Notes on British politics

‘All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.’ James Arbuthnot, 1735.

I remember a time when I would read almost anything on party political conferences, the latest opinion polls etc. I seem to have given nearly all that up, though I have given the coverage in The Guardian of the current Labour Conference in Brighton a cursory glance. I am increasingly of the opinion that the three main parties’ conferences are a desperate attempt by their party hierarchies to convince the voting public that they are (i) different from the other two and (ii) they are worth voting for. With a bit of luck, none of them will succeed.

I think the current Government is suffering several syndromes the Conservatives suffered from in the years running up to their electoral annihilation in 1997 and which it took them a good decade to recover from (and if Gordon Brown had bit the bullet two years back, we would quite likely now be almost two years into a fourth Labour term with a Conservative Party in an advanced state of disintegration…). One is they may have done the right thing (ie pulled out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, stopped the financial system from collapsing) but they will not get any credit for it, mainly because the actions they took contradicted a policy they had been advocating with enthusiasm for ages. I remember about a week before Sterling was pulled from the ERM John Major telling the CBI (I think) that it was ‘a dark lonely world outside the ERM.’ Of course, in fact it was the move that allowed Britain to get out of economic recession. Similarly, all Gordon Brown’s paeans to the City of London over the years (‘This is an era that history will record as a new golden age for the City of London. I want to thank all of you for what you are achieving.’ Gordon Brown’s Mansion house speech, 20th June ’07, quoted in Will Hutton ‘high stakes, low finance’ Guardian Review 2/5/09, p.8) makes his current attacks on the banks sound rather, well...pathetic.

Another similarity between the Cons then and NuLab now is the widespread feeling amongst their core supporters is that they are being dropped on from a great height. The high interest rates between 1989 and 1992 drove many small businesses to the wall- the very people who traditionally make up the backbone of local Conservative constituency parties. Although enough feared a Labour victory in 92 to get John Major back to office (then he stuck up VAT- tax bombshell anyone?) any small businesspeople that are left in political life are just as likely to be found in UKIP as the Tories. Similarly, NuLab’s management-speak cobblers about bringing ‘competition’ and ‘choice’ (ie bringing in large corporations to swallow up taxpayers' money with minimal accountability) into the public sector has alienated a wide swathe of people who stood by Labour through the Thatcher/Major years. If the great unsung reason for the collapse of the Tories in the 1990s was the destruction of the Nottinghamshire coalmines in 92/3 which kept open during the 1984-5 Miners Strike (I think the penny then dropped with many Tory voters that the Conservative Party would have no qualms about shafting them when the time came), I think the mass closure of Post Offices under New Labour will one day be seen as the reason why many traditional Labour voters deserted it.



Thirdly, I think it has reached the point where any new initiatives by the Government are greeted with the widespread question ‘Why didn’t you do that before? You’ve had plenty of time.’ Why House of Lords reform now? (Personally, there were three simple approaches to the Lords when Labour took over in 97: leave it as it was; make it 100% elected; & abolish it. Instead we’ve had 12 years of faffing about) Why a referendum on PR? (well at some point in the next Parliament we might just get something about a voting system based on the Alternate Vote, which like Single Transferable Vote, has many pros and cons, but it ain’t PR!) It’s all too little too late.

So is the Labour Party heading for total electoral annihilation? I am going to stick to the prediction I have been making for the last few years- that the Conservatives will be the biggest party, but will not get an overall majority and will form a ‘National Government’ with the Lib Dems and Blairites. (Lord Mandy looks like he'll be onto a winner whoever becomes PM on May 7th next year. Also do not be surprised if ultra-NuLab types like James Purnell end up in the House of Lords if they lose their seats in the Commons. As Harpy Marx suggests, Purnell's embrace of Government by 'Experts' has extremely undemocratic overtones). Maybe the Cons will get an overall majority, but I’m pretty sure ‘Call Me Dave’ will not want to be held hostage to the caprices of the EU-sceptic wing of his party and the ‘my EU, right or wrong’ types of the Far Centre inside the Lib Dems and NuLab will be ready to support the Cameroonies when the time comes. Put it this way, if Nick Clegg becomes Foreign Secretary, you can kiss goodbye to any chance of a Referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, whatever happens in Ireland on Friday. I think speculation that the Cons may call a such a referendum is merely a ruse by the Cameroonies to keep potential UKIP voters onside, which will be dropped ASAP after May 7th.

Although I predict a Con-led 'National Government' after the next Election I can see circumstances (short of Spain arranging to invade Gibraltar to give Gordon his own 'Falklands Factor') where events may conspire towards pushing the Election towards a lot tighter finish than many expect. For a start, there is no enthusiasm out there for a Conservative victory. Not so long back, I read in Private Eye a report from the wedding of former Sun editor and rising News International star Rebekah Brooks (nee Wade) where Shadow Chancellor George Osbourne declared 'It's just like '97!', referring to when Tony Blair became PM. To which comment former Indie editor Simon Kelner replied 'Yes, but there is a difference- nobody likes you.' If you look at the opinion polls the Cons are barely in the 40s, while in the run-up to 97, Labour was often getting over 50%. Maybe it will be enough, but some commentators have expressed their doubts. As Splintered Sunrise has argued, 'Call Me Dave' gets away with a lot, which Gordon Brown does not, as he is an ex-Carlton TV PR flak (one described by erstwhile Sun Business Editor Ian King as a 'poisonous slippery individual' and a 'smarmy bully who regularly threatened journalists who dared to write anything negative about Carlton- which was nearly all the time.' (The Sun 5/12/05 , cited in Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson Fantasy Island, p.73) and the Media Class love looking after one of their own. If the next General Election is not the Cameroonie mudslide the opinion polls currently suggest, the inabilty of most London-based media to see beyond their noses may be one reason why it will be treated as a shock.



In addition, I think the Government may perform rather better than currently expected if it was to borrow Stanley Baldwin's slogan from the 1929 General Election: 'Safety First.' (This somewhat suggests that the really big economic apocalypse is a few years down the line yet!) Let's be honest: that is how John Major slid home in '92, despite fighting a General Election in the midst of economic recession- fear of something worse. There is something else which makes Neil Kinnock's situation in 92 similar to how David Cameron's situation will be in 2010. That is, both are leading parties that have lost 3 consecutive General Elections. Both after the third defeat faced economic boom times and both saw the only real way of winning the next General Election was by adapting to economic boom times on the assumption that they would continue, although only an economic downturn, casting doubt on the Government's economic competence, gave them a real glimmer of hope. Kinnock had his Policy Review, which embraced the Exchange Rate Mechanism as an anti-inflationary measure. Then Thatcher's Economic Miracle petered out, she got Britain to join the ERM (great patriot as she was) and was replaced as Tory Leader by her Chancellor. Kinnock's New Model Labour Party (as was the phrase then) was confronted with economic recession but was saddled with a deflationary economic strategy based on the assumption of boom times. The rest is history. The Cameroonies thought the Blair/Brown boom would last for ever, and embraced greenery, 'quality of life', wind turbines on roofs etc to try and convince the public or at least media types that they were the true 'heirs to Blair.' Then the Great Boom turned out to be more fart than hurricane and the Cameroonies were left stuggling. They may get away with it- after all Labour supported ERM membership and they were not punished politically when Norman 'Green Shoots' Lamont had to oversee our withdrawal (I don't know what it's like elsewhere but in Britain the expression 'green shoots' is associated with Norman Lamont, who in the 90s was like a 'right-wing' version of the SWP- if you wanted to discredit a policy or cause, you got Norman to endorse it). I can definitely see with economic bad times still a distinct possibility Cameron getting some political fall-guys on board - hello power-hungry Lib Dems and NuLab types. I can see George Osbourne being accompanied on begging bowl trips to Brussels, Beijing and Bombay (ok it's Mumbai, but let's keep the alliteration going here- and it was renamed Mumbai by a Hitler fan!) by Lord Mandy and Vince Campbell (who could be the next Chancellor, despite not being as nice as some think).



Although we have managed thus far to avoid armed police outside every bank, no-one knows how the economic situation will pan out. Whatever the politicians' spin on the matter,the public spending cuts all three main parties are promising after the General Election will be painful, with unknown social and political consequences. There has been a constant drone throughout the Blair/Brown years from Corporate Boot Lickers in the Media and Political Classes about the need for wholesale 'reform' and 'modernisation' of the public sector. (The wonderful thing about this is that you can never 'modernise' or 'reform' enough...one chases constant, moving targets). The Droners agree that it is purely electoral considerations which has prevented 'reform'. In other words, if you want public sector 'reform' you have to ignore the 'public'. Get a Government that has no fear of the public voting it out (massive Commons majority + Purnell's 'GOAT: Government Of All Talents'- without much talent, a cynic might say) and the 'reforms' can go ahead.

On that uplifting note, I will leave you. I've got a copy of one of those books always cited, but hard to get, to read: Alec Nove's 1983 Economics of Feasible Socialism. I need inspiration- I really do!

2011: "Come Back Gordon, All Is Forgiven"?

Just some thoughts on politics both here and abroad at the moment…



One wonders how long the Labour Party can carry on without an attempt to bring down Gordon Brown. I think the only thing stopping a coup d’etat against him is the knowledge that once a new leader has been elected a General Election will have to be called soon after. Another Labour leader without any electoral legitimacy with the public would make a potential electoral wipeout even worse. If I was a betting person I think GB will stay on until the end of the year. Then he will be ousted (the only thing I can see saving him is a major national crisis in the next few months), followed by a leadership contest. The new leader (almost certainly a NuLab Bugger-All In A Suit) will achieve another “dead cat bounce” in the polls, before a General Election is called for May or June next year (same time as the local elections or the European elections). I imagine the Labour slogan would be something similar to Stanley Baldwin’s Tory slogan for the 1929 General Election: “Safety First”.

Whenever it comes, I think the Conservatives will be the largest party. If GB stays I think it will be a handsome Tory win. If he goes…maybe not. I think that, faced with a Con win, enough erstwhile Labour supporters will come out to stop it being a landslide. However, I think the Labour Party will be out of power a long time. What makes it worse than previous ejections from office is that the grass roots of the party are in a state of terminal decline. Also there is no ideological force that could unite or inspire party members. Since the collapse of the Alternative Economic Strategy and the retreat of the Labour Left in the 1980s, there has been nothing really on offer but managing Thatcherism with a smile. As I’m sure I’ve said before, publications by centre-left pressure groups such as Compass and Catalyst are frankly yawn inducing, which can inspire no one. If, as Harold Wilson said, the Labour Party is a crusade or it is nothing, then I think it will be nothing after the next General Election.




I can see some, if not all, of the Conservative readers of my blog (I have a few!) rubbing their hands at the thought of David Cameron re-establishing their hegemony over British politics after the next General Election. However, I would caution them, particularly if they are EU-critical. As is pretty well known, the Cameroonies have modelled their plan for winning the next General Election on how Tony Blair transformed the Labour Party in the mid-1990s. Due to the massive majority Labour achieved in 1997, one part of the NuLab game plan was not implemented. To quote from The Survivor: Tony Blair in Peace and War (2005, Aurum, p.171) by Francis Beckett & David Hencke:

“The Liberal Democrats were to join the new Labour government- even if it had a majority of up to fifty seats.”

“The most extraordinary decision taken by Blair was to reserve two cabinet seats for the Liberal Democrats in advance of the 1997 election campaign.”


Only at the weekend before the 1997 General Election, when it was clear that Labour would get a majority in excess of fifty, was the plan abandoned (ibid, p.173).

So if the weekend after the next General Election David Cameron announces that Nick Clegg is the new Foreign Secretary, you read it here first…!



I would say the EU is the issue that Cameron needs the Lib Dems onside. He is, after all, the man who complained about people “banging on” about the EU and called UKIP members "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists". The Lib Dems are leading members of the Far Centre’s “My EU right or wrong” brigade, as their opposition to any British referendum on the Lisbon Treaty this year made clear. My own opinion is that Cameron will also reach out to the ultra-Blairite wing of NuLab in a “Government of All The Talents” [sic!]. After all, there are a fair few careerist chancers amongst Labour MPs who have no loyalty to the Labour Party and would, if offered a position (again!) in Government, have no qualms about jumping over to the Conservatives. Not least, if the Government is led by a man who claims to be “The Heir to Blair”. (A billboard poster of DC next to that caption would probably the best way for Labour to prevent a Tory landslide at the next General Election…!)

Returning to the Lib Dems, the way things are going they appear to be returning to the days of the “National Liberals”, whose political existence was dependent on the Conservatives not standing against them for Parliament, and which almost merged with the Tories in the early 1950s. The decision to oppose a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty appeared to have cost them votes in the London Elections, not least in their electoral strongholds. Furthermore, in Camden, where I live, the Greens pushed the Lib Dems into fourth place in 11 of the borough’s 18 wards, although sharing power with the Tories on the council doesn’t seemed to have helped.

In fact, Nick Clegg seems set on committing a form of political hara-kiri, as this article from the Western Daily News suggests:

Fighting Tories not a priority - Clegg
Western Daily News 02-August-2008

LIBERAL Democrat leader Nick Clegg has stunned party members in the Westcountry by announcing that fighting the Tories is no longer a priority.

Amid plummeting poll ratings for Gordon Brown, Mr Clegg said he would focus on unseating Labour MPs at the next General Election.

More money will be spent on the seats where the Lib-Dems are “taking on Labour,” he said.

But the move will come at the expense of battles with the Conservatives who are the Lib-Dems' main rivals across Devon, Cornwall and Somerset.

One Lib-Dem MP said he felt he had been “cut loose” while other senior figures warned that the party faced “wipe-out” at the hands of a resurgent Tory party.

Several said Mr Clegg should be concentrating on “consolidating” the 63 MPs he has at present instead of opening up a new battlefront with Labour. “I wish he had told me first,” said one Lib-Dem MP faced with a close battle against the Conservatives.
Current opinion polls suggest David Cameron's Conservatives could sweep the board in the South West, unseating almost all Lib-Dems without the most substantial majorities. Mr Clegg recently insisted the party was performing well in the region but his move to focus on Labour seats in the South East and the North of England left some activists feeling he had given up on the Westcountry.

The party released a list of 50 target seats it hopes to win – and not one is the Westcountry, traditionally seen as Lib-Dem heartland.

Mr Clegg insists he is directing resources away from fighting the Tories because the turmoil engulfing the Government is a “huge opportunity”. In a summer podcast for the Lib-Dem website, Mr Clegg said Labour was “tearing itself apart”, and he had “never seen anything like it”.

Labour had proved it could not deliver help with spiralling energy bills or run public services effectively, according to Mr Clegg.

“It's over for them,” he insisted. “There is no point voting Labour any more. There are no safe Labour seats. They will lose every by-election they fight in this parliament. And at the next General Election, they will lose in their heartlands to the Liberal Democrats.

“A Labour vote is now a wasted vote. This is a huge opportunity for us. We've got to seize it. So I'm shifting our resources to put more campaigners and more effort into those seats where we're taking on Labour.

Mr Clegg said the Lib-Dems would launch a fundraising drive in the autumn specifically to bring in cash for fighting Labour.

But the move was greeted with dismay in the Westcountry where activists had been hoping Mr Clegg would “take the fight” to the Tories.

It also risks reigniting speculation that in the event of a hung parliament Mr Clegg would be more sympathetic to a pact with the Conservatives.

The prospect of seeing financial help and campaigning muscle diverted from the region – once seen as the home turf for the Lib-Dems under Paddy Ashdown's leadership – provoked fears that Mr Clegg had given up trying to beat the Tories.

Senior Westcountry Lib-Dems in the privately fear they are “facing wipe-out”.
“We are going to be squeezed out again and again,” said one.

“I just think people from North Cornwall to Plymouth will be thinking 'what are we playing at?'”

In short, it appears the Lib Dems are planning to be junior partners to the Cons after the next General Election. However, there is plenty of time to go until the big day yet…

Well, if we are not getting a vote on the Lisbon Treaty, the Irish appear to be having one again, after failing to give the EU the right answer the first time around. Frankly, I think the whole thing stinks- if Ireland had voted “Yes”, an EU-wide putsch would have taken place without any more ado. No wonder less and less people vote any more…



What riles me almost as much is the way that the US Presidential Elections are covered here, compared to the near silence about the lack of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. If I hear one more pundit saying “why we don’t have primaries like the Americans? Isn’t it great how they care about their democratic process?” I will scream! I don’t want to get all Euro-centric about this, but more people this side of the pond vote than they do in our ex-colony. (bit below the belt there, but…) To quote Andrew Stephen, in an excellent piece on NuLab’s infatuation with the USA:

“voter turnout is much higher in Europe than here; in Britain it averaged 76 per cent between 1960 and 1995. In the 2004 US presidential elections voter turnout was 59 per cent, and plunged to 29.7 per cent in the 2006 midterms; maybe as many as a third of all Americans do not even bother to register to vote at all.”

As for Obama, he’s another “Heir of Blair”…

Finally, I’m glad tensions have gone down a little over Iran. However, I fear there are enough war-mongers in Iran, Israel and the US who want a war, and will try by all means possible to start one. Perhaps they should settle it by a Bush v Ahmadinejad drinking contest…

What England Means To Me

The Battle of Hastings, October 13th 1066: A bad day at the office for England.


It's up there in its full glory in cyberspace at What England Means To Me.

Here's what I said:

I think of myself as an old-style English Radical in my politics, somewhere on the Left. I see the English people, whatever their origins, as having struggled for centuries to reverse the effects of the “Norman Yoke”. When I was about eight, living in a Labour-voting (or, more accurately, Tory-hating) household in the West Midlands, I remember learning at school about the Roman and Viking invasions of England and how they left eventually. Then when learning about the Normans, the obvious question to me was “when did the Normans leave?” I never got a decent answer at the time. As I got older the obvious answer was “never”, but l knew from the callous destruction of much of the West Midlands’ industrial base under the Thatcher regime that we were a nation of lions led by donkeys. When I was 19 I came across the Levellers in the English Civil Wars and their idea of the “Norman Yoke” which deprived the “free-born” Anglo-Saxons of their liberties after 1066. Ever since, I have basically held onto the idea that England is still under the thrall of a much-modified “Norman Yoke”. The faces and names may change (and if your ancestors came over in 1066 I don’t hold you personally responsible for anything!) but “the Thing”, to quote William Cobbett, has persisted for centuries. Its “golden thread”, to coin a phrase, runs from the “Harrying of the North”, Magna Carta (a baron’s carve-up), the Glorious Revolution (a banker’s coup d’etat) all the way up to New Labour’s paeans to “New Britishness”.

Why does anyone on the Left have hang-ups about the idea of being English? It sure beats the idea of Britishness. For about two decades I’ve thought the whole concept of Britishness (for which my spellchecker suggests “Brutishness”) as an idea whose time has gone. The only question is how we give the United Kingdom a decent burial. However, too many on the Left hold onto the idea of Britishness, fearing Englishness. However, how on Earth can holding onto the ideology of a big business dominated imperial state, which is in its death throes, be progressive? There is simply no “Britishness”, new or otherwise, that political progressives can subscribe to and be true to their ideals. It is a concept too weighed down by the gap between its democratic, enlightened rhetoric and the sordid reality that the British state has presided over for centuries.

Instead the Left should embrace English Radicalism, which inspired thinkers and movements such as the Levellers, Tom Paine, William Cobbett, the Chartists, the mutualist and co-operative movements, William Morris, the pre-1914 syndicalists and Guild Socialists such as GDH Cole. It was driven underground politically by the triumph of “top-down” socialism, in both its Fabian and Leninist forms, after 1918. Now that global “top-down” models of organising society, whether by states or corporations, are under attack from decentralising, democratic tendencies, it is time for the English Left to embrace a national identity that accords with the spirit of the age.

It also means we need a national identity that draws upon one of the most abused phrases in modern politics: “Little Englander”. The original “Little Englanders” were patriotic radicals who were opposed to the Empire building that underlay Britain’s participation in the 1899-1902 Boer War. Our nation can only be at ease with itself when we abandon imperial adventures, whether our own or on behalf of the USA or EU, and realise that our real gifts to the world are our language, our culture and our sense of humour, none of which the Normans gave us! (“Taking the piss” is something that William the Conqueror, Oliver Cromwell, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair would never appreciate!). We should become a country where, to quote Orwell, we “hate to see England either humiliated or humiliating anyone else.”

Biographical note: I was born in Walsall in the Black Country two weeks before the end of 1969. My mother was also born in the Black Country. My father was born in County Sligo. He came over in 1948 at the age of six after his dad served in the British Army during WW2 (and was to again in Korea in the early 1950s). However, I think of myself as English rather than British, and have done for 30 odd years.

Little

Is New Labour Finished?

I still think we will have a hung Parliament next time around (and another prediction is that the next General Election will be held in June 2009, the same day as the European Elections) and the Cons will be the biggest party, though they will fall well short of an overall majority. I also think neither of the two main parties will get 40% of the vote. A coalition "National Government" pledged to "reform" & "modernisation" will take over.

However, such a "National Government" will see its main challenges as being based around questions of identity. That is, the threat to the UK from Scottish (and Welsh...and English) Nationalism; opposition to greater EU integration; and divisions along ethnic, religious and racial lines.

In the meantime...one wonders how New Labour will get out of this one. The best commentary piece I've seen so far is this:

Another fiasco, but Brown is forever a sucker for business: The funding scandal has a familiar reek for a party infatuated with finance at the expense of the ethos of public service
Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, Wednesday November 28, 2007

For the Tories it is sex, for Labour it is money. Financial scandal sticks to the latter like political napalm. From formula one to ministerial mortgages, privatisation contracts and cash-for-honours, the sign of a £50 note waving in the wind sends Labour politicians weak at the knees. Their only moral is don't get caught, yet they get caught all the time.

Last July a Tyneside jobbing builder, Ray Ruddick, and a secretary, Janet Kidd, were jointly seized by the urge to give £80,000 each to Gordon Brown. This startling summertime generosity was in addition to some £400,000 they had given since 2003. Along with two others, they had contributed a total of £600,000. "Mrs Kidd of Lindale Avenue, Whickham, Gateshead" was out-donated only by Lord Sainsbury and Mahmoud Khayami. No hair turned.

Walk into a high street bank with that amount of cash and men in dark suits will gather round and demand in no uncertain terms how you came by it, usually just before the arrival of the police. Walk into the Labour party and you get an invitation to dinner with the prime minister and talk of "a K or a big P". Murmur that you are "from Mr Big" and the general secretary hurries to the door. You whisper in his ear, he puts his finger to his nose and congratulates you on winning the pools. He of course will keep the good news to himself.

The whole thing is preposterous. Gordon Brown's explanation yesterday was like a Lord Gnome editorial in Private Eye. Not since the print unions signed on in Fleet Street as "Mickey Mouse" and "Lord Beaverbrook" has the system been taken for such a ride. Brown may have been rueful about a prime facie breach of election law, but he could not help hinting that the fault lay variously with Tony Blair, under whom these things "were going on for some time", and Sir Hayden Phillips, for not giving Labour more taxpayers' cash. He could add that Blair's fiendish Geordie allies have now cost him a general secretary and given him Northern Rock and the Inland Revenue fiasco, all inside 10 days.

Labour's third biggest donor of the year has turned out to be a David Abrahams, known to Durham planning officers as David Martin. He was selected to fight William Hague in the Yorkshire seat of Richmond but was deselected when his curriculum vitae, including a reference to a non-existent wife and son, proved less than authentic. Yet he was close enough to Blair to attend his farewell in Sedgefield earlier this year.

Abrahams has rightly threatened to sue anyone who links his donations with a controversial planning application by his Durham Green Developments for a business park in prime land off the A1. This was at first refused by Durham planners, then approved after intervention from Douglas Alexander's transport department. A second application is now under way. For those who suggest that owt is never done for nowt, Abrahams has gone to some lengths to ensure that the general public knows nothing of any link between his one hand and his other.

What is astonishing is that, with cash-for-favours going nuclear on all sides, Labour's finance department did not ascertain any risk that might lie behind the source of its largesse, especially when the general secretary, Peter Watt, must have given them at least a wink and a nod.

The truth is that New Labour has been a sucker for "business" from the moment in the early 1990s when Blair and Brown decided to curry favour with the City. Eager to seem business-friendly, Brown abandoned his pledge to reverse Thatcher's union legislation and privatisation. He decided never to raise income or business taxes, and bizarrely chose Geoffrey Robinson as his buddy. His only act of delegation, ever, was to the one profession he trusted, the financiers of the Bank of England.

The word business still mesmerises Brown. To most people the occupation is about making money. To Brown it is a mysterious priesthood of infinite competence. To build a school or hospital, run a prison or plan an urban renewal, you must pledge partnership with a "businessman". Private money is always good, public bad.

If business wants a new runway at Heathrow, Brown orders one. If business wants the planning regime collapsed, he will collapse it. If business worries over capital gains tax, it will be heard. Never was the maxim, what is good for General Motors is good for the nation, so enshrined in one man. Any theory that Brown is not a real Thatcherite is rubbish.

In Brown's Britain there is no longer a public service ethos, only a business ethos applied to public services. No longer do Presbyterians render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's. Everything goes to Caesar under a private finance initiative.

After a decade of getting their fingers burned by business links to politics, Brown and his colleagues should surely have been streetwise. Apparently not. Despite reforms requiring openness in donations in 1997, despite the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, and despite the trauma of cash-for-honours, nothing was learned.

As Brown thrashed about yesterday he decided there was no rescue from within. He showed the depths of his despair when, as if on his deathbed, he summoned a lawyer and a priest, Judge McCluskey and the former Bishop of Oxford, Lord Harries, hoping for the umpteenth time to "restore trust in the political process". They may save his party from the courts and his soul from damnation. But what do they know of business?

Brown has been woefully served by his infatuation with high finance. Men and women whose sole skill is the pursuit of money have been corralled into the public sector and given tasks way beyond their vocation. They have been honoured with jobs, gongs and contracts. Their money has been taken under the counter. Civil servants have been demeaned and demoralised, and public service has rotted in the process.

One outcome of this fiasco must be stamped out without delay. Brown implied yesterday that the taxpayer should buck up and rescue politicians from their own sins by giving them a thumping great subsidy. This is outrageous blackmail. The public should not give these people a penny, other than in direct and accountable local subscriptions and open donations. How can Brown claim to run the country when each week he fails the whelk-stall test?

simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk

Greg Palast also shows that some of the leading people in the saga have previous, to use police parlance...

Brown’s Fixer Explains How It’s Done: Jon Mendelsohn and the Secret Tape
Boasted £11 million donated by Tesco cut tax bill by £20 million
Greg Palast, November 29th, 2007

It was a stunning admission. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s crony explained to the U.S. businessman, in evil detail, exactly how the fix is done in Britain.

Unfortunately, for Jon Mendelsohn and his partners, the “businessman” was, in fact, an undercover reporter for The Observer of London.

Today, Brown’s foes are calling for Mendelsohn’s resignation as chief fundraiser of the Labour Party for his admitted knowledge of £630,000 ($1.2 million) in dodgy, possibly illegal, campaign contributions to Labour.

What’s odd here are the protestations of shock at the behavior of Mendelsohn, described in the Guardian as an “ethical” lobbyist. “Ethical” my arse.

It was exactly nine years ago that Mendelsohn and his lobby firm partners were caught trading cash for access. How this Mendelsohn character ended up heading Labour Party fundraising and how he obtained the sobriquet ‘ethical’ is the real shocker.

I know a few things about this Mendelsohn. The “businessman” with the hidden microphone was me. In June 1998, joined by my recorder and a real US businessman, Mark Swedlund, who designed my elaborate corporate front, I met Mr. Mendelsohn at his tony Soho London office. There Mendelsohn confirmed what was already on tape from his partners in the lobby firm he founded, LLM.

I explained my corporate needs: some environmental rules needed bending. I hinted I was with Enron. Mendelsohn’s partner Neil Lawson told my recorder that, if I paid LLM £5,000 to £20,000 per month, “We can go to anyone. We can go to Gordon Brown if we have to.” Brown was at the time Chancellor of the Exchequer. Could the lobbyist provide concrete examples of a fix?

Easily. Here is a short list of LLM claimed accomplishments:

- Inside information on then-Chancellor Gordon Brown’s budgets.
- Tax avoided by a supermarket chain following millions donated to a New Labour pet project.
- A pass on anti-trust action against client Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
- And for Gordon Brown, a favor that the Mendelsohn team expected to redeem.

Tesco Goes Tax-Free

LLM, which stands for the founders Lucas, Neil Lawson and Mendelsohn, were about to derail Brown’s plan for a tax on car parks (”parking lots” as we say in the States). This would cost Tesco, the supermarket chain, an LLM client, £20 million annually. LLM was holding secret meetings that week in June 1998 with Tony Blair’s Downing Street Policy Unit to get Tesco exempted from the proposed tax.

The tax threat went away after LLM advised Tesco to drop £11 million into funding for Blair’s odd Millennium Dome project.

[To my US readers: The Dome is a gargantuan tent costing $100 million - no kidding.]

“This government likes to do deals,” Lucas told me.

But this deal was complex, Mendelsohn said, not so simple as cash paid for a tax break. “Tony is very anxious to be seen as ‘green’,” Mendelsohn explained to me and my confederate. “Everything has to be couched in environmental language - even if it’s slightly Orwellian.” So LLM devised a set of cockamamie gimmicks for Tesco, like offering bus services to the elderly, which would paint the retailer green.

It worked. Tesco was spared the tax - though the company denies categorically that its cash dumped into the Dome bought any favors.

Message for Murdoch

The year of my paper’s original investigation (dubbed, “Lobbygate”), anti-trust authorities were looking into Rupert Murdoch’s companies’ alleged predatory pricing practices. LLM carried the word from Downing Street, according to Lucas, that, if Murdoch’s tabloids toned down criticism of new antitrust legislation, the law’s final language would reflect the government’s appreciation. On the other hand, harsh coverage in Murdoch’s papers could provoke problems for the media group in Parliament’s union-recognition bill.

The message to muzzle journalists was not, said Lucas, “an easy one in their culture” - journalists being a trying lot. However, the outcome pleased LLM clientele.

A Peek at the Budget

It also happened that on one of the days I recorded Mendelsohn’s partners, they boasted of informing an LLM client about details of Gordon Brown’s budget plans before the Chancellor’s announcement went public.

A lobbyist competing for my “business,” when asked to match the offer of inside information and deal-making held out by LLM and another New Labour firm said, “It’s appalling. It’s disturbing,” and added that he would refuse to match LLM’s services at any price.

If LLM appeared favored by Brown’s operation, Brown himself received favors from LLM. “Gordon Brown asked us to have our client KPMG [the consultancy] host a breakfast for him where it was pre-arranged that they would praise him for his prudent budgets.” Brown basked in this Potemkin praise-fest - a favor that would be returned with special access (for my own clients, if I paid the retainer).

Whether Mendelsohn, Lawson and Lucas actually pulled off all they claimed, I can’t say. Though just kids in their twenties, LLM had garnered millions in revenue, a lot of loot if for mere advice. No one seriously investigated; no one asked uncomfortable questions of Mr. Brown, Mr. Blair or the man at the center of several of these supposed “deals,” Mr. Peter Mandelson, now an EU Commissioner.

However, that Mendelsohn made these tawdry claims (or grinned at me while his partner made them), and that they were published on page one of every newspaper in the realm - part of an LLM tape broadcast on BBC’s Newsnight - one would think that the perspicacious Mr. Brown would have avoided Mendelsohn like the plague.

But the PM embraced Mr. Let’s-Make-A-Deal. The reason was made clear to me by Mendelsohn himself, a man as brainy as he is cynical and wealthy. Those many years ago, at the dawn of the Blair regime, Mendelsohn handed me a confidential manifesto he’d penned for LLM clients only. It was a map of the soul of New Labour.

Here was a chilling combination of Mendelsohn, Mandelson and Nietzsche. “AN OLD WORLD IS DISAPPEARING AND A NEW ONE EMERGING,” he announced in upper case. In the “Passing World” were “ideology” and “conviction” - which would now be replaced by “Pragmatism” and “Consumption.” “Buying” would replace “Belief.”

And ultimately, in this Brave New Labour World, style was all: “WHAT YOU DO,” wrote Mendelsohn, was passé, replaced by, “HOW YOU DO IT.”

So why demand Mendelsohn’s head now? Gordon Brown is a prudent man whom, I suspect, reads a newspaper or two - and knew exactly whom he had positioned to fill his party’s coin sacks. Mendelsohn is just a gun for hire, a forgettable factotum. I wouldn’t place the blame on the hired gun, but on the man whose finger is on the trigger.

The series “Lobbygate: Cash for Access” was originally published by The Observer (UK) in July 1998 by Greg Palast and Antony Barnett. For a complete history of the scandal, read, “Blair and the Sale of Britain” in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin/Constable & Robinson 2004).

My own feeling is that although quite a few Labour MPs would willingly join a National Government, careerists as they are, the Labour Party itself will not survive being out of office. I've read stuff by "think-tanks" like the Fabians, Compass and Catalyst. None of it is very inspiring, coming across as happy-clappy managerialism at best. Not the sort of stuff to make one fight on the barricades, or even write out a cheque for...

Another Kevin Carson book review

In fact two reviews, of books by Sean Gabb and Chris Dillow. Both are scorching critiques, from heterodox "Right" and "Left" positions, of New Labour.

Two Book Reviews: New Labour and Managerialism in British Politics, Monday, November 05, 2007

Sean Gabb. Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back (London: The Hampden Press, 2007). 105 pp.

Chris Dillow. The End of Politics: New Labour and the folly of managerialism (Hampshire, UK: Harriman House, 2007).

These two books, seemingly from divergent ideological perspectives, are both critiques of managerialism in British politics--and perhaps not so divergent after all.

Sean Gabb, successor to the late Chris Tame as Director of the Libertarian Alliance, is very much a man of the Right: a composite of Burkean and Little Englander, roughly equivalent to the Old Right or paleolibertarians on this side of the Atlantic. In his critique of managerialism and the corporate state, however, he has much to say about globalization and corporate rule, among many other things, that left-libertarians will find of benefit.

Chris Dillow, a heterodox economist who owns Stumbling and Mumbling blog, attacks managerialism from a position decidedly on the Left. But it's a Left that's friendly to markets, decentralism, and self-management, and hostile to the New Class version of bureaucratic socialism that dominated Britain from the Webbs to Harold Wilson.


* * *


1. The chief villain in Gabb's book is the managerial New Class and the rentier capitalists whose main source of profit is their association with the corporate state:

It is clear that our ruling class--or that loose coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, educators, and media and business people who derive wealth and power and status from an enlarged and active state--wants an end of liberal democracy. [p. 6]

Elected politicians never have the running of a country all to themselves. While undoubtedly important, they must in all cases govern with the advice and consent of a wider community of the powerful. There are the civil servants. There are the public sector educators. There are the semi-autonomous agencies funded by the tax payers. There are journalists and other communicators. There are certain formally private media and entertainment and legal and professional and business interests that also obtain power, status and income from the policies of government. Together, these form a web of individuals and institutions that is sometimes called the Establishment, though I prefer... to call it the ruling class. [p. 8]

Gabb's ruling class, like the mass base of Orwell's Ingsoc party, was "brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government."

The new Britain he finds so objectionable was essentially described by Anthony Burgess some forty years before. Indeed I find the absence of any reference to Burgess somewhat remarkable. Tony Blair's Britain, with its near-total supercession of common law protections by administrative courts, and with the social pathologies symbolized by the ubiquity of yobs, happy-slappers and ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders), under the watchful eye of the public surveillance camera, could have leapt from the pages of A Clockwork Orange or 1985. Burgess's Britain, terrorized by hoodlums like Alex and his droogs, in which "everyone not a child or with child must work," and where the Minister of the Interior sought to empty the prisons of common prisons because they'd "soon be needing them for the politicals"--is it really such a stretch of the imagination, these days?

The instruments by which the New Class is imposing this "new settlement" on Britain are the replacement of common law due process, civil liberties, and parliamentary government by the unaccountable rule of administrative bodies, and the use of multiculturalism as an ideology to divide, conquer, and reshape society.

Gabb sees the old institutional basis of liberal democracy being eviscerated by the New Class:

...structures of accountability that emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries are to be deactivated. Their forms will continue. There will be assemblies at Westminster. But these will not be sovereign assemblies with the formal authority of life and death over us all. That authority will have been passed to various unelected and transnational agencies. And so far as the Westminster assemblies will remain important, our votes will have little effect on what they enact. [p. 6]

I can find much to disagree with in Gabb's view of cultural (or rather multicultural) matters. For example, in principle I would view the shift in orientation of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich that he describes, from a celebration of Empire and naval supremacy to a focus on slavery and "history from the position of the colonised," [p. 10] as a good thing. I consider insititutional racism in police forces, and the casual expression within police circles of racist attitudes toward the subject populations over which they are have been given near-unlimited power to coerce, in a much more alarming light than Gabb apparently does. In a country where the names Cory Maye and Katherine Johnson have recently figured in the news, where every week brings another story of someone murdered in a botched no-knock raid, or of someone being tasered to death for "resisting arrest" (who turned out to have been in a diabetic coma)--I can understand the reasons for rooting out such attitudes among our "protectors and servers" root and branch. I confess little sympathy for a uniformed beast of prey (or "filth," in the apt terminology of some across the Pond) who expressed approval for the murder of black suspects in police custody, and who joked about burying a "Paki bastard" under a railway line,-- regardless of how badly his life was "ruined" by exposure. [pp. 11-12] Although Gabb suggests the public reaction was "excessive" and expressed some doubt as to whether such views would affect their performance of public duties, [p. 12] given the background of police abuses in my own country I tend to think cops with absolute and unaccountable power are quite prone to act on such views, and that the public reaction isn't severe enough.

But the remarkable fact is not our disagreement on cultural matters, but that I concur with so much of his analysis of the effect of "political correctness" and multiculturalism as ruling class ideologies. Like Gabb, I see official multiculturalism in the hands of the New Class and its state agencies as an instrument of division and control, serving a ruling class that prefers a population without the cohesion to resist.

The ruling class seeks "the establishment of absolute and unaccountable power," to be achieved in part by coercion, but even more by the "reshaping of our thoughts." The significance of multiculturalism is not so much its objective content, or the often harmful and wrongheaded content of the older habits of thought it seeks to replace. It is the attitude of uncertainty and deference it seeks to create among the ruled: constant uncertainty and anxiety lest they be using a word ("crippled" or "handicapped" rather than "differently-abled," "black" rather than "African-American," "Indian" rather than "Native American") that has been superceded by the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary, and deference to the class of social engineers who decide the currently acceptable terminology. And the terminology is deliberately changed frequently enough to maintain this constant free-floating sense of anxiety and dependence.

As dangerous as virulently racist views may be when held by the lawless thugs whose "gang colors" are police uniforms, the nature of the ideas being stamped out is purely incidental for the social engineers; their real purpose could be served just as well by identifying any widely held belief, no matter its substantive content, as a "thoughtcrime" to be policed by themselves. And the assumption of such state power is even more dangerous when exercised against private citizens--as when plainclothes police agents visited Chinese and Indian restaurants to monitor the patrons for ethnic slurs against the staff. [p. 13] Criminalizing the expression of racist views by private citizens, no matter how abhorrent--it should go without saying for any libertarian--endangers the liberties of everyone else.

The ruling class's motivation in ideologically renovating museums and such is not to replace a worse with a better understanding of an objective truth, but to "weaken their ties with the past, or... to make them into vehicles for contemporary propaganda." [p. 10]

Every autonomous institution, every set of historical associations, every pattern of loyalty that cannot be co-opted and controlled--these must be destroyed or neuralized. [p. 25]

Their agenda, in rooting out and punishing private expressions of racist thought, is to seize on the abhorrence that many understandably feel for such views as a vehicle for putting power into the hands of a class of social engineers.

If borders and customs and other artificial barriers to the free movement of people are a bad thing, then so is the artificial mobility promoted by Empire and by subsidized global capitalism. The result, as described by Gabb, is to render impossible a recurrence of the liberal uprisings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries , "by promoting movements of peolles so that nations in the old sense disappear, and are replaced by patchworks of nationalities more suspicious of each other than of any ruling class." [p. 6]

Stripped of the Left's older preoccupations with economics and class, likewise, multiculturalism can be of immense service to the cartelized private sector in policing its wage-serfs and cubicle-drones. For one thing, the added inefficiency and overhead costs of an internal PC regime, as Gabb observes, are cartelized: that is, they apply equally to all large corporations and are therefore not a matter for competition between firms. [p. 48] For another, the postmodern, multicultural corporate culture described by Thomas Frank in One Market Under God is much closer to the worldview of David Brooks' "Bobos" who predominate in managerial ranks. In the U.S., for the managerialists and professionals who constitute the base of the Democratic Party, stagnant wages, downsizing, and all the other economic aspects of the new global economy are perfectly fine--so long as the people in the boardrooms who do the exploiting "look like America." Forty years ago in The Greening of America, Charles Reich depicted a hippie chic utopia in which the centralized, hierarchical power structures of the state and corporation were largely unaltered--but staffed by people with bell-bottoms and beads. What mattered was not the existence of concentrations of power, but that the people in power "had their heads in the right place, man." That "utopia" is, in essence, now a reality. Most importantly, in an age of increasing worker disgruntlement over stagnant pay and increased workloads, an internal PC regime serves admirably to promote resentment and divisions and reduce solidarity among workers, and provide trumped-up grounds for disciplining troublemakers.

A central part of Gabb's analytical toolkit is the work of Frankfurt School and neo-Marxist scholars on "ideological hegemony." Although he denies the applicability of their analysis to "liberal democracy," he sees it as well-suited to the ideological project of the new ruling class.

I should say, in passing, that I take issue with Gabb on the relevance of neo-Marxist thought to the old, "liberal" order. He denied the existence of any real "hegemonic discourse" under the old liberal regime, arguing rather that political leaders tended to legitimize their positions in terms of a value system which arose spontaneously from civil society and which they accepted as given. [p. 20] Likewise, he considers the Chomsky/Herman "propaganda model" of the media to have been inapplicable to liberal democracy. [pp. 31-32]

I think he is mistaken on this count. For one thing, the question of whether "liberal democracy" even existed in any meaningful sense is a very real one. The old liberal democracy was dominated by privileged capitalist and landed elites whose economic position resulted, not from the workings of a market, but from the state. And the old "spontaneous" ideological climate reflected, to a large extent, their interests. For another, the New Class and its ideology are nearly as old as corporate capitalism, and its managerialist world-view (eg. scientific management) has been incorporated into the service of the plutocracy since the corporate revolution first required a class of "professional" overseers. The New Class and managerialism, and the protective and nurturing state, have been integral parts of corporate capitalism since its beginning; and if we identify the full flowering of liberal democracy with the electoral reforms of 1833 and 1867 (let alone 1911), then liberal democracy was hardly even fairly begun and the Old Regime fairly ended, before the beginnings of state capitalism. Genuine "liberal democracy" was largely limited to a thin sliver of thought by Ricardian radicals like Hodgskin, assorted Cobdenites, etc., sandwiched in-between the Old Regime and state capitalism, which was quickly relegated to a few radical free market strands (the individualist anarchists, Georgists, Nock and Borsodi, etc.) fighting a rear-guard action within state capitalism.

And in more general terms, hegemonic ideology is coextensive with, and as old as, class society. As an individualist anarchist, I consider class power and economic exploitation the primary functions of the state; and just as there has never been a genuine free market, free from economic exploitation by state-privileged classes, there has never been a society without a hegemonic ideology serving such privileged classes. Hegemonic ideology, I should add, does not require any conscious, conspiratorial design--it is a largely automatic result of a society's normal tendency to reproduce the conditions for its own continued existence.

I also suspect Gabb's treatment of neo-Marxism as the ideology of the new ruling class is overblown. There may be something to his tracing of their political style to the New Left fashions of their formative years; Gabb cites Boyd Tonkin to the effect that while Nulab has abandoned most of the economic content of Marxism and social democracy, their "pattern-building, system-seeking cast of thought" persists. [p. 22] But stripped of their economic and political substance, the signficance of their style itself is tenuous at best (as also with explanations of the neoconservative "style" in terms of their alleged Trotskyite origins).

As an analytical tool for describing the ideological functions of the ruling class, as opposed to the content of their ideology, neo-Marxist concepts may however be quite useful.

And while I disagree with Gabb on the question of whether a hegemonic ideology existed under "liberalism" and the Old Regime, I do agree that it was much more feasible to argue against the hegemonic ideology from an independent base. The average person of the late twentieth century was far more conditioned by his televised matrix reality, than the average member of the working class by the hegemonic ideology of the nineteenth century. The very extent to which Marxism and assorted brands of anarchism spread among the working classes demonstrates as much. Contrast, for example, Thomas Franks' Kansas before WWI, to the same region in recent years. It was surely even more prone to Bible-thumping and Jesus-shouting at the turn of the twentieth century as it is now--and yet it was one of the prime constituencies for the Wobblies and Gene Debs, and home to a vibrant and independent working class press. Today, on the other hand, the populist resentment of the area is channeled by Rove's talking points and AM talk radio against a range of targets carefully selected by the ruling class. The turning point was probably the liquidation of the genuine socialist, working class, and economic populist movements during the reign of terror under St. Woodrow and A. Mitchell Palmer. We may finally be witnessing today, with the rise of the Internet and network culture as an alternative to the gatekeepers of the corporate media, the weak beginnings of a resurgence of something like the pre-WWI independent popular culture.

Gabb's revolutionary agenda deserves a great deal of attention. He rejects any gradualist program of scaling back one institution at a time. Such a strategy, he says, would just result in a pitched battle over each institution, with the anti-state coalition quickly losing its political capital to a war of attrition. The only hope is to gamble everything on electoral success and then to act quickly and decisively, in the brief window of opportunity, to dismantle as much of the ruling class' institutional base as possible, so that it cannot be quickly reconstituted if power once again changes hands. That means completely abolishing institutions like the BBC, and completely dismantling the administrative apparatus and records of the regulatory state ("An hour in front of a shredding machine can ruin the work of 20 years."), and--while leaving the state schools intact--completely abolishing teacher training colleges. [pp. 54-56, 60]

I am skeptical as to the prospects for any such all-at-once seizure of power, as opposed to gradually rolling back the state and supplanting it with alternative organizations (as per both the agorist agenda of building a counter-economy, and the Wobbly strategy of "building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old"). But I agree that, revolutionary or gradualist, the goal of any libertarian movement should be, not to control the state and other centralized institutions, but to dismantle them. I am very much a believer in Michels' Iron Law of Oligarchy. Genuine democratic control of centralized, hierarchical institutions is impossible. Our only hope for real democracy is to destroy as much of the infrastructure of the centralized state and corporate economy as possible, and replace them with loose political federations of local direct democracies and with a free market of competing worker cooperatives.

Along these last lines, interestingly, Gabb proposes something of an entente with the libertarian left.

...there are many anarchists and syndicalists and libertarian socialists who do not believe in this extended state. And so I will make it clear that when I talk about a free market, I do not mean a legal framework within which giant corporations are able to squeeze their suppliers, shut down their small competitors and socialize their workers into human sheep.

I have already said I would not defend the landed interests. I would very strongly favor an attack on the structures of corporate capitalism

Organisations like Tesco, British Pretroleum and ICI are not free market entities. They are joint stock limited liability cororations. The Company Acts allow them to incorporate so that their directors and shareholders can evade their natural responsibilities in contract and tort. They are, for this reason, privileged in law....

It is not true that big business has in any sense suffered from the public interventions in economic activity of the past hundred years. The truth is that big business has benefited from, and in many cases, promoted every agenda of big government. Employment protection laws, product safety laws, curbs on advertising and promotion, heavy taxes, and all the rest--these have served to insulate big business from their smaller competition, or have cartelized or externalized costs, thereby reducing the need for competition between big business....

The leaders of large corporations are nothing more than the economic wing of the ruling class. They provide taxes and outright bribes that enrich the political wing. They act as part of the ideological state apparatus.... In return for all this, they receive various kinds of protection and subsidy that allow them to make large profits.

They police their workers... Workers find themselves gently conscripted into large organisations that strip them of autonomy and suppress any actual desire for self-direction. Anyone who works for any length of time in one of these big corporations tends to become just another "human resource"--all his important life decisions made for him by others, and insensibly encouraged into political and cultural passivity. [pp. 63-65]

His description of the likely fate of the state-affiliated "private sector" corporate economy, after the revolution, is positively eloquent:

Our first big attack on the present ruling class should destroy most of the really dangerous government bodies, and the formally private bodies that now cluster round them would perish like tapeworms in a dead rat. [p. 61]

The tapeworm is to be killed through the elimination of all subsidies and protections, and above all the elimination of limited liability.

We should promote the emergence of markets in which the majority of players are sole traders and partnerships and worker cooperatives, and in which the number of people employed on contracts of permanent service is an ever-dwindling minority.... [This policy] would replace armies of ruling class serfs with beneficiaries of our counter-revolution. [pp. 65-66]

The welfare state he advises to leave pretty much alone for the near term. In so doing, the revolution would deprive the ruling class of its chief potential ally for an attempted counter-revolution. And, he points out, the main actual cost of the welfare state is the administrative overhead from supporting intrusive and authoritarian welfare bureaucrats in a comfortable lifestyle. As a first reform, he proposes eliminating the entire apparatus of case workers and redirecting the entire welfare budget to a guaranteed annual income. [pp. 57-59] Ultimately, it could be drastically scaled back as increased working class prosperity and a resurgence of voluntary mutual aid arrangements made it unnecessary. [p. 63]

His tax agenda--eliminating the income tax and VAT, and replacing them with a tax on land-value--should be pleasing to the Geolibertarian contingent of the libertarian left. [pp. 62-63]

In the legal realm, Gabb proposes dismantling as much as possible of the administrative state and its prerogative law procedures. In the restored common law, all regulations of vice and private behavior are to be eliminated, while making penalties for real crimes against person and property sufficient to deter. For the latter crimes, however, a maximalist reading of all common law due process guarantees is to be restored:


the right to silence under police questioning, the full right of habeas corpus, the full presumption of innocence, the full right of peremptory challenge of jurors, the rules against similar fact and hearsay evidence, the unanimity rule in jury trials, and all else that has been taken away. [p. 68]


* * *


2. The central focus of Dillow's critique of New Labour is managerialism. By that, he says,

...I mean an ideology which tries to eliminate political debate about the rival merits of competing ideals. In its stead, managerialism relies on a central elite which believes that it, and it alone, has the skill and know-how to devise policies to cope with the inexorable forces of economic change.... In short, New Labour believes it can run a country in the same way that executives run a business. [pp. 11-12]

...Managerialists like to pretend that we face big challenges in a fast-moving environment. They invite us to believe that they alone are equipped to address such challenges (in managerialism, problems are never solved, only addressed). And they like to present policies as necessary responses to external events--just as company bosses present mass redundancies as inevitable measures over which they have little choice. [p. 14]

The irony is that New Labour managerialists, for all their proclaimed technocratic competency, are so ham-handed in their "solutions" to the pressing needs of the changing economy. "Information technologies are transforming our lives," goes the Nulab slogan. "Fair enough," replies Dillow. But he points out that the organizational paradigm of the new economy is the substitution of networks for hierarchy, while the Blairite "solution" is even more hierarchy. [p. 16] An interesting point of comparison is Bill Gates, the fountain of so much superficially libertarian rhetoric about new economies and flattening hierarchies, but whose practical agenda focuses almost entirely on the use of state power to protect corporate hierarchies from the destabilizing effects of the new economy: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Vista Genuine Advantage, the recurring threat of infringement action against Linux distributers. Blair and Gates, faced with a technological and economic revolution against hierarchical institutions, attempt to domesticate the revolution and render it amenable to the control of hierarchical institutions.

This is especially disappointing, given Blair's Christian socialist roots and his early affinity for quasi-distributist ideas. The Cooperative Party, in an almost touching exercise in denial, have long persisted in celebrating their ties to Blair and Brown; until recently Blair's visage leered down from the banner of their website.

But despite occasional lip service to "a redistribution of power that offers people real control over the decisions that affect our lives" (Gordon Brown), New Labourites never consider any cooperative challenge to corporate hierarchy.

New Labour likes to claim that it is "pro-business." The significance of this is that one rarely hears that it is "pro-market."

The distinction is important. Markets are tumultuous, unpredictable and uncontrollable processes, which often make fools of the most esteemed expert.... Businesses, however, are hierarchical bureaucracies and their leaders are often more like senior civil servants than buccaneering entrepreneurs.

New Labour's preference for business over markets shows its managerialist bias--because to any managerialist, businesses, with their mission statements and their illusions of control, are much more congenial than the disruptive anarchic forces of the market. [p. 19]

Dillow, in denouncing New Labour managerialism, does not fall into the common pattern of considering its economic agenda a neoliberal departure from the older Fabian socialism.

We might observe, in passing, that almost from their first Fabian and Crolyite beginnings, New Class advocates of a mixed economy in the Anglophone world have been in fact the hired help of the corporate plutocracy.

And as Dillow points out, Blair's agenda was very much in line with the anti-labor authoritarianism of the old Fabian movement. Blair's "work not welfare" was a logical outgrowth of the Beveridge Report's aim "to make and keep men fit for service." [p. 9] C.S. Lewis' depiction of authoritarian social engineering in That Hideous Strength was a fairly plausible extrapolation from the most proto-fascistic tendencies of H.G. Wells and the Webbs (with their forced labor camps and sterilization for the underclass), and from the New Statesman agenda of the late 1940s.

There is one issue on which I probably disagree with Dillow: the necessary tradeoff between efficiency and equality. Dillow takes issue with the New Labour theme that we can have both efficiency and equality. Although that position may well be spurious as it is meant by New Labour, I think it is in fact quite possible to have dramatic gains in both equality and efficiency compared to the present baseline, with no tradeoffs of any kind. The reason is that most of the present inequality in income bears no relation to differences in efficiency, but rather results from privilege and exploitation. If by "equality" one means eliminating incomes that derive from privilege, and by "efficiency" tying income to productivity, the two are necessarily connected.

I suspect the problem with New Labour's idea of reconciling the two lies with their conception of "efficiency": a Schumpeterian/Chandlerian/Galbraithian monstrosity of centralization, false economies of scale, and Weberian rationality. Accordingly, their recipe for "efficiency" assumes the existing corporate institutional structure will be left intact with all its assorted forms of privilege, and then "equality" is achieved by redistributive taxation and welfare to distribute some of the surplus accruing from such "efficiency." The New Labour approach is to leave the hierarchical corporate and state apparatus untouched, and then promote both "equality" and "efficiency" through top-down social engineering: carefully tailoring taxes, benefits, minimum wages, and other incentives to maximize output and achieve the ideal distribution of income.

....governments know how labour supply decisions respond to tax and benefit rates, so they can design a tax and benefit system that encourages people to work. They know how to set the minimum wage at a high enough level to raise incomes, but not so high as to destroy employers' willingness to employ peole. They know enough about what determines companies' capital spending decisions, so they can promote investment by striving for macroeconomic stability. And they know how to improve education, and how education affects earnings, so they can use better schooling to reduce wage inequality and promote economic growth by providing a bigger supply of skilled workers. [p. 21]

But in fact the present corporate system is pretty bad from the standpoint of efficiency. It starts from the assumption of enormous concentrations of wealth in a few hands, the absentee ownership of capital by large-scale investors, and a hired labor force with no property in the means of production it works. Necessarily, therefore, the absentee owners must resort to the expedient of hierarchy and top-down authority to elicit effort from a work force with no rational interest in maximizing its own productivity. Such hierarchies necessarily result in the divorce of effort from reward, and of productive knowledge from authority. Each rung of authority interferes in the efforts of those who know more about what they're doing, receives only information filtered from below based on what they want to hear, and is accountable only to those higher up the chain of command who are even more unaccountable and out of touch with reality.

The obvious solution, the worker cooperative, by uniting knowledge with authority and reward with effort, would slice through the overwhelming majority of the hierarchical corporation's knowledge and agency problems like a Gordian knot. The problem of socially engineering the wages and benefits system so as to "encourage people to work" would disappear; the elimination of privilege and unearned income, and the receipt by labor of its full product, would tie reward directly to effort.

But this solution is ruled out by the system's structural starting assumptions of concentrated wealth and absentee ownership. So the hierarchical corporation is adopted as a sort of Rube Goldberg expedient, the most rational means available given fundamentally irrational ends.

I say above that I probably disagree because Dillow's own agenda, presented at the end of the book, consists of the very sort of program of economic democracy that would be perfectly designed for the coincidence of efficiency and equality. He is an enthusisatic supporter, for example, of worker cooperatives and self-management. He is also very big on the idea of the government introducing cooperative, decentralist and democratic principles into its own enterprises:

The salient fact about New labour is that it has done nothing whatever to equalize status within the organizations it runs. The civil service is as inegalitarian--lethally so--as it was in 1997. And there's been no effort to convert schools and hospitals into more egalitarianly managed structures. The state is far more hierarchical--far more opposed to the concept of equal status--than any investment bank. [p. 215]

Indeed, one of the planks in his agenda is titled "Turn schools and hospitals into cooperatives."

His case against hierarchy and for self-management is bolstered by extended arguments toward the end of the book. In Chapter 13, "The Rituals of Reason," he examines at length the fallacies and biases to which management is prone, in overestimating its own competence and underestimating the intractability of problems.

One might raise the question of whether managers are really unique in this respect; are not workers, also, prone to such conceptual biases? The answer, I think, is that (of course) everyone is prone to logical fallacies and conceptual biases. But their tendency to distort thought increases the more a decision-maker is separated from direct knowledge of a problem, and the more concrete practical knowledge is replaced by abstract considerations. The closer a decision-maker is to the subject of his decision, and the more it involves matters of familiar technique or personal experience, the more competent his decisions. A skilled laborer on the shop floor is apt to be the best judge of organizing production, or of handling the organizational problems involved in coordinating the activity of skilled workers like himself in his own work unit. If his work unit is a small factory producing for a local market, made up of people largely known to the work force, and with retail outlets that have maintained relations with the factory for an extended period of time, he and his coworkers are apt to be the best judges of the levels output required by the market and the product innovations likely to be demanded.

Dillow's critique of hierarchy, as a source of irrationality and knowledge distortion, is very Hayekian.

When the first factories were established by Richard Arkwright and James Watt, it made sense for them to control production with an iron hand, because they knew the production processes inside out--they had invented them...

Today management doesn't have this know-how. Products, process and markets are too complex for anyone to know as thoroughly as Arkwright or Watt did....

Instead, knowledge of the production process is scattered across the organisation. If you have a problem, it is often better solved by asking your fellow workers than asking the boss.

However, hierarchies can obstruct co-operation between workers. One reason for this is simply that pyramidal reporting lines often prevent workers from knowing and therefore using the skill of their colleagues. Another reason is that communication requires trust.... Worse still, the benefits of co-operation are often impossible to quantify, and so a management obsessed with budgets and targets does not encourage it. And the knowledge that such gains will flow to managers, rather than themselves, will inhibit workers from co-operating fully. [p. 278]

The hierarchical, authoritarian corporation is especially ill-suited to knowledge work, and other forms of production in which human capital is the most important factor.

It might make sense to give the order "be here by nine o'clock." But it's just gibberish to say, "be creative."

In an authoritarian environment, workers prefer (in the words of Kenneth Cloke and Joan Goldsmith) to "suppress their innate capacity to solve problems and wait instead for commands from above." [p. 279]

Dillow observes that excessively large government works contrary to the goal of income equality. The reason is that, when state expenditures eat up a large enough portion of the GDP, it becomes impossible to fund them by taxing the rich alone. A society in which the state consumes 50% or more of GDP will, of necessity, have a high tax burden on the middle class. [p. 69]

He is quite hostile to New Labour's social engineering approach to taxation. Rather than a complex, administration-intensive program of carefully targeted tax credits and cuts, it would make far more sense to institute a citizen's basic income which requires little administrative bureaucracy. [p. 85] In the American context, I have long cursed the lack of an alternative to the mainstream Democratic and Republican approaches to tax cuts. The Republicans, predictably, are wedded to the idea of "across the board" tax cuts that go overwhelmingly to the plutocracy. Democrats, as one might expect of such nanny statish social engineers, prefer carefully targeted tax credits for child rearing, health insurance, higher education, home energy efficiency, etc. The obvious alternative to both, as progressive as it would be libertarian, would be to simply raise the standard exemption to $30,000 or so.

The great size of political units, and the removal of the administration of welfare as a question for local self-government, has nullified the natural tendency toward mutual aid shown by humans in communities small enough for direct personal acquaintance with the disabled or unemployed. As a result, the working class tends to resent the underclass and to be vulnerable to anti-welfare demagogy by right-wing politicians. [p. 219] A decentralized society of small, self-governing population units might well contribute voluntarily to mutual aid arrangements on a scale sufficient to render taxation unnecessary (especially if laborers received a larger portion of their actual product).

In the process of writing his book, Dillow manages to attack many of the platitudes of establishment economists and neoliberal chatterers like Tom Friedman. For example, he points out that the natural tendency of technical change is to reduce the international division of labor. The increasing speed with which technology crosses national borders means that particular nations maintain comparative advantage for shorter and shorter periods. "that tends to limit the international division of labour and, with it, world trade growth." [p. 45] And as I recall someone else suggesting, a great deal of "comparative advantage" is the artificial result of "intellectual property" [sic] laws.

He is merciless in attacking the New Labour love affair with education as the solution to poverty (likewise beloved of social engineers in this country, both liberal and neocon). The real benefit of education, from the perspective of the corporate economy, is its function in signalling a "good attitude": educated workers have "a high marginal utility of income, a propensity for hard work, ...and an ability to identify with managers rather than workers."

If education works by changing our characters, and by straightening the crooked timper of humanity into something useful to bosses, prosperity is achieved by sacrificing liberty and diversity to managerialism. [p. 119]

What's more, as the impolitic Joe Bageant argued, the social engineering panacea of education depends on a fallacy of composition. While individuals can increase their chances of advancement by education, the entire population cannot do so. The Empire requires some 25% or so of the population to fill supervisory, administrative and technical slots. Increasing higher education beyond this share of the total population simply increases the competition for those slots and drives down salaries, while inspiring an authoritarian, dog-eat-dog attitude on the part of the winners toward the losers. It inspires, that is, the same status anxiety that motivated so much of the German lower middle class to support Hitler.