I have been accused of many things in my life but never of hyperbole. Ok, let’s have an honest appraisal of NL over the past 13 years, Andy argues:
But it is a mistake to see the record of the Labour government over the last 13 years as all bad in this regard: indeed their policies were informed by an intelligent understanding of the structural causes of inequality in our society, and sincere desire to help the most disadvantaged. But their framework has been a timid one, and in the final analysis failed to acknowledge that equality has to rest upon shared sense of community, and that community is alien to the spirit of free market capitalism.
So lets have a fair assessment of NL’s policies. Indeed NL has been under social democratic pressure and this led to Sure Start, Tax Credits, minimum wage and upped pensioners benefits. They have built more public buildings BUT (and a very BIG one at that) at the expense of PFI and NL have been the accidental nationalisation of railtrack and the banks. But am hard pressed to think of anything else. Section 28… well, it took them 6 years to repeal that homophobic piece of reactionary legislation. Cost free to them as well, they coulda/shoulda repealed it within months of their first term but didn’t…So much for the strive for equality! All of these policies were superficial and scratched the surface again they expose the social democratic pressure NL were under and also the contradictory nature of NL. The policies amounted to sops to the core voters… the crumbs from the table while the financial markets were the big winners. And the report published this week amounts to a society being fractured by inequalities and poverty. Widened by a Labour government….
So while NL has created sops for the working class let’s look at what they have done to further oppress, damage and create an unequal society. Ok, how much time and space do we have when documenting the bad bad bad things NL has wreaked in 13 years: Illegal and unjust wars, the further advancement of liberal interventionism and imperialism, two Welfare Reform Acts that create far more conditionality, sanctions and Workfare, privatisation (PFI and PPP) of legal advice, benefits system, NHS… welfare state overall, marketisation, plethora of anti-terror laws that curtail our freedoms and civil liberties, not repealed anti-trade union laws, didn’t restore the link between earnings and pensions, no improvement to the minimum wage, ASBOS, general social authoritarianism, lack of real constitutional changes, further powers to the police, allowing asset inflation to build up along with allowing the housing bubble to build up, adhering to corporate free markets and the ideology of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism and free markets underpinned the ideology of NL and no matter how much you would want to you can’t escape from that. Hyperbole? No, realist….
If Labour had been truly transformative that created the conditions for an equal and just society then we would not be in this sorry state where the financial markets crashed and burned, the housing bubble imploded and to quote one of the comments from SU on Andy’s thread, ”There is going to be plenty of social mobility for everyone. Down the shit hole”… Crude but true.
And are we out of the recession? Well, the economy grew 0.01% last month but one swallow doesn’t make a summer. It also doesn’t show that much and it is one month’s worth of figures. What will happen next month and the month after? If it showed a trend over the next 12 months then it would be significant but it is too soon to tell whether it is time to crack open the cheap Bucks Fizz from Tesco (well, that’s what I buy). The underlining causes of the recession are still there, the owners of fictitious capital don’t want to take a financial hit. And certainly these are the conditions that will inevitably lead to a double-dip in the economy. This means you have a small recovery based on the massive bailout but the causes are not dealt with and then you go back into recession sans bailout. And that will be the big one…. We aint seen nothing yet as this crisis deepens…
As Andrew Fisher maintains: If a socialist government then wanted to make investments then some simple reprioritisation would free billions: cutting Trident, ID cards, ending the inefficiency of rail franchising, and scrapping the FireControl Project. It would also use public ownership of banking and other industries to generate a surplus to the Exchequer.
Since there is no short-term prospect of such a Government, this crisis is only going to deepen. The probably temporary emergence from recession will be a false dawn before a renewed and deep economic and political crisis takes hold.
Joe Bageant (this month’s Socialist Review)
A Deutsche Bank analyst tells me the worst is yet to come. Bank failures and home foreclosures have not peaked. A commercial real estate bust is coming down the pike. He says that, while there will be some minor periodic upswings, the fraudulent value of the dollar is now evident as it falls against every other currency, except those unlucky enough to be pegged to the US dollar.As former assistant secretary of the treasury Paul Craig Roberts says, “What sort of recovery is it when the safest investment an American can make is to bet against the US dollar?”
