Democracy: It’s More Than Just Numbers

Right now the central question in British politics is what the next government will look like.  Will Nick Clegg choose to align his Liberal Democrat party with David Cameron’s Conservative Party (who got 36.1% of the overall UK vote), or with Gordon Brown’s Labour Party (who only got 29%).  Despite the substantial ideological differences between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, there are those who believe that forming a government with the defeated Labour Party would be a betrayal of democracy: a “coalition of the losers”, unfairly placed to rule above the clearly victorious Tories.  There are others, however, and I am one of them, who believe that, far from being a “coalition of the losers”, a coalition Labour/Liberal Democrat government is exactly what democracy requires.

Looking at the election results, although it benefits the Conservatives immensely to view their numerical majority of 306 MPs and their net gain of ninety-eight seats as a decisive victory and rejection of the incumbent Labour government, in reality it is hardly that.  Though Labour did indeed lose ninety-two seats on May 6th, and only returned 258 MPs compared with the Tories’ 306, their loss was hardly a resounding rejection.  Indeed, considering the appalling low polling numbers in support of Labour over the past eighteen months, one could even argue that support for the party had increased across the country throughout the election campaign.  On election day, Labour remained strong in many parts of the country where the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats hoped to make a gain, and though they undoubtedly suffered a loss and part-rejection of their last thirteen years in power (sometimes where it was justified, such as anger over the illegal and unjustified wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; sometimes merely as a scapegoat, such as over the cross-party expenses scandal, or the current global economic crisis that is more a failure of unregulated globalised capitalism than it is of any specifically Labour policy) that loss and part-rejection did not translate into a massive swing rightwards towards the Conservatives.  The Tories got some gains, but not enough, and though there may indeed be disillusionment with Labour after thirteen disappointing years, what was made clear at this election was that the alternative to Labour which the voting public sought was not a Conservative one. 

While 36% of the public did vote Conservative; 52% of the public did not.  29% chose to continue with the present Labour government rather than pursue the Conservative agenda on offer, and a further 23% voted for the Liberal Democrats who, on all central areas of key policy and ideology, were in direct opposition to the Conservative Party and had much more in common, ideologically, with Labour.

I think it is fair to say that the central concern of this entire election, underlying all other questions of policy, was this: how are we going to deal with the economic crisis?  How will we secure recovery and get the country’s finances in order?  Are we going to raise taxes or cut taxes?  Invest or make cuts?  Are we going to protect frontline services or put them at risk?  Basically: how can we propose to do anything about crime, education, health, immigration, defence, etc, if we don’t know first where the money’s coming from and how we are going to tackle the deficit?  And on this central issue, the split between the Conservative Party and both Labour and the Liberal Democrats was clear: the Conservatives were alone in advocating making massive cuts in public spending immediately, whereas both Labour and Liberal Democrats believed that such measures could be risky for a fragile economy right now and, instead, proposed not making cuts until 2011.

From the three party manifestos:

CONSERVATIVE:  “Labour will not take action to cut waste in government. They have identified £11 billion pounds of waste, but they do not plan to start dealing with it until April 2011. So Labour will continue wasting money while putting up taxes on working people. We will act immediately to cut government waste…we will take immediate action to cut a net £6 billion of wasteful departmental spending in the financial year 2010/11, with further savings in future years.”

LABOUR: “We will continue to support the economy while growth is still fragile, sticking with our targeted increase in public spending over the next year to sustain the recovery…Once the recovery is secure, we will rapidly reduce the budget deficit.  We have set out a clear, balanced and fair plan to more than halve the deficit over the next four years and we will stick to it.  We will achieve this through a combination of: fair tax increases; a firm grip on public spending including cuts in lower-priority areas; and strategies for growth that increase tax revenues and reduce spending on benefits.”

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS: “We have already identified over £15 billion of savings in government spending per year, vastly in excess of the £5 billion per year that we have set aside for additional spending commitments…If spending is cut too soon, it would undermine the much-needed recovery and cost jobs.  We will base the timing of cuts on an objective assessment of economic conditions, not political dogma.  Our working assumption is that the economy will be in a stable enough condition to bear cuts from the beginning of 2011-12.”

On this vital and immediate question, therefore, the British public have spoken: 52% of them do not want the fragile recovery jeopardized by making cuts in public spending too soon.  Despite this, David Cameron made it clear in his “big, open and comprehensive offer” to Nick Clegg: “We remain completely convinced that starting to deal with the deficit this year is essential.”

The second important issue at the forefront of the election now is the question of electoral reform.  As soon as it became likely that this election might result in a hung Parliament, a major discussion throughout the country began around the prospects, likelihood and desirability of changing the voting system to some form of proportional representation.  The importance of this issue became amplified by the election results themselves: the Liberal Democrats received 23% of the votes, yet returned only fifty-seven Parliamentary seats, whereas Labour, who only had 6% more votes than the Lib Dems, received 31% more seats.  Meanwhile, back in first-past-the-post-land, we were left confused and unimpressed with a Conservative majority that was not majority enough to govern.

There came a complex and subtle message from the electorate on May 6th that our clumsy and outdated electoral system is structurally incapable of deciphering: we are unhappy with Labour, but we are equally unhappy with the Conservative and Liberal Democrat alternative.  Who, therefore, should govern our country?

Returning to this question of whether or not the General Election was a massive rejection of thirteen years of Labour government, the answer was clearly: no.  It was a rebuke, certainly, but a rejection?  Hardly.  A truly responsive democracy must allow for more than black or white options: in a complex and diverse world there will always be shades of grey.  Labour have let a lot of people down and have made a lot of mistakes over their thirteen years in power, but in certain areas, and on certain questions, they have done great and popular things.  Why must it be that, for the handful of mistakes, an entire programme is rejected, or that, for a few bad apples, we must expel the entire bunch?

Similarly – the surge in Liberal Democrat numbers before the election did not translate into votes on polling day.  Why?  Well, likely because voters were all-too aware of the stacked deck against their vote in a flawed, first-past-the-post system.  No one wants to waste their vote, so they voted cautiously instead: for Labour, if they didn’t want the Tories to get in, or for the Conservatives if they were sick of Gordon Brown. 

Certainly in this election we can read a disappointment in what Labour have done – but that disappointment was clearly not enough for people to reject them from government entirely, nor were the alternative agendas proposed by the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats popular enough to gain mass support.  True democracy, therefore, must be more than YES or NO – in a representative democracy there must be a mechanism in place for nuanced representation: not simply YES or NO, but a qualified YES or NO – something that tells the party you support that you are not going to abandon them entirely and switch your allegiances across the political spectrum, but that you are dissatisfied with certain aspects of their record and that they must change or it will cost them votes.  

It is clear that, to do this, electoral reform is needed.  For Liberal Democrats, such reform has been at the forefront of their agenda since their inception, and if they are to remain a party of their principles, then a demand for electoral reform must be the price they ask of any potential partner in coalition.

In their 2010 manifesto, they make it clear: “Liberal Democrats will change politics and abolish safe seats by introducing a fair, more proportional voting system for MPs.  Our preferred Single Transferable Vote system gives people the choice between candidates as well as parties.” 

Similarly, Labour – though late to the party – were not afraid to acknowledge this need for electoral reform in their own 2010 manifesto, weeks before a hung Parliament became a reality and it became politically useful to hold such a view: “People want a greater say in how the country is governed and for politicians to be more accountable to those they serve.  So while we are proud of our record of devolving power and reforming the constitution, we believe that further and more radical reform is imperative if we are to renew our democratic public life.  Britain needs a new constitutional and political settlement for a new era.  To begin the task of building a new politics, we will let the British people decide on whether to make Parliament more democratic and accountable in referenda on reform of the House of Commons and House of Lords, to be held on the same day, by October 2011.  To ensure that every MP is supported by the majority of their constituents voting at each election, we will hold a referendum on introducing the Alternative Vote for elections to the House of Commons.”

The Conservatives, meanwhile, on this vital matter of national interest, yet again do not share the opinion of the 52% majority.  As they put it in their manifesto: “We support the first-past-the-post system for Westminster elections because it gives voters the chance to kick out a government they are fed up with.”

And that is precisely the problem.

As the results of May 6th show – the country did not necessarily want to kick the government out.  Or at least: they did not want to kick the government out and replace them with a distinctly Conservative one.  Only 7.1% more voters specifically chose the right-wing Conservative agenda on offer than chose the existing Labour government, and, taken as an ideological whole – those opposing a shift to the right and sharing a progressive vision of the future – 52% of the voters rejected the Conservative programme.      

Now, numerically it could be argued that, similarly, 59.1% of voters rejected the Labour programme, or that 65.1% of voters rejected the Liberal Democrats’, but when we look beyond the numerical results and to what the three individual parties were actually offering, I think there can be no argument at all that ideologically the Conservative party stood alone and were rejected by the majority.  They were the only explicitly right-wing party on the ballot out of the three, and stood at significant odds from Labour and Liberal Democrats on the two main issues of the day – making immediate cuts to public spending instead of waiting until 2011, and opposing proportional representation – and so the 52% who voted against this lone platform is therefore a much more significant figure than any other combination of Lib/Con or  Lab/Con.  It represents a 52% shared progressive mandate against the Conservatives’ meagre 36% of support.

We have been taught by first-past-the-post politics to think of winners and losers, but real democracy is more than just a number of arbitrarily distributed seats.  Although with 306 seats to Labour’s 258, it seems like the Conservatives are the “winners” of this election, when we actually consider what our votes mean, and what it was that 52% of the electorate actually voted for on May 6th, then it is clear the direction that this country needs to go.  Whilst certainly sense and decency suggest that Nick Clegg, as apparent kingmaker in this scenario, ought to hear out what the Conservatives have to offer in the face of their numerical victory, he should feel no shame in joining the majority of the population in rejecting a Conservative proposal if it does not concede important ground.  To form a coalition with Labour instead would not only make much more sense ideologically, but democratically too.  An expression not of the “coalition of the losers” but of the combined progressive majority in this country who opposed the Conservative programme.

Democracy is more than just numbers.  It is about translating mechanical votes into meaningful representation.  The first step, therefore, is in forming a government reflective of the nation’s true feelings; the second is in introducing proportional representation so that in future those votes can speak clearer.  Neither of these things can be done with a Tory government, and I hope that Nick Clegg looks beyond the misleading numbers and makes the right decision for democracy.

 

Technorati Tags: General Election 2010,General Election,UK Politics,Politics,Hung Parliament,Liberal Democrats,Conservative Party,Labour Party,Nick Clegg,Democracy

New Scanner “Jail Where Terrorists Make The Rules” Article

My latest SCANNER ARTICLE is up on the Scanner-zine website.  Entitled “General Election 2010 – How Ignoring Minor Differences Can Lead to Major Disappointments”, it deals with my thoughts on the impending UK election…

 

Technorati Tags: UK Politics,General Election,Scanner Zine,Jail Where Terrorists Make The Rules,Links,US Politics,Democracy,Politics

The X-Factorization of British Politics II: The Quickening

“We would have a red telephone in the middle…at anytime, someone from Number 10 could call in…”

Two months ago I wrote about what I called the “X-Factorization of British Politics” and now it seems that things are only going to get worse.

On the BBC programme, Newsnight, this week, Simon Cowell, the mastermind behind the pop-music show in question, X-Factor, revealed that in 2010 he hopes to bring a political version of the X-Factor format to our TV screens in a series of referendum-type shows leading up to the General Election.

In essence, the premise is simple: an important political issue would be presented to the voting public each week – immigration, the war in Afghanistan, knife crime, etc – and advocates from both sides of the debate – professional and public – would put forward their arguments.  The issue would then be voted on by television viewers and a “winning” position declared.

But the simple premise of the plan hides its equally simple flaws, especially when Cowell himself describes what he wants to see as a “bear pit” rather than an American-style formal debate. 

Complex issues require a serious level of argument and analysis if they are to be meaningfully discussed, and any real debate on controversial subjects must be first and foremost informed.  Hearing what “the public” thinks is all good and well – indeed, it is the essence of a functioning democracy – but hearing what an informed and educated public believe, in light of all available evidence and the substantiated claims of experts, is one thing.  Hearing what an un-informed and knee-jerk public believe, after hearing only the condensed and sensationalistic TV sound-bite versions of those issues, reduced to a simple “for or against” dichotomy is the ugly politics of mob rule.

Cowell himself knows this of course.  In perhaps a damning Freudian slip, when trying to explain his motivations for making such a show and saying that he was more interested in what the public think than what politicians think, what he actually said was: “what I’m always interested in is what the public fear…” before correcting himself and saying “…think on certain issues”.

Informed public debate on a popular Saturday night TV show would be a wonderful thing.  But after seeing Cowell’s work on the X-Factor for so many years – subtly manipulating the public into voting exactly the way that he wants them to and dividing the country up into fabricated tabloid outrages – the idea of this Cowell-conducted political “bear pit” occurring in the weeks before a hugely important election is very worrying indeed.

More on this one as it develops…

Technorati Tags: Simon Cowell,X-Factor,UK Politics,General Election,Democracy,Debate,Referendum,BBC,Politics,Media,ITV,Hell on Earth

A Change We Can Deceive In…

So President Obama has committed 30,000 more troops to the unjustified and immoral war in Afghanistan, proving once and for all that it doesn’t matter who you vote for – the interests of power and business always rule the day.

Worse: this is just the 30,000 troops that he’s telling us about. 

Who knows what the true total will be once all the private military contractors like Blackwater (sorry: Xe, as they are called today) are added to the mix? 

It’s also only the 30,000 more American troops we are talking about here, exclusive of all the other additional surges the President has demanded from all other “allies” involved in the “Coalition of the Killing” currently fighting in Afghanistan (the UK, for example, will be sending at least 500 more too).

Of course, what we’re supposed to feel about this 30,000 number, is that it shows a tremendous restraint in comparison to the gung-ho, “kill ‘em all” approach of the previous administration.  Sure, Obama’s sending 30,000 new soldiers into a war we have no business being in, but the General McChrystal wanted him to send 40,000.  Even the media got it wrong when they spent the week predicting 34,000 – Obama has undercut the General’s demands by 10,000 soldiers, and the media consensus by 4,000 – what a guy!

He also spent a very long time coming to this decision.

We are supposed to feel – as has been repeated in every media report I have read, seen, or listened to since this decision was made – that this was a decision Obama didn’t want to have to make; that he struggled long and hard with his conscience over this one, but the facts, in the end, were just too convincing to ignore…

Perhaps that idea would hold a little more weight had Obama’s long and torturous soul-seeking not ended in the entirely predictable outcome of an Afghanistan decision that completely conforms to over sixty years worth of historically consistent US Foreign Policy?

I remember a girlfriend I had once.  I knew I needed to break-up with her, but when I told her about it she told me that maybe I just needed a little more time to think about things?  She gave me the night to re-assess our relationship and said she’d be back in the morning for my real, thought-out, answer.

I knew all along that my answer wouldn’t change – I wanted to break up with the girl and the relationship was done.  But I also knew that the appearance of deliberation was important to her.  So I stayed in my room – not really thinking things over at all; just playing on my Playstation whilst she waited in her room hoping I would come to my senses. 

When we met the next morning, the illusion of deliberation complete, my decision to end the relationship carried a lot more gravitas to the girl in question – this wasn’t just a knee-jerk decision I’d come to after one or two bad dates, I’d thought about it, damn it!  It had pained me to come to my conclusions…

The whole idea that Obama legitimately wrestled with this issue is an insult to anyone actually aware of US Foreign Policy since the end of the Second World War.  Obama has simply done what every President before him has done for nearly seven decades.  Namely, whatever is best for elite power and business interests; human rights, international law, and the domestic population be damned!

Of course the next argument meant to salve my outrage is that, at the same time Obama committed yet more troops to this ridiculous war, he unveiled a timetable for withdrawal by the end of 2011.

Well, first off, excuse me for not being tremendously overjoyed at the news that this murderous and unnecessary war is now guaranteed to continue at least one and a half more years.  We could pull every single soldier out of that country today and be no less safe than we currently are – if anything, an immediate withdrawal, along with a publically made apology for invading an innocent country in the first place and the prosecution of George W Bush as a war criminal, would make us far safer, because the massive al-Qaeda problem we allegedly have now in Afghanistan and Pakistan is entirely the result of our having invaded both there and Iraq since 2001, as consecutive National Intelligence Estimates have concluded – but by committing to an escalation of the war – even a limited one – instead of a withdrawal, Obama has committed himself to both the continued occupation and massacre of a previously innocent country, and the assured radicalization of the native population into the terrorists of tomorrow; a self-perpetuating war machine.

Secondly – how exactly does Obama know that we will be out in 2011?  Escalating the war at this stage is a completely unknown variable: will our escalation be met with escalation from the other side?  Will things get progressively worse – as they did in Vietnam – until yet more troops are needed, and more pseudo-justifications for continued occupation are explored?

Let us not forget what I said above – the problem we are facing in Afghanistan now, is entirely the result of the initial 2001 invasion.  That invasion was illegitimate.  At the time – and arguably still today – there was no evidence of Afghanistan’s involvement in 9/11 (only that its alleged mastermind, bin Laden, was “hiding” there).  The Afghanis agreed to hand bin Laden over as soon as they were given evidence to support the claim that he was culpable for the 9/11 attacks.  No evidence came, and instead the bombs started falling.

If we are already justifying our continued occupation of the country on the basis of a situation that we have created ourselves, what is to stop us from staying long past 2011 if the additional 30,000 troops in the region cause even more complications that we then have to deal with?

The answer is nothing.  As always: what elite power wants, elite power shall get.  I’m sure that, if troops do stay past 2011, Obama will explain that decision to us too, with all the gravity that accompanied this one.  He will dwell long and hard on it.  He will seek advisement from experts and Generals.  He will play his role perfectly, maintain the illusion of “change”, and then – with his fabulous skill at oratory – he shall spin us the latest eloquent version of the exact same line of bullshit the Whitehouse has been shovelling out since 1945.

And even if the troops do leave Afghanistan in 2011; where will he send them to next?

I said throughout the Obama campaign that my central worry about this President – despite the obvious fact that no President in history has truly brought with them the change that they have promised – was that he was being portrayed as a dove on Iraq whilst his tremendously hawkish position on Afghanistan was often ignored. 

Obama, wrongfully perceived as the candidate for “peace”, spoke a lot about getting the troops out of Iraq – but he did so only via the argument that Iraq was a “distraction” from the real problem at hand: Afghanistan.

Obama never once questioned the legitimacy of the war in that country, and often he spoke of his desire to see attentions turned more thoroughly to it.  Indeed, he was implicitly arguing for troop escalation all along: we need to get our soldiers out of the unnecessary war in Iraq, so that we can put them where they need to be: Afghanistan.  That, my friends, is escalation.  That is taking the troops out of Iraq not so that they can go home and see their families or return to civilian life, but so that they can be re-assigned to a different – less controversial –unjustified war.

So the troops may well leave Afghanistan in 2011…but will they be leaving Afghanistan because the war will finally be over?  Because it will be acknowledged – at long last – that they were only ever causing more harm than good by being there?

No.

They will likely be leaving Afghanistan in 2011 because intelligence will tell us that al-Qaeda has now moved further into Pakistan, and the soldiers currently deployed in Afghanistan would be much better served relocating over the border.  The US is, after all, already funding private military contractors in the region to fight the war in Pakistan…by 2011 the country should be nicely softened up for a full-blown invasion.

And if Pakistan won’t do, there’s always Iran nearby…or North Korea…or we could always give good old Syria a go.  You see, until we have a President who actually stands up and acknowledges that this whole bogus war on terror is a crime, our troops will never be truly “coming home”, they will simply be re-fuelling and re-focusing for the next phase of this seemingly endless bloodbath.

30,000 more troops to Afghanistan may not seem like a lot compared to the numbers already there fighting – or compared to the much higher number demanded by General McChrystal – and getting troops out by the end of 2011 might even seem like real progress.  But what Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan really means, is that Obama is just another in a long line of confidence-tricksters who have manipulated their way to the Oval Office and pursued the consistent and unchanged policies of American imperialism whilst pretending to offer us change.  It means that he endorses this war, he endorses its duplicitous justificatory principles, and the fundamental wrongs of the war on terror will not be addressed during his Presidency, if they are ever addressed at all.

President Obama committed 30,000 more troops to the war in Afghanistan this week, and by doing so he showed us that the Bush years are far from over, and that democracy in the twenty-first century is as meaningless as slogans for change.

Technorati Tags: Politics,US Politics,War on Terror,War,Obama,Afghanistan,9/11,Democracy,Foreign Policy,Troop Surge

David Cameron’s (Empty) Pledges

So I received a hilarious (and glossy) newsletter the other day from my local Conservative councillors here in Birmingham, and on the back of this dull piece of dross about 20mph zones and anti-social behaviour orders was the most hilarious political “filler” I have ever seen.

Entitled “David Cameron’s Pledges”, this third of a page is, I assume, meant to be the early yawning-signs of an ambitious party coming to life before a general election, but all it really is, once they are actually thought about, is a collection of empty platitudes that are as hollow as they are meaningless.

“If you save money your whole life, …you will be rewarded” goes the first one.  Well, great.  But that’s not really David Cameron’s pledge is it?  That’s the pledge of basic economics.  If you save money your whole life, the reward is all that money you saved.  End of story.

“If you are frightened, …we will protect you”

Well…I hope so.  That’s kind of the government’s job.  The State provides police, armies, social services…you know, all the things that we use to protect ourselves against the things that we fear, and these same protective social institutions have existed under twelve years of a Labour government too.  Last I heard, I don’t recall Gordon Brown saying that a re-elected Labour government were not going to protect us in the future?  Do you?

“If you want to raise a family, …we will support you.”

Yeah, because for twelve years the Labour Party have been doing their level best to dissuade us from raising our families.  Since 1997, prospective mothers and fathers have become social pariahs all across the country, spat at for wanting children, reviled for keeping a pet…  And all those various tax credits and benefits that Labour have implemented for working families (and that the Tories want to take away come 2010), they have been designed specifically not to support families under a Labour government. 

Meanwhile, let us not forget, it was eighteen years of a neo-liberal Conservative government between 1979 and 1997 that brought us to our current situation, where it now requires two wages per family to bring home the same amount of real-term money that just one wage would have brought in during the 1970s.  Ah progress, don’t it taste sour? 

“If you risk your safety to stop a crime, …we will stand by you.”

Because the running theme of the past twelve years has been the Labour government jailing and condemning those who risk safety to stop a crime?  Under David Cameron’s new government, I can only assume that this means he is condoning carte blanche for Watchmen-style vigilantism. 

“I injured my arm hitting a cricket bat into the hoodie’s skull after he terrified our neighbourhood by…gasp…riding his bike!”

“We will stand by you!  No jail!  More cricket bats!”

“If you start your own business, …we will be right behind you.”

Ignoring how sinister that sounds (right behind you…lurking; right behind you…ready to skim off our 10%), again, we have the false impression that somehow the Labour government are not right behind small businesses.

Every government in living memory has paid lip service to the idea of being “behind” small businesses whilst, in reality, helping to finance the mega-corporations that crush them.  The Tories did just this from ‘79 to ‘97, and Labour have continued from ‘97 to the present. 

The stuff about high taxation, etc is all a misleading red herring – the real reason small businesses often fail is not because of the overheads they couldn’t afford, but because of the monolithic competition they have no feasible means to defeat!

“If you risk your life to fight for your country, …we will honour you.”

Great.  Because Labour have spent the eight years of the war on terror publically spitting on soldier’s graves, haven’t they?

Any idiot can honour the dead (Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, and John Major all did it last week – callously placing poppies in “honour” of the innocent people they knowingly sent off to die in unnecessary wars to protect the economic interests of a small minority of powerful elites); the trick is keeping these people alive, not unnecessarily sending them into harm’s way.    

Yes – the war on terror transpired under Labour’s watch.  But let’s not forget, it was with the full, unwavering support of the Tories.  And as for Iraq – we would not have been there in the first place had it not been for the Tories’ original invasion back in ‘91.  A war which, technically, never ended until the 2003 invasion.

A lot of dead soldiers have been “honoured” by Conservative and Labour governments alike over the years…few have been spared their unnecessary sacrifice in the first place, and that’s the real missing pledge.

“We will reward those who take responsibility, …and care for those who can’t.”

If you’re interested in how this pledge pans out, see UK History, circa 1979 – 1997.  At its heart, the guiding Conservative philosophy is simply incapable of achieving this goal.  A more likely scenario, therefore, is: “we will reward those who take responsibility, …and demonize those who can’t.”

Remember kids: those who don’t remember their past are condemned to repeat it.  And those who are taken in by David Cameron and his empty, meaningless pledges, will be condemned to experience a brand new, 21st Century version, of one of the 20th Century’s last great living hells.

Technorati Tags: Politics,UK Politics,Conservative Party,General Election,Advertising,Democracy,Labour Party,Propaganda,Welfare,David Cameron

The Tone of Our Oppression

What exactly do I mean by the phrase: “The Tone of Our Oppression” ; and what do I mean when I say: “Labour/Conservative; Democrat/Republican - whoever wins, we lose...but we always lose more with the Right”? 

Indeed: just what the hell is a self-proclaimed “anarchist” doing worrying about party politics anyway – if all politicians are “the same”, and real freedom won’t come until we do away with the state and form self-governing autonomous collectives in some unreachable fantasy utopia, then why get worked up about what these interchangeable corporate quislings are doing in the real world?  Whether we are ruled from the right, or from the left, are we not ultimately being ruled by puppets beholden to powerful elite interests instead of the will of the people – why does it matter which particular puppet is in control? 

Well, the short answer is that, as well as being, at heart, an anarchist, I am also a realist.  As far as I am aware, we do not yet live in the anarcho-utopia that I yearn for; we live in the real world, and in the real world, these things matter.  In fact, they matter a lot.

When I first got into radical politics – a fifteen year old punk rocker with some Dead Kennedys records and a Noam Chomsky book or two – I subscribed to the age old philosophy that all teenage radicals embrace at one point or another: all politicians are the same.  Right or left, blue or red; they’re all bought and paid for by the rich and powerful and the choice is an illusion.

“A one party state masquerading as a two party state”, as Dead Kennedys front-man, Jello Biafra, used to say.  Or, as the old Bill Hicks routine went:  “I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs…I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking…hey, wait a minute – there’s one guy holding up both puppets!”

On the one hand of course – on a fundamental level – this is absolutely true.  The historical record is quite clear, certainly in Britain and the United States: whilst differences in ruling party do lead to superficial differences in policy, on the fundamental areas of economy and foreign policy, there is broad consensus and continuity between all mainstream political parties that hasn’t changed significantly since at least the end of the second world war. 

On the other hand though – can we really write off the importance of these superficial differences if they are the only differences that we have?

Now, I am not saying this as a complete rejection of the idea of third party alternatives (or even no party alternatives!)…but what I am saying, is that, whilst there are no viable third parties that truly represent the people’s interests and have a genuine chance of winning an election, these minimal differences between the two ruling parties (Labour/Conservative; Democrat/Republican) are literally the only area in which we have some sort of democratic control.

Importantly, these minor differences on paper, don’t become so minor when one considers the real-world ramifications of those differences – capitalism may remain the dominant economic system; illegal and unjust wars may continue to be fought around the world; human rights might continue to come only second to the rights of businesses to make profit, BUT…if voting for one party over the other means that even 1% of the population might get slightly better healthcare, slightly better benefits, slightly better schools, slightly better jobs, slightly better pensions, slightly better opportunities; if voting for one party over the other means that it will be just that little bit harder for them to wage unjustified wars, make society-destroying deals with big business, and throw innocent people in jail…then, well, isn’t even that minimal sliver of difference worth fighting for?

Although real, meaningful difference is only an illusion, the existence of these perceived differences between largely similar parties can actually mean more than we think – the perception can sometimes become the – almost – reality. 

Ultimately, in a democracy, our elected representatives must answer to the voters – even if they do so via spin and propaganda in a manipulative corporate press – and so the image that they project regarding their policies and ideas – even if they are lies –  can become an important tool of accountability and change.

If, as is true of most mainstream parties on the right, you unashamedly run for political office on a platform of war, cuts in public spending, anti-immigration, pro-“family values”, and strong law and order, then there is nothing the public can say when you do exactly what you said you would do: wage war, strip benefits, dehumanize foreigners, ban gay marriage and let police beat up protesters, etc. 

However, if, as is true of most mainstream parties on the left, you run for political office under a liberal platform of promoting worker’s rights, using diplomacy instead of force, maintaining a strong welfare state and curbing the abuses of excessive authority, then you have a much harder job ahead of you when it comes to justifying your inevitable kowtowing to corporate and elite power interests. 

When the wars get declared, the jobs start leaving the country, the benefits get cut, the asylum seekers get turned away, the gays still get refused their marriages and the police turn nasty, a left-wing government is a much more accountable and responsive government than a right-wing one, because there is a clear discrepancy between word and deed – this is not what you told us you would do – that even the most jaded voter becomes aware of. 

If they do not explain themselves, therefore, then the people who’s votes they want will begin to look elsewhere; either to their right-wing opponents (as is depressingly happening right now in the UK), or to a much more extreme party of the left.

If one truly believes that all politicians – left or right – work in the interests of power and business, instead of the interests of their citizens, then one must also understand the importance to elite power of there being a safe but viable mainstream left-wing, in whom the people can believe.  If there isn’t, then those citizens with left-leaning tendencies might be inclined to seek (or form) genuinely radical left-wing parties instead.  Ones who won’t give in to corporate power; ones who won’t sell their supporters out.

Watered-down leftist parties like the Democrats in the US, and Labour in the UK, are vital, therefore, for the continued success of the oppressive state system, because they provide an acceptable and futile outlet for popular frustration and anger that might otherwise organize and revolt; as a result, although these left-wing parties will always be a disappointment to the truly radical left, they have an inherent limitation on their treachery that the right-wing parties do not: the mainstream left need the people to maintain their belief in them; they need the people to be convinced that they really do support the workers and represent a better way.

As such, they are much more likely to – and have a proven track record of – throwing the public a bone.  Higher wages, higher employment, better benefits, tolerance of diversity and more funding for public services; these things usually tend to occur much more regularly under a “left-wing” government than they do with governments on the right.  One need only look to the past thirty years for examples of this – neither Labour under Blair and Brown, nor the Democrats under Clinton or Obama have been perfect; far from it.  But in each case – even as rampant neoliberal capitalism continued to rape the world and horrific and unjust wars were waged – it is hard to deny that there were more jobs, more benefits, better public services, an inclusivity of women, homosexuality, people of different ethnicities, religions, abilities and disabilities, etc, and a much less gung-ho, “kill ‘em all”, rhetoric than there was under the right-wing years of Thatcher, Major, Reagan and the Bushes.

Although this truism sadly works both ways (although it is arguably harder for an ostensibly “left-wing” government to cut benefits, wage illegal wars, etc, because of their campaign promises and the expectations of the voters, there is also a dangerous corollary of presumed trust that they won’t do these things, which allows them – as with the ongoing war on terror; or the Clintonoids and NAFTA, etc – to often get away with murder), the important thing to remember is that, outside of the “big picture” issues on which their polices do not differ from their counterparts on the right, on domestic policy and social issues – the “superficial” differences – the left will always have much more pressure and expectation to improve the lives of the majority, than the right, who promise us nothing.

Hence, whilst we might never change the fact of our oppression under the current capitalist system, by merely replacing one set of puppets with another, we absolutely can change the tone of our oppression: by constantly making sure that only the lesser of two evils ever gets control of our lives.

By voting for the left – even if that left is ultimately watered down and endlessly disappointing – we limit the parameters of what passes as acceptable politics in the country, and give a clear and powerful message to the elites: we will not stand for the unbridled cruelties of the right!

Choosing the lesser of two evils might make your stomach churn, and it might well still be evil"; but when two evil choices are the only choices you’ve got, doesn’t it make sense to do everything in your power to make sure you choose the evil that will cause the least harm?

Of course, hand in hand with this sickening compromise comes fighting for the changes you really want to see – creating the conditions within society – through activism, demonstration and protest – whereby the betrayals of the mainstream left are no longer acceptable; conditions where fighting imperialist wars and putting profits before people are seen for the true evil that they are.

But until we get there, I think it is important to remember that to dismiss all politicians as “the same” just because – on every major issue – they all lie and screw us over, is to blind oneself to the importance of their differences: the tone of our oppression that we choose.

I would love to live in an anarchist utopia – self-governed; peaceful; a truly authentic democracy…

But while that just remains a faraway dream, I would much rather live in Britain under Labour than Britain under the Conservatives; or America under Obama than America under Bush.

With a general election coming up here in the UK – and a very real possibility that the Tories will win – and a fledgling Democratic Administration in the US being drowned in the din of Republican fear-mongering, I hope to use this blog to show how these little differences still matter, even when you believe all politicians are the same.

Technorati Tags: Political Philosophy,Politics,Philosophy,UK Politics,US Politics,Labour Party,Conservative Party,Democrats,Republicans,politicians,Anarchism,Mission Statement,Democracy,Left-Wing,Right-Wing,The Tone of Our Oppression

Darling’s Choice…

On Tuesday, the Prime Minister announced that it would be necessary to make some cuts in public spending.  Today, Alistair Darling will hold a series of one-on-one meetings with Cabinet colleagues to discuss which areas should receive the cuts, and which areas should be spared.

But has it ever occurred to the Chancellor that there is a simple, far more democratic, way of adjusting government spending than asking a cabal of Cabinet colleagues what they think we should do?  Namely, asking the citizens – the ones who pay the taxes – what it is they want their money to be spent on.

Imagine, if you will, a once-a-year form from the treasury, sent to every tax-paying individual in the country, whereby each citizen can designate the specific areas in which they want their taxes to be spent.  The results of these polls are then tallied and processed, and the total taxed income of everyone is divided according to a national average.  (i.e. if 62% of the population wish for an average of 58% of their yearly taxes to be spent on the NHS and associated services, then that is what will happen.)

How hard could that be?

Instead of the relatively unaccountable Chancellor dividing the budget into what he believes to be the best interests of the nation, we let the nation do it themselves.

On my own personal form, I would ask that the majority of my money went into healthcare, education, and other important areas of the underfunded welfare state, and I would prohibit any of my money being spent on “defence” and the ongoing illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  To some, that simply highlights the major flaws in such a plan – if everyone were like me, the military would have no money; conversely, if everyone thought the opposite, defence spending could skyrocket whilst schools and hospitals suffered.  But the fact is, the genius of such a system is that by averaging the total national results, extreme views such as my own will be tempered down by more sober-minded and utilitarian citizens.  In reality, the likely outcome would simply be an accurate reflection of what the nation really wants: institutions the public need and care about would receive the most money, and those they think are bloated or over-budgeted would get cuts (the wisdom of crowds and all that).

Under such a radical change of system, government would be forced to listen to the true demands of its people; the public would hold the purse-strings, and thus the key to policy. 

With this new distribution strategy being an annual, or even six-monthly, occurrence, as national priorities change, so too would our individual designations, making it a much more flexible and responsive system than our current budgetary procedure, beholden each year to outdated historical precedents and Whitehall in-fighting. 

Underfunded schools failing our children?  Give ‘em a little more cash.

Overfunded schools still failing our children?  Take the money away until they produce results.

An inflated military budget allowing never-ending and unjustified overseas wars that kill thousands of innocents each year?  Put the money somewhere else and bring “our boys” back home until they learn to behave.

Mass unemployment because of an ongoing financial crisis for which the majority of people are not responsible?  Refuse to give more hand-outs to the banks and corporations that caused this mess, and help ensure nobody gets kicked off their Jobseeker’s Allowance because of lack of funding.

It’s simple Mr. Darling…at least, it would be if we actually lived in any kind of democracy.  As it is, I expect the result of the Chancellor’s meetings will be pretty predictable: cuts in benefits, welfare, education and healthcare; no major changes in defence spending (there’s an illegal war to win in Afghanistan you know!); and a further extension of insidious public/private partnerships (such as the Private Finance Initiative) that claim to cut public expenditure by selling our souls – and institutions – out to big business.  

In other words: same shit different day in the corridors of power.

Technorati Tags: Economy,Economic Policy,Alistair Darling,Gordon Brown,Politics,Afghanistan,Democracy,healthcare,welfare,education,military budget,the wisdom of crowds

Cabinet War Minutes: A Democratic Tragedy

So Jack Straw has vetoed the release of the Cabinet minutes, requested under the Freedom of Information act, regarding the decision to go to war in Iraq?

The dual justifications that have been offered for this unprecedented move are as spurious as they are contradictory.

First off, we are told, to release Cabinet minutes would be to severely impinge on the functioning of our democracy. In the wake of public exposure, future Cabinet discussions would see ministers afraid to talk frankly, in case those minutes were also one day thrown into the public eye. The openness of debate would be stifled and unpopular opinions would be muted: no one would want to look like a villain should the minutes, once again, fall into the ‘wrong’ hands of the blame-hungry public.

Then we are told that Cabinet minutes aren’t all that useful anyway. They are not complete records of the discussions held, merely generalized accounts made vague and superficial. They wouldn’t be much help for investigators trying get to the bottom of the questions they have about Iraq anyway, and to release them would therefore be an unwarranted violation of Cabinet privacy.

So to recap: the minutes can’t be released because they will expose the views and arguments of the participants to a public scrutiny so severe that it will inhibit future Cabinets from being able to speak freely again. And yet there would be absolutely no information worth hearing in them anyway because the views and arguments of individual participants are not recorded in these generalized and vague bureaucratic accounts.

Hmmm?

Beside the overt case of logical incoherency in the position, there are other flaws to be found. Not least of all in the huge conflict of interests shown in the fact that the man making the decision to place the veto – Justice Secretary Jack Straw – is himself a member of the Cabinet in question – as former Foreign Secretary – and thus stands to be damaged should the minutes get out and prove unflattering. In other words: a man who knows exactly what was said and would, himself, be on the revealed record, has decided that it would better if we didn’t know what went on that fateful day.

And, of course, current Prime Minister Gordon Brown would also have been in Blair’s cabinet at the time. Would he, perhaps, be worried too at letting the public hear his views in the build-up to the invasion, now he has spent so much time trying to distance himself from his predecessor’s war?

Apart from this seemingly criminal conspiracy to cover up the deliberations that led to an unjustified war with no basis in international law and in which – at the very least – over ninety thousand people have died, the argument that such confidentiality is needed to protect the functioning of the Cabinet, and of our democracy, is merely a smoke and mirrors appeal to Parliamentary procedure that obfuscates reality and turns truth onto its head.

Yes, in some cases, the privacy of certain meetings arguably is a crucial factor in their ability to work successfully. People want to know that when discussing important life and death issues, they can ‘think out loud’ without risk of censure or reproach, exploring all the options available regardless of their public popularity or political expediency.

But at the end of the day, truly democratic government is – above all else – meant to be accountable to the people, and in the case of our democratically elected government’s decision to go into Iraq in 2003, the people want to know why such a catastrophic decision was made when there was no evidence for Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, no basis for the invasion in international law, massive opposition to war coming from the citizenry, legal council from the Attorney General at the time advising the government that the war would be illegal, and the vehement disavowal of the attacks from a former Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, which led to his resignation.

This is not a case of invasion of privacy, or of impeding the function of democracy. This is a demand to our elected government that they take account for their decision to send our citizens off to die in a war that did not need to happen. This is a call for an explanation as to why we have the blood on our hands of nearly a hundred thousand innocent Iraqis after an invasion took place on a tissue of lies.

As there was enough intelligence at the time of the invasion for people like me, a university undergraduate with a library card and a laptop, to know that Iraq posed no immediate threat to the United Kingdom or America, and as the subsequent war which these Cabinet discussions put into action has been a prolonged and murderous affair, to see the minutes of that meeting is to try to understand, in the shadow of our suspicions, the basis by which such a deadly decision was made.

On Iraq, the facts are quite simple: we were either taken to war through blind idiocy, or we were taken to war on an intentional lie. If anything, the strength of our democracy is more threatened by the idea that our government could have absolute immunity when it comes to committing such war-crimes, than it ever could be by our simply finding out that our government is merely stacked with idiots.

The demand to see these minutes was not a demand to set a legal precedent denying Cabinet members the privacy of free and open discussion. It was a demand to set a legal precedent for accountability when demonstrably flawed decisions lead to deadly and destructive results. Jack Straw’s self-serving decision to veto this request, therefore, should be seen only for what it is: yet another duplicitous move in this ongoing democratic tragedy.

Jack Straw
Iraq War Minutes
Freedom of Information
Democracy
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War on Terror
Gordon Brown