Labour need a better strategy

in

Now that the dust has settled on "Super Thursday" we can critically examine Jeremy Corbyn’s first big electoral test as leader of the Labour Party. The results are very mixed. The Labour Party had some successes, most notably Sadiq Khan’s election as Mayor of London ending the Tories’ eight-year occupation of that office. Elsewhere Labour did not fare so well, losing overall control of the Welsh Assembly and slipping to third place in the Scottish elections.

The severe trouble that Scottish Labour finds itself in predates Corbyn’s election as Labour leader; he cannot take much blame for it. However the real problem comes from the wider test of Corbyn's electability, the council elections. Last Thursday the Labour Party became the first opposition party to lose council seats in mid-term local elections since 1985. The Labour Party picked up fewer councilors than Ed Miliband's Labour in 2012 or William Hague’s Conservatives in 1998 - both of which went on to electoral defeats.

This does not necessarily mean Labour is doomed to a landslide defeat in 2020. It is almost impossible to accurately predict the outcome of an election four years in the future. However with Tories, Lib Dems and UKIP eating into Labour’s support and no clear path back to electability in Scotland, the outlook for Labour is not so good.

In many ways the Corbyn leadership is going badly. There have been a series of unprofessional disasters including John McDonnell waving around Chairman Mao's Little Red Book and Ken Livingston opening on Hitler a week before a critical election. The Conservatives are maneuvering on the centre ground of British politics and increasing their electoral support. At the same time, accusations of rising anti-Semitism are proving difficult to refute.

The ultimate question for Labour is what alternative is there? Corbyn's three leadership rivals were dismissed by party members not because of sudden love of socialism, but because they offered no chance of winning an election. The simple truth is that there is currently no alternative plan to get Labour back into government. Moderates talk about Dan Jarvis as a replacement leader, however, I do not understand what happens after Jarvis (or any other moderate) replaces Corbyn. What is the moderates' strategy for winning back voters and getting Labour into power?

In order for Labour to win the 2020 general election the party needs a platform that is radically different to what Gordon Brown offered in 2010, Miliband offered in 2015 and what the Tories are offering now. Repeating the failed 2010 or 2015 approach will not work in 2020. I do not see a direction that the moderates would take Labour in that would be different enough from the mistakes of the past and the current Tory government.

Those who argue for a return to Blair’s triangulation strategy miss the point. Rather than a cohesive coalition between working and middle class voters, the 1997 landslide relied on chasing ‘aspirational’ Middle England, safe in the knowledge that working class core voters could be relied on to vote Labour anyway. Endemic political alienation since then, along with the financial crash, means re-running New Labour is not the answer either.

Labour is under attack from all sides. Centrist middle class voters are defecting to the Tories; working class and northern voters are being wooed by UKIP. Scotland is off the table, for now. The strategy that the moderates would adopt to win back centrist, middle class voters is likely to drive working class voters to UKIP, and left leaning, metropolitan liberals to the Greens. There no is guarantee that Labour would fare any better under a different leader.

It is not enough to simply write off victory in 2020, as I fear both Corbyn and the Labour moderates have done. Labour needs a plan to return it to government. This criticism applies to both Corbyn, and to the moderates: fighting over control of the party does not matter if the party loses 100 seats in the next election. There has to be a clear strategy to win, and "make Dan Jarvis party leader” is not a plan, it is barely even the beginning of one.

Labour cannot spend the next 4 years squabbling and hand the Tories a landslide victory in 2020. Labour needs a clear, workable strategy to win the general election. Now is not the time for complacency. Now is the time for action.

Hillary Clinton cannot save America

in

Hot take: Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders are reinvigorating politics and shaking up the left wing establishment. It's a cliche of political blogging, drawing out the obvious comparisons between old white men, both veteran socialist campaigners who are enjoying an unlikely period of success despite many people writing off their ideology in the early 90s.

It shows how complacent the centre left in Britain and America have become. Before the UK general election, and when the American Presidential election had only been going on for 6 months (why does it last 2 years?), no one would have imagined that Jeremy Corbyn would win a landslide victory to lead the Labour Party and that Bernie Sanders would give Hillary Clinton a run for her money. Then again, a year ago we were told that Donald Trump could never be the Republican Nominee.

The centre left (the Clintons, Coopers and Burnhams of this world) have been startled by a surge in support for the far left, mainly amongst younger and more disenfranchised party members. Their only response has been scare tactics. The conversation has been remarkably similar on both sides of the Atlantic: "he'll alienate moderates, he's unelectable, look at that awful right wing guy with freaky hair who will get power if we choose him".

If Sanders and Corbyn are so completely unelectable, then how come professional centre left politicians with years of experience, huge amounts of money, massive popular recognition and opinions that (apparently) everyone agrees with cannot beat them? Could it be because the centre left has completely lost its way and has nothing to offer anymore? Does anyone seriously think that electing Hillary Clinton as President will change much?

When Barack Obama was elected President back in 2008 I was hopefully for change. Eight long, painful years of George Bush Jr's presidency was coming to an end. A young, energetic, exciting politician was sweeping his way to victory. Surely after the disastrous wars and economic collapse of previous Republican government, things were going to be different this time.

For a while that hope lasted, Obama said he would close the prison in Guantanamo Bay, end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and deliver healthcare for millions of uninsured poor Americans. Then the Republicans took back the House of Representatives and the rest of the Obama presidency became a slow war of attrition between the Democratic White House and the Republican Congress. The pettiness reached its height in Autumn 2013 when the Republican shutdown the entire US government simply because they could.

I do not think Clinton will tackle the deep rooted problems of America: the huge economic inequality, the systematic unemployment, the criminalisation and intense poverty of African Americans, the openly xenophobic politics, the systematic assault on women's rights, the hollowing out of worker's rights, the sense of hopelessness and powerlessness that gives rise to extremism. I had more confidence that Obama would tackle these problems when he was re-elected in 2012 (despite four years of painfully slow struggle) than I do in a future Clinton presidency. What does Clinton have to offer to tackle America’s problems? Not much that is particularly inspiring.

The issue in Britain and America is that the centre left has nothing to offer to fix the problems of society (a lot of which were caused by their past periods of power, i.e. Blair and Clinton I). The centre left has run out of things to offer other than being opposed to the centre right, which they look quite similar to. The only reason why the centre left is in less of a crisis in America than in Britain is because the right is in thrall to the far right, which is scaring moderate voters. Trump is a gift to Clinton; I do not think she could have beaten Jed Bush or Marco Rubio.

Obama has achieved a lot in his 8 years, he did provide the healthcare he promised and stopped the Republican Congress from defunding it. He did pull America out of Afghanistan and Iraq (after a while). He brought Iran in from the cold and avoided the worst effects of the stagnating global economy. He did not close Guantanamo and he has taken America into wars in Libya and Syria. Clinton does not fill me with the confidence that she can even achieve this much. Her centre left politics do not seem capable of responding to the more complex and frightening world of the 21st century. They seem more appropriate to the mid 1990s when we thought the good times will never stop rolling. A slightly more compassionate neoliberalism is not what the world needs now. The world's needs change, now more than ever.

Bernie Sanders offers the change that America needs. Unfortunately his campaign was doomed from the start. His poll ratings among ethnic minorities are very low and he cannot win the democratic nomination without the support of black and Hispanic democrats. The current delegates spit is 2,228 to Clinton and 1,454 to Sanders, with 2,383 being the magic number to win the race. It looks like it will be Hillary Clinton.

Clinton will most likely defeat Trump to become the next President. I am sure she will be a good liberal President. She is unlikely to ban Muslims from entering the country or pass a national ban on abortions. However, I do not think she will tackle the deep rooted structural problems in American society. Oppression, hopelessness and feelings of powerlessness are rising and this breeds extremism of all flavours. America needs the type of change that Sanders promises and it needs it soon.

Will Britain leave the EU?

in
Will Britain leave the EU?

Britain's EU membership is divisive on the left and the right. In conversations recently, I have been told on separate occasions that there are no valid arguments for staying in or leaving the EU. I believe there is a case for both remaining in the EU and for leaving it. Leaving aside which way you should vote, can we predict what the result is likely to be?

The polls are currently predicting a narrow win for the remain camp, but after last year's surprise general election result, faith in polling is low. All polls should be taken with a pinch of salt at this point.

The majority of the electorate has not made up their mind. Very few people engage with politics outside of a general election, and the looming implications of the referendum are yet to dawn on most people. The majority of voters will decide 2 weeks or less beforehand, around the time they realise that their vote matters because referendum results are more proportional than a general election.

The way a voter makes up their mind is important when considering the outcome of any vote. In the EU referendum the argument for leaving is mainly an emotional one. It hinges on the belief that the EU is crushing British identity and pushing the country in a direction the people do not want to go in. If you on the right this is epitomised by uncontrolled migration; on the left it is a corporate assault on the NHS. Voters who make up their mind based on emotional arguments are more likely to do this immediately before the election itself. Emotional decisions are quick ones, they feel instantly right.

The remain argument is a more logical one. It is simply that Britain will be better off as a member of the EU than outside it. It comes down to jobs and money. It is not inspiring, it is cold and rational. Voters who make decisions based on logic tend to make them further in advance. This is why polls taken further out from an election will generally return a result that follows an argument based on logic. Polls taken nearer to an election will show a greater degree of voters influenced by their emotions.

With most voters likely to make up their minds only in the final few weeks, the emotional resonance of the leave argument is yet to have an impact. This makes it difficult to predict what the result will be this far in advance.

A case in point is the Scottish Independence referendum. Similarly, remain was a logical decision, based on jobs and money, and leave was an emotional decision, based on freedom and national identity. Polls taken far in advance showed a clear majority for remain, whereas polls taken immediately before the vote showed a majority in favour of leaving. Remain started strong and slowly declined as emotional voters moved from the undecided to the leave camp.

On the day, more voters were influenced by the logical arguments based around the money in their banks accounts than an emotional appeal to their national identity. However the emotional argument still resonated and that has translated into continuing success for the SNP.

There is clearly a lot of dissatisfaction with the EU. The left have found it hard to articulate their support in a concrete way. There are lots of problems with the EU - how undemocratic it is, how secretive it is, and how it pushes a neoliberal agenda on its members. I get the feeling that many on the left support the remain campaign because the leaders of the leave campaign are so repulsive. There is very little willingness to agree with Michael Gove, Chris Grayling, Nigel Farage or George Galloway (regardless of how the latter sees himself as the saviour of the left).

