Alistair Darling | ukwatch.net

Alistair Darling- International Marxist?

tim — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 21:44:21 +0000

When Britain’s Chancellor Alistair Darling was interviewed by Decca Aitkenhead in the August 30 edition of the Guardian, his comments created an international furore.

His admission that the economic times we are facing “are arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years” led to accusations that he had undermined confidence in Britain’s economy and prompted a run on the pound.

In some rather more limited circles, there was at least a measure of incredulity at how Darling had so blatantly lied about his political background.

The interview reports, “There was no teenage radicalism, and he would have been astonished, he says, if he’d known his future lay in politics. Studying law at Aberdeen, he stood for election in the student union, but not for a party. ‘I was just quite interested in getting things done.’ His manifesto favoured ‘strictly bread-and-butter issues, things like food prices in the student refectory’. When he joined the Labour party in 1977, he never expected to be more than a member. ‘I was enjoying becoming a lawyer.’ He’d simply realised, he explains, that ‘if you want to make any changes, there’s only one way you can do it, and that’s by getting into a position where you can influence things. And the obvious thing to do seemed to be to join a party.’”

He was then asked by Aitkenhead, “Why Labour?” He replied, “Just… I suppose, overall, I thought the Tories were unfair. They were only for one side, and not for everyone. The Labour party just seemed to reflect my outlook on life—you know, that we were better working together—fairness, helping everyone to get on, rather than just a few.”

Giving his sole attempt at providing political context for his decision to join, Darling added, “The Labour government in 1977 was in a terrible mess, and I was getting fed up looking at all these things on the television, and thinking, God, surely we can do better than that. I wanted to do things. But I was never really interested in the theory of achieving things, just the practicality of doing things.”

When this author read Darling’s comments, I found it difficult to understand why someone would even join the Labour Party in 1977.

I wrote that “This was a year during which Labour was in coalition with the Liberals and imposing IMF-dictated austerity measures that met with fierce resistance from the working class, and ended with the 1979 ‘Winter of Discontent’ and the election of the Conservatives.” (See “Alistair Darling and the implosion of the Labour government”)

Millions of working people were bitterly angry towards the Labour government and had turned against it. And within the party, there was a move by Labour’s left wing against its right wing that saw the election of Michael Foot as leader, and the adoption of the Alternative Economic Strategy as party policy. Over the next years there was a period of ideological and political warfare in the party that eventually proved to be a last gasp for social democratic reformism and ended with the triumph of the right wing. I thought, how could Darling not be involved in this?

As it turns out, Darling was intimately involved. Like so many others, he is in fact someone who has traversed the political spectrum from left to right to end up as a loyal supporter of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

According to informed sources, his early years were not spent as the apolitical young man he professed, but as a member of the International Marxist Group, then the British section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. He must also presumably have stood in the Students Union as an IMG member and joined the Labour Party in 1977 while either still a member or under the IMG’s political influence. Certainly in the early 1980s he was still on the left of the Labour Party.

The satirical magazine Private Eye was almost alone in responding to Darling’s dissembling, by drawing attention to a March 10 column in the Daily Record by the former Labour MP and now leader of Respect Renewal, George Galloway.

Galloway, who is sympathetic to the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain, has no love lost for any of the various middle class radical groups which he always refers to as “Trots,” even though many work with him politically. Neither has he forgotten how he was forced out of the Labour Party by Blair and Brown. Therefore he was not averse—and clearly took some pleasure in—trying to cause Darling some political embarrassment when he recounted his first meeting with Darling.

“When I first met him 35 years ago,” Galloway states, “Darling was pressing Trotskyite tracts on bewildered railwaymen at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. He was a supporter of the International Marxist Group, whose publication was entitled the Black Dwarf.

“Later, in preparation for his current role he became the treasurer of what was always termed the rebel Lothian Regional Council.”

Galloway continues, “Red Ally and his friends around the Black Dwarf were for a time a colourful part of the Scottish left. The late Ron Brown, Red Ronnie as he was known, was Alistair’s bosom buddy. He was thrown out of Parliament for placing a placard saying hands off Lothian Region on Mrs Thatcher’s despatch box while she was addressing the House. And Darling loved it at the time.”

Galloway also states how “The former Scottish trade union leader Bill Speirs and I were dispatched by the Scottish Labour Party to try and talk Alistair Darling down from the ledge of this kamikaze strategy…”

Clearly, in the long-run at least, Galloway and Speirs must have been persuasive as to the merits of collaboration rather than confrontation with Labour’s leadership.

Naturally the Guardian would also have been well aware of Darling’s past, but chose not to raise it and instead allowed him to present himself as a somewhat pragmatic liberal. Its only acknowledgement of its “error” came the following week in the form of an aside in the blog of political editor Michael White in which he stated that “Alistair Darling doesn’t do red meat politics, though—as Private Eye pointed out this week—he did have a Trot phase in his political youth as a turbulent member of Lothian regional council, defying Margaret Thatcher’s calls to cap the rates.”

Aside from this brief passage, and a side-swipe from arch Tory Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail, the story then died the proverbial death.

This is extraordinary. If what is said about Darling is true, we have someone who was once a member of a supposedly Marxist and even Trotskyist group who has held five ministerial posts and is today Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most powerful position in British political life. Yet not only is this not considered as an obstacle to holding such high office, it is not even mentioned by anyone in the media—other than a few disgruntled political mavericks like Galloway.

Such silence in the media can only be explained by the fact that no one within ruling circles wants to politically embarrass Darling, because he is such a key figure in government. It must also be surmised that the security services, who will have vetted Darling long ago, must have determined that no issue should be made of his youthful excesses. It is, at the same time, an indication of how the IMG itself was viewed by the security services.

Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, the IMG established a certain base amongst radicalised students, often coming into conflict with the police in its work around the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and its support for the IRA in Northern Ireland. A 1974 protest against the National Front at Red Lion Square resulted in the death of the student Kevin Gately. Its other major activity was to regularly denounce the International Committee of the Fourth International and its then section, the Socialist Labour League, later the Workers Revolutionary Party.

By the 1980s the IMG’s revolutionary posturing and flirtations with “direct action” were to give way to total submergence into the Labour Party and support for the party’s left wing led by Tony Benn. The British state was happy to make full use of the IMG during its radical protest phase and, together with the Labour Party bureaucracy, appears to have unreservedly forgiven its former supporters for the follies of their youth, welcoming those such as Darling and others, such as journalist Tariq Ali, as trusted members of the political establishment.

Along with the silence of the media, at no time, either now or in the past, has anything been said of Darling’s political history and evolution by the United Secretariat itself.

Naturally, it can never be excluded from possibility that someone on what passes for the left can end up on the political right—especially when he or she comes from one of myriad radical groups characterised by opportunist and essentially reformist politics that have provided decades of slavish loyalty to Labour and the trade union bureaucracy. So-called “entry work” in the Labour Party, apparently in Darling’s case “deep, deep” entry, and holding positions within the trade unions are frequently the starting point for personal career advancement in which early alliances are easily shed. Thus today not a few former radicals now sit alongside former Stalinists at Labour’s top table.

Even so, Darling’s political passage seems to have been smoother than most. Neither the United Secretariat, nor the IMG and its various splinters have ever felt it necessary to explain the political evolution of someone who is easily their most prominent ex-member in Britain. And there is no record of political struggle against him, either when he broke from the group or at any point when he was making his way up the ranks of the Labour Party.

For his part, Darling has also kept silent about his past rather than seeking to earn his spurs by denouncing his former comrades and railing against Marxism. By way of a contrast, the former cabinet member Stephen Byers was once a supporter of the Militant group. But like many others, his march to the right involved him participating in the political attacks on the group in his position as deputy leader of North Tyneside Council from 1986 to 1992.

Another prominent former member of the IMG within Labour’s leadership is the arch-Brownite Secretary of State for Health, Alan Milburn. As an IMG member in the 1980s he ran the “Days of Hope” radical bookshop in Newcastle. A June 3 2000 interview with the Independent reports him stating that he “left the IMG ‘by 1984’, although there is some vagueness as to when he joined the Labour Party: ‘after the 1983 election’ is about as exact as it gets, leaving open the intriguing possibility that Milburn was an entryist.”

Milburn too has never felt the need to attack the IMG as, like Darling, he moved effortlessly to the right of the Labour Party and took up high office in the process.

Such a pact of silence regarding such renegade members could only be maintained by an organisation that is rotten to the core. The leaders of United Secretariat clearly not only understand, but indeed sympathise with, Darling’s actions in securing a place for himself within Labour’s highest echelons. They would not take issue with him in any event for fear of alienating their many friends in the party and trade union bureaucracy—and thus closing off avenues for exerting their political influence and hopefully securing their own political careers.

Once again the United Secretariat and its affiliated groups have proved themselves to be the training ground for individuals considered worthy of being entrusted with the most fundamental interests of the bourgeoisie—in Darling’s case, control of Britain’s economic policy.

In addition, it should be noted that the rest of the radical left has also kept quiet about Darling’s past. They must calculate that, as the old adage insists, “People in glass houses should not throw stones.” Like doyens of a West End gentlemen’s club, they have decided that it is best not to point out the disreputable behaviour of one of their number for fear of a retaliatory citing of their own reprobate members’ misdeeds, past and present.

'Them and us' economy hits the rocks

tim — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:54:24 +0000

“The economic times we are facing are arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years”, blurted out chancellor Alistair Darling in an unguarded moment on his summer holiday. “And I think it’s going to be more profound and long-lasting than people thought”, he added.

Darling’s words sent a chill through millions of working people as we leave the summer that ‘never was’ and prepare for a long winter. It is working class people who will bear the brunt of the recession that many economists believe has already begun.

It’s not just the chancellor. Bad news has spilled out from the City for over a week. The pound reflected the dire state of the British economy by tumbling to a new low. The normally cautious Nationwide building society said house prices are falling at £150 a day and the CBI, the bosses’ union, reported the biggest annual decline in shopping since records began in 1983.

A member of the Bank of England monetary policy committee has predicted two million people will be unemployed by Christmas. Over a thousand workers at Northern Rock are amongst the first to lose their jobs in this wave of redundancies, because the multi-billion pound rescue of the bank by the government does not include saving their jobs.

But some people don’t have to worry about a cold winter. Energy multinational Centrica’s shares rose in value when it announced its latest price increase for British Gas customers. Having blighted Christmas for these customers, Christmas came early for Centrica’s big shareholders a couple of days later, when it posted a profit of £992 million in six months. Meanwhile Shell oil recorded a profit of £4 billion in just three months – that’s £2 million an hour!

So while the rest of us tighten our belts and count our pennies, the super wealthy are doing very well. On the day that it was announced that pay increases are falling behind the rate of inflation, it was reported that in central London in July, houses priced at over £10 million rose in price by 1%, while the average house price in the same area went down. Many working people cannot afford to buy any house, but the super wealthy are buying more expensive homes than ever before.

In his March budget speech, Darling said: “Britain is better placed than other economies to withstand the slowdown in the global economy”. This is not true. First Margaret Thatcher and the Tories, and then New Labour, encouraged the decline of manufacturing industry and moved the economy onto one based on finance and services, lubricated by a flood of debt. This appeared to work for a period, but as The Socialist warned, would come a cropper in a financial crisis.

Now the mega rich who got us into this mess want working class people to get them out of it – we are expected to pay the price. But faced with this agenda, anger is growing and major struggles are inevitable. This anger and action will be accompanied by people drawing political conclusions, including the vital conclusion that a new workers’ party needs to be built.

The ‘Them and Us’ recession

Them:

* 37% pay increase for FTSE 100 chief executives last year
* £992 million profit for Centrica in first six months of this year
* £26.9 billion pumped into Northern Rock

Us:

* 3.5% average annual pay increases April -June
* 35% increase in prices to Centrica’s British Gas customers
* 2000 jobs to go at Northern Rock

Rats Loose in the Granary

Ellie Keen — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Put rats in charge of the granary and, without doubt, you will get cereal thieving, and haven’t Gordon Brown and his Chancellor Alistair Darling found the truth behind that rather feeble joke.

Not even waiting 24 hours after the deadly duo hurled £50 billion their way, the pack of merchant bankers who style themselves Britain’s finance industry, but ought more accurately to be known as the country’s top predators, have stuck two fingers up at them and gone their own merry and profiteering way.

Despite all of Mr Brown’s sanctimonious pleading on Monday that the £50 billion windfall to the bankers was to stabilise the mortgage industry and give back a chance to first-time buyers to enter the housing market, Britain’s second-largest lender Abbey announced on Tuesday that it is to screw customers who can’t stump up at least 25 per cent of the price of their home as a deposit.

With lower rates and its tracker mortgage only being made available for those with a large deposit, the first-time buyer is, as one City source put it, “stuck, unless they have parents who can help.”

So, home-buyers who cannot afford a large initial deposit or don’t have a rich mummy and daddy behind them will be forced to take less competitive rates and pay more on their monthly repayments.

Once again, as with the 10p tax rate abolition, it’s the rich what gets the pleasure and the poor what takes the blame.

And is there any clearer way for Abbey to let Mr Brown know just who is in charge in the City and underline that it isn’t him?

Well, other bankers clearly think that there is.

Not content with access to £50 billion to defray its risks, the boss of the Royal Bank of Scotland is asking shareholders to pump in £12 billion of new capital, diluting their existing holdings by a hefty percentage unless they fork out again, given that the new rights offer is in the ratio of 11 new shares for every 18 existing shares that they hold.

According to RBS boss Sir Fred Goodwin, whose £4.2 million pay package included a £2.9 million bonus last year, the bank’s financial position was “satisfactory” less than two months ago.

Does anyone seriously believe that things have changed so much in just eight or nine weeks?

And, if they have, should people who did not even foresee it be left in charge of the banking industry?

It should be noted that the bank, which claims to have lost another £5.9 billion recently, spent nearly £50 billion last year on the acquisition of Dutch bank ABN Amro, so it certainly isn’t down to its last few bob.

And other banks are expected to jump on the rights issue bandwagon, including Barclays and Halifax Bank of Scotland. Both banks are denying this, but they would, wouldn’t they?

The result of all this would seem to be that £50 billion of taxpayers’ cash has vanished into the banks’ black hole and many billions more are going to be raised by rights issues, all to correct the absolute dog’s breakfast that a pack of avaricious speculators have made of the banking system that they are still to be left in charge of.

Meanwhile the lower paid are screwed on their tax, cut out of the housing market, the government is giving away their cash, and no attempt is being made by central or local government to supply social housing in anything like the amounts needed.

And they say that socialists are the impractical and unrealistic ones!

A mucky business

JamieSW — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:06:27 +0000

THE whole Northern Rock fiasco has been a mucky business from beginning to end.

What was, a year ago, the darling of the Stock Exchange, with shares priced at over 1226p each, is now a crisis-ridden mess with shares priced at under 90p.

Despite all of the hot air pumped out by the money-men in the stock market, this fiasco is solely and exclusively the responsibility of greedy, profit-fixated speculators prepared to take any risk for a fast buck. And, boy, have they come unstuck.

Chancellor Alistair Darling claims that he is now “nationalising” the bank because that is the only way that the taxpayers’ money, which he so freely used to underwrite the failing enterprise, can be safeguarded.

But those of us who hold nationalisation dear, as a step towards the elimination of speculation and predatory capitalism, must step carefully here.

What Mr Darling calls nationalisation holds about the same relationship to the real deal as a farmyard chicken does to a golden eagle.

Bear in mind our treacherous Prime Minister’s description of the Chancellor’s brand of nationalisation. “We want,” he said, “a successful company that we can pass onto the private sector at the earliest opportunity.”

He insisted that the problems in the US sub-prime mortgage market which, he claimed, had led to the collapse of Northern Rock, could not have been foreseen.

But, despite all the talk, it was not merely the US sub-prime crisis that triggered Northern Rock’s problems. It was British banks losing their nerve and pulling the rug out from a company that had taken one gamble too many.

And it is not Mr Darling’s brand of nationalisation that will save it.

The issues that are important in this situation are the jobs of Northern Rock employees, which the unions are rightly concerned about.

And don’t forget the stability of the British economy, which will hardly be guaranteed by stripping out the problems of Northern Rock and handing it back to the same gang of speculators that screwed it up in the first place, the vultures of the City.

Putting Ron Sandler in charge of the company at over £1 million a year, with a deputy on very little less, is hardly a good sign.

It is to hoped that Mr Sandler’s reputation for toughness will mean that he can stand up to the hedge-fund profiteers who, having bought and increased their shareholdings after the share price dropped through the floor, are now the loudest in their protestations that the government is trying to rip off shareholders and demanding massive compensation for their supposed losses.

Hedge funds RAB and SRM involvement in campaigning for a fair deal for shareholders has raised eyebrows in light of the timing of their purchase, with many of their shares bought after the bank’s troubles began last autumn.

The hedge funds have, in fact, been increasing their stake in recent days and clearly hope to talk their sticky fingers into the public purse.

It will help if Mr Sandler resists both that and the temptation to cut jobs in order to slim the company’s costs.

But any real solution rests on messrs Brown and Darling resorting to real nationalisation, not the cosmetic exercise that they are contemplating.

And the chance of that happening with this new Labour gang is about the same as a farmer rearing golden eagles in a chicken run.