Tony Benn – the new face of the Tories

No wonder our Thatcherite prime minister can’t win over much of his party on the European Union. They’re closet Bennites

• 
• • Steve Richards
  • The Guardian, Sunday 26 October 2014 18.22 GMT

‘Tony Benn supported the right of local parties to de-select MPs – the unrelenting mission of some Tory MPs today.’ Photomontage: Photonews Scotland/Rex

‘Cameron won’t pay new EU bill!” “Cameron might threaten to pull out of the EU!” The exclamations erupt once more, but while the focus is on David Cameron’s latest position, a remarkable transformation has been taking place below him in the Conservative party, which explains his contortions and also makes them irrelevant.

A significant section of the Conservative party has become Bennite: ardent followers of the views espoused by the leftwinger Tony Benn, who died earlier this year. The rightwing Bennites do not look to their leadership for guidance. Like Benn used to do, they follow other lines of democratic accountability. Due to a matter of deeply held principle, the leader can never count on their support, even when he seeks to appease them.

I cannot quite believe I have written the previous paragraph. As a student in the early 1980s I was a Bennite and remember how much the right loathed him. Indeed, I suspect that one of the reasons I was a youthful devotee arose from my admiration of Benn’s polite dignity in the face of ferocious vilification. For a time the Conservative party projected him as the most dangerous man in Britain. Now parts of the right pay homage. The role reversal is the strangest and most significant in British politics for many decades.

Of course, there are big differences between Benn’s overall beliefs and the Tory Bennites. He was a socialist and they most emphatically are not. Benn regarded the state as a benevolent force, and sought wider state ownership, while a lot of the Tory Bennites want government to play a much smaller role. But in the importance they attach to democracy, and in their interpretation of what form democratic politics should take, they have much in common. I also sense that Benn regarded his views on democracy as of overriding importance. So do the Tory Bennites.

The former Tory MP and Ukip defector, Douglas Carswell, was typical in praising Benn in his Guardian interview last week: “Benn said the key questions were: who has power, who gave it to them, on whose behalf do they wield it, and are they accountable? I remember thinking this guy is spot on.” Separately, the founder of the ConservativeHome website, Tim Montgomerie, told me at a public event that he was a “Bennite on Europe”. He would advocate withdrawal whatever Cameron says or does, on the grounds that the EU can never be accountable to voters here or elsewhere. On another front, Benn started a campaign after the 1979 election to make Labour’s leadership and MPs more accountable to party members, supporting the right of local parties to deselect MPs. Benn’s crusade then has become, in a different form, the unrelenting mission of some Tory MPs now, or former Tory MPs. Carswell defected above all over the right of constituents to remove errant MPs – the project led by his former Conservative colleague, Zac Goldsmith. The Tory Bennites’ proposal, the right of recall, is a different measure to Benn’s, but the principle is similar. Constituents should hold MPs to account and not the national leadership.

In the last parliament David Davis pointed the way when he resigned as shadow home secretary to fight a local byelection in his constituency over his support for civil liberties – a move with Bennite rhythms, as local members and voters marched as one to put pressure on the national leadership. Benn was a strong supporter of Davis’s move. When Benn died, Davis presented a glowing tribute on Radio 4. In its counter-intuitive verve, it is the best political programme broadcast this year.

The younger generation is even more emphatic in its focus on the local over loyalty to national leadership. One of the most engaging and smartest of the 2010 intake, Dominic Raab, speaks openly of his commitment to the local party and constituents rather than following an expedient route to ministerial office. Selected by an open primary, Sarah Wollaston has similar priorities, as does Andrew Percy, a regular rebel. Benn would approve.

Listen carefully to the arguments of Tory dissenters on several matters and they care about the mechanics of decision-making as much as the substance of the decisions. This applies to their current explosive opposition to the European arrest warrant and free movement of labour. They fume above all because neither they nor their constituents can decide on the issue, even if they can see merits in the policies being imposed on them.

Benn went on to make a broader argument that the Labour government in the 1970s had failed to carry out the wishes of members. Similarly, a section of Tory MPs do not trust the leadership to deliver what their local members seek. They sought that guarantee of a referendum on Europe so that power was transferred from unreliable leaders to voters. It was Benn who originated the idea of a referendum on Europe when the Labour government held one in 1975.

There is a common characteristic between Benn and the Tory Bennites that goes beyond specifics. He was, and they are, animated by debate rather than tribal loyalties. In Benn’s diaries he was often at his most excited when reporting discussions with Tory ideologues. He describes at length a long, friendly conversation with the rightwing Keith Joseph when they met on a train. He speaks admiringly of Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher, on the basis that they were “teachers” of conviction. In his Guardian interview Carswell is highly complimentary of Labour MPs who are also gripped by issues relating to accountability. Davis enjoys good relations with left-of-centre commentators and some Labour tribalists, including Alastair Campbell.

From the younger generation, Raab is similarly excited by internal debate and ideas rather than the stifling control freakery perhaps understandably favoured by leaders. At a fringe meeting during the Conservative conference Raab noted that the current parliamentary party includes libertarians, patrician Tories, Eurosceptics who want out, Eurosceptics who want to stay in, pro-Europeans, those who above all seek ministerial office, and the growing number who have other priorities in politics. In his enthusiasm for such stimulating diversity, he reminded me of Benn, who once described Labour’s mighty internal ideological battles as a healing process.

The practical consequence of Bennism is that a party becomes impossible to lead – at least on the New Labour model adopted at first by Cameron and George Osborne, of a leader and close allies deciding policy and imposing it on a docile party. Today’s Tory party is not docile enough for the model to work. Cameron can appease or challenge the Tory Bennites – it does not matter very much. In some respects he becomes marginal to them. They are driven, as Benn was, by purer lines of accountability in which members and their constituents are agents of change. I have been curious for some time about why Cameron is loathed by some of his MPs when he has delivered a programme that in some respects is more Thatcherite than Margaret Thatcher. Now I know the answer. Some of his MPs on the right are not Thatcherite. They are Bennite.

Why did Britain’s political class buy into the Tories’ economic fairytale?

Falling wages, savage cuts and sham employment expose the recovery as bogus. Without a new vision we’re heading for social conflict

• 
• • Ha-Joon Chang
  • The Guardian, Sunday 19 October 2014 17.46 BST

Demonstrators among tens of thousands who protested about austerity in London on Saturday. Photograph: Mary Turner/Getty Images

The UK economy has been in difficulty since the 2008 financial crisis. Tough spending decisions have been needed to put it on the path to recovery because of the huge budget deficit left behind by the last irresponsible Labour government, showering its supporters with social benefit spending. Thanks to the coalition holding its nerve amid the clamour against cuts, the economy has finally recovered. True, wages have yet to make up the lost ground, but it is at least a “job-rich” recovery, allowing people to stand on their own feet rather than relying on state handouts.

That is the Conservative party’s narrative on the UK economy, and a large proportion of the British voting public has bought into it. They say they trust the Conservatives more than Labour by a big margin when it comes to economic management. And it’s not just the voting public. Even the Labour party has come to subscribe to this narrative and tried to match, if not outdo, the Conservatives in pledging continued austerity. The trouble is that when you hold it up to the light this narrative is so full of holes it looks like a piece of Swiss cheese.

First, let’s look at the origins of the deficit. Contrary to the Conservative portrayal of it as a spendthrift party, Labour kept the budget in balance averaged over its first six years in office between 1997 and 2002. Between 2003 and 2007 the deficit rose, but at 3.2% of GDP a year it was manageable.

More importantly, this rise in the deficit between 2003 and 2007 was not due to increased welfare spending. According to data from the Office for National Statistics, social benefit spending as a proportion of GDP was more or less constant at about 9.5% of GDP a year during this period. The dramatic climb in budget deficit from there to the average of 10.7% in 2009-2010 was mostly a consequence of the recession caused by the financial crisis.

First, the recession reduced government revenue by the equivalent of 2.4% of GDP – from 42.1% to 39.7% – between 2008 and 2009-10. Second, it raised social spending (social benefit plus health spending). Economic downturn automatically increases spending on many social benefits, such as unemployment benefit and income support, but it also increases spending on things like disability benefit and healthcare, as increased unemployment and poverty lead to more physical and mental health problems. In 2009-10, at the height of the recession, UK public social spending rose by the equivalent of 3.2% of GDP compared with its 2008 level (from 21.8% to 24%).

When you add together the recession-triggered fall in tax revenue and rise in social spending, they amount to 5.6% of GDP – almost the same as the rise in the deficit between 2008 and 2009-10 (5.7% of GDP). Even though some of the rise in social spending was due to factors other than the recession, such as an ageing population, it would be safe to say that much of the rise in deficit can be explained by the recession itself, rather than Labour’s economic mismanagement.

When faced with this, supporters of the Tory narrative would say, “OK, but however it was caused, we had to control the deficit because we can’t live beyond our means and accumulate debt”. This is a pre-modern, quasi-religious view of debt. Whether debt is a bad thing or not depends on what the money is used for. After all, the coalition has made students run up huge debts for their university education on the grounds that their heightened earning power will make them better off even after they pay back their loans.

The same reasoning should be applied to government debt. For example, when private sector demand collapses, as in the 2008 crisis, the government “living beyond its means” in the short run may actually reduce public debt faster in the long run, by speeding up economic recovery and thereby more quickly raising tax revenues and lowering social spending. If the increased government debt is accounted for by spending on projects that raise productivity – infrastructure, R&D, training and early learning programmes for disadvantaged children – the reduction in public debt in the long run will be even larger.

Against this, the advocates of the Conservative narrative may retort that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that the recovery is the best proof that the government’s economic strategy has worked. But has the UK economy really fully recovered? We keep hearing that national income is higher than at the pre-crisis peak of the first quarter of 2008. However, in the meantime the population has grown by 3.5 million (from 60.5 million to 64 million), and in per capita terms UK income is still 3.4% less than it was six years ago. And this is even before we talk about the highly uneven nature of the recovery, in which real wages have fallen by 10% while people at the top have increased their shares of wealth.

But can we not at least say that the recovery has been “jobs-rich”, creating 1.8m positions between 2011 and 2014? The trouble with this is that, apart from the fact that the current unemployment rate of 6% is nothing to be proud of, many of the newly created jobs are of very poor quality.

The ranks of workers in “time-related unemployment”, doing fewer hours than they wish due to a lack of availability of work – have swollen dramatically. Between 1998 and 2005, only about 1.9% of workers were in such a position; by 2012-13 the figure was 8%.

Then there is the extraordinary increase in self-employment. Its share of total employment, whose historical norm (1984-2007) was 12.6%, now stands at an unprecedented 15%. With no evidence of a sudden burst of entrepreneurial energy among Britons, we may conclude that many are in self-employment out of necessity or even desperation. Even though surveys show that most newly self-employed people say it is their preference, the fact that these workers have experienced a far greater collapse in earnings than employees – 20% against 6% between 2006-07 and 2011-12, according to the Resolution Foundation – suggests that they have few alternatives, not that they are budding entrepreneurs going places.

So, in between the people in underemployment (6.1% of employment) and the precarious newly self-employed (2.4%), 8.5% of British people in work (or 2.6 million people) are in jobs that do not fully utilise their abilities – call that semi-unemployment, if you will.

The success of the Conservative economic narrative has allowed the coalition to pursue a destructive and unfair economic strategy, which has generated only a bogus recovery largely based on government-fuelled asset bubbles in real estate and finance, with stagnant productivity, falling wages, millions of people in precarious jobs, and savage welfare cuts.

The country is in desperate need of a counter narrative that shifts the terms of debate. A government budget should be understood not just in terms of bookkeeping but also of demand management, national cohesion and productivity growth. Jobs and wages should not be seen simply as a matter of people being “worth” (or not) what they get, but of better utilising human potential and of providing decent and dignified livelihoods. Ways have to be found to generate economic growth based on rising productivity rather than the continuous blowing of asset bubbles.

Without a new economic vision incorporating these dimensions, Britain will continue on its path of stagnation, financial instability and social conflict.

Cronyism British Style - A depressingly British tale of friends in high places

From Ofsted and the BBC to the Lords, there’s a strong whiff of cronyism. When will we have the courage to challenge it?

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • The Guardian, Monday 4 August 2014

Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

One crony is just a crony; it doesn’t – by my reckoning – become an “ism” until there are three. If the chairmanship of the BBC Trust hadn’t come up at the same time as the chiefdom of Ofsted, and if those two things weren’t playing out in the foreground of the peerage announcements to come this week, it might be OK, and the whole of public life wouldn’t look like it could all be such an embarrassing stitch-up. Unfortunately, the three events have come together. David Hoare is the new chief of Ofsted. Seb Coe is not the new head of the BBC Trust, but not for want of begging by the government, which changed the job requirement to make it more appealing to him. Karren Brady and Stuart Rose are reported to be lined up for ennoblement.

In fairness, appointments to the House of Lords are at least meant to be political, even if they shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be distributed on the basis of wealth. The other two posts, however, are supposed to be appointed impartially, with the emphasis on fitness for the post.

So what is David Hoare’s fitness? He is a trustee of AET academies, which is the largest chain, and also one of the worst – in the bottom quarter for results, both its disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged pupils achieving below-average GCSEs. Five schools in the chain had “unacceptable standards”, according to ministers earlier this year, though Ofsted’s verdict, due to be published last week, has been delayed. Not to worry. The other 72 schools may well have acceptable features. The Department for Education can’t see what all the fuss is about, since Hoare appears to be far less unpopular and less irrelevantly qualified than its other candidate, Carphone Warehouse founder (and Tory donor) David Ross.

For me, the main problem isn’t Ross’s relationship with the Conservative party, or even the alleged tax-avoiding practices of Ross and Hoare’s current or past business interests, though I must admit I’m not thrilled to see the highest ranks of public life wedged with people who don’t appear to understand the point of tax. No, worse than any of that is the assumption of the DfE that almost anybody will be better at running education than someone with experience of teaching.

The entry point for a significant post in the academies system is that you should never have set foot in a state classroom. God forbid that you should ever have stood at the front of one, and taught anything to anyone. In years to come, we will look back in wonder at this period, when government worshipped at the feet of industry so fervently that it thought its titans could do anything. But right now, we’re all trapped in the bowels of government delusion, and won’t see the light until Alan Sugar has been appointed chancellor of Cambridge University and Richard Branson is chief medical officer.

These are two sides of the same coin, whether you’re talking about politicians fawning over business leaders, or business leaders casting cash – or the pearls of their acumen – towards politicians. You’d think we’d be used to it, since New Labour was beset by rows such as these. Whether it looks like corruption or cronyism – is it actively bent, or does it merely stink? – depends a lot on whose side is doing the crony recruitment. But this is surely a rare point of convergence between the Morning Star and the Daily Mail: it doesn’t look very transparent or objective when politicians recruit their allies.

They give us breadheads, to run our institutions of oversight, but they also give us circuses: this is the only plausible explanation for the desperate bid to appoint Seb Coe as chair of the BBC Trust. He is a Tory and a national treasure, a man it is impossible to dislike, a recognisable face and acute businessman whose achievements are uncomplicated and demonstrable. He can run really fast, OK? In these turbulent times for the BBC, as its enemies mass on the borders of its charter (up for renewal in 2016) calling for its disintegration, that’s what we need at the helm, clearly. A man who can run incredibly fast.

In the hubbub around the job description having been rewritten to suit Coe, you may have missed the details of that rewrite: it was to reduce the time commitment that the head of the trust would have to make. This said it all about the process – first, that nobody making the appointment was really taking seriously how significant it was, and second, that Coe didn’t really want to do it. He has now come out and rejected it, as apparently have Patience Wheatcroft, Dame Marjorie Scardino, Sir Howard Stringer and Sarah Hogg.

Why candidates should be snatching their hats so energetically out of the ring is open to question. Former Labour culture secretary Tessa Jowell maintains they are put off by the high level of political meddling, but this seems to be an unlikely deterrent for those who agree with the meddlers. I can well imagine, however, that a candidate of any leaning might be put off by the sheer bungling frivolity, the sight of a government desperately grappling for a household name, a bit of borrowed popularity. Anyway, the shortlist is, for today at least, back to one: Nick Prettejohn, City grandee and former adviser to George Osborne. The circus said no, and we’re back to the breadhead.

The phrase “City grandee” cheered me up, however: remember Royal Mail, and remember that it could be worse. They didn’t have to just give these posts to their associates; they could have sold them.

Ed Miliband isn’t offering socialism – but the Tories are still terrified

Owen Jones in The Independent

The rule of capital is “unimpaired and virtually unchallenged; no social democratic party is nowadays concerned to mount a serious challenge to that rule.” If he was still with us, the socialist Ralph Miliband would have noted two big changes since he wrote these words not long before his death in 1994. Firstly, he’d observe – with little surprise – that capitalism has plunged itself into yet another almighty mess. Secondly, he would undoubtedly be consumed with pride that his youngest son had assumed the leadership of one of these social democratic parties. Momentous events indeed: but his wistful conclusion would have remained the same.

That in mind, I wonder what Ralph Miliband would have made of his son’s transformation from a “laughable blank sheet of paper” to “frothing-at-the-mouth Communist who is going to nationalise your mother quicker than you can say ‘Friedrich Engels had a cracking beard'”. Ed Miliband’s suggested crackdown on land-banking (once endorsed by Boris “Commie” Johnson) and a temporary freeze on energy prices (backed by arch-Leninist Tom Burke, the former Tory special adviser on energy) have provoked comparisons with undesirable elements ranging from Robert Mugabe to the Bolsheviks. After he stood on a soapbox in Brighton and indulged a bystander asking when he would “bring back socialism”, the British right have behaved as though Labour are planning to finish what Lenin was doing before he was so rudely interrupted.

In part, it is the sinister red-baiting of Ed Miliband through his dead father, culminating with the Daily Mail accusing the Labour leader of planning to drive “a hammer and sickle through the heart of the nation so many of us love”. Pass the spliff, Mr Dacre. “Like a good Marxist,” writes The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Moore, “he detects the cowardice latent in capitalists,” accusing Miliband of being “part of an ideology” which is “ultimately pauperising and totalitarian.” Jeremy Hunt odiously endorsed the Mail’s lunacy, arguing that “Ralph Miliband was no friend of the free market and I have never heard Ed Miliband say he supports it.” George Osborne, meanwhile, accuses Ed Miliband of making “essentially the same argument Karl Marx made in Das Kapital.”

This is what is really going on. The right are so drunk on three decades of free-market triumphalism, so used to the left being smashed and battered, that they believe even the mildest deviation from the neo-liberal script is unacceptable. They thought all of these battles had been won, that they were rid of all their turbulent priests, and now they are incandescent at the alleged resurgence of defeated enemies. Don’t you know you’re supposed to be dead? It’s not even the most moderate form of social democracy that the right are trying to drive from political life. Anyone who does not advocate yet more aggressive doses of neo-liberalism – more privatisation, more cuts to the taxes of the wealthy, more attacks on workers’ rights – is liable to come under suspicion, too.

The British right’s strategy is pretty clear. They want to do to “socialist” what the US right have done to “liberal”: turn it into an unequivocally toxic word that no-one in public life would want to associate with, and use it as a means to smear political opponents deemed to deviate from Britain’s suffocating neo-liberal consensus. Bemusing, to say the least, given Labour first officially declared itself a “democratic socialist party” under Tony Blair in 1995 as a sop to the left in the party’s new revised Clause IV. He even wrote a Fabian Society pamphlet entitled Socialism. Yes, granted it meant nothing more to him than motherhood and apple pie, and he had more leeway than Miliband because it was rather more difficult to pin him down as a heartfelt lefty, but the point is even New Labour could happily bandy “socialism” about.

But let’s get a bit of perspective here. Socialism? I don’t think so. Labour have – wrongly – committed themselves to Osborne’s spending plans in the first year of a new government. As Michael Gove gobbles up the comprehensive education system for dinner, Labour’s response has been, to say the least, muted. Medialand may be wailing about 1970s socialism being back with a vengeance, but given polls show 69 per cent want the energy companies nationalised, the Labour leader still found himself to the right of public opinion. No commitment on rail renationalisation, either, which some polls show is even the preferred option of Tory voters. There’s suggestions Labour would hike the top rate of tax up to 50 per cent again, but polls show the public would be happy to take it to 60 per cent. Not exactly the full-scale expropriation of the bourgeoisie, is it?

In truth, Ed Miliband strikes me as an old-style social democrat, perhaps what would have been described as the “Old Labour Right” before Blair’s Year Zero. He generally seems well-intentioned about dragging the political centre of gravity away from the Thatcherite right, but appears to fear a lack of political space to do so. He has made moves towards a mild social democracy in limited areas – but it is just that, mild, although even that is too strong for those now imitating the hysterical rhetoric of Barack Obama’s Tea Party opponents.

It is difficult, sometimes, not to be overwhelmed by the  hypocrisy of the right. They don’t mind a bit of statism, as long as, generally speaking, it’s propping up the wealthy. Banks bailed out by the taxpayer, not free-market dogma; infrastructure, education, and research and development that all businesses depend on, paid for by the state; private contractors who owe their profits solely to state largesse; even mortgages now underwritten by the state. It is only when it is suggested that the state might help those near the bottom of the pile that the right cries foul. In their world, “moderation” means the biggest cuts since the 1920s, the driving of over a million children into poverty, privatising the NHS without public consent and dropping bombs on foreign countries. “Extremism” is curbing energy prices, asking the booming wealthy to pay a bit more tax, and stopping construction firms squatting on land during a housing crisis. So let’s start telling it as it is: they are the extremists, however much they squeal disingenuously about the “centre ground”.

Real democratic socialism would not mean the odd curb on energy prices. It would mean a living wage instead of subsidises for poverty pay, and allowing councils to build housing rather than taxpayers lining the pockets of private landlords. It would mean arguing for social ownership – from banks to the railways – giving real democratic control to workers and consumers.

That is not currently on offer from Labour. But the right fear that, if even mild social-democratic populism proves popular, the door might open to more radical ideas. Their whole Thatcherite consensus could prove imperilled. And that is why the British right are starting to sound like bad-tempered Joseph McCarthy clones who stigmatise even timid social democracy as dangerous extremism to block any further shift away from free market extremism. But a word of warning to the right. Look across the Atlantic. How has the Tea Party-isation of the US right worked out for them? Because that is exactly where you are heading.

The Government’s shameful scapegoating of immigrants

by Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent

The Home Office is on a mission to intimidate Kipling’s “fluttered folk and wild” abroad and in the UK.

It is proud to be institutionally racist, very proud indeed. It has figures to show just how many bloody foreigners have been dealt with and what awaits the others. In June a new £3,000 bond was imposed on visitors from “high risk” nations in Asia and Africa; overseas students from those continents are actively discouraged from coming to our universities. Blatantly discriminatory rules have been instituted; international treaties and human rights legislation are neglected. The nation is dishonoured again by its keepers.

On Friday, on BBC News, Home Office bully boys were shown rounding up dark-skinned folk in specially targeted multiracial localities. In Southall in  west London, outraged Asian women defied them and objected volubly. Some were from Southall Black Sisters, a collective which, for years, has defended gender and minority rights. I recognised some  – grey-haired now, but still full of indignation and passion. In previous decades they demonstrated against virginity tests for Asian women, carried out to check if they were really brides-to-be. And again against the law which denied foreign-born wives legal status for years. And again when the National Front marched through Southall.

The scenes on TV reminded me of South Africa’s pass laws. I broke down and cried inconsolably. Before this latest official  persecution, Home Office vans were spotted in inner-city areas with nasty signs telling illegal migrants to go home. The messages subliminally warned all people of colour not to get too comfortable, to assume we were safe. We who came to stay jumped through hoops of fire to gain some acceptance. But now we know it can be withdrawn. Nasty vans were not sent to areas where Australians and white South Africans hang out. The  barrister  Geoffrey Robertson, his novelist wife Kathy Lette or MP Peter Hain were not made to feel uninvited and unwanted. When will our governments stop pissing on non-white migrants? Will they ever? My kids look like me – I fear for them too.

Ukip’s Nigel Farage, now presenting himself as Mr Nice Guy, has criticised these Home Office initiatives. More bizarrely still, the Tory strategist, Australian Lynton Crosby, has privately expressed his own doubts about the vans. This is the controversial political operator who, in his own country, and the UK has used immigration as an election doodlebug. I told him at a party how much I detested these campaigns and he listened, unmoved, blasé. So why the reservations now about the hardline Home Office tactics? Is it part of Crosby’s cunning plan to disable Ukip? Or have even these unreconstructed men sensed that a line has been crossed?

London has just tried to relive the glorious multiracial Olympics. Oh how our PM and his mates loved all that colour and pizzazz. And all the while his Government forces landlords, medical staff and schools to check passports and exclude those who can’t prove they belong. Immigration detention centres, run by private companies, treat inmates like vermin. Not many white faces in there. Western Europeans have always migrated and still do, as if that is their birthright. But the movement of people from elsewhere is a threat, a menace, even when millions are dispossessed by Western geopolitical games and economic interests.

In our times, we are not permitted to call racism by its name when debating immigration. That discourse is strictly regulated. Immigration is now allegedly completely decoupled from prejudices. Furthermore, it is claimed that Britons are not “allowed” to talk about immigration for fear of being branded “racist”. When did we not talk about the “problems of immigration”? Has there been a single year when known public individuals did not express “brave” views against migration or express xenophobia? Today neo-Powellite nationalists like David Goodhart are lauded as messiahs and the twinned Frank Field and Nicholas Soames regurgitate the messages of anti-immigration lobbyists with enviable access to the media. Britons who are fair and open-minded are appalled by the ceaseless hostility towards incomers. They daren’t speak out because of the overpowering pressure to follow the populist line. Trolls are out to get us too.

The Tories always use the race/immigration card. They don’t even pretend inclusion any more. Shawn Bailey, the Tory black “street” mascot in Downing Street has been dumped; Sayeeda Warsi is back in the ghetto. Meanwhile New Labour, even while encouraging immigration, did not defend it and instead assuaged small island protectionists. But the most culpable are the black and Asian MPs and peers, an unprecedented number now in power, soon to be joined by Doreen Lawrence. So far hardly any have spoken out about the Home Office travesties. Those Southall women had more guts. They could form a cross-party faction and expose the racist immigration policies. Together they would be strong enough to make an impact. But the MPs and peers sit tight, treacherously let the state repeat and exceed the iniquities of the past suffered by their own people, families, possibly themselves. I think I am going to cry again.

Home Office is now a tool for stirring up racial tension

Dave Garret in The Independent 01/08/2013

Over the last few weeks we’ve seen some very visible signs of the Government’s “hostile environment” crusade. There have been vans out on the streets with threatening slogans and, reportedly, non-white people being visibly stopped and searched.

The Home Office is responsible for community cohesion. Yet we are increasingly seeing what appears to be hostility towards non-white immigration, which will do nothing but incite racial tensions and divisions within otherwise rich and diverse communities.

This has to change. We urgently need a more balanced public debate on immigration, free of political agendas. Without it we risk eroding the very foundations of communities across the UK.

The Government has now made the Home Office, who are also responsible for community policing and safety, a highly visible, taxpayer-funded tool for stirring up racial tension and community unrest. The method and location of these stunts make it hard to believe that they are not targeted at non-white communities, but, whatever the truth, they are certainly perceived that way.

Refugee Action wants to see a more balanced debate about immigration, and believes the Home Office has a huge responsibility to avoid adding to its toxicity. At least in the interests of balance, we’d like some vans which say: “The NHS would collapse without foreign-born staff,” or “the Office of Budget Responsibility says that migration has a positive impact on the sustainability of public finances” or “without immigration Britain would be without tea”.

Dave Garratt is chief executive of Refugee Action

For Tories, privatisation is still a matter of dogmatic faith

Dogmatic in the face of all the evidence; backing fringe policies embraced by obscure minorities; pushing failed ideas which, if implemented, would be nothing short of disastrous. Here are accusations long thrown at the left by level-headed advocates of such moderate proposals as, say, illegally invading countries prompting hundreds of thousands of deaths, or introducing cuts Mrs Thatcher could only have dreamt of.

So how about this for an extreme, unpopular policy? According to YouGov, the proposed privatisation of the Royal Mail is opposed by over two-thirds of Britons; even Tory voters are more likely to be against than in support. Just 4 per cent strongly support the flogging off of yet another public service, which gives an indication of how few hardcore free-marketeers there are.

The breadth of opposition is hardly surprising. Britons have endured a three-decade-long experiment of selling off our utilities and public services. After a fair run, the cheerleaders of free market extremism must now accept that they have failed to win the support or consent of the British people. A poll in April found that 61 per cent believed major public services such as energy and water were best run by the public sector; only just over a quarter opted for private companies. Every poll going shows that we want the railways back in public ownership. That so few MPs echo these calls in Parliament is a damning indictment indeed of our political elite and the state of British democracy.

The public’s verdict is undoubtedly based on pragmatic experience. The taxpayer is paying around three times more subsidising private railways than when they were run by the state. Ticket prices soar above inflation, pricing out millions of families, and the service is fragmented and chaotic. Energy and water companies are ripping off consumers when workers’ pay packets are facing the biggest squeeze in modern times.

This latest bout of free market extremism comes after a torrid week for the dogma of “private sector good, public sector bad”. Security companies G4S and Serco have both been accused of overcharging the state for the electronic tagging of offenders, including billing government for people who had died or never even been tagged. During the Olympics, G4S failed to deliver enough security guards, leaving the state – who else? – to fill the vacuum. At the time, Tory Cabinet minister Philip Hammond admitted that the episode challenged his “prejudice that we have to look at the way private sector does things to know how we should do things in government”.

The list could go on. Take the likes of A4e, the welfare-to-work company: on top of being investigated for fraud, its former chief executive Emma Harrison stood down after paying herself a £8.6m share dividend at the expense of the state. There are the PFI schemes that exploded under New Labour, leaving the taxpayer saddled with billions of pounds worth of debt. And then, of course, there’s the small matter of the banks that collapsed. It wasn’t free market dogma that rescued them – it was the state.

The case against privatising our Royal Mail is overwhelming, even disregarding other failures. It is a profitable business, making £440m last year. It is a natural monopoly. The right-wing think-tank Bow Group suggests that rural Post Offices could close and the price of stamps could be hiked.

The truth is the free market extremism pushed by the biggest party in Britain – the neo-liberal centre of Blairites, Cameroon Tories and Orange Book Lib Dems – is riddled with hypocrisy. Modern capitalism depends on a big state, on government largesse. Bailed out banks; PFI contracts; tax credits that subsidise bosses paying low wages; housing benefit subsidising landlords because of the mass sell-off of council houses – the list goes on.

Many of the free market extremists have benefited directly from their dogma. Take Patricia Hewitt, who journeyed from left-wing firebrand to Blairite health secretary: she was recently appointed board director at Bupa, a health company that stands to benefit from the privatisation of the NHS. Lord Norman Warner, a “Labour” Lord who supports the Tories’ dismantling of the NHS, is a non-executive chairman of UK Health Gateway and an adviser to technology firm Xansa, all of which government plans have guaranteed a bright future. The revolving door of free-market extremists is profitable indeed.

Evidence that shatters the demonisation of the public sector is routinely ignored by our media and political elite. The Government is planning to reprivatise the East Coast mainline, despite the Office of Rail Regulation finding it to be the “most efficiently run franchise”. None of this means opponents of free market extremism should be defensive, allowing themselves to be painted as conservative opponents of “reform” (a term stolen and redefined as “privatising” and “cutting”). When the post-war Labour government nationalised key sectors of the economy, it created top-down, undemocratic public corporations. Without meaningfully involving users and workers, there was little resistance when Thatcher sold the family silver.

It’s time to argue for a new form of democratic, social ownership. Take the railways. They could easily be taken into public ownership if the political will was there: the state could simply take over each franchise as it expires. But instead of being run by bureaucrats in Whitehall, passengers and workers could be given the right to vote for representatives on the management board. The same argument could be made for, say, the banks, the NHS, or Royal Mail, forcing services to be more responsive to the needs of users, without selling them off to companies who are solely interested in making big bucks – not in delivering a quality service.

As the free market extremists once again ignore the will of the British people, it’s time to go on the offensive. Yet another disastrous sell-off doesn’t mean simply sticking to the status quo. Democracy, not privatisation: that should be our call.

Looking for a party funding scandal? Try David Cameron's Conservatives

We know how much Unite gives Labour, but finding out who writes the cheques for Conservative Central Office is more difficult

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Monday 8 July 2013 20.00 BST

Len McCluskey, general secretary of Unite. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

I've just been reading about a political party in hock to shadowy donors who enjoy easy access to its leadership and untold influence over its policies. It's scandalous stuff. That's right: I've just been reading about David Cameron's Conservative party.

Few activities are more congenial to the British commentariat than an afternoon's fox-hunting that can be moralised away as "grownup" debate. So it is with Ed Miliband and Len McCluskey. Even as they fire upon Ed for not being his brother, the pundits insist their real subject is party funding and who runs British politics. Yet mentions of the Tories' paymasters are inevitably brief and come with the gloss of "they're all as bad as each other".

Actually, they're not. Yes, some of the allegations about Falkirk are shaming. And it goes without saying that all three main parties are damagingly dependent on big donors; no Obama-style flood of 20s and 50s on this side of the water. But when it comes to concentration of funding, the opacity over where the cash comes from and the overlap between policy and donor interests, the Conservatives look far more corrupted.

We know how much Unite gives Labour because it's out in the open: all fully checkable on the Electoral Commission's website. Finding out who writes the cheques for Conservative Central Office is far harder. Cameron's funders seem to prefer channeling their money through conduits, or splitting the cash between multiple donors.

Through their forensic investigation into Tory funding, published just after the last general election, Stephen Crone and Stuart Wilks-Heeg discovered that some of the largest contributors would give a few hundred thousand: big, but not big enough to raise eyebrows. But then a funny thing could be spotted in the accounts: their wives and other family members would chip in, as well as their business ventures.

Take the JCB billionaire Sir Anthony Bamford, one of Cameron's favourite businessmen and a regular guest on the PM's trade missions abroad. Between 2001 and summer 2010, Wilks-Heeg and Crone found donations from Anthony Bamford, Mark Bamford, George Bamford, JCB Bamford Excavators, JCB Research, and JCB World Brands. Tot that up and you get a contribution to the Conservative party from the Bamford family of £3,898,900. But you'd need to be an expert sleuth with plenty of time and resources to tot it up.

One family: nearly £4m. Wilks-Heeg and Crone found that 15 of these families or "donor groups" account for almost a third of all Tory funding. They enjoy trips to Chequers, dinners in Downing Street and a friendly prime ministerial ear. Lord Irvine Laidlaw stuffed over £6m into Conservative pockets over a decade and, one of his former staffers told the Mail, liked to boast about his influence over party leaders: "William's [Hague] in my pocket".

Perhaps you're wondering why the Tories talked so tough on banking reform before election but have done so little since. That may have something to do with the money the City gives to them. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in 2010 donations from financial services accounted for over half of all Tory funding.

Three years ago, spread-betting boss Stuart Wheeler brazenly told MPs that "a party is going to take more notice of somebody who might give them lots of money than somebody who won't". He should know; he once gave the Conservatives a single donation of £5m. And certainly, the City has plenty to show for its investment. Across Europe, Angela Merkel, François Hollande and others are pushing ahead with plans for a Tobin tax or a small levy on financial transactions to start next year. Britain, on the other hand, is part of a small band of refuseniks, along with such other giants of financial regulation as Malta and Luxembourg.

One of the mysteries of this government is why George Osborne made a priority of cutting the 50p tax for the super-rich, thus handing the opposition a stick to beat him with. One possible answer to that is suggested by an FT report from November 2011 on hedge-fund donations to Osborne's party. "There probably aren't many votes in cutting the 50p top rate of tax," one major hedge fund donor told the paper, "but among those that give significant amounts to the party, it's a big issue, and that's probably why it's a big issue for the party too". Just four months later, at the next budget, the 50p rate was scrapped.

What, by contrast, has Uncle Len ever got from Ed Miliband? A promise of an end to the pay freeze for public servants? Nyet. A commitment to break from austerity? Nein. In spring 2010, the Telegraph claimed that Labour ministers "echoed the union's opposition to Kraft's takeover of Cadbury". This would be the takeover that actually went through. There are shades here of the MPs' expenses scandal, when the Tory schemes for lifting money from taxpayers were so baroque that they attracted less opprobrium than Labour parliamentarians claiming for bath plugs and blue movies. So it is with McCluskey's plan to fill Falkirk's constituency Labour party with Unite's Keystone Cops, even while hedgie Michael Hintze puts nearly £40,000 towards the chancellor's expenses alone and reaps the reward of a cut in his taxes.

But there's something else going on, too. Westminster and the press are still ruled by the idea that if workers' representatives seek to influence politics they must be bullies; while if capitalists get their way, then that's inevitably good for capitalism. Five years on from the banking crisis and all the evidence to the contrary, that really is a link that needs ending.