On The Unenlightened Prince of Wales

At the beginning of the week, the Press reported that the Prince of Wales had 'declared war' on the Enlightenment. The immediate reaction of the British liberal establishment was disdain - a hereditary monarch-in-the-making is perhaps not the best person to question the rule of reason.

The joke from Radio 4 satirists was that the progeny of a thousand year old Germanic war band was in no position to complain that the Enlightenment was past its sell-by date at two hundred years old.

Does The Prince Have A Point?

But, once we get past the cheap jibes, it may be that the Prince has a point even if he probably does the cause of critiquing the Enlightenment a disservice by questioning the primacy of reason from his highly self-interested position at the top of the traditionalist tree.

What exactly is the legacy of the Enlightenment today? The world before The Royal Society and Voltaire was a lot less prosperous and free than our current world but are we in danger of become intellectually sclerotic at the peak of our liberal establishment's faith in technocratic solutions to human problems?

Many traditionalists (especially in Eastern Europe) point to the Soviet experiment as the epitome of radical rationalism although this ignores the fundamentally irrational religious drives within socialism and its persistent failure to permit critical thinking from below.

The Enlightenment might be said to comprise four fundamental outcomes - the primacy of reason in decision-making, the notion that humans have inalienable rights, the belief in the efficacy of the free market and (based on egalitarian human rights) democracy.

The Early Modern era was, by contrast, deferential and traditionalist, mercantilist and dynastic. There are and have been throughout the last two hundred years those who would want to turn back to this world and some of these have been true conservative revolutionaries.

Some of the disdain of the Prince is scarcely hidden fear. The holistic traditionalism of the Prince is not so very far off the mentality of the non-racial (nobody can accuse the Prince of racism) 'green' elements in inter-war fascism and few at the top of society want opportunity-limiting protectionism.

But the fear of going backwards into obscurantism, tyranny and corporatism means that the liberal establishment has shifted (in a surprisingly short period of time) from being expansive and truly progressive into something close to conservatism  - with a neurotic fear of change and challenge.

Questioning Reason

In each of the main zones of Enlightenment triumph (the philosophical, the economic and the political), there are legitimate reasons for questioning their legacy - not to turn backwards but to move forwards.

The primacy of Reason is a good starting point for a critique. All our modern systems may be predicated on reason but the people who work within them and whom they serve have never operated on that basis in practice. If ever they have, the results have been soulless and cruel.

The initial non-traditionalist critique of Kantian rationalism began with the existentialists and continued with the phenomenologists and the post-moderns but such thinking has always been limited to an artistic, academic and cultural elite.

Another track entirely, that of psychology (which we covered in our last posting) initially discovered the irrational as something that could and should be commanded by reason. The higher function would drive the lower functions into, say, art where it could not upset the order of things.

Behaviourism then tried to systematise the command and control of the irrational individual, associated with the optimism of the 'left' rather than with the pessimism of the 'right'.

Today, thanks to the new psychology, we see irrational responses as deeply embedded in the mind, as 'normal' behavioural responses in every sphere of life - not excepting those of the allegedly rational market and the politics of technocracy.

Policymakers are faced with the awe-inspiring truth that, in order to effect rational ends, they must commit to massive levels of social manipulation of flawed human beings, wait thousands of years for evolution to work its magic, hand over society to purely rational AI or accept irrationality as a fact.

Rationalism is now so alien to what it is to be human in fact that we are faced with the same problem that the Communists faced - how to create a 'new humanity' out of a bunch of complicated, intelligent, self-interested but non-rational animals.

The current instinct of authority is, of course, to go for social intervention and to impose rationality 'for our own good'. It is a project doomed to failure as an internal contradiction within Enlightenment thinking because the intervention can only be undertaken at the expense of rights and democracy.

Rights - The 'Noble Lie'

If reason is no longer a reliable tool except in terms of tyranny, other thinkers are beginning to expose the sandy foundations of the philosophy of rights. We now take rights as a 'reality' for granted and then extend them everywhere - to types of human, to animals, even to the planet.

Our own Right2Link campaign uses the language of rights because that is what you do in our modern society. Once you appealed to God but if the Campaign had started by saying that "God commands ... " or "Scripture says that", we would have been laughed out of court.

In fact, rights are not philosophically very soundly based. Rights are claimed by one side or another (whether as freedoms or as radical property rights) as struggles over resources and power.

What the Enlightenment did, based on the idea that the exercise of Pure Reason was something that all persons were equally capable of in theory, was to create initial human inalienable rights that transferred equality before God to equality in society.

In reality, as Nietzche pointed out ruthlessly, the egalitarianism of the Church had enabled a redressing of the balance of power in society in favour of 'slaves and women'.

By extension, the Enlightenment's purloining of equality was cover for ensuring that the baby of humanity was not thrown out with the bath water of revealed religion.

This 'noble lie' then enabled democracy, based on the fiction that each person was equal. Intelligence, attainment, wealth and every other attribute were thrust aside for an essentialism that initially only covered males and then was extended to women under universal suffrage.

Economic struggle (expressed in Enlightenment terms by socialism) could be accommodated within the system. For all the actual irrationalism of German Idealism, it was packaged by Marx and his successors as Scientific Materialism (in other words, as the next stage of the Enlightenment project).

The problem of sclerosis started when, in post-war Paris and then in the universities, the power relations underpinning real inequalities within the egalitarian rhetoric began to be exposed and 'ressentiment' bubbled up from people who felt aggrieved not just economically but culturally.

Cultural struggle resulted in a first wave of resistance to 'reason', which was atavistic and traditionalist and collapsed in a welter of blood and gore in 1945. The second wave tried to appropriate rights for every conceivable aspect of being human - sexual, spiritual, cultural ...

Twenty-First Century Hysteria

As we enter the Twenty First Century, a sort of hysteria of competing rights (indigenous peoples, women's, ethnic, transgender, animal, planetary, alien and AI) has been presented as rational but, in fact, is a drive to appropriate the Enlightenment for every petty power struggle in the market.

At Treadwell's last night, an interesting lecture on HP Lovecraft's relationship with archaeology by Dr. James Holloway closed with the controversy of the Kennewick Man.

His point that the absurdist claims of a self-professed Euro-tribe to the contentious bones had caused laughter in the audience while the equally absurdist but now 'rights'-sanctioned essentialist claims of an indigenous North American tribe did not was well taken.

In short, the 'reductio ad absurdam' of rights theory (which is now little more than sentimental engagement with one side or another in many small or large-scale power struggles over resources) has unpicked Enlightenment rights theory. Rights theory is irrational but useful. Hmmmm. Like tradition then?

On Free Markets & Liberal Expansion

As for our Right2Link Campaign, it too is a power struggle - in this case between an old media culture on the defensive and desperate for revenue and a new media culture whose values are free exchange of information. A 'right' has to be protected or grabbed back from predators.

This brings us to the free market and democratic legacies of the Enlightenment. Systems under threat get aggressive. The Counter-Reformation and the stultifying religion of industrialising Catholic Europe were a reaction to Protestantism, then secularism, then socialism.

Sclerotic contemporary liberalism is becoming militant both economically and politically in the same way. The last decade has seen yet another form of hysteria - the driving of liberal passions away from domestic reform and into reform of foreign nations.

On the one hand, we see a system asserting property rights within massive global free trading arrangements conducted, like ACTA, in secret and in close collaboration between industry lobbyists and technocrats.

On the other hand, we see these same States who are collaborating in regulating the global market seeking collaboration to extend Enlightenment values into lagging or traditionalist cultures overseas.

Liberalism has turned militant. We can hold reasonable fears that somewhere on the borderlands of its militancy, possibly in the Eastern Ukraine or in Baluchistan, some equivalent of the 'defenestration of Prague' may tip us into the blood and horror of another 30 years' War.

The point here is that the Enlightenment as a total system under challenge (as the Catholic Church was challenged as a total system by Protestant rebellion) has to respond not merely as internal sclerosis but through external aggression - or else face the illogic and irrationality of its own nature.

The Real Challenges To The Enlightenment

At this point in history, Enlightenment liberals, raised on Reason and rights, are faced with two 'irrational' facts - that Adam Smith's hidden hand is prone to periodic bouts of appallingly painful 'creative destruction' and that there is no real connection between democratic forms and an educated public.

Former bouts of 'creative destruction' either took place before democracy was fully instituted (if we include female suffrage, this would be from the 1920s to 1950s outside the US) or it did not have the massive scale implied in contemporary globalised capital markets.

The instinct of US federal authorities, states and large corporations is to develop systems of regulation, centred on the property rights of large accumulations of capital. The general result is to enforce a form of class mercantilism against national accumulations of capital and consumers alike.

Economic responses are matched by political responses where very defined political classes, who have risen on the back of sectional and coalitional appeals to the very identity politics that rights theory has encouraged, have no incentive to reform the system that gives them considerable power.

The political class constantly appeal to their 'democratic legitimacy', meaning, in fact, no more than that they have captured control of machines for aggregating votes sufficient to launch them into control of executive authority for set periods of time.

You can see where this is heading. Enlightenment rationalism has not merely destroyed old forms of society (the 'ressentiment' of traditionalists) but it is eating itself up from within.

Rational discourse has ceased to be a critique of the dead weight of irrational traditionalist thought on humanity and become a system of regulatory and social control by small minorities, transfixed by fear of the chaos that is humanity and with an interest in the perpetuation of existing structures of power.

The Prince of Wales is not making this critique by any means. He sees that something is wrong. I suspect the vast majority of us see it. From his perspective, the peculiar perspective of an aristocracy of birth surrounded by a court of like-minded people, the call is for resistance by reviving tradition.

However, there is another, more forward thinking way that recognises the crisis but sees it as one of sclerosis in a system that has long since achieved all the good that it will do in its current form and now needs a further round of critical thinking - and not the gloomy negativism of critical theory either.

Alternative Non-Traditionalist Responses

The starting point is respect for 'rational irrationalism' - that is, that when people make irrational choices this is both a reflection of their true nature and a sign that they need protection from predators (such as commercial interests and states) rather than more manipulation towards rational behaviour.

From there we might restore the notion of 'rights' to mean an expansion of the initial 'noble lie' but away from its appropriation by identity politicians and intellectuals. The expansion would be to move away from any idea of abstract 'rights' to one of the 'right' of a person to make choices that are fully informed.

This shift of paradigm then feeds back into our collective handling of the problems of economic and political sclerosis and this is the hardest struggle of all.

Instead of encouraging persons to embed themselves in invented traditions that will anaesthetise them against the modern world, we should be looking to empowering and enabling persons to take control of both politics and the executive machinery - but in their interest and not that of the technocrats.

And this is where it gets interesting. The liberal technocrats were once the radicals against privilege and agrarian and aristocratic sclerosis. They and the socialist planners have now become the conservatives so that the libertarian right and left have become the liberating revolutionaries.

The system has become so sclerotic that the temptation to go back to conservative revolutionary ways, which are the ways of the traditionalists and the Prince of Wales, may become overwhelming. This would be a mistake.

The future lies, instead, in taking the revolution in the opposite direction, stepping back into the mind-set of economic libertarians like Thomas Jefferson and political libertarians like Thomas Paine and taking a new trajectory that unravels the many accretions to the Enlightenment that have taken place since.

Excessive constitutionalism, excessive legalism, excessive application of rights theory, excessive federalism, excessive idealism, excessive progressivism, excessive essentialism, excessive reification - in an excess of rationalising order, the point of the Enlightenment has been lost.

Compass - An 'Ersatz' Left Within New Labour?

Within six months, the United Kingdom will have a new Government. It might be a Tory Government or a Government of the centre-right or centre-left precariously juggling nationalists or Liberal Democrats before being forced to return to the country - or we might see the return of New Labour ...

How New Labour Might Return From The Dead

New Labour's return to power under Gordon Brown looks unlikely but it is far from impossible. Its coalition might yet remain solid while the opposition, although a majority in the country and almost certainly in Southern England, splits into its Tory, liberal and radical nationalist components.

The New Labour coalition has some pretty good reasons for holding together and getting its core vote out. The trades unions fear political evisceration under a vengeful Tory Government and the public sector always suffers more in terms of cuts under the centre-right.

The Celtic nations and decaying Northern urban communities have lived off the fat of the South. They know that the machine for taking Southerners cash and re-laundering it back to them via the EU, and more directly, will come to a sharp halt as the Tories look for quick and easy cuts.

Finally, there is a large middle class quangocracy and a fair body of liberal progressives who like the redistribution of English cash to the emerging world. Neither trust claims of compassionate conservatism despite Cameron's attempts to win classical social liberals over to the Tory cause.

For all these reasons and others, New Labour could squeak back in with a majority but if and only if its traditional voters walk out of their front door on the day, forget their rage and frustration - with wars overseas, failures to deal with poverty and 'political correctness gone mad' - and vote.

Compass

And this is where Compass comes in - a sort of ersatz Leftist movement, led by Jon Cruddas, MP, a key figure in the liaison between the trades union political officers and New Labour in the early days of the party's 'modernisation' but now reinvented as the main Left challenger to the consensus.

Its latest mailshot (admittedly to the faithful) is red in hue, its main symbol the internationalist one of a man holding a globe and weighed down by the responsibility, with much talk of 'change' through action (an obvious nod to the Obama phenomenon).

It claims 30,000 members and supporters which, if true, is significant in recent political terms. It is probably 10 times the size of the real membership of the last grassroots revolt within the Party in the mid-1990s.

If Compass succeeds in mobilising its growing number of discouraged activists, students and fringe intellectuals into a machinery for winning Labour a victory in 2010, Jon Cruddas and those associated with him can justifiably demand preferment. Cruddas is Cabinet material under such circumstances.

Ersatz?

I used the harsh word 'ersatz' to describe Compass but I write objectively not to denigrate what Cruddas and his supporters believe themselves to be. They believe themselves to be of the Left because they have taken radical positions within an essentially conservative movement.

Naturally they continue to avoid the 'S' word. Socialism frightens the English horses and is now unacceptable to a progressive mentality that hated Sovietism more than 'American imperialism'. If they are attempting anything, it is to take over the contested word 'progressive' and own it.

Instead Compass speaks of 'greater radicalism' (as if New Labour has been radical at all). This term radical refers back to a late nineteenth century pre-Labour Representation Committee culture of dissent before the socialists and Fabians muddied the waters and confused trades unionists with theory.

To back this up, in their fund-raising and recruitment campaigns, Compass makes seven claims that define what they are and how they want to capture the Labour Party and, through the Labour Party, the Government:

1. Their support for Jon Cruddas as Deputy Leader is positioned as instrumental in getting housing and inequality up the Party agenda.
2. Compass MPs campaigned to add 'ethical', social and environmental obligations (or 'burdens' as the centre-right might put it) on businesses through amendments to the Companies Bill.
3. They have 'led calls' for a High Pay Commission.
4. They campaigned for greater 'tax justice' just before the 2009 Budget and claim that three of their demands were included in Darling's Speech.
5. They campaigned for a windfall tax on the energy and oil firms which, they claim, was instrumental in the Government's subsequent £1bn energy package.
6. They were part of a 'broad coalition' in opposing the part-privatisation of Royal Mail (and claim substantial credit for postponing, though not 'shelving' as they further claim, these plans in July 2009).
7. They collaborated with CND, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to delay the renewal of the Trident nuclear WMD system.

Assessment

This is not a bad record over eighteen months or so - certainly so when compared to the complete failure of any Left challenge to the prevailing order within the Party since the middle years of Kinnock's leadership.

But it is not quite as impressive as they claim. The determination in their literature to tell us that 63% supported a High Pay Commission and 67% supported the windfall tax on energy tells us that the campaigns are still not built on principle but on populism.

Compass is not a coherent ideological challenge to New Labour. It is pitching for a place in New Labour's sun, adopting its assumption that power derives from political mobilisation. Compass will claim its place on mobilising votes for New Labour rather than by mounting a cogent critique of its failures.

Nor has it achieved a great deal of a practical nature. The changes to the Companies Bill may be irritating to business but they are insignificant. The windfall tax and the postponement of Royal Mail part-privatisation and Trident owe far more to straightened economic circumstances than Compass.

Compass' power resides entirely on its ability to mobilise disillusioned activists to vote for a Party that has (by any standards) been involved in illegal war, been a mere adjunct to a foreign power and reduced basic civil liberties (albeit in return for increased 'human rights').

It has also been administratively incompetent, done little about inequality and presided over a disastrous economic meltdown built on an unsustainable use of credit to promote growth. So, the critique of particular policies rather than the system is telling - loyalty and solidarity trump analysis.

The Limits of Compass

Closer analysis of Compass' claims show that its power is extremely limited. The big wins are merely postponements of controversial policies. The use by the State of their street pressure to mount windfall raids on the prosperous are not signs of a shift to the Left but of economic weakness.

The particular failure to position housing (a sector which cheap credit was designed to deal with) as ring-fenced, alongside the educational and healthcare expenditures that most concern the swing middle classes, shows that Compass is still mostly noise and fury.

In fact, the Government has done very little to claw back bonuses or deal with high pay as a structural issue. It bought into 'international competitiveness' arguments about the City, on which welfare spending now largely depends. Compass has no consistent alternative critique of this strategy.

Compass is being used by New Labour to give itself the opportunity of stabilising and even advancing its vote in the street. Compass offers the Party the chance to mobilise activists to knock on doors and show enthusiasm on the day without having to make any promises it has to keep!

Hope Again!

What New Labour needs is students and activists on the doorstep able to counter negative arguments with a message of hope and hope is best spread by believers and not by bureaucrats.

We have covered hope before in our postings - it is a very powerful political tool but also one that raises expectations. Growing disillusion with Obama in the US is the price paid for using hope as a campaign weapon. But New Labour is now desperate - later disillusion it can live with, loss of office it cannot.

Any New Labour Government that emerges on a bit of populist Left legerdemain will not be radically different from the one that it replaced. It will still have a PLP dominated by the centre-right of the Party and figures like Mandelson and Miliband, even Purnell, will be of more significance than Cruddas.

If Brown remains in office (it would be hard to dispose of an election winner for perhaps another two years), the Brownites will be manouevring to protect their future. Cruddas and the Compassites are likely to be seen as merely the mobiliser of the OMOV vote in a Leadership contest.

But this is where Compass pays off for its PLP and union promoters. It builds bridges across the Party to non-Party progressives. Its real power will lie either in its value as a chip in a leadership contest if existing factions are prepared to bid for its vote or in the immediate aftermath of a defeat.

Compass' populist stance has thus nothing to do with the country and everything to do with the Party. If it can 'own' the grassroots activists and then pull disillusioned outsiders into the party for the first time or as returnees, it could, with trades union support, transform the balance of power within the Party.

What Compass Means

This is what Compass is about - the recapture of the main centre-left Party by the Labour Movement so that it can resist, in coalition with progressives and the regions, a vicious class attack from the Southern middle classes.

What the Labour Movement fears is the ending of the New Labour commitment to full employment, deregulation of the labour market and cuts in public spending affecting their members. Civil liberties, issues of war and peace and national sovereignty are trivial next to these concerns.

A beaten New Labour Party with a disillusioned and divided activist base might open the door to decisive action by the Conservatives to break the link between the trades unions and politics, decentralise public services (removing union bargaining power) and turn the labour market into a free-for-all.

For trades unions, the best and only option is to ensure the return of a Labour Government against the odds so that the Tories collapse back into a futile English nationalism. But if that option fails, the second line of defence is a united 'resistance movement' that has forgotten the failures of New Labour.

So, Compass is not unimportant. It is of no direct political consequence currently in terms of policy but, as a tool of Labour/trades union recovery, as a potential influencer in the next Leadership contest and as a centre of labour resistance to Tory 'reform' on defeat, it needs to be watched.

But, at the end of the day, it is still an 'ersatz' Left. It has no coherent ideology other than a general and vague progressivism and labourism where labourism represents a decreasing number of people. 

Labourism just wants more 'working class representation' within an existing Blairite politics. Compass, in this context, replaces coherent thought with populism. It suffers from the same disease as New Labour - a preference for power over principle.

This is not its fault. The structures of New Labour offer no alternative to challengers - and there are signs that Cruddas may be sympathetic to reform of those structures. But what Compass offers to anyone outside the special interests operating within Labour coalition remains unclear.

Class War Is Back - Equality As Political Tool

The Guardian this morning has a story that tells us a great deal about the state of the New Labour Party. Apparently a 'fierce' debate has broken out on equality.

What passed for the Left in the Blair-Brown coalition is now attemping to drive the forthcoming election manifesto in a more traditionalist and 'progressive' direction.

We should always be cautious about this sort of story. It is 'kite-flying'. Proposals, as in this case, for an attack on high pay in the public sector and for increased taxes on family assets are flown high into the air to see if they can be sustained on the political breeze.

It does not take a cynic to see that the common denominator in these two proposals (touted to be responses to a report on equality commissioned by Deputy Prime Minister Hariet Harman) is money, both cutting its expenditure and raising more for the benefit of Government.

In the event of Labour returning to Government (increasingly unlikely but still not impossible), a 'progressive' Government is going to be forced to make massive spending cuts. It has to make this palatable to its core vote in the public sector.

These particular measures are designed to ensure that the highest ranks of the civil service set an example for lower level pay freezes and even cuts to preserve jobs across the sector and to raise funds from those in the upper middle classes who have managed to hold on to their assets in a recession.

They also increase the policy water between New Labour and the Tories. The Tories, if they have to make choices, will only make necessary tax increases to balance the budget. All their efforts, as we have suggested elsewhere, will be on cutting the fat in the public sector - and that means job losses.

We should not be too hard on New Labour but there is little idealism in the coming calculations. It is not just that New Labour is slipping towards unprecedentedly (at least since the 1930s) low shares of the vote or that a coming by-election seat needs to be held on a traditionalist Scottish Labour vote.

New Labour is now in survival mode. The next three or four months require tough calculations on how far to go towards Harman's 'progressive' agenda or whether to try a last-ditch effort to woo back the middle classes who voted for Blair.

The route that New Labour goes will tell us whether it thinks it can win or not. And by survival, we do not mean just as a Government, but as a party. The Sunday Times reported at the weekend on the depth of the party's financial crisis. Private sources have confirmed its seriousness.

Local parties are resistant to putting their assets on the line as guarantees for bank loans and they are politically right to do so. If the property assets in the localities fall into the banks' hands and are then sold off, the material infrastructure of a national party could be destroyed over night.

On the other hand, the trades unions are not in a position to bail out the party or offer their own guarantees. Their own memberships would not be universally happy and may have legal cause to challenge any funding that goes beyond the approved - approval for good money after bad is unlikely.

The pressure is also growing for increased working class representation on the Left. The loyalist representative of the Labour Representation Committee got a bit of a rough ride at an RMT-sponsored conference on the issue this weekend when she advocated working within New Labour.

Given their own limited resources and the fear that an incoming Tory Government will legislate their independent political role out of existence if they make a mistake, the trades unions must deliver a cogent traditionalist result for angry workers in a recession in return for any bail-out.

The 'progressive' agenda, increasingly associated with the trades union political officers, the New Labour Left (not to be confused with the 'real' Left) and the feminists, requires Government. Progressive Government requires progressive control of the main centre-left party.

The weight of criticism from both Left and the Tories simultaneously for a simple bail-out of a failed and defeated non-progressive New Labour Party would open up vistas of both division within and legislative action against the trades unions too terrible to contemplate.

Under current circumstances what this means is that the progressives are already making their own gamble on loss of office, driving legislation like the Equalities Bill and the anti-prostitution clauses in the Police & Crime Bill hard and seeking to position themselves for the civil war that will emerge on defeat.

This also helps to explain why an anti-inequality strategy, unexceptionable by historic Labour standards, appears to be being promoted at precisely the wrong time in history - when the Party is at an all-time low in the polls and is ready to lose power. Its purpose is not policy but power.

The puzzling thing to historians and idealists (though not to those who know the Party) might be - why now? The right time to promote such an agenda would have been 2001 when the Party had proven itself competent in office and had a reasonable mandate for a radical agenda.

Indeed the first reaction of angry centre-leftists seems to be not optimism and pleasure at the shift to the agenda that they have fought for but cynicism and renewed anger at the timing. History suggests that this is an opposition agenda, to be ditched when office can be smelled in the winds once again.

The active promotion of a full anti-inequality agenda, even if it gets past Brown and Darling which is to be doubted, moght well stop the drift of centre-left activists and voters from inertia or for voting for other parties. It may even push up Labour's vote by a few percentage points to ensure its survival.

But this is a time of recession when most middle classes are still filled with economic anxiety and distrustful of Government (and most voters see themselves as middle class).

Many small businesses are surviving only by dipping into family reserves. A tax assault on reserve wealth, while Government is bailing out banks, strikes this writer as the height of political ineptitude and a precursor to tax revolt.

Implicit threats to redistribute pensions and then transfer the added value of the house from their children to an inefficient 'bloated' state are going to go down like the proverbial lead balloon. We can be sure that neither Tories nor Liberal Democrats are going to be silent on the matter.

The real purpose of 'equality' promotion at this time is to lay the ground work for the preservation of jobs in the Labour-voting public sector and regions and to mobilise those same workers to vote in their interest.

What was once a class war between workers and bosses is in danger of degenerating into a class war between those working in the market and those protected by the State. The margins of the latter may have nowhere else to go but New Labour within a few months.

We doubt whether Brown or his circle will let this happen but the progressive rhetoric is useful for bamboozling old loyalists and public sector activists into a re-commitment to a Party that is about to lose Government or may only regain it on terms that are unlikely to deliver their agenda.

The Harman Report appears in January so it is interesting to see the debate hotting up as early as November, indicating that something is going on behind the scenes to manage its content. January is convenient because its recommendations can be assessed for inclusion in New Labour's manifesto.

This manifesto will probably have more union input that any since the early 1990s. There are signs that, having been corralled into employment rights since 1996, union political officers are chafing to get a grip once again on social policy and that means the equality agenda.

The probability is that this report will be fine-tuned in content and presentation to make it 'realistic' so that what we will get in the end is a manifesto that drives the equality agenda in populist terms but which contains nothing that would genuinely unnerve Middle England or offer hostages to the Tories.

The prescriptions will be genuine enough but they will boil down to cover for redirecting funds into the white working class areas where New Labour is losing ground to the BNP and extending the tax base to allow New Labour more leeway in holding its attenuated coalition together.

But the stakes for Southern Middle England, potentially overwhelmed by the interests of London, the regions and the public sector vote, grow proportionately, especially if the 'egalitarians' gain power within the Party without an economic recovery funding their ambitions. Redistribution will mean just that.

If the equality 'punt' is managed into something that sells well into the mass of the population who are not well paid or with significant assets (and there is evidence that it might), then a revived New Labour Government now or in a few years could seriously damage upper middle class wealth.

Given Tory grassroots anger at Cameron's decision on Europe, a lot of middle class conservative-minded voters are going to have to choose between their heart (on the national question) and their wealth. History shows that they will tend to choose their wealth.