Jeremy Corbyn is vital to Labour’s future – whether he’s leader or not

Maya Goodfellow in The Guardian


Is Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle plotting to replace him? Will he go before the 2020 election or will he stick it out? These questions may sound appealing, but do they miss the point of Corbyn? Is he the person who will take the Labour party to where many want it to be? Because Corbyn’s leadership isn’t solely about him: it’s about the left’s long-term goals of transforming Labour into a leftwing populist party. The kind of party many have long yearned for.

Over the weekend, rumours began to swirl about whether Corbyn’s departure was imminent when it emerged that Labour had been testing the appeal of frontbenchers in the north of England. Despite the tone of some of the reporting, it’s normal for political parties to try to get an idea of how people in different parts of the country perceive shadow ministers. But while these reports captured the headlines, another more telling piece of Labour news received far less attention: the fight over whether the “McDonnell clause” will pass at Labour conference.


Were someone from another wing of the party to take over as leader, the problems that plague Labour would remain

The clause is a change to the leadership rules that would lower the number of nominations leadership candidates need from MPs to get on the ballot paper – something the bulk of the parliamentary party opposes. Their efforts to stop a leftwing successor making it on to the ballot should Corbyn resign – thereby denying members the right to vote for such a candidate – were bolstered over the weekend through two internal elections for conference delegates. This is a struggle within the party that many activists see as far more important than the last two leadership contests; it’s one that will define Labour’s long-term future identity as either a party that manages the status quo or one that pushes for radical change.


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Corbyn’s victories in 2015 and 2016 were a symbol of a move towards a more progressive Labour party; he was saying things that my generation had never heard uttered by a mainstream, frontline politician. But his leadership has been spoken about as if it were some sort of power grab made possible by crazed Trotsky entryists. In his book on Corbyn’s move from the back to the front benches, Richard Seymour charts how this rise was made possible by Labour’s long-term decline and a wider crisis in parliamentary democracy.

Corbyn’s leadership must be set against a history of plummeting interest in parliamentary politics, and the rapidly expanding disconnect between the state and the people. This sense of disenfranchisement has been exploited by the far right and was made possible by New Labour’s years in power. Their aim wasn’t to transform the political system; they chose to ameliorate the symptoms of the free-market economy, which handed power to corporations at the expense of people, rather than try to change its structures. Similar policies across Europe have led to struggles for all social democratic parties – Corbyn offered an alternative route.

Recognising this context does not mean ignoring Labour’s current woes, not least their confused approach to Brexit. Take immigration. It’s one of the main issues dragging British politics to the right. While certain MPs have remained adamant that they must listen to voters’ “legitimate concerns” over immigration, even when those concerns are unfounded, Labour’s current leadership has not yet offered a strong pro-migration message. Many Corbyn supporters have been pressuring them to do so. The left’s aim isn’t to maintain an uncritical defence of Corbyn but to keep working at the project that was started when he was elected leader – that is, breaking with an economic consensus that breeds inequality, and crafting a leftwing form of populism that speaks to people without scapegoating migrants.

Were someone from another wing of the party to take over as leader, the problems that plague Labour would remain. The old tactics of managing the country’s problems, instead of trying to solve them, wouldn’t suffice.

Given the challenges facing Labour and Corbyn, there is a propensity for people on the left to fall into despair. But the long-term goal is transformation. While Corbyn’s election in 2015 and then again in 2016 felt like the way to achieve this, his supporters have realised it was only the beginning, and that Corbyn is an essential part of the journey as the left seeks to cement much-needed change within the Labour party.

Finance and facade

Tabish Khair in The Hindu

REGULATION NEEDED: “Finance capital is the storm, and our governments can and will do nothing about it."  

Imagine a mythical planet not visited by the Little Prince. This is a planet divided up into a thousand and one sections with walls between them. There are doors in the walls, and windows of course. But there is no roof to the planet. Everyone on the planet is affected by storms that cross the skies, sometimes devastating this section, sometimes that. Sometimes the storms afflict all the sections, but in different ways: flood in one place and hail in another; cyclone on one, landslide in another.

A man-made storm

The denizens of this planet are peculiar: they are mostly unable to look up. As such, many of them cannot see signs of a gathering storm. The few who can are helpless. What can they do about storms? This is also true of the various presidents, prime ministers, monarchs and dictators who govern the different sections of this planet. Many of these leaders even believe that the storms are necessary: some good will trickle down. So all they can do is regulate the doors and windows of their sections, and the citizens inside them.

We are living on this planet today. With one difference: most of the storm clouds circling us are man-made.

Finance capital is the storm, and our governments can and will do nothing about it. If you are running a national government but cannot really regulate financial speculation and finance capital as the main source of power, what is it that you can do? Regulate people — as citizens and as foreigners. That is the condition, in slightly different ways, of almost every country in the world today.

When liberal capitalism died

Sometime in the 1980s, a strange thing happened to classical liberal capitalism. It was murdered. No one noticed the crime. Today, we are living with the dead body of liberal capitalism, which is why leftist critiques of it also fail. What we have today is said to be neo-liberalism, but neo-liberalism is almost as different from classical capitalism as night is from day. Actually, neo-liberalism is partly a misnomer: it has little to do with liberalism.

Liberalism insisted on the separation of the state and the market, and decried government interference in markets. Neo-liberalism believes that governments should intervene in markets — but only on the side of banks, finance capitalists and lending agencies. Every time financial speculation creates a crisis, governments are expected to tax their citizens and use that money to save banks and financial institutions. Even if one argues, as some do, that liberal capitalism was always to some extent state capitalism, this signifies a major shift.

We have known since the 19th century that money makes better sense than production or services in capitalist societies. Goods and services fluctuate in demand, but money has to be employed no matter what good or service is on offer. Hence, it makes sense, finally, to traffic only in money. Financial speculation is built into capitalism. 

But when financial speculation takes over, as it started doing from the 1980s, an entirely different situation comes into being. Today, financial speculation far outstrips global trade. Finance capital tyrannises not just social capital but even industrial capital. Most of the capital used for such financial speculation does not need to be invested in production or services; it can just be moved around in, as U.S. President Donald Trump said about his taxes, ‘smart’ ways. Most of this capital is not even in the shape of cash, which is cumbersome to move. It is sheer numbers, including digital money, and many types of debt and credit.

Mr. Trump’s victory is the assault of finance capital on not just social capital (welfare, public facilities, etc.), which has long been battered, but this time also on industrial capital. Mr. Trump might actually try to ‘bring jobs home,’ but what this will lead to is greater curbs on industrial capital — not only leaving finance capital free, as his Wall Street appointments have indicated, but probably forcing more industrialists to convert industrial capital into financial speculation. Demonetisation in India might be a sincere attempt to fight corruption, but it will also reinforce the ascendency of finance capital, regardless of what the government wants.

Maurizio Lazzarato points out in Governing by Debt that all national governments are basically employed in collecting taxes from their citizens and cutting on social services, in order to keep paying national and other debts to financial organisations. National leaders have come to believe that ‘economics’ is an independent field, far from politics, when actually economics is the new politics of neo-liberalism. That is why governments are employed to tax citizens in order to repay financiers and banks, and governments are also employed to smoothen the paths of financial speculation.

A necessary façade

In this context, the nationalist policing of ‘undesirable foreigners’ is a necessary façade — to obscure the lack of governance of global finance. Xenophobia is inevitable in such a situation, because national leaders cannot even talk of the real storm — invisible finance capital; they can only regulate the bodies on the ground. The general scepticism of politicians — on which Mr. Trump, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and so many others have ridden to power — arises from the fact that politicians only govern people today. They cannot govern global finance capital. Instead, finance capital governs politicians.

Politicians have abandoned much of actual politics to the economic ideologues of neo-liberalism, and they cannot even confess it to ordinary people.

The cities where exercise does more harm than good

 Nick Van Mead in The Guardian

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Monday 13 February 2017 07.00 GMTLast modified on Monday 13 February 2017 07.02 GMT

Who says exercise is always good for you? Cycling to work in certain highly polluted cities could be more dangerous to your health than not doing it at all, according to researchers.


In cities such as Allahabad in India, or Zabol in Iran, the long-term damage from inhaling fine particulates could outweigh the usual health gains of cycling after just 30 minutes. In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, this tipping point happens after just 45 minutes a day cycling along busy roads. In Delhi or the Chinese city of Xingtai, meanwhile, residents pass what the researchers call the “breakeven point” after an hour. Other exercise with the same intensity as cycling – such as slow jogging – would have the same effect.

“If you are beyond the breakeven point, you may be doing yourself more harm than good,” said Audrey de Nazelle, a lecturer in air pollution management at Imperial College’s Centre for Environmental Policy, and one of the authors of the report.

The study, originally published in the journal Preventive Medicine before the World Health Organization’s latest global estimates, modelled the health effects of active travel and of air pollution. They measured air quality through average annual levels of PM2.5s, the tiny pollutant particles that can embed themselves deep in the lungs. This type of air pollution can occur naturally – from dust storms or forest fires, for example – but is mainly created by motor vehicles and manufacturing.

Breathing polluted air has been linked to infections including pneumonia, ischemic heart disease, stroke and some cancers. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s Global Burden of Disease study ranks it among the top risk factors for loss of health.

The report in Preventive Medicine assumed cyclists moved at speeds of 12/14kph, with health benefits calculated in a similar way to the WHO’s Heat assessment tool. It also assumed cyclists used roads with double the background levels of air pollution, which may underestimate how poor air quality is in many developing world cities: for example, a study in Lagos found five out of eight sites exceeded Delhi’s annual PM2.5 concentration.

People commuting to work along busy roads in a city with average annual background PM2.5 levels of 160 micrograms per cubic metre (μg/m3) or above will pass the breakeven point at just 30 minutes a day, the study found. Using the WHO’s latest global estimates, published in May, those levels are only reached in Zabor, and in Allahabad and Gwalior in India – although many large cities in the developing world do not accurately measure air pollution so were not included in the WHO database.

Fifteen cities (see map above and table below) have annual mean PM2.5 levels of 115μg/m3 or above, according to the WHO data, so the breakeven point is reached after an hour of active travel. Fine particulate levels above 80μg/m3 were found in 62 cities, making cycling more harmful than beneficial after two hours.

The study found people in western cities such as London, Paris or New York would never reach the point where PM2.5 air pollution’s negatives outweigh exercise’s positives in the long term.

“The benefits of active travel outweighed the harm from air pollution in all but the most extreme air pollution concentrations,” said Nazelle. “It is not currently an issue for healthy adults in Europe in general.”

London’s annual average PM2.5 pollution was estimated at 15μg/m3 by the WHO – above the WHO’s guideline of 10, but still at a level at which the study estimated active travel would always be beneficial. Paris had ambient PM2.5 levels of 18μg/m3, while New York had 9μg/m3.

However, the study did not consider the health impacts of short-term spikes in PM2.5 pollution, or take into account the effect of exercising in air containing larger PM10 particulates, ozone, or toxic nitrogen oxides (NOx) from diesel cars.

London mayor Sadiq Khan issued his first “very high” air pollution alert last month when air in the UK capital hit the maximum score of 10 on the Air Quality Index, equivalent to PM10 in excess of 101μg/m3. NOx pollution causes 5,900 early deaths a year in the city, and most air quality zones across Britain break legal limits.

“This is the highest level of alert and everyone – from the most vulnerable to the physically fit – may need to take precautions to protect themselves from the filthy air,” Khan warned.

The point at which air pollution becomes so bad that the harm from cycling to work outweighs the health benefits

City	Country	PM2.5 annual mean, micrograms/m3, from WHO 2016	Minutes spent cycling per day for harm to outweigh benefits
Zabol	Iran (Islamic Republic of)	217	30
Gwalior	India	176	30
Allahabad	India	170	30
Riyadh	Saudi Arabia	156	45
Al Jubail	Saudi Arabia	152	45
Patna	India	149	45
Raipur	India	144	45
Bamenda	Cameroon	132	45
Xingtai	China	128	60
Baoding	China	126	60
Delhi	India	122	60
Ludhiana	India	122	60
Dammam	Saudi Arabia	121	60
Shijiazhuang	China	121	60
Kanpur	India	115	60
Khanna	India	114	75
Firozabad	India	113	75
Lucknow	India	113	75
Handan	China	112	75
Peshawar	Pakistan	111	75
Amritsar	India	108	75
Gobindgarh	India	108	75
Rawalpindi	Pakistan	107	75
Hengshui	China	107	75
Narayangonj	Bangladesh	106	75
Boshehr	Iran (Islamic Republic of)	105	75
Agra	India	105	75
Kampala	Uganda	104	90
Tangshan	China	102	90
Jodhpur	India	101	90
Dehradun	India	100	90
Ahmedabad	India	100	90
Jaipur	India	100	90
Howrah	India	100	90
Faridabad	India	98	90
Yenbu	Saudi Arabia	97	90
Langfang	China	96	90
Dhanbad	India	95	90
Chittagong	Bangladesh	95	90
Ahvaz	Iran (Islamic Republic of)	95	90
Doha	Qatar	93	105
Bhopal	India	93	105
Khurja	India	90	105
Dhaka	Bangladesh	90	105
Kaduna	Nigeria	90	105
Gazipur	Bangladesh	89	105
Karachi	Pakistan	88	105
Cangzhou	China	88	105
Baghdad	Iraq	88	105
Al-Shuwaikh	Kuwait	88	105
Tianjin	China	87	105
Raebareli	India	87	105
Kabul	Afghanistan	86	105
Zhengzhou	China	86	105
Barisal	Bangladesh	85	105
Beijing	China	85	105
Al Wakrah	Qatar	85	105
Kota	India	84	120
Udaipur	India	83	120
TETOVO	The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia	81	120
Alwar	India	81	120
Wuhan	China	80	120