The Weeknd feat. Daft Punk - Starboy

Marking the end of one of the most influential dance acts ever with one of the last decade's biggest and best tunes.

Labour's Rotten Heart

Is there something rotten at the heart of the Labour Party? Yes and, I'm afraid to say, 'twas forever thus. The latest victims of shenanigans are the three hopefuls shortlisted for Liverpool's mayoral elections. Having pulled the plug on the final selection meeting, the party today declared it was reopening applications, scrapping the all-women's shortlist, and barring the shortlisters from standing. Anna Rothery, whose candidacy had received an endorsement from Jeremy Corbyn and the backing of Unite said she would take legal action if the decision is not reversed.

In typical Labour fashion, the whole thing was handled appallingly. No explanation was forthcoming about the decision, releasing a pitiful non-statement saying the party wanted a candidate who would "stand up against the Conservatives, lead Liverpool out of the coronavirus crisis and fight for the resources that the city desperately needs." Candidates were not even informed that their bids had been given the heave ho. And so, where there is a vacuum of information speculation rushes in.

While much has been made about the politics of Anna Rothery, my first instinct wasn't a question of compatibility between her (soft left) positions and the world according to Dear Keir, but more an issue of tidying up. Given what has happened with Joe Anderson, the former mayor who resigned under a cloud of corruption allegations, there might have been a concern all of the candidates were considered too close to the ancien regime. And so while Unite has had its nose put out of joint by the suspension, so too has Unison who are normally considered reliable by LOTO. A clean break with what went before appeared to offer a good explanation. Avoid embarrassment, and put as much distance between the party and fall out from whatever happens with the Anderson case.

But, as per Skwawkbox's story, my spies in the belly of the beast back their reporting up. The overturn did not come from the top but within the regional apparatus. Less a case of hobbling the left candidate and more one of installing a favoured son of the bureaucracy, as the cancellation of the AWS attests. Anna suffered not because she was the leftist, but simply because as per Ann O'Bryne and Wendy Simon, she was in the way of someone else.

Either way, while knowing the factional details are important for the minutiae of inner party manoeuvring, the point of principle remains. Stitch ups were bad when the right did it. They were no better when the left pulled the same. And now the right are back in charge, here we are again. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Remember, when there was the merest suggestion the party's complaints system was going to abide by due process and no longer be a factional football, a certain someone made their displeasure known.

Therefore best of luck to Anna if she goes down the injunction route, but unfortunately I don't hold out much hope for success. Shabby manoeuvres are fine as long as they're consistent with the rule book and NEC rulings. Natural justice doesn't exist in the party. This serves to remind us that if Labour is to change a strategy is required to transform it from top to bottom, to enhance democratic decision making, due process, and bring the parliamentary party to heel. We had this opportunity, and the left will forever rue the day Corbynism didn't push change harder. And sadly, the task becomes more difficult as every outrage, rotten move, and terrible tactical positioning repels good people from the party. Legal challenges won't stop the right and the apparatus. And neither will giving up.

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Boris Johnson's Russian Roulette

Last week we heard how Boris Johnson was resisting pressure from his backbenchers to open everything up. Had he caught a bit of caution and drawn appropriate conclusions after the third national lockdown and 120,000 dead? Not a bit of it. At his address in the Commons on Monday afternoon, we definitively learned all schools and colleges are to open on 8th March. No phased return, just home Covid tests, masks for some pupils, and the return of the fines for parents who refuse to comply. 10 million kids back school, mixing, and then returning home. Clairvoyance isn't required to forecast the result of this ridiculous big bang approach to education.

Then we have the other steps. The rule of six returns on 29th March for outdoor meeting and socialising. 12th April sees non-essential retail opening, alongside outdoor attractions, gyms and swimming pools, but the rules on social mixing still apply. 17th May sees outdoor social contact rules lifted with hospitality and hotels opening up, and finally 21st June marks the end: no more restrictions. Because, by then, Coronavirus will have respected the government's timetable and done the decent thing by disappearing. Johnson said matters would be kept under review and implementation of subsequent stages delayed if this was what the data suggested, but we know what this means: more dithering, more delaying, more nothing. How many unnecessarily died because the country was late into all three of its quarantine measures, and how many more are going to be killed by this government's indifference to the data and determination to stick by its arbitrary timetable?

It's not just about deaths or serious disease. With the old largely protected and the voter base secure, entirely coincidentally the rest of the population can take their chances until they have their jabs. Some will die, and the R number is set to ramp right up, but these are acceptable losses. And here lies the risk. Thanks to Tory recklessness which merrily left the virus to circulate in late Summer and Autumn, the even more infectious Boris variant emerged and has become the dominant version of Covid in this country. This act of careless stupidity has cost the lives of tens of thousands of people. Allowing schools and colleges back with little restriction gives infection a new lease of life and, just like last time, multiplies the chances of a harmful mutation emerging. With so much disease and millions of people not fully vaccinated, it's not difficult to imagine the emergence of a new strain that pays our Pfizers and our AstraZenecas no mind. And we're back to square one again: more restrictions, more lockdowns, more waits for a new treatment. Vaccines are essential for suppressing Covid but in the early phase of the roll out, it can't do the heavy lifting on its own. A magic bullet will not stop Johnson from playing Russian roulette with lives of tens of thousands.

Where does this reckless impulse come from? This impatience to get back to normal betrays Johnson's impestuous character and hurry to get on with his programme. But the urgency also has its roots in Tory anxieties about class relationships. Forced into the Job Retention Scheme, providing (limited) support for the self-employed, uprating Universal Credit, and suffering political damage for being beastly to the poor is not just what Toryism is about. Having successfully depoliticised the crisis and largely escaped sanction for the catastrophic failure they presided over, there is a danger of losing the post-Covid peace because of the expectations raised over the last year. The feeling we cannot carry on in the old way, the (temporary) decoupling of income from work, the importance of key workers, the huge sacrifices made by NHS staff, the life support for many businesses, the inadequacy of social security, the all-in-it-together solidarity fostered, and a mental heath crisis unlikely to disappear with the opening of the pubs are huge challenges for any government. "Johnsonism" and its talk of levelling up is only really a more Keynesian turn, with added arbitrary government interventions in the day-to-day. Is it capable of taking on the huge social challenges it faces?

No, therefore the haste to get back to normal is the hope these challenges might sort themselves out and/or not have the time to cohere around an oppositional politics. What are several tens of thousands of deaths, cases of long Covid, and the possibility of a vaccine-resistant variant against preserving a favourable political climate and returning to the balance of class forces as was before the pandemic? Mere trifles, confirmed each and every time Johnson condemns others to infection and disease.

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Late Capitalism, the Tories, and the State

In Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism, his chapter on the state makes some interesting observations. In a quick overview of the then state-of-the-art (remember, the English edition was pubished in 1975), he argues Marxism has thoroughly analysed the two dominant aspects of the state. Its repressive character was explicated by the likes of Marx, Lenin, and Luxemburg, and people like Lukacs and Gramsci were responsible for theorising the state's articulation of the politics of persuasion and consent. An authoritarian state resting on force of arms only is a naked state, and not as well protected as it might think. Mandel then goes on to note a third characteristic of the state: the part it plays in the general maintenance of production. This comes in two flavours: the reproduction of the technical basis of the society, and then the social conditions (preservation of markets, the currency, wage labour, etc.). The state is also largely responsible for the training of the increasingly important intellectual labour that makes its reproductive strategies possible.

To cut a long chapter short, this third characteristic of the state has grown in importance over time. Its assumption of more social responsibility is a consequence of rising social pressures from mass democracy and the strength of labour movements, and social necessity. The provision of social security is beneficial to capital-in-general, despite efforts made by the right to force the floor lower. However, because the state does control social spending, is the first line of crisis management, and the guarantor of capitalist relations of production the owners of capital have a collective interest in its policies and strategies. Because of the separation of politics from economics, underlined by the hidden character of exploitation, the state has a certain autonomy, and the development of the state in the post-war period only saw this freedom grow more expansive. But the autonomy is only relative, which leads Mandel to ask the simple question: how adequate is it as an instrument of the bourgeois interest?

This "guarantee", which our late comrade Ed Rooksby was interested in was, for Mandel, a complex of relationships: capital's economic dominance over the state in terms of credit supply, capital mobility (and the threat of capital flight), financial relationships to the governing parties, the bourgeois backgrounds/integration argument around decision-making state personnel (the old Ralph Miliband argument), and, crucially, the overlooked behind-the-scenes relationships between politicians, the civil service, and capital.

These relationships assume greater importance in the age of liberal democracy. Mandel suggests in the 19th century legislative bodies served well for the clearing houses of competing bourgeois interests, and the limited/managed democracies of the time ensured the state's autonomy was kept within certain parameters. But the rise of labour, social democratic and later, communist parties meant parliaments grew to be dominated by issues around population management and demands from below. With this declining efficacy of official politics for determining common bourgeois interests, new axes of articulation outside of politics became more important. As, simultaneously, competition passed over into monopoly and capital concentrated into fewer and fewer handfuls of firms, the formalities of democracy were bypassed and direct relationships between the key decision makers in the state - government politicians and top civil servants - increasingly became the norm. Mandel here singles out the importance of lobbyists. These organisations, whether independent businesses in their own right or wholly-owned subsidaries of multinationals speak directly to government about their interests and offer inducements/bribes/favours to get them looked after. The revolving door between the Cabinet, boardrooms and lucrative consultancies shows this remains the case. Another avenue was the virtual fusion of offices of state with large companies. It is routine in the British system, for example, to not only have staff seconded to key politicians from big firms, but for them to fund the think tank research, input directly into policy, undertake reviews on government's behalf (a favoured tool of Margaret Thatcher's), take over functions via outsourcing, and so on. And while politicians will come and go, the permanent cadre of decision-making civil servants remain and with them the direct line to big business.

This is pretty much the common sense when it comes to Marxist approaches to the state, so what's the point of disinterring it now from Mandel's famous if, nowadays, little read book? It was this centralisation and bypassing of formal politics that interested me. Since 1975, the politics landscape has shifted. Neoliberalism was a fringe idea, though its foregrounding had been present for years, and the labour movement was, arguably, the rising power in the land. An ocean's worth of difference separates 2021 from 1975, yet the core argument offered by Mandel about the withering of official politics has remained a constant throughout this time, regardless of Prime Minister, regardless of party. Yet, since 2015, establishment politics has been in profound crisis. For an interregnum of four years, capitalist realism suffered a major defeat in the Labour Party. To all intents and purposes the Liberal Democrats were destroyed. The British state faces the real prospect of losing Scotland. Brexit won and has damaged the soft power of the state and its class on the world stage while compounding the country's economic decline, and the Tories have proven disastrously short-termist and serially, structurally incompetent. And this is without the recklessness of the May/Johnson governments on Brexit and the ticking time bomb of long-term decline.

Is there something deeper to the question of the overt authoritarian turn in Tory politics since May took over? As discussed here a fair few times, the neoliberal governments from Thatcher onwards have used the state to smash opponents to impose its normative imaginary and the insitutional relationships supporting it. This involved gutting civil society, centralised strategic governance in government and, perversely, rendered the Prime Ministerial position more vulnerable and accountable as the decision-maker in the last instance. Too many questionable decisions and failures, authority evaporates and they're done. Such has been the case of each occupant of Number 10 since Thatcher was forced from office. It stands to reason Prime Ministers since are obsessed with preserving this authority, which handily explains Boris Johnson's behaviour since entering office. Might Mandel have something to add to this?

Possibly. Given the recent crisis, the splits in capital, the dysfunctionality of the Tories, and the Corbynist reminder that Labour is always suspect from the standpoint of bourgeois interests, no matter how right wing it gets, might this have spurred more articulation of those extra-parliamentary avenues of influence along Mandel's lines? I.e. A closer reationship between offices of state and offices of CEOs? This is a question requiring further investigation. For example, is the (ostensible) roll back of NHS marketisation an application of the "what works" principle, or a power grab by Matt Hancock consistent with Tory statecraft, or is there an added layer of serving up sections of the NHS to the party's backers on an even less transparent basis than the market nonsense of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act? Additionally, in the context of Covid-19, the government's losses in the courts, and the egregiously corrupt handing out of procurement and supply contract, is this the usual cronyism or symptomatic of the bypass of formal politics? It's one thing to point out the business pushed disproportionately to Tory donors, but how many of them lobbied government and made use of informal channels. Quite a few if mates of Dom (remember him?), mates of Hancock, and other friends of friends are walking away with lucrative deals.

The evidence is anecdotal, and we'll have more once Johnson fires up his "blue Jerusalem." If we see the same arbitrary dishing out of contracts, then the answer is yes. The risk for Johnson and the Tories is by embracing and acting more on the basis of their extra-parliamentary relationships, the greater the scrutiny they attract, and the more pungency the odour of corruption acquires, a stench that might make Johnson's authority grow sickly and become vulnerable. All the more reason to attack these practices now. The questions raised by a contemporary reading of Late Capitalism in regards to the state aren't scholastic then, as interesting as some might find them. They reveal the possible contours of Tory strategy, and should allow the Labour movement time to formulate its response.

Ninja Gaiden for the Nintendo Entertainment System

A month has passed since last visiting a notorious Nintendo game, so why not another? Ninja Gaiden, or Shadow Warriors as it was known in Europe in pre-internet days is one of the most praised and feared video games in the NES library. While it never made a splash on these shores, its mix of precise gameplay, stunning sound and presentation (at least for the humble grey box) and the most punishing difficulty was legendary in North America. Its reputation secured the game an appearannce in The Wizard, a Hollywood/Nintendo tie-in to market Super Mario Bros 3 ahead of its release. Before the coming of YouTube, all I knew of Ninja Gaiden was a positive review in Mean Machines. While a canonical game over there, it was a curio over here. Thankfully, it was one of the first games I was able to score for my NES in 2011 when one of the local emporiums was basically chucking retro titles out the door on a three for two offer. My gain was, um, my gain.

The origins of Ninja Gaiden lay in a duff but, at the time, well-reviewed arcade beat 'em up called Shadow Warriors, Having had this game for the Commodore 64 it was next to impossible and an exercise in frustration thanks to crap controls and terrible collision detection. The NES iteration, like many other conversions for the system, opted to use the branding and intellectual assets but were reworked into an entirely new game. The arcade machine, apparently, was about doing battle wth a descendent of Nostradamus determined to fulfill his doomy quatrain for 1999 and raise an evil king to take over the world. A trace of this remains in the NES plot. You are Ryu Hayabusa and you are tasked with preventing a ne'er-do-well from raising a demon for world conquering/being annoying reasons. The name of this baddy? Jaquio, a play on the jacquerie evoked in Nostradamus's riddlesome prophecy. An interesting nugget of trivia, but plot actually matters in this game. One of the most celebrated aspects of Ninja Gaiden is its use of cut scenes. There are 20 minutes worth of panels and animations setting the scene and linking the action between levels to move the story along. This was virtually unheard of at the time outside of role-playing games, and conferred the game a level of narrative depth absent from any other contemporary action platformer. The famed introductory duel between Ryu's father and an unknown ninja, getting blindsided by a young woman, and seeing the baddy's castle at the end of the jungle level pull the player into and along with the game. It wasn't really until the 32-bit generation that this level of presentation became customary.

As for the game itself, most of the time it is as flawless a ninja game you could hope for. Certainly better than Shinobi on the Master System and almost on a par with the MegaDrive's The Revenge of Shinobi. Almost. There are few Nintendo games reporting for duty with controls as precise as these. And, like any ninja game, there has to be magical special abilities because ninjas. These abilities are acquired by picking up magical icons along the way, with other icons that refill the amount of times it can be used. For example, while fire is dangerous at the best of tims for Ryu a set of fireballs can surround him for a limited time, rendering him virtually invulnerable. Very handy for the numerous death runs later in the game. He can fling fireballs too, chuck shuriken, and whip out his sword and make like a whirligig of doom - all used to stunning effect by the game's community of speedrunners. The actual gameplay is very straightforward. Traverse the level from left to right, or in some cases right to left, kill baddies (a mix of thugs, soldiers, dogs, monkeys, birds(!), and an assortment of weirdies, take out the end of level boss and rinse and repeat. All the levels are well laid out. There are no opportunities for getting lost, but some properly test your platforming abilities. Clinging to walls and working out how to jump right, while assailed by birds is, um, a favourite.

And then there is the fabled difficulty. The problem is despite the bells and whistles, the flawless controls, and the hugely gratifying action the game is super hard, and it's because the developers resorted to some very cheap tricks. These include respawning enemies, placing them on narrow platforms you cannot clear in advance, getting overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of running and flying bad 'uns, having enemies come at you when you're vulnerable - like climbing walls/ladders. And some of the late bosses are very cheap as well. They all have predictable patterns, but the penultimate boss cycles through his pattern super quick. Lightning fast reflexes are required. Like a lot of NES games, getting hit knocks Ryu backwards, which means instant death if you're surrounded by bottomless pits. And last of all, die during the end of game confrontation with Jaquio and his subsequent incarnations and you're sent all the way back to the beginning of the level. This was apparently noted during playtesting and was a mistake, but they left it in anyway. Hence why the MegaDrive game edges it out in the best ninja title stakes.

Yet this did not prevent Ninja Gaiden from becoming a hit and something of a saught after cartridge, and there were two things going for it apart from its excellence (after all, not all great games are hits). First, as discussed here many times, the lone wolf action hero was neoliberal masculinity du jour in the 1980s. Forget the constraints society places on you, deal with your enemies as if rules don't matter. As a one-man army (though later, in collaboration with the US security apparatus) Ryu manly enters battle without constraints. Second, following the success of Bruce Lee in the 70s, the ninja trope was built up by film after film featuring martial arts and sprinkled with a flavouring of orientalist mystery. This framing of the East as mystical, traditional and exotic was picked up on by Japanese audiences of Western film (and media), and in turn was re-repackaged and sold back as the premises for hundreds of video games. The second was the theme of urban decay and crime fighting. Indeed, the first level sees Ryu battling with street gangs and their (literal) attack dogs. As acceptably disposable baddies when authoritarian governments in the US and UK were cracking skulls and declaring the war on drugs, the theme of fighting back against the decay, vigilante-style, was very much in the air. This was the time of the Guardian Angels and kids cartoons relentlessly pushing anti-crime populism. The zeitgeist was there and Ninja Gaiden rode it.

Then there is the overall culture of difficulty. Old farts talk about the how hard 8 and 16-bit games were versus most modern titles, but it was not a myth. Games were tougher and demanded they be played on their own terms. Yet the cheap deaths, the respawning enemies, the dreaded knock back, and the tough level of challenge were common mechanics in NES titles. Konami's Castlevania being another notable example. In this sense, Ninja Gaiden's basic unfairness was not a disadvantage as far as its reception was concerned. The meta-habitus of NES gamers had long grown accustomed to similar cheap tricks and they were accepted as part of the gaming scene, just as infinite player respawns are in most first person shooters today.

For the casual gamer is Ninja Gaiden worth a go? Absolutely. As a landmark if not a monument to difficult games, its canonical status is well deserved. And because its ludic qualities are so compelling, it is hard to put the game down. New players might overlook its unforgiving countenance and, who knows, perhaps accept the ridiculous challenge it represents.

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Remembering Ed Rooksby

The awful news Ed Rooksby had passed away came as a shock. He was known as a brilliant tutor at Ruskin College and then, for too short a time, at York. I only knew Ed through his writings and the occasional Twitter exchanges, but he always came across as someone dedicated to his students, and underlined this by teaching a full semester in the Autumn while being unwell. He movingly wrote about his experience with long Covid at the beginning of this year.

Ed was serious about social theory, and understood it as a means to a political ends. He was interested in thinking through the problem of the state in Marxist theory, and in a three-part essay on Lenin's State and Revolution he subjects the text to a close reading, bringing out some of the fuzzy and metaphysical props ignored and overlooked by others. Particularly those claiming fidelity to "Leninism". Needless to say, Ed didn't think there was much there to help us with our strategic travails today.

He was also intereted in the viability of structural reforms. This was different to the idea of reformism handed down to us from Rosa Luxemburg's attack on Eduard Bernstein and countless Trotskyist educationals since, but were a theoretically viable set of strategies left governments might (or, to be more exact, must) pursue if they're serious about social transformation. For example, Corbynism's transgressive quality lay in its positions on economic democracy which, unsurprisingly, are ignored by the present incumbent of the Labour leader's office. Structural reforms struck at the root of capitalist relations in ways demanding tax rises on the rich and a properly funded NHS do not. In another memorable piece for the Graun from 2011, he took apart the bilge that is Blue Labour - a piece that repays reading now this is the party's Big Idea again.

At times over this last year, Ed had mentioned he was wrestling with a book on these themes. I hope what exists of the unfinished draft becomes available in due course. In Ed, we have lost a talented comrade and a militant thinker determined to put the materialist theory of politics on a firmer footing. It falls on us to continue with the work he left - there are plenty of tantalising leads for us to pick up.

This bibliography of Ed's work put together by Jonah Wedekind is a valuable and fitting act of remembrance. My deepest consolescences to Ed's family, friends, and everyone who knew him. Sleep easy, comrade.

Burying Corbynism

Keir Starmer's economy speech then. It's fair to say it wasn't overwhelming, and few but the usual loyalists gave it a buoyant reception. The left, as you might have guessed, weren't full of praise. But neither were the centrist hacks. On this James Ball offered an infrequent insight, noting Dear Keir was acting as if he was in government not opposition, and this is fatal. A rare confluence of opinion between him and the left he affects to despise.

I'm not going to go through all the criticisms as they're ten-a-penny on Twitter. There are three aspects worth noting. The first was the eye-catching original policy (albeit half-inched from Thatcherite think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies). I.e. The Covid recovery bonds. The plan proposes to raise billions from voluntary subscriptions to go into community investment. In practice, one would assume rebuilding local infrastructure and public services gutted by Tory cuts is where this money is destined. The bonds themselves would be long maturing, and are designed to soak up the savings large numbers of (mainly middle class) people have built up over the course of the pandemic.

This might be too vague to capture the public imagination, but in principle it is a sound policy. For middle class people, there's the promise for a better return on their savings than the negligible fractional interest bank deposits currently attract, and with a preponderance of profitible opportunities for investment unlikely in the immediate future, the bond scheme might appeal to those uninterested in tying their savings up in strings-attached investment vehicles and ISAs. Second, it ties these investments into the health of the public realm and community building. In other words, it offers a secure and stable alternative to the usual form of petty middle class investment. I.e. Property. Given the political toxins our ageing cohorts of property owners have showered on us this last decade, this is designed to move the locus of material interest away from individuated petit bourgeois landlordism to building up what the centrist wonks call the foundational economy. In other words, by socialising the investment behaviour of millions the hope is they see their economic interests tied up with the general interest. Hey presto, the selfishness and scapegoating that have powered the Tories in recent decades is gradually engineered out of the voting population. Including among those who might otherwise be predisposed toward them.

I've said my positive piece, what about the rest? Offering support to business is nothing new, and comrades will recall John McDonnell often spoke of policies appealing to its better nature. As a centrist, of course Keir Starmer is going to say positive things about business. And this about sums up the tone of the pitch. This wasn't aimed at winning back leftists or, for that matter, those drifting to other parties. This was, just like the patriotism stuff, calibrated at wooing sections of small business, soft Labour/soft Tory swing voters of means, and the odd home-owning former Labour voter who went Tory in 2019. It sounded plodding and boring because the "SLT" believe this is what these people want. By avoiding public spending commitments and offering a prospectus that, at first glance, is little different to the new Tory statism, let's just say the horses are in their stables and all is calm. If the aim was to offer a vision of a better Britain to a narrow demographic, then this is exactly what Keir achieved. No one's frightened. No one's gnashing their teeth.

At the same time this is a step back from Corbynism. Indeed, it constitutes a break with it. Starmerism as a political current is virtually indistinguishable from Fabianism. This is a politics in which popular participation is entirely a matter of voting for a Labour government, and then the Keirists are left to their difficult business of introducing the right policies for everyone's betterment. As such it tends toward centralisation and authoritarianism, a point celebrated by useful idiots and dim bulbs craving preferment. On paper, when the full Starmerist programme emerges blinking into the light it's going to involve industrial activism on state's part, more investment in public services, the integration of health and social care, the abolition of tuition fees, and quite a few things you might find in Labour's last two manifestos. What, however, will be conspicuous by its absence is democratisation.

Central to the Corbynist programme was what our much-missed comrade Ed Rooksby referred to as structural reforms. Whereas Keir's policies are about making British capitalism fairer and more functional, Corbynism wanted to use the levers of the state to introduce democratic decision-making where it is anathema to capitalist relations of production: in the workplace. The discussions around and positions taken on alternative models of ownership, democratic nationalisation of the utilities and rail, and the break up and socialisation of the media were about empowering workers, of creating a toehold from which the democratisation of economics could flow and with it a fundamental challenge to capital. This radical content of Corbynism is not just absent from Starmerism, it is entirely alien to the Fabian tradition itself.

We now know a little bit more about Starmerism today than we did yesterday. It is capable of taking on new, interesting, and innovative policy ideas. But strategically, this was no departure from what we've seen up until now and was, explicitly, a divorce from the Corbynism it happily gestured to a year ago. Yes, this is better than the Tories. But so, as a general rule, are the programmes put out by the Liberal Democrats. Try as he might, he cannot avoid the issue. Keir Starmer either locates Labour in the interests of the rising generation and sticks up for its core vote, as Corbynism partially managed, or he loses. The political calculus is that simple.

Keir Starmer's Decrepitude

Interesting discussion this evening from the Novara comrades about Keir Starmer's leadership. Whereas yesterday this place focused on a pitiful attempt at defending Keir's record as LOTO, of more interest was the blistering critique from Tom Kibasi published in the Graun. Readers might recall Tom was involved in the Corbyn project and, along with Paul Mason and Momentum's Laura Parker, a prominent left figure to make the jump from Corbynism to Starmerism. Having criticised Starmerism for its lack of vision, following recent wobbles Dear Keir himself is due to make a major speech on the economy on Thursday. Undoubtedly, this is going to attract some comment, and means tomorrow night's blog post is sorted.

In this piece, Michael and Aaron discuss Tom's critique and cover the appalling abuses of process which have come screeching back under the Labour Party's new regime. It's entirely understandable why lots of people can't stomach this crap.

The Right Wing Defence of Starmerism

At last! A centrist defence of Keir Starmer! Taking vows of silence of late following the noted jitters and polling figures heading the wrong way, there was a gap in the market for some rightwinger to make waves penning a defence of Keir's record. Jake Richards was the man who can, and has earned plaudits from the usual suspects. As the first such piece defending actually-existing Starmerism, its arguments will find themselves echoed by continuity Blairists, Trannsylvanian columnists, and plagiarists incapable of formulating a thought of their own.

When stumping for the status quo, distorting political realities to serve political purposes is the oldest move in the book. Jake's piece is no different. To put melt water between his frozen caricature of Corbynism and the competently forensic competence of Starmerism, he has to chat a lot of shit. We're told "Jeremy Corbyn reached unrivalled lows in political polls", forgetting his Gordon Brown plumbed the same depths in 2008 and 2009. We have the condemnation for failing to deal with antisemitism, while conveniently looking the other way when active sabotage designed to do just this was uncovered, and we hear how the huge polling deficit Keir inherited was entirely down to the left and nothing about the Coronavirus crisis. This is empiricism most cynical, and then Jake has the cheek to lecture the reader about the importance of context for assessing Starmerism.

Scraping away this froth, what we're left with is small beer. Jake makes three basic arguments. The first is how Keir's "constructive opposition" is the right tone to take. "(T)he public is (sic] eager for politicians to put aside party differences in times of national crisis." This is true, but then again "the public" don't like differences per se, a point Tim Kibasi makes in his own withering critique of Starmerism. This is an example of followship, not leadership as he rightly puts it. Jake, however, chooses not to defend the Labour leader's actual record in opposition but relies instead on them there Corbynist phantasms. "Shrill pronouncements from the opposition amid a global pandemic would not sit well", he wibbles. "Starmer’s more grown-up approach to politics successfully contrasts with the years under Corbyn, who called for resignations, general elections and national strikes on what seemed like a weekly basis, and whose brand of politics often portrays all Tories as “evil” or “stupid.”" Naturally, he can't back any of this up and if challenged, he's mutter something about Corbyn supporters on Twitter. In the real world or "the context" Jake has instructed us to appreciate, Jeremy did not call for strikes, or elections, or resignations on a "weekly basis." What he did offer in the first few weeks of the outbreak was an alternative to the Tories' politics of the crisis. Its startung point was support the government where they were right, criticise them where they were wrong, and point to alternative courses of action if necessary. Hardly the politics of the sixth form student meetings ritualistically attacked at Progress bootcamp.

Here's what Corbyn said in the closing days of his leadership. He called for the government to provide decent sick pay, so workers wouldn't have to risk their health and others by going to work. He argued for an income protection scheme and a moritorium on evictions. This amounted to a five-point plan calling for a rise in sick pay, a job retention scheme that would have covered the self-employed, uprating social security, and protecting renters with help for bills for the poorest. The last piece put out by the party in his name called for a plan to be brought forward for securing PPE and expanding testing, increasing social care provision, the enforcement of social distancing, increasing support for workers, and collaborating with other world leaders in managing the pandemic. But no, according to Jake the Wise wearing the big boy pants entails keeping schtum and moaning from the sidelines about incompetence. The consequence is a repeating of history. Ed Miliband did not contest the Tory framing of the deficit and austerity, and therefore fought them at a disadvantage. Keir Starmer has refused to challenge the government's line, and so has cast himself the role of whinger-in-chief because, in the absence of political critique and, gasp, leadership, this is all that's open to him.

Jake then moves on to Brexit. Here, his assessment is right. Keir has gone from second referendumism running through him like a stick of rock to conveying Boris Johnson's deal through the Commons. And, unpopular opinion, he was on balance this was the correct call. Labour avoids the worst anti-EU attacks the Tories and their press ping Keir's way, but simultaneously it does tie his hands when it comes to the disaster the new trading rules are proving to be for many businesses. Jake suggests these powerful criticisms might come in time, but will anyone listen when millions have decided he isn't saying much worth paying attention to?

On "deCorbynisation", always the real concern of the Labour right, Jake finds much to like. Indeed, the culture of administrative opacity, kangeroo courts, and the empowering of unelected employees is back. Getting the thumbs up from his management consultants, Keir has successfully centralised power in the party apparatus, gerrymandered the NEC to gift him a majority, and has used bureaucratic feat to push out the awkwards and irreconcilables. This will certainly have consequences for the party, but nevertheless he has demonstrated a certain ruthlessness Corbynism lacked, despite the exaggerations and outright bullshit peddled by grandees and lickspittles. Antisemitism, somewhat surprisingly, is gloseed over and doesn't labour the point, unlike some. Perhaps because Jake does retain a smidgen of honesty. Afterall, our friend Peter Mandelson, once more back in favour at LOTO, let the cat out of the bag about Keir's plans in November.

Summing up, Jake notes the (declining) positive personal polling figures Keir enjoys. He does not, of course, consider why they are falling beyond the few opportunities he has to tell his story in the media. It's hard to make weather in opposition, after all. The problem is, for anyone who's even looked askance at Labour's leadership this last year, is he has no story. Keir has demanded little from the government and so has thrown away opportunities for framing key issues. Take schools for example, instead of listening to concerns, until this lockdown he was practically egging the government on to keep them open. And whatever points victories he's won were led either by Marcus Rashford or SAGE. Where he has tried, such as on tower block cladding, these unfortunately have only got picked up by the cognoscenti. Meanwhile, reviled by the mainstream and suspended from the PLP, the positions Jeremy Corbyn advocated at the beginning of the crisis have, in their own distorted way, been largely implemented by the government. His legacy has proved a more effective Leader of the Opposition than the beige blur who replaced him.

Where then does this leave Jake's defence? Well, as polemics go I've had more challenging arm wrestles with a grasshopper. Stripped of the bad faith framing, we see three "achievements" picked, described in barely any detail, a few general points about strategy any first year A-Level politics student would make, and subsequently summed up as good and right things. It's a series of demonstrably false assertions allied to banal observations, and excuted in such a way to dazzle the impoverished political imaginary of the Labour right. If this is the best they've got, no wonder they have to resort to lies, innuendo, and outright slander to get their way. Persuasion? Argument? As this piece demonstrates, they're rubbish.

Populist Government and Necropolitics

For an upcoming conference on populism I've sent in this abstract. No idea if it'll get picked up. Regular readers familiar with the output of this place will know the arguments the proposal is drawing on, but the purpose of the presentation and paper is to put them on firmer foundations.

Populist Government and Necropolitics: The UK Conservative Party's Management of Europe's Worst Covid Crisis

The Conservative Party convincingly won the 2019 UK General Election because it faced a split opposition, an unpopular Labour leader, and because the party had united Leave voters behind their campaign. Boris Johnson was able to do so by mobilising classic populist tropes commonly associated with the UK Independence Party and the Brexit Party, most notably opposing the democratic will of the British people to EU-friendly/remain-minded liberal elites determined to reverse Brexit. With a thin manifesto, it appeared his government were going to carry on governing in a populist vein, but then the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Johnson has since presided over the worst death toll in Europe, and yet, at the time of writing, consistently posts polling leads and has escaped censure for the calamity. This paper introduces the notion of necropolitics as developed by Mbembe (2019) in relation to the state's power over life and death issues, albeit modified from the conflict situations to which the concept was originally applied. It argues the Conservatives have escaped accountability for their Covid management because these necropolitics are imbued with populist logics of scapegoating, which are intentionally framed to depoliticise the crisis. This puts the party in a good position for reaping the political credit of the vaccine and the end to quarantine measures.

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