Against the Tory Age Tax

The first week of the parliamentary recess, so what is a leading Tory to do? How about kite-flying a new policy to see if it catches a violent gust of opposition, or floats languidly in a pleasant breeze of indifference or, even better, acquiescence? This is exactly what Matt Hancock, our ever-present health secretary has decided to do. According to The Graun, one policy under consideration by the government - which Hancock is favourable toward - is introducing a new tax to pay for elderly social care. With the proviso that workers over the age of 40 pay for it.

Because this government, like its predecessors, fetishises choice as a good in and of itself, we are going to be compelled to choose: either pay more tax or national insurance, or be forced to take out an insurance policy to cover later costs for later care. The models for this come from Japan, which already funds social care from a 40+ tax, and Germany where contributions begin from the point of entry into work. Great news, right? At last the boil of how to pay for social care is going to be lanced and the issue can be resolved once and for all?

Well, obviously not. The first thing worth remembering is the crisis we have in adult social care now only exists because of decisions the Tories made. Over the course of the last decade, their cuts programme has seen £16bn wiped off the budgets of councils, by far and away the biggest provider of these services. This left them in such a poor state that George Osborne allowed local authorities to add a social care precept onto council tax from 2015. Which, in true Tory fashion, came nowhere near meeting demand let alone making good the support infrastructure broken up so, for example, Osborne could dole out year-on-year corporation tax cuts. He, however, was merely one in a long line of chancellors to deliberately underfund services. Between 1997-2010, adult social care spending (i.e. inclusive of people with complex needs, as well as the elderly) increased 4.3% year on year in real terms and this was supported by care standards regulation, an inspectorate, and initiatives around personalised care. Yet this was within the tax regime inherited from the Thatcher/Major years. You'll remember it, the one where North Sea oil receipts, for example, were frittered away on lowering taxes for the rich. Even under Labour spending couldn't keep up with demand because Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were not prepared to claw back the cash imposed by the Tory tax settlement. 40 years of purposeful underspending because the capacious pockets of the wealthy mattered and matter more has brought us to the brink of the age tax.

The second point is why should workers pay for it? Over the last 20 years final salary pension schemes have closed and career average schemes are now the norm. Multiple employers, public and private, have taken holidays from paying their contributions into pension pots with the blessing of governments red and blue. And to add insult to injury, across the board employee contributions have gone up for a less generous income in retirement. We see headlines about the shrinkification of Whispa Golds and Double Deckers make the front pages and front ends of newspapers and news sites. The whittling down of pensions is never deemed as important. Workers then have already lost out when it comes to old age. And then there is the small matter of stagnant wage. Pay has been flat in real terms since August 2007. On occasion, even the Daily Mail is forced to admit the rich have gained from increased productivity since the 1980s at the expense of everyone else. Effectively, without getting into arguments about surplus value, it's obvious the rich have banked wages owed to us. It's high time they coughed them up or this extra unearned wealth was put to more socially useful purposes than a fleet of yachts. Such as getting fed into rebuilding adult social care.

This is the context of the crisis facing the elderly. It is the bitter fruit of decades of systematic looting and defunding. Therefore, the Tory framing of the problem must be challenged. It suits Hancock to simply declare a funding black hole that can only be filled if we ask everyone to contribute a little bit extra. He wants to pretend we're talking about an accident of demographics, an accident of more people living longer and that's the end of it. Something must be done. The temptation, and the danger, when it comes to criticising the proposal from a "forensic" standpoint is zeroing in on its regressive characteristics to the exclusion of all else. Is it fair the 30 year old sales executive pays nothing when their 45 year old office cleaner does? What insurance company would be crazy enough to offer a social care policy that is virtually certain to pay out large sums? Important objections certainly, but limiting them to "technical" matters takes the political sting out of repeated Tory (and Labour) failures on care. Rejecting the Tories' age tax has to involve opening up their record, how they have engineered this impasse, and who's benefited from it. After all, the first responsibility of an effective opposition is to tell the truth.

Five Years of Facebook: A Rant

Social media is a fact of social life and an increasingly central vector of capital accumulation. The content generation and imminent networking capacities these platforms enable offers new ways of organising, as well as the means for indulging a bit of mass manipulation. But you don't need me to tell you this. We're not living in 2006 any longer and this is understood to the point of assuming the status of a banality. What gives then? If you permit your author a moment of indulgence, Saturday marked five years of this blog having a page on the Facebook, so while you're here why not give us a like? On the occasion of another blogging milestone, I won't be slapping my own back or giving the dusty old vanity trumpet a blow. Now is time as good as any to have a short moan about how shitty Facebook is.

As of this set of key strokes, your favourite Stoke-on-Trent-based politics blog has accumulated 5,726 likes. A modest quantity but here's the thing. While the likes have built very slowly over time the reach of the blog's Facebook page has actually declined. All thanks to the unaccountable and (usually) incomprehensible changes to the company's algorithms. Starting out sharing links on sundry groups, you would always get a good number to the blog via sharing posts from the page. Likewise, shares grown organically, to use the awful jargon, were quite healthy to begin with. Then, from 2018, material was getting regularly picked up and shared by Red Labour's page. The audience numbers were good and then, over night, Facebook changed how people see material shared to their feeds. The numbers referred from Facebook to here crashed by about two-thirds. An annoying inconvenience for me, but the impact on businesses and the self-employed who depend on stable traffic from the site for their income must have been hard.

Remember the fake news panic? Well, it's never really left us, and neither have the changes Facebook made. Finding an affected concern for community building and prioritising content from friends, those changes de-prioritised the content put out by pages and groups, and so another drop in traffic hit all groups and pages, and by extension those who depended on traffic via these portals. The problem is there's still just enough people visiting the site after the two big cuts in audience figures. Facebook remains one of this blog's main feeders, though nowhere near the levels of when the page had half the likes it does now. And so tending to it, trying to drive those likes ever higher, sharing your bits and pieces in the corners of a dozen or so groups, this all demands time but with ever decreasing returns. Not that Facebook cares. The whole shtick is premised on you sharing your content, be it a clip here, a meme there, a photo of a slap up meal, or a learned and discerning political screed. And people who pump out their own stuff will carry on feeding Mark Zuckerberg's machine because, if they want their stuff to be seen, they have no choice. Such are the labours intrinsic to the attention economy.

Facebook is a monster. The same goes for Twitter and any other social media platform. Their service is socially useful, but they simultaneously leech off the data freely given over and by their meddling with algorithms, tinkering with the interface, and introducing paid for and subscription elements they destroy the serendipitous creativity and (semi-) random connectedness that powered them to success in the first place. Just because it's Silicon Valley with its tech bros, the contrived talk of ecosystems and self-actualisation, and on trend piffle doesn't change the nature of the beast. Capitalism eats itself by cannibalising the conditions of its own production, be it digital or analogue.

On Jeremy Corbyn's Defence Fund

14.1k donors. £255,233 raised. Not bad for a few days work. The announcement from Panorama journalist John Ware that he intended to pursue Jeremy Corbyn and others for defamation has certainly provoked a reaction. Should Ware decide to see his tough words through, the monies raised on Corbyn's behalf can easily afford him half-decent counsel. Facing a defence fund of this size, perhaps the writ will not be forthcoming after all.

This talk of taking legal action is another episode in the hounding of Jeremy Corbyn, of which there has been no let up since relinquishing the Labour leadership back in April. Ahead of the long-awaited release of the report on Russia's involvement in British politics this week, the Tories' press arm smeared Corbyn as being in receipt of Russia-sourced leaks about the UK's preparedness to put the NHS on the chopping block for a post-Brexit trade deal with the US. Readers might remember Corbyn ambushing Boris Johnson with the documents during one of last winter's leaders' debates. Never mind how the papers had sat on Reddit for months beforehand and were published by The Telegraph. Does that make Johnson's favourite paper complicit too? And after all that, far from poppycock the leaks turned out to be utterly prescient.

