Everything about Putin terrifies me

Vladimir Putin is to the West as that rubik's pyramid I bought when I was sixteen is to me. Every time I take it down, convinced that it's only a few turns away from being solved, I just make the situation worse and confuse myself further. Although, the Putin situation comes with the added possibility of mass extinction in a nuclear war.

Let's not mince words: Putin is clearly our enemy and we want him gone. However, the usual solutions do not apply. Military types are confused because this not an enemy you can bomb to dust and then declare victory over from the safety of an aircraft carrier. He's also a little too unpleasant for us to pretend to be his friend and hope that the situation sorts itself out.

In reading about Putin and the current crisis in Eastern Europe, one criticism of the West consistently reappears. You can hear it made here by former Head of MI6, Richard Dearlove. The criticism is that it was a bad idea to push the borders of NATO right up against Russia and to poke our liberal Western noses into former Soviet Bloc business. The argument goes that all the bad things in Crimea and Ukraine that have happened are ultimately our fault because we did something stupid.

I don't dispute any of this, but I have one question: who was in favour of this? Surely someone was. NATO policy is not decided by spinning a big wheel to decide who we will have a potentially Armageddon-inducing falling out with. Surely this is not a blunder that can be blamed on the craft beer drinking, bearded, metropolitan liberal. It's not like we attend NATO planning sessions in between exhibitions at the Tate Modern and trying out the latest pop up restaurant in Peckham.

I can't read a copy of the New Statement without giving myself a paper cut, so I probably shouldn't be making decisions involving actual guns, but I am slowly becoming aware that the people we trust to run this show aren't much clever than us thickos. For example, weren’t we told that Putin would be gone by now because of the sanctions against Russia? Well, he's still in power and stronger than ever. He's got his man in the White House and he's probably the most powerful person in the world, so you'll for forgive my lack of confidence in those who are supposed to be sorting this out. You guys are shit at your job.

If putting the NATO border next to Russia was so bad, why was it done? Every interview I read with people in the military or intelligence community has the same smug confidence of military people telling civilians that they know best, that I know so well from relatives in the army or the police. Make no mistake, this confidence and complete lack of self-examination will last up to the point when they start firing nukes at Russia and sign the death warrant of every living organism on Earth.

There's a lot of "very sensible" talk about increasing military spending amongst European countries, with the same self-confidence that unpinned assertions that sanctions will bring down Putin. Don't worry - the guns will never be used. The top brass are just worried that there'll be nothing in the Imperial War Museum for the 2020-2030 period and they don't want future generations to think that we were all pussies. If it comes down to it we can always use the guns to attack Spain as the next logical stage in Teresa May’s plan to completely ruin our relationship with Europe.

Escalating the situation is always a good idea. That's why I always throw a brick through my landlord's window before signing a new contract. Just so he knows that I am ready and willing to be a complete shit if I don't get what I want. I find that this approach works best. Building more mechanized death systems must be a top priority when significant numbers of people can't put food on the table despite working full time.

At least the left has a healthy scepticism of all this. Although, I am frankly horrified by some of the relaxed opinions about Putin I have seen in left wing Facebook groups. I am against Western imperialism and I am against the Tory government. But that doesn't mean I want to be friends with everyone who shares these two aims, as that does include a lot of the world’s scum bags as well as lots of lovely people.

Putin benefits from us doubting how massively awful he is, and he is really good at spreading ideas that we like on the left like - such as that American actions in the Middle East created ISIS, or that our leaders are shits and lie to us. Putin also does awful things in Syria and any discussion of Putin that does not begin with how much of a tyrannical bastard he is it’s not worth the pixels used to render it. If the left is good for anything then it should be against mass death dropped on civilians from the sky by brutal dictators.

I am not happy with the job that the people who are supposed to be dealing with Putin are doing. I am also wary of attempts to embrace Putin as an ally. Some of this on the left is down to a simple misunderstanding of Putin, but we need to be more nuanced than: "I love anyone who says bad things about Western governments". If anything is plain we all need to get smart on Putin, quickly.

Vladimir Putin picture taken from Wikipedia and used under creative commons.

What does protesting against Brexit achieve?

I am writing this on the day that Britain triggers Article 50 and we formally begin the process of leaving the EU. The papers are full of optimistic headlines - that they may live to deny they ever wrote in the first place - and Theresa May has said: “it is time to come together”.

If you go to Twitter this morning, you will see that lots of people are not in the mood to come together. They did not vote for Brexit, and there is still little evidence that it will go well. On Saturday some of these people, including me, were at a protest in central London. I was genuinely surprised by how passionate people were in defending the EU. I had expected the tone to be demoralised, but marchers and speakers alike were defiant in their opposition to Brexit.

It was a very middle class march, judging by the way protesters descended on the Piccadilly Pret A Manger - it looked like a plague of locusts had swept through the sandwich shop. When the self-contented middle classes feel the need to get off Twitter and take to the streets, this should be a sign that things are not going well. Standing in line, trying to buy a bottle of water and a falafel and halloumi wrap, I realised that a casual observer would see a massive disconnect between these people marching under EU flags and the ordinary, salt of the earth, Brexit voter.

Not that everyone who opposed Brexit is middle class or that this march was about saying that the majority of people opposed Brexit. It was about fighting the idea that everyone was now united behind Brexit. It was also about making sure that the minority against Brexit are still heard. Brexit is the most complex and difficult thing the country has undertaken since World War 2 and the government is approaching with the same ill-founded confidence of a 16-year-old, hosting their first house party, who is generously pouring measures of vodka without really knowing what it is. To silence any opposition (as many want to do) is nothing short of irresponsible.

There was something else bringing people together on Saturday: defending the EU has become a symbol for a broader opposition to the right wing lurch of the country in the last year. Unpleasant arguments were made by the leave side during the campaign and the result has only emboldened racism and nationalism. Opposing Brexit is a byword for being against this. It shows that we are against populism and politics based around blatant lies, like £350 million for the NHS or that Turkey is about to join the EU. It shows we are against the attacks on the judiciary, parliament and democratic due process that have come from Brexit supporters. It shows that we are in favour of an open society, not a closed and narrow minded one.

The months since the referendum have been tumultuous and politics has changed a lot. As the public consensus has shifted to the right, many centrists now find themselves on the left. As someone who has always been on the left, I can’t help but feel that we are in a bad way if the thing we are primarily fighting for is a neoliberal institution that has inflicted massive pain on Greece and built up the walls of Fortress Europe to keep out as many refugees as possible - many of whom are fleeing some of the worst circumstances in the world.

How many of the people who I marched with on Saturday oppose the naked racism of Nigel Farage, the blatant lies of Boris Johnson and the disdain for experts of Michael Gove, but still believe that the Greek people should be punished for their government’s deficit? Or want refugees kept out? Or voted Lib Dem? A protest movement led by the Lib Dems and supported by the sort of middle class person who opposes raising progressive taxation (for whatever reason), and seeks to pander to right wing rhetoric on immigration is not radical enough for me.

Hopefully fighting Brexit will wake up people on the soft left to the idea of arguing for something and changing people’s mind, rather than just repositioning your offer to where the public is. To stop Brexit in the next two years we have to change peoples’ minds. Once we have changed minds on this issue, we can aspire to do more than just defending status quo. We can start articulating what we want the future to be like.

What does protesting against Brexit achieve? It shows that there are people opposed to the ruinous Brexit project. It shows that there are people who are opposed to the sudden rightwards lurch of politics. It shows that we can start thinking about how we want things to be different and that we do not have to accept the way that they are.

Can we change opinions?

When was the last time you changed your mind? I don’t remember. Well, I changed my mind when I decided that I liked sour craft beers, but that’s not what I mean. When was the last time that you realised that a political belief you held was wrong and changed your mind?

Not recently, right? This might go some way to explaining why we are such a divided nation. Divided between the left and the right, or the town and the city, or the educated and not so educated, or the people who aspire to sleeve tattoos and those who try to avoid them. These are deeply held tribal identities and they inform how we see the world.

This is why people don’t change their minds. Even within the broad churches of the mainstream left and right political parties, opinions to do not change much from that ascribed to narrow factions. Corbyn is either a saint or a curse, nothing in between, and your view is fixed.

Then again, most people don’t spend their free time earnestly refreshing their podcast feeds to see if the latest issue of Novara FM is out whilst reading Sarah Ditum’s latest piece on gender politics in the New Statesman. Most people don’t wait in silence at parties until the point when last week’s Question Time can be brought up.

Most people have other interests. Most people don’t really care about politics (or at least the cut and thrust of politics as sport that fills newspapers and Twitter feeds). Most people don’t have fixed opinions outside of the run up to an election. Most people can be persuaded, because they don’t mainline ideology 24/7.

If most people can be persuaded, but the right is in the ascendancy globally, then it follows that the left are really bad at persuading people. Our arguments have merit. One of the things I have been surprised by over the last year or so is that criticism of globalisation and neoliberalism have been taken on by the right. These criticisms look strangely similar to arguments made by the left over the last 20 years. The difference between Russel Brand and Donald Trump is different varieties of bad haircuts.

None of this has been of benefit to the left. People agree with our criticisms of the status quo, but not with our proposed solutions. This could be because of our reliance on facts and statistics. Strangely enough people don't believe facts. You could easily characterise the average voter as a scion of Homer Simpson, who once claimed: “Facts are meaningless. You can use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true.”

You could do that and you’d be wrong. This is because there is no objective truths in politics. Data shows that immigration is good for our overall economy, but who benefits from this? Do you personally? Can you prove it’s everyone? To a five sigma level of accuracy? You can't, because you can't be scientific about politics the same way you can about particle physics. The most deluded people in politics are those who believe in Rationalia. And people who still trust the Lib Dems.

People’s opinions are driven by emotions. This is true of benefits, immigration, Brexit, almost anything. Most people feel that they are Remain or Leave and then gather facts that support this. If you think this isn’t true then can you remember the moment when you consciously weighed up the evidence of the Leave and Remain cases and reached a decision?

These emotions are created by personal experiences. This means appealing to rational self-interest or statistics does not work. Appealing to people’s emotions will work. So does this mean that the left should be occupying the emotional state of things that people feel are true rather than fact based arguments?

I don’t want to abandon logical arguments for what “feels true”. There is an effective way to use facts and emotions to make a case. Black Lives Matter do this really well, as did the No To Page 3 campaign. There is an attack on the notion of facts and certainty, that is being exploited by the populist right who have just discovered postmodernism and think it makes them clever. I don’t want the left to be a part of this, but we need to recognise the subjective truth of politics.

I think we can learn from the right, but not that we should completely abandon facts. I see people on the left who want to give over time to acknowledging the objections that people have with our crazy ideas like not crippling our economy, letting in a few people from war torn countries, fairness, tolerance and not killing every living thing on the planet in a nuclear fireball. This strikes me as ridiculous.

The Leave campaign did not go out of its way to acknowledge legitimate concerns about leaving the EU. They did not start with “I know you are worried that leaving the EU is the same as hollowing out Ben Nevis and filling it with money and jobs and then concreting over the entrance, but we think that it will be okay”. Does Nigel Farage acknowledge the case for immigration? We are not going to convince anyone by starting with apologising for what we believe in.

There are things we can learn from the right about how to make are arguments better and bolder. Emotional arguments have a place too, but cannot entirely replace facts and data. We must acknowledge that everyone has a subjective understanding of politics. We can convince people of the merits of left wing arguments if we are less timid and apologetic for the things we believe in.

Labour Party image created by David Holt and used under creative commons.

We are all cool with this, right?

I'm surprised with how relaxed everyone is about Brexit. 48% of the electorate voted remain, but you can’t tell that by reading the news. After a quick glance at the headlines and you would think that the winner of the referendum was people drawing in an additional box on the ballot paper saying "hardest Brexit possible" and then spitting on it. Why do we act like the whole country is united behind Brexit?

The only people standing up for the 48% are the Lib Dems, but if they get anywhere near actual power again I expect them to turn around and say: “We’ve looked at it and it turns out that what’s in everyone’s best interest is to drag the UK to the middle of Atlantic ocean”.

The public seems to be broadly united behind Brexit happening. Or more accurately: the public is united behind having no more elections or referendums. The public is sick of being asked its opinion and considering how hard I find it choose which craft beer I want in my local hipster pub, I too am dubious about the merits of having everyone make an important decision about the future of the country every year. The public don’t want any more referendums, expect perhaps, maybe, one more in Scotland, because that was fun last time and it ended well. Sort of.

The consensus is that we have to do Brexit, to stop Nigel Farage leading a pitchfork-wielding mob down to Westminster, but there are many different types of Brexit, so why are we getting hard Brexit?

The leave campaign was so woolly that it could mean anything to anyone. Paul Stephenson, is still saying that we should have £350 million a week for the NHS, although it's more likely that Boris Johnson will join a monastery and take a vow of poverty. The Brexit we are getting prioritises control on immigration and leaving the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. The latter was hardly a feature of the campaign; it's just May’s personal desire to have a British Jack Bauer go to town on people she does not like, like a horrible cross between James Bond and Peter Sutcliffe.

The former priority is as widely supported as the Leave campaign’s offer of £350 million more for the NHS, which was dropped quicker than a Lib Dem MP’s majority and with no political consequences. So why can't we also drop the immigration pledge? It's not like the Tories think cutting immigration dramatically is possible.

I am surprised that the whole country seems to be relaxed that we are getting the most right wing Brexit possible. We voted to leave the EU, not to give the Daily Mail everything they wanted. I wouldn't be surprised if a referendum on reintroducing capital punishment and making it the law to sing the national anthem at the start of every school or working day is next.

I suppose we do have PM who is loved by the Daily Mail (apart from when she is trying to raise the national insurance payment of their columnists) and two thirds of the public want immigration to come down. The main division in the EU referendum was not between pro and anti-immigration camps, but between people who wanted immigration to come down but were not willing to be poorer to achieve this, vs people who either were willing to be poorer or thought that this would not be necessary.

The Tories have also given up pretending to be nice like David Cameron did (apparently that’s what the Tories think a nice human being is like) and now they really want to appeal to base selfishness by being pro-business and pro-hating people because of what they look like. There is also the issue that a significant number of remain voters were Tories and they don’t seem keen on turning against their government, even while it tramples all over our future prospects.

At first I was worried that giving two fingers up to the EU was likely to result in a bad deal for Britain. Now I am worried that there will be no deal and we will exit on WTO terms. The odds of us leaving with no deal are increasing and there is a complete lack of panic about this; in fact, some have argued that it would be okay.

I don't think that it will be okay to have a 15% tariff on food coming into Britain from the EU and a 36% tariff on dairy, raising cost of living and creating inflation. I certainly don't think that it will be okay if we have a hard border in Northern Ireland. This could literally lead to violence and the loss of lives. How many lives is it politically acceptable to lose to get a good deal from the EU? I am pretty sure some poor intern in Tory Party HQ has been given the job of working this out. It honestly frightens me when people are blasé about exiting on WTO terms as if that were not so bad.

This little talk has made me more nervous. I'm not sure why we are all so cool about the way Brexit is going. The 48% should be more angry about how their future is being mortgaged to placate the ire of Daily Mail-reading 70 year olds who won't be around to appreciate just how bad the long term implications of their dislike of immigration will be.

I'm worried by how little people are freaking out about hard Brexit or no Brexit deal (currently it's 50/50 between the two - I never thought I would root for hard Brexit on some level) and the lurch to the right. We're all cool with this, right? Because I'm not.

Is capitalism destroying journalism?

Sales of print newspapers are collapsing. The Sun has seen an 11% year-on-year fall in sales, the Daily Mirror 12%, the Daily Mail 7%, and the Guardian 3%. However, in their recent online subscription drive, The Guardian claims that: “more people than ever rely on The Guardian to keep them up-to-date, but far fewer are paying for our journalism”. The Daily Mail also has more than 200 million monthly online browsers. Yet the industry is still in trouble, with widespread losses and staff layoffs reported.

Established newspaper brands, such as the Guardian or the Daily Mail, have had massive success using Facebook, Twitter, email newsletters, YouTube, podcasts and a host of other online channels to get their content in front of people. This is not covering their costs as less revenue is made by this form of distribution.

Clearly the business model of free content supported by adverts is not working. The Economist has already predicted the end of online display advertising by 2025. Deputy editor and digital strategy head Tom Standage said to Press Gazette: “Video advertising, native advertising and other forms of advertising provide only small incremental revenue streams for publishers.”

Standage goes on to say that a different model is needed. This could be paywalls (like the Times and Financial Times use) or partial paywalls, where the user can read a few articles a week, but must pay for everything else (like the Economist). Being part of a larger conglomerate that cross-subsidises the losses of a media organisation is another option, or selling additional services to readers such as dating, consulting or premium paid-for content (Slate in the US is an example of the latter).

The online publisher Medium recently ditched its ad-based model, because, as Frederic Filloux of the Monday Note, says: “there is absolutely no correlation between editorial quality and the revenue it brings”. Despite having a premium audience - of mainly start up/tech people - and lots of high-value content, Medium was unable to make money from ads. This led Lucia Moses of Digday to say: “The ad-driven system is broken”. The question is, now that Medium have moved away from ads, can Medium or Medium’s high-value bloggers charge for the content? Is there another way to cover their costs?

The news industry lacks a business model that will make it profitable to create journalism and distribute it online. Technological change has destroyed the business models of print news and made “fake news” more profitable. By fake news, I do not mean the spuriously sourced claims about what causes cancer that you might read in the Daily Mail; I mean out right falsehoods spread by sites like Breitbart. These sites are able make a profit online as they do not have the same overheads as the Guardian or the New York Times, but they are able to capture vast amounts of traffic on social media by writing content with outrageous headlines, that is easily shared. Websites like Breitbart can turn a profit from the ad based business model that is currently failing the Guardian or the New York Times, hence the proliferation of fake news.

It is technological change that is behind the squeeze on established media brands, but behind this change is an economic process that is as old as capitalism itself. In his book Postcapitalism, Paul Mason says that: “The 250-year history of capitalism has been about extending market forces into sectors where they did not exist before.” We saw this when the railways destroyed the business model of canals; we see it now as AirBNB threatens hotels by creating a new market in sharing private property; and this what we are seeing in the news industry.

The internet has made it possible to distribute news to millions of people. Now that the news is available online the market for print has gone. New markets have been created in online ads, however, these do not produce the same amount of profit. This is a feature of this process. Despite the success of AirBNB, it produces less profit than the hotel industry whose market is disappearing (and AirBNB employees fewer people). It is the process of capitalism itself that is threatening the future of established news brands.

In the long term this means that traditional news organisations (which value things like facts and balanced reporting) will find it increasingly difficult to compete with fake news that costs less and can survive in this leaner profit environment. The solution is that we need to evaluate the worth of a news brands by more than the profit they make. We need a system that recognises the value of high quality journalism as a good in itself, not just a means to make money.

This is not just a problem in the news industry, but a problem with capitalism as a whole. Capitalism only has a use for goods and services that create profit; goods and services that do not, but may have a social value, are set aside. High quality journalism that informs the public is an example of this. In his book, Ill Fares The Land, Tony Judt identifies this problem in what neoliberal capitalism considers to be useful. He said: “If we confine ourselves to issues of economic efficiency and productivity, ignoring ethical considerations and all reference to broader social goals, we cannot hope to engage it.”

The changes going on in the news industry are not novel and are not confined to this industry. Journalism is changing because of the process in capitalism that destroy markets and replaces them with ones that make less money and employ less people. Quality, independent journalism will never be more profitable than fake news. We need to think about its real value, not just its use for making profit. This is something we need to think about across our economy from hotels to taxi firms, or else profits will be squeezed, employment will fall and socially valuable goods and services will be lost.

Newspaper image created by Yukiko Matsuoka and used under creative commons.

Brexit offers many opportunities for the Labour Party

It is certainly strange to be feeling disappointed that the Labour Party has a similar policy stance to the Tory Party when Jeremy Corbyn is leader. I voted for Corbyn precisely to avoid this feeling. If I wanted to be realistic about what the voters wanted, I would have supported Andy Burnham. I voted for a serial rebel, because I did not want to see Labour compromising. Now the preferred politicians of the Morning Star and the Daily Mail have little difference between them on the biggest issue of today. If Douglas Adams had submitted this as a novel, it would have been rejected as too surreal.

John McDonnell has said that Brexit offers many opportunities. It's worth remembering that crashing your car into a brick wall offers you the opportunity to get a better one, but most people just head down to their local Ford dealership. Although the British public has spoken - and their chosen direction is into the brick wall. Driving safely is apparently what metropolitan liberals do, and in 2017 no-one wants to be seen publicly shopping in Waitrose or being nice to another human being. So with that in mind let's take McDonnell at face value.

Brexit offers us the opportunity to get the economy we want. Everything is up for grabs and Britain is clearly too dependent on financial services and desperately needs to diversify its economy, so that the new jobs created are not just at companies that find inventive ways for the very poor to do for money what rich millennials’ parents used to do for free. (This, by the way, is not sarcasm, it's an actual Silicon Valley business strategy.)

No-one is more excited than me about giving a bloody nose to the cunts who do coke in the toilet of the Liverpool Street Station Wetherspoons. However, after every financial crisis we end up ever more dependent on an unstable financial sector and then banks get less apologetic. If you think that the slow crushing of prosperity that Brexit will bring is going to be felt in the square mile then remember we have a Tory government who would sell Newcastle to Kim Jong-Un to test his nuclear weapons before they contemplate inconveniencing the City of London. We always end up worse off and they always end up richer.

Let's not forget that the Tories back up plan for Brexit (if acting like an impatient child for some reason doesn't land a brilliant deal from the EU27) is to turn Britain into a low tax, low regulation, neoliberal hell hole to lure in the money of the most greedy and unscrupulous people in Europe. In essence we will be like Monaco with rubbish weather. Or Switzerland with rubbish trains. Or Singapore with rubbish. What everyone who does not work in financial services, the sex industry, the coke supply industry, or north of Watford is supposed to do in these circumstance is unclear. Certainly do not think about being a nurse or a teacher or anything useful and (formerly) supplied by the government, as the Tories will be rushing to deliver as much austerity as possible so that they can offer dodgy back handlers to any company that threatens to relocate to mainland Europe.

Brexit also offers the opportunity for Britain to regain sovereignty of its laws, this will surely be of benefit to a future Labour government. Never mind that we have a Tory government right now that treats the Human Rights Act as an inconvenience that stops us driving nails through the fingers of people we do not like. Leaving the EU will offer any future Tory government the ability to do whatever they like with workers', environmental and human rights.

The Tories are salivating at the prospect of bringing back child labour (you need to start on that CV early in today's competitive job market), drilling for shale glass in the Lake District (can anything that doesn't make money for big business be truly beautiful) and throwing benefit claimants who don't look for work into the Thames (only a metropolitan liberal who lives in East London, cycles to work and drinks vegan beer would disagree with this). Unless we were looking at very long period of uninterrupted Labour rule, I would be very wary about leaving the comforting, regulated embrace of the EU.

While Brexit offers a great opportunity to regain the sovereignty of the UK, it also offers a great opportunity to destroy it. After Wales and Cornwall have become Mad Max-esque hellscapes following the withdrawal of EU assistance grants, we have the prospect of Scotland leaving the union and the creation of a hard border between Northern and the Republic of Ireland. Of course the proposed Tory solution to the latter is to treat Northern Ireland as if it is in the Republic, which will definitely go down well with the Protestants and Unionists there. We may be able to rip Britain away from the tyranny of the EU, but we are very likely to rip the country apart in the process.

Supporting Brexit also offers Labour the opportunity to reconnect with its base, because what voters up and down country really want is to hear a Labour leader talk awkwardly about immigration. It went well for Ed Miliband and I for one am looking forward to more conversations with Green Party members about why our leader’s so keen on controls on immigration, while trying to silence that nagging bit at the back of my brain telling me that this is not right. All the time we will be accused of betraying the two thirds of Labour voters who voted remain, and being accused of being Britain hating, Brexit traitors by UKIP regardless of how much we hug the flag and try to stop people coming here to contribute to our economy by doing jobs that British people turn their noises up at.

Finally Brexit offers the opportunity to make a strong statement about the Britain we want. It's a great opportunity to tell the world that we are a closed and xenophobic island with a hugely exaggerated sense of a self-importance, and who would not be want to sign trade deals with such a nation? Never mind that we have no experience of negotiating trade deals for the last 40 years, our closest ally thinks that the point of a deal is to come out massively better off than the other side and that many of the other countries we want to do deals with want Britain to relax our visa laws, something that the reasonable Brexit voters will certainly be opened minded to as they are so keen to put national interest ahead of their small minded prejudices.

Only a metropolitan liberal who grows ironic facial hair, attends music festivals in Eastern Europe and wants to buried wrapped in old copies of the Guardian (it's more environmentally friendly) would have reservations about tearing up 40 years of law and rewriting them in 30 seconds while primarily considering whether the Daily Mail will like the result.

With all the opportunities for radical change what is there to worry about? Anyone who says otherwise is just a Remoaner who hates Britain. I'm not worried. I'm not even going to wear my seatbelt when I voluntarily crash my car into this wall. To do otherwise is to talk down Britain.

My disappointment with Corbyn

These are strange political times we are living through. The Tories are actively going against the wishes of big business. The Lib Dems are making a resurgence. Corbynistas on Facebook are arguing that we should be pragmatic and accept Brexit as what the voters want, while Corbyn-sceptics on Facebook are arguing that the party should ignore what voters want because it goes against Labour's core values. Politics has been turned completely on its head and I am finding it hard to make sense of it all.

The outlook for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour is not good. Many people in the party are not happy with his pro-Brexit stance and we just lost the Copeland by-election, which suggests that the chances of a wipe out at the next general election are high. If the country follows Copeland’s 6.7% swing to the Tories, then they will have a majority of 114, which fills me with terror.

Personally, I am really disappointed with Corbyn. When I voted for him in 2015 (which seems like a lifetime ago now) I hoped that this would be the beginning of a better Labour Party. Corbyn gave me hope not just because he is a lifelong socialist and anti-war campaigner, he also gave me hope because he was not like other politicians. Everything that was soulless and managerial about New Labour was coming to end and we would have a leader who is passionate and principled. The public was clear about its dislike of normal politics and here we were, offering something different.

In 2015 I went to see Corbyn give a speech at the Camden Town Hall in London. It was a free event and the queue was so long that it wrapped around the building twice. I remember being stunned that this many people had turned up to see a politician speak. Not even the Prime Minister could draw such crowds and the atmosphere was more like a concert than a campaign rally. I thought this was utterly surprising in our cynical and apathetic age; this could be the beginning of something, dare I say it, revolutionary.

Maybe I was naive for thinking that things could be different. Maybe I was stupid for putting my trust in Corbyn. The simple fact is that I did and it hurts when I see that the Tories are up 18% on Labour in opinion polls and are likely to be in government for years to come. I feel responsible for this because I dared to hope that things could be different.

This experience has not changed my politics much. I am a stubborn creature who keeps odd bits of tech in a drawer in my bedroom, because they might be useful one day. My politics are an odd collection of different ideas: a bit Marxist, a bit anarchist, a bit modernist, a bit internationalist, a bit environmentalist, a bit woke and a lot of the time they don't make sense even to me. (If anyone wants to know more buy me a pint and I will happily bend your ear.) In 2015 they aligned to Corbyn more than to the other three candidates.

I still want a left wing Labour Party, but Corbyn himself is too tainted by bad leadership. The way I think of it is like this: in the 2015 Labour leadership election was four people competing to be the captain of a ship. Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall wanted to take the ship to Spain. Corbyn said we could sail all the way to India. At first we were not certain, but he made a good case and for a while we believed that we could make it to India and that the only obstacle was that we didn't believe that we could do it. Then Corbyn starts sailing and we ram into the Isle of Wight. India is a great destination, but at this point it is starting to look like we should have gone with Spain if it were achievable. (I look forward to people expanding on this metaphor in Facebook comments.)

The area where I am most disillusioned with Corbyn is over Brexit. I may have been naive to trust a politician who voted against even the nice EU treaties, the ones that protect workers’ rights, to defend Britain's role as positive member of the EU. To put it mildly, I am not happy with Corbyn's complete lack of opposition to the government (although surprise is my main emotional response). The government, supported by Labour, is following hard Brexit and many party members oppose it.

This is where the complex mess of thing I believe comes into play. Although I am anti-Brexit, I am wary about opposing it, because of the damage this could do to the Labour Party, which is still the best vehicle to achieve what I want from politics - or to at least stop the horror show that is the current Tory government (sorry Greens, fuck you Lib Dems).

I am not convinced that there is a clear electoral strategy around opposing Brexit. It won a referendum, which gives it legitimacy even in the eyes of people who voted Remain. There is also the thorny issue that people do not like elections and most people - even those who voted Remain - are a) consigned to the result; and b) want immigration to come down and are happy to get this from Brexit.

At the very least, most peoples’ attitude (judging from all my conversation with people and a wide spectrum of media from left/right and remain/leave) is that they do not want to be asked again, do not want more elections any time soon and want the government to get on with Brexit. I see no evidence that a second referendum would go any differently than the first. In fact, it would probably return the same result only more so (like Corbyn vs. Owen Smith) because people hate being asked the same question twice.

None of this answers the question of what direction Labour should take. There is no consensus or even good ideas. Oppose Brexit and we might as well batter ourselves and serve ourselves to the Tories in a chippy. Go hard Brexit and Lib Dems will pull us apart like pulled pork in a London craft beer establishment. Some combination of both? Well in the words of Harry Perkins, the fictional PM in Chris Mullin’s novel A Very British Coup: "I tried going down the middle of the road. I was hit by the traffic in both directions".

I still want a radical left-wing agenda, but I do not see the Labour Party rushing to embrace anarcho-syndicalism. So I am willing to compromise to get some of what I want done. To support Liz Kendall would be a huge climb down for me, but I would take her as PM over Theresa May in a heartbeat. The only problem is I am not sure if there are good compromises out there. No one has any good ideas. Corbyn has shat the bed. The great hopes of Lisa Nandy or Tom Watson look as befuddled as everyone else. What does the right of the party have to offer besides their usual plan of moving to where the country is (which is what Corbyn is already doing on Brexit)? A friend tried to convince me that despite the poor leadership, Corbyn has opened the possibility that things can be different. Can they now be different in a good way? I feel like attaching my hopes to Rebecca Long-Bailey, but, you know, everything I have written above.

One thing I a certain of is that we need a new direction. We do not need a 80s throwback. Also we don’t need a 90s throwback who tries to recapture the Blair glory years. We need leadership that is engaged with the problems of today and tomorrow, not refighting the battles of yesterday.

We need some decent leadership more than anything else. We also need to address a few issues while we're at it. Labour is clearly disconnected with its base in working class areas, from what I have been told by people who know more about this than me and who I respect. However, Labour is also disconnected with its base in metropolitan areas. Round my way, as people are fond of saying, the party's stance on Brexit has gone down like a cup of cold sick, but so has Corbyn's refusal to talk about electoral reform or his lack of support for decent new ideas like basic income. Why aren't we talking about mutualisation? Why aren't we talking about non-market solutions to problems?

Bigger than all this, we need an answer to the question of: “what does Labour stand for?” in one sentence. It sounds glib, but this is the real estate that politics takes place on. The only way to do this is with a leadership election where the different answers to this question can compete with each other, and I mean all the different answers. Including those from factions of the party that I disagree with. The outcome will only be legitimate if it is comprehensive. I do not mind if the party turns around to me and says: "we don't want your metropolitan, craft beer drinking, two-meme T-shirt wearing, New Statesman reading, Kraken podcast listening sort in our party". I reserve the right to leave such a party (sorry for the mean things I said above Greens), but if the party genuinely decided that this was the direction it should go in then I would be fine with that.

Right now no one is happy with the Labour Party. I have come to terms with the fact that I will never get exactly what I want from any party, because a party that did everything I wanted would receive the vote of precisely one person, i.e. me. I am willing to compromise because above all I hate the Tories and want them given a bloody nose. I will always hope for George Orwell to be Labour Party leader, but I am resolved to the fact that it is not going happen. What we do need is some kind of change; and change that the members believe is legitimate, if not one they agree with.

The alternative, as I see it, is the biggest Tory electoral victory ever, followed by 10-15 years of pain meted out to everyone who is not a tabloid newspaper owner, then followed by a Labour government running on a platform similar to David Cameron in 2010 (which by that point will be considered a left wing alternative). This is what I fear most and I cannot escape the realisation that this is what we are racing towards.

Picture of Jeremy Corbyn taken by Garry Knight and used under creative commons.

The long shadow of Tony Blair

This week has been great for late 90s/early 2000s comebacks. Not only was it announced that the Nokia 3310 was to be reborn, but also Tony Blair made a return to front line politics. To say that Tony Blair casts a long show over the Labour Party is an understatement. In some ways the history of the Labour Party since 1994 has been the story of how the party responds to Tony Blair. He won three general elections and redefined politics, but he remains a deeply controversial figure amongst party members and the country.

I have a lot of strong feelings about both Tony Blair and Brexit, which he is using to relaunch his political career. However, in this post I will be objective about Blair, his legacy and why he casts such a long shadow over the Labour Party. I will leave some space for my opinions at the end.

The Blair government did a lot of good. It introduced the minimum wage, grew the economy, reduced pensioner poverty (for which pensioners rewarded Labour by becoming more likely to vote Conservative), expanded education opportunities, reduced unemployment and many other progressive accomplishments. Blair was an optimistic break with 18 years of painful Tory rule. For the party, he represents something more than a list of policy accomplishments, bringing to mind a time when Labour led the political debate and made decisions which affected peoples’ lives. In short Blair reminds members of what it was like to be popular.

Blair’s legacy is a break with the orthodoxies that had governed Labour since the Second World War, with the acceptance of free marketing economics. He also ushered in an area of tolerance and social liberalism. The social conservatives of Thatcher’s era were sidelined; Blair’s was a much more inclusive Britain. Blair’s greatest political accomplishment is David Cameron, a man modeled in his own image who changed the Tory party to look more like New Labour. Cameron’s own greatest accomplishment is making same-sex marriage legal, something that would have been unthinkable both in the Tory Party and the country without Blair.

The shadow that Blair casts over the party is that of a successful leader who was followed by a period of decline. It is the inescapable question of “would we be better off with Blair in charge?” Also, “how can we get back to that time when Labour was the dominant force in politics?” Many of the Clause 1 Socialists, who prioritize winning elections, look to Blair as an inspiration of how turn the party back in to the electoral juggernaut it once was.

There are good reasons for disliking Blair; his legacy is not just economic growth and social liberalism. Blair’s blind acceptance of the free market sowed the seeds of the banking crash, from which we have barely recovered. It also lay behind introducing university tuition fees and PFI, a blight on the nation that we will be paying for generations. Rising inequality, falling productivity, the housing crisis, the NHS crisis, deindustrialization, the rise of low paid casual work and many other long term problems either began with

Labour appeared invincible under Blair, but what is the point of complete dominance over politics if you cannot make the difficult decisions and tackle the big issues affecting the country? At the least, there were wasted opportunities. At worst, Blair deliberately ignored key issues because they were politically inconvenient to tackle.

Then there was the Iraq war. I could write a book on Labour and the Iraq War, but to save space I will say that whatever Blair hoped to achieve with the war it was clearly a failure. Iraq, the Middle East and the World are not safer today because of the war. It is almost impossible to find anyone of any political persuasion who thinks, in retrospect, that the war was a good idea. If Iraq had not been such a disaster, and the party was not wracked with guilty for supporting it, then Jeremy Corbyn would not be Labour leader.

Labour Party members may look back on Blair’s time as Prime Minister with misty eyes, but does the rest of the country? 60% of YouGov users rate Blair unfavorably. Many people do not remember the dynamic young Blair that Labour Party members idealise. They remember Blair as the epitome of a disconnected Westminster elite that does not know or care about events beyond central London. Blair is byword for everything that is modern and rubbish in a soulless way. For many he is remembered more for high spending on benefits and increasing immigration than for the minimum wage or winning elections.

