Getting beyond dead end parliamentary politics

Positioning yourself to the left of One Nation Labour, as it now prefers to be known, is an easy enough task. Building a new party that can mount a successful electoral challenge to Ed Miliband’s austerity-lite “responsible capitalism” crew is more fraught.

Left Unity, launched at a weekend conference, has set out along a parliamentary road which many others continue to tramp. It’s a crowded space that already includes the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, Respect and the Socialist Labour Party.

An initiative launched by former members of Respect, leading ex-members of the Socialist Workers Party and other organisations, with film director Ken Loach, Left Unity has expressed the desire for a change and a way out of a political logjam.

The impasse is not, however, simply the result of the convergence of the three mainstream parties around the imperatives of the capitalist market economy, which stubbornly remains in recession. The blockage is also a constitutional one, with the parliamentary state a clear obstacle to further social progress.

Disengagement, dissatisfaction, distaste, despair, disgust – they all express the degree to which a majority of new generations and a substantial minority of older people have switched off from the present political process. You can’t say it often enough but that’s why Russell Brand’s tirade against the system has had 10 million views on YouTube.

Although couched in negative terms, these sentiments present an historic opportunity to advocate a revolutionary political roadmap. It’s a moment to put forward new forms of real democracy, participatory and direct, that go beyond the compromised representative system and to debate how we get from A to B.

Left Unity, unfortunately, passed up that chance. A clear majority favoured a “broad left”, non-revolutionary approach that sidelines the vital issue of the state and political democracy. The new party hopes, instead, to capture votes from disillusioned Labour supporters at the next election. Some even see the party as a the “left’s Ukip” in its potential to win votes from the disaffected.

This is a fundamental misjudgement of where we are today. Instead of reinforcing the parliamentary status quo by proposing a “left” version of what we have already, this is a historic opportunity to put forward alternatives for a different relationship of state to people. That means a different kind of state altogether. Not of voters who have no power – a democracy in name only – but where people can determine their own futures within a new constitutional settlement.

In Scotland, the constitutional issue has come to the fore as a result of the independence campaign, which Steve Freeman pointed out in moving his Republican Socialist platform. A movement has emerged around the referendum which is faced with what kind of constitution Scotland should have if it is to achieve an independence which is anything more than a transfer of power to another elite.

Throughout Europe, the capitalist state has enforced austerity, sometimes relying on the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank to browbeat elected governments. Repeated general strikes in Greece and elsewhere have failed to dent this arrangement. Coalitions of the left like Syrizia in Greece (which Left Unity sees as an example to follow) have failed to distinguish themselves .

The plain fact is that support for all political parties is plummeting, partly because they are identified with the status quo. Increasing numbers clearly feel that the existing parliamentary parties have little relevance to the realities of their life and that voting will not change things.

This has created a crisis of legitimacy for the existing political structures and therefore for the state itself. That process was behind the formation of the Occupy and movements in Spain, Brazil, Turkey and the Arab Spring itself.

The major challenge for all of us, not just Left Unity, is to deepen our understanding of where we are in history, analysing the diverse impacts of corporate-driven globalisation on politics, the economy and the eco-system and demonstrating how a return to the Labour of 1945 is impossible.

We have an obligation to put forward comprehensive alternatives whose content is a transition beyond capitalism. Thinking about and working on what kind of democratic, networked organisations are needed to reflect these aspirations and support their achievement is where we should direct our energy.

Corinna Lotz and Paul Feldman

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

A time for boldness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary