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Britain is the Dorian Gray economy, hiding its ugly truths from the world. Now they are exposed

From Tony Blair to George Osborne, our rulers painted false pictures of success while real wealth and wages withered away writes Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian 

You know the central conceit of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, of course you do. A lad of sun-kissed beauty is presented with a stunning likeness of himself. Disturbed at the notion that he will grow old while the painting doesn’t, he locks it away – where it is the portrait that ages and uglifies while Dorian stays boyish and beautiful. But perhaps you’ve forgotten what happens next.

The story has come to my mind many times, as the foulness of British politics becomes ever harder to ignore. Genteel liberals wonder how their land of cricket whites and orderly queues could be ruled by a grasping liar such as Boris Johnson and I hear a whisper on the wind: Dorian Gray. The New York Times and Der Spiegel report in bewilderment on a country with pockets of deep poverty and unslaked anger, and again rasps that hoarse voice: the horror was hidden here all along.

Now it’s all out in the open. In one of the richest societies in human history, inhabitants are starting to twig that by 2030 or thereabouts they will earn less per head than the Poles they so recently patronised. Whatever the politicians and pundits may argue, this debacle owes nothing to Jeremy Corbyn or Brexit or any supposedly un-British “populism”. It is homegrown and has deep roots.

Like Dorian Gray, Britain has for too long presented one face to the world while concealing the awful truth. The author of that novel, Oscar Wilde, was the son of an Irish nationalist and a graduate of Oxford, where he became a fine student of the British upper classes and their mellifluous hypocrisy. He would have recognised much of the mess we’re in, because it grew among shadows and cover-ups. From Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia through to George Osborne’s “march of the makers”, our rulers have trumpeted every false success, while ugly facts have been waved away as anomalies: from the former manufacturing suburbs and towns turned into giant warehouses of surplus people, to the fact that 15% of adults in England are on antidepressants. We’re winning the global race, claimed David Cameron, even as the population’s life expectancy fell far behind other rich countries. We shan’t stunt future generations with debt, he boasted, as our five-year-olds became the shortest in Europe.

Or take the housing bubble that politicians pretended was true prosperity – until this week, as the Bank of England hiked rates for the 13th time in a row and the prospect of it bursting began to terrify them. Yet the Westminster classes blew their hardest into that bubble. As soon as estate agents were out of lockdown, Rishi Sunak gave up £6bn of taxpayers’ money for a stamp duty holiday – an act as prudent as pouring petrol on a fire. Many of those he lured up the property ladder will be hardest hit by rising mortgage rates. Analysis done for me by UK Finance suggests that 465,000 house purchases during that tax break were financed with two- or three-year fixed rate mortgages – the very ones running out right now. In other words, nearly half a million households took the chancellor’s inducement; many will plunge into dangerous financial straits; some face losing their homes. They were mis-sold a dream by Sunak. Still, at least the Tories enjoyed a bounce in the polls.

Helmut Berger stars in the 1970 film adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Photograph: Sargon/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock


“Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face,” Dorian is told by his portraitist Basil Hallward. “If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even … But you, Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face and your marvellous untroubled youth – I can’t believe anything against you.” The picture of Dorian, which would have revealed the grotesque truth, is hidden away. So, too, has the UK avoided admitting its ills. Even now, in a country where patently so little works for people who rely on work for their income, commentators and frontbenchers still blame supposedly all-powerful interlopers: Boris, Nigel, Jeremy. And from Sunak to Starmer, all push growth and jobs as the remedy for what ails us.

Yet growth in this country is falling and not because of Ukraine or Covid or Brexit. Since the 1950s, the growth rate adjusted for inflation has been on a gentle but insistent downward slide. Our economy has become ever more stagnant and dependent on debt. It is fatuous to pretend this is going to turn around through magicking Britain into an AI free-for-all or a jolly green industrial giant. Employment? One in four employees are on low weekly wages – either because the pay is too low or the hours aren’t enough – while the average real wage has flatlined for many years.

Much of this analysis comes from a new book, When Nothing Works, written by a team of scholars. Although specialising in economics and accountancy, what they have produced is an essential text for understanding British government: the polarised politics of a highly unequal and increasingly stagnant society.

Take the issue at the top of today’s agenda: wages. Why can’t you and I take home more money? Because of a lack of productivity, politicians will say. Yet the researchers point to how labour has got a smaller and smaller share of economic output since the 1970s.

If the same share of GDP was paid out in wages today as in 1976, the average working-age household would have an extra £9,744 a year. We haven’t lost that 10 grand a year through laziness at work but because politicians from Thatcher onwards smashed up trade unions, undermined labour rights, and crowed over the result as a “flexible labour market”. What they really created was a low-wage workforce, in a low-growth country ruled by politicians with low ambitions for everyone bar themselves.

“The prayer of your pride has been answered,” Basil counsels Dorian, when he finally sees the portrait and its horrific truth. “The prayer of your repentance will be answered also.” When Nothing Works will inevitably be termed pessimistic, but it is no such thing. Realism comes from facing who we are and dropping the pretence that a growth miracle is just around the corner. Instead of trying to boost “the economy”, it is high time to boost our people: to ensure they have the basics they need to live a life free from indignity and free to flourish. This will come from redistribution rather than growth, from replacing extractive businesses with fair ones. Such ideas will not go down well in SW1, where both Tory and Labour are increasingly hostile to pluralism and brittle in their dogmatism. Self-knowledge is the hardest knowledge, as one of the book’s authors, Karel Williams, says. And self-delusion leads eventually to disaster.

Unable to face his loathsome self-image, Dorian slashes that portrait. He is found by servants. “Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage. It was not till they examined the rings that they recognised who it was.”

Who’s to blame for the Afghanistan chaos? Remember the war’s cheerleaders

Today the media are looking for scapegoats, but 20 years ago they helped facilitate the disastrous intervention writes George Monbiot in The Guardian

‘Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable.’ A US marine with evacuees at Kabul airport. Photograph: U.S. Central Command Public Affairs vis Getty Images
 

Everyone is to blame for the catastrophe in Afghanistan, except the people who started it. Yes, Joe Biden screwed up by rushing out so chaotically. Yes, Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab failed to make adequate and timely provisions for the evacuation of vulnerable people. But there is a frantic determination in the media to ensure that none of the blame is attached to those who began this open-ended war without realistic aims or an exit plan, then waged it with little concern for the lives and rights of the Afghan people: the then US president, George W Bush, the British prime minister Tony Blair and their entourages.

Indeed, Blair’s self-exoneration and transfer of blame to Biden last weekend was front-page news, while those who opposed his disastrous war 20 years ago remain cancelled across most of the media. Why? Because to acknowledge the mistakes of the men who prosecuted this war would be to expose the media’s role in facilitating it. 

Any fair reckoning of what went wrong in Afghanistan, Iraq and the other nations swept up in the “war on terror” should include the disastrous performance of the media. Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable. After the Northern Alliance stormed into Kabul, torturing and castrating its prisoners, raping women and children, the Telegraph urged us to “just rejoice, rejoice”, while the Sun ran a two-page editorial entitled “Shame of the traitors: wrong, wrong, wrong … the fools who said Allies faced disaster”. In the Guardian, Christopher Hitchens, a convert to US hegemony and war, marked the solemnity of the occasion with the words: “Well, ha ha ha, and yah, boo. It was … obvious that defeat was impossible. The Taliban will soon be history.”

The few journalists and public figures who dissented were added to the Telegraph’s daily list of “Osama bin Laden’s useful idiots”, accused of being “anti-American” and “pro-terrorism”, mocked, vilified and de-platformed almost everywhere. In the Independent, David Aaronovitch claimed that if you opposed the ongoing war, you were “indulging yourself in a cosmic whinge”.

Everyone I know in the US and the UK who was attacked in the media for opposing the war received death threats. Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress who voted against granting the Bush government an open licence to use military force, needed round-the-clock bodyguards. Amid this McCarthyite fervour, peace campaigners such as Women in Black were listed as “potential terrorists” by the FBI. The then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, sought to persuade the emir of Qatar to censor Al Jazeera, one of the few outlets that consistently challenged the rush to war. After he failed, the US bombed Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul.

The broadcast media were almost exclusively reserved for those who supported the adventure. The same thing happened before and during the invasion of Iraq, when the war’s opponents received only 2% of BBC airtime on the subject. Attempts to challenge the lies that justified the invasion – such as Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and his supposed refusal to negotiate – were drowned in a surge of patriotic excitement.

So why is so much of the media so bloodthirsty? Why do they love bombs and bullets so much, and diplomacy so little? Why do they take such evident delight in striking a pose atop a heap of bodies, before quietly shuffling away when things go wrong?

An obvious answer is the old adage that “if it bleeds it leads”, so there’s an inbuilt demand for blood. I remember as if it were yesterday the moment I began to hate the industry I work for. In 1987, I was producing a current affairs programme for the BBC World Service. It was a slow news day, and none of the stories gave us a strong lead for the programme. Ten minutes before transmission, the studio door flew open and the editor strode in. He clapped his hands and shouted: “Great! 110 dead in Sri Lanka!” News is spectacle, and nothing delivers spectacle like war.

Another factor in the UK is a continued failure to come to terms with our colonial history. For centuries the interests of the nation have been conflated with the interests of the rich, while the interests of the rich depended to a remarkable degree on colonial loot and the military adventures that supplied it. Supporting overseas wars, however disastrous, became a patriotic duty.

For all the current breastbeating about the catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan, nothing has been learned. The media still regale us with comforting lies about the war and occupation. They airbrush the drone strikes in which civilians were massacred and the corruption permitted and encouraged by the occupying forces. They seek to retrofit justifications to the decision to go to war, chief among them securing the rights of women.

But this issue, crucial as it was and remains, didn’t feature among the original war aims. Nor, for that matter, did overthrowing the Taliban. Bush’s presidency was secured, and his wars promoted, by American ultra-conservative religious fundamentalists who had more in common with the Taliban than with the brave women seeking liberation. In 2001, the newspapers now backcasting themselves as champions of human rights mocked and impeded women at every opportunity. The Sun was running photos of topless teenagers on Page 3; the Daily Mail ruined women’s lives with its Sidebar of Shame; extreme sexism, body shaming and attacks on feminism were endemic.

Those of us who argued against the war possessed no prophetic powers. I asked the following questions in the Guardian not because I had any special information or insight, but because they were bleeding obvious. “At what point do we stop fighting? At what point does withdrawal become either honourable or responsible? Having once engaged its forces, are we then obliged to reduce Afghanistan to a permanent protectorate? Or will we jettison responsibility as soon as military power becomes impossible to sustain?” But even asking such things puts you beyond the pale of acceptable opinion.

You can get away with a lot in the media, but not, in most outlets, with opposing a war waged by your own nation – unless your reasons are solely practical. If your motives are humanitarian, you are marked from that point on as a fanatic. Those who make their arguments with bombs and missiles are “moderates” and “centrists”; those who oppose them with words are “extremists”. The inconvenient fact that the “extremists” were right and the “centrists” were wrong is today being strenuously forgotten.

The secret of Johnson’s success lies in his break with Treasury dominance

Gordon Brown’s rule-based approach shaped Whitehall for two decades. But the Tories are forging a new politics that has little regard for prudence writes William Davies in The Guardian

 

Illustration: Eva Bee/The Guardian Thu 20 May 2021 07.00 BST

 

The Conservative party’s growing electoral dominance in non-metropolitan England, so starkly re-emphasised by results in the north-east, has been attributed to various causes. Brexit and the popularity of Boris Johnson both count for a great deal. But while Labour is busy telling voters how much it deserved to lose, this is only half the picture. A major part of Johnson’s appeal is the way he has escaped the shadow cast by one of Britain’s three most significant political figures of the past 45 years: not Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair, but Gordon Brown. 

The 1994 meeting between Blair and Brown at the Granita restaurant in Islington, north London, shortly after John Smith’s death, is the founding myth of New Labour: the moment when Brown agreed to let Blair stand for the leadership, on certain conditions. In addition to Blair’s much disputed commitment to serve only two terms in office should he become prime minister, there was also his promise that Brown, as chancellor, would get control over the domestic policy agenda. At least the second of these commitments was honoured, resulting in a situation where, from 1997 to 2007, the Treasury held an overwhelming dominance over the rest of Whitehall, while Brown was implicitly unsackable.

But, together with his adviser Ed Balls, Brown was also the architect of a new apparatus of economic policymaking designed for the era of globalisation. The central problem that Balls and Brown confronted was how to build the capacity for higher levels of social spending, while also retaining financial credibility in an age of far more mobile capital than any confronted by previous Labour governments. The fear was that, with financial capital able to cross borders at speed, a high-spending government might be viewed suspiciously by investors and lenders, making it harder for the state to borrow cheaply. The first part of their answer endures to this day: operational independence was handed to the Bank of England, accompanied by an inflation target. No longer could politicians seek to win elections by cutting interest rates, a move that aimed to win the trust of the markets.

On top of this, Brown also introduced a culture of almost obsessive fiscal discipline, as if the bond markets would attack the moment he showed any flexibility – the same paranoia that shaped Clintonism. His “golden rule”, outlined in his first budget, stated that, over the economic cycle, the government could borrow only to invest, not for day-to-day spending. The Treasury governed the rest of Whitehall according to a strict economic rubric, demanding every spending proposal was audited according to orthodox neoclassical economics.

Balls later wrote that their thinking had been guided by an influential 1977 article, Rules Rather than Discretion, in which two economists, Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott, sought to demonstrate that policymakers will produce far better economic outcomes if they stick rigidly to certain principles and heuristics of policy, rather than seeking to intervene on a case-by-case basis. Brown’s robotic persona and his mantra of “prudence” conveyed a programme that was so focused on policy as to be oblivious to more frivolous aspects of politics.

Elements of this Brownite machine remained in place during the David Cameron-George Osborne years: a chancellor acting as a kind of parallel prime minister, transforming society through force of cost-benefit analysis, only now the fiscal tide was going out rather than in. Even “Spreadsheet Phil” Hammond sustained the template as far as he could, in the face of ever-rising attacks from the Brexit extremists in his own party. The point is that, from 1997 to 2019, the government largely meant the Treasury. Those powers that are so foundational for the modern nation state – to tax, borrow and spend – were the basis on which governments asked to be judged, by voters and financial markets.

Various things have happened to weaken the Treasury’s political authority over the past five years, though – significantly – none of these has yet seemed to weaken the government’s credibility in the eyes of the markets. First, there was the notorious cooked Brexit forecast published in May 2016, predicting an immediate recession, half a million job losses and a house price crash, should Britain vote to leave. The referendum itself, a mass refusal to view the world in terms of macroeconomics, meant there could be no going back to a world in which politics was dominated by economists.

Consider how different things are now from in Brown’s heyday. Johnson’s first chancellor, Sajid Javid, lasted little more than six months in the job, resigning after one of his aides was sacked by Dominic Cummings without his knowledge. His second, Rishi Sunak, may have high political ambitions and approval ratings, but scarcely forms the kind of double-act with Johnson that Brown did with Blair, or Osborne with Cameron. Johnson’s cabinet is notable for lacking any obvious next-in-line leader.

What’s more interesting are the parts of Whitehall that have suddenly risen in profile under Johnson: communities and local government under Robert Jenrick, and the Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport under Oliver Dowden. With the “levelling up” agenda of the former, (manifest in such pork barrel politics as the Towns Fund) and the “culture war” agenda of the latter (evident in attacks on the autonomy of museums), a new vision of government is emerging, one that is no longer afraid of expressing cultural favouritism or fixing deals. Balls and Brown were inspired by “rules rather than discretion”; now there’s no better way to sum up Jenrick’s disgraceful governmental career to date than “discretion rather than rules”.

In the background, of course, are the unique fiscal and financial circumstances produced by Covid, in which all notions of prudence have been thrown out of the window. With the Bank of England buying most of the additional government bonds issued over the last 15 months (beyond the wildest imaginings of Balls and Brown), and with the cost of borrowing close to zero, the rationale for strict fiscal discipline or austerity has currently evaporated. Paradoxically, a situation in which the Treasury can find an emergency £60bn to pay the country’s wages makes for a popular chancellor, but may make for a less powerful Treasury.

Amid all this, Labour is left in an unenviable position, which is in many ways deeply unfair. So long as the Tories are associated with Brexit, England and Johnson, the voters don’t expect them to exercise any kind of discipline, fiscal or otherwise. Meanwhile, Labour remains associated with a Treasury worldview: technocratic, London-centric, British not English, rules not discretion. What’s doubly unfair is that, thanks to the serial fictions of Osborne and the Tory press from 2010 onwards that Labour had “spent all the money”, it is not even viewed as economically trustworthy. In the end, it turned out that public perceptions of financial credibility were largely shaped by political messaging and media narratives, not by adherence to self-imposed fiscal rules.

In the eyes of party members, New Labour will be for ever tarred by Blair and Iraq. In the eyes of much of the country, however, it will be tarred by some vague memory of centralised Brownite spending regimes. The fact that Labour receives so little credit for Brown’s undoubted successes as a spending chancellor is due to many factors, but ultimately consists in the fact that the technocratic, Treasury view of the world was never adequately translated into a political story. Osborne simply presented himself as the inheritor of a centralised “mess” that needed cleaning up.

The recent elections demonstrated that all political momentum is now with the cities and nations of Britain: the Conservatives in leave-voting England, Andy Burnham in Manchester, the SNP in Scotland, Labour in Wales. Rather than making weak gestures towards the union jack or against London, Labour needs to think deeply about the kind of statecraft and policy style that is suited to such a moment, so as to finally leave the world of Granita and “golden rules” behind.

I’ll take Labour dithering over Conservative cruelty any day

We face a choice between a party in it for themselves and one seeking to solve our massive problems. It’s no contest writes George Monbiot in The Guardian


 

‘The first test of politics is this: are they in it for themselves, or for us?’ Rebecca Long-Bailey and Jeremy Corbyn with other members of Labour’s shadow cabinet. Photograph: Danny Lawson/EPA


Try to imagine Jeremy Corbyn in Tony Blair’s post-political role: flying around the world, enriching himself by striking deals with tyrants and oil companies. Try to picture John McDonnell setting up, like Blair’s righthand man, Peter Mandelson, a consultancy that gives reputational advice to controversial corporations. Try to picture Rebecca Long-Bailey being caught in a sting, like three of Blair’s former ministers, who offered undercover journalists political influence in exchange for cash.

I find these scenarios impossible to imagine. Whatever you might think of Labour’s frontbenchers, you could surely no more picture them behaving this way than you could picture Boris Johnson abandoning his career to become a hospital cleaner.

The first test of politics is this: are they in it for themselves, or for us? I don’t mean to suggest that Blair and his frontbenchers were entirely selfish, but self-interest and the national interest became too easily entangled. Among the Conservatives there is no confusion: self-interest is the political doctrine. Unlike either group, Corbyn’s team passes.

This carries a cost. The game you are supposed to play in British politics is feathering your nest by feathering the nests of others. Those who refuse are denounced in the billionaire press as unfit for government.

I’ve never been a member of any political party, and have no party loyalties. I know the Labour party is imperfect. But what I see is a group of people genuinely seeking to solve our massive problems – environmental, political, economic, medical and social – rather than appeasing press barons and queueing at the notorious revolving door between politics and money-making.

My experience, as an author of the Land for the Many report that Labour commissioned, has been of a party boldly seeking new ideas for improving national life, and being prepared to weather a storm of lies for having the temerity to mention them. We are likely to see a lot more of this when it publishes its manifesto on Thursday.

Of course the first test is not the only test. Another is the ability to lead, and here Labour often fails. First, some context. Several hundred Labour members, out of 485,000, have been accused of antisemitism. That is several hundred too many: every instance is an outrage. However, as a fraction of 1%, it’s a far cry from public perceptions of the issue. According to a new book about the media’s treatment of the Labour party, Bad News for Labour, the average estimate by people surveyed is that 34% of Labour members have succumbed to this evil.

Part of the problem is that Corbyn has failed to get a grip on his party and respond with the decisive speed this deadly bigotry demands. Instead, senior figures sometimes appear to have done the opposite, obstructing the swift and uncompromising resolution of complaints. This is completely unacceptable. But it does not amount to a party riddled with antisemitism.

Corbyn’s dithering on this issue reflects a general diffidence about asserting power. It could be seen as the flipside of his lack of self-interest. Blair might be egocentric, but one result was that he immediately stamped out any tendency he believed would threaten his chances of election.

By contrast, Corbyn wasted precious months failing to articulate a clear position on Brexit. He repeatedly missed the open goals the government offered. He allowed infighting to dominate when the party’s energies should have been concentrated on the Tories. No one could definitively solve the conflicts within the Labour party, but a firmer leader could have prevented them from spiralling into open warfare.

FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘The Conservatives are entirely focused on wealth and power, and the protection of those who wield them.’ Boris Johnson at the CBI conference in London. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

Yes, drift in politics is a sin. But compare it with the alternative. Last week, I wrote about the government’s proposal to criminalise the lives of Romany Gypsies and Travellers, among the most persecuted minorities in European history. It was so determined to beat them up in public that it broke its own rules: “Consultation exercises should not generally be launched during local or national election periods.” This is what institutional racism looks like.

Of course, it does not cancel or excuse Labour’s failure decisively to crush antisemitism. Yet, by contrast to the justified outrage about Labour’s weakness on this issue, my article, a week after the consultation was published, was the first in the national press to criticise the government’s extraordinary assault on threatened minorities. There has been almost no take-up since.

A survey by YouGov for Hope Not Hate discovered that 54% of Conservative party members believe Islam is “generally a threat to the British way of life”. Islamophobia is a genuine majority sentiment within the party, whose leader has repeatedly made racist and Islamophobic statements. This week, I searched Google for mentions of Labour antisemitism by the BBC, and found 7,810 returns. But a search for BBC mentions of Conservative Islamophobia delivered only 1,420 results.

Labour has an urgent desire for a better world. But it is coupled with such a weak instinct for power or even self-preservation that you can’t help wondering how much of its programme it can deliver. The Conservatives are entirely focused on wealth and power, and the protection of those who wield them. On one side, there is a ferment of new ideas. On the other, the old agenda of stripping away public protections and promoting private business at the expense of public interests.

We have a choice of self-denying dither or determined cruelty. Neither set of traits will deliver an ideal government. But I know which one I favour.

We exclude the Labour left from British politics at our peril

Jeremy Corbyn’s project could solve Britain’s problems. But we will never know if we focus only on its flaws, not its policies writes Andy Beckett in The Guardian
 

 

 Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA


Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is on borrowed time. That assumption has hung over it throughout his three and a half years in charge. It’s there during every Labour crisis. It’s there before every perilous election – such as the local polls this May. And after every bad or even so-so Labour result the end of Corbyn’s leadership is there in the minds of his many enemies, of many commentators, of many anxious Corbynistas.

When the party is doing better under him, such as during and immediately after the 2017 election, this sense that he is on perpetual probation recedes, but never completely and never for long. In June 2017, two days after Labour had won its largest general election vote since Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide, the then Labour MP Chris Leslie told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We shouldn’t pretend that this is a famous victory. It is good … but it’s not going to be good enough.” Twenty months later, without waiting to see if his scepticism about Corbynism’s electoral potential was justified, he left the party to co-found the Independent Group.

Some of the temporary, besieged feel of the current Labour regime is down to Corbyn himself: his initial reluctance to fill Labour’s leadership vacuum, his relative lack of conventional political skills, his advanced age for a modern British party leader. He will turn 70 in May, shortly after the local elections, which will be handy for his political obituarists if Labour does as poorly as polls currently suggest.

The wilderness years: how Labour’s left survived to conquer



Yet the unforgiving standards by which he is judged are also applied to the Labour left as a whole. Despite Corbyn’s two enormous democratic mandates, the left is endlessly said to have “taken over” the party; to be a “sect”, a “cult”, an alien “virus”. The language has become so commonplace, it is rarely pointed out how loaded it is. The Labour left has been othered.

Many people in the rest of the party, and wider British politics and the media, don’t consider the left to be a legitimate Labour tribe, let alone legitimate rulers of the party, let alone a legitimate potential government. This is rarely stated explicitly. Excluding a large and currently vibrant group from mainstream politics can be an awkward argument to make in a democracy – especially when the radical right of the Conservative party has never been othered in the same way. Instead, starting with Margaret Thatcher, it has often run the country. But once you appreciate the implacable hostility the Labour left arouses, it explains a lot of otherwise puzzling British political phenomena.
In recent weeks, MPs at a meeting of the parliamentary Labour party have reportedly applauded the Independent Group breakaway, despite the immense damage it has done to the chances of a Labour government. Tom Watson, in theory Corbyn’s loyal deputy, has said things that could end up on Tory election posters, such as “I love this [Labour] party but sometimes I no longer recognise it.” He has also set up the Future Britain group, scheduled to meet for the first time on Monday night , for “social democratic” Labour MPs to assert themselves against “doctrinaire utopianism”, which sounds like none-to-subtle code for the left.

Meanwhile, as ever, seasoned political journalists, who spent decades tolerating the dark arts of Alastair Campbell and New Labour’s other arm-twisters, have declared themselves horrified at the “bullying” of opponents by Corbynistas. Tom Bower, biographer of Gordon Brown and a dozen other bruisers, gives his current book on Corbyn the subtitle Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power. Corbyn supporters may be tempted to reply: we should be so lucky.

Despite, or, rather, partly because of, all the panics about the Labour left, it has rarely been dominant in the party. The last leftwing leader before Corbyn was George Lansbury, in the 1930s, another relatively elderly London radical, who lasted three years before being forced to resign by more centrist figures who did not like his pacifism. The fact that Labour’s leader in the early 1980s, Michael Foot, is also often regarded as a leftwinger, when he actually spent much of his tenure frustrating and arguing with the left, and its key player Tony Benn in particular, is a sign of how exaggerated the conventional picture of the Labour left’s strength can be.

“Labour leaders tremble at the relentless advance of Benn’s army,” warned the Express in May 1981, after Benn launched his famous bid for the party’s deputy leadership. And yet, in large part because the press othered him so effectively, as a kind of foreign demagogue – “Ayatollah Benn”, according to the Sun, after Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini – he did not win.

Poverty and climate more important than Brexit, says Corbyn


Labour centrists often talk about the need for the party to be “a broad church”. Rather less often, they accept that control of it ought to alternate between its different tribes, in a roughly representative way. Eight years ago David Owen, the former Labour minister and SDP co-founder, told the New Statesman that after the defeat of Jim Callaghan’s centrist government (in which Owen served) at the 1979 general election: “It was not unreasonable for those on the left to try to shift the balance of power in the party closer to their views.”

But back in the 80s Owen was rather less willing to let the left have its turn. He co-founded the SDP partly to block it. The SDP’s founding document, the 1981 Limehouse declaration, which he helped draw up, denounced “the drift towards extremism in the Labour party”, supposedly being led by Benn, as “not compatible” with the party’s “democratic traditions”. Last month, at the launch of the Independent Group, Leslie caricatured Corbynism in almost exactly the same way. Labour, he said, had been “hijacked” by “the hard left”.

Does it matter that so many people don’t want British politics to include a left of any significance? Even if you’re not at all leftwing, recent British history suggests it does. Between the fading of Benn’s influence in the mid-80s and Corbyn’s leadership win in 2015, the Labour parliamentary left – effectively the entire Commons left – dwindled to a few dozen MPs, occasionally admired, more often patronised and derided, almost always marginal to the making of government policy. Meanwhile more mainstream, supposedly more realistic politicians gave us Thatcherism, frequently disastrous wars, the financial crisis, austerity, and an increasingly dysfunctional version of free-market capitalism.

Now that we are living with the aftermath of all that – with a Conservative right promising further destructive experiments; and a Labour centre-left that has come up with almost no fresh ideas since the heyday of Blairism, two decades ago – it seems an odd time to decide that British politics can do without a leftwing alternative. Corbyn’s Labour project is rickety, incomplete and overambitious. It may be easier to concentrate on its flaws and scandals than to evaluate its policies, and then decide whether any of them are solutions to the country’s multiple crises. But if Britain could, somehow, finally, stop questioning whether the Labour left belongs in mainstream politics, it may even discover that the left has things to offer.

Targeting Corbyn

Mahir Ali in The Dawn


LAST Sunday, many of the participants in the latest protest in London against the Labour Party’s allegedly inadequate response to anti-Semitism are likely to have been buoyed by a report in The Observer about a £50 million project to launch a centrist third force in British politics.

There is no guarantee that such a party will indeed take shape before the next general election, but it does not require much imagination to categorise it as part of the effort to ensure that Jeremy Corbyn never becomes prime minister. Whether many members of the Parliamentary Labour Party would be dumb enough to latch on to such an enterprise, given the dire fate of the last concerted effort to ‘break the mould’ back in the early 1980s, is an open question.

The majority of Labour parliamentarians were discombobulated by a dedicated socialist’s emergence as party leader three years ago, and moves to unseat him were launched almost immediately. The idea of a dedicated socialist leading a party that had once prided itself on its socialism, but had in the 1990s lapsed into a kind of neoliberalism that made it virtually indistinguishable from the Conservative Party, was anathema to the Blairite diehards.

But Corbyn enjoyed mass support among the party membership, and an attempt to replace him led to his re-election with an even bigger majority. Never mind, the malcontents thought, the next general election will render his leadership untenable after Labour is decimated. But when Theresa May made the mistake of calling an early election last year, the opposition made substantial gains while the Tories lost their majority.

Corbyn’s critics were temporarily silenced. A few stepped back, and some opponents even recanted their scepticism about his leadership. The ideological divide remained unbridged, though, and the tendency to latch on to smear campaigns undiminished.

Not long ago, they were heartened by news reports suggesting Corbyn might have been a communist spy, based on the testimony of a delusional former Czechoslovak diplomat. That mud didn’t stick. Corbyn’s considered response to the poisoning of a Russian ex-spy and his daughter in Salisbury offered another opportunity to malign him, just because the Labour leader sensibly suggested that solid evidence of Russian state complicity in the outrage should precede any action against Moscow.

Reverting to the anti-Semitism trope emerged as the next best option for destabilisation, the latest hook being Corbyn’s sympathy eight years ago in a Facebook post for an artist deploring the erasure of an anti-capitalist mural he had pained on a wall. Corbyn has apologised for failing to notice the mural’s anti-Semitic implications at first glance — namely a couple of stereotypical Jewish faces among the bankers sitting around a table that is crushing the rest of humanity.

It has been claimed the depiction echoes Nazi propaganda, although the critics generally fail to mention that in Germany back then it was common for ‘Jewish financiers’ to be condemned specifically for bankrolling Russia’s Bolshevik revolution, many of whose stalwarts were in turn targeted by their foes on the basis of their Jewish origins.

There is a long history of virulent anti-Semitism across Europe, which contributed to the Holocaust but also survived the Second World War. Its European manifestations today are found mainly on the Continent rather than in Britain, largely on the far right of politics. They are dwarfed, though, by growing anti-Muslim prejudice.

It is perfectly appropriate that even the most passionate critics of the militant Islamic State group or Saudi Arabia, including Corbyn, are seldom branded as Islamophobes. By the same token, it is utterly ridiculous for all critics of Israel, including Jews, to be dubbed anti-Semitic. It is certainly wrong to conflate Jewishness with Israel or with Zionism. But this is a grave error that is routinely compounded by all too many Zionists and most representatives of the Israeli state.

It was in evidence last week when Corbyn was berated for attending a Passover Seder organised by a non-Zionist Jewish collective called Jewdas in his London constituency. To an extent, this particular smear backfired on the Jewish Board of Deputies and other critics. On the other hand, a poll published last Sunday found that half of the British electorate believes — contrary to the evidence, but in keeping with the malign diatribes echoed throughout the mainstream media, from The Guardian to the Daily Mail — that Labour has a bigger anti-Semitism problem than other parties, and that 34 per cent of voters believe Corbyn is among those who hold anti-Semitic views, notwithstanding his unrelenting opposition to all forms of racism.

The latest campaign may have been motivated in part by the May 3 local elections, and its efficacy should be visible in a couple of weeks. It is reassuring, though, that Corbyn has not been cowed into tempering his criticism of the latest atrocities in Gaza.

Labour party's hypocrisy on Corbyn

George Monbiot in The Guardian


Where are the nose-pegs this time? Those who tolerated anything the Labour party did under Blair tolerate nothing under Corbyn. Those who insisted that we should vote Labour at any cost turn their backs as it seeks to recover its principles.

They proclaimed undying loyalty when the party stood for the creeping privatisation of the NHS, the abandonment of the biggest corruption case in British history, the collapse of Britain’s social housing programme, bans on peaceful protest, detention without trial, the kidnap and torture of innocent people and an illegal war in which hundreds of thousands died. They proclaim disenchantment now that it calls for the protection of the poor, the containment of the rich and the peaceful resolution of conflict.

Those who insisted that William Hague, Michael Howard and David Cameron presented an existential threat remain silent as Labour confronts a Conservative leader who makes her predecessors look like socialists.

Blair himself, forgiven so often by the party he treated as both ladder and obstacle to his own ambition, repays the favour by suggesting that some should vote for Conservatives who seek a softer Brexit. He appears to believe that the enhanced majority this would deliver to Theresa May might weaken her. So much for the great tactician.

Yes, Jeremy Corbyn is disappointing. Yes, his leadership has been marked by missed opportunities, weakness in opposition and (until recently) incoherence in proposition, as well as strategic and organisational failure. It would be foolish to deny or minimise these flaws. But it would be more foolish still to use them as a reason for granting May a mandate to destroy what remains of British decency and moderation, or for refusing to see the good that a government implementing Corbyn’s policies could do.

Of course I fear a repeat of 1983. But the popularity of Corbyn’s recent policy announcements emboldens me to believe he has a chance, albeit slight, of turning this around. His pledge to raise the minimum wage to £10 an hour is supported by 71% of people, according to a ComRes poll; raising the top rate of tax is endorsed by 62%.

Labour’s 10 pledges could, if they formed the core of its manifesto, appeal to almost everyone. They promote a theme that should resonate widely in these precarious times: security. They promise secure employment rights, secure access to housing, secure public services, a secure living world. Contrast this to what the Conservatives offer: the “fantastic insecurity” anticipated by the major funder of the Brexit campaign, the billionaire Peter Hargreaves.


I would love to elect a government led by someone competent and humane, but this option will not be on the ballot paper.


Could people be induced to see past the ineptitudes of Labour leadership to the underlying policies? I would argue that the record of recent decades suggests that the quality of competence in politics is overrated.

Blair’s powers of persuasion led to the Iraq war. Gordon Brown’s reputation for prudence blinded people to the financial disaster he was helping to engineer, through the confidence he vested in the banks. Cameron’s smooth assurance caused the greatest national crisis since the second world war. May’s calculating tenacity is likely to exacerbate it. After 38 years of shrill certainties presented as strength, Britain could do with some hesitation and self-doubt from a prime minister.

Corbyn’s team has been hopeless at handling the media and managing his public image. This is a massive liability, but it also reflects a noble disregard for presentation and spin. Shouldn’t we embrace it? This was the licence granted to Gordon Brown, whose inept performances on television and radio as prime minister were attributed initially to his “authenticity” and “integrity”. Never mind that he had financed the Iraq war and championed the private finance initiative, which as several of us predicted is now ripping the NHS and other public services apart. Never mind that he stood back as the banks designed exotic financial instruments. He had the confidence of the City and the billionaire press. This ensured that his ineptitude was treated as a blessing, while Corbyn’s is a curse.

I would love to elect a government led by someone both competent and humane, but this option will not be on the ballot paper. The choice today is between brutal efficiency in pursuit of a disastrous agenda, and gentle inefficiency in pursuit of a better world. I know which I favour.

There is much that Labour, despite its limitations, could do better in the next six weeks. It is halfway towards spelling out an inspiring vision for the future; now it needs to complete the process. It must hammer home its vision for a post-European settlement, clarifying whether or not it wants to remain within the single market (its continued equivocation on this point is another missed opportunity) and emphasising the difference between its position and the extremism, uncertainty and chaos the Conservative version of Brexit could unleash.

It should embrace the offer of a tactical alliance with other parties. The Greens have already stood aside in Ealing Central and Acton, to help the Labour MP there defend her seat. Labour should reciprocate by withdrawing from Caroline Lucas’s constituency of Brighton Pavilion. Such deals could be made all over the country: as the thinktank Compass shows, they enhance the chances of knocking the Tories out of government.

Labour’s use of new organising technologies is promising, but it should go much further. No one on the left should design their election strategy without first reading the book Rules for Revolutionaries, by two of Bernie Sanders’ campaigners. It shows how a complete outsider almost scooped the Democratic nomination, and how the same tactics could be applied with greater effect now that they have been refined. And anyone who fears what a new Conservative government might do should rally behind Labour’s unlikely figurehead to enhance his distant prospects.

The choice before us is as follows: a party that, through strong leadership and iron discipline, allows three million children to go hungry while hedge fund bosses stash their money in the Caribbean and a party that hopes, however untidily, to make this a kinder, more equal, more inclusive nation. I will vote Labour on 8 June, and I will not hold my nose. I urge you to do the same.

Blair is right on Brexit: parliament must have a democratic debate

Anatole Kaletsky in The Guardian

Former UK prime minister Tony Blair’s recent call for voters to think again about leaving the EU, echoed in parliamentary debates ahead of the government’s official launch of the process in March, is an emperor’s new clothes moment. Although Blair is now an unpopular figure, his voice, like that of the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, is loud enough to carry above the cabal of flatterers assuring Theresa May that her naked gamble with Britain’s future is clad in democratic finery.

The importance of Blair’s speech can be gauged by the hysterical overreaction to his suggestion of reopening the Brexit debate, even from supposedly objective media: “It will be seen by some as a call to arms – Tony Blair’s Brexit insurrection,” according to the BBC.

Such is the tyranny of the majority in post-referendum Britain that a “remainer” proposal for rational debate and persuasion is considered an insurrection. And anyone questioning government policy on Brexit is routinely described as an “enemy of the people,” whose treachery will provoke “blood in the streets.”

What explains this sudden paranoia? After all, political opposition is a necessary condition for functioning democracy – and nobody would have been shocked if Eurosceptics continued to oppose Europe after losing the referendum, just as Scottish nationalists have continued campaigning for independence after their 10-point referendum defeat in 2014. And no one seriously expects US opponents of Donald Trump to stop protesting and unite with his supporters.

The difference with Brexit is that last June’s referendum subverted British democracy in two insidious ways. First, the leave vote was inspired mainly by resentments unconnected with Europe. Second, the government has exploited this confusion of issues to claim a mandate to do anything it wants.

Six months before the referendum, the EU did not even appear among the 10 most important issues facing Britain as mentioned by potential voters. Immigration did rank at the top, but, as Blair noted in his speech, anti-immigration sentiment was mainly against multicultural immigration, which had little or nothing to do with the EU. The leave campaign’s strategy was therefore to open a Pandora’s box of resentments over regional imbalances, economic inequality, social values and cultural change. The remain campaign completely failed to respond to this, because it concentrated on the question that was literally on the ballot, and addressed the costs and benefits of EU membership.

The fact that the referendum was such an amorphous but all-encompassing protest vote explains its second politically corrosive effect. Because the leave campaign successfully combined a multitude of different grievances, May now claims the referendum as an open-ended mandate. Instead of arguing for controversial Conservative policies – including corporate tax cuts, deregulation, unpopular infrastructure projects and social security reforms – on their merits, May now portrays such policies as necessary conditions for a “successful Brexit”. Anyone who disagrees is dismissed as an elitist “remoaner” showing contempt for ordinary voters.

Making matters worse, the obvious risks of Brexit have created a siege mentality. “Successful Brexit” has become a matter of national survival, turning even the mildest proposals to limit the government’s negotiating options – for example, parliamentary votes to guarantee rights for EU citizens already living in Britain – into acts of sabotage.

As in wartime, every criticism shades into treason. That is why the Labour party has collaborated in defeating all parliamentary efforts to moderate May’s hardline Brexit plans, even on such relatively uncontentious issues as visa-free travel, pharmaceutical testing or science funding. Likewise, more ambitious demands from Britain’s smaller opposition parties for a second referendum on the final exit deal have gained no traction, even among committed pro-Europeans, who are intimidated by the witch-hunting atmosphere against unrepentant remainers.

Sir Ivan Rogers, who was forced to resign last month as the UK’s permanent representative to the EU because he questioned May’s negotiating approach, predicted this week a “gory, bitter, and twisted” breakup between Britain and Europe. But this scenario is not inevitable. A more constructive possibility is now emerging along the lines suggested by Blair. Instead of vainly trying to influence May’s hardline stance in the negotiations, the new priority should be to restart a rational debate about Britain’s relationship with Europe and to convince the public that this debate is democratically legitimate.

This means challenging the idea that a referendum permanently outweighs all other mechanisms of democratic politics and persuading voters that a referendum mandate refers to a specific question in specific conditions, at a specific time. If the conditions change or the referendum question acquires a different meaning, voters should be allowed to change their minds.

The process of restoring a proper understanding of democracy could start within the next few weeks. The catalyst would be amendments to the Brexit legislation now passing through parliament. The goal would be to prevent any new relationship between Britain and the EU from taking effect unless approved by a parliamentary vote that allowed for the possibility of continuing EU membership. Such an amendment would make the status quo the default option if the government failed to satisfy parliament with the new arrangements negotiated over the next two years. It would avert the Hobson’s choice the government now proposes: either accept whatever deal we offer, or crash out of the EU with no agreed relationship at all.

Allowing parliament to decide about the new relationship with Europe, instead of leaving it entirely up to May, would restore the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. More important, it would legitimise a new political debate in Britain about the true costs and benefits of EU membership, possibly leading to a second referendum on the government’s Brexit plans.

This is precisely why May vehemently opposes giving parliament any meaningful voice on the outcome of the Brexit negotiations. Presumably, she will block any such requirement from being attached to the Brexit legislation in March. But that may not matter: if a genuine debate about Brexit gets restarted, democracy will prevent her from closing it down.

Are we all really expected to work until we drop?

Catherine Bennett in The Guardian


As Tony Blair repeatedly confirms, and John Cridland notes in his interim report on the state pension age, a “significant” number of workers who left the labour market before the age of 63 “wish they had postponed their retirement”.

In many ways, the response to Blair’s longing for a second act, in full knowledge of his power irredeemably to contaminate any political project, is a timely reminder to younger workers, as the retirement age rises, of the need to plan ahead. Leave early – whether for reasons of ill health, burn-out or for being universally denounced as an avaricious, world-blighting menace – and it may prove almost impossible, as the TUC recently noted, for the older worker to find another job. 

But with his determination to defy the above obstacles, Blair is also a terrific example of the model, can-do, older worker. One whose undimmed desire to serve – or do incalculable harm to his own side – so compellingly supports the proposition, one especially dear to British politicians, that increased longevity should naturally be accompanied by an ever-extended working life. Cridland, the former Confederation of British Industry chief, is the latest to reassess the retirement age and is still consulting for a report due next year.

As it stands, the state’s reward for scientific advances that should usher millions more people into their 90s is the raised retirement age of 68 (rescheduled for 2041), the highest in the OECD. Behind Cridland’s interim report is the expectation, supposing longevity keeps increasing, that it should be raised again.

Quite why the British older worker should, if only in this respect, have become synonymous with drudgery, has never, so far as I can discover, been explained. Maybe decades of strong tea are what helps our oldest people to become, with their furious, late-onset capacity for record-breaking productivity, the envy of the world. Or maybe younger workers, or the politicians who should represent their interests, are lamentably passive. As it is, with their proved success in delivering, by adjusting the retirement age, what are, in effect, huge fines on generations too youthful and busy to notice, there is every reason for British politicians to continue to impose penalties for age-defying insouciance.

And with so much to divert public attention, now is the perfect time for the pensions minister, Richard Harrington, to mention that he has asked the Government Actuary’s Department to recalculate life expectancy and project what might be a nifty way of relieving younger generations of a few more hundred billion pounds – if the percentage of adult life (from the age of 20) considered eligible for state-pensioned retirement were lowered from the current 33.3% to 32%. “People are living and working longer than ever before,” Harrington said. “That is why it is important we get this right to ensure the system stays fair and sustainable for generations to come.” Or, alternatively, until modern medicine buys the government another year or two’s pension deferral.

Supposing the lower figure were adopted, a pension consultant told the Telegraph, the government “would struggle to find a more politically painless way to take £8,000 off tens of millions of people”. Moreover, if and when affected workers began to make a fuss, many of those responsible would, themselves, be safely retired on final salary pensions, and protected, as Women Against State Pension Inequality protests – by 50s-born women obliged to work beyond 60 – has shown, by intergenerational indifference.

Described by the New Statesman, in its article “Tony Blair’s Unfinished Business”, as looking “anything but broken” – and allegedly reminiscent of the figure whose cojones were so esteemed by George Bush – the tanned Blair, no less than orangeTrump, is, in contrast, a poster boy for the five decades of toil that will, if some pension lobbyists have their way, become the norm in the UK and the US. Trump’s example was somewhat compromised, in this respect, by his age-related insulting of Hillary Clinton. “Importantly,” he said, “she [also] lacks the mental and physical stamina to take on Isis and all the many adversaries we face.”

As many future, almost 70-year-old workers may eventually discover, strategies for reducing age prejudice and intergenerational resentment have failed – largely through not existing – to keep pace with deferments of state pensionable age and the end of obligatory retirement. Outside politics and the BBC, and anywhere else Farage’s “big silverback gorillas” are not delightedly deferred to, the lingering presence of pension-defying, grandparent-age colleagues can, one gathers, be distinctly unwelcome to co-workers – and not only those hoping for promotion within the next century or so.

The recent proposal, by the Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway, that older graduates consider, like her, a pre-retirement switch to teaching elicited some wry responses from members of a profession where the average retirement age is 59. For instance: “Teaching is a young person’s game.”
The word “ageism” does not appear in Cridland’s 100-page report, a document that may not only cheer politicians praying for the go-ahead on 70, but reassure anyone who fears – whether from experience, or from listening too closely to health officials, or from reading too much literature – that advancing age and physical decline are in any way connected.

“Old age isn’t a battle,” thinks one of Philip Roth’s ageing protagonists. “Old age is a massacre.” Not any more, to judge by the cheerful Cridland. “Longevity is changing the pensions landscape.”

A decade after Roth’s Everyman, Cridland depicts many of us as promisingly situated for the payment or, rather, non-payment, of pensions, since, with “quite substantial” geographical variations, “healthy life expectancy (the proportion of life someone can expect to spend in ‘good’ or ‘very good’ health) appears to be keeping track with overall life expectancy”. If a man aged 65 can expect around nine years of good health, some will ask: why not use up over half of those at work?

It is for academics and actuaries to judge how Cridland’s analysis squares with the gloomier conclusions of a 2015 government report: Trends in Life Expectancy and Healthy Life Expectancy. Its key finding: “Increases in health expectancies in the UK are not keeping pace with gains in life expectancy, particularly at older ages.”

Still, if Cridland is willing to factor into his pension recommendations the assumption of protracted liveliness in Britain’s long living over 65s, Generations X and Y may want to consider how this sunny outlook might feature in their own career plans. With flexibility on the government’s part they could offer to work, say, between 70 and 80, later if the actuaries agree, in exchange for a state pension in their 20s or 30s. Just in case, through sheer over-optimism, a Cridland-influenced proposal keeps them indentured until the last five years, or less, of healthy life.

Any interested generations have until 31 December to tell Mr Cridland how they feel about becoming the oldest non-pensioners in the developed world.

Thank God Theresa May is continuing the historic Tory tradition of fighting the elite

Whenever an elite is unjust, anywhere in the world, from South Africa to Chile to Saudi Arabia, it’s been the Conservative Party that has bravely fought them by selling them weapons and inviting their leaders to dinner.



Mark Steel in The Independent




What a welcome message from Theresa May, that she’s sick of the elite. The Cabinet all applauded, as you’d expect; although 27 of them are millionaires, that doesn’t make them elite – they all got their money by winning it on scratch cards.

The Prime Minister was only abiding by a change to international law that states everyone who makes a public speech now has to insist they can’t stand the “elite”. Donald Trump – a man whose background is so modest that, in one of his castles, he has to go outside to use the moat – hates the elite. Iain Duncan Smith with his modest 15-up 15-down Tudor mansion is fed up with the elite, too. Boris Johnson stands up against the elite, because his background was so humble that one of the kids at his primary school had an imaginary friend who didn’t have his own valet.

This year, the Queen will probably start her Christmas speech by saying, “My husband and I are sick to death of the elite. When one has been required to reign as a working-class monarch, one rather views these elite types with sufficient disdain to get the right hump.”

But May was more specific. She singled out the “Liberal Metropolitan Elite,” for ruining our lives.

You can understand why, because these are the very people who have spoilt everything with their liberal ways. There’s Topshop’s Philip Green, who wasted millions so he could complete a course as a human rights lawyer and get his hipster beard trimmed. Mike Ashley, condemned for his treatment of staff at Sports Direct, has “homeopath” written all over him.

There’s Alan “cycle lane” Sugar, who, if I remember right, turned down his knighthood as a protest against the number of toads that get run over. And the most powerful man in the media is Rupert Murdoch, who publishes newspapers full of feminism and media studies.

One way we must stop these liberals, she insisted, is prevent human rights lawyers from haranguing the army. She’s right there: if there’s one area in which human rights lawyers have absolutelyno need to investigate, it’s war. Whoever heard of an army that isn’t careful to look after human rights? They should concern themselves with real human rights culprits, such as florists.

These abuses have come about because, for 35 years, British life has been relentlessly liberal. It started with Margaret Thatcher, who shut down the mines so they could be replaced by documentaries on BBC4 about Tibetan dance. And she brought in the Poll Tax, but only because she was convinced this would lead to wider ownership of African wood carvings bought from antique shops in Notting Hill.

Then we had liberal Tony Blair with his liberal invasion of Iraq, in which he insisted the air force only used Fairtrade depleted uranium. Now, at last, we’re all sick of being ruled by these elite liberals.

Conservative figures such as Amber Rudd have this week been forced to ask “can we at last talk about immigration?” Thanks to the elite, who can think of a single occasion in the last six months when anyone in public eye has mentioned immigration?

There are some programmes on radio or television that simply refuse to discuss the issue. For example, during a first-round clash in the Swedish open snooker championship on Eurosport, a whole four minutes went by on the commentary without mention of how you can’t move in Lincolnshire for Bulgarians. And two minutes passed by without any talk of immigration during the two-minute silence on Remembrance Day at the Cenotaph. And if we can’t talk about protecting our borders at that time when can we discuss it?

The idea that we should welcome immigration is a perfect example of how the Liberal Metropolitan Elite operates, because foreigners are alright for some with their cheap nannies but down-to-earth types, bless them, can’t stand people who have the nerve to move over here and fix radiators or bed-bath the elderly.
This week is the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, when thousands of people assembled in East London to prevent the British Union of Fascists from marching through a Jewish area. I wonder who was in the crowds that day, linking arms to defy the supporters of Hitler? It can’t have been the working class, since they must all have said “it’s alright for the elite, but these Jews come over here and lower our wages.” So it must have been the Liberal Metropolitan Elite who took on the fascists, by hurling antique carriage clocks at them after distracting them with an avant-garde contemporary dance evening.

Theresa May seems ambitious, because she said she’s going to battle an “international elite”. So they’re global, these elites, and they can only be fought by determined earthy salt-of-the-earth types such as Anna Soubry. Jeremy Hunt, for example, looks exactly like someone who’s just come off an eight-hour shift driving a forklift truck carrying tomatoes round a warehouse for Lidl, shouting “there you go sweetheart, stack them up while I sort out these elite doctors giving it all that about weekends”.

If there’s one thing we know about the Conservative Party, it’s the natural home for common folk who want to take on the international elite.

Whenever an elite is unjust, anywhere in the world, from apartheid South Africa to military Chile or patriarchal Saudi Arabia, it’s been the Conservative Party that has bravely fought them by selling them weapons and inviting their leaders to dinner. Just like the poor-but-happy folk down any council estate always keep a door open for a military dictator, the little darlings.

The Labour plotters are right: it‘s definitely Jeremy Corbyn who needs to ‘learn lessons’ from the last few months

Mark Steel in The Independent


Well, that was a highly successful three-month campaign to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn. There’s nothing like spending all summer on a project that proves worthwhile and repays the effort.

If Angela Eagle and Owen Smith were generals in a medieval army, they would report back to their commander: “We fired incessantly for three months and have brought such damage to our opponent’s army they now have 100,000 more soldiers than when we started, sir. And I’m not sure how, but although we’re fighting in Belgium, we seem to have given them Wales.”

Corbyn should ask them to do it every year; by 2025 he’d be crowned King of Europe.

Even more impressive was the way the plotters all agreed, after the result, that “this shows the lessons Jeremy needs to learn, and he has to reach out”.

Next they’ll ask Owen Smith to fight Tyson Fury, and as Owen is dragged away by paramedics, Stephen Kinnock will announce: “This shows the lessons Tyson has to learn. From now on he needs to look more skinny and wear glasses and reach out if he knows what’s good for him”.

This is an exciting development in democracy, that the side who won the least number of votes decides what the lessons are that have to be learned. Maybe this is how the anti-Corbyn section of Labour hopes to govern after a general election. They’ll say to the Tories: “As you won a majority of 190, you have to learn to reach out and fill your cabinet with me and my mates”.

Even so, the plotters made an important point: that Corbyn must reach out to those who already tried to unite the party by calling him a moronic pitiful unelectable pile of steaming goat sick for the last year.

Instead of being divisive, as he was last time by offering them jobs in the shadow Cabinet from which they resigned, he should let them pick their own jobs, and if they don’t fancy doing them one day, let them bring in games.

All the plotters agreed on the need for unity, and many of them displayed that straight away by not turning up to Corbyn’s speech. But Corbyn himself ruined the unity by turning up to it himself, rather than uniting with his colleagues by saying he couldn’t be bothered to say anything so he was popping down the pub.

Some MPs will soon resume their commitment to unity by insisting Corbyn is hopeless, on every TV station, one by one through the news channels, the cartoon channels and the GOD channels. Then on a porn channel, John Mann will knock on a door to say: “Hope you’ll be voting Labour in the council by-election”. But a woman in rubber will reply: “I certainly won’t be voting for you”, so he’ll say: “I suppose that’s because we’ve been very, very bad and chosen an unelectable leader”, then lay down and scream: “We’ve been so irresponsible by saying we’ll renationalise the Royal Mail!” while getting thrashed on the arse with an egg whisk.

Others will prove their loyalty as they did before, by texting helpful snippets of information to journalists from meetings, such as: “OMG! Apparently Corbyn wants to abolish the army and replace it with a salad”.

The other demand from the side celebrating its achievement of getting fewer votes than someone they say is unelectable is there can be no threats of deselection. There should be no half measures with this; if Jess Phillips announces: “I’d rather vote for Donald Trump than Corbyn, that’s why I broke into his house and poisoned his fish”, that’s her right as a loyal party member and any talk of deselection would be divisive.

The next issue Corbyn must address now he’s been humbled by winning the election is the problem of all these new members. For example, an investigation into Liverpool Riverside complains there has been “an explosion in membership” which now “meets several times a month”.

That sounds sinister, because when has there ever been any need to do two things in a month?

And what are they all doing, joining like that? No wonder proper Labour members are suspicious. They should have to pass a test, clambering across an assault course, or swimming through piranhas.

As any business leader will confirm, there’s nothing more damaging to an enterprise than an explosion in people demanding your product. This is why Bill Gates always insists, when a new version of Microsoft Windows comes out, that anyone who asks for one is told they can’t have it as they’re almost certainly a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

One MP grumbled: “It’s all right these new people joining, but will they go knocking on doors at the election?” We can’t know the answer to that, which is why the best way to ensure they’re enthusiastic enough to knock on doors is to tell them they’re all infiltrating scum and they can sod off somewhere else with their several meetings a month.

If they still join, they should have to prove their loyalty by not only knocking on doors, but when someone answers, say: “Our leader’s unelectable so I don’t know why I’m bothering”.

But most importantly, not one of the plotters has fallen into the trap of accepting they may have made the odd mistake, and perhaps shouldn’t have all resigned to get rid of their elected leader, or whined too many people have joined their party, or gone to court to ban their own voters, or insisted people supported Corbyn because they’d had their arm twisted by Trotskyists, because it’s obviously Corbyn that needs to learn the lessons from the result.

If you can’t beat Jeremy Corbyn, you’d better try to learn from him

Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian


Speaking shortly before the re-coronation of Jeremy Corbyn, one Labour MP gloomily remarked of Owen Smith’s failed challenge: “It was always a kamikaze mission.”

Oh no, it has turned out much more desperate than that for Labour’s parliamentarians. Back in July, when the challenge was launched off the back of a no-confidence vote by MPs and mass resignations from the frontbench, few of his colleagues thought Mr Smith could win. The purpose of the exercise, or so they calculated, was not to install a new leader but to take the shine off the incumbent. Mr Smith was designed, and in more than one sense, to be the anti-Momentum candidate. If Mr Corbyn could be run reasonably close, so backers of the challenge hoped, it would diminish the “mandate” that he and his supporters have spent the last 12 months brandishing in the face of Labour MPs.

When the result was announced from the conference stage in Liverpool, it was instantly clear that the reverse has happened. Jeremy Corbyn has not only been reanointed as leader, he won by a larger margin than last year, he won in all three segments of the selectorate and he won on a higher rate of participation. The challenge has not diminished him; it has swollen the size of his congregation. The immediate fear of Labour MPs is that this will now be self-reinforcing. Mr Corbyn will further consolidate his grip on the commanding heights of Labour if centre-left members who have stuck with the party despite all the ugliness of the past year are so demoralised by his victory that they give up and quit.

Examining the entrails of defeat, many who originally backed it now acknowledge that this was the wrong challenge at the wrong time with the wrong candidate. Mr Smith ended up as the anti-Corbyn standard bearer on the grounds that a relative unknown from the soft left – “a clean skin” – had the best chance of getting a hearing from Labour activists. His first handicap was that he spent the beginning of the campaign having to say who he was. He had barely started to introduce himself before a ruthlessly efficient effort by Team Corbyn had already defined him as a former employee of big pharma and a “Trojan horse” for Blairite revanchism. He largely positioned himself in the same ideological zone as the incumbent in the belief that this would be the best way to appeal to Corbynistas. That strategy would have been no more effective had he also put on a fake beard. For this invited and received an understandable response from that constituency: why vote for an imitation when you can re-elect the real thing?

His claims that he would make a more credible and competent leader were undermined by his propensity to gaffe. One hundred and sixty-two of his parliamentary colleagues nominated Mr Smith. The more conventionally minded of us might think that, in a parliamentary democracy, it is quite important for a party leader to command the confidence of his MPs. Yet for those to whom Mr Corbyn is an appealing figure, it is one of his virtues that his parliamentary party are so hostile to him. Being the MPs’ candidate was not an asset for the challenger – it was massive liability. I have talked to a lot of Labour MPs who spent time canvassing members. They universally report that many activists blamed the party’s predicament and Mr Corbyn’s abysmal personal poll ratings not on the leader, but on the mutinous behaviour of Labour parliamentarians. The depiction of the challenge as a “coup” and the framing of the contest as Members v MPs, Grassroots v Westminster was toxic.

So Labour is back to where it was at the beginning of the summer, with a vast chasm between a leader with a mandate from the members and MPs claiming a rival mandate from their voters. With this difference. Those divisions are now more starkly exposed, more deeply entrenched and more poisonously bitter. One MP speaks about “taking bodyguards” to protect him at the conference. Another expresses genuine fear that fist fights – or worse – will break out in Liverpool.

If there can’t be a genuine peace between the two sides, could there at least be some form of truce? In his victory speech, a much crisper and more polished performance than 12 months ago, Mr Corbyn made magnanimous-sounding noises about wiping the slate clean. His campaign manager and shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, tells us that the party can move on from the venom that has flowed over the summer. “What is said on tour, stays on tour.” Even some of Mr Corbyn’s most implacable critics know that it would sound churlish to snipe this weekend and have largely fallen silent for the moment.

Beneath the surface, though, it is already evident that the party is as riven as ever. There will now be a struggle for control of the party machinery at both national and local levels. There is also the question, of importance to the country as well as to the Labour party, of whether it can become at least semi-functional as an opposition to the Tories in parliament. I can find some MPs willing to unresign and return to take on a frontbench role. Some will do so for fear of retribution in their constituencies or for careerist reasons. Some argue that the parliamentary party now has to make at least a show of being co-operative or the membership will carry on blaming the MPs, rather than the leader, when things go wrong. One of this tendency says: “We have to stop being an excuse for his failings.”

Others are prepared to return to the frontbench on the grounds that it is their duty to be a voice for the 9 million people who voted Labour at the last election and to provide an opposition to the Tories. Yet many say they will only do so if the parliamentary party is allowed to elect at least some of the frontbench. That would give them a way of returning on their terms and with at least some shreds of dignity. Mr Corbyn’s circle sound extremely resistant to that. From their point of view, they have good reasons not to accept the demand. They don’t see why he should agree to elections that would surround him with hostiles in his top team.

Nor do they see why he should concede to the demands of the parliamentary party when he has just seen off its attempt to unseat him. The general emollience of his victory speech had a streak of menace when he warned Labour MPs “to respect the democratic choice that has been made”.

With or without shadow cabinet elections, a lot of senior Labour figures will not serve in his team anyway. They say they cannot bite their tongues for long when, as they see it, the Labour party they love is being destroyed. They ask how it is possible to sit on Mr Corbyn’s frontbench when 172 of them have publicly declared him unfit to be leader of the opposition.

One thing they will now have time to ponder on is why their advice was rejected by the party. It might be convenient for moderate Labour MPs to blame the failure of the challenge entirely on the flaws of the challenger, but it would also be wrong. What the last three months have exposed again are fundamental weaknesses on the centre-left. Labour MPs often express dismay at Mr Corbyn’s claims to be building a “social movement” superior to his parliamentary party. They mock it as the politics of protest and a betrayal of Labour’s founding purpose, set out in Clause I of the party constitution, to aim for power. The former frontbencher Tristram Hunt wittily despairs that his party is becoming “the political wing of the Stop the War coalition”. They are right to say that there is a big difference between rousing rallies of the already converted and the harder challenge of moving enough of the wider population into your column to win a general election.

Sound as that analysis might be, you can see why Team Corbyn are not receptive to lectures about electability from critics who can’t win – can’t get anywhere near winning – an election in the Labour party. Comprehensively out-organised by Team Corbyn and their union backers in last year’s contest, the anti-Corbynites vowed to do much better this time. They have developed some infrastructure in the form of the groups Labour Tomorrow and Saving Labour. The latter claims to have signed up 120,000 new members. But the result speaks for itself. Momentum out-recruited and out-organised them. Labour has now become the largest political party in western Europe. That may say nothing about its capacity to win a general election under its current leadership, but it does say something.

Love him or loathe him, Mr Corbyn – or what he represents – is capable of attracting and enthusing support. If they are ever to get their party back, his opponents will have to do the same. And they will have to offer a more enticing prospectus than begging people to join Labour to save the party from itself. They have again failed to beat Jeremy Corbyn. Perhaps the best thing Labour moderates could do now, strange as this may seem, is to try to learn from him.