Don’t sweat the small stuff (2019)

From the March 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

We’ve been hearing a lot about traditional politics being ‘broken’. There is deep dissatisfaction and disillusionment with all political parties, with their failed promises, their increasingly transparent dishonesty, the personal ambition of their representatives, and their idiotic circus of privileged shouting matches in the Palace of Westminster. But beneath the surface, our discontent is really a frustration at the social system itself, and its perpetual inability to deliver genuine comfort and security for all, regardless of which party has its hands on the wheel.

This is an era of profound social crisis, both culturally and economically. We are witnessing new levels of corruption, decadence and mendacity in public life. Decades of intelligent discourse and positive social evolution seem to be unravelling in front of our eyes. Frustration with the way things are is leading to a new surge in irrationality and abuse. The past year has seen a dramatic increase in the number of violent racist attacks in the USA, Britain and throughout Europe. The gap between rich and poor widens, and the rich and powerful are succeeding in persuading large numbers of the impoverished to scapegoat those even poorer or more vulnerable, rather than focus on their actual exploiters.

More and more the issues facing us are global and deadly in their urgency. In that context, the petty squabbles within the British Labour and Conservative parties are irrelevant and absurd in their self-importance and pomposity. There is an increasing risk of major and possibly nuclear conflict, which could kill millions. Even though Britain is one of the world’s most developed states, the figures for poverty are chronic and worsening. Confidence in the democratic process is plummeting to new lows. There is evidence of the French gilet jaunes, who started by protesting against fuel price rises, now being partly hijacked by expressions of anti-semitism, whilst groups of political thugs in Britain have also donned high-vis tunics in a crude, confused and blunt protest against the so-called ‘liberal elite’.

The social problems which have vexed us throughout modern history could have been solved long ago, by a radical and imaginative change in the basis of society, but true radicalism has at each turn been dismissed, as much by the Left as by conservatives, in the name of ‘realism’ and reasonable expectations. We inhabit a social system of brutal capital accumulation and dehumanisation which can only get worse, and periodically implode as it is doing now. This could be a time for a great positive change, if we question and replace the underlying economic system – or for a plunge into the abyss, if once again we don’t.

Whilst Labour and Tory seem to be falling apart at the seams, the new groupings are essentially no better. There was a very telling moment when Kirsty Wark interviewed Anna Soubry for Newsnight about the new Independent Group. Wark pressed her on what they stood for and she had absolutely no answer. Eventually, she actually paused and laughed patronisingly at Wark, pityingly saying: ‘You see, you’re still in the old way of doing things. This is something new!’ However, she then admitted that they had ‘no policies’ yet. Pushed again, she said they ‘believe in sound economic policies, and a sound economy’. So, that’s clear, then! That moment when she tried to reverse roles and criticise the reporter questioning her was similar to what Trump does, attacking reporters for asking the right questions, turning the question back on them, switching roles in order to avoid scrutiny.

Within three hours of being formed, one of the Independent Group, Angela Smith MP, referred to ‘people of a funny tinge’ in the context of saying that discrimination against minority ethnic groups was not just about colour, and had to apologise for her offensive phrase.

On a much more positive note, February saw the beginnings of a new global movement for change from school students, with strikes and protests about the lack of action on climate change. Inspired by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who protests every Friday outside her country’s parliament, the British action (Youth Strike 4 Climate) was swiftly condemned by Theresa May and others as ‘wasting time’! – wanting to avert global catastrophe is clearly sneered at by these dinosaurs of political depravity. These advocates of a rotten and murderous system, who would herald a new dark age if we let them, should be held in utter contempt.

There is one thing which ties all of this together, and overshadows the petty, parochial politics of Britain, Brexit, Labour, Tory, Independent Group and all of the other intellectual pygmies bleating to sell us into slavery on the altar of the profits of a few. The uniting thread running through all of these crises, of climate change, militarism and war, insecurity, racism, violence and political cynicism is the unspoken, open secret of ownership and control. On this, Karl Marx was spot on, and the clarity of his observations is even now becoming more and more compelling. Capitalism is still the social system which exists throughout the world and its effects get worse every day that it staggers on. Wealth concentration is now even more extreme than it was in his day, increasing the already extreme social power of a tiny and largely anonymous elite, which cuts across every country and culture.

Such an absurd system can only continue to cultivate support and acceptance by persuading us to see a world divided into rival states, cultures and religions rather than realise that the absolutely fundamental divide, between the billionaire class and the rest, between capital and labour, in fact cuts across such cultural contrasts and is blind to them. British billionaires like James Dyson and James Ratcliffe of Ineos (Britain’s richest man) supported Brexit, but have recently both moved their headquarters and assets away from Britain in order to protect their value. This simple point is often missed. For example, why do so many industries, businesses, and governments resist the need to reduce carbon emissions? Because they believe that to do so might cut into certain profit flows. Because we inhabit a system which depends, regardless even of the greed or kindness of individual investors, on maximising profits.

To resolve the climate change crisis will absolutely necessitate ending the economic system of minority ownership and of profit. Likewise, wars are fought between rival groups of those who own and control the planet’s resources. More than 99 percent of us have no real stake in any country. We are already ‘the dispossessed’. All of our problems in society will be solved by dispossessing the tiny but all-powerful global minority, and replacing private and/or state ownership of the world and all its resources with a new and thoroughly democratic system of common ownership, democratic control and production not for profit, but instead purely to meet needs.

Clifford Slapper

Cameron’s Selections (2017)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Driven out by Brexit from 10 Downing Street and then from the Tory benches in Parliament David Cameron will be written into history through his talent for composing a welter of vacuous, discreditable phrases which did nothing to avert his decline. An early example of this was his assurance that with him in charge there would be ‘no more Punch and Judy politics’. No more performances in the House of Commons when his reluctance to deal appropriately with some genuine problems of the people – the workers, the children, the voters – outside served only to provoke the Tory hooligan benches into a storm of bellows and false laughter designed to blank out all discussion. In 2010 there was his trumpeted conviction that ‘. . . if you trust people and give them more power and control over their lives, they become stronger, and society becomes stronger too, and I believe profoundly that we are all in this together’. Those final six words were to be repeatedly quoted as evidence of his enduring duplicity.  There was not even a hint that he feared his government would be bitterly remembered for repressive, impoverishing measures such as the Bedroom Tax as the cause of so many desperately homeless people. Or the maliciously sprouting figures of those who need their local Food Bank to sustain them. And the degradation of JAM –  the masses who, conforming to all the demands of the  politicians, are compelled to exist on the basis of Just About Managing – in other words through the charity of  Next To Nothing.

A List

The Conservatives won the 2015 election, in the process wiping out the Coalition Lib Dems, through gaining a majority of seats which encouraged Cameron, as only the second Prime Minister to have increased their majority while in power (triumphantly, the first example was of course Thatcher) to proclaim that they were ‘…on the brink of something special’ – which in reality was a government of false claims and pledges. And among the forecasts of a frighteningly successful future for them was the strategy of building a refashioned party more in tune with this vision. This was the origin of the so-called A List, an idea which had been in discussion since Cameron became leader in 2005. A few months later a party committee set out to reduce the 500 hopeful candidates to between 100 and 150 on the assumption that this was the way to ensure a party which would be free of the prejudices which had hampered its prospects in the past.

Portillo

The response among party members was varied. There was approval from Michael Portillo, on the grounds that at the time the Tories did not have a lot to lose as ‘. . . much of the Parliamentary Party is reactionary and unattractive to voters’. But Portillo was once the ‘darling of the Right’, in the days when he was MP at first for Enfield Southgate and then Kensington and Chelsea and a well-fancied candidate for the Party leadership. After a series of frustrated ambitions he resigned from Parliament in 2005 and turned to an alternative type of entertainment by dressing in flashy trousers and presenting TV programmes mournfully quoting from Bradshaw’s Handbook of railway history. The other side of the debate was scathingly represented by Ann Widdecombe, another ex-MP (and in fact no less than a Minister of Prisons) who condemned the List as ‘an insult to women’ which was ‘storing up huge problems for the future’. But Widdecombe’s TV experience was rather different to Portillo’s because there was no chance of her influencing opinion by her few but wretchedly clumsy appearances as a contestant in Strictly Come Dancing.

Broxtowe

But there were enough hopefuls in the List to persuade Cameron that it had introduced some hope and fertility into the Party. Andrea Leadsom, Priti Patel and Amber Rudd are among those who wriggled their way onto the Front Bench although not all of them have been impressive enough to avoid the conclusion that their selection was more a matter of appeasing Cameron than impressing the voters. One of them has been Anna Soubry, who sits for Broxtowe in Nottinghamshire. This is a marginal seat, re-created in 1983 and held by the Tories until it swung to Labour in the Blair landslide of 1997. Soubry won it in 2010 by a majority of 389, which she increased in 2015 to 4287. She went through the process familiar to precariously elected A Listers in that she held a series of minor governmental posts until she chose to return to the Back Benches in July 2016, by which time she had done enough to justify the opinion of Sam Carr in the Independent that she had‘ . . . a record of unusually free speech’, among a few other embarrassments. During her original attempt at election, for Gedling in Nottingham in 2005, she declared herself to be ‘ashamed’ at living in that city because of what she perceived as its serious reputation for crime. During her early time as an MP she was embarrassed to be informed that she had employed a party member who campaigned for the return of slavery.

Farage

In the EU Referendum she came out as a firm supporter of the Remain side, which may have persuaded her to deal with Nigel Farage as an opponent who ‘ . . . looked like somebody has put their finger up his bottom and he really rather likes it’ – an assessment she later excused as a ‘light hearted comment’. Which could not have applied to her rather less colourful opinion of Alex Salmond whose participation in government was a prospect which provoked ‘absolute horror’ in her. (Salmond rated her as ‘demented’ and advised her to ‘behave yourself woman'). So there can be no surprise at the record of Soubry’s favourite causes. She supports the Trident submarine renewal; developing private treatment rather than the NHS; university tuition fees; the deployment of British Armed forces abroad in theatres of war such as Iraq and Afghanistan . . .  No doubt David Cameron was proud of originating the idea of the A List as evidence of his place in history as an enterprising and dynamic leader. But we have had enough of such conceits. It would be better if in such matters we began to work our way through the alphabet.

Ivan