Category: Latest

Ayesha Hazarika’s advice in her Evening Standard column echoes what many political commentators have suggested.

From their point of view neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Boris Johnson are suitable prime ministers. But one of them is going to win, so you have to choose the one you least dislike.

I am not convinced.

For nearly forty years I abstained in every election because I did not think it made a difference. When New Labour was born, I felt my abstention had been vindicated. Here was a leader, Tony Blair, who was so similar to the Tories you could not separated them with a cigarette paper.

But then came theEU referendum. I was back. Here was a vote in which my vote counted. I could make a difference. The choice was simple – Leave or Remain – and whichever side won, their decision would be implemented. So I voted to Leave.

How naive I seem now.I was wrong. The most basic student of Marxism could have told me why. There is a reason why they call it the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. They don’t need jackboots and detention camps to exercise their power. They do not need to scrap parliament and dismantle the facade of democratic control. When you hold all the levers of power, the facde of a democratic referendum is an obstacle you can overcome.

So the machine rolled into action. For three years we heard an almost constant refrain of how we had got it wrong. First we were stupid or ignorant. Initially they reassured us they would still respect our decision. Every political discussion started with “Of course we respect the result of the referendum, but…” In the immediate aftermath of the biggest democratic kicking the ruling class have received since the 1945 election, it could have provoked a revolution (what they like to refer to as civil disorder) if they had simply slapped the working class electorate in the face at that point.

So they do what they know best. Kick it into the long grass. Delay. Shilly-shally. Drag it out in the hope the public would lose interest. And start the high-powered propaganda campaign to overturn the result.

The first prong of the attack was that we did not know what we voted for. Hard Brexit? Soft Brexit? But our self-appointed leaders of public opinion would sort it out for us. Every variation of Brexit was discussed, with a constant refrain in the background saying – see, it is more complicated than you thought.

After a year or so they moved to stage two of the campaign – the call for a ‘second referendum’. Of course that would be complicated too. We would need a three-way vote. Remain, Leave outright or accept some compromise deal. Keeping Leave on the ballot paper was a reluctant concession. But they still lacked the confidence to declare their intention to ignore our vote.

Finally after a three year war of attrition, the second referendum or People’s Vote morphed into a confirmatory referendum. The difference between the terminology is important. The crucial difference between a second referendum and a confirmatory vote is the disappearance of the Just Leave option. A confirmatory vote is a choice between staying in the EU and whatever deal the government of the day has negotiated. The option to Leave outright has just been dropped. Maybe they thought we would not notice.

This ‘confirmatory referendum’ was originally mooted when the deal on offer was Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement a deal which was almost universally rejected. So a confirmatory referendum at that point seemed an easy win for the ruling class’s preferred option – Remain. This has been complicated somewhat by the new Tory PM’s deal, which has a better chance of winning in a second vote.

The general election has been presented as a kind of second referendum. Giving the Tories a majority makes the Boris deal a shoe-in. Giving Labour a majority makes a confirmatory vote a shoe-in. And Labour have volunteered to load the dice even more heavily in favour of Remain by saying they will renegotiate a withdrawal agreement which will so closely resemble the Remain option as to make voting for it an almost pointless exercise.

But framing the general election as a second referendum is complicated. A general election is never a single issue decision – it cannot simply be about Brexit. The election also determines the economic and social policy of the next government. That is why Ms Hazarika and others want us to hold our noses and vote Labour.

They want both left wing Leave voters and left wing Corbyn haters to vote Labour – a Remain party in all but name – to keep out the Tories.

My answer to Hazarika and Co. is this. I came out of political abstentionism to participate in this farce. And Leave won. If your party cannot implement that decision then your party does not deserve my vote.

I am not going to ‘hold my nose’ and vote for a party that stinks. I would rather not vote than give my support to a political process that demonstrates its contempt for the democratic decision of the working class.

The Labour Party’s announcement that they will provide free fibre broadband to every home in the country by 2030 has hit the headlines today.

It is an eye-catching claim. And Boris Johnson has boosted its socialist credentials by describing it as a ‘communist’ policy. Yet other capitalist commentators are not so sure. Is nationalisation a socialist step?

Trains, water, electricity and the post are all services which Labour has already announced its intention to nationalise, or ‘bring back into public ownership’. Adding broadband provision to this list would increase the extent of state control of the British economy. But in the words of Ben Chu, economics correspondent at the BBC, ‘There is nothing inherently economically backward looking about putting certain industries in state hands, especially so-called natural monopoly utilities’.

Ben Chu lists other European countries who have nationally owned and run utilities, such as the Norwegian postal service, the Swiss and Italian railways, the French electricity system and german savings banks. Many of these industries are highly successful, and they contradict the British caricature of nationalised industries as dour, inefficient and wasteful. Quite the opposite in many cases.

From the point of view of bourgeois economists, the issue is less about who owns such assets. The main issue is whether they would be more efficiently run in private or public hands. Infrastructure services are needed by industry, and if they are run efficiently and more cheaply, that assists the private sector industries that rely on them.

The issue for socialists is who controls the economy. Nationalising service industries does not transfer control to the working class. Manufacturing, banking, retailing, insurance and other sectors remain in private hands and remain subject to the laws of motion of capital.

It is those laws of motion that threaten to interrupt Labour’s tinkering with the economy. In the background to this election there are the gathering clouds of the coming financial and economic crisis. This is building up because the ruling class have failed to deal with the underlying contradictions which led to the 2008 crisis. Years of trying to push back the living standards and working conditions of the working class were initiated. The purpose was primarily to increase the profitability of capitalist enterprises. In order to service the huge debt burden capitalism has created for itself it needs to become more profitable. And the most immediate way to increase profitability is to reduce the cost of labour power.

The push back by the ruling class since 2008 has been considerable. But it has only been marginally effective. And before the ruling class can achieve their objective, the working class reached breaking point. They will take so much, and no more. One way that resistance was expressed in the UK was by rejecting the neo-liberal consensus when asked to vote on continued membership of the EU.

As the economic situation deteriorates, the Labour Party hopes to come to the rescue of capitalism. Their programme of limited intervention to modernise the capitalist infrastructure is intended to save capitalism, not to replace it.

The whole thing will blow up in their faces. And that economic explosion may be quite soon. They will be seen as unprepared for the worst, unprepared to take the drastic steps needed to replace a failing capitalist system with a planned economy.

What we need to get us through the coming eruptions is a Workers’ Party, committed 100 per cent to defending the interests of the working class, no matter what economic chaos erupts. It is not the role of the working class to keep capitalism going. It is its historic role to act as the midwife of a new form of economic organisation based on common ownership and democratic control of the productive system. That is what communism really means, not this half-hearted attempt by social democracy to rescue a decaying system.

I have been looking at several left-wing websites, hoping to find a rationale for the position I have decided to take. And I do not see it.

They all want me to vote Labour. Some say put them in power to demonstrate to the working class they are not truly socialist. The argument goes that Corbyn and McDonnell will talk the good fight, claiming to be radical socialists, until they are put on the spot. Others seem to be taken in by the left-wing credentials of Corbyn, and see him as a genuine left-wing alternative to the status quo. And others, more desperately, cling to the argument that failing to vote for Corbyn is tantamount to voting for another 5 years of Tory austerity.

I am sorry, but I do not buy it.

Maybe I overestimate the working class. But if the last 3 years have achieved anything, it is to focus our minds on the contrast between what we vote for and what we get.

We can vote to Leave the EU. But what we get is a concerted campaign to overturn that decision. And the leadership of the Labour party has been complicit in that betrayal. Not just Starmer and Watson and Thornberry, but Corbyn too. And his erstwhile partner in arms, McDonnell, has made the most enthusiastic volte face of all.

If Corbyn was a principled socialist, he would have stuck to his guns and argued openly for the Labour Party to campaign against the EU. Like the parliamentary manoeuvrer he is, Corbyn weighed up the pros and cons of sticking to his principles, and decided he should jettison them. He chose to curry favour with the anti-Brexit membership of his party. Campaigning against them would have jeopardised his position as leader. So he went with the flow.

My first instinct, when the election was announced, was to abstain. There is no party standing which represents my position. So there is no party that gets my vote.

I think this is a position which is shared by millions of workers across the country. We want to support a party that would implement the type of policies the Labour Party claims to support. But we do not trust Corbyn to put those policies into practice.

If, after decades of anti-EU activism, he caves under the pressure of the last three years, what hope is there that he will implement genuine anti-capitalist policies?

So I will abstain.

Until there is a party in which I can place my trust, nobody gets my vote.

When Jeremy Corbyn said a fair society would not contain billionaires, it did not seem controversial to me.

The existence of an individual with access to one thousand million pounds (or dollars) can only seem acceptable to people who think gross inequality is a good idea. The usual culprits have sprung to the defence of the super-rich.

Yet most of those supporters of egregious wealth have expressed their concern, over the last few years, about the increasing polarisation of wealth in society. Watching social wealth become increasingly polarised is, they have been telling us, unjust and likely to result in ‘social disorder’. Yet they are disingenuously comfortable with the existence of extreme wealth.

When Jeremy Corbyn announced a Labour government would go after billionaires who enriched themselves by taking advantage of a ‘rigged system’ they were quick to criticise him. But from my point of view his personalised attack on individual billionaires is only intended to win votes in the general election. Labour needs to make left-sounding noises to try and bolster its support among working class voters who no longer see the Labour Party as the party that represents their class.

To illustrate his point he named several individuals whose wealth he thought would be easy to criticise. Jim Ratcliffe was one of them.

Ratcliffe is the chief executive of Ineos, a petrochemical company he founded. He still owns 60 per cent of the shares. The company owns several petrol refineries and is responsible for about one third of the industrial greenhouse gases produced in Scotland. Obviously an easy target – a bogey man. An evil man who poisons the planet.

Mike Ashley was also one of the named billionaires. Poor Mike only has a couple of billion, so he is not a very big billionaire. But he still gets into the list because of the bad publicity he has garnered over the last few years as the boss of Sports Direct. His company has been at the forefront of promoting the use of zero hours contracts, and has been fined for paying staff an effective wage which was lower than the legal national minimum. Jeff Bezos, a far wealthier billionaire than ‘poor’ Mike Ashley, does not make it on to Corbyn’s list of excessively rich people. Bezos’s staff at Amazon warehouses are arguably just as badly exploited as Ashley’s Sports Direct employees. But you only need one bogey man to illustrate your point. Exploitative employer chosen – and Corbyn has ticked that box.

Then there is the Duke of Westminster. Don’t get me started. The Westminster family paid zero inheritance tax when his father died. Hugh Grosvenor became the biggest landlord in the UK (with the possible exception of the Queen). He now owns billions of pounds worth of property in Mayfair and Belgravia and lives off the proceeds of his ancestors’ accumulation of property.

And finally Jeremy’s list included Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire who uses his wealth to exercise political influence, and reserves his greatest venom for political views which he considers threaten his vested interests.

But for all the harumph and bluster, picking out individual hate figures is an exercise in concealing the Labour Party’s determination not to significantly interfere with the ability of exploiters to exploit. They want to address the most egregious examples of exploitation, and at the same time defend a system based entirely on exploitation.

The Labour Party once claimed to want to renationalise the railways (and other privatised utilities). Now they say they want to ‘bring them back into public ownership’ by waiting until their franchises expire. And any re-nationalisation of the other utilities includes generous compensation for the current owners. Their reward for milking the captive consumers they have been ripping off for years is – to get their money back. So their capital remains intact and can be moved to another sector. They can continue reaping the rewards of owning vast fortunes and not having to sell their labour for a living.

The right-wing of the Labour Party want to declare themselves the ‘party of Remain’. For the working class the Labour Party is the ‘party of Maintain’. They want to maintain capitalism, maintain exploitation, and maintain capitalist profits, by tweaking its worst excesses in order to save it.

• 

‘I am really proud of the parliamentarians. Some of them have taken a great risk, knowing that their own constituents are against some of what they voted for in parliament. And that’s what our system is about.’

Yasmin Alibhai Brown speaking on The Papers (BBC News channel)

Yasmin Alibhai Brown is really proud MP’s are working to overturn the referendum result.

She realises that many constituencies voted to Leave the EU. She also implicitly concedes ‘in many cases’ the majority of those constituents still believe that the UK should leave the EU. But Ms Alibhai Brown is proud of those MP’s who are consciously working to thwart the wishes of those electors. ‘And that’s what our system is all about.’

The truth has been laid bare, to many people, that bourgeois democracy (so-called ‘parliamentary democracy’) is about a small cabal of 650 people making decisions about the future of the country, and over-riding the will of the people.

One of the gains of the political process over the last 3 years has been to lay bare the truth – that ‘parliamentary democracy’ is in fact bourgeois democracy, and is merely a facade covering what Marxists have always termed the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Those who hold the real power in society, those who control the money, financial institutions, media etc. are the ones who exercise power in practice.