An affront to parliamentary democracy that produces Truss as PM and Corbyn as Labour leader

Both main UK political parties have for more than a decade betrayed parliamentary democracy in favour of a US primary-type method for electing a party leader. On Monday we witnessed some of the awful consequences of that in the live televised head to head Truss-Sunak ‘debate’. The style, and no doubt agreed structure, of the prime time BBC1 broadcast was a grotesque dumbed down pandering to broadcast media conceptions of what the public will stomach. Given that it was the Parliamentary Conservative Party that reduced the candidates to two, and that 160,000 party members who, for the cheap price of an annual membership fee, will determine who the PM is, then any preconceived notion of what the British public wants is irrelevant. Another consequence of this Tory leadership election method, just as is normal now during a General Election of course, is the rival camps’ petty abuse on social media. I note that the media broadcast the five candidates’ debate before it shifted to a two horse race among Tory party members. However the choice of whether to broadcast these debates was that of the Tory party. They could have kept the election of their parliamentary leader where it properly belongs: in Parliament.

This Tory members’ party leadership election is worse than a US-style party primary because this is the third election in a row among Conservative Party members that has selected the PM by selecting their party leader. I accept that we live in a parliamentary democracy and that therefore the choice of PM is not the people’s direct choice. And I accept that the resultant new PM is not obligated to call an instant general election because, yes, their, authority comes from that elected Parliament. It is precisely my belief in parliamentary democracy, despite residual royal authority exercised by an executive only partly checked by an elected parliament, that means that I think that a parliamentary party should determine who its leader is, not that party’s membership. The fact that the media has influence on any such membership election of any major political party is largely the fault of the two parties for agreeing this method of choosing the leader. And for agreeing to televise the debates. 

Surely an election method that brought us Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the opposition and which runs the serious risk of imposing Liz Truss on us as PM, is very flawed indeed. I stand by bad electoral outcomes if that is either the popular will or the will of popularly elected MPs. I wholly object to bad, or any, outcome decided by a narrow band of Tory or Labour Party members, especially when this narrow band in either party can get to determine, directly, who the Prime Minister of the UK is. 

I would like to think that the two main UK party leaderships could agree together to go back to the future and resume parliamentary democracy when it comes to choosing their party leader. However this would be akin to reinventing Labour’s civil war of the 1980s, and for the Tories it would upset a membership base that seems to like the power to ensure that ‘chief betrayer’ Sunak can be prevented from entering No10 in favour of someone whose economic grasp revolves around printing money and whose regional knowledge when visiting an enemy capital suggested she wasn’t fit to teach GCSE Geography let alone lead the primary European military power.

A Labour leader with intellect and passion who advocated defence, patriotism and peace

Michael Foot's reply to Margaret Thatcher in the emergency House of Commons' Falkland Islands debate in April 1982 was the speech of a statesman, delivered with passion, wit and intellect. Its assault on the Thatcher Government’s signal failure to deliver on the first responsibility of any government, that of protecting its people, ought to have made a mockery of the Conservatives’ vaunted defence credentials. It was delivered by a Labour leader who believed in conventional military deterrence and who rhetorically asked why Margaret Thatcher seemingly didn’t, in practise. The previous Labour Government, of which Foot was a very senior member, had mobilised a flotilla in advance of an Argentinian threat, thereby successfully preventing the possibility of invasion. Given the current Conservative Government‘s announcement of a large defence expenditure expansion amidst economic retrenchment, when the Con-Dem Government had previously recklessly slashed defence spending and left the UK without an aircraft carrier for many years, it would be wise to once again question the credentials of a Conservative Government on defence. Foot of course could reach back to his own assaults on another Conservative Government being soft on defence and on fascism (I use the word advisedly) in the latter 1930s. Sad that this great man should have been so pilloried and so parodied to the detriment of appreciating the power of his reason and his rhetoric. Sad that after the moronic disdain for defence shown by the last Labour leader we don’t have one now who's able to rip apart the Tories’ pretensions as the ‘patriotic party’. To hear Foot's speech click on this link

Labour's meaningless election

As the only Labour leadership candidate with a spark of personality and emotional verve has pulled out, I’m inclined to switch off until another tiresome Labour leadership contest is over. Jess Phillips last week exited a race that ever since Blair was chosen as party leader in 1994 has been marketed by the Party as about putting power in the hands of the members. Yet Phillips departed not because she had failed to convince Labour Party members, or the wider public, but because she knew she couldn’t be confident of the support of enough Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) (or the support of two big trade unions) to ensure that she’d get through to the next round. It is only when these hurdles are jumped by candidates that the much vaunted ‘one member, one vote’ process will actually kick in and the real leadership election will start as ordinary members get to decide for themselves who to vote for.

Well, them and registered party ‘supporters’, a cheapo membership scheme introduced, in his perverse wisdom, by Ed Miliband for those people who (understandably) can’t endure going to members’ meetings. And among these ‘Labour supporters’ who in April will be determining who the next Labour Prime Minister might be, will be those who bought themselves a vote by registering as supporters as recently as mid-January. All’s fair then.

The absurdities of Labour’s leadership electoral system are a reflection of its spatchcock compromise between Labour’s historical roots as a parliamentary-orientated party paid for by organised labour, and the bizarre contemporary influence of US primaries. This has produced a corrupt charade where all party members are potential voters but some voters aren’t party members (and some of these have simply paid £25 to vote). Success in the election depends on garnering the backing of enough MPs and then the approval of enough CLP meetings or, proving that in the Labour Party the past is always present, a couple of trade union barons.

The actual leadership election this April was always going to include the candidate who wrote Labour’s least successful manifesto since George Lansbury’s poor performance paved the way for the takeover of the party in 1935 by that masterfully bland public school boy, Mr Clement Attlee. Rebecca Long Bailey’s skilled authorship of Labour’s most recent ‘longest suicide note in its history’ was facilitated by the man who had already blessed her prospective leadership. In December Mr Corbyn’s reverse Midas touch meant that party volunteers like me had to knock on doors with an unsellable message from an unconscionable leader. Long Bailey is likely to be among the final two thanks to the imprimatur of the man who led Labour to a defeat markedly worse in seat terms than Michael Foot’s in 1983.

Like the other, current, front runner, Sir Keir Starmer, Rebecca has been in parliament for all of five years. If I am not mistaken, this is the same depth of parliamentary experience enjoyed by Lisa Nandy too. Emily Thornberry though has been traipsing round the Westminster corridors for an incredible decade. Gosh. Better perhaps than Corbyn who’s been there since 1983 but who not only lacks ministerial experience – like every single Labour leadership candidate this time round – but hasn’t even previously shadowed the government minister for office stationery.

Sir Keir Starmer was anointed at birth with the name of Labour’s second most popular leader, and is eager to emphasise that he too has a (relatively) proletarian background in order to offset the knighthood he secured for an indifferent performance as the head of Public Prosecutions.

Thornberry’s disadvantaged Oxford graduate and high-paid lawyer routine probably won’t impress. Lisa Nandy genuinely understands that Labour’s disconnect with its onetime (white) working-class base is almost terminal, but this message is too difficult for the party’s liberal middle class chauvinists to process. Therefore it’ll be down to either Starmer or Long Bailey to bore the electorate over the next five years.

Long Bailey’s seismically dull campaign launch - head down, droning on from a tiresome text - suggests that she will only inspire those for whom having a politically ‘correct’ (i.e. leftist) message is what matters. Not the fact that it’s delivered, like the current leadership incumbent, with all the charisma, style and authority of a deputy borough council leader. 

She told the Party that being a working-class woman means that she’s doubly-disadvantaged. This cynical little routine comes from yet another former lawyer, but one who thinks that the way to reach the working-class is affecting to sound like them. 

So we’ll presumably end up with Keir Starmer. A onetime student Trotskyist with little hope of reaching those parts of the country that began being lost by Labour more than 40 years ago and which now vote Johnson. Still, the brave knight will be good at the dispatch box cut and thrust. And that’s what will convince on the door step, isn't it? 

Labour will never get out of this mess until it restores the election of the leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party solely to Labour politicians elected to Parliament. Historically this method didn't always produce the most plausible leaders to contest a national election. However it usually had the virtue of producing someone who not only understood what contesting a national election entailed, but who could authoritatively articulate an inclusive message to the whole of the nation. 

Labour's class coalition coming unstuck over Europe

Labour’s pragmatism (or waffle/procrastination) over Brexit, argues writer Nick Cohen, is both psephologically illiterate and ideologically motivated. Of course trying to bridge different interests has a very long tradition in the party. A compromise among Labour’s class and ideological broad church brought majority Labour governments for at least some of the period from 1945-2010. On Europe, Labour has never been enthusiastic, preferring to try on this, as on many other major issues, to manage (or obfuscate) the deep divisions within its electoral and parliamentary coalition.

Gaitskell feigned ‘little Englander’ anger at a prospective ‘end of a thousand years of history,’ while Wilson only tentatively sought to get beyond De Gaulle’s ‘Non’ in response to Macmillan's speculative application. It was Tory PM Heath who forced through the UK’s membership of the then Common Market (with the backing of some dissident Labour MPs) in an exercise in executive chutzpah. Three years later Wilson foreshadowed Cameron by putting political convenience before national interest and held the UK’s first referendum on whether to leave the European project. In the 1950s and early 1960s Jim Callaghan had reflected the Labourite conservatism of the Party’s trade union base in being instinctively unenthusiastic about the Common Market. However, as foreign secretary and then Prime Minister in the 1970s, Callaghan understood that as a middle-ranking post-imperial power, the UK was either in the club or it was irrelevant. 

Labour leader Michael Foot had to swallow many of the ideological stances of a hard left that - as a parliamentary socialist, intellect and pragmatist - he usually had little time for. However Foot tried his best to manage the then intra-party coalition that was rupturing over Europe – and over much else. Kinnock and Smith took Labour back to its broad church position on Europe, defence, and the economy. Blair in turn maintained that traditional Labour pragmatism on Europe. However the desperation of party that, in Austin Mitchell’s famous words, was ‘prepared to eat shit to get a Labour government,’ meant that Blair and Brown could get away with upholding the neo-liberal abdication of national interest they inherited from Margaret Thatcher, even if much of the country baulked at their unprecedentedly supine and ill-considered Iraq policy. Blair was arguably an outlier in Labour’s tradition, although on much social and welfare policy, and on Europe, he was pragmatic. 

Corbyn though is the first ever Labour leader who's not a genuine managerial pragmatist. He’s also the first Labour leader since George Lansbury to have little interest in leading. Corbyn is rooted in the late 1970s and early 1980s hard left Labour ‘activist’ myopia that favoured ideological correctness over class compromise. Back in the day, a half-baked perversion of cod Marxist theory led the polytechnocrats and bourgeois militants of the Bennite left to believe that, from the ashes of the dialectical clash of the differing class interests that have characterised the Party from birth to government, a truly socialist (ruling) class could emerge to finally deliver socialism.

The spectacle of a Labour Party, a Labour Party, run by middle class activists purporting, Leninist-style, to lead the proletariat into the light, didn’t convince many of the working class, then or now. Nor did it attract many of the middle class: the support of sufficient white-collar workers has always been a necessary and important part of Labour’s coalition. 

Today, the ideological heirs of Labour’s early 1980s deviation into political irrelevance are prioritising their own version of the party’s historic pragmatic alliance. In their case however it’s a very unholy union of bourgeois leftist disdain for a ‘capitalist club’ (the EU) with the appeasement of Labour’s disappearing white working class voting base who are angry over immigration and the loss of national sovereignty.  

Labour might now decide that the middle class electoral swing to the pro-EU Lib-Dem centre (and the Green left) is so out-stripping the loss of (white) working class Labour voters to the Brexit Party, that it can no longer maintain the party’s historic fudge on Europe. However a firm Labour embrace of another referendum – because Tories aren’t going to vote for an early electoral Christmas, to paraphrase aspirant Labour Party leader McDonnell – could mean JC jettisoning his misguided version of Labour class pragmatism in favour of a stance that hardly convinces anybody.

Corbyn cannot seek to persuade 'decent moderate Tories' (to paraphrase Baroness Chakrabarti on the ‘Marr’ show) to back another national referendum if he doesn’t make clear how he wants actual or prospective Labour voters to vote. Likewise, he cannot present himself as the nation’s prospective PM in the event of a short-notice general election if he can’t say whether he wants Britain to be in or out of the EU. So, unless Corbyn intends to approach the next fork in the road with the response he’s maintained ever since the last EU referendum, he will be forced to break the Party’s historic class coalition and to prioritise the winning back of liberal middle class voters. However unless they are convinced by Corbyn's 11th hour decisiveness, then Labour might have kissed goodbye to the white working class and to the prospect of ever returning to power.

Sir Harold Wilson and the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool

We were given a key to the joint entrance to rooms 100 and 101 in Liverpool’s most iconic hotel, The Adelphi. Four years earlier I had only managed to get as far as the plaque outside that very modestly marks the fact that Harold Wilson - the 20^th Century’s most electorally successful party leader - had used the suite as his Constituency Room.

The entrance to the Sir Harold Wilson suite, replete with modest plaque

The dark wooden doors led you into two rooms that are virtually unchanged since the Labour leader had used the hotel to conduct constituency business for his Liverpool seat of Huyton, located close to the city centre where the hotel stands. Opening the door to the sitting room, we were struck by the large dark marble fire place, replete with electric fire that looked vintage 1960s, an original looking dining table and even a fold-out green beige card table. The sofa was decidedly of a different vintage. However the huge windows, subtly painted mock Georgian wall panels, and phenomenal ceiling plaster moulding that would in Harold’s time have sported a chandelier not an electric mock candelabra, made it easy to imagine yourself in a time when the PM needed somewhere very comfortable to, perhaps once a month, conduct meetings with local party officials and trade unionists or to simply be based for a night in advance of a Saturday morning constituency surgery in Huyton.

Harold's sitting room (Room 100)

Room 100 at the Adelphi was handy on election night too (1966) (c/o 'Harold Wilson' by Ben Pimlott, HarperCollins, 1992)

Harold’s bedroom was equally original, minus the bed with its mock leather headboard. The huge, fitted wood and marble washstand cum chest of drawers, replete with deco-looking chrome towel rack, and the large marble fire place were not only in place when Wilson used these rooms but when this incarnation of the famous hotel opened in 1914. 

Harold's washstand

A huge wooden, mirrored, wardrobe had certainly been in the room for more than half a century. It is hard to imagine that a hotel that for several decades has had a funding problem – one not remotely alleviated by its comparatively recent transfer to the ownership of the Britannia chain – would replace anything that wasn’t broken, save for maybe the odd light bulb and, sadly, the original carpet. 

Sir Harold Wilson's bedroom

The bathroom separated the two main rooms; its tasteful frosted glass lattice work door opened to a porcelain furniture set that may not have been 1914 but was probably at least 1950s. Valerie mused on the idea that Sir Harold had used the very same bath as her. From the bathtub you can look out via an enormous window to the rather grand building opposite that in Wilson’s time housed Lewis’ department store. Above the entrance to Lewis’ (now no doubt housing offices or flats) is a slightly odd but no less iconic stone sculpture of a naked male, which was referenced in a famous local tune popularised by a mostly local act, The Spinners. The sculpture almost matches the campness of a much smaller, metallic one depicting a naked young soldier sporting what looks like a Teutonic hard hat, which is located in the Adelphi Hotel ballroom.

The view from Harold's bathroom

When I booked the Sir Harold Wilson suite, I discovered the rather odd fact that it is actually known as Room 101. In fact it isn’t really known as the Sir Harold Wilson suite at all. The scouse-sounding and very helpful guy who took my phone reservation confirmed that he had typed into the booking that the ‘Sir Harry Wilson suite’ i.e. Room 101 had been requested. After successfully checking in to the suite we heard an older person’s voice outside the door informing her husband that Harold Wilson had stayed here, and evincing a disinterested response.

Wilson is mentioned on the Adelphi Hotel’s website, as is his ‘preferred suite’ where we stayed. However the Huddersfield-born man, part schooled in Liverpool, who represented a Liverpool constituency for 33 years, 13 of which as Labour leader and eight of which as prime minister, remains almost an incidental figure in the catalogue of famous people who’ve either made Liverpool their home or who were born and raised there.

If that’s true of Liverpool, it’s much more so nationally. In 2006, a decade after his death, a metal sculpture of Wilson was unveiled in Huyton by the then Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair (the only Labour leader to serve more years as PM than Wilson). Blair is reported as saying that his fondness for Wilson was because he was the first ‘modern British prime minister’, more or less code for the fact that he was (more or less) working class. Wilson was a ‘modern prime minister’ because unlike every predecessor save Lloyd George, and patently unlike Blair (or his successor but one, Cameron), he wasn’t privileged. Wilson’s immediate predecessor as Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, was, according to Wilson's biographer Ben Pimlott, superiorly conscious of the huge class gulf between them, while some of the upmarket press mocked Wilson for being a philistine. Yet he had a first class brain, got a first class degree from Oxford, and founded the Open University – the only Wilson policy legacy that Blair noted. Only a year before Blair unveiled the sculpture, he gave a speech to the Labour conference in which he attacked the Wilson-led Labour governments of the 1960s for being responsible for Thatcherism by failing to understand the depth of economic and social change. Ironically, just prior to entering No 10 for the first time Wilson urged change on both sides of industry in his famous ‘White Heat of Technology’ speech. As prime minister Harold Wilson would be weakened by often senseless industrial action; his successor and close colleague Callaghan was destroyed by it. However Mr Blair’s simplistic attack on, in effect, Wilson’s legacy was rich coming from the man ultimately responsible for fiscal mistakes that subsequently helped undermine the Brown Government amidst global economic meltdown. In supposedly praising Wilson, Blair failed to mention the neo-colonial American war that he kept British troops out of (Vietnam), in marked contrast to the one Blair sent British troops to fight in (Iraq). If, as the comment attributed to Churchill has it, ‘to govern is to decide’, then Wilson’s decision to in effect break with Washington (and for which the UK economy was punished by the US) was very much about governing - and doing so in the national interest.

Perhaps you don’t get remembered or properly respected as a British prime minister for the wisdom of what you didn’t do – as opposed to the damage caused by much of what you did (Margaret Thatcher). However Wilson did much in general to expand higher education and its availability to people of his background. A BBC story written in 2009 about long abandoned car production in the Merseyside town of Speke begins with a reference to what it calls ‘the dark days of the 1970s’. While there was much industrial action, there was also much less inequality pre-1979, and, for all the faults of Wilson’s public housing and welfare programmes, far less homelessness. As we walked around the centre of Liverpool the number of very visible homeless people on the streets was shocking. No doubt they congregated in the centre to try to tap visitors coming out of pubs, but their plight in the middle of winter was, and is, very real.

'V' performed by Jonny Magnanti at the St. Leonard Pub

Jonny Magnanti is the first actor to interpret Tony Harrison’s still controversial poem,‘V’. Like Tony Harrison, Jonny Magnanti had a working class upbringing in Leeds. In his familiarity with the Leeds dialect, its cadences, and the reality of what for some at least is everyday speech, Magnanti took us right to Harrison’s parents’ municipal graveyard, daubed with swastikas and profanity and littered with discarded cans of Harp larger. For nearly an hour in three separate performances this week, thirty-odd people in the St Leonard pub in London Road were drawn-in to Harrison’s (or was it Magnanti’s?) private world where a painful internal dialogue took centre stage.

Years before he wrote this poem in 1985, Harrison had sometimes used vernacular language in his poems so that people like his parents would not be alienated from them. Returning to Leeds for the first time in years, this middle aged man was seared by his visit to his parents’ desecrated grave and by the poverty and desperation of a city wilfully run down like the surrounding pits where the bitter confrontation of the Miners’ Strike raged. However the vernacular in ‘V’ came largely from the skinhead, the ‘yobbo’ that Harrison’s poem says he (or Magnanti) could have been, had not education taken them both to a different creative and material dimension. When speaking in the poet narrator’s voice, Magnanti delivered powerful and highly evocative poetry of a different kind, where the damp stone of the graves was suffused with images of coal’s prehistoric geology and an eternity of unity as all bodies secrete together in an undifferentiated carbonic mass. The skin dismisses this part of Harrison’s delivery, contemptuous of this elitist ‘c***’. 

It’s probably debatable whether Harrison or Magnanti ‘but for the grace of God’ would, minus an advanced education, have become Nazi skinheads. In the mid-80s I remember unemployed northerners on the edge of, or fully absorbed in, the black economy down south. They were angry but very unlikely recruits to that particular form of working class politics. The dramatic effect, however, of the polarity that Harrison writes, and Magnanti so powerfully vocalises, is mining a rich seam indeed.

The strike of course hangs heavy over the poem and this performance, as it does any recollection of the 1980s. Fetch Theatre, who produced the performance, include brief audio interludes that politically and musically soundtrack the decade. Margaret Thatcher’s voice, and its dogmatic and propagandist interpretation of what the strike was about, still cuts to the quick in its absolutist sense of what she believed, or wanted, to be at stake. A warmer voice of a striking miner paradoxically becalms with its moving assertion of the social dimension to what some saw as just an economic issue.

Harrison wasn’t expressing the ‘V’ for ‘Versus’ sentiment that united many young Leeds men with their football team, and much else in their culture, against whoever they were ‘losing to’ that week. Harrison’s ‘true’ voice says that the reference to Leeds football club, ‘United’, that had been spray-painted on his parents’ grave could perhaps be left there. While having no religious faith himself, he says that it could be a sentiment of hope that they would, someday, be together again. More broadly, the poet expresses in ‘V’ the wish that his nation could be united; not divided down the middle in what is presented as a wilful exercise in class politics.

Magnanti gives expression to Harrison’s guilt upon making one of his rare homecomings; not privileged but having escaped from the miserable powerlessness that the poem argues spawns such ‘yobbos’. The occupants of these tombs – butcher, baker and publican - would have wanted such vandals punished, Harrison’s non-skin voice observes. His own Dad, elderly and isolated, had felt increasingly alienated too, not recognising the city he grew up in and uncomfortable at the presence of ‘coloureds’ (his father’s most ‘liberal’ term) whose culture he didn’t understand and whose shops obliged him to walk ever further for a tin of baked beans. Leeds was, according to ‘V’, ‘beef, bread and beer’ and that is what was being played out, positively and negatively, among the tombstones. There is much humanity and realism in Harrison’s poem and in Magnanti’s telling of it, including language and sentiment that can still be shocking, but now perhaps for an otherwise very sympathetic audience.

Jonny Magnanti in 'V' - a portrait by Peter Mould www.stagesnaps.com

I don’t think the poem’s telling is intended to evoke some guilt in the audience. However Magnanti’s delivery and the audio soundbites combined to trigger in me sharp memories of the class-conscious politics of the time. I felt a familiar conflict between total sympathy for miners resisting deliberate and spiteful socio-economic engineering and contempt for those whose cynical political calculations helped lead them to defeat. Thatcher’s self-serving ‘enemies of democracy’ rhetoric aimed at working class industrial action did have a ring of truth for some, like me, on the compromising, trimming, centre-left. The poet detected where the Labour leadership was heading; two references to the Leeds MP who led the Labour Party when Harrison was a much younger man, Hugh Gaitskell, and his ‘smooth’ appeal to what the ‘other side’ wanted to hear, were signposts of what was beginning to happen when ‘V’ was written.

If this performance of ‘V’ still makes people uncomfortable, for the contemporary resonances of its subject matter, for its explanation of where social resentment can come from, and because of the disconnect that perhaps many of us feel from those at the sharp end, then it only proves the poem’s abiding power and particularly this performance of it. 

Jonny Magnanti said to me afterwards that the Leeds LitFest have not only thrilled him by inviting him to perform ‘V’ there, but have asked him to sit on a discussion panel about it with Tony Harrison. ‘You couldn’t make it up,’ he said. You couldn’t make up the language and concerns of ‘V’ up either. Rooted in the real and poetically connecting to other possibilities: not ‘Versus’ but ‘United’.

Labour's forgotten the 100th anniversary of working class men getting the vote

The Labour Party has forgotten that it's also the 100th anniversary of working class men getting the vote, all of them. In 2018 Labour is saying that the fight for women's equality still goes on, but has a problem saying that the fight for class equality must continue too. 

Yet ironically today's Labour Party, under a pro-Brexit, left-wing leadership, has no problem getting liberal middle class support. It's the (white) working class (who are often pro-Brexit) that Labour is still struggling to reconnect with. Without them Labour won't win the next General Election. 

Unless Labour can somehow rediscover its class credentials throughout Britain without alienating the metropolitan middle class, the Tories will win again. This requires being progressive on tax and social justice, tough on getting British workers into employment and reducing immigration, and asserting a UK identity that’s inclusive in terms of class as well as gender, sexuality and ethnicity. 

Building a broad class base is good democratic politics. For most of its history Labour has understood that this, rather than narrow sectarian interests, are what brings it power. It can’t, and shouldn’t be expected to, propose class war. However Labour didn’t lose elections because it talked about and tackled class inequality. 

Addressing this subject now could bring back some of the badly needed white working class voters who didn’t back Labour at the 2017 General Election, despite Jeremy Corbyn having long been a Brexiteer.

Labour leadership ballot: A victory for common sense

I have just mailed my Labour Leadership ballot. It was a tough decision to bring myself to vote for “none of the two sad saps whose old hard left and neo-right wing cabals, respectively, have done so much damage to the Party since the 2015 leadership election”. But it had to be done. It is only sad that a spoilt virtual ballot isn’t possible too, given that the greater majority of members have and will vote online.

I don’t like being an abstainer, but Militant-reborn (Momentum) versus Mr Smith’s cynical little “retail offer” of left-sounding bargains for the undiscerning shopper in the Labour leader market place is absolutely no choice at all. The UK isn’t a presidential system. The morons at Labour HQ who invited me to vote for “Labour’s candidate to be the next Prime Minister” should consider improving their knowledge of our hard-won democratic political system rather than taking courses in law, computer studies or perpetual revolution. Our last wholly inadequate Labour leader didn’t understand our political system either, and bequeathed us Labour (would-be) prime minister primaries. Consequently, votes to determine Labour’s parliamentary leader have been bought by a ragtag bunch of leftist discontents who’ve rarely sullied their hands with campaign material in a general or local election, let alone knocked on doors outside of red rosette donkey territory and tried to persuade a member of the working class of the joys of socialism and unrestricted immigration.

Four of the only six Labour prime ministers in British history - MacDonald, Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan - were elected by the votes of Labour MPs only. The other two were for the most part supported by the Parliamentary Party but either defined themselves against Labour (Blair) or were wholly incapable of talking to the country (Brown).


Once Jeremy has taken us to our worst general election defeat since 1918 and, please God, resigns, can we take the parliamentary leadership vote away from party members, registered supporters and affiliated members, and place it where it belongs? I mean with those who are Labour parliamentary representatives, and who know what it’s like to talk to voters and do not see parliament as merely a platform for mobilising the masses toward some imagined socialist nirvana. Then perhaps plausible Labour parliamentary leaders (and thus plausible British prime ministers) can throw their hat into the ring, such as Hilary Benn and …eh…..eh…Yvette Cooper…eh…

Careful what you wish for: Brexit will feed popular anger, UK breakup and Labour irrelevance

This morning’s news confirmed the dread I felt going to bed last light. The Brexiteers have won. Just as disturbing are the domestic party political consequences. People who campaigned for the UK to Remain in the EU feared a Leave vote would parachute a more right wing Tory into No 10, in addition to unravelling employment protection legislation for British workers, and reducing living standards for all. 

Two of these three elements are already happening, although Boris and Gove may have to wait until October to see which of them claims the prize. A run on the pound, if sustained, will not only push up prices but put off badly needed foreign investors whose wealth we need to finance the growing deficit in trade and services. When it is freed from the “shackles” of the EU, an even more rightward Conservative Government will also be free to reduce British workers’ rights at work.

The new UK leadership will be under enormous pressure to confirm that a Leave vote will produce a major change in the one issue that sadly dominated the campaign: European immigration. Goodwill among remaining EU member states will be necessary for the UK to retain access to the European Single Market. It will be very hard to generate, whatever the claimed influence of domestic car makers over German chancellor, Angela Merkel. Why make secession from the EU seem relatively painless when you are desperately trying to keep the union together amidst bail outs and migration crises and the possibility of other member states, or at least their emboldened far right parties, seeking a similar vote? If the UK is not allowed to stay in the European Single Market then the common standards that the EU enforces – the right to holidays, and maternity and paternity pay, even for temporary workers – can be swept away by the new Tory administration.

Perhaps a change at the top of British politics in the context of UK negotiations with the EU over the terms of its exit will create a public clamour among a newly empowered British electorate for a UK General Election in the Autumn. After all, can the angry British public continue to say “What’s the point in voting, they’re all the same?” However, even a divided Tory Party would trash a Labour Party that firmly, and conservatively, sided with the status quo – remaining in the EU – especially one that may still be led by Jeremy Corbyn. The man who told white working class Labour voters angry about deindustrialisation and public spending cuts that unlimited migration was a good thing sounded even more out of touch with Labour’s traditional values than the Blair acolytes he so roundly trounced in last year’s leadership election.

The last time the Labour Party faced a working class revolt over immigration it used the pragmatism of office to swiftly reduce it, specifically targeting Commonwealth immigration in hurried legislation issued in the wake of the mass appeal nationalism of Enoch Powell. Blair in government was disinterested in the contemporary version of these concerns, which is less about colour but is partly about culture and religion. Being a believer in neo-liberal economics he didn’t consider using the option of a five year delay to mass Polish immigration.

Middle class metropolitan liberals like to shop around in the multicultural store. Britain for them is about values, imperfect and contradictory as they may be, not culture or identity. Mr Brown famously said of a voter who was the epitome of traditional Labour support that she was “some bigoted old woman.” The EU referendum debate did not mention culture, the “c” word that still doesn’t get mentioned in polite political company, yet it was there all the time, just below the surface, and Remain had nothing to say about it. In fact the Remain campaign’s leading figures had precious little to say about immigration at all, other than it was simply a “good thing”, until the final stages when a few relatively centrist Labour figures mused unconvincingly about trying to restrict it from the rest of Europe.

We do need migrants, skilled and unskilled, but we also need to properly train our own workforce, enforce a genuine Living wage, clamp down on illegal migrants, and punish hard those who sidestep our workers in favour of cheaper workers, wherever they come from. (The UK would actually have had the EU on its side if it got tough with UK-based companies who import cheaper European labour in preference to indigenous workers). We also need to keep out multi-millionaires who add nothing to our economy than increased property prices, and the plethora of servants that travel here (from outside the EU) to ease their indolence.

Labour is now officially a sideshow. Following Brexit and Scotland’s almost inevitable second stab at an independence vote at a time more or less of the SNP’s choosing, it will struggle to ever get into office again. The EU referendum result will now take second place to a three month Tory leadership campaign in which 150,000 party members will choose the British Prime Minister. Parliament is plainly not sovereign. The last two British PMs to resign in office were at least replaced in a vote of their party’s MPs. Cameron says the will of the British people cannot be ignored, but he has this morning used the powers vested in him by the royal sovereign to put exit negotiations on ice until his party’s latest little local difficulty is resolved.

The British people exercised their version of sovereignty in yesterday’s “advisory” referendum. They will (eventually) get their way. I do not think they will like the outcome. Overall migration will not go down that much, unemployment will rise - chiefly because of the decline in our EU-related trade and investment, rights for those in work will be weakened, tax revenues will fall and public services will very definitely be cut. British, or rather English, politics will be a debate conducted pretty far to the right, and the disaffection among those dispossessed by the impersonal economic forces unleashed by successive governments since the 1980s will grow. Perhaps into this void a reasonable sounding English nationalist will emerge. Nigel? Maybe this is genuinely what a majority of (English) voters would wish for.

Careful what you wish for: Brexit will feed popular anger, UK breakup and Labour irrelevance

This morning’s news confirmed the dread I felt going to bed last light. The Brexiteers have won. Just as disturbing are the domestic party political consequences. People who campaigned for the UK to Remain in the EU feared a Leave vote would parachute a more right wing Tory into No 10, in addition to unravelling employment protection legislation for British workers, and reducing living standards for all. 

Two of these three elements are already happening, although Boris and Gove may have to wait until October to see which of them claims the prize. A run on the pound, if sustained, will not only push up prices but put off badly needed foreign investors whose wealth we need to finance the growing deficit in trade and services. When it is freed from the “shackles” of the EU, an even more rightward Conservative Government will also be free to reduce British workers’ rights at work.

The new UK leadership will be under enormous pressure to confirm that a Leave vote will produce a major change in the one issue that sadly dominated the campaign: European immigration. Goodwill among remaining EU member states will be necessary for the UK to retain access to the European Single Market. It will be very hard to generate, whatever the claimed influence of domestic car makers over German chancellor, Angela Merkel. Why make secession from the EU seem relatively painless when you are desperately trying to keep the union together amidst bail outs and migration crises and the possibility of other member states, or at least their emboldened far right parties, seeking a similar vote? If the UK is not allowed to stay in the European Single Market then the common standards that the EU enforces – the right to holidays, and maternity and paternity pay, even for temporary workers – can be swept away by the new Tory administration.

Perhaps a change at the top of British politics in the context of UK negotiations with the EU over the terms of its exit will create a public clamour among a newly empowered British electorate for a UK General Election in the Autumn. After all, can the angry British public continue to say “What’s the point in voting, they’re all the same?” However, even a divided Tory Party would trash a Labour Party that firmly, and conservatively, sided with the status quo – remaining in the EU – especially one that may still be led by Jeremy Corbyn. The man who told working class Labour voters angry about deindustrialisation and welfare cuts that unlimited migration was a good thing sounded even more out of touch with Labour’s traditional values than the Blair acolytes he so roundly trounced in last year’s leadership election.

The last time the Labour Party faced a working class revolt over immigration it used the pragmatism of office to swiftly reduce it, specifically targeting Commonwealth immigration in hurried legislation issued in the wake of the mass appeal nationalism of Enoch Powell. Blair in government was disinterested in the contemporary version of these concerns, which is less about colour but is partly about culture and religion. Being a believer in neo-liberal economics he didn’t consider using the option of a five year delay to mass Polish immigration.

Middle class metropolitan liberals like to shop around in the multicultural store. Britain for them is about values, imperfect and contradictory as they may be, not culture or identity. Mr Brown famously said of a voter who was the epitome of traditional Labour support that she was “some bigoted old woman.” The EU referendum debate did not mention culture, the “c” word that still doesn’t get mentioned in polite political company, yet it was there all the time, just below the surface, and Remain had nothing to say about it. In fact the Remain campaign’s leading figures had precious little to say about immigration at all, other than it was simply a “good thing”, until the final stages when a few relatively centrist Labour figures mused unconvincingly about trying to restrict it from the rest of Europe.

We do need migrants, skilled and unskilled, but we also need to properly train our own workforce, enforce a genuine Living wage, clamp down on illegal immigrants, and punish hard those who sidestep our workers in favour of cheaper workers, wherever they come from. (The UK would actually have had the EU on its side if it got tough with UK-based companies who import cheaper European labour in preference to indigenous workers). We also need to keep out multi-millionaires who add nothing to our economy than increased property prices, and the plethora of servants that travel here (from outside the EU) to ease their indolence.

Labour is now officially a sideshow. Following Brexit and Scotland’s almost inevitable second stab at an independence vote at a time more or less of the SNP’s choosing, it will struggle to ever get into office again. The EU referendum result will now take second place to a three month Tory leadership campaign in which 150,000 party members will choose the British Prime Minister. Parliament is plainly not sovereign. The last two British PMs to resign in office were at least replaced in a vote of their party’s MPs. Cameron says the will of the British people cannot be ignored, but he has this morning used the powers vested in him by the royal sovereign to put exit negotiations on ice until his party’s latest little local difficulty is resolved.

The British people exercised their version of sovereignty in yesterday’s “advisory” referendum. They will (eventually) get their way. I do not think they will like the outcome. Overall migration will not go down that much, unemployment will rise - chiefly because of the decline in our EU-related trade and investment, rights for those in work will be weakened, tax revenues will fall and public services will very definitely be cut. British, or rather English, politics will be a debate conducted pretty far to the right, and the disaffection among those dispossessed by the impersonal economic forces unleashed by successive governments since the 1980s will grow. Perhaps into this void a reasonable sounding English nationalist will emerge. Nigel? Maybe this is genuinely what a majority of (English) voters would wish for.

Poetry, politics and song with Ragged Trousers and Hastings Friends

The Ragged Trousered Cabaret (RTC) and Hastings Friendship Group (HFG) came together for a gig at the welcoming Owl and Pussycat Lounge on Sunday to raise funds for HFG and to reflect on contemporary popular struggle.

RTC has a long history of cultural and political engagement, inspired by the famous book by the one time Hastings-based writer Robert Tressell and by the anti-trade union mood of the 1980s. Members of the print union Sogat originally formed the cabaret group in 1984 in Sutton, and subsequently famous names like Mike Myers and Harry Enfield trod its boards. In this collectivist spirit Ann Field began the evening with a long, and somewhat stern and pedagogic, talk about trade union struggle. Ann was mindful of the possible new beginning the day before with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, and spoke of the latest Conservative legislative proposal to “reform” the unions. Ann though was much more preoccupied with her scheduled talk on the Wapping print dispute. It was fascinating to be reminded of the context and detail of that mid-1980s conflict. However, as there were few in the room not old enough, nor I suspect not engaged enough, to remember it well, Ann was preaching to the converted. Still, it was all in a good cause: for HFG and for remembering an emblematic setback for organised labour.

A poem by poet Tom O’Brien continuing the same broad theme was read out by Warren Davis. Not for children or the faint-hearted, it was sweary and simplistic and went down very well. 

Songs mostly in the spirit of workers' struggle were performed by HFG regular Tom Cole. He sang great interpretations of numbers by Woody Guthrie ("Ain’t Got No Home In This World" and "Pretty Boy Floyd"), Ewan McColl ("My Old Man") and Billy Bragg ("Between The Wars"). I am more familiar with Ian Dury’s “My Old Man”, an altogether less maudlin and less precious take on his working class father. “Between The Wars”, inevitably perhaps, did the business for an audience in no doubt as to where its allegiances, political and cultural, lay.

Tony Peak followed. He has a poetic slant on struggle too. The inspired “Bottle Alley” tells of poverty and misery in a renowned Hastings street. Tony disparagingly referred to his own daily writing of sonnets, but chose to perform some in song. His ode to the late local Labour leader Jeremy Birch, was equal parts Sixth Form and Shakespearian.

Pete Donohue, literary editor at Hastings Independent Press, is a lively performance poet. He poured through loose sheaves of paper, sometimes performing one before literally discarding another. Pete brought to life many of the street characters familiar to those who live in the area. He is also not afraid to “do dark” either, whether the audience could cope or not. 

Paul Crimin, a HFG stalwart, largely avoided the theme of the day. In fact, singing “I Don’t Want To Talk About It”, a song originally performed by Crazy Horse but made famous by Rod Stewart, was a surreal counterpart to the worker-orientation. However it’s a wonderful number. Paul introduced the equally powerful Tears for Fears’ song “It’s A Mad World” as reflecting how he felt after Corbyn's election i.e. the (welcome)“Alice in Wonderland”  mood that Tony Peak referred to earlier. Given the choice, many present and outside the room would probably prefer the possibly bumpy ride of a Jeremy Corbyn prime ministership to yet more wars of intervention under either a Tory or a Neo-Blairite administration.

"Song for Jeremy" was the second number performed in memory of the new Labour leader's namesake: the late, great Jeremy Birch. It was sung at his memorial service and many joined in on this occasion too (see picture below).

Sue Johns was for me the highlight of the night. An avowed Cornish speaker, feminist, shop girl, and, most importantly, a brilliant declaimer of her own verse. Sue’s poems alternated between the exquisite and the very funny. I wondered why she isn’t much better known, but that is probably just my ignorance. She appears to have had many works published after all, and has been in a number of anthologies, including one, “The Poems of Labour”, which contains, she noted, an introduction by Roy Hattersley, that cultural doyen and former Labour deputy leader. 

JC is arguably a return to the days when cultured people were at, or near, the top of the party, as opposed to the Blairite acolytes who engineered the tacky and downright dangerous takeover of our high streets by bookies and pay day lenders. A cultural reassertion would be no bad thing among those who wish to better the lot of labour rather than serve it up patronising estuary English and a professed love of pop and football. 

Sue works in a department store in the Kings Road Chelsea, a job that once, she said, saw her narrowly avoid an encounter with Lady Thatcher. The final line of the poem, “Shop Girl”, references her employer and her status, “Shop girl: never knowingly understood.” Another poem told of her desire to go down on Kirsty Wark whenever she sees her on Newsnight, whatever death, destruction and misery she is talking about. Sue’s final poem on the night, "Before The Pussy Riots", quoted the Quran, the Hindu text the Manusmriti, and Tennyson’s 'Charge of the Light Brigade' in a highly emotional account of honour, marriage and violence.

Patric Cunnane of RTC lightened the mood somewhat with his often hilarious poetic observations. One concerned a Cuban man employed by the state to put granny specs on the life-size John Lennon statue in Havana whenever tourists want to pose next to it. He then takes them off the statue in case they get stolen. 

The night finished, I am told, with a rousing musical performance by Rob Johnson. Following the sound of my stomach sadly meant that I had left before Rob started performing. Next time I’ll bring sandwiches to HFG’s sometimes quite long shows.

• The next HFG gig is this Sunday (September 20th) at the Gecko Bar, St Leonard's at 4pm. It is in aid of Horizons Community Learning. 

Corbyn threatens to unleash activists on elected Labour MPs

If I was remotely waivering about NOT voting for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader, the latest pronouncement of the man has clinched it for me. Corbyn is threatening to discipline elected representatives of the people (i.e. MPs) with the pressure of un-elected activists if Labour MPs don't back him as leader. 

If this sounds familiar it is partly what the neo-Blairites thought they could achieve by setting up the registered supporters scheme a couple of years ago. It is absolutely what Benn unleashed in the 1970s and '80s. 

Remember "extra-parliamentary action"? Benn used it, and the force of his acolytes and Troskiyite fellow-travellers in the Party, to try and force his way into the leadership of the party against the wishes of many elected Labour MPs and of the then party leader Jim Callaghan and then Michael Foot (both far greater men than JC could ever dream of being). 

It was Foot who, as leader, told the Party Conference in 1981 that "Labour Party democracy" has to be a marriage of what the members want and what the Parliamentary Labour Party wants. Foot knew his history - Labour history and British democratic history. The semi-Burkean in him didn't believe that MPs were elected by the public to be told what to do by party activists accountable to no one but themselves.

Labour is doomed if Corbyn really is the answer

After last night's LBC Radio leadership debate I am starting to think that the UK Labour Party is doomed. Perhaps the best hope is the proposed party reform to trigger a new leadership election with a small amount of MPs' support (and possibly some members' backing too)....but only if the party thinks about the need to build a national (UK) coalition to win a general election and about who has the personality and intellect (gravitas even) to do it. This possibly means persuading/begging a few people to leave the back-benches/semi-retirement including Alan Johnson and David Blunkett. It certainly means thinking seriously about people like Hilary Benn. 

Corbyn "won" last night's radio debate because even a bearded prig from the old People's Republic of Islington (who like the other 3 hasn't had a real job in his life despite what they all claimed last night) can "do human". The other 3 forfeited their claims on this test, and confirmed that after the public revulsion at spin and expenses they still don't "get it", when they wouldn't answer whether they'd give Ed Miliband a job in the shadow cabinet that one of them will have to put together in 2 months time. 

I screamed at the radio at this point and almost voted for Jeremy on the spot. God help us (and I mean that).

There is a wider revolt going on and it's affecting the leadership election. The most democratic one ever (and perhaps that needs to be changed in the future too). Many of the new and old party members, quite a few of those who have bought their vote at £3 a pop in the appalling "registered supporters" scheme brought in by right-wing Labour lovers of US primary style elections, and no doubt a large number of the 50,000 plus trade union members (whose unions contribute to the Party) who are registering to vote individually, are in revolt. They are UK Syriza/Podemos/English SNP, and they aren't going to take it any more. And the three "serious" candidates still don't get it......

Labour leadership contest - a battle of the nice, the bland and the mostly unqualified

Yvette Cooper, who is seeking the Labour leadership, has ministerial experience and been an MP since 1997. Tom Watson, candidate for deputy Labour leader, has been in parliament since 2001 and has ministerial and top flight select committee experience. They're both absurdly overqualified and should withdraw now. Obviously people who've only been an MP for 5 years and only held junior shadow ministerial jobs are the ones to be taken seriously.

In the end though it will be Burnham or Cooper who come out on top, with the seriously unqualified Liz Kendall coming in a strong third. Caroline Flint might get the deputy leader job. Her campaign email emphasises her apparently impeccable proletarian credentials, always popular among the comrades, and then belatedly goes on to talk about the Party's need to connect with people of all backgrounds. Oh yeah Caroline. Any ideas on how to do that? Andy gives us "aspiration"; the buzzword everyone echoed as soon as Labour lost.

The only member of the Labour front bench with gravitas, passion, and the intellectual heft to face up to the dire state of the party after one of its worst performances for 80 years, is Hilary Benn. And he's backing Andy Burnham.

Benn obviously assumes he wouldn't win. A calculation perhaps based on him unsuccessfully challenging dear Harriet's assumption as deputy leader in 2007, and popular dislike of political dynasties. Or maybe, like another very able "might have been", Alan Johnson, he doesn't really hunger for it.

The Conservatives are the natural party of government

Labour has never been the “natural party of government” in this country. Harold Wilson’s claim was based on only one resounding election success under his leadership. Tony Blair, like him or loathe him, was perhaps a natural prime minister, the only Labour leader who was able to reach out beyond Labour’s comfort zones and into the socio-economic parts of Britain without which you cannot command a sustainable majority. Even in the face of his Iraq horror show, Blair led his party to its third comfortable election success.

Scotland is now pro-nationalist, and even perhaps willing to vote for independence in a year or two’s time. It has long been another country in political terms too. While it was revolting over the poll tax, England considered the mild radicalism of a Welsh Labour leader and, shyly, voted for John Major’s Conservative Party. Yesterday the Tories got a majority after hurting poorer “hard working” families for five years while those not in need of in-work welfare benefits feared that the Labour Party would somehow jeopardise the flimsy certainties of what, statistically at least, is an economic recovery.

The NHS is the exception to the rule, the last surviving nationalised industry and one that, broadly speaking, is popular. Labour may have won the 1945 election because its promise to introduce socialised medicine was the most believable, but after only six years in office it was out for another 13. Labour’s two election victories in 1974 were barely deserving of the name. The Labour government that lost office in 1979 had essentially been a minority one for most of its rule.

Now Labour has to consider whether a more authentically social justice and home rule message in Scotland and Wales will remotely help it in England (where Westminster elections, after all, are decided). To paraphrase Neil Kinnock, if you think that that is right, then go into the semi-detached homes of people struggling to pay their mortgage in the south of England and “tell it there, tell it there.”

The United Kingdom is under threat, and the very self-serving economic reasons why we joined the Common Market are increasingly being seen in England as not being upheld by the EU today. What will Labour do next? A lurch to the left will this time definitely consign it to the dustbin of history. There will be no electoral reform to save it, while Labour has lost Scotland (and its parliamentary support) whether it becomes an independent sovereign country or not. To be elected and then to govern in England will be impossible for Labour without being able to both appeal to aspiration and not somehow abandoning its so-called electoral base. In the 2015 election Labour absurdly pandered to that base without offering anything more than half-hearted apologies for past errors and an unconvincing line on deficit and debt reduction. The outcome was its third worst General Election result since 1935.

The recession was a fork in the road. In this election Labour tried to plough down the middle by refusing to say it had overspent in the last government whilst claiming it would reduce the deficit faster, but somehow more fairly, in the next. Electing a new leader who mouths the same (and, ironically, non-inclusive) platitudes about hard working families will not cut it, in England or Scotland. Something major needs to be tried. Reaching out to everybody, right across the Union, is an even taller order right now. Perhaps more honesty would help. If Scotland hasn’t already left the building by the time of the next Westminster election, tell voters that you will work with the SNP precisely to save the Union, that we should stay in the EU for the sake of jobs and, yes, for the sake of political stability across Europe, and that ever-expanding health and welfare budgets are not the answer. Otherwise, just carry on regardless.

The Destruction of the UK State: Betrayed by Ignorance and Miscalculation

The seeds were sown in 1978 when the SNP and Welsh Nats blackmailed Jim Callaghan and his minority Labour government to hold a referendum on devolution. Those in favour couldn't muster 40% of registered voters in Scotland, so it fell by the wayside. Devolution was clearly rejected in Wales. The SNP's representation collapsed in the May 1979 UK General Election, but the idea of home rule for Scotland was there.

If the Labour Gov't ('74-'79) had given two fingers to the petit tribalists of the British Isles (including trying to please both Ulster Unionist and SDLP MPs at the same time) and gone to the country in 1978, they would have won with a workable majority. We all know what happened next. Perhaps the decline of the post war UK political, economic and social order, and specifically of subsidised Scottish steel mills and coal mines, was inevitable, and would have fed deep frustrations north of the border. However the personality and ideology of Margaret Thatcher, and limited Scottish support for the Conservatives under her, helped bolster the SNP. Then comes wise Mr Blair and devolution for Scotland and Wales, arrogantly thinking that a semi- federal arrangement eternally steered by Labour politicians on the ground, buoyed by grateful celtic clients, would keep the UK settlement intact.

In 24 hours a bunch of kids and some older political illiterates will probably break up the UK state. A tribal war has been successfully waged, as if Westminster was the headquarters of the English Colonial Administration. Westminster is so loathed - by all quarters of the UK - that the fact that its MPs were elected by us, including Scottish residents, seems somehow to not be understood. A "democratic deficit" is one of Salmond's rallying cries, yet every UK subject determines who forms the UK Government. Unless they can't be arsed. 

The trouble is that if there is a narrow "No" vote tomorrow then a belated attempt to fire up enthusiasm for the political process in all parts of the UK will see devolution across its countries and regions. Scotland's nationalists may not be satisfied. The English rejected regional governments in the late 1990s (except in London). If they're offered their own national parliament then they will probably secede from the Union themselves, after the UK (possibly minus Scottish votes) comes out of the EU in 2017. We're doomed...

Tony Benn - messiah or devil?

Ed Miliband said that Tony Benn was a champion of the powerless, a conviction politician, and somebody of deep principle. In other words all the things that Ed isn’t.

I am sad at Mr Benn’s death. He was the reason why, in 1981, at just 17 years of age, I joined the Labour Party. I was electrified when I heard him speak alongside the open-shirted dockers’ leader, and communist, Jack Dash at the National Museum of Labour Party History.

I also heard him at a Tribune fringe meeting in Brighton shortly after he lost the deputy Labour leadership contest to Dennis Healey. A Bennite sitting two rows behind us shouted “Judas” at Neil Kinnock who had voted for Healey. “Is Benn Christ then?” responded a guy sitting right behind me. That was the atmosphere of the time. He was for some a messianic figure, and if you were young and idealistic this was especially beguiling. For others he was the devil incarnate. I remember a Daily Express cartoon depicting him in a Gestapo uniform. This was a man who served during the war as an RAF pilot. This was not something he ever particularly emphasised, but not because he was ashamed of it. He was a patriot but of a different kind. His pride in British parliamentary democracy made him opposed to the EU, NATO and the influence of the US over UK foreign policy. Like Benn said of the Labour Party, he was "more Methodist than Marxist." 

He had begun his political life as a fan of the then Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, who, whilst a socialist to my mind, was subsequently seen by the hard left as the Tony Blair of his day. Benn’s commitment to democratic socialism hardened in office in the 1970s under Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. He never resigned his cabinet post. After 1979 he wielded the knife against the government in which he had just served, and intoned about the great betrayal he had apparently witnessed from the inside.

His followers would demonise anyone insufficiently left-wing and would fellow travel with the enemies of democratic socialism. He does have some responsibility for the departure from the Labour Party of some very able politicians (and Gaitskellites) who founded the SDP in 1981, and especially for the 1983 election manifesto. Despite that devastating electoral defeat, the strength of the Labour left, of whom he remained the unofficial leader, made it hard for Kinnock to criticise what had to be criticised about violence and intimidation in the 1984-5 miners’ strike. After the loss of the 1987 general election, Benn largely became irrelevant to the party’s fortunes.

He could though still be powerful critic of the realism that so many of us went along with. I met him in February 1998 on the eve of an aborted US/UK military build up in the Gulf aimed at Iraq. I muttered what I thought was a relatively inoffensive comment about how the Blair Government was just helping to "shore up" containment. Benn rebuked me sharply with a statement about the moral bankruptcy of what then had been seven years of containment.

Harold Wilson once said that Tony Benn immatured as he grew older. As Benn’s socialism became more and more unfashionable, he ironically became something of a national treasure. However Benn’s radical opposition to the anti-democratic whims of the free market and his criticism of the closeness of some UK governments to Washington have arguably more relevance than ever.  

Mandela is dead and so is debate

Nelson Mandela is dead. I feel relieved for him and his family. Nauseated at the often absurd coverage of the event in the UK media. Sad at yet another confirmation that the era of great men has given way to the almost universal reign of the indifferent, the ordinary, the petty-minded administrators of tax revenue.

He was to come to prominence in a very different age. His cause, long before it was made fashionable by pop stars and simple-minded sloganisers, obliged both Conservative and Labour governments in Britain to look to what they thought was a higher national interest than majoritarian politics in Africa. The 1980s version of this debate was used by the left of centre Channel 4 News in Britain to settle party political scores with those, mostly dead or irrelevant, in the Conservative Party who did not worship at the shrine of Mandela. Smug, self-righteous, sanctimoniousness abounds, a chance for people to feel good about what records they bought, what stickers they wore, what demos they went on thirty years ago.

The sin of having equated him with terrorism is once again ritually trotted out, as if it is only a term of abuse and not ever a tactic of politics and of war. To target or threaten civilians or civilian life, to seek to wreck or undermine public stability in order to realise a political objective, this is the stuff of armed struggle. It is what the Royal Air Force did against German cities during World War Two and it is what the armed wing of the ANC began to undertake under Mr Mandela’s command before he was incarcerated. It may well be the action of freedom fighters too. The French Resistance killed not just for revenge but to achieve political goals by spreading fear. That is what terrorists do.

Nelson did not agree with the targeting of civilians. He was arrested before the shedding of civilian blood became more acceptable in ANC circles and before he would either have had to resign or accept responsibility for it. I have heard no debate in the last 24 hours about these issues nor any serious assessment of the wisdom of Mr Mandela in going as far as he did in reassuring business and, effectively, white interests that in office neither he or the ANC would rock the boat that much. The legacy of that “pact” continues to this day.

It is ironic perhaps that people all over the world are so ready to deify Nelson as a secular saint when in their own country they bemoan the fact that democracy is “merely” about one person one vote every 4 to 5 years. Twenty two years after his release South Africa struggles to be even that, given the lawlessness and violence that is the stuff of daily life in some cities and the treatment that can be meted out to striking trade unionists.

If Nelson has one simple and yet rare political legacy to be applauded it is his promotion of inclusion and reconciliation. This from a man who could so easily have pursued narrow, sectional and vindictive interests. He is still revered by regimes and militant groups who have every interest in the slogans of liberation but who usually fail to understand that inclusion is not achieved by the denial of the humanity of the other. Just as he did not dress his cause in a racial colour, so Mandela had no sympathy with the communal politics of many of his sympathisers in the Middle East. These are attributes worth remembering and worth revering.