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

New Labour's PFI legacy poisons NHS

Placing a major healthcare trust in Whitehall-led administration could signal the break-up of the NHS under the cover of a financial crisis that is largely the result of the pro-business policies of previous New Labour governments.

South London Healthcare Trust, which serves a million people, runs three hospitals and employs more than 6,000 staff, is in deficit to the tune of more than £1 million a week.

At the heart of its financial crisis are payments on a contract to build two of the hospitals.

These were made under the so-called Private Finance Initiative, which Gordon Brown in particular championed in the 1997-2010 New Labour governments. Under PFI, the finished buildings are leased back to the local NHS, which pays mounting interest payments over 25 years and more.

The PFI schemes in south London, which totalled more than £1 billion, cost more than £60 million annually in interest payments alone. There are also exorbitant costs for maintenance and small improvements, which the contractors set fees for doing.

Draft financial plans submitted by the hospitals to the Department of Health show that it faces a shortfall in its accounts of between £30 million and £75 million annually over the next five years.

Health secretary Andrew Lansley’s unprecedented decision to put the trust into administration will lead to a break-up and transfer of existing services. Some could end up in the hands of the private sector. A similar fate awaits another 20 hospitals in financial difficulty.

PFI deals became widespread from the late 1990s as a way of building hospitals and schools without finding the money up front but at higher-than-average interest rates. The enthusiasm for PFI expressed New Labour’s championing of the private sector as a “partner” for the public sector.

But this was no equal partnership, with the state guaranteeing the fulfilment of high-cost contracts. Lansley intends that the South London PFI contract will be paid directly by his department.

Through a sleight of hand, the costs to the taxpayer do not figure in public accounts and so do not contribute officially to the budget deficit (which the Tories have lost control of, if today’s figures are anything to go by). Nevertheless,  the total bill to the taxpayer over time is estimated at £229 billion on contracts valued at £62 billion.

In April a biting report by the National Audit Office found that each household will have to cough up nearly £400 next year to pay for hospitals, schools and motorways built under PFI.

The City firm Innisfree is the largest single investor in PFI, with money in 28 hospitals representing over 13,000 beds and 260 schools educating over 130,000 children. Innisfree’s profit margin was 53% in 2011. PFI is truly a licence to print money! 

Some PFI rip-off examples include:

• A hospital which charged £52,000 for a job that cost £750. Demolishing a shelter for smokers resulted in the PFI contractor charging £2,600 a year for the “extra cleaning”.
• A hospital in Bromley, south London, which will cost the NHS £1.2billion, more than 10 times what it is worth
• An empty school which will cost taxpayers £370,000 a year until 2027. Another school had to pay £302 for a socket, five times the cost of the equipment it wanted to plug in
• In Belfast, a school closed after seven years but the PFI contractor must be paid £370,000 a year for the next 16 years.

John Lister, director of campaign group, Health Emergency,  described PFI contracts as “a cosmic rip-off by almost every measure” which led to a “mass haemorrhaging of public cash”. He says:

“It also means that private sector profits are protected by legally binding contracts taking an increased share of declining trust budgets, while clinical services, patient care and the jobs of NHS staff are sacrificed, in an impossible battle to balance the books as the NHS faces real-terms cuts for the first time in a decade.”

With the Tories leaving PFI intact and preparing to launch a market-led health service on the unsuspecting public, the NHS has never been in such danger since it was founded in 1948.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

A post postmodern world

The crosscurrents that flow in the world of style are usually at least one remove from the humdrum daily lives of millions of people. Which is why fashion and celebrity have such a grip on the imagination.

So it may appear that current debates in the media, spurred on by Postmodernism – Style and Substance, a major show at London’s Victoria and Albert museum opening this week, have little relevance to the struggle to achieve political and social change.

But the reflections about the meaning of postmodernism are important and relevant. Writer Hari Kunzru – who memorably rejected an award because it was sponsored by the Mail on Sunday – has noted that the era of postmodernism is now superseded because, he says, what it predicted has come to pass.

Postmodernism first arrived in the 1960s in the world of literature, philosophy and style as a rejection of the by now jaded Modernism of the early 20^th century. The 1980s saw its rise as an all-pervasive way of interpreting the world around us – from architecture to styles in the arts – and also in politics.

The 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, became the heyday of postmodernist rejection of the notion that human beings can actually achieve social change. It held that perception is everything. It championed the ironic and in art the kitsch. Postmodernism had only contempt for the “naïve” view that things could have an essence, and that there is such a thing as “being”.

As Kunzru writes: “The essence of postmodernism [was] the idea that there is no essence, that we’re moving through a world of signs and wonders, where everything has been done before and is just lying around as cultural wreckage, waiting to be reused, combined in new and unusual ways. Nothing is direct, nothing is new. Everything is already mediated. The real, whatever that might be, is unavailable.”

Postmodernism’s popularity was due to its accurate description of a world in which the medium did actually become the message, as the Internet and the world of the image seemed all enveloping. In economics, the era of unlimited credit and plastic money fed in to the notion that real value created by human labour in the real economy no longer mattered. All that was solid melted into the air, to borrow from Karl Marx.

As a trend in thought – it was too amorphous and eclectic to be a coherent philosophy - postmodernism was derided by some for being utterly superficial in its championing of style over substance. But many of those who did this – from Tory conservatives on the right to Old Labour and Marxists on the left – failed to grasp that this wriggly, slippery, cynical, chameleon-like turn of thought itself reflected a deeper reality.

The years of corporate-driven globalisation were changing the world and people’s thinking much faster than those who thought the old truths were adequate.

Styles, which however superficial they may appear, are the foam on the surface of the ocean that his human society and thus can reflect and presage deeper movements to come. As the French writer de Buffon said: “The style is the man himself”.

That world was shattered by 9/11 in terms of the impregnability of the United States as a world power. In British politics the postmodern ethos was associated with the rise of New Labour with its focus on spin doctors and media image mongering – which ran rings around its opponents. But with the financial crash of 2008, that world also came to a definitive end.

A new epoch has opened up where deep, contradictory economic and political processes are asserting themselves and, in turn, shaping a new post postmodern consciousness. The challenge is to develop an understanding of the new period we are in and strategies for transforming it to our advantage.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Torture exposes West's hollow claims about democracy

The indictment gets longer. Still wanted over the illegal invasion of Iraq, former prime minister Blair could be open to prosecution over New Labour’s secret collaboration with the Gaddafi regime, leading international lawyer Philippe Sands has suggested.

Ironically, in the wake of the Nato-backed regime change in Libya, it has become crystal clear that British intelligence agency MI6 collaborated in the “rendering” of alleged terror suspects by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and were complicit in their torture.

Under New Labour, M16 tipped off the CIA to help ensnare and transport two leaders of the anti-Gaddafi opposition back to Tripoli where they were promptly imprisoned and tortured. MI6 also told Libyan intelligence about opposition figures who lived in Britain, supplying it with emails and telephone numbers.

As early as 2003 Mark Allen, head of counter-terrorism at MI6, wrote to former Libyan foreign intelligence and then foreign minister, Moussa Koussa on the friendliest of first-name terms.

US human rights campaigners found letters in Koussa’s home showing how pleased Allen was about the “delivery” of Abedelhakim Belhadj then known by his nom de guerre Abu Abdallah Sadiq. Belhadj says that British intelligence officers were among the first to interrogate him when he arrived in Libya and was promptly imprisoned and tortured.

The CIA paid for Belhadj and his deputy, Abu Munthir and their families’

air trips from Malayasia and Hong Kong. But Allen played a double-game, telling Koussa that he would not share information obtained by torture with the CIA – and how he found this “amusing”.

“I have no intention of doing any such thing [sharing information]. The intelligence about Abu Abdallah was British. I know I did not pay for the air cargo. But I feel I have the right to deal with you direct on this and am very grateful to you for the help you are giving us,” he wrote.

Mark Allen has since been knighted and is an advisor to BP.

UK Special Forces helped to train the Khamis Brigade run by one of Gaddafi’s sons. The elite SAS forces assisted Libyans in counter-terrorism techniques and surveillance between 2004 and 2009.

M16 also held counter-terrorism courses for them in 2006 to help them fight the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, then headed by Belhadj. The US had added this group to its list of banned terror groups in 2003. Ironically, Belhadj was one of the chief leaders in the overthrow of Gaddafi and is now head of the Tripoli Military Council which currently heads 8,000 troops. He has called for a full apology from Britain.

Although British diplomats tried to shred compromising documents before they fled Libya, they have been discovered in the residence of the British ambassador. They show how Labour PMs Blair and Brown wooed the Gaddafi family in terms of sycophantic flattery.

Using craven religious phraseology, Blair wrote in December 2006: “At this sacred time of harmony and reconciliation, recalling how our passionate God has mercy on mankind, I would like to express my personal wishes to you, to your family and to the Libyan people.”

But working with torturers in Libya was not enough for M16. While the British government made hypocritical noises about human rights in China, MI6 was cooperating with the notorious Chinese State Security Bureau: “We agreed that we would look at how we might engage the Chinese Services on the Islamic extremist target in China”, one letter says chillingly. It is well-known that the Chinese authorities have long been brutally repressing anyone campaigning for Uighur ethnic rights, denouncing them as Islamic terrorists.

Of course, when anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya were inspired by the Arab Spring to revolt, the Cameron-Clegg coalition changed the tune sung by Britain. But the same thinking lies behind this government: flatter the leaders, repress the opposition and above all - get the oil.

But as the evidence found in the ashes of the old regime prove, no amount of flattery or the torture of opponents can possibly guarantee this. Finally, what the revelations show is what we have always known – that fine words about “democracy” from the mouths of British governments are the height of hypocrisy – both at home and abroad.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Crisis at the top out of hand

A full-blown constitutional crisis is emerging within the British state, with the country’s top policeman challenging the authority of the prime minister who himself is connected to phone hacking through his former press secretary.

For Cameron to rush back from South Africa, while asking Parliament to meet on Wednesday – it was due to go into recess tomorrow – indicates the ever-increasing scale and scope of events precipitated by the Murdoch news empire’s meltdown.

The latest casualty is deep in the heart of the state – Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson. Although Home Secretary Teresa May poured oil on troubled waters in an unctuous statement, thanking the commissioner for his splendid work, knives are out big time between the police chief and the government.

The Commissioner claims there was nothing untoward in his relationship with ex-News International deputy editor Neil Wallis, But, as the Guardian points out: “The Metropolitan Police chose to hire the former second-in-command of an organisation while that organisation was being publicly accused of criminal activity”. Worse still, it failed to inform Downing Street about its close relationship with Wallis.

The real bombshell in Stephenson’s statement is his thinly-disguised challenge to Cameron. By comparing the PM’s hiring of former News of the World editor Andy Coulson to Scotland Yard’s hiring of Wallis, Stephenson has made a direct challenge to Cameron. Coming from Britain’s top police officer, who has only been in the job since 2009, this has the makings of a constitutional crisis.

The truth is that the media, the police and politicians (including of course New Labour) are all part of the system of governance. They have formed a social glue over a half-century as Murdoch’s media web stretched its tentacles around the world.

From the standpoint of logic, Stephenson is right. Cameron, like his New Labour predecessors, is absolutely tainted – and with him, Blair and Brown who repeatedly turned down opportunities to reopen hacking inquiries. Ed Miliband has also courted Murdoch and hired a former News International hack with question marks hanging over him as his own press advisor.

Stephenson’s resignation reveals a crisis of the state, intensified by the globalisation process and its subsequent crash. Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg yesterday warned of the dangers of another meltdown. A new report out today shows the UK economy is faltering – so badly that some suggest the Murdoch crisis is a convenient deflection from the real crisis.

The departure of the Met chief, under pressure from London mayor Boris Johnson, leaves a leadership gap at Scotland Yard which will grow if – as seems likely - counter-terrorism chief John Yates also resigns. It’s becoming blindingly clear that the Met is like that because the state as a whole is rotten and undemocratic and confidence in politicians as well as the media – and the police – continues to plummet. Now no one believes what they say – even if they are right!

The political turmoil is exacerbated by the plotting of right-wing Tories who see Cameron as too soft. The Telegraph and the Daily Mail are gunning for the Tory leader, believing they can get a more “traditional” one in his place.