Then we got to the hinge of the week. As expected, Labour dropped its defence against claims brought by John Ware and his Panorama interviewees, issued a grovelling apology and handed over a substantial out of court settlement. You don't need the keenest legal mind to divine this was driven by politics and not the likelihood of Labour winning in light of the contents of Labour's internal anti-semitism report. Keir Starmer made a simple political equation. Settle this, put the past behind us and get on with (ahem) providing some opposition. The problem is he's opened the door to other actions, such as the one currently mulled by former general secretary Iain McNicol - easy money for some now the party has admitted in court it was in the wrong. Likewise, our recent litigants could file further claims against their suspensions from the party because of the position the party has taken. And there's also the small matter of dumping on his own inquiry into the leak and its contents. In short, if Keir Starmer is so blas矇 about defending his own party, how can he be expected to stand up for the people it's supposed to represent?

The rapid accumulation of Jeremy's defence fund isn't just a reaction against vindictive elites, it's a protest against the Labour leader too. For the last five years Labour was consumed by some of the fiercest infighting the party has ever seen. A half decade of salting the earth Labour grows in, and we're supposed to simply forget the role those who run the Labour Party now played or blame the left. True, back in 2015 the right predicted disaster and they strained every sinew to make sure that was the outcome. Sadly, there is no reckoning for these people. Some of the worst are now out of parliament, but are stacking up on jobs and enjoying their elevation to the House of Lords thanks to Tory preferment. None of them have atoned, none of them have apologised for destroying ours chances, none have been held responsible for letting Johnson waltz through long-held Labour seats and letting him back into Downing Street. In this context, Keir's surrender is not an example of setting factionalism aside and pressing for unity, but one where he's aligned himself with them - not that there was very much doubt - and looking to strike a new balance in the party on their terms. And if this means tens of thousands leaving the party, so much the better. The defence fund is a middle finger to all that, of the little people rebelling against their party betters and hoping a just outcome can be purchased for a few quid.

Keir is not making things easy for himself. With papers full of keyboard warriors demanding reckonings with and purges of the left, he needs to remember more is at risk than an army of enthusiastic door knockers, but of losing and seeing his left flank dissipate among the Greens, the Liberal Democrats, and the sectlets. And if they go, they act as negative multipliers on their own friends, networks, and cohorts. Not all of them live in big cities and help Labour clock up super majorities, but whose mobilisation is key if the party is interested in winning over scores of marginals. There was no evidence Keir understood this basic fact when he embarked on his leadership campaign, and he hasn't shown an inkling since. Enjoy the opinion polls for the moment. The path to defeat is a long one.

Protest Stoke's Racist Lord Mayor

Last month featured a a brief post about Stoke's outgoing Lord Mayor, Cllr Jackie Barnes, and her tendency to post up outright racist and dog-whistling pieces to social media. The story made the national media and thanks to the furore her successor, Cllr Melanie Baddeley of the City Independents (and formerly of the BNP), resigned her deputy mayoralty and won't be taking over from her in September. However, Cllr Barnes remains the mayor. According to the statement occasionally sent out by the City Council in response to complaints, she has "self-referred" to the standards committee where there will be a "full investigation". For info, the standards committee does not have the power to suspend or expel a councillor and force a by-election.

Still, within the limits of the system Cllr Barnes should receive the toughest sanction at the committee's disposal. For too long Stoke-on-Trent has had a problem with racism. Those voters who supported the BNP throughout the 00s are still around, and the stench from its dalliance with fascism hasn't gone away. And, of course, if there was any shred of shame and decency in her veins Cllr Barnes would have matched her apology with her resignation from the mayoralty and the council chamber.

