The real state we’re in: a response to the iPaper’s jobs fair propaganda (2026)

From the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vicky Spratt’s glazing dispatch from the Youth Guarantee Jobs Fair at Boxpark Camden reads like a press release from the Department for Work and Pensions (In Camden, I saw the antidote to Gen Z’s endless job rejections). She describes a ‘buzzing’ event where recruiters from Arsenal Football Club to the NHS handed out chocolate bars and baseball caps to smiling young jobseekers. Secretary of State Pat McFadden who was also present waxes lyrical about ‘welfare reform’ that puts ‘work and opportunity at its heart’. It is, by her account, ‘the antidote to Gen Z’s endless job rejections’.

I was there too. And I saw something very different.

I am not a young person. I am in my late 40s, a former events manager who once worked across Europe (bringing revenue into the UK economy), until Brexit devastated the industry I loved. My case manager at the DWP, aware of my age and experience, sent me to this ‘youth’ jobs fair anyway. What I witnessed was not an antidote. It was a symptom.

The fiasco of the ‘Fair’

Let us begin with the basics of event management, a profession I practised for years before this government destroyed my livelihood. A jobs fair is, at minimum, a professional event requiring adequate space, accessibility, and basic dignity for attendees. Boxpark Camden, a street food market, offered none of these.

The DWP, symptomatic of its ‘The Thick Of It’ style corporate culture, decided to go cheap and secure the food hall’s grubby, rickety beer hall tables and bench seating on the second and third levels. There was no space to move. If you used a wheelchair, crutches, or had any mobility impairment, you could not have navigated the space at all. Access was via narrow staircases only. There were no accessible toilets. The noise was overwhelming, a cacophony that made conversation, let alone professional networking, nearly impossible. The food vendors I met weren’t very happy that their tables were occupied all day by companies (and consuming outside food) and the place packed with unemployed youth.

My case manager knows I have ASD and auditory processing difficulties so added a note on my file to say that a quiet space is required for my meetings. This environment was not merely unsuitable; it was actively hostile. I travelled over an hour and a half on two buses to reach it, despite my job coach’s insistence that the journey was shorter. DWP are notorious for this sort of support for disabled jobseekers: sending us to inaccessible, sensory-overloading spaces in the name of ‘opportunity’. I suppose my job coach has quotas to meet lest he end up back in the electronic dole queue behind me.

For a former event manager, the incompetence was staggering. The UK events industry, worth £68.7 billion in 2024, has been battered by Brexit with 82 percent of industry respondents reporting that leaving the EU negatively affected their business, and 67 percent experiencing significant or minor losses.

The damage is documented and severe. A Stanford study estimates that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6-8 percent, investment by 12-18 percent, and employment by 3-4 percent. The events sector saw losses of up to £1 million for individual companies. A major exhibition that drew 45,000 visitors annually moved from London to Barcelona. UK musicians have seen a 27 percent decline in small and medium-sized EU festival bookings, with 95 percent of affected artists experiencing decreased earnings.

The government’s own policies have helped hollow out a sector that once employed people like me. And yet when the DWP needs to organise an event, this is the best it can manage: a chaotic scramble in a food court which they probably got for free on a mid-week day in Camden.

Vicky Spratt writes warmly of hospitality roles ‘with training,’ care work, and paid experience on offer at this ramshackle event. What she does not interrogate is the quality of these jobs.

I spoke to the recruiters. Many of the ‘opportunities’ were barely really jobs at all, just the dregs of the labour market. Dishwashing in basement hotel kitchens. Zero-hour contracts in care. Jobs with such high turnover that employers attend fairs like this not out of social responsibility, but to factory farm disenfranchised young people and process them through. The symptom of an economy that has failed to provide meaningful work.

This is the ‘Youth Guarantee’ in practice: an £823 million scheme that offers employers £3,000 per hire, incentivising them to cycle through the cheapest possible labour rather than invest in genuine skills development. McFadden praises Marks & Spencer for creating 1,000 ‘training roles.’ He does not say what those roles pay, how long they last, or whether they lead anywhere. The structure of the scheme itself, paying employers to take on the long-term unemployed, creates a perverse incentive to treat young workers as subsidised, disposable inputs rather than human beings with futures.

Pat McFadden continues his spiel that ‘the narrative that says young people are shirkers and snowflakes … is wrong’. This is clever positioning. Rejecting the most overtly cruel rhetoric, he presents himself as the compassionate reformer and saviour. Actual policy direction reveals the same old coercion dressed in snake oil language.

McFadden describes hiring incentives and work experience placements as ‘welfare reform.’ He says the ‘best way into welfare reform’ is to ‘put work and opportunity at its heart’. This is not reform. This is the ideological enforcement of wage labour as the only legitimate form of existence.

But the Labour Party and the unions that founded it have always been occupied in trying to solve wages problems within capitalism, never questioning capitalism itself. The result? The problems multiply and become more complex and the armies of ‘solvers’ become larger and larger. There is not the slightest prospect that these people will solve the problems, because it is the very nature of wage-labour itself that causes the problems in the first place.

McFadden’s reform talks of cliff edges where people lose housing benefit if they enter work but his solution is not to question why housing should be contingent on employment at all. He speaks of ‘talking to people and working out how the government can help them to change their lives’ but the only change on offer is insertion into the labour market, on capital’s terms, at wages that do not cover the cost of living.

The right exam question, as McFadden puts it, is not how to assess what benefits people are entitled to. It is whether a system that forces millions to sell their labour power to survive while a tiny minority accumulates wealth from their subsequent labour is worth preserving at all.

Abolition of work

The young people Spratt interviews are not ‘snowflakes’. They are victims of a system that demands their labour while offering them precarity in return. Amina, the law graduate relying on Universal Credit who told the iPaper that ‘nobody replies’ to her applications, is not failing the labour market. The labour market is failing her. Brendan, who calls online applications a ‘black hole,’ is not lazy. He is alienated from a process that treats him as an input rather than a person.

The ‘black hole’ Brendan describes is not a glitch in the system. It is the system functioning as designed. Capitalism requires a reserve army of the unemployed applying for dozens, hundreds of jobs, hearing nothing back, to keep wages low and workers desperate. The DWP’s job fairs, with their chocolate bars and branded pens, are not an alternative to the black hole, they are it. To discipline the unemployed, making them visible, countable, and grateful for whatever scraps are offered

A genuine alternative would begin with the recognition that work as currently organised, serves capital not human need. What would society look like where housing, healthcare, education, or sustenance were not dependent on employment? Where the means of production were collectively owned and managed? Where the purpose of economic activity was the satisfaction of human needs rather than the accumulation of profit?

McFadden will never ask these questions. The Labour Party, committed to managing capitalism rather than transcending it, cannot ask them. But over a million young people classed as NEET, the highest figure since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, are to be herded through food courts and told that their problem is a lack of ‘opportunity’.

What Spratt won’t ask

Spratt’s article is not dishonest, but it is narrow. She does not ask why a jobs fair for young people was sending an experienced professional approaching her 40s to a youth event. She does not ask why the DWP chose a filthy Camden street food market over an accessible conference venue. She does not ask why the jobs on offer weren’t skilled careers but, overwhelmingly, low-wage, high-turnover positions where you’ll still be visiting food banks rather than skilled careers. She does not ask why a law graduate is on Universal Credit after six months of silence from employers. She does not ask why the ‘solution’ to youth unemployment is always more work, never less capitalism.

Spratt does not ask Pat McFadden whether the welfare system he oversees is designed to support people or to discipline them. Whether ‘work and opportunity at its heart’ is a promise or a threat.

In the end, McFadden’s ‘welfare reform’ is nothing more than an attempt to make wage-working seem more palatable, to dress coercion in the language of opportunity.

A.T.

Reforming UK politics? (2025)

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party has consistently questioned the efficacy of reform. Capitalise the word and it takes on a specific significance. Reform UK emerged as a political force of note by securing five parliamentary seats at the last general election.

The Green Party increased its representation in Parliament to four, which was impressive considering the difficulties posed by the first-past-the-post-system. Even more remarkable, though, was Reform’s performance. Considered along with its former incarnation as the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), its electoral progress is of interest. In the 2015 general election, one seat was won with an overall UK vote share of 12.6 percent. By the 2019 election, standing as the Brexit Party, its vote share had declined to around 2 percent, with no seats gained. This was the time of Boris Johnson’s Tory Party undertaking to ‘get Brexit done!’ The moment and purpose for UKIP/Brexit Party appeared to have passed.

Five years later though, emerging as Reform UK with a political platform expanded beyond just Brexit, came an apparent breakthrough. However, at 14.3 percent of the vote, the improvement on the 2015 performance was less than spectacular. The major factor was not so much the increased Reform vote, but the near collapse of Conservative Party support. In 2015 they took 36.8 percent of the vote, which increased to 43.6 percent in 2019. Five years on they were down to 23.7 percent. This seems to indicate many Conservative voters relocating with Reform, enabling the taking of seats previously denied them. The Tory right split and its largely extra-parliamentary pressure group was able to become in-house (of Commons).

A determining factor in Reform’s rise must be its leader, Nigel Farage. He had founded Reform UK, originally the Brexit Party, two years after he left UKIP following the Brexit referendum. He then effectively left Reform UK and concentrated his political activities around the Trump camp in America. Up to just a few weeks prior to the 2024 general election Reform UK was being led by Richard Tice. Initially Farage declined to advance himself as a candidate, undertaking to proselytise for the Tice campaign around the country.

Who owns Reform UK?

A sudden volte-face occurred when Farage claimed he had a sense of guilt about not stepping forwards and letting his supporters down. In short order, Tice was replaced as Reform UK leader by the apparently selfless Farage. Previously, Tice had been a member, and co-founder with Arron Banks, of the Brexit campaigning group Leave EU. This organisation distinguished itself in 2018 by being fined £70,000 for breaching electoral law during the referendum campaign.

Tice’s tenure as leader of Reform had been marred by fractious personal relations in the party. He had secured, in March 2024, the defection of a former Conservative Party deputy chair and MP for Ashfield, Lee Anderson. This was achieved despite Anderson, just a few months earlier, having referred to Tice as a ‘pound shop Nigel Farage’ who should ‘pipe down a little bit’ so as not to exacerbate tensions between Tories and Reform to the benefit of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

Tice’s response was to tell Sky News, ‘…we’re going to replace the Tories as the main alternative to Labour in those red wall seats.’ As the election turned out, the red wall seats the Johnson Tories took in 2019 largely returned to Labour. It was the Conservative Party that suffered loss of support in 2024.

The relative success of Reform under the renewed Farage leadership has also led to a reorganisation of the Party. Unusually, Reform UK was founded and owned by its leader, Farage, who initially established it as a private limited company in which he was the majority shareholder. Rarely, if ever, has a political party so blatantly reflected the capitalist system it is dedicated to serving. It was this that enabled Farage to simply take over the leadership again. As owner he didn’t require the democratic inconvenience of being voted into position by the membership.

Two months after the 2024 general election, at its Birmingham conference, Reform was informed by its leader that he intended giving up his shares, and thereby his personal ownership. For the first time since its inception, members would be able to vote on party matters. The party leader was, in future, to be elected and could subsequently be removed by a vote of no confidence. However, such a vote would only happen if 50 percent of the membership wrote to the chairman requesting one.

Alternatively, Reform MPs can trigger such a vote if 50 of them, or 50 percent, demand one. This only applies when there is a minimum of 100 MPs. The purpose behind this change is to attract a larger membership, although it does leave the leader in a strong, dominant position.

Companies House records show that Reform 2025 is now the shareholder, and that neither Farage nor Tice continue to hold shares. Reform UK has become a non-profit organisation limited by guarantee. Again, a reflection of capitalist structure is maintained.

Demagogic populism

Unsurprisingly, the policies of Reform, styled as a ‘contract with the people’ are, in many ways, largely indistinguishable from those of the other parliamentary parties, excepting differences of emphasis and nuance.

Policies include immigration and its control, increasing police numbers with more ‘bobbies on the beat’, cutting NHS waiting lists, reducing the tax burden and tweaking various taxes, freeing businesses from red tape, fast tracking brownfield development sites for housing, speeding up development of nuclear energy, increasing defence spending etc.

Education policies do give an insight into the political shading of Reform. They propose to scrap student loan interest (going for the youth vote?), ban teaching critical race theory and gender ideology, fine universities guilty of political bias or cancel culture, offer private school tax relief, re-introduce home economics, double pupil referral units, and make the school curriculum more ‘patriotic’.

There is a pervasive demagogic populism running through Reform UK. This is personified in Nigel Farage who does not typically appear as a fanatical ranter. Rather, his style is that of the plain speaker of common sense, appealing to the interests of various groups of voters.

There are business tax cuts for one section of the Tory-minded, VAT adjustments to deal with the cost of living, anti-woke messaging for the ‘you can’t say anything these days’ brigade and, of course immigration control. It’s pick-and-mix politics, a selection of flavours so nearly everyone’s taste is accommodated.

Underlying it all, as with the other parliamentary parties, is the broad if unacknowledged agreement not to challenge capitalism at all. That leaves the cause of the various concerns afflicting people free to operate as it does, as it must, driven by the absolute unquenchable thirst for profit. Production for profit and not for need would continue unhindered under a Reform administration.

The myriad problems people face in the UK, as around the world, cannot be solved by Reform or any other party committed to capitalism, the very system that is the source of the problems. Voting is important, but voting for another status-quo party, no matter how populist, will solve nothing.

Because the vote is valuable don’t give it away to a party making promises it can’t keep. Like any scam call ask the question, am I going to take what is offered on trust? Or should I take a considered, conscious decision to act in concert with others like me to achieve what will benefit us all?

Regressive mouthpiece

Reform UK has recently begun to show itself, for all its democratic claims, as a party where personal ambition and in-fighting are the order of the day. Rupert Lowe, just 8 months on from the general election, has had the Reform whip withdrawn. Also, the party has referred their MP to the police for threatening Zia Yusuf, the chair. There is also an internal investigation into possible staff bullying. Lowe has responded by appointing his own legal team. Perhaps of greater concern for Reform is that Lowe dominates Reform’s digital-first community with more than 300,000 followers on X. It may well be that Reform UK has had its moment in the political sun.

It is not possible to predict the future for Reform UK. It seems unlikely to garner enough support to amass a parliamentary majority. It may well have significant influence as the repository and mouthpiece of regressive, even xenophobic sectors of the electorate. Unfortunately, those sectors may, at present, constitute a rather greater number of voters than was once the case.

This indicates the importance of socialists continuing to challenge capitalism directly, and not to get drawn into specific concerns about Reform UK or any similar political group that might emerge in the future. Only when the majority of people come to embrace socialism and actively seek to abolish capitalism, will all the present parties, including Reform UK, become wholly irrelevant and disappear from the political sphere. This would be truly ‘reforming’ UK politics.

D. A.

Editorial: Labour, Tory, same old story (2023)

Editorial from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

The British regime which came to power on the back of Brexit is arguably one of the most corrupt, incompetent and invidious in recent British history. Since 2019 they, and the scam that was Brexit, have both failed abysmally to do anything except increase poverty and class division even more acutely. Brexit’s purpose was simply to remove certain limits on rapacious exploitation. Increasingly reflecting the Victorian capitalist fantasy of the Tufton Street ‘think tanks’ and of the ERG, this government has also proved repeatedly incompetent, stirring vast discontent and fury amongst much of the population.

But what is ‘His Majesty’s Opposition’ doing about this electoral own-goal scored by the Tories? The Labour Party also pursues nationalist populism, lowest common denominator politics, and is seeking power purely for the sake of power, regardless of which policies they have to adopt in order to attract ignorant and bigoted voters. They have long given up on engaging with what politics was about throughout most of modern history: persuading people to change their views, winning hearts and minds, engaging in genuine public debate about real ideas on how to run society.

This degeneration of the Labour Party from Keir Hardie’s radical, grass roots, pro-worker party of 1906 to Keir Starmer’s slick band of hypocrites and liars, desperately aping the Tories to garner votes, without a vestige of vision or principle, was always an inevitable process, in which these major parties would become increasingly indistinguishable. The reason it was always highly predictable is that, at their core, they stand for the same thing, and always have done – including the Corbynite version of the Labour Party, the Lib-Dems and the Green Party too. What they all stand for is running the capitalist system of society (even if they have different hopes for how they would like to try to make it run).

What all of these parties fail to fully grasp is that the social system of capitalism, which exists throughout the world today, is unmanageable in any way other than by maximising the profits which are its life-blood. That profit is extracted from working people of all kinds, and makes its way to those who own and control the productive resources. Power and wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

It is unfashionable to talk in terms of a ‘social system’ operating hermetically throughout the world, but it is very clearly a fact. From the Arctic to the Antarctic, human society functions in broadly the same (now outdated) way. All the key productive resources are owned and controlled by a tiny minority, who allow the production of useful products and services only on their terms: that to do so would add to their already vast wealth and power, through those products being sold on the market to realise a profit, a surplus beyond the actual costs. And the British Labour Party supports the retention of this irrational, exploitative and dangerous system whole-heartedly. So when Sir Keir Starmer recently publicly stated that Labour ‘are the real conservatives’ and promised to protect ‘our way of life’ it came as no surprise.

How contemptible it is for a so-called Opposition to watch this vicious and criminal regime spout the rhetoric of racism, crush the freedom to protest, and seek to reverse centuries of progress on democracy and trade unionism, but then to ask us to give them power instead…for them to do likewise! Labour, in effect, insists it will be at least as brutal in enforcing the warped priorities of capitalism as the Conservatives have been. Starmer fails signally to speak out properly against any of the miseries caused by the capitalist social system. A plague on both their houses!

The Chumocracy (2022)

Book Review from the September 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chums. By Simon Kuper. Profile Books. 2022. £16.99

Simon Kuper is a writer and columnist for the Financial Times, specifically the FT Weekend magazine. He was also the co-author of Soccernomics, which analysed the finances and tactics of modern football as they have emerged in western Europe in recent decades.

Kuper is an excellent writer, arguably one of the best, and while his politics is not ours, he is a provocateur who thinks seriously about current affairs and trends, always looking for unconventional angles to analyse familiar issues. And in Chums: How A Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, he has done it again.

For a start, 11 of the 15 post-war Prime Ministers (at the time of writing) went to Oxford. And five of these went to the very same school, Eton. In the 1980s and early 90s a group of politically minded students were at Oxford at similar times and Kuper – who was at Oxford himself then – has dissected their influence, political trajectory and growing power.

The incubating role of the Oxford Union debating society for toffs and aspiring toffs is paramount, the infamous and élite Bullingdon Club that Johnson, Cameron and Osborne were part of arguably less so, but Kuper chronicles it warts and all. His key insight is about Brexit, because in many ways it was at Oxford at this time that Brexit was conceived. Patrick Robertson, the founding secretary of the Bruges Group, was prominent at Oxford in this period, as was fellow Tory and later MEP Daniel Hannan, who set up a similar organisation of his own and was also to help Michael Spicer found a grouping of anti-EU MPs that became the European Research Group. Alongside these came Dr Alan Sked’s Anti-Federalist League, the forerunner of UKIP – and hence an entire Brexit ecosystem was formed.

The later role of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove in Brexit has been well documented and Kuper does not spare them:

‘Brexit was the sort of grand cause that Johnson and Gove had lacked all their political careers. It would give them a chance to live in interesting times, as their ancestors had… It would be a gloriously romantic act, like the Charge of the Light Brigade, only with less personal risk. The Oxford Tories would reclaim parliamentary sovereignty, the birthright of their caste, from the Brussels intruders. In private, they understood that Brexit might not work out brilliantly, but Britain had no natural predators and would survive even a blunder’ (p.160).

Whatever we may think of the Brexit/Remain debate and its ultimate futility, Kuper spots trends that others have missed here. Fascinatingly, there is a close alignment between the subjects that Oxford politicos studied and their subsequent position on the issue. Of the prominent Remainers that were at Oxford nearly all studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) – Cameron, Hunt, Hammond, Hancock, Truss, etc as well as the Milibands, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper and in an earlier period, Mandelson. Yet as Kuper explains:

‘By contrast, all the leading Tory Brexiteers studied backward-looking subjects: classics for Johnson, history for Rees-Mogg and Hannan, and ancient and modern history for Cummings. Gove’s degree was English, which mostly meant the canon’ (p.40)

The overwhelming sense here is of a group of privileged Tory students who thought of themselves as rule-makers not rule-takers, and who were looking for the next grand project once Thatcherism was complete, and one that could hopefully restore their birthright and entitlements. That they succeeded as much as they did is a remarkable testament to the UK’s enduring class system and its networks into business and the press. But as they say, all political careers ultimately end in failure – and this cohort of political careerists has clearly been no exception.

Dave Perrin

The Passing Political Show: Vacancy for a Caretaker (2022)

 

From the August 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vacancy for a Caretaker 

So Boris Johnson was finally forced to resign. Luck ran out for this ‘likeable rogue’ who was twice elected Mayor of Labour-dominated London, who delivered Brexit for the dodgy financiers who funded the Vote Leave campaign, and who won over dozens of Labour strongholds in the North and the Midlands to the Tories. In the end his lying, his attempts to protect his cronies in trouble, his partying while the rest of us were locked down, turned him into a ‘despicable rogue’ – and an electoral liability for the Tories, which of course is why most of his MPs turned on him.

What was it that attracted many members of the working class to this privileged (Eton and Bullingdon Club) member of the ruling class ?

As most members of the capitalist class were opposed to the UK leaving the EU, to win the referendum on UK membership he had to adopt a populist pose, presenting the campaign for Brexit as a struggle of ordinary people to take back control, not just from the Eurocrats of Brussels but also in opposition to the London-based British Establishment. With some jingoistic beating of drums and waving of flags, it worked. He successfully plotted to overthrow and replace Theresa May as Prime Minister, and fought and won the 2019 general election under the slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’. He appointed a Vote Leave cabinet rather than a traditional Tory one, and only got Brexit ‘done’ by signing a protocol on Northern Ireland that he had no intention of honouring and which may yet lead to a trade war with the EU.

His flagship policy was the populist one of ‘levelling up’ the standard of living of Brexit voters in the North and Midlands to that supposedly enjoyed by everyone in London and the South East but that was just the usual, worthless politician’s promise. When a shortage of HGV drivers developed, partly due to Brexit, and their wages rose, he said that a high-wage economy had been one of the aims of Brexit. When later, however, the rise in the cost of living led other workers to demand – and strike – to get higher wages, he opposed this. Just as any government of capitalism, including a Labour one, has to, because all governments have to accept that the capitalist system runs on profits and that profits therefore have to be given priority over wages.

This is why the personality – whether good or bad – of those presiding over the operation of capitalism doesn’t matter. No leader, even if they were a saint (which Johnson certainly isn’t) can make capitalism work for those obliged to work for wages. It is a profit-making system that can only run, and be run, in the interest of the profit-takers. It is this that limits what governments can do. When it comes to the way the economy works, governments are in office but not in power, they are caretakers for capitalism.

This is why workers shouldn’t place their trust in leaders, shouldn’t hand over their responsibility to act for themselves to others who promise to do something for them, as unfortunately most repeatedly do at election times. Leaders can’t do anything for us. It’s the system that must be changed, not those who make up the government. Johnson will be replaced by someone else but it won’t make any difference to our everyday life. Conventional politics is ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. It’s time we got together democratically, without leaders, to put an end to the class system with production for profit that is the cause of the problems we face and which the politicians falsely claim to be able to solve.

How irrelevant can you get?

In June Nicola Sturgeon announced that the devolved administration in Scotland was asking the UK Supreme Court if it would be legal for them to organise a referendum on Scottish independence in October 2023, nine years after the last one.

Since the SNP is not even pretending to propose a change in the economic basis of society, where the means of life are monopolised by a minority and used to make goods and provide services for sale with a view to profit, we can conclude that their case is that capitalism administered by a government in Edinburgh would be better than capitalism administered from London.

It is hard to imagine a proposition, made by a party with some degree of electoral support, that is so easy to refute. Since capitalism is the cause of the problems that wage-workers and their dependants face, the SNP’s proposed change to the political superstructure of society is not going to make any difference from a working class point of view. The problems faced by those obliged to sell their mental and physical energies for a living will continue under a separate Scottish state whose government will be no more able to solve them than the Westminster government has been.

It can’t even be argued that a separate Scottish state would enhance the limited political democracy that exists (and is desirable) under capitalism. Both Britain and Scotland are established constitutional democracies. It is not like a colony seeking independence. In colonies ruled from abroad the struggle for political independence was waged by a native capitalist class with a view to obtaining its own state. In Scotland there is no such class demanding this. The demand for an independent state is put forward just by some politicians and intellectuals. It is irrelevant even from a capitalist point of view.

The struggle to achieve a separate Scottish state only encourages nationalist illusions and prejudices, further dividing the working class. Even the campaign for a referendum, let alone a referendum campaign itself, has this divisive effect.

It is by no means certain that there will be a referendum. The law says that it can’t take place without the approval of the UK state. It is difficult to see how the Supreme Court could over-rule this. Maybe that is what the SNP is banking on. There has to be a British general election before 2024 and a refusal to give permission to hold a referendum could be a useful issue for the SNP to rally its voters.

If, somehow, the referendum does take place it remains to be seen if a majority will again vote to stay with the devil they know or take a leap in the dark. Socialists won’t be opting for either.

Making fans for Nigel? (2022)

Book Review from the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

One Party After Another. By Michael Crick. Simon & Schuster. 2022. £25

Ex-Newsnight journalist Michael Crick has something of a reputation as a hatchet-job specialist, though this book is more well-rounded than expected. It is helped by the fact that Crick is a good writer and so the book is an entertaining read, well-researched and salacious perhaps in equal measure. He portrays Nigel Farage as ‘the great disrupter’ and as the arch-UK populist of his time, and there can be little doubt about that aspect of Farage’s life.

Crick argues that Farage was like this from the outset, from his apparent teenage dalliance while at Dulwich College with the National Front, straight to his high-octane career as a City metals commodity trader (bypassing university, which never interested him). It was the decision in 1990 by the then Conservative government to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) that impelled Farage to take politics seriously – he had previously been a sometime member of the Tory Party but had also on one occasion voted Green.

Joining the Anti-Federalist League set up by Dr Alan Sked, he was eventually to take it over – pretty ruthlessly according to Crick – and turn it into what became UKIP. Crick does a good job of chronicling the turbulence at the centre of Farage’s life since (the multiple affairs, the serious drinking culture, the near-death experiences including the plane crash on election day in 2010) which has mirrored in some ways the turbulence of his political career. Hence the title One Party After Another – Farage has been UKIP leader and then resigned only to return so many times it is genuinely difficult to keep count, and of course then went on to form the Brexit Party and latterly Reform UK. He is portrayed as a veritable ‘force of nature’ who bizarrely couples a genuine talent for communication with a profound difficulty in working with other people.

His ultimate legacy is Brexit of course, though while Crick doesn’t underplay the role of Johnson, Gove, Cummings and their ilk in this, he does rather underplay the role of the tabloid press, who arguably enjoyed their last hurrah in promoting the greatest irrelevance ever purveyed to the British working class. And all with the help of arriviste businessmen and hedge fund managers who bankrolled the operation both before and after the 2016 referendum. Crick outlines how this campaign then paved the way for the 2019 General Election, the collapse of Labour’s ‘Red Wall’ and the eventual UK withdrawal from the EU. Crick says:

‘For a hundred years the Labour Party had depended on class loyalty. People voted Labour because they’d always voted Labour, and their families and friends all voted Labour too… In the 2016 referendum, Labour officially urged people to vote Remain, yet in hundreds of traditional working-class Labour seats, especially in the Midlands and the North, Labour supporters and trade unionists voted emphatically to leave the EU. The 2016 referendum burst the rising dam of resentment in such places that Labour no longer delivered for poor people like them with insecure, lowly paid jobs, and that under Blair, Miliband and Corbyn, Labour had become just another London party for wealthy middle-class types who’d gone to university’ (p.547).

In some ways, it’s difficult to disagree and Farage’s Brexit Party rubbed salt in this wound. But for what? Crick argues that part of Farage’s legacy is that it may be difficult for the Labour Party to ever form a government on its own again. But as people are now discovering with a likely pending recession (according to the Bank of England) and because Brexit has helped propel price rises to their greatest rate in decades, Brexit was just another illusion as a supposed solution to people’s problems. In fact, not only wasn’t it the answer, it wasn’t even asking the right question.

Farage was a key player in creating one of the biggest political apparitions of the last century and as time passes this is likely to become clearer. As a result, what seems like a career that had a massive impact now (Crick rates him as one of the five most significant political leaders of the last 50 years) might look rather differently when those voters in the Red Wall seats notice their lives haven’t actually changed for the better after all. Meanwhile, both UKIP and Reform UK have struggled to find a new purpose and given the political trajectories of both Northern Ireland and Scotland currently, it might not be too long before one of the greatest political ironies of all time emerges when UKIP has to rename itself ‘EWIP’.

Farage is currently marooned at GB News, which ever more seems to exist as being purely and simply his very own ‘news’ channel. Here he continues his rather repulsive dalliance with fellow egomaniac Donald Trump together with his campaign against men in little boats crossing the channel at great peril, effectively an unwanted latter-day Dunkirk without white faces. A man of the people until the end, clearly.

DAP

George Galloway: would-be Populist Leader (2021)

From the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the day the results of the recent Batley and Spen by-election were announced a Labour Party supporter responded to a comment about the meagre majority achieved. He was insistent that the 323-vote margin would have been 8,000+ higher had it not been for the appearance of George Galloway for the Workers Party of Britain.

From a purely psephological point of view the Galloway performance was remarkable for a representative of a small, leftish party. Nearly 22 percent of the vote secured a comfortable third place, a good 7,000 votes ahead of the Liberal Democrat, 5,000 or so behind the winner.

So perhaps the disgruntled Labour supporter had a point, except, of course, there is a large presumption involved. There is no way of determining whether an absence of Galloway and his new party would have resulted in in his 8,000 votes defaulting to Labour. Indeed, the experience of the previous by-election in Hartlepool suggests the Conservative candidate might have been a beneficiary too, especially given Galloway’s pro-Brexit stance.

There is a strong suggestion that Galloway profited from an alienated Muslim vote who may have perceived themselves as being tainted by Labour’s broad brush anti-Semitism accusations levelled at almost any anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian. It must be galling for a community more often the target of racism to feel themselves viewed as racists by the party they traditionally supported.

There is surely little doubt that the impressive vote was for Galloway personally rather than being an ideological breakthrough by the Workers Party of Britain. He has a background of championing anti-Zionism and favouring Islamic causes. There have even been suggestions that he converted from Roman Catholicism to Islam, although he has denied this.

The Workers Party of Britain appears to be a left-wing manifestation of that recent political phenomenon, populism. On its website the Party states it is a response to a need following the defeat of Corbynism. It believes:

• The importance of a planned economy directing the role of the state.
• Free-market fundamentalism has gutted British industry, castrated society and destabilised the working class.
• The state should guide economic life.
• The working class needs to be united on shared class interests to struggle for socialism.
• Countries that have tried to build the socialist new world include the USSR, China, Cuba et al.
• Brexit is a positive move to secure Britain’s independence to pursue fiscal and monetary policies and take key utilities and transport into public ownership.

There is ‘A ten-point programme for workers’ promoted on the Party’s website that sits easily with left-Labour aspirations. It has garnered the support of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), which situates itself in the tradition of Stalinism and Maoism. Indeed, Galloway’s deputy leader Joti Brar is from a family closely associated with the CPGB (ML). For the Workers Party of Britain the problem is free-market capitalism, the solution… state capitalism.

Galloway has been here before of course. In 2005 he did even better, winning the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency for Respect, a political grouping backed on that occasion by the Socialist Workers Party. A parting of the ways quickly followed and it would seem he has moved from the neo-Trotskyist camp to the neo-Stalinist one. Either way, the prospects for democracy would be dim should such a grouping ever succeed.

Is it a party at all, or a Galloway supporters’ club? It seems highly unlikely that some John or Joan Smith standing for the Workers Party of Britain in Batley and Spen would have garnered anything close to 8,000 votes and their performances elsewhere have been derisory.

Personality politics blurs the line between those who’d style themselves left or right wing. Thus George Galloway was quite sanguine about sharing a platform at a Brexit rally with Nigel Farage. The public moment being far more crucial than principles.

The charismatic leader, or a leader who thinks himself charismatic, becomes all important. A previous attempt to displace Labour as the party of the working class in Yorkshire was the now less than marginal Socialist Labour Party led by Arthur Scargill who tried to politically exploit the prominence he gained from the 1984/85 miners’ strike. Indeed, the CPGB (M-L) was a split from it.

What these parties have in common is being political cul-de-sacs. Setting aside implications of serious democratic deficit in its politics, should the Workers Party actually succeed in displacing the Labour Party nothing much would change for the working class.

With Galloway as prime minister implementing his 10-point plan the workers would still be working for wages that represent only a portion of the value their labour power creates. After all, ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ has successfully created numerous billionaires while the working masses most definitely do not have control of the means of production and distribution.

In other words, the Workers Party in power would replace capitalism with capitalism, and a less successful version of capitalism if some the models quoted on the Party’s website are anything to go by.

The Batley and Spen by-election is a demonstration that there are no answers to the problems created by capitalism for the working class in any of the parties on offer, major or minor, left wing or right wing.

Kim Leadbeater MP made the usual platitudinous vague promises to serve all the community, bring people together and further local interests. Had the Tory won he would have spouted an almost identical speech. Similarly, the LibDem. Galloway would undoubtedly have been more vocally belligerent, but it would have amounted to the same.

This is because community divisions, Brexit, economic decline and the plethora of other problems are rooted in capitalism. The dreadful murder of Kim Leadbeater’s sister Jo Cox, the then sitting MP, was an extreme example of politics under capitalism. It is a system wasteful of human lives that is immune to political point scoring.

The Labour Party supporter decrying George Galloway for undermining the Leadbeater vote remains politically blind, as presently all too many are. There are no short cuts, no inspired leaders, no previous models to draw on. Only a majority recognition of the need for a system of common ownership of economic means, moneyless and cooperative – socialism – can address those problems people have in common, even as they seem to be divided.

Until popular delusions can be effectively dispersed the people of Batley and Spen and everywhere else in the world will continue to labour for the pecuniary benefit of the capitalist few.

Dave Alton

Seeing Red (2022)

Book Review from the February 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Always Red. By Len McCluskey. OR Books. 2021.

McCluskey has always come across as the ultimate trade union bruiser and then, in later years, a close ally of Jeremy Corbyn. Originally a ‘planman’ on the Liverpool docks (drawing up plans of where cargoes from various ports would be held on ships), he rose through the ranks of the Transport and General Workers’ Union before playing a key role in the creation of Britain’s most powerful union, Unite – formed in 2007 from a merger of the T & G and Amicus. From 2010 until recently, he became its General Secretary.

The ‘red’ in the title refers not only to McCluskey’s politics – he was an early supporter of Militant, though says he was never a member – but also to his love of Liverpool FC, with which he appears to have travelled all over Europe. He also appears to have seen red many times in the more metaphorical sense during his union career and the book is full of score-settling. Former Labour Deputy Leader Tom Watson – who was McCluskey’s old flat mate – comes out of it particularly badly. And there is clearly no love lost with Keir Starmer either, who he accuses of duplicity.

One of the recurring issues in the book though is McCluskey’s belief that the working class are ready to rally behind a radical left-wing programme of nationalisation and state planning if it wasn’t for the right-wing of the Labour Party selling them out. This, of course, is the old Militant line, parroted today by their successors SPEW (he also still uses some of their terminology, banging on not just about the Labour Right but the ‘ultra-left’ too).

This perspective leads him to often make a highly selective and one-sided analysis of events, the best example being the Labour performance under his friend Corbyn in the 2017 and 2019 General Elections. 2017 is portrayed as a great victory in all but name as Labour increased its vote with a radical programme of reforms by more than in any other election since 1945. However, 2019 is portrayed as the Brexit election and that Labour’s downfall was simply a reflection of this and its pro-Remain stance.

But this won’t do. Not just because Brexit wasn’t the only factor that led to their disastrous showing in 2019 – the public perception of Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’s unrealistic long ‘shopping list’ of leftist demands were almost as significant. But it’s also because their relative success in 2017 (even though they didn’t actually win of course) wasn’t principally due to the fact they presented the British working class with the radical stuff they had long been waiting for. After all, they’d actually done the same in 1983 and had come a big cropper then, as they later did in 2019 with an even bigger radical promise.

The main reason for Labour’s relatively good showing in 2017 was because that election was also dominated by Brexit but that time they more successfully pitched themselves as a party that could be supported by Remainers and even some ‘soft’ Brexiters worried by a no-deal outcome. It was why Labour managed to win strongly pro-Remain Kensington and Canterbury for the first time ever, yet against the national swing, could also contrive to lose the likes of hard-Brexit Mansfield and Stoke-on-Trent South for the first time in living memory. The correlation between increases in the Tory vote in strong Brexit areas and the increase in the Labour vote in strong Remain areas was statistically significant and the biggest factor at play, but McCluskey just ignores this. By 2019 the ground had shifted and Labour was by then simply left with an unpopular leader, an incoherent campaign and an unconvincing set of leftist reforms.

But it was ever the way with the left – always wanting to convince themselves the precise cocktail of radical reforms of capitalism purveyed by one or other of their factions would one day triumph, when most of the evidence is to the contrary (and not just in the UK either).

The best chapter is actually the last one, on ‘fighting back’ trade unionism as he calls it. Here McCluskey outlines how Unite has developed the tactic of ‘leverage’ and discusses how it works. A good example was when ‘passenger transport company Go Ahead sacked a steward working on the buses in Manchester, we discovered its growth plan was to move into the Norwegian rail market by winning a contract worth £3.8 billion. We dispatched a team to speak to Norwegian politicians and the press, armed with a dossier detailing how this company dealt with rail contracts in the UK. The company was forced to weigh the benefit of getting rid of the steward against the threat to a multi-billion pound contract. Soon enough, the steward was back at work’ (p.292).

There are a variety of examples of Unite using leverage in successful ways to defend its members and their pay and conditions. This is what good unions are for (despite their imperfections) and this chapter is arguably worth more than the rest of the book put together. Indeed, McCluskey can take some genuine pride in the role he has played in developing this – and certainly far more than in what appears to be his enduring adherence to the Trotskyist tactics and programmes of the 70s and 80s.

DAP

No big deal (2021)

From the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Britain's decision to leave the European Union must be one of the riskiest decisions taken by a capitalist state — abandoning hassle-free access to a nearby large market (and a say in its rules and future development] in the hope of obtaining more trade through yet-to-be-negotiated deals with states in other parts of the world. A classic case of letting go of a bird in hand for two in the bush.

It was not a decision that any government, charged with looking after the overall general interest of a capitalist class (as all governments are], would normally have taken on its own. In fact it didn't. Plagued by internal conflict within his party, David Cameron's Conservative government decided to put the matter to a referendum in 2016 which it expected to win. It didn't. A campaign to leave the EU, funded by maverick financiers opposed to any EU regulation of their activities and led by opportunist politicians, won narrowly by 52 to 48 percent.

A rearguard action in parliament, in the interest of the majority section of the capitalist class who wanted to remain, failed and the matter was settled in a general election won decisively by the Conservatives on a Brexit platform. A Vote Leave government came into office and negotiated a withdrawal from the EU on 31 January last year, with a transition period until the end of the year during which a trade deal with the EU would be negotiated.

It was touch and go. Apart from fishing, stumbling blocks were, on the UK side, ‘sovereignty’, and, on the EU side, a ‘level playing field’. Neither of which were matters of interest or concern for the majority class of wage and salary workers.

A political area is constitutionally ‘sovereign’ when its rulers have the final say in matters concerning that area. They make the laws and sign agreements with other states. They also enforce the laws and have the coercive power to do so. However, when it comes to what they decide, states are in the same position as Marx said humans were in making history. They do exercise sovereignty but not 'as they please’, not 'under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already.’ Those already-existing circumstances are capitalism, a world system, the operation of whose economic laws means that states are restricted in what they can in practice do. From a political point of view they have the formal ‘right’ to make the final decision — and exercise their 'sovereignty' in making it — but it will be a decision ultimately circumscribed by these economic laws.

Even apart from this, all inter-state agreements involve surrendering a degree of their decision-making power to some other body to make final decisions on whether or not the agreement has been infringed. In the case of the post-Brexit trade talks, it was never going to be the European Court of Justice but some other body whose decisions both parties agreed to accept — and override their sovereignty.

It should be quite obvious that the arrangements a state makes to exercise its ‘sovereignty’ are of no concern whatsoever to workers.

The EU's concern was more pragmatic. They wanted a 'level playing field’, by which they meant that the UK, no more than its own member states, should not have a competitive advantage in selling on the Single Market by subsiding (state-aiding] any of its industries or imposing less onerous standards on them (as over workers rights or the environment]. The main problem was over future changes. The EU wanted a binding commitment from the UK to make roughly corresponding changes. The UK was reluctant to commit itself too much to this in a treaty as it regarded this as limitation on the future exercise of its sovereignty. It probably would have kept up with changes but as a ‘sovereign’ decision by an 'independent state, not as something it was obliged to do.

Some pragmatic arrangement was always possible. It depended on how insistent the UK Vote Leave government under Johnson was going to be on having (or appearing to have] full, formal ‘sovereignty’. Would they give priority to something symbolic over being pragmatic? Would they be the prisoners of the rhetoric and tub-thumping about ‘independence’ that helped them win the referendum? We now know the answer.

As far as the working class are concerned, deal or no deal, we were going to be collateral damage in that our freedom to move between Britain and the Continent was to become more of a hassle as visas and stricter border controls are re-introduced and having to face shortages and price rises. Something we could well have done without in the middle of a worsening pandemic.

A hundred years of Northern Ireland (2021)

From the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

A country, whose prospects and longevity many people must have doubted at the time of its inception, is set to have its one hundredth anniversary commemorated this year. Northern Ireland is preparing to celebrate its centenary in summer 2021 and by extension, the current version of the British state (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) will also mark 100 years of formal existence. For most countries, plans for such events are generally non-controversial and can engender a range of emotions varying from enthusiasm to indifference in the citizenry depending on how patriotic people feel and the level of identification they have with ‘their’ country. This is not the case for Northern Ireland and the ‘celebrations’ are likely to be quite muted. Indeed, for one of the governing parties in Belfast, Sinn Fein, its core, defining objective is the permanent elimination of the state.

Something else that is noteworthy is that in the other three nations that make up the UK, there appears very little awareness or interest in the significance of this coming event with the news agenda and public concerns dominated by COVID and the practical implications of Brexit. Furthermore, the centenary of Northern Ireland must logically mark a centenary for the state existing south of the border but no parallel or corresponding ceremony of any kind is at the moment planned for the Republic of Ireland. The peculiar position of Northern Ireland makes this an issue of interest to socialists. For most countries, there is a tacit acceptance of the legitimacy of the state amongst the population even if for purely pragmatic reasons. Because of the pervading national consciousness, there usually is a consensus of support for these commemorations even if many individuals are not actively involved. Given socialists’ antipathy to all nationalist ideologies, the reasons behind the ambiguous attitude to the usual bout of flag-waving and anthem-bellowing that usually accompanies such events is worth exploring.

The invention of the state of Northern Ireland, while not a temporary measure per se, was never really intended to result in a permanent new entity. It was set up as a matter of political expediency, as the only solution to the irreconcilable demands of Irish Nationalists and Unionists on the island of Ireland. For the British government of the time, it seemed the only workable outcome to what had been an intractable problem even though its arbitrariness and shortcomings were always evident. The border was never envisaged to be a full international frontier between two sovereign nations but an internal line demarcating two clashing ethnic groups living in a part of the United Kingdom. Its creation had all the hallmarks of a desperate government grasping at any solution to remove, even in the short term, an exasperating irritant.

Origins

The origins and validity of the state of Northern Ireland have been long studied and debated. In the early years of the seventeenth century, during the reign of James I, the organised and large-scale colonisation of a part of the island of Ireland, the northern province of Ulster, by people from northern England and southern Scotland was initiated. By the end of that century, the majority of the people in the province were British settlers and their descendants; Protestant in religion compared to the native or indigenous Irish who were invariably Catholic. However, and a point that would achieve great significance subsequently, the colonists were not uniformly distributed across the nine counties that would constitute the province but tended to be concentrated in the six more north-easterly counties. So as a result of this mass immigration, from the eighteenth century onwards, Ulster began to diverge significantly from the rest of Ireland in terms of economy and society. For a start, the province became much more prosperous than the rest of the country. It was regarded as being more dynamic and innovative than the South and a seedbed for new technologies, new industries, radical political ideas, and more modern social conventions. In some respects, it occupied a position in Ireland that California is reputed to have in the United States, being the part of the country that leads the way in adopting future trends. Indeed, during the nineteenth century, the local city of Belfast had overtaken the traditional Irish capital of Dublin in population and economic importance.

Because the whole island was governed from London (and became constitutionally united with Britain in 1801 to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland), the divergence between the two parts of the country was initially not a troubling issue for the government in London. However, as the nineteenth century progressed, a growing sense of Irish nationalism began to develop amongst the Catholic population who predominated in most of the southern part of the island. This led to a demand from them for the political separation of Ireland and Britain and the creation of an independent, all-island nation. This was resisted by the local Protestant majority in Ulster who believed their prosperity was vitally linked to remaining within the UK. After a considerable period of political turmoil, that had started in the mid to late nineteenth century, the solution finally adopted by the London government in 1921 was the formation of two regimes on the island of Ireland. The southern state, initially organised as a dominion state in the British Empire, would eventually become the fully independent Republic of Ireland; and the northern state was a devolved administration, with its own Parliament and government in Stormont, but subsidiary to Westminster and remaining within the UK.

The delineation of the border between the two states was a matter of much political passion at the time and fundamentally settled by sectarian considerations. Northern Ireland would consist of those six counties of the nine-county province of Ulster that would ensure a secure Unionist (at the time regarded as being synonymous with Protestant) voting majority and with a large enough land mass to be sustainable and not just to become a small British enclave on the island of Ireland. This meant the borders of the state were defined not by any geographical or historical landmarks but by the religious allegiances of the people. It resulted in a northern state with a two-thirds Protestant population, who generally welcomed its creation and sincerely believed it guaranteed their very continued existence, while simultaneously containing a one third, Nationalist and Catholic minority, some of whom bitterly resented the imposed new arrangement and yearned to be reunited with their southern co-religionists.

For the first fifty years of its existence, Northern Ireland could be regarded as performing quite satisfactorily although having to weather occasional periods of Republican violence against the state from elements of the discontented Nationalist minority. Whilst being fully democratic in terms of contemporary liberal European norms, (regular elections, a free press, independent judiciary, etc.) it had an authoritarian, majoritarian flavour in its conduct towards the minority Catholic population. Its leaders and senior government ministers tended to be drawn from the wealthy, large land-owning, Ascendancy class, many with some military background and intimately connected to the leading members of the Tory party in London at the time. Its single greatest achievement and ‘selling point’ was that it considerably outperformed the South in economic terms and thus ensured a better standard of living for all its citizens, though Catholics were always relatively disadvantaged. Its improved prosperity was partly due to its own local efforts, the significant amount of funding it received from the British Exchequer and the idiosyncratic and inept economic performance of the South under the leadership of its anachronistic leader, De Valera. This superior performance was important to the Stormont regime who always recognised the implicit economic rivalry it had with Dublin and realised that its continued secure existence was in part predicated on exceeding its southern neighbour. In fact, both North and South had a superficially antagonistic but mutually beneficial co-existence. In public propaganda, both justified the need for their survival by reference to the religious intolerance and bigotry that they claimed was prevalent in the other jurisdiction while absent in their own. However, the Republic had one trump card in that game of bogus moral high ground of tolerance; while Northern Ireland had a significant and growing Catholic minority who remained a distinct entity, the Protestant population of the Republic was always much smaller and declined so rapidly after 1921 that its remaining residual elements had no choice but to accept assimilation in the state.

While the Unionist leaders in Stormont were aware of the growing challenges posed by the Civil Rights movement that had begun in the mid-1960s, there seemed a certain complacency present regarding the future of the northern state. Coming up to its fiftieth anniversary, preparations were made to mark the event which was to be known as Ulster ’71. It was planned by then local Prime Minister Terence O’Neill before he resigned in 1969. Like all such ceremonies, its aim was to demonstrate ‘progress’ and to establish the forward-thrusting modernity of the state to the citizens. Also, it had the long-standing aim for Northern Ireland to showcase itself to Great Britain, to remind the mainland that it was still there and was a useful and important component of the whole nation. Notwithstanding its achievements, some Unionists tended to be defensive and insecure about how Ulster was perceived by the British public and anxious to display their worth to their compatriots in Britain. Looking back there is a poignancy to the events shown in the films that were made of Ulster ’71. While conveying an air of superficial optimism about the future, that year of 1971 really marked the end of Northern Ireland in the form it was originally intended to have. Within 18 months, the Stormont parliament was permanently prorogued, the Government of Northern Ireland ceased to exist and was replaced by direct rule from London. After 1971, there was 25 years of the Troubles followed by another 25 years of an uneasy peace. Today, irrespective of its formal constitutional arrangement as an integral part of the United Kingdom, the province is more linked to its Southern neighbour than at any time in its history. The UK government currently accepts that it is not possible to rule Northern Ireland without the tacit support of Dublin.

Changing demographics

Looking at it now, Northern Ireland has changed considerably since its creation with the decline of its traditional Unionist ruling class and the underpinning social structures of the Unionist-minded population. Demographically it is now very close to 50/50 between Protestants and Catholics and while this distinction is still important, it is not the all-defining criterion of yesteryear. A recent development is the increasing number of people identifying as ‘Northern Irish’ rather than the previous binary choice of British or Irish. Partly as a legacy of the Troubles, it is one of the poorest parts of the United Kingdom and also significantly lags behind the Republic in terms of average income per head. It must be an open question as to whether its continued presence as one of the nations of the UK is deemed essential to the capitalist class, as represented by the British government. Moreover, its future is very dependent on the outcome of Brexit in the years ahead. As part of the final arrangement between the UK and the EU, Northern Ireland remains within the Single Market and this necessitates some checks and barriers to trade between it and the mainland, marking a weakening of the Union to some degree at least. It has the strange feature that British firms are now ‘exporting’ goods to other firms that are meant to be in the same country! In passing it is ironic to note that this Northern Ireland protocol (undoubtedly a contrived political device that Boris Johnson has embraced for a short-term advantage) has been implemented almost 100 years after the creation of the Irish border itself by a previous London government as a similar stop-gap solution.

More immediately, any move towards Scottish independence will mark a major fracture of the UK and have profound implications for the province which has always had a stronger cultural connection to Scotland than to England. A poll on the border is always a possibility and the outcome of such a referendum is difficult to predict because of the volatility of the situation. Politically, Unionism, at least compared to the early years of the twentieth century, is considerably weaker now than it was then but that doesn’t necessarily mean a united Ireland is any closer let alone inevitable.

So what might socialists make of Northern Ireland achieving and marking its centenary? Any anniversary celebration by a state is usually an exercise in promoting the relevance and validity of that state to its citizens and their future and furthering ideas of patriotism. Unlike most countries where (unfortunately) most the workers readily identify with the remembrance of important historical events, Northern Ireland’s history means that is unlikely to happen in the usual sense. Traditionally minded Unionists will naturally be eager to celebrate the event while the staunchly nationalist element of the population will probably ignore it. More profoundly, socialists do not accept the division of the world into countries as the most sensible arrangement for society. Fundamentally countries exist to promote the interests of the local (capitalist) elites. Why and how they are ‘different’ to the countries that adjoin them is in many cases a result of historical events that now have no contemporary resonance or meaning. Northern Ireland has always been denounced as an artificial state by its Nationalist detractors, created solely to ensure a certain political outcome, but all countries are really just artificial constructs. Their populations are the sum of previous waves of migrations that have occurred and the sometimes arbitrary delineation of their frontiers just reflects the outcome of historical military engagements. For socialists, the fact that they still exist and can successfully claim the allegiance of their citizens shows the power of carefully fostered ‘identity’ politics. So, while Northern Ireland has its own peculiarities, its predicament over its centenary reflects much wider issues.

Fostering nationalist ideas and inculcating a faithful consciousness in the population have always been central functions of governments everywhere. But they are aware that such activities must be undertaken with care. Capitalists need nation-states to exist but they also need the freedom to trade profitably with the capitalists of other countries. While governments need a loyal citizenry, excessive and unchecked xenophobia can damage the interests of capitalism in that country by promoting a desire for foreign adventurism. History has proven many times that war is a risky business for those who engage in it. This may explain the curious phenomenon that, with arguably the most nationalistic government in London for over a century, there is such a subdued approach being taken to this centenary event. The Johnson government recognises that post-Brexit, the drawbacks in needlessly antagonising the nationalist segment of Northern Ireland and in turn the Dublin government, can have unpredictable repercussions for trade with Europe.

So Northern Ireland has proved the sceptics wrong and got to the big one-zero-zero. Whether or not it makes it to its 150th anniversary or its bi-centennial or whatever is, in a sense, a matter of indifference to socialists. The same sentiment applies to all other countries. We seek a different world system.

Kevin Cronin

Proper Gander: Brexit And Exports (2021)

The Proper Gander Column from the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The pandemic has understandably pushed Brexit out of the limelight recently. But an edition of BBC One’s Panorama reminded us that the issue drags on, and has impacted on how many businesses which export overseas run. Brexit: Six Months On follows several ‘UK businesses at the sharp end of Brexit’ and how they have managed through top-down changes to the market they have to operate within.

One common complaint is the burgeoning bureaucracy now involved in transporting commodities to Europe. For Loch Fyne Seafarms, a shellfish business in west Scotland, one delivery to a European Union country used to involve one delivery note, whereas now there are over 80 pages of tiresome forms which take hours to complete. ‘Paperwork, paperwork. It’s just madness. It’s so much a waste of paper, a waste of time, a waste to the environment, a waste to cost’ says managing director Jamie McMillan. One piece of required admin is a ‘transit declaration’, a messy procedure involving umpteen reference numbers from umpteen different databases. Another food exporter featured in the programme, Creative Nature, faced headaches from other Brexit-related regulations. A planned delivery to Malta got delayed for months while they argued that their vegan snack bars don’t need the same certification as animal products, and then while they added mandatory new labelling to all their Europe-bound stocks. An estimate from before Britain left the EU said that all this kind of knotty red tape would cost British-based businesses £7.5 billion a year. As well as costs taken up by the time taken to plough through additional admin, firms have also had to pay out for customs fees and health certificates when exporting to Europe. For Jamie McMillan these are equivalent to tariff costs which Boris Johnson boasted wouldn’t be part of his ‘jumbo’ Brexit deal. Small businesses are particularly vulnerable to financial pressures from increased costs (compounded by the pandemic), lacking the resources and capital which allow larger companies a little more security. In time, it’s likely that protocols will change so that costs are reduced, because costs eat into profits. Ultimately, Brexit means a shift in the markets so that some profits end up going to different capitalists than they otherwise would have. Along the way, the weakest businesses will go bust, wrecking the livelihoods of their staff, although the documentary doesn’t cover businesses cut off by ‘the sharp end of Brexit’.

The new complications and costs of exporting to EU countries have meant that many British companies have found that it’s easier and more lucrative to transport goods elsewhere, or they have needed to do this to survive. Loch Fyne Seafarms stopped exporting to Europe altogether and instead switched to places such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Similarly, Creative Nature decided to concentrate on the Middle East and American markets. It might sound counter-intuitive for it to be more worthwhile to export thousands of miles further, especially considering the additional pollution caused by moving shellfish or snack bars halfway round the world to places which could probably produce them anyway. But the market isn’t driven by what’s practical or sustainable, nor by genuine needs and wants, but by whatever’s more profitable.

Concert equipment transporters Stagetruck fell foul of new rules restricting how they can operate overseas. Lorries registered in the UK can no longer make more than two drop-offs in Europe, causing a problem because their business supports musicians on tour across multiple venues. To get round the change, Stagetruck built a new base in Holland for their lorries to be registered from, and then had to arrange Irish driving licences for their British drivers so they could travel around Europe. Lynas Foodservice, also featured in the documentary, is based in Northern Ireland, which is still part of the European Single Market and therefore subject to specific rules complicating how they deal with British companies. Its managing director Andrew Lynas says that nowadays it seems easier to attend a trade show in France than one in England. The convoluted way which these and other firms have had to manoeuvre around the system highlights its absurdity. The root of the problem here isn’t Brexit, but rather in nation states and the way that they divide up people. Legislation, policies and procedures formalise and normalise this, clogging up our lives and alienating us from others. Panorama: Brexit: Six Months On doesn’t reach this conclusion, of course, its analysis not looking deeply into capitalism’s workings, and certainly not beyond them.

The programme includes the views of a few economists, such as Julian Jessop of the Institute of Economic Affairs. An optimist about Brexit, he claims that shocks to the economy can have a positive impact if they make businesses think about doing things in a fresh way. In other words: treat ‘em mean to keep ‘em keen, which could be one of the guiding principles of capitalism itself. All that businesses can do is try to adapt to different circumstances, not having any say over what the legislators decide, nor, more fundamentally, any control over market forces. And this is the case whether or not Britain is part of Europe.

Mike Foster

Cooking the Books: The Tories and Free Trade (2021)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Defending the proposed Free Trade deal (no tariffs, no quotas) with Australia in spite of the harm to British farmers, Boris Johnson told a meeting of Tory MPs ‘We are the party of Peel’ (Times, 21 May). Sir Robert Peel was prime minister in the government that brought about the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. These laws, by imposing tariffs on the import of wheat and other cereals, benefitted the landlord class since the high price of wheat encouraged the use of less fertile land, so increasing the rent on all wheat-producing land.

Peel was a Tory but his move split the Tory party and the Peelites eventually became part of the Liberal party. Most Tories followed Disraeli in opposing repeal on behalf of the landlord class. In the early 1900s the Tories were campaigning for Tariff Reform, i.e., the imposition of tariffs on imported manufactured goods.

Johnson’s historical ignorance is bad enough, but that of Liz Truss, the International Trade Secretary, is appalling. She invokes not just Peel but John Bright and Richard Cobden. On 3 June last year she tweeted ‘Today is the birthday of Richard Cobden, champion of free trade, manufacturing and founder of the Anti-Corn Law League’. Last October, she declared that she wanted the Board of Trade ‘to become the Cobden, Peel and Bright of the twenty-first century’. In an article in the Sunday Express (14 February) she quoted Cobden as hailing Free Trade as ‘the greatest revolution that ever happened in the world’s history’.

Bright and Cobden were the political leaders of the industrial capitalists in their struggle against the landlord class for political and economic supremacy. They were implacable opponents of everything the Tories stood for (imperialism, military preparations, aristocratic privilege). The repeal of the Corn Laws was a key event in British economic history but hardly the greatest revolution in world history. In any event most Tories opposed it.

Marx lived through these events and naturally commented on them. In January 1848 he gave a speech in Brussels on free trade in which he said:

  ‘The repeal of the Corn Laws in England is the greatest triumph of Free Trade in the 19th century. (…) Cheap food, high wages, this is the sole aim for which English Free-Traders have spent millions, and their enthusiasm has already spread to their brethren on the Continent. Generally speaking, those who wish for Free Trade desire it in order to alleviate the condition of the working class. But, strange to say, the people for whom cheap food is to be procured at all costs are very ungrateful. (…) The English workers have very well understood the significance of the struggle between the landlords and the industrial capitalists. They know very well that the price of bread was to be reduced in order to reduce wages, and that industrial profit would rise by as much as rent fell.’

He ended by stating that he was in favour of free trade but only because it would bring about a more rapid development of capitalism and the antagonism between the working class and the capitalist class and so hasten the social revolution. ‘It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favour of free trade’.

Johnson and Truss are not justifying the Australia trade deal on the grounds of ‘Cheap Food, High Wages’. The deal is essentially only symbolic and any reduction in food prices that it might bring would be very slight. But we can expect this argument to be used to justify other trade deals, especially that with the US. But it will be as invalid as it was in the 1840s. Cheaper food will mean cheaper wages, leaving workers no better off.

Blue Labour (2021)

Book Review from the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despised. Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class. Paul Embery, (Polity, 2021)

This is a relatively short book but halfway through it I wondered if I could bear reading any more. Why? Well, it’s certainly not badly written or hard going. In fact it’s written in a congenially informal style that makes it easy to read and understand. But the trouble (or one of its troubles) is that it’s endlessly repetitive, simply going over the same ground time and time again, repeating the same polemic and even using the same words to express it.

What does it actually argue? Basically that the Labour Party is finished if it doesn’t manage to bring back to its fold the so-called ‘red wall’ of voters who deserted it in the Brexit referendum and in the 2019 General Election. These are the voters the author identifies as the ‘working class’ (defined as those who do ‘physical labour or work in blue-collar industries, factories, call centres, retail or frontline public services’) who have traditionally been the backbone of Labour’s support in urban Britain and from which background, as he frequently reminds us, he himself comes.

These people, Embery contends, have moved away from Labour because it has become a Party dominated by a middle-class elite hostile to traditional working-class values and favourable to globalisation, mass immigration and identity politics. According to the author, it needs to move back to embrace and represent those working-class values and only by so doing will it win back that core of traditional support and again become an electoral force. The words he uses to describe those ‘values’ are among those repeated over and over again throughout, giving this book its tiresomely repetitive feel: patriotism, tradition, custom, order, stability, flag, family, faith, identity, community, belonging.

Almost equally countless are his repetitions of a particular set of tired, hackneyed terms often used by those on the right of the capitalist political spectrum to seek to vilify their opponents: liberal wokedom, virtue signalling, identity politics, woke left, cosmopolitan elite, progressivism – or more or less any combination of these words. These are the terms he uses to denote forces he sees as standing in the way of those traditional working-class values.

Yet this book is a funny mixture. Its writer is ‘a firefighter and trade union activist’ and an adherent of so-called ‘blue Labour’. He proclaims himself ‘left-wing’ and makes it clear that he is on the side of the workers in their endeavours to improve pay and conditions. So it can be said that he recognises the struggle for a bigger share of the cake that the capitalist system creates between those who own most of the wealth and those who own little but their ability to work. But his solution is for workers to be represented by a Party, a reformed Labour Party, that tilts things in their direction and opposes the encroachments of global capital on their economic wellbeing. He proclaims himself fiercely pro-Brexit, seeing that vote as an indication that the working class (in his definition) was fed up with the ‘shackles of the EU’, with the ‘woke’ culture of Labour’s political elite, with the Party’s failure to respect workers’ traditional culture and values (patriotism, etc.) and with its embrace of ‘progressivism’, globalisation and ‘neo-liberal’ economic policies.

Some of this could be seen as well meaning, but it asks all the wrong questions and buys into a whole range of myths about class, race, the nature of government and much else. Above all it entirely misses the point about the struggle between workers and capitalists. It makes no sense to qualify as working class only those who do manual work or are in lower paid jobs. The reality, as even at one point the author comes close to recognising (but then dismisses), is that all those who sell their energies for a wage or salary are workers. They are all in the same basic position vis-à-vis their employer and all susceptible to losing their employment and so their means of living if the market determines it. No government, left, right or centre, can do much about that even if they would like to, for in the final analysis governments exist to administer the buying and selling system on behalf of the owners of capital and, even if they are able to take over some aspects of it (as suggested by Embery), they cannot control it, as has been shown time and time again by the continuous ups and downs brought about by what Marx called ‘the anarchy of the market’.

So though the author calls himself ‘a democratic socialist’ and says he wants ‘to address the injustices of the world’, his conception of how society should be run is a contradictory mishmash. He advocates a ‘strengthening of the nation state’, state control of utilities and such like, a government policy of ‘jobs for everyone’ and economic protectionism, yet at the same time he calls for internationalism, for a ‘flourishing private sector’ and insists that markets are ‘essential to the functioning of a free and democratic society’.

The author proclaims himself a socialist but would do better to look at a more meaningful conception of socialism, one that aims for a world without the market system, without buying and selling, without money or wages, and based on voluntary work, common ownership and democratic control. In such a society the narrow ‘cultural’ and class differences he sees as fundamental between people of one kind of background and another, between people of one country of origin or another, will disappear and give way to positive cultural diversity and real economic equality based on a system of from each according to ability, to each according to need.

Howard Moss