I’m surprised you weren’t also labelled ‘hysterical’ which is a term I had applied to me last night on another blog.
One small thing to add to NL’s positive actions – The Gender Recognition Act 2004, which while not exactly perfect and resulted from an EU ruling, does go over and beyond what was required by EU law.
Indeed another positive re The Gender Recognition Act.
The Equality Bill, for example, certainly does not go far enough, very toothless. It won’t close the pay gap between men and women. And various progressive clauses put forward have been dismissed.
You clearly haven’t been reading enough Polly Toynbee columns. Every Saturday when I get my Guardian I am agog to see whether we’ll get “let them eat SureStart” or “is it too late to make Postman Pat the leader?” Tsk tsk, this is all very cynical. Anybody would think the government had done something to disillusion you.
I know, utter shocker Splinty! Utter shocker it is….
yeah labour was shit, and the tories are gonna be even worse… so where’s the left alternative??
isn’t it about time left-wingers in labour-( is there any left?,) dropped that sinking ship once and for all, and lets try to build something better, as difficult as that may be.
I would guess that NL has run out of political steam and even if P Toynbee gets her best wish for May it will lead to a huge amount of turmoil in British party politics. There is little party discipline applied to the Bliar-ites and it is not clear what they would do with a hung Parliament…might even pal up with the Tories! Would be justified as something that would calm “panicky markets” (panic that they might not be able to screw the Working Class as throughly as they hope to).
Our job I think is to organise to make sure that the small core of reliable socialists in Parliament are re-elected. They will be our only voice in Parliament. To lose any one of them this year would be a defeat for the whole class. This is something that we can do and should do not some unrealistic goal mouthed to score a petty point.
The one bright lining to a dark cloud is that the turmoil stands a chance of a heightened political atmosphere generally. It may for a while be easier to argue with people whether in workplaces, colleges or anywhere else. This would at least build up an opportunity to create the kind of left wing organisation that can lead things forward in the class struggles to come.
Brilliant. It is fun watching the left destroy itself. Yes, you all should focus on the small number of socialists still clinging on. The left was never meant to govern, as their naive idealism is destined to fail. History teaches that oh so clearly. You are better as a small, annoying opposition – good at throwing grenades but poor at providing any workable solutions. Besides, being out of government will give you far more time for armchair intellectual discussion that never moves us forward. Enjoy the desert!
Workable solutions, what would those be? High unemployment, privatisation, growing inequality, the worship of the free market that so patently fails to deliver for the human race. Cameron’s “capitalism with a conscience” is every bit as redundant as Brown’s new labour project. “The left was never meant to govern”…. out of which public school did your elitist disdain spring from? The right hs nothing to offer but more of the same bankrupt ideology. The crisis in Greece, its latest example.
Tony B, i agree working for a voice in Parliament is a practical step as is supporting the hopefully growing signs of industrial struggle. Out of it I hope socialists can begin the task of buiding something better.
“Patently fails to deliver for the human race”. Tell that to China, Cambodia, North Korea or Eastern Europe.
Capitalism has, over the last thirty years, lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Capitalism is the engine of innovation that allows us to have our computers (Harpymarx has a Mac), mobile phones, digital cameras. As one example, check out what a great CAPITALIST, PROFIT-TAKING, EXPLOITATIVE company has done for 100,000s of Indian farmers (try telling these guys that capitalism offers them nothing):
http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20040906/ebusiness01.shtml
Beyond material things like technology and getting food out of the ground, capitalism is freedom of individual choice, thought and expression.
Only under capitalism can mixed economies ever hope to have the taxable income required to provide any kind of welfare state, most specifically universal healthcare and education (whose importance is acknowledged). The Left has nothing to offer but envy and self-entitlement that risks ensuring that the UK will continue trying to live beyond its means, crippling the prospects of our children as a result.
Compare and contrast to
- the winter of discontent (3-day working week, anyone?)
– history of the USSR
– China
– Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge
– Cuba
– the way Venezuela’s going under that lunatic Chavez
– North Korea
– Eastern Europe before and since the fall of the Berlin Wall
Ah you proved my point mate.