Representing the Mambo

Gary Younge on working class Romney supporters

27 May 2012 2 Comments

by representingthemambo in Opinions, Philosophical Meanderings, Politics

Gary Younge’s article about the failure of Democrats to persuade white working class people to vote for them is definitely worth a read if you missed it. It’s a theme he has discussed eloquently before and he raises a number of pertinent questions that are relevant on both sides of the Atlantic. Working class people in the UK aren’t as wedded to guns, god, and gay-bashing as many of their American brothers and sisters but both countries pose a similar dilemma for any aspirant left-wing party or politician: why do working class people vote ‘against their interests’ in such great numbers?

I think there are a number of linked issues here.

1) Younge is right to argue that it is the height of condescension to simply suggest that working class people who vote for the right are thickos who don’t know what’s good for them. Other issues are at play when someone makes a decision about how to vote: religion and morality are the two obvious ones particularly in an American context. People have been conditioned from birth and often fed outright lies in the media and if all your reference points tell you to vote Republican/Tory then can any of us honestly say that we would turn out differently to the Alf Garnetts and Joe Plumbers of this world? I’ve been lucky to grow up in a progressive environment where intellectual inquiry was encouraged and I’ve been given free rein to explore ideas as I have seen fit. Progressive and socialist reading material is widely available to me and I have been given the tools to look at both sides of any debate. Not everyone has had that good fortune. It isn’t a question of stupidity. It is a question of one’s environment.

2) Where Younge really hits the nail on the head however is in supposing that understanding one’s ‘objective interests’ should automatically lead one to vote Democrat. The Obama administration has been a huge disappointment in exactly the same way that Labour’s last period in office was. The Democratic Party has historically certainly been no friend of ordinary working class people:

“It was Bill Clinton who cut welfare, introduced the North American Free Trade Agreement and repealed the Glass-Steagall Act – which helped make the recent crisis possible. If you were going to trade your religious beliefs for economic gain, you could be forgiven for demanding a better deal than that.”

I’ve discussed the failings of the last Labour government ad nauseam on this blog, but if you needed the definitive verdict on the New Labour cabal and in particular Tony Blair’s disdain for ordinary people you could do worse than read Nick Cohen’s latest here. While the Democrats and Labour are marginally less reactionary than the Tories/Republicans, there isn’t a great deal in it right now.

3) This raises a wider point about how ‘left-wing’ political parties should proceed. Here at the Mambo, we think the situation is quite simple: there is a crisis of political representation for ordinary people. Government right now serves the interests of the rich more than ever. There probably hasn’t been a qualitative change but there has been a significant quantitative change in recent years. In order to reverse that Labour (for the purposes of this article) needs to shift sharply leftwards economically and put forward a programme for the democratic transformation of society (abolition of the Lords and the Monarchy, PR, cuts in MPs salaries, exclusion of all corporate interests from decision-making, complete separation of church and state, to take just a few examples). It is liable to provoke a ferocious reaction from the media and opinion-formers in the short term but that is a price worth paying in my humble view. It is easy to berate working people for supporting the right but if no alternative is being offered to that intellectual consensus then why are we surprised that people continue to vote that way? If we continue to play the right’s game on their territory when why are surprised when they keep winning?

However, in Labour the prevailing pressure is always to shift rightwards and Ed Miliband has done very little to challenge that consensus, regardless of what you have read in the Telegraph. When Liam Byrne, Frank Field, David Miliband and Jim Murphy, or in America the likes of Rahm Emanuel are setting the intellectual tone then why are we surprised that people aren’t interesting in voting for the centre-left?

4) The brief period when the BNP were making some headway is illustrative. Part of the appeal was clearly in blaming foreigners for the nation’s ills. But another part was in highlighting Labour’s years of failing ordinary working people, treating their views with contempt and taking their votes for granted. The socialism part of national socialism featured heavily in BNP propaganda, which highlighted that there was an appetite for the sorts of ideas that should be bread and butter for Labour (I’m referring to the anti-cuts, pro-public services ideas, not the racial war ones, obviously…….)

When working class people vote Republican or Tory the left should be blaming itself, not them. Right now we are failing to offer an alternative and failing miserably to make the case for that alternative.

Does Labour really need to be more conservative? Come on, what do you think I’m going to say……….

02 May 2012 3 Comments

by representingthemambo in Opinions, Philosophical Meanderings, Politics

Rowenna Davis launched an extremely noble, well-intentioned and principled campaign against the proliferation of betting shops in poor areas a while ago, a decision I lauded at the time.

The problem is that Davis sees this as part of the wider “Blue Labour” narrative that she is such a big fan of and has written an article for the New Statesman to that effect. It’s worth reading, as such pieces always are, but she is still wrong.

She thinks that Labour needs to rediscover its conservatism, and by that she means

“family, honour and order”

Extremely amorphous concepts I’m sure you agree but I think you can work out where she is going with them. Blue Labour’s guiding principles were

“family, faith, and flag”

Very similar I’m sure you’ll agree, and with very similar overtones.

To crudely sum up the Blue Labour creed, it is a rejection of untrammelled free market economics but also a belief in social conservatism on issues such as immigration and crime. A return to the right-wing social democratic politics of Jim Callaghan, to pick one example.

I presume these policies are designed to appeal to people who are thinking of voting BNP, to be blunt. Labour has haemorrhaged huge numbers of votes in white working class communities since 1997.

In support of her argument Davis makes this highly revealing statement:

“Demos, the left wing think tank, is drawn to the work of Jonathan Haidt, who believes that liberals overly focus on fairness at the expense of wider human concerns about sanctity and loyalty”

To suggest that the ‘liberals’ in the Labour Party focused overly on ‘fairness’ in their time in office is a quite extraordinary view. If anything, the opposite is true. Labour policies post 1997 positively entrenched inequality and unfairness. Admittedly some progressive equalities legislation was introduced, but this pointedly ignored surely the main cause of inequality in the UK; social class.

To my naïve eyes at least, the whole point of the Labour Party is to legislate for greater equality and fairness, and I really don’t think the millions of people who have stopped voting Labour in recent years have done so because of the party’s perceived obsession with ‘fairness’……..

It is because the Labour Party has stopped representing the working class in any meaningful way. That isn’t by being soft on immigration, for example, but by allowing social inequality to increase and by slavishly accepting neoliberal orthodoxy.

Of course many working class people may be fearful of mass immigration and gays. But they are wrong to be. These issues are distractions, designed to divert people’s attention away from the real causes of society’s problems. It is a trick that the Tories have pulled off for generations and when Labour has tried to ape them it has always ended in tears. Why vote for fakers when you can have the real thing?

The left’s job is to challenge those prejudices, not pander to them. Of course it is difficult work and it will alienate many in the short term. But it is nonetheless essential.

The other problem with any article like this is its use of terms whose meaning is contested. Davis’ article is refreshingly jargon-free, but to take this example:

“The left is worried about all of this. But it shouldn’t be. Labour used to care more about family, high streets, order and community. It used to take a stronger line on gambling and alcohol. It used to have a narrative about what it wanted to preserve as well as change. Look at the influence of co-operatives, mutuals and unions. This work is still carrying on in pockets. Stella Creasy’s work on payday loans; David Lammy on bookies. Jon Cruddas’s approach in Barking and Dagenham is part of a conservative tradition stemming back to George Lansbury.”

She is placing her support for restrictions on gambling and alcohol, and the wonderful work of Stella Creasy, firmly within the conservative tradition.

I totally disagree. Opposing the gambling, payday loan and drinks industries is the very opposite of conservatism. It is a profoundly radical and progressive territory to be inhabiting and involves challenging the most morally degenerate form of exploitative free market economics. A radical left would immediately take steps to prevent these parasitic firms taking advantage of the most vulnerable in society in exactly the same way they would immediately take steps to increase the minimum wage and repeal the legislation restricting the trade union movement.

Logically there is no difference.

The fact that most people ostensibly on the left don’t see that is their mistake, not Rowenna Davis’.

The problem is that Davis, as well as her co-thinkers in Blue Labour, for all of their talk of re-connecting with the white working class, have in fact rejected the discourse of class almost entirely. Instead she posits that

“We’re moving to a situation when the divide in this country isn’t between left and right. It’s between a liberal elite who runs the country and a small c conservative public that doesn’t. Abu Qatada is just the latest example. Whoever wins that ground takes all.”

This is straight out of the Karl Rove handbook. Pretty much every Republican candidate for the 2012 presidential nomination has made similar arguments. The only problem is that it’s patently absurd and if the perception does exist it is the product of years of downright dishonest Daily Mail and Sun editorials and a British media that lies and smears as a matter of routine. That consensus needs to be challenged, not embraced.

It is even more absurd coming from someone on the left. It also pre-supposes a conservative majority that can only be won over to Labour by flag-waving and foreigner bashing, which is an incredibly pessimistic view of the world.

I’m quite sure that there are cheap points to be gained by advocating the deportation of Abu Qatada. Labour has taken a very ‘strong’ (read cowardly) line on the subject and have they benefitted politically? No. So even on Davis’ own purely electoral terms it’s nonsensical.

To sum up I think the real problem with much of the purportedly ‘new thinking’ inside the Labour Party is that it’s desperate to avoid the elephant in the room.

The dreaded socialism.

We can’t possibly have any of that, so Labour people are desperately flailing around for an alternative that doesn’t involve advocating anything radical enough to genuinely challenge the status quo but accepts that the Blair years were a disaster.

But Blue Labour, just like New Labour, is an intellectual irrelevance and is merely a convenient cover to mask its proponents profound pessimism and embrace of the Thatcherite consensus.

Keep trying Rowenna.

Reflections on the 40th anniversary of The Battle of Saltley Gate

11 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment

by representingthemambo in Opinions, Philosophical Meanderings, Politics

Yesterday, unbelievably, was the 40^th anniversary of the Battle of Saltley Gate. An event that unsurprisingly didn’t get particularly huge coverage in the mainstream media (although what there was wasn’t exceptionally hostile, interestingly. I can only assume that the people at The Sun have other things on their minds at the moment, the corrupt bastards) even though it was probably one of the most important political events in Britain in the 1970s. We like to forget or romanticise our class conflict in Britain. Angry, militant workers don’t fit the national narrative.

I remember visiting Saltley, for reasons that right now escape me, a few years ago and hardly believing that this unassuming, now largely post-industrial part of the city was the scene of such a huge, historic confrontation between the workers and the state. It is unimaginable now that thousands of workers would a) come out in favour of their workers purely because they were fellow workers; b) be willing to face down the authorities and have the police back down so ignominiously and c) That such a thing could happen in Birmingham, a notoriously apolitical city. The level of working class consciousness, and basic solidarity, is just impossible to conceive of in 2012. But it really happened, and it was bloody fantastic.

The post from Shiraz Socialist I linked earlier gives a good account of what happened. It was a brutally effective demonstration of the strength of the unions at the time and the power that ordinary working people have in their hands if they only realised it. It was the beginning of the end for the Heath government and set the tone for a series of huge industrial confrontations over the next 15 years. Confrontations in which the unions lost badly. Doing what the workers did at Saltley in 1972, even if the political will was there, is illegal now, and of course Labour did nothing to loosen anti-union legislation in thirteen years in office.

It is very depressing to think the era of union power has probably gone forever. The big battalions of the industrial working class were deliberately decimated by the Tories in the 1980s and there is no prospect of them returning.

So of course the anniversary, whilst of course being one we should celebrate, is a bittersweet one as we know what happened to the mining industry and Labour movement in the 20 years after the events at Saltley Gate. Both have been decimated. In that respect at least Arthur Scargill has been proven completely right.

Scargill spoke at the rally yesterday and some it is recorded here. The once great union leader is a pale shadow of the man he was 25-30 years ago, but that is what the passage of time and defeat after defeat, industrially and politically, does to you I suppose. The charismatic, self-assured firebrand of the miners strike is long gone. The media don’t even bother demonising him anymore. He, and his largely irrelevant Socialist Labour Party, isn’t really taken very seriously in 2012. In 1984-85, Arthur Scargill was taken very seriously indeed. He was the ‘enemy within’.

Watching the bits of the rally on the net I can find (I can only presume they didn’t move it to the Saturday instead of a Friday morning as they weren’t expecting a huge turnout either way) one can’t help but think it is an exercise in nostalgia for the participants. A reminder of when things looked like they could be very different, but also, sadly, a painful reminder that the Tories won, completely, when the final scores are tallied up. The unions won that battle but lost the resulting war (and war isn’t too strong a word for it by the way).

Scargill, quoted at the rally on the 10th, was right when he pointed out:

“It’s no good simply commemorating the event, we need to use this experience in today’s terms. And that means opposing the attacks which are taking place in health, education – a whole range of things.”

Easier said than done right now of course, especially when the Labour leadership is as hopeless as ever.

Of course we won and continue to win the argument, and Scargill was and is right in the final analysis (at least on the issues raised by this article, not a lot else, but we’ll leave that to one side for now……..) but winning the argument is the only thing that the left and the unions ever seem to win anymore.

An important, moving but ultimately quite disheartening anniversary.

(Another good piece on the events is by this blogger)

There’s something about the ‘New Atheists’ that’s starting to bother me……..

07 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment

by representingthemambo in Opinions, Philosophical Meanderings, Politics

I’ve been catching up with some back issues of the New Statesman the last few days. Naturally a sophisticated and popular raconteur such as myself has only such time for reading, so I’ve been taking advanatage of a quiet few days on the training front to finish reading the christmas edition of that august weekly, which of course was edited by that scourge of religion and superstition, Richard Dawkins.

Time was when I used to think Richard Dawkins was the dogs bollocks. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that I would have put him up high up in my list of favourite public figures. But in a strange way the death of Christopher Hitchens has prompted something of a rethink. That and Dawkins previous disgraceful involvement in the College of the Humanities , an utterly reactionary and elitist concept that many so called ‘liberal’ intellectuals decided, in their infinite wisdom, to pin their colours to. It got Mr Mambo a-thinking, put it that way. That this was the best they could come up with in their attempts to rescue higher education was very disturbing indeed.

And then reading the ”conversation” between the two (a method of filling pages I have always found very lazy) had a bizarre effect on me. I was overwhelmed by a sense of self-satisfied smugness emanating from the pair of them.

Of course they are both bright, well read, highly educated individuals. Of course on the subject of God and his non-existence they are correct. Of course they are right on the dangers that religion poses. 

But there are other types of irrationality. Political irrationality. Something that Dawkins and Hitchens are both guilty of.   

They both make some frankly unbelievable statements in the course of the discussion. Let’s take a look at a few of them, shall we?

RD I’ve always been very suspicious of the left-right dimension in politics.

CH Yes; it’s broken down with me.

RD It’s astonishing how much traction the left-right continuum [has] . . . If you know what someone thinks about the death penalty or abortion, then you generally know what they think about everything else. But you clearly break that rule.

CH I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do.

Interesting stuff. Both of our new atheists are suspicious of left-right politics. Not surprising from Dawkins, who for all of his anti-religious stridency has never been a great radical, as I earlier highlighted, but more so Hitchens. Religion is something to get angry about but right now there are other things to get more angry about. I have more sympathy for and in common with Christians who supported (and were willing to take a stand and resign over) the St Paul’s protests than atheists (e.g. Nick Clegg) that are supporting the government’s plans.

And up until recently I thought Hitchens still considered himself an (admittedly renegade) member of the left end of that contiuum………

I share his disdain of totalitarianism, but I don’t think there is any such thing as left-wing totalitarianism. I don’t think Stalin was a left-winger, indeed any sort of totalitarianism is intrinsically not left-wing, if I can be so bold. To me, the left is committed to democracy or it is not worth being a part of. Social Democracy/Socialism/Revolution, whatever you want to call it will only come about if people have political freedom. In that sense the 1945 Labour government and the Scandinavian social democracies were far to the left of the Soviet Union and Maoist China.

I can see why the distinction has broken down for Hitchens. It is because his politics have broken down in tandem with his loss of left-wing faith. I am currently re-reading The Trial of Henry Kissinger.  It is simply unbelievable that a man who so forensically destroyed the reputation of Nixon’s right hand man ended up supporting someone with a similarly large volume of blood on his hands, and a man who did infinitely more damage domestically than Nixon, namely George W Bush. Unless Hitchens thought he could still justify the Iraq debacle? 

CH: So, really, the only threat from religious force in America is the same as it is, I’m afraid, in many other countries-from outside, And it’s Jihadism, some of it home-grown, but some of it that is so weak and self-discrediting.

RD: It’s more of a problem in Britain.

So let me get this straight. The Christian right poses no violent threat in America? So I’m imagining the firebombing of abortion clinics? From such a great mind, this is an incredibly and self-evidently facile comment. The idea that “Jihadism” poses some sort of existential threat to Western civilisation is patently ludicrous. But such statements serve to subconsciously legitimate Hitchens embrace many aspects of  neoconservative discourse in his own mind I suppose.

CH: There aren’t any believing Christians in the way there were generations ago.

RD: Certainly in Europe that’s true-but in America?

CH: There are revivals of course, and among Jews as well. But I think there’s a very long-running tendency in the developed world and in large areas elsewhere for people to see the virtues of secularism, the separation of church and state, because they’ve tried the alternatives….Every time something like a jihad or a sharia movement has taken over any country-admittedly they’ve only been able to do it in very primitive cases-it’s a smouldering wreck with no productivity.

RD: Total failure.

A few things here. Firstly, I think Hitchens is exposing the narrow of his social and political circle in his beloved America, i.e. liberal Manhattan luvvies and media potentates. The idea that the Christian right pose no threat to American secularism, even if just at the margins, is ridiculous. The Republican presidential nomination race might illustrate that there are plenty of prominent politicians with an explicitly religious agenda.

It’s also interesting that he turns the discussion around to Islam even though Dawkins’ question was clearly about the Christian right in America. A freudian slip? Or evidence that he was more interested in certain types of religious fundamentalism than others……

Also Saudi Arabia is in many ways primitive but not economically. Ditto Iran. They are ‘developed’ and by no means ‘smouldering wrecks’, however much we might like them to be. These are serious regional powers run by religious fundamentalists. The implication here, that religious fundamentalism is only capable of getting traction in the likes of Afghanistan and Somalia is clearly untrue.   

There is a pretty obvious thread running through Hitchens sections the dialogue. Hitchens is rather more concerned about the threat posed by the Islamic rather than the Christian form of fundamentalism. I think this is a dangerous, narrow-minded view, and strange coming from such a cosmopolitan and politically engaged man.

I’ve picked on the bits that I want to take issue with. There is much there that is commendable. But only to a certain degree.

My beef with the ‘New Atheists’ is that they seem to regard religion as the question right now. It is a question, and a big one. But even if they decisively win the argument I don’t see that that much will change for the better. Hundreds of millions of people will still go hungry every day. The change I want, and the change that Dawkins and Hitchens both seem rather indifferent to, despite their protestations of love for humanity, is going to require a rather more thorough examination of contemporary realities that go beyond the prevalence of religious superstition.

But maybe I’m being unfair.

Maybe I’ve matured, but I’m starting to see the limitations of these chaps. They are unaware of it, but their own irrational prejudices are there for us all to see in articles like these.