UK 'democracy'

[John Skelton]

John Skelton - I didn't know about Besna. The same old firms too. Who recalls this one? If your great grandfather had been a member of a union, you were on their blacklisted files. That sort of thing. It was on "World in Action". Nice.

There's something, however partial, to celebrate http://jerryhicks.wordpress.com/2012...est-in-pieces/.

[Lateralthinking1]

'Youth' is nearly always murdered....

Yes. You are probably right.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

. i think it is about narrative in normal times but it seems to me that this time we have problems with the processes and platforms that enable the utterance and discourse of narratives ... ukuncut & the occupy movement are maybe the only interesting politics at the moment ... by all means let us have a transparency and account of taxation for example but not the selective devices devised by mr osborne ....

....why is it so impossible to put forward a proposition that is genuinely held by sane intelligent individuals to be good for the whole of society without the assertion and those proposing it being subject to the vilifications by other politicos and media ... they think that is effective discourse, yet most people do not even bother to know what any such assertions are based upon and for ... uk democracy is just not serious and is pretty minimal ... uk politics is all we seem to have ... the mobs packs and plutocrats own the day

1960s, 1970s and 1980s who were very left wing

indeed they were in my experience lateral .... and any observer of the Labour Party and its electoral performance in that period will admit that the left did not exactly get support from the voters and in general were hammered .... interestingly the hard right has experienced a similar fate ....in votes any way and yet these failed behemoths set the terms of debate the parameters of discourse and narrative ... it may take us fifty or more years to develop a new political crystallisation that reflects the experiences of the last sixty years or so and the end of the Cold War

the coalition results from the votes at the election ... the electorate is not in any normal state of unanimity .... normal politics is not resumed except for the influence of big finance and corporate power ....

[eighthobstruction]

http://rationalsecurity.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451be3669e201116842dbb0970c-800wi

[mangerton]

[QUOTE=Lateralthinking1;142988]How many are Nationalists as I would be living in Scotland or Wales? And how many now feel completely disenfranchised and totally disgusted with it all?
QUOTE]

Me for the SNP, and have been for many years!

If it were not so, I should be feeling "completely disenfranchised and disgusted with it all". The sooner Scotland gets independence the better.

[scottycelt]

Lateralthinking1. "Right wng nationalists need to get their heads screwed on ..."

I'd much prefer to see a few get their heads screwed off.

I'm uneasy about the statement that if one lived in Scotland or Wales, one would vote SNP or PC. I've no doubt the claim that they have a committment to services is valid. But since I am english and live in England, does that persuade me to vote BNP or EDL?.

A common misconception outside of Scotland (and Wales) ...

The SNP and PC are broadly left-of-centre and completely non-racist. They both have members of different ethnic origin and are about as alike to the BNP or EDL as Charles Kennedy is to Jean-Marie Le Pen.

In Scotland, at least, that is why so many are prepared to vote SNP, whilst not necessarily favouring complete separation from the rest of the UK.

[Serial_Apologist]

any observer of the Labour Party and its electoral performance in that period will admit that the left did not exactly get support from the voters and in general were hammered .... interestingly the hard right has experienced a similar fate ....in votes any way and yet these failed behemoths set the terms of debate the parameters of discourse and narrative ... it may take us fifty or more years to develop a new political crystallisation that reflects the experiences of the last sixty years or so and the end of the Cold War

As one of those attracted to radical left-wing politics in the late '60s/'70s, one of the main problems one kept under one's hat while the old orthodoxies (and quite a few shibboleths) again took hold was the impoverishment of theory and its re-divorcing from practice. This in different guises spread right across the radical left, probably only not affecting the various anarchist non-groups (irony) who lived the inseparability of the personal from the political in inner-city squats and teepee communities in often half-baked attempts to create environmental sustainability micropolitically, to be either picked off for challenging the Proudhon tenet of property being theft, or laughed off by tabloid press while the major battles became about protecting jobs in unsustainable manufacture and mining without at very least outlining plans for co-operatives-based alternative, socially useful production, swords into ploughshares. Who remembers the Institute for Worker's Control? Few because the mainstream far left of which I was a part dismissed them as reformist, their ideas unrealisable under capitalist relations of production and distribution. The SWP, even the IMG, one of the more intelligent Trotskyist orgs of the 70s in which I was involved for my sins, talked the Leninist rhetoric of smashing the state, overlooking the capitalist state as a very different animal from that of late 19th C/early 20th C Europe or America, albeit still primarily geared to protecting the class status quo. The small part of the left that in the 60's had theorised anti-consumerism, (and thus implicitly that orthodoxy of taking more of the cake being a sine qua non of progress), and had unmasked the material bases of peer-group pressure, the mass media, the modelling of self-image, pointing out en route the family as the psychologically conditioning medium of conformism, was marginalised by the rest as "diversionary", thereby augmenting the logistical problem of too few activists of the wrong sociological background to relate where it mattered chasing too many battle fronts. The "spiritual", often referenced by Marx without religious conotations, was dissed as petty bourgeois individualism, the stuff for which middle class Viennese visited Freud and New Age flogged crystals) and any visionist call to foresee how society could be lived and worked differently met either with "We'll deal with that when the time comes" or some quasi-religious faith in the inevitability of historical processes.

Now of course the underhand ways in which the tabloids furthered the interests of the ruling class and maintained the passive compliance of much of the working class are up for examination because it is safe to do so, has done its job, and as in Victorian times "morality" can be reimposed on all our corruptible natures in falling for all this gumph for so long and in so many "feckless" ways. And of course "we are all in it together", now that even the rich who so kindly proffer their expertise in what is so misleadingly regurgitated as "wealth creation" look to a future in which the once-thought craziest prophet of environmental doom might well have been right.

[Serial_Apologist]

Interesting. There's a "where are they now?" programme in there somewhere. We know where Shirley Williams, Charles Kennedy, Chris Huhne and Mike Hancock are now, where Polly Toynbee is, where David Owen is, where Andrew Lansley, Chris Grayling, Greg Clark and Danny Finkelstein are, to my mind unbelievably......but what about ordinary members?

At the time, I had hoped that my fellow founder members were a bit more normal than that list as a whole. My "neutral" politics A'level teacher was in it, as I discovered to some all-round embarrassment in a party meeting, so too the teacher I most respected in the politics department at my university but who else? One local guy I campaigned for can't even be found on Google.

Why didn't I join the Liberals? Why didn't others? The start of something new. That breaking of the mould. But it was the economics. The Liberals were a party of good issues. Their economics less certain. So it was that idea of social democracy, references back to post war Labour, a bit of Macmillan too, the stunningly successful German and Scandinavian examples.

Blairism was very far removed from what was in my head. With hindsight, perhaps we were all wider apart in our values that it seemed. How a Lansley can be "broad left" at university and now to the right of Thatcher heaven knows. It is somewhat ironic that it was formed at the time social democracy across Europe started to be attacked to end up dead in the water.

So how many now are Tories or Blairites? How many Greens? How many went further to the left as they became older - what we are told is the opposite direction to how most people travel? I'm happy to be in that select club.* How many are Nationalists as I would be living in Scotland or Wales? And how many now feel completely disenfranchised and totally disgusted with it all?

*Footnote - "I'm happy to be in that select club" but there's also a feeling that I am pretty much where I always stood and that it was everything else that moved to the right, presenting itself as the same and for some peculiar reason getting away with it.

