Analysing The Cameron-Clegg Statement

The UK Coalition's Programme for Government is the first Manifesto in democratic British political history published after the voters have had their say. No one is too exercised by this. All understand that it is no mean feat to combine the programmes of two competing parties and then present it as a credible whole.

Yes, of course you can see the joins in places but Cameron and Clegg's two page Foreword to the Programme is an impressive political achievement. This is not the mere cobbling together of a bunch of kleptocrats in the standard European manner but the fusion of two ideologies into a greater whole.

How long it will stick is another matter but the contrast with New Labour's Stalinist imposition of its values on its internal Coalition in 1996 is stark.

We have elsewhere suggested that this very English 'soft' revolution should be seen not as a shift from the Right to the Left (though it has elements of this) but as a shift of power between two very different personality types - from the authoritarian to the libertarian.

This is expressed primarily in terms of radical anti-statism - against big government, centralisation and top-down control - but there is a libertarian wing on the Left, pushed aside by history, that would share this perspective while authoritarian Conservatives are clearly uncomfortable with it.

The code to the nature of the new Coalition lies in its rubric: free, fair and responsible:

• Free - the libertarian impulse that can combine economic libertarians of the Right, social libertarians of the centre and political libertarians of the left
• Fair - that very English sense of fair play that can be coded as both compassionate conservatism and the social liberal, perhaps social democrat, views of a Vince Cable
• Responsible - the implicit duties mantra of the still feudal Tory Right and of those renegades from a failed progressivism like Frank Field and Will Hutton

All these factions (if perhaps with far less enthusiasm on the Social Democrat Centre and Tory Right) can live with a radical model of decentralisation of power and increased individual freedom and responsibility (where you may put your emphasis to taste).

The cheeky use of 'progressive' to describe the Coalition was widely noted in the media and we look at this at the end of our posting but there are some dodgy elements in the Programme (we are looking at the big picture here and not the detail) that we cannot let pass.

The inability to unravel the country from its post-imperial destiny represents the inability of this coalition to detach itself both from the Atlantic project and from 'Ashdownism' i.e. using taxpayers' money to ride around the world quixotically righting wrongs. We have covered this weakness already.

The most interesting aspect of the Programme could easily be missed in the rhetoric. The Coalition has linked power to innovation in a way that we all once thought the prerogative of the intellectual Left, the sort of post-Fordist Marxist crew who gave thinking ballast to Blair before office.

Only, this time around, the politicians have got it more right than the intellectuals of yore but only because the evidence for radical shifts in power is there for all to see in the immensely rapid rise of the internet and of social networks and citizen choice on its back.

The quintessential New Labour use of new technology was the ID card system or the incompetently managed IT spine - major infrastructural projects based on state direction and designed for state purposes. The Coalition Programme is explicit on its stance:

" ... we are both committed to turning old thinking on its head and developing new approaches to government. For years, politicians could argue that because they held all the information, they needed more power. But today, technological innovation has - with astonishing speed - developed the opportunity to spread information and decentralise power in a way we have never seen before."

This is pure libertarian genius. Murdoch's boys will be grinding their teeth. Google kids will be grinning from ear to ear ... they continue:

" ... there has been the assumption that central government can only change people's behaviour through rules and regulations. Our Government will be a much smarter one, shunning the bureaucratic levers of the past and finding intelligent ways to encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves."

Oh dear, probable collapse of stout party. Here we have a perfectly accurate analysis capped with a rather dodgy belief that the new nudge philosophy will achieve what post-socialist state direction could not. The State is dead, long live the State. Spin is dead, long live Spin.

The first page of the Foreward is dynamic but this shift from hard State to soft State then opens the door to two lengthy paragraphs on the background to the Coalition that can only be seen as defensive, even apologetic in tone, a direct appeal to the confused unwashed of the two coalescing parties.

Defensive and claiming to be smarter than their predecessors? I think the public needs to be just a little wary that the text yet represents the reality of consistent, stable Government with a clear understanding of what it is dealing with in terms of national sustainability and the deficit.

The last two sentences of all are an attempt to send so many signals that it is hard for the casual reader to keep up. This Government is apparently radical (the antithesis of the conservative) yet reforming (which is what Peelite Conservatives take pride in).

The two Leaders ditch for ever the notorious Thatcher claim that there is no such thing as society, made in one of her more sub-Stirnerite moments, but then detach the fact of society firmly from its association with the State. The shared continuity from the Thatcher Right is certainly a distaste for socialism.

References to change and progress are back-handed compliments to the dominant rhetoric of the Labour Movement from Wilson to Blair, from Benn to Mandelson. This document is an attempt at an ideological coup d'etat, a libertarian-populist seizure of power after thirty years of authoritarian rule.

To be fair, the balance of unaligned public opinion, certainly in England, is probably with the coup leaders. The latter have captured the State, apparently that it might, as Marx predicted, wither away.

The greatest irony of the soft English revolution of May 2010 is that it may have ushered in the most left-wing Government (as pre-twentieth century observers might see things) in Britain's history. In reality, the State will soon recapture these ideologues - but do enjoy the revolution while it lasts!

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.

The Crisis in British Policing

The accidental release of information about terrorist suspects that lead this week to the resignation of its Head of Counter-Terrorism is only one of a long series of incidents that have cast doubt on the competence of the Metropolitan Police.

At one level, it was a simple mistake (he showed inadvertently to camera a list of largely foreign-born terror suspects) that could have been made by any overworked executive in any industry.

Similar blunders, related to intelligence material and to loss of government data, have plagued Government. They have in common the human weakness of heavily worked staff unaware of the dangers presented by technological advances- whether that of a long range lens or a memory stick.

Government & Technology

Government has still not caught up with technology by creating the necessary protocols for the guarding of data, protocols that can also help hard-pressed officials keep their wits about them under constant pressure.

The gut instinct of Government is always to suppress technological access and to introduce draconian measures against 'receivers of information' where it can. This can result in daft legislation - for example, that on photography which has outraged amateur photographers and irritated tourists.

The stupidity of this legislation beggars belief. It ignores the fact that the activities of the police or security arrangements can be picked up simply by slyly pointing a mobile phone in the right direction. It is another ham-fisted 'sledgehammer to crack a nut' policy that brings Government into disrepute.

And it is this disrepute that we now have to worry about. The public is beginning to edge away from its assumption that the police are a good thing towards seeing it as a threat in itself. Worse, police forces outside London are being tarred by a very London brush.

The London Met & Heavy-Handedness

The Metropolitan Police are increasingly being seen like the 'federales' in a Mexican bandit movie, accumulating their counter-terrorist cash and treating the outlying country bumpkin police as mere agents for the new intelligence-based policing.

The police have struggled in some areas since the 1980s to recover, with some success, a damaging image in depressed areas of being, first, the bootboys of Thatcher in relation to the pit closures and, then, the street managers of the poll tax riots.

In general, the role of the police as protectors of political order has taken second place by far to a warmer image of the police as protectors of the community against both organised crime and petty criminals - assisted by the kindly vision on television of murders solved by Wexford and Alleyne.

In fact, this is naive. As elsewhere in the world, the police are the sensible alternative to the army in keeping the angry mob from following 'V' into Parliament. And if provincial forces get sucked into managing strikes and direct action, it is the Met that is at the heart of national internal security.

The Confidence Factor

This role of maintaining order depends on the public believing that the preservation of order is wholly in its interest - much as the banking system depends on the belief that the saver will always get his money back with interest.

The latter belief has been knocked a little, now it is the former that is under pressure. Resentment at perceived police excesses on the one side face off a frightened property-owning element who think a stronger police presence might require turning a blind eye to the occasional abuse.

There are many factors merging to create this sense of a resumption of the hostilities of the 1980s but with this difference. The real rage is emerging in the South of the country and its middle class element is wobbling between the two extremes in its interpretation of the current crisis.

The alliance of environmentalists and property owners over the extension of Heathrow is not an isolated instance of rebellion verging on direct action. Whether credible or not, many middle class people have been sold on the environmental damage from industry and want something done.

Quantum Revolt

Of course, bad feeling is one thing, direct action is another. But we have seen a quantum leap only yesterday in police action against protest. The typical arrest until now has been of up to 10 to 12 persons connected with terrorism or (say) animal rights extremism or republican terror.

Some of these are then whittled down so that a few stand trial and are incarcerated using new legislation that makes it much easier to criminalise 'strong dissent'. Yesterday, the police moved in on a direct action group and arrested well over a hundred in a raid.

This may be exceptional but it indicates that over a hundred, even excluding the police narks, were prepared to meet late at night to effect a direct action operation. If this becomes the 'norm', then an overstretched police will be dealing with a similar quantum leap in intelligence policing.

And then the next stage, if things get worse, could be mass arrests of a thousand or more by aggressive police dealing with street protests made more aggressive, in turn, by the events in London during the G20 Summit. At this level of intensity, a few deaths become almost inevitable.

Middle Class Revolt

Meanwhile, many middle class people were angry enough at the banking crash, the bail-outs and the prospect of high taxes and low spending to cheer on the protesters at the G20 Summit in spirit if not in body.

Police and Home Office behaviour in the run-up to the Summit is only explicable as an attempt to frighten the Home Counties middle classes from jumping on a train and joining a demonstration that was otherwise peaceful and was easily accessible from St. Albans and Tunbridge Wells.

What the authorities did not want and could not afford was a massive 250,000 plus protest against capitalism. This would easily have been more dangerous than the million against the War in Iraq.

From that perspective, the politically-driven police tactics at the G20 Summit were a success. Numbers at the demonstration were moderate. There was a stage-managed bit of token violence at the RBS branch office in the City that caught the tabloid eye and the police showed their fist to the 'crusties'.

It Goes Sour for the Government

And this is where technology and incompetence come in. The Government 'spin' should have demonstrated that dangerous anarchists had been kept from more damage to property and averted risk to life and limb. But it did not quite turn out that way despite the connivance of the tabloids.

Unfortunately for the police and the Government, there were a lot of mobile phones and independent cameras in the neighbourhood.

Social networks, notably Facebook, were soon full of accounts 'from the front' that suggested that the vast bulk of the demonstration had been peaceful and that the police had been provocative. Moreover, not only peaceful demonstrators but ordinary citizens had been pinioned into blocks for hours at a time.

The truth should have been crushed by the dominance of the print media, dominated in turn by spin doctors. But it is no longer the 1990s when such methods worked. What now happened was that mobile and other footage and evidence of harm circulated social networks that included journalists.

An Unwilling Martyr to Truth

The critical development was the death of Ian Tomlinson, a local news vendor, who died of a heart attack on the street during the riots. In fact, he had beaten to the ground, despite not being a protester, and the heart attack took place after that assault.

The police lied - or rather did not tell the full truth. But there he and it would have lain if social networks had not started to circulate witness statements and then a call for evidence. Whether this was directly responsible for the discovery, ironically by a fund manager, of incriminating footage is not known.

The Guardian to its credit published footage of Mr. Tomlinson being walloped and then how the matter was handled started to come out of the woodwork. There was no suppression of the facts now or their marginalisation amongst already disgruntled activists.

Credible accounts of police brutality were soon complemented by footage that showed some very aggressive policing against legitimate protest. Finally, a thumping great copper bearing down and walloping a small female protestor became another bit of samizdat film.

The System Takes a PR Hit

A short term PR victory for the police based on traditional media manipulation was replaced within a few days by the nightmare scenario of computer-literate middle classes, human rights groups and even opposition politicians expressing more than grave doubts about the boys in blue.

The anarchists had scored a PR coup of their own - getting the system frightened of what was really a rather small group of disconnected demonstrations, causing the system to over-react and then allowing informal and truly anarchic social networks to spread the message through new technologies.

But the dissent did not happen in a vacuum. Let us summarise what has been happening recently:

• the Government has been struggling to reverse a major economic crisis which it cannot entirely blame on 'global conditions';
• 'our' money has gone to bail-out financiers who have caused serious economic damage and yet have been allowed to keep the rewards of their greed;
• the general public has seen, in some cases, job losses and, in more extreme cases, financial collapse and loss of their homes while the middle classes on their own have seen massive falls in their net asset value;
• the public knows it is faced with higher taxes and lower spending on services because of what it sees as incompetent business and governmental management;
• the Government is not only struggling to cope but, equally important, is mired in petty scandals that cast serious doubts on its judgement.

Now, add to this:

• national planning is imposing major infrastructural projects like Heathrow that appear to benefit the business community rather than local communities;
• for seven years, draconian legislation affecting civil liberties and personal rights has been put in place without any demonstration of the serious incidents that justifies the loss of those rights;
• there is no popular support for the small wars, most notably Afghanistan, that place the country in the terrorist firing line;
• there is a cultural irritation both at the mass migration that came with the boom but which has left the migrants stranded and at a culture of political correctness that appears to diminish both individual responsibility and indigenous rights.

Ressentiment

All in all, the State is losing control of the agenda. An anarchistic resentment of its lack of competence is beginning to develop in response.

Until now, the primary concern has been the potential alienation of minorities and keeping a lid on the spread of endemic breakdown and disorder within the white working class, whose problems worsen but which are scarcely reported except in terms of moralising at some extremecase of family breakdown.

Take the Muslims - an island of brown in a sea of white despite what the fascists imply. The communications culture of the Home Office requires a tone of hysteria about terrorism based on the supply of dossier material, not always credible, to favoured media.

Insiders have not trusted this material for a decade but it has served to mobilise the respectable working class and the small business class into a periodic frenzy of fear at the 'enemy within'. But the repetition of half truths has equally created a profound distrust of police claims amongst the educated.

Muslim Frustration

Relations between the Government and the younger elements in the Pakistani community are now becoming very tense and not only because of the recent arrests which many are convinced are for ‘thought crimes’.

The association of the UK with American drone attacks on the North West Frontier appears to make the Government complicit in murder. Within the UK, most counter-terrorism efforts outside London are based in the West Midlands because this contains the largest concentration of Muslims.

Additional funding has created a unit of 400 dedicated officers and a plethora of ‘soft’ anti-radicalisation efforts in schools and amongst imams in the region, creating a new sub-class of Muslims and inter-faith workers who are bottom-feeding off the state’s patronage

The net result is a small class of favoured Muslims who speak for cohesion and inter-faith initiatives and a smaller group of angry activists who may or may not be seriously contemplating direct action. Between the two lie the vast mass of British-Pakistanis opposed to extremism but alienated by police action.

Where We Are ...

The tide is just beginning to turn against government policies that demonise all protestors instead of dealing with a tiny minority of trouble-makers effectively and that de-humanise the police through the use of masks and unnecessary body armour.

The inappropriate use of anti-terrorism laws, as well as the creation of other laws which are regarded as draconian and unnecessary, builds concern about what all this legislation is actually for.

There have been 1,450 terrorism related arrests between 2001 and 2008 in the UK. The question now arises how many of these people actually intended harm and how many were guilty of little more than expressing extreme sentiments.

On the upside, the rest of the country does not look like the quasi-militarised zone that now surrounds the political and bureaucratic classes in Central London. The suspicion, however, has to be that these classes are protecting themselves at public expense far more than they are protecting the nation.

Our view? The police, under political influence, are throwing away over two decades of growing respect and reform. London has damaged the country.

And why? Because of an hysterical panic over future blame for a rogue security incident and then naked fear of what might happen if direct action became a natural response to the unresponsiveness to the public of Parliament and Whitehall.

This is a very serious moment in British history. Recovery might make many of these fears irrelevant but the systematic degradation of public trust in the police is as dangerous to the nation as the earlier collapse in confidence in its banking system might have been to its economy.

www.tppr.co.uk

www.pendrywhite.com

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