Antrim Killings

Condemned by Sinn Fein. Sneered at by Richard Seymour. Despaired of by the discussion on Cedar Lounge Revolution. It seems the perpetrators are isolated from both mainstream republican and far left opinion. From the initial press coverage they seem even more isolated from the mass of non political people in both communities.

But it is the nature of the potential retaliation which now matters. A successful police hunt is what is needed. A violent trawl through nationalist communities is not. The killings were carried out to provoke a reaction, and to undermine Sinn Fein by leaving them looking like collaborators. Or at least that's the only possible strategic logic.

At moments like these, Northern Irish politics is a macabre reel where all the parties know only too well that a slip in the rhythm, an accidental stepping on each others' shoes, can ruin the dance. The politicos have to move in lockstep on this one, each party keeping an wary eye on the community reaction of the other side.

Stories From My Youth (No2387): North Sea Oil

This was supposed to save an old imperial nation that had run out of empire. It was supposed to pay for our re-industrialisation and economic modernisation as I recall. It was going to help us avoid any messy entanglements with unpredictable Middle Eastern politics, in line with the abandonment of the East of Suez foreign policy.

Yeah, perhaps you're right, we must have been a bit simple to believe that, mustn't we? (The bit about no more Middle Eastern entanglements seems a real rib tickler in retrospect).

It's not run out yet - there's the usual teckkie argument about how cheaply what's left can be retrieved though (aka 'the Peak Oil debate'). But what has happened as the graph above so graphically shows is that it is getting less and less adequate to meet domestic needs. & the window it gave Britain to modernise and re-industrialise is closing, perhaps never to return.

Polly Getting Desperate

Polly T has upped her game from nose pegs to smelling salts today. She's switched from a kind of genteel version of the old SWP mantra of 'vote Labour with no illusions' to an analysis which seems to call for root and branch restructuring on an almost Italian scale:

"The moribund party structure now serves mainly to put down political enthusiasm. Fifty years ago one in 11 people joined parties: now it is only one in 88. These are roadblocks to democratic engagement. If you don't start a political career as a party researcher straight out of university, forget becoming an MP. If you want to start a new movement, don't expect to elect any MPs: the system is stitched up."

Well, seems to call for that: actually she's just supporting the rather under-powered-but-probably-necessary attempts by Compass to begin the process of organising an anti-Tory, pro-social democratic popular front before the expected election defeat. Polly, as befits an ex-SDP member, believes that it must all rest on the rock of PR.

But, in the British context, PR is a solution to a losers' problem - which is why Labour became tentative interested in it during the 1990s. Winners tend not to be so interested. Which is why Labour immediately forgot about it once it had had its own landslide in 1997. In any event, it certainly isn't clear that PR alone breaks the power of the professionalised party machines. As a glance at the governments of Israel or even Ireland makes clear. I support PR, but it is absurd to imagine it can save us from the ills she delineates.

Funnily enough I wonder if one way of allow popular voices to break into the 'magic policy circle' is to actually give political parties more power, not less. I'm slowly coming round to Paul Evans' idea that allowing incoming administrations to appoint their own senior civil servants on the American model might help. It seems, in America, to allow for a whole strata of talented people to have portfolio careers based partly in government, partly in academia and partly actually developing an expertise in specific areas. So incoming Minster don't just have 'straight outta Oxbridge' policy wonks or Mandelsonian PR oriented minions to advise them but solid, 'domain competent' experts who share their political objectives and might be expected to be able to counter the usual arguments from lobby groups and a sometimes supine civil service.

But we're still going to need that popular front. Especially if Mr.Salmond wins his independence referendum shortly after a Cameron government comes to power.

But They Got Dole, Not Coal

Christ, can it really be 25 years ago?

Here in Lambeth you couldn't move for miners: every time I left my front door there seemed to be another lot of them at this or that meeting, or just collecting at one of our many tube stations. About £1000 a week ( probably about £2.5K in today's terms) in donated coppers was being taken at Brixton tube alone. I also remember the big demos, mainly with fondness - I never saw any trouble. Like the rest of the country, I watched the big 'set-pieces' like Orgreave on the television. I was a supporter, not a participant.

But there are some funny memories that remain with me as well: one young South Welsh lad bitterly complaining he had been billeted with me and my mate in the hard to let council flat we lived in then, rather than in the posh Clapham house his mates were in; stories of miners refusing to go home from their comfy university billets (and, ahem, university girlfriends, comfy or otherwise...) after the strike had ended.

It was perfectly possible to support the strike and still think, on balance, the odds on winning would have been better with a ballot. That was my position at the time. It might have made it more difficult for the press to present the Nottinghamshire miners as heroic resistors of mob pressure, and made it a bit easier to lobby for solidarity action from other unions. But all this stuff about Scargill losing the strike through not holding a ballot is baloney.

Even back then I didn't think the ballot question was decisive in the battle. I was always amazed that Kinnock even gave it half -hearted support and I don't think having a ballot would have increased his support one iota. The key was always the Ridley plan - the Tories had meticulously prepared for the fight for a long time.

I also remember thinking the strike was lost after about six months. It was almost impossible to openly discuss this view on the Left back then - we were all so strongly committed to the struggle which was undoubtedly the biggest and most intense moment of class conflict I ever experienced, albeit at second hand as it were. Even quietly suggesting it was perhaps time to think about limiting the losses would have been seen as an act of gross betrayal. So I kept quiet (not that anyone would have bothered about the opinions of some 25 yr old South London voluntary sector worker from a non-mining family anyway).

But I do now wonder if the defeat would have been quite so total if the strike hadn't gone on for quite so long....if there is a potential criticism to be made of the NUM leadership this is the one I'd focus on, not the tired old issue of the ballot. Did they keep the miners out for so long out of pride, or because they genuinely thought it was still winnable in the winter of 1984/5?

Public Sector: the Battle to Come

OK: so everyone is discussing the Audit Commission's warning of massive public sector cuts to come and Matthew Taylor's call for early contingency planning by senior managers. Stumbling says there's no chance of them not being divisive, because the public sector lacks a coherent incentive structure; FlipChart tends to agree that it's going to be bloody, if only because intelligent public sector reform is just so difficult.

JKA, in a post I'd advise all non economists like me to read, makes crystal clear the sheer scale of problem we face sustaining the banks. Weighted for risk, our national exposure via effective ownership of the three semi-nationalised banks assets roughly equates to a full year's GDP. The level of risk these banks face seems terrifying, even now. We're betting the national mortgage on being able to sustain these institutions so there surely won't be much left over to pay for emptying out bins, healing the sick or buying new school books...

But Paul Mason is looking at things from a different angle in the light of today's announcement of quantitative easing aka printing money. He acknowledges the real possibility of the global economy collapsing into competing trade blocks and, by implication, Depression. But he also does something which few other commentators seem willing to do at the moment: he asks what if the measures being currently taken actually work?

"Well we'll be in a highly state-ised economy, with government holding everything from stakes in car companies, train operating companies, builders; a massively expanded public sector and hopefully a better developed green tech sector; and a lot more public and social housing." (my emphasis). So there might, just possibly, be more to play for than the Audit Commission can currently discern.

This view is of a piece with Comrade Mason's long term opinion that we're in a Minsky Moment, when capitalism has to reform itself to survive. He even quotes Minksy on how this might work at one point:

"As socialisation of the towering heights is fully compatible with a large, growing and prosperous private sector, this high-consumption synthesis might well be conducive to greater freedom for entrepreneurial daring than is our present structure". (Minsky, HP John Maynard Keynes, New York 2008, p164-5)"

Now all this sounds very, very like an updated version of the old Alternative Economic Strategy (AES), minus the import controls and with the additional of an international dimension and a green perspective.

For younger readers I should explain that the AES was the Horror From Which Mrs. Thatcher Saved Us - the road which wasn't taken out of the collapsing Keynesian corporatism of the 1970s. The road which I as a young man thought we should have taken. Left social democracy, possibly as a bridge to something more.

I so want Mason to be right. But there's a missing ingredient: popular engagement. We used to talk about this in terms of planning agreements and workplace democracy. I think Stumbling's worrying away at different version of the same issue when he constantly returns to the question of ownership and co-operatives. I think his comments about incentives in the public sector need to be understood in this light. You can't fundamentally restructure an economy and society solely from the 'top-down' - you need a critical mass of people to feel a sense of ownership in the change. Finding ways of unlocking that potential is the key to a coherent Left response to this crisis.

Even in Mason's best case scenario, the country is going to have to invest more and consume less. Imports, especially perhaps from the Far East, will be more expensive. The word 'austerity' hovers uncomfortably in the background when I think about this. People won't put up with this without a quid pro quo, some sense we're all in this together. Which is one reason why, however difficult it might be, that we do need a show trial or two: just to demonstrate things really have changed. Fred Goodwin's pension and a cap on bankers salaries suggest themselves as possible candidates for such a demonstration effect.....cuts in front line services do not.

One Flash Mob I Approve Of

Not very flash, not much of a mob. But a damn good thing.

The Economic Crisis: Getting A Sense of Scale

The economic commentators are always full of doom and gloom. The very strength of the adjectives they use make it difficult for non-economists to get a real sense of the sheer scale of current crisis. Because, without a doubt, part of the commentariat's shock at what is happening is simply the breaking of a spell: the illusion that 'boom and bust' was over, and the 'Great Moderation' had tamed the business cycle, had been very widespread. So some of this rhetoric may be simply a reaction to the previously prevailing orthodoxy, not a reliable guide to the severity of the problem.

Richard Parker in the NYRB, however, gives be a comparison I can understand:

"By mid-February, the Federal Reserve's once-gargantuan $29 billion rescue of Bear Stearns had been dwarfed not just by the government's hotly debated $700 billion "bailout bill" last fall, or even President Obama's nearly $800 billion stimulus package, but far more stunningly by the $7.6 trillion the Fed and Treasury had by the beginning of 2009 already pledged to contain the ever-widening collapse of the economy, and the additional sum of up to $2 trillion that the new administration said it would raise from public and private sources to rescue banks. Governments from London to Beijing have meanwhile rushed to provide vast sums to their own capital markets. These figures are mind-numbing to voters—and to sophisticated investors and economists as well, and for good reason: fifty years ago the United States spent what in today's dollars would amount to only $115 billion on the Marshall Plan to reconstruct all of Western Europe; the 1980s savings and loans bailout—at the time the largest financial rescue operation since the Great Depression—cost taxpayers a mere $130 billion." (my emphases)

The other issue is how long is this likely to go on for. Will this recession be 'V' shaped (painful decline, but followed by a very swift recovery)? Will it be 'U' shaped ( painful decline, followed by a period of flatlining before the recovery) ? Or will it be 'L' shaped, like in Japan ( drop off cliff and stay at the bottom of the economic canyon for ages...) ? John Ross points out 27th Febrauary was the 352th day since the Dow Jones hit it's peak, and that overall stock prices have so far declined by 50%. He goes on:

"The only fundamental difference between the current decline and that of 1929, so far, is the duration of the fall. After 1929 it took the Dow Jones 713 trading days to reach its bottom – the trough being on 8 July 1932 by which time the Dow it had lost 89.2% of its value. It remains to be seen for how long the current decline will continue. However although the duration of the drop is at least as yet not as great as after 1929 is as rapid."

OK: so we don't know what shape this recession will be because we're still falling off the cliff, despite throwing money at the problem on a scale which dwarfs the post-war recovery package for an entire continent.