Xenophobia - they are all in it together

In the wake of the threatened invasion by Romanians and Bulgarians that never was, anti-immigration demagogy continues to darken the political horizon. There is no shortage of politicians eager to exploit xenophobia of all kinds in the hunt for votes.

It’s not surprising, of course, that Nigel Farage, leader of the populist-nationalist Ukip should keep banging the anti-immigration drum. He insisted the other day that his hero Enoch Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech in 1968 remains relevant for today.

But Labour is a close second to the Tories who are raging on about EU benefit claimants. Top of the list is former home secretary David Blunkett, who said in an interview aired last night that he stood by inflammatory remarks made last November. Then he singled out the vulnerable Roma community in impoverished parts of his Sheffield constituency as his target.

Blunkett demanded that Roma immigrants should make more of an effort to fit in with British culture. If not, he warned, there could be a repeat of the 2001 riots in northern cities. He subsequently claimed that his comments had been “misused” by the media.

Poet Benjamin Zephaniah, who interviewed Blunkett, gave him the chance to make a retraction. But no, Blunkett insisted that “I am saying it as it is” and “people need to know you are listening”.

The reasons for tensions between immigrant communities in the Page Hall/Fir Vale area of Sheffield are not hard to fathom. It is a deprived area that has some of the highest levels of poor quality housing in Sheffield, according to a recent report. 

Zephaniah’s programme showed that Page Hall’s poor conditions date back far longer than recent EU immigration. Its cramped streets and 19th century terraces reveal decades of neglect from central and local government (Blunkett was once leader of Sheffield Council).  

But lest anyone thinks we are singling out Blunkett unfairly, the Labour leadership as a whole is stoking up xenophobia, especially amongst working class and poor communities in a grubby search for votes from people they don’t care a jobt about.

Shadow cabinet ministers David Hanson (immigration) and Yvette Cooper (defence) were preying on workers’ fears just as the so-called “mass migration” from Bulgaria and Romania was being talked up.

To sweeten her anti-immigration stance, Cooper claimed the government had ignored calls to strengthen existing legislation that could stop employers undercutting British employees' wages by recruiting cheaper staff from overseas. Hanson concentrated his fire on recruitment agencies that recruit solely from eastern Europe. But ultimately, they were trumpeting the infamous “British jobs for British workers” line of former prime minister Gordon Brown.

Labour’s poster-boy, shadow education minister and historian Tristram Hunt has joined in with his colleagues to say that immigration should have been more controlled in the past. He claimed that “white British boys are not getting the education they want”.

And when asked in an interview for the Fabian Society if he thought that poor attainment in some schools was because of high levels of EU migration, Hunt said: 'Exactly. And that comes back to the supply side, we have to get in there.” 

The fears of the poorest and most vulnerable in society which are easy to stoke up into hatred, as researcher Paul Quinn notes: “There will be an eternal availability of receptive terrain for populist political forces that wish to rally support via negative stereotyping of vulnerable groups. Succumbing to the temptation to cast aspersions on such groups is analogous to lighting matches in a hayfield.”

Scapegoating Roma migrants is now so bad that a cross-party group of MPs has warned about provocative language after Tory council leader Philippa Roe accused tiny groups of Roma in Westminster of causing “a massive amount of disruption and low level crime”. Ironically, inflamer-in-chief Blunkett sits on this parliamentary group.

Of course, the rich are treated quite differently to Romanian workers. The government is inviting 100 wealthy foreigners to join a new visa service which the Home Office says will ensure their passage through the UK border system is “swift and smooth”. No racism where they’re concerned, proving once again that this is a class issue which demands unity in the face of a concerted campaign to divide and rule.

Corinna Lotz

AWTW secretary

We have to move beyond 'post-democracy'

 The rise of Ukip and the parallel break-up of the Tory Party are part of a wider malaise across Europe that poses a threat to the established order. What happens next depends on whether we can get our act together in the face of growing reaction.

Ukip and the 5 Star Movement in Italy are just examples of the rise of populist, anti-politics. While these movements themselves are not fascist, their language, propaganda and nationalism has a threatening logic and opens the door to other forces. Nigel Farage rages against immigration and gay marriage, while Beppe Grillo is not hostile to Italy’s fascist past and is also anti-immigrant.

