Around 37% of voters on 7 May 2015 voted for a Conservative MP, giving the party a majority to form government. The election was, characteristically, defined by an aggressive and well-organised campaign across the national newspapers and broadcasters that effectively produced opinions of economic recovery and SNP menace in the people’s minds. FPTP effectively produced the characteristic result: key marginals and negative voting deciding the outcome (a common position would be “I choose Tory over Labour-SNP, even though I prefer Lib Dem”). The Commons now has some more Conservatives and few Lib Dems; meanwhile the unelected House of Lords and the unelected head of state carry on unperturbed.

Hand-wringing about a rightward shift in public opinion isn’t entirely justified. True, if we incorporate the 12.6% vote for UKIP, which resulted in one MP, and add this to the Conservative vote, then we could, arguably, claim that almost half of voters expressed a right-wing choice. And true, BSA surveys have traced a growing hostility to unregulated immigration, and a growing lack of sympathy to benefits claimants. But as my interviews last summer for Searching for Albion indicated, behind this common opinion are anxieties and struggles about low pay, unaffordable housing and a depressed lack of future. An effective deception-operation has migrants and claimants given as cause, but again I couldn’t say a majority of people I’ve met have taken on all the rhetoric. Questioning the narrative’s inconsistencies soon unravels it (how many migrants/claimants do you know? What proof have you they do this? Maybe instead it’s the case that… Etc.) The power of this operation is regularly indicated in surveys that trace a vast gulf between public polled opinions of various scandal-stories, e.g. number of immigrants, number of Muslims, and their actuality.

Believing that the entire public has taken on Tory myths about a collective negative solidarity over the deficit also seems unwarranted. The collapse of the Labour and Lib Dem vote (to be measured, in fairness, only in Scotland and English suburban/small town marginals) could itself be explained as expressive of a hatred of politicians, and the entrenched opinion that they are not credible, will lie if necessary, and have no relevant life experience. Memories of the Expenses scandal are sharp, and stories of mass surveillance, covered-up child abuse by politicians and newspaper hacking have coagulated into a glug of cynicism and distrust about ‘the Establishment’. Curiously the Lib Dems have been worst hit by this backlash in attempting to present themselves as something alternative. It was always likely that Miliband’s party would’ve collapsed in similar fashion over five years due to its commitment to austerity. But the narrative of Miliband’s rapid demise will probably be rewritten: too socialist, not aspirational enough. But he came across as robotic and fake (“as they all do”), and had no obvious policies. His inability to justify the previous Labour regime’s work in propping up the banking system also didn’t help. But the SNP and UKIP have absorbed the socialism that Miliband could’ve successfully advocated, drawing on trade union and left wing grassroots movements, instead of the bowdlerized hardworking families Blairite schtick.

Spinoza asked ‘why do people fight for their servitude as if for their salvation’? Five years of this government may well result in England and Wales leaving the EU, the loss of the protections of the Human Rights Act rendering employment in the UK an even more precarious experience, the collapse and privatisation of the NHS, the disappearance of social housing, the normalisation of suicides and deaths related to benefits sanctions and poverty, and the mass immiseration of the working class as in-work benefits are cut too. The City of London as a booming tax haven, the future a mess of debt repayments. It’s going to be awful. But it is not popular. So why do people fight for their servitude? Spinoza’s answer was that they do not. Populations are ‘enlisted’, as Frederic Lordon has recently phrased it, into servicing and experiencing the desires of their masters as their own (strong economy, tough on law and order, striking through red tape, punishing scroungers…).

We can read Spinoza, rightly, as a revolutionary. But his point is to understand how this kind of enlistment takes place. Always suspicious of free will, recognising that the ‘self’ was an internalised cultural by-product, Spinoza tells us that ideas and activities are produced by political institutions, languages, histories and customs, and emotional narratives we tell about ourselves. A total change has to capture these institutions, cultures and narratives by producing a unified public movement of its own. A counter-public with the aim of becoming the public. Because power is immanent in Spinoza’s system, models of total revolution or unleashing inner potential won’t help. Discoursing online or in the street, joining an already-arranged march, or voting for an independent left-wing party are good, but not enough. What’s required is this production of real counter-institutions. To aim for success without breaking current frames of reference and creating new ones is impossible. Entryism is an illusion with no proven long-term efficacy; it surprises me that it still remains voguish, though perhaps this reflects the ambitions of various activists thriving in the London media bubble. Producing counter-institutions rather than those with popular disenfranchisement built into them. Inevitably, what’s needed is the ground and virtual ability to counter the state’s violence and media fear operations with a counter-violence and counter-fear. The problem of violence, direct and indirect, faces the oppressed in this country every day, and protesters on occasion. To not have a position on it is to reinforce the status quo. And, above all, it belongs to the young, most disenfranchised of all by FPTP, whose minds are still open and willing to become a new public, one focused on the common good now and of the future.

Spinoza’s interventions into politics in his own life were always too theoretical, often occurring too late, and dangerously jeopardising his own safety. It is unlikely that the English Left will manage to change its ‘fortunes’ by 2020 (again, Spinoza instructs that fortune itself is a form of servitude to events we either refuse or are unable to understand). I’ve no illusions that this inarticulate note will be read by future historians. It felt like a good title. Those that do will already think like me. The same result will be repeated, because it always will, because such opinions and votes are socially produced. But it is not impossible. All things are as difficult as they are rare. The mobilisation of social democracy in Scotland indicates, even in the short-term, an inoffensive, winnable strategy. But facing the Scots after their probable independence in 5-10 years, and the dispersed English Left at the moment now, is what next?

I want to briefly talk about the need for a new kind of parliamentary democracy.

Nearly eight hundred years ago, in a field twenty miles west of here, the arbitrary and unjust rule of King John was forcibly restricted by a group of rebellious barons. The Magna Carta established the basis for a regular parliament, with powers to limit the king. It established a law of the land, giving every free man the right to due process, to fair legal treatment against the arbitrary violence of the state.

It began a line of thinking that would lead to parliamentary democracy. When we ask now, what should a parliament do, and I want to ask everyone – what should our parliament do? – we think of impartial representatives who speak up and make sure that the welfare and basic rights of the majority, of the collectivity, are the most important basis of all the state’s actions.

You’d think that in 800 years we might have come closer to realising some model of parliamentary democracy. True, there’s now universal suffrage for all men and women that our ancestors fought and died for. Yesterday’s terrorists are today’s democratic heritage. But today this right to vote doesn’t matter. Young people are deserting politicians in droves, in the UK and elsewhere. This right to due process, to fair legal treatment, is being fatally undermined by successive Tory-led and Labour governments with cuts to legal aid, and with legislation that exploits the fear of terrorism with a terrorism of its own, subjecting everyone to total surveillance and making it possible to arrest and detain people without charge.

Our parliament is a sham. It has failed to respond to the crises of the last few years. It has done nothing to prevent another banking crisis, nor punished those who caused the last. It has casually awarded itself pay-rises and generous expenses whilst the living standards of most people, particularly the poor, plummet. Look around. Insecurity is the new normal. Food banks; police spying, lying and killing of unarmed people; the career-insecurity, exam stress and huge debts that now dictate life for most young people; the decline in skilled and dignified employment; the lack of a long-term solution for our energy needs and environmental problems; where the working classes, the unemployed, and the disabled, have been made out to be a modern-day vermin. Many more, I won’t go on. Because of these failures, the word ‘politician’ has become a term of hatred second only to ‘banker’. Unpopular politicians are democratically illegitimate.

Some people think that the Labour party can be reformed. I disagree. The next government, quite possibly a Labour one, will bring in many of the same Oxbridge-educated people who formed the last one. Its leader has repeatedly praised Margaret Thatcher! I wonder, how many of tomorrow’s MPs will come from state schools, or without a university education, or without experience in business, law and PR, or without being the child of an existing MP? How many people are in the House of Lords because of their political allegiance to the government, or for donating to whatever party’s in power? Piecemeal attempts at reform cannot overturn this. Corruption is at root and branch. This is not a parliament fit for the majority of the British people.

What’s the answer? I’m not entirely sure. Unlike politicians, I don’t claim to be right, to have a monopoly on the ever-changing truth. But reactionary policies and a slavish pursuit of good media coverage and a few swing voters by Ed Milibot isn’t the answer. What will he actually agree to do if elected? I’m not sure, nor is he accountable if he does not. There’s nothing I’ve heard that suggests that this House will try, through policy, to tackle the long-term problems of housing, poverty, work, the environment, energy, of retaining a free national health service. More of the same stalling, mutual blaming and inaction. More fiddling and diddling.

I think instead that for anyone committed to equality, justice, and liberty, which I think most of us are, we need to start the fight for a new kind of parliament. One without political parties, without jeering public school boys, without the possibility for mega-rich party donors to dictate state decisions. Where it is impossible for five families to have more wealth than the poorest 20% of this nation. A parliament for the people, made up of people from all walks of life in its lower chamber, perhaps selected in a way similar to jury service, and made up of experienced and impartial experts in all fields in its upper chamber. With an elected, not hereditary, head of state. Accountable and transparent. With a codified constitution to prevent police violence and political corruption. With a set of civil rights to prevent the vulnerable dying when their benefits have been unfairly stopped, and from so many working people living under the daily anxiety of debt and hardship. With regular opportunities for direct democratic and proportional representation, beyond the 5-year first past the post shambles.

It is possible. I don’t think I’m being entirely utopian here. I’m expressing the same kind of ancient ideas that led to the formation of a jury, of a right to due process, of equality in law between rich and poor, of the right of all adult citizens to vote, of a welfare system, of free universal education up to the age of 18, and a national health service. Each puts the welfare of the majority at its centre. Not through words, but through democratic institutions.

I’m not a fortune-teller, but I’d bet that 2015 will see a low voter turnout, particularly among the young. Why vote, when there’s nothing to vote for, when the difference between major parties is little? British politics is facing a crisis of legitimacy. This house is a sham. Let’s start thinking about a new parliament of the people.

 

* The above is what I said at the People’s Parliament at the House of Commons this week.

[This isn’t a repost but an original article for this blog, about time I guess]

I’ve been troubled by the remarks of Russian Senator Nikolai Ryzhkov, quoted in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago. His words can be read on a number of levels. Regarding the political crisis in Ukraine, he said that Russia should be prepared for the west to “unleash their dogs on us”. “They ruined Yugoslavia, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, all in the name of western democracy. It’s not even double standards, it’s political cynicism.”

As Germany and the United States continue to issue threats, events skitter between an unstable compromise over Crimea and outright war. Simply, his words are a statement of international defiance. Russia makes preparations to defend its political and economic interests in what it considers as one of its client states. It rejects any political or humanitarian criticism from the West in advance, by pointing to the destruction, war, and shambolic failure to establish political institutions that western intervention has brought elsewhere. Intervention, including intervening to prevent international scrutiny to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia or Palestine, does not appear so contradictory when economic motives, rather than ‘women’s rights’ or ‘fair elections’, are placed at its head. The name of western democracy is not a sincere one, if it signifies only the justification of international aggression against economically disobedient states.

It also reflects the declining relevance of the UN, another well-meaning post-WW2 institution that ‘western democracy’ has effectively eroded. The corrupt behaviour of elected representatives, election fraud, the devastating influence of lobbyists, and the collective feeling in the young that politics is a pre-rigged, worthless game are all unanswered verdicts on democracy in American and western European states.

More troubling is the meaning of democracy in these cases, which no English-speaking writer has yet to satisfy me on. To understand the problems in Ukraine based simply on a left-wing, pro-democracy (and somewhat pro-EU) ‘#Euromaidan’ protest movement, against a corrupt Russian-propped puppet government, is to give too much attention to Kiev over the wider country, where a significant amount of its eastern citizens are actively pro-Russian, and generally seem to demand its intervention. It also overlooks the importance of nationalist feelings (either pro-Ukrainian, or pro-Russian), which have motivated and maintained the strength and unity of both sides of the escalation, be it against riot police in Kiev, or seizing government buildings in the eastern and Crimean towns. Again, well-meaning commentators here continue to insincerely place hope that the desire for freedom will win over the people. But such a freedom is meaningless unless it is predicated on a collective political identity that demands it, and it is this which in Ukraine, and in many other western states, the Left has been unable to address.

To insist that nationalist identification is somehow an aberration of ideology, an effect of politically-enforced ignorance, as a merely ‘imagined community‘, as many western commentators do, will not help to explain what sustains so many political movements, including anti-colonial and communist struggles (of course, fascism and religious authoritarianism too). Deny a person their feeling that their origin and identity matters, or that the way they can identify with others is through the collective belonging and aspirations of a culturally and linguistically homogeneous identity, and you ignore much of the source of their political desire.

This feeling is what Ken Loach’s ‘The Spirit of ’45‘ film (2013) played on, the sacrifices of a national people for a better society (understanding ‘national’ in the sense regarded then, particularly in Commonwealth countries, as something beyond just the UK), though again no English-speaking writer recognised this. It does surprise me that no writer since George Orwell has recognised that the possibility of democratic socialism, based on equality, justice and liberty, could only be possible in England if it was persuasively attached to popular identity and traditions. And so when commentators worry over the declining influence of the Left after the Cold War, they ought to consider why the Left no longer starts its politics from popular identity, rather than supposing some veil of ideology from which a pure and unrefined reality exists. The belief in such a reality is the hallmark of prejudice.

Meanwhile, the meaning of immigration and anxieties over cultural identity, issues which continue to dominate surveys of voters’ concerns, are clumsily handled. Few are able to persuasively articulate why toleration and equality are more important to our cultural identity than what language your fellow-passenger speaks on a train.

Perhaps, going back to the Ukraine for a moment, a close parallel is Egypt. In 2011, a large and strategically well-organised set of protest movements arose, representing many interests and grievances, of which the dominant account presented (at least in our ‘western democracy’) were the political aspirations of a frustrated urban middle-class, liberal in outlook and university-educated, which managed to effectively challenge the legitimacy of the Mubarak government. This forced the state to unveil the basis of its power, its violent police who will rise up against any revolutionary uprising. The ability of protesters to resist them inspired other citizens that a fight could be won for a fairer government. However democratic elections in Egypt did not produce an ‘Arab Spring’ freedom fighter, but the leader of a popular Islamic party with great influence outside the capital. The political incompetence of this leader, along with his belligerent refusal to cooperate with others, led to another sovereign crisis in which the military intervened and are in the process of installing a more favourable leader. Authoritarian rule, founded on violence and fear of violence, has been restored.

The situation may seem different in Ukraine. There is a power-play between former cold war powers, and its country is more divided on national and cultural lines. But in both cases a small pro-democracy movement sparked a wider civil conflict in which it rapidly lost influence, unable to collectively offer a positive self-identity and agreed set of political proposals. Western analysis devoted great attention to this initial movement but lost interest in the less theoretically clear matter of what followed. What of populations who freely elect leaders that clearly intend to install repressive policies? Of where the people are each time united, and divided, on along national and religious identities that narratives like ‘democracy’ are unwilling to influence? How valid are the claims of western democracy, its internationalism and demand for global human rights, when this language is more often than not cynically purposed to justify military aggression? Where its own citizens cannot count on fair political representation, and who go without work, shelter, food, healthcare, or countless other social rights, as its leaders take turns to play Richard III on the international stage?

So far, my point: the name of western democracy quickly becomes a euphemism for a form of modern economic and political aggression by an association of nation-states, military forces, paramilitary forces, energy and resources companies, and slightly gullible INGOs.

Let me present the problem another way. Now, in the west, the form of democracy presented to us has become equally unpopular. Democracy as unpopular, what does this mean? Consider the real desertion of trust and interest in politicians and political affairs across Europe. I’ve heard well-meaning people claim that educating young people about politics will end their apathy. It’s always based on a misunderstanding, that they do not know much of this vague and unspecific term, politics. But it’s easily discovered that the ideals of equality, fairness, justice, freedom, toleration and so on are easily grasped and commonly defended by young and old. What they lack instead is trust that these barely-elected officials will do anything more than lie, brag, steal or jeer. But commentators still aren’t listening.

Last November, an article entitled “Western democracy: decline and…” appeared on OpenDemocracy. Its authors, Ernesto Gallo and Giovanni Biava, make a number of arguments against our contemporary form of democracy which may be familiar. They fear that globalisation and the rule of the market has now made democracy irrelevant. A people in a state no longer have the power to decide the economic direction of their country. In the Eurozone we have seen how local referenda in Ireland, or governments in Greece or Italy, have been effectively toppled or dismissed not so much by the will of the people there, but by international economic forces.

That’s fine in explaining part of the issue, but it does not account for the decline of interest in any politics. It leaves to many unanswered questions about how effective those ‘democratic’ institutions were which supposedly declined. We still need a modern day definition of democracy and democratic action. Consider the failure of the anti-austerity movement, and the recent incarnation of Peoples’ Assemblies, to seize the mainstream. In these cases I describe, there’s nothing to feel: no account to popular identity, or to pride, or to things that can be hoped for, that can be fought for and won. Some of our best minds, far more intelligent and politically active than I will ever be, give countless hours to debunking right-wing narratives, fighting fictions with facts, occasionally winning exposure in a highbrow newspaper or late-night TV news discussion. Good stuff, I think. But less time is spent in producing stories, scenes and beliefs that directly win through to popularity, that become popular. Too much time is lost on reaction, on rejection, on righteous indignation. These are insufficient emotional ties to bring more people together to live for, and hope for, a future democracy.

I don’t mean popular according to some common vision of the ‘people’ as self-seeking, reactionary, hoping only for a tax-cut, the ‘hard-working families’ Ed Milibot drips on about. Dismissals of ‘populism’ starts from the premise that either most people are stupid, or that when most people get together, they are dangerous. We might call the first a monarchical prejudice, and the second an aristocratic prejudice, though maybe that’s a bit too pretentious. Anyway, it’s easy enough to see what passive and active resistance any kind of patronising or condescending attitude creates: look at eruptions of frustration in public buildings or in the modern classroom where teachers are themselves taught that today’s young people only care about money, careers, and cannot focus for more than 2 minutes. I am very glad to say that, from recent teaching experience, most things I have been taught about young people in education are totally wrong.

Equally, if the people are not too stupid or dangerous, there’s another common fear that the people in such states are too misled, or incapable, of wresting power back anyway. It’s common to hear newspapers and TV news as brainwashing the people, preventing them from even being able to independently make an impartial political judgement. Even populism, appealing to political popularity, is deemed a dangerous and suspicious thing. There is a great deal of pessimism by people, especially on the left, about the apparently growing popularity of anti-immigration, right-wing parties in Europe, and their irrational appeal to traditional identities and populism. I find this strange, because as someone who has studied 20th century British history for some years, this anti-immigration party popularity has never been old or new, but a feature of societal division in most decades.

Some theorists now, like Jacques Ranciere or Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, call our era ‘post-political’. For them, political language is now empty of meaning, full of ‘spin’ and PR, where politicians speak only of consensus, which implies that we should all consent to their particular view, and where the power of the markets is the most reliable and impartial way of ordering a society. All of this concedes too much lost ground to unpopular and untrusted mainstream political parties and their powerful allies. Many people seem to have increasingly had enough of this kind of politics, sure, but that doesn’t discount a more general social and political awareness.

What’s missing in this genuinely popular politics is, to my mind, a vision of a better society, like that which motivated the often violent campaigns of the Suffragettes, of the early 20th century workers movements, or of the desire to a new democratic welfare state after the second world war in Britain. My point is not to confer some collective genius on the ‘people’: that is too abstract, insufficiently explained, and too commonly argued already. No. I mean that there has not yet been an adequately democratic expression of the majority. What I think we lack is an argument for equality, liberty and justice that starts from popular identity, and an argument for these things which doesn’t just expect that the majority will get it right in whichever context they are in. There can be no reasonable or secure democracy unless there are institutions in place, safeguards and constitutional checks, which turn a disorganised and contrary group of individuals into a genuinely popular government, a government by and for the majority of people. A multitude or people is not a democracy, unless it has executive, juridical and deliberative institutions in place, in the form of a proper constitution, civil law and set of civil rights, that guarantee that the welfare of the majority is placed as the overall end to which all political and economic activity operates for.

Similarly, the verbose quibbling over the names of things (like class, object, politics, being, praxis, theory, spatiality, materiality, radical, or will, and so on forever), repeats a problem of the universities several centuries ago. It attributes some underlying reality to the name of a thing beyond what it is immediately a sign of. It sees momentary class solidarity as pertaining to some eternal ‘classness’, or an action of popular political activity as pertaining to some abstract ‘will’. This leads to the absurd calls later for a rediscovery of class, or will, or anything else, along such abstract lines that only the author of such theory can authoritatively claim to know the ‘true path’. This leads to the empty warring of egos in whichever forum: publications, meeting halls, or on the stage of international news, over the true name of western democracy.

But philosophers that today are taught as classic fare were, in their own time, declaring war on university school-men and their empty disputations over abstract universals. Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza and others rightly criticised any confusion of a thing (a stone) with some abstract essence (stone-ness). With our question, they would understand democracy not as the ‘essence’ of people power, but as an occasion or set of institutions that effectively produces popular power. On which count, our modern-day democracies might be more correctly termed aristocracies.

Writing in the midst of civil war and looming international invasion, the Dutch philosopher Spinoza asked why people will fight for their slavery as if for their salvation. Spinoza’s solution, unfinished when he died, was a political programme that organised the institutions of democratic representation, justice, and infrastructure, with the collective desire of a united people at its centre. It might seem that in this thought-piece, I am just as guilty as those I criticise for reacting to and rejecting what exists, rather than articulating what I am for. I can only answer with an IOU, that this is my goal, and I will give more information on it when I can.

I am still troubled by Ryzhkov’s words, and I’m not wise enough to make predictions about the future. But turning our minds back to our own yards, until the believers of equality, liberty and justice can produce a credible and positive politics that begins from popular identity, engaging the people and populism on its own terms, our theories are little more than the barking of dogs.

Fascinating call for ideas for a new UK constitution by the LSE has come out today, with more info here.

I’ve been thinking about this idea separately for a while, and couldn’t help but quickly bash together a few proposals. I’m putting up my post here too as otherwise I’ll forget where it is, but it’d be interesting to read any responses should they come. It’s for a federation of British republics, including whoever wants to be separately represented (England, Wales, Scotland, or broken down into cities, regions, whatever, let these fictional future people decide…). It’s presumptuous of course, but having some proposals to hand isn’t necessarily ossifying I hope.

 
Politics
1. Elected head of state, 2 years max service. No re-election.
2. Elected lower chamber of popular representatives, proportionally representing a local community. 2 year maximum with local community having right of recall. Can be re-elected once.
3. Elected upper chamber of experts, based on nomination of popular representatives, working associations, other experts, proportionally split. Re-elected multiple times.
4. Council of constitutional judges or ‘syndics’ as Spinoza called them, elected drawn from either retired experts or representatives, who meet to scrutinise, protect and update the constitution. Re-elected multiple times.
– all forms of organised political party forbidden. Representatives must act in the interests of the community which has nominated them, or from the profession/perspective they represent. Representatives paid a living salary equivalent to the living wage, below.

Law
5. Civil law – public and legal consultation on a public set of laws over several years. Laws to be maintained through a council of elected judges, also nominated from other chambers, who meet to discuss and, where necessary amend or add new laws.
6. Right to free legal representation and aid of one’s choice.

Work
7. Right to education and work training guaranteed without cost up to age of 25, to create a skilled workforce.
8. Systematic definancialisation of the economy, with return on producing domestically. High tariffs imposed on imports to build up manufacturing and high-skill IT production, with additional goal of right to work full employment.
9. Living wage becomes minimum wage. Benefits for sick, disabled, carers retired or unemployed to match this rate.
10. Working week restricted to 35 hours per week maximum. Working longer than this will undermine fellow-citizens, and goes against the model of cooperation rather than cynical competition as is current.

Housing
11. Total nationalisation and common ownership of utilities, financial assets, healthcare, policing, prisons, military, banking, land, housing stock. All to be run for the common good and welfare of the citizens of the republic, who are citizens either by birth or in working in the republic for more than two years. Proceeds from nationalisation to be pushed into building public infrastructure: housing, schools, hospitals, cities.
12. Public right to shelter, with all private property abolished. Rents paid to the republic who own property and must maintain it.

Society
13. Decisions and consultations regarding how services run e.g. leisure, policing, devolved to fortnightly community assemblies. These assemblies alone can nominate representatives.
14. Decriminalisation of all drugs, and prescription of safe forms of addictive drugs in controlled rehabilitative spaces. Additional support plunged into treatment and rehabilitation. Substance misuse to become a health and social issue, not legal one.
15. Free childcare for all parents, and vast expenditure in public infrastructure – spaces, services, libraries, paid for in the closure of tax loopholes and restoration of income tax rates to 1945 levels. Abolition of VAT.
16. Abolition of private schools, fee-paying schools and religious education. Local authorities to decide, under federal guidance and monitoring, programmes of education, which must be secular and provide equal access to all.
17. Discrimination based on grounds of race, sex, class, religion or sexual preference forbidden. All religions have right to worship, though without any state subsidy or preference. Freedom of thought and speech fully permitted, provided it does not threaten to undermine the security of the republic (e.g. cabals of bankers and exiled Tories agitating to have some foreign army invade the state).
18. Double the amount of public holidays, and make these compulsory, and named after inspiring figures in the arts or society. Aim to build a civic culture in every city by replacing advertising hoardings with stories and ideas, images and photos by local people, or inspiring words from members of the community or remarkable local people. Ban all forms of advertising except those demonstrating a public good.
19. Recruitment and training of young people for two years’ compulsory service in an area of choice of social/infrastructural benefit: engineering, nursing, overseas aid provision, military combat, etc. Arming and training of a citizen militia to inevitably defend this idealistic republican federation against military aggression from American neighbours probably needed by this point too!

But without any popular desire or threats against the current establishment, this constitution is an ‘unarmed prophet’ and at best a cheery thought-experiment. And there’s the rub…

Whilst the precarity of labour, zero hours and workplace organising are often discussed, less is said about the morality of work, and the righteousness of the hard-working. Carrots and sticks. I find it pretty dubious, so I decided to write about it, and OpenDemocracy have kindly published it as their Friday essay. Below is an excerpt:

The Department for Work and Pensions may not be the first obvious place one might turn to for moral instruction. But since 2010 under Iain Duncan Smith, it has been behind a ratcheting up of an increasingly moralising campaign against the fecklessly work-shy and benefits scroungers. If such a language is to be believed, the causes of poverty and workplace exploitation are in the individual moral defects of the poor themselves.

Yet whilst a powerful emotive rhetoric of ‘toughness’ and ‘fairness’ has been mobilised as a political trojan horse since the Coalition’s original plans to cut back welfare expenditure, new noises suggest that this campaign may take a sinister step further.

Click here to read the remainder of “Not working enough?”

Thanks everyone who came by to Housmans last Wednesday too. It was a full house, and the questions and discussion were great.

 

 

I have a piece in the new issue of Strike! Magazine, which you can get here for just a quid, or preview here. It’s all about possibilities, about being bored, hungry, shattered, skint, and below is quick excerpt.

The evening’s gentle sun is sinking, and the red skies above the soon to be demolished council high-rises carry an air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace. 

Beneath the palisades of CCTV posts, surplus street-signs and rolling billboards, I cycle through familiar streets, a nice way to pass the time and keep fit when you can’t afford to meet friends in pubs or eat much except processed foods, frozen tinned or dried. The bike’s seen better days but it’s a gift from my Dad, from the last generation of workers who can still expect a pension, at the expense of long-frozen wages and delayed retirement. I could go back home, but my head’s still reeling from arguing with my partner again about how skint we are and the growing number of things we can’t fix. So I’ll keep cycling a little further, marvelling at the beauty of the sky this evening. …

Keep following the excellent Strike at http://www.strikemag.org.

I have a piece on Liberal Conspiracy up today, with an excerpt below.

Though the EDL claim to have cancelled (EDL site) their intentionally inflammatory march to Woolwich this Saturday, unofficially their website is still inviting its 35,000 members to descend on south east London for a ‘walk of honour‘.

The callousness and hypocrisy of the EDL in attempting to politically profit out of the random murder of Lee Rigby is chilling, though not surprising. It’s to the credit of the Army and the local borough that they’ve warned the EDL away from hanging about in the area.

But the real problem of the EDL is both increasing violence unfolding against peaceful Muslim communities and the lack of challenge to its anti-Muslim rhetoric by mainstream politicians.

Read the remainder of “What the EDL tells us about hopelessness and fear in English communities” here.

A lot, I think. I’ve written a piece on this which features on OpenDemocracy this morning.

As Joseph Heller once wrote, ‘just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you’.

These words are uncomfortably fitting following the latest leak of Edward Snowden last Friday. Memos from the British intelligence agency, GCHQ, reveal that it has been given unparalleled powers among any Western (if not global) state to access and record almost all of our emails, web searches, and phone conversations. For independent citizens this may feel indeed ‘catastrophic’, but it marks only the latest unfolding of an extreme and out-of-control surveillance culture which suggests that the British government’s greatest enemy is its own people. ….

Read more of “What have I got to fear, if you’ve got something to hide?” at oD now.

I want to share a few words on this that I’ve accidentally stumbled upon since writing this. I’ve been busy working on a number of academic articles spanning histories and philosophies over the last fortnight. I love the rigour and difficulty of producing these (I’ve also been researching male hysteria and shell shock, Virginia Woolf’s London, the New Age journal and the emergence of a British intelligentsia between 1905-20, and death and dying in Bataille and Blanchot – a delicious mix). Though the downside is of course you can wait up to six months for even a rejection and, should the piece be published, few people will ever be able to access it. Anyway, in finishing up a long article on the Angry Brigade, a British left-wing terrorist group active between 1970-72, I stumbled on these words of Elizabeth Wilson. Wilson became involved in the defence campaign for the eight tried for the attacks. As she writes later in 1986,

the whole experience was a crash course in political reality […] henceforth I knew that ‘repressive arm of the state’ is no mere piece of academic Marxist jargon – there really is an iron first within the velvet glove of consumer capitalism. 

But on the other hand

I became convinced that the libertarian tactic of trying to organize the most smashed and marginalized sections of the population could not succeed, certainly not on its own, in a political void, […] and groups in conflict with the law […] must try to find some way of aligning themselves with the mainstream organizations of the working class and the progressive movement. (Hidden Agendas, pp. 42-3).

There’s some problems in translating these remarks to now. What mainstream organisations can we speak of, when the major unions only seem interested in hot, insincere words and bankrolling the Labour Party, a parliamentary lobby group for big business driven by Oxbridge MPs? And don’t many people already know what that iron fist feels like, be it as victims of violence at protests or racially-profiled stop and searches? In an era of mass unemployment and temporary part-time jobs, the whole concept of working class also needs redefining.

New organisations are now needed. The situation is desperate and I sense, like in other periods of history, depression, tolerance and passivity can only endure for so long. What would an application of Behaviourism to a democratic, socialist politics look like?