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.

Where the Sun Don't Shine ...

We really, really, really do not want to add to the overwrought, over-excitable, neurotic and nerdy commentary on the Sun's shift from New Labour to the Conservatives ... but duty calls. Let's keep it simple?

False Dawns

In a country of 44m voters, the Sun has an average daily circulation of just under 2.9m on a very good day (end-2008). It reaches directly only 6.5% of the population at best.

Of course, the fact that the Sun is not backing New Labour is now known to very many more people than this relatively small group but it is a moot point whether the rest of the population are going to be much impressed.

We need to unpick the hysteria surrounding a spoiler announcement and ask whether the British public have very much in common with an increasingly closed political and media elite whose prime characteristic appears to be its own self-referential agenda.

If you are on Twitter, you will probably have noticed the flood of excitable Tweets about this 'great event' - an excess of political emotionalism that reminds us of the French Third Republic at its most asinine.

But if New Labour suffers from this announcement, it will not be because the Sun can speak unto kings and make them tremble but because New Labour's historically craven attitude to Political Editors has returned to bite them.

New Labour 'strategists' (an inappropriate word for the motley crew who have succeeded the original winning team led by Mandelson, Gould and Campbell) created a narrative that gave the media far too much power in its drafting.

Between the mid-1990s, when manipulation of the newspapers was a critical factor in acquiring power, and today, New Labour lost track of important changes in mass communications and it has failed to create a communications plan that would eliminate the stranglehold of editors over the political agenda.

High Noon for New Labour

New Labour has far more fundamental problems than communications, of course. In our view, its socio-economic strategy may well be in ruins and, at best, taken a bad knock. Less contentiously, it looks tired, it has a string of failures to its name and it seems unable to connect with the population.

We still think that New Labour might recover to do creditably in an election, based in part on a slight recovery, in part on electoral distrust of Tory slipperiness and in part on the standard last minute bribery required to get the worker and regional votes out on the day.

But even if it gets its ducks in a row on the leadership, develops a distinctive policy position to fit the new times we are in and has luck on its side, its organisational and communications operations are in utter disarray. Much of this will have something to do with its appalling financial situation.

In politics, the illusion of success creates success - the prospect of power attracts funds which can be spent on political marketing. This creates an aura of success that increases the prospect of power and so funds ad near-infinitum ... and the converse.

Obscured by Clouds

Around two years ago, there were serious doubts about whether the Party was technically solvent. Since then, there has been relative silence but the open secret is that the trades unions have been holding things together in return for more influence behind the scenes.

There have been mutterings recently about the way that Jack Dromey of Unite has been lined up for a safe seat 'coincidentally' with a large union contribution, although trades union strategy for some time has been to increase union representation in Parliament.

With events in Germany showing that dissident Leftists can win votes - over 22% for the Left and the Greens virtually matching the 'official' Left - fissures are now opening up between radical mid-level union activists and the established political leaderships of the big unions.

The pressure is on now to stop any drift of funds and voting power to any putative Marxist-union breakaway. The traditional union leaderships, subject to some democratic pressure, must ensure that they can point to pro-working class representation and policies in a weakening official centre-left.

This, more than some ideological conversion, explains Brown's apparent shift to the Left and away from the language of markets this morning on Radio 4. Both conference and interview rhetoric were designed to unite a collapsing party and chase off the Left challenge - and shift back to the centre-ground later.

No2EU made a great thing of the fact that all its candidates in the Euro-election were front-line workers. The political wing of the working class has had enough of middle class representation and it is returning to the original purpose of the Labour Representation Committee with a vengeance.

Mandelson's job is to reassure the centre ground, especially big business, and keep the trades union right-wing (the manufacturing-orientated unions) in line with sufficient state aid (such as extension of car scrappage) to keep as many members' jobs as possible through to the next economic cycle.

The Twilight of the Gods

So, the journalists and bloggers who obsess about the opinions of one Editor and his proprietor are exhibiting all the signs of being a flock of oozlum birds.

Many of those who are active in demanding representation for workers in Parliament through Labour are also readers of the Sun, as likely to be so as readers of the Daily Mirror.

Liking Page Three girls and good sports coverage and being instinctively patriotic against Argies and Germans ought not to be associated with solid Menshevik values but people are complicated. My family took the Daily Telegraph every day and voted Labour every election.

A lot of Sun readers are going to enjoy these escapades but will still vote for a Labour candidate if it is the one that their union recommends. And a lot of trades union members will continue to vote Tory and Liberal Democrat - even BNP - regardless of what their union bosses advise.

The contempt of political nerds - whether obsessive activists, bloggers, mainstream journalists, policy wonks or armchair theorists - for the ability of the average voter to weigh up his or her own material and psychological interest beggars belief sometimes.

Of course there is a tribal element in voting but even this is an aggregation of special interest habits from the past or derived from shared experiences that can easily result in changed loyalties under provocation.

The next Government will be created out of a calculus of personal interest tempered by the oddities and biases of the FPTP electoral system. Good communications is there to give some sense of which horse might be worth backing in that interest. It's still the fundamentals, including the economy, stupid!

If New Labour is to be re-elected, it has to deal with these fundamentals and then create a narrative that includes fresh understanding of why the new technologies are half-way to transforming and weakening the power of the old priestly class of journalists and metropolitan intellectuals.

The next election is not going to be the first online media election - that experience is likely to be the election after that - but it should be the first election where the stranglehold of the old media is finally seen to be broken. It should start with a robust stance towards Mr. Kavanagh and his ilk. 

British Street Fighting Man

The Financial Times has reported that business is intensifying its efforts to lobby the Conservatives on their manifesto commitments in advance of the Party Conference, the point at which the Party is likely to fix its position on its policies for a General Election. 

The worry is whether the Party will concede to populist pressure in the planning process and to middle class environmentalist sentiment. The business community is also getting concerned that wildcat strikes in the engineering construction industry may jeopardize major infrastructural projects. 

The new but still limited worker militancy, which trades unions are finding increasingly difficult to control, is developing a neo-nationalist rhetoric at the margins that unnerves a business community sold on globalisation, the European single market and flexible labour markets.

In fact, radical social and political protest remains very limited in scope but, in addition to the wildcat strikes, there is significant future potential for mass direct action, led in part by anarchist activists, around major infrastructural developments.

There is also a mounting risk of racist attacks against new migrants (notably the Roma but also others), given renewed confidence amongst the radical right after the BNP’s victories in the euro-elections. A particularly nasty incident in Northern Ireland appears to have resulted in some forced ethnic cleansing.

The two eco-actions to watch are the Heathrow extension and the Kingsnorth power station in Kent where there are opportunities for local middle class ‘residential’ and community discontent to merge with ideological eco-anarchism.

There are many other small cases of green/bourgeois interaction emerging over local issues where land is being misused from a sustainability perspective. This libertarian anti-state sentiment, emerging in their heartlands, is something that the Tories will want to keep a careful eye on in an election year.

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