Labour’s Brexit policy is a disaster and that is why Blair’s back. The issue is overshadows everything else. It does not matter that Corbyn has good plans for the NHS and housing when Labour is seen as weak on Brexit, immigration and the economy. Blair is the most prominent public figure making arguments against the government, against Brexit and for a change in Labour’s policy.

These arguments need to be made, but I am worried that Blair makes the situation worse and not better. Blair and his time as Prime Minister is so intrinsically linked with everything that is disliked about the EU: high immigration, a disconnected elite, wasting of taxpayers’ money and policy that meddles unnecessarily in people’s lives. The vote to leave the EU was a rejection of everything Blair stood for and a rebellion against his way of doing politics.

Seeing Blair back in the news made me think that this is a man from a different political age. He did not even have a computer in his office for most of his time in Downing Street. The idea of Labour adopting a Blairite platform now seems completely disconnected to the challenges of the present. Global politics is moving away from the views of Blair and people like him. The most obvious example of this the defeat of Hilary Clinton last year by a Republican who stands against everything the Blair/Clinton centrists stood for.

Perhaps Blair is not unlike this week’s other ‘90s throwback, Nokia’s relaunched 3310 phone. It may well find a place in today’s vastly changed mobile phone market, but it can only appeal to a small niche; it can never again command the huge slice of market share that it did in its heyday.

Even if there is a Blair-like figure who can come forward to lead Labour to victory, they are likely to look and behave nothing like Tony Blair. His way of doing politics is over. His re-launch is an attempt to bring them back as much as it is an attempt to return himself to the spotlight.

Blair casts a long shadow over Labour and it was one the party needs to come to terms with. However, Blair is the past and I want Labour to be focused on its future. You can learn from the past, but you can never go back to it.

Tony Blair image created by Matthew Yglesias and used under creative commons.

Why are we surprised when Trump does what he said he would do?

The world has been shocked by President Donald Trump’s executive order that suspends America’s refugee program for 120 days, indefinitely halts the Syrian refugee program and bans entry to the US from seven Muslim majority nations (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen). Although suspended, for now, it caused chaos throughout the world’s airports and closed America off to people fleeing the worst conditions in the world. More significantly by creating a law that specifically targets the followers of one religion, Trump is putting into law the naked prejudice of his campaign.

The world has been shocked by President Donald Trump’s executive order that suspends America’s refugee program for 120 days, indefinitely halts the Syrian refugee program and bans entry to the US from seven Muslim majority nations (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen). Although suspended, for now, it caused chaos throughout the world’s airports and closed America off to people fleeing the worst conditions in the world. More significantly by creating a law that specifically targets the followers of one religion, Trump is putting into law the naked prejudice of his campaign.

Trump has disregarded the moral obligation that the West has to people feeling violence, tyranny and economic collapse. These are the least fortunate people in the world, who are leaving conditions the West has indirectly created or failed to address. To strongmen like Trump, compassion is a weakness to be expunged. It is essential that we stop Trump from crushing our compassion for people who have been caught in horrific civil wars and sectarian violence.

I am surprised that Trump actually enacted this executive order, despite making it a key part of his campaign for President. I thought it was such an extreme idea that surely he did not intend to go through with it. Trump is clearly a bully with little regard for the lives of other human beings, but I assumed that even he would want to protect America’s (and his own, as President’s) standing as the moral leader of the world. I am not alone in this. So why are we surprised when Trump does what he said he would do?

One reason may be our reassurance that the checks and balances of the American government would hold him in place. Trump may be President, but he is at odds with much of the Republican Party who control of the Senate and House of Representatives. So-called “mainstream Republicans” should act as a check against the extreme actions of Trump.

Congressmen and senators are not standing up to him out of fear of his base and the power they hold during the next primary season. Trump has already nominated a suitably conservative Supreme Court justice. As long as he also delivers the tax cut Congress has been itching to pass, repeals Obamacare and cuts Medicaid, then the Republicans are more than willing to let any number of heartless executive orders pass that motivated by prejudice.

His own government may not hold Trump back, but the pressure from other world leaders has constrained rogues before. Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande were quick to condemn Trump’s action. However, our own Theresa May has so far refused to do so. May is desperate to court Trump as an ally to deliver the trade deal that will make Brexit more viable. If sacrificing our status as a moral leader by refusing to condemn overt prejudice is the cost of Brexit, then it is too high to pay.

How can we criticise the actions of the Russian or Turkish government if we allow similar affronts to decency from our closest ally? One that we have a “special relationship” with? Jeremy Corbyn was right to call for Trump to be banned from the UK while his Muslim ban stands. Only by refusing to respect Trump and the office he holds can we communicate to him that his actions are morally unacceptable.

One reason why I surprised that Trump would actually enact this order might be because I am out of step with what people want? A recent poll showed that 49% of the British public think that Trump’s state visit should go ahead. It is possible that many other people have the same prejudices towards Muslim and refugees that Trump has, but a popular prejudice is still a prejudice and a popular moral outrage is still a moral outrage. We have a duty to these, because we won the lottery of life by being born into stable Western democracies. We owe to those less fortunate to help them however they can. Trump’s action must be opposed even if they are met with widespread support.

Another reason why we did not believe that Trump would enact the Muslim ban is that he lies a lot and contradicts himself a lot. It is difficult to tell what he really means. It is easy to dismiss anything that he says if we want to. This is connected to another reason for our disbelief: it is hard to

We are reluctant to accept that Trump will behave in an openly prejudiced way, enact illiberal executive orders (orders that violate the constitutional requirement not to pass laws that discriminate against someone because of religion) and cannot be held back by anyone, because this denial is a natural defence to prevent our fragile psyches being crushed by total and all-consuming panic about how much danger we are in. However, we must take Trump seriously when he says he wants to do something. We must accept that he will try and build the wall, start a trade war with China and begin a nuclear arms race. In the future he may threaten more extreme actions. We must take these seriously as well.

What Trump is doing is wrong. He may use the justification of national security, but America already has one of most stringent vetting processes for refugees and immigration controls. These measures go beyond those passed by George W. Bush during the height of the war on terror. This is a populist gesture informed by a perception of Muslims as dangerous. It fans the flames of hatred, prejudice and is inherently discretionary. The Republican Party will not stop him. Other world leaders will not stop him. It is up to us, concerned citizens, to stop him.

It is especially important that we take Trump seriously when he behaves like or shows affection for authoritarian strongmen. Trump has praised Vladimir Putin and people in his inner circle have links to Putin. Putin also aided Trump in getting elected through the targeted hacks of his Democratic opponent. Trump also frequently attacks the independence of the press and its right to criticise him. He has given senior government jobs to Republicans responsible for repressing the voting rights of African Americans. We must take seriously the fact that he is a threat to liberty and democracy. We need to take this seriously and to stop denying the truth of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

The rise of illiberal democracy

In my last post I talked about the threat to liberal democracy that comes from liberal undemocracy. Liberal democracy has been the basis of Western society since the end of World War 2, but now it is under threat from both liberal undemocracy and illiberal democracy, which is also spreading through the Western world.

To understand illiberal democracy, we need to start by looking at the basic elements of a liberal society. (This is liberal with a small “L” or liberal as in John Locke, not liberal like Hillary Clinton.) The main elements of a liberal society are a free press, an independent judiciary, a degree of economic freedom, a degree of social freedom and representative democracy coupled with universal suffrage. We are seeing the rise of a political movement that threatens all of these things and thus strikes at the heart of the liberal Western order.

Donald Trump is leading an attacking on the free press. He misses no opportunity to call the media biased against him and to question the legitimacy of any criticism of him. In Trump’s world there is no such thing as pro-Trump bias, there is only legitimate news that supports him and illegitimate news that criticises him. This is an attack on the liberal idea of a free press that holders the powerful to account.

Recently the independence of our judiciary has also been questioned. Following a High Court ruling that parliament (not the government) must decide to trigger Article 50, and begin the process of Britain leaving the EU, several British newspapers questioned the rights of judges to interpret the law and some even went so far as to label them “enemies of the people”. Another key principle of a liberal society is that parliament makes the law and judges are free to interrupt them. By suggesting that some political decisions are so important that judges must not be allowed to interrupt how the law applies to them is to question the independence of our judiciary. It is fine to claim that the judges made the wrong legal decision (or interpretation of the law), but to question their position as arbiters of the law is against liberalism.

Both of the above attacks were backed up by the fact that the political movements attacking liberalism (Trump and Brexit) won democratic elections. These political movements represent a huge change to Western society because they call into question our liberal democratic foundation. As political movements they attack liberalism in other ways: both want to restrict economic freedom and are a profound shift in the economic policy. This could be the end of neoliberalism and the beginning of a new age of economic nationalism. Although Brexit and Trump are profoundly different (Brexit is much more pro-free trade than Trump) they both question the current liberal economic consensus.

These two political movements also want to restrict social freedoms. At their core is nativist populism, which is frequently expressed as hostility to immigrants and non-whites. Winning elections based on illiberal practices such as curtailing immigration from certain countries, deporting large numbers Mexicans, banning Muslims from the country or exploiting latent xenophobia is an expression of hostility to the social freedoms that underpin liberalism. There is no valid liberal democracy without social liberalism and winning a democratic mandate on a platform of taking away people’s rights away is profoundly illiberal.

Trump and the Republican Party have even gone so far as to attack universal suffrage. Voting reforms put in place by Republicans and supported by Trump are designed specifically to stop poor people and ethnic minorities from voting. This is because they are more likely to vote for Democrats. We can expect to see more of this under President Trump and by making it difficult for citizens to vote, Trump is threatening the liberal principle of representative democracy through universal suffrage.

Finally, Trump attacks the foundations of liberal democracy by calling the election itself into question. Trump claims that millions voted illegally, which there is no evidence of. Questioning the legitimacy of elections themselves show the scale of Trump’s hostility to liberal democracy as does his fondness for dictators like Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Trump represents a clear and present danger to the very basis of western civilization through his attacks on liberal democracy.

These two occurrences, the rise of illiberal democracy and liberal undemocracy, are threatening liberal democracy because Western society is so divided. Trump, Brexit and other populist, nativist movements show the divisions of our society, which are mirrored by illiberal democracy and liberal undemocracy. Some people hail Trump and Brexit as the overturning of a corrupt political order and some see it as a threat to western society. Some are willing attack liberalism to destroy this corrupt political order and some want to subvert democracy in order to prevent them. This new divide between illiberal democracy and liberal undemocracy cuts across the old left and right political spectrum and is the key debate in contemporary politics. Restoring the old axis and liberal democracy is not possible until we unite our divided societies and return political debate to the old divisions.

This is not possible, partly because we cannot turn back time, but partly because the idea behind the old political debates do not explain the world we live in anymore. Neoliberalism does not make sense after the 2008 financial crash. Technocratic institutions are not protecting our society from existential threats. We need to engage with the ideas thrown up by illiberal democracy and liberal undemocracy so that we can combat the worst aspects of contemporary politics: ie racist populism and the desire of certain people to take away the rights of others.

The established liberal democratic ideas that underpinned Western society for decades are now being questioned. We cannot turn back the clock and stop this. Instead we need to ask ourselves: what do we want from our future and what must be stopped at all costs?

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

The rise of liberal undemocracy

Liberal democracy has been the bedrock of our society since the Second World War. The combination of representative democracy and a degree of economic and social liberalism is what united the West during the Cold War. It is this vision of government that we exported around the world, and since the fall of the Berlin Wall it has become the political structure that every country (bar a few exceptions) claims to have. Liberal democracy is so universal that it could be called the default form of government.

Now liberal democracy is being challenged in its own cradle. A conflict between liberalism and democracy has been born out of an old fear about democracy. Democracy has always been threatened by two fears: first, that the poor will use democracy to appropriate the wealth of the rich, and second, that democracy means the rule of the stupid over the smart against everyone’s best interest.

This has led to the rise of liberal undemocracy amongst liberals. Support for liberal undemocracy has become more prevalent in the UK since Britain voted to leave the EU. In its crudest form, it is the expression that the public is too stupid and too easily manipulated to be trusted with elections and referendums, with Brexit as the self-evident evidence of this. Liberal undemocracy’s more sophisticated form is the argument that it is in everyone’s best interest that the public are not allowed to make certain decisions.

