A global 'twilight of the elites'

The spectacle of former Cabinet ministers Stephen Byers, Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon peddling their services to a fictional US company for rates of between £3,000 and £5,000 per day has brought Parliament into even greater disrepute – if that is indeed possible.

Last year’s expenses’ scandal revealed that this unlimited greed in the corridors of power is not confined to a few individuals. In the wake of the Channel 4 exposé of the former Blairite ministers, a BBC investigation found that 20 MPs had failed to declare free overseas trips on more than 400 occasions. Andrew Dismore, who is actually on the committee that is supposed to oversee the behaviour of MPs, breached the rules no fewer than 90 times.

But looking at the global picture, Britain’s parliament is not unique when it comes to evidence of abuse of power and trust. The crisis in the Catholic church has forced even God’s Rottweiler, Pope Benedict XVI, to apologise for priests who sexually abused children in Ireland.

One experienced Vatican watcher comments that “during four decades of reporting from the Vatican, I have never seen a graver crisis affecting the very credibility of the leadership of the world's longest surviving international organisation, the Roman Catholic Church”.

And, in the United States, Nation editor Christopher Hayes, writing in Time magazine, uses the phrase “twilight of the elites” in his depiction of the corruption and incompetence of “nearly every pillar institution in American society whether it’s General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media”.

In what he calls “the implosion of nearly all sources of American authority”, trust in Congress has dropped to only 12% of people expressing confidence in it in the last Gallup poll. Naturally Hayes does not describe this failure as a crisis of the capitalist system. Instead he blames the elites themselves – “the people who run the institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy the commanding heights of our meritocratic order”.

But in reality, a widespread feeling of malaise and distrust has become a truly international phenomenon in response to what is being revealed as the internal corrosion of the capitalist system and its institutions.

The Conservative party is now moving in to seize the ground opened up by New Labour’s promotion of bleak corporate power with talk of local democracy, parent-run schools and community-run local shops. On Saturday we had nothing less than the sight of former Thatcherite Michael Portillo’s television programme called “power to the people”, where he asked how politics could “engage” with local people.

Thus New Labour’s authoritarian state has opened the door for equally reactionary populists of the Right. They do this under the cover of encouraging “people’s power”. Naturally, the Tories’ strategies will lead to nothing of the kind, but they reveal yet again the hollowing out and implosion of the political system.

A hung parliament and possible national government could see authoritarians of the far right seizing their chance, posing as cleaners-up of corruption. Something along these lines facilitated Berlusconi’s rise to power in Italy.

It would be a grave mistake to underestimate the political fall-out of this widespread awareness - on a multitude of levels - that the existing state institutions are corrupt and unfit for purpose.

The notion that we should prop up this collapsing structure by casting a vote for existing parties at the general election is thus revealed not as an exercise in democracy but a futile effort to preserve the status quo at any expense. The crisis of the institutions and their leaders opens up an unprecedented opportunity to advance new and truly democratic alternatives.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Rats desert sinking Parliamentary ship

When the MPs expenses scandal broke out like an ugly rash earlier this year, many cynics pooh-poohed it. Oh, we all knew that they were only in Parliament to line their own pockets, they scoffed.

Well, as so often, what first appeared as a bit of rottenness, turned out to be a much deeper and bigger decay. Scorn and contempt for Parliament is running at levels not seen since the late 18th century when painter William Hogarth satirised electoral corruption and Tom Paine, author of the Rights of Man, denounced the Rotten Boroughs, under which rich landowners could buy political influence.

But has the exposure of their greed made MPs contrite and willing to mend their ways, as party leaders would have us believe? No, quite the reverse, certainly for most New Labour MPs. Since it is apparent that New Labour could suffer a massive defeat in a possible spring 2010 election, backbench MPs are handing in their notice.

Yesterday’s Observer announced that 120 Labour MPs plan to resign at the next election. Some 63 have already told Brown that they will leave. Their reasons for leaving and their timing of their departures are due mainly to their desire to keep up their high earnings. One Labour MP is quoted as saying “I’m off. You can’t earn a decent living anymore. We’re going to have the most inexperienced parliament even after the elections with some big decisions to make. It is not somewhere I want to be. I want to earn some money.”

Denis MacShane, Labour MP for Rotherham, rightly warns that the mass exodus by MPs has a significance beyond rats leaving a sinking ship. In so far as Parliament has been a protected space and political forum where those who had any principles could speak freely, the upcoming implosion of Parliament will suit those he terms the “secret power holders in Britain – the media proprietors, the City and the permanent state bureaucrats, who have always believed the country would be better run if politicians did not get in the way.” In other words, when there is a severe crisis of democratic representation, the sinister forces of dictatorship shadows can seize the chance to the fore.

Is the answer to this crisis, the creation of another reformist organisation, reprising the formation of the Labour Party early in the 20th century? A number of left organisations and trade union leaders think so. Recently the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) issued a call for a discussion about “a single left alternative” to be formed “to represent working class interests at the next election”.

Behind-the-scenes discussions have been going on between the Socialist Party, the Communist Party of Britain, the leadership of the RMT rail union (who together recently created NO2EU), the SWP and Respect. The possibility of such an alliance deconstructing a system which has become little more than a façade for the interests of the global corporations and banks is pretty remote, however.

The inexorable drift, instead, of a faux "left unity" is towards a NO2EU Mark II on the back of Mark I, which stood in the recent Euro elections on a nationalist platform that counterposed British “democratic structures” to those of the European Union and hardly referred to the economic crisis at all.

The notion of a new “left” parliamentary party, comfortingly safe as it may seem, completely ignores the reasons for Parliament’s decline. The expenses scandal is the straw that is breaking the Parliamentary camel’s back, not some strange anomaly, but an indicator of the way in which economics and politics have been transformed in the decades of rampant globalisation, as A World to Win has analysed in its book, Unmasking the State

There is powerful symbolic context to MacShane’s warning about the dire consequences for democracy in yesterday’s Observer. Britain’s oldest Sunday newspaper – it was founded in 1791 – like parliamentary democracy itself, could be on its last legs. If it is forced to close, that will leave Murdoch and other right-wing media moguls to rule the roost, certainly on Sundays. It’s high time not to leave audacious political thinking to the far right but to set a course for a revolutionary transformation of politics and the state, thereby creating an enhanced democracy as well as defeating an incipient dictatorship. Anything less will simply reinforce a decaying status quo whatever the intentions.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Politics has to become our business

So more than half of the British electorate believe that MPs are corrupt and almost eight out of ten don’t trust them to “tell the truth” either. And 62% say they believe MPs put self-interest first. Not much of a vote of confidence in the Parliamentary system there then.

The Ipsos Mori poll for the BBC will do nothing to reassure the political establishment that a few tweaks here and tougher rules there will restore public confidence in a decrepit system.

In truth, support for the existing political system has withered on the vine for decades. Now it has reached a tipping point following the revelation in the Daily Telegraph of the hitherto secret world of MPs’ “expenses” which cabinet members like Alistair Darling and Geoff Hoon also milked.

Turnout in both national and local elections has fallen dramatically in the last decade – the 2001 and 2005 elections recorded the lowest turnout (59% and 61% respectively) since the advent of universal suffrage in 1918. Some 75% of people aged 65 and up voted in the last election compared to only 37% of young people. In other words, for every two older people who voted in the last general election, only one younger person voted. Turnout at local elections has fallen by around a tenth since the 1980s, with the result that little more than a third of registered electors turnout to vote in most local elections. Less than a quarter of registered voters say they intend to vote in Thursday’s European elections.

In 2004, the Power Inquiry was set up to discover what had happened to the political system and why “disengagement from formal democratic politics in Britain [has] grown in recent years and how can it be reversed?” The commission, chaired by radical lawyer Helena Kennedy QC, reported in 2006 that it was “vital to re-engage the British people with formal democracy” if the following were to be avoided:

 the weakening of the mandate and legitimacy for elected governments – whichever party is in power – because of plummeting turnout
 the further weakening of political equality because whole sections of the community feel estranged from politics
 the weakening of effective dialogue between governed and governors
 the weakening of effective recruitment into politics
 the rise of undemocratic political forces
 the rise of a “quiet authoritarianism” within government.

You could say with confidence that everything since the report was published has reinforced the inquiry’s fears. The question now arises as to whether it’s possible for the effectively disenfranchised electorate to take matters into their own hands in the sense of creating a more democratic political system?

For too long in history, politics has been left to or handed over to “others”. This was encouraged, for example, by the trade unions at the end of the 19th century when they created the Labour Party to deal with “political matters” on their behalf while they got on with industrial affairs. Well, “their” party turned out to be unaccountable and uncontrollable as it quickly became absorbed by the capitalist state. Now the unions are left powerless and unrepresented, pleading with New Labour to act to save jobs, all to no avail.

The existing set-up is clearly passed its use-by date and rearranging the deckchairs on a sinking SS Westminster will not suffice. Voters themselves have to decide what kind of new, democratic political system has to take its place through mechanisms like People’s Conventions. Politics should now become everyone’s affair.


Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

State cracks at its weakest point

The scandal of MPs’ expenses has led to a constitutional crisis because it creates a vacuum within that part of the machinery of state that the ruling classes have used to hoodwink the populace about the true nature of democracy under capitalism.

There are several enduring myths about the present state and democracy. They suggest that capitalism and democracy are natural partners and that the ruling elites have championed the rights of ordinary people since time immemorial. And that Parliament was and remains the centre of this process.

These legends have proved vital in cementing a relationship between rulers and the ruled, especially since 1884, by which time all men had finally achieved the vote. By then, however, the capitalist state had consolidated itself and as the political scientist Anthony King says in his book The British Constitution:

“Democracy, whether parliamentary or otherwise, was … a latecomer on the British political scene. It was a novel feature grafted on to a pre-existing constitutional structure. Largely for that reason, democracy in Britain, in the form of universal suffrage, was accepted as a humdrum matter of political practice long before any widespread enthusiasm developed for democracy as a set of political ideals that deserved to be promoted for its own sake.”

Nevertheless, this “humdrum” practice led to the building of the Labour Party and facilitated long periods of class compromise in the political sense. Some Labour governments were even able to make substantial reforms, like a free health service. That is what has come to an abrupt end and not just in recent weeks either.

The fact that New Labour MPs and cabinet ministers are even greedier than the Tories illustrates how far we have travelled down the road to the point where nothing of importance separates the three major parties and their unconditional commitment to global capitalism.

Nor is it an accident that the outrage has built at a time of the gravest economic crisis since the 1930s, when tens of thousands are losing their homes, their jobs and their pensions while the fat cats in and out of Parliament feel no pain whatsoever. The same MPs and ministers who have bailed out bankers and their pensions are caught with their own fingers in the till. What hypocrisy!
As to Parliament, it has had little or no effective control or real power for at least 125 years. The constitutional position of the House of Commons is to provide the raw material in the form of MPs who then go off and become something else – the government. The conventional idea that Parliament has lost power only in recent times is also rejected by King, who explains:

“Commentators frequently refer to the decline of parliament – that is, the House of Commons – in recent decades, but parliament’s decline as a legislative assembly began in the middle of the 19th century and was complete by, at the latest, the 1880s or 1890s. Nothing much of constitutional significance has happened [to parliament] since then…”

As Parliament is talking shop full of MPs on the make, while the government and the rest of the state machine hold on to serious power, it is clear that reforms will make little difference. Clearly, the cat is out of the bag in the sense that many voters now have little time for Parliament. An historic shift is under way and this explains why party leaders are running around like headless chickens trying to find a way forward, with some MPs hoping that replacing Speaker Martin will do the trick.