The SDP was formed, with massive tabloid support, (remember that?), to split the Labour Party then moving leftward, rather than save its redeeming Attleeian ideological residue under a new banner. The ruling class needs an alternative for when it's main ally, the Tories, fail to deliver the goods. Some of the left, the Tribunites, believed Labour could be won over to its Alternative Economic Strategy; others in the Party hoped of creaming off disillusioned left reformists into a new Marxist party. The Marxist left was riven by sectarianisms going all the way back to the times of Marx and William Morris. Within the Labour Party Militant were the worst sectarians, their strategy for such it was fixated on one line summarised in the maxim of "A third, and third and a third" regarding the relative weightings to have recommended influence over policy between the unions, the membership and the NEC. Had Militant not behaved as the bully-boys they were, the tabloids wouldn't have been offered a field-day of generalisations and misrepresentations; the Socialist Workers Party remained aloof from all this proclaiming itself as already the new Marxist party. Michael Foot could be portrayed by the meedja as a well-intentioned naive buffoon in the control of trade union bureaucrats feathering their own nests and communists infiltrators hell-bent on turning Britain into a version of the Soviet Union. As if!! What happened was, Kinnock came in, ridiculed Militant from the LP conference rostrum and used their entryism as a pretext for wholesale expulsion of the left and remaking of Conference into a consultation pretense forerunner of focus groups. Conference no longer represented grass roots membership or accountability - the way lay open for Blair to get rid of Clause 4 from its constitution.

[Lateralthinking1]

it may take us fifty or more years to develop a new political crystallisation that reflects the experiences of the last sixty years or so and the end of the Cold War

I agree. I also agree with scottycelt's comments on the points raised by umslopogaas.

Serial_Apologist - Your comments are full of merit and also complex. I can't do them full justice. However, I do take the point that some of the fracturing was away from theory as well as between interpretations of theory, if I understand you correctly. Then the key issue of worker ownership. I can't quite understand what sounds a little like too much self-condemnation around past affiliations. Things are as they seem at any given time. Historical reference looks different over time. And it isn't exactly as if you are now standing at each election for UKIP. There is a perfectly reasonable course that you have taken in my humble opinion.



I still hope to learn from forum members one day more about the emergence of the left counter culture of the 1960s. I was a kid and still find it all fascinating and a bit unfathomable. My feeling is that it was very, very, different from the 1950s. I don't know if it needed Stalin well out of the way before it could have happened. I note that The Sun was relatively recent - 1964 I think - and before that what? The Daily Herald? I am not sure quite what that was all about in the 1950s. Perhaps the new tabloids were recent enough to trigger impetus against them without the power to stifle. Plus Loach, Ochs etc but how significant were they?

International matters were influential - Vietnam etc - and yet capitalism wasn't as rampant as it was to become. Arguably, it was becoming of more help to ordinary people - basic consumer goods, some home ownership - rather than a burden. And then there was the whole White Heat of Technology stuff. That must have offered some sort of promise to many. So it is all a bit of a mystery to me how it ever flourished in the first place. I'm not sure if a year could be placed on when it happened or huge reason given to how it happened. My feeling is that it emerged c.1963 and was largely over by the 1973 oil crisis? It was certainly over by 1984.

In short, what took people at school to, say, the SWP in 2-3 years? And why not now?



By the way, recently I have increasingly sensed that my association of "turn on, tune in, drop out" with the left has been some sort of naive compliance with a bit of a media myth. Your comments hint at that too as did a clip someone recently posted. Still, there were certainly leftish themes there. Of that there is no doubt. So this in a funny way brings us back more closely to today's protest moments where the messages seem to be quite a mixed bag. No doubt Richard Branson would be happy to comment.

[Serial_Apologist]

I agree. I also agree with scottycelt's comments on the points raised by umslopogaas.

Serial_Apologist - Your comments are full of merit and also complex. I can't do them full justice. However, I do take the point that some of the fracturing was away from theory as well as between interpretations of theory, if I understand you correctly. Then the key issue of worker ownership. I can't quite understand what sounds a little like too much self-condemnation around past affiliations. Things are as they seem at any given time. Historical reference looks different over time. And it isn't exactly as if you are now standing at each election for UKIP. There is a perfectly reasonable course that you have taken in my humble opinion.

I still hope to learn from forum members one day more about the emergence of the left counter culture of the 1960s. I was a kid and still find it all fascinating and a bit unfathomable. My feeling is that it was very, very, different from the 1950s. I don't know if it needed Stalin well out of the way before it could have happened. I note that The Sun was relatively recent - 1964 I think - and before that what? The Daily Herald? I am not sure quite what that was all about at the time. Perhaps the new tabloids were recent enough to provide impetus against and yet not to stifle. Plus the Loach's and the Ochs's but how significant were they?

International matters were influential - Vietnam etc - and yet capitalism wasn't as rampant as it was to become. Arguably, it was becoming of more help to ordinary people - basic consumer goods, some home ownership - rather than a burden. And then there was the whole White Heat of Technology stuff and Open University. That must have offered some sort of promise to many. So it is all a bit of a mystery to me how it ever flourished in the first place. I'm not sure if a year could be placed on when it happened or huge reason given to how it happened. My feeling is that it emerged around 1963 and was largely over by the 1973 oil crisis?

It's a big story that still needs telling, and probably beyond my powers to deliver, subject as they rightly would be to criticism in terms of detail and theoretical coherence.

You're right to re-state the importance of Vietman: that issue came to trump those of the New Left, partiuclarly in the cultural field as represented by Loach et al, reflective as those great figures of the time were of the general consensus so many of us were brought up on - namely that war was forever a thing of the past, that my means of demand-management capitalism had changed for all time and would deliver jobs and consistent improvement for the masses for the foreseeable.

One thing Vietnam did was revitalise internationalism in the hearts of many, many young people; the idea that "late capitalism" had transferred the main focus of class struggle to the developing world was to be expressed in solidarity with those fighting the spread of multinational and military control, particularly in Latin America where one witnessed resistance against CIA activities supportive of the US-imposed or backed dictatorships. The whole rigmarole of "free choice" and the purposes to which education was being directed came under question, especially, in Europe, (and I'm oversimplifying by not talking about what was happening in the States), marginalising the position of Communist parties on the left - not merely as provedly prone to what had led to Stalinism, but also as purveyors of "socialist in one country", the rationalisation behind defending the "socialist" Soviet Union at all costs.

The consumer revolution of the late '50s/'60s was correctly understood, along with Wilson's "white heat of technology", as the rhetoric it was, consequent on Keynsian blood transfusions into technologically underinvested industries: many of the British boss class continued believing that the sun would never really set on the British Empire, and remained set in their ways as Germany re-equipped and then Japan. As the economic hangover and comeback to the western economies - the consequence of unprofitability that drove business off to parts of the world offering cheap labour and political repression and the promise of higher returns hit home in the early 70s - the left turned it's attentions back to the domestic front; I well remember the SWP making great virtues of its proletarian credentials as it sought to forsake its re-beginnings in the student radicalisations of '68 and recruit amid the now-declining industries. The issue of "defending the Soviet Union/Cuba/China/etc was important even to the left of the CPs insofar as the removal of large areas of the globe from capitalist exploitation post-1917 was seen as a gain, and the Stalinist and post-Stalinist bureaucracies "interruptions" in a process of political revolution that would see them off. No one, it seems to me - though I was politically inactive by the late 1980s - had foreseen the exhaustion and sheer demoralisation that had come to afflict a people subject to near-on 60 years of Stalinist repression and inefficiency - not even Gorbachev!

The "liberation" beyond the Iron Curtain, and opening of the statised economies to western economic interests, completed the picture of the demise of the "old left" in the West, with its illusory notions of change. Many have become attracted to "green" politics, which for me is right, resuscitating many of the early utopian socialist ideas that placed humanity in the balances of natural order, whikle seeking to make full use of what science has discovered and technology capable of, in the right hands.

[Lateralthinking1]

Yes, Serial_Apologist, I see a lot in that which I have glimpsed or more - war a thing of the past, things always going to improve, the fiery education debate which was very "tabloidy" here, the internationalism - Cuba etc, the fall of the Iron Curtain. I am not surprised to hear that the white heat of Wilson was seen as rhetoric. I find a little more difficult to take on board your point about consumer goods. There is no doubt at all that life is better with a washing machine than it ever was with a mangle.

But it seems to me that consumerism went from improving the basic procedures in life to enabling people to have a few extra luxuries here and there. Then later it was, with the full encouragement of Governments, "lets get our hands on as much as we can with credit cards" and more recently a bit of scaling down but giving priority to luxuries that are redefined as essentials.

I do wonder whether theory on the left suffered for becoming international in focus. What was gained in the width may have provided slighter foundations for practical change than if there had been more drilling down at home. By the 1950s, we had in Britain quite a few blocks on which to build, from Chartism onwards. I have always felt that the unions should have striven for greater democratic power in the 1960s. That they then went for huge pay increases was a sign that they had lost. Those things - all the Red Robbo stuff and people clocking in and out quickly as Micky Mouse - it was an absolute field day for the tabloids.

A New Way Forward

I have a cunning plan. I expect the powers-that-be to over reach themselves, having injected themselves with added arrogance boosters. By this, I mean the legal requirement to vote. I believe that it may be coming to our promised land sooner rather than later, that is when disillusionment really sets in and the voting figures plummet further. Expect a lot of disgruntled people talking about a dictatorial country. They won't be happy. Already even in general elections, 25-40% prefer just to say no.

And I think that this might just be the next moment of moments. AV was the last one and that moment was lost. This time, there will be a very distinct vacuum between what people are being told to do and what they actually want. A new political party could fill that vacuum. I'm not sure exactly what it would be like but it would appeal on the basis of negativity towards the current system rather than positive theory. It would have some sort of readily identifiable name. It might be absent of detailed policy and have just a few headline Twitter like soundbite principles. It would be aimed directly at all those who generally choose not to vote. And it would have a natural constituency so large that conceivably it could win a general election.

[cloughie]

Yes, why not, as Clegg & Co have done a pretty good job, imo ...

There are welcome Lib Dem policies that would never have seen the light of day under the Tories, like a more realistic approach towards the EU (silly single Cameron veto notwithstanding which had Clegg privately furious) and significantly higher tax allowances for the lower paid. There has been obvious LD influence in other areas of which I certainly don't approve, but that's hardly surprising in the great scheme of things.

I have voted Lib Dem in the past, and also the Tories and Labour at different times, depending on the circumstances, and will no doubt continue to do so again. Not all of us possess a particular political tribal loyalty.

Who was it that said that politics is 'the art of the possible'?

How very true!

Looking at some of the things that the Tories have achieved with a slight brake from the LibDems, I dread to think what they might have done without it - amazing how the right seems to blame the Lib dems for getting in the way with their small party, well excuse me but if the Tories were so attractive why did they not get a bigger majority. This country got what it voted for! If it helps curb excesses again, I shall vote LD, and certainly not for the party that wants to downgrade the south-west to a second-class economy!

[teamsaint]

Once you are in the political system you are an insider.Once you are an insider, the whole weight of the system begins to work on you.
These days, people like Rachel Reeves, a labour fron bencher, are insiders, (in her case HBOS and bank of England) before they start.
The current labour front bench couldn't even bring itself to support public sector workers who were striking to save their pension rights.

Big money interests control our system top to bottom. Don't listen what they say, look at what they do. And what they do is at every stage reduce power and money in the hands of the many, and transfer it into the hands of the few. In this , I would include government money endlessly being put into capital projects(and big compaanies) rather than into the pockets of those that need it.

The system is run by the wealthy, for the wealthy.
I don't intend to vote for any of the big parties for the forseeable future.

I'm not sure the LD's have done any good, (though I wish they had). I strongly suspect that cameron is very happy with how things are.

[Serial_Apologist]

Somehow I don't think the political establishment will bring in compulsory voting; apathy serves them well: they can offload blame onto apathy, apathy onto lack of god 'ole British Backbone that Won the War, etc etc.

If the left's focus on internationalism had one good outcome, it was undoubtedly in helping creating an atmosphere hostile to racism. Internationalism was important - not just for that reason, or out of some kind of challenge to Christianity to speak out for God's People - but because it recognised the internationalism of capitalism's modus operandi, and saw the necessity of building structures in parallel. The trade unions should have done more in this respect when practicability allowed. Indeed, there is the international organisation of trade unions whose name I forget; but trade unions have always prioritised nationalist-based protectionist thinking in this area, and this led to some nasty consequences when in the early '60s black workers from the Caribbean were seen as taking bus drivers' jobs and undercutting wages and conditions in Bristol, for one place.

Returning to consumerism. Yes of course people have been alleviated from unnecessary backbreaking work (women especially of course) by the advent of affordable washing machines. It took a long time for them to be affordable for the masses: I well remember crowded laundrettes in the 1970s - there's still two operating in the immediate vicinity here. The point is that goods, including cars, washing macines, clothes, are not made to last under capitalism, operating as capitalism does on the principle of "planned obsolescence"; and the other point I was making about consumerism (but didn't flesh out) was that fashion obsolescence keeps people buying in order to be seen to be keeping up with what peer group presure demands if we are to be seen as fitting into society and its norms. The pressures on teenagers today shaping their ideological mindsets are enormous compared even to my day when you looked poor for wearing darned socks. It also provides jobs - but as I was saying, no longer here, but where the source of labour is cheapest. Protectionism seems invidious and disingenuous versus principle, but what are we to do? Wait until the Chinese workers unionise and fight for THEIR workers' rights? It will happen one day, for sure, but what will have become of the planet in the meantime, eh??

Sorry btw - I usually post the respondee's post above my reply.

Yes, Serial_Apologist, I see a lot in that which I have glimpsed or more - war a thing of the past, things always going to improve, the heated education debate which was very "tabloidy" here, the internationalism - Cuba etc, the fall of the Iron Curtain. I am not surprised to hear that the white heat of Wilson was seen as rhetoric. I find a little more difficult to take on board your point about consumer goods. There is no doubt at all that life is better with a washing machine than it ever was with a mangle.

But it seems to me that consumerism went from improving the basic procedures in life to enabling people to have a few extra luxuries here and there. Then later it was, with the full encouragement of Governments, "lets get our hands on as much as we can with credit cards" and more recently a bit of scaling down but giving priority to luxuries that are redefined as essentials.

I do wonder whether theory on the left suffered for becoming international in focus. What was gained in the width may have provided slighter foundations for practical change than if there had been more drilling down at home. By the 1950s, we had in Britain quite a few blocks on which to build, from Chartism onwards. I have always felt that the unions should have striven for greater democratic power in the 1960s. That they then went for huge pay increases was a sign that they had lost. Those things - all the Red Robbo stuff and people clocking in and out quickly as Micky Mouse - it was an absolute field day for the tabloids.

A New Way Forward

I have a cunning plan. I expect the powers-that-be to over reach themselves, having injected themselves with added arrogance boosters. By this I mean, the legal requirement to vote. I believe that it may be coming to our promised land sooner rather than later, that is when disillusionment really sets in and the voting figures plummet further. Expect a lot of disgruntled people talking about a dictatorial country. They won't be happy. Already even in general elections, 25-40% prefer just to say no.

And I think that this might just be the next moment of moments. AV was the last one and that moment was lost. This time I think that there will be a very distinct vacuum between what people are being told to do and what they actually wan't. A new political party could fill that vacuum. I'm not sure exactly what it would be like but it would appeal on the basis of negativity towards the current system rather than positive theory. It would have some sort of readily identifiable name. It might be absent of detailed policy and have just a few headline Twitter like soundbite principles. It would be aimed directly at all those who generally choose not to vote. And it would have a natural constituency so large that conceivably it could possibly win a general election.

[Lateralthinking1]

I agree with you, S_A, on most of those points. Certainly race. The point on fashion is interesting. Make adequacy seem like poverty. Get them to buy themselves out of perceived poverty. Consequently make them more likely to fall into real poverty.