So what's the 'right' number?

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From the data available, it’s not at all clear that migration is as salient an issue in the election as some politicians seem to believe. On the other hand, if they bang on about it long enough and often enough, its salience is likely to increase – that’s just one of the many ways in which Labour seem to be determined to validate, rather than challenge, the Tory agenda. Starmer told us yesterday that net immigration is ‘too high’ and that Labour will slash the numbers. One might think that someone who believed that a number was ‘too high’ might have at least a rough idea of what number would not fit that description, but it is another of those details on which he seems to be clueless. And even if he feels unable to be precise about a number, it would surely be reasonable to expect that he would at least be able to set out, in rough terms, what criteria he would use to determine an answer to the question.

Sunak says much the same thing, and is thrashing around for policies which will reverse current trends – my, will he be angry when he finds out who’s been in government for the last 14 years. Whilst he can offer potential ways of cutting the numbers, in public he’s remarkably sanguine about the effect of those ‘solutions’ on the finances of UK universities, to say nothing of the sustainability of the entire health and social care sector. Perhaps he really does believe that most older people – his only remaining target group of voters, apparently – really would prefer to die for lack of care than receive care from some foreigner. Farage’s suggestion that the answer is to reduce net migration to zero is even further detached from reality, but then, so is the probability that he’ll ever have to implement anything he says.

It's worth noting that some of those most keen on eliminating immigration are also arguing for UK families to have more children. Well, well-off families at least – they don’t really want the poorer to have any children at all. Traditionally, the argument against immigration has been that we don’t have the homes, hospitals, schools etc to support the extra people, but it should be obvious that an increase in population caused by an increased birth rate leads to exactly the same pressures on services in the long run. And if the Tory-Labour antipathy towards immigrants isn’t rationally based on that sort of argument, then on what is it based? It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the underlying basis owes more to vote-seeking than anything else. It means that the ‘right answer’ for net migration is whatever number they think will prevent them losing racist and xenophobic votes to the other party. And it’s why they can’t ever put a number on it, because their opponent will simply outbid (or should that be underbid?) them. It’s ultimately a race to the bottom, and a pretty shameful one at that, given that they both understand the economic and social impact of drastically cutting numbers but are too afraid to spell it out.

There is, though, another solution open to them. Since the debate is largely about ‘net’ migration (a numbers game which rather ignores the fact that much of their target audience is more concerned about characteristics such as skin colour and religion than numbers), they could simply introduce a scheme under which large numbers of UK citizens are persuaded to leave. It would need both a carrot and a stick, but they are largely implementing the stick part already – poor services and declining standards of living (one might even add a rejection of action to reduce the climate change which is leading to semi-permanent rain). Given a big enough carrot, I’m sure that there are millions who might be open to an offer to live a better life elsewhere. Compulsory French, Spanish and Italian in schools might turn out to be rather more useful than Sunak’s weird obsession with Maths.

Turning the unthinkable into the inevitable

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It was reported recently that the IMF expects Russian economic growth to be higher than that of all advanced economies this year. Despite all the sanctions imposed by ‘the West’ and the costs of the war in Ukraine the Russian economy is doing rather well. It helps, of course, that ‘the West’, including the UK, is effectively breaching those sanctions on a large scale both by continuing to buy Russian oil after it’s been processed elsewhere, and by selling manufactured goods to Russian allies which then pass them on to Russia. Sanctions may be well-intentioned, but the capitalist desire for profit is, as ever, finding ways of avoiding them in pursuit of its own interests.

But there’s more to it than that. One of the points noted by the IMF is that part of the growth is down to the very high levels of expenditure by the state. It’s not something that anyone who listened for a moment to the Labour-Tory financial consensus would expect. In the UK we are told, from the Labour-Tory shared ideological perspective, that state expenditure actually impedes economic growth and must be reduced in order to cut taxes and incentivise those paying less tax to invest in new capacity, even if it’s more likely in practice that the money will simply be transferred to offshore tax havens. But the empirical truth, as demonstrated by Russia, is that state expenditure can and does lead directly to economic growth, in some circumstances at least. It would be preferable – for the planet and most of humanity, even if not for capitalists and oligarchs – if that expenditure wasn’t on munitions. But ‘capitalists and oligarchs’ is a not insignificant caveat: in simple terms, war is good for capitalism. It helps address the problems of over-production by building large scale destruction into the economic mix. And it is almost always funded by the creation of new money by states, money which then flows into the pockets of those who own the means of production. Misery for the many leads to profit for the few.

It's part of the context for the announcement by Sunak this week that the UK will increase its expenditure on armaments to 2.5% of GDP over the remainder of the decade. Like anything Sunak says now, it’s not something that he expects to be around to deliver: making promises that he won’t have to keep costs nothing. In this case, though, it’s a promise which Labour seems keen to match, even if they caveat the timescale a little by talking about “as soon as resources allow”. There are, of course, multiple ways of achieving the stated objective. Causing a recession and reducing GDP whilst holding military expenditure at current levels would work mathematically, and I wouldn’t put it past either of them to be able to achieve that. Incompetent procurement – simply paying more for the same amount of munitions – is another; and that’s almost guaranteed, given the officially-admitted incompetent UK approach to military procurement. Purchasing armaments is not enough, though: capitalist logic requires not just their purchase, but their use and destruction so that more can be purchased, even if few will voice that sentiment aloud.

Let us suppose that, between Starmer and Sunak, they manage to sort out procurement, avoid recession, and increase military expenditure (probably by cutting expenditure elsewhere, given their joint commitment to the nonsense about balanced budgets), the question we should be asking is this: does that make war more likely or less likely?  History tells us that some wars are started entirely by design (even if the outcome is often not that which was expected) – such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine – whilst others happen more by accident. The politicians talk about ‘deterring’ enemies, but one person’s deterrent is another’s provocation; people who feel threatened can just as easily decide to get their retaliation in first rather than wait to be attacked. The danger is that talk of being in a ‘pre-war’ situation and needing to consider conscription makes a drift into war more, rather than less, likely. Individual steps which might each seem logical in themselves risk building into a disaster. They are leading us to the brink of a self-fulfilling prophecy with no obvious route back.

Quantum voting

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Most of us are familiar with Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment about a cat in a box. Not so many realise that the point is not simply that we don’t know whether the cat is dead or alive until we open the box, but that the cat is, under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, both dead and alive until the box is opened and the cat is observed, at which point the uncertainty resolves itself into either a dead state or a live state. Until that point, not even the cat knows whether it is dead or alive, because it is both. It’s a hard concept to get one’s head around, but Schrödinger’s point was to demonstrate how foolish it is to seek to apply quantum uncertainty to real world physics, even if it is indeed odd that such fundamental uncertainty at particle level does not reflect itself in classical physics.

The UK is on the brink of running a rather different large scale experiment on the applicability of quantum uncertainty in the real world. According to Sunak, any vote for a party other than the Tories is a vote to put Starmer into Downing Street, whilst according to Labour, any vote for a party other than Labour is a vote for the continuation of a Sunak government. If both are true, it must mean that around 30% of the votes cast in the coming election will enter a state of quantum uncertainty when they are placed in the ballot boxes. At that point, those who thought that they had voted against both the two largest parties will actually, under the Labour-Tory interpretation, have voted both for and against both Labour and the Tories. This uncertainty will only resolve itself when the ballot boxes are opened and the papers counted, at which point the application of the Labour-Tory interpretation to voting will be shown to have been as foolish as the application of the Copenhagen interpretation to that imaginary cat.

For those of us who prefer to live in the real world rather than that postulated by strange thought experiments, what the observation and measurement will tell us is, firstly, that around 30% of the electorate will have rejected the idea of both a Tory government and a Labour government and, secondly, that most of their votes are essentially worthless because those behind the Labour-Tory interpretation have rigged the rules of the experiment to allow only two possible outcomes in most constituencies. If either of them really believed what they say, they would be arguing for a system of voting which allowed that 30% to express for themselves which of the two biggest parties they like most (or, perhaps, hate least) by indicating their second and subsequent choices. The main reason that they don’t do so is because they fear that, if they did, they might find that an awful lot of the ‘firm’ choices they receive from the 70% or so voting for one or the other are already concealed second or third choices being made by voters with pegs on their noses, and that the whole idea of ‘the two biggest parties’ is itself a largely imaginary construct. Just like Schrödinger’s poor cat.

Sharing the magic

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August is generally known in political circles as the silly season; a time when there is a lack of hard political stories to fill the news. Nature, however, abhors a vacuum, and fortunately both the Tories and the Labour Party have people on hand to make vacuous statements to fill the gap. I’m not entirely sure who got there first, Braverman or Streeting, but both seem to have chosen the Bank Holiday Monday as the ideal occasion to put forward their own version of magical thinking.

Streeting, for Labour, promised that patients would be able to see the GP of their choice rather than the one who happened to be in the surgery at the time, although how he plans to co-ordinate the timing of people’s illnesses with the GP’s holidays and days off was left unstated. Probably wisely. Implementing this policy will not, apparently, require any extra resource. Instead, those surgeries meeting the promise will be given extra financial incentives for doing so, and those incentives will be paid for by reducing the cash given to the surgeries who fail to comply. There is a rather obvious logical flaw in the argument: if you’re paying some doctors to provide this service by penalising those doctors who don’t, delivering the ‘promise’ to some people depends, inherently, on not delivering it to others. Still, why bother with mere maths when you can work magic on this scale.

Braverman, for the Tories, promised that police forces will follow all reasonable leads in investigating all crimes, rather than failing to investigate some at all. She also subscribes to the same sort of magical thinking, somehow believing that restoring some of the police numbers cut since her party entered government in 2010 will enable the police to provide a better service than that which they were under-resourced to provide before her party got its hands on government. I’m not sure how politically wise it is to present the days before her party came to power as a policing success story (particularly since it wasn’t), but then political wisdom and Braverman are not really words which belong in the same sentence. It’s also not entirely clear that her promise is any more universally applicable than that coming from Streeting – there will be many who will have at least a sneaking suspicion that suspected crimes allegedly perpetrated by a better class of criminal will remain less than fully investigated.

We probably shouldn’t take anything either of them says too seriously, though. In Streeting’s case, based on recent history, his leader will have reversed the policy within a month or so anyway, and in Braverman’s case she really isn’t expecting to be around long enough to implement anything – it has more to do with the leadership election expected in the wake of the next election. Assuming that the next general election is held in May next year – which is what many observers seem to expect – next year’s silly season could well be devoted to (yet another) Tory leadership election and, in celebration of the season, the silliest candidate might even win.

Seeking fulfilment, not just work

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Wales’ Education Minister, Jeremy Miles, told a meeting of business professionals in Wrecsam yesterday that children should start learning about the world of work from the age of three. He also argued that children should be helped to get off the educational ‘conveyor belt’ which sees progression to a university place as the natural aspirational outcome for the education system and look instead at more technical and vocational qualifications. The latter is a common argument, advanced by Tory and Labour politicians alike; and the idea of early contact with the world of work is hardly a strange one either, although whether it should start as early as three is open to rather more question.

They are both arguments which leave me uneasy, however, because they both raise questions about the purpose of education. Both seem to start from the point of view that the aim of the education system is – and should be – the production of ‘employment-ready’ workers; people with the skills, aptitudes and attitudes required for them to fit into the roles which employers have to offer. There is a lack of any understanding of the potential value, both to the individuals themselves and to society as a whole, of education, learning and a wider skillset not necessarily immediately applicable to any particular job. And although they skate round the issue and prefer to avoid facing up to it, the idea that some children should be encouraged to follow a more ‘vocational’ pathway is, in practice, to argue that higher education should be reserved for the privileged. We have decades of knowledge which tells us that it effectively means (with a few exceptions which enable people to talk vaguely about ‘equality of opportunity’ and ‘social mobility’) separating middle class and working class children into two different educational pathways. They always claim that such a separation is based on ‘ability’, but that ability is assessed on the basis of an educational system which consistently allows children from more affluent households to progress further than the rest. It’s not that I disagree with the notion that a university education might not be the right route for everyone, or the notion that there should be more parity of esteem between a degree and other forms of qualification; it’s just that the economic inequalities of the society in which we live largely predetermine which children follow which route and end up preserving those very inequalities as a result.

It would be far better to start encouraging children from an early age to think about what a fulfilling life might look like. For some – particularly the middle class children who enter the well-paid professions – their future employment might be a large part of that, but for many, work will be a necessary but largely unfulfilling part of their future life. Giving children the means and the skills to seek their fulfilment outside of their working life would be doing more for them than turning them into mere ‘resources’ for employers to exploit. It would also make for a more balanced society; not every worthwhile human activity has an economic value. There is, though, one other thing it would probably also do, which is why supporters of the current economic system – Labour and Tory alike – will shy away from it: it would lead people to question the whole basis of an economic system which sees children as young as three primarily as future workers whose role is to serve the system. Not all of us would see that questioning as a bad thing.

Playing games whilst children suffer

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There are varying estimates as to how many children in the UK are impacted directly by the ‘two-child-limit’ on benefits. This report suggests that the number is around 1 million. Whatever the number is – and a million is as good a starting point as any that I’ve seen – one of the increasing number of policies on which the Tories and Labour are agreed is that those children must remain in relative poverty for the foreseeable future (whilst they both, utterly incredibly, purport to support a levelling up of life chances). Their reasoning isn’t exactly the same, of course. In the case of the Tories, it’s a bit of performative nastiness, aimed to appeal to those voters who regard anyone receiving any benefits as being scroungers; those impacted are just collateral damage. They’re not people who are very likely to vote Tory anyway, and the few who do have already demonstrated that they don’t care what the government does to them, they’ll still vote for it. Labour’s argument is slightly different: it’s not that they don’t care (although I’m not sure they really do), it’s that deliberately keeping a million children in a state of relative poverty is a way of showing that they can take tough decisions contrary to their claimed core values in order to prove themselves fitting successors to the Tories in the eyes of the Tory press and media. Which of the two is the most immoral stance is one for the philosophers of ethics to debate: but in a choice between not caring on the one hand, and caring but deciding to do nothing on the other, it’s not at all clear to me that Labour are taking the more moral stance of the two.

Whatever, the effect of the different approaches is that it’s actually easier for the Tories to reverse their position than Labour. Populism with no great principles involved makes it easier to change direction if the alternative is more popular. It occurred to me that, if he so chose, Sunak could play a blinder here, by simply announcing that he would drop the policy if re-elected. Labour might bleat about unfunded spending commitments, but the Tories understand (rather better than Labour in terms of their actions, if not their words), that insisting on spending commitments being fully funded is a stick with which Tory governments beat opposition parties, not some great rule which needs to be obeyed. It would leave Labour floundering, forced to either reverse their previous reversal, adding to the Tories’ accusations of flip-floppery, or stick rigidly by their stupid and unnecessary fiscal rule, and defend the current policy. It would, of course, be an unprincipled, dishonest, cynical and opportunist ploy by Sunak, but all of those attributes only increase the probability that he would do it. It would also be a clever political move, and that’s the real obstacle. Clever politics is not an attribute of which Sunak has shown a great deal to date. Either way, the games that they are both playing aren’t doing much for a large number of children. We need to escape from them both.

Polishing the excreta

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Referendums don’t sit easily in the UK constitution. Unlike in some countries which have a formal written constitution, there is no formal definition of when and whether a referendum should be called, and no agreed criteria. The result is an ad hoc approach where politicians who believe that there is popular support for their position demand that the issue be put to the people in a simple yes/no vote, despite the fact that most such questions are far more complex than that. Sometimes they are proved right, sometimes they are proved wrong – opponents of devolution certainly believed that requiring a referendum was a not particularly cunning way of killing the proposals. And sometimes they promise a referendum because they think the promise will attract people to vote for them, with no real expectation that they will ever have to call one, let alone go on to lose it. David Cameron and his accidental Brexit is the most obvious case in point.

The Tories seem to be flirting with the Cameron approach again. There is no obvious legal or constitutional requirement to hold a referendum on membership of the European Convention on Human Rights. They just believe firstly that the sort of people who vote for them will be incensed about the lack of deportations to Rwanda, and secondly that an offer of a vote to abolish all connections to the ECHR will motivate their supporters to go out and vote. It is, of course, asking people to vote to abolish their own rights, but what better way to remove rights from citizens than to have those citizens themselves demanding it. It worked on freedom of movement, where many of those involved genuinely seem to have thought it was only other people’s freedom they were removing; there’s no obvious reason to believe that they can’t be fooled into voting against their own rights and freedoms a second time.

Like Brexit, it’s a sort of proxy vote, not really about the ostensible subject at all. The question they really want to ask is something along the lines of ‘do you agree that we should be as cruel and inhumane as possible in our treatment of refugees in particular, and foreigners in general?’, but even the most extreme Tories are neither brave nor honest enough to phrase it in those terms. Instead, they phrase it in terms of the sovereignty of UK courts, knowing that their target audience will understand that that’s just applying a veneer of polish to the turd of a policy, in order to try and make it look like a respectable position to hold. I’m not even convinced that Sunak and his pals actually care a jot about how many refugees come to the UK anyway; they care only about winning the votes of people who don’t like foreigners, and who believe that keeping foreigners out is more important than providing care to those who need it. I’d like to think that the good news is that, even if they do decide to include such a pledge in their manifesto, the chances of them being in a position to implement it are small. Trouble is, that’s what most people thought about Cameron and his Brexit referendum. And in the meantime, Labour are so afraid that their own potential voters share the hatred of foreigners that they can’t even point out the practical flaws, let alone the moral ones. As ever, those suffering most from the faux war between the UK’s two leading centre-right parties will be the weakest and most vulnerable.

The centre is a movable feast

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For long periods in British politics, the differences between the two major English parties – Labour and the Tories – have been more imagined than real, and it has sometimes felt as though the smaller the differences become, the more fire and fury surrounds them. Last week, Larry Elliot in the Guardian analysed this phenomenon, suggesting that what used to be called ‘Butskellism’ is back, and the differences between Starmer and Sunak are rapidly diminishing, making the next election more about managerial competence than serious policy disagreements (not that a bit of managerial competence would be exactly unwelcome). Much of his analysis rings true; Butskellism continued, one way or another, through the Wilson/Heath years, until the arrival of Thatcher and a clear break with the broadly social democratic consensus of the previous decades.

His suggestion is that a form of consensus is re-emerging under Sunak and Starmer. There did seem to me, though, to be a missing link in the process: Thatcher’s real success was not so much in breaking the old consensus as in establishing a new one, with Blair largely picking up where she left off. Not for nothing did she once proclaim that her greatest achievement was New Labour. The ever-closer alignment of policy between Sunak and Starmer is simply a reversion to the post-war norm of British politics, where elections are fought out on the centre ground between the two parties. The point to note, however, is that the ‘centre’ is not, and never has been, a fixed point. Whilst it’s arguable that the immediate post-war consensus was based on the Tories moving towards the left and taking the ‘centre’ with them, the trend since then has been for the Tories to move to the right and for Labour to follow them, taking the ‘centre’ along with them.

For those involved in the immediate post-war consensus, which included an acceptance that certain major industries (coal, steel, gas, water, the railways, the post office) belonged in public ownership (although steel was an ongoing bone of contention), the idea of a properly-funded NHS providing free health care for all (even if imperfectly implemented), a social security system which protected the weakest (although, again, far from perfect), the government taking responsibility for a massive programme of social housing (with Tory PMs taking pride in the number of council houses built under their governments), and the UK finding a new role in the world rather than hanging on to pretensions of Empire, today’s consensus would be unrecognisable. Whilst a growing consensus around Brexit, demonising refugees and asylum-seekers, and fiscal rectitude might be a fact of political life, Butskellism it certainly is not.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with ‘centrism’. It is not the fixed point as which it often appears in political discourse, it’s more the point at which politics stood at the last change of government. Whilst oppositions will move towards that centre to fight an election, once in power they tend to start moving away from it. Or, at least, some of them do. The reality is that, apart from a brief blip in the aftermath of the war when they succeeded the reforming Attlee government, the Tories are rather better at shifting the centre than are Labour. It’s a history which Starmer seems destined to repeat.

Talking sense. For once.

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The Conservative Party has slapped down its Scottish leader, Douglas Ross, for suggesting that Scottish Tories should be encouraged to vote for the Labour Party, or even the Lib Dems, in seats where those parties have a better chance of unseating an SNP candidate than the Tories themselves do. It’s easy to see why his London masters would not be happy – telling their voters to vote for a party which they’re trying to demonise certainly counts as mixed messaging.

It is, though, one of the more sensible things that Douglas Ross has ever said, although one has to admit that the competition is weak. ‘Sensible things said by Douglas Ross’ is not exactly a long list. But on any objective examination, there is far less of a difference in policy terms between the Tories and the Labour Party under Keir Starmer than there is between either of those parties and the SNP. And whilst the independentista vote has (to date at least) largely been concentrated behind one party, splitting the unionist vote three ways in a first-past-the-post election helps the SNP to win more constituencies. Some of us think lots of SNP MPs is rather a good thing on the whole, but for those who don’t, a large-scale campaign of tactical voting makes a lot of sense. It does, though, miss the point and avoid tackling the real problem, which is the electoral system itself.

If they really wanted to stop the SNP winning a huge majority of seats on a small majority, or even a minority, of votes, they’d introduce STV and multi-member constituencies. Paradoxically, they could be reasonably certain that the SNP itself would support them in doing so, despite that party being the one (currently) most likely to lose out as a result. For some people, the concept of fairness trumps short-term party advantage. Labour and the Tories won’t do that, of course. Both of them like a system which gives them absolute power on the basis of a minority of votes: the Tories because it keeps them in power most of the time, and Labour because they occasionally get to take a turn. Neither of them likes it when the system works against both of them and in favour of another party, such as the SNP, but that’s only a problem in Scotland, and their real focus is on winning seats in England. They’re the only seats that count in reality.

It’s doubtful that Ross will worry too much about the reaction of his masters in London; he’s not exactly unaccustomed to falling out with them. And he’s probably achieved what he set out to do: plant the idea in the minds of Scottish Tories that voting Labour in Scotland is some sort of patriotic duty for any committed unionist. Whether he’s given much thought to what happens next if they do as he suggests is an open question. But I’m not expecting to add to that list of sensible things in the immediate future.

Who's the baddest of them all?

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The PM is out and about today promoting his latest plans for persecuting those who commit anti-social behaviour. The Labour opposition is bitterly complaining that all he’s done is stolen and watered down their own plans for the same problem. It’s turning into a competition to see who can propose the most authoritarian measures, although they haven’t yet started an argument about what colour jumpsuits the offenders should be wearing, and neither (so far) has repeated the call a certain Boris Johnson made for them to be chained together to add to their shame and discomfort.

There is no doubt that ‘anti-social behaviour’ is a serious nuisance in some communities (although the definition isn’t really as obvious as some seem to think), nor that it is often the poorest communities which suffer most (which is not the same as saying that’s where the law is most assiduously enforced). And I suspect that many of those plagued by it would rather like to see their tormentors beavering away at their community service in fluorescent clothing. And yet the idea that police will be given more powers to dispense some sort of instant justice leave me more than a little uneasy – and that would be so even if we hadn’t had strong evidence last week that some police officers really can’t be trusted to act fairly without favour, and not to take advantage of their position. It’s not a new idea, of course: it was Tony Blair who wanted to empower police to march people to the nearest cash-point and take money from them on the spot (a very middle-class view if ever there was one, with its assumption that everyone had a cash card and could just withdraw substantial sums from their bank at will). We should also never forget that what they are willing to do with one group of citizens today, they will probably be happy to do to another group tomorrow.

The real question should be about what we are, collectively, trying to achieve. That, in turn, is connected with the age-old question about the purpose of the justice system – deterrent, punishment, or re-education? The answer, from Tory and Labour alike, seems to be first and foremost punishment, with an assumption (based on very little hard evidence) that punishment is in itself a deterrent. And the more obvious and embarrassing that punishment is, the better. It’s not at all clear to me, though, that that is the ‘right’ answer. The more desirable objective is surely that people feel enough common ownership to value facilities rather than vandalise them; that they feel enough membership of the community to consider the needs and feelings of others; that our communities are cohesive enough to reduce the extent of policing rather than increase it. It’s far from obvious that shaming miscreants contributes much to delivering that outcome.

And that brings us back to that old question of ideology again. Do we want to create and maintain cohesive communities of which people want to be part, or do we want to enforce compliance by heavy-handed policing? The traditional Tory answer is obvious – enforcement is always better than any form of community solidarity. Imposing ‘law and order’ on the lesser orders (but not on themselves) is a major part of what they see themselves as being all about. It’s  also the stock authoritarian answer. The fact that Labour are competing to see who is the most authoritarian is another example of the point made here before: such differences as exist between Labour and Tory aren’t about ideology – they share the same basic ideology, and are competing solely to see which can most effectively pursue it. They may yet end up arguing about the colour of the jumpsuits.

What are parties for?

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It’s rather more than half a century since I read Bob McKenzie’s tome on British Political Parties, so my memory of the detail is more than a little hazy. My main takeaway from the book was that the Conservative and Labour parties, despite starting from very different places, had ended up, organizationally at least, in a very similar place. The Conservative Party started in parliament as a grouping of members elected as individuals, and only later set up any organisation outside parliament in the form of local associations to support those individuals. Indeed, as I recall, despite the party having been founded almost two centuries ago, for most of that time, only MPs could join the ‘party’; mere plebs could only join their local association. Labour, on the other hand, was founded outside parliament, as a democratic movement, with the aim of achieving the policy objectives defined by its members. Both have ended up, with the brief aberration of the Corbyn years, as parties largely run by their elected MPs; both leaderships see their memberships as being there to serve them, rather than the other way around.

That which has happened in organisational terms has been reflected in policy terms as well. ‘Policy’ has become that which they say to win votes (and is most definitely not to be confused with what they will do if actually elected). It’s an exaggeration (to which I’ve sometimes been prone myself) to argue that there is ‘no’ difference between them, but the difference between vicious uncaring austerity on the one hand and austerity with a caring face and a few minor mitigations on the other is hardly a difference of ideological outlook. The point is that, on all the main points of neoliberal economics, the two parties are singing from the same hymn sheet, even if one is the tenor and the other the bass. For both of them, the only conceivable answer to the question ‘what are political parties for?’ has become ‘ensuring the election of this gang rather than that gang’ instead of presenting voters with any sort of real choice of futures.

It leads to articles like this one from the Guardian, where the author argues that the Labour Party leadership has a duty to restrict the influence of mere members on its policies and leaders. Far better to let MPs be the judge, apparently. There are similar murmurings within the Conservative Party about the dangers of allowing ordinary members any sort of role in selecting their leader. (Although, after the Truss debacle, it’s easy to see why people might think that.) It’s the sort of view of what political parties are about which leads to this sort of nonsense, advocating that the SNP should drop their demand for independence and choose some other mission in the light of their failure to win over a clear majority. It reminds me of Phil Williams’s old story about the man who came up to him and said, “If only you’d drop this nonsense about independence, Plaid Cymru would sweep the Valleys”. Well, yes. Or, perhaps, maybe. It's not something that’s ever been tried, although there have been periods where it seemed that some Plaid figures were at least flirting with the idea. There was another article by Martin Shipton in the Western Mail a week or so ago (unable to find it online) about Plaid’s launch of its new strategy. It contained a number of valid points and criticisms, but one of his points was that Plaid’s new platform looked remarkably similar to the previous one. Both that and the Telegraph miss the point: if a party believes that its proposals are the right ones for the country in which it operates, failure to persuade the populace at large doesn’t make them the wrong ones. Unless, of course, you start from the prevailing Labour-Tory belief that parties are just about getting elected, not about what they do afterwards.

Some argue that we are in a period of post-ideological politics, where minor differences of approach are all that there are. That is testimony to the success of capitalist ideology in convincing enough people that it isn’t an ideology at all. (Spoiler: it is.) And in the case of the UK, an electoral system which polarises people into two main parties, both of which believe that they are fighting for voters exclusively in the so-called ‘centre’, reinforces the expectation that the future will always be much like the past. Breaking through that is never going to be easy, but it’s an absolute certainty that accepting the basic premise is not the way of doing it.

The limits of democracy

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The most often-used argument against a second vote on Brexit is that it would be a ‘betrayal of democracy’; the people have voted and have expressed a clear conclusion and that desire must now be respected and implemented.  One of the problems with that argument is that what people actually voted for isn’t entirely clear.  Amongst that majority for Brexit, there were many different strands and views about what the outcome should be.  In those circumstances, the politicians have little choice but to try and interpret what people wanted and act accordingly.

In essence, the government has interpreted it as being a vote to leave all the institutions of the EU and be free of all EU rules and regulations, whilst at the same time enjoying all the economic benefits of membership, and that has been the basis of its negotiating position.  The Labour Party’s position is essentially the same – what else does ‘exact same benefits’ without membership of the single market mean?  As an interpretation of what people were voting for, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me, and it was effectively what many of those campaigning for Brexit said we could have.  They were lying, of course, but the fact that what they were offering was a lie doesn’t mean that people didn’t vote for it.

It isn’t an entirely impracticable solution either; as long as the EU27 are prepared to abandon some of the basic tenets of the single market to accommodate the UK’s wishes, a negotiated settlement along those lines is an entirely possible outcome.   Given their assumption that a solution which unpicks basic aspects of the single market and undermines the whole European project is as valid a basis for negotiation as any other, it’s almost understandable how shocked the UK Government is to find that the EU27 don’t take the same view and aren’t prepared to meet the UK halfway.

The point, though, is that demanding that the EU respect the decision of the UK and accede to the UK’s demands oversteps the bounds of what is democratically possible.  The UK government can interpret the referendum result as being binding on it and is probably right to do so (even though we were told it would not be), but its interpretation of the outcome cannot be binding on the other 27 member governments.  The people of the UK may have the right to determine what the UK wants, but they have no democratic right to determine what others will do, and there is no point in the UK government (and opposition) trying to pretend that they have.  Democracy has limits.

And that brings us back to the question about whether a further vote is or is not an affront to democracy.  If the Labour-Tory interpretation of what people voted for is correct (and it seems a reasonable interpretation to me), and if that outcome is simply unattainable, then where does that leave the democratic mandate?  People are wholly entitled to vote for a fantasy world in which the rest of the world gives us whatever we want (although there are serious questions to be asked about the competence of any government which actively facilitates a vote which leads to such a silly proposition in the first place), but when the government finds that it cannot deliver, what should it do next?  The answer coming from some quarters seems to be a demand that we all need to try harder to wish a compliant world into existence, but that just adds to the fantasy.

When a government is in a situation where it knows that what it thinks people voted for cannot ever be delivered, hiding behind the mantra that ‘the people have spoken’ is no solution at all.  Their choices are limited: they can deliver something completely different which they are pretty certain a majority would never have supported; they can tell people openly and honestly that what they asked for simply isn’t available and ignore the vote; or they can ask the people to think again and choose from the available options.  The first two look to me like bigger affronts to democracy than the third.  But the biggest affront of all to democracy is to pretend that the people can have whatever they want.  Unicorns cannot be magicked into existence by a referendum; government and opposition parties which both pretend that they can are doing more to undermine democracy than anyone calling for a vote to choose between realistic options.

Correcting the right mistake

Tweet I disagree with the claim made by Owen Smith over the weekend that Corbyn made a mistake in sacking him.  Not because I find it hard to imagine how sacking Owen Smith could ever be a mistake (although I do), but because the real mistake has nothing directly to do with sackings or individuals, it is a policy issue relating to Brexit.  Corbyn is, at heart, a determined Brexiteer, a factor which is making it incredibly difficult for him to see the open political goal in front of him.

Of bigger concern to me than sacking a shadow minister for not toeing his leader's lie was the statement by another shadow minister over the weekend, namely Keir Starmer, who said that "We cannot allow Labour to break apart over Brexit".  In a single sentence he has summed up the underlying similarity between Labour and the Tories - both are putting the needs of their parties at the top of their priority list.  And in both cases, that drives them to support a decision which they know to be damaging for almost everyone else.

Bigger sticks

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Last week, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister (for the time being, anyway) invited us to consider the scary prospect of the whole world giving up nuclear weapons – except for North Korea.  Who, he invited his audience to consider, would fancy living in such a world?  To him, the answer was obvious – but it’s one of those rhetorical flourishes which don’t stand up terribly well to detailed analysis.

Even from a simplistic perspective, would a world in which the Russian, American, Chinese, UK, French, Israeli, Indian and Pakistani nuclear arsenals had ceased to exist, leaving just a handful of weapons in the hands of one small isolated state, be better or worse than the situation today?  I can’t immediately see any argument which says that it wouldn’t be better.

But of course Benn was looking at a much narrower context than that.  If I understand his argument at all, it is that the UK needs to retain its nuclear deterrent so the North Korea wouldn’t ever dare to attack us with its own nuclear weapons.  But hold on a minute there – why would they want to?  I mean, it seems to me that they have other enemies which they are much more likely to pick on than the UK.  In that context, if they really did decide to fire one of their bombs at South Korea, say, would the UK really respond by firing a Trident missile at them?  It doesn’t seem a very credible scenario to me.

Perhaps the argument is that they are so irrational that they just might decide to go for the UK, and that’s why we need Trident to deter them.  But the whole point about a nuclear deterrent is that it assumes that ‘the enemy’ is not irrational, and will think very carefully about the potential consequences of their actions – if they cannot be depended on to rationally weigh up the costs and benefits of their actions, then there is no deterrent, only a mechanism for exacting revenge.

I suspect that the US Defence Secretary was much closer to the truth about why so many Labour-Tory politicians want to keep nuclear weapons, when he talked about the UK ‘punching above its weight’.  It’s nothing to do with deterring anyone, it’s all about being the big boy in the playground; one of the ones with the biggest sticks.  So, let me ask a variant of the question which Benn posed: “And finally, who fancies living in a world in which those with the biggest sticks tell everyone else what to do?”

A safe opposition

Tweet It’s touching to see how concerned so many Conservatives are about the need to have an effective and credible opposition.  Or it would be if they really meant what they are saying.  The MP for Monmouth, in the wake of the Corbyn victory, expressed his concern about the possible new direction of the Labour Party, saying “… there has to be a reasonably strong centre-left party in any democracy…”.

I think that what he really means is that the best way to ensure the predominance of Conservative ideology is to ensure that the main opposition party broadly accepts everything that the Conservatives say.  Conversely, an opposition party which says something different creates a real danger that people might start to understand that there really is an alternative to the Labour-Tory consensus of recent decades.

Cameron was a bit more honest, when he said about questions such as nationalisation and Trident “These are arguments I thought we had dealt with…” – i.e., that Labour has long accepted the Tory position.  It’s easy to see why he would prefer to have both the two main potential parties of government broadly in agreement on most issues.  It helps to legitimise the prevailing ideology, and ensure that people have no credible electoral option to vote for anything other than minor change.

Anything that challenges any part of that consensus, rather than simply falling into it to be seen as being ‘electable’, represents a move away from the two-faction one-party state which the UK has effectively become.  It remains to be seen, though, whether that move will be as large or as sustained as its supporters claim.  I’m still sceptical.

Hypocrisy trumps honesty

Tweet One of the things that came through loud and clear from Corbyn during the leadership election was that he doesn’t do personal.  He really doesn’t seem to care that much what people think of him at a personal level, and he wants to talk policy rather than personality.  It is, I suspect, a significant part of what won the election for him.

In the light of that, what can we make of the frenzied reaction of the press to him refusing to sing ‘God save the Queen’, and attacking his mode of dress?  Three things, it seems to me.

Firstly, his political opponents – including, or perhaps even especially, those in his own party – are deeply uncomfortable with discussing policy.  There are probably several reasons for this – including that they’re not used to thinking in terms of policy, and much more accustomed to voting as they’re told, and that they are probably (and rightly) afraid of losing any intelligent argument around policy.

Secondly, it makes for easier headlines.  There’s a lot less work involved in writing a press release or tweeting a negative and highly personal attack than there is in preparing a serious response to policy; and what passes for journalism finds it easier to write big screaming headlines in response.

But thirdly, and most importantly, there’s a less obvious effect at play, and that is an attempt to impose, or at least reinforce, the boundaries within which politics is conducted.  And that includes preventing or suppressing any serious debate about policy which might expose the fact that there are alternatives.   There’s a mindset at work for which ‘being different’ is inherently dangerous, even if the differences are not as great as they're portrayed. 

Corbyn could, of course, simply compromise and fall in with convention, which is what I’m sure many of his so-called colleagues will be urging him to do.  Hypocritical, of course, but it’s what they seem to want.  I doubt that it will make much difference – they’ll only find more and more things to criticise unless and until he’s brought completely back into line.  And parts of the media are not averse to making things up if it suits their agenda.

But for me, there’s something very sad about a political culture which would find complete and obvious hypocrisy more acceptable than honesty and consistency.  That, though, is the Labour-Tory consensus in which we live.

Learning the wrong lessons

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Over the past week, there have been a number of events to mark the 70^th anniversary of the dropping of nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities at the end of the Second World War.  And media coverage has been accompanied by some of the usual rationalisations for the action taken, and for the continued possession of nuclear weapons.

The customary justification of those who support the use made of the weapons is that it helped to end the war early, and saved more lives than it cost.  I’ll admit that I don’t know if that’s true or not; the nature of history is that we can only ever live it once, we can’t go back and do something different to see what would have happened.  There is some evidence in support of the view that more lives were saved than taken, but there is also plenty of evidence against it.

Bridgend’s Green Leftie has set out some of the evidence to suggest that the argument about saving more lives than it cost wasn’t true – and that the people involved had enough knowledge at the time to know that what they were saying was untrue.  Maybe.  It looks convincing to me, but then I start from a pre-disposition to believe that. 

But let’s give those who justify the bombings the benefit of the doubt for a moment, and assume that they really did believe that what they were doing was the lesser of two evils.  It seems to me that even on the basis of that assumption, there are two serious questions to be asked before one can excuse their actions.

The first is whether there really were only two choices – all out land invasion fighting inch by inch over the Japanese islands or dropping atomic bombs to annihilate two cities.  Reducing the options to two is a technique often used to justify taking a particular course of action; but such a simplistic binary choice rarely reflects the subtleties of life in the real world.  The argument that it saved more lives than it cost stands up only if we accept the premise that there were only two choices; those making that argument are wilfully over-simplifying. 

But the second question is, for me, the crucial one.  Even supposing it were true, on what basis does any civilised human being decide that killing 200,000 plus citizens, selected solely on the basis of where they live, in an act of deliberate mass extermination, is ‘better’ than the possibility that a greater number will die elsewhere, based on what can only be estimates and guesses?  It’s not that I don’t understand the mathematics of it – it’s as simple as believing that X is greater than Y.  But it’s the dehumanisation involved which is the issue; the treating of people with names and families as just numbers whose lives can be weighed and valued against the lives of others as though on a giant set of scales.

It’s too easy to dismiss that attitude as the product of a vicious total war which had already raged for 6 years and taken millions of lives.  It might, almost, be comprehensible (even if not excusable) in that context.  But those who support the continued possession of weapons of mass destruction are effectively applying the same type of judgement today, because there is no purpose at all in possessing such weapons unless those who possess them are willing to use them.

That includes every UK Prime Minister, Tory and Labour alike, since the end of the war in which nuclear weapons were first used.  All of them, even free of the pressures of immediate war, have effectively declared their willingness to eliminate whole cities and all those who live in them, selected for death solely on the basis of location. 

The lesson which we should learn from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that it should never happen again.  The lesson which our ‘leaders’ actually seem to have learnt is that possessing the biggest stick and being willing to use it on randomly selected victims allows the big boys to get their own way in the world.

Sometimes, ‘human progress’ sounds like an oxymoron.

Silly promises

Tweet One of the less attractive features of the New Labour years was the Blair approach of ‘solving’ everything by passing new laws.  Passing laws is something which governments can do at little cost.  It is easier than enforcing them, and easier than dealing with the root causes of problems.  It also grabs headlines.  But it doesn’t always achieve very much else.  And sometimes the new laws, passed in haste to suit the presentational needs of the government, can end up causing more problems than they solve.

It may have been a characteristic of New Labour, but it wasn’t and isn’t limited to them, as the latest promise from Cameron shows.  In an attempt to outbid some of the sillier promises on taxation being made by Miliband, he’s now promised to pass a law outlawing increases in certain taxes.  Quite apart from the minor little issue that any parliament can pass or repeal any laws it likes, making the promise rather worthless, the bidding war between the two main parties to give firm and binding commitments that they will not increase taxes is economic madness, as well as utterly dishonest.

I don’t know what the economic situation will be next year, let alone three or four years from now.  And, whatever they may say, neither do any of the politicians.  They can guess.  They can indulge in wishful thinking, donning their customary rose-tinted electoral spectacles.  But they can’t know.  And if they don’t know what the position will be three years from now, tying their hands now over what actions they can take in response is at the very least foolhardy.

More importantly, it shows, once again, their contempt for the intelligence of the electorate.  Do they really believe that the electorate cannot and will not understand a simple honest statement such as “we have no plans to increase tax A, B, or C at this stage, but of course any government must retain the freedom to change its taxation plans in the light of circumstances”?   And, given the obviousness of that statement, and the general low opinion of politicians and their promises, do they really think that anyone will believe what they say?

The Tories are keen to present Labour as financially irresponsible – yet the irresponsible commitments which they themselves are making fatally undermine their case.