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

The great deception

The reasons for hanging on to your vote at the general election next month are mounting. But surely the most significant is the fact that the electorate is being kept in the dark by a conspiracy of silence by all the major parties capable of forming a government.

How can people vote for parties that are refusing to say what their immediate post-election plans are in relation to cutting the budget deficit? Despite all the squabbles between New Labour, the Tories and Liberal Democrats over national insurance contributions, no one has admitted the truth: that savage reductions in public spending are on the cards.

Leaving aside for the moment whether the deficit ought to be cut as opposed to repudiated, from a capitalist point of view there is no choice. The deficit is close to 12% of the value of annual output (GDP) and similar in size to that of Greece, which is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

The government is forced to borrow on the bond markets to finance the gap between state spending and income – and the cost of this is rising. Currently, the Treasury is charged about 4% on borrowing and this is expected to rise to 5% this year. Interest payments alone are running at over £40 billion a year – adding to the total debt every day.

Jonathan Loynes, chief European economist at Capital Economics, is typical of City observers in noting after last month’s budget that “the current plans to halve the deficit over the next four years rely both on spending cuts which have not yet been properly detailed, and on almost certainly over-optimistic projections for the economy”.

His view that “the momentous task of tackling the UK's fiscal crisis will get under way after the election – and it's going to hurt" (my emphasis) is self-evidently true. But as that is the case, how can people actually take part in the election? Why should they vote when the major parties are effectively lying about what’s to come?

After all, you wouldn’t buy a car or a fridge or even a pint of milk without making some sort of check, would you? If you knew the milk was off, you wouldn’t buy it. So how can voters be expected to “buy in” to what’s on offer when the information on the label is pure fiction?

The great deception is what this election will be known for, therefore. And it is all part and parcel of the great wipe-out of democracy, where corruption and the big lie have undermined not just the significance of the right to vote but eaten into the very heart of the capitalist political system. Which is another good reason – perhaps the most important of them all – to hang on to your vote.

To those who say we have to use our vote because people died fighting for it, we say that their sacrifice was not made so that we could participate in a charade. The plot of the major parties is actually to steal our votes. Let’s not give them that opportunity.

We have to open a campaign that challenges the right of the political elites to impose the burden of a crisis created by their complicity with financial and economic powers on to the backs of ordinary people. That means withholding our vote, denying them a mandate to make draconian cuts. At the same time we favour building support for People’s Assemblies that would find ways to reorganise the economy and state finances along lines that benefit the majority instead of the privileged few.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

The politics of the present

The case for hanging on to your vote in the general election, while exercising your democratic right to go beyond the present exhausted political system, has more to do with the way we look at the world than most other considerations.

What it boils down to is a choice between 1) a view that accepts that the world external to our thinking is in constant flux and change or 2) an outlook that bases itself on more or less eternal “truths”.

The first approach to analysing the real world acknowledges that all phenomena – including society and its component parts – eventually assume entirely new qualities, often within an old form. They are both the same and yet not the same at any given moment and this is the result of internal contradictions working themselves out as a process.

By contrast, the second outlook is inevitably rooted in the past. Although this view allows for changes, these are viewed as incremental and incidental. They are not allowed to invalidate previous assumptions. Needless to say, this empirical ideology predominates within contemporary capitalist society and helps to reinforce the status quo.

In our view, attitudes to the question of Parliament and the general election, which is likely to be called a week today and held on May 6, are dependent upon analysis. This must set out the qualitative changes that have taken place within the state and political system since working men won the vote in 1867. For example:

Is New Labour a modern form of the original Labour Party or an entirely new quality in the shape of a capitalist party produced by the corporate-led globalisation of the last 30 years? All the evidence and experience points to the second conclusion.

Is Parliament the centre of the political system? Was it ever? If so, it was a long time ago. As political scientist Anthony King notes in his recent book The British Constitution:

Commentators frequently refer to the decline of parliament – that is, the House of Commons – in recent decades, but parliament’s decline as a legislative assembly began in the middle of the 19^th century and was complete by, at the latest, the 1880s or 1890s. Nothing much of constitutional significance has happened [to parliament] since then… It goes without saying that the British House of Commons is now, and has been for a very long time, the archetypal arena assembly. It is simply not equipped to function as a transformative legislature, and of course governments of all political parties are anxious to ensure that it never, ever becomes so equipped.

Can voters influence the course of events by participating in local, European and parliamentary elections? That is no longer possible.

As a result of globalisation, the capitalist democratic process has been undermined further. There is now a seamless relationship between government, state, corporate and financial power as well as external undemocratic bodes like the European Union and the World Trade Organisation. The government is accountable not to Parliament but to the markets. MPs are reduced to various levels of corruption to fill in their time.

So the case for taking the right to vote into new territory is based on what has changed. It’s time to move democracy on, and give the right to vote a new significance and weight. We could do this by encouraging people to create their own democratic bodies like People’s Assemblies. This would challenge the power of the existing state to decide, for example, that ordinary people should bear the pain of a crisis of capitalism that is not of their making.

Above all, it means living and thinking in the present, while learning from the past, and acting to shape the future in our own interests. You can be sure that whatever government emerges out of the election will be doing exactly the opposite.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Vote for 'none of the above'!

The spectre of a hung Parliament – where no party has an overall majority – is a possibility when the votes are counted after next year’s general election. It’s the last thing the ruling classes want and could open the door for quite a sinister development.

While the Tories remain ahead in the polls, their lead appears to be shrinking. Although they would probably emerge as the largest party, the Tories would not be able to form a majority government without the support of the Lib Dems. Nick Clegg, the Lib Dems’ leader, has already indicated his willingness to back the Tories rather than New Labour.

David Cameron’s New Tories need a swing bigger than the one that brought Thatcher to power in 1979 to win an outright majority. Winning an extra 117 seats would, for example, leave the Tories with an overall majority of just one. With virtually no support in Scotland or Wales, winning a comfortable majority could prove an electoral mountain too high to climb.

For Philip Johnston, the Daily Telegraph’s home affairs editor, a hung parliament is a ”nightmare scenario”, one made more possible by the fact nearly 100 of the 646 MPs in Parliament are from parties other than the Tories and New Labour.

The cat was set among the pigeons last week by former Tory chancellor Ken Clarke, when he remarked: “I do think that in the middle of an acute national crisis a hung parliament would be one of the biggest disasters we could suffer … that would be a bigger danger than a Labour victory.”

Clarke was, of course, referring to the massive state debt resulting from bailing out the bankers, the unparalleled programme of public spending cuts that all the major parties are proposing, alongside rising unemployment, especially among young people and a deepening recession.

In the event of an inconclusive election, it is questionable whether financial markets, for example, would be willing to lend a weak government the £220 billion it needs to borrow next year. This could precipitate a run on the pound. As commentators have noted, the only lender remaining then would be the International Monetary Fund.

Why should we be bothered about all this? Well, an economic collapse that coincides with a political crisis is the recipe for a “government of national unity” – or a coalition of the three major parties. If this sounds like a wartime arrangement you would be right. Except on this occasion, the “enemy” would be public sector workers and those who use services. The living standards of the vast majority would be targeted in order to save capitalism at our expense.

As in wartime, a national government might find it necessary to “suspend” democratic rights to oppose what would amount to a Parliamentary dictatorship. No doubt the security service MI5 is compiling lists of people that might prove troublesome in such circumstances.

Of course, none of this may happen and a government with a working majority might result from the election. It would, of course, enjoy the support of the other parties as it inflicted the pain of the crisis on ordinary people. So one conclusion is – whatever way people vote, they are going to get it in the neck!

This undemocratic Parliamentary system is inherently incapable of acting in the interests of the majority of working people, however they vote. We need to extend democracy and reconstruct the state to take power out of the hands of the corporations and bankers if we are to solve the economic and financial disaster at their expense. There is, therefore, a strong case building for voting for “None of the Above” and creating the momentum for revolutionary solutions to the crisis.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Brown prepares to cut and run

In 1997, New Labour chose Things Can Only Get Better by D:ream as its theme song for the election campaign. As speculation rises that prime minister Brown may call an election early in 2009, it is time for someone to record Things Can Only Get Worse. 

With unemployment soaring towards the 2 million mark by Christmas on today’s figures, reports that New Labour may cut and run before the full impact of the recession in human terms is revealed makes sense – if your only concern is holding on to power that is. 

The government knows that the financial and economic crisis is spiralling out of control. They’re just not telling anyone else that this is the case. So call a snap election around the idea that Brown has “saved the world”, as he told the Commons last week, and the electorate is likely to choose the devil they know (our saviour) rather than the one they don’t (Cameron).   

Or so the thinking inside No.10 goes. But it’s a race both against time and against the unpredictable. All the measures taken by the government – bailing out bankrupt banks, slashing interest rates and VAT and stoking up government debt – have had no discernible impact on a crisis that is global in scope and capitalist in nature.

The only shot left in the locker is printing more money, known as “quantitative easing”. And this is under serious consideration by the Bank of England, which would achieve this by buying more government bonds than are required and flooding the banks with the proceeds. No wonder analysts call this the ”nuclear option”. 

Such a move would be desperate and constitute an indictment of New Labour’s failures. You can see why Lord Mandelson (aka the Prince of Darkness) – who is about to part privatise the Royal Mail, adding to the jobless total – is urging Brown to make a dash to the polls before the Bank of England (which was set free by Brown when chancellor) pulls the rug from underneath the government’s feet. 

Experts are warning of a jobs catastrophe in 2009, with unemployment likely to top 3 million according to the Bank of England's labour market analyst, David Blanchflower."Where is the light at the end of the tunnel? I can't see any," he says. If he could actually see a light, it would probably be the train of depression coming the other way, for his estimates could well prove too conservative.

For example, more than 350,000 managers alone could lose their jobs during the next 12 months, according to the Management Consultancies Association (MCA), which also reports that two-thirds of top companies are expecting to lay off workers next year. Today’s official unemployment figures only go up to October and do not include the avalanche of job losses announced recently in banking and commerce. 

So as you ponder the “choice” between a capitalist government already in office and one waiting in the wings, here’s some preliminary advice about how to vote it you are invited to a polling station sometime in February 2009 – don’t! Why waste your hard-won right to vote on a bunch of creepy and useless politicians who will take your money and hand it over to the banks, big business or whoever? In fact, to anyone except those who need it most. 

An election in these circumstances will be a fraud on the voters and a further insult to the democratic process. Our time would be better spent campaigning for radically different, not to say revolutionary, solutions to a crisis which will otherwise engulf us all. 

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

 

 

Midnight of a surveillance society

In the week that new laws requiring phone companies to keep records of ALL calls and make them available to a range of agencies came into force in Britain, a report from the United States gives a chilling account of the destruction of civil liberties in that other great “democracy”.

In 2003 and 2003, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) described in separate reports how new technology was feeding a surveillance “monster” and how the government and private sector were increasingly “mining” data about individuals. In a further report, the ACLU says the situation has worsened dramatically and warns: “We are far too close to the midnight of a genuine surveillance society, and the second hand has not stopped sweeping around the dial.”

The state is engaged in a series of illegal activities. The National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency have departed from their supposedly exclusive focus on overseas spying, and have “turned their eyes and ears inward upon the American people” in violation of existing laws and the Constitution. The ACLU report shows that:

• the NSA has gained direct access to the telecommunications infrastructure through some of America’s largest companies. It is using broad data mining techniques to evaluate the communications of millions of people within the United States


• some of the major telecom companies have granted the NSA direct, wholesale access to their customers’ calling records – once again, outside the law – and that the NSA is compiling a giant database of those records


• the Treasury Department and the CIA is secretly sifting through the records of the global financial cooperative SWIFT, without Congressional authorisation or judicial oversight


• The NSA is sifting through the sea of communications using keyword searches, link analysis or other techniques such as voice pattern analysis


• A system for tracking cargo, also generated terrorist ratings on tens of millions of travellers, including American citizens


• the FBI’s “Investigative Data Warehouse” appears to be soaking up a broad array of data on innocent individuals


• a national ID system scheduled for 2008 will take state-issued documents such as a driver’s licence and turning them into nationally controlled, full-fledged national identity papers


• a radical shift in the use of CCTV, in which private cameras are actually tapped into by centralised government systems is under construction. New York City police plan to link together thousands of police and private video cameras combined with licence plate readers and a central police monitoring centre


• in August 2007 it was reported that the Department of Homeland Security was planning to deploy the nation’s spy satellites for domestic security purposes


• the government is claiming sweeping new powers to check the results of people’s Internet searches.

The ACLU report concludes: “In August 2007, the Bush Administration pressured Congress into enacting a misnamed Protect America Act. While the NSA can already engage in mass untargeted eavesdropping overseas, this legislation for the first time allows the government to engage in mass, untargeted collection of Americans’ communications (specifically, any conversations between people in the United States and overseas)… It cuts the courts out of the process, and permits the U.S. Attorney General to unilaterally issue a new legal order… in which entire programmes of electronic surveillance would be authorised in one sweep.”

Many of the practices described in the ACLU report take place in Britain too. New Labour has spent a decade building its own version of the surveillance society. The Brown government is constructing an authoritarian, one-party state and should it win the forthcoming election, it will press ahead with the destruction of what remains of our basic rights and civil liberties. One more reason to withhold your vote whenever the election is called.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor