It's all about power

The political crisis that has erupted in Britain following the general election provides a window of opportunity to bring the most basic of questions – who rules the country and in whose interests – right to the top of the agenda.

That is the focus of our ‘Taking the Revolutionary Road’ conference on May 22, which couldn’t be happening at a more opportune moment.

It is all too easy to be sucked into the drama around the frantic efforts being made to put together a coalition government of one variety or another. But behind the to-and-fro in Westminster, as the major capitalist parties jockey for power, is a profound political and economic crisis.

The political system is broken in a deeply significant way. A new system of weighing and distributing votes in the shape of proportional representation wouldn’t even begin to address the heart of the matter.

Many voted reluctantly last week. And a large proportion of those who dragged themselves to a polling station last week have no faith or trust in the parliamentary system. And for sound reasons that go way beyond the expenses scandal of the last parliament or the inadequacies of the first-past-the-post voting system.

As our Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions points out: “Full-on globalisation has resulted in an unholy alliance between the state, political parties, corporate and financial power in all the major capitalist countries. From London to Washington, from Berlin to Rome, from Tokyo to Seoul, the reality is essentially the same.

“Democracy is reduced to a sham, a façade behind which real decisions are made and power exercised over ordinary people. The right to vote counts for little and the aspirations of ordinary people are denied by state systems that primarily function in the interests of big business.”

This analysis is borne out by the events since it became clear that the election had produced deadlock. The tell-tale phrase is how all parties at Westminster have pledged to rule in the “national interest”. What this means is all to clear once the patriotic rhetoric is stripped away.

The “interest” in question here is not that of ordinary working people struggling in their daily lives to make ends meet. What Brown, Cameron, Clegg and others are prattling on about is something quite different. The “interest” they will protect at all costs is vested in the financial markets and corporate boardrooms.

So irrespective of the make-up of the next government, it will come down on the interests of ordinary people like a ton of bricks, imposing savage cuts in living standards and services to satisfy the money markets who fund the British state’s massive deficit. The answer to the question about who rules Britain and in whose interests suddenly is made clearer as a result.

The financial and economic crisis can only worsen. At the weekend, the eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund pledged €750 billion in rescue plans to try and reassure the markets that debts will be honoured. It merely serves to postpone the inevitable.

Whatever government emerges in Britain is certain to provoke large-scale resistance by trade unionists and communities as the full horror of the cuts becomes apparent. One of the immediate lessons from Greece, however, is that strikes and protests have not prevented the government from voting the cuts through the country’s parliament.

To fight to win means actually defeating and removing the government of the day, and in the process creating alternative structures to those of the capitalist state such as People’s Assemblies. In this way, ordinary people would get to rule in their own interests, replacing those of the money markets and boardrooms. By registering for the May 22 conference you would give this strategy a real boost.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Election crisis: markets call the shots

The hung parliament that has resulted from Britain’s inconclusive general election is certain to lead to a prolonged period of political instability slap bang in the middle of the gravest economic and financial crisis since the 1930s.

Now the horse-trading begins – behind the voters’ backs – to put together a government that is unlikely to see the year out. The Tories, New Labour and the Lib Dems don’t have much time, as the markets made clear while the last votes were being counted.

Sterling fell on the foreign exchange markets, while the cost of borrowing to fund the huge budget deficit rose as dealers in British bonds began to take evasive action. Shares on the FTSE 250 – which more closely reflects the British economy - fell by over 270 points. “They have got until the markets open on Monday to sort this out,” one dealer said.

Paralysis at Westminster comes amidst turmoil coursing through global markets in the wake of Greece’s bail-out by the International Monetary Fund and other eurozone countries. Few think the £100 billion rescue package will be sufficient and the resistance by Greek workers has further unnerved the markets.

“The election is shaping up to create the worst possible outcome at the worst possible time,” warned David Morrison, strategist at GFT. “Investors’ nerves are already jangling and this added uncertainty will undermine UK equities further. The sell-off in gilts [bonds] and sterling is a clear indication of how unimpressed the City is by the lack of a clear winner.”

If the City was unimpressed, so too were the electorate. Their refusal to give any party a clear mandate could be seen to express a fear that such an outcome would make massive cuts in services and living standards more certain. While the turnout was up slightly on 2005, in many inner-city areas it was below 60%. More than one in three registered voters did not participate, despite intense pressure to do so.

Clearly the TV debates did nothing to enable voters to distinguish one party from another, apart from the style of the respective leaders. Many undecided voters failed to work out a choice in time while thousands of those who made up their minds late in the day found themselves locked out because polling stations were understaffed.

All the major parties have now pledged to act “in the national interest”, which is tantamount to saying that the markets must be mollified by a cross-party agreement to make the cuts they hinted at but shied away from spelling out in any detail during the election campaign. Ruling in the people’s interest is not an option for any of them.

One thing is clear. New Labour spent 13 years in office promoting a market capitalist economy that ultimately crashed and in doing so created the political space for the hated Tories to make a comeback from the dead. In 1997, New Labour got 43% of the vote and more than 12 million votes. Now they are down to a 29% share and 8 million votes.

A majority New Labour government is now no longer a practical possibility in British politics. Any pact with the Lib Dems would simply confirm a new political alignment that is not so much “progressive” as anti-socialist, anti-trade union and pro-business.

The election result shows that the Parliamentary system is in melt-down, one that reflects the real chaos in global economics and finance. An anti-people regime without any mandate will set about clobbering the electorate very shortly. On that basis, we have an absolute right to oppose and reject whatever government and policies emerges this weekend. More than that, we should set out creating the framework for a real democracy in the shape of a network of People’s Assemblies. The old system is broken and can’t be fixed.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Election deepens political crisis

The death at the weekend of writer Alan Sillitoe and the looming possibility of a hung Parliament have no direct connection. And yet looking back at Sillitoe’s writings, and reflecting on the latest twists in the election campaign, you can detect a profound shift taking place in British history.

Sillitoe’s brilliant story, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner appeared as a film in 1960. The story of a borstal boy symbolised the rebelliousness of an entire generation of young people – and the gritty realities of working class life in post-war Britain.

That world has passed. Communities of factory workers like those depicted in Sillitoe’s writings disappeared under globalisation and the policies of Thatcher and New Labour. New class relations have emerged. Workers are more dispersed and less unionised. Large sections of the community no longer work and live in impoverished conditions in, for example, former mining areas.

The old party loyalties have gone as a result. That, at the political level, can help to explain the sudden rise of the Liberal Democrats and an historic break-up of the two-party system. The choice between first the Tories and the Whigs and later Tories and Labour has dominated British politics for 200 years. Formal coalitions have been reserved for war time only.

That is why the threat of a Parliament without an overall majority for any party signals a moment of instability in which the “known knowns” are – at least temporarily – shattered, and has forced a realignment between those who represent capitalism.

The connection between this political transformation is inseparable from the economic processes of the last 40 years, in which the British welfare state has changed into a “market state” – entirely subservient to the rule of global capital. This process, explained in A World to Win’s book Unmasking the State, has led to a “hollowing out” of the state itself.

As the state’s role has altered, more and more people have lost interest in politics, realising that exercising your right to vote does not lead to any influence over those elected. Clegg’s sudden stardom following the first TV debate was not so much due to his personal charisma as the desire to pin on him the widespread disaffection with New Labour and the Tories.

After all, Clegg is even more ruling class than Cameron, and the Lib Dems are even more pro-banker than Brown and Cameron put together, if that’s possible. Don’t forget that Clegg’s deputy leader, ex-banker Vince Cable was the oil corporation Shell’s chief economist.

As Clegg knows only too well, Both Brown and Cameron’s “love bombing” is just hot air and he is walking a political tightrope. Many Lib Dem voters would see entering into an agreement with Cameron, as a "pact with the devil” and those who want to get shot of New Labour will feel betrayed if Clegg joins with Brown.

Achieving a stable form of government under these conditions could be well-nigh impossible. Some will see the political crisis as simply shadow-dancing while the real power-brokers remain hidden from view in the corridors of Whitehall and the global corporations. In some respects they are right.

But at the same time, to view politics separately form the deep currents underneath is also to miss the real moment of opportunity. The political crisis means that the ruling class is unable to rule in the old way at a time of a serious financial emergency. The strength of those in power is precisely that they are aware of this weakness and will do all in their power to address it.

Our strength must be to see it as an opportunity for those excluded from power to exercise their power in a meaningful way. That is why our strategy of forming People’s Assemblies is a thousand times more realistic than believing we can influence any parliament that will result from the election.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

PR is not the road to happiness

As the likelihood grows of the Lib Dems holding the balance of power in terms of seats after May 6, so does the debate about what price Nick Clegg’s party might exact for joining a New Labour or Tory-led coalition government. Centre stage is the idea of replacing the present voting system with PR or proportional representation.

The Lib Dems have always been in favour of PR, which is not surprising. Under the present system, they could, for example, gain a larger share of the total votes cast than New Labour and yet end up with fewer than half the number of seats. Even the Tories could poll far higher than Gordon Brown’s party and still have fewer seats than New Labour. Democracy in action this isn’t!

Some people who are fed up with the present political system see PR as a way forward. It would, they argue, allow smaller parties to be represented in Parliament. PR could even open up the floodgates to “revolution or fundamental reform”, according to one response to our election policy of “hang on to your vote – build People’s Assemblies”.

But would it? PR assumes that a) Parliamentary representation is the only possible form of democracy b) Parliament in the shape of the House of Commons has real power c) reforming the voting system will benefit ordinary people d) the Lib Dems are alright really e) the present capitalist state system can become the tribune of the people.

None of these presuppositions holds water, however. As we have demonstrated many times, Parliament has had no real power for over 140 years, when the executive first established a permanent stranglehold over MPs. Representation is an extremely limited form of democracy. It was first elaborated by Alexander Hamilton, one of the key thinkers behind the American Revolution. He saw it as a way of filtering popular sentiment while keeping it at arms length.

So what developed much later in Britain following the 1867 Reform Act was representation – but without power, which lay firmly in the hands of the state. The founding of the Labour Party did not fundamentally alter this relationship, even when it took office for the first time as a minority government in 1923.

This is because the government is only a part of the state system as a whole. And this state is indisputably capitalist by nature in the sense that its primary role is to uphold the status quo of private property and the wage contract system for workers, with force when necessary. Globalisation has brought the character of the state out into the open for all to see, with banks and corporations ruling through parties like New Labour and the state reorganised to facilitate global finance and the free movement of capital.

In this context, PR would not make a jot of difference. Sure, smaller parties would be represented in Parliament – the Greens, the neo-fascist BNP and the ultra-right UKIP to name but three. But the levers of power would remain in the hands of the ruling classes.
The experience of Italy, which elects its MPs through a system of PR, is a clear example that a more balanced voting system does not result in progressive change.

Advocates of PR are in danger of missing the wood for the trees, the form for the content. A fairer voting system is obviously required because the first-past-the-post method used in general elections is clearly weighted against change. But something like PR only makes sense within a truly democratic political system built around ideas like People’s Assemblies. Otherwise PR could actually be used to reinforce the status quo.

This is, we repeat, a crisis election. Britain’s debts are enormous and the crisis convulsing Greece is a warning of what’s to come here. Whatever the manoeuvres around a post-election arrangement, whatever regime emerges will be down on our necks like a ton of bricks because that’s what the money markets are demanding. Voting for any of the parties planning these cuts would be like turkeys voting for Christmas, whatever the merits or otherwise of PR.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

TV debate masks fraud of an election

With the general election now firmly in the realms of a TV game show, the degeneration of mainstream politics is clear for all who care to take note. Another ninety minutes of well rehearsed assertions could not disguise the fact that in essence, there is nothing between the major parties.

Fundamentally, there are no disagreements between the three parties when it comes to the economy, immigration, defence, Afghanistan, climate change etc. Even on Iraq, where the Lib Dems opposed the war, the subject hardly got a look in, with the questions from the audience reduced to anodyne levels (e.g. should the Pope be allowed into Britain?!).

Forget all the knockabout stuff – that’s routine in the House of Commons every week at prime minister’s questions. It’s all for show, to try and sell the electorate the idea that politics is exciting and that New Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems are brimming with different ideas.

Any differences between them are about emphasis, not content. They are about ways of doing things – not changing the things themselves. The electorate is being asked to change management rather than elect a new government. None of the three leaders, for example, questions the assumption that massive cuts in public spending are needed to reduce the mounting budget deficit.

As the Financial Times reported hours before the televised debate, the government borrowed £163.4bn in the past financial year, the worst level of in Britain’s peacetime history. Public sector net debt rose to 53.8% of national income in 2009-10, up from 44% the previous year. The bankers’ paper noted: “The level of borrowing – at more than 11% of national income – highlights the need for the next government to enforce stringent public spending cuts and tax increases as the economy recovers, something all the parties agree on (emphasis added).”

The only reason the cuts are deemed necessary, however, is to appease international lenders who finance the deficit with loans and global foreign exchange traders buying and selling the pound. Yet the deficit itself is the result of the recession caused by the collapse of the very same financial system which has benefited from state bail-outs on a massive scale.

The alternative to making massive cuts in spending would require a total reorganisation of the economy and financial system. It would mean defying capitalist markets and relaunching the economy on the basis of gearing production to social need. None of this is going to happen at Westminster. After May 6, some sort of coalition will be cobbled together to clobber the electorate. Make no mistake about it.

So our twin policy of hanging on to your vote while campaigning to launch a network of People’s Assemblies may appear utopian but is actually a practical alternative. If you wouldn’t buy a used car off of Brown, Cameron or Clegg, why lend them your vote? If the present parliamentary system is undemocratic and unrepresentative, one where your vote counts for little, why participate in the fraud that is the 2010 general election?

If we want a real democracy in a society not beholden to bankers and corporations, we are going to have to take the initiative ourselves. A struggle for power against the political and economic elites is a tough road to go down. A World to Win is launching as an international organisation next month, committed to providing leadership for such a strategy. You are warmly invited to take part in the May 22 conference.

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

Hang on to your vote!

So the latest opinion polls are again pointing to a “hung” Parliament after the upcoming general election, with no single party able to form a majority government. In that event, say constitutional experts, the queen and her advisors could play a key role in deciding who is asked to form a government.

Yes, we are living in 2010 and the absolute power of monarchy was terminated in the English Revolution with the execution of Charles I for treason against his own people in 1649. But such is the nature of the compromise British constitution, the monarch still has residual powers as head of state. There is nothing written, for example, that says the largest single party in Parliament must be invited to form a government. New Labour could have fewer seats than the Tories but try to govern with the Liberal Democrats at the invitation of the queen.

The fact that an unelected figure, who inherited her power and position from her father (whose family has its origins in the German House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha!) still has potential political influence in modern Britain just about says it all about the restricted nature of bourgeois democracy. But one suspects (as they say at Buck House) that another unelected group – the global hedge funds and the big wheels in the financial system – will have a more decisive role to play if the election results in stalemate.

That is because the British state is heading for bankruptcy as the recession deepens and the money markets want action sooner rather than later to sort things out. Every January since modern records began, tax receipts have been larger than government outgoings.Not this January, however. In January 2010, the Treasury had to borrow £4.3 billion – compared to a surplus of £5.3 billion last year and £14 billion the year before. All the signs are of a worsening position, as unemployment grows, consumer spending falls further and corporate profits decline.

The markets reacted to the January deficit by raising the interest rates it charges to lend to the British government, adding to the total debt which is probably running somewhere near £200 billion a year or close to 13% of the annual value of economic output. It’s more or less the same ratio in Greece which, as you know, is said to be bankrupt.

Back to the general election scenario. Jonathan Loynes, senior figure at Capital Economics research consultancy, was voicing something more than his own opinion in commenting on the deficit: "It is clear that a more credible plan to restore the public finances to health will be required shortly after the general election to keep the markets and rating agencies at bay."

The markets will not want a weak government cobbled together as a result of some horse-trading between the parties and blessed by the queen. You cannot, therefore, rule out the possibility that in the event of a deadlocked general election, the pressure will mount for an emergency national government of all the main parties in a grand coalition to deal with the country’s financial crisis.

And with a “return to growth” as likely as the discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we know that will mean unparalleled, savage cuts in spending on public services, attacks on wages and pensions and more job losses. Opposition will be silenced in the “national interest”. Those who voted for one or other of the major parties will have been disenfranchised. You may ask yourself what the point is in participating in the general election under these conditions? And you would be right. Our votes are too precious to hand over to any of them in 2010.

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