Let me be clear that this criticism of liberal undemocracy is not support for Brexit. I am against Brexit, because I believe in workers’ rights and environmental protection at a European level. I believe that Britain should stay in the EU - mainly because for the above reasons it offers - but I am against liberal undemocracy for the reasons that I will outline below.

The reason for the popularity of liberal undemocracy is a belief in a greater good of public policy that is above politics and ideology. This is optimised by the reliance of Western governments on technocratic institutions, such as the European Commision or the Bank of England. These institutions were either created or given their independence to prevent politics and public opinion from influencing certain economic policy decisions. They work by moving key decisions away from parliaments - which respond to the will of the public through elections - to non-government institutions that are supposed to persue a non-ideological greater good of public policy. In short, they focus on “what works” rather than what people want, and as such they are fundamentally undemocratic.

There were good reasons for these institutions to be set up in the way that they were, as they stop politicians from making bad decisions that are politically convenient. However, they have their flaws as well, which were exposed in 2008 when the rule of "what works" in terms of economic policy stopped working. Our technocratic institutions did not save us from the banking crisis and biggest recession since the Second World War, despite having their independence.

What works stopped working because these institutions were free from politics, but no one is free from ideology. Technocratic institutions pursued what works, but no one asked the question who does it work for? It turns out that the who was large banks and finance companies, which focused on short-term profits. Our technocratic institutions were supposed to focus on the long-term health of the economy, but they failed to do so and we all suffered in the Great Recession.

The people running technocratic institutions (usually cut from the same upper crust of society that most politicians come from) are not free from ideology or prejudice. They may be independent from the daily cut-and-thrust of politics, but their decisions will still be influenced by how they see the world. Our technocratic institutions believed in free market economics so blindly that they did not foresee the banking crisis they were supposed to prevent. They were so wedded to this ideology that they saw no problem in turning over the fate of our economy to banks and finance companies that focus only on the short term and then to ignore the long-term consequences of this.

Technocratic institutions suffer from institutional rigidity and can be slow to change. This is one explanation why they did not act to prevent the baking crisis despite the warning signs. During the boom years of the 2000s they could not allow any other point of view beyond their own faith in neoliberalism. Due to their independence, there was no way to ensure that different opinions were heard in the meeting rooms of the technocratic institutions where all the important decision about our economy were made. We trusted them and they failed. This is the fundamental flaw of technocratic institutions.

If these technocratic institutions had been more accountable, then there was a chance that we could have seen their failure before it was too late. The lesson from years of liberal democracy is that accountability can only be through democracy and our institutions are stronger when they are more democratic. Parliament has it flaws as well, but it is responsive to change and more transparent than separate technocratic institutions.

The idea of liberal undemocracy is spreading because of decisions like Brexit and the second fear about democracy: the rule of the stupid over the smart. Voting to leave the EU was the wrong decision, but the voters were not divided between smart or stupid, there were plenty of smart or stupid people on both sides. The divisions in the referendum were between young/old, graduates/non-graduates, town/country and how we view the changes to the country of the last 40 years. No one should be denied a vote because they are old or from rural areas the country, which is essentially the argument of “stupid people voted for Brexit so stupid people should not allowed to vote”.

Liberal undemocracy is fundamentally not compatible with left-wing politics, because it appeals to a fundamental mistrust of the people. Liberal undemocracy involves taking decisions away from people because they cannot be trusted to make them and giving them instead to people who are supposed to be above politics to look after the greater good. In reality, these people pursue a narrow interest and are as ideologically-driven as anyyone else. On the left we need to believe that the people can make good decisions and not that decisions should be taken away from them.

The EU referendum result was a bad result, but we should not dismiss democracy because of it. We need to resist liberal undemocracy, because our institutions are stronger when they are more accountable through democracy. On the left, we need to recognise that liberal undemocracy is not the way to fight the other big threat to liberal democracy, which is illiberal democracy. More on that in the next post.

Bank of England picture taken by Martin Pettitt and used under creative commons.

Brexit must not distract us from poverty

At the beginning of 2017 it is clear that one issue will define the next 12 months of politics and probably a long time after that. Brexit: possibly the biggest and most complex undertaking in the history of this country. Certainly it is biggest task of government since the founding of the welfare state. It is important that we properly scrutinise the negotiations so that the government does not remove all protections for environmental and workers’ rights in their dash to take us out of the EU.

However, there are many other important issues that we must not lose sight of. While we are having a national conversation about Brexit, we have forgotten the rising level of poverty in Britain. Poverty has increased since the Tories came to power in 2010 and we cannot allow this new Tory government to wash its hands of its responsibility to the least fortunate in society. The left needs to fight to get tackling poverty higher up the agenda.

Most startling is the increase in child poverty. In the last year child poverty has risen by 200,000 children according to the latest official statistics. Frances Ryan wrote in the Guardian that: “this is the first increase in child poverty (when housing costs are included) since 2011-12." Rising child poverty is a damaging, and largely overlooked, indictment of our society.

Benefit cuts and low wage growth are behind the 3.9 million children now living in poverty. Two thirds of these children have family members in work, who are struggling to provide for their dependents because of low wages and the systematic cuts to the benefits that are a lifeline to those underemployed or in low paying jobs. The bedroom tax and other welfare reforms have hit the poorest the hardest. Cuts to housing benefit and working tax credit do not incentivise work as they are mainly claimed by those in work. They simply punish the poor for being poor. This was a political decision made by the previous Tory government. The welfare cuts of Iain Duncan Smith are directly to blame for rising child poverty. The government can do something about child poverty but it is choosing not to.

Homelessness has risen since David Cameron became Prime Minister. In 2015 in England 3,569 people slept rough on any one night according to official figures. 8,096 people slept rough in London during the 2015/16 financial year, a 6% rise on the previous year, and more than double the figure in 2009/10.

Homelessness is not just people sleeping on the streets. It is many people without a home living on friends or relatives’ sofas; it is many people with homes that are not fit for human habitation; it is many people in precarious housing situations. In the 2015/16 financial year in England, 114,790 households applied to their local authority for homelessness assistance - an 11 per cent increase on 2010/11. 57,750 households were accepted as homeless, a six per cent rise on 2014/15. All of these increases have occurred since the Tories came to power and since they started their program of welfare cuts. Research has shown that benefit cuts have led to an increase in homelessness.

Cameron's austerity program - enthusiastically supported by Theresa May - has taken a huge toll on the poorest members of society. We must not forget this. We must also not forget that the government has the power to do something about this tragedy and that it can help not hurt the least fortunate, it only lacks of the will to do so.

Just because Chancellor Philip Hammond has relaxed the deficit reduction goals does not mean he is spending more on welfare or being more generous to the poor. Hammond’s only consideration is making more money available to subsidised companies that threaten to leave the UK over Brexit. Hammond is most likely planning further cuts to public spending. Welfare, social care and other services the poorest rely on will be at the top of his list.

Remember that all this is a political choice. Leaving the single marketing to reduce immigration and thus encouraging business to leave the UK is a political choice. Bowing to pressure from large companies eager for subsidies and willing to strong-arm the government is also a political choice. So is cutting welfare or other services that the poorest members of society rely on. None of this is necessary.

Under the new government homelessness, child poverty and many other aspects of poverty will get worse. We cannot allow the Tories to get away with this. They have made child poverty and homelessness worse and they have the power to do something about it. They cannot claim to be decent, compassionate people whilst facilitating the impoverishment of huge numbers of their fellow human beings.

Another recession is still likely. The world economy has barely recovered from the last financial crisis and some areas of Britain have seen no improvement since 2008. Now we see the beginning of a fresh banking crisis brewing and Brexit makes a recession in Britain more likely. Child poverty and homelessness will get worse in a recession. Welfare and programs for the poor will be more important if the economy shrinks and they need to be expanded not cut. Under this new Tory government we are heading for harsher cuts and a worse economic climate, which will be directly the Tories’ and their Brexit policies’ fault. We cannot ignore this. We cannot allow them to get away with this.

Not only are we ignoring poverty and inequality because of Brexit, the government are likely to actively make these things worse because of Brexit. We must keep the government under pressure so that they do not throw our futures, environmental protection and workers’ rights under the bus to placate the howls of rage about immigration. We must also keep fighting for better welfare and more relief from poverty. The government created these problems and the government can solve them. We need to make it impossible to ignore these facts.

Cover image by Victoria Johnson and used under creative commons.

2016: the year everything stopped making sense

In 2015 there were lots of surprises, but at the end of the year everything made sense. David Cameron had won an unexpected majority for the Tories, but the reasons for his victory were typical of past elections: the voters preferred Cameron as a lead and thought that Labour were weak on the economy. No one predicted that Jeremy Corbyn could be leader of the Labour Party when he declared his intention to run for the position, but his victory makes sense when you remember that the other candidate’s statements on welfare, spending and immigration were far to the right of what the average Labour Party member is comfortable with. 2015 made sense when viewed through our traditional lens for examining politics.

All that changed in 2016. It is as if our ability to understand the titanic shifts occurring in politics is itself breaking down.

This year saw surprise victories for Brexit and Donald Trump, as well as growing support for right wing nationalist populism all over the Western world. Despite the conventional left and right opposing these movements, and the combined weight of our civil institutes and media thrown against them, they succeeded by engaging in a different political debate that is completely parallel to the one being had by established politics. Cameron wanted to talk about the economy, but Nigel Farage was talking about borders. Hillary Clinton wanted to talk about experienced leadership, but Trump wanted to talk about crooked politicians.

Brexit was not a left wing or a right wing issue. The leaders of government and opposition were united in opposing it and are now united in supporting it. The supporters of Brexit and Remain are drawn from both safe Tory and Labour seats. People now politically identify more strongly with their referendum vote than any particular political party. This is an earthquake that has shaken up the way we have been doing politics since 1989 (perhaps since 1945).

British Politics is profoundly different after the referendum result. There is now a new political spectrum divided between nativists and globalists with both sides drawing support from both the main right and left wing parties. This is nothing short of a profound reordering of politics.

The same process is happening in America. The victory of Trump has shown that the most electorally successful position in the old way of doing politics (being socially and economically liberal) does not work when confronted with populism. The way of doing politics that has gone unchallenged in Britain and America since the days of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton is now dead. Seeing the world through their political prism no longer allows us to make sense of it.

The unusual victories of Brexit and Trump were driven by many factors, but a key one is the way that we consume our news today. Two points emerged this year: firstly, that many of us get most of our news from a social media bubble that feeds back opinions that we are likely to agree with and excludes ones that we are likely to disagree with. This has distorted our perception of politics and how widely accepted our opinions are. It has allowed ideas and positions to go completely unchallenged and preventing voters from interrogating their own opinions.

The second issue is that many people are consuming some degree of fake news. Stories that are completely untrue and would not see the light of day in a media landscape that was dominated by a few well established brands that respected the ethics of journalism. The complacency and narrow mindedness of some established media companies is partly to blame for this. However, responsibility also lies with ourselves as media consumers.

We are too willing to only read articles that we agree with and ignore articles that we disagree with. This is what has allowed us to be lied to at an industrial scale. We need to break out of our filter bubble and find some way of telling what is a lie from what is truth in a media landscape where both appear equally valid and where we are driven to the one that most suits our own bias.

Much like climate change, the solution to this problem does not require a technological fix, but for people to behave better and to be more open minded. How do we encourage people to avoid confirmation bias, to be open to new ideas and to challenge their own assumptions? Most people, it turns out, would prefer to be lied to than to challenge their own world view. In our current way of doing politics we accept news from the sources that we like or that broadly share our political opinions. In the world of fake news this leaves us open to being lied to and exploited.

The undisputed king of the fake news and media relativism is Vladimir Putin, a man who has extended his reach across the world this year, maybe as far as the White House. Politicians of the left and the right are united in the belief that something needs to be done about this tyrant and threat to democracy. However no-one knows what to do beyond the use of strong words.

In the old politics sunlight was the best disinfectant. It was sunlight that showed the BNP to be the incompetent thugs that they were, but how do we do use facts to bring down a man who shifts perceptions of reality itself? How do we argue with someone who exists in a murky world where every piece of information is equal regardless of how extreme or spurious it is? How do we present a better alternative to someone who insists that all government is equally flawed? Putin challenges even the fundamental idea of what a fact is. We cannot defeat him with conventional politics.

Putin’s biggest accomplishment this year has been saving Bashar Al Assad’s oppressive Syrian regime and successfully crushing the uprising against him. In the process hundreds, perhaps thousands of civilians have been killed. The suffering the people of Aleppo, meted out indiscriminately by these cruel despots, must move every human being. However, the West cannot do anything about it. The world is too complex, too unstable and too frightening - so we are paralysed by inaction. This is not the world of the 2000s; America and Britain cannot throw their weight around and hope this effects a smooth transition to a better, freer world. We do not understand the complexities of the geopolitics in the 2010s enough to stop something as awful mass slaughter.

Our entire way of understanding the world has stopped working. The current toolbox we use to understand politics is not sufficient to explain the new political system that we live under. This has led to those with painfully simple messages to cut through the confusion to great effect: “take back control”, “make America great again”. The answer is not to become simpler, but to find a way to navigate these new complexities.

In 2016 the soft left ran out of things to say that explain the world to voters. Between Hillary Clinton and Owen Smith, people simply do not believe in the old way of doing social democracy anymore. Corbyn offers something different, which is welcome, but I do not feel that his analysis of the political challenges of the early 21st century are complex enough or radical enough to be up to the task of inspiring large numbers of people to support a left wing political movement.

Let 2017 be a year of new ideas. Not 80s throwbacks, or 90s throwbacks, or insultingly simple answers to complex questions. Let 2017 be a year of brand new exciting ideas, deep thought about the world we now find ourselves in and an openness to re-examine the assumptions of the past. The left needs a vision of the future because the future is frightening. It needs to be new and it needs be radical, perhaps more radical than we have ever been before. I know we can do it if we find a way to remixing our thinking so that we can make sense of 2017.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

My concerns about immigration

I have concerns about immigration. Specifically that the views of most people are moving in a direction that I am not comfortable with. It is the level of fury expressed that frightens me. Whenever I watch Question Time or read social media comments, I am surprised by how angry the public is over the level of immigration to Britain. I am in a minority of people concerned by this rhetoric, and that frightens me even more.

Many of us on the left do not understand how angry people are. This anger is different from the usual political anger: dissatisfaction with the government or grumbling over taxes. People want far reaching change to the whole country. 26% of the population want the government to encourage migrants to leave the UK, even if they have children born here. People are willing to go to extremes to control immigration, like leaving the EU and wrecking the economy through a Brexit deal that prioritises control of immigration above all else.

There is complacency on the left and amongst liberal people about the level of change needed to placate people’s anger over immigration. We think that there will be an easy fix. We have assumed that it is only low-skilled migration from other EU countries that people object to. Leaving the European Common Market and tightening border controls will bring down low skilled migration. However, some groups express concern about the number of foreign nurses working in the NHS.

The lack of integration by some immigrants is often cited as a cause of hostility to immigration. Integration is clearly an issue, but I am not sure how we force people to integrate. What do we do with the people who are unwilling or unable to integrate? Should they be deported? Even if they have children born here? Remember that 26% of the country want the children of immigrants born in the UK deported, even if they are integrated. There is also the problem that people do not want to pay for programs that will help immigrants integrate. Most people would rather just have less immigration than pay for integration.

This hatred of immigration is not new; Britain did not suddenly become more xenophobic this year. However, the referendum result has exposed a hatred dwelling beneath the surface of our society. Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Daniel Hannan and others picked at a scab to get the result they wanted, and now they have exposed a deep wound. The origins of this wound are complex; they go back to the days of British Empire and the birth of a sense of British exceptionalism that has bred contempt for Europe and people from other countries.

Attitudes worsened after immigration increased following the enlargement of the EU in 2004. Tony Blair has primarily been blamed for not imposing transitional controls on the number of people who move to Britain. He chose not to advance an argument of how this immigration would benefit the country - filling many skill shortages, especially in the NHS and generating more tax to support the welfare state - and this left a space that the far right filled with xenophobia.

Blair believed society was inevitably moving in a socially and economically liberal direction. He viewed those opposed to mass immigration similarly to socialists opposing to his market liberalisation: their views did not need arguing against; history would ultimately prove him right. He viewed the country as a business that had to adapt to market changes. Blair did not realise that although the country prospered after his reforms, the people opposed to mass immigration did not go away. When a business fails to adapt it disappears, but people remain fixed in their views. The discontent with immigration did not disappear over time. It festered into the wound that we have today.

A few people will be convinced by more integration and a reduction in the number of low skilled workers entering the country, but the fire that heats this anger (reflected in the anti-immigrant Daily Mail, Daily Express and others) is a deep intolerance, which will endure. Most people will not simply accept a fall in migration statistics; they want to see the reduction reflected in their local environment. It is not a logical dislike of the economic impacts of immigration, it is a deep emotional dislike of how the country is changing and a powerful desire to turn these changes back. It cuts across class, region, gender, income and age and cannot be solved by addressing one concern.

A recent OECD report recommends that western countries allow immigration on an unprecedented scale to redress the imbalance between the number of workers paying into their welfare states and pension schemes and the growing number of people dependant on the welfare state because of our aging population. We need a lot more workers if we are going to sustain the NHS, our education system, state pensions and the rest of the welfare state. I am worried that people would rather the welfare state collapse than allow more migrants into the country.

Politicians are falling over themselves to give the people shouting about controls on immigration what they want, even if it is bad for the economy and the welfare state. This is especially disappointing when it comes from the Labour Party, but all the major parties are guilty of it. There is no sense from politicians that if the public want something really drastic to be done about immigrants they should not be allowed to have it. By not pushing back against open hostility to immigrants we are setting a dangerous precedent.

What happens if the people's anger at immigration is not placated by leaving the single market and tighter border controls? What happens if people are still this angry after Brexit and the Tories’ anti-immigration policies have been enacted? How bad does the anger have to get before someone says that we have a national problem with how much we hate immigrants? If we continue to allow politicians and the press to blame everything on immigrants and not stand up for them violence is likely to follow.

We are dangerously close to rounding up and deporting huge amounts of people because of a sense that they do not belong in this country. The justification for this will be that they do not belong because they do not have the right skills, or have not integrated properly, or it is politically convenient to do so. It is a horrifying thought.

Why are most people I speak to so unconcerned about this anger? Many on the left or who are liberal think that immigration is too high and should come down. These liberals underestimate how angry most people are and how radical a change they want. It is important that we stand up to hatred wherever we see it and spread awareness of its depth. We must not understate the damage that could be done by placing controlling immigration above all other political objectives.

Are my worries just the panic of someone completely out of touch with the opinions of ordinary people? I am completely over-reacting to people’s legitimate concerns? I would be interested to know if this is the case, because right now I am concerned about out attitude to immigration.

Immigration image provided by the Minnesota Historical Society and used under Creative Commons.

Could Brexit kill the Labour Party?

The government and the opposition are both united in confusion over Brexit. Whilst there is no concrete plan for Britain to leave the EU it is difficult to see what the opposition should actually be opposing. The Labour Party’s position on Brexit remains unclear, although many members have taken it as read that Labour must support some form of Brexit for either tactical or moral reasons. Is this really the case?

From a tactical point of view it initially looks like opposing Brexit bad idea as 17 million people, or roughly 52% of the electorate, voted for Brexit - even if it is unclear exactly what they voted for. A recent study has shown that in a parliamentary election between a leave and remain party, leave would win 2/3s of seats. Add to this the fact that UKIP are second in 120 seats and support for overturning the referendum results looks suicidal for Labour.

All of this was received wisdom until the Richmond Park by-election, where the Lib Dems outperformed Labour in a strongly pro-Remain constituency. Richmond was never going to be won by Labour, however there are some worrying sign in Labour’s very poor performance. The Lib Dems were able to take advantage of Labour’s woolly position on Brexit. Jeremy Corbyn’s support for Brexit counted against the party in a strongly Remain area. Suddenly Labour is questioning whether support for Brexit is the right choice.

“Brexit appears to have made Liberal Democrat candidates palatable to Labour voters,” Stephen Bush wrote in the New Statesman following the result. Even worse for the party is the results of a YouGov poll indicating that a pro-Brexit Labour Party would finish third behind a pro-second referendum Liberal Democrat party in share of vote in a national election.

Diving deeper into the data, it shows that Labour should at minimum campaign for a soft Brexit to prevent the advance of the Lib Dems in metropolitan areas. The study shows that Labour would win the largest vote share when supporting a 2nd referendum, as they pick up votes at the Lib Dem’s expense. However, this situation leads to the largest Tory and UKIP vote share as the electorate becomes more polarised between the Leave and Remain camps.

All this shows that the Lib Dems (and possibly the Greens) could steal a lot of Labour’s voters if they support Brexit. This makes sense as 65% of Labour voters supported Remain in the referendum. Corbyn has always been luke-warm at best towards EU membership and his call to immediately trigger article 50 after the referendum angered many Remain Labour voters. The Lib Dems are poised to take advantage of this as the most vocally pro-Remain party. Supporting Brexit could be the death blow to Labour.

None of this changes any of facts laid out at the start of this article: the strong support for Brexit nationwide and the number of Labour seats that UKIP are eyeing up for the next election. Labour is caught in a bind. Support Brexit and lose its liberal metropolitan voters to the Lib Dems; or support Remain (or a soft Brexit) and UKIP moves in on Labour’s seats in the former industrial North. Neither are particularly enticing options for the party.

Labour also have the problem that they cannot outmanoeuvre UKIP on Brexit or immigration. Regardless of how anti-immigration and anti-EU Labour becomes, UKIP will claim they are pro-EU, pro-migration and most people will believe them. As Abi Wilkinson wrote in the Independent recently: “voters simply don’t believe such rhetoric when it comes from Labour”. Remember that many voters believed that Ed Miliband would overspend as Prime Minister, despite his budget being signed off by the OBR.

Trying to compromise with the people whose only objectives are to take Britain out of the EU and reduce migration is what allowed UKIP and the Tory right to push David Cameron into a having referendum in the first place. We must not allow Labour to be pushed further and further to the right by UKIP. As Michael Chessum wrote in the New Statesman recently: “Attempt to negotiate a compromise on migration in the face of that wave [the anti-immigration populist right], or try to claim it as an “opportunity”, and there is simply no limit to how far Labour will be pushed”.

If Labour opts to put controls on immigration or manage immigration, they will be making the same mistake that led to the downfall of Cameron. By meeting the anti-EU, anti-immigration right halfway we conceded ground and encourage them to advance. Attempting to assert control over the issue of immigration is what has allowed the Tory party to right to the drift to the point where the new government is putting immigration above the health of the economy. If Labour opts for controls on immigration they will lose; UKIP will argue their controls are not tough enough. In the next election Labour’s controls will be tougher, but the same result will occur. Where does all this end?

It looks like Labour’s tactical options are all bad, but is there a moral issue to consider? The Labour Party also has a responsibility not to do massive long term damage to the economy, which Brexit surely would do. Leaving the EU would also threaten workers’ rights and human rights, as outside the EU, any future Tory government could abolish any rights they disliked. Labour also has a responsibility to stand up to the advancement of right wing populism and the branding of anyone opposed to Brexit as a “traitor”. Standing up to Brexit could be the right thing to do even if it is unpopular.

There are also moral issues around supporting Brexit. Does Labour have a responsibility to uphold the democratic outcome of the referendum? Even if what that outcome should be is painfully unclear? Many Labour voters do not feel listened to by the party. Directly ignoring them when they voted for Brexit is not a good idea, it only empowers the far right.

Personally, I think that leaving the EU is a really bad idea. If a significant proportion of the 52% who voted for Brexit can be convinced that it was the wrong decision then there is a case for holding a second referendum. However, I have not seen any evidence of massive ”buyer’s remorse” from Brexit voters. In fact I have seen more Remain voters becoming pro-Brexit and anti-immigration after the result. For now, the result stands and the democratic outcome of an election must be respected. The sad truth is that the Labour Party are likely to suffer whatever stance they take on Brexit; hard, soft, in favour or against.

