In Colin Welland’s 1989 adapatation of Andre Brink’s novel A Dry White Season, the barrister played by Marlon Brando comments “Justice and law, Mr. Du Toit, are often just… well they’re, I suppose they can be described as distant cousins. And here in South Africa, well, they’re simply not on speaking terms at all.”
Judge Christopher Hehir, in his conduct of the case against the Just Stop Oil defendants, Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, and Cressida Gethin, who he has just sent down for 4 to 5 years in prison for “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”, has done his best to make people realise just how true that is of the UK too.
His summing up is almost beyond satire in its sophisticated mulishness. Talking of the breakdown of the climactic conditions needed for human civilisation to survive, this bewigged buffoon said, “I acknowledge that at least some of the concerns are shared by many, but the plain fact is that each of you has some time ago crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic”.
Lets break that down. “some of the concerns are shared by many”. The issue is not “concern” at climate breakdown it is the FACT of climate breakdown. This is not in serious dispute. Even the outgoing government’s “Impartiality guidance” for teachers noted that climate denial is not serious science and should not be taught.
Parliament has voted that we are in a “climate emergency”. This does not seem to have got through to Mr Justice Hehir.
So, this is not about opinions. Nor is it about how “many” people share them. It is a matter of UK law that the government has to decarbonise society by 2050. The last government’s plans to meet this target have been ruled inadequate by the UK High Court TWICE in the last two years. The consequences of a failure to meet this target will be considerably more severe than the £750,000 worth of disruption that the M25 protest is estimated to have caused. Would the Judge think it reasonably therefore to bang up Rishi Sunak, Claire Countinho, and the “Net Zero Scrutiny Group” (now happily depleted by the democratic process) for “conspiring” to put the UK well off course for reaching them, as they did in the more salubrious surroundings of the Cabinet Office, and probably on a few zoom calls as well?
It is also a matter of International legal obligation under the Paris Agreement that countries are working together to make this work. Except that the course taken by the last government clearly, in the judgement of the Climate Change Committee – the cross Party body set up to hold government to account for its actions, “signalled a slowing of pace and reversed or delayed key policies” which put the UKs progress below the curve.
In the context of an emergency that has not not been treated as an emergency, in which a lackadaisaical business as usual laziness was passed off as “pragmatism”, any “concerned campaigner” might reasonably conclude that more serious action was needed to make it plain that this is not OK, that the majority opinion, that wants more action on climate not less, should be heard. A “fanatic”, on the other hand, is someone who holds a view unreasonably and in the face of evidence to the contrary. The “plain fact” is that there is no evidence to the contrary in the case of climate breakdown. We can feel and see it happening around us. The consequences of failing to act to limit the damage will be catastrophic. Providing the protection of the law to, for example, banks that finance climate wrecking fossil fuel investments and making an example of people who, for example, take a demonstrative hammer to one of their windows, with punitive multi year sentences for a bit of cracked plate glass shows the same sense of proportion that, 220 years back, hanged Luddites for smashing stocking frames.
A keen advocate of crushing dissent on climate or Palestine by criminalising it has been the last government’s “Security Adviser”, Lord Walney, or plain old John Woodcock MP as he used to be. An acid test for whether the new government will continue down this path will be whether Walney retains his role and continues to be given credence. He should be sacked.
A basic principle of common law is that, for it to retain consent, it has to be seen to be “reasonable” to “the average man (or woman) on the Clapham onmibus”. The lengths to which the judge in this case went to silence the defendents in court, ruling that defendents were not allowed to speak to the jury about why they had done what they did, underlines his fear that the judgement of their 12 peers would be that this was a reasonable and proportionate response to the scale of the crisis and the paucity of action taken to address it. Defendents allowed to put this kind of public interest defence, however unpopular many of the JSO actions have been, have tended to be aquitted by Juries in the last few years. Can’t have that. Where will it all end?
When a judge orders the arrest of people standing outside the court holding placards affirming the rights of juries to hear the whole truth, for contempt of court, it is clear that the legal process as an arbiter of justice is being held in contempt by such a judge; which invites popular scorn for “the rule of law”, “Fundamental British Value” or not.
Mae West put it rather well in 1927.
Judge: “Miss West, are you trying to show contempt for this court?”
Mae West: “On the contrary, your Honor, I was doin’ my best to conceal it.”
Blairite retread George Robertson is set to lead Labour’s “Defence Review”, with former US Presidential advisor Fiona Hill on hand to keep it in line with US imperatives. The conclusions are flagged up in his premise, which is that the UK has to militarily confront a “deadly quartet” of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. This is itself a variation on George W Bush’s “axis of evil” and flags up a sharp increase not only in direct military expenditure but also a pro war domestic agenda, trying to ramp up Cold War mentality and reflexes to enable a series of suicidal conflicts and silence dissent.
None of the four countries concerned are in a formal alliance and coordination between them is – needless to say – qualitatively below that which is permanently structured by the dominant US system of alliances, on “sharing arms, components and military intelligence”.
Taking his premise as a given – which we shouldn’t – this is the balance of military spending between the US and its allies (which includes the UK) and the so called “deadly quartet” 2023.
To spell this out. The US and its allies, who Robertson poses as being under threat, outspend the “deadly Quartet” by a factor of 3 to 1. So, who is the more “deadly”? If you were to put teeth on the US slice of this graph, it might reflect how US allies are seen in most of the world.
These figures were taken from NATOs own stats, and the wikipedia list of expenditure by country from SIPRI The NATO figures are worth a look because they show how rapidly NATO is increasing its spending (from $904 billion in 2017 to $1056 in 2021 to $1185 now) and that the number of countries spending 2% or more of GDP has doubled in the last year. The NATO figures, however, are lower than those in the SIPRI list. The US figure from NATO for 2023 is $755 billion, while for Sipri, it is a significantly larger $916 billion. So, the blue, biting pacman shown here probably has its jaws clamping down even more tightly.They also don’t include the exponential increases now being set by US allies, with Japan and Germany doubling their spending.
Robertson’s inclusion of Iran in the list also implicitly underlines the UK’s alignment with Israel. This is also evident in the current government continuing with Sunak’s attempt to exempt Israel from ICC jurisdiction and the fact that it is one of only two countries to be continuing with the defunding of UNWRA after Israel made unsubstantiated allegations about its staff being involved in Oct 7th. The other country (down from the original 16) is the United States – which is one definition of a “special relationship”. This alignment in the face of an ongoing genocidal attack on Palestinians in Gaza and escalating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, requires the domestic demonisation of the solidarity movement in this country; which we are already beginning to see.
It beggars belief that there are people who are taking bets on a nuclear war taking place by 2025. While gambling addiction has its own dynamic, how does anyone placing one of these bets think they might be in a position to collect their winnings if it does?
The justified fear that the Ukraine war is heading in that direction is one of the factors in driving majorities in both North America and Europe to favour a ceasefire and negotiated peace over continued escalation.
A recent survey by the Institute for Global Affairs showed that more than twice as many people in Europe and the US supported NATO pushing for a ceasfire as opposed it.
The IGA notes that
In responding to Russia’s invasion, avoiding escalation with Russia is a top priority — especially among Europeans. Results suggest transatlantic support for a cautious response.
More support a negotiated settlement to end the war, with a plurality of Americans and Western Europeans citing the loss of life and casualties as a primary reason.
This is a broadly humane response that is the opposite of the course being taken by the G7 and NATO leaderships. It is perhaps no accident that all of the leaders at the G7 had a negative approval rating; ranging from Georgia Meloni on -10, through Joe Biden on -19 and Justin Tudeau on -33, Olaf Schultz and Rishi Sunak on – 44 to rock bottom Emmanuel Macron on – 52%. Even after just winning the UK General Election, as he arrives at the NATO summit in Washington, Keir Starmer’s rating is -3.
In fact, the same logic on the part of NATO that led to the war in Ukraine in 2022 is the logic that is heading inexorably over nuclear red lines, possibly before the Autumn. The problem with a nuclear balance of terror is that it only works until it doesn’t. And the calculated games of chicken only have to be got wrong once, and its the end for all of us.
It seems clear that the calculation in NATO in the Winter of 2021 that they did not have to take Russia’s attempts to end the smouldering Ukrainian civil war, and defang NATOs eastward expansion, with a
mutual security pact that would have guaranteed autonomy for the Russian speaking Donbass within Ukraine,
made Ukrainian neutrality permanent
and kicked negotiations about the status of Crimea into a possibly interminable negotiation process
seriously because they believed that either
Russian military threats were a bluff that could be called, or
that if Russia did intervene, that would be the opportunity they wanted for sanctions that would rapidly bring the Russian economy to its knees, creating domestic turmoil through which the well oiled processes of a colour revolution could lead to a “regime change” favourable to the US
were a complete miscalculation in both respects.
With the sanctions only supported by direct US allies,and largely blowing back on them, the Russian economy is doing fine, growing 5.4% in the first quarter of 2024 (compared with 0.6% in the UK, 0.4% for the US and 0.2% for Germany). And the military tide is turning slowly, remorselessly Russian, as the Ukrainian government is forced to resort to press ganging increasingly reluctant conscripts, sending them up to the line half trained, and suffering losses in soldiers and material that they can’t replace.
Faced with the prospect of defeat, the G7 and NATO are trying to up the military ante, rather than do what their populations want and seek a negotiated peace.
This is heading into very dangerous territory. Mark Rutte was confirmed as the incoming NATO Secretary General only after he assured Hungary that no Hungarian finance would be used for, or military personnel deployed to, Ukraine. That implies that other NATO forces will be, threatening the direct clash that could be a tipping point beyond the control of its instigators.
The decisions now being made at the NATO summit, with a dedicated NATO HQ being set up, promising an “irreversible path” to membership, cranked up arms spending, a no fly zone on the Western and Southern Ukrainian border, a green light for Ukraine to try to knock out Russian nuclear early warning systems that cover areas well away from Ukraine – a terrifying piece of irresponsible brinkmanship, as this makes a nervous nuclear armed power unable to tell if it is under fire or not in a context in which it is afraid it might be – deployment of NATO “instructors” within the theatre of conflict, and ever widening permissions given to fire NATO produced munitions into Russia are all edging towards catastrophe.
A letter to the FT by a number of academics and former diplomats, including Lord Skidelsky and Anatole Lieven, calling for a negotiated settlement to allow the world to be “pulled back from the very dangerous brink at which it currently stands” is a sign that the consensus at the top in favour of escalation is beginning to crack. This is likely to grow as the situation becomes more intractable and dangerous.
In this context, its important that positions taken in the Labour Movement do not rest too heavily on myths. A recent letter, Time to help Ukraine to win, signed, among others, by John McDonnell, Clive Lewis and Nadia Whittome, argued that failure on the battlefield has been down to inadequate supplies of munitions from the US and its allies, calling for the UK to “take a leading role” in supplying “all the weapons needed to free the entire country” and that, in the short term, this should take the form of obsolete MOD equipment being gifted instead of sold off, for a war crimes tribunal directed solely against the Russians and for Russian assets to be seized (stolen) by Western Banks.
There are four problems with this approach.
Myth 1. To “free the whole country” would actually be a reconquest of the Russian speaking areas that rebelled against the pro Western coup in 2014 and have been fighting it ever since, at a cost of thousands of dead from 2014 onwards; and, far from being a liberation, would constitute an occupation of those areas. This would not be pretty. Kyrill Budanov, head of Ukrainian military intelligence, has stated that this would require the mass reeducation of people “with a completely different mindset” and the “physical elimination” of some of them. Given what has happened in areas that Ukraine took back at the high point of its military efforts in autumn 2021, this does not have to be imagined.
Myth 2. McDonnell et al seem to assume that the taps can just be turned on from an infinite supply of military hardware. It can’t. The paradox of the NATO military Industrial Complex is that although it outspends the Russians 11 to 1, it characteristically produces immensely expensive and complex pieces of kit that require lengthy training, high levels of maintenance and can only be produced in relatively low numbers; and once they are used, at great expense, they are gone. This is highly profitable for the arms companies and is designed for short sharp wars against Global South countries, not long term grinding wars of attrition with near peers. Stocks are now run down, the obsolete equipment, like Leopard I and 2 tanks, Bradley AFVs and so on have been deployed and destroyed in large numbers. F16s – an aircraft first deployed in 1978 – are the next installment and will fare no better. Plans to increase production of, say, Patriot missiles, can only be incremental – from about 500 to 650 a year. That is why this position is a fantasy. The supplies sent to Ukraine have been the maximum that NATO could scrape together. The only way to shift this would be to completely retool arms manufacture, which would require massive investment over several years; and politically set a trajectory for war that would be very hard to stop. No one on the Left should support this.
Myth 3. The barrel has already been scraped for obsolete equipment. The MOD website Army Surplus Store section notes that as of May 2024 “There is currently no MOD surplus inventory for sale.”
Myth 4. McDonnell et al’s argument that “Ukraine deserves a just and socially progressive reconstruction in which trade unions and civil society can democratically participate. International support should help to restore and expand universal healthcare, education, rebuild affordable housing and public infrastructure, ensuring decent jobs and working conditions. No more advisors from the UK Government should be used to assist in retrogressive reforms of trade union and labour rights” is also, sadly, wishful thinking. The “reconstruction” of Ukraine will be a massive asset stripping fire sale, as its Western “backers” come for their loans like a flock of vultures. It has already been agreed between Western creditors and the oligarchs who have run the war, embezzled a good proportion of the “aid” and siphoned quite a bit of arms supplied into the international black market, that the “reconstruction” will be managed by Blackrock; whose priorities are not those of John McDonnell. Blackrock would, no doubt, wish for a succesful UAF offensive into the Donbass that would allow them to get their hands on the $12 Trillion worth or rare earths that are sitting below the surface there. Such an offensive is even less plausible now than when it was tried in 2022 and the UAF suffered terrible casuaklties to make marginal territorial gains of no strategic significance.
Myth 5. In this context, any notion that Ukraine’s debts will be cancelled is similarly wishful thinking. Its as if NATO powers aren’t in this conflict for themselves. As if it is some genuine genuflection to – a partially applied – principle of national self determintion. The West, will want its pound of flesh. One reason for the Ukrainian oligarchy to keep a hopeless war going is to postpone the time that the aid stops flowing and the debts come due. For NATO countries to unilaterally sieze Russian assets would be another nail in the coffin for any pretence at upholding a “rules based international order”, rule out any serious possibility of peace negotiations and be seen in the Global South as on a par with the appropriation of Venezuela’s assets by the same imperial powers.
Sections of the Left often put forward spurious – slightly fantasised – arguments in order to cover an accomodation to their imperatives of their own ruling class. The paradox of this is that the ruling class itself is more hard nosed. The section of the US ruling class that backs Trump wants to cut its losses, try to impose even more financially ruinous military spending on its European subordinate allies, so that, with or without a ceasefire in Ukraine, the US can concentrate on launching and even more ruinous war in the South China Sea.
That is where the US ruling class is heading. It is why a candidate like Trump, convicted felon and epic shyster, keeps afloat on a sea of money; and now looks like he is going to win, with all the “unpredictable violence” that Boris Johnson thinks is just what “the West needs”. This strategic shift is not because Trump is in some way “Putin’s patsy” but its actually a statement of weakness that the US no longer believes itself capable of fighting two and a half wars at once and prevailing in all of them. They have to concentrate on the biggest target, and if that causes problems for its subordinate imperial allies, so be it. To deal with the twists and turns of all this the section of the Left that finds itself cheerleading for NATO escalation will need to burn its delusions.
“In many ways, this looks more like an election the Conservatives have lost than one Labour has won.” John Curtice.
This is evidently the case for the Conservatives. Their support more than halved from 2019.
The splintering of the Tory vote almost down the middle between the Conservatives and “Deform UK” is their most serious split since the Corn Laws in the 1840s. And its a real split. It can’t be overcome by some fantasy of getting “the Conservative Family” back together and arithmetically adding the Conservative vote to the Reform vote (which, at 39% would be 4% larger than Labour’s share).
Farage has a programme to ruthlessly pursue the logic of Brexit, slashing and burning regulation and taxes and the welfare state, cracking down on unions, playing racist dog whistles on trombones in a manner calculated to cause social unrest and violence, and suicidally abandon any attempt to resist climate change; in a way that more traditional Conservatives would consider disruptive and dangerous to social order and profitability.
Add to that the fact that Reform’s economic policy is like that of Liz Truss, but without the restraint, and you get an environment that is too risky for slow and steady profitability. The problem for the wing of the Tories that don’t want to go for this kind of adventurist far right alternative is that the Tory grassroots are largely in that camp; which has meant bending to them in Parliament. So, that’s where the realignment of the Right is heading. This will be put on boosters if Trump regains the White House.
With Tommy Robinson’s thugs planning a street action in London to “take over” central London on July 27th, when Farage promises “something that willstun all of you” its hard not to think that rubber truncheons will be involved.
At the same time, when people say things like, Labour is now “once again in the service of working people”, or how changed Labour has regained popular trust, those statements stack up oddly against the number of people who could be bothered to get out and vote for the Party.
In 2017, under “shh, you know who”, Labour won 12,877,000 votes.
In 2019, under the same man, Labour won 10,300,000 votes.
Yesterday, under Starmer, Labour won 9,600,000 votes, more than half a million fewer than in 2019, still being talked about as “Labour’s worst result since 1935”.
Overall this amounts to 35% on the share of the vote, up less than 2% from 2019.
And this was on a turnout of 60%, down from 67% in 2019.
Most of this small rise is accounted for by a 17% rise in Scotland at the expense of the SNP.
In a constituency somewhere in South Essex, four leaflets plop through the letter box.
The Conservative leaflet is on the bottom. Because I am hoping they will get buried on Thursday.
One is from the sitting MP. She is a Conservative, but seems a bit shy about that. The leaflet leads with her name in large letters. If you look really hard you can see the word “Conservative” in tiny letters tucked into the bottom right corner in an attempt not to draw too much attention to itself, with that squiggly tree logo, from their greenwash phase, tucked alongside. Just so you don’t forget what she looks like, there are eight photos of her in a single folded A4 leaflet. This is not many by her standards. Her previous one had thirteen! An MP since 2010 and only briefly a junior minister, under Liz Truss, so definitely not front rank. The usual phative slogans – A Secure Future – A Brighter Future – are superimposed on a photo of the candidate looking away from the camera into the middle distance with a slightly constipated expression, while standing on a footbridge over a busy road and, hopefully, not breathing in too hard. Roads loom large in her pitch too, the solution to traffic congestion being to build more of them. Her Ayn Randish vision of the constituencyas “the best it can be” is a curiously dated hyperdevelopmentalism, in which hopefully the whole area will be tarmaced over and full of commerce freed from red tape and taxation rushing products in and out and through. Not a “green and pleasant” vision, however you look at it. The only remaining trees will probably be the tiny ones on Conservative leaflets. Her overall pitch of development for “our(sic) local priorities”, which is a bit previous in assuming that everyone else’s local priorities are the same as hers, with the Council – run and bankrupted by her Party until May this year – posed as the enemy and a Labour controlled Westminster, possibly with a “huge majority”, even more so. Its hard to tell who she is referring to when she says “our”. Perhaps she is just giving herself airs and using the majestic pronoun. There is, nevertheless, a whiff of panic about it.
A standard cut and paste job from Reform, in varying shades of blue, uses a template photomontaging images of Nigel Farage looking upwards like a toad in search of heavenly inspiration while holding his hands together in cut price man of destiny pose no.3 and Richard Tice – on a slightly smaller scale, so you get the heirarchy right – pointing up at the slogan “Vote Reform UK on July 4th”, while smiling to indicate this is a happy prospect. The candidate and constituency are slotted in to a small panel at the top. The sort of leaflet that sometimes gets rushed out with “insert name of candidate here” if the Party agent has had a rough night before proof reading it. The front page has two slogans against immigration but tosses in two others – make work pay – zero waiting lists – with no elaboration at all on how this might be done. Given the overall tenor of their politics the former might be achieved by starving the jobless and the latter by weeding the undeserving out of the queue, especailly “immigrants”. The entire reverse side attacks immigration on the argument that freezing it will make life better, in the same way that Brexit made life better presumably. Fool me once… A leaflet aimed at generating knee jerk reactions, not convincing anyone who doesn’t already have them. The Nastier Party.
The Lib Dems have a busy little leaflet that, oddly for them, does not contain a bar chart saying that only the Lib Dems can win here – perhaps because everyone knows they never have, and it wouldn’t wash. Instead, they have a little panel referring to a by election in an unnamed other constituency at an unnamed date, which shows that “Lib Dems can win anywhere”. With a long local record of lost deposits and no local councillors, I wouldn’t bet on that. Beyond that, they have a potted biography of their candidate, which is at least a human touch, but implies that he’s doing this to get elected as a councillor somewhere at some point in the future. The pledges – under the rubric For a Fair Deal – are positive but vague, like ” a fair plan to protect the poor and pensioners, tackle soaring prices and get our economy back on track”. Yes, but, what is it?
Labour, breaking the mould in this case, sends a letter, not from the local candidate but from Keir Starmer. This might be considered an odd choice as Starmer is far less popular than the Party; with a favourability rating of -19. The heading has a smiling Keir, with no tie on to show that he is relaxed and getting on with rolling his shirt sleeves up, staring confidently from right to left, into a future that is just off the page, superimposed on half a Union Jack that doubles up as an arrow pointing towards the word Change, with his name underneath it, in case anyone doesn’t recognise him. At this point, this should not be taken as an injunction on the Party to “change Keir Starmer”, though perhaps the designer has a sense of humour. The pitch is a simple one. There are two possible governments and “versions of Britain” posed as “Conservative chaos” vs “Britain rebuilt by Labour”. “Rebuilt” is an interesting word, as to some people it will mean “transformed” to others it will mean “restored”. On the one hand, the future. On the other, the past. Perfectly pitched for the sort of voters who preferred it in the good old days, when life was harder; and want a future just like it. The pledges are either oddly limited and specific – Recruit 6,500 teachers – or – Set up Great British Energy – too limited and specific to make a serious dent in the problems they purport to address, or magnificently vague – Deliver economic stability – Cut NHS waiting times (a phrase that begs the questions, to how long, by when?) while economicstability can mean solid, reliable, not flaky (like Liz Truss) but it can also mean immobile; not collapsing but not transforming either. Steady as she goes is not full steam ahead. Perhaps Small Change would be a better title.
Every one of these leafets is a parochial and infantilist retail offer. Vote for us and we will do this that or the other on your behalf, or, vote for us and we will take out your frustrations on someone who is worse off than you are. Looking at them, you wouldn’t think that this election is being held under the shadow of two wars in which the UK is complicit, one of them threatening nuclear war and the other a slow moving genocide, and an accelerating pace of climate breakdown that is risking serious global food shortages within a decade. The challenges facing us on a world scale to draw back from confrontation, seek a peaceful modus vivendi in which we can limit the climate damage are titanic. It is a sign of a crisis of leadership that not one of these leaflets seriously addresses these issues, or treats voters as citizens capable of doing so themselves.
At the end of the huge Restore Nature March in London on Saturday, the magnificent Mayday Morris team from South Devon finish off with a display of pagan exhuberance in Whitehall. The brown shrouded figure with antlers in the background wanders in and out like a gentle reminder of doom.
Descending into the false industrial bowels of Westminster tube with a flood of other marchers heading for home but not demobilising, there is a group of a dozen or so people dressed up immaculately with beautiful garlands of flowers in their hair – full blooming roses very prominent – who seem like a small contingent of aspirant minor deities. Stuck in the crush before accessing the platform I ask them if they were from the march or where they, perhaps, a hen party. Turns out they were Swedes living in London who were out celebrating Midsummer Day – a big deal in Sweden, where summer days are very long, and midwinter days barely peek into existence.
All the way up to Wembley, the Jubilee line is overwhelmed by a tsunami of sequins, silver stetsons, body glitter and dangly earings as an almost entirely female army of Swifties heads for the Eras show at the stadium. The atmosphere is effervescent and excited, packed out and hot. At each stop, a few get off, and a few more get on. A bloke with a strategically placed tuba on a trolley has to struggle to get out. At one stop, the driver announces the train is ready to depart before a crush of people have got off, so passengers heave themselves against the doors as the counter crush from the platform push themselves into spaces that aren’t there. A quick dash across the platform to the air condition wide open spaces of the Metropolitan Line – there’s even seats – proves a wise move. The importance of local knowledge. At Wembley Park, the platform is overwhelmed again. In dismal weather, the sequins would be defiant. In bright sunlight, they sparkle like a wave crest.
In stark contrast to the football. To slightly misquote Barnesley FCs inspirational song, to the tune of Blue Moon, “England… its not like watching Brazil”.
The core problem for Paul Mason’s* argument – in his piece for Open Democracy entitled The left has a choice: unite behind Starmer or face Farage rising to power – that a Starmer government has the same potential as Attlee’s to set “a new political consensus”, is that Attlee’s reforms in the 1940s were underpinned by Marshall Aid from the United States, as was the restabilisation of other Western European countries like France and Italy. But, we are now in a period in which the United States – faced with the rising economic weight of China and the BRICs – is no longer able to afford to subsidise its junior partners. In fact we are in a period of a reverse Marshall Plan in which capital is being sucked into the US, not only from the Global South but also its allies; which is destablising them politically and economically.
This is bad enough under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, attempts to divide the world economy through scanctions and tariffs, drawing the wagons ever tighter around its shrinking zone of economic dominance, while passing the ammunition for the wars they are engaged in in Ukraine and Gaza and preparing for in the South China Sea. Under Trump, if he does indeed have a Second Coming in November, this will be turbo charged, and we will all have to cope with his capacity for “unpredictable violence”, which, according to Boris Johnson, is “what the West needs”.
Mason’s assertion that “in a world where democracy is in peril, and where conservatism is merging with the far right, he (Starmer) stands a chance of making the UK a place of resistance and a model for the rest of Europe” is exposed as the nonsense it is by David Lammy’s attempts to build bridges with the Republicans and explain to us all that Trump has been “misunderstoodabout Europe”. The rule of Blair, that the key objective of British Foriegn Policy is to “get up the arse of the White House and stay there” remains hegemonic in the shadow cabinet.
Mason’s defence of Starmer’s “project” starts from a false premise, because Labour’s 20 point lead is not the result of a cunning plan by the Labour Right, but primarily a result of revulsion at the Tories. That is evident from
polls that shown that only around a third of voters think Labour is fit to govern. Its lead comes from the fact that only a sixth of voters think the Tories are.
a recent poll of who would make the better PM, Keir Starmer or Rishi Sunak in which the leading candidate was “neither of the above” on 49%.
the second TV leaders debate, during which both Sunak and Starmer were laughed at. Sunak more than Starmer, to be fair, as he has pulled one dead rabbit after another out of his hat, but being laughed at before being elected, rather than laughed at on the basis of a dreadful record in office, is not a good sign.
the March YouGov Leaders Standing poll, in which Starmer was viewed favourably by 38% of respondents and unfavourably by 53%.
So, this is not glad confident morning and does not bode well for a “honeymoom period”, let alone a “ten year mission”, whatever the size of the majority. Bubbles can be large, but burst quickly if they are thin.
A warning experience of what this might lead to is what has happened in the United States. In 2020, the vote for Joe Biden was primarily an anti -Trump vote. Biden’s record in office, even before his complicity in fuelling the attack on Gaza, means that Trump – despite everything – is back in contention as potential President. That in itself is evidence of a crisis of leadership in the US. In the UK, Starmer’s similarly cautious approach tees up a far right Faragiste Conservative revival – reeking of booze, fags, exhaust fumes and racism – exactly what Mason says he wants to avoid.
There are deeper currents at work here.
The scale of the economic stagnation, drops in living standards, life expectancy and eroding public services since 2008,
combined with the shifts in global power away from a previously unquestionable Pax Americana – that the UK (and Labour Right) has been an enthusiastic auxiliary of since WW2
and the increasingly evident breakdown in the climactic conditions for human civilisation to survive, means that people can’t live comfortable, complacent lives within a “mainstream consensus” expressed in the “political middle ground” any more.
The strange death of steady as she goes, bank manager Conservatism, as the UKs long managed decline becomes unmanagable, is an expression of that. This isn’t yet expressed in any clear move towards solutions, but the presumption that this can only be expressed in a curmudgeonly negativity is used by the Labour Front bench to make change without hope palatable.
Nevertheless, the 79% of people in John Curtice’s recent poll that said the UK system of government needed to be improved “quite a lot” or “a great deal” shows that there is a preparedness for significant change bubbling under.
Its also quite apparent in this election campaign that, given the scale of the Conservative implosion, not only are forces in the ruling class already angling for a Faragiste/Tory rump realignment, they are also trying to rebuild the Lib Dems as the core of a centre ground regroupment on “Change UK” lines. Now is the time for the breaking of Parties.
The result in the same Curtice poll that 45% would not trust any politicians to put “country before Party” is more ambiguous than its presented. The interests of “the country” is often interpreted as the “common interest”, which a lot of people see as being the interests of the majority of the people. But “the interests of the country” is invariably framed in terms of the interests of those who own the country not that of the majority of us who live in it; in the same way that the interests of “the economy” is framed as the interests of those who own capital, not those who work.
The Conservatives seen no contradiction here. The interests of the “country” is taken to be synomymous with that of private capital, of established institutions (including the Conservative Party) and its symbols. The role of the rest of us is to know our place, doff our caps at the right times, salute the flag when its run up a flagpole, work hard, keep our noses clean and not cause any trouble, lest we get defined as “the enemy within”. So, adopting this slogan (and symbols) as enthusiastically as Keir Starmer has, amounts to a quite explicit tug of the forelock. With this formula, “the many” defer to the interests of “the few”.
Mason argues for a strategy of appealing to “patriotic left” voters by supporting what he calls “mainstream positions on crime, immigration and defence” (my emphasis). This presents right wing positions as if they are a consensus (mainstream) and leaves them unchallenged, helping a punitive approach to criminal justice, xenophobia and war mongering to be accepted as default “common sense”; when they are anything but, and widely agreed, when they are not. This actively alienates a large number of people who normally vote Labour looking for a more progressive alternative. Even if they vote Labour again this time, in desperation to be rid of the Tories, Labour’s grip on them is increasingly tenuous.
As well as digging deep into these toxic trenches, Mason argues that “growth strategies based on borrowing, taxing and spending are precluded by … high bond yields and high inflation”. This is wrong on so many levels.
There is enormous room for higher taxes on the wealthy. In not proposing to raise them, Labour has left room on its left that even the Liberal Democrats and, especially, the Green Party have moved onto. The Green proposals to raise £50 billion a year by these means have been classed as viable by the BBC fact checker; so its not a wild outlier. So, why does Labour refuse to do so, especially with the Tories having set a £19 billion black hole in the public sector budget as a trap? Starmer and Reeves seem to be walking into this with their eyes wide shut. Their line that this gap will be filled by “growth”, that will appear solely by dint of managerial certainty, what Mason calls “creating the conditions for long term private investment”, is already visibly wilting in the election debate. This line won’t even hold in theory; even less so in fact.
Moreover, borrowing only makes any sense if the return on the investment is likely to be lower than the cost of the interest on the additional debt. This is explored in detail here.
This is doubly dangerous because, as Mason points out, “climate change means we need to invest massively in decarbonised energy” (my emphasis). The problem, and Mason knows this, is that Starmer and Reeves are not proposing to do that. They are proposing to invest modestly.
The National Wealth Fund and GB Energy are good steps, but on a very small scale. This has been described by the Guardian as likely to create “tepid” progress towards mitigating climate change. The result of that will be an accelerating drag on “the economy”, as the costs of coping with current impacts – like that of increasing winter rains on sewage systems and farming – get worse and worse. Every 1C increase in temperature hits GDP by 12%. More than the 2008 crash. More than Covid. So a failure to invest, even for people who think getting the books balanced is more important than the survival of human civilisation (and there are a lot of them in the Treasury) is bad for getting the books balanced too.
Voters motivated by “patriotism”, and politicians wanting to pander to them, might note Sir Nicholas Stern’s recent report that for the UK to keep up with the EU and US in infrastructure investment it needs to invest an additonal 1% of GDP. 1% of GDP is £26 billion a year. That figure has a familiar ring to it. Doing less than this is managing decline, no matter how many Union Jacks you surround yourself with. Most of this investment would necessarily be green, to avoid building in carbon emissions that would have to be undone later at greater cost. This is a key point when considering what the proposed Planning reform to build 1.5 million new homes is going to look like.
Putting the constrained resources that will be available in this context into increased arms manufacturing, beating ploughshares into swords, will copper bottom austerity. Mason should recall that the austerity of the Attlee government, that led to its fall in 1951, was driven by the level of military expenditure required to sustain a global Empire under threat from rebellion, to develop nuclear weapons “with the bloody Union Jack on it” (as Ernest Bevin put it) and show its commitment to the US in the Korean war. History in the 2020s could rhyme in this respect, if this course is followed again.
Mason’s argument that this is necessary to counter “Russian aggression” in Ukraine ignores the way the war grew out of NATO’s refusal to even negotiate with the Russians about mutual security guarantees during the Winter of 2021, let alone the national rights of Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea whose rebelion against the NATO coup in 2014 led to them being bombed by the Ukrainian air force and a civil war that lasted for eight years before February 2022.
Had the Labour line quoted with some disdain by Mason, that a Labour government would attempt to “lead efforts to secure strategic arms limitation and multilateral disarmament” been the general view of NATO in 2021, instead of consciously pushing through the well known red lines of a nuclear armed power, there would have been no war. Instead we have “security through strength”. Gaza shows us where that ends up.
Instead of seeking a peace settlement that would enable us all to put resources into stopping climate breakdown – Mason envisages a forever war in a militarised and impoverished Europe, with an entire generation of Ukrainian men fed with understandably increasing reluctance into a horrific meat grinder as dispensible armed henchmen fighting for the retreating US world order, or a possible escalation that is more and more likely to stumble over a final nuclear red line the longer it goes on.
The bottom line here is that we can’t afford a war drive and to invest in stopping climate change at the same time. It is stark how easily the US and its allies find the resources to balloon their military budgets and how difficult they find it to provide the Global South with the climate finance needed to avoid dependence on fossil fuels.
Choosing to play down the chronic certainty of extinction through climate breakdown by building up to a nuclear confrontation that will wipe us all out just as certainly, but quicker, is a bit like President Trump thinking he could stop a hurricane by bombing it.
Mason’s notion that supporting NATO and the Ukrainian oligarchy is “anti fascist” is also a piece of semi conscious self deception, because he knows full well that the European and North American far right have sent some of their most dedicated cadre to fight against the Donbass Republics in Ukraine since 2014; taking Andriyi Biletsky of the Azov battalion at his word when he said that Ukraine’s national purpose was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen”. Funny kind of “anti fascism” to link up with people like that.
Mason says Starmer is “not playing for a five year stint in power” and Reeves talks of “ten years of national renewal” but from an electoral point of view, the problem with their approach is that, because there will be insufficient state investment to generate green growth, especially if they prioritise guns over butter, we will continue to stagnate on our existing unsustainable basis, in conditions of deepening crisis that provide insufficient resources to shore up crumbling public services, leading to a mass rejection of the government presiding over this at the next election – be it in 2029 or earlier – as the current mood gets even angrier.
*Spook warning; Its important to bear in mind that whatever Mason has written is probably run past what he describes as “the official side”. Whether he does or does not have an MI6 handler, as Grayzone allege, is nevertheless, not something he has directly denied.
A crocheted Freddie Mercury atop a bollard on Titan Road outside the Thameside Theatre
Further along from Freddie is a similar figure for Cher, but about as X rated as you can get in crochet. The steps outside the library are painted rainbow, the lamposts are hanging vertical flags (in hideously clashing colours) alongside huge dream catchers with bright coloured streamers, outside tables are neatly arranged, a sound system is being set up. Glad confident morning for Thurrock’s first ever Pride Festival. Had to get here eventually. Inside the library the cafe is all spruced up in rainbow colours and workshops are advertised for the afternoon, make up, song writing, Bollywood dancing. What looks like a band with clothing that could best be described as “optimistic” bubble out of the lift and head for the doors, giving me a grin on the way. I ask a couple of the blokes setting up what time its all kicking off and wish them luck. There is something necessarily exhuberant, and life affirming about all this. Something that we could all do with a bit of at times like this.
Alongside the posters downstairs, a small group of pensioners sit in a small grey huddle getting one of those advice sessions that libraries run now, and make them such an important community hub. Next to them, an even older pensioner – in his dark blue army blazer and regimental beret – stands with a D day books stall from the museum but seeming almost to be one; looking slightly bemused but friendly. I slightly regret not speaking to him – and just asking as one of the last survivors. They won’t be here for much longer.
Half way up Cromwell Road, someone has put a huge Palestinian flag in their window. Which feels like waking up.
On the High Street, at that strategic corner with George Street that all the buskers use, the Saturday posse of evangelists is out. A couple of young black guys with a sound system, some younger women with leaflets. One of the men is preaching to the unconverted in a way that makes no connection at all. “Jesus Christ who died for the sins of the world”, and all that. Shoppers hurry by as though they don’t exist. Not even bothering to avert their eyes. As the parable goes “And some fell upon stony ground”. They have no crowd around them (missing a trick there; even faking an audience might generate a little curiosity from the otherwise lost and vulnerable). But perhaps thats not the point. Going out, giving testimony, being ignored, a sure sign of elect status. A smiling small boy offers me a leaflet and invites me to their Church. I smile back, thank him for the invitation and tell him that I’ve been an atheist since I was his age so I didn’t suppose I’d fit in. I don’t know if he thought that an “atheist” was a different denomination, Methodist, Baptist, Pentecontalist, Angloican, catholic, Atheist. It seemed kinder than telling him I didn’t believe in God.
“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet – if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,”President Biden. May 8th
On the face of it, this is a very strange statement. Israeli troops had already entered Rafah two days before Biden said they hadn’t done it yet. But, although this statement was already out of date at the point that Biden made it, on the other hand, it is “clear”, or seems to be from this statement, that “if they go into Rafah” – no caveats about that – the US would cut off “supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, with the cities…”
What happened since is that the Israelis have continued sending troops into and occupying Rafah, while shelling and bombing the parts of it that they do not occupy.
The UN puts the impact of that like this.
Ground incursions and heavy fighting also continue to be reported, particularly in Rafah. Intensified hostilities following the issuance of evacuation orders and the Israeli military operation in Rafah have so far forced the displacement of about one million people, amid a decline in the entry of humanitarian aid. Between the afternoons of 29 and 31 May, according to MoH in Gaza, 113 Palestinians were killed and 637 were injured, including 60 killed and 280 injured in the past 24 hours.
In Rafah, only three field hospitals are still operating, one of them partially. The World Food Programme (WFP) calls for the immediate opening of all access points, emphasizing that its ability to support people in need is deteriorating. Health and environmental risks are on the rise due to fuel shortages, limited access to clean water, sewage overflow, accumulation of solid waste, and infrastructural damage, UNRWA and partners warn.
The US, in response, made a tokenistic gesture of blocking one weapons shipment. This had the same performative media feed quality as their aid air drops and the pier they built to deliver aid that has now began to sink.
The International Court of Justice ruled on May 24th that Israel “must halt” its military offensive “immediately”. That was a week ago. The Israelis have ignored the ruling. They are in breach of international law and therefore, as the saying goes, “the rules based international order”.
The film below of National Security Council spokesman and former Rear Admiral John Kirby, a man who definitely has “something of the night about him”, slipping and sliding under pressure from reporters on this question is a study in squirming self righteous evasiveness that becomes embarassingly revealing.
His line can be summarised as …“the Israelis say that they didn’t do the bombing, it “might have been” a Hamas ammo dump spontanously combusting, and anyway they used their smallest bombs, a teeny, tiny bomb, and if they did it was somewhere else, and an accident, and they are investigating it; so I really can’t comment until their investigation is complete. And of course we will not rush to judgement until they have had time to judge their own actions, and there will be nothing self serving about this because they are a “democracy”. We haven’t been able to verify any of the evidence we have seen. We will ask the Israelis about this and accept what they say. Any critical view about this is conjecture that does not fit the facts, even though I’ve just said that we won’t know what the facts are until the Israelis decide what they are. As far as red lines are concerned, there is no mathematical formula, so, trust me, trying to pin me down on this will be like trying to nail blamange to the wall. A great deal of aid has gone into Gaza but I am not going to specify how much because I know damn well how far short it falls. We have a red line against a major incursion, but no matter how major the incursions have been so far, they won’t be major enough for us to actually do anything; and we are in constant talks with the Israelis so we are on the same page on whatever this is going to be. Trust me. Anyway, all this could be avoided if Hamas came out of their tunnels and lined up with big targets on their heads so the IDF could shoot them without having to, sadly, drop 2,000 lb bombs on thousands of people trying to shelter in tents; because its very worrying that the Israelis are having to send troops back into areas that they had already flattened and thought they had “cleared”; so there needs to be a plan for the day after, though for goodness sake don’t ask me what that might be.”
Watch it for yourself. Its an education.
“You cannot make judgements in the midst of a conflict”John Kirby. Exept that the US judgement to cut funding from UNWRA after Israeli accused 7 UNWRA personel of taking part in Oct 7th was immediate, and in the midst of the conflict, even though the Israelis presented no evidence at the time; and the funding remains suspended even though the Israelis have presented no evidence since. This is complicity in using famine as a weapon.
Alternative titles: Hooray Henry for the Red, White and Blue, Old Boryembraces Old Glory, Old Toadface heads West, The USA: last refuge for the scoundrel.
To avoid his eight succesive defeat in a Parliamentary election, Reform Party majority share proprietor, and backseat leader emeritus from half way across the water Nigel Farage, has announced that the US election is more important than the UK election; so that’s what he’ll be concentrating on; though “believe you me”, he will be shooting his mouth off throughout; secure in the knowledge that the press here will magnify whatever he has to say well beyond its significance.
As willfully discarded masks go, this is quite something. Brexit, for the fraction of the UK ruling class that pushed for it, was always about aligning the UK with US regulatory standards, but was always covered by a grandiose assertion of deluded nationalist vainglory that, shorn of EU regulation, the UK would once more bestride the world like a collosus. But Farage, in one careless swoop, has exposed the real power relations in this process. If Tony Blair was George Bush’s poodle, Nigel Farage is Donald Trump’s Shitzu.
Reform is a Party of the old. In this, it mirrors the Conservatives. In the Economist’s election tracker poll, Reform support by age group is like a shrunken, even more bitter and twisted, version of that of the Tories.
The contrast with Labour and the Greens is stark, because the young don’t dance to the same tunes, and don’t particularly want to be “toughened up” by being conscripted into the Army for a year, are excluded from whats left of the “property owning democracy” and, in fact, are finding it hard even to find a substandard place to rent, can’t afford to have children and are nervous of doing so because they can see the climate crisis deepening around them and have little truck with fools who deny that its happening.
Among the under thirties in fact, according to the most recent YouGov MRP poll, the Greens are the second Party, ahead of the Lib Dems, Conservatives and Reform.
The danger in this situation is that an incoming Labour government is so stolid and defensive that the sheer relief that they are not the Tories, anyone but the Tories, gives way to a similar reaction against them (bearing in mind that public trust in Starmer’s team is lower than that enjoyed by Ed Miliband in 2015 and their strong polling is based primarily on the Tories being loathed even more). In this context, “stability” is not “change”.
After the election, which Farage has left to jaw jutting, golf club Man of Destiny Richard Tice to lead Reform’s Kamikazi attack on whats left of the Conservative Party; the aim appears to be to gather up the burning wreckage of both into a Reformed Conservatism; with a politics straight off the Republican Right’s peg and infusions of US dark money turbocharging its Zombie rise from electoral oblivion.
In the event of a Trump victory, they will be his direct agents in UK politics. Attempts by David Lammy and others to ingratiate themselves by suggesting that Trump has been “misunderstood” will cut little ice in a scenario determined by a war drive and climate denial, bend over backwards as far as they like.
Urban ramblings 