I always thought of myself as intrinsically pro EU membership. But when I tried to articulate my reasons for this in a positive way, I found it hard to build a concrete argument. A lot of things I like about EU membership - visa free travel and the diversity of London - are unlikely to disappear if we leave. We currently do not need visas to visit Iceland, Norway, Switzerland or Israel, and London will always be a cultural melting pot.

The argument for remaining is mainly the frightening thought that if we leave, there will be job losses and the Tories will be free to do whatever they want to the people of Britain. This negative argument makes me doubt my own support for EU membership.

My own experience seems to be symptomatic. There is a lack of a positive pro-EU vision coming from the left, and without this, many of those who support EU membership do so grudgingly.

If this shortage of enthusiasm on Election Day results in low turnout from left wing voters then Brexit will become more likely - those who are passionately anti-EU will be guaranteed to vote. If the left cannot find a positive and inspiring argument for EU membership then Britain will leave the EU.

The polls may indicate that Britain is staying in the EU, but I think the question of whether Britain will leave is still wide open. This far out it is too difficult to take an accurate reading. If I had to make a prediction, it would be that whichever sides wins, it will be by the narrowest of margins.

What should Greece do? Part 2

in

In my last post I looked at political problems of Greece’s national debt and the argument against Greece paying the debt. Now I will address the implications of Greece leaving the Euro.

From the interviews with many Syriza supporters in Theopi Skarlatos and Paul Mason’s film #ThisIsACoup, I got the impression that this is what Syriza’s supporters want them to do. They feel that Greece has been humiliated by its creditors and they want Syriza to stand up for Greece. Whenever Syriza make a deal to with Greece’s creditors, Syriza supporters say they feel betrayed by the party they voted for.

The reason why Greece cannot default on its debt is because its economy would collapse. As has been said before, the majority of the Greek national debt is propping up Greek banks. If Greece defaults on its debt it would have to leave the Euro, and if it left the Euro then the EU would stop lending to Greek banks. This will cause them to collapse. In today’s finance based neo-liberal economy no country can survive the collapse of its banking sector, people would lose all their savings and their homes. So defaulting on its debts would mean economic armageddon for the Greek people. Understandably this is something Syriza want to avoid.

One of the points that Theopi Skarlatos and Paul Mason’s film makes is that Syriza’s mistake was playing for time. They argue for an extension on Greece’s debt while they renegotiate their position. During this time Greek banks have become more dependent on EU lending. Syriza could have got out of the debt if they had defaulted earlier, perhaps as soon as they had taken power, but by the time the negotiations were concluded it was clear that defaulting on Greece’s debt was not an option.

Another reason for Greece to not default on its debt is that it would take around 12 months for Greece to set up a new national currency to replace the Euro. If Greece started to lay plans to leave the Euro in 12 months time, it would be discovered and would mean announcing that Greece planned to default on its debts. This would create a panic, all assets would be removed from Greece by investors and creditors and the economy would collapse sooner. Leaving the Euro and/or defaulting on its debt would ruin the Greek economy and is not an option.

If paying the debt, or defaulting, are not options then a compromise will have to be reached. A compromise where Greece pays some of its debt but not all of it. After watching the film I think this is the solution that Syriza want and is the most sensible.

The only problem with this approach is that the EU does not want to compromise. Throughout the film the EU refuse to allow any amount of Greece’s crippling debt to be written off. After Syriza’s first debt extension, the EU demands that Greece pass a law saying the EU could veto any future Greek laws, which only increases their power over Greece. Later Syriza wanted to give free food to the poor and the old, but the EU used their power veto this. Clearly the EU were only interested in putting as much pressure onto Greece as possible so that they would pay the debt back. However, as discussed above this debt was illegal and practically cannot be paid back.

In the absence of a compromise, and faced with two impossible options, the negotiations between Syriza and Greece’s creditors do not lead to a resolution. The film shows Greek Prime Minister and Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras looking increasingly tired as he tries to find a way out of this impossible bind, even resorting to calling a referendum and a snap election to give the Greek people as much say as possible in the future of their country.

The film ends after the second general election victory for Syriza in September 2015. Since then there has been no clear solution to the problem of Greece’s debt. The film ends with the gloomy implication that if Syriza fail to resolve the problem in a way that is satisfactory to the Greek people then we do not know where the anger that drove Syriza to power will go next. If it becomes support for neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, then the implications for the whole of Europe are terrifying.

From watching this film I initially thought that Greece should default on its debt because it was crippling its economy and the EU had no interest in compromising. After thinking about issues and listening to the Q&A with Theopi Skarlatos and Paul Mason, I realised that this was not possible. A compromise between the EU and Syriza is the only viable resolution to this situation, which has grown worse with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants and the possibility of a Nazi takeover in Greece. Surely the EU does not want to see a Nazi government in control of so many vulnerable immigrants, so they will have to compromise with Syriza. The Greek national debt is still a live issue and we need to remember the possibility of a fascist regime with a million non-White immigrants is a real possibility and should be avoided at all costs.

Syriza are up against forces much more powerful than themselves and they are hampered by the fact that their own supporters are not always in favour of what they do - although so far their electoral support remains strong. I have a lot of respect for Alexis Tsipras and the other leaders of Syriza who are faced with such a mammoth task. I believe they do have the best interests of the Greek people at heart and are trying to work towards a realistic and workable compromise. Hopefully they can succeed, because I am very frightened of the implications if they fail.

Safe Spaces? Censorship on Campus

in

‘Well I am just a student sir, and I only want to learn / but it’s hard to read through the rising smoke of the books that you like to burn’.

These lines from a mid-sixties protest song by Phil Ochs convey the same message as many of the era: cultural and political conservatives had, for years, tried and succeeded in policing what students could read, watch or listen to, but it was time to challenge old authorities.

More recently, there has been a trend which can be seen as an inversion of this model. Student campaigns, considered broadly left-wing, have been advocating, with some success, various forms of modern day censorship. The chances are you’ve heard of some of them – the removal of (often seemingly benign) texts from syllabuses, or the addition of misrepresentative ‘trigger warnings’, the cancellation of speakers, or the removal of items such as building names or statues from university campuses.

The general aim has been to create and protect ‘Safe Spaces’ for those often marginalised or discriminated against. No doubt well-intentioned, the trend is nonetheless disconcerting.

It’s an emotive topic, and it seems wise first of all to explain what this article is not. It is not an argument against the concept of Safe Spaces, the idea that universities should take into account the sensibilities of an increasingly diverse student population.

I will not be arguing that white, male, straight people are the real victims of discrimination nowadays. They aren’t. Neither is it an argument in favour of untrammelled free speech. There have always been laws and customs limiting free speech, and rightly so. I will, instead, argue in favour of open, honest, challenging academic debate. This cannot always, or perhaps shouldn’t always, be comfortable. To use a word well-worn by the advocates of Safe Space, censoring things that might offend is, in the least, problematic.

There is a precedent of left-wing censorship at universities, including for less-than-honourable ends, as any reader of Malcolm Bradbury’s satirical campus novel, The History Man, can attest. But in general, forces of the Right were the ones (usually not literally) burning the books. On the Left, the obvious antecedent is the longstanding NUS No Platform policy on racist parties like the BNP. As a student, I supported this, but now, I’m not so sure.

What were we afraid of – that impressionable students would be converted into fascists by one of Nick Griffin’s half-wits? No, we don’t want them goose-stepping all over campus beating up ethnic minorities, but letting them have their say is a different matter. Racism is easy to defeat in open debate, and we shouldn’t have been afraid to do so.

No Platform has now been extended, on different campuses, to all sorts of speakers from feminists to UKIPers. But whatever their views, is it justifiable? In a university of all places? It makes us look frightened, like we don’t trust people with certain arguments. Let’s treat people as rational adults who can make up their own minds. I don’t like Germaine Greer’s views on transsexual people (or her views on men for that matter) but I don’t see any inherent harm, as students at Cardiff evidently did, in letting her have her say.

The now well-known Rhodes Must Fall campaign to remove colonialist Cecil Rhodes’s statue from Oriel College, Oxford, is symptomatic of the movement. It seems like a good idea at first glance, proposed by people whose motivations are understandable. But Britain’s troubling colonial history is surely addressed best head-on, not swept under the carpet.

Contextualisation, not deletion, might help: a plaque describing, in soberly factual terms, what Rhodes actually did. This view is hardly tantamount to colonial apologism, as some would have it.

The problem with censorship, or even the perception that it is being pushed for, is that it encourages taboos. Taboos become cool and subversive to defy, giving rise to a narrative of ‘political correctness gone mad’ and ‘snowflake’ (i.e. hypersensitive) students.

I instinctively dislike the tendency to pile-on, mob-like, to decry an individual or book as racist or misogynistic; there’s something of the witch hunt about it. It looks closed-minded and reactionary, and it feeds this narrative. The Left shouldn’t end up as a mirror image of the Right’s moralising censorship, setting itself up for challenge by daring convention-breakers.

There’s another problem inherent to this type of identity politics: it can lead to competitive, sometimes directly contradictory, grievance raising. One group’s affirmation of safe space may be the violation of another’s, as was the case in the odd events involving the ex-Muslim Iranian human-rights activist Maryam Namazie at Warwick and Goldsmiths universities, recounted here.

The criticism of those arguing against censorship is often that it’s easy for privileged people (white, male, straight etc) to denigrate Safe Space; we’re not the ones who need it. For people like me, they say, the presence of a particular speaker is merely a philosophical issue, whereas for minority groups, it’s an act of aggression.

I don’t agree. I’m not telling any less privileged group what they’re allowed to be offended by, although I appreciate it may sound worryingly close to that. If words hurt, then the best way to counter is to argue back. Education should thicken the skin and broaden the mind. This ought to apply to those demanding Rhodes’s removal, as well as those who cannot countenance any questioning of his existence without crying ‘political correctness gone mad’.

Universities must, first and foremost, be centres of febrile and fearless discussion. So, by all means, protest, counter-argue and demonstrate. Campaign for syllabuses to recognise different perspectives or be less Eurocentric. But censorship of academic work or political speakers is an apparently easy fix that’s more likely to foment opposition than solve structural prejudice.

Perhaps the trend is just a side effect of the marketization of higher education; students, paying exorbitant tuition fees, see themselves as customers and therefore entitled to complain. This may well be true, but as a society that aims, however falteringly, towards multicultural integration, we need to find ways of balancing respecting the sensibilities of others with free and open debate.

Universities, often a microcosm of, and trendsetters to, the wider world, are the perfect place to work out how.

What should Greece do? Part 1

in

What should Greece do? It is a complicated question with a complicated answer. The ruling party, Syriza, has been in power since January 2015 and the pressure is on to solve the problem of the enormous amount of debt that Greece owes, which is 320 billions Euros or 177% of Greece’s GDP (figures as of 10 July 2015, source).

Recently I went to see a film by Theopi Skarlatos and Paul Mason called #ThisIsACoup, which covers the period between Syriza’s first and second electoral victory. I highly recommend this film, made as events unfolded, as I felt much more informed about the Greek debt crisis after watching now it. Based on this film, a Q&A with its makers and my wider reading around the topic, I am going to see if I can answer the question of what Greece should do.

The simplest answer that has been put forward is that Greece should just pay off its national debt. This is the argument favoured by middle class British columnists, writing from the comfort of their cottages in Surrey. This is the argument favoured by people who believes that politics begins and ends with personal responsibility. This is the argument that assumes that the Greek debt is exactly the same as the credit card debt of a student who partied a bit too hard during freshers week. Cut back on the craft larger and pulled pork. Show some self-control.

As you can tell I do not have much for time argument, but I will give it a fair hearing. The argument for Greece paying its debts, is that Greece is spending too much on welfare, pensions, its military (which is massive) and propping up stated owned enterprises. The solution is for Greece to embrace austerity as well as reforming its economy to make to make it more competitive; the process that Britain went through during the 1980s. This will allow the Greek economy to reduce its debt and return to growth.

The main flaw with this argument is that it is clearly not what the Greek people want and democracy means that people get what they want, for better or worse. Greece's main creditors are other EU nations and the people of these countries do want Greece to pay the debt, which is a thorny issue. Whose democracy is more important, the debtor or the creditor? EU law does say that Greece should pay the debt. However, I find it strange that people in Britain argue that Greece should be subject to EU law no matter what its people want, but the cries the British people to be liberated from crushing yoke of EU technocrats must be answer.

Theopi Skarlatos and Paul Mason’s film makes the point that only 11% of Greek it went directly to the Greek people, i.e. for spending on Greece's apparently lavish welfare state and overstuffed state owned enterprises. The majority of the money went into propping up Greek banks hit by the global financial crisis, which certainly was not caused by Greece (or the Labour Party) spending too much on welfare or pensions or public health.

If the Greek government does embrace austerity, then the debt will be repaid over the next 50 years. Theopi Skarlatos and Paul Mason raise the question of whether the Euro, the EU or the current global financial system still be here in 50 years? The odds are stacked against it. The wider EU financial crisis and refugee crisis mean that it is very unlikely that the EU and the Euro in its current form will be around in 50 years. Perhaps a plan based on Euro longevity is a bad idea.

Austerity is not simply a case of make do with less; even when less is healthcare, support for the poorest in society and pensions. Austerity has other effects, as well as closing Sure Start Centres and raising child poverty. It creates Financial Melancholia, which is a sense that the future is only about paying for the past. This saps the creativity from the present because it is consumed by one thing: passing for decisions taken in the past.

Theopi Skarlatos and Paul Mason said that young people are leaving Greece in huge numbers because they believe there is no future. The youth unemployment rate is at 50%, which is encouraging them to leave. This will have long term economic consequences. Who will look after the old people? Who will do all the low level work? Who will start new businesses? Austerity does not create economic dynamism; it stifles it through Financial Melancholia.

The main problem with the Greece paying its debts is the question of how the economy returns to growth after going through an austerity regime that is more severe than anything else that has been seen in Europe. The debt repayment ideas requires that economic liberalisation also take place at the same time. Greece is different to most other European countries in that large global brands (McDonald's and Superdrug where the two examples that Paul Mason cited during the Q&A after the film) are not present in Greece. Greece is not a socialist utopia, they have their own large brands owned by ultra-wealthy oligarchs just like every other capitalist country, and these oligarchs have enormous political and social power. They also stand to lose the most if the Greek economy is opened up to international competition.

It is because of this that the liberalisation phase of the pay your debts plan will never happen. What will happen is heavy austerity (which punishes the poor for being poor) and the liberalisation will never actually occurs. This will continue until either the debt is repaid (which will not happen because growth will not return and tax revenue will not grow) or the Euro collapses for some other reason. This means that even if Greece tries to pay its debt, it will eventually be forced to take its other option: default and leave the Euro.

In my next post I will look at the problems with Greece leaving the Euro.

The rise of Trump shows the failings of American politics

in

I will refer you to all the moderate conservatives who said that Donald Trump will never be the Republican candidate for president. At the time of writing Trump is the frontrunner in the Republican race; it is still mathematically possible for Ted Cruz to win the nomination but it would require an unusual reversal of fortune.

Trump's campaign has been characterised by the rhetoric of the extreme right and has horrified both liberals and moderate conservatives. We were told that he would never get this far. We were told wrong. The success of Trump requires everyone to rethink how they see American politics. The reasons for Trump's success are complicated, but I believe that the rise of Trump shows a failure of American politics to tackle two critical issues: the decline in living standards of white working class Americans and the Islamophobia of American politics.

Trump’s rise as a political force is a result of his ability to exploit the rhetoric of Islamophobia. He is not the first politician to be Islamophobic, but his popularity is a result of the collective failure to stand up to Islamophobia. What was once a dog-whistle of Islamophobic political rhetoric has become just a whistle. We have had 14 years of blaming every Muslim for the actions of the few that have committed acts of terrorism and this has brought us to a point where a politician can be openly hostile to all Muslims. Trump is not new in being an openly Islamophobic, he is just better at it than everyone else.

It was inevitable that we would reach a point where a politician can call for a complete ban on Muslim immigration and imply that all Muslims should be made to identify wear badges that public identify them. It was inevitable when liberals and moderate conservatives failed to stand up to Islamophobia. We all act surprised when Trump says these awful things but he is only following an established narrative.

Liberals are to blame for the rise of Trump as much as moderate conservatives. Liberals in America have failed to stand up to Islamophobia and have been paying lip service to it whenever we talk about "criticising Islam". This is the dog whistle for being hostile to people who follow a minority religion and (usually) belong to a minority ethnic group. By not standing up to the dog whistle, or using it themselves, liberal Americans have aided Trump in turning it into an actual whistle.

Lack of moderate conservative opposition to Islamophobia, as well as exploiting this view, has allowed the conversation to be dictated by the far right. In many ways the the different candidates in the primary stage of the American presidential race are the different parties that would exist in any other country. Like in France, America has rounds of elections to narrow the field to two candidates who represent two political ideologies. Usually this ends up as being the moderate left and the moderate right, but occasionally (as in 2002 in France) a candidate from the far right makes it to the final round.

Trump represented the far right in this race and currently he is winning. Anyone who is a moderate conservative needs to think about how they have allowed this climate of Islamophobia to grow and how they have exploited it for their own ends until it was used by Trump to make moderate conservative voices irrelevant in this election. Moderates have no decent response to Trump's Islamophobia so they have been swept away by it.

A climate of Islamophobia has helped Trump get as far as he has, but this is not the only thing contributing to his success. Trump's followers are mainly white and working class, a demographic with problems that American politics has failed to tackle.

Liberal middle class Americans do not care about the loss of living standards of poor white people. Liberal Americans have other political objectives, such as defending Obama's healthcare program and tackling the massive racism in America. These are noble aims, but there is a real lack of interest in dealing with the problems of the white working class.

This failure to engage with the white working class is because the left does not want to ignore problems of race at this critical time for race relations and there are concerns about undercurrents of racism in poor white people’s politics. If liberal middle class America were willing to engage with the problems of white working class America then they might find that their political complaints are not rooted in racism but in the way they have been marginalised.

The moderate conservatives are also to blame for ignoring the problems faced by white class Americans. The moderate right has not tackled the problem of poor white people because it involves criticising capitalism, which they are not prepared to do. Conservative support for neo-liberalism on both sides of the Atlantic has created a ticking time bomb of ground down white working class people whose lives have been destroyed by prevailing economic thought. Poor white people were hit hard by the financial crash, de-industrialisation and globalisation. They have lost jobs and income. In Britain, poor white people are the lowest performing ethnic group in educational attainment. Now the white working class want answers that the moderate right do not have for them.

Bernie Sanders does appeal to some of the white working class in America, but the Hillary Clinton campaign does not fully appreciate how bad the fall in living standards of poor whites is. In many ways Clinton's politics is as bad as the moderate conservatives, she is not willing to criticise neo-liberalism and prefers platitudes about making America whole again. The left is generally focused on Clinton and their hopes that she will be the figure that unites America. She maybe that person that can span the growing left/right divide to win the presidential election, but she will not help poor white people. A vote for Clinton is a vote to kick this can down the road and hope that the problem will be dealt with in the future. It is a vote for the vague hope that the far right cannot mobilise this anger for electoral success.

Let me be clear here: I do not think that Trump cares about or will help white working class Americans. However he is willing to engage with these victims, which liberals and moderate conservatives are ignoring. Trump is a used car salesman, he will tell you everything you want to hear until he has his hand in your wallet and you drive off his lot with an overpriced, terrible car that you cannot claim a refund on. To help white working class America we must first stop Trump and to stop Trump we must understand his success, even if it involves asking painful question about how the American left has conducted itself.

It is very hard to say that would happen if Trump were actually elected president, partly because Trump has not mentioned many actual policies he intends to intact. I can imagine that it will be worse than George W. Bush's time in office, which is frightening enough. Liberals and moderate conservatives need to act together to defeat Trump, but as I said, this can only be done by understanding what has brought us to this juncture.

Trump will probably lose to Clinton because he frightens people too much, which is the only hope to cling to right now. Although we were told that he would never win the nomination and that looks likely. America needs to tackle the problems of Islamophobia and the loss of living standards by the white working class before someone comes along who is even more awful than Trump. If you think this will never happen then, I will refer you to all the moderate conservatives who said that Donald Trump will never be the Republican candidate for president.

Why Corbyn needs to be a positive defender of Britain in the EU

in ,

There are plenty of papers covering the "he said, she said" of the EU referendum. I want to take a step back and look at the campaign as a whole. As well the referendum being an important decision for the future of the country, it is an important political opportunity for Labour. As such, it is important that Labour shows a united front and that they take advantage of Tory divisions over Britain’s EU membership.

So far the Tories have kept their disagreements over the EU private because the Labour poll ratings have been so dire. Parties facing defeat show much less unity, for example the Tories in early 90s. There is currently a strong incentive for Tory MPs to stay in the good books of the leadership, i.e. being rewarded with government jobs in the 2020s.

However the mask of Tory unity is slipping. Boris Johnson is dividing the party by giving some credibility and popularity to the No campaign. This a careerist move from Boris, who views this as his last chance to become Tory leader and thus Prime Minister. Barbed words have already been exchanged between Boris and David Cameron, and the rift will only grow as Boris and George Osborn battle it out to be the heir apparent when Cameron steps down.

Labour's own divisions make it difficult to take advantage of the Tory split. This is why it is important for Labour to show a united front in the EU referendum. However, this is made harder by the fact that Labour's leader is not convinced of the benefit of EU membership. There are a lot of problems with the EU from a left wing perspective (TTIP is the tip of the iceberg) but the only way that the Labour Party can achieve socialist goals is through working with other left wing parties in a united Europe. Labour need to get behind the EU.

The left wing vote is needed for Britain to stay in the EU. This is why Alan Johnson is leading the passionately pro EU Labour In campaign. It is this positive approach to Europe that the country needs, not a scare campaign based on jobs and security that Britain Stronger in Europe will offer. Labour In is needed because if the left stay home on referendum day, the leave vote will win. Labour In is a great chance for the party to be the decisive element in British politics.

Corbyn and the Labour left need to take the upper hand if they want to stay in control of the party. There have been too many headlines about in-fighting and arguments between the Labour leadership and the PLP. The Tories are trying to maximise the divisions in Labour by moving forward the vote on renewing Trident. Labour need to do likewise, by making Tory divisions over Europe as big as possible, while putting on a well organised and united campaign to stay. If Corbyn can organise a united Labour Party, on the side of what most people want, against a divided and unpopular mid-term government, then he can turn the tide of bad headlines around.

This is a huge opportunity for Labour and Corbyn. A passionate, positive defence of the EU against a divided Tory party will show the public that Labour under Corbyn can be an effective opposition. People will believe Corbyn if he campaigns to stay in the EU. It plays to his strengths, namely that people think he is honest and believe what he has to say, which is unlike most politicians or his PLP rivals. He can even present his earlier wavering to his advantage - he considered both options sensibly, like the rest of us, before making an informed, balanced decision. Corbyn needs to take this opportunity to do what only he can do, show the county how Labour are different from the Tories.

Labour must be well disciplined, on the side of the voters and against a divided government. Above all, they must be positive, avoiding a mirror image of Farage’s knee-jerk rhetoric or the scare tactics of Cameron's stay in campaign. This will not only win the EU referendum for remain, but will also win back control of the headlines. Corbyn needs to seize this opportunity to start winning.

The problems with the staying in the EU argument

in

The referendum date has been set and the campaigning has started in earnest. Even at this early stage, it looks likely that the vote to remain will win. David Cameron and George Osborne will be stressing the threats to the UK if we vote to leave the European Union, and this concern about the loss of jobs will trump any worries over immigration or British sovereignty.

The argument that we should vote to stay in the EU because of the jobs loss that will result if we leave is a powerful one, but is it the best course of action for the pro-EU side? I think they would prefer to run a positive campaign that inspires people about the role the UK can play in Europe, but they will ultimately fall back on the vision of an isolated and impoverished Britain outside the EU.

The industry that stands to lose the most from an EU exit is the finance and banking industry. The City of London is the financial core of the EU and, if we vote to leave, then many global finance companies will relocate to Frankfurt to get better access to the EU’s financial markets. The resulting loss of jobs would be felt up and down the country, when we consider the supply chain that financial companies are plugged into. Many companies outside the City are dependent on the economic activity that goes on there, and if you remove those London companies there will be job losses in Newcastle, Bristol and Blackburn.

I hate having to admit that the UK economy is dependent on the whims of bankers; that they could choose to leave at any movement, and that would cause a lot of economic problems. That line of thought leads to the argument that we need to be as nice to bankers as possible - not tax or regulate them too much - to keep them happy and employing everyone else. There is a serious argument to be made about how unbalanced the British economy is and how dependent upon the finance sector we are, but in the short run we have to work with the economy we have.

Do we want to be a part of a Europe that exists to further the interests of the financial industry? Not really, is my answer, but an existence of principled poverty is equally unappealing. Still this argument is not the stuff of folk songs and banners. "Vote yes so that we're not totally fucked." “Daddy, what did you do during the great EU debate of 2016?" "Well son, I soberly told everyone that the EU is not perfect but we are reliant on it and we need to make a pragmatic decision based on jobs and the economy." This is no one’s ideas of our finest hour.

The argument that we are more secure within the EU goes beyond the jobs that will be lost if we leave. Europe is facing an unprecedented level of challenges, from migration to Russian expansionism, from environmental crisis to financial instability. The UK needs to be involved with Europe to participate in the solution to these problems, rather than just burying our heads in Union Flag bunting and hoping that the problems will go away.

However this is also another scare tactic to convince people to vote to stay in. The message is that Britain will be overloaded with refugees we cannot house, then drowned under melted polar ice, bankrupt from financial chaos and then crushed by Russian tanks. It is not an argument to convince anyone to love the European Union, it just makes voters frightened of the lonely world outside the EU.

The EU needs better PR if the stay campaign want to really convince people that EU membership is something important to be protected. The yes campaign is trying to be positive about the benefits of EU membership, but it will not be as effective as a scare campaign. After all, a positive message about British togetherness and shared successes during the Olympics had little effect during the Scottish Independence Referendum. Messages of doom and gloom if Scotland left the union did work.

The issue is that not many people in Britain love the EU. Although most will probably vote to stay in out of fear of the consequences of leaving. The problems of Britain's antipathy towards the EU will not be resolved by a campaign that bullies voters into staying in. The yes side need a campaign that appeals to people's hopes and aspirations for a better tomorrow, what we can achieve by working with our European neighbours. It needs to be positive and effective to settle this issue once and for all.

My biggest fear is that a yes campaign based on scare tactics will ultimately win but will not satisfy anyone. Britain will remain a part of the EU, but dislike of the EU will be at an all time high. Being reminded that we need the EU because we have to keep the finance industry happy - or else they will take away our jobs - and that the finance industry likes the EU is not a strategy to inspire affection and confidence in the European Project. Britain may vote to stay in, but the desire to leave will be stronger than before.

Ultimately this will not settle the issue and will only sow the seeds of another referendum, especially if a new EU treaty is proposed. We need a debate around this referendum that leads to some concencious over the EU, not one which leads to more hostility in the future. Those who are set in taking the UK out of the EU must get the clear message that Britain wants to stay in, or else they will begin this process all over again.

The problem with the yes campaign is that a strategy based on frightening the electorate will not settle the issue of whether EU membership is in Britain's interests. We need a positive campaign about the EU to convince the electorate once and for all of the benefits of Britain taking an active role in the EU. A scare campaign maybe the easiest route to victory, but in the long run it will fan the flames of the desire to leave the EU.

The left wing case for staying in the EU

in

Recently I laid out the left wing case of leaving the European Union. This was aimed more as a counterpoint to UKIP and their xenophobia than it was to those who want Britain to remain a part of the EU. Many on the left believe there is a lot to be gained from Britain having an active role in Europe, so here is the left wing case for staying in the EU:

The EU is generally more left wing than the British government has been over the last few decades, especially on economic issues. EU regulations prevent the worst excesses of private business. Health and safety standards and working time directives protect us from unsafe working conditions and long gruelling hours. I cannot imagine the Cameron or Blair governments passing the same laws.

Atlantean free marketeers (like Douglas Carswell) see this EU referendum as an opportunity to reduce regulation and government oversight of the British economy so that it becomes more competitive. George Monbiot aptly describes these as “rules that prevent children from being poisoned by exhaust fumes, rivers from being turned into farm sewers and workers from being exploited by their bosses.” Without the EU we will have less job security and less safety in the workplace.

The issue of large companies avoiding tax is also one that can only be tackled at an international level. The Conservative government has shown that it is intensely relaxed about large companies paying little or no tax, despite the fact these companies benefiting from government spending on education, healthcare, transportation, etc. The European Union has already indicated that it might force Google to pay more tax than the paltry sum which George Osborne negotiated with the search giant. In the age of globalisation and multinational companies, only multinational governments can hold large private firms to account and make them pay their taxes.

The greatest argument in favour of Britain taking an active role in the EU is that our future is intertwined with the EU countries, whether we are inside the EU or not. Our cultures and people are intertwined. There are 2.3 million people from other EU countries living inside Britain, bringing with them a huge diversity in language, food, religion and culture. There are also 1.26 million British people living abroad in other EU countries. If we left the EU these connections will still be present, the people of Europe will still be mixed together, but Britain would have no political voice in this shared European society.

I love the diversity and that immigration that EU membership brings to this county. I believe it makes us a more tolerant and flexible society, easily able adapt to the challenges of the future. With conflict spreading in the Middle East, China's economy slowing down and environmental crises looming Britain needs all the strengths and diversity of opinion it can get. The right thinks the free market can solve these problems, the left knows that only with European governments working together through the EU can these issues be tackled.

In the refugee crisis, Europe is being tested by an external shock. All the countries in Europe have been affected by the huge influx of people. With climate change meaning more environmental disasters and sea levels rising, we will see a lot of immigration into Europe over the next few decades. This will affect all of Europe and Britain needs to part of the solution. Pulling up the drawbridge will not work.

I believe in the wider EU project, the idea that it is in the interest of all the European countries to work together to solve the problems we are all facing. Europe is stronger when its countries are united in government as well as in purpose. The EU is the larger structure that allows European governments to respond collectively to the challenges of a globalised world. A country like Britain does not have the clout or the economy to influence global events alone, but by working with our neighbours we can be a powerful force for good in the world.

The nations of Europe have not fought a war between each other since the inception of the European Union, because we recognise that it is in all of our best interests to work together, share resources (such as labour and capital) where needed and to tackle problems with a united front. The EU is certainly not perfect and reform is needed to improve its ability to achieve this mission, but if we are to meet the challenges of the future then we need a multinational government with British representation. Leaving the EU is to sacrifice co-operation with our neighbours in favours of a mythical belief in the superiority of Britain.

The left wing case for leaving the EU

in

"Who will speak for England?" the Daily Mail asked, last Thursday, as they tore into Cameron's negotiated deal with the European Union. The announcement of this framework acts as a firing pistol for the race to secure Britain's place either in or out of the EU and has triggered a national debate about the merits of Brexit.

Certainly the EU is not perfect; the way Greece has been treated over the last few years has led me to firmly consider a vote to leave. However one issue is not enough for me to make up my mind. The arguments for both staying and leaving are complex, and reflect the politics of the person arguing. We have heard a lot from Nigel Farage, Douglas Carswell and Chris Grayling about the horrors of the EU, but in the midst of all this anti-immigration table thumping it has been largely overlooked that there is a solidly left wing case for leaving the EU.

On some level I feel obliged to support the EU just to spite the people I really hate - namely UKIP. Personally, I do quite well out of the EU. I live in London, which is awash with European cash, and no one loves the European city break more than me. However, I recognise that other people might not benefit quite so much from EU membership and I want to vote in the interests of people who are not as well off as I am, rather than my own.

On that note, what follows is the left wing case for Brexit. At some point in the near future the left wing case for staying in the EU will follow.

The first major point is that most people do not know what the EU is for or what it does. Aside from a few nebulous points about bringing Europe together, what does the EU actually do? The EU does has a profound affect on all our lives, mainly it provides the regulatory framework that Europe wide businesses operate under. These large companies employ a significant proportion of the British workforce and heavily contribute to our GDP. However the British voter is so disconnected from the decision making process behind this regulatory framework that we cannot have much of a say in how the EU is run.

Due to this, the EU is less accountable than our own national governments. Most people do not have a good understand of the issues and factions within the EU, which makes it very hard to have an informed opinion during European elections. I am very interested in politics, and even I cannot name the main centre left and centre right blocs within the MEPs.

I find it deeply worrying how disconnected we are from the debates in Brussels, which fundamentally limits the British voter's ability to have a say in how the EU is run. For this reason I would prefer decisions to be made closer to home, so that more people can participate in and feel affected by politics. This opinion extends to a belief that more power should be moved from Westminster to town halls around the country.

The regulatory framework that the EU provides exists to make it easier for multinational companies, mainly banks, to operate in the single European market. It grew out of the European Coal and Steel Community and has always sought to make Europe richer by providing a more stimulating environment for business. Whether intentionally or not, it mainly serves the interests of large financial companies and companies wanting cheap labour to drive down the cost of production.

TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) deal is good example of this. It is a proposed agreement between the EU and the USA, which will erode national government’s powers to regulate businesses. This is a clear example of the EU putting the needs of multinational corporations above its citizens. If we don’t want to be a part of TTIP then we need to leave.

Another example is the austerity imposed by the European Central bank on poorer EU nations. This has damaged the provision of social security, led to redundancies and wage cuts, depressed their struggling economies and resulted in huge privatisations in many countries. I do not want to be part of an EU that strips welfare and removes the provisions of public services from its poorer citizens.

Should a genuinely left wing government be elected in the UK, then the EU’s regulatory framework will make it harder for said government to implement its policies. Policies such as financial sector reform or higher progressive taxes on the wealthy will be difficult to implement in the single market of Europe, where it is easy for companies or individuals to move overseas where circumstances are more favourable. If the left wants to achieve socialism in Britain then we need to leave the EU and be fully in control of our own destiny.

Iceland is a shining example of how we should have dealt with the 2008 financial crisis. They allowed a few large banks to go bust, implemented legal reforms on the surviving banks and jailed bankers who were found to have broken the law. Iceland is also outside the EU and probably could not have done any of this if they weren’t. There are advantages to not having a seat at the table when the table is on fire.

As much as I love being able to interrail from country to country on my British passport, the reality of membership is not so rosey for low paid workers. Open borders and free movement of labour has driven down wages of low skilled workers, while allowing British firms to move jobs overseas where labour costs are less. Jobs in trades or construction that used to be well paid are now minimum wage jobs because of the income eroding power of the unregulated EU labour market.

This could be prevented if the government provided more protection to workers and invested in training for the low skilled. However this Tory government has clearly put the needs of large companies, which save money from the supply of cheap low skilled labour, above the well-being of these workers themselves. The only option to protect low skilled workers is to vote to leave the EU.

The case for voting to leave the EU goes beyond the anti-immigration arguments of UKIP and eurosceptic Tories. There are strong left wing arguments for leaving the EU, as the EU is more interested in helping businesses than helping ordinary people. If we want to use government to challenge the power of the financial sector and to help the poorest members of society, then it will be necessary to leave.

If you are interested in reading the left wing case for staying in the EU then it can be found here.

What makes a leader?

in

Sometimes it feels like our leaders are cut from a different cloth than the rest of us. They are frequently tall and good-looking, always smartly dressed and knowledgeable. They project these characteristics with confidence; this is how you know who is in charge when you walk into a room.

A myth has grown up around our political and business leaders that they have the most experience, they are the most knowledgeable and have the most creative ways of tackling problems. Why else would they be in charge? The rest of us have to have faith that the people in charge know what they are doing. We believe that our leaders are creative, innovative and original thinkers and that the incentive system rewards creative, innovative and original thinking. In reality our leaders are none of these things.

Professor Aeron Davis has specialized in studying our leaders, the elite or the 1%. He has talked to powerful people in the worlds of business, finance and government, including CEOs, venture capitalists, senior civil servants, politicians and policy advisers. Last Tuesday, in a lecture at Goldsmiths University, he shared some insights into what he has discovered about the people who control our lives.

The first thing that Professor Davis discovered is that leadership is like speed dating. This may seem like a strange comparison, but when you consider speed dating is a lot of people hopping from table to table quickly, then this is quite an accurate analogy for leadership. In his research, Davis discovered that a third of CEOs had been in their current positions for less than 2 years, and two thirds had been in their job for less than 5 years. One-year contracts for top executives are becoming more common. Top executives move in, work briefly in a senior position and then move on to another one at a speed that is completely alien to most people’s career progression.

The same is true of top positions in the government. Davis discovered that most cabinet ministers hold their job for less than two years. Senior civil servants and advisers are also moved from role to role every few years. In the world of finance, the average time a share is owned before being traded has dropped to 22 seconds. All of this makes me wonder how CEOs, investors or ministers can have any knowledge of what they own or run? The simple answer is that they do not. Often our leaders have no experience or understanding of what they lead. How can they when their tenures are so short?

Leaders many not understand the government department or company which they are running, but they understand the problems they are trying to solve, right? Surely in our modern competitive world, you can only get ahead by providing a solution to a need or want experienced by a large number of people? Not according to Professor Davis, who said that the lives of CEOs are a never-ending conveyor belt of fast-paced meetings. Their understanding of the needs or wants of our lives are limited.

Most senior business leaders or politicians only associate with each other in environments from which ordinary people are excluded. A good example is the arcane customs of parliament, which make outsiders feel unwelcome but send subtle signs to elites that they are in their own space. During the documentary Inside the Commons, David Cameron remarked that parliament looked like a cross between a church and a school. My school, a state run prefabricated modernist structure, did not look remotely like the neo-gothic pomposity of the Palace of Westminster, but parliament is not a place for people like me, it is a place for people like David Cameron.

We have an image of leaders - especially in business - as brilliant iconoclasts, people who think differently and create new products or ideas. Steve Jobs, for example, was someone who created a dazzling array of new consumer goods and conquered the technology market. Never mind that Jobs did not invent the computer, MP3 player, smart phone or tablet, most leaders are not even original enough to refine a product that someone else has invented. Due to their short contracts, leaders are quite risk-averse and creating something new is risky.

If doing something new it goes wrong, then a CEO can wave goodbye to the extremely high-paid speed-leadership scene and go back to living like the rest of us. CEOs would rather not risk it. Following what other companies are doing is much easier. Apple can popularise the tablet and then every other company can follow them into that market. It is safer that way. Maybe this is why we have a huge number of smart phones on the market but no flying cars.

Jokes aside, the image of the freethinking innovative business leader is a myth. Professor Davis claimed that leaders are more like lemmings, blindly following each other in the same direction. This is as true for politicians as it is for CEOs. Thatcher brought in neo-liberalism, and Labour followed suit. Blair had his army of spin-doctors and media-trained professional politicians, and now the Tories have the same. Original ideas are too risky. This is why every economy in the world liberalised their financial sector and transferred enormous power to their banks. Finding a different economic model was too risky, even when the risk of financial meltdown was high. This is why we have not had banking reform even after the 2008 financial crash.

The final one of Professor Davis’s insights into our leaders is the culture of targets. He said many of the CEOs and financiers that he met told them that neo-liberalism is a superior economic model to socialism or a mixed economy, but in application they did not see how free markets worked any better than state intervention. What works is targets. Targets set by leaders and then implemented by everyone else.

CEOs or government ministers are very good at gaming this system of targets to their own advantage, mainly because they set the targets. This has led to everyone else’s work becoming part of a giant computerised accounting system, where we are all compared to how efficiently we achieve our targets. The long-term effects of this have been wage stagnation and insecure employment, but also rapid economic growth and spiraling rewards for those at the top. Most people think the financial incentive system is set up to encourage effective leaderships, whereas in reality it is exploited by our leaders for their own financial advantage.

The leaders of business, finance, the civil service and politics live in a world isolated from everyone else, where they set their own short-term targets, follow what everyone else is doing, see a short-term uptick, and then rapidly move on to a better-paid position somewhere else. We have to complete their targets and have faith that our leaders know what is best for us. Over time, inequality has worsened, living standards have fallen and our leaders have become more remote from us. The net result of all this is that the world belongs to the 1%, and the rest of us just live in it.

Can the left blame its failures on the right wing media?

in

Last week saw the publication of Margaret Beckett’s report into why Labour lost last year’s the general election. The report can be read in a number of ways to confirm your own views about what Labour did wrong. During this period of Labour Party soul searching it is worth remembering what the weeks leading up to last May’s election were actually like. Immediately before the election the right wing press were full of images of Ed Miliband looking weird eating a bacon sandwich, front page articles about how his economic policies would bankrupt the country and how Labour had let an army of migrants into the country to simultaneously steal your job and claim benefits.

The Beckett report confirmed the perception that Labour was out of step with what most voters wanted, especially in terms of the economy, benefits and immigration. I find myself asking: were Labour out of step with public opinion, or were the public told Labour was out of step by the right wing media? Miliband committed to austerity, and controls on immigration, but it did not make a difference at the ballot box. Was this because the right wing papers rubbished Miliband from the start and never allowed his policies to have a fair hearing?

The power and influence of the nebulous right wing media are often cited by lefties on both sides of the Atlantic as the reason for electoral failure. Surely the masses would embrace nationalisation and higher taxes on the wealthy if only someone would explain to them how this is in their interest, preferably in words of three syllables or less. Maybe the left should stop using the right wing media as an excuse and confront its lack of popularity? After all, circulation of newspapers is declining. In Britain we have (largely) unbiased TV news coverage, and social media offers a far greater ability to reach people directly and convince them to support left wing policies.

When looking at this argument, it must first be said that there is clearly an overwhelming right wing bias in the print media. This is not imaginary. Apart from the Guardian and the Mirror, every mainstream daily paper supported a ring wing party in the last election - they all supported the Tories apart from the Express, which supported UKIP.

The coverage of Cameron and co. is generally favourable. The most glaring example of this is the press’s reaction to the comprehensive spending review in November. In the run up to the election, Labour campaigned on less austerity, higher corporation tax and a mansion tax on expensive homes. The papers’ reaction was that this would be the end of Britain, capitalism would crumble as incentives to be successful were removed, the rich would all move overseas and take their money with them, the deficit would swell and we would face an economic crisis of the same magnitude as Greece’s. Labour’s policies were a socialist dagger aimed at heart of Britain.

Then along comes the comprehensive spending review and George Osborne puts back his own deficit reduction target as well as raising corporation tax and stamp duty. The papers praise him as a level-headed chancellor, a moderate liberal claiming the centre ground of politics. Labour’s grab at the homes of rich would have put grannies onto the street. Osborn’s is a sensible policy for a more prosperous Britain.

John McDonnell did not help matters by waving around Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, but even so, the magnitude of Osborne's U-turn on working tax credits, on tax cuts and clearing the deficit went entirely unacknowledged. The Independent tried to draw everyone's attention to the gaping silence over Osborne’s back and forth on the economy: “George Osborne executes a tyre-melting U-turn over tax credits, and the nation’s ears are drawn away by the gentle thud of a little red book landing on a table.” However there was little open criticism of the government. Another painful example is when during the election campaign Cameron forgot his supposed football allegiance, saying he supported West Ham when in 2010 he claimed his team was Aston Villa. Could you imagine what would happen if the Labour leader had made this mistake in the weeks before an election? The front pages would be filled with photoshopped images of Miliband in different team’s stripes or probably as a giant ham.

The circulation of newspapers is declining steeply. In 1997 The Sun sold an average of 3.8 Million papers a day. Today it is less than 2 million. Over the same time period the Guardian’s circulation fell from 430,000 papers a day to 185,000. However these papers still have a lot of influence. Millions of non-purchasers still absorb their headlines in the newsagent’s queue. The power of their brands has made them very competitive in the growing space on online news and social media. People trust established papers and its shows in the fact that the Mail online is the most read news source in the UK. The Sun as a million Twitter followers, whereas the Carny (a new online only, left wing news source) has less than 4 thousand Twitter followers. The power of established newspapers brands to decide what is news and what is talked about is still very high.

The question is, does any of this influence the way people vote? Most news and commentary is read by people who follow politics regularly and most of these people have a set party affiliation. Social media - for all its ability to take left wing message directly to those who can benefits from them - is in reality a vast echo chamber, bouncing people’s own opinions back at them. Guardian editorials attacking the savagery of benefit cuts are shared and read by people who were going to vote Labour anyway. Telegraph editorials about the need to reduce the deficit are ready by Tory voters. Biased words falling on biased ears.

The newspapers do shape public opinion but they are also shaped by public opinion. Case in point is the Daily Mail putting a drowned Syrian refugee on their front page. The huge swell of support for the refugees in public opinion forced a newspaper that is typically strongly against immigration to take, for a time, a more compassionate line.

The right wing media also back the party that is going to win, whatever that party is. Despite headlines about Ed Miliband being in Nicola Sturgeon's pocket, The Scottish Sun endorsed the SNP in the general election, because they were going to win whatever happened.

My view is that the right wing media is not an impassable bar to left wing progress. The media follows public opinion as much as public opinion follows the media. I believe that the right wing press makes it harder to put left wing arguments across, but not impossible. When used properly, social media and online news can reach people directly and circumvent the right wing dominance of the printed media. When the left is doing badly then the press will be an obstacle to electoral success. When the left is doing a good job of getting our arguments across, then the press will fall in line behind popular and successful arguments.

Why David Cameron is not a compassionate conservative

in

David Cameron is legacy conscious, that is the take away from a speech he made earlier in the week. He wants to be remembered as more than an administrator in chief, someone who made a few reforms and reduced (but did not clear) the deficit. He wants to change society in a way he will be remembered for. Margaret Thatcher brought the language of the market into everyday life. Tony Blair oversaw huge social liberalisation. Cameron has survived three referendums and that is it.

Cameron started out wanting to be a moderniser. He wanted to ditch the Tory's "nasty party” image and occupy the centre ground of British politics the way Blair did for Labour in the 1990s. Now Cameron is legacy conscious; he is drawn back to the idea of compassionate conservatism that he championed in his early days as party leader. Cameron wants the Tory party to tackle the social ills and deep rooted problems of Britain.

I believe that Cameron really does want to tackle the country’s complex problems and leave office with more people from all walks of life better off than when he arrived. I also believe this goes further than a nebulous desire to help people and that he has ideas about how to tackle Britain’s social problems. However, these ideas have never come together into something tangible. Cameron has spent none of his political capital being a compassionate conservative.

The argument made by Cameron’s apologists is that he has not been compassionate because of circumstance. Cameron has had to jump from crisis to crisis, which has gotten in the way of his vision. I dispute this, as a lot of these crises were of Cameron's own creation. The EU referendum, Cameron's rebellious right wing backbenchers and the trouble with UKIP eating away at Tory marginal support were created by Cameron's timidity and his reluctance to confront the right of his own party. He has allowed the right of the party to consistently undermine him because it is easier than standing up to them. If Cameron really wanted to lead Britain to a future of compassionate conservatism then he should have started by convincing his own party to stay in line.

Other events (AV referendum, Scottish independence, etc) Cameron could also have avoided, had it not been convenient to allow them to happen at the time. The other obstacles to the compassionate conservative project, cited by its defenders, are part of the cut and thrust of politics. These are mainly elections and circumstances created by the opposition. Did Cameron expect to be able to govern in a vacuum? Did he think that the Labour Party would just allow him put his grand, but ill defined, vision in practice?

We have to evaluate governments on what they do, not what they say or what they intended to do in an ideal world. The Tories have introduced the Bedroom Tax, penalising benefit recipients whose family members die, which is the opposite of compassion. The Tories have created a blame culture which accuses the unemployed and disabled of being scroungers. People with bad luck who lose their jobs or who have medical and/or physical disabilities are people who need our compassion, but the Tories have created an atmosphere of accusation and imply that these people are just workshy and are therefore not deserving of our compassion.

The day to day governing of the country is filled with compromise and maybe Cameron felt these not so very compassionate moves were necessary. He may still intend on being a compassionate conservative, but I doubt this when I look at some of things Cameron attempted. Under Cameron the government proposed cutting tax relief to people in work who are struggling to get by as well as raising council rents for people in work but with low paying jobs. Surely people who are working hard but still cannot a pay their rent and put food on the table without government aid are people who need compassion. However in the eyes of the Tories the working poor and also scroungers who need to be bullied into making more money rather than being shown compassion.

In the last week Cameron has shown his lack of compassion as the Tories voted against an amendment to the housing bill to ensure that all rental properties are fit for human habitation. People living in substandard accommodation are apparently not deserving of compassion according to the Tories.

Then we come to Cameron’s greatest absence of compassion: child poverty. Even someone who blames the unemployed for being unemployed or the working poor for not having better paid jobs, must acknowledge that children are not responsibility for the poverty they are born into. The government should be compelled to tackle child poverty, to give every child in the country equality of opportunity.

Under Cameron’s government the number of children living in absolute poverty in the UK has increased by half a million Cameron’s response is to redefine child poverty as a social condition and not an economic one, thus dodging the government's obligation to tackle the issue. This is a shocking lack of compassion for children born into poverty and amount to Cameron turning his back on millions of poor children.

Cameron's flagship compassionate conservative policy is the Big Society. The most generous assessment that of this plan is that it aims to encourage ordinary people to take a stake in their community and local government and to use their expertise to improve local services by tailoring them to the needs of the community. It could be described as a plan to provide socialism without state interference. To make ordinary people care for each other and work together to improve the lives of others without the need for a draconian state that involves itself in the personal lives of its citizens.

That is when I am being generous. Most of the time I see the Big Society as a means to transfer services that were offered by the state to ordinary people and use social pressure as a means a to do this. The neo-liberal drive towards maximum labour market flexibility has created a society of workers disconnected from their communities, moving to where the work is (mainly London). The Tories have no plans to oppose this as it would involve standing up to private businesses who do quite well out of a flexible labour market. However in the towns and villages workers have vacated no one is available to look after the elderly people. The state could provide this service but that would be expensive.

Enter the Big Society. By using social pressures of the 1950s, workers are encouraged to provide social care or management expertise to cut back state run services. We will still move to where the work is, but we are supposed do our bit for Blighty while we are there and to slot into a community care, health and education network that used to run by the state. It is social democracy without the state or a lot of people working long hours and then providing care services and running schools in their free time. The time we are supposed to spend with our children or being idle for the sheer joy of it are not accounted for as they have no value. Compassion has been removed from this equation. It is the worst combination of the strict social pressure of the past and the austere state of the present.

Cameron may want to be a compassionate conservative but by victimising the unemployed, the disabled and low paid workers he is behaving like the same old nasty party that he wanted to move the Tories away from. His Big Society dream is a means to create a state that does not care for its citizens and little England nightmare of social pressure where overworked people provide the services the state used to run. This is a compassionate conservative vision of a future without leisure time or any collective responsibility.

2015 a year in review - trends and the future

in

This is a review of the political events of 2015. Read my summary of the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader here.

Parliament and party politics were more interesting this year than for a long time, but there were important trends outside the Westminster bubble. Questions over Scottish independence were clearly not settled by last years referendum. The SNP will call another independence ballot, but only when they are certain they will win. If Britain leaves the EU because England votes to go and Scotland votes to stay then this will give the SNP the excuse they need to break up the country.

In America gun massacre followed gun massacre and still Obama cannot get any movement on gun control legislation. If you are depressed about the state of British politics, then take a look at the US to feel better about things. The race for the White House rumbles on with Trump frightening the world more and more and Hilary Clinton being so bland and boring that an openly socialist candidate is making headway in an American election – further proof, if any was needed, that 2015 was a surreal year for politics.

2015 was also the year that a lot of prominent feminists were accused of being transphobic, sparking social media spats. This led to a healthy public debate about no-platforming on university campuses. There are already too many people telling students what they should and should not do, but my opinion is that people should be allowed to express their opinions unless they are openly and explicitly encouraging violence.

Online abuse, passing itself off as free speech, has caused numerous people to examine the issue of the limits of free speech. We have a right to freedom of speech but we also have a responsibility to do no harm with it, as much as possible. After so much abuse has been dished out and then defended as “freedom of speech”, I can see why students want more emphasis on the responsibility aspect of our freedom of speech.

Many of these debates – and abuses - have taken place on social media and one trend of 2015 is fashionable social media bashing. Social media used to be means to gage public opinion or engage with the public. Now it’s viewed as a nest of hysterical people, who must be ignored in order for their to be sane political debate.

One recent example is people taking to Twitter after the Christmas floods to claim about Tory cuts to the flood defenses budget. Most people would think that a debate about cutting flood defenses after a preventable flood has damaged peoples’ lives is a good thing. However in the world of “sane political debate” verses social media these people were labeled as idiots, rather than listened too. Here is a good example of someone dismissing discussion on Twitter out of hand and here is a good response.

Some good articles were written about how social media can be a left wing echo chamber and this might have cost Labour the election. For every nuanced thought about the role of social media there were many people dismissing out of hand a platform that gives voice to people, mainly young people, who find it hard to get their voices heard.

Social media is a great tool for collective actions, spreading information and holding the powerful to account. It has been used to spread hatred and disinformation by people of all political persuasions. I feel that the current fashionable bashing of social media is a way for journalists and politicians to dismiss the voices of ordinary people as just cranks and bullies.

Elements of the political and journalistic establishment do not like the fact that ordinary people hold them to account and would very much prefer it if social media is thought of as the domain of idiots and that it is everyone’s best interests that they are ignored. You will encounter opinions you do not like on social media, some of them will be stupid and ill-informed. Everyone has a right to an opinion. Fashionable bashing of social media is way for the privileged to conveniently ignore the opinions of everyday people.

2015’s most annoying trend was self-righteous articles about people moving out of London, such as this by Rafael Behr in the Guardian and this by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing. Yes we are all very pleased that you prefer Brighton to the capital but we really do not care. An opportunity to pop this balloon of pomposity was missed when one writer claimed that they cannot move out of London because the rest of the country is racist. Everyone looked like an idiot that week.

2016 will probably be as interesting as 2015, for better and for worse. There will be more social media spats and infighting in the Labour Party. There will also be more refugees than ever before arriving and we need a practical solution to what is to be done with all these people and we need it today. Terrorism is a fear, but I am hopefully that 2016 will not see a massacre in London similar to the ones we have seen in Paris.

The promised referendum of Britain’s European Union membership will most likely happen next year, because Cameron wants Britain to stay in the EU and he does not want this to be a vote on an unpopular midterm government – so the sooner the better from his point of view. The potential for both Labour and the Tories to trip over their own feet during the campaign is enormous and I am interested and slightly frightened to see how they both handle it. We can also expect sluggish economic growth and further cuts to public services. 2016 might finally be the year cuts and lack luster economic performance blows up in the Conservative Party’s faces.

At the Red Train blog 2016 we bring a new website design, new articles on a wider range of topics and a recommitment to cover as much politics as possible with our usual liberal dose of left wing bias.

Our society is still faced with some very large problems. I believe that the neo-liberal economics that underpin our current thinking and direction of our entire society is heading in is potentially disastrous. There are millions of people - poor people and social minorities - that no one cares about and have been left on the scrapheap by this government. The country needs an effective left wing alternative now more than ever. It is the only way we will meet the challenges of 2016.

2015 a year in review - Jeremy Corbyn

in ,

This is a review of the political events of 2015. Read my summary of the general election here.

If the election was a surprise than what happened afterwards was a shock. Jeremy Corbyn was given odds of 800 to 1 when he was nominated to stand for Labour leader but he won with nearly 60% of the membership backing him. Corbyn won a huge victory across all ages, demographics and types of Labour members, but all has not gone well since then. Corbyn’s victory has exposed huge divisions in the Labour party.

I voted for Corbyn, and his politics are the closest to mine of any Labour leader during my lifetime. It has been painful to read the writings of many left-wing journalists I respect, trashing him at every opportunity. There are certainly legitimate criticisms of Corbyn – I will come to these – but I feel many journalists made up their minds early on that they did not like him and nothing he can do will change this. This is because the election of Corbyn as Labour leader goes beyond what you think of Corbyn personally, his voting record, or even his policies. It is a question of what Labour stands for and what it should aim to be.

The division opening up across the Labour movement is a division between those who want radical change to our politics and our society, and those who want liberal reform to our current system. It is the difference between those who want capitalism with the worst excesses removed or those who want our entire relationship with capitalism reformed. I feel this divide is unbridgeable, by Corbyn or anyone else.

Corbyn’s victory is partly down to having an ideology at all in an ideologically bankrupt Labour, and partly down to inspiring young voters and many alienated leftists and Greens. But it is mainly because the rival Blairite and Brownite candidates were awful. None of them looked like they could win a general election so the party members preferred to make a principled stand, rather than choose a Prime Minister in waiting. The Blairite and Brownite factions need to take a hard look at themselves to work out why they lost so massively to the left of the party. They have nothing to offer apart from indigent cries of “it’s our party, we should be in charge”. Since Corbyn’s election they have continued down this route, doubtlessly helping keep Corbyn popular among Labour Party members.

Labour wins big when it can unite the working class trade-union supporting voters, the liberal metropolitan middle class voters and the aspirational voters who think they will be better off under Labour. Under Miliband, UKIP ate away at the first group, the Greens at the second and the Tories took a huge bite of out the third. Corbyn is losing the third group, but he has stopped the exodus of the second group and a question mark remains over his appeal to the first. In Oldham UKIP heavily targeted this group, hoping that accusing Corbyn of not being patriotic could win over these voters. It did not work, because of the issues with UKIP discussed above. The Tories are trying the same tactic on a bigger scale and that is where the real threat to Labour lies.

If the Tories can win over group 1 and 3, while holding onto their core support, they will win big in 2020. However I do not see a Labour front bench figure who can win over all three groups and Labour need all three. Yvette Cooper gets group 2 and 3, but loses group 1. Liz Kendall gets group 1 and 3, but loses 2. Stella Creasy gets group 2 and 3, but loses 1. David Miliband gets group 3, but loses 1 and 2. The only possibilities would be Lisa Nandy or Jess Phillips but they are not exposed enough for us to accurately judge how well they would do as party leader.

Corbyn and his new shadow cabinet have made some mistakes. Certainly having John McDonnell waving around Chairman Mao's Little Red Book was a bad idea, however over four years away from a general election these mistakes matter little to most voters. The few victories Corbyn has had have been the most widely noted, mainly Labour stopping Tory plans to cut working tax credits, which interim Labour leader Harriet Harman supported.

Then came a terrorist attack on Paris and the excuse Cameron had been looking for to start bombing Syria. This is a terrible idea and Corbyn was right to oppose it. However, parliament thought otherwise and a few in the Labour Party seized this as an opportunity to embarrass Corbyn; showing once and for all that Blairities care more about being proved right than they do about the Syrian civilians we will inevitably kill and how this will encourage others to flock to ISIS.

Even so, the Syria vote is a major defeat for Corbyn. I think ultimately he will be proved right and that this military intervention in Syria (and Iraq) will only increase support for ISIS. Unfortunately at the point when this becomes apparent everyone will have forgotten Corbyn’s stance on the issue as we will be focusing on a new political crisis. Sometimes it looks as if Corbyn cannot win whatever he does.

Parliament and party politics were more interesting this year than for a long time, but there were important trends outside the Westminster bubble. Read my summary of trends in 2015 and what to epxect in 2016 here.

2015 a year in review - the general election

in ,

I usually start the New Year with recommitting myself to writing this blog and standing up for left-wing values, so this year I decided to do something different and end the year with recommitting myself.

It has been a rollercoaster of a year in every sense. 12 months ago if you told me that by December 2015 Jeremy Corbyn would be leader of the Labour Party, Charles Kennedy would be no longer with us, David Cameron would have taken us into another Middle Eastern war of dubious legality and that the biggest political hash tag of the year would be in French, then I’d have claimed you had one too many eggnogs over Christmas.

However that’s the political landscape we find ourselves in at the end of 2015. It has been an unfortunate year for Paris, bookended with twin tragedies of the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the Paris massacre in November. Terrorism and security have been major themes of this year; partly because the Tories want to make it the subject of the next general election, in the same the way that economic competency was the subject of this year’s election – more on that later.

The refugee crisis reached a critical point this year as over a million people entered Europe from the Middle East, South West Asia and North Africa. How Europe responds to this crisis will be the defining debate of our generation. Britain’s offering to this debate was frosty indifference until the Independent put the picture of a drowned child on their front page and before long we had a commitment from Cameron to take in “thousands” more Syrian refugees. I was more surprised than anyone by this. It goes to show that maybe people do care about what happens outside our borders and that we not a selfish island of little Englander UKIP voters, whatever that demographic of squeaky wheels claims.

Insulting UKIP bring me neatly to the biggest British political event of this year, the general election. For people who follow politics like it is a sport it was both fascinating and dull. The polls were too close to all (up until the BBC’s exit poll) and it looked like another hung parliament, with coalition negotiations going on in the public view. However there were no moments of controversy, no gaffs and no defining moments of brilliance. The TV debates were interesting but ultimately changed nothing.

Small left-wing(ish) parties did well out of the TV debates. I was very impressed by Leanne Wood from Plaid Cymru and Nicola Sturgeon from the SNP. Sadly Natalie Bennett from the Greens failed to make much of an impression. She did manage produce the worst gaff of the election with a terrible interview for LBC.

I thought that we could face a “Green Moment” when the Greens steal large number of voters from Labour’s metropolitan liberal left and become a serious player in parliament. It did not happen. I have a soft spot for the Greens but while they are seen as the party of the self-satisfied, middle class, Guardian reading set - the people with their own compost heap in the garden but take three holidays aboard a year – they will fail to capture the broad based support they need in order to return more than a handful of MPs.

Lack of effective leadership for the Greens remains a major problem for them. Caroline Lucas is a good politician to have at the front. Natalie Bennett is not and I do not see her leading the party to electoral success. It must be said that the first past the post electoral system is a huge hindrance to parties like the Greens – and UKIP. A fairer electoral system would have given the Greens more seats for the one million votes they got in the general election. However it would have also returned a Tory UKIP coalition government. I think this is right, it is what we voted for and it was what we should get.

It is interesting that, in May, I thought that the general election was the death of major parties and first past the post system, that electoral reform was imminent, and that coalitions would be the future. With the poor performance of small parties this year, a Tory majority government and huge numbers of new members of the Labour Party, it looks like big parties are as strong as ever and that binary left/right politics is here to stay.

The general election also saw the annihilation of the Lib Dems, justly deserved for breaking so many manifesto commitments and alienating a new generation of voters who they courted in 2010. Many of the 2010 Lib Dem voters went over to the Tories, which cost Labour the election. This should finally put to bed the idea of the Lib Dems as a credible left-wing party. They are and always have been centrist party.

The only small party to do well out of the first past the post system was the SNP, who swept through Scotland like wildfire. This should concern Cameron more than it does. The Tories are great at ignoring places that do not return Tory MPs and Cameron is bad for this even by Tory standards. The huge popular support for the SNP means another referendum on Scottish independence is likely and it is possible that this Tory government will be the last of a united kingdom.

No one expected it, but the Tories eeked over the line to form a majority government. The public rejected coalitions, majority rule is back. It was the first Tory budget in nearly 20 years but it is a majority smaller than John Major’s in 1992, and look how well that went. Sluggish but present economic growth saved the Tories bacon at the polling booth. Growth was strong enough that the government could claim that they were doing well, but not so strong that the electorate could trust Labour to turn on the spending taps. Everyone hated the Lib Dem so the Tories were in – narrowly.

I hate the Tories, but I do have to acknowledge their clever electoral maneuvering. Back in 2010 I thought that austerity could keep the Tories out of office for 20 years, that when people felt the impact of the cuts it would mean a Labour landslide. It did not happen. Homelessness is up, child poverty is up, inequality and personal debt are at an all time high, yet the Tories remain popular. They have convinced enough people to win an election and hats off to them.

Having popular support from many newspapers helped, but I lay the blame squarely at the feet of Labour. By supporting austerity, by making it their top manifesto commitment, they handed victory over to the Tories. The Tories lost three elections to New Labour by promising to match Labour spending and deliver tax cuts. Similarly, Labour cannot win by offering spending cuts and better public services. The argument needs to change.

The possibility of a UKIP surge - long predicted but never appearing - was something that worried me during the election. UKIP came second in a lot of safe Labour seats and this should worry Labour, but these seats remain safe Labour seats as the Oldham by-election demonstrates. UKIP have claimed they are parking their tanks of Labour’s lawn, that their popular anti-EU, anti-immigrant, straight talking politics will bring them massive electoral victory. It has not and I see now that it will not.

This is partly because if a voter agrees with UKIP, there are plenty of Tories who share their views. It is also partly because of our British dislike of anyone seen as extreme. However it is mainly because UKIP are, at most, a dual issue party. Those who hate the EU and are frightened of immigrants care about the economy, healthcare, educating and housing and they want a party that has comprehensive policies on all of these fronts. UKIP does not and the Tories remain the main party of the right.

If the election was a surprise then what happened afterwards was a shock. Read my summary of the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader here.

Why we should not attack the Islamic State

in

The situation on the ground in Syria and Iraq is dire. The tyrannical rule that the Islamic State - or IS - imposes in the areas of Syria and Iraq which it controls are chilling. Their persecution of the Yazidi and other minorities is an affront to our common human decency. Now they are exporting murder to their neighbours, in Beirut and in Ankara, and more recently in Paris. I can understand the calls to do something, to use the West’s massive military power to help those who suffer under IS. A lot of people calling for intervention in Syria have the best intentions of civilians at heart. However, that does not make their desire to intervene is correct and I feel it could do much more harm than good.

What is typically meant by intervention against IS is usually bombing. Britain is currently bombing IS territory in Iraq. France, Russia and the US are heavily bombing IS in Syria and in Iraq. Our involvement in the regional conflict between IS, secular rebels and the governments of Iraq and Syria makes it more difficult to bring about a diplomatic solution. We can hardly argue against violence while using violence ourselves. We can hardly encourage any side to stop spreading the chaos and carnage, while we are spreading the chaos and change. At the same time chaos and destruction created by our bombing is the environment in which IS thrives.

I do not think there is an example of when bombing a Middle Eastern country has improved the situation for civilians. Our military has been heavily involved in Iraq since the 2003 invasion and the situation has deteriorated to the point where a medieval death cult controls vast swathes of land. When it was argued that we should not attack the Saddam regime, the counter argument was: "it can't get any worse". It can and it did. Now the same argument is being used to support attacking IS. It can get worse than IS and it will get worse the more we bomb. The west has been bombing this area of the world off and on for the last 25 years and it is in a worse state now than ever. Eventually we have to try something else.

It is difficult to talk about intervening against IS without looking at the wider issues. Firstly, Bashar al-Assad, the dictator of Syria. No one in favour of attacking IS can clearly say what Assad's role in their downfall should be. To some he is our natural regional ally; to others he is as much a part of the problem as IS. Russia supports Assad, but Britain and America want him to go. Assad's actions are clearly fanning the flames of IS, but fighting a war on two fronts in Syria would be much more difficult. If we must throw our military weight around, the Assad question has to be resolved first.

Secondly, IS needs to be put in the wider regional context. Looking beyond Syria and Iraq, we can see the wider Sunni Muslim world is in revolt against many factors: the secular governments which ignore the religion of their citizens, tyrannical regimes controlling the holy sites of Islam, the growing power of Shia Iran, heavy-handed Western foreign policy, artificial borders between nations which make no sense on the ground - some of which date back to the Sykes-Picot treaty in 1916 - and many other factors. Bombing IS to dust will not pacify an entire region. We are entering a long phase of conflict in the Middle East that cannot end until the above issues and others are resolved. This goes beyond religion, nationality and ideology, but involves all of these. A lasting and just peace for the region - which is what everyone really wants - cannot be brought about by the destruction of one group of fighters.

Another question that has yet to be resolved is what form should intervention take? We are currently bombing IS and have been for a while, but this has had little effect. I am not sure what more bombing by Britain can achieve that bombing by the US, France and Russia cannot. However the main question I would put to those who support bombing IS is how far do we go if bombing does not stop them?

Do those who support bombing believe that the British government should support a Turkish ground invasion? This will most likely result in heavy casualties for the Kurdish minority in the region, who are frequently targeted by the Turkish army. When that comes, it make may bombing supporters choke on their brown flakes when they read their Sunday Times.

Would those who support bombing IS, support a British and American ground invasion of Syria? Simon Jenkins of the Guardian claimed on the Moral Maze that it would take a deployment of 500,000 allied troops and the occupation of most of the region to defeat IS. Do we have the stomach for that? Do we think that re-creating the British Mandates in the Middle East will bring a just and lasting peace? Is that what is in everyone's wider interest? Will the Syrians who object to being ruled by Assad or IS welcome British rule with open arms? I think not. Most likely we would make an enemy of every side in the conflict and unite them all against us. This would destroy any chance of a negotiated peace.

Even if we send in the troops, as I have seen many people argue for, and defeat IS – what happens after that? What is our wider plan for the region? If there is anything we have learned from our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, it is that our post-invasion plan needs to be a lot better. Look at what happened in Libya: it would be generous to say that the post-Gaddafi plans for Libya were drawn up on the back of a cigarette packet. Now the country is in a state of chaos with violent clashes between different factions, including IS who were not present in Libya before. If we are intervening in Syria and Iraq in anyway, we need to have a clear understand of the type of society we are trying to build, who will be our allies in this process and how we cleanly transition to this. None of these criteria have been satisfied.

What we have right now is a rush to find a solution to IS. When you have a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. When you have a billion pound military based heavily on air superiority, then every problem starts to look like one you can bomb with jet planes. From most of the commentators in favour of bombing, I have heard a lot of "bombing is definitely the solution, we just need to find out why". We are currently sleepwalking into a half-century long conflict in the Middle East and we cannot let a sudden desire enact our revenge on IS dictate regional foreign policy.

None of this answers the question of what we should do about IS? Simon Jenkins says nothing. I would recommend discontinuing military operations to give the maximum weight to diplomacy. If we must do something militarily, then we should support the Kurds who are currently fighting on the frontline against IS. This support for the Kurds should include supporting their desire for a state and standing up to Turkey who oppresses them.

Above all, I would counsel caution at a time like this. We cannot be selective in our foreign policy and still claim to stand on the moral high ground. We cannot oppose the tyranny and brutality of IS while supporting the tyranny and brutality of Assad. We cannot say we are opposed to the spread of chaos and fear while using our military to spread chaos and fear. We cannot say we oppose religious nihilism while offering nothing more than a power vacuum and more dead bodies as an alternative. It is okay to admit that we do not have the answers and cannot act now. It is far worse to admit we do not have the answers and act anyway.