So the revolt against Gordon Brown fizzled out last night and it’s easy to see why. Ultimately, his opponents were only interested in saving their own skins come general election time and had no differences of principle or policy with the prime minister.
Backbench MPs as well as scores of ex-ministers have participated for over 12 years in shaping Labour to the point where any remaining signs of the party from which it had come have been extinguished for good. In its place appeared “New” Labour – openly dedicated to facilitating corporate and financial power and influence in a partnership with the state.
Being a Brownite or Blairite has made no essential difference to this naked and open alliance of capitalism and government. Between them they carved up the public sector for the benefit of private enterprise, urged on the City speculators and created a society where inequality grew at an unprecedented rate.
Apart from a handful of MPs, the vast majority sanctioned these changes as an easy way of getting re-elected. Now that their charmed existence is threatened in the wake of the economic, financial and parliamentary crises, it’s a case of every MP for him/herself. SOS in this case stands for Save Our Salaries (and pensions etc).
What finally convinced the so-called rebels to call of their attempted coup was the threat of an immediate general election should Brown be ousted, with the certainty that the vast majority would lose their seats if that happened. But the inevitable is surely only postponed.
The collapse of the New Labour vote in the European and council elections is historic in its depth and shows a party in terminal decline. While two-thirds of the electorate boycotted the polls, some sections of totally disillusioned working class voters even switched their allegiance to the neo-fascist British National Party out of desperation.
So it’s a bit late and more than a little disingenuous for Alistair Darling to say that his government’s failure to “articulate a sense of vision” and to “inspire confidence” was to blame for the BNP’s gathering of almost one million votes at the Euro elections (the BNP, naturally enough, used Brown’s slogan of “British Jobs for British Workers” during the election).
New Labour actually has had a “vision” – one based on people (and not a few MPs) getting wealthy through property dealing and spending their way out of poverty on credit cards. At the same time, many workers have endured low wages and poor to non-existent housing provision. Now younger generations especially are thrown on the dole as a result of the collapse of an economic boom based on fantasy finance and are prey to the appeals of the BNP, even if only temporarily.
This crisis is deepening by the day. Yesterday, the van maker LDV went into administration and a total of 3,000 direct and indirect jobs will go. Today, the Lloyds Banking Group, partly state owned, announced the loss of 1,500 jobs with the closure of its Cheltenham & Gloucester mortgage arm.
The break-up of New Labour and the crisis in the parliamentary system, which the election results reinforce, indicate that we have passed into a period of unprecedented social, economic and political instability. Ending the recession, creating decent jobs and housing will have to be achieved outside of the narrow confines of the parliamentary arena. You should sign our People’s Charter for Democracy and help build a movement to make leap that society needs.
Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label New Labour crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Labour crisis. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Monday, June 08, 2009
The parliamentary game is up
New Labour’s continued disintegration – both as a government and a party – is now accompanied by an historic fracturing of a political system that has hitherto functioned on the Tweedledum-Tweedledee principle. That much is clear from yesterday’s devastating European election results.
For those who can’t remember their nursery rhymes, Tweedledum and Tweedledee were two men who agreed to have a battle, only to take fright when a crow appeared. The story nicely sums up the history of the parliamentary system over the last century, where the major parties have sustained the democratic façade through mock battles while agreeing to preserve the status quo.
For this to work, Labour has had to remain a credible partner in the game.
Now that New Labour is collapsing before our very eyes - winning just 15.3% of the votes cast, its lowest share of the poll in a national election since 1910 – the Tweedledum-Tweedledee system is also coming to a finality.
Labour had its worst results since 1918 in Scotland and Wales. In Cornwall the party came sixth behind the Cornish Nationalist party. In the south-east and south-west, it came fifth behind the Greens. Add in the expenses scandal and there can be no doubt that all this adds up to a seminal crisis for the parliamentary democratic system.
New Labour’s betrayal of the less well-off, white working class in areas like Doncaster, Rotherham, Sheffield, Lincolnshire and parts of the North-West, along with the government’s anti-asylum, anti-migrant pandering, is entirely responsible for the election of two neo-fascist BNP members to the European Parliament. At the same time, the inability of the Tories to maintain loyalty amongst their own natural supporters enabled UKIP – another far right-wing grouping – to finish second in the Euro elections.
A further indication of the profound crisis gripping the capitalist political system is the slump in turn-out, not just in Britain where it plunged from 38.4 % in 2004 to 33% of those eligible to vote. This itself is well below the European average of 43%, which is down on 2004 and compares with an average of 63% when the first elections were held in 1979.
Significantly, the parties that have their origins in social democratic reform traditions in Spain, France and Germany did extremely poorly, whether in government or opposition. This is further verification that their historic role in preserving the capitalist status quo with a few reformist trimmings doesn’t wash any more. In Sweden, once a bastion of social democracy, the country’s Pirate Party, which wants to legalise Internet file sharing, won 7% of the national vote and one of the country's 18 seats in the European Parliament.
So where does all this leave us politically? The first thing to say is that just concentrating on who won what seats where to be represented in a pretty meaningless European parliament is to miss the essence of the crisis. Particularly in Britain, this is about a break-up of an historic and often cosy political arrangement in which the focus was Parliament.
Ultimately, the cause is the growing alienation from traditional politics that itself flows from the corporate-driven globalisation process. The simultaneous crisis within the capitalist economic and financial system gives the political crisis a unique character.
The answer cannot and does not lie simply in contesting elections for institutions that are increasingly discredited but in developing a credible, alternative anti-capitalist democratic politics (and economics) which will require a revolutionary transformation to carry through. There are enough warnings from the European elections to show that if we don’t grasp this nettle, others on the far right are ready to do so.
Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor
For those who can’t remember their nursery rhymes, Tweedledum and Tweedledee were two men who agreed to have a battle, only to take fright when a crow appeared. The story nicely sums up the history of the parliamentary system over the last century, where the major parties have sustained the democratic façade through mock battles while agreeing to preserve the status quo.
For this to work, Labour has had to remain a credible partner in the game.
Now that New Labour is collapsing before our very eyes - winning just 15.3% of the votes cast, its lowest share of the poll in a national election since 1910 – the Tweedledum-Tweedledee system is also coming to a finality.
Labour had its worst results since 1918 in Scotland and Wales. In Cornwall the party came sixth behind the Cornish Nationalist party. In the south-east and south-west, it came fifth behind the Greens. Add in the expenses scandal and there can be no doubt that all this adds up to a seminal crisis for the parliamentary democratic system.
New Labour’s betrayal of the less well-off, white working class in areas like Doncaster, Rotherham, Sheffield, Lincolnshire and parts of the North-West, along with the government’s anti-asylum, anti-migrant pandering, is entirely responsible for the election of two neo-fascist BNP members to the European Parliament. At the same time, the inability of the Tories to maintain loyalty amongst their own natural supporters enabled UKIP – another far right-wing grouping – to finish second in the Euro elections.
A further indication of the profound crisis gripping the capitalist political system is the slump in turn-out, not just in Britain where it plunged from 38.4 % in 2004 to 33% of those eligible to vote. This itself is well below the European average of 43%, which is down on 2004 and compares with an average of 63% when the first elections were held in 1979.
Significantly, the parties that have their origins in social democratic reform traditions in Spain, France and Germany did extremely poorly, whether in government or opposition. This is further verification that their historic role in preserving the capitalist status quo with a few reformist trimmings doesn’t wash any more. In Sweden, once a bastion of social democracy, the country’s Pirate Party, which wants to legalise Internet file sharing, won 7% of the national vote and one of the country's 18 seats in the European Parliament.
So where does all this leave us politically? The first thing to say is that just concentrating on who won what seats where to be represented in a pretty meaningless European parliament is to miss the essence of the crisis. Particularly in Britain, this is about a break-up of an historic and often cosy political arrangement in which the focus was Parliament.
Ultimately, the cause is the growing alienation from traditional politics that itself flows from the corporate-driven globalisation process. The simultaneous crisis within the capitalist economic and financial system gives the political crisis a unique character.
The answer cannot and does not lie simply in contesting elections for institutions that are increasingly discredited but in developing a credible, alternative anti-capitalist democratic politics (and economics) which will require a revolutionary transformation to carry through. There are enough warnings from the European elections to show that if we don’t grasp this nettle, others on the far right are ready to do so.
Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor
Friday, June 05, 2009
New improved 'fantasy finance' fuels the crisis
The maelstrom of scandal and political in-fighting that is shaking the New Labour government to its foundations – who knows what other ministers may have resigned by the time you read this – is fuelling the fires of the global crisis of capitalism.
The political meltdown, with its constitutional consequences, has added new dimensions to the economic, financial and ecological hydra-headed mother of all crises. Each of its parts is interacting and adversely affecting the others.
Just the suggestion that Brown would replace Chancellor Alistair Darling with Ed Balls, for example, triggered a negative reaction on the financial markets. The political crisis in the UK is undermining its credit rating – and hence its ability to raise new funds. So Darling is staying on at the Treasury to try and calm the markets if nothing else because it’s either borrow or bust (or should that be borrow and bust?).
Capitalist governments have been competing with each other in their zeal to replace decades of kow-towing to the free market demands of transnational corporations with supersized versions of Keynesian-style intervention to try and get the economy moving.
It’s easy to lose sight of the reason for all of this frenetic activity. The over-riding motivating force is a hopeless endeavour – trying to reverse the inevitable collapse of consumer demand which has exposed the mountains of overproduced commodities and production overcapacity.
To pay for it, treasuries have been pumping more oil on the fire, offering government bonds to the gamblers in the global casino and adding zeroes to their own balance sheets – simply by printing money, aka quantitative easing - to finance the issue of “new, improved” fantasy finance.
In doing so, they are attempting to burden generations to come of their increasingly unemployed populations with unsustainable levels of tax, whilst preparing to greatly reduce spending on health, education, pensions, social services, and the benefits on which tens of millions depend.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, governments will this year attempt to issue almost $12,000 billion of debt, up from $9,000 billion two years ago (and many times the level a decade ago.) The US alone is projected to sell almost $8,000bn.
The weakest links are showing signs of breaking, however. In Latvia, a bond auction on Wednesday which saw no bidders triggered a minor panic in Eastern European markets. Latvia's economy is set to contract by 18 per cent this year and unemployment is soaring. Already in May, the credit ratings agency Standard and Poor issued a warning reducing the UK government’s triple-A credit rating from stable to negative adversely affecting its ability to raise funds to bridge the gap.
According to the Financial Time’s Martin Wolf, real spending in the UK is forecast to rise by 7.2 per cent alone this year, while the value of goods and services produced shrinks by a (probably over-optimistic) 2.75 per cent. This is the vice that the capitalist system is caught in. It’s also the recipe for hyper-inflation in the near future.
Wolf puts the scale of the problem in its historical context: “A financial implosion can do fiscal damage comparable to that of a sizeable war. Indeed, this is quite likely to prove the fourth most adverse fiscal event since 1800, after the second world war, the first world war and the Napoleonic wars.”
It is time to acknowledge that the cost to ordinary working people of repairing the broken system of production for profit will be just too great, just as the burden of New Labour is too heavy for society to carry. The combined political and economic crisis offers tremendous opportunities to shake not just the Brown government but the entire edifice of the capitalist system. Let’s not miss it.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
The political meltdown, with its constitutional consequences, has added new dimensions to the economic, financial and ecological hydra-headed mother of all crises. Each of its parts is interacting and adversely affecting the others.
Just the suggestion that Brown would replace Chancellor Alistair Darling with Ed Balls, for example, triggered a negative reaction on the financial markets. The political crisis in the UK is undermining its credit rating – and hence its ability to raise new funds. So Darling is staying on at the Treasury to try and calm the markets if nothing else because it’s either borrow or bust (or should that be borrow and bust?).
Capitalist governments have been competing with each other in their zeal to replace decades of kow-towing to the free market demands of transnational corporations with supersized versions of Keynesian-style intervention to try and get the economy moving.
It’s easy to lose sight of the reason for all of this frenetic activity. The over-riding motivating force is a hopeless endeavour – trying to reverse the inevitable collapse of consumer demand which has exposed the mountains of overproduced commodities and production overcapacity.
To pay for it, treasuries have been pumping more oil on the fire, offering government bonds to the gamblers in the global casino and adding zeroes to their own balance sheets – simply by printing money, aka quantitative easing - to finance the issue of “new, improved” fantasy finance.
In doing so, they are attempting to burden generations to come of their increasingly unemployed populations with unsustainable levels of tax, whilst preparing to greatly reduce spending on health, education, pensions, social services, and the benefits on which tens of millions depend.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, governments will this year attempt to issue almost $12,000 billion of debt, up from $9,000 billion two years ago (and many times the level a decade ago.) The US alone is projected to sell almost $8,000bn.
The weakest links are showing signs of breaking, however. In Latvia, a bond auction on Wednesday which saw no bidders triggered a minor panic in Eastern European markets. Latvia's economy is set to contract by 18 per cent this year and unemployment is soaring. Already in May, the credit ratings agency Standard and Poor issued a warning reducing the UK government’s triple-A credit rating from stable to negative adversely affecting its ability to raise funds to bridge the gap.
According to the Financial Time’s Martin Wolf, real spending in the UK is forecast to rise by 7.2 per cent alone this year, while the value of goods and services produced shrinks by a (probably over-optimistic) 2.75 per cent. This is the vice that the capitalist system is caught in. It’s also the recipe for hyper-inflation in the near future.
Wolf puts the scale of the problem in its historical context: “A financial implosion can do fiscal damage comparable to that of a sizeable war. Indeed, this is quite likely to prove the fourth most adverse fiscal event since 1800, after the second world war, the first world war and the Napoleonic wars.”
It is time to acknowledge that the cost to ordinary working people of repairing the broken system of production for profit will be just too great, just as the burden of New Labour is too heavy for society to carry. The combined political and economic crisis offers tremendous opportunities to shake not just the Brown government but the entire edifice of the capitalist system. Let’s not miss it.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
Monday, May 04, 2009
New Labour vultures gather
As senior New Labour politicians form a queue to deny they are seeking to replace Gordon Brown as leader of the party and take over as prime minister, they are bringing the curtain down on an era that began exactly 30 years ago today.
On May 4, 1979, Margaret Thatcher led the Tory Party to victory at the general election and Britain was never the same again. She ruthlessly set about the task of modernising an ailing British capitalism at the expense of working people and the trade unions.
The Thatcherite period of rule was marked by one conflict after another – war with Argentina, the miners’ strike, poll tax and a string of privatisations to name but a few – as the economy was subjected to a new period of intense, corporate-driven globalisation. Unemployment soared and the scars of this economic blitzkrieg are still felt in hundreds of communities up and down the country, where unemployment has been passed down through successive generations.
The mantra that the market provided all the solutions and could regulate itself, drawn from the dogmas of American monetarist Milton Friedman, took over in every field, private and public. Financial markets were set free – and where there were no markets – in the NHS for example – one was created.
The relief when 18 years of Tory rule ended in 1997 was palpable, until the voters quickly discovered that New Labour’s leaders were actually Thatcher’s heirs. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had modelled themselves on the Tory leader’s outlook and gave it their own spin. As the penny dropped, disillusioned voters stopped casting their ballots to the point where New Labour won the 2002 election with the backing of just one in four of registered electors.
The consequences of New Labour rule have been just as squalid as those that resulted from the Thatcher period. Gross inequality in society, market-driven policies imposed on every sector, from schools to the London Underground, an illegal Iraq war launched on lies and pretexts as a former head of MI6 makes clear today, and a political degeneration that knows no bounds.
The crisis now engulfing the Brown government is not just of its own making. It has everything to do with the global economic crisis that is signalling the definite end of period of capitalism marked by an unparalleled expansion into every corner of the globe.
Today’s collapse of production and trade alongside the disintegration of the financial system, has been coming for some time. Early warning signals could be seen in the Asia-Russia financial crisis in the late 1990s and the dot com meltdown of Internet-based companies in 2000. Soaring house prices and an explosion in credit in the 21st century only served to disguise the storm that has now broken with a vengeance.
Now members of the New Labour cabinet are hovering over a political corpse like vultures, ready to pick the bones of the party clean as they jostle for Brown’s job. A fat lot of good it will do them because they clearly have no chance of success in the coming general election and the Tories will return to inflict savage spending cuts on those who can least bear them.
The moral of this 30-year story is not only that the corporate-driven globalisation period has self-terminated but that the politics that helped to drive the free-market train also belong on the refuse tip of history. If there was ever a time to create a new politics that aims to put an end to class-based divisions in society, it surely is now.
Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor
On May 4, 1979, Margaret Thatcher led the Tory Party to victory at the general election and Britain was never the same again. She ruthlessly set about the task of modernising an ailing British capitalism at the expense of working people and the trade unions.
The Thatcherite period of rule was marked by one conflict after another – war with Argentina, the miners’ strike, poll tax and a string of privatisations to name but a few – as the economy was subjected to a new period of intense, corporate-driven globalisation. Unemployment soared and the scars of this economic blitzkrieg are still felt in hundreds of communities up and down the country, where unemployment has been passed down through successive generations.
The mantra that the market provided all the solutions and could regulate itself, drawn from the dogmas of American monetarist Milton Friedman, took over in every field, private and public. Financial markets were set free – and where there were no markets – in the NHS for example – one was created.
The relief when 18 years of Tory rule ended in 1997 was palpable, until the voters quickly discovered that New Labour’s leaders were actually Thatcher’s heirs. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had modelled themselves on the Tory leader’s outlook and gave it their own spin. As the penny dropped, disillusioned voters stopped casting their ballots to the point where New Labour won the 2002 election with the backing of just one in four of registered electors.
The consequences of New Labour rule have been just as squalid as those that resulted from the Thatcher period. Gross inequality in society, market-driven policies imposed on every sector, from schools to the London Underground, an illegal Iraq war launched on lies and pretexts as a former head of MI6 makes clear today, and a political degeneration that knows no bounds.
The crisis now engulfing the Brown government is not just of its own making. It has everything to do with the global economic crisis that is signalling the definite end of period of capitalism marked by an unparalleled expansion into every corner of the globe.
Today’s collapse of production and trade alongside the disintegration of the financial system, has been coming for some time. Early warning signals could be seen in the Asia-Russia financial crisis in the late 1990s and the dot com meltdown of Internet-based companies in 2000. Soaring house prices and an explosion in credit in the 21st century only served to disguise the storm that has now broken with a vengeance.
Now members of the New Labour cabinet are hovering over a political corpse like vultures, ready to pick the bones of the party clean as they jostle for Brown’s job. A fat lot of good it will do them because they clearly have no chance of success in the coming general election and the Tories will return to inflict savage spending cuts on those who can least bear them.
The moral of this 30-year story is not only that the corporate-driven globalisation period has self-terminated but that the politics that helped to drive the free-market train also belong on the refuse tip of history. If there was ever a time to create a new politics that aims to put an end to class-based divisions in society, it surely is now.
Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Point of no return
The crisis within New Labour shows no signs of abating as MPs stare electoral oblivion in the face come the next election. In fact, matters are getting worse. Wendy Alexander, its leader in Scotland, has broken ranks with Gordon Brown’s position on an independence referendum in a bid to steal some votes from the nationalists, while opponents of the abolition of the 10p tax rate are resuming their campaign. These are further indications that New Labour has reached and passed the point of no return. It seems inconceivable they can win the next general election – whatever Brown does.
The votes are simply not there any more (and, in truth, haven’t been for some time). Evidence from last week’s elections shows that New Labour sustained a double whammy, losing the support of both formerly loyal working class voters as well as the middle class who had benefited from tax cuts and rising property prices. So it seems that New Labour’s one great “legacy” will be to return the country to Tory rule, allowing a party that was almost wiped out in 1997 to recover sufficiently to take over the reins of power, as it has already achieved in London.
What of the future for New Labour itself as an organisation, and what can its remaining activists do under these conditions? They could and should:
• Denounce New Labour’s leaders for siding with big business and financial power over the interests of working people, thereby creating the conditions for a Tory comeback.
• Recognise that Brown is incapable of changing tack and adopting new policies radically different from the present ones, especially as the economic position is worsening.
• Abandon any notion that New Labour somehow exists separately from a kind of more traditional, reformist Labour party hiding secretly in the background. The truth is that New Labour has remade all the structures and policies of the party in its image, destroying the old organisation in the process. History cannot be rewound.
• Acknowledge that capitalism in the period of corporate-driven globalisation does not allow sufficient space for governments of a reformist character and that this poses an historic political challenge for the labour movement which founded Labour to perform precisely that role.
• Support all struggles against the government and campaign for the defeat of the capitalist Brown regime inside and outside parliament. This is the best way to prepare for a return of the Tories to government.
• Call on the trade union leaders to break off all relations with New Labour, and to withdraw financial support from a government that has trampled over workers’ rights and is now enforcing pay cuts in the public sector.
• Demand that union leaders call a conference to discuss the political crisis and accept that the way forward lies beyond New Labour, in the creation of a forward-looking political alternative that can challenge and overturn corporate power and control.
• Appreciate that large numbers of people are alienated from the political system and do not believe that voting from time to time gives them any meaningful influence over government. Any new movement must therefore propose forms of democracy and involvement that extend beyond the extremely limited and somewhat discredited parliamentary system.
A series of bold initiatives along these lines would begin to end the political impasse that New Labour has helped to create. The deteriorating economic position is equally an opportunity to discuss alternative policies and solutions and that’s why the LEAP/Labour Representation Committee conference “Beyond the Market Economy” on May 24 is timely.
Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor
The votes are simply not there any more (and, in truth, haven’t been for some time). Evidence from last week’s elections shows that New Labour sustained a double whammy, losing the support of both formerly loyal working class voters as well as the middle class who had benefited from tax cuts and rising property prices. So it seems that New Labour’s one great “legacy” will be to return the country to Tory rule, allowing a party that was almost wiped out in 1997 to recover sufficiently to take over the reins of power, as it has already achieved in London.
What of the future for New Labour itself as an organisation, and what can its remaining activists do under these conditions? They could and should:
• Denounce New Labour’s leaders for siding with big business and financial power over the interests of working people, thereby creating the conditions for a Tory comeback.
• Recognise that Brown is incapable of changing tack and adopting new policies radically different from the present ones, especially as the economic position is worsening.
• Abandon any notion that New Labour somehow exists separately from a kind of more traditional, reformist Labour party hiding secretly in the background. The truth is that New Labour has remade all the structures and policies of the party in its image, destroying the old organisation in the process. History cannot be rewound.
• Acknowledge that capitalism in the period of corporate-driven globalisation does not allow sufficient space for governments of a reformist character and that this poses an historic political challenge for the labour movement which founded Labour to perform precisely that role.
• Support all struggles against the government and campaign for the defeat of the capitalist Brown regime inside and outside parliament. This is the best way to prepare for a return of the Tories to government.
• Call on the trade union leaders to break off all relations with New Labour, and to withdraw financial support from a government that has trampled over workers’ rights and is now enforcing pay cuts in the public sector.
• Demand that union leaders call a conference to discuss the political crisis and accept that the way forward lies beyond New Labour, in the creation of a forward-looking political alternative that can challenge and overturn corporate power and control.
• Appreciate that large numbers of people are alienated from the political system and do not believe that voting from time to time gives them any meaningful influence over government. Any new movement must therefore propose forms of democracy and involvement that extend beyond the extremely limited and somewhat discredited parliamentary system.
A series of bold initiatives along these lines would begin to end the political impasse that New Labour has helped to create. The deteriorating economic position is equally an opportunity to discuss alternative policies and solutions and that’s why the LEAP/Labour Representation Committee conference “Beyond the Market Economy” on May 24 is timely.
Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor
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