They couldn’t be more wrong. The state’s edifice has cracked at its weakest point and it threatens to bring the whole structure down with it.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Parliament is beyond reform

When right-wing newspapers call for “revolution not reform” and leading Tory writers claim that the bond between rulers and ruled is “irreparably ruptured”, you can gauge the measure of the constitutional crisis now sweeping through the British state.

The Parliamentary system is in meltdown following the revelations about large-scale abuse of the Commons’ expenses system, whereby MPs of all the major parties claimed for just about everything, including mortgages already paid off. And not just backbench MPs either. The Cabinet has been at it too. Chancellor Alistair Darling is a serial tax evader who “flipped” the designation of his main residence four times in as many years to claim the maximum expenses.

This crisis is exericising the right wing, who perhaps sense the consequences better than the liberal media. Peter Oborne (whose book The Triumph of the Political Class foreshadowed what has been revealed) says: “This is hypocrisy of the most staggering order. The scandalous revelations over the past week about MPs' expenses have destroyed any concept of Britain having a virtuous governing class and have also irreparably ruptured the bond between rulers and ruled.” Fraser Nelson, writing in the Murdoch-owned News of the World, went further, declaring: “What started as a scandal is mutating into a constitutional crisis. And one that will have to end not just in reform, but in revolution.”

The scandal reveals not just a loss of confidence in the major parties but also, more significantly, in the parliamentary state itself in a way not seen before in modern British history. By and large, the majority have consented to the present system of government on the condition that it would a) act as a buffer between capitalists and citizens b) provide key services like housing, education, health and pensions c) protect liberties and human rights and d) protect the country from external threats.

That political bargain has broken down, a victim of corporate-driven globalisation which itself has now produced the prospect of the greatest economic and financial crash in history. Capitalism has been let rip in society, first under Thatcher and then courtesy of New Labour. The imposition of naked market forces has undermined not just areas like housing and pensions but also reinforced rampant individualism.

It’s easy to see the greed of MPs as a reflection of the atmosphere created in society at large. After all, why should they be excluded from making money by buying and selling homes just because they were MPs? Apart from siding with corporate and financial interests, the capitalist state under New Labour has destroyed many human rights and engaged in illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have actually increased the threat to the safety of ordinary people.

So the expenses scandal has brought to the surface frustrations that have been boiling up over decades. During the 1945 period, turnout at elections, for example, has plummeted from 83.9% in 1950 to 59.4% in 2001. It rose slightly in 2005, still leaving New Labour victorious with the votes of just one in four of the registered electorate.

Now it is reported that large numbers of the electorate plan to vote for smaller parties at the June 4 European elections in order to “punish” the major parties caught up in sleazegate. This includes the Greens as well as two far right parties, the BNP (which is cashing in on New Labour’s abandonment of low-paid white workers) and UKIP.

When a social or political institution fails, it’s time to move history on. This could be achieved, for example, through the calling of a People’s Convention for Democracy, charged with drawing up and then implementing a written democratic constitution. Delegates would be drawn from all ordinary sections of the community but exclude the rich and the powerful who are responsible for first the economic and now the political crisis. Instead of being cast as bystanders, we should seize the initiative before the right wing uses the expenses' scandal to close down the democratic process altogether.

The Convention’s aim should be the transfer of power not just from the corrupt political elites but also from the minority who have run the economy into the sands. In short, we need a revolutionary new system of government that goes beyond mere representation to forms of direct democracy in all areas of society, including the workplace. If Parliament is to have any future, it has to be in this context because it is certainly beyond reform.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

For a new democratic politics

Some leading political commentators have suggested that the present crisis gripping Parliament over fiddled expenses will fuel what they term “anti-politics” and that this is dangerous because it could play into the hands of the far right like the British National Party.

Seumas Milne was at it The Guardian, declaring that “the greatest danger of this week's parliamentary disgrace is the boost it will give to anti-politics: the roar of rage that they're all the same, the cynicism that nothing can ever really change”, while Steve Richards in The Independent has written that this week’s revelations have a “grisly simplicity that will fuel the existing anti-politics orthodoxy”.

The implication is that to be against “politics” as practised at Westminster is bad and dangerous. But surely Milne and Richards are making the mistake of identifying “politics” with democracy, confusing form with content. They are not the same thing. Politics is, according to dictionaries, the “art and science of governing” or “political activities” and opinions. So it’s difficult, if not impossible, to be “against” politics on these terms.

Democracy is a relatively newcomer in the modern history of politics and it is this side of the political equation that was struggled for in Britain by ordinary people who demanded a voice. The country was on the verge of revolution in 1832 when the ruling classes finally conceded a limited franchise. Chartists built a mass movement and laid plans for an insurrection in their struggle for the vote for working men.

If the disdain for Westminster “politics” has reached a crescendo, it is precisely because these historical gains which produced a representative, albeit limited, democracy have been undermined. Decisions at national and local level are made regardless of majority opinion – ranging from the invasion of Iraq, airport expansion, post office closures to bank bail-outs. When workplaces shut down because of the capitalist crisis we are not consulted. It is fait accompli. In terms of “political choice”, the differences between the mainstream parties are slim to non-existent.

So to be against this kind of “politics” is healthy and to be encouraged. Of course the political crisis opens the doors to the right, as it did in Italy (where the reformist left also had their chances, only to blow them because of their subservience to the same system). But it also creates opportunities if we can raise our horizons beyond the narrow confines of the parliamentary system and how to make it work better. It is better to see “anti politics” as a form of antimatter, containing vast amounts of potential energy that could provide the fuel for a new political democracy.

The current system is narrow, inadequate and operates to mask the real centres of power in British life - the executive, state institutions and the corporations. No amount of fiddling (pardon the pun) with the issue of MPs' expenses will change that. If the contempt for Parliament has reached new heights, it is because large sections of the electorate have for some time felt alienated politically, restricted to electing "representatives" once every five years to a body that is itself toothless.

The anger generated by the expenses' scandal could be mobilised to create new, alternative forms of democracy that, for example, give people power in their workplaces and communities along the lines suggested in the People's Charter for Democracy. By advocating an extension of democracy we can spike the guns not just of the BNP and the Tories, but of the state within the state that is watching and plotting in case Britain should become ungovernable at a time of mounting economic chaos.


Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

'In the name of God, go'

What to do with Parliament? What to do with MPs who have bought and sold properties using taxpayers’ money, who have had their swimming pools cleaned and have even claimed for tons of horse manure on expenses? What to do with an institution that is said to be the cornerstone of the British constitution but whose members are preoccupied with feathering their own nests?

Similar concerns preoccupied Oliver Cromwell, whose statue stands in front of the Commons. In 1653, with the Civil War won, a tyrannical King executed, the rule of Parliament over monarchy irrevocably established and England now a republic known as the Commonwealth, MPs were trying to fix the new system to benefit themselves.

At 11 o'clock in the morning of 20 April 1653, Cromwell led a company of musketeers to Westminster. Having secured the approaches to the House, he addressed the Members in a speech about corruption that is worth repeating in the light of events three and half centuries later:

...It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter'd your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes, have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd; your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse the Augean Stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings, and which by God's help and the strength He has given me, I now come to do.

I command ye, therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. You have sat here too long for the good you do. In the name of God, go!”

At Cromwell's signal, Lieutenant-Colonel Worsley marched in with the musketeers to drive out the MPs. The doors were sealed and a wit pinned up a notice outside reading: "This House is to be let: now unfurnished."

Now, this is not 1653 and the revolutionary New Model Army that backed Cromwell’s dissolution is no longer. But history has come a full circle. The parliamentary system of rule that was eventually established (with few people having the vote until 1867) has clearly run its course.

The expenses’ scandal itself reflects a deeper crisis of democracy, where today’s Parliament is toothless and powerless in the face of the executive, who in turn are accountable to powerful corporate and financial interests and not the electorate.

Electing a cleaner, more honest group of MPs would not in itself be sufficient in what has developed into a full-scale crisis of the capitalist political system. It is not inconceivable that a corrupt Parliament becomes an excuse at some stage (especially at a time of social unrest) for direct, authoritarian rule.

What is required is a new, democratic constitution that would transfer power to the people in terms of direct control and ownership of productive and financial resources as well as new forms of more direct representation and participation in political life. If Parliament is to survive, it can only be as part of such a revolutionary transformation of the social system as a whole, in which people themselves are sovereign.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Parliament versus the people

The shoddy and demeaning spectacle of MPs milking their expenses’ system at the taxpayers' expense for all it is worth knows no bounds. They have been claiming for just about everything: £60,000 (Employment minister Tony McNulty) for second home allowances, and £25,000 for security patrols (Barbara Follett) down to 69p for a packet of biscuits, £2.50 for eyeliner and even for Kit Kats and an Ikea carrier bag.

MPs have blatantly engaged in property speculation, using allowances to do up homes before selling them on. “Never in my 20 years in politics have I seen the public as angry as they are today and, frankly, who can blame them? It doesn't help that the revelations have come at a time of recession.” Thus the Liberal Democrat Norman Baker, MP for Lewes, East Sussex, once home of revolutionary democrat Tom Paine. Baker’s remarks are part of a growing chorus warning about the yawning credibility gap between the electorate and those who purport to represent them in parliament.

And are the Honourable Members, who include 13 members of Gordon Brown’s Cabinet, expressing any shame or remorse for their venal attitude to office? No, sublimely oblivious to criticism, they are complaining that their abuses were exposed to public scrutiny. The House of Commons authorities are even asking the police to track down the source of the leak that showed how deeply MPs’ snouts are in the trough.

As The Observer commented yesterday, the distance between MPs and ordinary people is now so big that they consider a £24,000 second home allowance as an “incidental” perk. For most, that is a lump sum they would never dream of seeing in their bank account. And so, warnings of the breakdown of trust upon which bourgeois parliamentary democracy relies are flying thick and fast:

 Baker concludes that auditing, transparency and limits on expenses must be imposed – warning that “If we do not, then the trust between the people and Parliament will have been irrevocably damaged, with all the dangers that holds."

 The Daily Telegraph, which first blew the whistle on MPs expenses, concludes that: "There is no doubt that the current system is rotten and cannot survive."

 The Daily Mail says it means a “terminal wipe-out” for New Labour and that Blairism’s claim to moral virtue has been “blown to shreds”. The question now, it asks, is what will be the consequences of all this. “For with such an unprecedented breakdown of Parliamentary integrity and loss of public trust, we are surely in uncharted territory.”

 And last, but not least, a Guardian blogger points out that the corruption shows “how alienated the political classes are from those they serve”, demanding that Oliver Cromwell come back with a peoples’ army to shut the whole thing down.

The haughty obliviousness of New Labour after 12 years in power is indeed mind-boggling. Of course the Conservatives, and indeed Sinn Fein, have also been playing the system for all that it’s worth, but New Labour’s arrogance is far greater than that of the rest combined. It comes at a time when income inequality in Britain is at its widest point in 40 years after 12 years of Labour government, a result of low wages and benefits held below inflation.

MPs have justified their greed by pointing to the difference between their pay and the vast salaries paid to executives in the private sector. In doing so they show that they have nothing in common with the people that they are supposed to represent. Instead they draw their “morality” from the capitalist economic system which parliamentary democracy oversees and keeps in place.

The populist right like the Daily Mail is aware that the limits of parliamentary democracy have been reached and that they will be breached. By its actions, New Labour is opening the doors to dictatorial rule. It’s time to sound the alarm bells loud and clear.

The current scandal shows the urgent need to campaign for a People’s Charter for Democracy. The aim is not to “re-build trust” in a corrupt and undemocratic parliament but to end the rule of political elites, and create new forms of direct local and national democracy through peoples’ assemblies.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary