Conservatives | ukwatch.net

2014: A Tory dystopia

JamieSW — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:14:39 +0000

The year is 2014. The Tories, led by David Cameron, are preparing to go to the polls, seeking a second term in government. Back in 2010 they crushed Labour in the general election, and promised to bring about a social transformation to match the economic reforms of the late Margaret Thatcher. And it’s true that four years of Cameron government have certainly brought many changes – they’re just not the ones the voters expected.

Cameron’s first term has been marked by two main themes: painful restrictions in public spending, primarily focused on the welfare budget, and a dramatic acceleration of privatisation in the public services. Many health services are now routinely provided by the private sector, and most new schools have been ‘new academies’, set up by private benefactors. But privatisation has been given far wider scope: the task of getting people into work has been privatised, prisons make a profit, and media deregulation and budget restrictions have sent the BBC into a spiral of decline.

This has not gone unnoticed by the public. Services that used to be taken for granted are no longer available. Others are harder to access. The quality of service has declined, and there is frustration that companies cannot be held to account for their mistakes. And there has been a series of scandals as corporate contract negotiators have ripped off the taxpayer for millions of pounds.

While privatisation has proved controversial, the big headlines have been reserved for the severe restrictions Cameron has put on public spending. The Tories found themselves in a bind after the election. They had promised to ‘share the proceeds of growth’ by reducing public spending as a proportion of GDP, but the global economic slowdown that began in 2008 was far more intractable and lengthy than they had expected.

Cameron’s chancellor, George Osborne, seemed to have little room for manoeuvre – the Conservatives had promised to match Labour’s spending on the NHS, and education was one of their flagship policy areas. So Osborne turned his sights on the welfare budget, the largest component of public spending, where cuts could be made without much political risk. The government launched a propaganda campaign deriding benefit scroungers, incapacity cheats and immigrants on state handouts.

This rhetoric proved popular, encouraging the re-emergence of the nasty streak in the party. But gradually news seeped through of the losers – those who had fallen through the now-threadbare safety net into destitution; vulnerable people, unable to speak up. The public noticed an increase in homelessness. Poverty, including child poverty, rose dramatically, regardless of the new Conservative rhetoric about helping the poorest. Crime ballooned, as it had under Thatcher, despite harsher penal policies. The Daily Mail carried screaming headlines about the ‘feral underclass’ and their lives of crime, drugs and prostitution. It was all a far cry from David Cameron’s promise to fix the ‘broken society’.

Workfare

The Conservative government’s earliest reforms were designed to make the benefits system more difficult to access and far more judgemental of the citizen, in order to reduce the welfare budget. Benefit claimants who don’t participate in back-to-work programs now lose their benefits. The penalty for not accepting a job offer is the denial of a month’s jobseekers’ allowance. Three months’ benefit is docked for refusing a second offer, and if a third offer is turned down then the allowance is stopped for three years. Furthermore, anyone who has received jobseekers’ allowance for two out of three years is required to do community service.

The policy has achieved its objective – it has saved money – but it has proved far harder to actually get people into jobs. Instead, large numbers have simply disappeared from the system and descended into a black-market world of poverty and hopelessness, causing further social breakdown.

Those that have taken work have found that unscrupulous employers are well aware of their situation. Afraid of being left without jobseekers’ allowance, the new pool of unqualified labour is in no position to question illegal practices and poor conditions. They simply have to grin and bear it, clinging onto jobs with zero prospects for money that is never a penny over the minimum wage (which has risen far slower than inflation).

The problem has been exacerbated by the continuing long-term decline of manufacturing. The proportion of skilled employment has fallen, and the economy is now dependent on unskilled jobs. Eastern Europeans previously occupied many of these, but there has been a trend for migrant workers to return to their home countries – the workfare labour army has taken their place.

The Tories believed that the real treasure chest in the welfare budget was the money being spent on incapacity benefit. They thought that they could save more than £3 billion a year by 2014 – like New Labour before them, the Tories had a preconceived notion that many, if not most, of the two and a half million people claiming incapacity benefit were well enough to work. So the first step was a massive programme of ‘work capability assessments’, not just for new claimants (New Labour had already instituted much tighter criteria here), but for all existing incapacity claimants too.

This was a vast and hugely costly exercise, but the results were not what the Tories wanted. It has proved extremely difficult to significantly reduce the numbers on incapacity benefit. Those found partially capable of work by the assessments have been placed in jobs that are often inappropriate and stultifying.

It is the mentally ill who have suffered the most – because of the nature of their illnesses, their attendance at work is impossible to guarantee and confidence easily dashed, especially when the resources are not there for the kind of one-to-one support needed. For some, the harshness of the new regime has exacerbated their condition. So, despite making life very unpleasant for people on incapacity benefit, the Conservatives have not managed to make big spending reductions.

Poverty, tax credits and marriage

The Conservatives intended to use the savings from benefit cuts for other social ends, such as making marriage more fiscally rewarding and tackling poverty. But even if this had been possible, the problem of poverty has had its own impetus.

In opposition, the Tories were critical of Labour’s tax credits system, and so it has been no surprise that the value of tax credits has diminished. Child poverty is a hot issue. The Conservatives never committed to Labour’s target of ending child poverty by 2020, and this has served them well, as there is no way of achieving the target without massive investment. New Labour had believed the solution was to increase dramatically the number of parents in work, and to this end they ended income support for lone parents with children over the age of seven just before the election. But even before this change, low pay meant that two million children were living below the poverty line in working households.

Under the Tories, little has been done to combat bad employers. People have simply been moved from workless poverty to in-work poverty, and their inflexible, poorly paid jobs have undermined family life – the very thing that Conservatives said was essential to fix the ‘broken society’.

Cameron and Osborne championed marriage as one of their distinctive themes in the 2010 election. They promised to eliminate what they called the ‘couple penalty’ in the tax credit system. But the marriage issue came back to bite them when several cabinet ministers later went through messy divorces – to the delight of the tabloid press.

Housing

Some families have stuck together, but more out of necessity than desire. The ever-rising waiting list for dilapidated social housing has led to overcrowding in bad, privately-rented accommodation that has drawn parallels with Victorian times. But the most significant change has been to abandon the idea of mixed communities.

Particularly in London, under Ken Livingstone, it was accepted that the relationship between social housing and poverty, ill health and poor-quality education should be tackled by planning for mixed housing provision – having rich and poor living side by side, doing away with so-called ‘sink estates’. A clue to the different direction the Tories would take came immediately after Boris Johnson was elected as London mayor in May 2008: one of his first acts was to allow Conservative-led Hammersmith and Fulham council to cut all planned social housing from a new development in White City.

Under the banner of ‘decentralisation’, the Conservatives have reformed the housing revenue account – the mechanism Labour used to redistribute housing money from rich areas to poor, causing Conservative councils to claim that they were being ‘robbed by Whitehall’. Already-struggling estates have been left to deteriorate, while the more affluent Tory-controlled areas have built up surpluses. For inner cities, this has meant a return to the very worst kinds of neglect seen in the 1980s and 1990s, with huge backlogs of repairs. ‘Shameless estates,’ as they have become known (the Shameless TV show is now in its 17th series), are areas where unemployment is rife, prospects poor, and health bad.

Crime

With so many disappearing from the benefits system and living in poverty, often on abandoned estates, it came as no surprise that crime rocketed – except, that is, to the right-wing press and the Conservatives. They had thought that a tough penal system would deter people from breaking the law. Certainly, the small armies of mainly young people doing community sentences, dressed in their distinctive overalls designed to shame, are a visible symbol of punishment. But they also draw attention to an uncomfortable question: why are there so many criminals?

The prison population, already sky high under Labour, has grown exponentially. The Tory government has changed the sentencing rules so that judges set a minimum and a maximum sentence, ending automatic release. They had anticipated that this would lead to a 10 per cent increase in the average length of determinate sentences, but they thought this would be compensated for by a much-vaunted ‘rehabilitation revolution’, to be brought about by the involvement of private companies. It wasn’t: the effect of the Conservatives’ other social measures contributed to the sharp increase in crime, and that, in turn, kept prisons overcrowded, despite a prison-building scheme. This made rehabilitation work much more difficult.

Pensions and social care

For the elderly, times are hard. The pensions system has not yet reached complete crisis – that will be for the next generation – but the state pension has fallen further behind earnings, and pensioner poverty is rife. The Cameron project’s political strategy has been aimed at younger people from the start, as can be seen in George Osborne’s call for ‘fairness between the generations’ back in 2008, which suggested that the young were bearing the burden of an older nation. The elderly were never at the top of the priority list.

The most severe consequences have been in social care. The Tories have not cut spending on social care, but neither have they raised it to meet the enormous extra need. Since Derek Wanless’s social care report for the King’s Fund in 2006, it has been known that costs would rise from £10.1 billion in 2002 to £24 billion in 2026 just because of the ageing population. But under both Labour and the Conservatives the English government (unlike its Scottish counterpart) has been unwilling to take responsibility. The question has therefore been whether the state should ensure that the poorest in need of care get as much help as possible, or simply protect the assets of those who have property wealth.

The loudest voices in the debate have been the middle classes, understandably worried that they will have to sell their houses to fund care. So the Conservatives have looked for market-based solutions that protect property. For those without any assets, the quality of social care is in decline. It is the worst-case scenario – people have to get very poor or very ill before they can receive care that is patchy and poor quality.

The situation has attracted much political flak – and not just from the left. Tory councils, still in charge in most of the country and quite a force, have been under pressure to meet everyone’s needs with inadequate resources. Their rebellion has placed the issue in the spotlight, and it is looming large in the 2014 election.

Environment

The gravest consequence of the dearth of public investment has been the lack of progress on climate change. The ‘vote blue, go green’ slogan was a key part of the Tories’ rebranding exercise in opposition, but in 2011 the PR strategy backfired when journalists noticed that Cameron’s personal wind turbine kept on turning even when there was no wind. It transpired that it was powered by mains electricity, and was just for show.

Even so, Cameron has continued to make worthy speeches on climate change and has pushed for more international action. Unfortunately, the measures needed to avert climate catastrophe are ultimately incompatible with Conservative market philosophy.

The key area has been energy policy. The Tories went into the 2010 election with an ambitious plan for the micro-generation of energy, with German-style feed-in tariffs allowing individuals to sell sustainably-generated power to the national grid. In some pockets of the country, this has worked very well. However, coverage has not been national, and it has allowed the Conservatives to pose as a green party without bringing about a fundamental transformation of the energy sector.

Such a transformation would require a major role for the state, with massive investment in renewables, carbon-capture technology and energy efficiency. Britain’s private energy companies are simply not up to the job. There has been huge under-investment in energy infrastructure ever since the Conservatives privatised the sector in the 1980s and 1990s, and we are now starting to see the results.

Today, policy is adrift. Frequent climatic disasters keep the issue close to the top of the agenda, but all of the major parties still see the world strictly through the prism of the market. The political impetus to tackle climate change is lacking.

Privatisation

That same prism has refracted the state into a privatised entity. The second main theme of Cameron’s term in office, after the spending restrictions, has been the sweeping privatisation of public services. In many ways, it was laid out on a plate for him: New Labour fatally undermined the idea of public provision and changed the funding structures in areas such as the NHS, ready for an influx of private companies. It was as if New Labour had arranged all the dominoes in line, inviting the Tories to knock them down in one go.

Nowhere was this truer than in the English health service. By the time Tony Blair resigned, the English NHS was run on a payment-by-results basis, putting hospitals in competition with each other. Huge corporations such as Virgin and United Health were running GP surgeries, with a select few contracted for the crucial commissioning function, giving them control of billions of pounds of public money. (Blair, incidentally, has just taken up a £450,000-a-year part-time job as president of the Washington-based Institute for Christian-Muslim Relations, following his successful stint with the Exxon-sponsored Iraqi Freedom Foundation.)

It was difficult to see how the Tories could do more damage. In fact, they have managed to go even further down the market route. They have instituted what they call a ‘true payment-by-results system’ whereby hospitals are paid according to health outcomes rather than activity. This has been a disaster. Hospitals have no idea how much money to expect, leaving them with no ability to plan. The bureaucracy required is immense. League tables are produced for every conceivable treatment, with unintended consequences – private companies misreport their performance, as their profits depend on it, while NHS facilities are routinely pilloried in the tabloid press for supposedly poor (but in reality more honest) results.

All NHS hospitals are now foundation trusts, and, freed from Gordon Brown’s rather weak restrictions, they can now borrow like private hospitals. (Since resigning as an MP, Brown has focused on his writing, but his publisher has cancelled the release of his latest book, Vision, the follow up to 2007’s Courage.) Unprofitable treatments are no longer available. Again, this process began under New Labour with the denial of hernia operations in Oxfordshire, but it has greatly accelerated.

Conversely, the market leads hospitals and corporate-employed GPs to find ways to treat lucrative cases while shunting others aside. Also common is the levying of fees for extra services – some hospitals have even attempted to charge ‘bed rent’.

The public has perceived a degradation in service, but there has been no commensurate reduction in the cost of the NHS – indeed, the enormous performance bureaucracy created by the Tories, combined with the billing, contracting and accounting necessary in a market, means that costs are rising. Curiously, the public places the blame for this not only on the Conservatives but also on the NHS itself, feeding the frenzied calls of right-wing commentators for the complete handover of the service to the private sector.

Education

The same privatised vision informs the Conservatives’ education policy. In England the key Tory idea has been the establishment of ‘new academies’ (although they aren’t really much different from the old academies). They can be set up and run by companies, charities, trusts, voluntary groups, philanthropists or co-operatives, and all the same fears attached to New Labour’s academies still apply, especially in regard to sponsorship and the capitalist – and sometimes religious – ethos of the schools.

New academies are outside the national curriculum and independent of the local authority – in fact, they compete with local authority schools, as their funding depends on the number of children who attend. They can be established even in areas where there is a surplus of school places. This is justified on the grounds that it ‘drives up standards’.

While the Conservatives have drawn on the Swedish example of diverse schools, studies have shown that Finland’s fully-comprehensive system is more successful. Although new academies are supposed to be non-selective, the schools are outside local authority control and deal with their own admissions, which has inevitably led to a more socially-segregated education system.

The policy’s only saving grace has been that there were not many people who wanted to establish a new academy. They are still not allowed to make a profit, so business wasn’t interested, and the Tories were surprised to find that parents were largely indifferent to the idea of opening and running their own schools.

Wider education policy has been marked by inconsistency and contradiction. Despite the rhetoric about ending central control, the Conservative government has insisted that schools must have a formal uniform, place children in sets, and use synthetic phonics. It has also required the teaching of a skewed version of British history that amounts to propaganda, designed to stir national sentiment.

Public dissatisfaction in England has been exacerbated by the contrast with the rest of Britain. Even under New Labour, the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly set themselves against privatisation in health and education, and with the Tories in power the disparity has become even more pronounced. It is now a common theme of news coverage and pub conversation that the Scottish and Welsh are getting a better deal.

Welfare privatisation

As well as squeezing the benefits system, the Conservatives have privatised its job placement function. Jobcentres now grade potential benefit claimants according to their capability for different kinds of work and refer them to a private company to find a job. This fundamental reshaping of the welfare system built on New Labour’s reforms – Tory ministers defend their policies by saying they are only continuing James Purnell’s work.

The ‘payment-by-results’ system, under which companies’ funding depends on getting people into jobs and keeping them there, is meant to provide the state with the levers it needs to control the process. But it doesn’t work like that. The Tory plans were largely based on the Australian system introduced by the Howard government, but in that country the profit motive produced perverse outcomes and fraudulent behaviour. There was no real market, because the ‘customers’ (unemployed people) didn’t pay for the service and couldn’t choose to switch between companies. Although private providers were paid by results in Australia as in the Tory scheme, there was minimal competition once a few companies became dominant. To compensate for the failure of the market, the Australian government was forced to tighten regulation and central control – undermining the original aim of cutting bureaucracy and costs.

The Conservatives chose to ignore this evidence, and promptly repeated the Australian experience. They also faced an outcry from the voluntary sector, which had been promised a key role delivering job placement services but didn’t have the capital necessary to win many contracts. The sector belatedly realised that its involvement had been used as PR cover for privatisation.

Prison privatisation

Conservative rhetoric on prison reform also emphasised the voluntary sector, but the reality has been the privatisation of prisons. To use the jargon, there is now an ‘offender management marketplace’. All public prisons have been made into Prison and Rehabilitation Trusts, along the lines of Foundation Trust hospitals, with financial independence. The government has encouraged the private sector to build more prisons, which then compete for the same funding as the public prisons through a tariff system. Prisons are paid a set amount for each convict, and get a premium if a former prisoner doesn’t re-offend for two years. Newly-released prisoners are handed over to the private workfare companies to be put into work.

But if the market fails in welfare because the jobseeker is not a real consumer, then it can hardly work for prisoners, whose defining characteristic is a lack of choice over their destiny. Re-offending rates have proved stubborn. Ex-prisoners don’t seem too bothered that their activities might cost their former institution its premium tariff.

The media

The erosion of the public sphere has even spread into the broadcasting industry. The Tories have never been fans of the BBC, and the snappily dubbed ‘multi-channel, multi-platform era’ has provided the perfect excuse for Cameron (a former director of corporate affairs at Carlton Communications) to undermine it.

The Conservatives argued that it was unfair to expect commercial channels to carry current affairs or children’s programmes without a subsidy. Thus, the licence fee has been ‘top-sliced’: a proportion of the money is now distributed to commercial channels, leaving the BBC with less revenue and forced to close down channels.

Impartiality requirements on non-publicly funded broadcasters have been relaxed, meaning TV news on commercial channels can now wear its biases on its sleeve. While the BBC’s news still has to be impartial, all the editorial pressure now comes from the more boisterous and slanted end of the market, pulling even the publicly-funded newscasters rightwards. Newspapers have opened stations that follow their editorial line – and worse, Rupert Murdoch is in the process of launching a UK Fox News. The BBC has seen itself relegated to the role of making up for market failure, as it gradually loses out against its competitors. This has eroded faith in public broadcasting. People no longer expect to be treated as citizens by the broadcast media – merely as consumers.

The labour movement

The hurricane of privatisation has been opposed tooth and nail by the trade unions, and for good reason – union power is overwhelmingly centred in the public sector. Foundation hospitals, prison trusts and new academy schools have opted out of national pay bargaining agreements. The new, hostile employers make it difficult for unions to recruit members working for the private organisations that now deliver so many services, such as the health corporations or job placement companies.

Most of Margaret Thatcher’s anti-union legislation remained in place after 13 years of Labour government – it was nice of them to save the Tories the job of reintroducing it – but that hasn’t prevented further attempts to undermine the unions. In the first year of Cameron’s premiership, Boris Johnson, who had been kept on a tight leash before the 2010 election, was given free rein to take on the RMT transport union. He believed this would be popular with commuters. A drawn out battle ensued as the RMT surprised the Tories with its doggedness, and the dispute marred Cameron’s early period in office, casting an image of social strife.

Since then the Conservatives have been more subtle. Behind the scenes, the government has encouraged public sector employers, particularly in the NHS, to derecognise unions in areas where branch membership is not what it might be. After disputes in the health service and the fire brigades (where the Fire Brigades Union is fighting another wave of ‘rationalisation’ by cash-strapped local authorities), there is talk of strike bans in essential services.

A more fundamental change has been the end of direct union funding of the Labour party. Labour had the chance to settle the party funding issue before they left office, but lacked the political energy. So, under the guise of cleaning up politics, the new Conservative government outlawed donations of more than £50,000 from individuals, companies, organisations and trade unions, rejecting desperate pleas to allow individual union members to pay an optional affiliation fee as part of their annual membership. This was a financial disaster for Labour, as 90 per cent of the party’s money came from the unions in 2010.

Former Labour affiliates were left with a sudden surplus of cash that they could use for political ends, but only as third-party campaigning organisations. So, as the 2014 election looms, the big unions are agitating for a rise in the minimum wage and supporting candidates who back it, without directly mentioning the Labour Party. In many ways, this has made the unions higher-profile, more vibrant campaigning organisations.

For Labour, the change has made the party reliant on its members – and wealthy donors. This has pulled it in two different directions, causing tensions that have not been resolved as we go into the general election. The party has to compete for members in a political marketplace (an analogy the Conservatives are delighted with), and has found it easier to attract supporters by sounding social democratic and mildly left wing, keeping quiet about Blair and Brown. But the big £50,000 individual donations, which have started to pick up after four years of Tory government, generally come from unreconstructed Blairites who still want Labour to be like the US Democratic Party.

One of the great problems for Labour in opposition has been its inability to make political capital from unpopular Tory reforms. Whether it’s NHS privatisation or the brutal tightening of welfare, Labour has no credibility, thanks to its record in government. The Conservatives’ most effective defence has been to say ‘we’re only finishing what you started’. Without this handicap, Labour would be far more likely to win in 2014.

Tory England

Even if Labour can scrape back to power, though, its long-term future in England is threatened by developments north of the border. The SNP narrowly lost the first referendum on Scottish independence in 2010, throwing Alex Salmond’s party into temporary disarray. But seeing a Conservative government in London soon revived the nationalist cause, and opinion polls now suggest that the Scottish public will vote for independence if given another chance – a referendum is expected imminently. Welsh nationalism is also on the rise. (See ‘Break up of Britain’, p33.)

The secession of Scotland would leave a very Conservative England – a Tory dystopia of a neoliberal, privatised state, dominated by a political consensus that stifles any hope of challenging the market. It would be a truly broken society.

Yet there are rays of hope. It was not public clamour for right-wing policies that brought the Tories to power in 2010, but recession and an apparently bereft Labour party. Cameron’s programme in office has been blunted – sometimes by lack of public interest, sometimes by obstruction – and where policies have been put into action, they have rarely worked as expected. The results are already generating opposition, and how this opposition will be expressed is the key question for the future.

Alex Nunns is a Grammy award-winning rock star. His band’s fourth album, Singing the Blues in Red, was the biggest-selling record of 2013

With thanks to the Fire Brigades Union for their support

Fraternity without equality, and other Conservative ideals

JamieSW — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:09:56 +0000

In June 2005, when we had just begun the collective discussions leading up to the Compass publication The Good Society, an email circulated amongst our group containing a link to a speech by Oliver Letwin, who was then the Conservative Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The speech was called ‘Conducting Politics as if Beauty Matters’, and the theme was Environmentalism.1 Drawing on the language of the Romantics, Letwin argued that politicians needed a new vocabulary to talk about the environment. This was an issue that went beyond the merely mechanical. He called for a new political culture in which environmental policy is recognised as being the achievement of beauty. ‘The language of politics needs to reflect the felt experience of the environment as sensations and impressions that are capable of moving us to delight and awe.’ Some would dismiss this kind of ‘love of nature’ as a retreat into aestheticism. But this would be to miss the point. Aesthetic and cultural work is a central task of hegemonic politics. Intellectual knowledge, art, music, image-making, uses of language – these create new forms of consciousness. They can redefine our reality and lead us into new ways of thinking about the world. Letwin’s language, in stark contrast to the Whiggish joylessness of Thatcherism, was an early intimation of a renaissance in Conservative thinking. The Toryism of Burke and Ruskin was making a return.

In November, a month before his election as leader, David Cameron gave a speech to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations on ‘Building a prosocial society’. The speech marked a break with Margaret Thatcher’s Hayek-inspired statement that ‘there is no such thing as society’. We must restore trust in society, he said, and we must recognise that ‘we’re all in this together’. A series of rhetorical questions demonstrated the new Conservative sympathy:

How do you help an eighty-eight year old lady in a cold and lonely flat … who’s barely able to walk to the shops and often too frightened to do so anyway … who needs to navigate the complexity of the benefits system? How do you help a sixteen year old girl who’s never had the love and attention from her parents that she deserved? How do you make her understand that she’s worth something, that she’s special … and that her value to this world should never be measured by the number of boys she has sex with?

People were complex, their emotional problems were built up over the years. The answer to helping them lay in trusting society. Politicians had to trust people: ‘I want my Party to be one that says, loudly and proudly, that there is such a thing as society – it’s just not the same thing as the state.’

For the new pro-social Conservatism, the state still remains the impediment to freedom. Power and responsibility must be transferred back from the state. Not just to the individual alone, but to society as well; in particular to the voluntary associations and community groups who know what problems exist and how best to solve them. For change is not just about solving the physical manifestations of crime or deprivation: ‘In our country today, there’s a sense of spiritual poverty, as well as economic poverty’. There is more to life than money: ‘in an age of social fragmentation, where individuals and communities are often turning inwards to themselves, not outwards to each other, I believe that working together for the common good is the way to create a new and inspiring sense of national identity.’

In September 2006, Cameron’s special adviser Danny Kruger put intellectual substance to the new Conservatism. Writing in that month’s issue of Prospect, he argued that while the contest between the two main parties about the respective values of liberty and equality had not disappeared, it was now being contested on the ground of fraternity. Liberty and equality were political abstractions, but fraternity was concrete and self-generating. Fraternity was not the function of the state or of the individual, but of society – ‘the messy and plural mixture of our personal associations’. Kruger argues that the mistake of the left is to confuse the state with society, and equality with fraternity. The right disagrees with the idea that ‘brothers are equal’. ‘What matters to brothers is not their notional equality but their relationship’. Fraternity is about shared memories and a common home. Society is not the state, and fraternity is not just another word for equality. And the Thatcherites were also wrong, in thinking that fraternity would be taken care of by liberty. Fraternity is about the social. Kruger does not say any more about this, but points out that the influence of one’s wider group, one’s family and neighbourhood, determines one’s propensity for good health. The failure of the Labour government lay in the absence of a language of social life. It had abandoned the fraternity of ethical socialism – mutuals, self-help – in favour of central state control. ‘As the state takes over the institutions of society, individuals feel less confident in them. Egalitarian intrusions into fraternity are made at the expense of liberal attachments to it.’ Starved of liberty, fraternity suffers.

Kruger concludes by asserting that liberty and fraternity are not incompatible. The market relies on the values of trust and reciprocity, the sources of which, Kruger claims, are the family and nation. For Kruger freedom and nationalism – liberty and fraternity – are allies. Liberty needs fraternity – not least because the consequences of Thatcherism have left the Conservatives with the reputation of being society’s ‘wrecking crew’. But embracing social justice does not mean increasing the power of the state. It means extending the social power of voluntary institutions and social enterprises. ‘Trusting people’ is about liberty – ‘individuals should be trusted to make their decisions for their lives’. ‘We’re all in it together’ is about fraternity and the sphere of belonging. The policy strategy of localism, in which people make decisions about their neighbourhood and where communities can create a sense of belonging, captures the relationship of liberty and fraternity. The third element of the trio – equality – is explicitly rejected.

On becoming leader of the party, Cameron announced the setting up of a number of policy groups to review Conservative political strategy. In July 2007, the Social Justice Policy Group under Iain Duncan Smith published its Breakthrough Britain. Ending the costs of social breakdown.2 The report faithfully mirrors Cameron’s pro-social Conservatism. It defines the five key ‘paths to poverty’ – family breakdown, serious personal debt, drug and alcohol addiction, failed education, worklessness and dependency. The solution to these problems is not the welfare state but reinforcing the welfare society. ‘At the heart of the Welfare Society is the army of people who, for love of neighbour and community, shoulder the massive burden of care’ (p6). A welfare society is not the same as a laissez faire approach, which blames poverty on poor individual choices. But nor does it think that eliminating poverty is solely the job of government. ‘Our approach is based on the belief that people must take responsibility for their own choices but that government has a responsibility to help people make the right choices.’ The catch phrase of the welfare society is ‘shared responsibility’, an echo of Tony Blair’s welfare reform rhetoric.

In August the Economic Policy Review under John Redwood delivered its report, Freeing Britain to Compete.3 Its wide-ranging policy recommendations were dominated by its liberal proposals for £14bn of tax cuts. Inheritance tax should be scrapped, and corporation tax, stamp duty on shares and on property, cut. The threshold of the top rate of income tax should be raised. Redwood, it appeared, was keeping the Thatcherite flame alive. Shadow Chancellor George Osborne extinguished it. He affirmed that inheritance tax would be scrapped or reduced by an incoming Conservative Government. However there would be no overall reductions in taxation. Any tax cuts that were identifi ed would be balanced by tax increases elsewhere, such as green levies. A frisson of tension and dissent was exposing the division between Cameron’s new Conservatism and the right wing of the party.

On 13 September, the Quality of Life Policy Group under Zac Goldsmith and John Gummer published its report, Blueprint for a Green Economy.4 The good society it proclaimed must also be a green society. Borrowing from The Good Society, it argued that, despite material progress, the UK seemed to be experiencing a ‘social recession’. ‘Social cohesion is under increasing strain. Levels of trust, in each other and in our institutions, are dwindling. Rates of mental illness, drug abuse, “bingedrinking”, family break-up, and other symptoms of an unhappy society are rising inexorably.’ Unlike Duncan Smith, Goldsmith and Gummer were pushing at the limits of the new Conservatism. The market is central to their vision, but not the market alone. ‘If markets are not to master us then Governments have to intervene to ensure that they keep their place and remain our servants.’ Economic growth ‘is unsustainable without social justice’.

Blueprint exposed the central contradiction in Cameron’s new Conservatism. To create a sustainable economy and to end the social recession would require an active interventionist state, and the regulation of markets. This was a bridge too far. In contrast to the eulogies for Redwood’s report, the right-wing media responded to the Blueprint with contemptuous silence. Dominic Lawson in The Independent damned Goldsmith with faint praise, twisting the knife as he remarked: ‘the fact that he is a faithful frequenter of John Aspinall’s casino is nothing to do with his political views’. Cameron found himself with his feet on two boats as they started to drift apart. The opinion polls showed the public unwilling to trust his new caring style of Conservatism. Camilla Cavendish argued in The Timesonline (13.9.07), however, that the state of the Conservative Party could not be reduced to a simple battle of Goldsmith and Gummer versus Redwood: ‘The last 18 months have seen an outstanding intellectual turnaround in a party that had previously been hobbled by its single-minded obsession with individualism.’ But the turnaround had now stuck in an internecine struggle over the Party’s future and was threatening to unravel. Luckily for them, Labour came to the rescue.

In October Osborne followed up on Redwood’s proposal and announced that the Conservatives would raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1m. Almost immediately the polls began to shift in Cameron’s favour. Then Brown, after allowing weeks of speculation about a November election, lost his nerve. There would be no election. The following week Alistair Darling, in his pre-Budget Report, announced a plan to double the inheritance tax threshold for couples to £600,000. It was a turning point in the fortunes of both parties.

The inadequacy of Labour

Labour’s response to the Conservative policy review was dismissive. ‘We’ve seen their strategy unfold now’, wrote then Culture Secretary James Purnell in Progress. ‘It’s obvious what they are up to. They saw New Labour was popular. They didn’t understand why but they worked out that it was. So they decided to associate themselves with it.’5 Purnell dismissed Cameron for his lack of policies. ‘So, on the environment, Zac Goldsmith told Cameron that the kids liked it. But there’s not a single policy he can actually think of and stick to … There is a black hole in their plans – a £6 billion gap. Their proposals are unfair, unfunded, and unthought through.’ His contempt was echoed by Andy Burnham, then Chief Secretary to the Treasury: ‘The Tories would have to raise green taxes by eye-watering amounts to meet the tax proposals they have been making in other areas.’

But this criticism was oblivious of Labour’s own political crisis. Though Purnell claimed that ‘we have a vision of the good society that the Conservatives cannot match’, this was precisely what the Labour government did not have. Despite its extraordinary electoral successes, its managerialist and technocratic politics had failed to win it deep popular allegiance. Public sector reform, driven by public choice theory and marketisation, had created dysfunctional cultures of centralised control in which trust had evaporated. A principal line of attack should have been the contradiction between the new Conservatism’s social values and its continuing reliance on the market for solutions to the social recession and the ecological crisis. Sir Nicholas Stern had already described climate change as the biggest market failure the world had ever seen. Goldsmith and Gummer owned up to this in their report. Unrestrained, the market, ‘will catch till the last fish is landed, drill till there is no more oil, and pollute till the planet is destroyed’. But Labour could not seize on this contradiction because markets are its own blind faith. It had introduced markets or proxy markets into almost every facet of social life. While Labour remained more committed to the state than the Conservatives, its managerialism and centralising instincts allowed the Tories to portray state intervention – which has to be part of any redistributive politics – as an undesirable intrusion into people’s lives. By the autumn of 2007, the alliance that had brought Labour to power was disintegrating. What had been popular indifference was hardening into open dislike, even hatred. Meanwhile Cameron had regained control in the Conservative Party, and its intellectual renaissance continued.

Jesse Norman, Chairman of the Conservative Cooperative Movement, and a senior research fellow at the think tank Policy Exchange, continued Kruger’s work on fraternity. In From here to Fraternity he argued that ‘after 54 quarters of unbroken economic growth we are in, not an economic recession, but a serious “social recession”. Our society is weakening’.6 Beveridge’s ‘five giants’ of illness, ignorance, disease, squalor and want remained, though they were in abeyance: ‘However we face two new and rather different problems: a problem of security and a problem of trust.’ There was ‘a pervasive sense in Britain today that the social ties between us are weakening’. Like Kruger, Norman points the finger at the state as the main cause of social malaise. ‘The effects of a decade of Labour domestic policy have been to extend and centralise the power of the state, to remove power from individuals and established institutions, and to encourage feelings of deference, dependence and passivity among ordinary people’ (p9).

Norman defines the new Conservative agenda: ‘Compassionate conservatism seeks social renewal through the devolution of power and responsibility to people and local institutions, through greater personal freedom from bureaucracy and regulation, through breaking-up state monopolies to improve public services and through a renewed emphasis on the rights of the citizen and the rule of law’ (p6). The task is to embark on a radical programme designed to address the social recession and restore public trust. The politics of fraternity, with its concern for personal well-being and its recognition of the relational nature of individuals, is the best means for achieving it. Norman differentiates between a ‘social fraternity’ and a ‘personal fraternity’. Adhering to his liberal Conservatism, he favours the latter, which ‘implies limited government and a massive empowerment of nonstate institutions’. His programme, however, is vague. It includes private social entrepreneurship, performing arts to encourage people off the streets, competitive sports, outdoor exercise, programmes of community public service, benefit reform. He also argues for more apprenticeships, and greater flexibility in post-16 learning.

It would be a mistake to dismiss the new Conservatism as Cameron’sopportunistic Clause 4 moment. Rather, it represents a shift away from Thatcherism that retains the critique of the state but acknowledges the value of a stable andintegrated society. Because of New Labour’s politics of centralised control, thiscritique of state control strikes a popular chord. And its ethical language of relationships and social life resonates amongst many who in the past would never have considered voting Conservative. In the aftermath of the disastrous May local elections, the government struggled to re-assert itself. Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, delivered a challenge: ‘In every area we will challenge and scrutinise the Conservative position and expose their determination to protect excellence for the few and oppose our reforms to deliver excellence and opportunity for all.’ In a speech to the Fabian Society on 6 May, James Purnell, by now Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, called for ideological confi dence: ‘The Tories are paying lip service to our policies because they know their old answers are out of tune.’ But both positions are deeply compromised. It is Labour that is failing to deliver greater equality and it is Labour that is increasingly out of tune. Having triangulated rightward on every major social issue, the Government has neither political ideology nor moral authority to exploit the contradiction at the heart of the new Conservatism.

Kruger was right. The Labour government lacks an ethical politics to speak of relationships, or values or even social justice. It is unable to evoke a fraternal culture of care and empathy. Its silence over the super rich has been matched only by its hectoring of Incapacity Benefi t claimants. It has no idea about a more democratic way of governing the country. The joys, pleasures and frustrations of everyday life pass it by. Faced with a crisis, it offers to listen. All it will hear is the echo of its own jargon. Cameron is politically astute to focus on the depletion of trust and social feeling and claim the mantle of progressivism. The new Conservatism is confronting the remnants of New Labour with the bankruptcy of its political culture.

Reclaiming fraternity

It is far from certain that Cameron’s Conservatism will be able to sustain its own contradictions; and its belief that civil society organisations can take on the role of state institutions threatens its credibility. It is time for the left to take on this new Conservatism – a challenge that cannot be separated from the political and philosophical problems facing post-New Labour social democracy. For a start we need to go back to first principles and challenge the right’s attempt to redefine fraternity.

The idea of fraternity goes to the heart of what being human means – what it means to be social. Abraham Maslow defines four needs in life: a feeling of safety, a feeling of belonging, a feeling that we are worth being loved, and the experience of esteem and respect. These needs are social and relational; they cannot be satisfied by an individual in isolation from others. Norman acknowledges the relational nature of the individual. He acknowledges that ‘as adults our behaviour is radically affected by the environment and incentives we face’. However, contrary to Norman, fraternity cannot be ‘personal’. It exists between people. Without others it can only be an unrequited longing for connection.

Kruger agrees that fraternity is about the social, but he narrowly defines it in the biological relationship of brothers. Fraternity extends beyond family. It is not, as he argues, just about shared memories and a common home, nor the imagined community of the nation. It is realised in the reciprocity of friendship. It belongs to women as well as men. Sisterhood too is the experience of self-realisation in a common endeavour. It is the pleasure, even joy, of living with and for others. There is today, particularly in the rich countries of the world, a powerful desire to be true to one’s self. As the philosopher Charles Taylor argues, this ethic of self-fulfi lment is deep within modern consciousness. But it is social not individualistic. It involves the right of everyone to achieve their own unique way of being human. To dispute this right in others is to fail to live within its own terms. The liberty of making decisions about our own lives, and the fraternity of togetherness, require equality to bind them together.

‘For the Conservative party I’m leading’ says Cameron, ‘social justice is a vital issue’.7 But there can be no social justice without the anticipation of equality. Equality is the ethical core of social justice. The Conservatives are wrong to think they can have liberty and fraternity without equality. The new Conservatism sidesteps this dilemma by associating equality with an intrusive central state and the loss of freedom. But fraternity without equality means paternalism – gendered, and defined by the imposition of class rule. Paternalism is a social contract between unequals – a ‘shared responsibility’ between rulers and ruled. There is no anticipation of freedom, rather the ideal is a moral, organic order of unchanging classes in which each knows their place and duty. In contrast, the fraternity of socialism is structured into ways of life, in what Paul Ricoeur calls ‘just institutions’ and what Richard Tawney describes as ‘right relationships which are institutionally based’. Its idiom is the equitable distribution of shares and goods between members of a society. It is the freedom to become one’s own self in relation to others. The challenge is to imagine and build a democratic state and civil society institutions capable of realising this ethic of equality. The new Conservatism, despite its ‘no wealth but life’ language, cannot deliver freedom. Its paternalism is the nostalgic longing for the father to rule once more over his familial order.

1. All speeches referred to can be seen at www.conservatives.com.
2. Iain Duncan Smith, Breakthrough Britain. Ending the costs of social breakdown,
Centre for Social Justice, July 2007.
3. John Redwood and Simon Wolfson, Freeing Britain to Compete, 17 August
2007, www.conservatives.com.
4. John Gummer and Zac Goldsmith, Blueprint for a Green Economy, 13
September 2007, www.conservatives.com.
5. James Purnell, Progress, November 2007, www.progressonline.org.uk.
6. Jesse Norman, From here to fraternity: perspectives on social responsibility, CentreForum, 2007, www.jessenorman.com.
7. David Cameron, ‘Making our country a safe and civilised place for everyone’,
speech to the Centre for Social Justice, 10 July 2006

Thatcher's shadow falls over Alex Salmond

tim — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:44:40 +0000

British politics have for the last thirty years been shaped by Margaret Thatcher, Thatcherism and the legacy of Thatcher’s period in office.

All of the mainstream politicians who have followed her – John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron at a UK level, and Alex Salmond and his Labour predecessors as First Minister in Scotland – have been influenced by her, and their politics shaped, defined and framed by her and her achievements. This has been thrown into sharp focus by recent remarks – and the reaction to them – made by Alex Salmond in an interview for Total Politics with Iain Dale, who thought them so obvious as to be quite uncontroversial.

The fact that the political world we live in has been created by Mrs. Thatcher is well made by Simon Jenkins in his persuasive thesis, ‘Thatcher and Sons’ where he examines the Thatcher legacy and its acceptance by Major, Blair and Brown. This entailed the reconfiguration of politics, the state and polity around a new credo of free market capitalism, deregulation, privatisation, celebration of the super-rich, alongside increased centralisation and an authoritarian, powerful central state.

Blair and Brown both famously courted Margaret Thatcher once they arrived in office; both invited her to No 10 Downing Street, while at the same time overtly accepting, embracing and extending the nature of the Thatcher revolution. While they were doing this, large parts of Labour continued to see Thatcher as a hate figure and Thatcherism as something they totally detested.

This produced a strange kind of almost Alice in Wonderland politics whereby Blair and Brown attempted to send out overt signals to former Tory voters that they understood their concerns, while continuing with her policies and operating within her legacy, and at the same time, offering the pretence that they disagreed with large parts of her legacy by creating a caricature of it: going about three million unemployment or the ‘Black Wednesday’ moment of Major’s government. At its core New Labour was, in the words of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Thatcherism consolidated’.

‘Bathgate No More, Linwood No More’ and Thatcherism North of the Border

The way Thatcherism has been perceived in Scotland has been even more pronounced on the surface, but even more complex and complicated underneath. The combination of Thatcher’s English persona and style, English nationalism and the fact that the Tories were increasingly a small, declining minority of votes, always meant that Thatcherism was never going to win the popularity stakes north of the border. Part of this was no doubt due to Mrs. Thatcher’s personality rubbing Scots up the wrong way, as much as her policies.

The Thatcherite agenda produced north of the border economic and social dislocation with massive de-industrialisation, hardship and poverty, which were interpreted in Scotland increasingly in the 1980s as ‘anti-Scottish’ – something that the North of England, Yorkshire and Wales shared in policy-wise, but could not experience through the same paradigm. The poll tax was important in precipitating this disparity as it was imposed on Scotland first: the country was singled out as a test case a year before the rest of the UK. There was a genuinely proconsular aspect to this, as one of the most Tory of policies was rolled out in the least Tory province, which precipitated anti-English sentiment.

However, as with all things life was a little more complex that the ‘Bathgate no more, Linwood no more’ lament of The Proclaimers – who compared Scotland’s experience of Thatcherism to the Highland Clearances. Scottish people enjoyed many of the benefits of Thatcherism – buying their council houses and privatised shares, while higher public spending continued north of the border – but they just didn’t vote Tory as a result of it. Instead, the majority of Scottish opinion, aided by the grotesque imposition of the poll tax, moved into a position of feeling both the ‘victim’ of and ‘morally superior’ to, the rest of the UK.

Scottish politics for the eighteen years of Tory rule was characterised by opposition politicians – Labour, Lib Dem, SNP – trying to outdo each other in their opposition and rhetoric towards Thatcher. This was an era of symbols and shibboleths which defined the nation’s resistance to Thatcherism: Linwood, Invergordon, Ravenscraig and Rosyth. All but the last were closed under the Conservatives and each cause, campaign and crisis was meant to signify that the Union might be under threat. Two politicians who excelled in this climate were Gordon Brown and Alex Salmond.

Understanding Thatcherism in the post-Thatcher Age

The election of New Labour and acceptance and consolidation of much of the Thatcher legacy, led to Scottish politics moving on as well, but with the continuation of an even more complex Alice in Wonderland set of attitudes. With the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, both Scottish Labour and the SNP had to emphasise their ‘Scottish’ credentials and their difference. They did this by stressing that they were more left-wing and social democratic than parties south of the border, and continuing with the language of detestation towards Thatcher and Thatcherism. While they presented themselves in this way, both parties moved in the same direction as New Labour and came under the same influence: accepting the logic and values of the post-Thatcherite environment, while pretending otherwise.

Thus, we come to the importance of Alex Salmond’s recent remarks on Margaret Thatcher. Salmond stated:

The SNP has a strong, beating social conscience, which is very Scottish in itself. One of the reasons Scotland didn’t take to Lady Thatcher was because of that. It didn’t mind the economic side so much. But we didn’t like the social side at all.

He then had to qualify his remarks almost immediately, taking the unprecedented (and slightly embarrassing) step as First Minister of Scotland of phoning in to BBC Radio Scotland’s Saturday ‘Morning Extra’ programme to state:

I’m well on the record as never having approved of either Margaret Thatcher’s social or economic policies – that’s clear if you look at the interview.

He also commented that he would not be following Gordon Brown (and Tony Blair before him) of inviting Margaret Thatcher for tea. Subsequently Salmond said about his remarks:

I was commenting on why Scots, in particular, were so deeply resentful of Thatcher and I think here her social message epitomised in the unfair poll tax and her comments of ‘no such thing as society’ cut against a very Scottish grain of social conscience. That doesn’t mean that the nation liked her economic policies, just that we liked her lack of concern for social consequences even less.

Now it does not take a Kremlinologist to work out the difference between Salmond’s first and last statements. The quote that Scots ‘didn’t mind the economic side so much’ is a tacit acceptance and endorsement of Thatcherism’s economic agenda; in his follow up comments Salmond attempted to quote his ‘economic and social side’ remarks and deny that they were in any way support for Thatcherite economics.

What was as revealing was the reaction to the remarks. The ‘cybernat’ community tried to defend Salmond saying this was not an endorsement of Thatcherite economics; that New Labour has more embraced it, and so on. Labour politicians attacked Salmond’s ‘own goal’ and ‘praise of Thatcherism’. Most interesting of all was the comments from some of Salmond’s critics in the Nationalist community. Jim Fairlie, a senior figure in the party in the 1980s called the remarks ‘a qualified acceptance of Mrs. Thatcher’s economic policies’ and talked of Salmond’s ‘drift to the right’. Jim Sillars, SNP victor of the 1988 Govan by-election commented:

It is revisionist nonsense for Alex Salmond to suggest that our society only objected to her social policies, while we accepted her economic ones.

What is going on here is that Salmond has violated the first cardinal rule of Scottish politics after Thatcher: that is namely to vilify, degrade and denounce Thatcher and Thatcherism with every word in your vocabulary, while being influenced, shaped and following in her footsteps. To be flattering, he made the ‘political error’ of being too relaxed and speaking with a degree of honesty.

All of Scotland’s mainstream political parties have had their policies and philosophies altered by Thatcherism, while at the same time, they continue to articulate a social democratic centre-left politics which has been diluted and diminished by Thatcherism; you can even include the Scottish Tories in this equation as they have been consistently devoid of a right-wing agenda and gone with the grain of Scottish politics. When you combine this mix with the national question, Scottish centre-left politicians have to emphasise even more than south of the border, their distinctiveness and moral disgust at the world Mrs. Thatcher brought about.

The ‘Catch-All’ Nature of the Scottish Nationalists

Alex Salmond’s remarks and the controversy they have caused have to be seen in this context. He has inadvertently blown open the Alice in Wonderland mentality and Janus-like attitude which exists across the whole of the UK and the political spectrum about Thatcher and Thatcherism, which is just more acute and sensitive north of the border.

The SNP like Labour north and south of the border are a broad coalition of social democratic sentiment which has acquiesced with Thatcherism and the neo-liberal project. It is not for nothing that the SNP, like Scottish Labour and New Labour, is ominously silent on the central issue of political economy. Salmond’s acceptance of the dominant economic order was evident in remarks in the same interview:

I suppose I have tried to bring the SNP into the mainstream of Scotland. We have a very competitive economic agenda. Many business people have warmed towards the SNP. We need a competitive edge, a competitive advantage. That side of SNP politics – get on with it, get things done, speed up decision making, reduce bureaucracy.

These remarks reveal the ‘catch-all’ nature of the SNP’s political agenda, and the reality that for all its popularity, statecraft and progressive elements which have been on show since it came to office, social democracy and challenging the vested interests of the global order, are just as unsafe in the SNP’s hands as they are in Scottish Labour’s.

The political project of the SNP is a ‘Scotland plc’ – not that different from the kind of economy and society envisioned by Labour modernisers, only independent. That is one of the defining features of Scottish politics: the lack of a real, distinct set of political differences between Labour and the SNP beyond independence. And that leads us to the second cardinal rule of Scottish politics after Thatcher: because of that lack of substantive difference, Labour and SNP go at it upping the ante and vitriol between each other.

The current Nationalist vision of the world is one where a ‘national project’ will see an independent Scotland and its government align with business and corporate interests to promote the nation and compete in the global economy. Jim Mather, Enterprise Minister, an ardent marketer, once commented: ‘Any notion that an independent Scotland would be left-wing is delusional nonsense’; Mike Russell, Environment Minister, penned a book ‘Grasping The Thistle’ one year before becoming a minister, filled with the most fundamental free-market proposals.

Alex Salmond, once a radical left-winger in the days when he was an economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland in the 1980s, has now undergone a full conversion to celebrating and advocating corporate interests. This can be seen in Salmond’s fully fledged support for Donald Trump’s luxury golf development in North East Scotland, or his consistent advocacy for the corporate interests of the Royal Bank of Scotland: the fifth largest banking group in the world. Sometimes it seems as if Salmond sees the interests of RBS and the Scottish economy as being one and the same; this is a bank which employs 8,500 people in Edinburgh.

1979 And All That: The Power of the BBC Consensus

There is a larger set of questions for Scottish and UK politics posed by this episode. How long are politicians in Scotland and the UK going to continue being defined and shaped by Thatcher and Thatcherism? For how long are we going to continue to allow them to act in the two-faced, hypocritical, talking one way and acting another manner towards the Thatcher legacy?

Alex Salmond inadvertently has hit a raw nerve with his recent comments. He has shown the lack of straightforwardness and honesty that lies within the SNP acceptance and continuation of Thatcherism, that is much like Labour’s. By doing so has exposed the narrowness of the SNP’s rationale as a party to the ‘left’ of Scottish Labour. 1979 was a long, long, long time: over a generation ago. Yet, its myths, folklores, triumphs and limitations still shape our politics, our political debate and political horizons and imaginations.

The current political, economic and social impasse has a direct linkage and causal relationship to the events and forces which emerged in 1979 and this cannot go on forever. However, no political settlement just collapses because of the weight of its own internal contradictions, but requires a counter-movement and set of stories. It took over thirty years before the previous watershed – 1945 – was challenged and overthrown. But that was part of an international, neo-liberal mobilisation for a new global arrangements. Despite the limitations of Thatcherism and flaws in the neo-liberal worldview, of which the ‘credit crunch’ is the latest example, we don’t yet have any countervailing economic and social strategy.

Instead, we still live in the world created by Thatcherism: the world of the BBC consensus: Blair, Brown and Cameron (with Alex Salmond providing a supporting role). It is aptly titled for it is comprehensively signed up to by the influential and powerful in the UK whether they are in politics, the corporate world or the media. The bandwidth of what is politically possible and imaginable is defined by these elites, and what passes for their commentary unquestioningly supports the present political, economic and social order.

We should be grateful to Alex Salmond for being relatively honest about this and scornful of the hypocrisy of those in the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats who want to deny their subordination to the Thatcherite hegemony. It is up to progressives and democrats of every and no party to challenge this state of affairs. We have to push and pull, dream and work, to devise new counter-movements and widen our political horizons and imaginations from their current straightjacket.

What does David Davis stand for? (Part 2)

JamieSW — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:52:56 +0000

This is the second of a two-part article examining the political history of Conservative MP David Davis, who resigned his parliamentary seat in protest at Labour’s terror legislation enabling 42 days’ detention without trial. Part one can be viewed here.

In concluding his speech on the campaign to abolish the National Dock Labour Scheme, the former director of Britain’s National Association of Port Employers, Nicholas Finney, explains:

“We knew that confrontation would be inevitable and when at last the government announced on the 5th April 1989 that they were going to repeal the dock labour scheme we knew we had won a famous victory. What we then had to do was put our plan of action into operation. We set out to achieve reform as fast as possible using a £35,000 redundancy payment provided by the government in its repeal bill, to break the strike and to shed labour. Under UK labour law you can actually dismiss workers lawfully providing you are not selective. If all workers are on strike you can say ‘either you come back to work or you are sacked.’ We were accused of ‘gangster tactics.’ Nevertheless, that was the threat and it certainly had a major effect on breaking the strike, because of the potential loss to the dockers of their £35,000 sterling redundancy payment.”

He then cites the accomplishments made after just one year:

“We had 9,221 dockers on April 5th 1989. In October 1990, there are less than 4,000 dockers left and many ports where there are no ex registered dockers at all. The restructuring of the labour force has been complete.”

He boasted that “We” had removed “all national agreements…all port agreements…all industry Conciliation and Arbitration procedures…developed entirely new work patterns, totally flexible shift patterns” and “introduced part time working/contracting out.”

“But,” he concludes, “I think the greatest of our achievements (and this is an achievement for the company as a whole) is that we destroyed for the foreseeable future the power of trade unions to hold the country to ransom by calling a national dock strike, which is so wrong for any democratically elected government. I think these achievements are worth learning from.”

There is not a word uttered by Finney from which Davis could legitimately attempt to distance himself. Whether he was one of the three MPs cited by Finney or not, he acted as “an influential voice in parliament” and as a member of the “influential political body,” the Centre for Policy Studies, to help wage the propaganda war against the dockers preceding the abolition of the National Docks Labour Scheme.

How David Davis wanted to criminalise strikes

David Davis next ventured into print for the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) in November 1989, with a pamphlet that went even further than his plans for the docks. Advocating a major assault on the democratic rights of working people, his objective was nothing less than to outlaw strikes altogether in vast areas of the British economy.

The CPS pamphlet, “The Power of the Pendulum” is subtitled, “Reducing strikes by ‘final offer’ arbitration.” In it, Davis writes of the “rumblings” that the government might face from a series of strikes in a “summer of discontent,” which were “symptoms of a dangerous factor in industrial relations—the great difficulty of reforming the state sector unions.”

By “reform,” Davis means preventing strikes. He complains that while strike activity was at its lowest level for 50 years in the private sector, public sector strikes had not declined to the same degree.

The need for “reform” was not mediated by privatisation, he argued, because the recently privatised companies still often enjoyed a large or monopolist position.

Between them, the “combined state sector and recently privatised monopolies…can effectively bring the country to a halt. They can impose vast losses on other people and other businesses. They employ six or seven million people, about a quarter of all employees; and for all these reasons their continued productivity is a proper cause of government concern.”

Davis’s solution is to make strikes illegal throughout this entire sector, while bringing in a system of compulsory arbitration. He favours what is termed “pendulum” arbitration. As opposed to conventional arbitration, where the arbiter decides on pay and conditions based on a consideration of the positions of management and unions—and usually decides a settlement somewhere in the middle ground, Davis wanted a decision backing either one or the other position. If they faced the “pendulum” swinging against them, he believed this would force the unions to make more “moderate” demands.

Davis makes clear that his call to illegalise strikes goes much further than legislation to prohibit strikes in what are usually described as essential services—a demand that has often been raised by the political right.

He writes, “It has been suggested, both in Parliament and outside, that essential services are the proper area for restriction of the strike weapon…. This paper addresses the issue from a slightly different angle, that of monopoly industries.”

Listing the scope of his proposal, he continues, “Water, obviously, qualifies as an essential service which is in effect a monopoly. So does the National Health Service. But what of gas, electricity, telephones and the postal service?... [T]his paper’s policy proposals are aimed at all monopoly suppliers, not just state sector or ‘essential services.’ ”

Davis rejects the right to strike

Civil liberties are often represented as individual rights that are inalienable to the citizen. But for working people, faced with the power of major corporations and the state, the preservation of individual democratic and civil liberties has always been bound up with the right to organise collectively in furtherance of common social and political interests.

The right to a decent standard of living meant challenging the tyranny of the owners of capital. It meant the right to organise in trade unions, to collectively bargain and to withdraw labour, if necessary through strike action. This in turn meant preventing not only the individual worker being victimised, but also the collective union body from being subject to attack by the employers or the state.

On the political front, the struggle for the right to vote led inexorably to the struggle to break the monopoly of the parties of big business. This meant, of necessity, to establish and fund a party that would represent working people.

This is the only way that civil liberties can be properly understood. But as far as Davis is concerned, these collective rights do not properly exist and can be done away with.

Davis always writes of the “right to strike” in quotation marks, arguing that “British law does not explicitly recognise a ‘right to strike.’ ”

Instead, he acknowledges only a “combination of immunities in civil and criminal law” that “render strikes a viable tactic for trade unions and workers under certain conditions” [emphasis added].

After briefly describing how in 1906 trade unions secured freedom from liability for losses occurred during strikes, he states that because of the damage they can inflict in monopolistic sectors this freedom from prosecution for liability should no longer hold.

He believes this should be the case not only regarding official strike action, but also when the union does not actively prevent unofficial wildcat action by effectively policing its members. Any no-strike legislation, he insists, “must be able to deal with this sort of difficulty: able to deter guerrilla action which is apparently (and often only apparently) leaderless…. We should recognise that a trade union is its membership. Therefore if it has the majority of the membership of the bargaining unit involved, and that bargaining unit takes disruptive action, then in the absence of effective action to put the matter right the union is guilty of a breach.”

He concludes, “Any union that breaks this constraint should face sequestration of its assets.”

To make the legislation even more far-reaching, he proposes that prosecutions “should recognise who is the real victim of such action; and allow customers of the service or industry to initiate the action for sequestration of assets.”

Thus, Davis wanted a situation in which any Tory party activist could initiate legal proceedings against a union taking strike action, paralysing or even bankrupting them.

David Davis—then and now

Davis and his defenders might argue that he no longer calls for these measures and, like the rest of the Tory Party, has suffered an acute attack of niceness. In reality, he does not make these issues his central concern because—as he argues in his only other CPS pamphlet, “Modern Conservatism,” written in 2005—the Tories have successfully dealt with “overweening union power.”

That is why he continues to hail Margaret Thatcher for having secured “our freedom from the threat of the Soviet Union” and “from socialism at home.”

Even in 1989, he was able to cite as examples that should be emulated the “single-union ‘no strike’ agreements,” and the industrial relations pursued by Japanese companies investing in Britain—which were signed with the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbers Union and Amalgamated Engineering Union, now part of Unite. He then noted that “more surprisingly, the GMB, TGWU and ISTC are also signatories to no-strike pendulum arbitration deals.”

Since 1989, the phenomenon of no-strike deals has proved to be only one manifestation of the transformation of the trade unions into an adjunct of corporate management. The imposition of no-strike legislation was not necessary, because trade unions hardly ever called a strike, ingratiating themselves with the employers during year after year of record low levels of industrial action.

Nevertheless, should the trade union bureaucracy prove unable to prevent an eruption of militant activity as a result of today’s worsening recession, Davis and the Tories, together with Labour, would not hesitate to impose the harshest sanctions they deem necessary. Even more likely, they will demand measures targeting anyone who leads an unofficial action outside the control of the trade unions.

It is not David Davis who has moved to the left, but the Labour “left” and erstwhile liberal milieu that have moved inexorably to the right. They have not met Davis on the political middle ground, or recruited him to the cause of civil liberties. Rather, they have ceded any claim to defend the basic democratic rights and essential social interests of the working class to the Tory party’s big business agenda. In the process, they have abandoned even the pretence of an independent political existence or purpose.

What does David Davis MP really stand for? (Part 1)

JamieSW — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:59:44 +0000

This is the first of a two-part article examining the political history of Conservative MP David Davis, who resigned his parliamentary seat in protest at Labour’s terror legislation enabling 42 days’ detention without trial. Part two will be published tomorrow.

Veteran Labour “left” Tony Benn, Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews, Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty and a plethora of liberal journalists from the Guardian and the Independent all hailed David Davis for leading a campaign in defence of civil liberties after his resignation triggered a by-election in Haltemprice and Howden.

The Socialist Equality Party stood Chris Talbot against this attempt to corral hostility to the Labour government behind Davis, advocating an independent socialist perspective to defend democratic rights. On the day of the vote, we explained, “The end product of allowing Davis to be identified as the leader of a supposedly non-partisan movement in defence of civil liberties is to maintain the exclusion of the working class from political life. At the very point where the necessity of breaking with Labour is becoming clear to millions of people, and when the most thoughtful layers are looking for a political alternative, workers are urged to either remain loyal to Labour despite everything or to back the Tories.”

Just what it means to lend credence to Davis’s pretensions to be a civil libertarian, and what the working class can expect from any government of which he is a part, is illustrated by his own writings.

Davis is hardly prolific when it comes to setting pen to paper. However, in the late 1980s, he did publish two pamphlets for the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) that refute any and all claims he and his newfound allies might now make for him to be a guardian of democratic rights. They make clear that as far as working people were concerned, Davis’s aim was to deprive them of any possibility of mounting an independent defence of jobs, wages and conditions.

In the name of “allowing management to manage,” he sought to both utilise and extend the draconian anti-union laws enacted by his party leader and political idol Margaret Thatcher in order to outlaw strikes and bust any unions that defied the Tories’ sweeping privatisation programme and the “rationalisation” of industry and public services, at the expense of thousands of jobs.

As someone representing a constituency adjoining the seaport of Hull, Davis centred his attention initially on plans to deregulate Britain’s docks.

In 1988, the then MP for Boothferry, largely merged into Haltemprice and Howden in 1996, published a pamphlet for the CPS, entitled, “Clear the Decks: Abolish the National Dock Labour Scheme.”

The National Dock Labour Scheme (NDLS) was first introduced by the Labour government in 1947, in response to the rank-and-file wildcat dock strike of 1945. The strike was opposed by the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), and the government used troops to keep the ports open. It ended after six weeks when the striking dockers accepted an assurance from the TGWU leaders that they would negotiate a “Dockers’ Charter” with the government.

The NDLS promised an end to casual labour by giving dockers the legal right to minimum work, holidays, sick pay and pensions. It was administered by a National Dock Labour Board, made up of equal representation from unions and management, and also gave the unions a veto over dismissals and control over recruitment.

Registered dockers who were laid off by any of the 150 firms bound by the scheme had to be taken on by another firm or be paid compensation. By the time of Davis’s pamphlet, employers at the 60 British ports were all covered by the scheme.

Davis wanted an end to this situation. Above all, he sought the destruction of dual union-management control, the guaranteed employment rights for Registered Dock Workers (RDW) and other protections. He denounced these measures as “restrictive practices.”

The preamble in his pamphlet declared, “This paper demonstrates how unjust and ludicrous existing legislation is. If Britain is to seize fully the economic opportunities which will be offered by the Single European Act after 1992, the Dock Labour Scheme must be abolished. Legislation must be brought forward to end the Scheme; and steps be taken by the Government to secure the profitable expansion of Britain’s ports industry in order to meet the demands of a single European Market with 320 million consumers.”

Davis complains that a docker fired by an employer could not then be prevented from working elsewhere in the industry without the agreement of the Local Board. He cites as an extreme case one worker who was convicted of “smuggling” but continued to work on the docks. He lists various “abuses” such as “bobbing or welting”—setting too high a figure for workers needed for a particular job so some “bob-off” home—and “Ghosting”—enforcing a non-registered dockworker carrying out work on the docks to be monitored by an RDW.

All of this is used to portray the registered dockers as a group of corrupt time-wasters, who should be dealt with for the benefit of everyone else. What he actually wanted was to impose massive job cuts and greater levels of exploitation and thereby secure bigger profits for his corporate friends.

Strike-breaking and union-busting

One passage is revealing in that it explains how Davis saw the attack on the dockers as a continuation of the destruction of Britain’s mining industry, after the defeat of the 1984-1985 miners’ strike. He states, “Another difficulty which arises from the Scheme is that the port employers can be powerless to prevent political strikes.”

He gives as his example a July 9 strike in 1984 at Immingham that escalated to a national strike, when the British Steel Corporation used non-registered dockers to unload iron ore. “In light of the miners strike,” he writes, “it was important for British Steel that the work should continue.”

The national strike was to continue until July 21. Davis was incensed, as this was a rare example of an industrial action breaking the spirit, if not the letter, of Tory anti-union laws prohibiting so-called secondary action: “This example shows how the TGWU is able to manipulate the Scheme for its own political purposes, in this case giving support to the miners.”

Apart from this incident, the TGWU, like the rest of Britain’s unions, never did challenge the anti-union laws and bring out their members in solidarity with the striking miners—who were isolated and defeated. In contrast, Davis was prepared to do whatever was necessary to defeat both the miners and the dockers, using the legal powers of sequestration against the TGWU to possibly bankrupt and break the union that earlier had been employed against the National Union of Mineworkers.

Davis anticipated that the TGWU would call a strike should the government determine to abolish the NDLS. He stressed that the combined effect of the anti-union laws and the propaganda campaign he played a part in would isolate the dockers, noting that if a strike were to involve non-scheme ports then it would be illegal:

“If the TGWU is to have immunity from civil actions for damages resulting from a dock strike, it would have to be recognised by the law as a ‘trade dispute’...if the eventual decision went against the TGWU it would risk a large fine and the possible sequestration of all its assets if it persisted with a strike.”

He continues,

“The legislation, however, on trade unions and industrial disputes brought in by this Government, has laid down that a sympathy strike, by definition, cannot be ‘in contemplation, or furtherance of a trade dispute.’ Therefore if the non-Scheme workers were called out on strike in sympathy with the Scheme port RDWs, the employers in the non-Scheme ports would be able to obtain injunctions against the trade unions involved and damages for any losses incurred.”

The National Dock Labour Scheme was finally abolished in 1989, the year after the publication of Davis’s pamphlet.

A revealing speech

The dockers came out on strike in July of that year, but this was defeated without the need to implement Davis’s full agenda.

However, a speech delivered in Australia in 1990 by the former director of Britain’s National Association of Port Employers, Nicholas Finney OBE, vividly describes the nature of the campaign waged against the dockers in which Davis played such a prominent role.

Finney describes how the port employers prepared for the abolishing of the Scheme:

“When the confrontation came, a number of important factors made a difference to the outcome…

“We held two major conferences before we were sure the government was actually ready and these conferences were to try to persuade employers to plan in advance how they would go about setting new working patterns, how they would set about breaking down the demarcation lines, how they would go about setting new pay agreements, new manning levels, etc. Fundamentally and long before the government repealed the scheme, we took the decision that the employers were going to abandon all national and port pay bargaining.

“The campaign was conducted through parliament by using every possible parliamentary device. Early day motions, adjournment debates, etc. We had three MPs who really acted as our voice in Parliament. They did all the hard work, they talked to the other MPs, they introduced briefing materials into the House of Commons, and we made sure that they were always well supplied with appropriate material.

“We talked to influential political bodies (like your own) such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, the No 10 Policy Unit, the Aims of Industry. We made sure that those people who really had influence in government were fully committed and would themselves talk to a wide range of people. It was too serious an issue to just leave to transport or employment ministers. We knew that it would be a Cabinet decision; we knew we had to get people like the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary on our side. So we used every political body which had influence. We also used the press and media. We constantly searched out and supplied the media with anti-docker stories, headlines such as ‘welcome return even if the man’s a thief’ or ‘ghosts who keep vanishing’; ‘twenty things you never knew about fiddling dockers,’ ‘they can’t be fired.’ These headlines were all designed to make it easier for the dockers to be isolated. By the time government acted every national newspaper at one time or another had published an editorial calling for the government to end the dock labour scheme.

“We had a Times columnist write headlines like ‘dock ages on the docks,’ ‘queer seaside customs,’ ‘legalised extortion racket,’ ‘time to end it,’ ‘block those dock rip offs.’ We also encouraged radio and television to do documentary programmes on the docks scandal.

“We commissioned economic studies. One particularly important economic study (and perhaps it is worth thinking of using in the Australian scenario) was to try and prove that by getting rid of the dock labour scheme, you actually create many more jobs than you lose. Getting rid of the restrictions on the waterfront meant a whole new world in ‘investment opportunity.’ We sought two benefits from this approach. One, to make it much more difficult for the Labour Party and for the unions to argue against repeal, and secondly to make sure we could drive a wedge home to isolate dockers and describe them as a selfish, small group of workers who were actually stopping people from gaining jobs in unemployment black spots which frequently were in under-developed city dock areas which had been derelict for many years.”

To be continued

Boris Johnson’s return to “traditional Tory values”

tim — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:16:01 +0000

It is only two months since the newly elected Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson promised he would, with a new broom, sweep clean the sleaze and corruption he declared characterised the outgoing administration under the Labour Party’s Ken Livingstone.

Johnson also proclaimed that his mayoralty would be a return to “traditional Tory values.” As it has turned out, it is this pledge that is being realised as his own administration has begun to fall apart amidst accusations of racism and the type of “sleaze and corruption” he promised to root out.

Last week, longstanding allegations of financial and sexual misconduct against deputy mayor Ray Lewis ended in his resignation, and forced Johnson to set up an inquiry.

The media hailed Lewis’s appointment as deputy mayor for young people as a shrewd move aimed at countering adverse reports of comments made by Johnson in an article on Tony Blair in which he referred to “picaninnies” with “watermelon smiles.”

Lewis’s Eastside Young Leaders Academy in Edmonton, London, and its “tough love” ethos of army-style drilling, religion, uniforms and discipline, was proclaimed as the real answer to gang-related violence.

In the past several days, however, it was revealed that the former Church of England Minister had had restrictions placed on his ministry because of a series of allegations of sexual and financial misconduct against parishioners. In 1993 he was accused of “sexually inappropriate behaviour” by two members of the congregation at St. Matthew’s, West Ham and he was banned from preaching for six years.

Two years later he was accused of failing to repay a total of £41,000 borrowed from three parishioners, though the investigation was subsequently dropped. Lewis also faces accusations of assaulting pupils at his academy, all of which he denies.

The Lewis resignation follows that of Johnson’s chief policy advisor, James McGrath. When asked by a journalist if Johnson’s election would provoke a flight of black Londoners back to the Caribbean, McGrath replied, “Well, let them go if they don’t like it here.”

Johnson mounted a feeble defence of both men, but then dropped them fairly quickly.

McGrath was chosen as an advisor by fellow Australian, Lynton Crosby, the architect behind Johnson’ electoral campaign who earlier spearheaded electoral campaigns for former Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

Central to the campaign was a barrage of allegations of misconduct against Livingstone and his leading aides. Almost daily, the conservative Evening Standard newspaper ran stories charging the Livingstone administration with corruption. This claimed its first scalp shortly before the election, when Lee Jasper—the focus of many of the unproven allegations of corruption—resigned his post as Senior Policy Advisor on Equalities following the leaking of sexually explicit emails he had sent to a female friend in an organisation that received funding from the Assembly.

However hostile a section of the Tory press was to Livingstone, he retained the backing of the City of London as its favoured candidate and also had the support of newspapers running the political spectrum from the Financial Times to the Guardian. It is a measure of the widespread resentment and hostility felt towards Labour—and towards Livingstone himself—that this failed to win him re-election and that Johnson’s posturing as “Mr. Clean” was partially successful.

Livingstone’s defeat coincided with the disastrous performance of Labour in the May 3 local elections, as the party continues to lose what remains of its working class base and is deserted by the better-off traditional Tory and “swing voters” it won in 1997.

Johnson benefited on both counts. Turnout among Labour supporters was down while Johnson successfully mobilised his own party’s “natural constituency.”

In addition, Labour’s reputation as a party of big business, sleaze, incompetence, authoritarianism and militarism could no longer be countered by Livingstone invoking his radical past. Labour promoted Livingstone’s support in the City of London, but the Greens, Respect Renewal and the Socialist Workers Party’s Left List, together with the Guardian, promoted him as the “progressive candidate” and sought to mobilise support in the inner-city areas, particularly amongst black and Asian workers.

But such claims could no longer be reconciled after two terms in which Livingstone made his peace with Labour after first being elected as an independent. He famously denounced striking London Underground workers as “selfish” and defended Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair after an Old Bailey jury convicted the Met of corporate failure over the killing of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes. Livingstone insisted there were no grounds for the resignation of this “incredibly talented officer,” stating that the court’s verdict might make stopping suicide bombers more difficult.

Anyone foolish enough to believe that Johnson’s would be the “clean hands” administration he had promised has soon been disabused. Johnson’s record since taking office has provided a glimpse of what can be expected.

Once in power, he quickly set about appointing his own cronies—an army of consultants and advisors—stating bluntly that “it is not intended that the fees for these (other) individuals will be made public.” Reports suggest that many will receive a salary of more than £100,000.

The chief executive of the London Development Agency (LDA)—which declares itself the “Mayor’s agency responsible for driving London’s sustainable economic growth”—was sacked and Harvey McGrath, former chairman of the hedge fund specialists the Man Group, nominated in his place.

A “forensic audit team” has been set up to investigate allegations of corruption in the LDA and Greater London Authority, headed by the former editor of the Sunday Telegraph Patience Wheatcroft, who had stirred up controversy after censoring a critical article about Conservative leader David Cameron.

Multimillionaire former asset stripper and private equity chief Tim Parker was made first deputy and chief executive, as well as being appointed the new chairman of Transport for London. Full delegated powers over major planning decisions were given to Ian Clement, an unelected advisor from Bexley Council, who became notorious for cutting the “meals on wheels” scheme for pensioners.

Johnson has appointed Simon Milton as director of planning, but had to backtrack after it was revealed that he is also chairman of the Local Authorities’ chief lobbying group. Although losing his title, he will still remain in Johnson’s office in the role of consultant.

Munira Mirza, a former radical, has arrived at the heart of a Tory administration as the new cultural advisor to the mayor, thanks to her opposition to “multiculturalism” and professions that the extent of “Islamophobia” is exaggerated. She writes for the Policy Exchange think tank, whose founder Nick Boles will likely work on marketing for the mayor along with Dan Ritterband, a former Saatchi & Saatchi advertising executive.

Policy Exchange, which is described as the most influential think tank “on the right,” is headed by Charles Moore, former editor of the Thatcherite Spectator magazine—a position held previously by Johnson. The organisation was embroiled in controversy only recently over allegations that documents it circulated to prove the influence of Islamic extremists in Britain’s mosques were fakes.

Once in office, Johnson swiftly implemented the right-wing policies outlined in his manifesto. Central to this agenda is to “beef up the police presence on our streets by increasing police numbers and cutting red tape at the Metropolitan Police Service.”

Within hours of his election, dozens of extra police were deployed to carry out random “stop and search” procedures across the city in “Operation Blunt 2,” exploiting the media frenzy over youth-related gun and knife crime in the last few months. This has not been addressed on the basis of tackling the wider issues of poverty, job opportunities and social inequality, but by increased police powers and a zero tolerance policing policy.

In a city with the dubious honour of having the most surveillance cameras in the world, Johnson has also promised more closed circuit TVs.

These initiatives closely parallel those undertaken by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, whose critics have argued that the fall in street crime had more to do with enrolling an extra 7,000 officers than with any strategic master-stroke, and that much crime simply moved to neighbouring districts. Bloomberg made a special visit to London’s City Hall to congratulate Johnson on his electoral victory, but the content of their meeting has remained strictly confidential.

Another indication of the real agenda of the new mayor is in his attitude to low-income earners. Johnson has cancelled the cheap oil deal Livingstone made with the Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez last year and declared that he will annul applications for cheap fares, which have benefited more than 80,000 Londoners on Income Support benefits. Livingstone used the deal as part of a handful of populist gestures to buttress his neo-liberal economic policies, making sure they did not conflict with the fundamental interests of the City of London, or compromise his record in promoting London as a magnet for global capital.

It is Livingstone and Labour that have paved the way for a deepening of the assaults they began on the working class in London, only now with Boris Johnson at the helm.

SEP speaks to voters in Cottingham and Willerby

tim — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:23:39 +0000

Chris Talbot is the candidate of the Socialist Equality Party in the July 10 by-election in the constituency of Haltemprice and Howden in the East Riding of Yorkshire. It was called following the resignation of sitting Conservative MP David Davis in protest at government “anti-terrorist” legislation enabling police to detain individuals for up to 42 days without charge.

Angela Morkos is a mature student at Hull University and lives in Cottingham.

“I am familiar with all the issues that people are standing for. The SEP stands for more or less what I agree with,” she said.

“I am against the war in Iraq, I don’t like big business and I think David Davis is mobilising right-wing policies in Britain. I watch the news on TV and I suspected this. And I would never trust a Conservative anyway, to be quite honest.”

Angela said she fully agreed with the SEP’s aim of preventing Davis mobilising the popular hostility to the Labour government for his own right-wing agenda. She explained that she opposed all the attacks on democratic rights carried out by successive Conservative and Labour governments.

“I think Gordon Brown has been disappointing. I supported Blair when he first came into power but I was disappointed over the Iraq war. I didn’t believe all this about weapons of mass destruction when I heard about it on the TV. I think it was a bit like Maggie Thatcher and the Falklands War, that Blair wanted to be the next Churchill. I think he had delusions of grandeur.

“Before this election I have tended to support Liberal Democrat policies in Parliament.”

Angela said that she wasn’t aware that the Liberal Party were not standing their own candidate and that they were calling for a vote supporting Davis. The SEP explained that this showed how far the Liberals have moved in a right-wing direction, that they can now support an avowed anti-working class politician such as David Davis.

Angela said she supported the fact that only the SEP was putting forward a coherent programme representing working class people.

In response to questions about the impact of the worsening economic crisis on working class people, Angela said, “I think it very worrying. I am on a low income. I feel that around here businesses exploit me. I am on Disability Living Allowance. I think there is a prejudice against people who are unable to work. I am doing my best and am actually studying to improve my situation and I find I am just exploited.

“All the basics are going up—milk, cheese, butter. I have to live on lentils basically and people lending me a couple of quid because they feel sorry for me. That is not very healthy and I’m anaemic as it is.

“Then there are dental charges and I don’t know how I am going to afford those. I also have to take regular medication and I am just glad that at least prescription charges are free at the moment for people on Disability Living Allowance.

“I think all this stems from Margaret Thatcher anyway. Tony Blair said that he agreed with her and I think it all worsened right from the beginning with her. And the governments after Thatcher have just continued in the same vein since then”.

Kate Webster is a retired doctor’s receptionist and lives in Cottingham.

Socialist Equality Party members and supporters campaigned in the villages Cottingham and Willerby on July 2 and a reporting team from the World Socialist Web Site spoke to workers, students and youth about the issues raised in the election.The WSWS reporting team asked her what she thought of David Davis, the Labour Party and their attitude to the question of democratic rights.

“I don’t think David Davis stands for democratic rights. I thought the Conservatives are always for the richer people aren’t they? What I can’t understand is him resigning and then trying to get re-elected. What is all that about?”

Katie agreed that both the Labour Party and the Conservatives are right-wing formations, hostile to the working class.

“I wouldn’t have voted for Davis and I think the Labour Party are too right-wing. I saw that the NSPCC [a national child protection organisation] was trying to get smacking stopped, but Davis wasn’t interested in that.

“I didn’t agree with the Iraq war. The Labour Party are more like capitalists now. They are giving themselves a great big raise and the credit crisis is not affecting their pay is it?

“There is no party now for the working class. I will read the SEP election statement and I will vote for Chris Talbot,” Katie said.

During the campaign in Cottingham several other local residents told the SEP that they had heard about the party’s campaign and would be supporting Chris Talbot. Among these was a currently unemployed bricklayer, who said that he had read the SEP election statement a few days ago and that he agreed with a revolutionary socialist programme. He said he would like further discussion on the role of new left formations in Europe and the Socialist Workers Party. He added that he was going to attend the Eve of Poll meeting being held by the SEP at Cottingham Civic Hall on July 9.

During the day Chris Talbot was filmed and interviewed by a student from the University of Sheffield who was covering the by-election as her final project.