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Labour Pains

Ellie Keen — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 20:05:41 +0000

Stoke-on-Trent is a Labour city or at least it should be. In the mid-1990s the Labour Party held all 60 seats on the council and the three local MPs had five-figure majorities.

Those days are long gone and today we face the appalling prospect of the British National Party seriously challenging for mayor in next year’s election.

In May’s local elections the Labour Party won just four of the 20 seats up for election, leaving it with only 16 city councillors plus the directly elected mayor. The City Independents have 15, the BNP and the Conservative and Independent Alliance have nine each, the Liberal Democrats five, the Potteries Alliance two and there are three non-aligned and one Libertarian.

The BNP beat Labour in eight of the ten seats they both contested. Labour averaged 25% across the city, while the BNP averaged 24% in the wards it fought.

There are now two wards where the BNP holds all three seats, though its performance overall was overshadowed by the strong vote for the City Independents, who gained six seats. However, in next year’s Mayoral contest there are likely to be several independent candidates, who will no doubt split the vote, leaving the BNP to battle it out with an increasingly unpopular Labour Party and the former independent mayor Mike Wolfe, who himself used to be in the Labour Party.

In the first mayoral election in 2002 the BNP took 18.7% of the vote, missing out on going through to the second round by only 1,500 votes [see table above]. In 2005 the BNP polled 19%, which was a remarkable achievement considering that the election was on the same day as the general election.

Since then support for the BNP has grown. Over the past three years it has averaged between 24% and 28% in the wards the party has contested and the BNP has now moved out of its previous Stoke-on-Trent South heartland into other parts of the city.

A vote in excess of 20% is likely to take the BNP into the second round in next year’s mayoral election, in which the second preferences of the defeated candidates are distributed. Given the strong anti-Labour feelings in the city a run-off between Labour and the BNP might well see the fascist party gain its most high-profile victory to date.

Economic decline

Labour’s fall from grace in Stoke-on Trent began at the beginning of this decade, was reversed a few years later, but has gathered pace in the past two years.

There is no single explanation for this but rather a multitude of inter-related issues that have discredited the party locally.

The city was once home to heavy industry, manufacturing and skilled work, but much of this has now gone. The coal mines and the steel works have disappeared and there is little left of the ceramics industry, which once employed tens of thousands of people.

New employment has come in but much of it is in the service sector and short-term. “Many of the old jobs were tough work but they were well paid, they were secure jobs and they were skilled jobs,” says Jane Heggie, who works for Stoke-on-Trent South MP Rob Flello.

“The new jobs that have come in are less skilled, temporary and are not as well paid.”

The change in employment has led to the city becoming poorer over the past ten years. According to government statistics the city has slipped from 34th most deprived borough in 2000 to 18th in 2004 and now to 16th in 2007.

Movement out of the city reflects this declining economic situation. In 1981 252,509 people lived in Stoke-on-Trent. By 2001 the population had fallen to 240,636, with most of the decline in the latter part of this period.

Between 1991 and 2001 the population of Stoke-on-Trent fell by 9,000. By comparison the population of England and Wales grew by 2.6% over the same period, while the West Midlands experienced a 0.7% increase. Most of those leaving appear to be the more educated and qualified who have been able to move on to better jobs.

But there are also more local factors that have contributed to the collapse of Labour and the rise of the BNP. The mayoral system, which has handed almost total power to the elected mayor and the council’s chief executive, has been a disaster for the Labour Party and increasingly unpopular with the electorate. Many local councillors resent their weakened role and some Labour councillors have openly campaigned for the mayor’s abolition. Others have left the party.

In an effort to widen the decision-making process the current Labour mayor introduced a Cabinet to involve local councillors and, given Labour’s weak position, has formed a coalition of the three main political parties.

While this might have helped break down some of the factional infighting it has enabled the BNP to contrast itself with the old political establishment. An example of this emerged over the contentious changes to secondary schooling in the city, in which several schools will be replaced by fewer new schools. This has proved deeply unpopular and while many people in the Labour Party are opposed to the plan, including all three local MPs, the BNP has grabbed some local media headlines through its opposition.

“The BNP can present themselves as the only alternative,” says Jason Hill, of the local anti-BNP group NorSCARF.

Other commentators list a raft of unpopular council decisions which the BNP has exploited. Last year the council announced the closure of several care homes for the elderly and more recently the axing of the splash pool leisure facility at Dimensions in Burslem.

Jane Heggie points to a simple explanation for Labour’s decline and the BNP’s rise. “We are not addressing the concerns of voters and we have not been active enough.

“Of course the removal of the 10p tax rate had an impact, especially here where many people were affected, but there is a danger that we use the Government as an excuse. We really have to ask ourselves why is Labour collapsing here and not to the same extent in other areas which are doing even worse economically such as Sandwell or Manchester?”

Heggie cites recent results in Stoke-on-Trent South to support her case. Last year Labour won Fenton with a 400 majority over the BNP; this year Labour finished a poor third. “We had a candidate in his eighties who wasn’t able to campaign and simply had not done enough as a councillor,” she asserts.

In Longton North, by contrast, Labour has bucked the trend. It was once the city’s main BNP heartland, a ward the BNP had won three times in a row. Now it has three Labour councillors. “We have worked hard in the ward and people have responded positively.”

Certainly organisational factors and choice of candidates dramatically hampered the Labour Party’s chances in Mark Fisher’s Stoke-on-Trent Central constituency. Last year the BNP walked into a second seat in Bentilee and Townsend ward after Labour reselected a councillor who was in his late eighties, housebound and had just lost his wife. It was hardly surprising that the BNP won the election with very little campaigning.

The Labour Party in the constituency does not have any modern voter software, such as the new Contact Creator, and carries out little canvassing or Voter ID work. Not only is Labour unable to identify and so turn out voters in an election, but the lack of face-to-face contact with voters reinforces the impression that the party does not care.

The BNP alternative

Of course it would be wrong to place the entire blame for the BNP’s rise on Labour. The absence of other mainstream political alternatives, a common theme in areas where the BNP has emerged as a force, has resulted in the BNP appearing as the only alternative. However, given the economic and social make-up of the city it should be a Labour stronghold and much of the reason why it is not must lie in Labour’s own decline.

The BNP meanwhile has grown steadily over the past few years and has earned itself a reputation as a normal political party. Its councillors sit on committees, it is regularly quoted in the local media in the same manner as any other party and a growing number of people, from the editor of the local newspaper to the former mayor, believe it should be involved in decision making.

The BNP acts as though it is just another political party. Its recent election leaflets hardly touched on race, preferring to focus on local issues around schools, the closure of care homes for the elderly and jobs. However, it is quick to whip up racism and racial lies when it suits the party.

Over the past three years the BNP has repeatedly stoked up racism by means of a leaflet targeting plans for a mosque in the city. Full of lies, exaggeration and racial and religious stereotypes, it was designed solely to inflame the issue and whip up racial tensions.

A national priority

The growing respectability of the BNP puts it within reach of winning the mayoral election next year. Let us not be under any illusion about the severity of the situation as any success here would have national repercussions.

The job of anti-fascists must be to challenge the culture on the ground, not an easy job when the BNP is so entrenched in local communities and is viewed as a normal political party by so many people.

The mainstream political parties must finally get their act together. The Labour Party, regionally or nationally, must take control of the party campaign locally. Some will oppose this but unfortunately many of these same people have shown an inability to lead themselves. Locally, Labour needs to find a way to unite the party before next summer, address some of the more contentious issues and develop a clear understanding of the role of the mayor and its relationship with other elected officials and the voters at large. The stakes are too high.

The unions must also devote attention and resources to Stoke-on-Trent. There are thousands of union members in the area and these must be the focus of proper work and education. Some of it might not be easy but we have to take on the BNP’s arguments and dispel its myths in the workplace and in the community. For too long the regional unions have largely ignored the city, favouring other parts of the West Midlands, but again the stakes are too high.

The usual sort of anti-fascist leaflets are not adequate for the task. Producing leaflets that say don’t vote BNP because they are racists and fascists will simply not work in the BNP’s strongholds. We must produce local material which at least tries to address some of the issues that are making people support the BNP. Anti-fascists are not necessarily party political but we must highlight the shortcomings of the BNP approach while obviously reminding voters of its true intentions.

More importantly, anti-fascists can help identify and turn out the anti-BNP vote. This will require a more sophisticated approach than we have adopted so far and to achieve success will need a national anti-fascist effort. With a low turnout expected in the mayoral election, we need to identify and build up a relationship with 30,000 people who will vote for a party other than the BNP. While we cannot tell people whom to support we must convince people to cast their second preference vote for a party that they think can beat the BNP.

Searchlight and NorSCARF is calling for support from anti-fascists across the country to make Stoke-on-Trent a national priority. In addition to national days of action we will ask people from specific regions to work the area throughout the year.

Not to do this work could hand the BNP its greatest political prize to date. The stakes are that high.

Stoke-on-Trent at a glance

Stoke-on-Trent is the second most deprived local authority in the West Midlands, and 16th nationally. 33% of its 160 Super Output Areas (SOAs) – the geographical areas used in the Indices of Deprivation 2004 – are in the 10% most deprived areas nationally. Over 60% live in the worst 25%.
36% of Stoke-on-Trent’s SOAs are in the 10% most deprived nationally in employment (which measures long-term unemployed, people on incapacity benefit and those on New Deal schemes), making it the worst local authority in the West Midlands. Over 65% of the local population live in the most deprived 25%.
Stoke-on-Trent experiences the worst health deprivation in the West Midlands and ranks 12th nationally. 42% of its people live in the most deprived 10% of SOAs, while over 80% live in the worst 25%.
The city ranks second in the West Midlands in educational deprivation and 7th nationally. 34% of local people live in the most deprived 10% and 66% live in the worst 25%.
Stoke-on-Trent is the least deprived borough in the West Midlands, and 12th least deprived nationally, in the “Barriers to Housing and Services” domain, which measures ability to get local housing and homelessness. However, this figure reflects the declining local population.
22% of adults of working age are claiming a key benefit, compared to a national average of 14%. 13% of adults, twice the national average, claim incapacity benefit.
At the last census 42.9% of adults in Stoke-on-Trent had no educational qualifications, compared to a national average of 28.8%.

The Resistible Rise of the BNP

Ellie Keen — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most shocking results last month was the election of Nazi British National Party (BNP) member Richard Barnbrook to London’s assembly. This was on top of 13 seats the fascist organisation won in councils in England. It also lost three seats, so its net gain was ten, bringing a total of 57 seats.

The BNP often quotes a figure of over 100 seats, but this includes parish councils where it often stands unopposed or without its candidates identifying themselves as BNP members. In ten of its 13 seats the BNP replaced a Labour councillor, showing it can capture seats outside the inner cities where Labour’s base has collapsed.

The BNP has also been given a massive boost with programmes like those featured in the BBC’s White Season and the endless flow of media attacks on immigrants. In many cases, far from challenging such ideas, Labour has been seen to go along with them, most recently in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election.

The BNP won its first seats in South Yorkshire – two in Rotherham; two in Amber Valley and two in Nuneaton and Bedworth, both in the East Midlands; and one in the Three Rivers borough in the Eastern Region. It also came very near to winning a number of seats, including Amber Valley where it lost winning a third seat by just one vote. Nine of the top 20 wards it just missed were in South Yorkshire. The North East also saw some worrying results, when the BNP came within 60 votes of winning in Hartlepool, and polled over 25 percent in Newcastle.

In the 2004 European elections the BNP won 4.91 percent of the vote with 808,200 votes. On the basis of the votes gained this May, it has the potential to win seats in Yorkshire and Humberside, the North West and the Midlands in next year’s Euro election.

But the disturbing headlines about the BNP’s victories are just one part of the story. It’s important to put these votes in perspective. The percentage of the BNP vote rose by only 0.6 percent from 2004 in the London Assembly election. Yet this was enough to push it over the critical 5 percent barrier and win a seat.

However, because of the high turnout of 45.3 percent (up by 8.3 percent from 2004) it meant it won 130,714 votes. It’s worth noting that the total Conservative, BNP and UK Independence Party (UKIP) vote is almost the same as it was in 2004 – around 42 percent. UKIP’s vote collapsed from 8.2 percent to 1.9 percent, with their votes being distributed to the Tories and the BNP.

But the BNP also faces problems. Nationally it is still finding it hard to break into inner city areas – but it is trying. Also its Eurofascist strategy – putting itself across as a respectable political party – is succeeding in winning it seats but also has limitations.

As is the case with all fascist parties, the BNP is pulled in two different directions. One is towards elections, and another to taking to the streets in order to break up and terrorise progressive movements and immigrant areas. This creates tensions in its own ranks. We have seen several cases of this inside the BNP, most recently in Colwyn Bay, Wales. In May three BNP town councillors resigned before even attending a council meeting. One said he did not realise the BNP was a fascist party and didn’t like the fact that he was attacked by the party for helping an Asian family.

On the other hand, we have also seen a section of the party frustrated by the restraints imposed in the quest for respectability, wanting to break out of the straitjacket of elections. That is why we have seen convictions of a number of BNP members for violence. For the BNP to carry out its aim of creating a fascist state, elections will not be enough and it will have to take to the streets.

This is what all classic fascist movements have done in the past. The BNP has made several forays in recent years but has been pushed back by the anti-fascist movement. With its electoral success the pressure will grow for the BNP to capitalise on its gains and take to the streets in the near future.

All this shows the urgency of building against the fascists on many fronts in the coming months. The success of the Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) carnival was proof that there is a real mood to build opposition. The next step is building the biggest possible turnout on 21 June for the demonstration called in London by LMHR and Unite Against Fascism (UAF).

UAF will be calling a series of rallies all over the country, targeting particular places where the BNP has done well. The rallies alone will not be enough to challenge the growth of the BNP. In every city and region it will need local UAF groups involving trade unionists, students and other activists who can build roots to undercut the BNP at a local level.

Next year there will be a Northern carnival, on the same scale as this year’s carnival in London. At the same time LMHR will be trying to reach out to young people and will be holding a series of concerts in Hull, Rotherham, Stoke, Barking and Dagenham. LMHR will also be creating, alongside teachers’ unions, an educational pack for schools to use in developing anti-racist education.

This year’s election results shows there can be no complacency surrounding the BNP. Those who say we can just ignore the BNP and it will go away are playing a dangerous game. This strategy failed in France, as the growth of the fascist National Front shows.

What is needed is a broad based movement that can undermine the BNP at both a national and local level. But that leaves open one important question: how can we build a socialist current that offers people an alternative?

Hammering the BNP

Ellie Keen — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:25:15 +0000

It feels very odd to find any comfort from the local election results, but there is one outcome worthy of a small sigh of relief. The British National Party did not do as well as it might. It is true that it got Richard Barnbrook, its most personable, if absurd, figurehead, onto the London Assembly. But overall the party had a net gain of just ten councillors across the country, when it was hoping for, and many of us were dreading, some two or three assembly members and 40 more councillors.

It seemed that the BNP had everything going for it. It was exploiting the pumped-up fear of extremist violence and Islamophobia, aided by the media obsession with immigration and migration. The sudden media pre- occupation with the anniversary of Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech could hardly have been better timed. The party’s claim to have taken over Labour’s traditional role as the defender of the working class has had a great deal of resonance and could have put it in a strong position to take advantage of Labour’s collapse.

There are two obvious reasons for its comparative eclipse. The first and most obvious is that Cameron’s Tories swamped the BNP as they did Labour. But the second is that the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight and the trade unions combined in vigorous community- based campaigns against it, involving literally thousands of activists across the country. Nick Lowles, of Searchlight, says, ‘We have never had so many people involved in the anti-BNP campaign before. Against the odds, both political and climatic, decent people took to the streets and campaigned strongly for “hope not hate”.’

It is great to have something we can celebrate and I think we should. But most of these ‘decent’ people were from the left and we need to build stronger defences against the BNP across the board. Far from being down and out, the BNP is now a well- organised modern party and next year it will be seeking seats in several regions in the Euro elections, where low polls will assist it.

Combating the BNP involves an adjustment in the way we regard and describe the party, along with a surer and wider approach in society and in local government.

First, natural though it is to loathe the BNP, too often the left discourse sounds like an echo of the hate the BNP exploits. This is especially harmful when angry or violent expression spills over onto the people who vote for it. ‘Decent people’ can and do vote for the BNP, often with some shame, true, but defiantly nonetheless. It is not a protest vote, but a demand to be heard.

So tear off the party’s veil of respectability. Expose and broadcast the vile things that its members say and do. Keep watch on the performance of its councillors, show up their incompetence, deride the irrelevance of their statements and policies, complain to the local government Standards Board.

On the wider front, it is important to encourage people to take a robust approach to combating the BNP, especially in local government where councillors and staff often feel inhibited, either by fears that attacking the party gives it the ‘oxygen of publicity’, or that exposing the myths it propagates as lies will somehow breach electoral law. In the last election, a council official rang me and said that the other party leaders wanted to make common cause against the BNP offensive, but feared to draw attention to it.

Councils across the country have a duty to promote good race relations and social cohesion: combating the BNP’s lies simply fulfils this duty (on this point, see the Cohesion Matters website at www.cohesionmatters.co.uk).

Even in the Labour Party, I have experienced a reluctance to take on the far right. The most extreme example of this came some years ago when I was one of three people standing for election in Hackney. The agent (a man with real anti-fascist credibility) ordered us not to take part in a debate with the National Front candidate, Derek Day, a violent thug and prominent racist, on the estate where he lived and not to canvas the estate. The agent even came to the meeting to order us out. We stayed, trounced Day in the debate and won over people on the estate as we canvassed. In the pub one evening, my colleague’s handbag hit the table with a big thud. She was carrying a hammer, ‘just in case’.

I don’t advise carrying a hammer. But it is vital not to compromise or be intimidated. Resolute, informed, principled and persuasive argument is the way to combat the BNP.

Nothing Left to Fight For

tim — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:12:09 +0000

You can hear the wringing of hands and tearing of cloth all the way down Farringdon Road. Dismayed by the results of the local elections, convinced that Labour will be crushed in the byelection on Thursday, afraid that this will presage disaster in the next general election, my fellow columnists are predicting the end of the civilised world. But I can’t understand why we should care.

Yes, I worry about what the Tories might do when they get in. I also worry about what Labour might do if it wins another term. Why should anyone on the left seek the re-election of the most rightwing government Britain has had since the second world war?

New Labour’s apologists keep reminding us of the redistributive policies it has introduced: Sure Start children’s centres, reductions in child poverty, raising the school leaving age, the national minimum wage, flexible hours for parents and carers, better conditions for part-time workers, the Decent Homes programme, free museums, more foreign aid. All these are real achievements and deserve to be celebrated. But the catalogue of failures, backsliding and outright destruction is much longer and more consequential.

One fact alone should disqualify this government from office: we have a cabinet of war criminals. The Nuremberg Tribunal characterised a war of aggression as “the supreme international crime.” It is not just that Britain’s Labour government launched and has sustained an unprovoked war, it also sabotaged all means of achieving a peaceful resolution. In April 2002 it helped the Bush administration to sack Jose Bustani, the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, in order to prevent him from settling the dispute over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction(1,2). In two separate offers before the invasion began, Saddam Hussein agreed to meet the terms the US and Britain were demanding. But they slapped him down and concealed his offers from their electorates(3).

Cluster bombs can be legally used because the British government helped to block an international ban in 2006(4): it is still holding out against an outright ban at the current talks in Dublin(5). The government has undermined another international peace agreement – the nuclear non-proliferation treaty – by deciding to renew the Trident missile programme. It was the first administration to announce a policy of pre-emptive nuclear attack(6): even the great nuclear enthusiast Harold Macmillan never went this far. In 2007, the defence secretary, without parliamentary debate, revealed that the US would be allowed to use the listening station at Menwith Hill for its missile defence system(7).

Labour appears to be prepared to meet any demand, however outrageous, the Bush administration makes. In 2003 the government signed a one-sided extradition treaty, permitting the US to extract our citizens without producing prima facie evidence of an offence. In the same year the defence secretary announced that he would restructure the British armed forces to make them “inter-operable” with those of the United States, ensuring for the first time in British history that they became functionally subordinate to those of another sovereign power(8).

Labour’s foreign policy is as unethical as Margaret Thatcher’s. It provides military aid to the government of Colombia, whose troops are involved in a campaign of terror against the civilian population. It granted an open licence for weapons exports to the government of Uzbekistan, and sacked the British ambassador when he tried to draw attention to the regime’s human rights abuses. It has collaborated with the US programme of extrajudicial kidnapping and imprisonment, left our citizens to languish in Guantanamo Bay, and made use of Pakistani torture chambers in seeking to extract testimony from British suspects(9). Until 2005 it tied its foreign aid programme to the privatisation of public utilities in some of the world’s poorest countries(10,11). Last year it held out against reform of the International Monetary Fund’s unfair allocation of votes(12).

The proportion of the British population in prison has risen by a fifth since the Tories left office. Today Britain locks up 151 out of every 100,000 people(13). The Chinese judiciary, by contrast, which is notorious for its willingness to bang up anyone and everyone, jails 119 people per 100,000; Myanmar imprisons 120, Saudi Arabia 132(14). The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, passed in 2005, contains clauses which permit the police to ban any demonstration, however peaceful(15). It is one of a long series of bills the Labour government has passed which restrict the right to protest.

The citizen has been re-regulated; business has been deregulated. Last year deaths caused by serious injuries at work rose by 11%(16): a predictable result of the sacking of 1000 staff at the Health and Safety Executive and a 24% reduction in workplace inspections(17). In 2006 the government instructed the Serious Fraud Office to drop its corruption case against the arms manufacturer BAe. It has obstructed efforts by other states to investigate the company(18,19).

Labour has shifted taxation from the rich to the poor, cutting corporation tax from 33% to 28% and capital gains tax from 40% to 18%, and introducing a new Entrepreneurs’ Relief scheme, taxing the first million of capital gains at just 10%. It tried to raise the income tax paid by the poorest earners from 10% to 20%. Labour has lifted the inheritance tax threshold from £300,000 to £700,000, and maintained the cap on the highest rates of council tax. While vigorously prosecuting benefits cheats, it has allowed tax avoidance, mostly by the very rich, to reach an estimated £41billion(20). Inequality today is slightly worse than it was when Labour took power (the Gini coefficient which measures it has risen from 0.33 to 0.35(21)).

Both as Chancellor and as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown has forced the private finance initiative into almost all public services. His privatisation schemes have crept into places where the Conservative government never dared to tread. Labour has waged war against our planning system and overseen a disastrous decline in social housing: under Margaret Thatcher’s tenure an average of 46,600 social homes were built every year; under Tony Blair the average rate was 17,300(22). Labour is closing post offices, small schools and GPs’ surgeries, while overseeing a doubling of the UK’s airport capacity and the construction of 4000km of new trunk roads(23). These developments ensure that even the modest targets in the climate change bill are likely to be missed. Carbon dioxide pollution fell faster under the Conservatives than it has under Labour(24).

Above all, the Labour government has destroyed hope. It has put into practice Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no alternative” to a market fundamentalism that subordinates human welfare to the demands of business. It has created a political monoculture which kills voters’ enthusasism, and delayed the electoral reforms which would have given smaller parties an opportunity to be heard. All we are left with is fear: the fear that this awful government might be replaced with something slightly worse. Fear has destroyed the Labour party: people keep supporting it, whatever it does, in trepidation of letting the other side win.

Save this government? I would sooner give money to the Malarial Mosquito Conservation Project. Of all the causes leftist thinkers might support, New Labour must be the least deserving.

References:

1. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/04/16/a-war-against-the-peacemaker/

2. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/04/23/diplomatic-impunity/

3. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2003/11/11/dreamers-and-idiots/

4. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/11/07/asserting-our-right-to-kill-a…
5. BBC Online, 19th May 2008. Forum seeks to ban cluster bombs
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7407631.stm

6. Geoff Hoon, 24th March 2002. The Jonathan Dimbleby Show, ITV 1.

7. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/07/31/drumming-up-a-new-cold-war/

8. Geoff Hoon, 26th June 2003. Britain’s Armed Forces for Tomorrow’s Defence. Speech to the Royal United Services Institute.

9. Ian Cobain, 29th April 2008. MI5 accused of colluding in torture of terrorist suspects. The Guardian.

10. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/01/06/on-the-edge-of-lunacy/

11. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/05/18/this-is-what-we-paid-for/

12. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/04/17/the-emperor-of-africa/

13. Kings College, London, 2008. Prison Brief – Highest to Lowest Rates.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?a…

14. ibid.

15. Sections 125-127.

16. Health and Safety Executive, 2008. Fatal injury statistics.
http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/fatals.htm

17. SchNEWS, 11th April 2008. Issue 628. http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news628.htm

18. Rob Evans, Ian Traynor, Luke Harding and Rory Carroll, 12th June 2003. Politicians’ claims put BAE in firing line. The Guardian.

19. Rob Evans and Ian Traynor, 12th June 2003. US accuses British over arms deal bribery bid. The Guardian.
20. http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld200708/ldhansrd/t…

21. Mike Brewer et al, 2008. Poverty and inequality in the UK: 2007. IFS Briefing Note No. 73. The Institute for Fiscal Studies. http://www.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn73.pdf

22. DCLG, August 2007. Table 244. Housebuilding: permanent dwellings completed, by tenure, England, historical calendar year series. www.communities.gov.uk/documents/housing/xls/140912

23. Department for Transport, July 2004. The Future of Transport White Paper.

24. www.defra.gov.uk/environment/statistics/globatmos/download/xls/ghg_annex…

The Threat of a Good Example

Ellie Keen — Sun, 18 May 2008 01:33:06 +0000

On a night where Labour were deservedly massacred across the whole country how were a bunch of lacklustre candidates able to win two out of three against the IWCA in Oxford?

In the local elections on 1 May, the IWCA lost two of its four councillors on Oxford City Council. In Churchill ward, Claire Kent’s vote from 2004 –where she won by 10 votes from a standing start- stood up, but Labour were able to add on over 200 to theirs. In Blackbird Leys, Labour were able to turn Lee Cole’s 80 vote majority from 2004 into a 230 vote deficit. These results were greeted with unrestrained glee and relish by Labour at the count. In Northfield Brook, IWCA group leader Stuart Craft held on, though his majority was reduced from 116 to 66.

Elsewhere, the BNP officially took 5.3% in the London Assembly elections and now have one of the 25 Assembly members. They also added a dozen or so councillors and now have over 100 elected representatives at various local levels. In the individual London Assembly constituencies, the British Nationalists took 5.7% in Greenwich and Lewisham, 5.6% in Bexley and Bromley and 4.5% in Ealing and Hillingdon. Respect and the BNP only faced each other in one constituency, City and East, where they finished third and fourth respectively with 14.3% and 9.6% (City and East is made up of the Respect/ Galloway fiefdoms of Newham and Tower Hamlets, and the BNP stronghold of Barking and Dagenham). The Left List stood a candidate in every constituency, and the best they could manage was 3.56% in Enfield and Haringey. The Left List’s Mayoral candidate, Lindsey German, pulled in just under 52,000 votes, compared to over 120,000 that she got running under the Respect banner last time. By way of comparison, the IWCA’s Lorna Reid pulled in just under 50,000 votes in 2004 on a significantly lower turn-out (37% to 45%).

On a night where Labour were deservedly massacred across the whole country and posted their worst electoral results for forty years—the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley wrote: ‘The genius of New Labour was to create an election-winning alliance of both traditional supporters and converts, of Labour heartlands and new territories. Labour was not hammered in one or the other – it was slaughtered in both’—in Oxford they were able to successfully unseat two dedicated, born-and-bred independent working class representatives.

How? The Labour candidates that were stood against the IWCA were in themselves hardly A-grade material: in Churchill Labour stood Mark Lygo, a man relatively new to the area with no track record of community work or local activism, and who himself said he was ‘surprised by the margin of victory’. In Blackbird Leys Labour stood Val Smith, an incumbent county councillor and wife of the sitting Oxford East MP Andrew Smith. The Smiths are New Labour personified, and Andrew Smith is holding onto his Parliamentary seat by his fingertips: his majority in the last general election was cut from over 10,000 to less than 1,000. Labour’s candidate in Northfield Brook was a corporate lawyer from wealthy North Oxford. So how were this shower able to win two out of three against the IWCA?

In January an Oxford Green councillor, Matt Sellwood, predicted precisely this very outcome. His reasoning?: ‘part of their [the IWCA’s] problem is that they’ve made such an impact that they’ve scared Labour half to death, and so Labour are going to do everything they can to defeat them … even more so than against the Lib Dems, and much more than against the Greens (Labour have pretty much abandoned most of our wards these days, and given up trying to get them back). So basically their seats are Labours #1, #2 and #3 targets, and that is hard to resist in a city that still has a lot of Labour funding and volunteers. Not impossible, but very difficult.’

The Smiths are the biggest political fish in Oxford and they have taken personal charge of the campaign to defeat the IWCA. In September 2004, soon after the IWCA increased its number of councillors in Oxford from one to three, Andrew Smith suddenly and mysteriously resigned from his post as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions ‘to devote more time to the responsibilities I enjoy in my constituency and to my family.’ And in their efforts to stop the IWCA the Smiths are not averse to bringing in outside reinforcements: in this local election campaign no less than Gordon Brown himself paid a visit to Oxford, where he made three stops: Blackbird Leys, Churchill, and Stuart Craft’s workplace (‘Brown backs slur-hit city estate’, Oxford Mail, 8 April 2008). Brown never visited Bury, a key swing battleground where Labour eventually lost the council to the Tories.

So Labour pulled out all the stops and threw everything they had at us, up to and including the Prime Minister. Does that explain everything, particularly the large, and unforeseen, swing towards Labour away from Lee Cole? Perhaps not. This is not the first time that Labour, increasingly nationally unpopular and devoid of decent personnel, have been able to produce a large vote against the IWCA seemingly from nowhere: the same thing happened in Islington in 2006.

The day after this years elections, the Guardian reported on comments made by members of the Labour controlled Public Administration Select Committee on postal ballot fraud. Labour MP Gordon Prentice said: ‘Our elections are wide open to fraud. We have judges that have said in recent months and years that the UK is like a banana republic when it comes to an election.’ Tory MP Charles Walker said: ‘In many parts of this country, it is one man, one woman, three or four hundred votes.’ Labour’s Kelvin Hopkins has argued for the introduction of individual voter registration to clamp down on fraud, while adding with admirable candour: ‘I hesitate to say this, but one of the reasons our party is reluctant to do this, is because it might actually dent our support in certain areas,’ (‘Election fraud: Labour failed to act, say MPs’, The Guardian, 2 May 2008).

The Lib Dem MP John Hemming has written: ‘Labour’s strategy (called the L Vote) in recent years has been to identify where their own supporters are, and address the campaign to them. This may result in lower turnouts, although having postal votes where individuals fill in a few hundred votes each has helped increase the Labour vote. Happily the more recent changes to election law will reduce the amount of electoral fraud’.

An undercover investigation by the Sunday Times into the Labour party in Leeds showed the ‘L Vote’ strategy in action, with canvassers ‘chasing’ postal votes by going door-to-door prior to election day collecting postal ballots from voters, and filling them out on their behalf if need be. When one of the group suggested that the practice was illegal, the team leader responded with: ‘Yes it is. But we’ve done 25% already, so …’ (( ‘Get the votes and we can win, but don’t get caught with them’, (The Sunday Times, 29 April 2008 ).

A report by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust published in April found: i) ‘Greater use of postal voting has made UK elections far more vulnerable to fraud and resulted in several instances of large-scale fraud’; ii) ‘There is widespread, and justifiable, concern about both the comprehensiveness and the accuracy of the UK’s electoral registers – the poor state of the registers potentially compromises the integrity of the ballot’; iii) ‘There is a genuine risk of electoral integrity being threatened by previously robust systems of electoral administration having reached ‘breaking point’ as a result of pressures imposed in recent years’.

But far less important than the ‘how’ of Labour’s victory is the ‘why’. Why would Labour—the Prime Minister included—go to all this trouble to try and knock out three councillors on the eastern edge of Oxford? Because of the threat of a good example: if working class people—with virtually no resources—can get organised, sling out Labour and demonstrably start to take back control on the eastern edge of Oxford then they can do it elsewhere (when Gordon Brown visited Blackbird Leys he remarked that the estate had ‘made a huge step forward’ and that ‘there is so much improvement taking place on Blackbird Leys’, forgetting to mention who was the source of this improvement or who was responsible for the previous neglect). Will Hutton wrote in the Observer on 4 May: ‘There has not been a gap between the rich and poor on the current scale ever in history. It is unstable. Sooner or later, there will be popular outrage and a political response… Who isn’t spooked by the renaissance of Italian fascism? Challenging times require courageous responses.

None is in prospect,’ (‘Feeble government lets the superclass soar over the rest of us’, The Observer). As we have seen above, the renaissance of Italian fascism is being mirrored by the far right’s greatest ever electoral success in the UK. Neo-liberalism is becoming increasingly unstable, yet only fascism is positioning itself as a viable alternative. Meanwhile, the middle class left, in the shape of the Left List, with sufficient resources to make an impact, continue only to provide further proof of Peter Wright’s claim that the British left ‘are about as dangerous as a pondful of ducks.’

The IWCA is not: the BNP’s current success is largely based on the same analysis of New Labour that led to the formation of the IWCA in the first place. In 1997 the BNP’s Tony Lecomber said, ‘The people who have been abandoned by Labour and have never been represented by the Tories will, in their desperation, turn to us. This is unlikely to happen next May, since people will still be giving Tony Blair’s Labour Party the chance to show what they can do. After that, though, disappointment will set in.’

One of the IWCA’s early breakthroughs came in the London borough of Havering, where we took 25% of the vote the first time out in the wards of Gooshays and Heaton in 2002. Since then, unfortunately, the IWCA branch there has had to cease activity due to pressures of work and time on the key activists. However, this gave the BNP the chance to move in, win Gooshays marginally in 2006 and then decisively in 2008.

This, in microcosm, is the choice we face. The IWCA analysis, applied from the left rather than the right, calls into question the very legitimacy of the Labour Party, of it’s alleged reason for being as the party of the working class. More than that, pound for pound the IWCA strategy works and has been proven to work where we’ve been able to apply it and so the Labour party –‘scared half to death’- has had no choice other than to try and stop it at source. We now know how hard and how dirty Labour will fight in order to safeguard their position and prevent a progressive, working class alternative to the barbarism of neo-liberalism, and the greater barbarism of fascism, from emerging. We now know that the working class will have to fight all the more effectively in terms of organisation, numbers, tactics, resources and ideas if that alternative is to be made a reality. We will.

Labour’s “re-launch” stymied by worsening economic forecast

tim — Sat, 17 May 2008 16:45:45 +0000

The Labour government brought forward a series of measures this week in a rearguard action to try to rescue its political fortunes in wake of the party’s collapse into third place in the May 1 local elections.

With a by-election due on May 22, in which the Conservatives are currently tipped to overturn a 7,000 Labour majority, Prime Minister Gordon Brown sought to placate voters’ wrath.

On Tuesday, Chancellor Alistair Darling announced what many described as an emergency “mini-budget” on taxation. The government’s abolition of the 10 pence tax band has severely financially affected more than 5 million low-earners. While the measure had been announced last year, it only took effect last month.

In 2007, the move won applause from Labour’s backbenches, not least because it had enabled the government to make cuts into corporation tax. But a lot has changed since then, particularly the sharp decline in living standards due to the global economic crisis.

Rising food prices sent the UK’s official annual inflation rate to 3 percent in April—the sharpest increase in the cost of living in almost six years, rising 0.5 percent in just one month. Reports indicate that the real cost of living, however, is far greater, as food costs alone are increasing at an average of 15.5 percent a year. Rising costs in other essentials such as fuel and utilities mean that many families are already spending £1,000 a year more out of pocket—without taking into account spiralling mortgage costs.

In his mini-budget Darling announced that personal tax allowance would rise by £600. Those earning less than £40,000 per annum (the overwhelming majority) will gain up to £120 this year. The chancellor claimed that this would also compensate the majority of those who lost out from the scrapping of the 10 pence tax band.

Labour’s attempt at a political re-launch was followed by Brown outlining planned legislation to be brought forward in the next Queen’s speech, which he claimed would create a “more prosperous and fairer Britain.”

He set out the further “reform” of schools, hospitals and the welfare benefit system. His government will grant new powers to local authorities to intervene against “failing schools,” link hospital funding to performance, introduce tougher controls on immigration and more punitive measures against the long-term unemployed.

The government had given an indication of just what this amounted to in an earlier statement promising a radical shakeup of England’s social care system for the elderly. State support for elderly care is means-tested in England, with most having to pay for home help and assisted accommodation. Thousands have been forced to sell their homes to raise the finance as a consequence.

Health Secretary Alan Johnson said that the government was initiating a six-month consultation period to consider how people could be provided for in old age. He claimed that the government had set “no pre-determined answers,” but went on to make clear that what was intended is a move away from universal state provision to an insurance-based scheme paid for by the individual. “If we are running out of so-called free personal care—which even the Liberal Democrats have dropped as a commitment—then you are looking at some kind of insurance that can be provided by the state or the individual,” he said.

It is a measure of how far removed Labour is from the realities of millions of people’s lives that it could consider such measures to be a popular re-launch. Moreover, while the government claims that these moves are necessary because of a £6 billion shortfall in provision, it has had no such qualms over using some £100 billion of taxpayers’ money to shore up the banks, or the some £800 million per month being spent on the occupation of Iraq.

So right-wing are Labour’s politics that the Conservatives are casting themselves as a “progressive” alternative, even while boasting that they are the only party prepared to “break open the monopoly” on state education and social welfare.

But as Brown was speaking in Parliament, asking the voters to “judge and test” him on the basis of his economic stewardship, his room for political manoeuvre was rapidly diminishing. Not only are some 1 million low-earners still out of pocket despite Darling’s announcement, but hopes that tax changes will help re-stimulate the economy were almost immediately dashed by the Bank of England’s quarterly inflation report.

Governor Mervyn King warned that the “the nice decade is behind us” and the economy was “travelling along a bumpy road.”

“Real take-home pay has not risen by much in the past four years—by well below 1 percent a year. The next couple of years are going to see at least as great a squeeze on living standards that will erode purchasing power,” he continued.

The report spelt out that millions of working people would be hit financially from all sides over the next period. According to the Bank, gas, electricity and food prices will continue to rise pushing inflation towards 4 percent while the housing market, which it stated has already worsened “markedly,” is set to fall even further. The banking crisis could continue well into 2009, the report stated, while economic growth is likely to slump toward 1 percent by the end of 2008, bringing the risk of recession.

The assessment made a mockery of the trade union bureaucracy’s claims that the chancellor’s tax allowance changes were sufficient to salvage Labour. Tony Woodley, joint leader of Unite, had pronounced that Darling’s mini-budget meant the party was “reconnecting with Labour’s social conscience” and “with voters generally,” while GMB general secretary Paul Kenny congratulated Brown and Darling for “listening to the public and changing tack.”

No doubt the trade union leaders hoped that Darling’s measures would be enough to prevent the party imploding in an orgy of unprincipled factionalism.

Labour’s latest drubbing in the polls coincided with the publication of memoirs by Tony Blair’s wife, Cherie, former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and Blair’s Middle East envoy, Lord Levy.

All seized the opportunity to settle personal scores with Brown directly—and to make some money in the process. Prescott described Brown as “prickly,” saying that he could “go off like a volcano” while Levy, who was arrested twice during the cash-for-honours inquiry before being cleared of any wrongdoing, told the BBC that it was “inconceivable” that the former chancellor had not known about the party’s financial arrangements.

Darling’s announcement proved to be enough to silence a potential rebellion by sections of Labour backbenchers who are afraid they will lose their seats. Frank Field, who had led threats to vote down the government’s budget and who had said he would be “very surprised” if Brown were still Labour leader at the next election, pronounced his satisfaction with the changes and publicly apologised to the prime minister.

But outside of Labour’s immediate environs, criticism of Brown and the government in ruling circles rages unabated. Under banner headlines on the day Brown spoke, the Independent reported that the “spectre of ‘stagflation’” associated with the 1970s was back on the agenda. “The 15 percent decline in the value of sterling—as steep as when the pound was forced out of the ERM on ‘Black Wednesday’ in 1992—has exacerbated inflationary pressures,” it said, “hitting living standards, especially for pensioners and the poorest,” hardest. There was little leeway for policymakers, it continued, “as they are pulled between the need to fight inflation and avoid a slump.”

Against this background, economists complained that Darling’s compensation package would push public borrowing towards £50 billion this year, jeopardizing the government’s fiscal rules. The Financial Times said that Darling’s measure smacked of “desperation,” as the government failed to make tax policy “with an eye to the long-term health of the public finances and a coherent fiscal philosophy.” It had “shattered any residual idea that Mr. Brown’s administration can run an orderly fiscal policy,” the newspaper pronounced.

Such comments were intended to serve notice that big business will not tolerate any palliative measures, no matter how pitiful, even at the expense of the government’s fall.

More significant for Brown’s political survival was the savaging he received in Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper. Describing Darling’s tax changes as a “gamble” with taxpayer’s money, it complained that it was “not the first time Gordon Brown has panicked in the face of the polls.”

Having backed out of calling an early general election in November it had “rewritten a Budget just over two months old … if he can be persuaded to rip up a Budget, what’s to stop Labour’s union paymasters and the public sector demanding pay rises this summer?” the newspaper thundered.

There is already widespread discontent across the public sector at the government’s imposition of a below-inflation pay award. The Sun is only too aware that this will grow significantly over the next months and does not believe Brown has the mettle to face down the opposition. In a particularly hostile piece the next day, associate editor Trevor Kavanagh wrote that the local elections had “torpedoed this Government beneath the waterline.”

“As Gordon Brown prowled the TV studios saying sorry yesterday, we were watching a dead man drowning. I give him six months.

“Labour has burst asunder from stem to stern, its timbers rotten to the core,” he continued, as the “Blair/Brown Government has been sussed as the incompetent, interfering and wasteful political con-trick it was from May 1, 1997.”

Given that Rupert Murdoch and his tabloid have been one of the main political backers of New Labour and have played a major role in shaping its policies, such supposedly newfound wisdom is deserving only of contempt.

In a comment in the Guardian designed to bolster Brown by laying New Labour’s failings at Blair’s door, Robert Harris revealed the substance of the party’s meltdown more tellingly than he had perhaps intended. Complaining that the former prime minister had cut and run, leaving New Labour high and dry, Harris then opined that the current crisis in Labour was not so much one “of leadership as a crisis of purpose—of existence, in fact…”

“What is this thing called the Labour party for, exactly? One can see why the Tories exist, and why the Liberals have endured. But Labour—this friend of global corporations, this ally of the neocons in Washington, this raiser of income tax on the poor—where is its place supposed to be in the political firmament?”

For the likes of Murdoch, et al the answer appears to be clear. The “political con-trick” of New Labour completely exhausted, they are now looking at the Tories to repackage the same pro-business agenda. For working people, however, Labour’s right-wing putrefaction must underscore the necessity for the construction of a new workers party based on socialist policies.

Labour’s electoral meltdown continues to worsen

tim — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:21:42 +0000

The meltdown suffered by the Brown government in last week’s local elections, coupled with Ken Livingstone’s defeat by Boris Johnson in the contest for London Mayor, is a major staging post in the ongoing collapse of New Labour.

The party’s share of the vote fell to a 40-year low of just 24 percent, compared with 44 percent for the Conservatives and 25 percent for the Liberal Democrats. But its eclipse by the Tories is only part of the picture. Turnout was just 35 percent, confirming the widespread alienation from all the major parties.

Labour has long ago lost most of the support it once enjoyed in working class areas. The May 1 poll demonstrated that it has now also lost much of those sections of the middle class electorate it had won from the Conservatives in 1997.

In England, these twin factors found expression in the Conservative victory in Bury, in the north, for the first time in 22 years, and Labour’s loss of Reading, one of its few strongholds in the southeast.

The picture in Wales is even more devastating. Long considered Labour’s heartland, the party has continued to hemorrhage support and lost control of Merthyr Tydfil, Blaeau Gwent, Torfaen, Caerphilly and Newport councils. No one did particularly well, least of all Labour’s coalition partners in the Welsh Assembly, Plaid Cymru, as Labour’s vote dispersed across the political spectrum and resulted in victories for the Liberal Democrats, Tories and independent councilors.

Even so, the rise in support for the Conservatives amongst those who turned out to vote would be enough to secure them a general election victory. The poll has been compared with the situation that faced John Major’s Conservative administration in the local elections that preceded Labour’s landslide victory in 1997.

Just as devastating for the government was Livingstone’s defeat in London. Conservative candidate Boris Johnson has a high media profile, having cultivated his image as an eccentric plain speaker. He is in fact an arch right-winger, whose racist and anti-Islamic statements, and denunciations of people from Liverpool, has necessitated him making public apologies and made sections of the Tory party extremely nervous about his candidacy. In the final weeks, he was told to keep his mouth shut and maintain a low profile, leaving his campaign firmly under the control of Lynton Crosby who had spearheaded electoral campaigns for former Australian prime minister John Howard.

The pro-Labour press and the party apparatus—along with Respect Renewal, the Socialist Workers Party and the Greens—had all urged support for Livingstone. Labour promoted Livingstone’s support in the City of London, but it also hoped, with the aid of the nominally left and socialist parties, to be able to mobilise support in the inner-city areas, particularly amongst black and Asian workers, by portraying Livingstone as the “progressive” candidate.

Labour’s vote did rise slightly in these areas, but not by nearly enough to counter Johnson’s gains in the outer suburbs. The more fundamental problem for Livingstone and his left apologists was summed up by journalist Andrew Gilligan, who led the pro-Johnson offensive in the pages of the Evening Standard.

Responding to accusations that he was backing a reactionary, Gilligan retorted that, “Livingstone is the ally of some of the most reactionary forces in this city. I’m thinking of [Police Commissioner] Ian Blair, I’m thinking of property developers he’s in bed with, I’m thinking of City big business.”

The reaction in Labour circles to its electoral meltdown centred on disaffection with Gordon Brown’s premiership. He was condemned privately and publicly for his performance since taking over from Tony Blair in June 2007.

Martin Kettle, a personal friend of Blair, wrote in the Guardian that “the answer that stares these [Labour] MPs in the face is that, echoing Cromwell, they should tell [Brown]: ‘in the name of God, go.’ ” And there was widespread speculation as to whether a leadership challenge would be mounted and if so, when. Others more loyal to Brown urged him to “reconnect” with the electorate and Labour’s traditional supporters, or to “renew” New Labour’s “coalition,” supposedly marrying economic efficiency with social justice.

All that this produced was the pathetic spectacle of Brown seeking to emulate former US President Bill Clinton by telling the media how he felt “the hurt” of people struggling with rising prices and mortgage repayments.

In reality, Labour’s performance under Brown has only deepened a crisis that began under Blair. When Blair left office, he was widely hated and led a government condemned for the war against Iraq and viewed as a corrupt party of the super-rich. Its previous electoral showing in May 2007 gave it a predicted 27 percent of the national vote in a general election—just 3 percent higher than last week.

With Brown’s successions to leadership, there was a concerted campaign to claim a new era for Labour. The Daily Mirror described him as a man “on fire,” with a new “moral purpose,” while the Guardian wrote of a new “dawn” for a “new government.”

What actually took place was that Brown continued the big business agenda of Blair, bringing into government figures such as Sir Digby Jones, former head of the Confederation of British Industry, and praising Margaret Thatcher as a “conviction politician.”

The deluded belief within Labour circles that the new premier would somehow restore the party’s popularity found finished expression in Brown’s humiliating retreat from plans to hold a snap election as early as November last year when it became clear that, at best, Labour’s majority would be slashed and that it might even lose.

Brown’s climb-down at that time took place in the aftermath of the collapse of Northern Rock, amidst scenes of savers queuing up to withdraw their money. Since then, the economic crisis that began in the US subprime mortgage market has spread throughout the world and had a particularly severe impact on Britain.

Brown admitted, “What people are most worried about…[is that] petrol prices are going up, food prices are going up, they are worried about utilities bills, they are worried about their standard of living, there is an uncertainty about the economy…. People’s immediate priority is how to deal with the family budgets and the problems we face as a result of what is an economic downturn which started in America.”

But while Brown claimed to understand the “anxiety” over economic insecurity, his government suffered particularly badly at the polls because of its decision to abolish the 10 pence tax band for lower-income workers. The move, which had been announced by Brown when he was chancellor in 2007 and took effect this year, hit millions of people earning less than £15,000 per annum. In the same budget, Brown had slashed the headline corporation tax rate by 2 pence.

Under these circumstances, how could anyone believe that Labour’s support would not continue to plummet?

Since it came to power, New Labour has functioned as the political representative of the oligarchy, presiding over a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth from working people to the fabulously rich and the City. Only the flooding of the economy with cheap credit and rising property prices helped to partially conceal this process. Now that this possibility no longer exists, the full scale of Labour’s decline becomes apparent.

There had been calls for the prime minister to modify the 10 pence tax rate change or make some kind of recompense. But, beholden as it is to big business, Labour’s room for manoeuvre is strictly limited. Writing in Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper, Peter Riddell warned that “the real danger is that the government will find it hard to resist calls for relaxing spending controls and public sector pay limits in order to respond to the worries of Labour MPs and core working-class voters.” This is equivalent to instructing Brown not to do so.

Neither does Brown face any substantial unified opposition within the parliamentary Labour Party, let alone one that in any way advances the interests of the working class. Speculation that the leader of the Campaign Group of Labour MPs, John McDonnell, would stand against Brown was quickly dashed by McDonnell himself. In any event, McDonnell could only count on a few MPs and was unable to mount a leadership campaign last year.

For his part, Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas, who has the support of the Compass group and is portrayed by the media as a more traditional Labourite, limited himself to calls for Brown to “learn from Boris Johnson and from [Tory leader] David Cameron as well…. They seem to be more emotionally literate than us. Boris Johnson is connecting with people emotionally.”

Aside from that, there are merely reports of 40 or so MPs supposedly considering the possibility of making their unhappiness with Brown public, Brown being “safe” from direct challenge for at least a year and Labour’s Frank Field speaking about a sense of “private despair” amongst MPs.

What is unfolding is not simply the crisis of a premiership, but the crisis of a party. Labour’s fortunes cannot be restored by changing leaders. It is dead on its feet due to the impossibility of securing a popular mandate for policies that serve the interests of a tiny minority at the expense of working people. Labour is not merely exhausted and in need of reinvigoration. From the standpoint of the working class, it is a hostile entity that must be replaced by a genuine party of socialism.

Reaping What they have Sown

Ellie Keen — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:11:08 +0000

The collapse of Labour ’s vote in these local elections is about something more than New Labour ’s Daily Mail electoral tactics and the stay-at-home revolt of Labour’s traditional supporters. Though this continues to be a factor – reinforced by the 10 per cent tax ’mistake’. But there’s something deeper going on and it’s less easy to reverse. New Labour is now reaping what it has sown: a cumulative weakening in values of social solidarity, public service and altruism which provide the invisible bedrock on which the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party ultimately depend. New Labour has lived electorally off the legacy of earlier eras of Labour politics without renewing it and it’s a renewal that has been direly needed.

From Mandelson’s celebration of the ’filthy rich’ and Blair ’s contempt for public sector workers to Gordon Brown’s present refusal to properly reward public servants and the contracting out of services to private business means self-seeking individualism has been valorised and public service ethics denigrated. In his first few months as prime minister, Brown appeared to acknowledge the need to explicitly advocate social democratic value but it wasn’t reflected in significant policy shifts. And he now seems to have abandoned even this relatively superficial effort to shift Labour’s presentational tone.

Brown’s strategy (the economic foundations of New Labour) has been to make Britain a fast growing economy competing on the terms set by finance-led global capitalism and to stealthily engineer a trickle down to the deserving poor. As we all know by now, this has meant being soft on the super rich and a micro redistribution from the lower end of the top 10 per cent highest earners to low income families.

This formula could more or less appear to work when the economy was buoyant but as soon as this speculation-led growth began to falter New Labour ’s uncritical attachment to the priorities of the City was visibly paralysing. As growth slows the government has less money to spend on tackling poverty or investing in services and it dare not borrow more or tax the wealthy because this will torpedo the Thatcherite economic model they inherited and developed. They’ve been outflanked by the Governor of the Bank of England who last week made the kind of statement attacking city pay and incompetence that we should have been hearing from Labour’s front benches .

Even Mayor Johnson expostulates about the growing ’inequality between rich and poor’. (It will be interesting to see whether he sticks by his commitment to London Citizens to maintain Livingstone’s use of the GLA’s power as employer and purchaser to implement a living wage of £7.50 an hour).We are seeing a new Tory rhetoric of fairness combined with a strong anti-statism aimed at a caricature of Gordon Brown’s ‘top-down government’. The combination has an appeal which New Labour is finding difficult to answer because it has neither a strategy for social justice nor a confident vision of the positive role of the state.

The two go together. Seriously redistributive and now green taxation is only politically possible if the state has real legitimacy; if there’s a popular belief grounded in experience, that it responds to people’s needs and the money paid in taxes is returned in responsive services which users feel are theirs.

Back to the future

The British state won this legitimacy throughout the post-war decades of reconstruction, building the welfare state and enjoying its first benefits. The result was a 20-year or so social democratic consensus legitimating taxation and redistribution. The administration and delivery of these social benefits, however, was via an unreformed mandarin state whose administrative hierarchies were imitated throughout the pubic sector and whose most powerful links with civil society were predominantly with business . The result was a daily experiences of state institutions – from universities and the education system through to local government and even the health service – that was contradictory and frustrating. Unresponsive to growing expectations and a new diversity of demand.

The movements of the 1960s and 1970s were one response. Arguably one reason for the significance and lasting memory of Ken Livingstone’s GLC was that it was one of the few politically successful experiments in translating the diffuse but creative radicalism of the 1970s into a popular political programme. It was cut short in its prime. We all know what happened then. But perhaps now after 1 May the significance of what didn’t happen is coming home to roost for New Labour – and tragically for Londoners as a result of Ken’s political downsizing to rejoin the party he once loved.

What didn’t happen was the Labour Party grasping the importance of the GLC experiment – in all its messiness -and showing the possibility of transforming, opening and democratising state institutions, and translating this on to the national level. It could have been the basis of a direct challenge to Thatcher’s privatisation and Hood Robin approach to redistribution. Indeed Norman Tebbit saw the threat when he remarked of the GLC on the eve of its abolition: ’this is modern socialism and we will kill it.’ It’s no real comfort but there was in Livingstone’s extra 14 per cent support on 1 May, on top of Labour’s share national vote, a residue of that old potential to present a modern alternative.

Reactivate public service values

We on the radical but pragmatic left cannot now simply say ’I told you so.’ It’s mightily tempting. But we are in no position to come out of the wings with a perfectly formed alternative strategy and means of implementing it. But the belief in public service values are still there on the ground, as is much thinking and experimentation in renewing them. But they lie dormant, unnurtured, lacking champions and increasingly overgrown in the jungle of competitive, self-seeking values.

It’s not to late to reactivate them. Drawing together the scattered left, across party boundaries, we need to resist the persistent and pervasive intrusion of a narrow, desiccated commercial logic into every public space. And to resist by celebrating the values of cooperation, of human ingenuity meeting urgent sometimes desperate social needs, of the satisfaction of helping to resolve the problems of fellow citizens. These values are still daily enacted all over the place; in hospital intensive care units, in what’s left of youth services working innovatively with voluntary organisations, in councils that have blocked privatisation and developed means of genuine improvements and so on.

Everyone has their own personal stories of public services values being practiced, unsung, not only within the public sector but in voluntary organisations working long hours and in the face of almost impossible funding pressures. These values and the kind of practices keeping them alive against the odds need the mutual reinforcement of some kind of broad based national movement. Addressing this need is surely a condition for reviving the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party or indeed any party on the left.

We Get the Message

Ellie Keen — Sun, 04 May 2008 11:57:52 +0000

THERE is only one thing worse than suffering electoral meltdown and that is emerging from a disaster with no idea how to overcome it.

It is simply useless to repeat the bland twaddle parroted by John Major’s Tory ministers in the mid 1990s that “we’re not getting our message across.”

Voters are having no difficulty in understanding the Brown government’s message or in responding to it and they don’t like it. They won’t vote for it and, unless it changes, cataclysmic defeat awaits Labour at the general election.

Gordon Brown claims to be a listening and learning Prime Minister, but his actions give a contrary message, despite his belated recognition that doubling the 10p tax rate for five million low-income people has been a political disaster.

But this isn’t the only policy decision to have shocked or disgusted Labour’s natural supporters.

There are a whole raft of policies that have been chalked up in recent years at Labour Party conference, with decisions carried against the platform and dismissed with cavalier abandon by the party leader, whether Tony Blair or Gordon Brown.

When Mr Brown took over the reins of power from his new Labour twin, his spin doctors whispered that, unlike Mr Blair, the incoming leader was Labour through and through and he promised a new start.

But neither the propaganda offensive nor the nods and winks of his team have delivered real change.

In fact, he has continued his predecessor’s approach of treating the labour movement as the enemy, fighting tooth and nail to appoint his personal candidate, City fund manager David Pitt-Watson, as general secretary rather than Unite union official Mike Griffiths – a decision that is even the more remarkable since Mr Pitt-Watson has left the job without starting it.

Mr Brown’s apparent positive response to the conference decision in support of the fourth option for council housing has been illusory.

It’s the usual half-baked dog’s dinner of housing associations and part-own, part-rent rather than a programme of council-built, council-owned properties to tackle the acute shortage of affordable housing.

The PM has uttered warm words about the need to help agency and temporary workers, but he is the man who authorised his minister to filibuster proposed legislation.

He refuses to win easy popularity by taking the railways back into public ownership, even though, in light of the tens of billions of pounds handed over to greedy and reckless banks, no-one will take seriously his claim that renationalisation cannot be afforded.

Mr Brown has failed to draw up an industrial policy, being utterly attached to a free-market, easy come, easy go attitude to inward investment that has seen manufacturing jobs haemorrhage out of the economy.

And he rides roughshod over widespread complaints about his privatisation programme that hands public assets over to privateers while demeaning and short-changing public-service workers.

Unless the labour movement forces a change of political direction or, failing that, of leadership, there will be no fourth Labour term.

There will be a return for a Tory Party that is already planning further restrictions on strikes in public services. The time for polite advice is over. The labour movement has to act.

New Labour is Dead

Ellie Keen — Sun, 04 May 2008 11:38:38 +0000

Power Can’t Shape Truth Forever

New Labour has suffered a crushing defeat. The Blair project of promoting and implementing right-wing policies in the knowledge that traditional working class voters would remain solid died on 1 May 2008. Labour’s vote in the local elections in dropped to 24 percent, a point below the Liberal Democrats and twenty points less than the Conservatives (44 percent). Given the scale of the catastrophe, It seems unlikely that Gordon Brown can win the next general election.

Awestruck by Margaret Thatcher, Blair and Brown aped her achievements within their own party, squeezing old social-democratic ideas out of themselves, drop by drop. They were all market fundamentalists now. Deregulation and privatisation became a mantra and over the last ten years the social divide in the country between rich and poor increased more than even under Thatcher. Redistribution of wealth was no longer on Labour’s agenda.

As the market suffered a series of shocks—-the collapse of a debt-ridden British bank, Northern Rock, led to state intervention in the form of nationalisation. No lessons were learnt. Helping the rich by further tax-cuts, abandoning (under pressure from the Financial Times) plans to tax non-domiciled billionaires symbolised the regime. The neo-liberal model atomised social and political life, weakened democratic accountability and drastically reduced the margins of reformist possibilities within the system. After 9/11 civil liberties were seriously eroded. A fdew weeks ago Brown and his ministers were arguing for increasing the detention of suspects to 42-days without trial. The Conservatives and police chiefs opposed this as draconian.

The British electoral system helped to conceal the relentless ebbing of popular support for the Blairite agenda. No longer. The New Labour Emperor is now revealed without any clothes. Power can shape ‘truth’, but not forever. That is the lesson of the New Labour defeat.

In London the choice was clear. . A Conservative celebrity who carefully cultivates an ultra-reactionary image, Boris Johnson, is a star of TV comedy shows. Given the way that politics has gone to the dogs in so many parts of the democratic world, its hardly surprising that celebrity status and wealth have taken centre stage. A somewhat pathetic and ineffectual ex-policeman stood for the Liberal Democrats or Ken Livingstone, the Labour candidate. Even though Livingstone first won as an independent against New Labour, he subsequently made his peace with Blair and rejoined the party, while preserving an independent stance on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and developing his own foreign policy by inviting Hugo Chavez to visit London.

The elections for the Mayor of London reflected the national mood. That Livingstone made mistakes is obvious. The biggest error was not in receiving an eccentric Muslim cleric and annjoying the right-wing press, but re-entering the Labour fold. The basis of his popularity had rested on the fact that he was not a confected New Labour politician. The fact that margin of his defeat appears to be less than the national average reflected this fact, but was not enough to save him. The official result has yet to be declared, but New Labour commentators on TV have accepted defeat. He suffered because he was associated with an unpopular New Labour government. Had he remained an independent and lacerated the Blair and Brown regimes, instead of being photographed with them he would have been home and dry.

A city in which 70% of the citizens oppose the British presence in Iraq will now be represented by a pro-war mayor. Who cares if a million Iraqis have died since the occupation of their country, three million have become refugees and millions in that suffering country face the most horrendous conditions in their everyday lives. Anything associated with New Labour was punished.

Tariq Ali’s memoir Streetfighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties is published by Verso.

Dog Whistles and Guard Dogs

Ellie Keen — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:53:53 +0000

‘I opposed the idea of a directly-elected mayor,’ wrote Ken Livingstone in 1998, because it tends to personalise debate and thus obscure the issues at stake.’ Ten years on, Mayor Livingstone is engaged in a bitter battle with Boris Johnson that comes straight out of Have I Got News For You.

It is a fight that Johnson could win. And while the image of buffoonery can be endearing, his politics are less so: in favour of the war on Iraq, railway privatisation, nuclear power, public schools and staghunting. The left-leaning Compass pressure group labelled Johnson ‘a type of Norman Tebbit in clown’s uniform’. They are right.

Behind the casually racist turn of phrase that has seen Johnson describe black people as ‘picanninies’ lies a more consistent playing of the race card, orchestrated by his campaign strategist Lynton Crosby. Crosby was behind the 2005 Conservative campaign that denigrated immigrants, then asked voters ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’

Thankfully, they weren’t. But this same style of ‘dog-whistle politics’ has been successful elsewhere. The trick is to speak in a code that chimes with racist assumptions, without making ostensibly racist statements. In this case, the Tories are building on a discourse established by the Evening Standard, the Daily Mail’s London stablemate, which has vilified Livingstone for lavishing money on anti-racist groups. Crosby may or may not have orchestrated these attacks, but his campaign message feeds off the racist fantasy that Ken ‘gives all the money to minorities’ just the same. And it is not just Johnson who benefits: come 1 May, there is a strong chance that the BNP could gain seats on the Greater London Authority.

The mud slinging also comes from a neo-con ‘left’ that sees Livingstone’s engagement with Muslim groups as a threat. Martin Bright of the New Statesman came to this position off the back of writing a report on Islamism for the Cameronite think-tank Policy Exchange. Nick Cohen has also taken a break from Iraq war cheerleading to argue that ‘Ken Livingstone is not fit for office’.

These claims are backed up by accounts of Livingstone’s bullying advisers. ‘Vote Ken Livingstone, get Socialist Action,’ as Bright put it. But the real scandal is not that a left- wing mayor has left-wing advisors or that they oppose racism. The problem, as any left or anti-racist activist who has encountered Livingstone’s guard dogs will tell you, is that they have consistently denigrated community struggles, grassroots activism and anything that veers from whatever they deem politically correct or opportune.

Socialist Action does not represent ‘the most successful Trotskyist entryist operation since Derek Hatton’s Liverpool’, as Bright argues, but the futility of entryism itself. The state is far better at transforming entryists than vice versa – although what remains unchanged, in this case, is a distaste for democracy in line with the worst of left traditions. The problem is exacerbated by the flawed structure of London government. Livingstone once denounced the mayoral system as ‘barmy’ because it concentrates power without accountability. His advisers have set out to prove him right.

The resulting politics are highly contradictory, as was dramatically embodied in the aftermath of the 2005 London bombings. Livingstone admirably steered clear of inflammatory rhetoric by referring to it as an attack on all of London’s ‘diverse communities’. Two weeks later, Jean Charles De Menezes was killed by the Metropolitan police, and Livingstone offered unblinking support to the police chief who sanctioned a ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy.

On the economy, Livingstone’s positive endorsement of a London ‘living wage’ contrasts favourably with Johnson’s rejection of even the minimum wage. But this has to be set against his extended love- in with the Corporation of London, whose ‘trickle down’ economics have proven so successful that the gleaming towers of London’s finance district back onto some of the poorest neighbourhoods in the country.

Despite this, Livingstone continues to project London as a ‘world city’ built on finance capital. In January, he went to the World Economic Forum to hawk an Olympic Games that will distort development prospects in the east end way beyond 2012. In February, Livingstone attacked the government’s plan to tax millionaire tax-evaders £30,000 a year for fear that it might drive away investment. Such policies have effects beyond London, as the City is a key node of global neoliberalism. Livingstone, like Johnson, supports it.

So whichever way you vote, the mayor always gets in. But sometimes there really is a lesser of two evils, and the electoral system makes this a relatively simple choice. A first preference vote for the Greens’ Sian Berry would send Ken a clear and progressive message. But a second preference for Livingstone remains an important signal that Johnson’s dog- whistle racism has no place in London politics.

This article is reposted from the Red Pepper website. They have a lively debate on the elections at this page

The political choice facing London could not be clearer

JamieSW — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:15:13 +0000

It’s as if the last 25 years had never happened. For the past week we’ve been back in the days of Margaret Thatcher’s war on Red Ken and the Greater London Council. Every morning, the media have brought new revelations of the horrors at City Hall and Ken Livingstone’s manifest unfitness to be re-elected mayor of London. Just as in the time of the GLC, Livingstone is denounced for consorting with dangerous leftists and terrorist apologists. Only the details have changed: for lesbian workers’ cooperatives, read the Arab women’s network, and for Sinn Féin and the Irish community, substitute Islamist groups and London’s Muslims.

Leading the charge until now has been the capital’s only paid-for daily newspaper, the Evening Standard, which is to all intents and purposes running the Tory candidate Boris Johnson’s campaign for the mayoral election in May. But now most of the national press has fallen in behind, as stories have multiplied of Livingstone’s whisky tippling, alleged dodgy grants to black businesses and a “secret Marxist cell” of advisers intent on turning London into a “socialist city state”, or maybe fomenting a “bourgeois democratic revolution” – the specifics were never quite clear.

The trigger for this retro onslaught was Monday’s almost comically slanted Channel 4 Dispatches programme on Livingstone, presented by the New Statesman’s Martin Bright, who wrote that he felt it his “duty to warn the London electorate that a vote for Livingstone is a vote for a bully and a coward who is not worthy to lead this great city of ours”. Quite how Channel 4 managed to describe an hour of primetime vilification as a “fair and balanced investigation” with a straight face will be a mystery to most of those who watched a programme without a single supportive interview. Instead, we were treated to a hotchpotch of allegations and denunciations from disgruntled ex-employees and political opponents, ranging from the bizarre and sub-McCarthyite to the more serious but unproven.

Among them was an attack on Livingstone’s deal with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to subsidise half-price travel for London’s unemployed, his dialogue with non-violent Islamist groups, the use of public funds to commission research for his dispute over multiculturalism with the then head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, and the well-aired fact that several aides have been members of the one-time Trotskyist group Socialist Action – though since they have been working happily with the police and City grandees for the past eight years, that might seem to be of somewhat specialist interest. Most of the real issues that will dominate the mayoral elections – housing, transport, crime, the environment – barely got a walk-on part. But the programme was certainly an effective party political broadcast on behalf of Johnson.

What has given this latest assault on Livingstone a special edge is that the people driving it trade as being on the left: Bright as a representative of Britain’s main centre-left political weekly and Nick Cohen, who has more openly lined up behind Johnson, as an Observer columnist. In reality, both writers share a broadly neoconservative agenda on Islamism and the “war on terror” – though Bright opposed the Iraq invasion – and that is the central issue that has turned them and their allies against Livingstone. Bright wrote a pamphlet for the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange attacking government dialogue with Islamists, warmly praised by the leading US neocon Richard Perle. Cohen famously declared after meeting Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz for drinks at the Mayfair nightclub Annabel’s: “I was in the presence of a politician committed to extending human freedom.”

As the most powerful British politician to have opposed the Iraq and Afghan wars and supported engagement with mainstream political Islam, Livingstone has naturally attracted the enmity of the neocons. After hearing Bright dismiss Chávez’s administration as a “government with links to Iran and cocaine-smuggling guerrillas and accused of human rights abuses”, it should come as no surprise that he, Cohen and their friends prefer to see a high Tory elected mayor of London rather than the radical Labour incumbent.

To the rest of London, it’s scarcely news that London’s mayor has his faults, or controversial that he should be held to account. It’s right that the less than 1% of the London Development Agency’s budget that went on grants to failed business startups should be properly investigated, even if that isn’t a bad record compared with the private sector. You’d never know it from all the chatter about Bolshevik cabals, but there’s also a strong left critique of Livingstone: for his embrace of the City and property developers, for example, and defence of the Metropolitan police commissioner over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.

But that’s not what will be at stake in May’s election. The choice will be between two candidates: one who has pioneered congestion charging and cut traffic by 70,000 cars a day, pushed up the supply of affordable housing, boosted bus ridership by one and a half million journeys a day, abolished fares for under-18s, is preparing to introduce emissions charging and free public transport for pensioners and has played a key role in cutting crime and maintaining community relations during a tense and dangerous period. On the other hand, you have a Thatcherite who thinks it’s witty to refer to Africans as “piccaninnies” and regrets the end of colonialism, is an enthusiastic Bush and Iraq war supporter, opposed the Kyoto treaty, and is against the welfare state and the “teaching” of homosexuality in schools.

The choice could hardly be starker. No other candidate is in with a shout. Despite his record, Johnson’s media profile and geniality mean he is the first serious challenge the mayor has had to face. With Livingstone and Johnson only one point apart in the latest opinion poll, the Tories have scented blood. Johnson’s decision to hire the ruthless Lynton Crosby, who masterminded four election victories for John Howard in Australia, should be a warning. The Tory candidate knows he’ll make little headway among the non-white third of London’s electorate, so expect some dog-whistle appeals to white voters, perhaps dressed up as broadsides against political correctness. A defeat for Livingstone would not just be a blow to the broadly defined left, working-class Londoners, women, ethnic minorities and greens. It would represent a wider defeat for progressive politics, in Britain and beyond.