Milibandism is New Labour Mark II

Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s call for the prosecution of Tony Blair at the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes comes as Labour plans to restore the former prime minister to a prominent position in the party.

Nobel-prize winner Tutu’s honourable decision to turn down an invitation to share a platform with the former Labour leader at a conference on leadership is well founded.

In 2010 a Dutch inquiry found that the US-UK invasion of Iraq, authorised by Blair and George W. Bush, had “no sound foundation in international law”. In Britain two top judges also ruled that without UN endorsement, the war was illegal.

But while the misery in Iraq continues unabated, those who promoted the 2003 invasion and occupation are doing very nicely thank you.

Blair currently owns at least six homes and is said to be worth £20 million. Meanwhile, Blair’s former spin doctor, Lord Peter Mandelson, is competing with the ex-PM in amassing a wide-ranging business empire worth millions.

Mandelson’s international business consultancy has assets of nearly £600,000, according to the Sunday Telegraph’s Mandrake. Mandelson advises companies via Global Counsel. He also co-runs a company called Willbury, which posted a profit of nearly £375,000. He and his partner have just purchased an £8m home.

The extent of Mandelson’s wealth is guarded with jealous secrecy. But due to a change in the House of Lords’ transparency rules, the advisor to autocrats around the world may come under pressure to declare his company interests.

One might think that the extraordinarily greedy behaviour of these men who knocked the Old Labour into what it is today might give pause to those who still cling to the party – and parliamentary politics - as the only possible alternative to the ConDem coalition.

Unfortunately this is far from the case. There is, for example, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, who sees the future in a conservative form of Milibandism.  Toynbee has taken upon herself the role of advising Ed Miliband about how to suck up to the LibDems. At a debate about the future of New Labour, at the Edinburgh Book Festival, Toynbee declared that Labour should be “the party of conservatism”, of “preserving and restoring”.

Blogger and political commentator, Gerry Hassan, who believes in Scottish self-government, rightly pointed out that:

“Four periods of Labour in office and nine popular mandates since 1945 and the Labour Party hasn’t challenged the power nexuses and networks of establishment Britain or touched the institutions of ‘the Conservative nation’, which give succour and support to privilege and status. Nor has it, with the exception of the Attlee administration, substantially reduced inequality in any of its periods of office.”

But nonetheless he shares Toynbee’s hope that Miliband would distance himself from his New Labour heritage. This is, of course, to ignore the reality of what he said himself: Labour is part and parcel of the establishment itself.

Despite the forlorn dreams of those who cling to Labour as the only alternative to the ConDem coalition, there is no fundamental difference between Miliband’s economic and political strategy and that of his predecessors in New Labour.

For all Miliband and others’ hot air, New Labour was the real architect of the introduction of the market into the public sector. The only difference between the Labour and the Coalition is in the degree of austerity they endorse.

Feeding the illusion that the New Labour leopard can change its spots leaves the door wide open for Tory backwoodsmen and more sinister forces lurking in the wings. The serious danger to Cameron is not from Miliband but the Tory far right.

This prospect makes working for a more advanced form of democracy such as A World to Win’s strategy of people’s assemblies an urgent political task. It is certainly more progressive than waiting three years for a chance to vote for Miliband’s New Labour Mark II.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

A future unfair for most

Once upon a time in the 18^th century, a Frenchman wrote “the style is the man”. Studying New Labour’s election manifesto published yesterday, it is wise to keep this in mind.

The garish-kitsch-retro design of the manifesto cover is a ham-fisted attempt to refer backwards to Old Labour with lashings of Stalinist Socialist Realism. The “vision” it presents is of a white family looking out over green fields towards a radiant sun emblazoned with the words “a future fair for all” (whatever that means).

From where most of us live in large or small cities and towns, this is not a Britain we would recognise, except when we might be on holiday. Likewise the bizarre fake cornfield projected behind Gordon Brown at the launch – has Britain suddenly turned into a rural idyll?

