Labour comes out for Remain

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Jonathan Ashworth 2

I was in Wales at the weekend where I saw a Sunday morning political programme. All 8 of the parties putting up candidates for the EU elections were represented.

I was struck by how blatantly anti-Brexit Jackie Jones (the Labour Party representative) was.

She told the presenter voters who wanted to remain in the EU should vote Labour. She was challenged – the Labour Party manifesto was not explicitly pro-Remain – and she answered defiantly she had always been a Remainer and all four Labour candidates in Wales had come out in favour of a second referendum.

I noted Ms Jones prefers to use the term ‘Final Say’ instead of second referendum. The subtle difference is that a ‘final say’ is about accepting or rejecting the government’s deal with the EU. It excludes the possibility of having on the ballot paper an option to Leave the EU without accepting the government deal.

Back in England later the same day I heard the Labour Party Shadow Health Secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, say to Andrew Marr …

“This is a two horse race now between the Labour Party and the Brexit Party. The Liberals or the Change Party are not going to stop Nigel Farage’s party in the election… Only the Labour Party can stop Nigel Farage.”.

The message here was plain. The ugly phrase ‘dog-whistle politics’ comes to mind – if you do not have the courage to say what you mean, imply it and let those who share your views draw their own conclusions. Jonathan Ashworth was explicit enough for the deafest of dogs to get the message – name two explicitly Remain parties and tell people who are thinking of voting for them they should support the Labour Party. What conclusion should they draw? The Labour Party is anti-Brexit.

There is a clear message here to the working class – the Labour Party does not represent the millions of workers who voted to leave the pro-big business, pro-capitalist free market economic system represented by the EU.

The prospect of a Brexit Party landslide is worrying the existing parties. But the support for the Brexit Party does not represent support for the kind of right-wing policies Nigel Farage favours.

The British working class is educated enough to understand you can vote Brexit Party to send a message to the powers-that-be – we said Leave in June 2016, and we meant Leave. We know this is not a General Election and we are not voting for the party that will decide economic and social policy in the UK for the next five years. We are electing representatives to a body that has no effective power whatsoever. So we can use this vote to express our anger at Parliament’s refusal to implement the referendum result.

On May 23rd millions of socialist-minded working-class voters will be casting their vote for the Brexit Party. Farage may interpret a big vote as support for the Brexit Party. In fact it is the only electoral way to express anger at the decision of the main political groups to overturn the Leave decision.

If there was a Labour Party, or another socialist party, explicitly supporting Leave, I have no doubt they would get massive support. But Labour’s weasel-worded prevarication on the issue, trying to be all things to all people, fools nobody. It definitely does not fool the politically sophisticated working class voters.

Labour claims that their solution (staying in a permanent Customs Union) delivers Brexit. That is simply not true.

Labour comes out as a Remain party

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I was in Wales at the weekend where I saw a Sunday morning political programme. All 8 of the parties putting up candidates for the EU elections were represented.

I was struck by how blatantly anti-Brexit Jackie Jones (the Labour Party representative) was.

She told the presenter, in no uncertain terms, that voters who wanted to remain in the EU should vote Labour. She was challenged – the Labour Party manifesto was not explicitly pro-Remain – and she answered defiantly she had always been a Remainer and all four Labour candidates in Wales had come out in favour of a second referendum.

Ms Jones prefers to use the term ‘Final Say’ instead of second referendum. The subtle difference is that a ‘final say’ is about accepting or rejecting the government’s deal with the EU. It excludes the possibility of having on the ballot paper an option to Leave the EU without accepting the government deal.

Back in England later the same day I heard the Labour Party Shadow Health Secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, say to Andrew Marr …

“This is a two horse race now between the Labour Party and the Brexit Party. The Liberals or the Change Party are not going to stop Nigel Farage’s party in the election… Only the Labour Party can stop Nigel Farage.”

The message here was plain. The ugly phrase ‘dog-whistle politics’ comes to mind – if you do not have the courage to say what you mean explicitly, imply it and let those who share your views draw their own conclusions. And Jonathan Ashworth was explicit enough for the deafest of dogs to get the message – name two explicitly Remain parties, then tell people who are thinking of voting for them they should support the Labour Party. What conclusion should they draw? That the Labour Party is anti-Brexit.

There is a clear message here to the working class – the Labour Party does not represent the millions of workers who voted to leave the pro-big business, pro-capitalist free market economic system represented by the EU.

The prospect of a Brexit Party landslide is worrying the existing parties. But the support for the Brexit Party does not represent support for the kind of right-wing policies Nigel Farage favours.

The British working class is educated enough to understand you can vote Brexit Party to send a message to the powers that be – we said Leave in June 2016, and we meant it. We know this is not a General Election and we are not voting for the party that will decide economic and social policy in the UK for the next five years. We are electing representatives to a body that has no effective power whatsoever.

On May 23rd millions of working-class socialist-minded voters will be casting their vote for the Brexit Party. Farage may interpret a big vote as support for the Brexit Party. In fact it is the only electoral way to express anger at the decision of the main political groups to overturn the Leave decision.

If there was a Labour Party, or another socialist party, explicitly supporting Leave, they would get massive support. But Labour’s weasel-worded prevarication on the issue, trying to be all things to all people, fools nobody. It definitely does not fool the politically sophisticated working class voters. Labour claims that their solution (staying in a permanent Customs Union) delivers Brexit. That is simply not true.

Ukraine votes for a clown

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The Ukrainian presidential elections resulted in a TV actor beating the incumbent (Petro Poroshenko) and a third-time candidate for president (Yulia Tymoshenko) into second and third places, respectively.
The first round of the Ukrainian elections was won by Volodymyr Zelensky, an actor, with no previous political experience – unless you include playing an anti-corruption campaigner who becomes president in a satirical TV show.
The election of Zelensky is yet another sign of the willingness of the working class to stray from the well-worn path the ruling elites would have them follow. Zelensky, however, is no anti-corruption superhero. His campaign was supported and partially funded by one of the many oligarchs who use their financial clout to try and wield political power in Ukraine. This support from Igor Kolomoisky, who owns a Ukrainian TV channel, casts a shadow over Zelensky’s anti-corruption credentials.
The incumbent president, Petro Poroshenko, is himself a chocolate magnate and ranks among the wealthiest people in Ukraine. And Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister and presidential candidate, was at one time one of the richest people in the country as a result of her activities in the gas industry.
The rejection of these establishment characters by the Ukrainian working class is an indication of their growing impatience with the high-level corruption in Ukrainian government circles. The fact that they would rather vote for a TV comedian than their current president or their former prime minister is a measure of the contempt felt by ordinary working people for the political elite.
For a truly effective anti-corruption regime to be established in Ukraine they may need to return to the soviet election system, as it was first established in 1905 and 1917 – in which elected representatives do not serve a fixed term but can be recalled and forced to stand for re-election by their constituents at any time. Putting political power back into the hands of the working class, as it was briefly following the successful Russian Revolution of 1917, is a big step, and will require more than the current protest vote for Zelensky. He is not the saviour he portrays in the television series.
Taking political power into the hands of the working class will require a social revolution, and the expropriation of the oligarchs who have been robbing the country for decades. Ukraine is in a uniquely fortunate position as the social ownership of the country’s greatest manufacturing assets is a recent memory for the working class. But it will require democratic workers’ control those assets to prevent them becoming under the control of a political bureaucracy with its own agenda.

BBC’s Venezuela bias

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Who says the BBC’s World Service, which is part-funded by the British government’s Foreign Office, is biased?

Venezuela Flag

Today the radio service reported on 2 demonstrations in Venezuela – one pro-Maduro and one pro-Guaido – which took place in different areas of Caracas. The emphasis of the report, by Will Grant, was on the grievances of the anti-Maduro demonstrators. His opening remarks were to state the words that he heard the anti-government demonstrators use. Followed by the statement; “This was a day of opposing marches – demonstrations at two different ends of the city, reflecting two starkly different visions for Venezuela.”

We were left to assume the two demonstrations were equal in size. There was no reference to the numbers of demonstrators. Perhaps they were about the same size?. How would we know? Will Grant wasn’t going to tell us. But a few clues came out of his report.

“When the man they want to replace President Maduro arrived – Juan Guaido – he addressed them by megaphone,” reported Grant. A megaphone! Take a moment to think about that fact. He addressed this (massive?) demonstration with a hand-held megaphone.

Grant went on to report Guaido told the demonstration “He would travel the entire country with members of the National Assembly and bring people back from the provinces for another big demonstration in Caracas.” You might think that sounded like a leader trying to give hope to disappointed supporters at a small demonstration. If you thought that, your conclusion could only be reinforced by the words of one of Guaido’s supporters, Manolo, who told Will Grant,

“Every minimal advance is very, very important – every display of popular unity – every display in the streets. This dictatorship won’t be forced out overnight. It will take a lot of work. They are deeply entrenched in power. They have the police, the army, the guns. We are just working people. But although it might look small, it all adds up until we reach our objective of getting out from under this government.”

So even according to one of Guaido’s activist supporters the demonstration Will Grant was reporting “might look small”. It might look small indeed, but you would have to read carefully between the lines of the BBC report to glean that information.

The ruling class is right

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Bruno Le Maire
Brune Le Maire

It is worth listening to what the ruling class is saying. Because often they display a greater level of class-consciousness than we do when analysing the economic and political crisis.

Take Bruno Le Maire for example. Mr Le Maire is the Economy and Finance Minister in Macon’s government in France. He appeared recently in an interview with Stephen Sackur on Hard Talk (BBC News Channel). His response to Sackur’s questions about the political turbulence in France was telling. Here is the quote (his English is good but there are some expressions he would have changed had he been speaking in his native tongue).

“We are all facing the same crisis, which is a social crisis, an economic crisis and also a political crisis. You have a large amount of people in the UK, in France, but also in Germany, in Spain and in Italy which are suffering from the globalisation; which had deeply the impression of being neglected, of being left out. We have to listen to those people.”

What Le Maire recognises here is that the break-up of the political status quo is driven not by political mistakes on the part of the ruling parties, but more profoundly by economic factors.

Personally I have trouble grasping what they mean by globalisation. It is a vague term. But what is clear is that the economies of most of the advanced capitalist countries are experiencing major problems. And the greatest one is that they have had to reduce the living standards of millions of people in an attempt to deal with the financial crisis of 2007-2008. In the UK the government approach has been termed ‘austerity’. Austerity is just a propaganda term to describe a series of attacks on the wages, living standards and social conditions of the working class. They like to call it austerity because it has a ring of religious abstinence. But economic austerity is not a choice we made. It is a policy of cuts and more cuts.

They like to pretend that austerity is over. Or it is about to be over. But only the other day they announced cuts to pensioner tax credit which would take effect in May 2019. Up to that date, pensioner couples on low income were eligible for a credit that amounted to about £100 per week. But from May if either of them is under pension age then no tax credit is available. So a 70 year old man with a 62 year old wife is not eligible. To soften the blow they are allowing couples who were in receipt of the credit before May to continue receiving it. But approximately 10,000 of the poorest pensioner couples who would have received this assistance will have it witheld.

That is just one small example of how the attacks on living standards are continuing. Public sector workers still have their pay rises held to below inflation. For many workers this has been a 2% cut in wages every year for the last 9 years.

Cuts to local government funding continue apace, with most councils having their funding cut by 60-70% since 2010. This has meant reductions in many of the services provided by local authorities.

According to Mr Le Maire many people have “the impression” of being neglected. It is not an impression. It is a fact of life for many of us. And it is the fundamental driving force behind the disgruntlement, anger and frustration that workers feel.

The media would like to tell us workers are angry because they feel the political class ignores them. They will tell you the anger is because we feel immigrants are making the country worse. But the real reason, the reason even Mr Le Maire acknowledges, is the economic impoverishment we are experiencing.

It is no use the ruling class telling us they are going to listen. It is deeds that count, not words. Listen all you like, but if the economic system over which you preside cannot provide a better standard of living for most of the population you have a big problem. And that problem is that capitalism is bankrupt. It has no future, and has only survived this long by creating massive amounts of made-up money in the form of quantitative easing.

The future of the working class does not lie in following the well-travelled political paths we have been pushed down by the ruling class. Our future involves taking ownership of the wealth we create, and taking political control by rejecting the false democracy of corrupt parliamentarianism in favour of a direct workers’ democracy.

That involves a social revolution, and the signs are out there that its time is coming.

Time to get ready for the big change.

A bigot accuses us of xenophobia

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Mathew d’Ancona is a columnist in the London Evening Standard and the Guardian. He is also a bigot.

181203 Matthew DAncona 300x255

In the Evening Standard today he characterises the people on the other side of the referendum vote as xenophobes. It must be very comforting to this moral guardian of the nation to blame the ‘breakdown in the consensus’ on bigotry. But d’Ancona is guilty of lazy thinking – as a result of which he jumps to conclusions about his opponents. Is that not the definition of bigotry?

He harks back to those halcyon days before the referendum when all was sweetness and light in his ivory tower. The ignorant masses used to mill about outside his privileged environment and were content with their lot. “For decades there was something close to a political consensus that the most important metric [sic] was economic prosperity. A wealthy nation was essential both to the aspirations of individual households and the funding of public services.”

And yet he fails to even consider the possibility that it might be a lack of prosperity that drives the rejection of the status quo. Perhaps it was that frustration which expressed itself in the vote to Leave the EU.

Out here, outside his ivory tower, where ordinary people live, it is obvious that the economic prosperity he values is disappearing. For 10 years workers have seen huge sums spent on banking and finance, even huger sums spent on quantitive easing, while the services they rely on are underfunded. Education. Tax credits. Care for the elderly. Care for the vulnerable.

Mr d’Ancona tells us immigration is a net benefit to the economy. If he is right (and on this point I believe he is) then we should be asking why the economy is not improving as a result of the additional wealth created by our new compatriots. It is time to put your brain into gear and work out why people are anxious. Or you could just be lazy and put it all down to xenophobia.

You might also explain the Trump phenomenon as xenophobia.

But then you have to ask yourself whether it is just a coincidence that xenophobia is on the rise in the UK, in the USA, and, we might add, in Italy, France, Hungary, Poland. All just coincidence?

Workers across the USA and Europe see their economic conditions worsening. They are not convinced by the statistics. In the UK we are told that wages are rising faster than inflation. And we ask, ‘Whose wages are rising? Because it bloody well isn’t mine’. We are told that unemployment is at an all-time low. And we ask, what kind of jobs are being created? Anybody who is made redundant today knows they have little chance of getting a comparable position in the immediate future. They risk finding themselves in low-pay or casual labour. Yes there are jobs. But what kind of jobs?

We all know that the Tories decided to steal billions from the welfare budget when they started to introduce Universal Credit. Even Tories knew it, and Ian Duncan-Smith quit the government in protest.

And despite all this evidence of a worsening economic situation driving the rejection of the status quo, Mr d’Ancona needs to convince himself that his gut instinct, to despise the lower orders, is right.

He needs evidence to back up his prejudices. Liberals need evidence to justify their prejudices. And they find their justifications easily because they are too lazy to think things through. Here is his evidence.

‘In June 2017, a report collated from the British Social Attitudes survey showed that the most significant factor in the leave vote was anxiety about the number of people coming to the UK. A comprehensive study published by Nuffield College in April drew similar conclusions about the salience of immigration in attitudes to Brexit.’

‘Anxiety about the number of people coming to the UK’ is, for him, the same thing as xenophobia. Forget about the commonly repeated statements by people who expressed this anxiety. How many times have we heard Leave voters explain they are worried that the infrastructure cannot cope. Perhaps what underlies this anxiety is a realisation that the economy is getting worse.

D’Ancona’s mindset is so complacently ensconced in his liberal bourgeois environment he cannot even imagine a world different from the comfortable world that surrounds him. He asserts, without any effort to adduce ‘evidence’:

“We live in a world defined by the economic, social and cultural interdependence of nation states. And those who promise that leaving the EU will deliver “control” are really promising something quite specific: a social and cultural reboot. As well as being morally contemptible, of course, this is also a complete impossibility.”

A social and cultural reboot is not an impossibility, Mr d’Ancona. It is just unimaginable to people like you.

There are millions of people outside your circle for whom a reboot is exactly what they feel is needed. And for many of them the referendum was a chance to say so. We told you what we think. Ignore it at your peril.

A ‘proud Fenian’ has his say

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James McClean plays for Stoke City, and has chosen not to wear a poppy.

In a home game against Middlesborough on Saturday he was the subject of verbal abuse from visiting fans, and some home fans, for his choice. McClean’s response was to use a quotation from Bobby Sands:

“They have nothing in their whole imperial arsenal that can break the spirit of one Irishman who doesn’t want to be broken.”

Bobby Sands MP was a member of the Provisional IRA who was elected to parliament while in prison by the voters of Fermanagh and South Tyrone, as a gesture of their support for his opposition to British imperialism. He died on hunger strike in the Maze prison.

McClean grew upon the Creggan estate. Six of the people ruthlessly massacred by the SAS on Bloody Sunday were from his estate. For those of you too young to remember, on Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972) British troops from the Parachute regiment demonstrated their loyalty to British imperialism and their military courage by shooting 28 unarmed civilians, half of whom died from their wounds. Some of the civilians were shot in the back. Some were shot when they went to the aid of others who had been shot.

For the general public McClean had a simple message: “I know many people won’t agree with my decision or even attempt to gain an understanding of why I don’t wear a poppy. I accept that but I would ask people to be respectful of the choice I have made, just as I am respectful of people who do choose to wear a poppy.”

For the ‘uneducated cavemen’ his message was more direct: “To the uneducated cavemen in the left-hand corner of the Booten End stand that want to sing their anti-Irish song each game and call me a Fenian this and that… I am a PROUD FENIAN and no c@#t will ever change that, so sing away.”

Bad cops

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Guardian Friday 3 Aug 2018

PC Daniel Reed was one of six officers from Durham police who went to the Dalesman pub in Darlington to arrest a 43-year-old man on suspicion of a public order offence and witness intimidation on 8 November 2016.

When the man did not cooperate, officers deployed pepper spray and then a stun gun. An independent panel determined that the man had been brought under control at that point but Reed, an acting sergeant at the time, nevertheless struck him six times before the suspect was placed in a police van.
…
Miranda Biddle, the regional director for the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), said:

“Our investigation found evidence that the force used by police constable Reed was excessive, and the independent panel, who also had the benefit of hearing live evidence this week, agreed that the evidence amounted to gross misconduct. The panel decided that the sixth strike to the head was excessive because PC Reed was aware that the man was incapacitated when this blow was delivered.”

After completing its investigation in April last year, the IOPC submitted a file to the Crown Prosecution Service, which charged Reed with assault causing actual bodily harm. Reed was acquitted of the charge at Sunderland magistrates court on 6 September last year.

O’Neill’s behaviour was found not to amount to misconduct but Reed was dismissed without notice.

Project Fear is back

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John Major On Andrew Marr Show 300x243

 

Once again the ruling class are out in force trying to undo the Leave vote. 17.4 million workers and middle class voters declared their wish to leave the capitalist club that is the EU. And ever since that decision was reached there has been a concerted campaign to overthrow their vote.
Voters were too stupid to understand the issues. Only Remain voters were intelligent enough to grasp the issues.
Voters were too gullible and swallowed all the lies and propaganda peddled by the Leave campaign. Only Remain voters were wise enough to believe only the lies peddled by the Remain campaign.
Voters were too dumb to comprehend the dire consequences of even VOTING to leave the EU, never mind the results of actually leaving. Only Remain voters had the courage to swallow the politically motivated cataclysmic predictions of made by the IMF, Treasury, Bank of England and that famously impartial George Osborne.
As the negotiations work towards a final position Old Tories like John Major are now dragged out of the dustbin of history onto the Andrew Marr Show to tell us about the ‘catastrophe’ that awaits us. Meanwhile Amazon lectures the government Brexit minister  on the risk of ‘civil unrest’ if a deal with the EU is not reached.
And Michel Barnier is smiling like a Cheshire cat. No need for him to play the bad guy. He already has Dominic Grieve making the EU’s case for them. This so-called nationalist, whose patriotism nobody has called into question, sides with the big business interests who benefit from the single market and the customs union. In an interview yesterday he warned Brexit would be “absolutely catastrophic”.

“We will be in a state of emergency – basic services we take for granted might not be available,” he said.

Barnier stands quietly by with his smug smile. While he watches the UK government trying to negotiate without being able to walk away from the table, he knows he only has to stand still and do nothing. Concede nothing. Agree to nothing. And watch while the UK talks itself into a deal so similar to membership of the EU that working class voters will have trouble telling the difference.

The real danger, so feared by the ruling class, is that failure to deliver what the working class voted for in the EU referendum could lead to even greater disillusion with the two-party political system they have relied on to control and subvert the wishes of the vast majority of the population.

And when the working class moves away from the Labour Party and it’s pro-capitalist economic framework, the possibility of civil unrest really starts to keep the ruling class awake at night.

An economist explains

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You could read a whole article by a highly-regarded economist and come away convinced he is a simpleton. Stephen King of HSBC is no exception.

He wrote a comment piece in the Evening Standard asking whether the Bank of England understood what was going on. Fair question. We know they don’t. But then Stephen, HSBC’s’ senior economic advisor’ and author of ‘Grave New World’ proceeds to demonstrate his own powers of explanation. And it is not impressive.

The questions he was trying to answer were:

1. if employment is so strong, why is growth so weak, and

2. if unemployment is so low, why are wages so depressed?

And his answer is Brexit.

He points out that growth in the UK was consistently higher than in the EU until the European referendum. But 15 months after the vote UK growth has slowed and EU growth has accelerated. This correlation he assumes can be taken as a causal explanation. No evidence needed – just point to a coincidence of two events, and explain one by the other. A fatuous assumption for someone claiming to be a serious economist. You could just as well conclude that the consistent growth in UK GDP was the reason for the Leave vote. After all, the Leave vote came after the growth, so the former must have caused the latter.

When he addresses the two questions he put to himself (strong employment yet low wages, and low unemployment yet depressed wages) his explanation is even more fatuous. ‘This year the eurozone has lost its mojo,’ he tells us. Hold on a second. Is this the same eurozone area he just told us was growing so vigorously that the UK could not keep up? And yet within the space of a paragraph it has lost its mojo. [Mojo, here, is used in its precise economic sense of … oh dear, it doesn’t have an economic sense!)

As he jumps around from one superficial observation to another he lands on another explanation straight out of the Children’s Guide to Economics. ‘…it may be that unemployment is so low precisely because wages keep falling.’

Brilliant. This ‘senior economic advisor’ to HSBC should submit this theory to a peer-reviewed journal. It meets the criteria expected in journals of bourgeois economics. If you cannot explain A by B, switch the sentence around and make B the cause of A.

To bourgeois economists the law of supply and demand is the explainer of most economic phenomena. They do not look past the surface appearances of reality to try and understand WHY supply increases/decreases or why demand increases/decreases. If they did, they might find something resembling a causal relationship. At least they would be trying to find a reasonable explanation. But economics remains at the level of a child staring at a rainbow and seeing that is somehow associated with rain and sun occurring together. No need to delve into the realms of light refraction. That would be scientific. And if there is one thing that bourgeois economists run from, it is any attempt at non-superficial explanation.

So here we have a ‘senior economic advisor’ informing us that, if full employment does not cause wage growth, then low wages cause full employment.

Brilliant!