Everyone should go and see Mike Leigh’s Peterloo

Mike Leigh, veteran left-wing filmmaker, director of Happy-Go-Lucky and Secrets & Lies, has made a film of a seminal event in British history: the Peterloo massacre. In 1819, the unprovoked massacre of ordinary people protesting injustice shocked the nation. Peterloo is the foundational event of British democracy and it paved the way for the process of reforms that (eventually) gave everyone the vote.

This was certainly a film that I was going to like, as it combines my interest in cinema, history and radical politics. It is probably no surprise to you, if you know me, that I did like this film. I can’t have unbiased opinions about something as important to me as this film. 

So, my entirely subjective opinion is that this is a powerful film. I defy anyone to not be moved when they see unarmed men, women and children mowed down by cavalry in a confined square.

Mike Leigh and the army of actors, camera people, set designers, clothes makers and prop designers have created a very detailed portrait of a critical time in British history. There are lots of historic details that bring the film to life, from beautiful period costumes to the recreation of political rhetoric from the time.

The film’s sympathies are with the ordinary victims of the massacre, however, it does not paint the massacre as either a freak occurrence, an accident or being unavoidable. There were clear decisions that led up to it happening, made by a range of people with their own prejudices and assumptions. The film characterises the complex political situation and nodes of state power around Peterloo and the events that ultimately led to the deaths of 15 people and between 400 and 700 injuries.

As well as exploring the complexities of the state apparatus that carried out the massacre the film does not present the victims as one monolithic block. The film explores how they had a wide range of opinions. Some people were people were poor and simply wanted to improve their circumstances. Some people were protesting against the greed and callousness of landowners. Some had specific goals such as the repeal of the Corn Laws or reforms to how parliament was elected. Some had a radical vision of changing all of British society. Then, like today, a mass movement of people was made up of many different people with different visions, united in a common expression of discontent.

Peterloo is a strangely hopefully film, considering it is about a peaceful protest that was cut down. There are many characters in the film who are hopeful about the prospect of one form of change or another. Many of the characters in the film who are poor and have been ground down by early 19th century Manchester. There had been a lot of change, industrialisation and the rise of dark satanic mills, and many people’s lives has been made worse by the Corn Laws and a draconian establishment that uses everything from courts to the military to batter people down. Despite all this, many characters are hopeful, they believe their situation can improve and that their lives can get better and that they are the instrument of the change they need.

Our world is changing rapidly as well. Information technology could have as dramatic an effect on the world of the 21st century as industrialisation did on the 19th. A lot of this change seems to be for the worse. Social media has given a new platform to nationalists and hate mongers. In many ways it seems our world is spinning out of control. In this last week we have had bombs sent to liberal politicians, mass shootings in a Synagogue and the far-right candidate winning an election in Brazil. Just as it did for the Manchester poor of the early 19th century, the future looks bleak.

I think we can take some courage from the people who stood up for a better world in St Peter’s Field in Manchester. Their sacrifice brought us a fairer and more equal society. Peterloo shows that there is a cost to doing politics, especially when the state is heavily armed and its power is wielded by people who are the awful combination of stupid, prejudiced and frightened. Terrible things can happen when standing up to power and demanding that you be treated like a human being with rights. There is a cost to asking for a better world. Terrible things may happen in our future, but we still need to stand up for our rights against those who would oppress us and grind us down.

If ordinary people can come together and stand up for fairer, more equal and less oppressive society then a positive change can be made. The legacy of Peterloo is that ordinary people can make a positive difference, when united, even against an oppressive and powerful enemy. This is why a film that is very sad, ultimately left me feeling positive about our future.

Remainers are angry with the establishment that ignores them

700,000 people marched through London last week to demand a People’s Vote. From those I know who attended the march, and what I read on social media, the point of a People’s Vote is to give the government a democratic reason to stop Brexit. The fact that 70,000 marched for this goes to show that a lot of people are still very hostile to Brexit.

Although the tone of the march was good-natured and overall it was positive, many Remainers are angry at the political establishment. Not only are they angry, they feel there is no democratic outlet for their anger. Remainers feel they have been ignored, as over the last year and a half a narrow referendum win for Brexit has steered us increasingly towards a No Deal cliff edge.

As with every Brexit article, I feel I need to make my position clear at this point: I voted for Remain and I think Brexit is a bad idea. I am very angry with this government that is being reckless with the livelihoods of millions of people. It’s farcical that the government is risking crashing out of the EU without a deal, which would do enormous damage to our economy. Damage that will be felt the hardest by the poorest. I understand the anger of Remainers, because it is my anger too.

I understand that many Remainers feel that Brexit is an existential threat to them. There is a very real danger of a No Deal Brexit and something biblically awful following, like hospitals closing because they can’t get medicines or recession so severe that it will make the last one look like a minor economic adjustment. Remainers are right to be angry about how careless the government is being.

This anger goes beyond the fact that the government is handling Brexit terribly. It comes from a feeling of that Brexit project itself is illegitimate. The fact that Leave won the referendum doesn’t settle the issue for many Remainers, as it wouldn't be for many Brexiters if they had lost by only 2%.

The government’s poor handling of Brexit has made this worse. No one voted for the debacle we ended with and many Brexit voters didn't vote for a No Deal cliff edge. Remainers are angry that the Brexit leaders lied to win and possibly had support from Russia. The fact that these charges have gone largely unacknowledged by many politicians means that many Remainers feel let down by both Labour and the Tories.

Not only do many Remainers feel that Brexit is fundamentally illegitimate, the very idea of Brexit strikes at the heart of how Remainers see the world. Brexit is the political expression of suspicion of foreigners, hostility to people with different cultures and nostalgia for an imagined past of British global supremacy. Remainers feel that their values are under threat from a culture of intolerance and backwardness. Remainers feel that their culture of tolerance and openness is under attack not only from the government but in the streets by emboldened nationalists. They also think they are being sneered at for being soft and out-of-touch by a political class that prefers to pander to knee-jerk bigotry.

The way that many Remainers see Leavers is deeper than the specific issues that came to a head around the time of the referendum, such as migration from Eastern Europe or the refugee crisis. The cultural difference between Remainers and Brexiteers comes down to basic things like a dislike of patriotism and preference for internationalism. Many Remainers simply don't understand why people would love their country to the point that they want to do huge damage to it so that they can save it from foreigners. The idea of patriotism (especially the way patriotism has been expressed through Brexit) is an anathema.

Remainers are also angry about being told to listen to Leavers. A lot of the Remainers I talk to don't want to listen to people with different views from them. They don’t want to listen to peoples’ concerns about immigration or the loss of British identity. Remainers are constantly implored to understand Leavers, but why is the opposite never said? Why are Brexiters never told to listen to Remainers? No one is suggesting that there be a pro-EU column written in the Daily Express to broaden their worldview.

At this point, it's worth remembering that not every Brexit voter was an unemployed former steelworker. Many were middle-class, property owners who feel insulated from an economic shock that Brexit cold produce. Most Brexit voters are older and not university educated, but that doesn't mean their howls of anger directed about the EU is the product of a life of being crapped on by the system. It could equally be the product of a close-minded, curtain twitching, dislike of others. Most young, University educated, Remainers, trapped in the private rented sector, have a better claim to being the people abandoned by the political class then Daily Mail readers who have been pandered to at every possible opportunity.

Remainers feel betrayed by the establishment. They feel betrayed by Corbyn and Labour for failing to mount an effective opposition to Brexit. They feel betrayed by the Tories for failing to put the practical needs of the economy ahead of the whims of the anti-EU loonies in their party. Above all, they feel betrayed by supposedly sensible politicians for pandering to people’s dislike of immigration to the point where the political manifestation of this dislike has driven the country to the brink of disaster.

There is the very real possibility of crashing out the EU without a deal and doing huge damage not just to our economy but also to the basic infrastructure of the country. If Brexit is a gargantuan disaster (which we may discover it is, very soon) then we will have ruined our country because a few people are sent into waves of existential anger because they hear Polish being spoken on the bus, and politicians were too frightened to tell them this is small minded and bigoted.

Remainers are angry that despite the fact that 48% of the country voted not to gamble our future on the promises of Boris Johnson, no serious political party is representing this group of people. Ignoring this number of angry people or dismissing these concerns as just those of "metropolitan liberals" will make Remainers feel less alienated. So far this anger has not found itself a radical outlet, but it will. Given time. Doing Brexit and getting it over with will not make this anger disappear. It needs to find adequate political expression.

EU flag image created by Yanni Koutsomitis and used under creative commons.

The Bercow scandal shows that Remain fake news is a problem

If you have been following the news this week it has been impossible to miss the scandal enveloping House of Commons Speaker John Bercow. For those not aware, an independent House of Commons inquiry has found that accusations of bullying and harassment of Parliamentary staff are not being dealt with due to a culture of "acquiescence and silence".

Just to remove any doubt that it is The Speaker’s office is responsible for this culture. The following paragraph from the report is quite damming:

“Almost all the allegations of bullying by members of House staff in this inquiry were made against someone in a more senior position, consistent with the typical pattern of bullying cases. Management style is closely linked to organisational culture, and there were many examples of behaviour described that would fall within the category of workplace bullying. A single incident of some of these may be unlikely to be characterised as such, but a few incidents taken together or occurring repeatedly over time can indicate a pattern suggestive of unacceptable bullying.”

What I have found most shocking about this has been the response from Labour MPs, who I had naively assumed would want to stand for the rights of workers. As journalist Stephen Bush said the Party’s "literal name is about workplace rights.” 

The reason for Labour MP's failure to stand up for these peoples’ right to safe working environment is Brexit, or as I prefer to call it, the root of all evil. As speaker, Bercow has defended MPs’ desire for a meaningful vote on Brexit when Theresa May's deal comes before the commons, and what's a little workplace bullying next to the future of the nation? Dame Margaret Beckett went as far as saying that Brexit “trump bad behaviour”.

This is all disgusting. Bercow has to go, no one should be allowed to preside over a climate of bullying and harassment and be expected to keep their job. Labour MPs should stand up for workers’ rights, be the workers in a coal mine, a call centre or the Palace of Westminster.

The response from soft left, Remain MPs has been shocking and I have lost a lot of respect for some MPs. The response from Remain Labour supporting groups on social media has been similarly awful. The way people have closed ranks around Bercow reminds me of, and it pains me to say this, Donald Trump’s supporters and how they brook no criticism of their President. The rhetoric reminds of how the US right rallied to Bret Kavanagh when he was accused of sexual assault. It was pure tribalism and based on a complete refusal to believe that any higher moral standard has been transgressed. I thought that the point in opposing Brexit is that the EU protects workers’ rights. Well there is no point having rights if they aren’t respected.

Remainers have even engaged in spreading elaborate conspiracy theories as to why this has happened. Naturally, the hand of the Brexit ultras appears in all of these. Like the conspiracy theories that infest the American right, these are spread on social media via rage shares and filter bubbles. I saw this happen in real time as the Bercow accusations came out. I haven't repeated what I saw here as I haven't asked permission of anyone involved to share their words, but if you're doubting my veracity then this stuff is easy to find on Facebook.

I want to say at this point that I am pro-Remain and really wish this whole Brexit shitstorm would go away. I want Britain to stay in the EU so that we can reform it. However, the cause of stopping Brexit is not served by sharing conspiracy theories that see shadowy Brexiters behind everything. Unless your goal is just to project rage at the current state of politics, instead of, you know, change things.

This type of behaviour is what allows fake news or conspiracy theories like Pizzagate to spread. The latter nearly resulted in deaths. Fake news is lies that serve someone's political goals and imaging that Brexiteers are responsible for the Bercow scandal to stop parliament having a meaningful vote on Brexit is fake news.

So-called sensible liberals are no different than Trump supporting sharing Pizzagate stories, or the far left sharing fake news about Portland Communications. I support Jeremy Corbyn, but that story is made up. I have seen a lot of pro-Remain Fake News shared over last two and half years. Most of it revolves around Sinn Fein taking up their seats in Westminster to stop Brexit. The stars in the sky will grow cold and dead before Sinn Fein MPs swear an oath of loyalty to the Queen so that they can sit in the House of Commons.

There is a sad side to all this, which is that this debacle is stopping justice for the people who have been bullied and harassed. It means that this kind of behaviour can continue. It means that Westminster is not a safe place for people to work, especially for women, and our politics is poorer for this. It shows the rank hypocrisy of Remain supporters who claim to stand up for the vulnerable, except when it is politically inconvenient. Having principles isn't principled when it doesn't cost anything. 

This whole shitshow also illustrates that fake news and conspiracy theories are not just for the far right or the far left. They're for anyone who believes anything hard enough to stop thinking. This includes passionate Remainers.

John Bercow image created by National Assembly of Wales and used under creative commons.

The growing support for fascism should scare us all

Bookmarks on Bloomsbury Street in London is a left wing institution. For those not familiar with London's Premier socialist bookshops, I highly recommend a visit. The shop stocks a wide selection of books on left politics from histories of the Russian Revolution to books on women's liberation and trans rights. It sells magazines, journals, pamphlets and second-hand books, in a small space that has reading chairs and soft jazz music on the stereo. It is an oasis of calm reflection next to Tottenham Court Road station.

It was also the subject of an attack by mask-wearing fascists, who tore up books and intimated staff. This was a clear attempt to intimidate and silence the left. It’s strongly linked to the growing confidence and support for the far right in Britain. From Free Tommy Robinson to Boris Johnson insulting women who wear the Niqab, hatred is rising and fascists are benefiting from it. This is something that should worry us all.

Fascist is not a word I use lightly, but it does apply here. The word is overused and members of the far right don't have to be fascists to be scary. Fascism is like pornography, a terrible system to base a government on. Also like pornography, it's very difficult to define but we all know it when we see it.

Understanding exactly what fascism is can be difficult. There are many competing definitions. Benito Mussolini said he was fascism’s only theorist and when asked to define fascism he always gave different answers. Writing a clinical definition of fascism is very difficult, but it’s plain to see that people who attacked a bookshop, that sells books they disagree with, are fascists. Bullying and intimidating people who have different political views to silence their free speech is fascism.

I can tell at least some of you are rolling their eyes at this point and thinking something along the lines of “what about all those left wing students on campuses that I keep reading about? They want to bully and intimidate people. They’re against free speech”. Well, a campaign to disinvite Germaine Greer from a lecture is not the same as people invading a shop and threatening staff. One is tinged with the very real possibility of actual violence. The other is using non-violent political actions to stop the spreading of transphobia.

What the left is having right now is a discussion about what the limits of speech should be. Everyone believes in some limits to freedom of speech, unless you think child pornography or printing your own pound sterling is completely okay. Should I be allowed to give a speech to my local conservative club on how Margaret Thatcher ruined Britain? Is denying me the chance to scream at local Tories infringing on my freedom of speech? Well, it is, but I still shouldn’t be allowed to yell obscenities at Tory members in their own club if they don’t want me to. There are limits to freedom of speech.

It’s important that we have the discussion about what the limit is. It’s happening in a messy disorganized way, which frightens some people, but important political discussions are rarely neat. I can’t talk politics with someone in the pub without it getting heated, so it’s going to get messy when all of society tries to talk about something difficult. This tough debate on the limits of free speech is clearly different to menacing people quietly buying books.

Fascism is a political movement that aims to replace the current political system with a different, parallel one. One that is authoritarian and violent. Fascism is moving political debate off the TV and Twitter and into a street brawl where the strong assert their political dominance through physical strength. Fascism isn’t a set of beliefs, but a way of doing politics that is different and more violent. This might not be what the people who attacked Bookmarks wanted, but it’s what they’re participating in.

As much as I enjoy an academic discussion of politics and trying to wrestle with the definitions of what is and isn't fascism, this discussion is removed from many people’s experience of it. Fascism isn’t a thing that only lives in political science textbooks. It’s in the streets kicking people in the stomach.

For the people being kicked in the stomach, the fact fascism is hard to define from a political science point of view is a pointless observation. Fascism is a real force in Britain and it targets the people who have the least power. Immigrants, non-White people, queer people. Muslims and Muslim women especially. These people have much less power than white, straight, male, atheists like myself. Fascism is terrorizing their communities. This attack on Bookmarks may have drawn our attention to it, but it’s been going on for a while and it's getting worse.

The forces of fascism in the UK are getting stronger, fuelled by hatred of immigrants and fear of Muslims. Fascism needs an enemy to fight in the streets, one with less power, and by exploiting hatred of minorities fascism spreads. Fascists are using the freedom of open platforms like Facebook and Twitter to connect and organise. Fascism has always had an undercurrent in the UK, but now it is a serious threat.

Sometimes when I read reports of what’s happening in America or Hungry and Poland, I have visions of John Snow coming down from the Wall to warn the rest of us in sunny King’s Landing. Meanwhile, the various factions of the left are fighting over who gets to sit on the Iron Throne. Don’t get me wrong, it’s important who sits on the Iron Throne. The Iron Throne is very significant, that’s why people are fighting over it. However, John Snow has come down from the Wall to tell us that the old enemy has returned, the enemy we thought was long dead. Not only are they back, but they’re strong and getting stronger. The old enemy doesn’t care about our fights and our differences. The old enemy is coming to kill us all. Unless we can stop them. 

I’m very worried about how fascism is growing in the UK, fuelled by those in the media and on social media who spout hatred aimed at those with less social power. I am worried about how many people don’t see the danger that is on the march. Are we going to go back to the 70s when the National Front openly marched through the street and racist attacks were a frequent occurrence? Or, are we entering some new hell, unlike anything we've seen before?

The Bookmarks attack show how bold fascists have become. If we don’t stop them, this will become much worse. I am very frightened.

Crowd image created by James Cridland and used under creative commons.

The past is all around us: A tale of architecture in Bucharest

I was surprised by how hot Bucharest was in July. I had assumed that a city in a former Communist, Eastern European Country would have permanent grey skies and light drizzle. This, of course, more accurately describes the London climate and not the climate of a city that is roughly as far south Milian or Lyon. This was an assumption I made based on how Bucharest looks, ie very Soviet. 

Romania is the place that first comes to mind when people think about Eastern European Communist countries. It had a self obsessed, power mad, authoritarian dictator in the form of Nicolae Ceausescu. During Ceausescu’s 24 years in power he committed many crimes against humanity, as well as ordering the construction of buildings that would make the judges of the Carbuncle Cup weep. His style of building was greatly influenced by a visit to North Korea, as was his ordering of huge military parades for his own self-aggrandisement.

I spent an afternoon in the baking Bucharest July sun looking at huge, grey buildings and trying to understand the lives of the people who lived there. Many of these lives overlap with my own (there are still former Communist politicians in the Romanian parliament) but their lives seem as alien to me as those of people of Victorian Britain. The fact that their TV only showed two hours of broadcast a day that was entirely propaganda speeches from Communist leaders and that it was illegal to consume media from outside the country, was one striking fact that stayed with me. In truth I struggle to imagine that it would be like to live in such a society.

My initial conclusion, after spending an afternoon walking around the decaying ruins of what seemed to me like another world, is that Bucharest lives up to its reputation of having a lot of very large, very grey, very Soviet buildings. The most famous of these is the Palace of the Parliament, the world's largest parliament building and second largest government building (behind the Pentagon). This eleven story high structure dominates the skyline of Bucharest just as Castle Rock dominates Edinburgh. Surprisingly it is even larger underground than it is above. Just to remove any doubt, that is the building pictured at the top of this page.

Most of Bucharest's large and grey buildings were began in the 1980s when Ceausescu went on a building rampage that involved demolishing a 6th of the city. He was overthrown in a violent revolution that fitted his blood soaked rule in 1989 and most of the construction was put on hold. The revolution resulted in Ceausescu and his wife, Elena Petrescu, being executed on live TV. You can watch this clip on YouTube if you really want. I am not linking to that here, because it is the actual footage of actual human beings being shot to death.

Since the revolution, legal disputes between the current and former occupiers of land that was confiscated by the Communist government has meant that construction on my buildings has not continued and maintenance has not been done. Many buildings remain half finished or have been abandoned. This gives the city is ruinous, dystopian feel.

Bucharest has been doubly damaged, first by having a lot of its 19th century neoclassical buildings pulled down, then by what was put up in their place left unfinished and now much of it falling into legal limbo and ultimately ruins. Many buildings had unfinished facades like the example below:

The double presence of the architectural excesses of an authoritarian regime and then the decay of something that capitalism sees no value in, does give Bucharest a decaying, run down feel. This is not a city that inspires much affection. Although, the beer is gloriously cheap.

It is not that Bucharest's buildings are without merit. Many are fine examples of the socialist realistic or socialist functionalist style of architecture. Especially those designed as residents for Communist Party officials that can be found along the Victory of Socialism boulevard. These are fine examples of a socialist interpretation of the neoclassical view of architecture.

What these buildings have in common with modernist architecture - a style that doesn't seem to have had much impact on Bucharest as dictators generally disliked the artistically challenging and personally expressive nature of modernism - is that these are buildings that the people of Romania are trying to put behind them just as Britain has spent the last 40 years trying to put the modernism, of 1950 and 60s councils behind us. Our guide on the tour declared that there was only one Communist building of merit in Bucharest, a concert hall that I was unable to photograph. Many people will see similarities (both architecturally and philosophically) between the Palace of the Parliaments and Birmingham Central Library, ie they were imposed on people and stand radically against the public’s perception of beauty.

The similarities between Bucharest's socialist functionalist buildings and the modernist buildings in Western Europe, is that these buildings doesn't apologise for themselves or seek to flatter bourgeoisie aesthetic tastes. These buildings have ambition and work on a scale that are much bigger than individual humans. The monumental scale of Bucharest's buildings is their architectural merit. They possess, what Jonathan Meades has called the architecture of the sublime, a rare character posed by the buildings of great architects from John Vanbrugh to Le Corbusier.

That said, Bucharest's buildings have all the hallmarks of totalitarianism. I can see why people find these buildings ugly. They go against conventional taste, and I am not enough of a snob to say that conventional taste is entirely invalid. Furthermore, I can see why the people of Bucharest want to put their past and these buildings (which are an ever present reminder of the past) behind them. I didn’t seem confident enough in my convictions of the merits of Bucharest's architecture (or enough of a dickhead) to argue with a local guide’s summary of the city.

The problem is that Bucharest is struggling to put the past behind it because of the scale of the past. Bucharest is currently building the world's largest Orthodox Church (pictured below) that will be taller than the Palace of the Parliaments. I am not sure the solution to having a city based around a large building that has aged poorly is to construct a large building that will probably age poorly. Certainly the leaders of Romanian haven't lost their appetite for monumental building.

It is impossible to defend the regime that made Bucharest the way it is, even for diehard socialists. It killed people and crushed liberty on a scale only imagined in Orwell's 1984. Bucharest has the feeling that monumental mistakes were made here and now people are paying for those mistakes. Such is Bucharest disdain for its own past that the memorial to those who died in the 1989 Revolution is broken and covered in graffiti.

Are the people any better off now? Certainly they can’t be arrested for listening to foreign media anymore, which has to be an improvement. The transition to capitalism and western democracy has brought liberty to the people of Romania, but it has also brought its own problems. Corruption and legal disputes are a blight on their economy and the aesthetics of Bucharest.

Bucharest serves as a reminder that bringing down an authoritarian regime doesn’t solve all the problems. The people are better off with Ceausescu gone, but a lot of reform is needed to make Romania a prosperous country. Western capitalism promises more than liberty with poverty and it needs to make good on these promises. In Bucharest the jury is still out on whether it has made good on these promises.

The past leaves long marks on the present and takes a long time to get over it. People and places don’t change overnight or even over decades. The built environment that the past leaves behind is a reflection of this. 

Haringey: A borough of two halves

The names of the places that make up the London Borough of Haringey are more famous than the borough itself. The same cannot be said for Islington, Hackney, Camden or a host of other boroughs. Tottenham, Crouch End and Highgate are well known, but the name of Haringey is sadly usually evoked with negative connotations. Harry Kane plays for Tottenham and the position of this national hero inside the borough of Haringey has not changed the perception of it.

Outside of North London, Haringey reminds people of either the Baby-P scandal or the battle between local people and different factions of the Labour Party that erupted over the Haringey Development Vehicle. I have especially enjoyed people who couldn't find Haringey on a map of London, opine on Twitter about what events in Haringey have to say about the state of the nation. Have they asked anyone who lives locally? No, that would require actual engagement with the complexities of an area.

After spending the better part of seven years variably living, working, volunteering and most importantly drinking in the London Borough of Haringey, I can say that I find most views expressed by people outside the borough as reductive and lazy. Responding to Haringey, if such a thing was possible, is the same as responding to the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe in one tweet. It's simply too varied to do it justice.

If you want to understand Haringey then I suggest you start by putting some boots on the ground. Take a walk and as we've having a rare spell of unbroken good weather, why not visit a few pubs as you go.

I began at the Green Rooms on Station Road, not far from Wood Green tube station, which is a classic Charles Holden design: geometrically shaped and bricked built. A modern, clean and functional design. The borough has several tube stations designed by Holden on the Piccadilly Line, who certainly the architect to have the biggest impact on London after Sir Christopher Wren.

The Green Rooms is one of the most individual pubs in London. The space reminds me more of East Berlin than East, North, Central London. The large windows let ample light spill in and the exposed brick work and wiring is an excellent execution of the modern ascetic. Art from local artists adorn the walls and there is a rotation of pop up restaurants that occupy the kitten. It goes without saying that the beer selection is very good, local favourite Beavertown Gamma Ray and German classic Paulaner Helles are frequently available. When I dropped by in the middle of the day, there were many people sitting alone at tables working on Mac Books.

So far this may seem so very London, but the Green Rooms is located in area that is subject to an ongoing postcode war that included a young man being disembowelled. I have several anecdotes about the space around Wood Green tube station, but I don't think the area is served by a white middle class man's poverty safari stories. What I will say is a fact: that Wood Green is in East Haringey and the average life expectancy in East Haringey is nine years less than West Haringey.

There is another point here: the mixing of craft beer and gang violence shows the changing face of London. East Haringey may have social and economic problems, but it’s also rapidly gentrifying. You can live a life at the Green Room, Crouch End Picturehouse and Jack's Off Licence (the best offie in the world, and I don't use those words lightly) without interacting with the poverty that surrounds you. I know, because that was my life before I started volunteering. Being a middle class white person or a poor person of colour in East Haringey is very much like living in Ul Qoma or Besźel in China Mieville's The City and the City.

I am trying to convey the complexities of Haringey, and you'll notice that I only mentioned East Haringey so far. After leaving the Green Rooms I hopped on a bus that took me on a tour of Haringey's suburban sprawl. Don't assume this was a bad experience. To summarise Jonathan Meades, sprawl is just sprawl, it can be good or bad.

Haringey has lots of lovely sprawl. There a Victorian terraces that are now blocks of flats. There are rows of small shops that border parks. There is interesting infill, something that I always find fascinating as they ask the question: what was there that needed to be filled in?

The bus took me past 1930s housing blocks that have ornate curved brick balconies and shopping parades where branded stores are being slowly driven out by local cafes/art galleries and interesting restaurants, whose menu can only be described as nationality X, but modern.

The bus ultimately arrived in Highgate Village. Filled with beautiful Georgian houses, which are mind bendingly expensive to own anywhere and in London I cannot imagine the level of wealth needed to purchase such a property. There is a level of wealth above the hipster craft beer drinker and above even the obnoxious City Boys.

Highgate Village does a better approximation of a country village than most other parts of London that have tried this. This is the village that many urban villages are modelled on. I dropped by The Flask, which is very much a country pub transposed to what is still TfL zone three. It has beautiful wooden interiors with nooks and carries that provide privacy. The most interesting part was wallpaper showing facades various buildings made in the neo gothic style. It goes without saying that the beer selection is very good, a full range of Fullers cask ales and craft beer is frequently stocked. There is also a leafy outside area complete with picnic tables that remind me of the canal side pub where I first sampled craft beer as a student.

Highgate Village, with its expensive cars and boutique shops, also has a pedigree for producing the country's poshest leftists. It has been home to both Miliband brothers and to Peter Mandelson (who is technically on the left, at least by this eye-wateringly posh part of the country’s standards). From its position on the side of a hill, Highgate Village commands views across London. On a clear day you can see Anish Kapoor’s Orbital in the Queen Elizabeth Park. From here it is possible to look down on the rest of London in every sense.

Highgate Village may seem more like Richmond, just as Wood Green feels more like Hackney, but the two places are united by being in same borough. A borough many people have tried to summarise glibly. Highgate is as disconnected from Wood Green (socially and politically) as the drinkers of the Green Rooms are from the drug dealers. In London we live shoulder to shoulder with people whose lives are completely unrecognizable to our own. This is something China Mieville understood. We share a space with people who are different to us, but we don't understand them and often we don’t see them. We're more likely to see their lives represented in our media than to engage with them.

The solution: take a walk more often. If you do this in Haringey then don't think of Haringey as a poor place or a place of hipster craft beer or a place full of wealthy people. Think of it as it is: varied.

Should we have a People’s Vote on Brexit?

Okay … deep breath … we’re going to talk about Brexit.

Before we start, I want to get this out of the way, just so there’s no doubt: I voted Remain. Remain with a capital R. I hated the leave campaign and how they lied about money, exploited love of the NHS and whipped up fear of immigrants. I think Brexit is a terrible idea, likely to reduce workers' rights, cause an economic shock that will hit the poorest the hardest and restart a sectarian war in Northern Ireland. Even if Brexit wasn’t an awful idea, it’s been handled atrociously by the Tories who can’t even agree amongst themselves as to which horrendous, dystopian visions of the future they want to force on everyone not lucky enough to be financially insulated from this bullshit.

Yes, I have criticisms of the EU and the official Remain campaign couldn’t find a decent argument with both hands. But on the whole if I could wave a magic wand and make the whole Brexit thing go away I would. Slight problem with that: I can’t.

Now, there’s lots of talk of having another referendum or a People’s Vote. The point of this is to stop this Brexit nightmare by democratic means. I’m not going to dignify the colossally stupid idea of stopping Brexit via a non-democratic means with any discussion. Ideas for what exactly the People Vote would be differ, but generally it’s another referendum between some form of Brexit and Britain remaining a full EU member.

Brexit and the left

A lot of the people who don’t like Jeremy Corbyn and don’t like his stance on Brexit are pushing this. The Venn diagram of being Labour, anti-Corbyn and anti-Brexit has a lot of overlap. Also, Corbyn is a Eurosceptic of long standing.

On the other hand, a lot of young people and middle class metropolitan lefties (I’m at least one of those things) are really into Corbyn and really anti-Brexit. Calls for a People’s Vote is not just a means to get rid of Corbyn without the awkwardness of winning a Labour leadership contest. A lot of people on the left think Brexit is a bad idea, handled badly and would like it to go away. Not least the Corbyn leadership who want to turn the many against the few (such as by supporting more money for the NHS), not the many against the many (by rubbing salt into Brexit wounds).

The case against holding another referendum is that most normal people really hate politics, politicians, the time the media devote to politicians, elections and most of all referendums. Everyone remember this?

Another referendum would empower the far right by handing them an easy narrative of the people betrayed by the elite. It would also massively empower the regular pro-Brexit right. “Brexit Betrayed!” Splashed across every right wing paper is a) something all right learning papers really want to do, and b) would mean right wing or far right government until the point the sea rises high enough to drown London.

The case for a second referendum

Another reason not do it is (and I haven’t read this elsewhere is so this maybe, shock horror, an original thought) that it wouldn’t stop Brexit anyway. Even if we stop the current Brexit process without making Arron Banks Fuhrer of Britain, what’s to stop Boris Johnson leading the Conservative Party to a huge election victory at the next general election on the platform of Brexit? After he hoovers up all Tories and Leave Labour voters he’ll take us out of the EU without another referendum or a parliamentary vote or anything. Does the People’s Vote do anything other than kick the can down the road?

The case for a second referendum is built on the idea that significant numbers of people have buyer’s remorse over Brexit. If we do this again, only the diehard immigration haters will vote Brexit; so the logic goes. I don’t think many people do regret their vote, to be honest.

They regret putting Theresa May in charge of Brexit for sure, but the idea itself remains resolutely popular. If anything we’re more Brexit-y now than we were in 2016, as it has been given the sheen of democratic approval - the government wouldn’t throw its weight behind not-Brexit next time. If you’re rolling your eyes right now: remember people do listen to the government, even when David Cameron is in charge of it.

That said … Brexit is currently a massive mess. A mess because it is filled with contradictions and I don’t see how we can resolve these contradictions without another referendum.

With Brexit, essentially, we have to choose between two models: Norway or Canada. High access and taking rules, or low access and striking our own trade deals. Peace in Northern Ireland or more control on immigration. This government is incapable of choosing between the two because it is unwilling to accept the negative consequences of either. I don’t see how other governments, say a Labour one, could resolve this either, as Labour voters are split between wanting controls on immigration and single market access.

Fantasy policy making

Brexit has only got as far as it has through fantasy promises made during the campaign and then fantasy policy making by those who were supposed to be the grown ups and sort this out. Too much bullshit has been said about Britain being able to negotiate something different from these two models. We can’t. Certainly not now, after we have wasted all our good will and nearly all our time. The fantasy crap has obscured the single choice facing Britain.

No one wants what May is offering. Her Chequers agreement won’t work and neither the EU, her party or MPs will accept it. There’s really only one way to resolve the fundamental Brexit split: put both options - with full details, no more fantasies about artificial intelligence, the blockchain or Churchill coming back from the dead to save us - on the table and let the people decide.

That way we can have a proper debate about Brexit, not the farce we had in 2016. People will have to decide whether they want (and newspaper/politicians will have to be honest about the trade offs between) a reduction on immigration and an end to EU red tape or peace in a Northern Ireland and economic stability.

Would there be an option for Remain in such a referendum? As in a complete no Brexit, time machine back to 2015, option? I don’t see this happening in the event of another referendum. Although, if we are going to give people a choice, it’s hard to argue that they shouldn’t be given the option to make it all go away. Whatever referendum we have will embolden the far right.

Two Brexits and one Remain

The real problem with this plan is: what happens if most people vote for the two Brexits but Remain still wins with about 45% of the vote? We would be in real trouble. Like, armed Gammons storming parliament trouble.

All options are risky. Also, there’s no time to arrange any of this and make sure that the Russians don’t rig it so that Nigel Farage becomes Prime Minister.

So, should we have a People’s Vote or another referendum? I don’t see how we can resolve the two-Brexits issue without one. Parliament would rather tear itself apart than resolve this problem themselves. I would like Remain on the ballot, under the proviso that Brexit is only cancelled if more people voted Remain than both Brexit options combined.

What I really want is for the government/parliament to resolve this. However, I don’t see that happening. Party politics and government are struggling to absorb the result of a referendum. The two seem incompatible. Certainly, having no plan for what happened after the referendum if Brexit won didn’t help. Also, not having a proper debate about what Brexit would actually mean during the referendum made things worse. For this, I blame both the Brexit and Remain press, but we can’t change what happened.

The entire process of Brexit has broken down. As we are going, I don’t see a way forward that doesn’t run the serious risk of a no deal, cliff edge, hospitals run out of medicine, Brexit. Maybe the unthinkable second referendum is the only way to settle this once and for all.

EU flag image created by Yanni Koutsomitis and used under creative commons.

What is the struggle for?

One of the most successful political movements on the 20th Century was the Civil Rights movement. It brought together millions of Americans, with different views and backgrounds to address a specific injustice. The movement had tangible outcomes in the form of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

We can learn from this when building a left wing movement in the UK. For example, having a clear goal that can unite people. This is one reason why the campaign to make Jeremy Corbyn leader of the Labour Party worked so well; having a specific goal brought together people with a range of distinct and indistinct political opinions.

The Corbyn campaign was supported by people who felt left wing and wanted a broader change in society. Corbyn was able to unite this desire (a desire for people disagreed on many details of politics) around a specific outcome: becoming Labour leader.

Completing this goal is not the end of the struggle. We have a long way to go before any meaningful social change in enacted. This leads me to ask: "what is Corbyn Labour and the wider left wing movement behind it trying to achieve?" What is the struggle for? It's not enough to say "make Corbyn Prime Minister," what do we want him to do after that? What are the tangible outcomes?

The end of neoliberalism

One answer is to end neoliberalism, the political ideology that believes free markets bring about the optimum allocation of resources and that it is government's role to make markets freer. Getting rid of neoliberalism is a good idea, but what ideology do we want to replace neoliberalism with?

Socialism has become a byword for opposition to neoliberalism. Do you want to nationalise the railways, spend more on the NHS, increase benefits, beef-up trade unions and invest more in economic development of poorer areas? Then you're probably a socialist. However, being someone who is more economically left wing than Tony Blair is not what socialism used to be.

What I described above is Keynesian economics and fairly timid Keynesianism at that. From what I can see, the economic program of a future Corbyn government would be to return to the policies of Harold Wilson's Labour government. This would make a Corbyn's government the third most radically left wing Labour government out of five. That is not what I thought was being offered when Corbyn stood to be party leader.

Corbyn clearly wants to change Britain's foreign policy, or more accurately the entire way that Britain acts in the world. During his years on the backbenches, foreign policy is where Corbyn concentrated his efforts, mainly through solidarity with various oppressed groups around the world.

Foreign policy

Certainly a Corbyn government would have a radically different foreign policy to any previous British government. Britain is not the international heavyweight it once was and now we  have lost our ability to influence EU foreign policy our influence is diminished further. I am not sure what global impact the Corbyn government will have, beyond a greater capacity to make gestures of solidarity. If Corbyn was PM would he be able to stop the Syrian Civil War?

A focus on foreign policy would overlook the crucial role of domestic politics. What will a Corbyn government do to fix the problems in Britain? I am worried that the objectives of socialism has become changing the people at the top of the machinery of state to be nice people and then let them fix social problems with said machinery. This ignores the fact that the machinery itself is part of the problem, no matter who is in charge of it. We need to change society, not just put Corbyn at the top of it.

The stated aim of a socialist government should be creating the conditions to transition our economy to a post-capitalist one, providing a minimum standard of living to all its citizens, reducing inequality in all its forms, addressing climate change and diminish in the power of the state wherever possible. This is what socialism should be about.

This will require radical new policies that go beyond nationalising the railways, spending more on the NHS or even introducing Universal Basic Income. There are many areas we need to think about, such as how taxation, housing, unions, health, transport and work. We need to ask questions, such as who has social power, and how do we measure values?

Change society, not the Prime Minister

A lot of this can't be done at the Westminster level and will need a broader movement aimed at changing society instead of just changing who is PM. I am sure that Corbyn is a nice guy, but what we need to achieve is bigger than him, bigger than any person or political party. Party and government are tools to help us change society, but we need to also build new tools that are more suited to the task of improving people’s lives.

We can look at the Civil Rights Movement and how we are a much more racially tolerant society now than we were in the 1960s as proof that broad social movements can change society.

The photo of Corbyn at a CND event was taken by Garry Knight and is used under creative commons.

Between the Mega Spoons and the Brown Jug: A tale of the Kent coast

The writer who best captures the sense of a place is Jonathan Meades, mainly because he brings his own experience of a place into how he captures it. Meades’s writing and documentaries shows that you cannot know a place outside of your subjective understanding of it.

I always thought that if you wanted to know a place in Britain, the best way to start is by visiting its pubs. Pubs reflect the complex web of class, community, politics, history and people that make a town or suburb distinctive.

With this in mind, I headed down to Ramsgate on the Kent coast to visit Britain’s largest pub, the so called “Mega Spoons”, and to see what it can teach me about British’s small coastal town.

The Ramsgate pub scene is dominated by The Royal Pavilion, which was built in 1904 and is now a Wetherspoons. Its presence looms from the front of town, despite it being a low squat building, and all drinkers in the town feel its pull wherever they are.

On the waterfront

The waterfront is lined with beautiful Georgian buildings, which are nice as anything found in Bath or Islington. I was staying in the Royal Temple Yacht club, which is a charming hotel that appears as if time stopped in the early 1960s. It stocks a good range of local ales and was decorated with oil paintings and small models of ships, which should be mandatory for coastal pubs.

The Yacht club very much represented the old world of Ramsgate. It’s thick carpet and polished brass handrails belong to a different age from the shabby chic of London’s Antic pubs. It is a place that is much alive, set next to a row of seafront restaurants and bars that hummed with activity in the late afternoon. As did the Queen Charlotte, a bohemian pub a few streets away that boasted a wide selection of beers from popular breweries.

Then to the Mega Spoons, a welcoming an airy pub, which is impressive given its size and dominance over the town. The sea front terrace is an excellent in the warm summer early evening. It’s a shame to think of this beautiful building standing empty and I’m glad that it has found a use worthy of its former royal status.

The Mega Spoons is the epitome of Spoons, and Spoons is the epitome of the modern pub experience. It is a social leveller, bringing together people from all aspects of Ramsgate life, boasts a wide selection of cask ale and craft beer and wholesome food. I ordered food and drink via their app and enjoyed libations late into the night. The only issue was that in an inebriated state I struggled to open the door to my room at the Yacht club.

The bus to Broadstairs

The next morning I took the bus to Broadstairs, further along the Kent coast. As the bus wound its way through the back streets of Thanet I noticed it was a different story to sunny seafront I had visited the night before. Only a few streets away from the Mega spoons and the poverty became apparent. The back streets of Thanet were reminiscent of Skerton or other poor places in the North of England. Not somewhere that was supposedly gentrifying due to people being displaced to Kent by London’s housing crisis. The wealth of London is not spreading through the South East.

This is mirrored in the pub situation across the country. Pubs in London are going from strength to strength. So many are opening that old shops, cinemas, working men’s clubs and even a former Job Centre are turning into pubs. Micro breweries are springing up everywhere.

Across the rest of the country pubs are closing at two a week and many rural communities are left without a pub. Wetherspoons continues to expand and the centre of Britain’s large cities still have many pubs, but the future for the estate pub outside of the wealthier suburbs looks bleak. The causes of this are myriad and reflect the current unequal economic state of the country.

In the back streets of Thanet my bus passed a pub called the Brown Jug (complete with a giant brown ceramic jug on the front porch), which was closed and boarded up. It looks like it was once a much loved local that had fallen on hard times. Tourists may be patronising the Mega Spoons or seafront pubs, but a few streets away pubs can’t stay open.

Fundamental division

This shows the fundamental divisions in British society. Thanet is an area split between wealthy former Londoners (or wealthy Londoners visiting the Mega Spoons) and suburbs of the “left behind”. Thanet is represented in the European Parliament by Nigel Farage and voted heavily for Brexit. I can’t help but feel that this division between the patrons of bohemian craft beer pubs and people whose locals are closing is part of the divide that was opened up in British society since the referendum.

The state of our pubs shows the emotional underpinning of the divisions in Britain. Some people see their lives getting worse, their communities declining and their pubs closing and want it to stop. Some people never leave their microbreweries and craft beer pubs and can’t see why anyone else thinks differently to them. Some people don’t understand shabby chic, exposed pipes, e-sports bars or board game cafes, and feel that the patrons of such places have contempt for the old fashioned boozer.

Even if the government paid for the Brown Jug to reopen I don’t think this would help the situation. We need solution that brings everyone into a prosperous future, whether they drink in sports bars, Spoons or Antic pubs. How we achieve this is a question too big to find the solution to in one weekend by the sea.

Taking stock of Corbyn so far

I used to think that it was impossible for an overtly socialist politician to be leader of the Labour Party. The idea is completely antithetical to how the Labour was run for all of my adult life. Everything I knew about politics told me that it would be impossible for Jeremy Corbyn to have gotten as far as he has. Not only becoming Labour Party leader and being popular with the members, but also having a decent chance of becoming Prime Minister at the next election.

I used to think that radicalism was separate from mainstream politics. Maybe a small, local campaign somewhere could come up with an interesting policy idea that might possibly be more widely adopted after it had been watered down a bit and stripped of its radical context. There was no way that the Labour Party as a whole would be heading in a radical direction. Yet here we find ourselves.

The result in last year's general election was incredible. To go from being so far behind in the polls to improving Labour's position was an enormous achievement. One that came from the hard work of activists across the country. This shows that left wing policies can be popular when offered to the electorate and disproves the New Labour idea that Labour must tack towards the centre to win power.

Brexit and small towns

One year on from the election seems like a good moment to pause and to take stock of the Corbyn project so far. We shouldn't be complacent; there is still a long way to go before Labour can form a government. So a frank assessment of where we are now will give us some insights in what we should do next.

Brexit is a real threat to Corbyn's chances of becoming Prime Minister. The country remains divided between Leave and Remain camps and has settled down to a grudging acceptance that Brexit must go ahead. As a Remain voter, it’s painful to admit that it's tactically suicidal for Labour to oppose Brexit at this point. Becoming the party of Remain voters will not gain Labour the votes it needs to form a government. Neither will halfway measures such as offering a referendum on the final deal. There are a lot of pitfalls for Labour to avoid, on this issue.

There is also the problem that Labour is not making enough gains in small towns. It is clear that there was not enough liberal metropolitan voters in the county for Labour to form a government. Labour needs to win over more voters in small towns to gain power. An economically redistributive policy offer will help here, but more needs to be done to bridge the vast cultural gap opening up between the Labour Party and those who live in small towns.

If Labour can address these two crucial issues then the possibilities are staggering. Not only a return to power for Labour, but the chance to pass reforms that will address the big problems facing the country. What I want to see from the party is more radicalism in the face of these challenges, an openness to the far reaching reforms that are needed.

Radical reforms

These radical reforms will need to think about more than how much we spend on schools and hospitals, although these are important. We need to ask questions about how we relate to the state, how we participate in democracy, how we think about value and how we save the natural environment.

We need to ask ourselves: what is that we want to achieve? It’s not enough to get Corbyn into power, we need to know what we will do when he gets there. All the tactical thinking over Brexit will be for nothing it if we don't know what we’re fighting for.

Is the plan undoing neoliberalism and the damage that cold ideology has done to this country? An end to austerity and giving a lifeline to those who have suffered through years of cuts? Is it the rebirth of Keynesianism and idea that there is a role for the state to play in curbing the worst excesses of markets. Is it Universal Basic Income and giving a minimum standard of living to everyone? Is it something else more radical and more powerful?

We need something concrete to build the movement that can win the next election. Something that we are offering everyone in this country. Something that will transform their lives for the better. I believe that we can do this. We can change the country.

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

What can the British left learn from Russian propaganda in Germany?

Yeah, it’s wordy title, but Russian propaganda is complicated issue that affects the left globally. I have been thinking about this a lot recently and what follows are some conclusions I came to with the help of some clever people who study this sort of thing.

Being, in many ways, between the USA and Russia, the British left has had a complicated relationship to Russian foreign policy. Many view it as a necessary check on American Imperialism. In some instances, hostility to American foreign policy has muted into support for Vladimir Putin and his own brutal Imperialism.

I have criticism of any left wing politics that involves support for a brutal authoritarian who surrounds himself with, and represents the interests of, billionaire oligarchs. Until recently, I thought that this flirtation with Putin (usually expressed as sharing Russia Today news posts that support the Kremlin's line in left wing Facebook groups) was a peculiarly British thing.

I had assumed that things were different in Germany and that the German left would be united in their opposition to Putin. This is because Germany is the major player in the two institutions that are the most effective check on Putin, the EU and NATO. Britain is trying desperately to walk away from one and austerity is testing its commitment to the other. During this period of national navel gazing, we are leaving the crucial work of standing up to Putin to Germany.

This neat assumption that I had made was shattered recently when I read a paper called Make Germany Great Again by Anne Applebaum, Peter Pomerantsev, Melanie Smith and Chloe Colliver and published by Arena, based at the Institute of Global Affairs (IGA) within the LSE.

The paper looks into the Kremlin's attempts to interfere with last year's German Federal Election. The paper’s authors (who shall henceforth be referred to as Applebaum et al to save space more than anything else) look at the Kremlin's attempt to use online propaganda to influence the far right in Germany and the Russian-German community. However, the sections of the paper I read with the most interest were about the Kremlin's attempts to influence the far left in Germany.

The German left is a not the single monolithic institution I had naively assumed it was. Applebaum et al say that several groups on the Germany left are critical of Putinism, usually those who support feminism, environmentalism and human rights. There are also left wing groups that flirt with Putinism - as some elements of the British left do. These tend to be anti-Imperialist, anti-Zionist and against US hegemony.

I was surprised to learn that there are significant Putin-sympathetic groups on the Germany left. Applebaum et al say that the main German radical left party, Die Linke (literally The Left) has: "grown closer to the Russian government in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine." This is characterised by following the Kremlin's line on NATO, the US and Syria.

Some groups have a more complicated relations with Russia, such Alliance 90/The Green Party who criticise Russia as being undemocratic, but in the words of Applebaum et al: "occasionally portrays the Kremlin as the victim of the West." There are also groups on the German left that are strongly opposed to Putin, such as the anti-fascist movement.

After reading the work of Applebaum et al, I felt that this divide between pro and anti-Putin left wing groups in Germany is not a difference in ideology per se. It's not about different outlooks on the world or different thinking about the Putin regime. I believe it shows the differing media diets of different left wing groups.

Applebaum et al talk about how in Germany: "the far left users in our network map showed far less reliance on fringe outlets as top sources of information than those in the far right." Applebaum et al also state that the German left as a whole is less likely to share disinformation and more likely to debunk fake news.

I believe that this will be reflected in the German left wing groups that are anti-Putin. Certainly, what I have seen in Britain is that the left wing groups that are the most scornful of mainstream media are the ones that are most likely to be sharing Kremlin propaganda. British left wing groups with a varied media diet, are generally more hostile to Putin.

Applebaum et al talk about the: "rapid expansion of transnational networks of information and toxic speech." It would be wrong to see Putin as the spider in the middle of this web or as some kind of sinister puppet master of online hatred. Nationalists the world over, from Donald Trump’s supporters to Britain First, have been effectively organising online either with or without any aid from Putin. It would also be wrong to think that the infiltration of Kremlin propaganda into political debate is exclusively a right wing problem.

Applebaum et al have recommendations for the media in Germany to tackle the problems of pro-Kremlin propaganda. I think we need to take on these recommendations as a project for the left and not to leave it up to Western governments that have their own agenda to push - or might just do a terrible job of implementing the recommendations.

For example, Applebaum et al recommend that Germany: "invest in sustainable digital literacy programmes" and that "critical thinking skills need to not only be taught in schools, but also delivered via media and public awareness campaigns for adults." I can imagine this being done terribly. Imagine government infomercials telling worried parents about the signs that their child is reading Russian propaganda. Then imagine this ad campaign designed by a committee in the most centrist dad way possible. Noble as at intentions of this campaign would be, the state does not have the ear of the people the campaign needs to reach.

The left needs to tackle on this important work of teaching critical thinking and digital literacy so that well informed citizens can spot media propaganda, whether it's pro-corporate, pro-Russia bombing whoever they feel like this week or pro-America bombing whoever they feel like this week.

Applebaum et al also talk about the need to: "reduce the financial incentives for disinformation." As social media sites monopolise and sell our attention, and are more than happy to spread Russian propaganda or extremist content in the process, then a left wing critiques of these media companies and why they care more about making money than protecting their values of our society is necessary. We can’t talk about financial incentives for disinformation, without critiquing capitalism itself.

At the end of reading Make Germany Great Again, I was aware that the issues I thought were local to the British left are global. There are many similarities between Britain and Germany. How "wedge issues", such as immigration, are exploited by the far right or how a loss of trust in the mainstream media is creating gaps in the media diet that pro-Kremlin news sources are happy to fill.

The changes to media and technology of the last ten years present a global challenge to the left and to the Western governments. The left needs to globally rise to this challenge and offer a means for people to understand this brave new world that we live in. If we don't then the vacuum of media authority will be filled by authoritarians of one stripe or another. We need to be critical of Putin, and of our Western governments, and of the media companies that are "disrupting" how politics is done with new technology.

There is a lot of passion on the left right now and a lot of good new ideas. There has never been a better time to be on the left and there is a huge need for a prominent left wing narrative in our politics. I believe that we can make the difference the world needs.

Are other governments lying to us worse than our own government lying to us?

Whilst bouncing around left wing Facebook groups I came across this article by Caitlin Johnstone. It makes the argument that we cannot discuss Russian disinformation on social media (the stuff that may have helped get Donald Trump get elected) without talking about how Western governments lied when making the case for the invasion of Iraq. Johnstone says:

“Any argument about the truth of what’s happening with regard to Syria or Russia which does not begin with an explicit and thorough explanation as to why this is completely different from Iraq should be instantly rejected as illegitimate.”

This made me think that we often talk about the propaganda spread on social media by Russia as inherently bad, whilst failing to explain why it is worse than the lies told by our own government or our "free" Western media.

I am not naive enough to believe that our government doesn't lie to us. I believe that blind and uncritical faith in your government is a bad thing. I am also not naive enough to believe that Russia doesn't have a geo-political agenda in spreading its own media narratives via social media. Russia Today is not criticising the monarch on the weekend of the Royal Wedding because it stands for making Britain a more egalitarian society.

I thought about the issue Johnstone raised and realised that the whole thing boils down to one question: "Why are other governments lying to us worse than our own government lying to us?" Answering this question took a considerable amount of thought. Below are the conclusions I came to:

Firstly, let's take the instances of Russian disinformation spread via social media. By disinformation I mean stories that challenge or contradict the accepted narrative of our domestic media.

I believe these are a bad thing. Not because I believe our Western governments are paragons of truth and virtue, but because I believe that this disinformation is not spread with the aim of building a fairer and more just society in the west. Disinformation that helps advance the cause of Vladimir Putin is not good. It needs to be said to everyone on the left, loud and clear, that Putin is not our friend. He may oppose Western foreign policy that we also oppose, but that doesn't make him one of the good guys.

Putin is an ultra-capitalist, supported by billionaire oligarchs. He suppresses free speech and opposition in Russia. He throws around his military weight as much as America does, and he has allied himself with very conservative factions in his society that attack the rights of LGBTQ people. He has people he doesn’t like killed.

The disinformation spread by Russia is not designed to educate people, but is designed to turn us against each other. It exploits the divisions in Western society (young v old, town v country, rich v poor, conservative v liberal, etc.) to make it difficult for our society to function because we are constantly fighting each other. Look at how well Russia was able to use social media to exacerbate the divisions in American society before the 2016 election. America is more divided now than ever.

This hostility and suspicion of each other cases us to lose faith in the institutions of government and democracy. Not just faith in one government, party or leader, but faith in the entire political mechanism. This will make it harder to change society for the better - something I very much want to do - via democratic means.

It must be said that the above also happens when Western governments abuse their power and/or lie to their citizens. Again, the Iraq War is a good example of this, as is the expenses scandal that has shaken faith in democracy.

Stepping aside from the all the bad effects of Russia lying to us, is it harder to address the question of whether a generic foreign power's lies are worse than our own government's lies? All lies undermine faith in the idea of an objective truth. I am critical of the idea of objective truth; what is one person's objective truth is another's subjective opinion. Again the war in Iraq is a good example. We were told an objective truth, that Saddam Hussein was attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and this turned out to be just the subjective opinion of the establishment with no basis in fact.

After a lot of thought, I came to the conclusion that the answer to the above question is no. Devoid of context, all lies are equally bad. However, what I also decided is that the question of whether generic country X lying to us is worse than our own government, misses the most important thing about disinformation.

We are lied to all the time: by Russia, by our own government, by newspapers in our own country. Pro-Brexit newspapers and politicians lied when they said that Brexit would be easy. Pro-Remain politicians lied when the said voting to leave the EU would trigger an instant economic meltdown. There are lots of lies out there, but the key question is why do we believe them? Also, why do we believe specific lies and not others?

The answer to these questions involves digging into the key issues in politics today. The answer is that because we are divided society, suspicious of groups who think differently to us. It’s because of rising inequality, which means that people in the same country, even the same city, live in vastly different economic worlds. It's because of the fragmentation of news media caused by technology and the rise of filter bubbles on social media sites. It's because we are becoming increasingly partisan in who we associate with and talk to.

If none of this were happening, then it wouldn't be so easy for either the Daily Mail or Russia Today to lie to us. Fully explaining these issues is too big a job to get into here, but I hope to dive into them in following blog posts. I will say that you need a leftist political framework to get to grips with them. You need a left wing political view to understanding rising inequality, social strife and the problems of big tech companies.

After all this thinking, and I like nothing better than having a good deep think about politics, I have determined that all of us on the left should be against Russian disinformation aimed at undermining democracy, but also have a healthy scepticism of our own government. To get to the truth of the big political issues, that disinformation exposes, you need to tackle them from a left wing perspective.

The truth about local election results

Hundreds of Labour activists across the country made a huge effort in this week's local elections. It was great to see so many people inspired by Jeremy Corbyn to get out on the doorstep and make the case for Labour directly to the electorate.

The results arrived over Thursday night and Friday morning and it looked like the hard work had paid off. Labour won 2,350 councillors to the Conservatives’ 1,332. Labour also took control of Plymouth Council and became the largest party in Trafford, meaning that the Tories no longer control any councils in Greater Manchester.

However, the view from the commentariat is that these results were not good for Labour. The general consensus is that this election was a draw between Labour and Tories, which seems unfair to Labour who won more councillors. 

False equivalence

Why would anyone claim this? False equivalence is certainly a factor here. Due to the BBC's hardwired neutrality, when both Labour and the Tories claim victory the BBC decides it was a draw rather than making a judgement that could be viewed as partisan. The issue is that this desire to be neutral can itself be interpreted as partisan when one party has won many more councillors than the other.

Another factor is that it is possible to read these results as positive for both parties. This might sound strange, as Labour won more elections than the Tories, but bear with me here.

Labour won more councillors, but didn't do as well as they wanted to. They failed to take Westminster and Wandsworth councils. The Tories on the other hand did better than was expected, winning Barnet and Redditch. As local elections are primarily seen as an indicator of how people will vote in a general election, this fits into a narrative of Labour's performance declining from year's general election (where Labour did well, but failed to gain a majority) and the Tories support increasing from last year (where they did poorly, but stayed in power).

Labour did well in the great cities of England, but the Tories did well in towns. The UKIP vote collapsed, but the Lib Dems did better than expected. There is no clear path to a majority for either main party. Certainly not while the country remains polarised between Leave and Remain groups and Labour is forced to do an awkward dance to appeal to both camps simultaneously.

Divided country

Labour's vote is becoming more metropolitan and the Tories is becoming more focused on small towns. There are not enough voters in either place for either party to win a majority so something must change, or we will be stuck with weak minority governments for a long time. Anyone who supports Corbyn’s vision of radical change to this country is hoping for a sizeable Labour majority after the next election.

The truth is that Labour did well in the local elections and were the clear winner. However, it is also true that the elections were a disappointment for Labour if they want to win the next general election. The good news is that the election is still likely to be years away and there is plenty of time to Labour to learn and get better.

Labour's performance over the last year and a bit has been inspiring, but we need to do more to win the next general election. Loads of people are being drawn into the Labour Party and many of them are out canvassing and making the case for Labour, which is really inspiring to see. With this energy we can go far.

Inspiration

The Party needs to grow this momentum (if you'll pardon the pun) to get rid of the Tories. Remember this is the party that has presided over a huge rise in child poverty and homelessness and brought the NHS to the brink of collapse. It's vital that Labour kick them out of power at the next general election and to do that we all need to work harder and win more.

We can do this. We can get more people involved. We can get more people out making the case for Labour, not just in the great cities but in the towns and suburbs that the Tories have forgotten. Places that need the change that Labour offers. We can spread the word further and get more Labour voters. I believe Labour can win the next general election.

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

This viaduct is more impressive when you know what went into building it

Muslims visit the Al-Haram Mosque in Mecca, Catholics go to St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, Classicists go to the Colosseum in Rome, and British railway geeks go to Ribblehead on the Cumbrian/Yorkshire boarder to be awestruck by history.

The Ribblehead Viaduct has to be the most impressive viaduct in England. Opened in 1875 it spans Batty Moss, carrying the line that connects Carlisle to Settle. It has 24 massive stone arches that rise 32 meters (104 feet) above the moor. Take a second to look at the picture above and drink in vastness.

Ironically the viaduct is best approached on foot, not via the railway, to get the sense of its sheer scale. It dominates the landscape and symbolises humanity's domination over nature, a popular belief of the Victorian society that built it. When you approach the arches you are stuck by the sense that this structure has the proportions of natural feature, not a human building. It is built on the scale of the hills that surround it.

It is a scale that defies that sense as it is impossible to take in the entire structure in from one viewing point. At a distance, the craftsmanship is hard to appreciate. Up close, it is too big to be viewed by one individual. The same is true of monumental religious buildings, from St Peters to Borobudur.

The Ribblehead Viaduct is more humbling when you know the human cost that went into building it. So many navvies (manual labourers working on civil engineering projects) died in its construction that the railway paid for an expansion of the local graveyard. Shanty towns grew up around the viaduct, which took four years to build. There were smallpox outbreaks and industrial accidents that led to the death of more than 100 navvies.

British rail spent a substantial amount of money renovating the viaducts to keep it operational and it was listed in November 1988. Ribblehead might have been the vision of engineer John Sydney Crossley, but it was built by bloody hard graft from hundreds of ordinary Victorian workers.

Today when we think of the railways we think of big brands or the thrillionaire businessmen who own it, like Richard Branson. When we think about its history we think about Brunel or Stevenson, intelligent people of great vision, but we overlook the sheer volume of hard work that ordinary people did to make the railways.

This is why the railways belong to us all, regardless of how it is broken up into companies and bits of it are sold to different owners. The hard, dangerous work that our ancestors put into building the railways cannot be dismissed or forgotten. The sacrifices that the railways’ builders made (many with their lives) cannot be bought by private companies or traded on stock markets.

The only fitting tribute to the thousands of people who lost their lives building the Ribblehead Viaduct, or Box Tunnel, or many other Victorian civil engineering projects is to bring the railways back into public ownership. That way the benefits of the hard work of the ordinary people who build the railways can be shared by all of us, and not captured by a few ultra-rich individuals.

The monumental, awe inspiring scale of Ribblehead stands as a testament to what the hard work and sacrifices of ordinary people can achieve. It is part of us all and we should all own it.

The Hungarian election shows how Britain needs to be worried about the far right

Every day the world seems to inch closer to completely falling apart. Donald Trump is stepping up the bellicose rhetoric against Bashar Al-Assad and his friend Vladimir Putin, Russia has launched a chemical weapons attack on British soil and London’s murder rate has overtaken New York’s.

Amongst all this you could be forgiven for overlooking the re-election of Viktor Orbán as Prime Minister of Hungary. On the service it doesn’t seem remarkable that an election took place in the world’s 58th largest economy, but Orbán’s re-election requires our attention - perhaps more so than Trump’s misadventures in international relations.

Orbán won his third time as Hungary’s Prime Minister by stirring up hatred of migrants and refugees. He has claimed increasing immigration would lead to “terrorism and crime, and would expose our womenfolk and daughters to danger.”

It is frightening how effective Orbán’s strategy has been. It’s unusual that a politician can remain consistently popular for as long as Orbán has. He has been Prime Minister of Hungary since 2000, weathering the financial crash, the Eurozone crisis and the migrant crisis by stoking fear of vulnerable people fleeing war, famine and poverty.

This is not the first time that hatred and fear of migrants has been used by unscrupulous right wing politicians to swing an election. What Orbán has done in Hungary is only a more brazen version of Trump’s rhetoric about Mexicans or the misinformation spread by Vote Leave ahead of the Brexit referendum. Across the world, right wing populist and aspiring authoritarians are exploiting fears to get the results they want.

Orbán is not the first strongman to use fear of migrants to gain power, but he could be the most successful and the most frightening. Orbán’s Fidesz party held onto their two-third majority in the Hungarian parliament following Sunday’s election, which means he retains the ability to pass amendments to the Hungarians constitution. Orbán has already made changes to turn Hungary into what he describes as an “illiberal democracy” a place where there are opposition parties and free elections, but the democratic process is hampered by a lack of independent media.

Hungary is the not the only country currently taking an anti-democratic turn. Poland and Austria both have their authoritarian leaders who dislike criticism and threaten the foundations of liberal democracy. However, the country Orbán’s Hungary bares the closest relationship to is Russia, where democracy is seriously threatened and it appears all but impossible that Putin will relinquish power.

Those of us who live in Western democracies should be very worried about the rise of these right wing authoritarian strongmen, who surf into power on a wave of xenophobic hatred of migrants and then get to work dismantling liberal democracy. Our democracy is only stable as long as we protect it.

There are plenty of aspiring despots in the UK. If Nigel Farage, Arron Banks and other high-priests of Brexit get their hands on the reigns of power they are likely to have as much respect for the institutions of liberal democracy as Putin does. These are the people who look at what Orbán is doing in Hungary and see the possibilities of what they can do here.

The centre and the left have very little that can counter the persuasive power of right wing populists like Orbán. The liberal LMP party did well in metropolitan Budapest, but poorly in the rest of the country. Hungary’s official opposition party is Jobbik, another nationalist party. From Hillary Clinton to the Remain campaign, liberal arguments are failing to connect with voters. Unless we can find a way to convince people of the value of an open, tolerant society, with healthy democratic institutions, then aspiring authoritarians will use their prejudices to undermine democracy.

The solution to the problem posed by Orbán and others is not to give into the easy option of demonising vulnerable people who are fleeing their homes and looking for a safe country to make a new life in. The solution is bridge the gap of understanding and to find a way to convince voters that liberal democracy offers a better solution to their problems then the nightmare of totalitarian illiberal democracy.

This needs to be done before it is too late. Authoritarian populists are on the march across the world, from Hungary to Britain, and they are coming to dismantle our democracy.

How the far right is using anger on social media to change politics

Restaurant reviews aren’t something that I read. Occasionally one, such as this, pops up in my Facebook or Twitter feed. So, according to Facebook or Twitter, I am only interested in especially bad restaurant reviews.

I know that I’m not interested in particularly good or bad restaurant reviews, but the really bad ones (especially for a high profile restaurant) get a lot of shares and thus reach a wider audience. I am part of that wider audience for bad reviews that get shared a lot.

Film reviewer Mark Kermode has said that his worse reviews are more widely shared and travel further than his more positive ones. I can remember his rants about terrible films such as Dirty Grampa or Entourage: The Movie, but I can’t remember any of his glowing reviews off the top of my head.

Why do bad reviews travel further? It’s because there’s something satisfying about sharing an especially bad or angry review. A powerful sense of social media schadenfreude. There is something satisfying about saying, “take a look at this guy get taken down a peg”.

The same applies for political stories. It is cathartic to share an especially angry comment piece, that really lays into a politician or party that we hate. It’s much more cathartic than sharing a piece that celebrates someone we love. Most cathartic of all is sharing a piece expressing how angry we are about a snub or injustice aimed at a politician we love. Those pieces are shared more widely than the worst restaurant reviews.

This mechanism is essential to how social media platforms work. Stories that inspire an emotional reaction get more shares and find their way into in our time lines. By showing the most shared content - along with a few smart design tricks - platforms like Facebook or Twitter keep our eyeballs on their apps. There is even evidence this might be addictive.

Angry content seems to get the most shares and engagement, much more than anything positive, so social networks are designed to bring angry content to millions of people. This has not escaped the attention of the far right who are using this mechanism to reach a bigger audience via Facebook or Twitter than ever before. We thought Nazis were a thing of the past. Now they’re in our timelines recruiting people, getting stronger.

In the news this week has been data firm Cambridge Analytica, the information warfare mercenaries for hire connected to everything from Brexit to the election of Donald Trump. Angry shares on Facebook are Cambridge Analytica’s weapons in their electoral battles. Their “psychographics” are just clever ways of finding out what will push different groups of people’s rage buttons and how to target them on social media.

What Cambridge Analytica and the alt-right have in common is that they are taking advantage of how angry content is shared on social media platforms to reach a wider audience. They are using their intelligence to engineer the spread of their propaganda via our cathartic rage-sharing.

Social media platforms have an important role in this. We get most of our news via Facebook or Twitter but they don’t make money by providing quality news, social media platforms make their money by selling advertising to engaged users. They need the engaging content to keep users hooked and angry content is the best hook. By supplying users with a constant stream of rage-shares, they are keeping us hooked and consuming more adverts.

All this has an affect offline. What goes on online is no longer a separate world. Nazis openly marching in Charlottesville, attacks on refugees in Italy or the far right making noises in the UK is all possible because of the exposure these groups are getting online. They are growing, recruiting more members and getting stronger. We should be very worried about this.

What is the solution to all this? Better regulation of social media platforms would help. Facebook and others need to recognise their obligations as a media company not to spread hate speech and to provide an informed discourse to their readers.

We have a role too as social media users. We need to be responsible social media users. If we carry on constantly being angry we are just fueling the rise of hate preachers or the far right. We need to think before we rage-share. There is real world consequences for creating an atmosphere of constant rage on social media. One place to start would be to share reviews of places we like to eat. Bon appetit.

How is what Cambridge Analytica did different to selling mattresses online?

A lot of the discussion of Cambridge Analytica obscures what it does with fancy language such as “information warfare” and “psychographics”. I think what they do is digital marketing, not too different to what agencies all over the world do to sell everything from flights to car insurance.

The data that Cambridge Analytica has (not just from Facebook), and the sophisticated understanding they have of psychology from Cambridge University academics, means they can do very detailed segmentation, targeting and positioning work on populations the size of the entire US electorate. STP is the bread and butter of what digital marketers do.

Cambridge Analytica work on a scale much bigger than what most digital marketers are capable of, (it’s easier to do this sort of thing when you have Robert Mercer’s checkbook) but it’s not radically different in approach to techniques used by the Obama campaign - or online mattress sellers.

Cambridge Analytica’s segmentation of the US electorate are very detailed and their political understanding means they know exactly who to target to have the desired effect and they know what messages these people will respond well to, (that’s positioning) but this is what digital marketers around the world are doing. Information warfare, whether it’s by Cambridge Analytica or Russia’s Internet Research Agency, seems to be little different to the process that made me a customer of Beer 52.

There are question marks over whether Cambridge Analytica is effective; most digital marketers are keen to demonstrate that their methods are effective. It’s difficult to say what got Donald Trump elected. His Tweets, false equivalence of both candidates’ flaws, Russian interference, dislike of Hillary Clinton, democrats being incumbents, the FBI email investigation and a vacant supreme court seat where certainly factors, along with fake news made by Macedonian teenagers and the general left/right cultural divide in America. It’s hard to identify the precise impact that Cambridge Analytica had amongst all of this.

Whistleblower Christopher Wylie implied that what Cambridge Analytica did went beyond digital marketing when he exposed their activities to the Guardian. He said that there activity was “worse than bullying,” because “if you do not respect the agency of people, anything that you’re doing after that point is not conducive to a democracy.”

This implies that Cambridge Analytica are doing goes beyond marketing for politicians and is against democracy. It implies that Cambridge Analytica took the data they had from Facebook (and other sources), put it through standard digital marketing processes and created weapons. If you can use your digital marketing to bring down a government then it’s a weapon. If you can use your digital marketing to prop up a tyrant then it is a weapon. What is a Kalashnikov, but a weapon to overgrow a government? The same can be said of digital marketing that destabilises democracy.

What I find most scary about Cambridge Analytica and what they can do is that its segments are so detailed, its targeting so sophisticated and their positioning so subtle that it would allow politicians to speak in very different ways to different audiences. Using this, politicians can safety identify people who would respond positively to racist messaging, exploit those prejudices and it be so subtle that other supporters of said politician or party, who would be horrified by racist campaigning, would never find out about it.

What has stopped politicians from appealing to our most carnal hatreds is fear that they will be found out. Very detailed segmentation, targeting and positioning makes it possible this would go unnoticed.

If this scares you as much as it scares me, then that’s good as it means we can do something about it. This could be the moment that people wake up to the risks of social media firms and big tech companies, just as they woke up to the problems of big tobacco firms in the 1960s.

We can pass laws that regulate these firms. The complete absence of regulation that they have operated in so far has led to this scandal, but we can prevent worse abuses of data in the future. It used to be possible to advertise cigarettes as healthy, now we are aware how bad such advertising would be and we don’t allow it. Maybe soon everyone will be aware of how bad digital marketing for politicians is?

“Launching the new Geoloqi website” by Aaron Parecki is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Marx was right about capitalism today

Karl Marx:  hear his name socialists and tremble. It is he who laid the foundations of all the great work that has come after, from the Russian Revolution to the British welfare state. All future generations of socialists should behold the awesomeness of his works.

I have a lot of respect for Marx and his contribution to left wing politics. Although, I have always resisted the temptation to turn him into the socialist equivalent of a prophet. The above is a gentle parody of how some socialists approach the work of Karl Marx. Putting Marx on such a pedestal adds to his legend as an important, but difficult to approach, thinker.

Reading Marx is certainly not as easy as reading the journalism of today, but Marx shouldn’t be inaccessible to the majority of people on the left - like the Bible written in Latin. Marx understood some fundamental truths about capitalism, which still apply 150 years after he published them. Paul Mason, has done a great job making Marx accessible to a modern audience in his book Post-capitalism.

Capitalism changes, but the underlying ideas as understood by Marx don’t. Today’s tech companies and the gig economy are governed by the same principles as the factories of 19th century Manchester.

Revolutionary system

First of all, Marx understood that capitalism is a revolutionary system. It overthrows everything that came before it and remakes society anew. We can see that in how much industrialisation has changed China has changed during my lifetime, and I’m a Millennial.

Marx also saw that capitalism was a destructive system. Competitive firms are constantly destroying each other and some firms are destroying entire industries that came before them. You can see that in how digital publishing has destroyed the business model of print newspapers leading to the closure of local newspapers up and down the country.

Capitalism is also destructive to the environment. That was true when Marx was writing in the early days of industrialisation and it remains true today. Marx also described how capitalism creates vast inequalities. Before capitalism, there were only so many banquets a landed noble could have and only so many fine clothes he could buy, but under capitalism there is no end to the greed of the capitalists.

Alienation is one of the more difficult Marxist concepts to get your head around, but its effects can be keenly felt today. Marx said that capitalism alienates workers from what they produce as they either can’t afford it or are completely disconnected from the final product. Today we can see that in countries where smartphones are made by workers too poor to afford them or call centre workers who are entirely disconnected from any services that are being delivered. The businesses have changed since Marx’s time, but alienation remains a constant.

Overproduction of unnecessary goods

Mainly Marx knew that capitalism leads to the overproduction of goods that do not have a social value. We can see that today in the unnecessary quantities of plastics wrappings that is produced or in how much more money is poured into making viagra by big pharmaceutical companies as opposed to life saving medicine. This is misallocation of resources on a society-wide scale away from what will make people’s lives better.

Key to Marx’s writing is a fact that remains very much true today, and that is that capitalism needs to be overthrown. The capitalists who have economic power will not give it up easily so a revolution is necessary to have an economic system based not on profit motives, but on people's needs. I believe that this revolution need not be violent and when it happens it will be unlike anything that has come before it, even events that called themselves revolutions but merely changed who sat at the head of the table.

Marx understood that radical change was necessary to fix the problems of a capitalist society. That simple insight remains as relevant today as it did in Marx’s time. We lionise Marx, and his accomplishments are impressive, but the basic truth of his ideas are something we all experience everyday.

The rest of Europe should be very worried about the far right’s success in Italy

In 2016 it the far right made significant advances. Their arguments on nationalism and immigration became part of mainstream political discourse as far right backed campaigns such as Brexit and Donald Trump’s Presidential bid achieved electoral success.

In 2017 it looked like normality had reasserted itself as Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine Le Pen to become President of France, Angela Merkel held off the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and UKIP’s support collapsed in the British General Election. People all over the world worried about creeping nationalism and xenophobia breathed a sigh of relief.

We can't be complacent. A few setbacks have not defeated the emboldened far right. Social democracy as a political force is in a bad shape across Europe. Immigration and entrenched economic problems remain potent issues that the far right is using to rally support.

The far right did well in the recent Italian Elections. Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia party didn’t do as well as many predicted. The Eurosceptic, populist Five Star Movement won the largest share of the vote and far right party The League (formally Lega Nord) performed much better than expected. The League, an aggressively anti-immigration party, are likely to be the main authority in a new far right/centre right government.

The success of The League is due to economic problems such as high unemployment (and especially high youth unemployment) and regional inequality (the North of Italy is much more prosperous than the South), but mainly hostility to immigration. This election campaign has been characterised by aggressive anti-immigration rhetoric; The League’s leader Matteo Salvini says he wants to deport all undocumented migrants and in Macerata a right wing extremist shot and wounded six migrants.

The centre-left’s performance was disappointing and the leader of the main centre-left party, Matteo Renzi of the Democratic Party, has resigned. Renzi was once hailed as the saviour of the European left and was thought of as the Tony Blair of Italy. He moved his party to the right to embrace the "mainstream" of economic and political thought. In 2013 The Independent wrote: “Mr Renzi has staked his claim on the centre-ground and made little secret of his opposition to the unreconstructed leftist policies held dear by large swathes of his own party.”

Now Renzi is out after failing to achieve domination of politics through occupying the centre ground that Blair did. Politics has changed since 1997 and the centre ground is a shifting mass of uncertainty, pushed and pulled by populist tremours. Renzi and his party have no counter argument to the far right’s anti-immigration rhetoric. Now the far right is closer to power in Italy than it has been for generations.

The centre left is failing across Europe. The Germany SPD is currently trailing the AfD in the polls and is about to yoked (again) to a Merkel-led centre right government. The main centre left party suffered a huge defeat in Dutcth elections last year, getting only 9% of the vote. In France the centre left candidate, Benoît Hamon, got only 6% in the first round of Presiental elections.

Interestingly, the Italian, French and Dutch centre left parties’ names all translate into English as the ‘Socialist Party’, but their policies are (to a greater or lesser extent) neoliberal. What has happened to all three parties is a common enough phenomenon that it has a name: Pasokifcation. This name comes from the Greek centre left party, Panhellenic Socialist Movement or PASOK, which was the first party to experience this. Again, note the transformation from socialist, to neoliberal, to collapse, that the party’s namesakes have followed in.

“The old project of European social democracy is over, and that what comes next will have to be radically different,” Paul Mason said in a recent post for Novara Media. It is clear that social democracy as a political movement is in crisis across Europe. Ed Miliband's 30% of the vote in 2015 appears to be a high water mark.

Immigration (of both refugees and economic migrants) is a key issue across Europe. It is fuelling the rise of the far right who are rocketing into power in a populist blast of dissatisfaction with mainstream politicians. Anti-Immigration parties are in power in Austria, Hungary, Poland and now it looks like Italy as well. The centre left has no response to this.

If the centre left cannot offer a response to the far right on the subject of immigration then it is up to the radical left to do so. We need to demand investment in communities hit hard by deindustrialisation to revitalise not only their economies, but also civic and community institutions. It is these areas of high unemployment, underfunded public services, housing shortages and high inequality where the far right are recruiting support. The left can do something about this.

The radical left also needs to vocally stand up for the rights of migrants and not be tempted to demonise them for short term political gain. The left should stand up for the most vulnerable in society, whether they are fleeing war in Syria, the collapse of Libya, poverty in Ethiopia or problems closer to home such as a lack of jobs and decent houses. By helping the poor and the vulnerable the radical left can turn the tide against the emboldened far right.

The problems of Europe are not being addresses by the centre left. This is fuelling support for the far right. We have seen too many right, anti-immigration populist parties seize power across Europe, Italy being the latest tragedy. We should be frightened for the future if the tide cannot be turned back against the far right. Only the radical left is in a position to do this.

Crowd image created by James Cridland and used under creative commons.

Labour’s history of nationalisation gives us hope for the future

I have always found the industrial nationalisations undertaken by the Clement Attlee's Labour government inspiring. It was an ambitious task to bring so much of the economy into public ownership. Few subsequent governments have had grand ambitions. The Blair government’s reforms pale in comparison.

In the 1940s Labour realised a long term socialist ambition to run industries democratically and for the benefit of all, not just a few rich owners. The nationalisations following World War 2 were widely supported. The government took control of the mines, railways, electricity, gas, iron and steel, the Bank of England, inland waterways, road haulage and Cable & Wireless Ltd.

These nationalisations were popular as they tackled big economic problems. The mining industry had been in financial trouble since the First World War and many small mines were closing, leading to unemployment. There was also a lot of concern about safety and the dire working conditions in many mines.

The railways were also in a bad state after the war. There had been heavy bombing of track and stations, and there was a shortage of locomotives. Both the railways and the mines had been successfully run by the government during the war, so it made sense that they should be nationalised.

Massive ambition

Over 800 coal mines were taken into public ownership under the National Coal Board (NCB). Conditions in the mines run by the NCB were more humane than they had been before nationalisation. The newly-nationalised British Rail also invested in new rolling stock to replace what had been destroyed in the war.

The nationalised industries were given money by the government for investment and modernisation. There was an expansion of civil aviation and of cable and wireless communications. This greater investment in energy, transport and communication was good for all businesses, not just the state-owned ones, and it contributed to postwar economic growth.

The nationalised industries could exploit economies of scale as they were much larger than the small firms they had replaced. British Rail could produce a locomotive or lay track much more efficiently than the smaller private rail companies as the steel was brought in bulk from another nationalised supplier that didn’t need to satisfy the demands of shareholders.

The main advantage of nationalisation was that the government could coordinate industries and plan across the entire economy. The vast apparatus of the state, which had so effectively prospected the war, could now be turned to creating jobs and wealth for all.

This was an impressive accomplishment. Never before had any government brought so much into public ownership. Mines, railways and other large industries were being run in the interests of ordinary people and not for the wealthy few. Decisions that affect the entire economy could be debated in the public sphere, not in shadowy boardrooms.

Selling the family silver

Of course it didn’t last. The Thatcher government privatised many of these state-owned industries in the 1980s. At the time it was described (by former Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan no less) as “selling off the family silver”. The comparison is apt as the revenue for the government can only be made once and then the gains of nationalisation were lost.

The Thatcher government did this because of its ideological commitment to free markets. At the core of all this was the greed of neoliberals, an economic belief that opening up markets for private companies is automatically best for everyone. Ultimately this has lead to the wealth created by these industries being captured by a few rich owners.

Today, the coal mines are almost all gone. The cost of privatised utilities are going up and up. A 2017 study by the University of Greenwich estimated that consumers in England were paying £2.3bn more year a year on their water bills than if the company was nationalised. £18.1bn was paid out in dividends, but little infrastructure investment was undertaken.

Private island

For anyone looking to learn more about this topic, James Meek’s book Private Island catalogues the errors and waste of privatisation. He traces the disastrous privatisations of the railways, the postal service and the utilities, showing that privatisation failed to achieve the increased innovation and economic dynamism that was promised.

There is some hope in the form of the current Labour opposition. Both Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are in favour of nationalisation, and McDonnell has said that a Labour government would renationalise the railways, water companies, energy firms and the Royal Mail. The private rail franchises would not be renewed and the lines would be brought back into public ownership one by one as the franchises come up for renewal.

This gives me hope that the great accomplishments of the Attlee government aren’t lost forever. There is a future for nationalisation and the idea that it is better if industries are run openly, democratically and with the proceeds of their activity shared amongst us all.

British Rail image created by Steve Jones and used under creative commons.