So, while we can be pleased that the Pandora’s Box (more like a three-way sewer between Scotland Yard, Downing Street and Media-ville) is open, its secrets out and many involved tearing each other apart, there are many dangers behind the scenes.

Not least is the threat of a national government as the political crisis meets a worsening economic situation. Such a government would undoubtedly introduce emergency measures in “the national interest”.

The whole political structure and its disgruntled counterparts in the police and security services are irretrievably tainted and compromised. We should take up the call from the Spanish Real Democracy Now activists: Don’t vote for them! Build People’s Assemblies instead!

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

A one-party state for the rich

Shocked or surprised at Ed Miliband equating those struggling on benefits in the absence of jobs at decent wages with bankers and executives whose salaries resemble telephone numbers? You shouldn’t be.

Miliband’s speech on “responsibility” yesterday was only the latest in a long line of pronouncements and actions that marked the definitive end of Labour as a party dedicated to defending workers’ interests and reforming capitalism.

Even so, it was sickening to hear Miliband declaim: “To those entrepreneurs and business people who generate wealth, create jobs and deserve their top salaries, I’m not just relaxed about you getting rich, I applaud you.”

Joining in the open season on welfare claimants, Miliband couldn’t help himself and added: “We will be a party that rewards contribution, not worklessness.” People had to take work if it was on offer rather than claim benefits. And, in future, social housing should only go to those who “contribute” to society.

In over 3,000 words of his speech, he never once referred to unemployment as an issue at a time when the dole queue is heading for 10%. And, of course, he declined to use those two “C” words – class and capitalism. He did, however, find time to quote Blair on patriotism.

Worse, he invoked the wartime service of his father, Ralph, to whip up patriotic and nationalist sentiments about “community”. This is shockingly dishonest too because Ralph Miliband was regarded as a Marxist and wrote critiques of Labour and reformism in books like Parliamentary socialism. No doubt Ralph is turning in his proverbial grave this morning.

Ed Miliband is the latest in a long line of leaders of a party that made its unconditional peace with capitalism a long time ago. The die was cast as far back as the Callaghan government in the late 1970s, when the government went cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund. The attacks on wages that followed led to mass industrial action and the end of Old Labour as we knew it.

The context for parliamentary politics that enabled post-war Labour governments to create the health service and the welfare state changed in a qualitative way in this period. After prolonged class struggles, deregulated, free market globalisation emerged. This demanded flexible, cheap labour and shifting production from advanced to developing economies.

The basis for old-style reformist politics disappeared almost overnight. And out of this train crash came New Labour. The rise of Blairism was not therefore, as is often mistakenly assumed, simply a rightward move or a policy decision aimed at winning elections by capturing the “middle ground”.

More than that, it was a recognition and an acceptance that capitalism had changed and that the best could hoped for in future was for wealth to “trickle down” from the top to the bottom. Instead, cheap credit fuelled unsustainable consumption that globalisation called for. The rest, as we know, is history.

The Miliband speech was hailed by the miserable Fabian Society, whose research director Tim Horton said “some on the left may feel queasy about this. But they should understand its logic and cheer it.” Frank Field, the right-wing Labour MP who favours the break-up of the benefits system also hailed Miliband’s speech.

As one comment on Horton’s article, put it: “We now have a one party state, a political class which acts as an administrator of corporate excess, to facilitate resources from poor to rich.” A one-party state is a dictatorship in anyone’s language and that is what we have in a coalition of Tories, Lib Dems and Labourites. Overthrowing dictatorships, of course, is an entirely legitimate social activity.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

What a balls up

The degree to which Ed Balls, as a key Treasury minister in the last New Labour government, is responsible for the government’s massive budget deficit is subject to argument. But what is not in dispute is Balls’ undying support for the unbridled, unregulated expansion of the financial sector which, as we know, went down in flames in 2008.

Balls, newly promoted as shadow chancellor following the sudden resignation of Alan Johnson, claimed yesterday that having studied economics for over 25 years, he knew what it was all about. Subsequent events prove a) how useless bourgeois economics is and b) how arrogant Balls is.

New Labour, as we know, transformed itself into a party that cheer-led the rise of corporate-driven globalisation and, in particular, the parallel growth of a financial sector that fuelled consumerism and, more to the point, had with government support, evaded all known regulatory frameworks.

As chancellor, Gordon Brown couldn’t believe it. The financial sector’s tax revenues grew apace. And in September 2006, Balls, then economic secretary to the Treasury under Brown, went to Hong Kong to sing the praises of London as a financial centre and how easy it was to do business under New Labour.

Balls told a joint meeting of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce and the British Chamber of Commerce: “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%.”

After praising the growth of fantasy finance, Balls declared that central to London’s “success story” was “light-touch principle-based regulation” which New Labour was entirely responsible for. Giving the Bank of England independence was Brown’s first act in May 1997. Creating the toothless Financial Services Authority was act two.

Admiring the Big Bang of 1986, when the Thatcher government opened up the City to global competition as “decisive”, Balls went on to laud the FSA which had “confounded those who feared the FSA might become a heavy-handed and inflexible regulator.” In fact, Britain’s “regulatory regime continues to be the best in the world”.

Famous last words or what, considering there were queues outside Northern Rock branches 12 months later as people scrambled to withdrew their money from a bank that had failed in every respect?

The truth is that regulation was non-existent, not so much a light touch as light-headed. Bankers were running rings round the FSA and the Bank of England – and everyone knew it. “Products” like derivatives lay completely outside the scope of the regulators, yet Balls praised them as if they were a new form of gold.

At the time, this is how the political class and the financial elites saw it. Money could beget more money, profits would rise along with tax revenues, ordinary people could get as much credit as they wanted to buy commodities mostly made in other countries. Surely it could never end? As Brown himself said on the eve of the meltdown in July 2007, the City had entered a “new golden age”.

Then came the crash, an immediate recession and the crisis found its way into government finances, producing eye-watering deficits and interest payments on the debt heading towards £100 billion a year. So, yes, Balls does share political responsibility for the crisis. As he said in Hong Kong: “Government decisions … have an important role to play, for good or ill.”