The swing to anti-politics – which can also take the form of not voting – coincides with and is driven by a rejection of austerity policies. Yet its origin actually predates the economic and financial crisis and is closely related to the globalisation process.

    

From the mid-1990s onwards, in Britain anyway, we entered a period which some refer to as “post-democracy”. Under this system, all the trappings of parliamentary democracy are retained, but the system is hollowed out. Corporate lobbyists and transnational, secretive, unaccountable agencies like the European Union and the World Trade Organisation actually determine policy. Elections become meaningless because the mainstream parties have been integrated into this process.

Ukip’s fear of the rise of the European “super-state” is not without foundation. The European Council has assumed fantastic legislative powers, while the European Parliament is the only one in the Western world that does not have the power to propose legislation and can only amend it. The Council operates in secret with its own secretariat and in reality calls all the shots. Of course, this has nothing to do with any known concept of democracy. In a challenging article for the new Statewatch journal, which monitors the EU and civil liberties Leigh Phillips notes:

The legislative decision-making apparatus is not parliamentary but intergovernmental and takes place primarily between diplomats behind closed doors. In truth, this is a form of treaty making rather than legislating, a method that historically was the realm of war, peace-making, and espionage. Great swathes of policy areas have been taken out of the domain of public, contestatory parliaments and placed in the hands of diplomats and civil servants.

Unlike most observers and to his credit, Leigh does not throw up his hands in horror at the rise of the Golden Dawn, neo-Nazi movement in Greece or Hungary’s Jobbik, with its Magyar Garda (Hungarian Guard) paramilitary association and what he describes as its “anti-Roma pogroms and unashamed Anti-Semitism”.

The question that he poses is what lies beyond “post-democracy”? We can’t return to the post-1945 social democratic consensus that lasted until the 1970s. That space is now occupied by the imperatives of corporate-driven globalisation. As Leigh says:

Depending on its particular flavour, anti-politics can exist as a cynical apathy that buttresses the neo-liberal post-democratic turn, or even wishes for an outright authoritarian turn with the arrival of a strongman saviour. But anti-politics can also be the germ of the overthrow of post-democracy if it embraces a progressive road that transforms anti-politics into the construction of (rather than just demand for) popular self-government.

Where his analysis falters, however, is in suggesting that “there is the possibility that the rejection of the political class transforms itself” into a belief in self-government” and “a desire for a transcendence of liberal political and economic structures”. Unfortunately, there is no historical evidence to indicate that democratic advances on this scale can take place without some decisive, organised intervention against prevailing state forces. That’s our responsibility to build. Nevertheless, Leigh reveals the dialectic in the break-up of the old order and his article is well worth reading in full.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

SS Westminster heads for black hole

Westminster is fast becoming the political equivalent of an emerging black hole, with the political elite engaged in an increasingly futile struggle to overcome the collapse of their own system into a region where nothing, including light, can escape.

The edge of a black hole is known as the “event horizon”. It marks the point of no return. There is a strong possibility that point has been reached, judging by the mayhem in the mainstream parties, which an astounding opinion poll is bound to reinforce.

A dramatic ­Guardian/ICM poll reveals a previously unrecorded decline in 30 years of surveys in support for the Tories, Labour and LibDems at the same time. Support has literally drained away at a rapid rate of knots, washing up at the door of the right-wing populist Ukip under Nigel Farage. 

Ukip has soared to 18%, while the Tories have plummeted to 28%, Labour to 34% and the LibDems to a miserable 11%. The patent disintegration of mainstream politics has led to a rapid Titanic-like rearranging of deckchairs as the SS Westminster heads for the iceberg.

In a desperate bid to thwart Ukip’s anti-Europe stance and a backbench rebellion, David Cameron is rushing out a draft bill to introduce an in-out EU referendum, even though it has no chance of getting through parliament and could break the Coalition.

Vince Cable is allegedly involved in a dastardly plot to oust Nick Clegg as leader of the LibDems to prevent a wipe-out of MPs at the next election.

Labour is under pressure to sack the under-performing shadow chancellor Ed Balls, who is closely associated with the failed policies of the last Labour government. Ed Miliband is also being told to go down the “Blue Labour” path of being tough on immigration, benefits and spending or face the chop as leader.

The decision of Lord Sainsbury, formerly one of the party’s biggest donors, to stop giving to Labour can only strengthen the Blairite/Blue Labour factions.

The pressure on Miliband will also grow as a result of a report that shows traditional Labour supporters are more and more unsympathetic towards welfare recipients. A big group is saying that individuals are responsible for their own predicament. After more than 15 years of New Labour/ConDem propaganda along these lines, it’s no surprise that social attitudes have shifted.

Ukip have rounded up voters who – rightly – feel powerless and dominated by forces beyond their control. These include the massive, impenetrable European Union bureaucracy, the major corporations and banks and an unresponsive political system at Westminster.

Add into the mix a spurious fear of Rumanians and Bulgarians heading for Britain in their millions, and it’s a heady, dangerous brew that Farage is stirring. Ukip’s trajectory is unpredictable but the emergence of right-wing nationalist politics is succeeding where the fascists of the BNP and other have failed. 

Clearly, the response to Ukip cannot be to urge support for the mainstream parties. Labour, for example, is opposed to self-determination for Scotland on the grounds that it would create a permanent Tory majority in England! Hardly the stuff of principle.

Political and economic institutions, including the European Union, are indeed broken and oppressive. Events since the collapse of the financial system in a number of countries demonstrate that a virulent, dangerous, anti-democratic nationalism is making headway against the old order.

There is a real opportunity to pose a revolutionary, democratic alternative to the present state, both here and in the EU. We need to campaign for that right now, not wait until the political system becomes so unstable that dark forces within the state emerge to enforce order. They were ready to do that in the 1970s. Don’t think they are not waiting in the wings now.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Warning signs as Ukip's neo-nasties cash in

The massive vote for Ukip in the English local elections alongside its second place in the South Shields by-election is confirmation, if any was needed, that the political system is dying on its feet. We have now entered a period of the known unknowns.

As defeated Conservative councillor Alexis McEvoy remarked: "For UKIP to come from nowhere like this, you have to ask, what is going on?”  

Political uncertainty and instability is the last thing the ruling economic and financial elites want. But that’s what they’re getting across Europe as disgruntled voters – for a variety of reasons – turn away from mainstream parties or simply stay at home.

South Shields was retained by Labour but on a 39% turnout which saw Ukip reducing its majority while the Lib Dems polled just a few hundred votes and lost their deposit. That is the price they paid for propping up the Tory government.

With Ukip picking up more than 26% of the votes in the council elections, the shockwaves are making themselves felt right across Westminster. John Curtice, the elections expert, said Ukip achieved "an astounding performance of a historic scale" and had a chance to "reshape the structure of English party politics".

No party is safe from the rampaging Ukip, with its right-wing brand of populism which is founded on blatant anti-foreigner, anti-European Union, nationalist prejudices. Ukip has so few policies that internal emails revealed they are thinking of buying ready-made policy packages from right-wing think tanks.

But that did not stop the disaffected from registering their disgust at the mainstream parties in a protest vote which if repeated in 2015 would almost certainly produce another coalition government.

If Labour had hoped to benefit from the hatred of the ConDems, they were sorely disappointed. In fact, their accommodation to the crisis with austerity-lite policies is responsible, in part at least, for the rise of Ukip. Further shifts to the right are to be expected. Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman indicated as much when said Ukip’s rise was a "wake-up call" to other parties. "We should listen very seriously if people are feeling disaffected and disenchanted.”

All petit-bourgeois populists take aim at the ruling political and social elites and Nigel Farage, Ukip’s leader, is no exception. He told the BBC that "the people who vote for us are rejecting the establishment and quite right too". He added: “Three parties, three fronts benches who look the same and sound the same and made up of people who basically have never had a job in the real world.”

That much is indisputable. The logic of Farage’s politics is, however, to replace the Milibands and Camerons with a group of neo-nasties who would make the present incumbents look positively pleasant.

The local election results are line with a recent poll that showed that voters have lost faith in the state’s ability to restore living standards to pre-recession levels. Peter Kellner, president of YouGov which carried out the poll for the Resolution Foundation, said: "The larger truth is that pessimism abounds. The dominant mood is that things will continue to get worse… I cannot recall a time when so many voters had so little faith in the ability of politicians to secure prosperity."

So there you have it. The economic crisis of capitalism has in turn generated a profound crisis in the political system. All the danger signs are there with the growth of Ukip. The mainstream parties have no answers because they are beholden to markets, corporations and the banks.

Far from defending our partial democracy, the ConDems and New Labour before them, sold it to the highest bidder. Opposing Ukip therefore involves fighting for a real democratic transformation, a revolutionary change that leads to a progressive society, a future without capitalism.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Dancing to the tune of the far right

Prime Minister David Cameron has chosen the pages of the Sun newspaper to launch a crackdown on immigrants. In what the tabloid calls his “manifesto”, he claims that “Frankly this country became a soft touch”.

Whilst saying that immigration has benefited Britain, his words are a clear bid to win back those voters who have been migrating to the anti-immigration, anti-Europe UK Independence party.

The manifesto is Cameron’s attempt to outflank Ukip leader Nigel Farage, who recently met with the Sun’s owner, Rupert Murdoch for the first time. The PM’s attack on welfare for immigrants mimics proposals put forward by Ukip.

Cameron announced that immigrants would no longer receive benefits if they did not find a job after six months. They would only qualify to be on the waiting list (let alone be given) council homes when they have lived in the UK for up to five years. He said they would not be able to receive free treatment in the NHS.

The entire basis for his attack was that immigrants are an overall drain on the UK economy in general and on housing benefits and the health service.

But on BBC Radio 4 this morning, Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), put the record straight. He said that the Institute’s research for the Migration Advisory Committee of the UK Border Agency has shown that migrants “make a substantial net contribution to UK finance”.

This is because migrants are mostly young people who come to the UK to work and who pay taxes, he explained. They are far less of a burden on the welfare state than the average British citizen. The overwhelming part of UK benefits go to older people who need long-term health care.

While there obviously were some cases of abuse, “the figures tell us that the people from outside the UK are a miniscule cost to the NHS”.

The NIESR is not the only organisation challenging the increasingly shrill anti-immigration rhetoric. On Saturday, the Bishop of Dudley, David Walker, said the tone of the debate was “wholly disproportionate”. Walker, who has served on the board of the National Housing Federation pricked the “fear” bubble. 

“Public fears around immigration are like fears around crime,” he said.  “They bear little relationship to the actual reality. The true threats to our national wellbeing lie not with those who come to visit or make their lives here but with the increasing gap between the rich and poor among us."

It’s clear that Cameron is dancing to the tune of Ukip and the far right, is using the pages of the right wing press to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment based on a fictional scenario.

His stance, however, still fails to match up to that of Labour. Not long ago, Blairite Dan Hodges noted that Labour leader Ed Miliband “laid out some of the hardest policy lines ever drawn on the issue by a Labour leader”. And Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's agenda involved “arrest, incarceration and deportation. Not One Nation, but a one-way ticket out of Britain”. She called for greater powers to be given to the UK Borders Agency.

But that very same agency is guilty of repeatedly breaking the law in its attempts to deport those legally seeking leave to remain in the UK.

UKBA’s monstrous behaviour has led to the deaths of a number of asylum seekers whilst in custody (some whilst in the “care” of global security giant G4S), the separation of children from parents, wives from husbands and many other human rights infringements.

The continuing shift to ever more anti-immigration policies is a bankrupt racist attempt by all the main political parties to make immigrants into scapegoats as the economic crisis deepens. Former immigration lawyer Francis Webber’s call for “a braver alternative vision” in her new book Borderline Justice is spot on. It can help to inspire the development of a new constitution for the 21^st century.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win Secretary

Miliband joins race to the bottom after Eastleigh

Earlier in the week,  the key message from the Italian elections was that support for traditional politics was in free-fall. Yesterday, the point was reinforced in the Hampshire town of Eastleigh where the by-election result is likely to kick-start a political crisis at Westminster.

Although the Lib Dems held on to the seat – despite its former MP Chris Huhne awaiting a probable jail sentence and sex allegations surrounding former party chief executive Lord Rennard – the junior partner in the Coalition government lost 14% of its vote.

With the Tories coming third and Labour a distant fourth, the only winner was Ukip – the party of Little Englanders and populist reactionaries. They picked up votes from the right-wing of the other two front-runners and but for entrenched Lib Dem organisation on the ground, would have captured the seat.

Ukip ran with on an anti-EU bureaucracy and anti-immigration platform – hardly issues that affect most people in this relatively wealthy town in southern England. But their appeal also reached out to those whose disgust at Westminster politics has built over the last decades.

Voters like that are to be found in all social classes who, for a variety of reasons, feel betrayed, abandoned or simply used by the major parties at election time. That’s why no party was able to secure enthusiastic let alone overwhelming support at the 2010 general election.

Come 2015, the scheduled date of the next election, neither the Tories, Lib Dems nor Labour will find the position has improved. In fact, Ukip is capable of taking votes off all of them and another hung parliament seems the outcome. Viewing Ukip’s performance as a one-off protest vote would be a mistake.

We should not underestimate the crisis surrounding the leadership of David Cameron following the Eastleigh result. His project to remake the Tory party in a modern image lies in ruins. As Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, noted after the result: “The Conservatives failed here because traditional Tory voters look at Cameron and they ask themselves ‘Is he a Conservative?’ and they conclude ‘No, he’s not’. He’s talking about gay marriage, wind turbines, unlimited immigration from India. He wants Turkey to join the European Union. The Conservatives’ problems are not because of Ukip, it’s because of their leader.”

A coup against Cameron is entirely possible, replacing him with a figure from the right of the party. This would almost certainly lead to a swift end to the Coalition with the Lib Dems and precipitate an early election, at which the Tories could well get hammered. With Britain losing its AAA credit rating, a political crisis of this magnitude would shake the markets. Just look at Italy’s perilous position since the election.

Which leaves with Ed Miliband’s party, New Labour Mark II, the champions of responsible capitalism, and whose policies are barely distinguishable from those of the government parties. The lesson Labour is apparently drawing is that – wait for it – they have to appear tougher on immigration than they have done thus far.

So come next Wednesday, Miliband is to devote an entire party political broadcast to address “voters’ concerns” on immigration (which, by the way, is falling rapidly). He will tell them that Labour should have done more to address the issue when in office for 13 years.

Making this a key issue when austerity driven by the crisis of global capitalism is wrecking people’s lives is entirely reactionary. This is Labour’s appeal to backwardness, narrow nationalism and prejudiced voters who hold immigrants and foreigners responsible for every problem.

Ukip is leading a race to the bottom in British politics and Labour is desperately trying to get in amongst the front-runners. It makes you want to throw up.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Ukip leads the race to the bottom of politics

The apparent rise in support for the right-wing, populist Ukip in the polls is further evidence of the break-up of traditional party alignments which we saw at the 2010 general election and the break-down of Westminster parliamentary politics.

Once written off by David Cameron as a party of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”, Ukip is a clear and present danger not just to the Tories but to Labour as well, as Ed Miliband’s party might discover in the Rotherham by-election later this week.

The couple at the centre of the fostering row in Rotherham, where children were removed from their home because they are members of Ukip, were previously Labour voters.

The background to the by-election might help to explain their defection. In this former heavy industry town, unemployment at 10% is far higher than the national average. While the total has been falling, in Rotherham it has actually increased in the last year. During this period, youth unemployment has tripled.

Then there is the town’s council, which Labour has controlled since the metropolitan borough was first created in 1973. A record of bureaucratic incompetence, combined with the implementation of Tory cuts, has eaten away at Labour’s image in Rotherham, leaving it something of a rotten borough.

It wasn’t helped by the sense that Labour – and the notorious South Yorkshire police force of Hillsborough and Orgreave infamy – did little to tackle rampant sexual exploitation of young girls in Rotherham.

Add to this the woeful story of Denis MacShane, whose resignation triggered the by-election, and you can see why Ukip is making hay in the town. The Labour MP was forced to quit parliament after falsifying a number of expenses claims.  

Into this political morass steps Ukip, hard on the heels of extreme right-wing and neo-fascist thugs who have descended on the town twice in recent months. They feed on the contempt many people have for parliament, which MacShane’s activities only helped to reinforce.

In an economic and political crisis like we have today, the search for scapegoats is always a priority. For Ukip it is the European Union (although Ukip is content to rake in the salaries and expenses from its 12 MEPs), immigrant workers from Eastern Europe who allegedly take the jobs destined for British workers at lower wages and the “political elite” who champion such mad ideas as “climate targets”, leading to higher energy prices. So says Ukip leader Nigel Farage, given space in the Daily Telegraph to launch his very British brand of simplistic, reactionary populism.

And he has Cameron and Labour leader Ed Miliband trying to play catch up, especially on Europe. Both parties are edging towards a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, although they know it would make not one jot of difference to economic prospects.

Miliband is toughening up Labour’s policy on immigration, welfare benefits, crime and just about everything else in a bid to prevent Ukip from winning over disillusioned supporters like the couple in Rotherham.

It’s a race to the bottom of politics, with Ukip leading the field. It could also conceivably result in the ousting of Cameron in favour of a more right-wing Tory. Certainly, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail would support that if it helped Tory prospects at the next election which are looking bleak.

Scapegoating minorities, immigrant workers or “Europe” itself expresses the bankruptcy of the major parties who have opened the door to Ukip. More than that, the rise of Ukip is a backlash against a political system that ostensibly favours the rich and the powerful.

These are indeed dangerous, unstable, turbulent times. The right-wing historically has played on prejudice to shut down enfeebled democracies. Our response should be to develop strategies and proposals to extend democracy in new ways that transfers economic and political power to the people, away from the bureaucracies, the corporations and the banks.

In other words, our fight for democracy also has to be the struggle against capitalism as a defective, unsustainable social system. Anything less will serve to reinforce parties like Ukip.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Confusion at the top masks a deeper crisis of legitimacy

Theresa May’s palpable discomfort over the Home Office’s inability to read a calendar can only add to the general disdain voters feel for the political class which goes beyond the issue of Abu Qatada and his intended deportation into the hands of Jordanian torturers. With Tory backbenchers flexing their muscles over House of Lords reform and a host of other issues, the uncertainty in government is palpable. A collapse of the ConDem coalition, wished for by papers like the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph, is not out of the question. It could be hastened by the reported defection of some Tory MPs to the nationalist UKIP party in the coming days. UKIP is now reportedly polling higher than the Lib Dems. This is not an issue solely confined to the UK either. In France, Sunday’s first round of the presidential election is expected to produce a record low turn-out. No surprise there because the two principal candidates, Nicholas Sarkozy and Socialist Party’s Francois Hollande are committed to making public spending cuts. The left unity candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, who was a Socialist Party minister in earlier political life, is polling well over 15%, clearly an indication that the two-party system offers nothing to the majority of voters. In Greece, without a government for months since an EU-IMF-ECB coup that led to the installation of a Goldman Sachs advisor as prime minister, it’s a similar story. Next month’s general election is certain to see a massive rejection of Pasok and New Democracy, who have between them carved up Greek politics for generations. In the United States, Congress is deadlocked by the Republicans while the Democrats are finding it difficult to hide their disappointment at Barack Obama’s first term. There is no enthusiasm for Obama, who has presided over an economy in decline, or his challenger Mitt Romney and the race for the White House is said to be too close to call. In the UK, the break-up of traditional party politics is the form that the growing revolt against the cosy but totally ineffectual parliamentary system is taking. The most staggering example was the collapse of Labour’s massive majority in the Bradford West by-election, which saw George Galloway triumphant. In Scotland, Labour has lost control of Glasgow City Council for the first time in 40 years and is expecting a hammering at the hands of the Scottish National Party in local elections on May 3. In London, maverick populist Boris Johnson may well defy the general hatred of the Tories to stay on as the capital’s mayor. According to a report in the Financial Times, many MPs campaigning for the local elections have returned to Westminster telling the same story, that “voters appear disillusioned with all the major parties and are increasing turning to smaller parties as an outlet for their frustration”. Amber Rudd, Conservative MP for Hastings, says the disdain for mainstream politics was palpable on the doorsteps. “There was an exasperation and disengagement with politics that I’ve never seen before.” The YouGov tracker poll since the 2010 elections shows a rise in support for “others” – none of the three main UK parties – inexorably rising from 8% to 17% today. Neither the Tories nor Labour are likely to win an overall majority again on this basis. At the back of voters’ minds is a growing understanding that the political system itself – not just the parties – has failed them. At a time of economic crisis, the system has come down in favour of the masters of capitalism – the banks, corporations, hedge funds, bond markets and the rich. Key services like education and health are being turned into commodities where the markets not need decide what happens. We should use this tremendous disquiet to open up a wide debate not just about this or that party, but on the historic question of how to create a real democracy in place of the comprehensively undemocratic state that becomes more oppressive by the day. It’s the best way to block the clear danger of right-wing populism filling the vacuum. Paul Feldman Communications editor