Tory Sleaze and Ruling Class Solidarity

Thrift and making your own way in the world by the sweat of your brow are Tory fairy tales. What goes unsaid every time these fables are trotted out by friendly newspaper columnists and MPs addressing their monthly Conservative association meetings is how "making one's way" plays very differently when one ascends to a certain level. In the case of our old friend Dave, we read about how he's raided his piggy bank of social capital and used his offices with Dishy Rishi and Matt Hancock to open doors for the firm he was employed by (and had substantial holdings in), Greensill Capital. Things are so bad that even Sunday morning's Andrew Marr, which was to be devoted to the official mourning for Prince Philip, had to discuss the scandal at length.

Characteristic of his former sidekick, George Osborne, who used to go to ground as soon as the shit hit the fan, Dave is nowhere to be seen. Instead "friends" and "close sources" to the former prime minister have taken it upon themselves to issue the denials. Well, facts don't care about their lies. That Dave texted the chancellor to get state money into Greensill is indisputable. That Dave introduced Lex Greensill to Hancock at a private drinks, and that one of his companies subsequently won a contract for handling payments for NHS workers is completelt what happened. The Graun quotes a "Hancock ally" as saying, "Matt acted in entirely the correct way – he updated officials on the business that was discussed, as is appropriate." The article notes Greensill's outfit were supplying a free service. Guess that makes everything alright then, as if providing a loss-leading service for nowt is never with a view to securing more lucrative contracts later on.

More delicious are the revelations about Dave's text exchanges with Sunak asking for loans for Greensill. When the story first aired, Dishy Rishi wasn't about to let these claims ruffle his feathers. Through intermediaries, he let the press know he did nothing improper and referred Dave to his team. Seems above board. But when the texts themselves were published, what do we see? A bit of factually accurate sleight of hand. In the exchanges we find less a polite brush off and, well, this: "Hi David, apologies for the delay. I think the proposals in the end did require a change to the Market Notice but I have pushed the team to explore an alternative with the Bank that might work." Does that look like a refusal to you, or an admission Sunak got on the Treasury's case to help out his chum? As Bridget Phillipson of the shadow treasury team rightly notes, Sunak is now on the hook for breaking the Ministerial Code. Not that Boris Johnson will care or do anything about it, but a question mark hanging over the chancellor's integrity won't hurt Labour's chances.

This kind of lobbying and arm-twisting happens all the time in the Tory party. The bonds of ruling class solidarity, the ties that bind, rely on knowing the right people, cultivating them, doing favours and, occasionally, cultivating conspiracies of silence through complicity in dark deeds. See, for example, how the compromising material Jeffrey Epstein accumulated on celebrities and politicians for insurance. But also there's something instructive about the Dave/Greensill affair and how the Conservative Party conducts itself.

In the first place, why enter politics? Most who enter parliament enjoy a nice salary uplift, but this isn't always the case and especially so on the Tory benches. Aspirant business people and successful capitalists also vye for seats and high office. They might tell themselves they're doing it for the right reasons, of wanting to give something back and help people. If this was the case, they'd do less harm attending their local Rotary Club dinner. Regardless of their rubbish justifications, the rewards of office include status, which always means a wider profile and the opening of doors money grubbing alone cannot achieve. And with it, influence. For the egoist being a player on the national stage, having one's leaks splashed over the press, getting invites for the politics shows, and being on first name terms with the ministers of the day is what a lot of politicians (and would-be MPs) crave. And, of course, the further one climbs up the greasy pole the more opportunities for the same.

Here's why there's not really any such thing as a Tory rebel. As one moves in these exalted circles, what happens to politicians after politics comes into view. Osborne and his many lucrative jobs, Dave and his extensive share options, the passage of Tony Blair into the fabulously wealthy. Politics facilitates introductions to other businesses, and in turn what businesses always want is access to politicians because they direct state spending. Lobbying is a fact of life, and politicians are very well placed to make a killing in this field when they've left their parliamentary offices for the final time. And so, though Dave has got himself into seriously choppy waters, his entirely improper attempts at influencing Sunak aren't about to put any Tory MPs off from following suit. Quite the opposite. They know if they toe the line, vote the right way, make sure they serve the interests of the fractions of business they're broadly aligned to, then they can look forward to being looked after in much the same way. Though perhaps they'll show a little more caution and discretion than Dave.

After a lifetime working in defence of his class and the state, Prince Philip appeared to render one last service by passing away when he did. The lobbying revelations vanished and he became the focus of the news, though it hasn't taken long for them to come roaring back. Yet politics has officially shut down. Ministers have taken time off and affairs of state suspended for "mourning". This includes, entirely coincidentally, not being available to answer questions about the scandal. But this final favour might rebound on the Tories' heads. Refusing to rebut, and with the big names and recognisible faces absent until after next Saturday's funeral, the story could spiral and, hopefully, see some of the sleaze finally stick to the Tories. A reminder that there are few things more repugnant than seeing the back scratching of ruling class solidarity open to public display.

Image Credit

Armin van Buuren feat. Susana - Shivers

The winner of A State of Trance's top 1,000 no less.

Rescue for the Sinclair Spectrum

Looking to escape the mawkish coverage of Prince Philip as television enforces compulsory mourning? Why not spend it reflecting on a game that is very far from famous? Indeed, coming after two major megahits, we're slipping down the ZX Spectrum's memory hole to find (perhaps) the most obscure game our occasional featurette has alighted upon. The title in question goes by the innocuous and generic name of Rescue, and it hit Sinclair's rubber-keyed beastie back in 1987 courtesy of Mastertronic.

I remember picking this up in a four-pack of science fiction games from Derby Woolies. If memory serves, the other three titles were the equally obscure strategy game, Invasion (never could work this one out), the terrible isometric shooter Galletron, and the far more interesting giant ant killing simulator, Amaurote. Rescue was by far the most immediately playable and accessible of the lot, and it went on to become one of my brother's favourite games.

The plot was perhaps a bit too detailed for a £1.99 game, but it provided background enough for some arcade action. As the Solar System fell apart following the terrible "Last War", humanity retreated to its enclaves scattered across the moons and planets. Yet out at Pluto some UN scientists developed a stardrive that ... might double up as a nasty weapon. Cue the attention of space pirates and all manner of other nasties. The player's job, having docked with their space station, is rescuing as many scientists as possible, their experiments, and stock up on enough fuel to take off. Two problems. The enemies are also roaming the station, and a 30 minute destruct system has been activated. Yikes.

The action is a flip screen affair. Wander around the map locating where the scientists are, shepherd them back to the ship, and kill the enemies. This, however, was easier said than done. There were eight of our lab-coated chums in all but they can't simply be collected. At any given time one would wake up and start running around. The tricky job was blocking off exits and bumping into the panicking boffin to try and force them in the direction you want them to go. Get them in your ship and they eventually run into one of the suspended animation pods. Do this and another scientist somewhere wakes up and starts running around. And so off you go to find them. If this wasn't bad enough, each has a red test tube next to them we should also be returned to the ship. One of these scientists and their experiments is the star drive and its inventor, but the only way of knowing for sure you have them is collecting all eight. On top of this, you need to acquire wnough fuel to take off. Without it, your ship will crash and the mission ends in failure.

Rescue is very interesting for a couple of reasons. While some would undoubtedly find the herding aspect of the game irritating to the point of hair pulling, you can forget the main mission completely and go about doing your own thing. The scientists can be killed, so there was some satisfaction to be had from hunting and shooting them all yourself. Rooms can also be blocked off preventing the space pirates from entering, and one thing I enjoyed doing was going to the far room in which the screen is separated by a wall and watching a menagerie of baddies move in and kill each other. It was a lesson in how many decent-sized sprites the Speccie could handle on screen (three), and there was something of a kick from teasing the indestructable tanks - a baddy totally impervious to your fire and only offable thanks to detonating one of the bombs lying around. In other words, this was an early example of a sand box game. It was time limited and there wasn't much to the game world, but it allowed the player a much greater degree of freedom within its parameters then most other arcade adventures on the Speccy.

The other interesting aspect was the degrading environment. If the two main entry points for the space pirates aren't blocked off, then the station can be quickly overrun. This is a problem if there are a few tanks about, but also each enemy destroys the environment. Often entering a screen a baddie will be in the process of destroying a door, a crate, a teleportation terminal or, argh, a sleeping scientist! Because enemies are dumb they'll also have a go at setting off a bomb. And when that blows, everything is damaged. Screens blow out, cracks paper the walls. Ammo boxes, first aid kits, crates, all destroyed. Their capacity for destroying the environment adds urgency to the player who wants to complete the game properly. Go after all the scientists, is there going to be enough fuel left? Put a tiger in your tank first and will the pirates have killed a few snoozing savants and wrecked the experiments? Decisions, decisions.

Rescue is a good game, though it only attracted average reviews at the time. No two goes were exactly the same and it offered a limited environment for experimention and rejection of the aims of the game if the player so chose. Indeed, playing about, exploring, trapping tanks and treating them like pets, if anything its sandboxy character of enables you to learn the game, understand its enemies and mechanics, and how goodie boxes do more than refill the health and recharge the laser. Knowing its ins and outs and doing your own thing prepares the player for the actual mission, spells out the challenge it presents, and makes them want to do it as a test of skill and mastery over the environment. As such Rescue deserves to be remembered precisely because of its innovative, partially open-ended game design. Crank up the Speccy emulator and give it a go. It's not like there's going to be much on television.

Loyalism's Tortured Decline

"Policing is a devolved matter for Northern Ireland", said Matt Hancock after getting quizzed about another night of loyalist violence. The non-too-subtle subtext being this is nothing to do with the government nor its grandstanding and reckless approach to Brexit. For his vanity and the electoral interests of the Conservative Party, Boris Johnson at first courted and then betrayed the Democratic Unionist Party and its wish to keep the UK internal market together. And what do you know, since Brexit happened we've seen supermarket shortages and the perception the government in Westminster have washed their hands of all responsibility for the province. The Tories have also made the DUP look like a right bunch of mugs.

This is the background, and knowing there is trouble at the mill Arlene Foster has tried her damnedest to ride the wave of disaffection rippling through unionist communities. Making a big deal of Sinn Fein ministers' attendance at a funeral last year, she made it clear on Wednesday evening how this was more objectionable than torching a bus. Ham fisted and equivocal by the standards of Westminster boilerplate, Foster is actually in a great deal of political trouble. Not only is the Brexit the DUP campaigned for proving damaging to their raison d'etre and making a united Ireland more likely, the most pressing concern are the threats gnawing at Foster's position as First Minister and the DUP's standing.

The latest poll from January reports the surreal result that Sinn Fein is the most popular party in Northern Ireland. The DUP however are now scraping second place with 19%, down nine points on the 2017 elections and one point ahead of the third placed Alliance. They are proving especially threatening as the party emerged from and bites deeply into moderate unionism, despite punting itself as a non-sectarian party. And to the DUP's right, Traditional Unionist Voice has been egging on street opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol and, by extension, the Executive Foster leads. Boxed in and seemingly giving up on tacking toward the moderates, she has decided to ramp up the rhetoric against SF and virtually giving loyalist riots a free pass to bring back the extremists. Unfortunately for her, the DUP's doey-eyed participation in Brexit and having led unionism into the current impasse doesn't bode well for the party's political future.

Yet the predicament the DUP find themselves in isn't entirely their own doing. As per conservatism and Tory Britain generally, loyalism itself is in long-term decline. This year 42% polled in the north said would back a united Ireland, declining slightly from 45% when asked last year. In all, by far the most popular party among the under-44s is Sinn Fein, and by a very healthy majority Northern Ireland voted to Remain. The unionist community split 57/43 to leave, but like elsewhere younger people were most likely to support remaining with the EU. As we also saw recently, the DUP were on the wrong side of Northern Ireland's abortion debate, leaving them saddled with a sectarian social conservatism increasingly at odds not just with younger people's values, but their everyday experience. As the most vocal champions for the union and the UK, the British state could do with better cheerleaders.

Unionism's decline is more than value change and the recomposition of the working class, but an erosion of the sectarian character of the Ulster statelet itself. Active discrimination in housing, jobs, particularly public sector jobs, and policing had been in decline prior to the Good Friday Agreement and has continued since. Politics has a tendency to lag behind economics, and as the material basis for a particular cultural location evaporates so clinging to its identities and rituals can become stronger and, in some instances, extreme among a significant minority, Even as, especially as its wider influence diminishes. Given the alacrity with which the DUP opposed the decriminalisation of abortion, here we have a particular case of trying to uphold the social conservatism unionism identifies with. This is also the root of their embrace of Brexit too. There is no loyalism without the Irish border, and so withdrawing from the European Union, they calculated, would remphasise their difference and distinction from the rapidly secularising republic and secure their continued political relevance. What they weren't expecting was Boris Johnson hanging them out to dry by moving the border into the Irish Sea and, if anything, accelerating their appointment with marginalisation.

The problem is what happens next. If a group feels under threat, thanks to Northern Ireland's history this could step up from property damage and play itself out as attacks and murders. And given loyalism's record of butchery during the Troubles, this everywhere and always means political opponents and ordinary civilians. There is no popular appetite for a return to violence, but this is unlikely to stay the hands of would-be terror gangs. As Ulster unionism comes apart, there's every chance its final chapter could be blood-soaked and violent.

Whither the Northern Independence Party?

There's a bit of a puzzle with the formation of the newly-minted Northern Independence Party. As the UK state is hopelessly over-centralised and menaced by the SNP in Scotland and, to a lesser extent in Wales by Plaid Cymru, it's curious how NIP-sryle parties haven't formed sooner corresponding to England's stark regional divides. "Ah!" Might exclaim the nerds who follow things like local council by-elections, "don't you know about the North East Party and the Yorkshire Party?" Indeed I do, with three and seven councillors respectively. Regionalist parties are, actually, ten-a-penny. Mebyon Kernow down in Cornwall has been punting for independence for 70 years, and local authorities are littered with independents claiming to put their communities before party politics. My beloved Stoke-on-Trent is no different.

What makes NIP different from these other manifestations of what the pol profs call the centre/periphery cleavage? First off, it's explicitly socially liberal. As NIP's statement of aims makes clear, "We have members from across the LGBTQ+ rainbow and those of many different faiths and none. We will always fight against bigotry of all kinds - including racism, antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia." And second? It's where the party is from. Most regionalist parties and independent groups usually start life as a split from one of the two big parties, and typically as a result of fallings out in a council chamber. In this sense they are elite projects, albeit local government elites. As such, they tend to be older and have some years of experience behind them. Recall what happened with our unlamented friends Change UK, albeit at a municipal level: their characters are fundamentally the same. NIP, however, is not cut from the same cloth. It has come together out of the debris of Corbynism as a self-organised network of activists appalled with Labour's record since Keir Starmer assumed the leadership. Furthermore, while social liberalism is consciously stressed to jar Westminster-centric accounts of the north as a dessicated racist tundrascape, it reflects the basic common sense of the class cohorts who founded NIP: the immaterial workers and generation left, the backbone and natural base of Corbynism. Neither is it different to the cohorts lining up behind the SNP and an independent Scotland, except obviously the magnitudes of numbers involved are qualitative leaps apart.

But new political movements have to start from somewhere, and this is never from a position of strength. What prospects for NIP then under First Past the Post? As founder Philip Proudfoot says in his interview on Novara Media, electoral success is not the be-all and end-all for the new party. As Nigel Farage via UKIP and the Brexit Party was able to show, the mobilisation of a critical enough mass can impinge on and infuence the direction of the mainstream. True, though NIP will never have the same advantages enjoyed by UKIP in terms of media coverage and handy, five-yearly elections fought under proportional representation. But like these two parties and unlike other left-of-Labour outfits, it does have the possibility of building something out of its regionalist orientation. For one, few can pretend the north of England does well out of the current constitutional set up. Even Tory backbenchers know this and organise accordingly. And so while there isn't a generic northern identity outside of the imaginations of London journos as they head north on gammon safaris, there is an inchoate grievance ready to be drawn on.

One advantage NIP does have is the records of its activists. Having gone through the struggle Corbynism was thrust into and having a baptism of political realities at the font of scabbing by "comrades" and "allies", one would think they're not prey to the delusion of winning Westminster seats any time soon and have a grasp of how difficult making a breakthrough is. With this in mind, where it has enough members in a locality is it going to focus efforts on elections, building support in workplaces, the community organising Labour is foolishly abandoning, and/or the politics of the street? I imagine they will try all to build name recognition and recruit, but ultimately it was the electoral threat UKIP brought to bear that allowed Farage to set up his abode in Dave's head. Going for every local authority contest they can, and contesting seats consistently is the tried and tested method of other small parties.

Hence NIP's contesting of the Hartlepool by-election is quite interesting. The Survation poll for the CWU puts them on two per cent. Not a great score, but more than any of the other parties running apart from Labour and the Tories. Here the circumstances of the contest, particularly Labour's arrogant approach to the selection of Paul Williams and their entitled attitude could be grist to the NIP mill. Having selected the former Labour MP Thelma Walker and with campaigning now underway, including targeted Facebook advertising, we'll see if the party can scoop up any anti-Labour protest votes currently heading in the Tories' direction. And, given NIP's social base, whether it can flush out more votes from the corresponding milieu in the constituency.

The limiting factor for NIP is also its strength, and that is the party's regionalism. What it stands for requires little explanation, and undoubtedly a segment of any electorate it attracts will be on that basis - a bit like how the Greens have a record of winning Tory council seats in Tory areas despite being a socially liberal party with roots in the post-war expansion of immaterial labour. But the problem is, despite billing itself a democratic socialist party, is its efforts are always limited by this and if success comes, sooner or later the class interests of the coalition NIP's trying to build are going to come into conflict with the self-imposed geographic extent of its ambitions. Indeed, as Philip said in his Novara interview about this issue is people in other parts of the country should start their own regionalist rebellion against Westminster or move to the free North after independence. As we have seen in the UK, the nationalism of the mass politicisation in Scotland, even though it has a similar base to Corbynism has ensured its radicalism is boxed in and isolated from the rest of the UK body politic.

That said, the responsibility of NIP's emergence lies squarely with the Labour leadership for dumping on its people. And, I'm afraid to say, the Labour left. Little to no work was done to prepare Corbyn supporters in the event of losing, and since then the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs have not assumed the mantle of leadership. Seeing Jon Trickett tweet about policy, Richard Burgon pushing zero Covid, and Claudia Webbe talking about racism, there is no strategy let alone a good argument forthcoming for staying in the Labour Party. Keir Starmer is disaggregating and dispersing Labour's vote. Who knows, it might be enough to make NIP and similar parties viable, but those who would be leaders of the left are practically standing by, seemingly indifferent as our activists are carried to the four winds.

Explaining the Hartlepool Poll

Ouch. Contrary to earlier predictions, the Tories are on course to win the Hartlepool by-election. In a Survation poll for th CWU, they reported the Conservatives on 49%, Labour on 42%, the new Northern Independence Party on 2%, and the rest scratting around for one per cent apiece. Accurate constituency polls are harder to pull off than national polls thanks to smaller sample sizes and the difficulties ensuring it is representative, but ultimately it's the headline that matters.

Unfortunately, things look worse as you peer into the details. Boris Johnson has a 49% favourability rating versus just 24% for Keir Starmer. And yet, policy wise, this by-election should be uncontested territory for Labour. 67% want more spending on public services versus 24% who want deficit reduction prioritised, 57% would like to see Royal Mail renationalised, and 69% would like to see free broadband rolled out to all homes and businesses. How can we begin to account for these mind-bending findings? Hartlepool appears to want what Labour offered in 2017 and 2019 and voted for it on those occasions, but are now beguiled by a party offering towns just like them nothing but piss and wind?

There are two factors in play. The first is Boris Johnson himself. Without getting into the full details of how he is escaping accountability for 127,000 dead people, he is rare among politicians, at least as far as many punters are concerned, because he has kept his word and done what he said he would do. He promised to deliver Brexit, and through a series of shenanigans in which he nearly blew up the Tory party and sailed close to the wind of flouting the law, he did just that. On Coronavirus, despite the many failings of his government the handling of the vaccine roll out has gone swimmingly. Nearly everyone over 50 in Hartlepool will now have had at least one jab and some, as I write this, are going to be waiting their turn in the local vaccine centre for the second injection. On the two key issues of the last two years, Johnson has come good and delivered. If you don't follow politics closely and have largely been shielded from the consequences of both, what is there to be angry about?

There are, however, reasons to be dissatisfied with Labour. And these aren't the same reasons why the left aren't happy. In many places that have customarily returned Labour MPs, that they're the opposition doesn't matter. They typify distant, unappealing, and entitled establishment politics among certain layers of voters. For many millions who went Tory, they felt the party's refusal to abide by the decision of the referendum was them rubbing their noses in it, telling them they were thick and wrong and the party wasn't interested in listening. And so, this lack of interest was returned in a lack of votes. And Keir Starmer, despite his very late necessary conversion to respecting Brexit initially epitomised this arrogance by leading the charge for ignoring their referendum decision. Compounding this perception of an arrogant and out-of-touch party were the efforts to which the leader's office went to impose Paul Williams as their choice. The fact he was chosen despite voting against the Brexit decision of his former Stockton South constituents on no less than six occasions. He was and is the worst possible candidate, and the message this sends to the good people of Hartlepool is a contemptuous expectation on Labour's part that the town will vote for any old donkey in a red rosette.

The dynamic of this by-election then is a protest vote, a vote aimed against Labour as opposed to the ruinous government of the day because the party is seen to be tone deaf. Until it starts listening instead of doling out fake platitudes it thinks the ignorant proles want to hear, this won't be the last near-death experience/unnecessary defeat Labour will suffer under Keir Starmer's auspices.

Image Credit

One Abysmal Year of Keir

A full year since Labour returned to the mean and elected a man in a nice suit. Looking back at the occasion, this blog met Keir Starmer's election with a bouquet of scepticism. The power grabs and rolling back of internal democracy, a default to the bourgeois common sense of politics, a load of dishonest but politically convenient hand wringing over antisemitism - despite the leak of that report. As I wrote of the left's relationship to the new leadership, "We're going to have to live with someone whose first instinct is to praise the government when they're doing well, and keep quiet when they're not." Prepared? What I was expecting was a leadership not unlike Ed Miliband's, something that at least meant well which the majority of the left could support at a remove. Unfortunately, Dear Keir is yet to touch even this low bar.

In policy terms, he writes in Sunday's Observer about the failings of the Conservatives, and how Labour's "ambition for Britain must match the moment. Not merely fiddling with tax incentives or creating pots of money for towns to scrap over but creating an economy that works for everyone." One might point out this is exactly how Keir has spent his time in the Leader's chair. Attacking the Tories from the right over the minutiae of corporation tax rates, quibbling with the process and details of Coronavirus management, and only going on the offensive when either Marcus Rashford or teaching unions or SAGE have prepared the ground for him, this falls somewhat short of a functioning and effective opposition, let alone anything demonstrating ambition capable of rising to the occasion.

But I'm nothing if not fair, so let us consider some of the arguments in Keir's defence we haven't looked at already. For PoliticsHome, Adam Payne quotes an anonymous (of course) "senior party source" saying the party was in a terrible state when Keir inherited it. The party was near to bankruptcy too, so the story goes. There might have been a time when a journo might have challenged claims made by their interlocutor, but this wasn't one of them. At the end of 2019, the party's statement of accounts published under Keir's leadership show that following the election the party had a tiny surplus. Under previous leaders the party routinely got into multi-million pound debt holes. Another lie then. But there is some truth to the notion Labour wasn't in tip-top shape. The campaign itself was poorly coordinated, and organisation from region down to branch level were riddled with accumulations of dysfunctions. What else might one expect when the Labour right stretched every sinew in their scorched earth struggle against the leadership?

The other argument in the leader's defence, it is said, is something Keir can't do a great deal about. With the pandemic clogging the headlines and everyone's horizon depressed by it, the punters aren't especially interested in what politicians have to say - particularly when they're not in government and have no bearing on the management of the crisis. To all intents and purposes, Labour are whistling in the wind and we're going to have to wait until Coronavirus had faded into the background before the party's offer is noticed. Therefore, coming out with bold policy statements or making loud oppositional noises is a waste of time or looks like point scoring. The moment for a vision for government is ... not yet. Now, this is pretty unconvncing for a couple of reasons. Contrary to what our PLP and shadcab whisperers think, Keir Starmer has had plenty of coverage. And nearly all of it has been soft and supportive. If Keir isn't getting noticed, it's because he's not using these plentiful avenues to say anything memorable or meaningful. Second, it appears Keir's anonymous outriders can only conceive of opposition in two ways, as either shouty and ranty or as "constructive", which always means giving the government a free pass save some minor aspects of policy and positioning. There was a third way, which any assessment of Keir's record needs reminding of, and that's what Jeremy Corbyn accomplished in the dead duck days of his leadership. Contrary to the invented histories circulating for factional advantage, not only was he ahead of the government in calling for proper quarantine strategies, he was constructive because he offered policy solutions to problems, which the Tories promptly took up. This is something Keir has steered clear away from, apart from a ritualistic request that the government extend the Job Retention Scheme or carry on the measly uplift to Universal Credit.

Since his first day in the job, the openings have been there for Keir to carry on in the same vein, but he didn't. Why? One might put it down to a personal failing but in fact it has everything to do with his politics. Despite being weak on opposition, Keir is the most authoritarian (though certainly not authoritative) leader Labour has had since Tony Blair. His politics, such as they are, depend on affirming state authority and particularly government as not just the key but the only institution for getting things done. Keir's opposition to Boris Johnson, when it has manifested, has not gone for the jugular nor offered different ways of doing things because that might undermine the government's authority by creating an alternative to it. Even though he would be this counterpoint, Keir's strategy depends on the restoration and protection of state authority. Talking about policy and attacking the Tories on big picture stuff, or even his reticence to mention scores of thousands of dead, is an attempt to oppose while preserving the authority he seeks to draw on if he enters Number 10. In practice this means anemia. He has let the Tories define the Covid-19 crisis, and as such they're setting about defining the peace. Clever clever games leading to stupid stupid outcomes.

In terms of conventional politics, he's failing. But much more serious than poor parliamentary footsy is the potentially existential crisis the leadership and its right wing cheerleaders are dragging the party into. As this blog has pointed out enough, the main consequence of Jeremy Corbyn's time was the recomposition of the Labour vote. The core Labour supporter is now the immaterial worker, someone whose working life is bounded by the production of care, knowledge, and social relationships - typically, though not exclusively, for the profit of others. On top of this, the way Tory policy works to keep their voter coalition together by shielding older people, retirees particularly, from the (private) consequences of austerity, the fall out of the Brexit mess and the Covid slump, keeping the property market overheated and, indeed, subordinating crisis management to these ends, the Tories are underwriting the long-term decline of their support by raising a generation of anti-Tory voters. Jeremy Corbyn's clear anti-austerity message in 2017, plus the promise of a softer Brexit was able to cohere these emerging interests around Labour while keeping enough of the old core vote on board. As a new political consciousness in the process of emergence, there was a certain softnesss to it but, more importantly, conditionality. For it to solidify and identify with Labour the party needed to act consistently in their interests. Instead, there was more internal warfare and the stoking of Brexit - purposely by the right, including a certain Keir Starmer - as a wedge issue. The result was confusion, a panicky arse covering adoption of the second referendum, and a partial fragmentation of the 2017 coalition as a few hundred thousand defected direct to the Tories, and some two million migrated to the Liberal Democrats, Greens, the nationalist parties, and abstentionism.

The inescapable task of Labour strategy is bringing these people back, holding on to the new core that stuck with Labour in 2019, peeling soft supporters off the Tories, and looking at ways of energising the spontaneously socially liberal and small s socialist layers of younger workers. This is not just crucial for winning elections, but for securing the future of the party itself. According to the wisdom revealed by Claire Ainsley, Keir's policy guru and writer of matters on the new working class, this is what has to be done ... but thinks traditionalist appeals to flags and family would secure them. We have then an explanation for the plastic patriotism and similar embarrassing efforts, but from a position utterly ignorant of the relationship between the materiality of immaterial labour, social liberalism, and the constitution of new class identities. If this wasnt bad enough, something the dim wattage of Labourist thought should recognise - bread and butter issues, and how the Tories stymie them at every turn - is completely off the Starmerist radar too. It's almost as if they're not serious about power.

It gets worse. The loudest cheers for Keir come from the right of the party frothing at the purge of the left. Though, of course, they like to pretend it's a struggle against antisemitism, not least because they lack the arguments to contest the left at the level of ideas and strategy. As was pointed out last June, the problem with driving out the left, whether by adopting right wing positions or by simple diktat, is the party is ridding itself of the very people who were crucial to mobilising voters at the last two general elections. I'm not talking about campaigning, but those who did the unseen and under-the-radar work of converting friends, workmates, and family members into giving Labour a go. Those who, completely unbidden, were an influence in their online and offline networks and helped cohere support around the party. As dreadful as the 2019 result was, there's a reason why, bar 2017, Labour got the highest number of votes it had since 2001 and the greatest number of votes in England since 1997. In other words, Keir Starmer and his host are demobilising the party's support. Now, they might believe they can do a simple trade: putting the backs up of the new core vote in the big cities where Labour MPs sit on huge supermajorities doesn't matter if tacking right wins back support in the so-called Red Wall and soft Tories elsewhere. Completely forgetting immaterial workers are distributed across the land. Winning back the Brexit-supporting Tory switcher snack bar manager at a provincial railway station isn't worth it if the party does so on a prospectus alienating the younger, low paid precarious workers she oversees. Chasing after Tory supporters on a Tory-lite platform is less a matter of digging your own hole, but driving the spade into one's foot.

This is why Keir Starmer is doing abysmally. He's waging class politics alright, the class politics of the other side. As he waxes about our once-in-a-generation opportunity, the possibility of the party carrying on wanes that little bit more. "Starmerism" and its trajectory doesn't just risk Labour becoming less than the sum of its parts, but allowing it to fall apart completely. The polls have consistently shown upticks in Green support and faltering gains for the LibDems. The SNP are poised to sweep all before it, and Plaid Cyrmu is putting in a better showing. And thanks to the worst possible start to the Hartlepool by-election, a new party has a shout of coming from nowhere to take more support off Labour than the Tories. Might Keir be able to turn it around? Possibly, but in politics as with most things the best indicator of future behaviour is past behaviour. He managed to repair Labour's polling position before crashing it, and having disaggregated the party's support he's not about to put it together again without a fundamental strategic rethink. Though, of course, having an impotent and useless party at a remove from the messy business of proper politics suits the Tories and the Labour right alike.

Image Credit

New Left Media April 2021

More month(?), more new left media. What projects have come to light since early March? Batten down the hatches.

1. Black Woman's Hour (Twitter) (YouTube Channel)

2. Buddies Without Organs (Twitter) (Podcast)

3. Cursed Objects (Twitter) (Instagram) (Podcast)

4. Decolonial Groundings (Twitter) (Blog)

5. Labour Affairs (Magazine)

6. Labour's New Leadership Podcast (Twitter) (Podcast)

7. Samuel K (Twitter) (Viral video)

8. Tempest (Twitter) (Magazine)

9. Under Another Name (Twitter) (Podcast)

10. Unlabour (Twitter) (Blog)

11. What's Left of Philosophy? (Twitter) (Podcast)

If you know of any new(ish) blogs, podcasts, channels, Facebook pages or whatever that haven't featured before then drop me a line via the comments, email, Facebook, or Twitter. Please note I'm looking for new media that has started within the last 12 months. The round up appears hereabouts when there are enough new entrants to justify a post!

Radical Theory and the Crisis of the Present

As part of the series of lectures about the crisis in social theory and philosophy (one may be tempted to ask when hasn't there been a crisis?), yours truly tuned into last week's seminar to listen to Benjamin Noys talk about the crisis of the future as it exists in philosophy, and how might those of us who engage with and produce social theory could benefit from reflecting on this problem.

He began with the character of the crisis, which follows on from a set of observations made by the late Mark Fisher. That is, presently, the images of a better future that were part and parcel of capital's vision in the past, particularly in the post-war period and certainly up until the demise of the Soviet Union, have vanished. Capitalist institutions, especially the state and the media, instead cohere consent on the basis of reiterations of the past. The future then is cancelled and we're caught in a recurrent time trap. Because this sense of other, better times is no longer "spontaneously" produced, movements of the left and the right have embraced a certain voluntarism by manufacturing their own. For the left, its theory has become suffused with a utopian imaginary, culminating in the propagation of fully automated luxury communism. On the right, its "theory" has assumed the quality of a fundamental negativity and a compulsive yearning for an imagined past, something we saw with large chunks of the Brexit and Trumpist movement, and with the incels, the Men Going Their Own Way, and the so-called alt-right.

How then is this a crisis? For Benjamin, whether envisaging a progressive or regressive future, they have a fantastical quality to them. The bridge between now and these futures is fuzzy and unclear, and are symptomatic of what the crisis of the future really is: a crisis of the present, or an inability to imagine or map our present. The present then is absent, or if we take a leaf from Mark Fisher's book, a moment of stagnation and decadence. We live in a static and disappointing now among the debris of promised futures never fulfilled, and the dissatisfaction with our lot feeds the vivid fullness of past certainties or future possibilities. And the villains of the piece, at least where philosophy is concerned, stems from the Nietzschean wave of the last 50 years, refracted through the prism of Heidegger.

The scorn for the present suffuses Heidegger's critique of Western metaphysics. Beginning with Socrates and Plato, he argues what is excluded from philosophy is a willful forgetting of being, which for Heidegger was something always-already situated and embedded. For example, human consciousness is always relational and constituted through an interplay of interaction with other people and objects. This quality of being was repressed in Western philosophy, but continued to impinge and make itself present partially through the canonical thinkers. For example, Descartes's famous separation of subject and object was a distorted attempt to grasp and account for being. This wrestling, for Heidegger, was a buried but haunting presence in philsophy down to Nietzsche. Therefore, to reclaim the truths of being philosophy has to go backwards to the pre-Socratics to reclaim the importance of being. So much then for the past for Heidegger, but what of the future side of the equation? Heidegger has long appeared anti-future, what with his denunciation of technology and embrace of the pastoral and the farmer - in other words, he offers a bucolic philosophy stamped by the backwards orientation of his thought. However, for Noys, there is another possible way through for Heidegger. Again, stressing the situatedness of being he envisaged a way of working with technology and therefore preserving it, while retaining the pastoral and the poetic - a humanised modernity. The problem with Heidegger, of course, was his alternative to the futures offered by American technocracy and the Soviet Union was ... Nazi Germany. Fascist modernisation reintegrates the individual into the national community, and this is a route through the dualisms and fragmentation of being charted and accomplished by Western philosophy.

Why then for Heidegger was Nietzsche the beguiling moment for reasserting the repressed philosophical tradition? Because for Nietzsche the nihilism he noted, along with the death of God, was a consequence of Christian moralism and Socratic reason undoing themselves - the irrationality of rationality later taken up by Max Weber. The growing accent on technology is a realisation of this collapse as other, colder imperatives direct the thrum of social life which, in turn, enables an evaluation (or transvaluation) of all values. Nietzsche located his project in this conjuncture as calling for an affirmation of the powers of creativity and life. Catastrophe, therefore, midwifes rebirth, and affirming life can (and should) take from the past an aristocratic will to power. I.e. Self-assertion in (if not against) the world. As far as Noys is concerned, this Nietzschean appreciation of affirmation has made its way into the left via the standpoint of anti-capitalist critiques of culture emphasising stagnation and the manner by which culture arrests rather than fosters development - something certainly present in Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri, and latterly, Fisher's thought. Except for them creative properties are the stuff of the masses, as opposed to Nietzsche who previously located this in the minority slave holding and aristocratic classes.

This crisis of the present then, of always looking forwards and backwards, has not led to a resurgence of the left. When we think about the multiple crises bedevilling capitalism, of the environment and climate, of economic slump and joblessness, of precarity, housing, and state capacity, because the system is totalising and subsumes everything, its crises appear as generalised crises of civilisation. This is a film covering and affecting to depoliticise capitalism's structural antagonisms, but is (presently) successful because, beneath the surface, the state of politics is fairly calm. And this has consequences for capitalism and the character of the politics of crisis.

Jumping off from Mario Tronti's Workers and Capital, the book makes the argument that capitalist development is driven by workers' struggle. That is containing workers, creating disciplinary mechanisms and new vectors of exploitation, all the technologies invented to intensify exploitation and, by extension, developing new products for individual consumption, is concerned not just with the production of surplus value but keeping the workers where they are so the wage relation and the power of capital carries on, unchallenged. When class struggle is at a low level or is diffuse, the pace of innovation slows because living labour is largely docile. More importantly, capital no longer knows itself. Without an opposition conscious of its interests and menacing the system, the ruling class itself starts lacking consciousness and a collective stupefaction descends upon it - hence in the UK context our very own Tory party's preference for authoritarianism, dressed up in antiquated notions of national sovereignty. With nothing to identify themselves against, the bourgeoisie start looking to the past, and the results are particular forms of reaction.

For Noys, the UK is proving to be a laboratory for this politics. Brexit, for instance, while a backward looking project actually sold itself as a future-facing affair. We know anti-immigration and racism were core components of the Leave vote, but it also had a vision of a more confident Britain bestriding the globe. "Out of Europe and into the World" went another one of the campaign's important slogans. This fits nicely with Tory modernisation, and Boris Johnson's particular fetish for high technology while pushing the politics of scapegoating and other nostalgic favourites. At this passive moment of our disappointing todays, we have to be aware that it might not contain any radical potentials. But we also require a standpoint understanding of how this passivity is uneven and might provoke layers of people who aren't as subsumed into capital's logics into action against it. Therefore, the moment, as always, requires a focus on the present, which would be a work of collective analysis and theoretical development. As Noys observed in the subsequent discussion, analysis has to provide those linkages between the past, the present, and the future.

I thought the paper was very interesting, and made explicit a few things I've thought about (but not written about) from time to time. The link between passivity, stagnation, and the backward-looking character of much of the right certainly rings true. There are plenty of times this place has railed against Tory and bourgeois decadence, for instance. The paper also offers a good explanation of, for want of a better phrase, the left utopianism we've seen much of in recent years. As for the idea capital is entirely reactive, this is the notion from Italian autonomism/post-Marxism that I've always found most problematic. Framing ruling class activity this way carries the danger of downplaying ruling class offensives and efforts bourgeois parties and governments go to while constructing cross-class alliances favourable/more favourable to the continued rule of capital. It also, on one level, provides succour for right wing apologetics for these efforts. I.e. If organised workers had behaved themselves in the 1970s, Thatcher's Tories wouldn't need to have smashed them. We must also remember capital, or rather capitalists and their parties are not omnipotent. Even when politics is "passive" they can, and do, make mistakes. Therefore, capital has agency. It is quite capable of reacting. It is also quite capable of forestalling and anticipating future issues around labour discipline and class consciousness, and working to engineer social relations and their environs to discourage or stymie their emergence. Something the Tories are adept at.

The second is the idea of an absent left resurgence. This is simply not the case. In the Anglo-American context, in Corbynism and Bernieism we have seen a huge uplift in leftist political activity. These movements were defeated, but have not gone away. Corbynism still appears to be the first wave of new cohorts of our class, which Keir Milburn has memorably dubbed 'generation left', coming into political consciousness. Corbynism was more than a generational revolt though as it drew widely from existing layers of Millennial and GenX workers whose relationship to work has been transformed by immaterial labour. Corbynism might no longer be a thing, but what is are new street movements, new political formations, and a stronger left in Labour and the trade union movement. British politics in March 2021 is unrecognisible from the perspective of March 2015.

The third is Noys's idea of a crisis of the present itself. I'm not au fait with all the ins and outs of current social theory and philosophy in academia, but to my mind there is no crisis in theory as such. Looking around at the work coming from the left in recent years, I see nothing but a relentless focus on the present and how it might be overcome. Richard Seymour's recent polemic against social media, Alison Phipp's attacks on corporate feminism, Aaaron Bastani and the communist potentials of current technology, Naomi Waltham-Smith's critique of neoliberal biopolitics, even this place fully inhabit the moment. Hundreds and thousands of other writers and activists do likewise. Militant thinking has not been in ruder health for decades. Time and again they reconstruct history, imagine the present, and try and constitute the pathways to the future.

The crisis then isn't one of theory or theory production, it is a question of practice. Or, to be more precise, of organisation. The left resurgence is real, is growing, but is amorphous and uneven. The real task of the present is to build and rebuild the vehicles and institutions of these movements, of creating catalysts for further action, coalescing political consciousness and drawing in many millions of others. It's a problem, or a crisis, as old as the workers' movement itself.

Image Credit

The Tories' Racist Gaslighting

1. The government's 258-page report on race and racism wasn't worth the keystrokes. This is gaslighting on an extraoridnary scale, and goes out of its way to deny the life experiences of minority ethnicities and purposely ignore the multiple indices that have recorded and continue to record the consequences of racial discrimination and inequality. The British Medical Journal are especially scathing, damning it for "cherry-picked data" and its attempt "to undo several decades of irrefutable peer-reviewed research evidence on ethnic disparities, previous governments’ reports, and independent reviews all reaching similar conclusions." All of which point to the inescapable fact that "ethnic minorities have the worst health outcomes on almost all health parameters." If this wasn't a government-endorsed report, its correct repository would be the bin and its contents laughed out of contention.

2. The authors of this "independent report" were government appointed, and it selected a tranche of lackeys and useful idiots who were always going to turn something out congenial to the Tories' interests. Again, the BMJ criticising the author selection observes it "included a space scientist, a retired diplomat, a politics graduate, a TV presenter and an English literature graduate, but no one with an academic background in health inequalities." Even worse, it transpires a number of experts the report claims to have consulted were not. Befitting a government of organised cynicism, the report's authors were selected from minority ethnicities to give this shoddy document a cover it would never have acquired if the Tories had relied on the Toby Youngs and Sarah Vines of this world.

3. The document might be a load of rubbish, but it is reflective of a layer of opinion within minority ethnicities, particularly those who are upwardly mobile and find themselves occupying comfortable professional or business occupations. Not dissimilar from the brief flap of so-called conservative feminism from eight or so years ago, this is an individuated and individualising mindset of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, working hard, and overcoming racism and discrimination to make a good go of things and becoming successful. Having made their way in the world, this layer looks around itself and puts its success down to their personal qualities, such as talent, intelligence, and graft. From their point of view, because they have a nice house and a nice salary, institutionalised racism is so much poppycock. Racist attitudes are the mindset of ignoramuses and bigots, a matter of individual fault, and therefore responsibility. To even talk about structural racism is, for these people, to provide excuses for those who did not rise with them. Their situation at the bottom of the occupational ladder is thanks to not enough application, a lack of effort, a revelling in victimhood, or in a racialised twist of the cultures-of-worklessness claims beloved of Tories and centrists, not being socialised into the right values. Therefore white privilege does not exist. What we see instead is racialised underperformance. Or, to put it another way, minority ethnicities are to blame for their predicament for being insufficiently British.

4. This is pure propaganda with a firm objective in mind. It is, obviously, another effort in the Tory culture wars. With Brexit done, Boris Johnson has to cast around for new glue to keep the Tory voter coalition together. He has the advantage of having kept his word at his back, but no Tory government can manage without finding scapegoats and ourgroups to pin their failings on. The report, coming with the official stamp of approval, serves these purposes in two ways. With the Tory coalition disproportionately dependent on the legacy print media for news and opinion formation, headlines trumpeting the "findings" that Britain is a beacon for race relations and inclusion tells its mainly white, mainly old, mainly propertied support that all is fine and dandy. Where this voter coalition has racist views, it's telling them they don't matter in the grand scheme of things. And when the government is on the hook for the likes of the Windrush deportations, profile policing, and immigration bashing, these aren't racist either. Where there is fault it's an honest mistake or somesuch - so goes the frame. The second consequence is to attack and delegitimise complaints about racism, and moving to a position where protests and marches against racism are stripped of political recognition and positioned as social order problems to be managed. By rejecting claims about institutional racism in the shoddiest manner possible, the aim is to show those who complain or take to the streets have nothing to get angry about. It's entirely perfomative, and therefore entirely illegitimate.

5. It's a good job Labour have come out strongly against this. Oh, wait a minute. It wasn't until lunch time on Good Friday that the party pushed out a statement from Marsha de Cordova deploring how the report sets the clock back. But nothing from the top, which is what is exactly warranted in response to such a blunt force attack. A Labour leader worth their salt would be all over this and challenging the naked Tory attempt at reframing race, ethnicity, and nationality in a way that suits Johnson's political positioning. But, as we have seen, not only are the Labour right not serious about winning office, Keir Starmer is practically allergic to contesting the Tory definition of political issues. He has not dissented from their management of the pandemic, so he's not about to wade into what the Labour right would regard as identity politics. And so the party concedes more ground to the Tories and fails to stick up for key constituents of its own coalition, making the job of cobbling together a coalition broad enough to turf them out of office even more difficult.

Image Credit