The appeal is directly to the middle classes, as confirmed by Brown: “We are the party of everybody of middle income and modest incomes in this country. We are the party appealing to middle class voters in every constituency.”

New Labour’s hope is that it can keep the real issues and its real plans in the shadows. Behind all the tinsel and promises of crumbs, the real strategy is “to encourage a culture of long-term commitment to company growth”. There is not an instant’s reflection on what has taken place since 2007, when the financial meltdown got under way.

New Labour’s corporate-friendly “high growth” policy of the last 13 years will continue if it is re-elected – as if there has been no evidence that the financial and economic crash was the direct result of giving free sway to the interests of the banks and global corporate capitalism.

That’s why Lord Mandelson said that “the spirit of Tony Blair smiles down on New Labour today” and described the manifesto as “Blair plus”. Helping the corporations to maintain their growth and profits will remain at the heart of New Labour, however great the suffering this will wreak on all but the super-rich.

New Labour intends to recover the staggering £900 billion national debt by huge cuts in public spending, including £20 billion-worth in the National Health Service and attacks on public sector pensions – punishing the very people who keep the country going – fire-fighters, NHS and council workers.

The manifesto boasts: “We will take a tough stance on public-sector pay, saving over £3 billion by capping public-sector pay rises at one per cent in 2011-12 and 2012-13. We have agreed tough reforms to public-sector pensions.”

Meanwhile, immigrant workers, young people and “problem families” are effectively blamed for social problems and crime. The manifesto proudly announces its primitive attitude: more punishment and medieval-style “shaming”: “We will ensure a total of 96,000 prison places by 2014. More EU and other foreign prisoners will be transferred abroad….For offenders not sentenced to prison we have brought in tough new ‘Community Payback’: hard work in public, wearing orange jackets.”

The database surveillance state will be breathing down our necks and prying into our lives. CCTV, DNA profiling and databases, biometric ID schemes (i.e. passports) will be “offered” at high prices. DNA data will be kept for six years for “serious” offenders.

A vision? New ideas? Quite the opposite. The manifesto is a tawdry and shameful attempt is to hoodwink the middle classes and whip up anti-immigration sentiments. Meanwhile, the need to pour money into the black hole of debt to pay for the banking bail-outs will consign lower-paid and public sector workers, the poor, the young, the disabled and pensioners to an impoverished and insecure fate.

And yet, you still meet people who tell us that you have to vote New Labour to keep the Tories out. Surely they are just joking?

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

New Labour lines up with BA

There’s nothing like a looming national strike to bring out the true class credentials of the political parties, together with the baying hound-dogs of the media. The democratically-agreed industrial action by 12,000 BA’s cabin crew workers in defence of their jobs, pay and conditions is certainly having this effect.

Leaders of all the major parties are only too anxious to condemn BA workers. Leading the pack are New Labour’s Lord Mandelson and transport secretary Lord Adonis (NB: There are no elections to the Lords). Adonis said yesterday: “I absolutely deplore the strike… it’s totally unjustified.” Today Gordon Brown declared: “It's not in the company's interest, it's not in the workers' interest and it's certainly not in the national interest."

Never mind the fact that cabin crew staff have now voted twice for strike action with overwhelming majorities. In the latest ballot nearly 79% of the membership voted 80.7% for action. New Labour, you will recall, was elected with the support of 25% of all registered voters at the last election. As for turnout, the BA ballot is far higher than anything you can expect in the upcoming general election.

And the notion peddled by the Tories that New Labour is “soft on the unions” is complete and utter hokum – and they know it. It is a fact that Britain’s biggest trade union, Unite, has paid a total of £11 million into the Blair and Brown’s coffers since 2007. It is the biggest single donor to New Labour. Without this support, New Labour would be unable to survive. The £11 million has brought Unite nothing in return.

Rather than making New Labour more pliable towards the interests of trade union members, the opposite is true. The rights of trade unions are perhaps even more restrictive than they were under the Tories. Secondary strikes and effective picketing remain illegal because this government retained all the anti-union laws introduced by Thatcher. Union leaders, with a few honourable exceptions, have fallen over backwards to comply with New Labour and its capitalist policies such as bailing out the banks.

Willie Walsh, BA’s chief executive, who is paid £735,000 a year, is determined to sack up to 2,000 staff and undermine the union Unite. The company has been running courses for strike breakers ever since the union’s first ballot showed a huge majority in favour of strike action. Walsh plans to use a 1,000-strong force of strike breakers to keep a skeleton service running and to defeat the strike.

Instead of getting ready to mobilise its membership at Heathrow and other airports against this threat, Unite leaders Len McCluskey and Tony Woodley have expressed shock at Adonis’ outright support for BA management. But this is a false naiveté. The real danger for BA cabin crew is that Unite leaders and the Trades Union Congress will quickly buckle under pressure and impose some rotten deal on their members. In any case, McCluskey and company certainly have no intention of defying the anti-union laws, which would be necessary to defeat BA’s strike-breaking actions with solidarity strikes.

British Airways, like the economy as a whole, in a major crisis. Walsh knows what is at stake. He needs to enfeeble the trade unions to save the airline for shareholder returns. Pretending that New Labour will broker a favourable compromise deal because it faces an election is living in a dangerous cloud cuckoo land. Precisely because of the election, Brown, Adonis and Mandelson will take the hard line. The future of a private corporation like BA is more important to them than the jobs and pay of the workforce.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

The challenge facing postal workers

Just how right postal workers are to fight for their jobs is borne out by today’s figures showing that the British economy, far from “recovering”, remains critically ill on life support. The sixth successive quarterly fall in output is the longest continuous decline since records began in 1955.

The estimates mean the depth of the current slump in output is close to the 6% fall seen between 1979 and 1981. None of the measures adopted by the state, including virtually zero interest rates and pumping £175 billion into the financial system is having a significant impact. The banks have simply taken the money and used it to finance another bout of speculation.

To lose your job in this situation is tantamount to joining poverty street. You can’t survive on dole payments and if you’ve got a mortgage, there is no help with housing costs either. There are few decently-paid jobs out there and mail workers would be crazy to accept management-imposed “efficiency” changes at their expense.

Their solid strikes this week show Royal Mail workers don’t accept that they should sacrifice their livelihoods on the altar of cost-cutting. Some 60,000 jobs have already gone in the last few years and the burden on those remaining is already intolerable.

This has drawn the accusation from management and New Labour that mail workers are standing in the way of “modernisation”. But what is this “modernisation” that Lord Mandelson and others are so fond of? Mandelson, of course, was the architect of “modernising” the Labour Party. This proved to be a cover for the actual destruction of what had gone before and its replacement with something quite different.

New Labour is not a “modernised” version of its predecessor. Instead, it is the political executive of the business and financial classes. This explains Mandelson’s vehement attacks on postal workers and the government’s sabotaging of a compromise deal with the Communication Workers’ Union.

The “modernisation” of Royal Mail in the same way is not intended to create a better place to work or to improve the service to the public. Instead, it is aimed at making it profitable so that the service can be privatised – by whichever party wins the next general election.

Placing the postal strikes in the context of the deepening economic crisis, it is important to support mail workers in developing a strategy that challenges the capitalist mantra of cost accounting and efficiency savings that inevitably lead to job losses and more intense exploitation for those left. The strategy would focus on an alternative, not-for-profit approach. For example, where new technology is applied, the results could include a shorter working week at the same levels of pay. It would expose the fact that in class society, the interests of workers and employers can never be identical.

We have to study alternatives to the capitalist approach, whereby cost reduction is always carried out to the disadvantage of the workforce. In any case, as we have seen, the profit-based approach leads inevitably to an over-reliance on credit and debt and thence to an uncontrollable crisis such as the one we are in now.

Bringing about change along these lines requires imagination and a capacity to look beyond the immediate struggle to protect jobs and livelihoods. By rejecting government-orchestrated intimidation and pursuing their strikes, postal workers are creating the conditions for doing just that.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Plot to destroy postal union

New Labour and Royal Mail management have hatched a thinly-disguised plot to destroy the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) if postal workers go ahead with their strikes next week over jobs and pay. That’s the clear message from the leaked document obtained by BBC’s Newsnight.

Behind the strategy is business secretary Lord Mandelson, who more and more seems in charge of the government. Gordon Brown is beholden to Mandelson after he blocked attempts to remove him as prime minister earlier this year. Mandelson has described CWU’s strike plans as “suicidal” and has come out against intervention by the arbitration service ACAS.

Mandelson withdrew plans to for a partial sell-off of Royal Mail because potential buyers signalled that the service needed “modernising” first. Since then, management has unilaterally introduced new working practices, leading to a series of localised strikes by postal workers.

Next week’s two days of national strike action (22 and 23 October) have been called in a bid to force Royal Mail to reach an agreement with the union on a way forward. But the leaked document shows that management and the government are not interested in a compromise but want to fatally weaken the CWU to prepare the state-owned service for privatisation.

The Royal Mail document marked “in strictest confidence” talks of “shareholder support” for the hard-line position - the government is the company’s only shareholder. Dated 24 September, the secret plan suggests that Royal Mail will effectively “de-recognise” the CWU by denying union reps facilities to carry out their activities.

The document also raises the possibility of managers delivering the mail and scab labour also being recruited. The PowerPoint presentation, obtained by BBC's Newsnight has a section marked “objectives” which states that “through the dispute” Royal Mail will “deliver the necessary 2009 changes with or without union engagement”. It refers to strikes as an "enabler" of its aims, saying "strikes make things worse".

Billy Hayes, general secretary of the CWU, told the BBC: "There is no question the document is genuine, what's more worrying is that Peter Mandelson seemed to know the document quite well. It does seem like an organised attempt to sideline the union. What we need is an agreement to modernise the company with the consent of the workforce. We want an agreement and we want to negotiate with good faith."

This is clearly not on the agenda, however. The government and management intend to break the union’s resistance and carry through their own programme of rationalisation and redundancies to add to the 63,000 workers already cut from the payroll over the last few years.

Right-wing papers like the Daily Mail are already salivating about the prospects of a re-run of the miners’ strike of 1984-8, when the Tories deployed the state to batter the union and impose pit closures. And yet the CWU inexplicably continues to fund New Labour to the tune of £1 million a year and express surprise at Mandelson’s position.

The argument has been that funding buys “influence” with the government and that the Tories could be much worse. Well, it seems more likely money down the drain when you consider Mandelson’s position and it’s hard to see the Tories planning anything harsher than the current government.

New Labour wants to demonstrate to big business and the middle-class electorate that it can be “tough” with the unions and workers. That’s why the government also intends to postpone the introduction of rights for temporary workers until 2011 required under European Union law.

The CWU is facing a fight to the finish with the government and management and it better get ready for this. Postal workers will need the active support in industrial action of other trade unionists, especially those in the public sector facing imminent pay cuts and job losses, if they are to defeat the New Labour government.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

If it can't be fixed, scrap it!

At the end of last week, Lord Mandelson, the authentic, unelected voice of global capital within the New Labour government, stated what he saw as the “simple problem”. He was making a bid for supranational influence in Washington, in a speech entitled “Can we fix globalisation?".

He put it like this: “The stability of the global economy is the sum of sovereign national macroeconomic policies on interest rates, currency levels, domestic spending and demand. There is no mechanism to mediate between these policies or enforce action that would counter systemic risk, in financial markets or at the general level of the global economy.”

Mandelson, who is now effectively deputy prime minister after saving Gordon Brown’s skin, couldn’t have put it clearer: the whole thing is beyond control. Capital does what it has to do, regardless of what policymakers and wonks want. Take pensions, for example. Employers now see their contributions as a major cost to be cut at a time of crisis.

Yesterday, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that the destruction of the value of both private and public pensions threatened to turn the two year financial crisis into a “social crisis lasting decades”. An OECD survey found that private pension plans lost 23% of their value last year, while higher unemployment “leaves little room for more generous public pensions”. At the same time, accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers revealed that for the first time many firms are planning to end their final-salary pension schemes for existing staff as well as new entrants.

What, you may ask, about the total of $5,000bn (about £3,000bn or £3 trillion) already pumped into banks and pledged by governments to stimulate their own economies? Even if you discount the fact, according to Kroll, the world’s leading risk consultancy, in the rush to spend the money, more than $500 billion – at least a tenth of the total - will be lost to fraud and bribery it’s still a load of cash. Surely all that money is doing its job, freeing the credit markets and restarting investment? Surely the upturn is on the way?

No, it isn’t.

The World Bank, another global agency with no power at all to fix the crisis, projects that the world economy will now contract 2.9%, seriously worse than its forecast of a minus 1.75% just three months ago in March.

Capital inflows to developing countries will turn sharply down, says the report, falling by a shocking 75%, leading to a 50% contraction in industrial outputs. Germany, Japan and South Korea are heavily dependent on capital intensive exports to economies like Russia, China and Hungary, so will suffer badly from the reciprocal effect of the accelerating downturn. Shares in Russia have crashed 20% this month already, and its banking system has all but ceased lending due to growing fears about a second wave of financial crisis that could hit the banking sector later this year.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, 16 weeks have passed since the Bank of England began “quantitative easing” after Alistair Darling authorised the creation of £150 billion of new money, widely trumpeted as the last throw of the financial dice. So far, £96 billion has been spent, of which £93.5 billion was used to buy “gilts”, which means it was not lent to industry for capital investment but lent to the government.

But it isn’t working. Overall, lending to private, non-financial companies fell by an average of £1 billion over each of the past six months. It’s OK though, Alistair’s capitalist friends haven’t gone empty-handed. They’ve had £750 million in the form of corporate bonds. It’s amazing how they’ve got away with it for so long, and it’s high time they were stopped. The simple truth is that the capitalist system cannot be “fixed” and instead would benefit from a unique scrappage project much more radical than the one introduced to try and boost car sales.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

New Labour flounders as old order crumbles

When the prince of darkness – aka Lord Mandelson – tells his fellow New Labour ministers not to panic, you can be sure that is exactly what they are doing. The reason is simple. Social anger is mounting as the economic crisis worsens almost by the hour and the government appears to have no sense of purpose or grip on the crisis.

Political intrigue is more frenzied than ever as ministers compete with one another for future dubious spoils, such as the leadership of New Labour. Some brief that Brown is shortly off to head a new global body designed to regulate international finance (!), while others are undoubtedly stoking the fires under David Miliband, the foreign secretary, for his department’s role in the torture of a British resident in Guantanamo. Miliband famously fluffed a challenge to Brown last year.

But Mandelson’s plea for the government to “handle expectations”, “keep a steady nerve and cool judgment” and not be “pushed into hurried judgments because we fear accusations of indecision" will make little or no difference. The pace of events is phenomenal, as is their dynamic, with the old economic order crumbling before our very eyes.

Not long ago, Lloyds Bank was regarded as a boring, safe bank. Forced by the government last autumn into a shotgun marriage with HBOS, today its shares are worth just 50p each. The debts of HBOS are equivalent to the entire capital of Lloyds. And there is worse to come. During the property boom, HBOS lent massively to commercial property developers, hotel chains and leisure companies. Most of these loans are secured against assets now worth far less while as the economy worsens, many of the borrowers are going bust. It seems Lloyds will be back for further state aid. Yesterday prime minister Brown defended the merger as the right thing to do at the time.

Meanwhile, as New Labour makes the saving of the capitalist financial system its sole priority, jobs are disappearing in the real world as recession turns to slump. Yesterday’s instant sackings by BMW in Oxford led to an angry response by the 850 agency workers laid off in the most brutal fashion. Not all of it was directed at the company either. One report says sacked workers threw eggs and fruit at union representatives, accusing them of betrayal. It appears they were in secret talks with BMW about redundancies.

One agency worker, Silvia Fernandes, said: “I've never been sick, I've never missed work and they tell me one hour before (the end of my shift) that I have been sacked. That's not on. That's why people are angry and so upset with BMW and with the union.” Others vented their frustration on new cars at the plant, scratching bonnets with keys, smashing dashboards and hiding ignition keys.

Agency workers, of course, have fewer rights than permanent staff and their vulnerable position owes much to a rotten deal with the government after a half-hearted campaign by the union leaders which left them out in the cold. The angry scenes at Cowley follow on from the explosive strikes by oil refinery workers earlier this month and augur social turmoil on a mass scale.

In the United States, Washington's new director of national intelligence, retired Admiral Dennis Blair, has warned that "the primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications”. It could trigger, he said, a return to the "violent extremism" of the 1920s and 1930s. While the New Labour government flounders, you can be sure that at the heart of the British state, similar views are being expressed and that scenario planning is well advanced. It would be a mistake to think otherwise as attention turns away from terrorism to dealing with wider, social unrest.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Bankers' government is bankrupt

Is there such a thing as a banking “expert”? We ask this question in the light of today’s announcement that New Labour has recruited a top City banker to the government to – wait for it – try and save the banking system. 

Mervyn Davies, chairman of Standard Chartered, will become Minister of State in Lord Mandelson's Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. He will be granted a peerage so that he can sit in the House of Lords, Downing Street said in a statement. 

According to the Daily Telegraph, Davies was personally courted by the prime minister for his “banking expertise”. He was involved in the government's autumn bank bail-out – which prevented bankruptcy but has signally failed to lift the financial system off life support. 

Davies’ appointment is unlikely to make any difference, therefore, except confirm that we truly have a bankers’ government in every aspect of the term. Such is the dire state of affairs in the world of capitalist finance that the government itself has essentially been transformed into a bank. From being the nominal property of the people who elected it, New Labour has become demutualised, privatised. It could and should be renamed New Labour Investments, Savings and Loans PLC.

How else can you explain Mandelson’s announcement today that the government is to guarantee up to £20 billion in bank loans to small businesses? This is the state transferring yet more taxpayers’ money to banks who have helped crash the economy. This is how desperate New Labour has become in trying and stave off what is looking more and more like an economy heading for a catastrophic slump. 

Business leaders have painted a bleak picture of the UK economy, with a survey suggesting the end of 2008 saw a "frightening deterioration". The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) said its survey results were "awful" and the worst since it began in 1989. Elsewhere, a separate report suggested it had been the worst December for UK retail sales in at least 14 years. The British Retail Consortium figures on sales from the High Street and online said that like-for-like sales in December were down 3.3% on a year ago while total sales shrank 1.4%. This is despite the government cut in value added tax (VAT), which took effect in December.

New Labour is running out of options. It is desperate to avoid the direct printing of money to pump into the financial system because a) it’s the last throw of the dice b) nobody knows if it would work and c) it’s a recipe for runaway inflation. Little surprise, therefore, at a new survey shows that people in Britain are now less likely to trust banks, the stock market or the government's economic management than people in comparable nations.   

Asked to rate their trust in the government's management of the financial situation, British people award the government 4.5 out of 10, below the worldwide average of 5.2 and just ahead of Iceland on 4.4. Only Germany and Japan are gloomier, scoring 4.0 and 3.0 respectively in the poll. Britain ranks 16th out of 17 countries for public trust in its banks. 

What the survey indicates is that the government has no mandate for handing over vast sums of money to banks or any other form of capitalist enterprise. This is a bankers’ regime governing on behalf of the narrowest of monied interests, using the powers of the capitalist state. New Labour’s argument that there is no alternative is another big lie. None of the bail-outs have succeeded in halting the economy’s downward plunge. The banks are effectively bankrupt and so is the government. 

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor