The world has crept into my new dad bubble and now I must respond with political analysis...
Chris Leslie, Labour's Treasury spokesman turned shadow chancellor, comes across with all the
political passion of a smooth-talking bank manager.
His interview in last Sunday's Observer was a manifesto for a post-Miliband Labour economic policy
that eschews anything remotely radical in favour of pure managerialism. It's an
unashamed bouquet of promises to do absolutely nothing that ruffles the
feathers of big business.
Sadly, Labour doesn’t seem to get that it is perfectly possible to be left wing and also believe that
free markets are actually necessary and good - within the framework of a mixed
economy. Alas, an economy in which public and private co-exist in healthy
competition was abolished by Margaret Thatcher and her successors.
Leslie used to run the New Local Government Network, a think tank that spent the 2000s arguing for deregulation and privatisation of local government services. In the
interview, Leslie takes an axe to all of Ed Miliband's progressive policies -
rail nationalisation is out, as too is rent control, capping banks' market
share, even the mansion tax was "too crude". Deficit reduction,
predictably, is a favourite. Market "transparency" is his watchword.
Instead of supporting competition in the private sector combined with strong public regulation of
natural monopolies and essential services (health, education, housing,
utilities, rail etc), nice Mr Leslie offers blind support for big business.
Leslie may or may not continue to be Labour's economic spokesman, but with this approach, he clearly
puts himself to the right of Ed Balls and anyone with a hint of pinkish social
democracy. This man is cut through like rock with neoliberalism and the promise
of never being outflanked to the right by Osborne or anyone else.
It is a peculiar thing that Labour politicians always see electoral defeat in terms of failing to
appeal to middle England Tory voters. Yes, the Tories won the most votes in the
south, but if you combine Ukip, SNP and Green votes, that's nearly 6 million
people who actually want left-of-centre economic policies that favour working
people, such as a living wage, nationalisation of rail and utilities, rent
control and so on.
Labour is not interested in these voters, and it wants nothing to do with the emerging progressive
alliance of parties - SNP, Green, Plaid Cymru - as witnessed by Miliband's
fatal refusal to make a deal with Nicola Sturgeon. (Once voters saw that
Miliband was blind to the inescapable fact that Labour needed the SNP’s support
to form a government, he was toast.) Amazingly, Labour’s tribalism and
blinkered hostility to new political forces meant it cut itself off from
potential allies, and left itself adrift and without credibility come election
day.
So, if Labour refuses to reach out to the parties who do win progressive votes – or to adopt policies
that win back working class votes from Ukip, eg rail nationalisation and strict
enforcement of the minimum wage – then where does that leave the hopes of
non-Tory Britain?
As the pitiful Labour leadership campaign has already shown, whoever wins the Labour leadership will
focus on reaching out to big business and Tory voters in order to win back
those marginals. It’s a narrow, opportunist politics that eschews fundamental
principles and long-term thinking in favour of pure electoral machination.
This idea - to see politics purely as a short-term electoral game under current badly broken rules
- is a fatal aspect of Labourism, and can be contrasted with the long-term
hegemonic strategies of the Right to not just win the immediate battle but to
win the class war.
Learning from the Neocons
Since the 1970s at least, neoconservatives and their UK counterparts in the Tory party have
approached politics with a Leninist, revolutionary focus that uses emergent
crises as opportunities for “clean breaks” – and for reshaping politics in
their own interests.
This was seen in the aftermath of the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, when chief ideologue of the
Tory right Nicolas Ridley came up with a plan to break the miners by enticing
them into a confrontation and then smashing them. This was part of a plan to
break the back of the labour movement, and so move Britain away from socialism,
which at the time was seen as a mortal threat to the British capitalist system.
They used the global oil crisis of 1979-81 to begin a process of
deindustrialisation, a brutal form of social engineering that gutted the
communities that were the rock-bed of the post-war social democratic consensus.
Neoconservatives were never parochial or short-termist in their outlook. Like good Leninists, they
were internationalists – 1989-91 was a key moment in the victorious march of
western-led globalisation, when first the east European communist states, then
the Soviet Union, collapsed after a long period of armed confrontation.
Afghanistan and a bankrupting arms race finished off the Soviets. After 1991,
neoliberal economic specialists moved in to radically overhaul the post-Soviet
economy, causing devastation to millions. Since then, the 9/11 attacks, and
more recently the 2008 crash, were both huge crises in the international system
that neoconservative forces used to re-engineer society toward militarisation
at home and abroad, and ever increasing concentration of wealth and corporate
power.
The left naively believed 2008 would mark the end of neoliberalism. But where were the left-wing
Leninists plotting to bring down the system thanks to its own fundamental
weaknesses when it was on its knees? They certainly were not in the Labour
cabinet – Gordon Brown, rather than seize the moment and bring the banking
system to heal with a new model of state-regulated and socially responsible
finance, rushed to the rescue of the banks, leaving them largely unreformed. He
was not thanked for saving capitalism, instead the voters rejected him - and
the Tories managed to make Labour’s economic record an election issue in 2015.
It is remarkable how the Tories were allowed to get off scot-free for their support for financial
deregulation since the 1980s that ultimately led to the crash of 2008. If
Labour had any political sense, it would have mercilessly slayed Osborne for
his restoking of the housing bubble, rather than weakly echo the homeownership
myth. Miliband, to his credit, saw that housing was a major issue, but the mansion
tax was too ad hoc a policy to sound coherent (compared to land value tax), and
rent control was only announced in the last month of the campaign.
There is no short cut to a revival of social democracy in Britain. But looking to Labour as a vehicle
for radical change is almost as daft as expecting Fifa to reform itself. Labour
needs to embrace the fact that the era of its big battalions is over and it
will never again be given a mandate to rule without the support of other
parties.
The next crisis
Governments lose elections, oppositions rarely win them.
The lesson taught by the neoconservative strategists is to look ahead to the next crisis and prepare for
a political offensive when it comes, so that for once, the left can seize
control of the political narrative. We can’t know what or when it will be
exactly, but capitalism goes through a slump on average every ten years.
Cameron and Osborne have recklessly reflated the housing and credit bubble and
that bubble will burst. International crises can be expected – the Middle East
is slipping towards apocalypse, while a new cold war is flaring in Europe.
The message of progressives must be one of hope, always, but hope not built on an
unsustainable model of financial capitalism, ever-rising debt, climate crises
and endless war. All these factors points toward disasters down the road but
also the possibility of a saner, greener, more equitable politico-economic
model that could replace this broken one.
Either the movement against neoliberalism will be ready to fight back when the next crisis comes,
or, as in 2008, the financial oligarchy and their neocon allies will once again
turn it into a new assault on what’s left of society to further enrich the 0.1
percent.
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