Living memory of death in war

I am always surprised how little most people know about the Second World War. I find it strange that people don’t know the details of the most massive military conflict ever. I assumed that a basic understanding of Operation Market Garden or the Battle of the Atlantic was just a natural part of being British; information everyone absorbed through osmosis via our cultural obsession with the World War 2.

Dunkirk, the subject of a new film by Christopher Nolan, is a good example. I wonder how many people didn’t understand the scale of the evacuation of Normandy until they saw it on film. My knowledge is a product of the fact that I was raised on war stories. They formed a core part of the popular culture I consumed from an early age. From Saving Private Ryan to Medal of Honour, stories about the Second World War were a constant part of my childhood. We are not an especially military family, although dad is a historian, but through these stories I felt connected to something huge that was within living memory.

That connection to the actual lived experience of the Second World War is dying. The Normandy Veteran’s Association closed in November 2014 - the same year as the 70th anniversary of D-Day - because there are not enough Normandy Veterans left alive to sustain it. The war is becoming another collection of dates, battles and statistics, rather than something tangible that is a part of us via our collective memory. This is not necessarily a good or bad thing; it is just how time works.

As World War 2 has become history, something significant has changed. We have lost the direct connection to the people, the ordinary soldiers, who fight in wars. Help for Heroes is generously supported by the British public and we still observe the two minutes silence on Remembrance Sunday, but fewer people have or know someone who has a direct experience of war.

In the Battle of the Somme, 420,000 British soldiers died. The total population of the UK was around 42m people, so 1 in 100 people died in a single battle. Almost everyone would have known someone personally connected to the Somme. By contrast: 454 British soldiers were killed during the entire war in Afghanistan, out of a UK population of around 63 million. That’s 0.0007% of the population. This enormous shift is changing how we relate to war and the people who fight it.

The connection to war is fading partly because war has not recently taken place on a scale to touch everyone’s lives. The people who fight in wars are becoming abstract concepts to many, but recent conflicts are still woven through our popular culture. From Jarhead, in the cynical early 2000s, saying that there are no anti-war films to the Punisher’s origin story in the Netflix's Daredevil Series 2 being updated from Vietnam to Iraq (he could just have been a vigilante, but the story is more effective if the Punisher is a man of honour, scared while serving his country’s political interests overseas). War is still a big deal for our society, but we are increasingly disconnected from it.

This point was underlined recently when Amy Shafer from Center for a New American Security published a report highlighting: “the growing civil-military divide” in the US. Shafer’s report found that 60% of veterans under the age of 40 had a family member in the military, compared 39% of civilians. 25% had a parent who served. The report also found that geographical location is significant in the makeup of US armed forces, as 60% of recruits come from the South and West. 37% came from the South alone. Shafer said: “half of the states in the U.S. contribute more than their fair share, and half contribute less.” War is still a big part of society, but for most of us, war is something that happens far away and to other people

Strangely, this has not made war any less popular. Shafer states that: “60% of youths ages 18 to 29 supported sending ground troops to fight ISIS”. We are currently fighting several wars around the world and are deeply embroiled in a handful of other conflicts. There are fewer anti-war protests then when I was a teenager. The public either supports our current wars or is apathetic to them.

As someone who wants the country to involved in less conflict I find this interesting. Support for war remains high (certainly war as defined as bombing people in other countries, I am not sure the British public would want British boots on the ground anytime soon) despite the fact that war is isolated from us both physically and socially.

I don’t think it is good that only small sections of society are engaged with military service. If we are going to have an army (whether we should, and what we should use it for, is a different debate), then it should be reflective of the country it represents. However, getting more people into the army (either via the draft or national service) is not good for preventing more wars. It appears that our enthusiasm for war is not related to the size or structure of our armed services.

I am left thinking that if we understood history better, what wars involved and the devastation they caused, then maybe we would be more hesitant about dropping bombs from a great height on other countries. My education in war history (even though it was full of thinly disguised American pro-war propaganda like Saving Private Ryan) made me more anti-war, not pro-war. Do the 18 to 29 year-olds Shafer talked about in her article, isolated physically and socially from war, know about the history of recent conflicts? How many people died? The human cost?

The knowledge of war I am referring to is more than troop movements and casualty figures. It is the social changes that bringing women into the factories caused, or segregation in the US army. It is looking at the money spent rebuilding Germany after World War 2 and the denazification program. If we understood these things then more people might ask if we spent enough rebuilding Iraq after the invasion, or question whether we spent enough time on a new political settlement there. If those issues had been raised, then maybe the current situation could have been avoided. Mosul has been liberated from IS, but it has also been completely destroyed. Who will pay to rebuild it? Who is asking that question?

Britain is still a country obsessed with war and our past glories. But it is ironically a country that knows less and less about war and the people who fight it. As World War 2 moves further into the past and nature of our armed forces changes, being better connected to our history and understanding it is a way to prevent the experiences of people who live through wars fading from our minds entire.

Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle

Look out your window. What do you see? I'll tell you: a housing crisis. Unless you're in the countryside, in which case you're probably looking at a nice field that will shortly become a site for shale gas exploration. As this blog is pretty metropolitan, I’ll assume that you're looking at houses.

Crucially, you are not looking at not enough houses. Not enough to meet the demand for accommodation. An Englishman's home is his castle, or so the saying goes. For this to be true castles would need to be redefined as mouldy bedsits that cost £700 a month to rent. We have a housing crisis, or a castle crisis if the saying is to be believed.

Whatever you call where you live (I go for Place de la Ball, but it's not catching on) it is becoming increasingly true that people with decent wages and money cannot afford to live in London or other big cities. We are, quite simply, not building enough houses.

Calls to tackle the problem of unaffordable homes have been getting louder for a while. Even the Daily Mail, the staunch defender of the property owner, is getting in on the act. However, we also have a crisis in social housing and this is less talked about. If you're struggling to pay for a bedsit in Tooting with your job as scrum manager and your landlord just raised the rent, then I feel for you mate. I really do. That's shit. However, we don't spend enough time talking about the housing that is supposed to be safety net for the less fortunate.

Since Margaret Thatcher's Right To Buy scheme in 1980, the social housing stock (mainly council housing, the homes owned directly by the government) has been run down. There is a massive shortage in housing generally but this more acutely felt in the social housing sector, which is supposed to provide for the poor, the disabled or those whose basic needs will not be met by the private rental market.

Houses prices are rising faster than my enthusiasm for a pub that just expanded its craft beer range, which means that the social housing stock is being run down. This is pushing more and more people into the private rental market and a lot of these people have basic needs that cannot be met at the price that the private rental market sets for accommodation. This is turn ultimately leads to the vulnerable being exploited.

A new film from director Paul Sng called Dispossession: the Great Social Housing Swindle, aims to shine a light on the current state of social housing. It is a powerful documentary that covers more than 30 years of history, politics and urbanism. Now, more than ever, this a topic that we need a public discussion about, so I urge you all to go and see this film.

The film examines the problems caused by the lack of social housing. It covers how the social housing stock has been run down as houses prices have grown. It looks at how people have lost of their homes or being priced out of accommodation that was supposed to provide for them for life. No one can claim to be human and not be moved by the plight of Beverley Robinson, who is refusing to leave her flat in the Aylesbury Estate in Walworth, London until the council offer her enough money to buy a home in the area. People like Beverley are the victims of the housing crisis.

The film shows specific examples of social housing, which was supposed to be set aside for the less well off, being taken away from the people who need in it. Not just Beverley in the Aylesbury Estate, but also residents of Balfron Tower, a brutalist marvel built by Erno Goldfinger, a Hungarian socialist who wanted to make housing for people with “deep roots in the immediate neighbourhood”. Sadly, middle class architecture enthusiasts who move to London to work, and live in East London (like me), are making Balfron Tower a fashionable place to live. This is leading to the people who should be living there; the people Goldfinger designed the building for, losing their homes.

When we talk about the housing crisis it is easy to focus on London, where price rises and austerity have taken a huge toll. However, we are in a grip of a national housing crisis with people in Birmingham, Liverpool and Newcastle unable to afford a place to live, while their neighbourhoods are colonised by people selling up in London. There is a social housing crisis across the land and Dispossession looks at estates such as St Ann’s in Nottingham, where residents have had to deal with the stigma associated with council housing for years. A stigma that is entirely false.

The film also looks at Glasgow and the huge privatisation of social housing that took place there. Between those exploited by rogue landlords and those who cannot afford to live in their home town, it is clear that the housing crisis is just as toxic in East Glasgow as it is in East London.

Dispossession talks to real people whose lives are affected by the social housing crisis and lets them tell their stories. This brings home the human side of an issue that can too often be dominated by discussion of policy on brown field land or relative house price inflation. Not that these things aren't important, but once you see the squalor that residents of Govanhill in Glasgow live in, you will feel compelled to act to help your fellow human beings.

Dispossession show the same pattern, being repeated across the country. Loss of social housing, through selling it off and bad deals that do not provide for the people who need it, and not enough new social housing being built. Across the country, people who want to stay in their homes cannot and vulnerable people are not having their basic needs met.

The conclusion from this is straightforward: the market mechanism for social housing cannot keep people in their homes meet their needs. We need more social housing. We need to stop the sale of the social housing that we have and we need to build more. Everyone has the right to a safe and secure home and should not lose it due a redevelopment deal or because rising house prices makes their central London plot incredibly desirable.

We cannot afford to overlook the problems of social housing when we tackle the housing crisis. The scrum manager struggling to make rent on his private rented bedsit in Tooting and Beverley, who risk being driven out of the Walworth area, are both victims of the same travesty. We need to know about each other's plight and work together to solve this problem so that everyone can have a safe and affordable home for life. This film is a critical step towards that.

If you want to see Dispossession: the Great Social Housing Swindle film screens across the country can be found here:

https://www.dispossessionfilm.com/

A huge bonfire of red tape

There are many things that make me angry about the Grenfell Fire and the tragic loss of life it caused. However, to find the thing that most stuck in my craw, we have to travel halfway round the world to Colorado. A short while ago, Slate's Political Gabfest podcast (which, is great and you should all listen to it ) did a special live episode with guest Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper. Practically the first thing out of the Governor’s mouth was a claim that no one defends red tape and that his administration was working hard to get rid of as many regulations as possible. He seemed pretty proud of that.

This may not be as overtly enraging as factors on that ground in the Grenfell Fire - the poor response from the council, Theresa May refusing to talk to homelessness families - but it speaks to some pretty lazy assumptions that we have been making for a long time. Assumptions that have probably cost more than 100 lives in this case.

The UK equivalent of Governor Hickenlooper’s railing against red tape is "health and safety gone mad". The idea that regulations aimed at preventing the place where your children sleep being turned into a 25 story pillar of flame are somehow stifling private business and preventing them from creating a bounty of wealth for all.

Former Prime Minister David Cameron, said he wanted to cut back the health and safety “monster”. This idea has a lot of credence in politics. Donald Trump promised a "bonfire of red tape" when he was running for President and the Daily Telegraph supported the idea. The Telegraph is currently running a campaign to cut EU red tape post Brexit.

Too many laws are holding back the natural British entrepreneurial spirit. The next Steve Jobs can't get his tech company off the ground because of all the rules about how much screen time employees are allowed without a break. For years this idea has been pushed to the point where lots of people say it without thinking about what it means. It has led to complete disdain for government and red tape, but these rules are here to keeps us alive.

Red tape must be got rid of to help businesses grow, that's the argument, and growing business is the most important thing that anyone can do. It's our highest and noblest calling, or so the argument goes. It is parroted by people like the Governor of Colorado who should have other priorities beyond growing business, like using government look after people and make their lives better.

Wait, doesn't growing business make people's lives better, I hear you say? The core of Governor Hickenlooper’s argument is that growing business employees more people and creates more wealth so that we can all live in lovely homes and raise healthy happy children and then retire to live near the seaside. Cut the red tape and the struggling Steve Jobs out there will make lots of wealth for everyone.

Except it doesn’t quite work like that, because the jobs created are insecure, low paid and sometimes dangerous because we just got rid of the red tape preventing that sort of thing. Cameron wanted to get rid of the health and safety culture to help business make jobs but almost all of the jobs created were low paid and insecure.

We have spent decades reducing red tape to allow business to grow, and where are we now? High unemployment, whole communities where there are very few jobs (have you been to Whitehaven recently?), stagnant wage growth, massive inequality between those owning/running the businesses and those working in them, job insecurity, people in work being more likely to be in poverty than anyone else and a huge increase in people relying on food banks. Helping business is not helping ordinary people.

None of the benefit of the getting rid of red tape goes to the people in the tower blocks or the food banks or the low paid insecure jobs. It goes to the landlords, the company owners and the people employing workers on low wages and insecure contracts. These people suffer the low wages, the insecure work, the housing crisis, the benefit cuts. They never get anything back, but the people who own the businesses get tax cuts and bonfires of red tape to make their lives easier.

Cutting red tape allowed for Grenfell Tower to be dangerously re-clad at the cheapest price, because cutting red tape is inherently good and not a penny more than necessary should be spent on the houses of poor people. They deserve it through not working hard, so the argument goes. This idea is not an 80s retro throwback; it is alive today in the benefit cap and the bedroom tax. It lives on in the Tories’ rhetoric of ‘strivers and skivers’.

The end goal of all this is to punish the poor for being poor. You might see the Tory prime ministers saying that The Grenfell Fire is a tragedy on TV, but her party caused this by perpetuating the idea that the poor deserve less because they are where they are through their own fault. Tories use their divisive rhetoric to turn workers against unemployed, low paid workers against the slightly better off, non-immigrants against immigrants. By positioning one side as undeserving and the Tories as the champions of the good, honest, hard-working people, they create the circumstances when the homes of poor people can be turned into a death trap.

Why should they get a safe home when I don’t get anything from the government? So the argument goes. Poor people are lazy and don’t deserve anything nice or safe. If they don't like it, work harder. This is the subtext and often the text of what the Tories say. Now people are dead because of the idea that poor people deserve as little as possible.

The assumptions that underpin a lot of our current economic and political thinking allowed the Grenfell Fire to happen. A lot of people have said how upset they are by this, but I bet they are still concerned about how much the government spends housing the poor. Either you’re on the side of a "healthy economy" (few subsidies to the poor and a good business climate with little red tape) or you’re on the side of protecting people's lives. I am on the side of looking after people, which means that business needs to move over.

The materials used in the Grenfell cladding failed safety tests. This shows we need more red tape to keep everyone safe. Everyone should be safe in their beds while they sleep, regardless of how much tax they pay or how many services they use or what job they have or how much they earn. Everyone. If people being safe while they sleep is a problem for business, then we have a problem with business. If red tape keeps people safe while they sleep then it is something we should be proud of and the Hickenloopers of this world should be ashamed of their desire to use public office to reckless endanger the public.

The Grenfell Fire is a tragedy and something needs to be done so that it never happens again. Even if people in business don’t like it. These people don’t care about our lives. At least they don't care about our lives as much as they care about making life easier for business, which from where I stand today has not led us to the shining corporate sponsor city on the hill that it was supposed to. It has made us less equal, more insecure and less safe.

I sincerely hope that Grenfell leads to a change in public opinion about the role of regulation in keeping people safe. Everyone's life is important and I want them to be bound up in red tape if that’s what it takes to protect them.

Grenfell Tower image created by ChiralJon and used under creative commons.

Meet the real nasty party

I can imagine Theresa May waking up one morning, still half asleep, imagining that it was all a terrible nightmare and that she has a 100 seat majority, with all the power to pass any legislation she wants. No opposition, no House of Lords or no rebellious back benchers to stop her. This lasts for a few glorious second before she remembers that it is real, she did gamble her party's majority on an election no one wanted and lost it. Now she has to limp on, wounded, demoralised and without a clear mandate.

Never was a truer word in politics was said when May addressed The 1922 Committee of Tory MPs, saying: "I got us into this mess and I'll get us out of it." Well, the first part is true. It was May who called the election and then put herself front and centre during the campaign, labouring under the misapprehension that people liked her. It was her bad judgement that led to an awful manifesto that people appreciated about as much as an unexpected trip to the dentist. It is her advisers whose heads have rolled, but to quote our other female Prime Minister: "Advisers advise and ministers decide." The blame for the Tory’s current woes can, and should, be laid squarely at the feet of their leader.

May's judgement is so poor that I half expect her to call another snap election in a few months, which Labour could easily win as Jeremy Corbyn’s approval is now higher than the Prime Minister’s. May’s proposed alternative to a Labour government is a "confidence and supply" arrangement with the DUP, a party so odious that I almost feel sorry for slightly likeable Tories like Ruth Davidson who have to be nice to the DUP in public.

The Tories must be desperate to consider this. They are frightened that any fuck up now could hand Jeremy Corbyn the keys to Downing Street. They are frightened of hanging on as an ineffectual monitory government that achieves nothing for the next five years (apart from screwing up Brexit because they are beholden to the most madly Eurosceptic Tory MPs) by the end of which everyone hates them so much that a bucket with a red rosette on it could beat them in an election.

The Tories are desperate to try something that is likely to reflect so poorly on them. Remember when Nick Clegg was blamed for the worst aspects of everything that went on in the coalition? Well it's going to be like that, with the Tories being blamed every time a DUP MP suggested we should bring back hang, drawing and quartering.

Do not be fooled into thinking that the DUP are regular conservatives, whatever the Tory Party tries to imply. DUP are more like American Conservatives; in other words, a bit much even for the sexually repressed, red trouser wearing, Daily Telegraph reading, retired Colonels living in Oxfordshire wing of the Tory Party. Even those guys are worried that global warming might affect the grouse season.

Here's a roll call of only some of the repugnant things that are perfectly acceptable in DUP circles: being against equal marriage (same sex couples still can't get married in Northern Ireland), being against abortion (see previous bracket) and denying climate change (in a scary Sarah Palin way, not in an annoying Jeremy Clarkson way) and supporting Loyalist militias (remember, it’s not terrorism if they’re waving the union flag while they murder you). Meet your new best friends everyone who voted Tory to keep Labour and Corbyn out. I hope you're happy with what you got.

It was May who coined the term nasty party during the Tories’ wilderness years to describe how the party is viewed by lots of people. She wasn't wrong, and before David Cameron detonated his own premiership on an unnecessary vote (Tory leaders should stop making the same mistake over and over) his biggest accomplishment was making people, ordinarily put off by the strong whiff of awfulness that the Tories give off, comfortable voting for the party.

May had the right idea back then, which is odd because since entering government she has become the poster child for everything that is nasty about the Tories. From savage welfare cuts to vans bullying immigrants into going home, May’s prints are on all of it. I thought that the lesson of the whole Tory revival post-2005 thing was that slavishly following whatever the Daily Mail wants alienates voters with even a little bit of conscience. Now May plans to out-Daily Mail the Daily Mail by finding some really backwards social conservatives and giving them actual power.

Of course the DUP are the real nasty party. They think that LGBT rights and women's rights are some sort of metropolitan thing that only people in London who queue for restaurants, drink hoppy craft beer and cycle everywhere think are important. You can tell they're the nasty party when you look at what they want from the Tories in exchange for not putting their wounded government out of its misery: the right to do their provocative marches through Catholic areas (and generally inflame tensions like only the Northern Irish know how), amnesty for people facing court cases (always a good sign, a politician who wants legal stuff to go away) and keeping their disgraced leader in charge in Stormont (after a terrible piece of legislation she supported that wasted nearly £490 million and brought down the government there). This is only the beginning. It will get worse over time. Confidence and supply means that I have confidence that the Tories will supply whatever the DUP want.

I doubt any good will come from this, but there is always a small possibility that the DUP will stop the Tories doing something mad involving a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. They may also get the Tories to go down to the basement and bring out the magical money tree they have hidden down there (found next to the box where they keep Theresa May's human nature). It always rains in Northern Ireland, but now that will take on a whole new meaning. Soon everyone else on these damp isles will want the government to make it rain on their communities. In the next election, jibes about Labour spending will be worth about as much as May's claims to "strong and stable leadership."

We shouldn't underestimate the DUP. They may be dinosaurs, but they don't have brains the size of a pea. They are smart and good at politics. They didn't get to be the biggest party in Northern Ireland and the natural home of most unionist voters by accident. They'll milk this opportunity for all it's worth, but the strong and sweaty cheese that comes out of this won't be good for anyone except a few extremely conservative evangelical Christians.

Everyone who is to the left of Elien Foster on social issues (which is basically everyone) needs to keep pressure on the government to stop them from backsliding on a whole raft of basic rights for women or LGBTQ people.

Theresa May wanted to stop the at Tories being the nasty party. Now she may have ensured that this is what they're known as for years to come by getting into bed with a really nasty party.

Arlene Foster picture taken by Richter Frank-Jurgen and used under creative commons.

Why we should all vote Labour

Cast your mind back to the 2015 general election. Cameron was Prime Minister, Barack Obama was the President, Britain was at least nominally committed to the European project, we were waiting David Bowie’s new album, Leicester were struggling in the Premier League and we didn't spend all day wonder what Covfefe is. I know it seems like ancient history, so I won’t be offended if you don’t remember this piece I wrote just before the election where I spelled out my reason for voting Labour.

Central to my argument was that we all vote for our local candidates and not the party leader; and my local Labour MP, Stella Creasy, is a good MP, which is a key reason why I was voting Labour. Fast forward to today and it looks more than ever like we are voting in a Presidential race, making a decision between Jeremy Corbyn or Theresa May’s vision for the future of the country.

That is the choice facing us. This election is likely to result in the highest combined vote share for the two parties in decades Lib Dem revival? It ain't going to happen. UKIP surge? Only in Paul Nuttall's dreams, which look like nightmares to any reasonable person.

I know to some people reading this, the decision between the two is like choosing between lovely fresh falafel wrap from a pop-up street kitchen washed down with pint of local craft IPA, or eating dog shit wrapped in a plastic bag. To others the choice is the difference between waking up to a cold shower or a flame thrower. I look forward to these metaphors being expanded in Facebook comments.

We must vote Labour because May’s vision for the future of Britain is a nightmare of rising poverty, inequality and greed. A vision of a nation that shrugs its shoulders towards suffering that we could alleviate by inconveniencing the rich a tiny little bit. The social justice that is common in many of our European neighbours is too much to ask in May’s Britain.

Corbyn has certainly been a less than impressive opposition leader and I have written before about my disappointment with him, despite voting for him in 2015. Surprisingly he has turned out, at the 11th hour, to be a quite an effective opposition campaigner, closing a 21 point gap in the polls to one point. This has been helped in no small part by Theresa May’s campaign, which has not just shat the bed, but burnt it down and then pissed on the ashes.

If the story of 2016 was the surprise success of the populist, anti-establishment campaigns then the story of 2017 is the return of the centre right at the expense of the centre left. This has been true in France and in the Netherlands, and is likely to happen in Germany. Britain looked like it would go down the same route, as May’s Tories triumphed over the Labour Party. Despite my concerns and if the polls hold, Corby could turn out to be the most effective leader of a left wing party in Europe this year.

Corbyn’s leadership could save the Labour Party from the Pasokification that has marred so many Western left wing parties and reduced Benoît Hamon (the French centre left Presidential candidate) to 6% in the first round of the French Presidential election. Gary Young has written elegantly about this here.

Policy reliably moves the dial in elections for more than a handful of hardcore politicos, but Corbyn’s manifesto has inspired praise from some of his harshest critics. It’s a good a platform of sensible policies that are only considered extreme in the minds of the most Thatcher worshiping tabloid editors. Again, this platform is helped by the contrast with the Tories’ platform, based on animal culturally and taking away the homes from people with dementia. I want to live in the Britain outlined in Labour’s manifesto. I really don’t want to live in the one outlined by the Tories.

The rally of support for Labour is more than just policies taken from the playbook of centre left European parties (the sort of things Labour should have offered in 2015). It is because Corbyn has become a symbol for a broad range of people who want things to be different, whether they agree specifically with him or not. Whether they understand his politics or history, Corbyn has become a vessel through which people are pouring their hopes for a different politics. A politics focused not focused on the bottom line of large companies, but on people’s lives. A politics best summed up as: “can’t we treat people a little better?”

If Corbyn represents the coalition of voters who want to make things better, then May represents the coalition of voters who want to make things worse. They want to make this a smaller, more inward looking, selfish and less tolerant country. A country where we don’t care about rising levels of child poverty, homelessness and food bank usage. A vote for the Tories is a vote for a Britain, which would rather kill foxes than help those in need.

Voting for Corbyn will be a compromise for many people. Myself included. The man and his leadership is flawed. However, we are faced with a clear choice: vote for a Labour Party that is at least trying to make things better or a Tory partly that doesn’t believe anything is wrong with the fact that the people most likely to be poverty are those who are in work.

We can't carry on as we are, so that is why I am voting Labour and urge you too as well. We can’t carry on with rising child poverty. We can’t carry on with a struggling NHS. We can’t carry on with low paying, insecure work. We can’t carry on with austerity punishing the poor and the sick for being poor and sick. I want things to be different, so I'm voting Labour.

Polling station image taken by Rachel H and used under creative commons.

Sensible Theresa May must save us from the radical left nightmare Jeremy Corbyn will unleash

Labour has unveiled a crazy left wing manifesto. It was a clear declaration that the party wanted to create a workers’ state, where private property does not exist and everyone lives in identical homes, wearing identical clothes. Chairman Mao himself would be proud.

The manifesto contained lots of radical left ideas lifted straight from the Communist Manifesto, like re-nationalising the railways, abolishing university tuition fees, free child care for one year olds and a rent cap. These are the sort of dangerous, lefty policy programs you see in Communist dictatorships like North Korea. Sensible Labour leaders, like Harold Wilson, will be turning over in their graves.

How was this latter-day Das Kapital received? These policies were supported by extreme left, Trotskyist organisations like the Co-op Amongst the media, they found favour with well known Leninists, like Polly Toynbee, who’s been nothing but an uncritical supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership so far.

If we elect Labour on this platform, it could destroy the stability and prosperity we have enjoyed since the Tories came to power in 2010. Basic human rights, like paying all of your money for a draughty one-bed flat ten miles from central London and commuting for hours to work in a zero-hours contract, could be destroyed and replaced with oppressive domination of the Party, which will control us via world class healthcare and cheap, efficient public transport. Britain will become Venezuela. Only with worse whether.

It is imperative that we elect the Conservatives and Theresa May, who have sensible policies that everyone can agree on like bringing back fox hunting or taking away your home if you get dementia. This is definitely what the JAMs, swing voters and people who work in Tescos, who Theresa May has sworn to stand up for, need.

Theresa May is a politician for all Britain. Unlike Corbyn who only appeals to a few metropolitan liberals who spend all their time in radical bookshops, drinking pints of Sound Wave IPA, eating chicken katsu curry and talking about the next upcoming show at the White Cube Bermondsey.

May sums up the British nation and what we want in a leader. She is patriotic, sings the national anthem, is willing to put petty gripes with Europeans above the national interest, wants to start a war with Spain, wants to take away old people houses and loves to make small mammals murder other small mammals. This is definitely where the centrist, modern, aspirational voter is. This is why Bryon Burger has introduced a new fox meat burger and you can buy riding coats in Primark now.

Corbyn struggles to connect with the average voter, who really respects how May surrounds herself with Tory supporters and activists and pretends that’s the same as talking to the public. They like how she doesn’t take questions from journalists and even locks them in a room to stop them taking pictures of her walking. Refusing to talk to a press that generally fawns over you anyway is what I consider to be strong and stable leadership.

May stands firmly against far left ideas like feeding children, reducing child poverty, supporting carers, investing in the NHS so that it can make it through the winter without needing emergency care itself and providing nurses with the basic dignity of knowing that their rights will be respected post Brexit so that they can continue taking care of the sick and the old. These are the sorts of policies that can ruin this great country.

May has clever ideas for tackling the problems of the 21st century like bringing back grammar schools (we need to find those entrepreneurs from poorer backgrounds, the rest can be fast-tracked to their career to working in an Amazon distribution centre), crippling the economy by storming out of Europe in a huff (if that doesn’t encourage innovation nothing will) and being a beg-friend to Donald Trump (a man who definitely has our best interests at heart). She has the making of a great Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Or possibly the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, which is pretty much the same thing.

No sensible person could support Labour with insane, radical ideas like the ones Corbyn proposes. If Blair were alive today (he died of a heart attack two years ago when Corbyn became party leader, what you have seen on TV is a robot that they found in Peter Mandelson’s garage) he would support the Tories as he could not condone a Labour government that had so completely abandoned the centre ground that it wanted to tackle child poverty and secure funding for the NHS.

It is essential that we all vote Tory on June the 8th to stop this Marxist-anarchist-Leninist madness. Britain could easily become a Communist dystopia like France, the Netherlands or Germany. It is essential that the belligerent, posh and slightly xenophobic centre right stops these dangerous radicals with their vision of a fairer and kinder society.

Theresa May picture created by Jim Mattis and used under creative commons. 

Who will take up the cause of the shat upon generation?

Sometimes as a millennial it can feel that the world is against you. It is often stated that we are likely to be the first generation who are worse off than our parents. Housing is prohibitively expensive, jobs are less secure and pay less, whatever future we have is likely to be blighted by environmental disasters, economic instability and decades of Tory rule.

Sometimes it feels as if the planet itself is trying to crush our generation. Then I realise that it is not the world that is against us, it is one group in particular: the baby boomers.

The baby boom generation is pretty open about its hostility to my generation. Hardly a day can go by without an opinion piece accusing my generation of being entitled and lazy. Entitled seems to mean having the chutzpah to demand an affordable place to live and a decent job. That must seem like an outrageous demand to a generation who grew up with full employment and readily available council housing.

I was 22 when the 2008 financial crash occurred. I don't remember there being many people my age making the top decisions in banks and government, taking liberal advantage of the revolving door between public and private sector, leveraging as much debt as possible then taking a sledgehammer to the global economy. I don't remember there being many people my age deciding to invade Iraq and creating the conditions for a medieval death cult to grow and spread terror all over the world.

From where I stand there is only one generation that felt entitled enough to act as if there was no consequences to their actions. They are not the generation that suffers the consequences of every bad decision of the last 15 years.

There weren't many people from my generation who made the decision to sell off our council houses and not replace them. Nor are there many people of my generation in government failing to do anything to tackle the housing crisis or running developer firms that sit on land to keep the value of the few properties they do build high. It wasn't our decision to let house building fall to the lowest point since the 1920s.

It is my generation sitting in unsafe, expensive rental accommodation with little rights, while the prospect of owning our own home moves away faster than a space shuttle taking off. Apparently we're a spoiled and entitled generation, but if baby boomers were forced to deal with the rental market as it currently stands, you can bet reform would be top of all partys’ agendas. Instead we get useless advice and contempt for our problems, such as claiming that the reason why we cannot afford a house is because we spend too much on avocado toast.

So who is going to take up the cause of the shat upon generation? There is a general election going on, which means that someone should at least pretend to care about us. Which party wants to correct this injustice? Not the Tory Party: the only contact their leaders have with young people are Young Tories, who wear suits and take briefcases to uni lectures. The sort of people who probably get central London flats as a first birthday present.

Labour under Jeremy Corbyn has a lot of support amongst younger people. Although baby boomer columnists are pretty keen to pour scorn on our desire for a politics that is not complete cynical, from the comfort of homes that they could afford on a journalist’s salary. That is when they’re not using said columns to tell other baby bombers that we’re entitled and deserve the shit we get.

Now 60% of people in poverty are working families, which creates the feeling that society consists of a large number of people working hard and impoverishing themselves for the benefit of a rich, older class who do not work and benefited from cheaper houses and better jobs (the former of which they hog and the latter of which they did their best to destroy).

Perhaps I am being too harsh on the baby boom generation. Obviously, no one should be forced out of their home. Although to act as if that is being suggested when any corrective to the current state of the housing market is proposed is pretty entitled. People are living longer and the number of older people is rising, which is one of the causes of the current pressures on welfare and the housing marketing.

The solution to this is to bring in more immigrants to readdress the worker to dependent ratio. However, the baby boom generation's reaction to all this was to vote overwhelming for Brexit, so I guess that solution is off the table for now.

If immigration must come down to appease baby boomers who, for some reason, feel threatened by hearing Polish spoken on their bus, but welfare benefits to older people (the triple-lock, fuel allowance, freedom passes, etc) must remain despite a falling percentage of the population who are workers and more workers being in poverty then ... well ... all I am saying is, that is pretty entitled. So entitled that I can't believe someone would suggest that in public without fear of being laughed at.

Yet that is the situation we find ourselves in. The baby boomers get what they want and then accuse us of being entitled when we ask for things like jobs and houses so that we can do things like work every hour that God sends to pay for the triple lock and find somewhere to raise the next generation who are likely to be even more shat upon.

I don't know about you, but I get a sense that society is run for the benefit of old people against the interests of working age or young people. From housing to Brexit, young people are being kicked by the most entitled generation in history. Their cultural concerns, such as immigration or Britain's role in the world, are given credence, miles of column space and are the focus of government policy, regardless of how stupid, short-sighted and ruinous their demands are.

Our concerns, such as housing, employment or the environment, are either ignored or openly mocked. Sometimes I think that my generation has a parasitic creature attached, which is sucking the life from us until we die and then it can move onto the next host (ie our children).

The latest outrageous instance of this? A column in Sky News where baby boomers literally say they want to beat us and then send us off for National Service? Let us remember that the baby boom generation not only got everything handed to them on a plate, but also didn't fight a war because to have served in World War 2 you would have to be at least 90, by now and people over 90 were only 0.9% of the population in 2015.

It is the generation that came after the war, who lived in the glow of the post-war consensus and then dismantled it and told those who came after that we should be grateful to live in this dystopian hell hole of a future, who are the real problem. Although, record numbers of young people are registering to vote, so maybe in this election, or a future election, the most entitled generation that ever existed will get a surprise from the hard working generation who pay for their luxury.

Avocado toast image created by T.Tseng and used under creative commons.

20 Years of Blair: Labour in the Wilderness

20 years since Tony Blair won a huge Labour victory, the certainties that he ushered in are no longer certain. In my last post I outlined the iron law of Blair: that taking a socially liberal, economically liberal, centrist approach, and moving to where the voters are, is always the best course of action. Brexit broke that iron law. The centrist, socially and economically liberal position (Remain, if anyone is wondering what I am referring to) lost.

Previously it was unthinkable to adopt policies that would harm economic growth and inconvenience the private sector. Blair won three elections with this in mind. David Cameron defeated Labour twice using the same logic. Gordon Brown was seen as incompetent on economic issues and Ed Miliband was seen as too much of a risk.

Now the government is enacting Brexit with all the enthusiasm of Nigel Farage arriving at a traditional boozer following a long treck through an area of metropolitan, independent coffee shops. I cannot think of anything that will be worse for the already anaemic economy and more of a pain in the arse to big business than Brexit. Yet the Tories are hugely popular and cheered on vast swathes of the press and electorate - the same people who thought that Miliband was dangerous for wanting to tax a few mansions.

Not that any of this is of benefit to the Labour Party or its left wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn. In my previous post I talked about the need for radical new ideas. It goes without saying that you need to convince people of the benefit of these ideas. Currently Corbyn is doing a poor job of convincing people to vote for a few Milibandish policies.

If all pans out as everyone expects, Labour will be looking for a new leader 20 years after Blair’s huge victory. Doubtless the iron law of Blair will be invoked. But in the post-Brexit world it no longer applies. Voters have lost faith in social liberalism and economic liberalism. The former because of resentment of immigration and a cultural counter-revolution against tolerance and being nice to people. The latter because of the fall out of the 2008 crash and no one feels better off despite a lot of austerity. I can imagine that a Blair-inspired candidate today would be dismissed as “metropolitan middle class liberal” for standing up for these ideas.

This only leaves moving to where the electorate is and (as the general election is about to prove) the electorate is pretty happy with Brexit and the Tory government. Would a Blair for 2017 move Labour towards the Tory Party’s current position on immigration, Brexit, welfare and a host of other issues? I hope that the party members would prevent this. Not least because it would open the left flank of Labour to a Lib Dem onslaught.

So Labour will once again be faced with a difficult choice about its future.. It is hard to know what sort of party leader I should support. One who shares my values? That involves a lot of compromising, as Thomas Piketty can’t stand for Labour leader because he is French and not an MP. One who will win the next election? That person probably doesn’t exist.

Through the last 20 years I have found out something about myself. The politics that I would like are far to the left of the Overturn Window - or anything that is on offer. I feel that to meet the challenges of the 21st century - climate change, broken capitalism, refugees and automation -  we need to be more radical than ever. The world will not be saved by timid alterations around the edges. I am less willing to compromise as the general public cannot see the difference between "Red Ed", Corbyn and myself.

Due to the first past the post system, all left of centre ideologies are locked together into one party and fight over control of it. This has not advanced the cause of any of them. Usually we can live together. But recently we cannot, because there is no clear route forwards. So squabbling has taken the place of progress.

The Labour Party needs compromise and unity. The party is currently weak and divided and this serves no-one. Not the country, the members, or the people who are suffering under Tory rule. We need to desperately to find a way to make peace with ourselves so that the opposition can function. We can still bloody the Tories nose if Labour can be made to work.

So now we at a crossroads. 20 years on from the biggest labour win of my lifetime, and Labour looks further away from government than ever. I'm not willing to compromise, because centrism will not solve the world’s problems, but compromise is what the party needs.

Does this mean I have a future in the party that has defined all my political awareness since I was a child? Maybe the party would be better off without radicals like me in it. Some opposition is better than none and Labour needs to oppose the government, because I fear where 10-15 years of Tory rule could take us.

We can’t go back to Blair, as much as we might like to. Certainly Blair achieved a lot, not least making people hopeful about politics. However, in the post-Brexit world, Labour need something new to win power and to tackle the problems of the country.

20 years on from 1997 gives an opportunity to look back, but we should also look forwards. As Abraham Lincoln said: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.” I take this to mean that we should keep an open mind about the future.

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

20 Years of Blair: Labour in Opposition

In the opinion of Tony Blair’s fans (and probably the man himself) there is an iron rule of politics: Blair always wins. This is partly because he won three elections, but it is also because the essence of Blairism is moving to where the electorate is. The flexibility of Blairism can be seen in his followers’ attitude to government spending. In government Blair invested heavily, but his followers (such as Liz Kendall in her 2015 leadership bid) advocate harsh fiscal discipline. Bear this in mind as our story continues. To see the first part go here.

It was not long after Tony Blair left Downing Street that the storm of the 2008 Financial Crisis started brewing. Around that time I realised that I was completely in the shit. Turns out being in full time education from age five to age 21 only qualified me to answer phones or type addresses into a spreadsheet. Something all my teachers had neglected to mention as they encouraged me sink further into debt.

Getting a job and earning enough to live on was a painful and frequently humiliating experience. I worked for some of the biggest cunts I have ever met, yet felt lucky to have a job at all. The whole thing was underscored with a feeling a pointlessness. When Lehman Brother collapsed, it looked for a while that global capitalism would be over by Friday and the first global water war would break out on Monday.

Meanwhile the iron law of Blair was being tested on the voters. After a mammoth election, that lasted for two days during which I didn't sleep, Cameron rode into Downing Street using Nick Clegg as both the horse and the whipping boy. A centrist, modelled in the image of Blair, had moved the Tory party to where the electorate was: social liberalism and free market economics, with a large side order of austerity. No more luxuries like disability benefits and school construction. This was New Labour without pretending to care about the poor.

It was around this time that I began reading contemporary left-wing commentators, especially the writing of Laurie Penny. Her work was a revelation to me. For the first time, someone I didn't know personally was saying the things I believed in. I was not the one mad person who hated the world out of sense of bitterness. There were others who thought that something was really wrong and we need to do something radical about it.

Penny's writing, among others - too many to name here - opened up my mind to ideas beyond socialism and economic inequality. It was around this time that I became aware of the interlinked nature of oppression and that it is as diverse as people are. I know I was a little late to the party on this one, but at least I made it in the end.

Meanwhile Labour was going through some introspection of its own. Ed Miliband was chosen as leader. A leftish, social democrat had been chosen over a Blairite (his own brother), as a reaction to the long shadow of Blair. There was a belief on the soft left that the financial crash would lead to the rebirth of social democracy and Keynesian economics as an alternative to neoliberalism.

Many people viewed Miliband as annoyingly posh, funny looking, awkward, geeky and thought he was too clever. As I am all of those things, I had a soft spot for Miliband. I thought that he had (some) good ideas and good intentions. His politics were to the right of what I wanted from the Labour Party, but I recognised that Labour was not getting into government on the policy platform of putting those who earned over £500k a year in stocks in Trafalgar Square and letting the public through faeces at them.

University Me was pleased for a chance to go back to Keynesianism and a mixed economy. Miliband was a compromise that both I and (I thought) the country would be willing to accept. Turns out I was wrong on both counts.

The Labour Party (and myself) was struck by crisis when Miliband lost. This was not a moment for social democracy; the cold, neoliberal argument had won out. The iron law of Blair had been proved right again: a centrist with socially liberal, economically liberal views had been chosen over a Keynesian social democrat who wanted a degree of market intervention.

Within the Labour Party, and myself, there was a sense of disappointment in the voters, almost betrayal. From our point of view we had the better candidate; a clever person who had ideas about what could be done to alleviate some of the problems of the post-crash era.

Yeah, he wasn't as flash as Mr PR, Media Personality, but he wanted to make a better country. From our point of view, Miliband was more genuine and had been rejected by voters in favour of a candidate that that was all spin and manipulation. A man who pitted the working poor against the unworking poor, or the disabled against workers or students against everyone else.

This was a turning point. The iron law of Blair looked like it was about to be evoked and the Labour Party would be moved to where the voters were: i.e. harsh austerity and free market economics. No more Keynesianism and intervention. However, that didn’t happen. Jeremy Corbyn happened instead.

Following the defeat there was a general consensus that moving to the right economically was the solution. Then Jeremy Corbyn entered the race to counter this. Pitted against three hopeless alternatives, all of which looked completely unelectable, and offering a change that the party needed after 8 years of soft left policies, he became the favourite. There was also a sense that Miliband had been a compromise; he had accepted austerity and controls on immigration that lots of party members did not want. Yet all the compromise had been for nothing.

I supported Corbyn because I wanted change in the party. I agreed with Corbyn more than any of the other candidates, but supporting him was still a compromise. This was not the move to the left I wanted, but neither did I want Labour to move to where the voters were on austerity, or as I call it: ruining the lives of the poor and the disabled.

The Labour Party led by Corbyn is now in a dismal state, trailing in the polls and likely to lose many seats in an election that comes 20 years after Blair’s historic win. The iron law of Blair appears to be holding. So if it is always true, then why have I always supported the Labour Party’s decision not to choose leaders modelled on Blair?

The iron rule of Blair does not mean that centrist policies and moving to where the electorate is are the right thing to do. In the last few years I have gained a new appreciation for how fucked up the world is. Everything from inequality, to the environment, to child poverty, social care, wage stagnation and worsening public services.. These issues cannot be tackled by a centrist modelled on Blair. Blair had huge political authority after his 1997 win and he could not solve these problems. We need radical change.

The problems outlined above require us to re-examine our thinking across a range of issues. The current tool box of economic policies and political rationales are insufficient to face the challenges of the 21st century. We need radical new ideas in economics, the environment and politics, but also new ideas about how we relate to each other and the world around us. We need to think about value in terms of more than money. We need to think about different people’s experiences. We need these soon before the water rises too far and our society becomes riven with division and hate.

I do not see these radical ideas coming from Corbyn and his ilk, although once I thought they might. I see now that I was wrong about that. I also don't see them coming from politicians who are unwilling to challenge the electorate, especially when the electorate has shown it does not care about rising child poverty and looming environmental destruction. If they did then the Tories would be 20 points behind in the polls.

I can see the appeal of the iron law of Blair. The hope that a moderate, flexible, charismatic leader could save us all. The French are currently hoping the same thing, we’ll see. how it works out of them. If you listen hard enough you can hear an echo of “things can only get better”.

In reality only some things got better - and that progress was quickly undone by the current Tory government. If we follow the iron law of Blair we won’t be able to save ourselves from ourselves. Now, we need to challenge the way things are and not accept them.

It was only a few months after Corbyn became leader that a grand re-ordering of politics took place. It owed something to Blair’s time in government more than we think, but stretched back further into our history. This huge change has broken the iron law of Blair. In the next part I will show why.

Ed Miliband image created by owen_lead and used under creative commons.

20 Years of Blair: Labour in Government

This week it will be the 20th anniversary of Tony Blair's 1997 landslide victory, the largest Labour majority of my life so far - and likely to remain so. Lots of people on the left still look back at it with misty-eyed reverence and think of it as a magical moment of political perfection, only giving a cursory consideration to how everything went downhill from there. Here’s a prime example.

I remember the 1997 election clearly as I was 11 years old at the time. I didn't really understand the politics, or the reasons behind the huge victory, but there was a sense that something epochal had happened. There was optimism in the air and the sense that things would be different; that we had turned a corner as a country.

I joined the Labour Party when I was 18. At the time, I guess you could say I was a Blairite. Although at the time I thought Limp Bizkit were really cool, so approach the opinions of teenage-me with caution. I had grown up under New Labour and it is difficult to overstate how dominant the ideology of Blair was in the late 90s/early 2000s.

If only it could have stayed that way, Blair’s many fans today must think. If only people had not grown dissatisfied with Blair and New Labour. If only Blair had remained the youthful, dynamic politician doing headers with Kevin Keegan and not become the self-styled messiah of globalised tomorrow that we saw at his third victory speech. If we could have stopped time around 2001 then all the terrible things that have happened since might not have occurred.

It was shortly before Blair’s third electoral victory that I went to uni, where I promptly became a long haired, weed smoking, Levellers listening, ‘Introduction to Marx’ reading socialist. At the time I claimed that I was a Communist and wanted a workers’ state, where the party controlled everything. Aside for wearing a hammer-and-sickle T-shirt, what I was really in favour of was the post war consensus: social democracy, the welfare state and redistribution. Maybe with more taxing of the rich and nationalisation of banks than the average Keynesian, but that was broadly what I believed.

Basically, I believed in a more even distribution of wealth. I was certainly against the free-market consensus of Blair and his fans, and neoliberal economic dominance. This was a crucial change for me. This was the point when I realised that the establishment was not a benign force that looked after everyone's best interests, but a group with interests of their own that need to be opposed.

Uni was great, with lots of free time, booze and weed. Waking up 2pm and going to bed at 4am. I frequently forget other aspects of what it was like: the anxiety, the stress of exams, not having money, being hungry and listlessness a lot of the time. That’s nostalgia for you. Perhaps I could have spent it more productively, but I had a good time.

Blair’s premiership was rapidly going to pot at the same time. An Ipsos-MORI poll taken on 25th of April 2007 showed that 66% of people were not satisfied with his leadership. This is what happens when you go from blowing the winds of change to being the epitome of the establishment. Blair had become synonymous for everything that was modern and a bit rubbish, summed up by so many Peep Show jokes.

There were lots of events along the way (like the Iraq War, which I am glossing over because if I get started on that we’ll be here all day), but in essence people got sick of Blair. His personal satisfaction rating went from 80% in 1997 down to 28% when he left office in 2007.

Blair gave way to Gordon Brown at the point where New Labour had really lost its shine. Brown's dour Scotsman act might have been suited to leading a Jacobite rebellion against the hated English bastards, but in the mid-2000s it looked about as out of touch as John Major's evocation of cricket greens had in the 90s.

Plus, the Conservatives had found their own Blair: David Cameron. It is important remember how completely mired in shit the New Labour project looked to everyone at this point, beset by endless fuck-ups like leaving NHS data on a train or cabinet ministers exposing briefing notes to the press.

Much of today's Labour Party looks back on this time with the fervour that UKIP supporters look back to the 1950s. The past they are remembering never really existed. Blair was always just another politician, in a specific time and a place, not an iron law that can be applied to all of politics. The way the party looks back on those heady early 90s years, when rock stars wanted to be seen with its politicians, is the same way I look back on University: all the freedom and possibility, none of the wasted opportunities.

After I left uni, my politics became more left-wing and more grounded in my own experience. Outside the comfortable bubble of student life, I had to deal with working long hours for barely enough to cover my rent, so that I could enrich a boss with the temperament of a grumpy chimpanzee that had been roughly shaved, forced into a suit, filled with coke and given too much power over objects it barely recognised as people. I also had to confront spending most of my wages to live in a matchbox that was cold, leaked, had a wasp nest in the roof and had a bathroom that once exploded.

I have led a pretty privileged life and there are certainly people have endured worse working and housing conditions than me, plus added racial, gender or sexual discrimination. I acknowledge that I have been lucky and there's no need to get out a tiny violin for this middle class white bloke in London.

The real world is cruel when you stop living on Britpop nostalgia. The confusing mix of things I believed at uni give way to a more concrete understanding of the problems many young people face. Leaving uni and entering the real world didn’t make me a greedy Tory, keen to kick everyone who gets a handout. It made me angrier, more convinced that something was fundamentally fucked up about all of this, and that we need to do something about it.

The Labour Party might never have been the vehicle to achieve these changes. But it certainly wasn’t by the late 2000s. Blair was gone, but the party was the establishment in service of the establishment. It was not interested in the sort of change that would make people's' lives better. That's why, in 2010, in a fit of Nick Clegg mania, I voted Lib Dem. However, it didn't last because everything was about change for me, the Labour Party and the country.

In the next post I will look at my journey through the Labour opposition years and the legacy of Blair's time as party leader.

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

A depressing beginning

On the same day that Theresa May announced the 2017 general election, my Labour Party membership was renewed. This was not deliberate, the money comes out at the same time each year by direct debit, but it brought a sense of certainty to me about the immediate future. The election is happening, I am in the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn is our candidate for Prime Minister. It was a day to acknowledge facts, because facts are stubborn things that, if ignored, go away, get friends, and come back to do you over.

Another fact to be acknowledged is that the outlook for Labour is terrible at best. The atmosphere amongst some of my Labour-supporting friends is like that in a trench before a World War One advance: eventually we will have to put our heads above the parapet to be shot down.

A poll published a few days before the election was called put Labour 21 points behind the Tories. There is little doubt in anyone’s mind that the Conservatives are going to win a thumping majority. Speaking as a citizen of London, the level of smugness coming from the home countries is palpable.

For years I believed that the radical left could win power if it was given a chance. If a major political party adopted a genuinely left wing approach of standing up to the people who fuck us all over, rather than shaking their heads and accepting the fucking with a little less glee than other parties, then why wouldn’t people support it? The only obstacle to this was voters’ support for being fucked over, aka accusing anyone opposed to the status quo as “anti business”.

Today the iron rule that has govern politics for decades is broken. It is no longer electoral suicide to be labelled ‘anti-business.’ I cannot think of anything that would be worse for UK Plc (I physically shuddered writing that) than Brexit, i.e. the top priority of the Tory government. The cocaine and Champagne cocktails must really be getting to the bosses of the capitalist class if they are throwing their lot in with the Tories on this one. For the first time in my life the voters are willing to put other priorities ahead of what’s best for people who are already really wealthy - but the left has never been further from power.

Meanwhile Corbyn, the great white hope of the radical left, is himself adopting policies from Ed Miliband’s leadership. If the Lib Dems can come back from their 2015 hammering by adopting the unpopular position of being anti-Brexit, and Scottish Tories can come back from near extinction through supporting Unionism despite Scottish fervor for independence, why can’t Corbyn use this apocalyptic moment to stand for something really radical? Like everyone who votes Labour gets to personally kick a banker in the nuts? What does he think he has to lose?

There is also the issue that Corbyn has failed to reform the party to ensure greater debate and internal democracy. The Labour Party needs reform if it is going to be able disagree with parts of itself without self-destructing, however, the entire Corbyn project is invested in one person. Socialists who chided Miliband for being too moderate are championing the same polices under Corbyn. Why? Because it’s the person that they care about more than the policy.

All of this is mainly the fault of Corbyn himself. As leader he bears responsibility for the party and the movement that he heads. It is an understatement of the century to say that opportunities have been missed in the last 2 years.

Corbyn has become of the focus of the left in British politics today to the point where the idea of Corbyn was become divorced from the man himself. From people who wanted politics to be a bit more genuine to anarchists who wanted radical new powers for local communities, all of these hopes have become bound up in one man.

This is partly because, in 2015, we were desperate to take anything that wasn’t Tweedledum, Tweedledee and Tweedledipshit (I’ll leave you to work out who is who). Three candidates whose reaction to the awfulness of the 2015 defeat was become either more awful, or more boring than cream-coloured wallpaper. There seemed to be no viable alterative to Corbyn as a means of change - and in June, there will be no viable alternative to the status quo at all. We have failed to build a movement for change, and have instead adopted one individual as a symbol for so many different fights against the establishment.

There are a lot of good, passionate, interesting people supporting Corbyn because they want change. I mean this in terms of politicians, journalists and ordinary people. Many cannot see his flaws, because he has ceased to be a person and has became a vessel for everything we want to be different. Now some of us are taking a look at that vessel and have seen that it was never fit for purpose, but it is too late.

All of this leaves me depressed about the future of the country and the left. The Conservatives will be in power, with a huge majority and can use Brexit to remake the country as the rainy version of Singapore where the unemployed dance for the amusement of tax dodgers, and being caught not wearing union flag underwear carries the death penalty.

What happens to the left, post Corbyn? A lot of people will collapse into complete cynicism about politics and try their best to destroy the Labour party through infighting in retaliation for it being not good enough to deliver all their hopes and dreams. Some will search for a new vessel and repeat a process that is doomed to failure from the start. The smart people will look to build the movement that we needed and desperately lacked in 2015, however it will be against a backdrop of utter hopelessness.

The Labour Party is in a terrible state. By glancing down the thoroughly unrepresentative sample of the people posting in my Facebook feed, I can see that support for the party is at an all time low. I have already seen former Labour supporters talking about voting Tory, because what the world needs is more cynical, middle class, centre-right people. Many more saying they will vote Lib Dem, because we also need politicians with the moral fibre of used toilet paper.

The likelihood of all the awful things happening in the year future seem as certain as the fact that a general election will take place in May or that I will have some craft beer over the weekend. These events are moving toward us at a steady and unstoppable pace as inevitably as one day following the next, or Brewdog taking all of my money. For now the facts are that an election is coming, Corbyn is the Labour leader and I am in the Labour Party. Depending on what happens in the next year I might not be renewing my party membership. All in all, this is certainly a depressing beginning to a campaign.

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

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.