Britain's Devastating Electoral Slip.

Slip-Sliding Away: Labour may now enjoy a dominant position in Britain’s political landscape, but only by virtue of not being swallowed by it.

THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY’S “landslide victory” is nothing of the sort. As most people understand the term, a landslide election victory is one in which the incumbent government, or its challenger, by the sheer force of its political appeal, sweeps its opponents from the field. Like the victims of a real landslide, the victims of an electoral landslide are buried by the decisive mass and unstoppable momentum of the voters’ mandate.

This is NOT what happened in the United Kingdom on 4 July 2024.

A much better way of describing what happened to the Conservative Government of Rishi Sunak is to utilise that very Kiwi word “slip”. The ground upon which the Tories had erected their political dominance simply slipped away from under them. Undermined by years of economic austerity and ideological polarisation, and jolted by politically irrecoverable corruption and incompetence. One minute the Conservatives were there, and the next minute they were gone, leaving Labour perched precariously on the slip’s edge. Labour may now enjoy a dominant position in Britain’s political landscape, but only by virtue of not being swallowed by it.

The raw numbers say it all. In 2019, the British Labour Party experienced its worst electoral defeat since 1935, attracting just 32.1 percent of the popular vote. At around sunrise on Friday 5 July 2024, when all the votes had been counted, the British Labour Party’s share of the popular vote had risen to 33.7 percent. But, thanks to the extraordinary unfairness of the UK’s First-Past-the-Post (FPP) electoral system, Labour’s one third of the vote had left it in possession of two thirds of the seats in the House of Commons.

Sir Keir Starmer is not the UK’s new Prime Minister because he won a landslide victory, but because the Conservative Party, quite simply, collapsed.

A Labour victory by default does not, however, satisfy the British Establishment’s requirement that UK governments be presented as positive expressions of the voters’ will – rather than a by-product of their bitter disillusionment and disgust. Uniformly, the British media have employed the landslide metaphor to legitimate Labour’s huge parliamentary majority. The British people have been told that they have handed their new government a decisive mandate, and that it is now their duty to let Starmer and his colleagues get on with the job.

Exactly what that job is is difficult to express with any clarity. It is important to bear in mind that the now governing party is not the Labour Party of Clement Attlee, or Harold Wilson, or even the “New Labour Party” of Tony Blair. What the British people have elected, wittingly or unwittingly, is “Changed Labour” – a political party which, according to its leader, is “unburdened by doctrine”. In the light of Starmer’s extraordinary admission, the only job which the Prime Minister and his new “Cabinet of all the talents” will be temperamentally equipped to get on with is the preservation of the status quo – which is a godawful mess.

As he sets out to clean up the mess that is contemporary Britain, Starmer has made it very clear to whatever remains of Labour’s beleaguered socialist factions, and even to the lack-lustre social-democrats of Blair’s New Labour, that he intends to be guided by the principle of “country before party”. This determination to lead a government that is at once non-ideological and unaccountable has raised no discernible hackles. Indeed, when openly enunciated by Starmer on Election Night these sentiments drew loud cheers from his audience of Labour activists. The acclamation of Starmer’s youthful supporters would appear to confirm the party’s full and final surrender to the political logic of technocracy. “Changed Labour” is an understatement.

But can a government of technocratic professionals possibly hope to win the support of the two-thirds of British voters who cast their ballots for other parties? Starmer may be reasonably confident of the Liberal Democrats’ backing in the years to come, ditto the Greens’. Not that he will need it. Not when his majority is greater than the seat tally of the Lib-Dems and Greens combined. It would be advantageous, however, if Starmer could point to a clear “progressive” majority across the UK, one that was broadly supportive of his government’s direction of travel. Fortunately, the combined vote share of the three progressive parties comes to 52 percent – a narrow majority, but a majority nonetheless.

Ranged against Starmer and his allies will be the 38 percent of voters who cast their ballots for the Conservatives (23.7 percent) and the UK Reform Party (14.3 percent). Of the two, it is Reform, Brexiteer Nigel Farage’s latest political vehicle, that constitutes the gravest threat to Starmer and his “changed” Labour Party. In spite of their leader’s claims, not all of Labour’s 411 MPs are unburdened by doctrine. Indeed, a great many of them hold rigidly ideological positions on immigration, gender, race, and the Israel-Gaza War. Farage and his colleagues (all four of them) will highlight the perceived extremism of Labour’s “identity politics” to drive a wedge into those same working-class constituencies that fell to the blandishments of Boris Johnson in 2019. Constituencies in which Reform polled impressively in 2024.

Farage has made no secret of his intention to “come after” Labour voters. He is confident that Starmer’s commitment to unscrambling a chaotic status quo, without upsetting the City of London and/or the Bank of England, can only result in the dangerous disillusionment of those many millions of Britons hopeful of being governed better, and with more compassion, by Labour than they were by the Tories. Though he doesn’t look like a fan of The Who, Farage’s message to the British working-class will be: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

And what of the biggest losers, the Tories? Down an astonishing 251 seats, reduced to a diehard rump of 121 MPs, and having lost nearly all their best and brightest leaders (and Liz Truss) in the “slip”. Where does the world’s most successful political party go now? And who will lead it there?

Looking back through the long career of the Conservative Party, it is clear that its remarkable ability to navigate the turbulent seas of British history is attributable largely to a clutch of colourful and proudly unorthodox navigators. Robert Peel, who broke his party to feed his people. Benjamin Disraeli, who, in forging “one nation” Toryism, bequeathed his party an enormously successful electoral formula. Stanley Baldwin, the successful industrialist whose death duties did for a feckless aristocracy more effectively than any cloth-cap socialist’s general strike. Winston Churchill, the narcissistic, grandiloquent turncoat who saved his country from fascism. Margaret Thatcher, who dared to unleash the atavism that lies in Toryism’s dark heart.

That person may not yet be seated in the House of Commons. But if and when the latest saviour of Conservatism finally takes their seat on the Opposition benches, they will be recognizable principally by how fully they embody the sentiments of G.K. Chesterton’s remarkable poem “The Secret People”:

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,

Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.

It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,

Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.

It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest

God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.

But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.

Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 8 July 2024.

Failing To Hold Back The Flood: The Edgy Politics of the Twenty-First Century.

Coming Over The Top: Rory Stewart's memoir, Politics On The Edge, lays bare the dangerous inadequacies of the Western World's current political model.

VERY FEW NEW ZEALANDERS will have heard of Rory Stewart. Those with a keen eye for the absurdities of politics may recognise the name as that of the hapless Tory cabinet minister who fronted for David Cameron’s government during the catastrophic British floods of 2015. It was Stewart who, glumly – and hilariously – informed the news media that: “[T]he flood walls are working well. The only problem is that the water is coming over the top.”

Not the sort of line that is easy for anyone, let alone a politician, to live down. Perhaps surprisingly, Stewart did recover from his prize-winning clanger and went on to hold many more ministerial portfolios under Cameron and Teresa May.

Boris Johnson, however, was a force of nature Stewart couldn’t survive – even if he’d wanted to. When the extreme Brexiters forced May to resign, Stewart offered himself as the sane alternative to Johnson. Roundly rejected by his fellow Tories, Stewart was then cast out of the Conservative Party altogether by the unforgiving Johnson.

Fascinating though Stewart’s career may have been, the only reason he is again being talked about is because he has written an unusually effective memoir entitled “Politics on the Edge”, in which he lays bare the dangerous inadequacies of the working model of politics currently in use across the Western world. In a powerful essay for the Guardian newspaper, published over the weekend, Stewart summarises the working assumptions of that model:

“The polling graphs, which had brought Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to victory, looked like bell jars with the votes heaped in the centre, and few at the extremes. This era had left a whole generation of politicians with three assumptions: that liberal global markets were the answer to prosperity; that prosperity would spread democracy; and that the world would be governed by a liberal global order.”

With our own general election less than a month away, it is alarming how much of New Zealand’s politics is still governed by these three assumptions. Certainly, National and Labour, the two major parties, in whom close to two-thirds of the voters place their trust, have yet to demonstrate, in either their political demeanour, or their policy platforms, any convincing evidence that they concur with Stewart’s assessment that since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 “all this has changed”.

Equally alarming is how closely Stewart’s experiences as a cabinet minister chime with what so many close observers of New Zealand politics have reported about the behaviour of our own executive branch of government. There is an ominous familiarity about Stewart’s reflections on the way contemporary politics is conducted:

“I had discovered how grotesquely unqualified so many of us, including myself, were for the offices we were given ….. It was a culture that prized campaigning over careful governing, opinion polls over detailed policy debates, announcements over implementation.”

That last sentence, in particular, could serve as the epitaph of the Sixth Labour Government.

Stewart’s most frightening observation, however, concerns the reckless excavation of the once proud mound of centre-ground:

“The old bell jar opinion poll, with the votes in the centre, [has] been replaced by a U-shape with the votes at the extremes.”

While New Zealand has yet to experience the extreme polarisation to which the United States has fallen prey, there exists a level of dissatisfaction with the way politics is being conducted that could easily be exploited by a populist politician less benign than Winston Peters and more effective than Brian Tamaki.

That such a figure has not arisen, either here or in the United Kingdom, bears out Stewart’s observations concerning the general level of knowledge and competence possessed by the political classes of most western democracies.

Certainly, it is hard to argue with his general thesis that because there continues to be broad agreement among the political and financial elites about how a twenty-first century society and economy should be run, our ideologically redundant politicians now vie with one another for the coveted title of “person the ordinary voter would most enjoy having a drink with”. Stewart would be the first to concede that, in the political celebrity stakes, Boris Johnson is without peer. What his Guardian essay (not to mention Johnson’s and our own Jacinda Ardern’s careers) make clear, however, is that celebrity is not enough.

The fascist leader, Benito Mussolini was much admired by middle-class Britons for making the notoriously unreliable Italian trains run on time. What was deemed admirable in the 1920s is making a resurgence in the 2020s. Democracy is entering that extraordinarily dangerous political space where a political ideology becomes inextricably associated with failure.

It is the principal reason for the Russian people’s troubling indifference (some would say contempt) for democratic values. In their minds, the global elites’ promotion of freedom, democracy and neoliberal capitalism coincided with the simultaneous collapse of Russia’s national prestige and their own personal well-being. Vladimir Putin’s popularity is due, in no small measure, to his success in restoring a fair measure of both.

Similarly, Donald Trump’s enduring political clout arises from his ability to make the degraded white American working-class feel proud again. Democracy is for college kids, sneer the Deplorables, apparently unaware that for a frightening proportion of woke college kids, democracy is also an over-rated political system.

Democracy’s steady retreat across the globe has left the moderate Tory, Stewart, reaching for such NGO panaceas as citizens’ assemblies and grass-roots, self-help initiatives. He is plenty smart enough, however, to know that these are nowhere near enough. What he, and a great many moderate politicians like him, are struggling to come up with is a democracy that works.

It’s not easy. This is how he describes the fork in the road at which he, a cabinet minister still in possession of a working brain and conscience, eventually arrived:

“I found myself struggling to produce policies that were other than either a grey compromise between past ideals and the populist present, or policies of the new right, cloaked in the language of the old centre. I acknowledged that the liberal consensus had failed to support manufacturing, adequately regulate the financial industry or invest appropriately in areas such as the north-east. But I struggled to come up with an alternative that did not echo Jeremy Corbyn’s nostalgia for the borrowing, protectionism and subsidies of the 70s.”

Which, depressingly, is where New Zealanders still in possession of a working brain and conscience find themselves struggling, just 26 days out from the General Election of 2023.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 18 September 2023.

Second Time Around.

Cynical Assumptions: British Prime Minister Liz Truss and her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, appeared to be operating on the cynical assumption that there is insufficient historical memory available to the British political class for anyone to recall that her “supply-side economics” remedy has been applied, off-and-on, and always catastrophically, for more than 40 years.

THAT LIZ TRUSS AND KWASI KWARTENG were surprised at the dramatic reaction to their “Mini-Budget” is, in itself, surprising. After all, the contents of Kwarteng’s package had been “trailed” through the news media for weeks. The financial markets, it was fondly assumed by the British Prime Minister’s advisers, had already “built-in” her government’s policies. Their shocked reaction to the markets’ shocked reaction is readily imagined.

In many respects, what has been on display in the United Kingdom over the past few weeks is a disturbing contest of cynicisms.

Truss and her team were operating on the cynical assumption that there is insufficient historical memory available to the British political class for anyone to recall that her “supply-side economics” remedy has been applied, off-and-on, and always catastrophically, for more than 40 years.

Meanwhile, the financial markets were operating on the equally cynical assumption that Truss could not possibly be serious, and that her commitment to tax-cuts in the midst of double-digit inflation and a cost-of-living crisis was just one of those things you say on the campaign trail, and then immediately jettison once in power. That the Prime Minister and her Chancellor of the Exchequer would actually go ahead and blow-up the UK economy was totally unexpected – and the Pound paid the price.

Viewed dispassionately, what is most shocking about this contest of cynicisms is how little impact the experiences of the last three years have made on both the political and financial elites.

The global Covid-19 pandemic, and the measures adopted to resist it, should have made Truss’s disinterment of supply-side economics (also known as Thatcherism, Reaganism, Rogernomics, and neoliberalism) the object of risible laughter. Beating the pandemic – and saving the global economy – had been achieved by printing money in huge quantities, spending it like a sailor on shore-leave, and then upping the state’s revenue collection capabilities to prevent the wallowing economic ship from capsizing and sinking.

In other words, by adopting the very measures supply-side economists have spent the last 50 years warning politicians against.

Truss and her fanatical Tory friends should also have come away from the pandemic with the vital importance of building and maintaining social cohesion seared into their political consciousness. If the ethical case for looking after the people somehow eluded her, Truss should at least have been educated by the fate of her predecessor. Having won an historic election victory on the strength of becoming the “People’s Tory”, Boris Johnson came to grief by being exposed as a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do kind of guy.

“Levelling-up” had proved to be a winning slogan for the British Conservatives. Grinding-down is proving considerably less popular. It takes a great deal to put the Sir Keir Starmer-led Labour Party 33 percentage points ahead of the Conservatives, but Truss’s mini-budget rose to meet the challenge!

New Zealand’s own conservatives, represented in the National and Act parties, have shown as little interest in learning anything from the last three years as their British counterparts. They do, however, appear to be quite keen on taking instruction from the same right-wing think-tanks as the Tories.

Christopher Luxon demonstrated this pedagogical relationship by turning up to a meeting of the Policy Exchange – one of the big-three UK ideology factories alongside the Centre for Policy Studies (Thatcher’s baby) and the Institute of Economic Affairs (Truss’s current Svengali). Keen, perhaps, to show his hosts that he, too, possessed the requisite hard-nosed ideological chops, Luxon declaimed against a New Zealand business community that was “getting soft and looking to the government for all their answers.” The conservative government he intends to lead by the end of 2023 will be all about “unleashing enterprise”.

How? Well, this is where it all gets just a little bit embarrassing. Luxon’s formula for success turns out to be exactly the same as Truss’s: cut taxes, restrain government spending, reduce the regulatory burden on private enterprise. In short, Luxon’s National Party is re-dedicating itself to the precepts of supply-side economics.

Not surprisingly, the sharply negative reaction of the British financial markets to Truss’s resurrection of Thatcherism, has prompted questions here about Luxon’s revivification of the economic and social policies of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. National’s critics point to the obvious similarities in the two parties’ programmes, and are pressing Luxon to explain why their similar content will not produce similar results.

The Opposition’s right-wing allies have been quick to play down the similarities between the policy frameworks of Truss and Luxon. According to one economist, they are as different as “chalk and cheese”. National’s tax-cuts, for example, are much smaller when presented as a percentage of New Zealand’s GDP. Neither do New Zealand consumers yet require the massive subsidies lavished on the UK’s industrial and domestic energy suppliers to keep the home gas-fires burning.

Even so, the general shape of National’s policy platform conforms – at least in ideological terms – with that of Truss and Kwarteng. Further enriching those at the summit of the income pyramid is held, as a matter of faith, to be the necessary first step towards re-igniting capital investment, labour productivity and economic growth. Paradoxically, the utter failure of these measures to generate growth in the short term is taken as proof that they are working.

As anyone who was paying attention as supply-side economics was being imposed here in New Zealand during the late-1980s will recall, Kiwis were constantly being enjoined to endure “short-term pain for long-term gain”. Never mind that the ill-fated “New Zealand Experiment”, like the equally disastrous “Kansas Experiment”, produced the opposite of what was promised. They simply hadn’t been given the necessary time to bear fruit.

Those undergoing the transition from “the failed policies of the past” to the neoliberal nirvana of the future, had to be prepared to “stay the course”. In the long run, the supply-siders policies were bound to work. The problem being, of course, that, in the words of the now despised economist, John Maynard Keynes: “In the ‘long run’, we’re all dead.”

It remains to be seen whether Truss possesses the single-minded tenacity of her hero, Margaret Thatcher, who, when pressured to reverse her hard-line policies, famously taunted her critics: “You turn if you want to, the Lady’s not for turning.” One suspects, however, that Truss is living proof of Karl Marx’s observation that History repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Supply Side Economics has always been bogus: economically, mathematically, politically and morally. It has never been anything more than a screen behind which the wealthiest are protected at the expense of the poorest.

But, as the saying goes: “Fool me once, shame on you: fool me twice, shame on me.”

Truss and Luxon seem to have forgotten that the British and the New Zealand people have seen this movie before. They know how it ends. Second time around, they may not be quite so willing to pick up the tab.

POSTSCRIPT: On Monday, 3 October (GMT) Kwasi Kwarteng executed a “screeching U-turn” and abandoned his promise to abolish the top-rate of UK Income Tax. The rest of his supply-side package remains intact, however, raising the wicked thought that the tax-cuts-for-the-wealthiest bit might have been included in his mini-budget for the express purpose of being discarded later ..... under pressure. Are the Tories really that cynical? Is the Pope a Catholic? 

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 3 October 2022.

Is Corbyn Allowing Yesterday’s Enemies To Win Again?

The Ghost Of Futures Passed: Does Jeremy Corbyn have the political ability to rise above his preoccupation with Labour’s past? Can he recast himself as the progressive champion of the UK’s European future? That would require him to align himself unequivocally with the Remainers by forcefully demanding a second referendum. It’s a big ask. But, surely, he understands that those who hesitate to climb on board History’s bus when it pulls up at their stop invariably get left behind.

JEREMY CORBYN’S fatal political error has been to look over his shoulder rather than over the horizon. As is so often the case with politicians who have had their party’s agenda wrenched from their hands by ideological rivals pursuing radically different goals, the temptation to start again from where they were forced to leave off is very strong. The 1980s Labour Party of Michael Foot and Tony Benn – the lodestars of Corbynism – was taken over and completely reshaped by Tony Blair in the 1990s. Rolling back Blairism and resuming Labour’s march towards democratic socialism has always been Corbyn’s mission. It was not, however, the mission imposed upon Labour by the relentless march of events. That, it turns out, is Brexit.

Corbyn has always been deeply conflicted by the evolution of the European project. Originally conceived as a means of preventing the powerful nations of Western Europe from ever again going to war with one another, the European Economic Community (EEC) had much to commend it. Its transformation, from the EEC into the European Union (EU), changed perceptions considerably. What began as an essentially social-democratic dream has morphed into what more and more leftists have come to regard as a neoliberal nightmare.

This trajectory (from social-democracy to neoliberalism) was, of course, mirrored in the domestic histories of practically all of the EU’s member states. Corbyn’s assessment, that a rejection of neoliberalism in the UK would be next-to-impossible if it remained an EU member, made him a very tepid advocate of his party’s official policy of encouraging Labour supporters to vote “Remain” in the 2016 Referendum. That so many of Labour’s heartland constituencies favoured the “Leave” option didn’t make things any easier.

Theresa May’s doomed attempt to increase the Conservative Party’s majority in the House of Commons by calling a snap-election in 2017, poured almost as much acid on the Leader of the Opposition as it did on the Prime Minister. Labour’s astonishing electoral performance was partly fuelled by its immensely popular “For the Many, Not the Few” manifesto, which, like Bernie Sander’s “democratic socialist” platform of the previous year, inspired and enthused tens-of-thousands of young, well-educated, but economically marginalised, voters. Mostly, however, Labour’s success was built on these younger voters’ conviction that Labour represented a forward-thinking alternative to the Tories’ reactionary “Little Englander” Brexiteers.

In the minds of the only voters that truly mattered – the ones who would spend most, if not all, of their lives in the Twenty-First Century – Labour stood for an open-hearted, multicultural and European future. If Labour wanted to endure as a viable political force (rather than a declining legacy party of Britain’s industrial past) then it had no choice but to make those young voters’ perceptions reality. Tragically, Corbyn was too mired in the politics of the Twentieth Century to rise to the challenge. Rather than lead the debate against Brexit; rather than mobilise his young supporters behind the call for a second referendum; Corbyn equivocated – and thereby surrendered the initiative.

What is currently unfolding in the UK is the direct consequence of Corbyn’s error.

Any politician who can count has worked out that for the Prime Minister to secure her “Brexit Deal” all she has to do is run down the clock to the point where the Labour Party – absolutely opposed to the UK “crashing-out” of the EU with no deal – is left with no alternative except to give May what she wants.

If Labour swings-in behind May’s deal, the Tory Brexiteers’ leverage instantly disappears. Would the humiliation of being outmanoeuvred by May and Corbyn cause the Brexit hardliners in the European Research Group to split the Tories? Of course! But the sheer intractability of the Brexit crisis has for some time indicated that some sort of break-up of the Conservative Party is unavoidable. It seems pretty clear that May accepts this. Willing to settle for the historical legacy of being the PM who fulfilled her “sacred duty” to take the UK out of the EU, May seems ready to ‘retire hurt’: limping, but with her head held high.

With the Conservative Government hopelessly divided, and May’s parliamentary majority in tatters, a new election becomes inevitable. Nothing could better please Jeremy Corbyn and his followers. With the Tories torn and bleeding, Labour would be swept to victory. Safely removed from the EU’s clutches, the battle against British neoliberalism could then begin in earnest.

This is the terrifying prospect that caused first the Labour Right, and then the Tory Left, to step forward as the vanguard of a new electoral force conceived to achieve two, brutally simple, strategic objectives. The first: To prevent, by any means necessary, Corbyn’s democratic-socialist Labour Party from taking power. The second: To secure, with all possible speed, the UK’s membership of, or re-admission to, the EU.

What the world is currently witnessing in the UK, is the “pre-emptive split” that simply has to happen if the looming, uncontrolled, disintegration of the British Right, and the left-wing victory such an unmediated break-up will permit, is to be circumvented.

As always, to save the Right, the Left has first to be rendered electorally harmless. Look, then, for the rise of a British version of Emanuel Macron’s “Le Republique En Marche” – a media-driven, City of London-funded, manifestation of the so-called “radical centre”.

It’s not as if such a re-alignment has never happened before. To get the UK through the Great Depression of the 1930s, without capitulating to the far-Right or the far-Left, required the formation of a “National Government” – led initially by the renegade Labour Leader, Ramsay MacDonald, but held up by the votes of the shires. The Labour Party proper was reduced to an impotent parliamentary rump. It required the massive social and economic upheavals of the Second World War to restore Labour to electoral competitiveness.

Clearly, there is still a great deal to do before this unfolding political re-alignment can be brought to a satisfactory conclusion. What its organisers need most is time.

And time, strangely enough, is precisely what the EU leader, Donald Tusk, appears to be offering Theresa May. The last thing the EU’s German and French masters want to see is a securely entrenched democratic-socialist government unsettling the people of Europe from the other side of the English Channel. The EU looks set to give the UK’s political class all the time it needs to prevent such a dangerous development.

Does Corbyn have the political ability to rise above his preoccupation with Labour’s past? Can he recast himself as the progressive champion of the UK’s European future? That would require him to align himself unequivocally with the Remainers by forcefully demanding a second referendum. It’s a big ask. But, surely, he understands that those who hesitate to climb on board History’s bus when it pulls up at their stop invariably get left behind.

In the end, Corbyn’s obsession with fighting yesterday’s battles may only make it easier for yesterday’s enemies to win again.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Sunday, 24 February 2019.

Theresa May – Disraeli’s “One Nation” Disciple?

Disrael's Disciple? Just hours before she discovered that she had become the next tenant of No. 10 Downing Street, this stern daughter of the vicarage, the woman who warned Conservatives against becoming “the nasty party”, was addressing the Conservatives of Birmingham. So radically “One Nation” was May’s speech, both in tone and content, that the veteran Guardian columnist, Jonathan Freedland, accused her of placing “several tanks on to what should be Labour’s lawn”.

 

IS IT A GOOD THING, or a bad thing, that politicians no longer write novels? Given Steven Joyce’s recent problems with Twitter, the politicians themselves would probably say it’s a very good thing indeed. If Mr Joyce could cause his party so much trouble with 140 characters, then just imagine how much damage he could do with 140 pages!

 

There was, however, one novelist who turned out to be a simply splendid politician. Long before the days of the Internet, television, radio, or even the rotary press, one Benjamin Disraeli used the novel form to talk about politics in a novel way.

 

It has long been said that if you want to tell the truth – write fiction. In his 1845 novel, Sybil, Disraeli constructed a conversation in which his truth-telling fictional characters inspired a whole new movement in conservative politics.

 

A young aristocrat by the name of Charles Egremont declares confidently that Great Britain is “the greatest nation that ever existed”, only to be set straight by a young working-class firebrand, Walter Gerard.

 

In reality, says Gerard, there are:

 

“‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.

 

‘You speak of –‘ said Egremont hesitatingly

 

‘The RICH and the POOR.’”

 

Benjamin Disraeli - The Founder of "One Nation" Conservatism.



 

It was Disraeli who first perceived the political impossibility of a Conservative Party dedicated to the maintenance of such glaring social divisions. By 1845 it was clear that the widening of the franchise, begun 13 years earlier with the passage of the Great Reform Act, was an irreversible process. Eventually all adult males (and, who knew, females too!) would have the vote. A party dedicated to the interests of the Egremonts exclusively could not hope to hold office. Disraeli understood that the future of conservatism in Great Britain could only be guaranteed if the Tory party first learned how to fashion – and then govern – a single nation.

 

Thus was born “One Nation Conservatism”.

 

One-hundred-and-seventy-one years after the publication of Sybil, Britain’s new Prime Minister, Theresa May, shows every sign of uplifting Disraeli’s fallen mantle and draping it fetchingly around her shoulders.

 

Just hours before she discovered that she had become the next tenant of No. 10 Downing Street, this stern daughter of the vicarage, the woman who warned Conservatives against becoming “the nasty party”, was addressing the Conservatives of Birmingham.

 

So radically “One Nation” was May’s speech, both in tone and content, that the veteran Guardian columnist, Jonathan Freedland, accused her of placing “several tanks on to what should be Labour’s lawn”. Indeed, had the beleaguered Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, delivered such a speech it would have been received as further proof of his unelectability.

 

Here’s a sample: one Disraeli, himself, could have written:

 

“This is a different kind of Conservatism … It marks a break with the past. But it is in fact completely consistent with Conservative principles. Because we don’t just believe in markets, but in communities. We don’t just believe in individualism, but in society. We don’t hate the state, we value the role that only the state can play. We believe everybody – not just the privileged few – has a right to take ownership of what matters in their lives.”

 

In that single paragraph, Britain’s second female Prime Minister has turned on its head the “there’s no such thing as society” credo of its first. May’s Birmingham speech signals a new departure for the Conservative Party; and her direction of travel, in part an acknowledgement of the intense feelings that drove Brexit, threatens to outflank her Labour opponents – from the Left.

 

The fratricidally distracted Left may not have noticed it yet, but the Financial Times’ Janan Ganesh certainly has:

 

“She is not a reactionary. Nobody who sensed the perceived nastiness of her party as early as 2002, as she did, and challenged the police as often as she has, could be. But if Tory history pits the spirit of freedom against the claims of social order, the one periodically dominating the other before giving way, she might herald the latter’s resurgence … Free-marketeers, gird yourselves.”

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 July 2016.

Revolution In The UK? Jeremy Corbyn And The Matter Of Britain.

Oh But I Was So Much Older Then I'm Younger Than That Now: In just a few, tumultuous weeks Britain has found itself cast into a political version of Life on Mars. Questions that have not been put to those in power for 40 years are about to be asked again – and by a man who, unbelievably, was there the first time around and remembers them all.

 

AND SO IT BEGINS. According to that house-journal of the British Conservative Party, The Telegraph: “John Mills, Labour’s biggest private donor, said he would stop giving money to the party in the wake of Mr Corbyn’s election and instead fund the MPs plotting to oust him.”

 

The response of the British Establishment could hardly be clearer. Be it Mr Mills and his millions, or the Blairite heavy-hitters who have resigned their front-bench positions rather than serve under a socialist leader, the men and women who have worked so long and so hard to deny British voters a genuine choice between alternative futures, are peeling away from Corbyn in anticipation of all-out war.

 

Looking back through British history, it is difficult not to seize upon the moment when King Charles I, accompanied by his family, and joined by his closest political allies, deserted London for the Royalist stronghold of Oxford. It was there that he raised the Royal Standard against England’s Parliament – thereby setting in motion the English Revolution, and a civil war that would kill more Britons – per head of population – that World War I.

 

Over the top? Maybe. But only “maybe”. Because, whether they realise it or not, the quarter-of-a-million Britons who voted for Jeremy Corbyn were also voting for revolution in the UK.

 

Revolution? Really? Yes, “really”. What else would you call a political project committed to toppling the economic and social status quo? A project determined to roll back 30 years of neoliberalism? A project which openly proclaims its objective of bringing into being a mass, nationwide movement for radical social democracy – and equipping it with state power?

 

Some people get it. Here, for example, is the response of Rob Williams from the National Shop Stewards [union delegates] Network: “‎The victory yesterday by Jeremy Corbyn has changed everything. The vote we saw yesterday was a political revolution. We must build a mass movement against austerity and the anti-union laws. The message must be simple – Cameron: we are going to take you down. Your anti-union bill and your cuts, you’re going down because we are mobilising against you.”

 

And then there’s this, from Mark Serwotka from the powerful Public and Commercial Services Union: “If we are going to see any of those policies realised, we will not get that just through what Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party do in Parliament. If Jeremy Corbyn wants to win on those policies, he absolutely needs a mass vibrant movement in the country… He needs the six-and-a-half million trade union members to ensure that we have that vibrant campaign through strikes, demonstrations, local campaigns, occupations and everything else ….. We have the ability to stop austerity in its tracks, to topple this government and to ensure we get a fairer society.”

 

It is statements such as these that prompted the British Prime Minister’s, David Cameron’s, terse response to the Corbyn landslide. “The Labour Party is now a threat to our national security, our economic security and your family’s security.”

 

Just pause for a moment and absorb the meaning of those words. Think about all the other individuals and groups which, over the decades, have been described as “a threat to national security”. Recall, if you can, the sorts of measures the British “secret state” (most particularly, MI5) felt entitled to take against these many and various “threats”.

 

Were they not long out-of-print, I would recommend two books – Smear! Wilson and the Secret State, by Stephen Dorrill and Robin Ramsay, and The Wilson Plot: How the Spycatchers and Their American Allies Tried to Overthrow the British Government, by David Leigh – as useful guides to the likely fate of any Labour leader who steps beyond the boundaries of what the British Establishment deems to be politically acceptable. Alternatively, you could watch the excellent 2006 BBC docudrama The Plot Against Harold Wilson – which covers much the same ground.

 



 

The events described in the books and the docudrama all took place the 1970s. Jeremy Corbyn was a young man in his 20s when the decade began. As a middle-class boy steeped in the history and traditions of the Left (his parents had met each other in the Spanish Civil War!) Corbyn soon gave up the life of a half-hearted Polytech student to become a trade union organiser. Living in the capital city through the drama of the 1973 Miners Strike; the fall of Edward Heath’s Tory Government; the sudden resignation of Harold Wilson; the IRA’s bombing campaign on the British mainland; the tragic 1978-79 “Winter of Discontent”; and the ominous rise of Margaret Thatcher; he could hardly fail to absorb the political lessons of that most querulous and perilous of decades.

 

Perhaps it was the fact that he did not go to university that saved Corbyn from the trahison de clercs  that saw the CPGB stalwarts behind Marxism Today end up singing the praises Tony Blair’s “new times”. Then again, it might simply have been the grounding effect of his day-to-day trade union work. Whatever it was that steered him clear of “New Labour’s” siren song, Corbyn remained true to the mass-based, radically democratic and very public politics of the era in which he came of political age.

 

He had seen this politics at work on the streets, in the factories and down the pits, and he had realised how much it frightened the powers that be. He’d also witnessed the lengths to which those same powers would go to demobilise and demoralise the ordinary people who are the only reliable drivers of progressive economic and social change. If Jeremy Corbyn’s politics were forged in the 1970s, they have been well-tempered in the treacherous decades that followed.

 

Labour’s new leader, and his enemies, are both acutely aware of the power of the political genie the party’s leadership election has released. In just a few, tumultuous weeks Britain has found itself cast into a political version of Life on Mars. Questions that have not been put to those in power for 40 years are about to be asked again – and by a man who, unbelievably, was there the first time around and remembers them all. They are not easy questions – many of Corbyn’s younger followers have never heard them asked before – and the answers are likely to prove painful for many and, for a few, very costly. But only in the asking, and the answering, of these, the most fundamental of questions: about Justice, and Equality, and Liberty, and Love; can the Matter of Britain be moved forward.

 

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green:

And was the holy Lamb of God

On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

 

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among those dark Satanic Mills?

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 14 September 2015.

UKIP's Genteel Xenophobia.

Loudly Defending "Little England": Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) is the product of Thatcherism's elimination of the threat of Labour's "socialism" and the trade unions' "communism". Their greatest fears allayed, the Little Englanders are now voicing their xenophobic antipathy to globalisation and its consequences.

 

IN LESS THAN A MONTH the people of the United Kingdom will have a new government. Depending on how the votes fall, one of the key figures in that new government could be Nigel Farage – leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).

 

Frequently interviewed outside a traditional English pub, pint of beer in hand, Mr Farage has spent a decade perfecting his populist political persona: that of the loud, but fearless, member of the local golf club who isn’t afraid to call a guest-worker a “bloody foreigner” – and political correctness be damned!

 

UKIP claims to speak for “Little England” – think Hobbiton with Range Rovers – a place where retired small businessmen and local branch managers keep their suburban hedges neatly trimmed, and their little squares of lawn as closely shaved as their own ruddy cheeks. Safe within the confines of the golf-club, or down at their local, these Little Englanders grouse and grumble about what they see as their country’s slow dissolution in the acidic cosmopolitanism of the despised European Union (EU) and the caustic demographic backwash of Britain’s long lost Empire.

 

The success with which Nigel Farage has given voice to this genteel suburban xenophobia has the British Conservative Party running scared.

 

Time was when Little England’s visceral fear of the “socialists” in the Labour Party, and the “communists” in the trade unions, was sufficient to keep them safely inside the Tory Party’s big tent. But thanks to Margaret Thatcher (the woman Little Englanders would canonise if they could) the great left-wing bogeymen of the 50s, 60s and (especially) the 1970s have been reduced to things of vinegar and brown paper. Ed Miliband undoubtedly possesses many talents, but the ability to frighten Tories isn’t one of them.

 

With the Left no longer strong enough to keep the Right united, the natural fissures within British conservatism have grown wider.

 

Little England and UKIP wishes their beleaguered country could look like Inspector Barnaby’s Midsomer (minus the lethal homicide rate). Theirs would be a land of picturesque cottages, thriving high-street shops and large Anglican congregations. A world in which everybody’s white, nobody’s red, and blue is still the colour you call true. UKIP and Little England have no time for the EU’s circle of stars; no time for the Euro; and no time for the tens-of-thousands of “bloody foreigners” pouring across the English Channel.

 

In their heart-of-hearts they must know that their Little England has never existed outside the pages of Agatha Christie’s whodunits. What made England – and Britain – “great” were her factories, her cities and her highly-skilled working-class. William Blake’s “green and pleasant” England is a place rooted in “ancient time” – one that is quite incompatible with the “dark Satanic Mills” that have made the Britain of modern times so prosperous and heroic.

 

For all its aristocratic heritage and old-Etonian chic, the modern British Conservative Party was built by Stanley Baldwin, a Big England iron-and-steel industrialist who understood that if British capitalism showed itself to be incapable of sustaining a prosperous and growing middle-class, then its much larger (and considerably less prosperous) working-class would, eventually, put an end to it.

 

Little England may have loved Margaret Thatcher for smashing Labour and the unions, but it never really grasped the fact that the Left was not broken for the sake of the posh and the toff. On the contrary, Mrs Thatcher broke the Left because she regarded it as an impediment to the modernisation of Britain’s economy. She didn’t want to turn England into Midsomer Worthy, she wanted to turn England into Canary Wharf. Thatcherism was about barrow-boys breaking into boardrooms. It was about the City of London sucking the wealth of Europe into a very big British bang. It was about refashioning the British Labour Party in Thatcherism’s own image.

 

Mr Farage can sup his traditional English pint, and excoriate David Cameron’s Tories for selling England’s inheritance for a mess of EU-approved pottage, but the truth of the matter is that a Conservative-UKIP coalition government; one at odds with Labour and the Scots, and out of the European Union altogether, would very quickly have the nation on life-support.

 

What UKIP has yet to grasp is that, given the goals they share, David Cameron and Ed Miliband would rather rule Britain together, than see it decline, out of Europe, on its own.

 

This essay was originally published by The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 10 April 2015.

Staying The Course: The Legacy Of Margaret Thatcher

Thatcher's Legacy: Margaret Thatcher tested the British Left - and found it wanting. The most pernicious of all her legacies is the damage she inflicted upon the ideological integrity of the British Labour Party. Rather than repudiate Thatcherism, Tony Blair's "New" Labour Party accepted it as an irreversible historical reality.

DE MORTUIS nil nisi bonum – of the dead speak only good – is a compassionate maxim. I’m not sure Margaret Thatcher would have followed it, but in writing about the late British Prime Minister, I will do my best.

 

Perhaps the kindest (and certainly the truest) observation I can offer about Baroness Thatcher is that she tested the British Left and found it wanting.

 

So absolute has “Thatcherism’s” ideological triumph been that few now remember how little prospect of success the British Conservative Party’s new leader was granted – even by her colleagues.

 

The 1970s represented the high-water mark of the Left’s success in the English-speaking world. Even as late as 1979 – the year in which Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female prime-minister – the ideology we know today as neoliberalism was dismissed as extremist folly by practically all “serious” public intellectuals (including a number on the Right). If the Keynesian economic policies that had underpinned thirty years of post-war prosperity no longer seemed to be working, the cure was generally supposed to lie in a shift to the Left – not in a lurch rightwards to the laissez-faire precepts of the Victorian era.

 

In this context, the election of the Margaret Thatcher-led Conservative Government was interpreted not as some sort of ideological sea-change, but as the British working-class’s angry response to the multiple economic and political failures of Jim Callaghan’s Labour government.

 

Under the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system, the Conservatives had (as always) benefited from the large number of votes cast for the Liberal Party. But the size of the Conservatives’ majority in the House of Commons by no means reflected the party’s share of the popular vote. With 13.6 million votes (43.9 percent) the Conservatives enjoyed a clear plurality, but the party’s tally was still well below that of the 15.8 million votes cast for their opponents – Labour and the Liberals.

 

Baroness Thatcher’s admirers may be loathe to admit it, but at no time in her eleven year reign did the Conservative Party’s neoliberal programme ever attract more than the 43.9 percent it received in 1979.
 

What she was able to do, however, was unite the Right's plurality and bind it ever-more-tightly to the Conservative Party’s radical economic and social programme. The middle-class voters who, under the hapless Ted Heath, had all but given up hope that the “lower orders” would ever be put back in their proper place, were both inspired and invigorated by the Tories’ “Iron Lady”.

 

This unity on the Right was not, however, answered by unity on the Left. The right of the Labour Party simply wasn’t willing to follow Tony Benn into the radical territory dictated by the party’s socialist ideology. Egged on by the right-wing British media (which needed no assistance in recognising an opportunity to divide and conquer when it saw one) the 15-17 million British voters who opposed Thatcherism fruitlessly divvied up their support between Labour, the Liberal Party and the Labour Right’s breakaway Social Democratic Party.
 

In sociological terms this splitting of the Left reflected the professional middle-classes’ political refusal to surrender either their status (or their taxes!) to working-class people. When the chips were down (and Thatcherism made damn sure the chips were always down) even these ostensibly “conscience-driven” members of the British bourgeoisie refused to recognise working-class Britons as their social and intellectual equals.

 

As Margaret Thatcher set about defeating the organised working-class in the mines and factories, their middle-class "comrades" were waging a parallel campaign of class warfare inside the Labour Party.

 

Thatcherism’s ultimate triumph, therefore, is not represented in Britain’s pulverised trade unions and privatised industries (unions can be rebuilt, industries can be renationalised) but in the person of Tony Blair and his ideologically de-fanged “New” Labour Party.

 

“You turn if you want to.” Margaret Thatcher famously told the 1980 Conservative Party Conference. “The Lady’s not for turning!”

 

If only the British Left had been equally determined to stay the course.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News. The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 April 2013.