Politics changed during 2016. The old political divisions no longer apply and a new spectrum is emerging. The traditional Labour voter coalition is being ripped apart by these changes. If politics continues to shift into a globalist/nativist configuration then there will no place for the Labour Party as it currently exists. This means that Labour needs to adapt and that they need to resolve some of the fundamental disputes that are dividing the party, especially over what form of Brexit does Labour stand for?

What I have learned about the Labour Party in the last five months?

I started this series of blog posts examining the ongoing crisis in the Labour by saying that I cannot remember a time when the Labour Party was in such a sorry state. The party’s prospects have not improved in the last five months. Recent research shows that trust in Labour is low. 66% of voters do not trust Labour and this is nothing to do with the Iraq War or Blair’s more authoritarian moments - as some have suggested. The problem is also nothing to do with the poorly planned and poorly executed coup that the PLP engaged in after the EU referendum. The problem with Labour is that the electorate does not like Jeremy Corbyn, and that Labour is seen as too soft on spending, benefits and immigration.

All wings and groups within the Labour Party need to face up the situation the whole party is in. Labour has a lot to do to win back the trust of the voters and to stand a chance of governing again in the next 15 years. The Party needs to address the issues of spending, benefits and immigration or else face a crushing defeat to the Tories. If you are relaxed about being defeated by the Tories - or intent on making excuses if this happens - then you should not be in the Labour Party. The Labour Party is not the Green Party; it is not a party of protest but a party of government and a government that changes things for the better.

The problems go much deeper than who should lead the party. Labour’s old base of support that won three general elections has collapsed and cannot be easily won back. This problem cannot be easily solved by repositioning the party to be in line with the public on immigration, spending and benefits; it can only be solved by finding a compelling vision for Labour. Once we have this, then we can discuss who should be leader.

The party needs unity until it can answer some key questions. Most importantly: what is the Labour Party for? Is it only for winning elections and undoing the worst of the damage the Tories have done, as the so called Clause One socialists would argue? If so, then maybe we need to be cynical about positioning the party. For all my reservations about Corbyn and his leadership, this is not what I want to happen.

I want the Labour Party to tackle real social issues such as the housing crisis, rising hostility to immigration, falling productivity, inequality and the economic problems caused by technological change. I want the party to help people abandoned by the Tory government. I want the party to offer a real, credible alternative to what we have now. This is what I want the Labour Party to be for.

For now, Corbyn is the party leader and all members need to accept that (unless they have a candidate who can beat him in a leadership election). However, Corbyn’s brand of 80s throwback politics will not offer the vision Labour needs to win an election.

Time has moved on. Across the world in the 20th century, left wing movements were all telling different versions of the same story. When Communism fell we lost that story, because we lost the belief that we were moving towards a better, more left wing future. Communism may have been a bastardisation of the dreams of many on the left, but it still represented the view that we can move forwards to something else. When Communism fell the word “progressive” became meaningless. What followed was the technocratic management politics of “what works”. Now “what works” has stopped working - the rise of Donald Trump and Brexit show that - and we need something new.

The left need to tell a new story for the 21st century. It needs to be about a future where the benefits of technology are shared between people and not hoarded by a few. A future where we work less and not more. A future where we rethink the role of the state. What can it do for us? What should it do for us? A future where we rethink ourselves as actors within society. What can we do for the world? What would be good?

We need a new narrative for the 21st century. The Conservatives are moving to the right socially to push out UKIP and the left economically to attract moderate Labour voters. In doing so they are redefining the centre ground as aggressively anti-immigration. They are targeting Labour’s former industrial heartland as they think they can use immigration to attract people alienated by Corbyn. At the same time the Tories are exposing the naked racism of Brexit, for example: 59% of voters support making companies report how many foreign workers they employ (Source: YouGov / 05 Oct). I have a horrible feeling that the Tory plan will work as the public is deeply opposed to immigration. Even half of all remain votes think immigration is too high and should come down. This is very electorally fertile ground that the Tories are moving in on.

Labour will face problems whatever it does. It is faced with general apathy towards politicians, a hostile right-leaning and pro-Brexit press, the rise of the far-right and bad memories of the Blair/Brown era. Economic stagnation and declining living standards present a new challenge to the party. Labour needs a policy for growth, a policy for housing, a policy for the NHS and a plan for Brexit (or a plan for stopping it). Labour must rise to these challenges.

The Labour Party will have to adapt to meet these challenges. We need a new way of discussing the left. Social democracy has run out of ideas to tackle our economic and political problems, so we need to start talking about it in new ways. We need to think about costs and value in terms of social good and not simply economic good. We need to look forwards and not backwards. Our new narrative needs to be informed by the past, however it cannot be dictated by it. As Abraham Lincoln said: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.”

There is some good news that this is already happening. At the most recent Labour Party conference, a Momentum fringe event showed some of the promise that Labour needs. Labour needs more discussion and more ideas. We need an answer to what is Labour for in the 21st century? If we can get a good answer to this question then we can start the fight back against the Tories and the resurgent far-right. If Labour cannot, then the party will be pulled apart by infighting and then swept under the carpet of history. I do not want this to happen and I am ready to fight for the Labour Party.

Picture of Jeremy Corbyn taken by Garry Knight and used under creative commons.

In defence of identity politics

Alec MacGillis, at Pro Publica, wrote a piece that was typical of how we thought before the election. There was fear that Donald Trump would win over blue collar Democrats and non-voters and ride into office on the backs of the economically marginalised, those left behind by globalisation. It did not happen. According to Shane Bauer, Senior Reporter for Mother Jones, Trump supporters earned on average $11 thousand a year more than Hillary Clinton’s supporters.

This shows how divided America is politically. Millions of Republicans would not support Clinton despite the racism and sexism of the Trump campaign. However, rather than a divide between the haves and the have-nots, the divide is between those who like the way American culture and society is changing and those who are hostile to it.

This is an important fact about the state of contemporary politics in the West. Brexit has been described in similar terms, however, 59% of leave voters were middle class. As David Wearing, at the Centre for Labour and Social Studies, has argued: "The Leave vote correlates much more strongly with social attitudes than with social class."

Wearing goes on to show 81% of leave voters think multiculturalism is a hostile force and that 74% dislike feminism. 26% of the U.K. population (slightly less than the percentage who voted to leave the EU) agree with the statement that “the government should encourage immigrants and their families to leave Britain (including family members who were born in Britain)”. Taken together this paints a picture of people who are motivated primarily by hostility to multiculturalism and not economic anxiety.

70% of Brexit voters say they would make an economic sacrifice to leave the EU, which indicates that Leave supporters are not living on the breadline. As Wearing says: “If the white van man has become the iconic Brexiteer, it appears that what's more pertinent is the whiteness of the man rather than the van (and the fact that the van is more likely to be an Audi).” The key point is that the election of Trump and the Brexit vote were not caused by economic hardship, but a rejection of multiculturalism.

Why are so many people opposed to multiculturalism? For many on the left support for multiculturalism is self-evident. If many people are alienated by it then it must be because we are going about seeking equality the wrong way. The goal is fine, but the methods are wrong. People who hate identity politics, political correctness, safe spaces and privilege checking are responding with an anti-liberal backlash.

Recently Stephen Kinnock argued that Labour must stop “obsessing” over diversity or face the same defeat as Clinton. Kinnock argues for a one size fits all approach to social justice, saying that: “Every group is actually struggling with the same problems of social mobility, the same problems of disempowerment, the same problems of feeling that they are being left behind. It doesn’t matter what the colour of your skin is or what your background is. What matters is that you’re poor and you’re disadvantaged and we’ve got to be there to help and engage with every single one of you - not just those who seem to have been taking priority over others.”

Tackling poverty and disempowerment should be a priority of the Labour Party, but Kinnock is misrepresenting the growing political division as economic and not social. In Britain 48% of adults hold authoritarian, populist attitudes and 26% support a statement that is a clear definition of prejudice. This division cuts across economic groups and is a rejection of multiculturalism itself, not how we package it.

Prejudice and right wing populism is spreading. The victims will be immigrants and ethnic minorities. Already one in four people believe that you are not properly British if your parents were immigrants. Hostility to Muslims is spreading. A significant number of people believe that acceptance and tolerance of other cultures is a force for social ill. On the left we need to stand up to this. You can call this standing up for identity politics or political correctness or whatever you like, but it is what we need to do. It is not enough to have a one size fits all policy on equality, because we are not all the same. Some people suffer more discrimination than others. On the left we need to specifically stand with the people suffering from the backlash against equality. That is doing identity politics.

People who feel alienated by identity politics, political correctness, safe spaces and privilege checking are people who do not like the way that ethnic minorities or women ask for equality. Identify politics is the mechanism through which emancipation from prejudice is achieved. If someone feel uncomfortable with this, it is because they benefit from the systems of privilege that run through society and realising this is a painful experience.

We need to stop spreading the view that the disaffection of the poor created Trump, Brexit and the backlash against multiculturalism, because they wanted jobs and healthcare. This is simply not true. The root of this backlash is dislike of how our society is changing. It is a dislike of equality.

The growing backlash against equality needs to be directly confronted and not pandered to. People need to know that it is unacceptable to hold racist and xenophobic beliefs to stop holding them. To legitimise them in any way is encouraging racism and xenophobia. Identity politics, political correctness, safe spaces and privilege checking are all parts of this.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

Trump’s election shows how divided we are politically

Already a lot of column inches have been filled by analysis of Donald Trump’s unprecedented victory. A lot focus on how racially divided the results were: 58% of white voters opted for Trump, whereas only 21% of non-white voters did. Despite the fact that Trump won the support of the majority of white voters, there was no white surge, i.e. he did not turn out millions of white non-voters. The support he did get was from traditional Republican voters. Trump turned out 90% of the Republican coalition that Mitt Romney did in 2012, and got around 1 million less votes than Romney did.

Trump won the election because Hillary Clinton did not turn out Democratic voters; she got 5 million votes less than Barack Obama in 2012. The effect of Trump and his extraordinarily racist campaign was to turn voters off, hence the lower turnout, rather than encouraging support for Clinton. It turns out that Americans would not vote for the candidate of another party, even if one party’s candidate is a sexist, xenophobic demigod without experience of government and temperamentally unsuited to the Presidency. Trump’s awfulness failing to translate into support for Clinton is because of the huge political divide that has opened up between the two different Americas that inhabit one country.

This divide ensured that Republicans would not vote for Clinton to keep Trump out. Republicans were willing to overlook racism to vote for their party's candidate; they knew how awful Trump was, but they did not care enough to vote for another candidate. Endorsing, with your vote, an openly racist candidate is racism, however, I do not believe voters were consciously voting for a candidate of white supremacy. They were voting for a party they supported against a party and a candidate they loathed.

How did we get to the point where millions of people are willing to support racism instead of changing their political allegiance? Certainly the false equivalence we saw during the campaign played a huge part. Anyone, whether professional pundit or casual social media commentator, claiming that both candidates were equally flawed was supporting the view that Republicans should stick with their disgusting monster of a candidate, because Clinton was just as bad. This is not true. One candidate was objectively worse than the other. Anyone engaging in false equivalence directly contributed to a Trump victory.

The filter bubble created by social media is crucial, it means that we do not see news that challenges our worldview. In order to curate the information environment that you will agree with, Facebook or Twitter also engage in a false equivalence of news sources. A blog putting out unsubstantiated, heavily biased “news” that you agree with is presented as equally credible to a news source putting out news you disagree with. A Republican may see an article about Trump being accused of sexual harassment from the New York Times, but below it is a Breitbart article or a post from a smaller blog claiming that Hillary Clinton had people killed. One of these is legitimate news from legitimate news source. The other is not, but our own confirmation bias and social media’s false equivalence mean that they are given equal weight.

Hatred of mainstream media feeds into this. We are quick to dismiss anything from a mainstream news source that might challenge our worldview and quick to accept anything, regardless of how flimsy or dubious it might be, that chimes with how we see the world.

There are lots of problems with how mainstream publications cover many stories, but the solution is not turn instead to news sites that have no reputation to uphold, no sense of journalistic standards, print outright lies or conspiracy theories. The Internet has provided a whole Universe of different news sources so that we can turn our backs on the mainstream media and never hear anything that challenges our deeply held beliefs. This has grown the political divide and leads us to a situation where people believe that Hillary Clinton is a worse candidate for President than Donald Trump.

Some have chosen to blame “safe spaces”, “political correctness”, or any aspect of social liberalism or pluralism that they do not like, as a cause of this divide. This is not the case. Political correctness is the desire for minority groups to be treated as equals to others, not a plan to marginalise white heterosexual males. Safe spaces are places where people can be sure they will not experience racism, sexism or other forms of prejudice. If you accept that they caused the divide then the solution is to abandon attempts to treat other people fairly, get rid of spaces where people can shelter from prejudice and accept more of the discourse of Trump and his followers into our politics.

Western society is very close to a breakthrough in the difficult struggle for racial equality. Movements such as Black Lives Matter and thousands of other grass roots campaigners, writers and journalists have detailed the struggle of ethnic minorities. The emphasis is now on politicians and members of privileged groups to act, however we are now confronted with a backlash from white people who believe that giving rights to others takes away their own rights. We have seen this in GamerGate, the Sad Puppies, accusations of ‘feminazis’ - and now in Brexit and Trump.

Calls to end political correctness and abolish safe spaces are calls to slow down the journey towards racial equality in favour of a slide backwards to a world where white privilege stands unchallenged. Some have claimed that social liberalism and pluralism is too confrontational and is exacerbating the political divide. They would prefer that women, people of colour and other oppressed groups made their objections as quietly as possible so that they can be easily ignored.

Social liberalism or pluralism is not the problem. The problem is that many of us have gone on a journey and not taken others with us. This is the cause of the divide. We have not made the case for political correctness in a convincing way, and that is where we have faltered. The problem is not being too confrontational - rights were never won by not being confrontational. The problem is not standing up for social liberalism and making the case.

We are deeply divided but not entirely irreconcilable. People on both sides of the divide hold common values of a sense of justice, fairness and community. It is through these values that we can appeal to other people, make our case and heal this division.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

Heathrow exposes the contradictions of Tory policy

All this fuss for a strip of tarmac? The government’s go-ahead for Heathrow Airport’s third runway is ultimately a local South East issue, so why does it need so much national airtime?

This was how one caller to BBC Radio 4’s ‘You And Yours’ programme last weekend saw it. And, indeed, the majority of the hour-long programme was taken up discussing such issues: noise, air quality, increased traffic on the already clogged M25. All important issues, but undoubtedly local ones. The problem with keeping the conversation local is that Heathrow will have consequences for all of us.

The decision to expand shines a light on two crucial contradictions of government policy. Firstly, how can a government committed, at least in theory, to reducing carbon emissions in line with last year’s Paris agreement simultaneously expand aviation? And secondly, in the shadow of yet another expensive, London-centric infrastructure project, what happened to the ‘Northern Powerhouse’?

The 2015 Paris Agreement commits all countries, albeit voluntarily, to move their economies away from fossil fuels in the hope of limiting global warming to the ‘safe’ level of 1.5C. Aviation is responsible for approximately 6% of the UK’s carbon emissions. This might not sound link much compared to, say, the 25% contributed by road transport. But whilst a future of zero-emissions cars is genuinely in sight (and at any rate can be alleviated by improved public transport), the same cannot be said for aircraft. Yes, jets are becoming ever more efficient, but are likely to be reliant on carbon-emitting kerosene fuel for the foreseeable future.

Even this might not matter so much in itself; according to the Committee on Climate Change, aviation emissions have actually fallen slightly in the UK, year on year, since the financial crisis. But the government sees encouraging aviation as crucial to business growth: the Heathrow decision makes this clear. The Tories may give lip service to taking climate change seriously, and signed up to Paris along with everyone else. But Heathrow flies in the face of all that (no pun intended).

‘Climate change means there can be no airport expansion at Heathrow – or anywhere’  responded George Monbiot, typically uncompromisingly. I’m not a particular fan of Monbiot’s pious, sanctimonious style, but he’s right. Other sectors have paths towards decarbonisation; aviation doesn’t. Acceptance of man-made climate change may have reached the political mainstream, but de-growth certainly hasn’t. The determination to expand aviation might contradict what the ‘green’ Cameron government said, but is entirely concurrent with the actions of a Prime Minister that shut down the Department for Climate Change immediately upon taking office.

Alternatively, however, let’s suppose that Theresa May genuinely does want to meet her Paris commitments. This means that she appreciates the ongoing, and possibly rising, contribution of aviation emissions to the UK’s total. This means one of two things. The first explanation if that other sectors – and other people – will have to compensate for the aviation sector’s emissions, by reducing emissions elsewhere. This means higher costs in other areas, which – as Monbiot explains – is unfair.

Essentially, by letting aviation off the hook to continue emitting, the rest of us will be paying for the holidays of the rich. Unlike Monbiot, I don’t begrudge the foreign holiday taken every year or two by the average traveller. But, like him, I recognise that the vast majority of frequent flyers are, in fact, the rich: 75% of all international flights are taken by just 15% of the population.

The other scenario is that Theresa May is well aware that aviation will have to be curtailed if we have any hope of meeting our Paris commitments. This explanation has Cameron and Osbourne’s ‘Northern Powerhouse’ squarely in its crosshairs. This answers the question of ‘why don’t we just expand Northern airports, as well as Heathrow?’ with the blunt answer of ‘we can’t’. Punitive taxes will eventually have to be applied to air fares; regional airports will decline. Instead of a way of expanding national airport capacity, it may be, as John Sauven speculates, an exercise in moving it. Away from the written-off North and towards the South East.

If this sounds a bit far-fetched, it’s worth pointing out that John Sauven is the Director of Greenpeace. He’s not an advocate for or against Tory policy, or for the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ – his only stake in this game is a belief that climate change needs drastic action.

It is also possible that the government isn’t really bothered about the contradictions, or the implications of navigating them, outlined above. Perhaps it’s just another symptom of a short-termist outlook. The government is trying to please as many people as it can at this specific moment, whilst prostrating itself at the feet of the international business community to make clear that Britain is ‘open for business’ in the face of Brexit and hoping they’ll notice. I highly suspect that this is the most likely explanation.

Getting back to Heathrow, the conversation we’ve had about it has been widespread, and yet stubbornly local. The ‘You and Yours’ programme, despite a few nods to wider issues, absolutely treated it as a local concern. As with many projects, the ‘nimbys verses progress’ dichotomy often serves primarily to obscure the bigger picture and other narratives. Similarly, the ridiculous advertising spat between Heathrow and rival Gatwick over who gets to expand served to make it into an either/or question. Why not both? Or, more importantly, neither?

Personally, I’m undecided as to whether expanding Heathrow was the right decision or not. I fly sometimes, and it would be hypocritical to argue that people shouldn’t. The affordability of overseas travel to the wider population is a positive thing. But aviation certainly needs to be limited to help prevent catastrophic climate change. The priority for the Left should be to ensure that this happens, but that it is done fairly. Rather than simply taxing flying so heavily that it reverts to a luxury for the very rich, I would support a rationing system: one return flight per year per person, for example. This would be politically tricky, but no more so that the heavy tax route. Emissions need to come down, certainly – but the poor shouldn’t have to pay for the mobility of the rich.

Heathrow airport picture taken by Tony Hisgett and used under creative commons.

Welcome to life inside the nightmare

I am writing this on Wednesday evening while looking at the front page of the BBC news website. I cannot believe that the events of the last 24 hours are real. There was a moment, at about 4am on Wednesday morning, when I was confronted with the full ghastliness of what was happening and my sleep deprived brain decided that it was not true. This is just a dream, I thought and spent a good few seconds trying to wake myself up. It did not work. Reality remains stubbornly real. We now have to accept that we are living inside our worst nightmare.

Oscar Wild once said that “when the Gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.” This sums up the perverse way that I feel responsible for what has happened in America. For years I have wished that all the people oppressed by the neoliberal status quo would get together and throw their weight behind an alternative. Then we could rock our economic system to the foundations. This is what has happened, but it was not supposed to be like this.

The first question that came to mind is, how did an uprising against global hyper-capitalism come from the far right and not the left? How did we get to a point where millions of Americans are willing to vote for a candidate who is openly racist, has ties to Vladimir Putin, lies through his teeth, brags about sexually assaulting women, flirts with the alt-right, is supported by neo-Nazis and the KKK and shows contempt for democracy itself? Who is to blame for this?

It is a complex question. False equivalence is certainly a factor; the media and individuals on social media have created a myth that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are equally flawed candidates and this is simply not true. I am not the biggest fan of Clinton but she is a million times the better option than Trump. How partisan politics has become is also to blame. Despite Trump being obviously awful, millions of people could not bring themselves to vote for the candidate of the other party. There are the left behind, the people whose wages and living standards have declined over the last thirty years, who desperately want change. There is the overt racism spreading amongst the white population. There are other factors. It is not an easy question to answer.

There are obvious parallels to be made with Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in June of this year. Two distinct interpretations of Brexit have emerged. The first is that this was a rebellion against the unequal distribution of the economic growth caused by neoliberal globalisation. Jobs, wages and living standard have declined in post-industrial areas of Western economies. Many of these areas have been thrown under a bus in the dash for the market liberalisation, free movement of capital and financialisation of the economy - the tenets of the neoliberal capitalism embraced by both major parties. People from Flint, Michigan to Boston in Lincolnshire are angry about how bleak their future is. We need to listen to them and take steps to improve the quality of life in such places to stop radical, right wing populism spreading.

The second interpretation is that white Western people are becoming increasingly hostile to multiculturalism and the mingling of different races. They are angry at the loss of privilege that being white once brought. And men, who over-index in support for the populist right, are angry about the loss of male privilege. Racism and xenophobia are spreading in a backlash to social liberalism that has been adopted by all mainstream politicians. This needs to be directly confronted to create a more harmonious society. What is overlooked in many of these discussions is that this populist, right wing rebellion against the status quo can be both of these things at the same time. The two are intrinsically linked.

The radical populism of the right is a response to the changes in society that we have seen over the last thirty years. It is a response to the changes in social structures that have given more status to women and ethnic minorities, which some people believe is at the expense of white men. It is a response to globalisation, which has given increased freedom to business, created economic growth but also created huge inequalities. It is a response to changing economic landscape, the location of jobs, the types of jobs and sectors of employment. It is a response to the increased number of people living cities and the increased numbers of people holding degrees. It is a response to the way the whole world is changing by the people who want to tell “STOP” at the top of their voice.

This has led to the emergence of a new political spectrum. It is not left wing versus right wing, but those in favour of these changes versus those opposed to them. For now, we call these two groups globalists and nativists, but clearer definitions will emerge in time. This new spectrum cuts across existing political divides. That is one reason for the success of Trump, he reaches across the Republican/Democrat split and appeals to non-voters because he is the alternative people wanted to the way the world is going. The same can be said for the leave vote in Britain or a vote for Marine Le Pen in the upcoming French presidential elections or a vote for the AfD in Germany or a host of other new nativist movements.

What does all this mean for the left? It does show that there are many people who are opposed to the globalist status quo, but Trump and the Tories under Theresa May are already shifting to occupy this territory. Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders’s traditional left wing politics do not fit into the new political spectrum. They are anti-globalist, but not nativist. By not fitting into this spectrum they risk alienating people at both ends of it.

New politics needs new politicians and new policies. People schooled in the changing political discourse. The left needs something new. The technocratic neoliberalism of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton has been rejected by voters, but the old left politics of Corbyn and Sanders is not gaining much traction. I do not know what this something new will be, but it should contain a healthy amount of social liberalism and skepticism of globalisation with a thirst for the future and a politics that looks forwards to a more hopeful tomorrow and not back to a lost golden age.

The problem is that the left does not have much time to decide what this something new is before we cease to be relevant altogether. We need to get active and resist the populist right now, because I do not want to spend the rest of my life trapped inside a nightmare that I cannot wake up from.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.