Unsurprisingly, Stoke's Black Lives Matter are not impressed. They have been in touch to share their email uniform template they have used to contact Cllr Barnes and Council Leader Abi Brown, which I'm happy to reproduce below. Their email addresses are: jackie.barnes@stoke.gov.uk and abi.brown@stoke.gov.uk


Put REMOVE JACKIE BARNES as subject

I (INSERT NAME) call for the immediate removal of Jackie Barnes from her tenure as Lord Mayor of Stoke-on-Trent. Jackie Barnes has deliberately and wilfully breached Stoke-on-Trent City Council's Equality Policy. Her racist social media posts have caused extreme offence to many people of this city and harmed its reputation nationally and internationally.

I do not trust your Internal Standards Committee to investigate this without bias.

I demand that Jackie Barnes is immediately removed from the position of Lord Mayor of Stoke-on-Trent and her removal be publicly announced by 4pm, Monday 27th July 2020.

Imany - Don't Be So Shy (Filatov & Karas Remix)

Top tune incoming. And yes, there's plenty more where this came from.

Conditional and Transactional Politics

We're coming up to a year of Boris Johnson in the saddle, and as I write a few dozen hacks are penning their assessment of Johnson's performance, summarising his spectacular victories and disastrous failings. Most articles will carry their banality like a gold star and contribute nothing to the accumulated wisdom about British politics. Thankfully, there are already a couple of pieces worth your time by the New Statesman's Stephen Bush, and Conservative Home's Paul Goodman. Both of whom have an insight worth reflecting on. Stephen writes that the Tories are, for want of a better formulation, a government of campaigners and future success depends on their becoming something resembling a proper government. For his part, Paul argues that Johnson shares some qualities with Thatcher and Blair: none of his opponents had or have his measure, nor know how to neutralise him.

Going with Paul's first, the polls appear to bear his argument out. The Tories are proving very resilient and, if anything, are gaining ground again. Explaining this is relatively simple. As we have seen over the decades, people identifying with a political party has fallen. Since 1991 when 41% either very strongly or fairly strongly identified with a party, from 1997 the figures have hovered between 33 and 36, with 2017 proving to be an outlier year when it increased to 39% (BSA Survey, 2019, p.191). Younger people are the least likely to identify, but when it comes to Brexit 40% alone identify either as a strong leaver or a strong remainer. As party ID, as the polprofs like to call it, is the best and most obvious predictor of voting intention, its decline makes elections more difficult to predict and the job harder for political parties. Instead, we have the rise of conditional and transactional politics. To put it simply, larger numbers of people vote not out of party loyalty but because parties are offering and doing something they want.

Cast your mind back to the carnage of last year's EU elections. At 22.4%, the combined vote of the Tories and Labour was their worst result in a national ballot ever. Why? Theresa May's deal and her extension of Article 50 allowed the Brexit Party to be the vehicle of sending our referendum-thwarting elites a message. And Labour's sensible approach hardly lent itself to easy sloganeering and the simplistic binarism of Remain to Nigel Farage's Leave, and so the Liberal Democrats and the Greens cashed in. Johnson's insight was the Tories were only ever going to win an election if they could properly align their position with an unambiguous break with the EU and being seen to get Brexit done. Hence the theatrics and chaos once Westminster re-opened its doors, and he was proved correct. The transactional promise of sorting Brexit out overrode the party identities and voting habits of millions of former Labour voters, particularly those with a bit of property, are older and/or retired (and effectively declassed), and have no obligation to vote otherwise.

Johnson and Dominic Cummings know the character of this support, which helps explain their barrelling approach to all things. For as long as Brexit is delivered, they're fine. But what happens after December? This is where Stephen is right to make the distinction between campaigning and governing. If politics is conditional and transactional, especially if the content of the exchange is symbolic and rooted in values and identity, how can Johnson set up a new range of prospective transactions? Immigration had the capacity to fill the gap and contributed to Brexit in the first place, but from this perspective it's about to get sorted via their points-based dog's dinner, and so has limited utility. Culture war stuff about lecturers and students on campuses isn't going to excite anyone outside the incestuous coterie of right wing columnists and rent-a-gob backbenchers. Johnson's challenge in government then is to offer new wares.

The problem Labour has, even though polling shows the voters like Keir Starmer so far and prefer him to Johnson, is he and Labour aren't selling anything. More worryingly his flat footed treatment of Black Lives Matter, the reticence to say a cross word about the government, and distance put between him and Labour's platforms of 2017 and 2019 runs the risk of losing its already existing support. Thanks to the collapse of the old institutions, family relationships, and workplace organisation that used to inculcate the spirit of collectivism and class consciousness, the rising class of immaterial workers are predisposed to Labour precisely because it offered a programme complementary to their interests. Their support was conditional on this, and if Keir retreats too far from these positions they won't bother. Staying home on polling day or giving the Greens or LibDems a punt is more than possible. It happened last summer, after all. The politics of triangulation are dead - if Labour doesn't go to them, then they won't come to Labour. It is that simple. Beating the Tories demands much more than just not being the Tories when the next general election comes around.

Conditional and transactional politics are here to stay. Who can make the most credible promises and be seen to deliver them has the best hope of transforming episodic support into something longer lasting. The Tories, as the governing party, have an advantage because they possess an unassailable majority and can do as they please. If they decide to do nothing with it, as per some advice to have come their way, they're in danger of throwing it all away. And likewise, if Labour retreats from the interests of their coalition of voters, they're doomed. But if both promise and deliver, promise and deliver, those party ID figures could start rising again. Do either have the wit to ride conditionality successfully over the medium to long-term?

Brexit Was Not Made in Moscow

When things in politics aren't going your way, folks of all persuasions can lapse into the outside agitator fantasy. Forget about doing the spadework that might uncover what's happening in front of your face, it's much easier to locate and attach responsibility to some external actor of almost supernatural provenance. For the beleaguered Labour right during the Corbyn era, the membership surge was inspired and steered by the cargo cults of the Trotskyist left. For the Brexit fundamentalists confronted by a more culturally permissive and tolerant society, it's the machinations of the liberal elite who are the font of evil. And for centrist politics on both sides of the Atlantic, rather than coming to political terms with the presidency of Donald Trump or how the EU referendum was won by Leave, they prefer to believe Russian psyops on social media is responsible. For example, just look at the state of this prominent remain campaigner.

Imagine the disappointment for some as the Intelligence and Security Committee Report on Russian involvement in British politics revealed absolutely nothing. No gun smoke, let alone a gun. Yes, it said the Putin regime were a bunch of wrong 'uns, as if we didn't know that already. It also said the UK was too blas矇 when it came to the Kremlin's influence because we're now their number one target. Sounds terrifying. Unfortunately, the committee refused to elaborate further as we have to be careful about national security. It did concede the Russian troll farms were active during the Scottish referendum - cue the Murdo Fraser and Ian Murray chum-in calling for an investigation of this influence in the hope of tarring the SNP with the Putinist brush. However, it found no evidence of interference in the EU referendum because Theresa May, bless her cotton socks, specifically instructed the intelligence services to steer clear of the Brexit result. Unsurprisingly, the Scottish Tories' enthusiasm to look into one referendum is not matched by Downing Street's keenness to investigate the other.

Do the Tories have something to hide? To suggest the Russian state and its various actors and proxies don't try and influence elections overseas is absurd and naive. It is sinister and banal behaviour when you realise most states with sufficient capacity do the same when they think it's strategically useful to do so. You don't have to be a Maduro apologist to note similar activities are undertaken by the UK in Venezuela, for example. The Tories know that if Russian attempts to influence the EU referendum are taken seriously by any arm of the state, let alone evidence is uncovered and officially sanctified in some way means having to deal with the political fall out over potential subversion, it also severely damages the reputation of the UK as a stable fixture of the international system. Thanks to the City of London the UK is at the heart of international trade and capital flows, and one reason why many city slickers were so pro-Brexit was their belief it could double down on this outside of the "strictures" of the European Union. However, if it is shown how easily the UK was influenced by a few thousand targeted adverts on Facebook and some extra not-at-al-dodgy money for one of the Leave campaigns, its reputation for solidity goes up in smoke and with it the trust of those who run their cash through the City. That said, publicly ruling out of bounds any further investigation of Russian influence isn't the best PR for a post-Brexit Britain eager for trade deals with anybody and everybody.

Subtract the beige macs, cyphers hidden in Hyde Park, and sightseeing England's cathedrals, the Tories have very serious questions to answer about Russia anyway. Again, Russia maintains an active lobby here in Britain, just as we do in other countries via the British Council and a panoply of business interests and NGOs. Russia Today is the most obvious manifestation of these efforts, and has no problem finding useful idiots from the dregs of politics to regularly appear on its output. However, where matters are more pernicious is the extent to which Russian money penetrates the Conservative Party itself. Many a wealthy exile from Moscow, whether hanging around in London out of necessity or choice, have donated monies to the Tories. Some of these people include close political allies of Putin himself. So when Boris Johnson played tennis with the banker Lubov Chernukhin, who also happened to be the wife of a former deputy finance minister, bunged the Tories £160k back in 2014, what was said? Likewise, how much Russian money winds its way into Tory coffers via their exclusive and murky dining clubs? Despite the bravado and Russia-baiting we've seen from Tories this week in advance of the report, how dependent is the party on the kindness of oligarchs?

Russia's influence on British politics is real, and the Tories should explain themselves and be forced to open up their shadowy channels of funding. Nothing to hide, nothing to worry about as the old adage goes. But the Kremlin's influence is nought compared to those of other states - the United States and the EU immediately come to mind. Even the oil-rich autocracies of the Gulf have more clout. Therefore no one's interests are served by over-egging the pudding. Russia ran troll farms and funded posters and leaflets. In the grand scheme of things, so what? When we can explain the Scottish referendum's close result and why Dave and friends failed to convince that staying in the EU was best for Britain entirely by analysing the political dynamics in play. Whether Russia provided the pipeline to Arron Banks's magic pockets or not, this does not get away from the main point some still refuse to confront. Brexit was manufactured, packaged, and delivered here in good old Blighty, and no amount of pinning it on the Russians changes this fact.

Obligation and Class Consciousness

Helen Pidds's ridiculous article about working class Tory voters deserved all the brickbats it attracted. If you hold an artisanal pizzeria owner to be working class, then you're operating with a notion of class that is neither use nor ornament. As the piece has been commented on and mocked, we're not going on another journey around the nature of class in the 21st century - here's a couple of items if this is your bag. Instead, I want to concentrate on a throwaway comment from one of the interviewees.

Retired nurse Keith Park is the archetypal retiree I've written about so many times. Owns property? Check. Psychopathic indifference to the Covid dead? Check. Racist? Check. If my bits and pieces on the conservatising effects of age could manufacture people, out would pop Mr Park, proud bungalow owner. Okay, he's representative of millions who think alike and have the same "real concerns" about immigration, and could be anyone vox popped by the likes of John Harris or the BBC's indoor market safaris. These former Labour voters all suit because we've heard their refrain enough. To quote the Pidds piece, "He felt able to vote Tory only after burying his dad – “He’d kill me!”."

How many times did you hear similar on the doorstep and after? "Oooh, my dad would be rolling in his grave if he knew. My mum would have disowned me." Etcetera, et-bloody-cetera. It's like a layer of people were rebelling against the memory of their own parents. And they knew by voting Tory they were doing wrong. Okay, but is it important?

Yes. When Thatcher was elected in 1979, her programme aimed at recasting Britain's class relations by taking on and defeating the labour movement. Which is exactly what the Tories did. But one leg of her assault on working class solidarity was by disrupting it and creating the conditions for generating new Tory voters. Most obviously, introducing Right to Buy and turning millions of council tenants into home owners was very much part of this. This subjected swathes of working class people to the discipline exacted by mortgage holding. I.e. Meet the payments or face repossession, hence curbing impulses to workplace militancy and individuating responsibility for keeping a roof over your head. The other string to the Thatcherite bow was the privatisation programme. Selling lucrative public sector monopolies to the friends of the Tory party was the game, but marketing them as experiments in popular capitalism was the genius political move. Offering reserved but limited shares to the public was an effort at popularising share ownership, with the hope of effectively turning millions of people into petty capitalists with an eye on their modest portfolio. Share price movement yes, labour movement no. This was reinforced by implementing new conditionalities to benefits, particularly the dole, and a growing emphasis on linking education to vocational training. Taken together, these measures laid down a culturally dominant way of being: entrepreneurial, self-reliant, individuated, indifferent, indebted.

This project was, however, time limited. Eventually, you run out of the carrots. There's only so much state property to privatise and public housing stock to sell cheap, and if you carry on - as John Major, Tony Blair, and Dave did - the sell offs become increasingly meagre, dysfunctional, and absurd. The stick however, the conditions that can be attached to social security, the quantities of personal debt that can be taken on, the (neoliberal) expectations the state has when it addresses its citizens, the limit here is the extent to which a population finds them bearable. We now live in the end times for Thatcherism. Hers and subsequent governments' refusal to replenish the social housing stock, the evisceration of the job market with its plethora of part-time and insecure jobs, and flat living standards means there is a blockage in the system. Those who acquired property and shares in the 1980s and after still have them, but their children and especially their grand children cannot repeat their feat.

For those with the property, as they move into retirement the transformation of consciousness 1980s Tory strategists were banking on is now paying interest. As incomes become limited and fixed, house values for most and petty portfolios for some assume greater importance as a means of securing them against economic and political uncertainty. An ontological anxiety is their lot and anyone promising a more secure future by lashing out against stand-ins and scapegoats for their sense of unease is politically appealing. Boris Johnson and Theresa May offered this in 2019 and 2017, and Brexit promised the same in 2016. This collapse in class consciousness on the part of millions of working class people who've entered into retirement over this last decade was a long time in the works. It was assiduously deconstructed, deracinated and deposited in the receptacle of history.

The one brake on this process preventing the collapse from happening earlier was not their links to the present, i.e. the lives of their offspring, but the living relations to the past. Their parents were their conscience, a reminder not only of where they came from but their exposure to a set of values that hadn't changed: a collective and small p political culture of working class consciousness with a fidelity to local community, the union, and, crucially, the Labourist reflex. As this generation dies they fade into memory and the obligation to vote the right way dies with them. Indeed, some might have felt a frisson of transgression when they ticked the box next to the Tory candidate back in December, but ultimately what mattered more to them was feeding the fears and delusions and cruelty inculcated in them over the past 40 years.

Lives on the Left

I couldn't wait for next month's new left media plug to share this. Lives on the Left is a new project by Paul Simpson looking at well-known and lesser-known figures in labour movement history, and it's fascinating. The first episode below profiles Peter Lee, a largely forgotten ex-miner, trade unionist and politician from Durham in the early 20th century. This interview with Jonathan Tomaney highlights the relationship between the labour movement and Methodism, looks at the deep roots of Labourism's conciliatory politics, and discusses how working class institutions in Durham in alliance with local government came together to empower our class - a movement ironically undercut by Labour's election in 1945.

There are 12 episodes so far and hopefully many more to come. If you appreciate Paul's efforts, he's raising funds to keep the project going here.

Lives on the Left: A Labour History Podcast · Episode 1: John Tomaney on Peter Lee

You can find the list of available episodes here.

The BBC's Leftist Bias

It's another victory for the advancing armies of Wokeism. Andrew Neil, scourge of ill-prepared politicians and upsetterer of the snowflake left is done. Along with 520 jobs set to go from the BBC, his show is not being renewed and when Politics Live resumes, he won't be hosting it. Pity then not the poor workers about to be left high and dry, but Britain's under siege right wingers. Still reeling from the government's decision to make face masks compulsory in shops, their favourite journalists are as cancelled as their civil liberties. Sucks to be them. Well, no one is sacking Andrew Neil. In fact, so keen are the BBC to see Brillo's back end that it wants to give him a new show.

It's curious. When you're on the left, it's not so much an article of faith that the BBC is biased toward the narrow range of establishment opinion but rather a fact of political life. The BBC's politics coverage takes its cue from the papers, who are overwhelmingly slanted to the right, and shares the same assumptions not just about newsworthiness, but the world too. Jeremy Corbyn was, of course, the outsider par excellence and got the treatment they thought he deserved. But to a lesser extent, Nigel Farage and Nick Griffin in their turns received the same.

Yet one thing that has always tickled are the accusations of bias that come from the right. These come in two flavours. Moaning whenever a Tory politician is asked a tricky question, or someone in the Question Time audience turns out to be a Labour activist or councillor. Which is funny because those times when it's a Labour politician caught like a terrified rabbit in the headlights of scrutiny, or a Tory activist or councillor in the audience gets to ask a pointed, party political question do not register at all. None are so blind as those who do not wish to see. And then we have those complaints claiming the BBC is structurally biased towards the left. How do they work that one out?

Over the years, professional shithouses and right wing commentators invariably booked for slots on BBC television and radio like to claim Auntie is run by liberal elites. You might as well call it Graun TV. And how does "leftism" manifest in their output? Not via socialist messaging (though howls out outrage accompany most episodes of Doctor Who) or the broadcasting of communism, but ... by ensuring women, LGBTQ+ folks and minority ethnicities get a fair crack. In the last 10 years, the BBC was at the forefront of pushing high profile and good quality programming centring characters who aren't your archetypal straight white men and does not revolve around their experiences. Shows as innocuous as Killing Eve or Luther are vanguards of liberal tolerance, which is always the outer shell of militant Cultural Marxism. This is nothing new. From the unlamented ex-Tory MP Aiden Burley getting sniffy over the "multicultural crap" of the 2012 Olympics ceremony to the racists who objected to Derek Griffiths appearing on Playschool in the 1970s and 80s, the desire our media should reflect society as it is instead of how they imagine it to be tips them into states of apoplexy. This, apparently, is left wing.

Stands to reason then a balanced and non-biased BBC would be racist, sexist, homophobic, and happily run gags ridiculing disabled people. In fact, insisting women and ethnic and sexual minorities be treated equally and that, for once, white men should fade into the background is the real bigotry. In other words, what drives ludicrous and increasingly hysterical accusations of leftist bias at the BBC is the brittle character of their privilege. It's almost as if the commentators who bang on about it know they're mediocre and wouldn't have got anywhere without the right connections, a word from Daddy, and the advantages afforded by their pale bodies. And in a world characterised by galloping anxiety, especially among those who have a stake in it, a female face or an Asian face at the BBC is a cultural reminder of how they are not forever. They shrink in fear before the advance notice of their obsolescence and lash out at those they hold responsible, such as pin up hate figures on the left, or the imaginary Bolshevists plotting the overthrow of Britain from Broadcasting House.

Leftwing bias at the BBC does not exist, it is not an everyday property of British politics. But then again, the right wing imaginary has never been much interested in the inconvenience of the real.