, and for all that they've been out of the news since the 1980s we should definitely take these small scale stock transfers as seriously as the large, for their political ramifications go way beyond. People remember Margaret Thatcher's annihilation of the unions as a political force - and are right to be encouraged by recent signs of a recovery from this attack - but just as important in her arsenal against a working class politic was the right to buy.

We are mostly right to deride the word "aspirational" as media code for "middle class", but this misses a crucial nuance. To be an aspirational voter is to be an individualist, a lonely robot, a Willie or Linda Loman mortgaging themselves out to better build up their own little place in the world, and reshaping the working class (well, a section thereof) into this image was an important part of Thatcher's mission. The formulation that "any man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure" didn't just serve as an excuse to sell off public transport, it served to stigmatize the use of collective facilities and gear up our aspiration towards a private mode of transport. Likewise, when each put in charge of our own little corner, we are much less inclined towards collective struggle.

That being determines consciousness is a cliché of the far left, but the Thatcherite right understood it at least as well as we did, and were better equipped to act upon it, changing our economic situation to undermine our politics. The home-owning consciousness starts with a reluctance to strike lest we endanger our mortgage payments, and ends with the dismissal of our collective interests, with the feeling that "we are all middle class now". We were not, of course, suddenly middle class - most of us still had a relationship with the means of production far less ambiguous than this implies, and a lower income too - but a significant minority of us were nonetheless being taught by our mortgages how to aspire. And it was this, as much as the destruction of the NUM, that set back the workers' movement for a generation.

This whole process, however, depends on the market as a reliable manager of housing. Which, as is surely being proved beyond all doubt by current events, it is not. The current economic crisis was not caused by the housing markets, but it has manifested itself here more than anywhere else. Waves of credit-fuelled speculation push the price up so that no-one can afford to buy a house, and then the bubble bursts so that no-one can afford to sell a house. And so do we enter the phase of creative destruction, in which capitalism crushes the very aspirations that its political representatives had put so much effort into cultivating.

Where once they were ushered into the housing market with welcoming arms and "generous" subsidies, people are now being chased out by mortgage foreclosures. The alarming increase in home reposessions is far from the whole story.; the trade fairs and seminars that promoted getting rich quick out of buying to let have now switched their focus towards the sell-and-rent-back market. Hark! Ye property investors, desperate mortgage-holders will sell their homes to you at a massive discount to avoid the repo men, and then pay you rent for the privelege of staying there (and don't worry, you can always evict them after a year if someone else seems more profitable). Others still are going for IVAs and the like, which can sometimes help but which also add another layor of creditors seeking a profit at the debtors' expense.

Mightn't these homeowners prefer to be bailed out by an accountable, public body that would put tenants before profits? Mightn't the construction companies struggling to sell their accumulated inventories have difficulty arguing against a massive compulsory purchase order from the government, on behalf of those eternally waiting for a council house? Mightn't we question too the second and third homes of those in the "plutonomy sector"? Mightn't there be a case, in short, for nationalising a huge swathe of the nation's housing stock? There's certainly an environmental case - the market is never going to meet even the government's tame targets for sustainable homes, let alone deliver the kind of efficiency drive that peak oil and climate change demand - but I think that the political case might strike a chord at the moment too.

The campaign to defend council housing is a very good start, but this might be the time to get us through the housing crisis and to reunite ourselves against the divisions that Thatcher and her successors have sown among us; the time, in other words, to demand council housing.

Labels: defend council housing, homelessness, housing, mortgages, rent