Bigger state no answer to 'Big Society'

David Cameron’s crusade for the “Big Society” should compel its opponents to question and reconsider the role of the state in our corporate-owned, profit-driven society. Unfortunately, it has done nothing of the kind.

Though difficult to pin down, the BS project could be understood as Cameron’s libertarian response to a top-down, bureaucratic state that vast swathes of the population despise and want nothing to do with.

Perhaps Tory prime minister Cameron understands that should this attitude to the state continue unchallenged, there’ll come a time when it loses remaining legitimacy. And that point, anything could happen, as events in Egypt have shown.

So the Coalition’s plan is to shed the state’s responsibility for things like forests and involve the unelected, unaccountable “third sector” of charities and the like to bid for services currently provided by local councils. Other community projects will be able to access funds from a BS bank and the rest of us simply have to volunteer.

Labour and trade union leaders like Brendan Barber have simplistic responses which reveal much about their fondness for the capitalist state and litle else. Labour crudely says the BS is a “cover for the cuts”, which is a bit rich for a party implementing the government’s draconian policies at local level without any resistance.

Just for the record, the previous New Labour government contracted out huge chunks of formerly state-provided services at vast cost to the taxpayer. Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes became a licence to print money for companies building hospitals and schools while Londoners are weighed down by the cost of rescuing a failed Tube modernisation contract.

Now it turns out that 25 for-profit Independent Sector Treatment Centres created by New Labour to do non-essential operations on behalf of the NHS have been overpaid by up to £250 million in the five years to 2010. This is because they were paid a fixed sum, even though the centres carried out fewer operations than the contract specified.

So the Coalition is deepening a trend set by Blair and Brown, which makes the claims that Cameron wants a “smaller state” more than slightly ludicrous. Barber, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, who bizarrely says the BS will create a failed state like Somalia, favours the Scandinavian approach, consisting of a massive (and oppressive) state apparatus and a welfare system paid for by taxing ordinary workers at around 50% of their incomes. (If he cared to check he would find Scandinavia is moving towards market states).

But we should we allow ourselves to be placed in a position of defending the role of the existing state (Scandinavian or otherwise) in opposition to the BS project? The present state reinforces the capitalist status quo, with its gross inequality and exploitation. It sanctifies profit by legally obliging corporations to put shareholder interests first. The “welfare state” in turn legitimises the notion of the deserving poor, forever dependent on the charity of the state.

Other parts of the state apparatus supply judicial and police powers to control the population lest they resent what passes for democracy, fitting up activists where necessary as they did over the Nottinghamshire power station action. So who’s for a bigger version of this wretched state? Only Ed Miliband and Barber because access to the state gives them privilege and limited power without ever having to challenge how things are.

We are obliged to develop concrete ideas for an altogether different system of ruling, one that does not sit above society while operating on behalf of the powerful and the rich. What is wanted as an alternative to the BS and Labour’s love of the state is a thoroughly democratic system based on a network of People’s Assemblies as a transition to real self-rule. At the heart of such a democratic system would be co-ownership and control of all society’s resources, including land, banks and corporations. Then we could truly say that society was much, much bigger than it is today.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Parlament's crisis goes from bad to worse

The present Parliamentary system is fast digging its own grave if yesterday’s events are anything to go by and the danger is that without the creation of a democratic alternative, populist forces could try and replace it with something even worse and less representative.

Westminster is plagued by the abuse of state funds for personal gain (the expenses scandal), the arbitrary use of state power against MPs (the case of Damian Green) and the continuing ignoring of Parliament when it comes to government announcements (the fire sale of state assets planned by Gordon Brown, leaked to the press over the weekend).

The expenses furore lurched towards the ridiculous yesterday when a former senior civil servant appointed by Brown instructed some MPs to repay money while others, notably former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, got away with an apology while being allowed to keep dodgy second-home “allowances”.

MPs complained that the rules had been changed retrospectively to catch them out, and they have a point. But if it’s arbitrary power they’re worried about, then they need look no further than the Cabinet Office, the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police – where the real power in the state is located.

Last year, you will recall, Tory MP Damian Green revealed immigration figures leaked to him by a civil servant. Green was arrested in the House of Commons and held under anti-terror laws while his home was searched from top to bottom on the grounds that the information could threaten “national security”

Of course it was nothing of the kind, but that didn’t prevent Brown’s boot-boys from rampaging about. Two reports published yesterday said Green’s arrest was “disproportionate and ill-advised” (no charges were brought) but the MP was less forgiving. He said if it became a criminal offence to embarrass ministers “then you have crossed a great big line away from being a democracy.”

Pointing to a deteriorating state of relations between the police and the policed, Green added: “My arrest is a very small corner of this but the whole surveillance state, database collection, keeping details of people on the DNA database, all that aggregation of data which makes all of us suspects in the long run is going to make more and more people feel the police are not on my side.”

Green’s comments confirm that it is the power of the state that is overwhelmingly apparent in Britain, with Parliament’s role in this set-up reduced to a cipher. The incredibly low esteem in which Parliament is held is an opportunity as well as a danger.

Its decline reflects a profound shift over the last 30 or so years towards a market, or business state. In this way, Britain has become a branch of a global PLC and the state is its executive management team. Parliament is irrelevant in this arrangement, at best to be “consulted” after the event, at worst to be left to its own devices.

So the challenge is to remake the relations of power in Britain in order to enhance and develop democracy in any meaningful way. A transfer of power out of the hands of the capitalist state, as well the key corporate and financial enterprises, would create the conditions for a new type of revolutionary Parliament along the lines advocated in our People’s Charter for Democracy.

The danger in all this is that the present Parliament becomes so discredited that a clamour led by right-wing populists to shut it down gathers momentum. In the midst of the grave economic and financial crisis, we should be on full alert. We may yet be forced to defend Parliament against authoritarian rule in a way that at the same time challenges the power and legitimacy of the ruling elites themselves.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

A step forward in Manchester

The Convention of the Left meeting in Manchester near the New Labour conference yesterday adopted a “statement of intent” that is intended to sustain a framework of ongoing discussion on policies and actions over the next few months. A World to Win’s participants voted for the statement because it represents a step forward.

John McDonnell, one of the few MPs who have consistently resisted the New Labour government, was right to stress caution. An attempt to create a “left unity” or to launch a new electorally-oriented party would not only be premature but futile. The dilemmas facing the socialist movement require more than what would amount to cosmetic political window-dressing along these lines.

The challenges arise from the fact that the conventional routes to social and political progress are now more or less closed off. Labour being transformed into capitalist New Labour – in fact, it is the self-appointed bankers’ party – is only part of the story. Two other inter-related developments within the state raise even more problematic questions.

Firstly, in Britain the post-World War II so-called consensus, welfare state has been obliterated by successive Tory and New Labour governments. In turn, policies of governments express profound changes in the demands of the corporate-driven globalisation process. What we have now is an undemocratic, unashamedly business state under which parliamentary processes and political representation count for nothing.

The priorities of the business state are clear: save capitalism and its financial system at all costs, including mass unemployment, homelessness, reduced wages and social division, provoked by racist, anti-immigration statements and policies. The events of the last seven days, with the US government offering to buy up bad debts and New Labour facilitating the takeover of HBOS, is a graphic illustration of how this is working out.

The Convention’s statement of intent makes no mention of these questions. Nor does it refer to the crisis now spreading like a contagion from the financial sector to other areas of the economy. Most observers now acknowledge that the crash of 2008, which last week claimed banks in Britain and America (and yesterday saw the last two investment banks change their status to try and escape), is only just starting to unfold.

The statement’s strength lies in the admission that there are no simple answers, declaring: “We must find ways to develop and promote alternative positive policies and demands – of peace, social and environmental justice, public ownership, workers’ rights, civil liberties and equality. We must join together with all those seeking a better society, as an anti-capitalist left fighting for an alternative socialist society.” The Convention also wants to define ways of joint working and is calling for local Left Forums to continue the discussion.

This is a positive initiative. For our part, A World to Win will want to discuss how to take forward the struggle for democracy that in its time produced parliamentary representation, the Labour Party and major welfare reforms. The termination of that period of history is not a matter for regret but can be made into an opportunity to create a new democratic state as a platform for overturning an economic system that is plunging the world into a catastrophe.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor