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We deserve better than Starmer’s Blairite government. Here’s how we get it

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Original article by Dan Hind republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. 

Keir Starmer at the World Economic Forum, Davos.

OPINION: To avoid another government committed to continuing Thatcherism, we need new tech that makes votes count

After nearly 13 years in power, the Conservatives have a problem. They are surrounded by the consequences of their own policies, and the place looks like a bomb site. Living costs have soared, the NHS is in crisis, and staff across the public and private sectors are on strike. The party’s friends in the media are doing their best, but even the most incurious and forgiving voter can see that all is not well.

Not surprisingly, support for radical change to Britain’s economic and political model is overwhelming. Most Tory voters support wealth taxes and the re-nationalisation of the energy infrastructure. A majority of Labour voters want to introduce PR and a majority of all voters are in favour of some kind of electoral reform.

Given all this, it would be a massive missed opportunity if Labour emerged as the main beneficiary of the Conservatives’ collapse. Keir Starmer, the party’s leader, has refused to give a whole-hearted voice to the desire for change. Instead he has dropped the reform pledges that secured his victory in the 2020 leadership contest and is now sounding off about fiscal responsibility and tough choices.

Comparisons with the 1990s are easy. But there is more of a hint of 2008 Barack Obama in Labour’s current posture. The elite are nervous; the scams have become too obvious and the cruelty isn’t being confined to the usual victims. As in the US immediately after the collapse of the banks, British capitalism needs its Team B to give the appearance of change without conceding its substance. And Starmer is all too willing to play his part.

Anthony Barnett, the founder of this site, points to another historical analogy, far less flattering to the Blairites who now control the Labour Party: 1974. Back then the Labour Party won an election at a time of escalating crisis. But rather than make the radical reforms necessary to revive the postwar social order, first Harold Wilson and then James Callaghan presided over years of desperate brinkmanship until Thatcher took power in 1979 and imposed her own radical vision on the country.

Presented with a series of provocations from the Tories, the Labour leader has repeatedly sided with the right in an attempt to demonstrate his reliability to the UK’s media. At a time when living standards are rapidly declining and organised labour is fighting to protect what little of the postwar social compact remains, the Labour Party is laser-focused on the fact that government departments buy stationery.

The response of the democratic left to the restoration of the Labour right since 2019 has been hampered by the massive damage done to the Liberal Democrats by Nick Clegg and the Bennites’ recent and fraught stint at the pinnacle of the Labour Party. Many with a public platform who support radical change seem to think that, while extra-parliamentary activism is all very well, there is no realistic alternative to voting Labour at the next election.

But a 2024 Labour government committed to the Blair-Thatcher status quo, which refuses to meet the UK’s accumulating crises with a programme equal to it, will only aid a nativist and authoritarian right that offers its own, hallucinatory solutions. Our likely trajectory, absent fundamental reform, is one that discredits the centre-left in government and empowers the extreme right in opposition.

As living standards decline, the Labour Party is laser-focused on the fact that the government buys stationery

In these circumstances, our best option at the next general election must be a mobilisation that puts as many ecosocialists and sincere left Keynesians into Parliament as possible. Our priority should be to maximise the number of MPs willing to argue for replacing Thatcherism with a new green and democratic settlement. Once we grasp that, the question then becomes technical: how?

Part of the answer is down to the politicians. The Greens could help by formally adopting strengthened versions of the ten pledges that Starmer has now dropped. And the Lib Dems urgently need to apologise for their role in the austerity disaster, and loudly denounce Clegg.

But we also need digital resources to translate the public’s desire for radical change into electoral victories. We have no independent means to secure the full value of our votes. We don’t know what other voters in our constituencies think, how they would vote given various conditions, or what opportunities the political geography offers. Not only that, the entirety of the established media is always determined to treat each election as a national contest, as a presidential choice between Rishi Sunak and Starmer, in which we all have an isolated vote among millions.

Digital technology makes it possible to communicate voter-to-voter and voter-to-candidate more easily than ever before. We could, given the right tools, understand where we live in fine detail and use this to make informed political choices about how we vote. We only have to imagine what a BBC that wanted to make votes count would create and make freely available: vote-swapping tools, apps that allow voters to share what they would do in various scenarios, Reddit-style forums that allow groups to organise around local demands in their constituencies and to plan real-world candidate debates and meet-ups, mapping software that gives ordinary voters some of the insights currently hoarded by political professionals. Taken together, these digital resources would help to transform tactical voting from a Lib Dem ruse into a strategy for democratic self-assertion.

Labour branches and constituency parties could use such a technology to help re-elect incumbent MPs who are serious about promoting the policies we need, or to break with the party and run independent candidates – and not just in Jeremy Corbyn’s seat. Other parties, currently squeezed by the Con-Lab duopoly, will also benefit if they can persuade voters that they will represent the desire for change in Parliament, and not fall for the seductions of Westminster’s lobbying industry.

I recently spoke with a Labour Party member living in an English university town. They told me that every Labour member they knew would vote Green if they thought the Greens could win the constituency. These are not just Labour voters, but fully paid-up members. With the right digital resources, they could discover the extent of support for the Greens in their constituency, and act together accordingly.

To create this technology, we need a generous budget and lots of clever people. Exactly how much doesn’t really matter. The costs are going to seem trivial or exorbitant, depending on whether the project works or not. But we are probably looking at hundreds of thousands of pounds, rather than millions. Not much compared to the amounts wasted on futile or deceptive efforts to stop Brexit.

Starmer won’t reform a voting system that has just given him a landslide victory. His challengers on the left should

Who’s going to pay? The large unions are paralysed by their constitutional link to Labour and their long neglect of communications as an aspect of collective power. To give you some idea of how rigorous that neglect has been, Unite, Unison and the GMB have a combined membership of 3.2 million but fewer than 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. It would be nice to think that they could change in time, but it seems unlikely. As things stand they seem content to put their trust in Starmer and hope he doesn’t treat his assurances to them as casually as his promises to Labour members, or those who thought he was going to stop Brexit.

There’s another source of support that has enough money and is motivated to want the next general election to be at least a little bit democratic. If the wealthy liberals who support proportional representation and House of Lords reform are serious, they need to support a programme to make votes count in the next election, in spite of first-past-the-post. Starmer will not reform a voting system, never mind a broader constitutional order, that has just given him and his faction in the Labour Party a landslide victory. His challengers on the left will, if they have any sense at all.

The offshore right gave Dominic Cummings a few million pounds in 2016 to win the Brexit referendum for them. He built a superb propaganda machine, which comprehensively defeated the left in 2019. His success tells us something important about agency in a political system as centralised and befuddled by propaganda as ours. Relatively modest investments in technology can make a massive difference to political outcomes. If we can create the means for voters to communicate among ourselves in pursuit of our shared interests, if we then act with some fraction of the right’s energy and daring, with some fraction of their budget, we can begin to create a new economic and political settlement before the old impoverishes and demoralises even more of us. If we wait meekly for a Starmer landslide, we will get nothing, and deserve less.

Original article by Dan Hind republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. 

Continue ReadingWe deserve better than Starmer’s Blairite government. Here’s how we get it

Bye-bye Boris, you worse than useless absolute cnut

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Image of Tory idiot Boris Johnson
Tory idiot Boris Johnson

Heavy-drinking Criminal Boris Johnson is out. He should never have been prime minister since his character and history was well documented. There was plenty of evidence that he was a worse than useless absolute cnut. To be fair to him, he partied well.

Image of Boris Johnson sucking up to Rupert Murdoch
Boris Johnson sucking up to Rupert Murdoch

Unfortunately the Conservative Party is now going to inflict a militaristic, pea-brained, basic maths misunderstanding prime minister in the pocket of big business on us. I was tempted to call her a bungalow but I’m thinking of a rattle with just the one pea moving freely inside bouncing and rattling off the inside of her skull.

Image of Tory idiot Boris Johnson
Tory idiot Boris Johnson

Johnson to exit Downing St in a shower of sleaze and sexual misconduct claims

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Two women allege they were assaulted and groped by figures within the government.

One woman told Sky News she was “sexually assaulted by someone who is now a Cabinet minister”.

A second woman said she was working at a Conservative event when she was groped, adding: “I turned around and this guy was just looking right at me.”

She complained and raised it again when the man was due to get a top job in No 10, but “nothing happened”.

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Image: Boris Johnson confirms his thumbs up from Rupert Murdoch
Boris Johnson confirms his thumbs up from Rupert Murdoch

Huge leaving card showing naked Boris Johnson running from chaos delivered to No10

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The grim 6 foot-tall card contains messages from thousands of people who suffered during the PM’s leadership.

One message read: “My wonderful mum – a brilliant yet horribly overworked NHS surgeon for over 30 years – died in 2020 and I had to watch her tiny Covid-restricted funeral online from my home rather than being there.

“Meanwhile you were partying. You have no shame. You have no conscience. You have no integrity. You won’t be missed.

Another stated: “When a clown moves into the castle he doesn’t become a king, the castle becomes a circus. Good riddance.”

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Image of Oxford's Bullingdon Club including Boris Johnson
Oxford’s Bullingdon Club including Boris Johnson

Continue ReadingBye-bye Boris, you worse than useless absolute cnut

What nationalising energy companies would cost – and how to do it

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UK could bring National Grid and retailers in-house and build public renewable energy, says ex-Labour policy chief

Andrew Fisher

17 August 2022, 12.01am

Image of banknotes and a prepayment meter key by Lydia, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Republished from OpenDemocracy under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

When 62% of Conservative voters want energy run in the public sector, it’s fair to say the left has won the argument (75% of Labour voters agree, 68% of Lib Dems).

Yet public ownership is opposed passionately by the Conservative government, while the leader of the opposition has said he is “not in favour” of it – despite his election on a platform that committed to “bring rail, mail, water and energy into public ownership to end the great privatisation rip-off and save you money on your fares and bills”.

Public ownership is on the media’s radar, too. When Labour leader Keir Starmer announced his policy to freeze bills this week, he was asked why he wouldn’t also nationalise energy, replying that: “In a national emergency where people are struggling to pay their bills … the right choice is for every single penny to go to reducing those bills.”

But so long as energy remains privatised, every single penny won’t. Billions of pennies will keep going to shareholders instead.

The energy market was fractured under the mass privatisations of the Thatcher governments in the 1980s. It contains three sectors: producers or suppliers (those that produce energy), retailers (those that sell you energy), and distribution or transmission (the infrastructure that transports energy to your home).

It is important to bear this in mind when we’re talking about taking energy into public ownership. We need to be clear about what we want in public ownership and why.

By 2019, Labour had a detailed plan on how to do this – worked up by the teams around then shadow business and energy secretary Rebecca Long Bailey and then shadow chancellor John McDonnell. The plan is not the only way, but it illustrates what exists and how one could go about re-establishing a public energy ecosystem, run for people not profit.

The recent TUC report shows the cost of nationalising the ‘Big 5’ energy retailers – British Gas, E.ON, EDF, Scottish Power and Ovo – to be £2.8bn, which would go on buying all the companies’ shares. That’s a lot of money, equivalent to more than the annual budget of the Sure Start programme in 2009/10 (its peak year). But it’s a one-off cost, not an annual one.

And it’s not like the current privatised system doesn’t have its costs: since June 2021, the UK government has spent £2.7bn bailing out 28 energy companies that collapsed because they put short-term profits ahead of long-term stability – companies like Bulb Energy. We have spent billions of pounds already to get nothing in return. So £2.8bn is not a large amount of money to pay to gain these assets, rather than just bailing them out.

The big energy retail companies made £23bn in dividends between 2010 and 2020 according to Common Wealth, and £43bn if you include share buy-backs. What you choose to do with that surplus in public ownership is another matter: you could use it to invest in new clean energy or to lower bills or fund staff pay rises, rather than subject your workers to fire-and-rehire practices as British Gas did last year.

Labour’s previous plan also involved taking the distribution networks – the National Grid – into public ownership. This would end the profiteering at this level, too – with £13bn paid out in dividends over the five years prior to 2019. As Long Bailey said at the time, we need “public driven and coordinated action, without which we simply will not be able to tackle climate change”. Like previous nationalisations, the purchase of the grid and distribution networks could be achieved by swapping shares for government bonds. By international accounting standards, the cost is fiscally neutral as the state gains a revenue-generating asset, which more than pays for the bond yield.

The final part of the plan – and the most complicated – is production and supply. It would be impossible to nationalise the oilfields of Saudi Arabia or Qatar – and for good reasons we should want to leave fossil fuels in the ground, anyway, rather than contest their ownership.

And so what Labour proposed in 2019 was a mass investment in new renewable energy generation projects, with the public sector taking a stake and returning profits to the public. For example, under the ‘People’s Power Plan’, we proposed 37 new offshore wind farms with a 51% public stake, delivering 52GW alone by 2030, equivalent to 38 coal power stations. There were additional proposals for onshore wind, solar, and tidal schemes, as part of a 10-year £250bn Green Transformation Fund, which included other schemes like the Warm Homes insulation initiative.

Labour’s new shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has promised a similar level of investment – a £28bn a year climate investment pledge.

Any surplus energy would then be sold on international markets, with a People’s Power Fund – a sort of sovereign wealth fund – to deliver public investment in local communities’ social infrastructure: a genuine levelling-up fund, perhaps.

Many people will say this can’t be done, but of course it has been before. The 1945 Attlee government nationalised energy and successive Conservative governments – including those of Churchill, MacMillan and Heath – were happy to have a nationalised asset. Harold MacMillan famously accused Margaret Thatcher of “selling off the family silver” when she privatised state industries.

When I was born in 1979, the National Coal Board, British Gas and British Petroleum were all publicly-owned or majority publicly-owned companies. Between them, they were the major suppliers of our energy. Our gas bills came from British Gas and our electricity bills from our regional electricity board (in my case Seeboard, the South Eastern Electricity Board), and coal and oil fuelled our power stations.

The regional electricity boards had been brought into being by the Attlee government’s Electricity Act 1947, when electricity companies were forcibly merged into regional area boards and nationalised. The Coal Industry Nationalisation Act 1946 and the Gas Act 1948 had together brought energy into public ownership.

Seeboard was privatised in 1990, and later became part of EDF Energy – ironically, the nationalised French energy company, whose profits from the UK’s stupidity are used to subsidise French consumers.

The French government has now fully nationalised EDF (previously it was 84% publicly owned), and household energy bills rose by just 4% this year – compared to over 50% in the UK and a forecast 200% by January 2023.

If Starmer doesn’t want to listen to me (or his own commitments from 2020), perhaps emulating the centrist Emmanuel Macron in this instance would be palatable?

From the depletion of fish stocks to the burning of the Amazon, profit has proved a failed regulator for use of our natural resources

In his later years, Robin Cook argued: “The market is incapable of respecting a common resource such as the environment, which provides no price signal to express the cost of its erosion nor to warn of the long-term dangers of its destruction.”

From the depletion of fish stocks to the burning of the Amazon, profit has proved a failed regulator for use of our natural resources. The market has also failed to decarbonise at pace, or to end the scourge of fuel poverty.

On the media this week, shadow energy secretary Ed Miliband said Labour is “continuing to look at what the right long-term solution is for our energy system”. It is up to all of us to campaign for that solution to be public ownership – whether that’s from within the Labour Party (like me) or from the outside.

Republished from OpenDemocracy under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

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Continue ReadingWhat nationalising energy companies would cost – and how to do it

Rupert Murdoch’s history of political influence

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Murdoch repeatedly meets UK prime ministers in secret. The deal is that Murdoch sets the agenda and provides support to these right-wing politicians in return for favourable treatment. It should be recognised and accepted that Murdoch is a foreign tax evading billionaire so politicians are promoting private foreign interests over those of their country.

4 January 1981 Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch meet in secret with the meeting repeatedly denied since. Thatcher agrees that Murdoch can aquire the Times and Sunday Times newspapers thereby controlling a huge proportion of UK newspapers without a referral to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.

Murdoch attacks and breaks the power of the UK newspaper unions with the support of Thatcher’s government and UK police.

The News of the World phone hacking scandal damages Rupert Murdoch’s influence. The News of the World hacked the phones of murder victims and thereby damaged police investigations as well as hacking the phones of royalty and celebrities.

Murdoch’s political influence returns following the phone hacking scandal.

Boris Johnson's thumbs up from Rupert Murdoch
Boris Johnson’s thumbs up from Rupert Murdoch

Murdoch owns prominent UK politicians Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Priti Patel. Boris Johnson gets the thumbs-up to be UK prime minister from Murdoch at the London Olympics, Priti Patel and Michael Gove attend Murdoch and Jerry Hall’s wedding celebrations in London. Priti Patel behaves as Rupert Murdoch’s private secretary e.g. here and here.

Continue ReadingRupert Murdoch’s history of political influence

Articles on the Blairite attempted coup against Corbyn and the left

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A few articles on the continuing Blairite attempted coup against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party by Labour Party MPs. They do seem in an awful rush to depose Corbyn … almost as though a clock is ticking. Craig Murray has excellent analyses yet again.

It’s Still the Iraq War, Stupid.

No rational person could blame Jeremy Corbyn for Brexit. So why are the Blairites moving against Corbyn now, with such precipitate haste?

The answer is the Chilcot Report. It is only a fortnight away, and though its form will be concealed by thick layers of establishment whitewash, the basic contours of Blair’s lies will still be visible beneath. …

[Oops, I forgot this one

How the News Agenda is Set

David Cameron gets heckled every day of his life. The media never bother to report the names of the hecklers or the gist of what they say.

Yet a single heckler shouts at Jeremy Corbyn at Gay Pride, and not only is that front page news in the Guardian, it is on BBC, ITN and Sky News.

What makes a single individual heckling a politician newsworthy? There are dozens such examples every single day that are not newsworthy.

The answer is simple. Normally the hecklers are promoting an anti-establishment view, so it does not get reported. Whereas this heckler was promoting the number one priority of the establishment and mainstream media, to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn. So this heckler, uniquely, is front page news and his words are repeated at great length in the Guardian and throughout the broadcast media.

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Another Media Setup?

This picture has been all over twitter, promoted by every high level Blairite you can think of, from JK Rowling down. Yet all may not be what it seems. …

Back to the Future

The priority now of the political “elite” is to ensure voters never again get the chance to make a choice the political class do not want. Jeremy Corbyn is the thing the political class want least.

Do you remember when 184 Labour MPs refused to vote against the Tory benefit cuts that ruined lives and caused suicides? They did so on the grounds that their focus groups showed the public wanted benefit cuts, and so it would be wrong to oppose the Tory Welfare Reform and Work Bill.

Well, I can promise you that the 172 Labour MPs who voted to no-confidence Corbyn are exactly the same people who would not oppose welfare cuts. The net effect of the Corbyn year has been that 12 Labour MPs have decided that they have a purpose in politics which is not just personal gain. The vast majority would vote to push the unemployed off a cliff if they thought it would get them career advancement. Or adapt the John Mann anti-immigrant agenda.

Make no mistake. If Corbyn is deposed, the people of England and Wales will be back to having a choice between two colours of Tory. Labour will go full on anti welfare, anti immigrant and pro-nuclear weapon. Because Jon Cruddas will tell them that is what will get them elected.

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Labour crisis: Alan Sugar and Alastair Campbell lead anti-Corbyn campaign

Former Number 10 communications chief claims a ‘sect has taken control’ of the Labour Party.

Lord Alan Sugar and Alastair Campbell are two of the best-known names backing an online campaign to oust Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. The former Number 10 communications chief and the ex-Labour peer are urging hundreds of thousands of their followers on social media site Twitter to sign a ‘Saving Labour’ petition.

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dizzy: LOL that’s classic isn’t it? Blair’s master of lies and the UK’s version of Donald Trump accuse the left of hijacking the Labour party!

 

Ken Livingstone urges Jeremy Corbyn to allow party members to deselect dissenting MPs

Ken Livingstone has urged Jeremy Corbyn to allow party members and activists to deselect dissenting MPs in the wake of a bruising no confidence vote that has destabilised the party’s leadership.

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Continue ReadingArticles on the Blairite attempted coup against Corbyn and the left