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Miliband's New Labour Mark II

There are some in and around the Labour Party who believe – or perhaps imagine – that the election of Ed Miliband opens up the prospect of a qualitative break from the Blair-Brown years. After reading his first major interview as party leader, you have to say they couldn’t be further from the truth.

New Labour Mark I may be over but watch out for New Labour Mark II, is Miliband’s essential message. In his interview with The Guardian today, Miliband talks about going “beyond New Labour” without ever repudiating the way his predecessors transformed the party into a cheerleader for market and corporate-driven globalisation.

In fact, Miliband praises much of what New Labour did, saying: “Don't knock it, because it achieved a lot, like the rebuilding of the public realm, tackling poverty.” He omitted to mention the downsides like increased inequality and encouraging an economy dominated by finance capitalism, which contributed to the 2008 meltdown.

Although Miliband claims he is starting with a “blank sheet” in terms of policy, it is clear what direction he wants the party to travel in. Sounding not unlike David Camerons’ New Tories, Miliband says the main task is to examine "how you can create greater social justice in the economy without having to rely only on redistribution and the welfare state.”

What does this actually mean, you may ask? This is Miliband saying that the idea of using the state to redistribute wealth is over. No doubt one reason is that the state no longer has the money to pay for things like tax credits, which were a feature of Brown’s policies. And his criticism of the welfare state uncannily echoes Cameron’s attack on “welfare dependency”, which is behind the Coalition’s plans to dismantle what is a safety net for millions of people in terms of housing and benefits.

Miliband explains: “"However, I think it's very clear that as we are reformers of the market – we should also need to be reformers of the state. I don't consider myself a sort of statist. The top-down idea of the state is as much of a problem as an idealised view of the market and in a way they have their similarities. Both treat people not as people but as kind of objects."

So how is the aim of “social justice” to be achieved? If it’s not through the state, then it can only be via capitalist markets and corporations. There Is No Alternative – within our present political and economic framework, that is. What Miliband is burying is a central principle of what was Old Labour in order to come to terms with the financial crisis that broke in 2008 and that shows every sign of exploding once more.

And that means cutting the budget deficit. Miliband may disagree with the Tories’ rate of attrition, but admits that Labour would be making deep cuts in spending if they’d won the election. In fact, Labour is already preparing to make massive cuts at local council level, from Manchester to Lambeth, and at town halls across Scotland and Wales.

Labour councillors say they have no choice because the instructions to cut are coming from Whitehall and, by law, they have to make a balanced budget. In other words, they are just carrying out orders. That’s never been an acceptable excuse at any time in history. But for Labourite councillors and leaders, it’s all water off a duck’s back.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Groucho says it how it is

Perhaps John McDonnell could draw some comfort from Groucho Marx after his exclusion (for a second time) from the contest for leader of the Labour Party. Groucho once quipped that he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member.

McDonnell could only have secured the required 33 nominations – he ended up with about half, including two right-wing mavericks Kate Hoey and Frank Fields – with the active support of the anti-socialist, New Labour majority that runs the party. It wasn’t going to happen.

They were never going to lend McDonnell their votes precisely because he has systematically struggled and campaigned against them, inside and outside parliament, on picket lines and in rallies. By all accounts, he did not pull his punches on Monday evening when he challenged the main contenders over New Labour’s record.

McDonnell has also argued for a genuine socialist alternative to corporate globalisation, taking up the theme that another world is possible. So if he didn’t get on the ballot, it’s because of his principles which New Labour is consciously opposed to.

In 13 years in office, lest we forget, Blair and Brown – with the help of the two Milibands, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham – turned Labour into a management team for global capital. They gave political blessing to the generation of a gigantic financial bubble which has now burst, leading to massive spending cuts. And, make no mistake, if New Labour had won the election, they would be announcing major cuts as well.

The New Labour establishment has lent support to TV personality Diane Abbott to provide themselves with a cover of respectability. There is no other way to explain the last-minute rush to nominate her led by David Miliband. This followed McDonnell’s decision to withdraw under pressure from Abbott’s supporters, even though she had fewer nominations at the time.

It was ironic indeed that a black woman MP secured her 33rd vote from Phil Woolas. His anti-immigrant rhetoric as a minister in the outgoing government was music to the ears of the far right. Nevertheless, Woolas was given a big hug by the raging opportunist Abbott – who sends her son to a private school – after signing her papers. Steve Bell just about summed it up with his “Diane and the Tokens” cartoon in today's Guardian . Another Groucho Marx quip might be appropriate here: “Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.”

For all the media speculation about who succeeds Gordon Brown, the future will be decided on the streets and in communities and not in the House of Commons. We are moving into the territory of extra-parliamentary action as the Lib-Tory coalition prepares to cut wages, raise VAT and destroy whole areas of public services. This will be class war with a vengeance and – just as in the Thatcher period – Labour will oppose militant resistance to workers being made to pay for the crisis of capitalism.

The mass opposition to Cameron and Clegg that is on the horizon will need a dramatically fresh political perspective. Any idea of returning to New Labour is a nightmare too far and would, in any case, only be a change of management!

There is something in the coalition’s declaration that the “old politics” is dead. Why try and breathe new life into a corpse when the opportunity is there to create a revolutionary, democratic politics in its place? McDonnell and his supporters have an essential role to play in the discussion about where we go from here politically which they should not pass up.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Coalition will provoke extra-parliamentary struggles

The collapse of the Tories and Liberal Democrats into each other’s arms to form the first coalition government in modern times does not so much signify a “new politics” but the suspension of old-style politics in the face of a calamitous financial crisis.

New Labour was prepared to go down the same road. Its failure to woo the Lib Dems – Britain’s oldest capitalist party – led to Gordon Brown’s late evening resignation and his replacement by David Cameron. Most of the New Labour cabinet – members of Britain’s newest capitalist party – were relieved to be out of office and not having to make the savage cuts that the money markets are demanding.

On entering Downing Street, Cameron accepted responsibility for implementing the demands imposed by an unprecedented financial and economic crisis. Hours earlier the International Monetary Fund (IMF), eurozone authorities and European Central Bank (ECB) came together with the US Federal Reserve in a desperate King Canute-style 750 billion euros/1 trillion US dollars global alliance:

• On Monday the ECB reversed its policy and began to echo the British government in “quantitative easing”, buying up eurozone government bonds and accepting junk debt to prevent a string of state bankruptcies

• 27 European countries created an emergency loan facility of 60 billion euros aimed at stopping the Greek crisis spreading to Spain, Portugal and Ireland.

• The 16 eurozone countries together with Sweden and Poland have put together a 440 billion euros “special purpose vehicle”, a fund to defend themselves against foreign currency speculation.

• The IMF offered 250 billion euros in loans to stricken countries.

• The US Federal Reserve renewed the emergency measures it used during the global meltdown of autumn 2008 allowing foreign banks to borrow dollars.

All of these actions, promises and offers are conditional on governments old and new ratcheting up the brutal austerity programme that has already precipitated general strikes and street battles in Greece and Spain.

The new coalition replaces an administration which had spent 13 years cultivating the relationship with the financial masters of the universe. New Labour helped create the conditions which resulted in a system crash that began in 2008 and that is still unravelling.

The Cameron-Clegg coalition’s announcement that it will start to reduce the budget deficit by cutting public spending immediately with a £6 billion programme of “efficiency savings” is aimed at reassuring the hedge fund managers and other market traders whose gambling with bonds determines government action throughout the world. Liberal Democratic manifesto intentions to postpone the cuts to avoid a deflationary spiral have been ditched.

The coming assault on services, jobs, wages, pensions and benefits is certain to trigger an avalanche of conflict with millions of workers in education, health, social services as well as in the civil service who together make up the majority of the workforce.

Some say the New Labour project failed and is over. On the contrary, it served its purpose. It held the reins and reorganised the state while the Tories were in crisis. There is no going back to an earlier form of Labour as a reformist party because globalisation and the merger of the state with financial and corporate interests does not allow for this. To think otherwise is to perpetuate illusions about electoral politics when new forms of struggle beckon.

There are no electoral or parliamentary “solutions” to this crisis. If New Labour had won the election, savage cuts would still have been top of the agenda. The struggles immediately ahead will be extra-parliamentary in shape and form, beginning with the British Airways cabin crew strikes planned for next week.

Giving these struggles a political shape and objective means going beyond a parliamentary politics that is in any case in deep freeze. A perspective around the building of a network of People’s Assemblies to challenge the state’s right to make the cuts is the best way to respond the anti-people coalition now in Downing Street. register for our May 22 conference to discuss how we can mobilise to take the revolutionary road with the aim of bringing the Cameron-Clegg regime down sooner rather than later.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

The uncertainty principle in politics

The break-up of parliamentary politics is happening right before our eyes, most dramatically shown in the resignation under pressure of Gordon Brown and the frantic moves to cobble together some sort of coalition before the money markets decide Britain is another basket case.

All the major parties are bitterly divided about who to get into bed with. David Blunkett’s accusation that the Lib Dems were behaving “like every harlot in history” is hardly a term of endearment for a would-be partner in a coalition of the losers. A stable government looks a remote possibility. Political stalemate combined with an attack on the pound could yet produce an all-party “government of national emergency”.

Brown, of course, was the architect with Tony Blair of New Labour, which transformed the old party from a social democratic organisation into full-blown cheer-leaders for globalised capitalism, particularly in the financial sector. Brown’s first act was to create the Financial Services Authority as a hands-off “regulator” which would allow the City to do what it wanted.

Brown once famously declared he had put an end to Tory “boom and bust”. Well, he got that spectacularly wrong. Happy to rake in tax revenue from bank profits, New Labour ignored warnings that a boom based on unsustainable levels of credit would end in crash. Brown’s announcement that he is resigning as party leader reflects the impact of a crisis that has taken the British state towards bankruptcy.

The outcome of 29.6 million people casting their votes (under two thirds of the electorate, but 2 million more than last time) has produced an unprecedented political vacuum. This was not necessarily anyone’s intention. But the result is nonetheless the outcome of millions of individual decisions as voters rejected 13 years of New Labour rule, but refused to endorse other parties in an overwhelming way.

Around the world, scrambles by politicians to form one kind of unholy multi-party alliance or another have been par for the course in politics for a long time, but not in Britain. A vacuum in politics, as in nature, cannot persist for long. As we remarked the day after the election, the top priority for those overseeing the capitalist state at this time of extreme financial crisis is the need for stability:

Just read this account of yesterday evening in the City:

17:41 "A Lib-Lab coalition would be a big negative for sterling," Ian Stannard at BNP Paribas says. "The Government will be unstable and not have the ability to drive through the cuts required."

17:30 Pound is now at $1.4866 against the dollar, compared to $1.5056 earlier in the afternoon. Still falling too.

17:23 Euro has risen by more than half a cent against the pound following Brown's statement. Markets really spooked by prospect of more uncertainty.

17:14 Reaction to Brown's statement and subsequent fall in pound from Jeremy Cook, chief economist at World First:

“It’s pretty clear that the market wants certainty and that the news that Clegg is dilly-dallying between Labour and the Conservatives have not gone down well. I’m surprised that the markets haven’t hit sterling hard today, the EU plan has taken a bullet for us. As soon as that become old news however sterling is once again in the firing line”.

Due to the effects of globalisation on politics, the electoral base of both Tory and New Labour parties has changed in Britain, while the rise of the Liberal Democrats has destabilised the two-party system at the national level. These complex realities mark the end of an historical era and the opening up of a new political landscape in which the only certainty has become uncertainty.

Despite their differences, Cameron, Clegg, Mandelson and Balls will seek to impose the rule of the corporations and the markets. Forget all this rubbish about a “progressive alliance”. More like an anti-people alliance. We should seize this moment of no government to advocate strategies to achieve a real democracy in place of the Westminster charade.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Election deepens political crisis

The death at the weekend of writer Alan Sillitoe and the looming possibility of a hung Parliament have no direct connection. And yet looking back at Sillitoe’s writings, and reflecting on the latest twists in the election campaign, you can detect a profound shift taking place in British history.

Sillitoe’s brilliant story, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner appeared as a film in 1960. The story of a borstal boy symbolised the rebelliousness of an entire generation of young people – and the gritty realities of working class life in post-war Britain.

That world has passed. Communities of factory workers like those depicted in Sillitoe’s writings disappeared under globalisation and the policies of Thatcher and New Labour. New class relations have emerged. Workers are more dispersed and less unionised. Large sections of the community no longer work and live in impoverished conditions in, for example, former mining areas.

The old party loyalties have gone as a result. That, at the political level, can help to explain the sudden rise of the Liberal Democrats and an historic break-up of the two-party system. The choice between first the Tories and the Whigs and later Tories and Labour has dominated British politics for 200 years. Formal coalitions have been reserved for war time only.

That is why the threat of a Parliament without an overall majority for any party signals a moment of instability in which the “known knowns” are – at least temporarily – shattered, and has forced a realignment between those who represent capitalism.

The connection between this political transformation is inseparable from the economic processes of the last 40 years, in which the British welfare state has changed into a “market state” – entirely subservient to the rule of global capital. This process, explained in A World to Win’s book Unmasking the State, has led to a “hollowing out” of the state itself.

As the state’s role has altered, more and more people have lost interest in politics, realising that exercising your right to vote does not lead to any influence over those elected. Clegg’s sudden stardom following the first TV debate was not so much due to his personal charisma as the desire to pin on him the widespread disaffection with New Labour and the Tories.

After all, Clegg is even more ruling class than Cameron, and the Lib Dems are even more pro-banker than Brown and Cameron put together, if that’s possible. Don’t forget that Clegg’s deputy leader, ex-banker Vince Cable was the oil corporation Shell’s chief economist.

As Clegg knows only too well, Both Brown and Cameron’s “love bombing” is just hot air and he is walking a political tightrope. Many Lib Dem voters would see entering into an agreement with Cameron, as a "pact with the devil” and those who want to get shot of New Labour will feel betrayed if Clegg joins with Brown.

Achieving a stable form of government under these conditions could be well-nigh impossible. Some will see the political crisis as simply shadow-dancing while the real power-brokers remain hidden from view in the corridors of Whitehall and the global corporations. In some respects they are right.

But at the same time, to view politics separately form the deep currents underneath is also to miss the real moment of opportunity. The political crisis means that the ruling class is unable to rule in the old way at a time of a serious financial emergency. The strength of those in power is precisely that they are aware of this weakness and will do all in their power to address it.

Our strength must be to see it as an opportunity for those excluded from power to exercise their power in a meaningful way. That is why our strategy of forming People’s Assemblies is a thousand times more realistic than believing we can influence any parliament that will result from the election.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

TV debate masks fraud of an election

With the general election now firmly in the realms of a TV game show, the degeneration of mainstream politics is clear for all who care to take note. Another ninety minutes of well rehearsed assertions could not disguise the fact that in essence, there is nothing between the major parties.

Fundamentally, there are no disagreements between the three parties when it comes to the economy, immigration, defence, Afghanistan, climate change etc. Even on Iraq, where the Lib Dems opposed the war, the subject hardly got a look in, with the questions from the audience reduced to anodyne levels (e.g. should the Pope be allowed into Britain?!).

Forget all the knockabout stuff – that’s routine in the House of Commons every week at prime minister’s questions. It’s all for show, to try and sell the electorate the idea that politics is exciting and that New Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems are brimming with different ideas.

Any differences between them are about emphasis, not content. They are about ways of doing things – not changing the things themselves. The electorate is being asked to change management rather than elect a new government. None of the three leaders, for example, questions the assumption that massive cuts in public spending are needed to reduce the mounting budget deficit.

As the Financial Times reported hours before the televised debate, the government borrowed £163.4bn in the past financial year, the worst level of in Britain’s peacetime history. Public sector net debt rose to 53.8% of national income in 2009-10, up from 44% the previous year. The bankers’ paper noted: “The level of borrowing – at more than 11% of national income – highlights the need for the next government to enforce stringent public spending cuts and tax increases as the economy recovers, something all the parties agree on (emphasis added).”

The only reason the cuts are deemed necessary, however, is to appease international lenders who finance the deficit with loans and global foreign exchange traders buying and selling the pound. Yet the deficit itself is the result of the recession caused by the collapse of the very same financial system which has benefited from state bail-outs on a massive scale.

The alternative to making massive cuts in spending would require a total reorganisation of the economy and financial system. It would mean defying capitalist markets and relaunching the economy on the basis of gearing production to social need. None of this is going to happen at Westminster. After May 6, some sort of coalition will be cobbled together to clobber the electorate. Make no mistake about it.

So our twin policy of hanging on to your vote while campaigning to launch a network of People’s Assemblies may appear utopian but is actually a practical alternative. If you wouldn’t buy a used car off of Brown, Cameron or Clegg, why lend them your vote? If the present parliamentary system is undemocratic and unrepresentative, one where your vote counts for little, why participate in the fraud that is the 2010 general election?

If we want a real democracy in a society not beholden to bankers and corporations, we are going to have to take the initiative ourselves. A struggle for power against the political and economic elites is a tough road to go down. A World to Win is launching as an international organisation next month, committed to providing leadership for such a strategy. You are warmly invited to take part in the May 22 conference.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Cameron plays populist card

Tory leader David Cameron claimed today that his party and New Labour have swapped places in British politics – the Conservatives are now the “radicals” while New Labour are the “reactionaries”.

He says this is a “strange reversal”. And, he’s right. It is strange in more ways than one. For a start, if a top Tory believes that appealing to radicalism could be a means of gaining votes that should be a wake-up call to those who believe that conservatism with a small “c” is the most dominant force in British politics.

Reinforcing his earlier calls for community assemblies to revive local democracy, Cameron yesterday teamed up somewhat bizarrely with actor Michael Caine to raise the idea of a national service for youth, as part of his notion of a “Big Society”. Caine referred to the Conservative Party as “the government”. Perhaps he knows something we don’t.

Cameron has also called for a 5,000-strong army of full-time professional community organisers, in an emulation of Barack Obama. The US president once immersed himself as a community organiser in Chicago’s most deprived neighbourhoods, working with black car workers, youth and unemployed. The Tories along with their house newspaper, The Sunday Telegraph, have been praising the virtues of co-operatively-owned and run local shops in communities killed off by globalised commerce as great initiatives.

Those who still cling to the delusion that New Labour retains its old credentials of being the party that represents in some way the working class will, of course, simply dismiss this as lying word-twisting by power-hungry Tories. It’s easy to pooh-pooh Cameron’s “visions” as the usual election posturing, by of all people a rich boy educated at the best public schools in the country, whose wife’s wealth is estimated at more than £30m.

But the truth is that the Conservatives, have done some serious homework. They are sensitive to the widespread disaffection and alienation that has built up in the 13 years of New Labour. In their hunger for votes and power, even privileged toffs like Cameron must appeal to the vast numbers of people in Britain who have lost faith in politics and politicians and the establishment in general.

For all Cameron’s fine talk and “sympathy” for teenagers in deprived areas who are frustrated and bored, the Conservatives in power would make the same immense cuts in public spending as New Labour is secretly planning. The Tories are already proposing to cut inheritance tax which will directly benefit the richest 2 per cent in Britain. Most of it will go to the 3,000 wealthiest estates including those of his wife. There will be handouts of billions more to the richest 1 per cent of the population.

In this respect the Tories are the same as New Labour, under whose rule more wealth and power has been handed to the rich than ever before in recent history. Prosecuting neo-imperialist wars, retaining and strengthening anti-trade union legislation, widening the gap between the rich and poor and giving the forces of the state unheard of powers have made Blair and Brown almost indistinguishable from their Tory predecessors, Thatcher and Major.

Therefore, the only way that Cameron’s Tories can really make themselves look different is by occupying what political ground remains with some form of populist democracy. The ruling elites are, as ever, quite adept at making adjustments to the state in order to try and reel the electorate back into the traditional parliamentary political process.

The answer is not vote for discredited New Labour but to step up the campaign to expose the sham nature of the election and the undemocratic state that is beyond reform. That has to go hand in hand with establishing the framework for transferring actual political and economic power from the state to People’s Assemblies, thereby creating our democratic society.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

The politics of the present

The case for hanging on to your vote in the general election, while exercising your democratic right to go beyond the present exhausted political system, has more to do with the way we look at the world than most other considerations.

What it boils down to is a choice between 1) a view that accepts that the world external to our thinking is in constant flux and change or 2) an outlook that bases itself on more or less eternal “truths”.

The first approach to analysing the real world acknowledges that all phenomena – including society and its component parts – eventually assume entirely new qualities, often within an old form. They are both the same and yet not the same at any given moment and this is the result of internal contradictions working themselves out as a process.

By contrast, the second outlook is inevitably rooted in the past. Although this view allows for changes, these are viewed as incremental and incidental. They are not allowed to invalidate previous assumptions. Needless to say, this empirical ideology predominates within contemporary capitalist society and helps to reinforce the status quo.

In our view, attitudes to the question of Parliament and the general election, which is likely to be called a week today and held on May 6, are dependent upon analysis. This must set out the qualitative changes that have taken place within the state and political system since working men won the vote in 1867. For example:

Is New Labour a modern form of the original Labour Party or an entirely new quality in the shape of a capitalist party produced by the corporate-led globalisation of the last 30 years? All the evidence and experience points to the second conclusion.

Is Parliament the centre of the political system? Was it ever? If so, it was a long time ago. As political scientist Anthony King notes in his recent book The British Constitution:

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 19^th century and was complete by, at the latest, the 1880s or 1890s. Nothing much of constitutional significance has happened [to parliament] since then… It goes without saying that the British House of Commons is now, and has been for a very long time, the archetypal arena assembly. It is simply not equipped to function as a transformative legislature, and of course governments of all political parties are anxious to ensure that it never, ever becomes so equipped.

Can voters influence the course of events by participating in local, European and parliamentary elections? That is no longer possible.

As a result of globalisation, the capitalist democratic process has been undermined further. There is now a seamless relationship between government, state, corporate and financial power as well as external undemocratic bodes like the European Union and the World Trade Organisation. The government is accountable not to Parliament but to the markets. MPs are reduced to various levels of corruption to fill in their time.

So the case for taking the right to vote into new territory is based on what has changed. It’s time to move democracy on, and give the right to vote a new significance and weight. We could do this by encouraging people to create their own democratic bodies like People’s Assemblies. This would challenge the power of the existing state to decide, for example, that ordinary people should bear the pain of a crisis of capitalism that is not of their making.

Above all, it means living and thinking in the present, while learning from the past, and acting to shape the future in our own interests. You can be sure that whatever government emerges out of the election will be doing exactly the opposite.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

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

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 only way to stop the Tories

As time runs out for the New Labour government, the big question is how do we stop the Tories? The answer is made more difficult by the fact that there is no practical electoral answer to this matter.

For example, there is no way that you could advocate a vote for New Labour at the forthcoming general election. The party led by Gordon Brown is essentially capitalist in its outlook and practice, as it has shown in more than 12 years in power. From the beginning under Tony Blair, it assumed the role of the political management team in Britain for global corporate and financial power.

Policies inherited from the previous Tory governments have been deepened and applied in a ruthless fashion across the public sector, from education to health, while the private sector was set free to pursue profit and promote globalisation. Internationally, the government pursued neo-imperialist policies by invading Iraq and Afghanistan while domestically New Labour constructed the edifice of an authoritarian state.

Now that the world capitalist economy has plunged into crisis, New Labour government is in trouble politically and with the electorate. Tough! There’s no way anyone should help them out by lending them a vote at the next election and certainly not on the spurious ground that the Tories “will be worse”.

As for voting Lib Dem, well the party has swung so far to the right under Nick Clegg that even a forensic scientist would be hard-pressed to tell them apart from David Cameron’s Tories.

Over the last couple of decades not only have the three main parties have coalesced while the capitalist state, including the Parliamentary system, now openly rather than covertly functions in the service of economic and financial elites, as the bank bail-outs demonstrated.

So where does that leave us? What is certain is that the economic crisis is set to get far worse over the next six months, that whoever wins the election will be faced with an immediate political crisis and that we will have to produce some unconventional solutions to find a practical way forward.

In an interview with the Financial Times today, Michael Geoghegan, chief executive of HSBC, warns of a second downturn in the coming months. One of the better capitalised banks, HSBC is holding off from expansion plans in the expectation of a W or “double-dip” recession.

Geoghegan has no doubt studied the latest unemployment figures from the United States, which show that 7.2 million people have lost their jobs since the beginning of the current recession in December 2007. The total population of the unemployed in America is now 15.1 million. One estimate is that about one-in-six employable Americans are without a job.

Meanwhile, California – the eighth largest economy in the world – is bankrupt. Thousands of public sector workers are losing their jobs and having their pay cut. Students are revolting against plans a mid-year increase in tuition fees. This is the kind of crsis that the Tories, or whatever political formation comes out of the election, will face. Not some cuts here and there but ruthless, savage, drastic and draconian cuts in the midst of a recession. And beginning the day after the election.

So to answer the question about how to stop the Tories, it means building a movement that recognises what’s at stake. A World to Win’s People’s Charter for Democracy suggests how economic and political power could be transferred out of the hands of the powerless majority. The way forward, in our view, lies beyond putting a cross on a ballot paper for a Parliamentary system that masks the need for the state to dispense with democratic niceties in order to impose the crisis on ordinary people.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Not me, guv'!

Listening to Gordon Brown yesterday reminded you that New Labour is not actually responsible for anything, despite a dozen years in office. Above all, the government has washed its hands of any shared liability for the financial crisis that has overwhelmed the economy.

Brown, chancellor Alistair Darling, and unelected Business Secretary Lord Mandelson are united in once again trying to pass the entire blame for the crisis on to the bankers while absolving themselves for creating the framework for the very same financial system.

"We won't allow greed and recklessness to ever again endanger the whole global economy and the lives of millions of people,” said Darling in Brighton. “Markets need morals” said Brown in his keynote speech, yesterday, pledging that the government would pass new rules covering bankers' behaviour, including disqualifying those unfit to run banks.

Leaving aside the fact that there can be no such thing as a “moral market” in the capitalist system, there is the small matter of Brown’s own role in the financial meltdown that is far from over.

For 11 years Brown was chief supplicant to the world’s financial operators. During that time he willingly and actively encouraged the City of London to become one of the world’s sweetest honey pots for the busy bees in the banks, and the gamblers on the non-bank markets in derivatives.

Ensuring that credit expanded and flowed around the world, turning into debt as it went, was crucial in keeping the profits of global corporations high. Somebody had to do it to keep production churning out the commodities, and consumers buying them.

So in June 2007, just weeks before the credit crunch took hold, Brown declared that the City had entered a new “golden age”, telling bankers: “The financial services sector in Britain and the City of London at the centre of it, is a great example of a highly skilled, high value added, talent driven industry that shows how we can excel in a world of global competition. Britain needs more of the vigour, ingenuity and aspiration that you already demonstrate that is the hallmark of your success.”

But now, apparently there’s going to be “new economic model for a strong economy”, “a new settlement”. While these platitudes were enough to win over union bureaucrats like Tony Woodley, of Unite, Dave Prentis of Unison and Brendan Barber of the TUC, they were just faint echoes of the laughable “birth of a new economic system” conclusion to the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh. And there, dissenters were dealt with severely using tear gas and sonic weapons.

Now, says Brown, finance is going to be the servant of the people, not the other way round. Why then, we ask, did the US and UK delegates ensure that the G20 decided against mandatory limits on bankers bonuses?

When Brown told his conference that “what let the world down last autumn was not just bankrupt institutions but a bankrupt ideology” he could (but wasn’t) have just as easily been referring to himself and the New Labour “project”.

Brown, Blair and Mandelson won the City over to New Labour on the grounds that they would use the state to set business and finance free to compete in global markets. They would resist the repeal of the anti-union laws and create markets in public services. And the City lapped it up and all went out and voted Labour.

Now the game is up. New Labour has lost it and the British state itself is teetering on bankruptcy. The Tories are on their way back with the support of The Sun, which has seen the writing on the wall and ditched Brown’s party. One thing is certain, however: New Labour is not actually responsible for anything!

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

The real issues behind the election campaign

As the countdown to the general election gets under way with New Labour’s conference at Brighton, there is a danger that politics in Britain will become so narrowly focussed that the real issues and challenges are consumed by a debate about which party to vote for.

Some political organisations on the Left, led by the rail union RMT, are even in a race to put together a new electoral coalition in time for the election, which is likely to be held in early May 2010. This would be a kind of “No2EU – Yes to Democracy” Mark II, which produced a nationalist programme for the recent European elections.

The election and what comes afterwards was also uppermost in the minds of most speakers at the Convention of the Left over the weekend, where there were repeated calls for “unity” alongside a reluctance to consider more fundamental issues.

But the impending disintegration of New Labour has far greater implications than those connected with mere voting intentions.

The emergence of New Labour was driven by the capitalist globalisation process and its demise is determined by the crisis now affecting the world economic and financial system.

Brown and Blair championed an economy subservient to the needs of the transnational corporations and banks.

Globalisation at the same time rendered Parliamentary democracy meaningless in an historic sense of being an arena where significant reforms could be established. Instead, the market has penetrated and undermined public services while MPs have been reduced to fiddling expenses.

The changed role of the capitalist state was underscored when no resources were spared by New Labour in propping up failed banks. Now the price for this is to be paid by ordinary working people, whoever wins the election.

However, we are not facing anything like a repeat of the early period of the 1979 Thatcher government, when public spending cuts roused fierce trade union opposition.

For one, the scale of the cuts now required is so immense that they would require a dictatorship of sorts to impose on the population. Whether the Tories or a coalition of the main parties is capable of this is another question.

But you can say with certainty that all the traditional parties are lying about the grave nature of the financial crisis and about the prospects for the economy, which is prevented from collapse only by pumping in increasing amounts of government debt.

Any hesitation on making savage cuts will produce a “strike” by international finance, which will refuse to fund further loans.

So what lies ahead goes far deeper than electoral considerations. Challenging the cuts will throw up the need not just for an alternative economic and financial set-up but bring on a challenge for power itself.

Under the threat of dictatorship, our aim is not the resurrection of a worn-out, limited and barely democratic political system but the total reconstruction of the state in a way that transfers essential power to ordinary people.

It would be a grave error, therefore, to waste time and resources just to focus on having something or someone to vote for without warning of the dangers ahead. If we don’t attend to the underlying processes at work, we will pay a heavy price.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor