How Miliband called McCluskey's bluff

If Len McCluskey were an investment banker, he surely would have been fired a long time ago. Instead, his position as general secretary of the Unite union is secure even though the return on capital invested in Labour leader Ed Miliband is beyond measurement because it’s so low.

Tomorrow, McCluskey and fellow union bureaucrats from affiliated unions will, not unlike turkeys at Christmas, vote for their own slaughter at the hands of Miliband and his party leadership.

Miliband will formally complete a process of “reform” – was ever a word so misused – in party structures that began in the early 1990s, and carried on by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when they got the unions to vote to abandon the socialist Clause 4 of the constitution.

This time Miliband has gone when even Blair feared to tread. Out goes the historic links by which members of affiliated unions had a portion of their subs handed over to Labour. Out goes the way Labour leaders are elected, with the unions having a substantial say through a ballot of members.

Out goes the collective and in comes individualism. Margaret Thatcher would be the first to applaud, especially as Miliband gave her a glowing reference recently.

Labour’s national executive confirmed the plans earlier this month with only two votes against. Tomorrow, a special half-day conference will rubber stamp the proposals. After the Nec, one shadow cabinet member is reported as saying:

"At the start, the unions were shocked, but in the end the unions had no option. Ed Miliband was their choice for leader and he wanted these reforms and, 18 months out from an election, they could not defeat him. Unite may be in a different place, but Falkirk [the constituency troubled by a selection row] meant it was impossible for them to lead a rebellion. They feel they have done nothing and are badly bruised.”

McCluskey, in particular, has egg all over his face. Miliband was his choice as leader and in return he has been humiliated. In a belated attempt to recover some poise, McCluskey is now threatening to cut his union’s affiliation fees by £1.5 million because a poll shows that only 40% of Unite’s members vote Labour.

He said: "I know there are some people internally in the Labour party that are beginning to panic because of what we are considering. I am not sure why because it was self-evident from last summer when Ed Miliband made his proposals that there would be consequences. I said that having been challenged by Ed to consider the status quo, I suddenly felt it was untenable. We have one million members paying into the political fund and affiliate the full one million members to the party…. Looking at it, I thought it was difficult to justify even from a moral standpoint".

Last October, the company that owns the Grangemouth petrochemical plant threatened to pull out unless the union agreed to new harsh terms and conditions. McCluskey’s bluff was called and he rushed up to Scotland to overrule local officials and impose a shocking deal on his members.

So perhaps Miliband knows that the Unite union leader is mostly bluster and that when push comes to shove, McCluskey will not rock the boat with just over a year to the general election. In any case, McCluskey has said: “Even if we reduce our affiliations we can still give direct donations to the national Labour Party".

The truth is that investment in Miliband has produced precious little for Unite and its members. One Nation Labour as it prefers to be called as it careers further and further into naked populism, is pledged to uphold austerity and ConDem spending cuts, a public sector wage freeze and to retain markets in the NHS and other services.

Vote for that? You have to be joking!

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Miliband marches in Blair's footsteps

When Labour’s national executive committee today rubber-stamps plans to “reform” the party’s historic relations with the trade unions, it will put the finishing touches to a long-term project to bring the party’s organisation into line with what it actually stands for.

Many sins have been committed in the name of “modernisation”, not least the creation of New Labour as a party wholeheartedly committed to corporate globalisation and an economy pretty much dominated by market forces. Add a little “light-touch” regulation and you could be looking at any of the mainstream political parties.

For New Labour – now rebranded as One Nation Labour – this has been a project that began with Neil Kinnock in the late 1980s and was carried on by his successor, John Smith. Ed Miliband, the current leader, is proud to march in their footsteps. He said last week:

"The first time I met Tony Blair was in 1993 and at the time he was on a group helping John Smith bring in one member, one vote for the selection of parliamentary candidates. I remember him looking at me and saying how difficult change was proving to be. At the very first party conference I attended, Smith – with the help of a speech by John Prescott – got those reforms through.

"Smith, Blair and Neil Kinnock have all embarked on these kinds of reforms over the past 30 years and I see this as completing that work. They are significantly bigger than anyone expected we would be proposing, and some are the biggest to the party since its formation."

Of course, Blair and Gordon Brown famously persuaded the trade unions to vote in 1995 for the abolition of Clause 4 of the party’s constitution that set out common ownership of the means of production as an aim. Union leaders did so in the hope that an incoming New Labour government would deliver policies to benefit their members. How wrong they were!

Today’s generation of union leaders are just as pathetic. With a few moans and groans here and there, the big three – Unite, Unison and the GMB – will back Miliband’s plans. They will be told, as they were in 1995, that the election of Labour in next year’s general election depends on it.

Miliband has to persuade the middle-class that One Nation Labour has broken free from union influence. So the way the party leader is elected will change to one member, one vote. At union level, individual members of affiliated unions will in future have to “opt in” to become associate members of the Labour Party. The last time that happened was in 1927, when in the wake of the General Strike, the Tories passed opt-in legislation (which Labour repealed after 1945).

The aim then was to weaken the collective in favour of the individual. And so it is with Miliband, whatever he says about “letting people back into our politics”. Miliband used the Falkirk selection farrago – which is par for the course in Labour constituencies – as the pretext for the changes.

In a wider context, Labour is part of the process of the end of the old politics and these changes won’t alter that fact. The mainstream parties are no more than state managers rather than independent actors, there to facilitate for powerful forces rather than respond to electors. This corporatocracy is so unattractive that millions have switched off party politics and the electoral fraud that goes under the name of a general election.

One Nation Labour is for continuing ConDem austerity and giving tax subsidies to companies to pay better wages. Miliband wants to “improve” the way markets work (as if he could!) and show that his party is for nothing less than “responsible capitalism”. I’d have to be dragged to a polling station to vote for that. And if I’d got that far, I’d spoil my ballot.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor 

Miliband's dream of a new, improved capitalism

Ed Miliband’s half-baked proposals to increase competition between high street banks – not exactly a burning issue for most working people – just about sums up the Labour leader’s vision of the “responsible capitalism” he champions.

In this Miliband dream world, the top five avaricious banks that regularly fleece their customers with all sorts of charges – when they are not busy precipitating a financial collapse that is – will be made to sell some of their branches.

Somehow these will be bought by a new entrant into the banking sector and, lo and behold, competition will increase and bring a better deal for customers. And this is One Nation Labour’s outlook: better markets, more competition, new and improved capitalism.

Who can fail to be swept off their feet with the excitement of it all! The intellectual power of this argument is too stunning for words. So don’t think about it – get out there and vote for responsible capitalism as soon as you have the chance. You know it makes sense.  

Don’t fret about the fact that last year Lloyds tried to sell hundreds of branches and couldn’t find a buyer. Ignore the fact that it’s increasingly hard to find a fully-functioning bank branch in the high street in any case because many have already been shut down.

This is all typical Miliband. Ignore the fundamentals of the system and go for the froth. When he says that the problem is that the market is dominated by a handful of banks, he is totally wrong.

While there is a concentration of power, the real issue is that banks are run for profit and will do whatever it takes to increase their shareholders’ wealth. When the previous Labour government completely deregulated them, they racked up enormous profits which produced handy tax revenues. All seemed well until the financial collapse of 2007-8 exposed their operations.

Miliband thinks he can put the genie back in the bottle and create an imaginary economy of regulated corporations that put their customers first. In the real world, the opposite is happening. For example, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership being negotiated between the United States and the European Union is setting out to abolish whole areas of regulation in the name of competition.

Existing (and even improved) regulations are simply subverted, as with the supposed limits on bankers’ bonuses. Traders will simply get their bonuses in another form and the show will roll on.

Miliband’s appeal now is almost entirely to the middle-class, whose votes disproportionately affect the outcome of general elections. He said as much in his article in the right-wing Daily Telegraph where he promised to “rebuild our middle class”, while the notorious shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt laid into the teaching profession.

Just to round things off, Miliband is planning further steps to substantially weaken the historic relationship between the trade unions and the party they founded. In March, a half-day conference is scheduled to ratify plans that are aimed at appeasing anti-union sentiment.

Miliband plans to end the electoral college system for electing a Labour leader under which the trade unions have a third of the votes. In addition, the present arrangements whereby members of affiliated unions have part of their subs paid over to Labour will be scrapped in favour of individual membership.

Some union leaders, most notably Paul Kenny, right-wing general secretary of the GMB, have baulked at these plans and suspended funding to Labour. But when push comes to shove, the majority will fall into line on the grounds that a revolt could damage Labour’s chances at the 2015 election.

Yet if they were really intent on fighting for their members, union leaders would be questioning the point of achieving Labour success at the polls? What benefit would it be to their members to have Labour-style austerity over that of the ConDems, or state hand-outs to firms to subsidise a “living wage”, or attacks on teachers and other workers?

That union leaders would rather bury their heads in the sand than raise these issues is testimony to the crisis of political representation that ordinary working people are presented with. No one speaks or fights for their interests any longer.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Ralph got it right and his son 100% wrong

In defending him against the malicious Daily Mail, Ed Miliband tries to depict his father Ralph as a man who “loved Britain” while at the same time distancing himself from his actual views.

The assumption that everyone has to love “their” country is, of course, a patriotic, populist sentiment encouraged by the media and political elites. Its purpose is to bind the whole population together behind the state, especially in times of crisis.

"Your King and Country need you”, went the recruiting slogan of World War I. All the parties supported it, including Labour. Millions believed in it enough to volunteer to join what would be become a human slaughter house on the battlefields of Europe.

For Ed Miliband to suggest that because his father fought in World War II he “loved his country”, is plainly wrong. In the main, British soldiers fought for self-preservation, for their comrades and communities against the Nazis. It was possible to fight without “loving your country”.

Many had spent years on the dole, living in appalling housing with no health service while the political elites were oblivious to their plight. What was there, for these soldiers, to “love” about this class-divided Britain?

As for the notion that World War II was a “war for democracy” against fascism, that was simply not the case. The British ruling classes flirted with the Nazis for six years before war broke out. Rothermere’s Daily Mail found much to admire in Hitler’s Germany. A whole group favoured a separate peace with Hitler after hostilities began and they almost prevailed inside the cabinet.

For the ruling class, it was above all a war to preserve the British empire and, in line with foreign policy down the centuries, an effort to prevent one European power from dominating the continent.

It’s hard to believe that Ralph Miliband “loved his country” in an unthinking way, in the fashion that his son describes. Of course, he was grateful for being allowed in as a Jewish refugee. But as his political thinking developed, he could never espouse a concept that is embraced mainly by the right wing.

As a Marxist academic, he understood the significance of class in capitalist societies like Britain. In place of an abstract “country” there was a society divided along class lines, where interests did not coincide but were in constant conflict.

In 1983, Ralph Miliband wrote an essay called “State Power and Class Interests”. This took up the issues of the state in relation to the rule of capital, which had recently become the subject of intense debate in Marxist academic circles. He wrote:

“… The contradictions and shortcomings of capitalism, and the class pressures and social tensions this produces, require the state to assume an ever more pronounced role in the defence of the social order. The end of that process is one form or  another of ‘Bonapartism’. Meanwhile, it makes for a steady inflation of state power within the framework of a capitalist-democratic order whose democratic features are under permanent threat from the partnership of state and capital.”

This “partnership” is what his son wants to develop under the populist umbrella of "One Nation Labour". As he says in his own article in the Mail: “I want to make capitalism work for working people, not destroy it.”

But how on earth can a system that is run for profit, for the benefit of shareholders and funders, ever do what Miliband junior wants? Even if we all declared that we “loved our country”, the real world would confirm that Ralph Miliband was right and his son 100% wrong.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Move over Ukip, One Nation Labour is the real deal

Move over Nigel Farage and your eurosceptic-patriotic Ukip outfit. If you want real social populism (as opposed to social-ism), Ed Miliband and his One Nation Labour are the better brand, or so he would like you to believe.

If you think that “Britain can do better than this”, Miliband will lead the way. In fact, he used the phrase no fewer than 17 times during his speech yesterday.

One Nation Labour is to become a party of small business and angry consumers, raging at the energy corporations (while leaving them in control), threatening land owners and praising the armed forces.

Above all, it’s British. So the Scots have to join in, and forget dreams of independence which, if achieved, would prevent Britain from “doing better than this”.

After setting out to overturn the roots of the party of labour by severing its formal connections with the trades unions, Miliband is on a rebranding exercise which must have his Marxist father turning in his grave.

And - we must presume from the rapturous standing ovation greeting his confident, hour long speech - he has the agreement and support of the majority if not all of the delegates present.

The emphatic turn to nationalism was already evident way back in 2007 in the days of Gordon “British jobs for British workers” Brown. But Miliband’s One Nation Labour is frankly breathtaking. The word xenophobia comes to mind.

Just so we all know where his allegiances lie, Miliband opened with a heartfelt tribute to “our troops” and “our brave police”. Hundreds of thousands of former miners who battled the police in 1984 in defence of jobs will take note.  

Now the new “mass membership” party stands up for 1.5 million small businesses (good) against the strong, vested interests identified as Rupert Murdoch, and the six big suppliers of gas and electricity (bad).

Miliband’s view is as narrow and blinkered as it is possible to be. The world outside the United Kingdom consists only of the unmentioned, unidentified “others” who are to be defeated in the “race to the top”, plus cheap labour shipped in by recruitment agencies and gangmasters. Does he mean China? The US? Germany?

How the race to the top victory is to be achieved without driving wage levels to the global minimum must remain a mystery. All that’s proposed is a mandatory charitable donation from big to small businesses and a form of barter, trading apprenticeships for immigrant labour.

Somehow, exports will increase and Britain will become great. Again. Rule Britannia.

The One Nation populist appeal is clearly designed to outflank Ukip – way out on the right wing. It’s a real mystery why some are attempting to label Ed as “red”. Just for proposing to regulate the energy market?

What was missing from the speech was much more interesting than what we actually heard.

Apart from the slow pace of “recovery”, no mention of the global crisis, no mention of Europe, the US, China, Africa, the Middle East, anywhere at all. And no mention of capitalism, naturally.

Nothing about the majority of non-tax paying global corporations who laugh in the face of national governments, of which Amazon and Google are just the most famous.

And, bizarrely missing from the demagogic message, was anything bar a passing favourable mention of the banks, some of whom it seems pay a living wage!

Nationalism? Support for the little man, the small business? As the Financial Times noted in assessing Miliband’s speech: “There is whiff of Poujadiste populism about all this.” Pierre Poujade led a briefly successful right-wing populist movement of small traders and peasants against the Paris elite in the 1950s.

One Nation Labour is in a naked bidding war for votes, playing the nationalist card to rally a disillusioned public, in a shameless effort to win the 2015 election with policies snatched out of the air.

With the electorate’s disdain for Westminster, big business and the rich growing at a rate of knots, Miliband wants to cash in on widespread discontent. Be warned: One Nation Labour populism is a dangerous road to go down.   

Gerry Gold

Unions losing their 'voice' as Labour plans long goodbye

Frances O’Grady, the first woman general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, says “trade unions should have a strong political voice”. She’s so right because as things stand, their traditional “voice” in the shape of Labour is fading away.

The last week has been wracked with tensions and real as well as apparent turn-arounds in the trade unions’ crucial and historic relationship with the Labour Party. A schism emerged when one of the party’s biggest donors, the GMB, announced that it would cut its affiliation fees by 90% in response to planned rule changes by Labour.

These will terminate the present arrangement, whereby members of affiliated unions have part of their subs forwarded to the Labour Party. In future, individual members would have to “opt in” to membership to make a financial contribution. Labour will hold a special conference next year to make the changes.

Meanwhile, the party has had to back off from allegations of vote-rigging in a parliamentary candidate selection process in Falkirk, Scotland, in what appears to be a behind the scenes deal between the Unite union and Labour leaders. Yet the claims originally triggered Ed Miliband’s plans.

He remains unrepentant. Miliband’s unapologetically arrogant anti-union stance remains nothing other an abject sop to Tory-Liberal ideology and a continuation of Tony Blair’s policy of weakening, reducing and finally eliminating the links between Labour and the unions that founded the party at the start of the 20th century.

His hand is strengthened by a YouGov survey for the Labour UnCut blog.  According to the results, Miliband’s move to make trade unionists “opt-in” is backed by 60% of members of unions affiliated to Labour. The poll result is double-edged. It’s not surprising that trade unionists feel disgruntled and let down by Labour which has endorsed most ConDem policies and implemented the cuts at local council level.

New Labour governments drove on not only the marketisation/outsourcing of public services but the introduction of an authoritarian surveillance state. Their rejection of the socialist Clause Four of the Labour Party’s constitution heralded the transformation of Labour into an openly capitalist, neo-liberal party. Blairite “modernisation”, is being continued by Miliband.

The right to have political representation was achieved through historic political and legal struggles that began in the early 19th century. But now more than ever, workers and trade unionists are losing even the semblance of a political voice. Thus, Miliband and his co-thinkers are completing the reversal of the very process that gave rise to their party in the first place.

Motions put to this year’s TUC reveal the rising tide of discontent against the ConDems destruction of the welfare state and the growing sense that even if Labour were elected in 2015, nothing much would change because the party has accepted ConDem future budget cuts.

A crucial composite put by Unite and seconded by Unison, proposes that “Congress believes that the crisis facing people and their local services is so severe that we cannot wait for a general election in 2015, we must act now.”

It calls on Congress to “instruct the General Council to organise in the course of 2014 a nationwide march against poverty, focusing on the bedroom tax, food banks and other effects of government policy designed to draw in working people and their communities in all parts of the country and to unite people around the trade union movement”.

Council should, it says, “facilitate a co-ordinated programme of civil and industrial action involving trade unions and other campaigns”. The motion, which is certain to be passed, also calls on unions to “promote and support the day of action called by the People’s Assembly for 5 November 2013”.

This is not what Miliband, who speaks at the TUC tomorrow, particularly wants to hear. And he definitely won’t be backing strikes against the government.

Like the appointment of a woman to head the TUC after 150 years waiting, these actions are well overdue and we unreservedly support them. At last year’s Congress, there was plenty of rhetoric and even talk of a general strike. It came to nothing. This time round, we need deeds to match the words. Or the TUC’s own credibility will be worthless.    

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary 

Miliband to apply coup de grace to Labour's history

What a day! There was wall-to-wall media coverage of just one of 370,000 babies born yesterday around the world and confirmation that Labour is pressing ahead with plans to break its current links with the organisations that created the party in 1900.

Are these events linked in any way? I think they are – in one important respect. They both contribute to what Antonio Gramsci referred to as the hegemony of the ruling class in terms of penetrating the rest of us with their outlook and ideology.

Hegemony is not a pretty word and also hard to pronounce (try it). It means domination or supremacy. Gramsci was a founder-member of the Italian Communist Party. Despite being an MP, he was seized by Mussolini’s fascist regime in 1926 and spent the next six years in jail.

Although he died a few years after his conditional release on health grounds, his Prison Notebooks were smuggled out of jail and later published. Gramsci wanted to understand why the masses in the major capitalist countries seemed to support the state political system. So he investigated how the ideas of the ruling class were the dominant, or hegemonic, ideas in society.

An essential, even “socially accepted function” of any state is, as Bob Jessop, professor of sociology at Lancaster University, explains is to “enforce collectively binding decisions on the members of a society in the name of their common interest or general will”.

So how are these “common interests” articulated? How are we persuaded, for example, that monarchy is good for every single person and that we should be happy that there is another addition to the royal family? This particular notion is achieved by way of social traditions, culture, ideas that we are born into, through the education system, the church and, of course, the media.

From the BBC to the “liberal” Guardian, there was only one story yesterday – the birth of one single baby. “Duchess in labour as the world awaits news”, said the BBC website. Yes, the whole world was standing by! The Guardian had rolling “live coverage” all day long.

A good day to bury bad news. So off the headlines went (in no particular order), the terrible situation in Syria, the end of the welfare state, outsourcing the NHS, surveillance state, tax cuts for fracking, global recession etc. Then later in the day, in stepped Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party with his own particular contribution to hegemony.

Whatever came later, the foundation of the Labour Party by the trade unions at the beginning of the 20^th century challenged the hegemony of ruling class ideas. It had been accepted until then that workers could only find representation through the Liberal Party.

The Tories bitterly opposed the scheme whereby trade unionists automatically had part of their subscriptions passed on to Labour to fund its campaigns and election work. So in 1927, the Baldwin government banned the practice. Instead, trade unionists had to opt into paying the levy. Labour opposed the move and pledged to repeal the law, which was in force for two decades.

Miliband is, as we know, proposing that Labour now follows what the Tories did in 1927. And yesterday it became known that his party is calling a special conference in March 2014 to get the rules changed. For good measure, the voting rights of the unions are to be further reduced.

This then is Miliband’s contribution to passing on the ideological domination of the ruling class. He doesn’t care that the party will lose millions as a result. Miliband is more interested in impressing middle-class, middle-England voters in the general election scheduled for 2015.

So Labour, having abandoned its famous socialist Clause 4 in 1995, is applying the coup de grâce to its history. Naturally, the Guardian, dresses this up as “reform” when it is nothing of the kind. More hegemonic deception!

You can point to numerous, every-day examples of this process. What is a more difficult task is to develop ideas and, above all, practices that challenge not just the grand illusions and deceptions but also the capitalist power structures that lie at the heart of the hegemony that Gramsci was referring to.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Miliband's 'epiphany' clear victory for Mammon

And Mammon spoke. Let there be just one party that worships me. And lo and behold, the ConDemLab party came to pass. Some people were astonished and many declared in a firm voice: “We will not vote for this party. But who will represent us now?”

Who indeed. Ed Miliband’s acceptance yesterday of ConDem budget cuts for 2015-16, Labour’s refusal to restore child benefits to all, the attack on older people’s fuel allowances and the party’s plan to cap the overall benefits bill is clear enough.

Having previously stated that child benefit is “an important bedrock of our society”,  Miliband said it would not be a priority to restore it to higher earners. This not only accepts the ConDem cuts but just as significantly abandons the principle of universalism in favour of means testing.

The demonising of the unemployed will continue. Unemployed people with children aged three to four will lose benefits if they do not prepare for work.

RIP Welfare State.

Miliband’s capitulation is, essentially, to Mammon, to the financial markets that dictated first the formation of the Coalition in 2010 and that since then have threatened just about every government running a budget deficit that wasn’t cutting fast enough.

So the Labour leader pledged to match Tory plans to cut the welfare bill. Speaking in one of the poorest parts of Britain in East London, he declared: “The next Labour government will have less money to spend . . . Social security spending, vital as it is, cannot be exempt from that discipline.”

Incapacity and housing benefit spending will be targeted while employers would be offered a state subsidy to encourage them to pay higher wages. This is “responsible capitalism” at the taxpayers’ expense. What a joke.

So you will not be surprised to learn that the Financial Times, the official mouthpiece of Mammon, welcomed Miliband’s conversion on the road to the money-lenders’ temple. Its editorial talked of Miliband’s “epiphany”, adding: “The Labour leader has made a welcome step towards credibility. He still needs to do more.”

And from the Blairite think-tank Progress, there was praised from co-founder Paul Richards, who said there had been a new “re-engagement with reality”. The Blairites, who never really went away, have their mouthpiece in the shape of Miliband as well as several cuckoos group in the shadow cabinet nest

Which leaves Miliband’s main backers in the trade union bureaucracy with eggs all over their face. Only the other week, Ed McCluskey, the leader of Unite which bankrolled Miliband’s election as leader, was raging against the Blairite influence in the party. Miliband rebuked him and yesterday McCluskey rolled over like the pussycat he is.

In an obviously pre-prepared statement, McCluskey claimed that Miliband’s speech “offers hope that there is an alternative to George Osborne's punishing experiment with the national economy”. He must have been referring to some other secret speech we know nothing about.

And Paul Kenny of the GMB union, who has also been critical in the past, lauded Miliband’s policy for “dealing with the housing benefit scandal”. The real scandal here, however, is that social housing rents soared under New Labour. Council rents in London rose 60% and housing association rents in the capital almost doubled between 1997-2010. This was entirely the result of government policy. In the end, you had to be on benefits to be to live in a property charging £400 a month.

When Miliband was elected in 2010, some people told us there was now a unique opportunity to “recapture” the Labour Party from the Blairites and win back the support of working people. How wrong was that scenario!

Labour under Miliband has reaffirmed its commitment to markets, capitalism, austerity, the cuts, extending the pensionable age, public sector pay freezes and a variety of other ConDem policies. In 2015, the electorate will be offered more or the less the same by the mainstream parties within a pretty rotten, undemocratic political system.

This is truly an historic crisis of political democracy as well as economy which we have to address with bold, revolutionary ideas and policies.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

SS Westminster heads for black hole

Westminster is fast becoming the political equivalent of an emerging black hole, with the political elite engaged in an increasingly futile struggle to overcome the collapse of their own system into a region where nothing, including light, can escape.

The edge of a black hole is known as the “event horizon”. It marks the point of no return. There is a strong possibility that point has been reached, judging by the mayhem in the mainstream parties, which an astounding opinion poll is bound to reinforce.

A dramatic ­Guardian/ICM poll reveals a previously unrecorded decline in 30 years of surveys in support for the Tories, Labour and LibDems at the same time. Support has literally drained away at a rapid rate of knots, washing up at the door of the right-wing populist Ukip under Nigel Farage. 

Ukip has soared to 18%, while the Tories have plummeted to 28%, Labour to 34% and the LibDems to a miserable 11%. The patent disintegration of mainstream politics has led to a rapid Titanic-like rearranging of deckchairs as the SS Westminster heads for the iceberg.

In a desperate bid to thwart Ukip’s anti-Europe stance and a backbench rebellion, David Cameron is rushing out a draft bill to introduce an in-out EU referendum, even though it has no chance of getting through parliament and could break the Coalition.

Vince Cable is allegedly involved in a dastardly plot to oust Nick Clegg as leader of the LibDems to prevent a wipe-out of MPs at the next election.

Labour is under pressure to sack the under-performing shadow chancellor Ed Balls, who is closely associated with the failed policies of the last Labour government. Ed Miliband is also being told to go down the “Blue Labour” path of being tough on immigration, benefits and spending or face the chop as leader.

The decision of Lord Sainsbury, formerly one of the party’s biggest donors, to stop giving to Labour can only strengthen the Blairite/Blue Labour factions.

The pressure on Miliband will also grow as a result of a report that shows traditional Labour supporters are more and more unsympathetic towards welfare recipients. A big group is saying that individuals are responsible for their own predicament. After more than 15 years of New Labour/ConDem propaganda along these lines, it’s no surprise that social attitudes have shifted.

Ukip have rounded up voters who – rightly – feel powerless and dominated by forces beyond their control. These include the massive, impenetrable European Union bureaucracy, the major corporations and banks and an unresponsive political system at Westminster.

Add into the mix a spurious fear of Rumanians and Bulgarians heading for Britain in their millions, and it’s a heady, dangerous brew that Farage is stirring. Ukip’s trajectory is unpredictable but the emergence of right-wing nationalist politics is succeeding where the fascists of the BNP and other have failed. 

Clearly, the response to Ukip cannot be to urge support for the mainstream parties. Labour, for example, is opposed to self-determination for Scotland on the grounds that it would create a permanent Tory majority in England! Hardly the stuff of principle.

Political and economic institutions, including the European Union, are indeed broken and oppressive. Events since the collapse of the financial system in a number of countries demonstrate that a virulent, dangerous, anti-democratic nationalism is making headway against the old order.

There is a real opportunity to pose a revolutionary, democratic alternative to the present state, both here and in the EU. We need to campaign for that right now, not wait until the political system becomes so unstable that dark forces within the state emerge to enforce order. They were ready to do that in the 1970s. Don’t think they are not waiting in the wings now.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

McCluskey lets Miliband off the hook

What are we to make of the spat between Len McCluskey, the leader of Britain’s biggest union and Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party who in large measures owes his very position to the man he has publicly castigated?

McCluskey wants Miliband to rid his leadership of three Blairite members of the shadow cabinet or risk losing the next election. For his part, Miliband has attacked McCluskey for a “reprehensible” attempt to divide the Labour and of being “disloyal” to the party.

Wary of attempts by the right-wing press to portray him as a creature of the unions, a spokesman for Miliband added for good measure that McCluskey "does not speak for the Labour Party".

The charge sheet against McCluskey was further extended to accuse him of advocating “the kind of politics that lost Labour many elections in the 1980s”. Considering that McCluskey’s Unite provides 20% of the funding for Labour, it’s a high-risk quarrel.

Miliband is surely aware, however, that McCluskey is unlikely to turn his words into actions anytime soon. And here’s where McCluskey is somewhat disingenuous. In his interview with the New Statesman, McCluskey says his recent re-election as general secretary means the union will be checking up on Labour up to after the next election.

But when McCluskey suggests Miliband must spending many an hour worrying about how to neuter the influence of the Blairites, he has got it 100% wrong. Miliband, it is true, has tried to distance himself a little from the Blair-Brown governments, of which he was a member. But in essence, Miliband is no different in outlook.

Under his leadership, Labour has adopted policies and attitudes which Unite is actually opposed to. These include the acceptance of the ConDems’ public sector pay freeze, cuts in services and jobs at local government level, opposition to strike action in defence of pensions, etc. etc. etc.

As Miliband’s statement says, he believes McCluskey is advocating the politics of the 1980s, which Labour has rejected. Instead, Miliband has embraced “responsible capitalism” as a goal, pre-distribution rather than redistribution (I’ll leave you to ponder that one), workfare and reducing the national debt. He is also vying with Ukip and the Tories to adopt anti-immigration postures and has no plans to end the role of the markets in public services and the NHS.

This is Blairism Mark II, the hunt for the so-called “centre ground” in British politics, which is now overcrowded with politicians from the all the mainstream parties putting forward more or less the same policies.

McCluskey must know this. Indeed, he refers to the dangers of Miliband going into an election with “austerity-lite” policies. But by choosing to attack Blairites like Douglas Alexander, Jim Murphy and Liam Byrne, he evades the reality of Miliband’s own leadership and what Labour has irrefutably become.

McCluskey claims that Labour is “at a crossroads” when in fact it passed them a long time ago. Neoliberalism isn’t, whatever McCluskey might suggest, a product of Blairism. Rather, it was the other way round. Blair, like Thatcher before him, responded to the changes in the capitalist system.

Globalisation demanded deregulation and open markets. States and governments fell into line because, ultimately, they serve the same master – the bottom line. The era that went before – top-down state ownership, heavy bureaucracy, capital controls, regulation etc – was swept aside and cannot be reproduced.

Miliband is no fool and he knows this. Having seen what’s happened to Francois Hollande across the Channel, where attempts to rein in capitalism have floundered, Miliband is not about to go down the same path. So when McCluskey says that if Labour fails to emerge as “the authentic voice of ordinary working people” his union would reconsider its position, he is a long way behind what’s already happened.

Unite stumped up the cash to get Miliband elected ahead of his brother after the last election. The political return on capital invested is so negligible that his membership must wonder why they continue to fund Labour. McCluskey is undoubtedly feeling the pressure from his rank-and-file. That’s why he’s spoken out. Now he owes them a debate about where their money goes right now, not at some distant point in the future.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Miliband joins race to the bottom after Eastleigh

Earlier in the week,  the key message from the Italian elections was that support for traditional politics was in free-fall. Yesterday, the point was reinforced in the Hampshire town of Eastleigh where the by-election result is likely to kick-start a political crisis at Westminster.

Although the Lib Dems held on to the seat – despite its former MP Chris Huhne awaiting a probable jail sentence and sex allegations surrounding former party chief executive Lord Rennard – the junior partner in the Coalition government lost 14% of its vote.

With the Tories coming third and Labour a distant fourth, the only winner was Ukip – the party of Little Englanders and populist reactionaries. They picked up votes from the right-wing of the other two front-runners and but for entrenched Lib Dem organisation on the ground, would have captured the seat.

Ukip ran with on an anti-EU bureaucracy and anti-immigration platform – hardly issues that affect most people in this relatively wealthy town in southern England. But their appeal also reached out to those whose disgust at Westminster politics has built over the last decades.

Voters like that are to be found in all social classes who, for a variety of reasons, feel betrayed, abandoned or simply used by the major parties at election time. That’s why no party was able to secure enthusiastic let alone overwhelming support at the 2010 general election.

Come 2015, the scheduled date of the next election, neither the Tories, Lib Dems nor Labour will find the position has improved. In fact, Ukip is capable of taking votes off all of them and another hung parliament seems the outcome. Viewing Ukip’s performance as a one-off protest vote would be a mistake.

We should not underestimate the crisis surrounding the leadership of David Cameron following the Eastleigh result. His project to remake the Tory party in a modern image lies in ruins. As Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, noted after the result: “The Conservatives failed here because traditional Tory voters look at Cameron and they ask themselves ‘Is he a Conservative?’ and they conclude ‘No, he’s not’. He’s talking about gay marriage, wind turbines, unlimited immigration from India. He wants Turkey to join the European Union. The Conservatives’ problems are not because of Ukip, it’s because of their leader.”

A coup against Cameron is entirely possible, replacing him with a figure from the right of the party. This would almost certainly lead to a swift end to the Coalition with the Lib Dems and precipitate an early election, at which the Tories could well get hammered. With Britain losing its AAA credit rating, a political crisis of this magnitude would shake the markets. Just look at Italy’s perilous position since the election.

Which leaves with Ed Miliband’s party, New Labour Mark II, the champions of responsible capitalism, and whose policies are barely distinguishable from those of the government parties. The lesson Labour is apparently drawing is that – wait for it – they have to appear tougher on immigration than they have done thus far.

So come next Wednesday, Miliband is to devote an entire party political broadcast to address “voters’ concerns” on immigration (which, by the way, is falling rapidly). He will tell them that Labour should have done more to address the issue when in office for 13 years.

Making this a key issue when austerity driven by the crisis of global capitalism is wrecking people’s lives is entirely reactionary. This is Labour’s appeal to backwardness, narrow nationalism and prejudiced voters who hold immigrants and foreigners responsible for every problem.

Ukip is leading a race to the bottom in British politics and Labour is desperately trying to get in amongst the front-runners. It makes you want to throw up.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

The politics of increasingly small differences

It’s reached the point where you need a high-powered microscope to detect the differences between the major political parties. If there are any, they are at sub-atomic level as the much-heralded speech on the economy by Ed Miliband demonstrates.

The economy is in crisis, in its deepest recession since the 1930s. People have stopped spending because they don’t have the money. Retail sales fell last month and not just because of the bad weather.

Most ordinary people are either repaying debts or simply don’t have the income. If you have a job, your wages are falling in real terms; if you’re unemployed your benefits are miserly and also declining.

ConDem austerity policies have made a bad thing worse. But then they are also caught up in the crisis not just of the British economy but of the global capitalist system. Yesterday Germany and France reported deep contractions in their economies, for example.

Corporations are ripping off the taxpayer while the privatised utilities, rail networks and supermarkets are banging up prices like there is no tomorrow. Meanwhile, the supermarkets have never bothered to check whether beef is actually horsemeat. 

People are angry, fed up and increasingly desperate for a solution.

Enter the Labour leader Miliband. Did he promise a cut in train fares, control of soaring private rents or a return of gas and electricity to public ownership? Did he hell! All he came up with was the return of a 10p tax rate for the low paid scrapped by the previous Labour government and a so-called “mansion tax”.

The Tories are thinking of introducing the tax rate and the Liberal Democrats are in favour of the mansion tax. So forgive me for declaring Miliband’s speech to be a prime example of the politics of small differences. As The Independent noted:

What was striking was the overlap with either existing Coalition plans or proposals from one or other of its members. Even the repeated references to “working people” sounded suspiciously similar to the Tory pre-occupation with “strivers”.

It’s not as if the sums even add up. A 10p tax rate for low earners would cost the Treasury about £7 billion. The best estimates for the revenue for a tax on high value homes is £2 billion, according to experts at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), which noted:

"To have observed lower starting rates of tax being introduced and abolished by governments of both complexions over the last three decades and then to propose the same thing again suggests a remarkable failure to learn from history." The same aims, the IFS added, could be achieved by increasing personal tax allowances.

On the mansion tax proposals, the IFS described the idea as a bandage over the regressive council tax system which under-taxes valuable properties. "Rather than adding a mansion tax on top of an unreformed and deficient council tax, it would be better to reform council tax itself to make it proportional to current property values," the think tank said.

Perhaps Labour will abandon the mansion tax proposal –  which is widely viewed as a bid to cosy up to the Liberal Democrats in case the next election is a stalemate – when it realises that several of its MPs will be in the firing line.

David Miliband’s home is in the £2 million-plus bracket which Labour intends to use as a benchmark. So is deputy leader Harriet Harman’s home in Herne Hill, south London, which she bought with a cheap mortgage provided by her husband’s union (she also has another home in Suffolk).

And then there is the wealthy Labour MP for Feltham and Heston, Seema Malhotra who won a by-election in the relatively poor West London constituency. The market value of her home in fashionable Chelsea is reputedly over £3 million.

Finally, there is Ed himself. He lives in a house, in the name of his wife, which is valued at up to £2.3 million – a rise of £700,000 in the three years since it was purchased. Yes, they are all in it together. One big ConDemLab nation.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

McCluskey's sleight of hand is cover for Miliband

Go and read Len McCluskey’s lecture at the London School of Economics. It was tremendous and a breath of fresh air, I was told. So I did. Was I disappointed? Not really, because my expectations were not all that high to start with.

McCluskey has always talked a good talk, telling committed socialists what they want to hear.. The rhetoric, the references to Marx, are all well and good. In practice, however, his leadership of Britain’s biggest union Unite is never as half as committed.

Unite has blocked any suggestion, for example, that Labour councillors should refuse to implement Tory-driven budget cuts. The union leadership short-circuited resistance to ConDem pension attacks and eventually signed on the dotted line.

Ultimately, as we will see, McCluskey’s hopes rest with Ed Miliband. In that he is not alone, of course. There are plenty on the left who believe Miliband is some kind of “open book” who will somehow represent the interests of working people if he becomes prime minister.

McCluskey’s address, “A working class politics for the 21st century”, was delivered as the Ralph Miliband lecture at the LSE. The father of Ed and David was regarded as a Marxist and wrote critiques of Labour and reformism in books like Parliamentary socialism.  

The irony was not lost on McCluskey who noted: “ Indeed, it is sometimes said that there is a common thread linking the generations of Milibands – the father spent his life trying to convince our movement that there was no possibility of a parliamentary road to socialism, while his sons have been loyally putting theory into practice, and proving Ralph right!”
 
McCluskey gave a swift overview of the historic role played by the organised working class through its trade unions in fighting for democracy, creating a welfare state and establishing a political voice by “influencing government through the Labour Party”. 

When it came to contemporary history, he was on much shakier ground. The weakening of the trade unions was part of the “neo-liberal offensive” which began in the mid-1970s, he claimed. While this is true, McCluskey’s view that this was “not mainly about economics” is plainly wrong. The mid-1970s signalled the end of consensus politics because the post-war international economic framework collapsed in a heap.

The offensive against the working class was driven by this crisis. It was not, as he suggests, that the ruling élites woke up one day and decided that the trade unions had become too strong. While McCluskey frequently uses the term capitalism in his lecture, the concept of globalisation is totally absent.

Yet it is the emergence of a globalised capitalism, with its tremendous hold over nation states, governments and international institutions, that is the real game changer. McCluskey’s view that the offensive was “about restoring what our rulers regarded as the proper social hierarchy, including getting the working-class out of politics”, he is referring to the consequences rather than the cause.

In his lecture, McCluskey spelled out innovative ways that the unions could rebuild their membership and the role they could play in uniting communities against austerity. He praised Ukuncut and other grass roots movements that have exposed inequality and tax avoidance. McCluskey noted the growing anger at local level against the cuts.

But what, you may ask, is this all for. McCluskey told his audience: “So my message to capitalism – if you can send a message to a system – is this:  Mend your ways or risk mounting social breakdown and disorder.”

And who will do the “mending”? For McCluskey, “Labour is the natural, historic, vehicle” for the working class. And here’s the ultimate sleight of hand. McCluskey said that if “in the future” [emphasis added] there is any return to the “discredited recipes of Blairism”, then the Labour Party will be over for him and others.

The fact that all the evidence points says this is already the case. Miliband’s espousal of pseudo-Tory “One Nation” politics, his support for a pubic sector wage freeze, his opposition to strikes, the Labour leader’s commitment to reducing the deficit through cuts,  the espousal of “responsible capitalism”, the backing for the end of universal benefits etc etc – tells its own story.

It was one that McCluskey had nothing to say about.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor 

Revealed: those Cable-Miliband texts

We have been offered details of some the frequent texts exchanged between Vince Cable, the business secretary and leading Lib Dem, and Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party.

How they were obtained, we don’t know. But we thought the “public interest” would be best served by publishing extracts. These cover exchanges from early September this year and go right up until yesterday afternoon. Enjoy!

---------------------------------------------

Ed:

What do u think of my predistribution speech? Need fairer, responsible capitalism. This is my big idea.

Sent @ 16.42 Sep 6

Vince:

Great idea imo. Redistribution old hat now!!!! LDs can support predistribution.

Sent @ 16.59 Sep 6

Ed: If bosses play ball we could save billions in pub spending. Genius stuff from US

Sent @ 17.02 Sep 6

Vince:

Deficit getting worse. So every penny we can save…

Sent @ 17.04 Sep 6

---------------------------------------------

Vince:

Great to be on with Ed [Balls, shadow chancellor] on Marr’s show. Bit of a stir when I said was on centre-left!!!!!

Sent @ 14.17 Sep 9  

Ed:

Left/right not issue anymore imo. System needs sorting. Ed’s ego a prob tho!

Sent @ 15.19 Sep 9

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Vince:

Bros gave Ed bad time at TUC. What’s wrong with them? Thgt they were all signed up?

Sent @ 18.30 Sep 11

Ed:

Think they own me!!! Don’t want to know abt deficit. Pay freeze right for country. Glad Ed was there and not me!!!
Sent @19.07 Sep 11 

---------------------------------------------

Vince:

Hope my plans on emp tribs ok with you? [Cable is to consult on curbing employment tribunal payouts and other restrictions]

Sent @ 13.05 Sep 14

Ed:

No probs! Too much conflict in the system. Sort it out Vince!

Sent @ 14.27 Sep 14

---------------------------------------------

Ed:

Hope u liked my int in D Tel. Cld bring our 2 parties closer. Need to wk 2gether after 2015 [date of next general election].

Sent @ 13.20 Sep 15

Vince:

Great stuff. Liked bit about saving capitalism from itself. Can we do it? Yes we can!!!!!

Sent @14.00 Sep 15
---------------------------------------------

Vince

Nick’s [Clegg] apol on fees was amazing. Cldn’t believe it!!!! Whatever next!!! He can’t last. My turn????

Sent @ 11.01 Sep 19

Ed:

Hope so. Be gt to have u and LDs with us after 2015. Still more cuts to come. So need to wk closer.

Sent @ 11.05 Sep 19

---------------------------------------------

Vince: Polls show you well ahead. Cld u manage without LDs after 2015? Pity if so.

Sent @ 14.25 Sep 21

Ed: Don’t worry. Public don’t really like any of us. Will they vote? Will need each other imo.

Sent @ 15.08 Sep 21

---------------------------------------------

Vince: Bit lonely in govt. Most Tories won’t speak to me!!!! Keep telling myself in govt in nat interest. Not sure anymore!!!!

Sent @ 8.50 Sep 23

Ed:  Don’t worry. You’ve got a friend in me [believed to be a Toy Story reference]. Tories are out of touch.

Sent @ 8.52 Sep 23

---------------------------------------------

Ed:  Great speech at ur conf Vince. Lvd stuff about Tory headbangers and plebs. Small business bank right way to go.

Sent @ 15.58 Sep 24

Vince: Cheers! They love me here. Nick is done for imo. I could relaunch LDs in time for 2015. But u know LDs. They can’t make up their minds!!!!!

Sent @ 16.20 Sep 24

Ed: I’m here for you. There’s a new third way and we’ve found it.

Sent @ 16.25 Sep 24

---------------------------------------------

Miliband's manifesto for 'responsible capitalism'

There are people out there who harbour hopes that a future Labour government under Ed Miliband would be a radical administration that responds to ordinary people’s aspirations. Dream on.

What is made clearer each time Miliband or shadow chancellor Ed Balls speaks is that they accept lock, stock and barrel that the first priority will be to reduce the public spending deficit. If elected, Labour would carry on where the Tories leave off.

That was the hardly-disguised implication of Miliband’s speech yesterday at the stock exchange where Labour came down in favour of what is known as “predistribution”. You read that right, not redistribution but predistribution.  

"The redistribution of the last Labour government relied on revenue, at least in part, which the next Labour government will not enjoy," Miliband told his audience ."The option of simply increasing tax credits, for example, in the way we did before will not be open to us … fiscal circumstances will make it harder not easier."

Now, in the dim and distant past, Labour was in principle in favour of redistribution. In fact, that was the raison d’être of voting for Labour in the first place. By way of taxation, housing, education and state-owned utilities, the inequality/wealth gap would at least be held in check, if not narrowed

That philosophy went out of the window in the 1990s, when New Labour came into existence. As Miliband said: “In the 1990s New Labour rightly embraced markets, most famously in our change to Clause 4. The party embraced the creativity of capitalism.”

In came the love for deregulated market capitalism and so-called trickle-down economics. Except the trickle became a tide heading in the opposite direction. Inequality grew as the better off increased their share of wealth. One report published just before the last general election concluded: “Households in the top tenth have total wealth (including private pension rights) almost 100 times those at the cut-off for the bottom tenth.”

Millions were condemned to low wage, unskilled jobs as the corporations moved skilled manufacturing jobs to Asia. House prices soared out of the reach of most people, while rents in private and social sectors became unaffordable on wages alone. Many households were forced to live in permanent debt, and still do.

Neither the minimum wage – which you cannot live on – nor tax credits made a substantial difference. But even those measures are being abandoned by Miliband in favour of predistribution, a term coined by political economist Jacob S. Hacker who has advised the Democratic Party in the US.

So what does it mean? It is little more than encouraging capitalism to be more “responsible”. As Miliband told his audience: “"Predistribution is about saying, 'We cannot allow ourselves to be stuck with permanently being a low-wage economy and hope that through taxes and benefits we can make up the shortfall. It's not just, nor does it enable us to pay our way in the world. Our aim must be to transform our economy so it is a much higher skill, much higher wage economy.”

And, pray, who is to achieve this laudable aim? Not the government, not the state. Yes, you’ve guessed it, the employers! Miliband claimed that “the move towards a more responsible capitalism is actually being led by many business people”, by companies who know that firms “flourish best when rewards are fairly shared”.

This will come as news to the vast majority of workers, who real incomes have fallen sharply since the economic and financial crisis broke five years ago (with much worse to come at the end of this year when food, fuel and transport costs soar).

Just in case his audience was in any doubt, Miliband finished his speech by declaring: “And I believe creating this responsible capitalism will be better for our country. A responsible capitalism is a resilient capitalism.” Vote for that? You are joking!

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Miliband plays the race card

The euro is heading for collapse, major banks were downgraded overnight, the global economy is plunging into depression and Ed Miliband chooses this very moment to play the reactionary race card.

Pandering to prejudice, the right-wing press and voters looking for scapegoats for social problems is what Labour leader Miliband is doing today, however much he dresses it up as a “policy rethink”.

In his Guardian interview, Miliband claims that workers from countries like Poland have driven down wages while denying British citizens jobs. Of course, he produces no evidence whatsoever to substantiate this.

Britain was one of three countries that allowed workers from new European Union member states to enter the country without restrictions after May 2004. But research in 2008 concluded: “Despite anecdotal evidence, we found little hard evidence that the inflow of accession migrants contributed to a fall in wages or a rise in claimant unemployment in the UK between 2004 and 2006.”

But Miliband is basing his new hard-line on the very same “anecdotal evidence”, including the amazing statement that people “in every kitchen” up and down the country are discussing what to do about immigration. 

And no doubt Miliband was inspired by recent findings from the right-wing Policy Exchange think-tank that a harder line on immigration would help Labour win back swing voters, as well as the views of Jon Cruddas, his new policy adviser.

By referring to sectors of the economy “where there is a problem”, Miliband immediately drags the issue of the numbers of migrant workers into the limelight. But having raised the hopes of racists that the numbers could be reduced somehow, Miliband only proposes that new vacancies should be notified to Jobcentre Plus!

Saying he will review immigrants access to benefits – all the statistics show EU workers claim less than the average UK citizen – and routes to local social housing is something you would expect from the right of the Tory Party. In his rush to reject New Labour’s relative open door policy, Miliband has found himself in the company of UKIP and other nationalist outfits.

His late Marxist father Ralph (a refugee from Nazi persecution) will no doubt be turning in his grave to hear son Ed argue that immigration should be seen as a “class issue” because “evidence” showed lower-paid workers and the unskilled suffer from cheap East European labour.

A genuine class-based approach would, however, be to insist that there is a divide and rule strategy to hand and that workers have to find ways to stick together against a common enemy or face joint immiseration.

Instead, Miliband said he was entering the debate on immigration in the context of his call for a more “responsible capitalism”. He wants the employers to pay better wages and treat everyone more fairly and end the “nasty, brutish and short-term” nature of the labour market.

That’s really going to happen!

Corporate-driven globalisation, which the New Labour governments endorsed 100%, benefited big business and the banks at the expense of working conditions and wages. Now that the global economy is in its worst-ever crisis, many people regard the system of capitalism as the problem and not the solution.

At this point, Miliband steps in to deflect people’s attention away from the incompetent ruling elites, the bloated bankers and the corporations whose obsession with profit has produced a catastrophe.

The present Labour leader, like those before him, is just what the system needs at this point. Instead of confronting those responsible for low wages, unemployment, poor housing and run-down services, let’s just fight amongst ourselves for the scraps. Miliband confirms that there is no point in Labour, none whatsoever.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

NHS vote marks end of parliamentary road

While last night’s vote to approve the health bill marks the end of the parliamentary road – in more ways than one – the future of the NHS is far from being a done deal.

Only royal assent is needed to complete the legislation that brings competition right into the heart of the National Health Service and threatens its future.

And the gushing warmth of the parliamentary congratulations to the Queen on her diamond jubilee – with Ed Miliband suggesting to David Cameron that they should stand to applaud - ensures that happens very soon.

Living in the forlorn hope that Labour will repeal the bill is a waste of time. The ConDems actually built on what New Labour had done, especially in relation to virtually independent foundation trusts.

In any case, we can’t afford to wait until the general election of 2015. For the vast majority whose lives, literally, are bound up with the not-for-profit institution set up in 1948, defence of the principles of universal health care must be along a new path.

The same is true for pensions. Unions yesterday lost a legal battle to stop the government slashing up to 20% off public sector pensions by switching to the consumer price index instead of the normally faster-rising retail price index to calculate cost-of-living rises.

Siding with the Coalition, Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, put it like this: “The government clearly believed the state of the economy was grave, and that any savings which could properly be made should be made – as soon as possible.” Unions are considering an appeal, but they’ll be wasting their time, and their members’ money.

The state of the capitalist economy is worse than grave, and the UK government, like most throughout the world, is willingly submitting to the relentless logic of contraction expressed through the simple measure of the credit rating calculated by agencies representing investors on the global capital markets.

Two of the three - Fitch and Standard & Poor – have already threatened to downgrade Britain’s AAA rating if the Coalition’s intensifying drive to cuts and privatisation continues to fail to deliver. The growth promised in last year’s budget hasn’t materialised, so the austerity assault will be ramped up in today’s budget – despite it deepening the recession.

Everything that can be handed over to the for-profit sector will be, and the latest victim is the handling of emergency calls to ambulance, fire and police, soon to be joined by the roads.

Simon Reed, vice-chairman of the Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers, warned that the momentum towards outsourcing was gathering pace. “This is the drip, drip, drip of privatisation,” he said. “They move in on something that might look like a good idea, and before we know it they are working in vast areas of British policing.”

Just as in the revolts of the Arab Spring, the police will soon be faced with a three way choice: to side with the repressive state forces seeking to preserve the status quo; to stand aside as new democratic forces arise; or to join with them in people's assemblies formed from workers in factories and offices, the professions, school and college students the unemployed, pensioners, community groups.

With the state’s forces ranged against the interests of the majority, and the parliamentary process a cul de sac, these new assemblies will become the focus for the democratic process that makes and carries out decisions in the interests of the people and small businesses.

They will work to identify and satisfy the unmet needs of the local population with respect to nutrition, housing, clothing, health, energy, safety, communications, transport, education and self-development, culture, sport, recreation, arts, entertainment, social support including security in older age.

And, as the democratic expression of the majority, they will give themselves the power to acquire the resources, including land, from their present owners in order to satisfy needs. That’s the best way to respond to what happened in Parliament yesterday.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Whatever happens on bonuses, we lose out

For all the excitement generated over the reluctant decision by Stephen Hester, the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, to decline his near £1 million bonus, this is not a zero sum game.

Hester forgoing his bonus, which would have been paid in shares, does not mean, for example, that as a result there is more money in the public purse to offset against the ConDem’s austerity cuts programme.

Nor does it help hard-pressed RBS borrowers – from small businesses to home owners with mortgages. They will not be treated any more sympathetically by the bank when they struggle to meet repayments.

Will it prevent RBS from punishing hard-pressed workers struggling to make ends meet when they accidentally drift into the overdraft zone? I don’t think so.

Paradoxically, it seems that the shares, if they had been cashed in over the next couple of years, would have produced a tax take of around £500,000 depending on their market value at the time.

In other words, if Hester hadn’t taken home more than £11m in shares and cash since being brought in by New Labour to run the bailed-out bank in October 2008 (with a golden hello of 10.4 million shares), we in the shape of the 99%, would not be better off by the same amount.

As RBS bankers outside the boardroom form an orderly queue to share in a bonus pool worth an estimated £500 million in the next month or so, some are waiting to see how many shares they get under a scheme approved in 2009, when Gordon Brown was prime minister. John Hourican, head of RBS’s investment bank, could receive up to 21.3m shares in April – worth around £5m at last night's price – and options on another 7.4m shares.

What all this demonstrates is not only that the bankers hold the aces – there is clear evidence that the RBS board threatened to resign if the Treasury had tried to block Hester’s bonus – but that they also have absolute control over resources.

While the financial system continues to be run for profit to benefit shareholders and senior staff, no good can come of it. Quite the reverse, as we have discovered to our cost since the meltdown began in 2007. The state’s resources – aka taxpayers’ money - are despatched to bail out the system without delay so that things can stay as they are. The sums committed are then added to the deficit and result in more cuts.

All the remedies suggested by either the government or Labour leader Ed Miliband are designed to maintain the status quo of capitalist-owned banks that serve their own interest. Miliband, of course, was a member of a government that gloried the achievements of the bankers and financed large amounts of public spending from tax revenues from the financial sector.

Ed Balls, now shadow chancellor but then a Treasury minister, speaking to business figures in Hong Kong in 2006, remarked: “The UK’s financial tradition as a free, fair and open global market has resulted in tremendous growth in London’s international financial markets in the past decade – over-the-counter derivatives turnover up by 770%, foreign equities turnover up by 260%, cross-border bank lending up by 160% and foreign exchange turnover up by over 60%.”

Miliband is not opposed to bonuses – so long as they are “merited”! As for a one-off tax on bonuses – which Labour actually introduced in 2009 – that is hardly going to change what goes on.

As one comment on the Financial Times website noted: “What difference does Hester's bonus make to the billions already allocated to the rest of the banking community. Given the trillion the banks are now borrowing from the ECB [European Central Bank], I can only conclude that the banking community remains impervious to their financial reality. I wish someone would give me a bonus for defrauding my customers and still managing to go bankrupt!”

The real issue is about who owns and controls the country’s financial resources and what they are used for. Massive bonuses are a symptom of the problem – but not the problem itself.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor