Vote Balls get Clegg. Why bother?

In 2010, Labour joined in the general vilification of Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg for choosing the Tories over them after the general election produced a hung parliament. Now, with the next election on the horizon, Labour’s tune is changing.

It’s not hard to work out why Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, is courting Clegg through the columns of the New Statesman. Apart from the fact that the incompetent and tarnished Balls needs all the friends he can get, is the reality that another electoral stalemate is entirely possible.

Although most polls give Labour a lead over the Tories, it continues to narrow. Throw in the wild card known as Ukip, mass abstentions by a disillusioned electorate and a revival of the economic fortunes of sections of the middle class and you can see why Ed Miliband is nervous.

With policies that for the most part are indistinguishable from those of the Tories, Labour is keeping its options open. So Balls has made overtures to Clegg, whose party is responsible for propping up the most reactionary government of modern times.

Balls, part of the negotiating team that failed to woo the Lib Dems in May 2010, now says: “I understand totally why Nick Clegg made the decision that he made to go into coalition with the Conservatives at the time. I may not have liked it at the time, but I understood it. I also understood totally his decision to support a credible deficit reduction plan, because it was necessary in 2010.”

Balls’ adds that “I’ve no reason to doubt his integrity”. This is a conscious attempt to rehabilitate Clegg and his party in the eyes of the voters who abandoned the Lib Dems after they joined the coalition and then broke their pledge by voting for a tripling of university tuition fees a few months later.

As to a future coalition with the Lib Dems, Balls left the door wide open by replying: “I think what you always have to do is deal with politics as you find it . . . I saw that subsequently he made a further statement to one of the newspapers that these things weren’t about personalities, and I think he’s right about that.”

So the chances are that if you vote for Ed Miliband’s party in May 2015 you’ll get a Lab-Lib coalition – carrying on more or less where the present government leaves off. Labour is committed to the Tories’ spending cuts programme, free schools, academies, benefit cuts, workfare for young unemployed and scapegoating immigrants.

Even though a European Union commissioner has attacked David Cameron for “peddling myths” about an invasion of migrant workers, this has not stopped shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna from joining the blame game. Speaking on BBC One’s Question Times, Umunna played his own nationalist card, saying: “I think on low-skill immigration we believe there was too much of it from the European Union.”

He was against the “free movement of jobseekers” and was seeking talks with “our European partners” on the issue. Umunna is, of course, only the latest in a long line of Labour leaders to go down this road, including Yvette Cooper, Tristram Hunt and David Blunkett.

We don’t have to wait 16 months to discover that the general election will be a mass fraud perpetrated on unwilling voters by parties that more or less agree with each other on crucial issues. Better to hang on to your vote and work for a democratic alternative where it will mean something again because your ballot counts for very little now.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

When the House of Lords was sent packing

While the present Parliament wrestles with a half-baked attempt to turn the House of Lords into something resembling a democratic body, they could always reflect on the legislation introduced into the House of Commons in March 1649.

Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army had successfully concluded not one but two civil wars provoked by Charles 1, who had shut down the Commons and claimed divine powers to rule and raise money as he saw fit.

Among his allies were many members of the House of Lords, including leading clergy and nobility. The Lords had until then been more powerful than the Commons. By the end of the civil war, the balance of power had definitively shifted away from the landed aristocracy.

A new, emerging social class, driven more by wealth creation than the protection of inherited wealth, was in the ascendancy in political and economic terms. So a few  months after the king’s execution and the abolition of the monarchy, a revolutionary Act was passed that declared:

“The Commons of England assembled in Parliament, finding by too long experience that the House of Lords is useless and dangerous to the people of England to be continued, have thought fit to ordain and enact … that from henceforth the House of Lords in Parliament shall be and is hereby wholly abolished and taken away; and that the Lords shall not from henceforth meet or sit in the said House called the Lords' House, or in any other house or place whatsoever, as a House of Lords; nor shall sit, vote, advise, adjudge, or determine of any matter or thing whatsoever, as a House of Lords in Parliament.”

And that was that for the next 11 years. In 1660, following the death of Cromwell, a relatively toothless monarchy was restored along with the House of Lords. Conflict between the two Houses of Parliament has continued ever since, with the occasional constitutional crisis as in 1906 when the Lords defeated the Liberals’ radical budget. In 1911, the Commons deprived  the Lords of any say over financial matters in revenge. 

The present Bill to create a predominantly elected Lords, introduced yesterday by the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg as part of the Coalition agreement with the Tories, has predictably drawn the ire of right-wing MPs who want to preserve the essentially conservative nature of the second chamber.

But the Bill is something of a smokescreen despite its apparent democratic credentials because it does not even to begin to answer the fundamental crisis that is overwhelming the political system. This is highlighted in the latest, devastating Democratic Audit report into developments over the last decade.

The report warns that Britain's constitutional arrangements are "increasingly unstable", public faith in democratic institutions is "decaying" and that there has been an "unprecedented" growth in corporate power, which the study's authors warn "threatens to undermine some of the most basic principles of democratic decision-making".

In an interview, Stuart Wilks-Heeg, the report's lead author, warned: “How low would turnout have to be before we question whether it's really representative democracy at all?"  As to elections and their meaning, the report declares:

“Rather more difficult to measure, but just as fundamental, is our concern that broader changes in UK politics have served to reduce the scope of elections to give people control over governments and their policies. Democratic elections are rooted in the principle that 'everyone counts for one and none for more than one’ . Not only does the evidence presented … highlight doubts about whether the UK’s electoral system realises this in practice, but our broader analysis suggests that power in the political process increasingly resides with elites rather than with electors.”

These elites – the corporations, investment bankers, hedge funds, land owners etc – have not just the political class in their pockets but the institutions of the state too, as the financial crisis demonstrates repeatedly. Breaking their power by extending democracy into the workplace, school, university and throughout society is the precondition for real democratic change.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

The eunuch of all Parliaments

When the leader of a major political party devotes 2,500 words in a national newspaper to the crisis of the parliamentary political system, he confirms that it’s not only New Labour that is in free fall. Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, is expressing the fact that the authority, legitimacy and role of the state itself is now being called into question by increasing numbers of people.

Of course Clegg has some self interest because without some change in the voting system, for example, his party is continually squeezed by first-past-the-post elections. But his article in The Independent reveals real fears amongst the political elite.

Clegg writes that the ceremonial aspects of parliament hide “a crisis in which the public feel ever more alienated from, and angry towards, the political class. And a crisis in which Parliament itself is neutered by the all encompassing power of the centralised Whitehall state”. He says that there is “a spineless abdication of scrutiny and accountability at the heart of our government” and claims: “The mother of all Parliaments has become the eunuch of all Parliaments.”

As evidence, he cites the fall-off in voting, where in 2001 and 2005,more people didn’t vote than supported the winning party, New Labour, or the fact that three out of four people say they think politicians don’t tell the truth. It is true, as Clegg writes, that “people have been locked out of politics for too long”. But what he cannot recognise, of course, is that this is how the system has always operated – except that the situation has clearly deteriorated rapidly in recent decades under Thatcher and then Blair/Brown.

Ordinary people have only ever been allowed a modest participation in politics through the occasional visit to the ballot box where they could elect representatives to govern on their behalf without any further accountability. Voters have never had a direct democratic voice or role, even after the franchise was extended nearly 150 years ago. Parliament has never had any effective control over what the government does since that time.

A number of processes have come together to discredit even this limited version of democracy. During the last 35 years of corporate-driven globalisation, the state has more and more abandoned parliamentary niceties to rule in a kind of managerial style that tries to imitate the transnationals. The British government, or the “executive”, itself is hardly in control, let alone parliament. For example, economic policy, large areas of law, environmental policy and so on are determined at European Union level by unelected and totally unaccountable commissioners or by global bodies like the World Trade. All the major parties, including Clegg’s, have embraced the market economy’s philosophy and only disagree about marginal questions.

So Clegg’s call to redistribute power within the essentially capitalist political system, to remedy what he calls “the imbalance of the system” not only misses the point but stands no chance of success whatsoever. No one is going to set up a convention of citizens to draft a new constitution for Britain to, as he puts it, “make power contingent on accountability” or give MPs real power over an executive which in turn is in thrall to corporate power.

The Lib Dem leader clearly feels, rightly, that time is running out and warns that the “greatest danger” is “the feeling that change is no longer possible”. To which we should add: Change is no longer be possible in the old way, through traditional institutions or political parties. So as parliament won’t and can’t yield, the time has come to create and extend direct democracy through mass action. In fashioning real democracy at every level, including the workplace, we would set out to break the capitalist monopoly of power. In doing this, we would be acting in the tradition that created the parliamentary state in the first place.


Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor