Q: What else could we do with £100 billion other than blow it on Trident?

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A: Spend it on renewables and give us real national security

The Tories, the media and right-wing Labour MPs appear to be of one voice on the importance of spending a vast fortune on the next generation of submarine-based WMDs. Jeremy Corbyn’s insistence that he would never use them has apparently cast him into the wilderness of the unelectable and the dovishly naïve. Russia’s Putin is apparently rubbing his hands with glee at the thought of Britain’s imminent nuclear nakedness.

But in an age of austerity, when the government claims it has to cut the income of 3 million low-income families to the bone, while slashing subsidies for renewable energy following the hottest year on record, surely the question of value for money in achieving security for Britain should be paramount?

It’s not as if climate change has no impact on national security. Charlotte Church was sneered at for mentioning a report that found Syria’s uprising was in part caused by a severe drought over three years that drove thousands of people off the land and into slums prior to the 2011 protests.
Across the world, traditional rain patterns are being disrupted by climate change, adding to stress in regions that are already wracked by social violence. When the Pentagon recognises climate change as a bigger threat to global security than terrorism, the smart move for policymakers would be to invest heavily in green energy, not blow the nation’s resources on an unusable instrument of nuclear terror.
The cost of the subsidy for renewables soon to be axed by the government is £1.5 billion – a billion less than Trident 2’s annual cost of £2.4bn. Britain, by investing a big part of its Trident budget in a renewable revolution, could by 2030 have created a new green economy and weaned us off dependency on OPEC oil (36% of oil imports) and Russian coal (42% of coal imports). This change would surely offer us far greater security than to continue to rely for energy sources on countries who could, at some not too distant future point, suffer violent political change and possible economic collapse.
In a modern economy, energy security is central to national security. Following development of oil and gas production in the North Sea, the UK became a net exporter in the 1980s, but North Sea production peaked in 1999, and the UK returned to being an energy importer in 2004.
In terms of energy security, things have gotten worse since David Cameron came to power. In 2013, 47 percent of energy used in the UK was imported, up sharply from the 2010 level, due to the decline in oil and gas output.
In 2013 Russia remained the leading source of our coal imports, accounting for 41%, with the US at 25% and Colombia 23%. For crude oil we rely on Norway, which accounted for 40% of imports, with OPEC countries – including Algeria, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia - supplying a further 36%. Norway accounted for 58% of UK gas imports, with the remaining 20% as Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), with over 90% of this coming from Qatar. UK oil production in 2013 was 70% lower than the record 150.2 million tonnes in 1999. Gas production in 2013 was 66% lower than the record levels seen in 2000.
So there you have it – we are increasingly import dependent for fuel, with a significant portion of this coming from Russia and OPEC countries. Britain in other words, is reliant on fuel from countries – in the Gulf, Russia and Africa – who effectively have a gun pointed to our head over energy. Billionaires from these countries have been accumulating vast portfolios of British real estate, mostly in London.
In the case of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, they have funded the advancement of conservative Islam across an arc from North Africa to Indonesia that has helped spur militant violence across the world.
So Corbyn’s best option to win the argument, and for Britain’s future prosperity and energy self-sufficiency, is to propose investing a big portion of the £100 billion that was due to be spent on Trident in a green economy that will genuinely give us national security in a highly unstable world.
Alternatively we can continue with Cameron’s option of dependency on coal, oil and gas from our friends in Russia, the Middle East and Colombia, while holding a very expensive stick of dynamite and pretending that it makes us safe.

Corbyn's rise is caused by neoliberalism's onslaught on 'Middle Britain'

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Hark the sound of panic from the Labour establishment and its media backers, from the Sun to the Guardian, vainly trying to warn voters away from the surge in support for Jeremy Corbyn.
But Tony Blair's warning of annihilation, along with those of Mandelson and Campbell, are a Canute-like chorus against a swelling tide caused by decades of neoliberal policies of new Labour and the Tories.
Essentially the middle ground, middle England voter to whom new Labour has always sworn its undying faith, has been whittled away as a voter demographic by the economic and social policies of the last 35 years, and especially of the last five years. The first signs of this were clear from the 2015 election - with the millions voting Ukip, SNP and Green.
The theory of Blairism was that the working class was disappearing, being replaced by a new middle class of aspirational voter, especially in the south and Midlands where most elections were won or lost. This was the result of the policies of Margaret Thatcher, which deindustrialised Britain and turned many more people into homeowners, thanks to the Right to Buy policy, and also the culture of consumerism and the decline of trade unions.
In theory this change was irreversible and meant that the traditional Labour social base was being replaced by a new type of voter more naturally inclined toward consumerist and individualist ie Tory values. Hence new Labour's shopping list approach to politics, with pledges and carefully triangulated messages - minimum wage, yes, but tough on welfare and immigration, and an insouciant acceptance of rising inequality.
Behind a lot of this was fear of the Tory media, which new Labour spent an enormous amount of energy cultivating in order to avoid the fate of Neil Kinnock. Recall Blair's early meetings with Rupert Murdoch in Australia and of course, his model, Margaret Thatcher.
However, it makes no historical sense whatsoever to believe that the moderate centre-left appeal of early Blairism that worked in 1997 after 18 years of Toryism is in any way relevant to the 2020 election. The biggest party in recent elections has been the non-voters - who in 2015 were 34 per cent to the Tories' 24 percent. These are the people Russell Brand says he represents - those who no longer have a stake in a political system that appeals to lower middle and middle-class homeowners. As for traditional Labour voters - public sector workers and carers, they were always treated with contempt by Blair - but in Corbyn, they at last have a candidate who unashamedly shares their values.
Since the financial crisis of 2008, the social divisions caused by a policy of deregulation and privatisation have accelerated - and it is clear who has lost out: average wage earners, young people, renters and others, such as those on in-work benefits and zero hours contracts, have suffered declining living standards, while often apparently treated by our political class as the great unwashed whose votes don't count.
Home ownership is in decline, private sector renting is moving toward 9 million, zero hours contracts have rocketed, food bank use has become a commonplace. In this deeply divided country where the wealthiest 0.1 percent saw their assets double in value since 2008, for whom austerity is what happens to the little people, Corbyn is the answer to the question - who stands up for us?
This is the socio-economic soil from which the Corbyn surge emerges, and is only surprising to those living in a privileged Westminster-media-West London bubble. It is not going away.

Why the right can't handle democracy

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The horror, the horror. Democracy - that quaint idea of the people actually deciding who leads us, as against having to choose between pre-selected establishment candidates - has broken out in the Labour Party. The Blairites and others who see in Jeremy Corbyn everything they hate about their own party's traditions - honesty, socialism, commitment to principles - must be truly cursing Ed Miliband now for introducing a new democratic system for electing the leader. In the 1990s, the Parliamentary Labour party had half the votes on the leadership of the party. It was a way of making sure grassroots members didn't get above themselves and start thinking it was their party. God and Tony Blair forbid!
At some point, the leader election system was changed again, with a third of votes going to members, a third to affiliated unions, and a third to Labour MPs. That system put Ed Miliband in charge over his brother, whose Blairite record made him a dead duck for the unions.
And now, thanks to Ed, its just one member, one supporter, one union affiliate, one vote. Oh glorious democracy. Getting Corbyn on the ballot was a way of showing how fair minded Labour MPs were in the wake of the shocking defeat in May. But very few ever expected there to be an insurgency of the kind we are now seeing.
They bought into the Tory media line that Miliband lost for being too left wing. What is it about Labour politicians that they believe everything they read in the Sun, Telegraph and Mail? It's as if they lack the capacity for independent thought. They all trot out the same line - the Tories won and Labour lost because we don't 'get' popular right wing sentiments on immigration, welfare, tax etc. Yes, many people do worry about these things, but if you go and ask someone on the doorstep what they feel about these issues, some of them might repeat what they have read in the papers. Gypsies with big families are given five bedroom houses. People enjoying a life of ease on welfare. God forbid that you should challenge the distortions and lies that appear in the papers and point out some other salient facts - the billions in subsidies that go to landlords and businesses to subsidise high rents and low wages. No, no - that would be to suggest you could change these inequities and build a fairer country No, that would be a dangerous raising of expectations. Just keep it vague and aspirational and hope people vote for you out of desperation - maybe stick it on a stone plaque with apple pie promises of sunshine and warm feelings. This then becomes Labour policy.
Then along comes Jeremy Corbyn, squeezed onto the ballot for Labour leader and now leading the pack. I've known Jeremy for years as a peace and solidarity campaigner whose commitment is second to none - he has supported a lot of unfashionable causes, from Diego Garcia, to Palestine, CND, to Colombian trade unionists and the Kurds. Those who sneer should ask themselves what it is about political commitment they find so off-putting.
Corbyn is straight talking and is not burdened with the kind of inflated ego that has been the downfall of other left leaders in the recent past - abrasive personalities who, while charismatic, too often can't live up to the principles they espouse.
Kendal and Blair and all their right-wing media acolytes warn that we might be moving back to the 80s. They seem to be unaware that when the country voted Labour in 1997 and 2001, it was looking for an alternative to the right-wing Thatcherism that had governed the country and raised levels of inequality and poverty in the 80s and 90s. They did not actually vote for Blairism - they voted Labour. A landslide in 97 was almost inevitable. But even more important than this, 2020 is 23 years after 1997. The country has been ruled by a neoliberal regime - with a very short interregnum of Gordon Brown - since 1979. Perhaps only a radical candidate committed to real social change can challenge and bring to a halt this juggernaut that keeps coming back stronger like a zombie we thought we had killed.
Remember 1990 and the end of Thatcher. After that we got Major and the closure of the mines and the rail privatisations. With Blair we got Public Private Partnerships, Iraq, and ever greater security surveillance, plus the micromanagement and farming out of public services.
Neoliberalism comes in different guises, with different faces - but each time the electorate is fooled that it has voted for change, the continuity candidate wins. Even Brown, confronted with the biggest crisis in capitalism in 80 years, bailed out the banks with our money and asked for nothing in return - no radical reform of a financial sector that had become a blood sucking beast on the backs of ordinary people.
Blair reorganised Labour's democratic system so that members no longer had any real say over policy. Miliband began to change that.
So yes, people are desperate for something different. Janus-faced candidates like Burnham and Cooper - who declare love for big business or Israel whenever someone says jump and can't give a straight answer to a question - are not going to do it.
This is why Corbyn has caught the moment, and why Labour's political establishment - and the right-wing and liberal media including the Guardian - are in shock and don't know what's hit them.
Can Corbyn win in 2020? Who knows? And who knows what catastrophes Osborne will have inflicted upon the nation by then. Anything is possible - except the sudden discovery of conviction and principles coming from any of the other three candidates.
And as for the Labour right, the slick-faced elitists like Tristrum Hunt and Chukka Ummuna, they have shamefully exposed their contempt for democracy. After 20 years of managed control of the party in the name of staying rigidly to centrist politics that kill all enthusiasm, they have revealed the very reason millions in Scotland and England no longer want their kind of politics.
There is every chance that if Corbyn wins, they will split the party as happened in 1981 with the Social Democrats. That didn't work out well. However, as European politics has shown, new popular left movements can eclipse traditional social democracy - or at least give it a run for its money. See Spain, Greece, Italy, Holland. Britain needs a left-wing alternative to Ukip and the SNP in Scotland. This could be the beginning of something truly exciting.

How to lose an election in the last 2 weeks of the campaign

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Answer: do what Labour is doing. Attack the SNP, and go round shouting how you won't make any deals with them because they are such separatist nationalist b******ds. Balls's "absolute 100 per cent total firewall" between Labour and the SNP is the most stupid statement he has made in some time. Doesn't Labour see this is a Tory trap to make them distance themselves from the SNP, and refuse to be part of a progressive coalition or agreement. The left social-democratic voters across the UK include SNP voters - SNP voters have abandoned Labour for being too right wing and Westminster focused. Labour, as a Westminster establishment party, don't want a coalition with any of the new progressive forces Green, SNP, Plaid - they want to jump into bed with Nick Clegg's Lib Dems - that's their comfort zone, where nothing will change. That is how to demobilise that left-of-centre anti-Tory vote. Go on, throw the election! I hope I am wrong but this right-wing narrative can only increase the Tory vote. What a pathetic excuse for a strategy.

Myleene and Angelina Jolie's 10 point plan to save Labour

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Mansion-class celebs are coming for Labour. First there was Myleene Klass’s ITV sofa assault on Ed Miliband’s property tax plans — “You can’t just point at things and tax them!” — to which a frozen Ed failed to answer “Yes you can if it’s a house!”
Then Hollywood royalty waded in on the row. Angelina Jolie (net worth with Brad £269m) told Channel 4’s Jon Snow that she may — shock, horror — decide not to move to a Marylebone mansion if Labour decides to tax it. “That might put me off.”
With Myles and Angie on his case, Miliband’s no-balls shadow chancellor is quaking. In an Evening Standard column Ed Balls admitted that plans to tax £2m-plus properties “are not popular with everyone but we but we are being clear about where the money is coming from for our health service.”
Let’s face it, if you put Myleene and “Tomb Raider” Angelina into a ring with the two Eds for gloves-off fisticuffs, there’s little doubt about who would end up face down on the mat. These high-net worth stars, known for their humanitarian leanings and constant use of the pages of Hello! to show off their fabulous lifestyle, have now jumped to the defence of the hard put-upon pluto-grannies from this tax thingummy.
And to save the Eds from a further pasting, Myles and Angie have got together to have a go at rewriting the Labour manifesto to make it more celeb-friendly. Truly, with Brangelina serious about getting a “foothold” in London — and she being “responsible about money” — who better to give advice on economy policy?

So here is their 10-point plan to remake Britain:

1. Poor people should stop complaining. It’s within their power to become who they want to be. All you need is hard work, expensive education and high-powered pushy parents. Go for it!

2. Celebrities pay a lot of tax already (well, the ones not smart enough to use tax-avoidance schemes). The least we could do is give them their own lane on the motorway to drive their hot wheels past adoring fans. If it’s good enough for Kim Jong Un...

3. Elections will be fought out in an X-Factor cum Bake Off — that’s right. Sing or bake, or both. The public decides. Digital democracy at work.

4. Politics is boring and turning people off. From now on, PMQs will be replaced with a Klaas and Jolie masterclass in economics, including priceless advice on how to disburse your millions across the world and stay ahead of the taxman.

5. The British royal family needs a makeover, so let’s have a TV vote for who should be the next Queen. (Hint: someone younger, beautiful with a string of hit songs and/or movies).

6. Most NHS costs can be reduced by healthier lifestyles — its strictly seaweed from now on. Jolie-Klass TV will offer tips to the nation on healthy eating and daily workouts. Get out the lycra and get with the programme.

7. All school uniforms will be from Littlewoods and M&S, with free Baby K Clothes for nursery age toddlers — royalties to Myleene. Kerrching!

8. Most life lessons can be gleaned from a careful viewing of Lara Croft, Mr and Mrs Smith, Maleficent and The Tourist. Compulsory movie classes in schools from age five and school assemblies will learn to sing the Hear’Say back catalogue.

9. Free acting and classical music lessons for offenders to encourage rehabilitation with inspiration from Myles and Angie. A lucky few will get places on the Ex-Con Factor, hosted by Andy Coulson.

10. No more politics of envy. You are beautiful and talented — not as beautiful or talented as us obviously, but everyone can aspire to be the best.

There you go, Ed. Alternatively you could just tell these millionaires that if they don’t want to pay their tax, they are welcome to leave. I hear Malibu is lovely this time of year — they can be happy knowing we’ll find a socially useful way to occupy those empty mansions.

Capitalism - the long view

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"The more the world goes to hell, the more the prices of houses in Chelsea and Kensington ascend towards heaven."

I have been thinking about the evolution of capitalism, perhaps spurred by reading the London Review of Books – and having a little time on my hands.

The early emerging stage begins with the Italian city states and the aftermath of the Great Plague from 1350, marking the beginning of the end for western feudalism. The emergent period culminates with the print revolution, the Reformation and the Conquest of the Americas, as well as the institution of Atlantic-American slavery. 
By 1550, slavery in the Americas and expanding free labour in Europe combined with the destruction of the Church hierarchy in many lands to bring about social and religious revolution. The Anabaptists of Munster attempted to bring about a communist Jerusalem, a dystopian utopia that is besieged and destroyed by the forces of reaction. Meanwhile a peasant-hating Luther urged the slaughter of revolting commoners as the German Peasant War is likewise crushed.

Out of this early 16^th century upheaval emerges Mercantile Capitalism, a new world order dominated by the merchants of Italy, Holland and London, funded by the Spanish crown’s immense riches, in turn melted down from the treasures of obliterated Mezoamerican civilizations.

1600 was the year that marked the birth of capitalism proper, with the arrival of the world’s first stock-holding trading corporations – the East India Company and Dutch East India companies. Out of the new world trading system that tilted toward the Americas and Asia emerged the first great profit-seeking enterprises. 
Unlike the Spanish colonists, their treasure was not for the Crown, the Church and the slave-owning overlords of America, but for the stockholders in London and Amsterdam.

One sees here a common trait of capitalism that even today its propagandists deny is integral to it – free labour exists alongside unfree labour. The system has always required both.

From 1550 to 1770 the mercantile system prevailed, through England’s aborted bourgeois revolution and the rise of Dutch and English mercantile capitalism, built on slavery and commodity trade.

Then came the industrial revolution, and the republican revolutions of America and France. The third phase of capital from 1770 until around 2000 was defined by western dominance, the rise of industrial capitalism and western imperialism. 
It was also the age of bourgeois revolution, democracy and two other world movements: from 1870 to about 1945, working-class revolution, and then from 1945 until 1980, anti-colonial revolution.

While some have described the world that emerged after 1980 as post-industrial (and post-colonial), this is false, as it only describes a trend of deindustrialization in the West. 
Urbanisation and industrialisation actually reach their zenith in this final phase that takes us to the present. Only in 2005 did the majority of the planet find themselves living in urban centres (See Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums), leaving behind millennia of rural existence. 
The industrial revolutions of Asia, starting in Korea and Taiwan, and moving on to Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and, most importantly, China, at last begin to universalise the new mode of production that started in Britain and America 200 years before.

Simply because the most valuable companies in the world now reside in the ‘digital’ or ‘weightless’ parts of the economy, does not mean that this era is not an industrial one. Human labour, organised in factories and offices, and the use of vast quantities of material in the production of consumer devices, mark simply the development of the consumer phase of industrial society, out of the steam and steel industrial ages that preceded it.
 The endless warehouses of whirring servers that power the networks that keep millions of us online, as much as the army of factory workers assembling the gadgets, these are the inescapable dirty secrets holding up the weightless age.

We can likewise discern, with our 21^st century environmental spectacles, that the fuel of industry was first peat and steam, then coal and now oil and gas. Over nearly 250 years of the age of industry, much has altered beyond recognition, but the underlying forces of capital and labour and the mediating technologies –productive, energetic and monetary – remain at work. 
What we can say for certain is that production and consumption are expanding exponentially, along with population. Bumps in the road do not alter that trajectory.

Since 1980 capital, most particularly finance capital, and also Asian industrial and energy capital, have been in the ascendancy. Labour has been corralled through competition from the new hinterlands, and the age of militancy has receded. The massive expansion of the global labour force has made the withdrawal of labour by any part of it less likely to strike terror into any capitalist. 
Perhaps a time will come when there is no longer a source of cheap, underemployed labour to replace the once uppity workers of the metropolis, but this seems unlikely. Capital is constantly destroying the foundations of social wealth, in a process of borderless rolling back of social gains, euphemistically known as structural adjustment, now, austerity, or better,  ‘disaster capitalism’ (Kline). 
As the last great recession has shown, capital recovers its losses quickly, while workers find it ever harder to hold onto their share of social wealth. This wage stagnation is mostly a western phenomenon, as across the developing world, wages are catching up. Some call this the 'great levelling'.

The last time western capital showed fear of its populace was the last time it had to call on them to fight its wars, and the last such war was Vietnam. In the age of drones, who needs worker soldiers? History tells us that worker soldiers are the most dangerous force for any old regime, since they can demand, and often get, altered social arrangements. 
With their drone wars, perhaps our crafty rulers have abolished the possibility that a New Model Army, or heroes of the wars in Europe, can ever return to demand the end to the system that made them fight.

Meanwhile Asia and the Gulf increasingly hold the great surpluses with which they can acquire strategic assets in the western heartlands. 
This is achieved without blood, like a backdoor coup, much as the blood and treasure of the Spanish and Portuguese empires ended up in the coffers of Dutch, Venetian and English financiers.

Not that capitalism is any less bloody than it was in previous centuries. The American empire keeps order, following the brief interlude of the Cold War, maintaining a status quo that allows the billionaires of Europe, Asia and the Middle East to remain safe in their fortresses. The ability of this gradually declining empire to maintain such order is now in question. 
But if instability strikes in one of the world’s forgotten corners, London is always there to provide a safe haven for money, whatever its colour. Strange how it was that London welcomed the refugees of the world in previous centuries, including Karl Marx, and now welcomes its oligarchs. 
It is a common fact known to London estate agents that the Chinese are the main buyers behind the latest property bubble, getting their money to somewhere safe. The more the world goes to hell, the more the prices of houses in Chelsea and Kensington ascend towards heaven.
This is part of a trend whereby rent of various kinds is eating into the earnings of workers and other producers. Rent is acquired through monopoly control of an asset, and is charged purely by virtue of this ownership, not for adding any value to the economy. The major rentiers include energy producing countries, especially the Gulf monarchies, landlords and banks - who charge us rent (interest and fees) for loans created through leverage on minimal or sometimes zero deposits, which costs the banks nothing but make them rich. The housing bubbles of recent years have been the biggest example of a rent-seeking spree - allowing house prices to rise way beyond any sustainable values - that has actually cost the 'real' economy trillions of dollars in bailouts and debt austerity.
If we ask who has survived best and grown mega-rich in recent decades we note that it is oil-producing countries, the financial sector and property owners. Essentially, rentiers. The only rivals in wealth terms to this are the new manufacturing nations of Asia, firstly China. 

There is a related secular trend worth noting for futurologists and students of political economy. Technological revolution makes anything manufactured cheaper over time. (Is it a coincidence that burglaries are less of a threat nowadays, when most household items, consisting of the latest technology, come so cheap and plentiful that it is not worth the criminal’s bother and risk to break in and take them?)

By contrast, as production expands exponentially, the planet is relentlessly denuded of its finite mineral wealth and consequently, the price of this natural wealth rises. We see this most obviously with oil, but it applies to any number of commodities. 
The stuff we make gets cheaper, but the stuff that we make it from – that the planet has created over millions of years - becomes more precious and expensive. Thus at some point, barring a new form of production that is entirely based on recycled material, a crisis occurs.

We cannot keep producing goods that are built with an ever-decreasing lifespan. The natural resource components make up a greater part of the value of the product, while the product’s inherent human labour and technology becomes cheap as chips, thanks to rising ‘efficiency’. (Efficiency is a very misleading word for a system that is so wasteful of resources; its prime efficiency is to extract profit from the production-circulation process - the accumulation of capital. In terms of materials, it is utterly profligate - see the oceans full of plastic waste).

The holders of the natural wealth become the rulers of the world, while the makers of things, unless they also own the materials, become the slaves of the resource owners. 
The proprietors of the land or sea under which such wealth exists become the greatest rentiers in history. All they do is dig stuff up (or get someone to dig it up for them) and sell it to the highest bidder. This is the future of capitalism unless it can re-use materials more effectively, or make things that last much longer. 
Which of course, it will have to learn to do in order to survive as a system. Unfortunately, capitalism has been moving in the other direction entirely, with products designed to become obsolete more rapidly than ever. 
This is the process of circulation and accumulation speeding up. If I cannot sell you the same thing next year as I did this year, how am I going to make money?

To change such an immanent feature of capitalist production seems unthinkable, and it ought at some point to mark the end of the consumer capitalist age.

Will this end see the beginning of green [recycled] capitalism, or green socialism? The age-old question of whether any private person or corporate body can ‘own’ what lies beneath then becomes the paramount question of the age, since this is ultimately where future wealth lies, just as it did in ages past. 
This will likely be the fight of the – rapidly approaching - future.