Labour Leadership: Time for Change?

I have recently received letters from Ed Balls and David Miliband asking for my vote in the Labour leadership election. Balls is running his campaign on his reputation as an activist and agitator. Indeed, of all the contenders, Balls has perhaps been the most vocal in his opposition to Tory cuts. His bullish pursuit of Michael Gove over the school building programme illuminated the Tories not just as heartless but as incompetent. Balls’ tigerish aggression would undoubtedly work well as leader of the opposition, but I’m sure many Labour supporters would be concerned that this assertive style wouldn’t appeal to the floating voters of Middle England.

Conversely, and quite remarkably, David Miliband’s letter positions him as the candidate of change. He declares that the “Blair/Brown era of the Labour Party is over” and the “era of command and control must end”. Yet, of all the candidates, David Miliband is the most implicated in the Blair/Brown dichotomy. He served as head of Blair’s No. 10 Policy Unit before holding various ministerial positions under both Brown and Blair.

The affinity between the politics of Miliband and Blair are clear, but the similarities between their style and syntax is also striking. Miliband begins his letter by stating “I wanted to start by saying thank you”. What exactly does this mean? I wanted to start this blog with a poem about dolphins, but then I realised it was a stupid idea. Did he intend to say thank you but then thought better of it? Why doesn’t he simply say thank you?

Miliband’s opener reminded me of Blair’s limp apology on Iraq at the Labour Party conference in 2004:

“The problem is, I can apologize for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologize for removing Saddam.”

A vacuous and misleading statement if ever there was one. No reference to the illegal invasion, bloodshed or millions who marched against the war. And, again, what does “I can apologize” actually mean? We’re all aware that Tony Blair has the physical capacity to verbalise the phrase “I am sorry” – but it doesn’t mean he actually did it. Still it’s a step beyond Miliband who wanted to thank me, but couldn’t even get that far. He's yet to refine the lexical gerrymandering of his master.

My concern is that the only literature I’ve been sent directly is from the candidates that have raised the most campaign funds. Naturally, I have sought more information online and at various events – but what about all those who don’t have access to the internet? I want a balanced understanding of all the candidates – not only those that can afford to disseminate mailshots. Despite progressive rhetoric, the campaign is still predicated on money and influence.

According to a source running one of the campaigns, each candidate is allowed one electronic mail merge to all members via Labour central office – but this privilege costs tens of thousands of pounds and has therefore been roundly rejected by the candidates. Not only does this disenfranchise much of the membership from learning in more detail about the candidates, but leading and influential figures have other ways to contact the membership. For instance, candidates can gain access to members’ contact details if they are provided by an MP or MEP. The average MP represents around 100 000 people whilst the average MEP represents nearly 1 million people. If you have the influence and contacts, that’s access to a lot of information.

And so access to membership details comes down to the relationship each leadership candidate has with fellow MPs and MEPs. Understandably, the front runner David Miliband has a lot of contacts – he’s been a Minister for a long time after all – and therefore, not only does he have the most money, he has the access to most members. Does that really represent the end of command and control?

The CPS’s Ian Tomlinson Decision: A Met. Police Uniform is your ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ Card.

I have been outraged this week on the decision by the CPS not to bring criminal charges against PC Simon Harwood of the Metropolitan Police.

Whilst I have no doubt that the officer concerned did not mean to cause the death of this innocent bystander, his actions were seriously irresponsible and completely unwarranted. Many of us have seen the video of the incident that took place during the G20 protests in April 2009. My interpretation of this is that Tomlinson displayed no threatening behaviour at all. Perhaps he’s not exactly helpful to the 5 officers behind him and takes his time to move out of the way, but there is no evidence of physical provocation for the unexpected shove to the ground he receives, with such force, that he does not even have time to put his hands out to protect himself.

Dr Freddy Patel’s post-mortem put his death down to a heart attack and has been used as the principal piece of evidence from a medical professional. Interestingly, his professional credibility is currently being scrutinized in a GMC hearing in respect of 4 ‘bungled’ post-mortem examinations carried out between 2002 and 2005 , but clearly the CPS are not questioning the reliability of this. Other professional opinions and the findings of the Independent Police Complaints Commission have been ignored. Nat Cary, a pathologist held in high regard, with an unblemished professional record and described by some as ‘Britain’s Top Pathologist’, found an abdominal haemorrhage to be the cause of death and expressed ‘no doubt’ that the physical impact from Harwood’s actions was the catalyst for his death.

Leaving the medical technicalities of the case aside and concentrating on the video, this man died shortly after he was shoved over by the officer. Problems with his liver made him more susceptible to serious internal injuries and investigations have pointed to him either suffering a massive heart attack or bleeding to death internally as the result of a haemorrhage. I’m no mathematician but the probability of this being a coincidence is not high. We can see from this video that there is a significant impact when he hits the concrete.

I agree that this police officer should remain suspended from duty and face a Police disciplinary hearing, but his actions were criminal. If I was caught on camera pushing someone over in the street, unprovoked and with the force that officer used, chances are I wouldn’t be walking away from that without criminal charges being brought against me. How should this PC be treated any differently? In my eyes, there was a case for manslaughter here. The force used was unreasonable, irresponsible, and cowardly. The physical trauma it triggered led to Tomlinson’s death.

I don’t live in London (I’m feeling progressively more glad about this), but rogue officers like this seriously damage public trust and faith in all the police forces of this country. While I do believe that most people in the police forces are there for the right reasons (public service and a desire to protect), there needs to be a hard line taken in dealing with individuals like Harwood to make sure there is a damn good reason not to step out of line and act professionally and with integrity at all times. Forces from above seem to have protected this officer from criminal charges and this is a gross injustice to the Tomlinson family. The CPS’s decision here has been an astonishing one and seems to go against common sense and the laws in place in this country for (apparently) everyone who lives here. The Police Authorities obviously want to play this down and for the whole affair to just disappear as quickly as possible but by protecting someone so obviously in the wrong, they are damaging public trust in the whole organisation. I don’t want people who act in this way to be patrolling the streets I live in and abusing the authority that goes hand in hand with their role. The Police Authorities need to stop covering up the truth and start facing up to it. They need to come up with a way of dealing with incidents like this that doesn’t present an image of Police employees as being above the law. This will help prevent the worrying perception from members of the public that hypocrisy seems to be increasing within the institution of policing as a whole.

The Far Right and the Need to Listen

Nick Griffin’s invite to a garden party at Buckingham Palace – like his invite to BBC Question Time –was issued to him as an elected member of the European Parliament. Whereas Griffin was royally trounced on Question Time, his invite to Buckingham Palace was withdrawn at the last moment and the prawn sandwiches (on white bread, obviously) were left uneaten. The reason cited was that Griffin “overtly” used his invitation for political purposes.

The incident raises the perennial question of how to deal with the far right. It has been argued that fascist parties should be banned – I do not agree. It has more frequently been argued that fascist parties should be denied a platform and this has seen the BNP disenfranchised from university debates and electoral hustings around the country – again, I do not agree.

The reason I disagree is not because I am a libertarian on a crusade to champion free speech. Neither is it because I am a Nazi. It is because I feel that challenging the BNP’s rhetoric of hate is the best way to fight fascists. Fascism is based on lies and fear - both of which can be exposed when confronted. Peter Tatchell challenged Nick Griffin today and how did the BNP react? With aggression and violence. This exposure and publicity severely harms the BNP. Griffin himself has denied the Holocaust on a number of occasions – but the horrors of the Holocaust are as close as you can get to historical fact. For every one person attracted to their views, ten times more are appalled by their ill-informed macho idiocy.

Seeing the BNP in national media swells the ranks of the anti-fascist movement. The BNP lost all 12 of their councillors on Barking and Dagenham council because of mass mobilisation. The increased turn-out which facilitated this wasn’t because the electorate was particularly politicised, it was because they recognised the threat of the BNP. They knew through the national media that the possibility of BNP gains were very real and that inspired millions to fight. Without this publicity, they could’ve crept in through the back door.

Banning parties of the far right serves to galvanise and invigorate their cause. It creates martyrs out of morons and the underground threat is even harder to monitor. Movements are given lifeblood by a veil of mystique, intrigue and sense of rebellion – but remove this shroud and they can be fought and exposed.

Potential BNP voters shouldn’t be pushed further to the margins of society, they should be re-engaged and their concerns should be addressed. The BNP thrive in places of white working-class deprivation where the scapegoat of immigration is their bloodlust. But disquiet around immigration is usually a proxy for other concerns – availability of jobs, job security, affordable housing, crime – and the problem of the BNP can only be truly combated when these core issues are addressed.

Therefore, not only should the BNP be fought openly and honestly to expose their abhorrent views, we also need to listen to the concerns of the vulnerable and marginalised people on which the BNP prey. Only then can we tackle the cause and effect of the far right.

Media Watch: Is Clegg fit to speak for the Tories?

The last PMQs before the recess was a typically raucous event, where the House of Commons transforms into an arena where political debate is not forthcoming, and instead plays host to slanging matches and jeers from opposing benches. The ringleaders in today's spectacle were Nick Clegg and Jack Straw.

Two newcomers to the dispatch box, and the media did not fail to point out that Nick Clegg was the first Liberal to do so since the 1920s. This was his opportunity. Lest we forget that he wasn’t free to speak solely as a man of his party. He had to defend a coalition, whose policies are so far dominated by the Conservative Party.

Cue the Tory-leaning press to back-slap Nick Clegg on a wonderful performance. The Daily Telegraph’s lead writer David Hughes wrote a short blog after PMQs in which he attacked not only Jack Straw, but the Speaker John Bercow and dismissed the Sheffield Forgemasters funding row as an issue “about which few have heard, and even fewer care”. I think even Nick Clegg would disagree with you on this one.

The tide could be turning, as cracks showed and slip-ups were made. Nick Clegg made a number of comments that have upset some Conservative MPs. By calling the Iraq war “an illegal invasion” and suggesting that child detention at Yarl’s Wood detention centre would end, he just couldn’t help slipping back into his old self. Number 10 tried to play it down by claiming he was expressing his individual view, but this was a told-you-so urge from a Liberal Democrat leader, momentarily forgetting he’s locked in a coalition with his illegal-war supporting Conservative colleagues.

David Hughes may come to regret his concluding sentence about Nick Clegg: “Cameron should watch his back”.

The Price of Freedom

One of the core signifiers of totalitarianism is the existence of a secret police – indeed the term totalitarianism is often used interchangeably with ‘police state’. I was intrigued, therefore, when I came across The Washington Post’s Top Secret America investigation.

In American, the intelligence service exists beyond the authority of the executive, legislature and judiciary – all of which are transparent and accountable bodies. According to estimates 854,000 people within the US have been given high-level security clearance. That’s a staggering 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington D.C - all without public accountability and transparency. And how many people have lower level clearance or perform other counter-terrorist roles?

According to the Post, the official US intelligence budget stands at a huge $75bn. That’s more than the GDP of Croatia and almost three times its size in 2001. This colossal figure translates into 1,271 government bodies and 1,931 private contractors working on counter-terrorism. With $75bn at stake, I’d be slightly worried about the reliability of information if private contractors were in charge of intelligence. They have to justify their pay and suddenly the purpose of intelligence shifts from being about security to being about profit.

In times of national emergency – such as leading the ‘war on terror’ – the dichotomy between freedom and national security often tips in favour of security. Yet it is acknowledged by the liberal Richard Dreyfuss that “Al Qaeda and its affiliates, its sympathizers, and even self-starting terrorist actors who aren't part of Al Qaeda itself, are a tiny and manageable problem”. So why the need for such an extensive counter-terrorist apparatus? Of course the irony here is that right-wing yahoos wailing for a small state support the proliferation of this pervasive network of subterfuge.

Alarmingly, these questionable invasions of civil liberties are becoming increasingly common in Britain. Whether it’s the elderly anti-war protestor tracked by police or today’s eviction of peaceful protestors at Democracy Village, sometimes the greatest threat to freedom doesn’t come from an external menace, it comes from those you least expect.

Why Did the Tories Pledge to Protect NHS Spending?

Tom has already written an excellent blog on the NHS, but I think it’s important to look in more detail at why the Conservatives pledged to protect NHS spending before the election. After all, it’s a distinctly anti-Conservative standpoint.

Firstly, and most obviously, it is an example of cynical and opportunistic electioneering. It was an attempt to win votes and reassure people they wouldn’t dismantle the NHS. Globally, only the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, Wal-Mart and the Indian Railways employ more people than the NHS – that’s a significant proportion of the franchise and, understandably, they wouldn’t vote for a party that threatened their livelihood.

The second reason is much more Machiavellian. As Labour blogger Hopi Sen highlighted in a blog this week, Cameron pledged there would be “no more pointless re-organisations” of the NHS. Of course the key word here is "pointless" and the implication now is that the current re-organisation is necessary.

Re-organisations – particularly when nearly two million people are involved – cost money. According to the BBC, the Tory re-organisation proposals will cost £1.7bn at least – probably closer to £3bn. Therefore, the Conservatives needed to protect NHS spending, not because of altruism, but to fund their ideologically motivated dismantling of the NHS – something which didn’t appear in their manifesto.

So who will our taxes go to in order to pay for this stealth privatisation? And who will deliver these ‘commissioned’ services? Health Secretary Andrew Lansley seems to suggest that it will be charities, voluntary sector groups and SMEs in what would represent “the largest social enterprise sector in the world". This could work because third sector organisations would no doubt have unparalleled local knowledge and insight, but Lansley’s statement amounts to little more than a hollow promise. The same guarantees were given in Welfare to Work, but it has now emerged that there will be no money available upfront for new contracts and organisations will only be paid on sustainable outcome. This means that small, local organisations – often surviving hand-to-mouth but with peerless local knowledge – cannot bid for Welfare to Work contracts. The inevitable result is that they will be awarded to large, faceless corporations with little regional knowledge and little appreciation of local labour markets. The most third sector organisations can hope for is to be sub-contractors of gargantuan money-making machines – and this will inevitably be the case for the NHS too.

So who will these private health giants be? Organisations like UnitedHealth UK, Tribal Newchurch, Humana, Bupa, Care UK and Aetna UK have already been mentioned. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard about them though, Health Minister Andrew Lansley has been bankrolled by Care UK for some time – so at least they’re familiar to the Conservatives. And in case you’re unaware of the other providers, most are major players in the US – so rest assured our public health service is in safe hands. In fact, Aetna have nearly 200 years experience of providing a range of consumer directed health care insurance products. They even had the foresight to issue life insurance policies to slave-owners covering the lives of their slaves – so they’ll definitely have patients at the centre of their service.

In conclusion, the Conservatives protected NHS spending to bankroll its own demise – like putting aside money in your will to pay for your own funeral. It also means they can use tax payers’ money to line the pockets of private companies. There will always be costs associated with administration, management and bureaucracy – but this will now be executed by the private sector at huge public cost. Whereas a unified NHS can provide necessary services which run at a loss, the private sector is motivated entirely by profit.

The ConDems do not have a mandate for this re-organisation and it should be fought at every stage. If you haven’t already, please sign up to Keep Our NHS Public. Let’s show the Coalition that, unlike their principles, the NHS is not for sale.

Cartoon courtesy of Private Eye

Graduate Tax is Bad Education

Considering the Lib-Dems’ spineless concession on top-up fees, asking Vince Cable to make any announcement on Higher Education is the political equivalent of rubbing a dog’s nose in its own excrement in an attempt to house train it.

The Coalition’s proposition of a variable graduate tax is flawed on a number of levels. Firstly, the whole premise is predicated on students paying a specific tax when they graduate. There are a number of obvious issues with this:

• What happens if a graduate moves abroad when they finish university?
• What happens if a student doesn’t complete their degree – either dropping out after two weeks or just before finals?
• What happens if someone never works or spends their whole lives in academia?
• What about mature students who, after a long career, decide to go to university having never had the opportunity when they were younger?

The second problem is that Cable has already asked Lord Browne to “consider varying the contribution that graduates pay according to how much they earn, and possibly which university they attend”. Therefore, because taxes will go directly to universities, this policy would further increase the divide between the best and the worst universities. For instance, red brick universities like Oxford and Cambridge would only deliver lucrative courses – such as accountancy or law – whilst the Bolton Institute will be left with basket weaving and David Beckham studies.

Finally, the idea that money can be saved by reducing undergraduate degrees to two years would further devalue Higher Education in Britain.

I am disappointed that there is unlikely to be significant opposition to the graduate tax with a number of the Labour leadership candidates already embracing the policy. Furthermore, it should be remembered that it was New Labour who introduced top-up fees in the first place - so we can't expect them to lead the fight for a fair Higher Education system.

The idea underpinning the graduate tax – that tax contributions should be based on how much someone earns and students shouldn’t be saddled with debt – is fundamentally sound, but it shouldn’t just be restricted to graduates. All high earners have benefitted in some way from living in Britain – be that graduates from Higher Education, businessmen from economic freedoms or plumbers from vocational training – and all of these should pay equally for this privilege (depending on their actual incomes). The best way to protect the quality of our universities and ensure equality of access is to abolish top-up fees, dismiss the idea of the graduate tax and re-introduce bursaries. Higher Education itself should be funded by a more robust and progressive income tax system which targets all high earners. A good place to start would be the Robin Hood Tax.

New is the New New

We were trying to write a short paragraph to sum up this blog and came across a problem. As we were attempting to pick appropriate adjectives we suddenly became aware that we sounded eerily like the Conservative manifesto. For a leftist blog this was a slight concern. Were we Tories all along? Luckily I have a politics degree so went through my extensive notes and happened across the answer below:

Great, that proves it then. Definitely not Tories. So why does every attempt to describe what we believe in sound like the result of some sort of overpaid PR yuppie? The answer unfortunately is that modern political debate has descended into lowest common denominator newspeak that is so simple it means everything and therefore nothing. The simplest message not only can be understood by the most people, it is also harder to challenge. A great example of this is “change”.

Change is generally used to combat incumbent administrations and was used effectively both by Obama and David Cameron. You can’t argue against change. Everyone wants it. If I lived under a government that gave me alone one million pounds a day I would still want change. I would want a million and one pounds a day.

“Progressive” is the newest gem. In the 90s Clinton’s New Democrats found that if you are “new” you are again beyond criticism. New has no precedent that can be held down and scrutinised. This was then copied by New Labour and then again by David Cameron. However, Labour’s new third way was very different to the modern Conservative approach. Whilst they genuinely tried to reposition themselves to straddle the centre ground (leaving them with an ideological deficit), the Tories have instead adopted the language of progressive politics without changing at all. This does mean though that occasionally they tie themselves in knots though. They are carrying out age old Tory policy under banners of “choice”, “responsibility” and “progressive politics”. The ConDem coalition helps them immensely in this regard as it can be sold as a new progressive system of government.

So where does that leave the young writers of a blog who find party politics unrepresentative of their knowledge and beliefs, who are trying to engage in a genuine debate to find left of centre answers? Well just as that sentence demonstrates, by using words like “engage” and “genuine debate” it leaves them looking like a bunch of Tories.

Palin's year of the Grizzlies

Commentators are asking whether Sarah Palin’s ability to raise US $1 million in 3 months (and spend 75% of it) is a sign that she’s preparing to put her hat in the ring for the next Presidential elections in 2012. This is big money, until you read that Mitt Romney raised US$1 million in 2 months.

Aside from all the gossip and money floating around US politics, you may have come across the “mama grizzlies” who are no fictional characters from a children’s book. No, these are the women who have already had enough of Obama, who walk around in tailored stars and stripes jackets, who hold placards saying “annoy liberal” and “I am the angry tax-bled hockey-mom”.

There are a lot of images of women and a lot of talk about women too. But the images and emotive speech do not quite match up. Despite many placards in the images citing Obama’s reforms and tax proposals, Palin fails to mention any policies at all. The nearest she gets is mentioning the policies coming out of “DC”, as though Washington is some foreign entity.

According to Palin, these policies are bringing a fundamental change to the US that are worrying mothers. Well, worry no more as I can assure you that your children will be served better under universal healthcare, flexible working hours for parents, and the Child Care Tax credit reform, which will financially assist low-income families with child care. These are just a few current administration policies that will actually benefit women as mothers. Not to mention Obama’s detailed policies for women as women, and not just as mothers and wives.

The problem with Palin’s speech is she speaks about women as though their prime political motivation is driven by their children and families. She talks about the “mom awakening”, women being worried about their children’s and grandchildren’s future, mothers just having that knack of knowing when something is wrong, and then of course, the mama grizzlies.

If there’s one way to get Republican women from Alaska to join your cause, the mama grizzlies may just do it. But I’m not sure how you get from someone doing something adverse towards their cubs, to a democratically elected government turning policies into law. Now that’s not the same as say a fully grown male bear trying to eat your bear cubs is it?

I shouldn’t be so dismissive though. Money is power, $1 million is a lot of power, and this woman talks about women. 2008 was not the year of the hockey-mom , but will 2012 be the year of the mama grizzlies?

A Climate of Frustration

I was happy to see Phil Jones vindicated and re-instated within the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, in a new role of Director of Research last week.

‘Climategate’, as it became ridiculously known, the scandal over the content of emails that were quite possibly hacked into and leaked over the internet from the above mentioned university department, provided further fuel to the arguments of the climate change sceptic community and provoked a blood-thirsty demand for inquiry into the allegations they had orchestrated.


My frustration with these people is difficult to express. It took three independent publicly funded reviews to conclude the obvious: that the content of these emails had no bearing on the fact human activity on this planet is inducing global warming.

I can appreciate the reasons for counter research in order that both sides can collaborate to try and better predict the trends in environmental change and measure the changes that have already taken place. However, I can see no benefit to this attempt to discredit the research and working practices of the CRU. In my opinion, not only did these three independent reviews end up dismissing the integrity of their argument, but also questioning the integrity of the members of these sceptic organisations as human beings.

The UK Met Office spokesperson from Leo Hickman’s article on the scandal for the Guardian in November 2009 summed it up well, I thought. They expressed no doubt that an inquiry would essentially be a waste of time, as the work by some of the world’s most respected scientists would stand as strong as ever at the end:

“It's a shame that some of the sceptics have had to take this rather shallow attempt to discredit robust science undertaken by some of the world's most respected scientists. The bottom line is that temperatures continue to rise and humans are responsible for it.”

In summary of the conclusions from the reviews that subsequently took place and were released this month, I thought the New York Times editorial from last week was pretty spot on:

“Perhaps now we can put the manufactured controversy known as Climategate behind us and turn to the task of actually doing something about global warming. On Wednesday, a panel in Britain concluded that scientists whose e-mail had been hacked late last year had not, as critics alleged, distorted scientific evidence to prove that global warming was occurring and that human beings were primarily responsible.”

I wasn’t surprised by any of the findings from the reviews because I, like many ordinary people who live with very little involvement in the actual science community, have enough common sense to have formed the reasonable expectation that the earth will become damaged beyond recognition and repair if we carry on using and destroying its natural resources at the current rate. For me, this goes beyond Science and is a deeply moral issue. Why does the sceptic community insist on using cheap tricks to whip up controversy like this and then call for the use of public money on pointless enquiries that will have predictable outcomes? They failed to discredit the science behind Climate Change that indicates it is the biggest threat to human livelihood and this planet. What they did succeed in discrediting was themselves in terms of human compassion and consideration for the fragile ecosystem and its inhabitants. Isn’t it about time the sceptics piped down, behaved more responsibly and started co-operating more with those scientists who work for preservation, conservation and survival, instead of leaving our future to chance?

Picture from: www.chrismadden.co.uk

Media Watch: We’ll have a gay old time

According to Stonewall’s report No Going Back, “consensual acts between same-sex adults are criminalised in 80 member states of the United Nations”. Homosexuality results in the death penalty in six of these countries and, in many more, lesbian, gay and bisexual people face persecution, torture, rape and murder from ‘the mob’ or the government. It was refreshing, therefore, that the Supreme Court recently ruled that two gay men facing persecution in their home countries have the right to asylum in the UK.

This historic decision should have been heralded as a great act of compassion and solidarity, but instead it has been met with homophobic vitriol from the gutter press. The Express front page ran ““Now asylum if You’re Gay: they must be free to go to Kylie concerts and drink multi-coloured cocktails”. The Daily Mail warned that the judgement “could allow thousands of homosexuals to claim asylum in Britain”. And The Daily Star alleged that “opening the floodgates to gay asylum seekers is absolute madness”. Accusing all those who support offering asylum to persecuted homosexuals of being mentally ill demonstrates the ever balanced and informed approach of Fleet Street.

The Daily Star’s article might not explicitly say the decision is wrong, “but it’s not practical in the real world”. Is ‘real’ a byword for reactionary, bigoted or homophobic? The terminology employed – every illegal, outcasts, flood of numbers – serves to dehumanise homosexuals and asylum seekers whilst fortifying hatred and division. They argue that “every illegal” looking for a “cushy life in Britain” will try “claiming they’re gay to ensure they (can) stay”. I’d hardly describe British life as “cushy” when the mainstream media promote and reinforce prejudice against asylum seekers, immigrants and homosexuals. I’m just waiting for the headline: “Tired of persecution in your own country, why not come to Britain where it’s slightly less bad?”

But surely the political response has been more balanced and celebratory? Unfortunately not. Conservative MP Philip Davies said “It’s a dangerous game to play to go down this line because it’s quite feasible that this could offer an ideal line of defence for someone who wants to try to avoid being kicked out of the country, whether it is true or not that they are gay”. Again, no mention of helping those suffering discrimination or prejudice – but what else would you expect from someone who’s voted consistently against gay rights? Anyone would think the Conservatives weren’t interested in helping people outside of Britain. Or maybe they just don’t like gays.

My only point of agreement with The Daily Star is their assertion that “we cannot solve the world’s problems on our own”. Their response, however, is to pull up the drawbridge and splurge detestable dross into our atmosphere. The truth is we can’t solve the world’s problems on our own, but we do the world a disservice if we do nothing. We need to mobilise and applaud the decision of the Supreme Court and challenge homophobia and racism in all forms – be it overt in places like Iran, Uganda and Jamaica or covert in places like Fleet Street. We need to publicise and applaud the Supreme Court’s decision and put international pressure on other countries to do the same. Moreover, we need to put pressure on countries which decriminalise homosexuality and newspapers which peddle reactionary nonsense. But where do we begin? How about the online editor for The Daily Star for a start geoff.marsh@dailystar.co.uk

Dismembering the NHS

On the surface, the government’s planned NHS reforms sound like a positive step forward. Greater freedom for staff on the front line to be involved in decision-making – good idea. A patient-orientated NHS – great. Getting rid of unnecessary bureaucracy – excellent. All of these things would, on paper, make for a streamlined, well-targeted NHS. However, in practice what this will actually mean is our old friend privatisation creeping in through the back door. It’s important to note that Labour opened the door and invited privatisation into the NHS to start with through PFI, but it is the Tories who will set the table, make its bed and give it the key to the safe.

The best way to understand the true nature of these measures is through the eyes of a party which has pledged to ‘ring-fence’ the NHS but is ideologically driven to privatise as many public services as possible. It would be indefensible for any government, ring-fence pledge or not, to come to power and simply say “We’ve had quite enough of this free healthcare malarkey so we’re selling it off to the private sector. Anyone who has a problem with that can go fuck themselves.” Unable to do this (and I think we can be certain that many Tories would very much like to) the only option is that of privatisation through covert means. Using the “cloak of GP commissioning,” as Jeremy Corbyn puts it, the Tories plan to put 80% of the NHS budget under the control of multiple ‘consortia’ of GPs. This move, the government would have us believe, will give local practitioners more say over what treatments and equipment are required in their areas by giving them control of service commissioning and remove the restrictive grip of centralised government. What they actually want is well demonstrated by an extract from a summary of the key changes on the BBC News website: “Hospitals - Encouraged to move outside the NHS to become "vibrant" industry of social enterprises.” Combined with ministers stating that it shouldn’t matter which sector service providers come from – public, private or voluntary – and the emphasis on ‘choice’, the message here is clear: the government want more competition in the NHS.

As stated above, Labour brought elements of this privatisation in with their own policies which arguably led to the squandering of much of their record investment in healthcare on private companies’ middleman and consultancy services when pumping the money directly into actual, state-run services would have been far more effective. This has led to a narrowing of the debate on the desired direction of the NHS. Now the choice seems to be “Do you want a little bit of private involvement or a lot?” No major party seems to be suggesting that an entirely state-run NHS with public health at its heart would be the way forward – all debates seem to revolve around ‘patient choice’ and who is in charge of commissioning.

The danger here, and arguably the Con-Dem intention, is that these local GP consortia will preside over the coming ‘austerity’ measures and be forced to make the ‘tough decisions’ the government loves reminding us are necessary, meaning that the blame if anything goes wrong will be laid squarely at the door of local mismanagement rather than flawed centralised policy. Another effect of these measures will be to force these groups of GPs to commission the cheapest possible service providers who will ostensibly come from the private sector and be of a far lower quality (see the multiple problems hospitals have had with cleaning companies over the years) and the privatisation of one of our most important public services will seem to have been a logical, decentralised decision. But what are we worried about, anyway? This approach worked really well with the railways, didn’t it?

Media Watch: "One in 5 Britons will be ethnics"

The front page of today’s Daily Express warns that “One in 5 Britons will be ethnics” by the middle of the century. But the Cambridge dictionary defines ethnic as “a person belonging to an ethnic group”. So what does that make the rest of the population? Will they be some sort of highly-evolved superhuman hybrid that transcends all known ethnicity? Or are the Express just being racist? I think five out of five Britons know the answer...

Media Watch: It's not even Raoul Moately interesting

Anyone watching the BBC News 24 and Sky News coverage of the Raoul Moat siege on Friday night/Saturday morning will have been shocked, appalled and, most probably, gripped with morbid fascination.

The behaviour of BBC reporter Jon Sopel was nothing short of scandalous – corralling locals before stealing their mobile phones, imposing on personal conversations and petrifying stranded relatives. Both news services even tried to contrive some sort of “carnival atmosphere” as the essentially bland events unfolded.

Thankfully I didn’t watch much of the coverage, but it wasn’t because my sense of apaul compelled me – it was because nothing was happening. I felt myself willing the reporters to impose more and more. Why can’t you burst through the police cordon and get some decent footage? Why haven’t the residents taken any footage and uploaded it to YouTube? Why hasn’t Sopel wrestled Moat to the ground before turning the gun on the police and then himself?

So who’s to blame for this sick news merry-go-round? It is the 24-hour news broadcasters themselves – forced not just to report the news but to create it? Or is it us, the sick viewing public, that demands this nauseatingly grotesque voyeurism?

Marxism 2010: Does the Far Left have a future?

In short, yes. People will always be attracted to the ideas of revolutionary socialism and Marxism will always provide a useful framework to study history and economics. But beyond academic discourse and the revolutionary zeal of youth, it is difficult to say what influence Marxism will have on politics in the future.

The tyranny and failure of self-professed ‘Marxist’ regimes in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China has done much to damage the ideas of Karl Marx (although few academics would agree that either China or the USSR were Marxist). It matters little that none of the successful ‘Marxist’ revolutions were borne from circumstances prescribed by Marx (i.e. from developed capitalist countries) – the ideology is still dead amongst much of the developed world.

This seems to be reflected in the demographics attending Marxism 2010. From my estimates, 50% of attendees were students, 35% were the ‘generation of 68’ and the other 15% were somewhere in between. Clearly, large numbers of students are being lost when they graduate. This suggests an intrinsic fragility in the movement.

The Socialist Workers’ Party – the most significant party on the far left and organiser of Marxism 2010 – suffers from a number of internal contradictions and a dogmatic refusal to embrace a modernisation of Marxist analysis. In a lecture on Marxist economics, it is claimed that the falling rate of profit limits the capitalist’s ability to accumulate and this threatens capitalist production – but this is based on a completely “free” market and there is no mention of monopolies or protectionism. The SWP subscribe to an orthodox Marxist idea of profit – i.e. all work is based on the idea that the capitalist rate of profit is the value of what is produced minus the cost of labour. But what about the public sector? Nurses do not create profit – they are just a cost to the state. The only value they have is the services they provide. Karl Marx can be forgiven for not foreseeing the creation of the welfare state, but why don’t the SWP update their analysis? And why do they consistently champion the welfare state but never give Labour credit for creating it?

The SWP harp on about the need for proletarian revolution, but there is no indication of what a modern revolution would look like. There is no discussion of issues which affect workers – housing, jobs, education etc – it is all theoretical and hypothetical. In one seminar, a contributor had the audacity to propose a sports section in the Socialist Worker (official newspaper for the SWP) only to be hounded for proposing something that wasn’t ideologically pure. How can the SWP claim to represent workers when they refuse to relate on their level? I would’ve thought a sports section is a good way to attract a new readership that can then be converted to your arguments. Likewise, there is an inherent contradiction between the Marxist interpretation of class and the fact that most workers now consider themselves middle-class. Unless the SWP can resolve this conflict, there is a permanent impasse for their revolution.

The SWP’s lack of objective analysis is also a major hindrance. In a talk entitled ‘Will the working class ever be revolutionary?’ the SWP look back at historical examples to illustrate the revolutionary nature of British workers and cite the English civil war and the overthrow of the monarchy (there is no mention of the monarchy being re-instated a number of years later). Generally, the SWP seem to confuse protest for developed revolutionary consciousness. They finally concluded that British workers “are not enamoured with parliamentary democracy”. Maybe not, but they’re not exactly enamoured with revolution either. The SWP shouldn’t be trying to pretend there is a history of working class revolution – they should be looking at why there isn’t and how they’ve been bought off by capitalism.

Until parties like the SWP can update their ideological analysis and resolve fundamental contradictions, they will remain increasingly marginalised movements. The ideas of Karl Marx are still highly relevant as the advent of globalisation stratifies the world into two classes of countries – the bourgeois countries of the Northern hemisphere and the proletarian producers of the South hemisphere. As long as the SWP clings to its ideological purity, the far left will remain an anachronism. Not because Marxism isn’t relevant anymore, but because they remain trapped in a political time warp. The core constituency of a Marxist-Leninist party is the working class, but the SWP are not only unable to communicate with the working class, they are seemingly unwilling to do so.

Coalition are "ideological amateurs"

In the New Statesman, Keynesian economist David Blanchflower makes an impassioned and convincing defence of Labour’s spending and attacks the “ideological amateurs” of the Coalition. Blanchflower argues that Labour borrowing – at very low rates – stimulated the economy and kept unemployment down. The logical conclusion is that cutting government spending now threatens economic growth and risks a double-dip recession.

The evidence employed by Blanchflower is mixed. Quantitative data shows that our fragile economy is not yet ready to have state investment withdrawn at levels proposed by the government. For example, business investment in the first quarter of 2010 is estimated to be 6% higher than the previous quarter – but it is still 11% lower than the same period in 2009. Likewise, investment in private-sector manufacturing is down 29% on the corresponding quarter in 2009.

Blanchflower’s empirical approach is very persuasive, but where it suffers is the over-emphasis on qualitative data gathered through the consumer confidence index. This suggests that, between 19 April and 23 May, consumer confidence fell by 10 points and expectation regarding future economic conditions fell by 12 points. This sample, however, covers the period before and after a general election – a time of flux, instability and uncertainty – and would certainly have adversely affected consumer confidence. Furthermore, protracted coalition talks – with speculators unsure who would form the government – would only have compounded the situation.

Regardless of selective methodology, however, Blanchflower’s argument is very compelling. Austerity measures cannot create 2.5 million jobs – especially with the government putting all their faith in the private sector. Incessant talk of cuts and financial crisis creates a flawed confidence and makes private sector growth even less likely. There is a certain tragic irony that Vince Cable’s Department for Business Innovation and Skills is the first government department to face 25% cuts. The BIS, after all, is tasked with stimulating the private sector to create jobs.

Who’s going to stimulate the private sector when the BIS has been decimated and confidence has crashed? Who knows – but only state investment can remain immune to confidence crises.

Marxism 2010: Reminiscences of the SWP bore?

In recent years I’ve often felt as if I’m in a bit of a political limbo – too left-wing to join the modern Labour Party, too logical to make any kind of enthusiastic call for a working class uprising. I think this is a common feeling among progressive people of my age. We were born and raised under Thatcher and then became politically switched-on just as a ‘Third Way’ version of Labour came to power. That is to say, we were born during the destruction of the old left and became self-aware under a confusing, blurred, neo-liberal version of what I will begrudgingly call ‘social democracy’. When I was 18 – and a self-avowed Marxist, no less! – Marxism 2003 seemed to offer an exciting opportunity to mix with people who shared my hard left politics and ‘revolutionary’ zeal. In the event I was actually put off by the unquestioning nature of the SWP’s lectures and so-called debates. The latter tended to consist of a load of people calling for a workers’ revolution led by a vanguard party (the SWP, of course) who would ignore or jeer anyone who suggested a reformist route. Even by my naive analysis they seemed to be, well, naive. Still unable to bring myself to join or vote Labour, I saw Marxism 2010 as an opportunity to see how the far left in Britain (at least the part of it that was represented here) had developed over the last seven years, while also comparing it to the progress of my own political thinking.

The first lecture we attended was on the Marxist analysis of economics – a nice easy start, then. I actually found this lecture to be a good refresher for basic Marxist theory and it gave a fairly clear analysis of Marx’s argument regarding the crisis-prone nature of capitalism. The speaker made a good fist of applying it to the current economic situation but his argument didn’t quite come off as he failed to even mention the fact that the ‘means of production’ has largely been moved to the third world, therefore negating any possibility of the workers in this country seizing them from their capitalist owners. This lack of progressive – or even logical – thinking was to become a regular fixture. Following this we attended talks throughout the weekend on seemingly diverse topics including Venezuela’s and Bolivia’s socialist ‘revolutions’ – apparently they’re not socialist enough; the British working class and whether they are ‘revolutionary’ or not – according to the SWP they are, we’ve just got to keep telling them that until they rise up like one massive BA cabin crew; and the history of the world through a Marxist perspective – I found this to fit with my own beliefs in a very general way, but their debates about history and the way it is taught today were woefully out of date.

This is not to say that it was all bad. One talk on Keynesian economics and another entitled ‘Does the media control out minds?’ were enjoyable and were followed by interesting contributions from audience members. However, the latter talk made very little reference to online media and its scope for organising networks of disparate people and putting pressure on politicians (see the 38 Degrees and Take Back Parliament campaigns for evidence). All the speaker seemed to suggest was taking the Socialist Worker newspaper into your place of work with you or attempting to flog it to disinterested passersby who would probably rather be reading the Sun. By far the most positive aspects of the whole event were Slavoj Zizek’s contribution to the panel discussion on ‘The Idea of Communism’ and Tony Benn’s lecture. Unfortunately, other than these examples the unifying theme was a slavish deference to Marxist-Leninism, with seemingly no effort made to develop this theory past the 1920s. Combined with their rejection of trade unions and Parliamentary reform as a means of achieving better conditions for workers, and their constant references to some unidentified form of ‘struggle’ to achieve a revolution, this all added up to a very frustrating and, at times, irritating experience. The overall result? I’m still in limbo.

Who Doesn't Agree With Tom Watson?

Charity Starts At School

Twelve months ago the Charity Commission concluded that St Anselm's private school was “not currently operating for the public benefit” and challenged its charitable status. This threatened a raft of charity perks which the £15 000 pa school enjoyed – including reduced business rates and opt-outs from income/corporation tax, capital gains tax and stamp duty.

One year on and St Anselm’s School has secured its charitable status by pledging “to triple the number of children with full bursaries”. Interesting spin here by the Telegraph as, in actual fact, the number of bursaries has increased from one to three. That’s a total of 1.3% of 230 pupils receiving bursaries. But tripling sounds much more philanthropic than “extended to three”.

In its report, the Charity Commission commends St Anselm’s selection procedures for not being "academically selective". Well why would they? All they care about is a family’s ability to pay, not the academic prowess of a child. Interestingly, when a person applies for a bursary, there is a formal testing process involved. This hardly seems fair and equitable – oh yeah, we don’t care if the rich kids are as thick as shit, but if we let a prole in they better be clever otherwise they won’t be able to compete with our received wisdom following years of inbreeding.

Charitable status should be reserved for those organisations which help the most needy and vulnerable – not the cleverest or richest. The benefits associated with being a charity are designed to do more good, not make more profit. St Anselm’s might help three intelligent working-class kids every year, but what about those not as academically gifted? Just because someone has their fees paid does not mean that they will fit in if they can’t afford trendy clothes or the latest technology. Giving places to disadvantaged pupils will never challenge the inherent hierarchy and elitism at fee paying schools – if anything it will make it worse.

David Hanson, chief executive of the Independent Association of Prep Schools said “the vast majority of schools . . . do not have the resources to be able to pay for fully-funded bursaries. . . the commission has to get into the real world”. I agree with Mr Hanson – the commission should get into the real world because there is something fundamentally wrong when independent schools are afforded charity status. Their very existence is incompatible with community benefit because entry is based on an ability to pay. When a poor pupil does receive a bursary, then entrance is determined by an arbitrary measure of intelligence. Either way, access depends on discrimination and this acts to reinforce divisions within society and fortify social and economic stratification.

We Don't Work for Money

Above video courtesy of The RSA


The Open Source movement is evidence that money is a poor way to motivate humans in an information based economy. Open Source software is software that has been produced by programmers and developers for free in their spare time. They then allow others to modify this freely. Open Source software is illegal to sell and drives much of the world of computing. The largest projects have hundreds of contributors and organisational structures.

As we advance away from having to provide our own physical labour our economic model must change. People are doing similar work as they do at work but in their spare time for free.

Inefficient Competition

Free market advocates would have you believe that competition leads to an efficient market and therefore cheap and reliable goods and services. This is a persuasive argument. If only the fittest survive then only the best products will be produced. In a simple economic model this may be true but in our advanced western capitalist society this idea has number of problems.

There are a number of areas in the market where it is difficult to achieve competition at all. For certain things, a monopoly is most efficient. For example, Ebay commands a 95% share of the online auction market. Is this because they innovate and provide a service 95% better than other auction sites? Not really. It dominates due to the fact that if you want to buy or sell something you go to the biggest market place to do it. There can only be one largest. It’s this gravity that once achieved is impossible to compete with. All Ebay has to do is make sure its charges are not excessive enough to allow a competitor to rise up. Even if a competitor offered a similar service for free it would be difficult to imagine how it would gain ground.

Facebook and YouTube are other examples that rose to prominence by innovation and then attained the critical mass necessary to dominate. Admittedly, these do have increased competitive influences from other areas. Twitter, whilst not challenging Facebook’s whole model provides a service similar a small aspect of its service.

Where there is no choice there can be no competition. There can only be one rail network, one power grid and one telecommunications system within a state which makes true competition impossible. What about mobile networks I hear you cry? They run their own independent networks and have competition. Yes they do which means we have three mobile masts to cover the same area one could. Is that an efficient use of resources? When was the last time you picked your train by the company that runs it or the hospital you visit when knocked unconscious?

The idea of competition also assumes a level playing field in knowledge. You can only pick the products and services you know about or understand. The appearance that a product is the best is more important to the manufacturer than it actually being the best. This means that marketing becomes the central component in manufacturing. This in itself is wasteful. If an average marketing budget is 10% of the cost of the product and you earn the average of £25k a year you will be spending £1917.42 to be told what to buy (after tax). This means you would work the equivalent of a month’s pay to go home to watch adverts on TV, in the cinema and here on the internet. I don’t find working for a month to watch adverts a very efficient use of my time. To avoid this corporate tax you could try not spending any money at all.

If the government created a department which slapped a 10% tax on all goods whilst providing confusing information about the value of goods and services there would be an outcry. Monopolies have to exist and the inability to accurately assess the inherent value of a product leads to an inefficient model of production.

The components in the iPhone 4 cost $188. It sells for $599. I don't understand how this is efficient. Apple must be paying all those Foxconn workers a mint.

Let's Wage War

The Coalition’s decision to publish a quango rich list is seemingly another tick against their ‘progressive’ credentials. How dare some poxy civil servant earn more than our beloved Prime Minister! Just as well Cameron’s already a millionaire – otherwise he might only be able to afford one holiday home in the South of France. But this debate isn’t an attack on greed or inequality – it’s an ideologically motivated campaign against the public sector. After all, why not attack bankers or expose excessive wages in the private sector?

The logical assumption of these revelations is that overpaid bosses in quangos, the public sector and local government will be on the chopping block ahead of frontline workers – but this quite clearly isn’t the case. For instance, Brighton & Hove City Council are already recruiting four Strategic Directors (£125 000 pa) to carry out ‘efficiency savings’ whilst departments make massive budget cuts. How many stories in the paper have you seen about ‘wasteful’ public programmes helping the old, vulnerable and disabled? Not very many – but you can rest assured they’ll be cut ahead of the Senior Management.

The public sector is attacked by Conservative critics for not being subject to market forces. It is also attacked for paying high wages in order to attract private sector high-flyers and remain competitive. But both of these viewpoints are mutually exclusive. Hence, the only consistency in the Coalition’s view of the public sector is that they wish to undermine it.

That is not to say that we don’t need to debate wage inequality, but the current debate is subjective and confused. We should be campaigning for transparency in the public sector – but we should demand it in the private sector too. We should be looking at parity between public and private sectors to ensure the public sector can attract the best talent. We should also be looking at decreasing the gap between the lowest and the highest paid in organisations. For instance, why not limit the wage of the best paid person in an organisation to ten times that of the lowest paid? If a cleaner earns £12, 000 pa, is it unreasonable to expect a Chief Executive to exist on a measly £120, 000? If the Chief Executive feels aggrieved then they can fight for a higher wage – this would have the pleasant effect of increasing the cleaner’s wage accordingly. This would help reduce division and promote a sense of community and unity within organisations.

The Failure of Western Capitalism

The above image shows the amount of national debt as a percentage of GDP and therefore gives an indication of a state's ability to pay if it's in debt. The data is sourced from the CIA's fact book website and was compiled for Wikipedia under the Creative Commons licence.

A cornerstone of liberal free markets is their ability to provide an efficient, reliable and stable financial system. They are clearly failing in this regard. Market failure has resulted in increased borrowing in order to stabilise the major economies of the world. Notice that this is only a feature of Western states and others with liberalised markets.

What feature of Western capitalism is to blame for this? The liberalised movement of finance (i.e. the removal of tarrifs and limits on flows of finance), deregulation of the financial sectors or something else?

Marxism 2010: A Virgin’s Tale

Am I a Marxist? This is a question I have asked a number of times when trying to place myself within the political spectrum. I have just spent the weekend attending the SWP’s Marxism festival trying to answer this question. The answer I arrived at is resolutely no, well not the Marxism defined under the narrow constraints of the SWP anyway.

Unlike Dan and Tom I was a virgin to the event. I have a general distaste for far leftist meetings due to many past experiences which involved a large amount of hippy idealism and limited dogmatic thought. I was certain that I would hear phrases like “can’t we just all get along” and “when will everyone learn that we don’t need governments anymore”.

The first meeting I attended did nothing to allay these preconceptions. I was late due to a delayed train but helpfully Dan and Tom had sat at the front of the room in the middle of a row which meant I disrupted the speaker by pushing past people and apologising loudly. This entertained Dan and Tom greatly and for them was the highlight of the talk. The speaker mumbled at the floor and then a precession of people crowed about how clever they were.

This was a trend which ran through the whole event. Each meeting consisted of 30 minutes of a lecture and then 45 minutes of people speaking from the audience. This resulted in far too many occasions of people standing up and ranting with the sole aim of impressing everyone about how committed and intelligent they were. If your point was the inevitability of a workers revolution led by a vanguard, you would be well supported by the speaker, if not you were either ignored or told the above was true. Sometimes you would get the bizarre situation when the lecture topic or debate seemed to disagree or be unconcerned with the idea of a Leninist workers style revolution but would end with the speaker stating that it was the natural result of what had been discussed. This confused me as I wondered why you would devote a considerable amount of time to a discussion and then ignore it.

It became clear to me that much of the organisers and attendees were living in the past. The majority of topics on display were based on historical overviews and analyses of theories over a hundred years old rather than on anything progressive or new. Only one of the lectures I attended employed any technology above a microphone. Whilst I would be the first to admit that an analysis of history helps understand the future, this subject has been debated in this way for the past 100 years.

At one point I overheard a conversation between a man and woman that completely summed up all those present. At first the middle aged man complained that he had just missed a meeting with a friend due to being delayed. When asked why he didn’t call his friend to notify him he stated “I don’t believe in mobile phones”. I resisted the urge to show him my own phone as evidence that they existed. His female friend then produced a letter from BT which she said had a code on it that could be used in a phone box to get 90p’s worth of call time. This letter was a response to a complaint the woman had made after losing that value in a phone box once. He then tried to give her 90p which she refused. After hearing this exchange I worried for a while that I had somehow been transported back to the 1950s.

However, not everyone was caught in the past. We soon realised that picking meetings needed skill. If you weren’t careful you would end up with an SWP activist giving you the usual spiel. Occasionally though you would find either a multi-speaker debate or an outside expert. One such expert was Dr John Parrington (a Molecular Pharmacologist) whose lecture on evolution and genetics inspired a really interesting debate over the ethics of gene screening. His contention that a Marxist model of society was the best method of dealing with these ethical issues was compelling. Similarly a fair overview of psychoanalysis and its arguably necessary relationship with Marxist theory given by Sabby Sagall gave rise to one of the most intelligent debates I have ever witnessed in person. I was astonished with the breadth of knowledge, ideas and articulate discussion that followed (although I suspect half of those who spoke of being academics).

I would characterise the whole event as a well organised wasted opportunity to engage with new ideas and a wider audience. When those new areas of thought were explored an unparalleled opportunity for leftist debate arose.

Your Freedom: Brought to you by Nick Clegg!

Today, Nick ‘fig leaf’ Clegg launched the inventively named new government programme Your Freedom via YouTube. The name and method of delivery were clearly an attempt to be ‘down with the youth’ (frankly I’m surprised they didn’t go with something even worse like Freedombook). In full ‘earnest face mode’ Clegg delivered the amazing news that people can now write to the government with any concerns they have regarding their ‘freedoms’ in Britain today. “For too long new laws have taken away your freedom,” Clegg announced (earnestly), “interfered in everyday life and made it difficult for businesses to get on. We want your ideas to change that.” Now, I don’t know about you, but I thought we already had the power to write to our government, not just about our freedoms, but about anything at all. But wait, if you continue to watch Clegg’s ground-breaking announcement, there’s more to this astounding new system than you initially realise: they’ve set up a website that you can add your ideas to and – you’re not going to believe this – “all suggestions will be read”! Any genuine attempts to undo some of Labour’s disgraceful ‘security’ policies which were introduced over the last 10 years or so – 28 days detention, et al – and to restore some of our lost civil liberties are to be welcomed, but this is far from genuine. If you read between the lines (or on the lines, in fact) the coalition government’s priorities are clearly identifiable. It’s tempting to think that references to “mind-numbing” rules and “unnecessary laws” are alluding to some of Labour’s ill-conceived policies such as ASBOs or Community Payback, but his emphasis on allowing businesses to “get on” is the real message here, and a very worrying one too. The government has no interest in reducing the power of the state, just its responsibilities towards its citizens. The short translation of the coalition’s Your Freedom initiative? Privatisation, privatisation and, that’s right, privatisation. The website even has an entire section entitled ‘Cutting Business and Third Sector Regulations’. If they wanted to be entirely honest they would’ve called it ‘Your Freedom to be fired without notice, paid a crappy wage and generally exploited by your employer’. Probably wasn’t catchy enough.

Despite the government’s clear lack of interest in issues of any real importance to everyday people, and in the interests of democracy, I’d like to take Mr Clegg up on his request for suggestions, and I’d encourage you to do the same. Okay, Nick, how about you start with ordering all the Liberal Democrat members of the coalition to oppose one of the most unfair and destructive budgets of the last 75 years? And while you’re at it, why not stand up for the people who voted you into government on what appeared to be a manifesto of ‘progressive’ policies only to have you side with the most regressive party in parliament? How about promoting the freedom of the poor to not lose their jobs, benefits and homes when the worst of the Con-Dem cuts start to hit – the freedom from persecution just for inhabiting the bottom rung in our society? But of course old ‘yellow shield’ Clegg doesn’t want to hear about this sort of thing. What he’s interested in is if you’ve “ever had to fill out three versions of the same form” or “felt snooped on by the state.” Well, I’m sure filling in three versions of the same form can be very irritating, though I don’t think I’ve ever been required to do that, ever. As for being snooped on by the state, I suppose that is a pretty worrying prospect, unfortunately for us the Con-Dem translation of this is “has the state ever been involved in your life at all, in any capacity whatsoever? Tell us about it so we can cut it immediately.” A final point of interest is when Clegg asks to know about “any time your rights have been infringed.” Well, I don’t know about you, but having Nick Clegg in government feels like a pretty big violation of my democratic rights at the moment.

Soft on crime, soft on the causes of crime

After seeing the Lib-Dems break countless pre-election promises, it’s refreshing to see the Conservatives backtrack on one of their own major vote winners. In what sounds like a progressive move by Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, the Coalition Government is looking for alternatives to just “banging people up without actively seeking to change them”. So from criticising Gordon Brown for releasing 80 000 criminals early, the Tories are proposing not sending people to prison in the first place. Will core Tory voters tolerate this? I think the blue rinse brigade will be turning grey with worry.

One could almost be fooled into thinking the move by Clarke to champion rehabilitation over punitive punishment is progressive. Unfortunately, it’s not. If the Coalition is serious about tackling the causes of crime, then why squeeze preventative initiatives such as Sure Start and the Child Trust Fund? Also, why cancel the Future Jobs Fund which creates youth employment and gives a realistic alternative to a life of crime?

The truth is the Tories don’t care about their pre-election promises and the Coalition isn’t serious about criminal rehabilitation. Instead, it is a cheap trick to mask 25% public sector cuts. Likewise, it provides easy access for private companies to supply and deliver none custodial sentences. Hence, the Tories' ideological raison d'etre - to reduce the size of the state - is a fait accompli.

Marxism 2010: A Revolutionary Reminiscence

Seven years ago I attended the Socialist Workers Party’s educational conference Marxism with fellow Eyes on Power contributor Tom. Neither Tom nor I were members of the SWP, but we had worked closely with them as part of the Stop the War Coalition in Hull. We attended their meetings because we enjoyed the debate and were both students of Marxism and socialism – but we were wary of their “text book” politics and tendency to jump on bandwagons.

I remember feeling consumed with youthful optimism on my journey down to Marxism - thinking it would be full of like-minded individuals engaged in frank, open and constructive debate. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case and I remember being overwhelmed on arrival by the multifarious groups of Marxists, neo-Marxists and other leftists peddling their party papers – the SWP, The Spartacists, The Socialist Party, The Socialist Labour Party, The Communist Party of Great Britain, The New Communist Party of Great Britain, The Workers’ Revolutionary Party. It was like a Monty Python sketch – I was just waiting to receive a leaflet from the People’s Front of Judea. As I wrote in my diary at the time, it was “a physical manifestation of the division and infighting which has dominated and ultimately undermined the history of socialist politics in Britain”. All parties equally passionate, but all claiming to have the correct interpretation of Marx.

Inside, I learnt a lot from the seminars I attended – on the Paris Commune, the Vietnam War and the united front (oh the irony) – but I do recall the sectarian ways of the left spilling out into discussions too. All points which reflected the SWP party line would be met with cheering, but any alternative explanation or less radical suggestion would be met with stony silence. It wasn’t really the debate I had anticipated but, then again, I was a naive seventeen year-old. A seventeen year-old who was even accused of being a Stalinist for suggesting the Bolshevik Revolution wasn’t a mass movement! Incidentally, this makes most historians who’ve ever written about the Russian Revolution Stalinists too, so I'm not in bad company. . . apart from Stalin, that is.

But it wasn’t all frustration and infuriation. The last person we saw speak was the wonderful and inspirational Tony Benn. He spoke about parliamentary socialism, about solidarity, and about forgetting differences to pursue common calls for the greater good. Tom and I loved it – but the majority of the crowd preached “one solution revolution”. It was about that time that I realised Marxism was a glorified recruitment event. It worked. The only problem is I joined Tony Benn in the Labour Party instead.

When I left Marxism 2003, I vowed to return one day. Now, seven years later, Tom, Pete and I return for Marxism 2010. Let’s see if anything’s changed . . .