AV: A Tactical Question for England ?

I'm in the 'Oh alright then, if that's the only thing on offer' camp on AV.

That's simply because, on balance, I think it is just a tinsey bit more sensible that FPTP. But proportional and fair it sure ain't. Not that any electoral system can necessarily guarantee those aims: you pick a electoral system to fit the underlying political sociology in my view, not to change it. Therefore a system which allows (it doesn't guarantee this of course) the two major parties to be cut down to something closer to their declining linkages to the political outlook(s) of the mass of us is probably preferable. That's as far I as tend to think about it before giving up with a yawn.

Up to now, I've been a bit dismissive of folk who think about this choice in purely tactical terms. I distrust those who tell me they'll be voting this way or that because of some predicted short term political effect. In general, I simply don't think people - even practiced spinners from the no-longer-smoke-filled backrooms - can predict that sort of thing. Life is just too messy. But this poll has concentrated my thoughts: it appears that pro independence parties - the SNP and Scottish Greens - may, for the first time, win a majority in Holyrood.

Now, this might not happen of course. & even if it does it's a long way from Salmond having a majority in his parliament to him actually wining a referendum on Scottish Independence. But it does focus the leftwing English mind on how FPTP elections might be expected to go in the future without the Caledonian contribution. We'd be looking at more or less permanent Tory government.

So I've changed my view. There is a tactical question involved here, but it's not about giving Cameron or Clegg a black eye, or encouraging the 'left' LibDems to jump ship or whatever. It's about an insurance policy against the possible day when the Scots leave us.

A Question

The Problem

My mother is very old and very frail. She has various chronic medical problems which mean that she has severely restricted mobility and stability, so there have been a number of recent falls. She has lost the effective use of her right hand which means that she can’t cook or even cut her own food up. I call these problems ‘medical’ in the sense they each have at least one medical name – but, truth be told, I don’t really see them as separate ‘medical’ problems. Mum is just old. & she lives alone. She's also poor: she lives in a ground floor privately rented flat and gets full Housing Benefit.

She is now in a care home for a spot of respite care after her most recent fall, and I'm trying to sort out the necessary services to allow her to return to her flat - aids, adaptations, meals on wheels and so on. As a woman who was 8 on the formal abolition of the workhouse - and only 26 when they really ended - she views residence in any kind of institutional 'care', from hospitals down, as a sort of shaming personal disgrace. And I live two hours drive away in a house with no downstairs bathroom or spare bedroom. My only sibling lives abroad and Dad is dead.

The Question

Mum is going to die at some point in the probably not-too-distance future I know. But it is her chassis and wheels that are failing, not the basic engine - her heart and lungs - so this might take a number of years. I want her to have a good ending.

I invite all all you lefty - or even perhaps not so lefty - bloggers to explain how your particular take on politics and the world might help achieve this. Or are there things about the nature of welfare and old age which are just beyond politics as we currently understand it?

& it's OK, I'm not asking you to solve my problem let alone my Mum's. It's not that personal. I just want to see how the left can attempt to connect its formal politics to lived experience. I don't want to 'tag' anyone formally, but I'd be interested in responses from anyone, especially anyone on my blogroll.

Weekend Links

What on earth are you doing here?

You should be over at Will Davies' place, understanding the nature of crises.

When you've done that, you can decide whether John Ross (Economics adviser to a certain K.Livingstone) or Duncan (Ex-Treasury fund manager of a post-Keynesian bent) has the most effective investment strategy for China.

& if, as I increasingly suspect, this government - indeed, this whole parliament - is in the early stages of dying of shame, lefties amongst you might want to wonder if we have any lessons to learn from our Italian comrades who got quite comprehensively hammered this time last year. Go check a variety of views on all this @ Red Pepper.

Addendum - if it's Italy on your mind, don't miss Henry's wonderful review of a new book on the Autonomist movements of the 1970s and their relationship with the PCI over at Crooked Timber.

Red and Green

Paulie directs his readers to a Liberal Conspiracy debate over the car bail outs. Is the difference between Left and Green simply over the the relative importance they attach to jobs per se, rather than a wider sense of 'the good life'? Does the green movement have a tin-ear for workers' concerns? Conversely: has the Labour Movement, and most especially it's left, lost all touch with the difference between sectional interests, albeit those of the oppressed and disadvantaged, and the broader good ? (even if that 'broader good' is expressed in classic terms of 'the working class as a whole' in some more traditional quarters....or even if the more jargon ridden amongst them might describe a Left vision of the 'broader good' as being a 'hegemonic aspiration'. ).


The answer to every one of these questions, it seems to me, is a 'yes' with a variety of different qualifiers. Therein lies the problem for anyone with a spark of radicalism in them.

Leftism surely can't mean conservatism. It can't mean, to take a non-ecologically relevant example, supporting the absurd 'People's Woolworth's' campaign. Woolworths was a crap store selling crap things. I do not mourn its passing. The issue is finding a quick transition into new work for its employees, not pretending it should be saved for the nation. Calls for TU action beyond this are blinkered in my view. Socialism has to mean progress of some sort, surely?

Yet the Greens need to find of a way of concretising their call for industrial and commercial transformation. The Green New Deal is fine as far as it goes - but it's high level Keynesianism at root. Even if it was a adequate programme to confront the crisis - and, remember, it was designed before the worst of the credit crunch - it is an inherently top-down series of measures. People - workers and their organisations - need to be able to contribute.

At this point, lets remember not just Mike Cooley and his fellow Shop Stewards at Lucas Areospace, but also what came out of it: a Centre for Alternative Industrial and Technological Systems (CAITS). I can't find it on Google any more - perhaps it's folded, which would be very sad. Instead we have the purely Green Centre for Alternative Technology, which even boasts of being visited by the Duke of Edinburgh....

The Left and the Greens need each other, and need each other badly. Neither has a workable vision of the future without the other.

Little Brown Jug

I'd forgotten about this: a drinking song from my youth. Do young lefties still sing?

Actually, do they still drink?

N.B. Honest - I never sang the dodgy 13th verse...even then I thought that level of sectarianism was naff.


I'll sing you one - O!
Red Fly The Banners, O!
What is your one - O!
One is Workers' Unity and ever more shall be so.

I'll sing you two - O!
Red Fly The Banners, O!
What are your two - O!
Two, two, the workers' hands, working for a living - O!
One is Workers' Unity and ever more shall be so.

I'll sing you three - O!
Red Fly The Banners, O!
What are your three - O!
Three, three the Rights of Man
Two, two, the workers' hands, working for a living - O!
One is Workers' Unity and ever more shall be so.

I'll sing you four -O!
Red Fly The Banners, O!
What are your four - O!
Four for the Four Great heroes ( Shout Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin - or Gramsci- to taste)
Three, three the Rights of Man
Two, two, the workers' hands, working for a living - O!
One is Workers' Unity and ever more shall be so.

I'll sing you five -O!
Red Fly The Banners, O!
What are your five - O!
Five for the years in the five year plan
And four for the four years taken,
Three, three, the Rights of Man!
Two, two the workers' hands, working for a living, O!
One is Workers' Unity and ever more shall be so.

I'll sing you six -O!
Red Fly The Banners, O!
What are your six - O!
Six for the Tolpuddle Martyrs,
Five for the years in the five year plan
And four for the four years taken,
Three, three, the Rights of Man!
Two, two the workers' hands, working for a living, O!
One is Workers' Unity and ever more shall be so.

I'll sing you seven -O!
Red Fly The Banners, O!
What are your seven - O!
Seven for the hours of the working day
Six for the Tolpuddle Martyrs,
Five for the years in the five year plans
And four for the four years taken,
Three, three, the Rights of Man!
Two, two the workers' hands, working for a living, O!
One is Workers' Unity and ever more shall be so.

I'll sing you eight -O!
Red Fly The Banners, O!
What are your eight - O!
Eight for the Eighth Red Army
Seven for the hours of the working day
Six for the Tolpuddle Martyrs,
Five for the years in in the five year plans
And four for the four years taken,
Three, three, the Rights of Man!
Two, two the workers' hands, working for a living, O!
One is Workers' Unity and ever more shall be so.


I'll sing you nine -O!
Red Fly The Banners, O!
What are your nine - O!
Nine for the Days of the General Strike
Eight for the Eighth Red Army
Seven for the the hours of the working day
Six for the Tolpuddle Martyrs,
Five for the years in in the five year plans
And four for the four years taken,
Three, three, the Rights of Man!
Two, two the workers' hands, working for a living, O!
One is Workers' Unity and ever more shall be so.

I'll sing you ten -O!
Red Fly The Banners, O!
What are your ten - O!
Ten for the Days that Shook the World
And Nine for the Days of the General Strike
Eight for the for the Eighth Red Army
Seven for the the hours of the working day
Six for the Tolpuddle Martyrs,
Five for the years in in the five year plans
And four for the four years taken,
Three, three, the Rights of Man!
Two, two the workers' hands, working for a living, O!
One is Workers' Unity and ever more shall be so.

I'll sing you eleven -O!
Red Fly The Banners, O!
What are your eleven - O!
Eleven for the Moscow Dynamos
Ten for the Days that Shook the World
And Nine for the Days of the General Strike
Eight for the for the Eighth Red Army
Seven for the the hours of the working day
Six for the Tolpuddle Martyrs,
Five for the years in in the five year plans
And four for the four years taken,
Three, three, the Rights of Man!
Two, two the workers' hands, working for a living, O!
One is Workers' Unity and ever more shall be so.

I'll sing you twelve -O!
Red Fly The Banners, O!
What are your twelve - O!
Twelve for the chimes on the Kremlin clock
And eleven for the Moscow Dynamos
Ten for the Days that Shook the World
And Nine for the Days of the General Strike
Eight for the for the Eighth Red Army
Seven for the the hours of the working day
Six for the Tolpuddle Martyrs,
Five for the years in in the five year plans
And four for the four years taken,
Three, three, the Rights of Man!
Two, two the workers' hands, working for a living, O!
One is Workers' Unity and ever more shall be so.

Dr.Finlay Returns

No more Mr. Bean, no more Stalin:suddenly Brown and Darling have managed to make this government look like Dr.Finlay - that kindly and authoritative Scottish professional of impeccable probity and wisdom who knows and cares about his patients. Suddenly, improbably, they are world leaders in defusing crises of capitalism and the Eurozone and, somewhat less publicly, the States are queuing up to copy their policy proscriptions. Nobel prize winners laud Dr Finlay in the New York Times. Jackie Ashley in the Guardian is cock-a-hoop. Suggestions of a snap election to “re-affirm their mandate during the difficult times to come” can’t be far away.

Well, we’ll see. Richard Murphy is in no doubt: the respite is temporary and full nationalisation will have to follow. (He’s also warned of Ireland ‘doing an Iceland' btw).

Comrade Mason also warns that many economists say that this deal won’t hold and full nationalisation will have to follow across most of the Western world. Both of them are concerned about how governments now change previous commercial practice, whether or not full nationalisation occurs. Business as usual is what got us into this mess - so something has to change, despite Darling’s insistence on the radio this morning that the new state banks be run ‘on a commercial basis’. Murphy has a set of detailed policy proposals here which sound quite sensible to this non banker. Mason puts it thus:

“If you are, say the head of corporate social responsibility at a bank like RBS your main obsessions have been with responding to lobbyists on two of the great issues of our time: climate change and international development. I suggest that this will now lead to a reprioritisation to a third great issue of our time - ending rip-off banking.
Once the wing public realises these companies are being run in part in the public interest there will be an avalanche of campaigns: over small business interest rates, over rip off lending practices, over off shoring. The banks, in other words, will be required to show some social responsibility towards their actual customers.”

Suddenly, the efficiency, ethics and politics of running finance capital come to the fore: it’s not just a technical question any more. TINA is dead, whatever the efforts of Dr.Finlay....

The Newt Returns: Nationalise the City

Ken Livingstone calls for the total nationalisation of British banks - at market prices which means, currently, diddly-squat. Glad to see my 1940 analogy is being used by others. His economics advisor, John Ross, offers this analysis of the root cause of the current crisis, which Ken shares:

"The core of the present financial crisis is that the dollar is overvalued compared to the real competitive potential of the US economy, that is compared to any market equilibrium, and has been increasingly overvalued for approximately twenty years. Consequently all assets held in dollars are also overvalued. As those dollar denominated assets eventually begin to adjust downwards towards their real international values this means they no longer counterbalance the weight of debt which has been offset against them – this crisis, of course, logically breaking out in the weakest, that is most clearly overvalued, part of the asset chain, that is sub-prime mortgages. ‘Over indebtedness’ is then created as assets will no longer support the existing weight of debt."

This would seem to imply (a) there's no national solution to this problem, it's international; and (b) there's no international solution which doesn't involve a loss of American power and influence...

Meanwhile another economist popular with the Labour Left reminds that he called for this back at the end of September. (He also said we should get the troops ready to quell disorder and think about opening talks on forming a government of national unity - two proposals which the LRC might not give quite so much prominence as his call for full bank nationalisation...)

Why Am I Blettering On...

So, time to explain where the blog title came from.

From 1976 I passed through, first, a number of left wing groups within the Labour Party and then, from just after the 1983 election, the Communist Party. In 1991 it all came to an end and I retreated to lick my wounds. In a move which faintly embarrasses me when I recall it now I even went round to Gordon McLennan’s house to resign personally, and accepted a glass of whisky from him as I blurted out that I was leaving.

We live in a world where everyone over 30 sat in front of their TVs and saw millions of people escaping from collectively run economies when the Berlin Wall came down. Economies run under the formal label of 'socialist'. & there is no coherent socialist economic policy which has ever since been developed which comes close to overcoming the effect of that sight. State run economies failed. Everything that I had spent so long attempting to understand, explain and promote had fallen apart. Perhaps Gordon was right to offer me that whisky after all...I'd had a big shock.

Oh I still called myself a socialist, even a Marxist influenced one, but in practice I undertook very little directly party political activity, although I did engage in various kinds of community politics, and even held down ‘political-with-a-small-p’ type jobs.

New Labour always left me cold. It wasn’t even a direct political rejection, just that they were always so distant from the sociological ‘feel’ of the labour movement I had spent so long in. I just despised them, faintly at first, and then with an increasing passion, especially after the decision to trick us into the Iraq War.

But now, in New Labour’s dying days, my interest has sparked again. This blog is not really about teaching myself economics or being a third rate commentator on the financial crisis, it’s about trying to work out what I now believe in. ‘Socialism’ - what’s that then the young people ask? & I can see their point. It’s been edited out of history as anything other than a monstrous perversion or, at very best, a charming historical curio that says nothing useful about out globalised world. It can offer nothing in allocating resources - apparently the basic job of our strangely de-politicised,technocratic politics. At best it is a private language of academic clerks, used in their mysterious temples of learning, through which to re-mystify a world which I find pretty bloody mysterious already.

But I do not accept that the problem of poverty has been solved - though it has of course been greatly alleviated. Equality - measured either globally or nationally – continues to increase, obscenely. Nor has the issue of meaningful work has not been solved by a very long chalk and may actually have intensified as a problem. We live in a world where it is patterns of consumption which defines people - this car, that watch, this new dress - not the meaning of work or production. I think this leaves many, many people with a deep inner sense of dissatisfaction. There are exceptions to this general statement, however, and it is in the sphere of *intellectual* production - where this distinction breaks down. If intellectuals can have meaningful work, why can't manual workers? Yes, there will always have to some 'cutting of wood and drawing of water', but why isn't society and economy organised to allow people's creativity to blossom at work? These feel like fairly traditional ‘left wing’ questions to me...

But they don’t constitute‘socialism’ in any sense. They are fragmentary responses to a world changed beyond recognition from my youth. I want to understand what the left has been doing since I've been away. & I suppose I want to find out if I can possibly feel part of it once again.

Brown Out for Labour?

New Labour is decomposing. Each day Brown's position is undermined a little more, either by another back bencher calling for a leadership contest or simply because the big beasts of the World's financial sector are going belly up. (That doesn't really work for our Great Helmsman as he's spend a decade boasting about his 'special friend',Prudence).

Can he get through Labour Party Conference at the end of this month? Conferences are great places for plotting after all. I think he will because it really isn't going to be easy to dump him, elect another leader and still pretend a general election isn't necessary. You can't change Prime Minster twice on one mandate without getting pilloried in the Press. & the one viable tactic for Labour whoever is leading them surely has to be avoiding an election for as long as possible. People have stopped talking about 1983 - which was a better outcome for Labour than the sort of result currently suggested on websites like Electoral Calculus - and started muttering about 1931 (52 seats for Labour).

This has happened in other countries - whole historic parties have been almost wiped out in single elections in my life time in both Canada and Italy. I know it sounds ridiculous to imagine it might happen here - but a perfect storm is brewing for New Labour. There is a gathering sense of the economic crisis of 1929 being re-run in miniature(well, I hope it's in miniature..). The SNP look and sound like a social democratic party of government on a European model. Labour's old 'core' manual working class vote is slipping away, mainly to apathy but sometimes to the BNP, and the 'aspirational' classes are turning Tory again.

But most of all New Labour no longer has a coherent and trustworthy political story, just a bunch of increasingly panicky policies that change, it seems, from day to day. It could really all go tits up for them.If (and it's a big 'if') they lose the Glenrothes by-election I predict Brown will fall. & then Miliband or Cruddas or whoever it is will be forced to go to the polls in months and get massacred....

Or Glenrothes will be held. & then we will face a sort of re-run of the last 18 months of the Major administration: government by 'waiting for something to turn up'...But in either event, I can see no circumstances under which New Labour can possibly win the next election. It's just a case of them choosing when and by how much they might lose.