Wanted: a democracy for the people

The Tory wing of the Coalition’s plans for the “Big Society”, which now include a massive shake-up of the police force, are not simply a cover for public spending cuts. They are far more sinister than that.

The Tories, especially, because they are genuine representatives of the ruling classes rather than the aspirant New Labourites, understand and are concerned about a deepening social and political alienation in Britain.

The parliamentary state does not rule through naked force but through a changing mix of ideology and practice. Because the state holds power for a minority – the capitalist classes – it actually needs, even craves, a legitimacy from society at large.

This is achieved through various mechanisms such as elections at national and local level as well as a reiteration of the importance of the state in maintaining order in society and providing essential services.

Without a consent that is also fairly active, the state tends to lose its authority. People stop voting, or express little trust or faith in mainstream political parties. This extends to a loss of “respect” for other parts of the state like the police force or the legal system. These are all a feature of Britain today.

New Labour’s response was to create more and more layers of bureaucracy while retaining power over decision-making at the centre. Thus schools and hospitals, for example, were overwhelmed with new instructions and targets almost on a monthly basis. None of this worked. Teachers and health workers – and the police – faced mountains of bureaucracy, which led to fiddling of figures on a grand scale.

The Tories’ approach to the challenge of securing support for the state is openly populist, by contrast. Plans for schools, the health service and now the police involve co-opting vast numbers of workers as well as members of the public. Teachers will be invited to have a direct say in the running of schools, for example, while “free schools” will go further and bring in parents.

Yesterday’s announcement about the police force involve directly-elected local commissioners, joint patrols with the community and the recruitment of tens of thousands of special constables. They will be unpaid volunteers but have powers of arrest like ordinary police.

The sinister side becomes more apparent with the prospect of vigilante policing and right-wing, racist commissioners being elected. Special constables will always be useful in times of social unrest and strikes, which is the period we are entering as a result of the economic crisis. And, of course, getting workers delivering front-line services involved in making the spending cuts that are coming up the line is a great way to divide and rule.

Our response cannot be, however, to let things remain as they are. That would put us in a position of defending the capitalist state and the way it does things. The Tories are desperately trying to modernise a state whose political structures are 19^th century while coping with the demands of a genuine 21^st century global financial and economic crisis.

This is a set of improbable contradictions. The capitalist state cannot possibly reform itself by handing over power simply because it does not and can never represent the mass of the people. A leopard cannot change its spots and the present state will always rule on behalf of corporate and financial power.

Our demand is not for “involvement” but a genuine transfer of real power. That means democratic control and ownership of resources as well as a political voice that is direct and locally based. The “Big Society” is not that, of course. But it does create a challenge which we should start to answer in a creative, revolutionary way to claim democracy for the people.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Voters in for 'the shock of their lives'

Nothing that happened during this election has persuaded us that our call on people to hang on to their votes and instead focus on building the framework for a new political democracy in Britain was mistaken. In fact, quite the opposite.

As the campaign came to resemble a TV game show, it was clear that none of the major parties was prepared to admit that if elected to office they would have to make cuts in public spending on a scale that could easily destabilise society. Even when august bodies like the Institute for Fiscal Studies said as much, the conspiracy of silence persisted.

Little wonder then opinion pollsters found record levels of undecided voters who were unable to believe anything they had heard since the election was called. The turbulence in the polls equally reflected as the Independent’s Steve Richards put it, the fact that “a majority of voters yearn for a new way of conducting politics”.

There is no apparent enthusiasm for any party among those intending to vote today. Most people are voting against something rather than in favour of this set of policies. For example, some will vote New Labour to keep the Tories out even while admitting that Blair and Brown’s governments have pursued free market capitalist policies that even Thatcher shied away from in the 1980s.

Richards hopes that a hung parliament will enable to the Liberal Democrats to exact proportional representation as the price for supporting either the Tories or New Labour if, as seems likely, no party wins an overall majority and there is a hung parliament. But PR wouldn’t even begin to solve the political crisis – in fact, it could even intensify it. In any case, it’s a distant prospect when more immediate issues are crowding in.

The ruling classes disassociate themselves from the crisis in Greece, saying that the British economy is far stronger and there is no risk of struggling to make the repayments on the equivalent of a £163 billion mortgage, which is the current size of the budget deficit. Yet at 11% of the value of the country’s annual production, Britain’s deficit is larger than Greece’s.

And keeping it under control presupposes a growth in the economy which is simply not there. Unemployment is rising and output is stagnant. The eurozone is in crisis following the near-default by Greece with German chancellor Angela Merkel declaring that the future of the European Union itself is at stake. A slump on the continent will take Britain down with it.

For the truth about what happens next, you have to turn to the bankers’ own newspaper, the Financial Times. As its weekend editorial declared: “Whichever party wins this election will need to sack public sector staff, cut their wages, slash benefits, reduce pensions and axe services. None, however, has deigned to explain that.”

It forecast that voters “are in for the shock of their lives – and will respond with fury when they learn the truth”, warning: “Their anger, moreover, will not be directed at bankers or bureaucrats. It will be aimed at the politicians who hid their plans from the public.” The FT even went so far as to claim that no party would be able to claim a mandate to cut the state because each had hidden the truth from the electorate.

So, not only has this election been a massive fraud on the electorate, there is no way out of the emerging political and financial crisis through the existing parliamentary system. A popular revolt is on the cards. The second half of our call – to start the campaign for People’s Assemblies to challenge and ultimately replace Britain’s failed state – is right on the money.

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

A time for boldness

The apparent recovery of Tory fortunes as New Labour’s poll popularity plunges offers much food for thought. Support for New Labour is now at its lowest level since polling began in 1943. There are those who, fixated on the mood-swings expressed through parliamentary politics, see these trends as indicators of a general shift to the right.

But are the rising fortunes of Cameron really an indicator of such a mass enthusiasm for the right? Well, actually, no. They have a lot more to do with disaffection with New Labour than a born-again faith in the Conservative Party. Cameron’s image as the nice guy of Tory politics is about as wafer thin as that of Blair’s persona as a man of the people back in the 1990s, when he was dubbed Bambi. The fact is that the Conservative Party’s new image (and by implication, its popularity) is no deeper than the advertising for breakfast cereals.

Media experts like Matt Beaumont, quoted in The Sunday Telegraph’s analysis of the rebranding of Tory politics, are acutely aware of this: “The huge Conservative lead in the opinion polls suggests they are doing something right, though I suspect this has more to do with public ennui after a decade of Labour, combined with distaste for Gordon Brown.”

The “power-couple” behind Cameron’s throne are Steve Hilton and Rachel Whetstone, advertising experts whose relationship to Cameron is comparable to that of Peter Mandelson’s and Alistair Campbell’s with Blair and New Labour. Media mogul Maurice Saatchi, who helped Margaret Thatcher come to power, sees Hilton as his heir. He became Cameron’s director of strategy in December 2005 at a salary of between £180,000 to £276,000.

Hilton’s political philosophy (if it can be graced with that name) is of a socially responsible capitalism. His book, Good Business, ends with a paraphrase of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto: “Capitalists and anti-capitalists of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your guilt”. The new Tory outlook – which is essentially a freshened-up version of New Labour's - crafted by Hilton focuses especially on a green agenda, and indeed Conservatives have taken this seriously. Boris Johnson claims to oppose the third runway at Heathrow and there were some leading Tories on Saturday’s march against airport expansion. Zac Goldsmith, the archetypal Tory son of billionaire James Goldsmith, and editor of The Ecologist magazine, was selected as the party’s candidate for Richmond Park in March 2007.

But Hilton and others’ notion of a socially-responsible form of globalised capital is about as realistic as the Camerons leaving their Notting Hill home and moving into a council flat. And of course, these cuddly new Tories have no solutions to the problems, which their media gurus are able to identify, even while they pander to the many anxieties of the middle classes and the sections of the working class abandoned by New Labour

Just like Brown, Cameron and his ilk stand helpless in the face of the massive economic crisis now ripping through the advanced capitalist countries. The near-collapse of Bradford & Bingley today is only a taste of what is to come. A quarter of a million UK homeowners are already in negative equity with a million forecast by the end of 2009. Rising mortgage, fuel and food costs are eating into incomes and fuelling the economic recession as retail sales slow.

We are witnessing an historic disenfranchisement of wide swathes of the population who cannot relate either to the new smooth Tory Party or to Brown’s New Labour and who feel they have no power to influence events. This is accompanied by a deepening social and economic malaise for which there are no conventional answers. Behind Cameron’s superficial Tories stand sinister forces within the state who are preparing to intervene if and when things get out of hand. Seeking solutions solely at the level of parliamentary politics and parties is a futile and doomed activity. The circumstances call, above all, for boldness in advocating a revolutionary, new direction for society to sweep both New Labour and the Tories aside.

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary