Why I’m backing Brighton and Hove’s Green administration

Last Thursday evening, Labour and Tories in Brighton collaborated to pass amendments to the Green administration’s proposed Budget that froze Council Tax – in contrast to the Green proposal for a 3.5% increase – and to make corresponding cuts.  Following the vote in favour of the amendments, the Green group on the council – with one exception – voted to accept the amended budget.

It has been a matter of real controversy within the Green Party, both in Brighton and nationally – fortuitously the vote took place the day before the Green Party conference opened in Liverpool, and a motion critical of the Brighton and Hove Group was not debated in a move that has apparently deepened the controversy and led to resignations from the Party.

My immediate gut instinct was to side with those who argued that the Green group in Brighton could not continue in office having lost the Budget vote.  It’s worth considering the background – the administration had embarked on one of the most comprehensive consultation exercises ever seen on a local authority budget, against the background of swingeing, ideologically-motivated cuts in central Government funding for local authorities.  Moreover, the Green decision to support a modest Council Tax increase was taken against the background of what was effectively a bribe from central Government – get extra cash this year if you freeze council tax, but commit to funding cuts in the longer term.

Labour and Tories proposed near-identical amendments to the Budget (while denying collaboration, although if they didn’t the draft speaks eloquent volumes about the closeness of thinking between Labour and Tories in Brighton) and the Labour amendments were passed.  Most of the Green group then voted for the amended Budget.

As I said, my gut feeling was that the Green administration could not carry on.  But I now realise, on reflection, that their actions were right for the Party and right for the people of Brighton and Hove.

Had the Green group tried to vote against the amended Budget, their moral authority as an administration would have been finished.  Every measure they proposed, every aspiration, would have been torn apart by Labour and the Tories and their friends in Brighton’s local media on the grounds that the administration had voted against giving itself the means to do so.  It would have become a lame duck administration, its authority shot to pieces.

So why continue in administraion?  If the Green administration resigned, the Tories would come to office.  Brighton and Hove Tories:

• want every school in Brighton to become an academy;
• would overturn the city’s commitment to a living wage;
• support the privatisation of all Brighton’s care homes;
• would eviscerate the innovative Green proposals to improve Brighton’s public realm and make the city a liveable place;

and during the course of the debate

• supported  nursery closures while attacking the decision of the Green administration to sell the Mayor’s personalised number plate;
• repeated the racist lie that the city is “awash with travellers” – an inflammatory fiction that Tory MPs and Councillors continue to push, in contrast to the adminstration’s aim to produce a long-term solution to the traveller issue;
• complained that the Green group contained too many incomers to the city (see previous bullet point);
• backed an illegal proposal to remove facility time from the Council’s unions (a measure which of course provides a consultative route that makes the council more efficient and saves money)

I am wondering quite why some critics in the wider Green Party – including those proposing motions at the Green Party conference – see the installation of an administration believing these things as the best way in which Green councillors could discharge their obligations to their electors.  Of course, one can understand that none of them have had the experience of administration and the wider responsibilities that that brings; but they need to get beyond the belief that this is a theoretical debate. Like it or not, Brighton Greens took on the administration of the city in the full knowledge that they would be a minority administration facing years of cuts.  The idea that you could walk away now on a point of principle and that the electorate would continue to have faith in you seems to me to be utterly misguided.

Could a minority Tory administration do all those things?  Possibly not, but the chaos of trying to do so is not something that should be lightly dismissed.  Moreover, how could we be sure that Labour would not back them?  As I’ve written elsewhere (scroll down to comments) the really interesting thing about Labour in Brighton is the way that its rhetoric and politics  has developed in a way that aligns them so closely with the Tory position on how local government is financed – indeed on what local government is for.

Those on low incomes are hit hard by cuts in services – while a coucil tax freeze favours the better-off.  It’s a simple economic fact.  In other words, Labour still claims to speak for the poor and vulnerable but in general is advocating policies that have precisely the opposite effect. And it appears to have bought into precisely the sort of low-tax rhetoric that Pickles uses to justify his assault on local authority power. One would like to think that Labour would know better – but recent history suggests otherwise (students of urban development will realise that Labour’s urban legacy in Government will be the erosion of local democracy, the privatisation of public space, the gated estate, the private mall and the CCTV camera – in the essentials of urban policy, as in so much else, Labour and Tory are increasingly indistinguishable).

So why the inconsistencies? It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Labour in Brighton is still fighting the 2010 General Election, and still smarting at the fact that, having taken for granted that it would get the progressive vote in this city, it lost to a candidate who outflanked it on the left and continues to provide real opposition to the coalition in a way that the national Labour leadership just doesn’t appear to have the stomach for. It’s now indulding in toddler politics – still smarting over its defeat and throwing a toddler hissy fit that must be giving Brighton’s Tories quite a lot of quiet satisfaction. It looks very much like a group that has lost the will to argue for change and is content with throwing its toys around instead; and one that will do almost anything in its power to discredit the Greens.  Labour may once have been a party that knew the difference between statesmanship and an emotional spasm but pronouncements from its leaders suggest that it’s really quite comfortable with a neoliberal tax and spending agenda and that attacking the Greens counts for far more than defending the vulnerable.

It seems to me that not the least of Labour’s offences – especially through its denial of collusion with the Tories – is to treat the electors of Brighton as if they were stupid.  It contrasts very powerfully with the Green administration’s commitment to real consultation.

In this situation, it seems to me that however painful the decision to vote for the amended Budget – and it would not have been easy – and to carry on in administration, it was the right one and the one that does most to protect the interests and aspirations of the people who put their faith in the Party at last year’s Elections.  To have walked away would have condemned the Party as a home of people who have nice fluffy ideas but run a mile when the going gets tough – and would seriously have undermined Caroline Lucas’ position as the only MP and Party Leader who is standing out against the three-party neoliberal consensus.  I have every respect for the people within the Green Party who argue that the Group should have resigned, but I am very proud indeed of our Green Councillors in Brighton and Hove for continuing the fight for the values that I and thousands of others across our city voted for last May.

Miliband, Balls and the death of functioning democracy

These have been dispiriting times for those who oppose the ideology that the Coalition Government is enacting with a brutality that should surprise no-one, but somehow always does (mostly because they haven’t read the Orange Book). In the week that we have seen the House of Lords approve a huge cut in the living standards of thousands of vulnerable people through the abolition of Disability Living Allowance (DLA) – with Liberal Democrat lords leaping happily through the division lobby to ensure that yet another piece of Orange Book ideology is slipped into place – and in which we have seen Government Ministers debating whether to award the Queen a new yacht for her Diamond Jubilee – we see the official opposition throwing in the towel.

There has been some controversy about what Ed Balls actually meant in his comments about a future Labour government and cuts in an interview in last Saturday’s Guardian. The fact that so much ink has been spilt in trying to decipher Balls’ gnomic utterances is in itself part of Labour’s problem; an opposition that cannot express itself clearly has obviously got a problem. Those who defend Balls argue that he is simply being realistic – that by the time Labour comes to office it will confront a situation in which deep cuts have been made and which will form the baseline for what Labour does. But Balls went much further than that – he stated that public sector workers will continue to take pay cuts and public expenditure decisions that have eviscerated the living standards of the most vulnerable will not be reversed. It’s all very well to talk about the need to preserve jobs, but in doing so Balls has failed to notice that it is the economics of austerity that is putting jobs at risk. The clear message from Balls is that the poorest in society will continue to bear the costs of the failures of economic elites, and talking about tax evasion is no more than a cosmetic sop. He’s adopted the Tory axioms and assumptions and has allowed Cameron, Osborne and the Orange Bookers to drive the economic agenda.

This is serious, but not surprising. Labour has long since ceased to be a party that challenges the neoliberal ideology, but in the past the complicity has gone by default rather than being explicit. It seems to mark something of a turning point, though, in the tone of political debate; after a year and a half of coalition government, the Tory party is resurgent and appears to dominate debate.

But there’s a subtext too – one that is reflected in the current debate about independence for Scotland. I have spent quite a lot of cyber-ink on this blog talking about crises of democratic legitimacy; this appears to be the moment at which Westminster politics finally took leave of its democratic pretence. It’s not just the fact that a ruling party which dared not expose the extent of its ambitions to the electorate, and which achieved a little more a third of votes cast in 2010, is now left without any meaningful opposition to its imposition of  a feral neoliberal agenda – it’s that the ethos of the ruling coalition is defined, not by what it told the electorate in 2010, but what it tried to conceal. And now the official opposition has joined in.

Whatever that may be, it is not a healthy democracy. The large majority of the electorate did not vote for this – which is why the Westminster neoliberals use the language of necessity, of realism, of common-sense to describe a set of ideas and values which are largely unsupported by any empirical evidence. Austerity is failing and the burden of that failure is falling overwhelmingly, and in some cases almost exclusively, on the people who are least able to bear it, while the perpetrators of the latest round of crisis continue to enrich themselves. It need not and should not be like that, but there are no voices in the political mainstream with the courage or insight to say so.

The obvious implication is that opposition to neoliberalism must now take place entirely outside the Parliamentary process. Three mainstream political party share the same assumptions and debate across ever-shrinking territory while the real questions facing our society are all about the validity of their consensus.  It is impossible to see any realistic prospect of change within the three-party system that is not forced from outside (and which depends on the mainstream media). The neoliberals realise this – the closing down of public space, the criminalisation of protest and the active promotion of hatred for the poor and vulnerable demonstrate this. Consider the case of the students – many of whom voted Liberal Democrat in 2010, the first time they were able to vote, on the basis of Clegg’s promise on tuition fees; when Clegg and his party of fools and liars pissed on their idealism they took the path of legitimate protest only to find themselves collectively punished by kettling and beating. Of course there was a strong element of self-interest in the student movement; but what I remember from that first demonstration in November 2010 was a belief that they were upholding democracy and had yet to learn that this was how Westminster politics worked.  Or we could ask why the neoliberals are so afraid of the Occupy movement and have, especially in the United States, deployed such extreme violence against it.  The threat is not about a few dozen people establishing camps; it’s about the risk that questions will be asked and answers proffered that blow apart the fictions on which the elite justifies its power and wealth.

Above all, this is the Government – and now the opposition – that chose to abandon evidence. I mentioned the way on which the political elite has sought to demonise the vulnerable. It has done this through a combination of spin, insinuation and downright dishonesty.  Its guiding principle is not truth but pandering to the prejudices of a mass media which is, at almost every level, a fantasy factory. Those of us who have long understood the evidential base for climate change, or watchers of the US Republican primaries in recent weeks, or even followed the genesis of the Tea Party, will recognise the methods; it seems that all mainstream Westminster parties are striving for a politics of unsupported ideological statements in which victory goes to the producer of the most attractive lie. For all the language of realism and common-sense it is those who criticise neoliberalism from the Left who remain grounded in the world of evidence.

The sight of a political elite abandoning wholesale the intellectual disciplines of empiricism is deeply disturbing.  It’s very easy to criticise the position of the Republican Right; but our political mainstream is, in essence, no different. What Labour has done is make that abandonment of empiricism public and obvious.

Returning to Miliband and Balls, I for one am getting very fed up with hearing special pleading by people whose loyalty to Labour as an institution is greater than to the people on whose behalf Labour used to speak. Labour, after all, began as a movement to give a voice to the voiceless – to bring the trade unions, with their everyday experience of the daily lives of working people, into Parliament.  It now joins in a political consensus that diminishes those authentic voices, and spins away the witness of ordinary people about their lives.

Clegg and the shafting of Middle England

A new post on how, despite Liberal Democrat rhetoric, tax changes due to take effect in April will hit middle and lower income families hard while benefitting the better-off has appeared at our sister blog, Bad Economics

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Cameron, the veto and the abuse of EU process

As the political furore over Cameron’s use of the veto at last week’s EU Summit rages on, complete with the entertaining spectacle of Clegg throwing his toys and demonstrating his and his party’s impotence in the process, I’ve been trying to get my head round the legalities of what the 26 other European nations have agreed.  The British media have, as ever, done an appalling job of reporting the detail of the decisions in Brussels although this piece in the Telegraph raises many of the essential issues.

I should say that I would not only normally consider myself as strongly pro-EU but spent much of my last ten years in the Civil Service working on EU business, negotiating directives and other legal instruments and, it sometimes seemed, spending more time in Brussels than in Whitehall.  Issues of legality and propriety were always at the heart of those negotiations, as well as of the most effective way of maximising UK influence.

At the heart of the operation of the EU is that is has almost no direct law-making powers.  With the exception of a small number of largely technical regulations, all EU decisions have to be adopted into the domestic legislation of Member States; when EU laws are broken or ignored it is not the perpetrator who is subject to sanction but the Member State who is called to account.  One of the implications of the Lisbon Treaty is to make it easier and quicker to take so-called infraction proceedings against Member States who do not comply with EU law.

The proposal on the table at the Summit would have involved new treaty obligations to require Member States to remain within tight fiscal guidelines – including strict limits on deficit financing – and strict requirements to submit national budgets to Commission scrutiny.  It was, in effect, a writing of neoliberal doctrine into the EU constitution, and represented a major power grab from national politicians.  It closely reflects the appointment of unelected, “technocractic” governments in Greece and Italy to take the decisions that bankers wanted.  The proposals have been closely linked with German ambitions, and the reluctance of an economically strong Germany to be constantly bailing out Europe’s fiscal basket cases, but in my view it’s about something much wider than that – it’s about circumventing democracy and identifying the EU with an ideology to a far greater extent than now.

To anyone on the left this is pretty disastrous.  It is possible to be pro-EU and of the left – the political agenda of more democracy and reducing the power of nation states is a radical one, and the role and power of the European Parliament has expanded in recent years, partly through the Lisbon Treaty.  At the level of practical politics it is difficult to see how many of the Member States who have strongly resisted the incursion of Community competence into domestic financial affairs – Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Poland and, yes, in most circumstances, Germany – as well as the UK could have swallowed it.  It is hard to see how the most obnoxious elements could have survived a negotiation, and it is worth recalling that Treaty changes have to be ratified in Member States.  It seems to me that the UK would have had a strong negotiating hand in such a situation, although the spectacle of the British government arguing against a neoliberal agenda would have been an ironic and entertaining one.

Of course the immediate need was to convince the markets that Europe was doing something – especially with the next tranche of Greek debt payable in a few days’ time.  Would the speculators and bankers have understood the constitutional subtleties? I guess not – the public commitment to austerity packages may have convinced them they had got their way.

Instead, Cameron has used the veto – a tool that quite obvioiusly you should never use in the first stages of a negotiation – and isolated the UK in Europe.  The other 26 Member States have rallied around the concept of a “treaty within a treaty”.

But what does this mean? What force does it have other than a general agreement between a group of countries?  Where are the sanctions?  The leaders’ comminique talked of using existing institutions and legislation, but is vague on the detail. Ultimate responsibility for interpreting European law lies with the European court – so what is the basis for their decisions.  Not an informal agreement between a group of Member States, for sure.

Green MEP Jean Lambert tweeted that in her view many national governments were keen to wash their hands of responsibility for this crisis.  It seems intuitively realistic to me – and entirely in tune with the ambitions of neoliberalism to subvert political institutions – especially democratic ones (and the real impact of these neoliberal doctrines would be in Member States, not in Brussels).

There is a huge irony that had he not absented himself from the discussions by using his veto, Cameron could have presented himself as a good European, upholding the institutions of the Union and protecting both democracy and Member States’ rights. My guess is that it would have been a far more constructive negotiating tactic which would have garnered the support of the UK’s traditional allies like the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands.  But of course Cameron may not have wanted to look like a good European – the debate over Europe is so toxic and infantile in the UK that, even had he possessed the imagination to understand this, he might have preferred to go down the route of ranting from the sidelines.

But on the next steps forward, Cameron and Osborne seem to me absolutely right – this Treaty within a Treaty is outside the processes of the EU and should not involve EU institutions.  Meetings should not be held in EU buildings and Commission staff should not be involved in its preparation.  The European Court cannot have any role in its enforcement.  Above all, it is essential that such agreements remain explicity separate from the EU.  Some would argue that on many issues like the single market and the new approach to regulation, Brussels has sold the pass already to the neoliberals.  I believe the possibility of capturing the EU for progress and democracy still exists, and this agreement must be kept away from it.

This is what democracy looks like

I managed to visit the Occupy Brighton camp in Victoria Gardens for a few minutes this morning. I had been meaning to go for some time – this was the first opportunity.

I had seen in the media the extreme violence used against protests in New York and Oakland.  I had watched the Church of England make complete fools of themselves over OSX outside St Paul’s – a church that preached that Christ ejected the moneylenders from the temple, only to find themselves being pressed by the moneylenders bankrolling St Paul’s to move on a protest of which those clergymen with a bit of imagination realised Christ would probably have supported.  More locally, I had heard about Cardiff City council using archaic byelaws to move on a similar camp in Cardiff.

So the question I wanted to answer was a simple one.  Why have these camps got the establishment so rattled? What are they running scared of?

My first impressions of the camp were of a clean, quiet, calm orderly place – a few people going about their daily tasks peacefully, the calm a conspicuous contrast to the traffic roaring past a few metres away.  Just beside the camp were a number of patches where tents had been pitched, and since moved in order to allow the grass to grow back.  This was a place that was practising environmental responsibility in a very practical way.

One of the first things you see on walking into the camp is a sign pointing out that drugs and alcohol are forbidden.  This, an activist explained to me, was a collective decision – while there were some supporters who had addiction problems they were not permitted to stay overnight.  It’s a reminder that the reality of the Occupy movement is a world away from Cameron’s easy sneer about comatose protesters.

One of the things that was very clear was the public support the camp enjoys.  I was told that most people passing the camp were strongly supportive – and that local businesses especially so, providing real moral and practical support.  The police were taking the attitude that as long as the camp didn’t cause them extra costs and work, or increase crime, they were unconcerned – in fact, the presence of the camp had reduced crime in the vicinity.  Having a Green MP who unequivocally supported the right to protest made a real difference.

Talking for a few minutes to an activist it becomes clear that this camp is, as much as anything, about education – in its broadest sense.  It’s about workshops and discussions – and above all about collective decision-making and the challenges that such decision-making brings.  We talked about education, and about how young people were being priced out of the university system.  We talked about economics, and about how the camp was holding workshops on the myths of money.

We talked about the shock of getting past the lies and ideology of market economics to develop a coherent alternative – Occupy Brighton’s statement is here.

We talked about collective decision-making.  Yes, it was difficult.  Collective decisions had to be enforced, and more generally people were used to structures of authority and hierarchy.  But making collective decisions work through nightly meetings was at the heart of what the camp was about.  This was about finding better ways for people to live together.

And this perhaps was the reason why this movement has attracted so much hostility.  I’ve often written on this blog about our crisis of democratic legitimacy – both in Britain and internationally.  “Technocratic” governments in Greece and Italy, three main political parties in Britain fighting over an ever-smaller political battleground while indulging in ideological consensus – we are being told that the behaviours, structures and ideologies of market economics are inevitable and trump democracy.  Here were people who were standing up and asking hard and grounded questions, faced with a system that stared into the abyss in 2008 when the banks collapsed and is gripped with fear.  People are throwing off the shackles, and are beginning to realise that the world is both a simpler and more complex place than the elites would have them believe.  Elites talk about democracy and are content to permit it as far as it serves their interests.  Occupy protesters are eloquently advocating the real thing.  No wonder the reaction to this thoughtcrime has been violent.

Collective democratic decision-making? On a planet of seven billion people blighted by grotesque inequalities and vast environmental degradation?  It’s a tall order.  But can it be any worse than a system based on market economics, pollution and privatisation, and nationalism?

Leaving the camp, I walked up Brighton’s busy London Road.  The first shop you see is a pawnbroker.  Then – the charity shops, the pound shops, the shops leasing household goods to those who can’t get credit, Macdonalds, all presided over by the bulk of St Bartholomew’s church, that memorial to the well-heeled Anglicanism that sought to remake God in the image of the English gentleman.  And I saw people crushed by the daily grind of life under market capitalism – the mind-forged manacles, as Blake put it, still firmly intact.  Like William Morris at the end of News from Nowhere one had the sense of returning to a darker, sadder, less sane world.

 

Mr Toad votes Conservative

As the Tory Party prepares for its annual conference, the big idea appears to have been leaked a week early.  The Government is to consult on increasing the motorway speed limit to 80mph – Transport Secretary Philip Hammond claims that it will be good for business and will earn redress for the victims of the “war against the motorist”.

At almost every level this is a disastrous piece of policy.  Safety campaigners have already pointed out the potential impact on road casualties (especially on roads that have been engineered to be safe at 70mph); but that’s just the start of it.  The impact on business looks like a red herring – yes, most of our freight travels by road and since we simply don’t have the long trips (over 1000km) at which rail freight becomes viable it will stay that way.  But trucks are limited by EU law to 90kph (56mph) using speed governors so this move will make no difference to them – and the representatives of the haulage industry have long argued that what they need is not faster but reliable journey times.

So any time benefits will accrue to private, not commercial vehicles – and even here it looks as if the arguments just don’t stand up.  The main motorway routes in the UK are seriously congested – all that will happen is that cars will move faster between jams, burning far more carbon in the process.  This measure will do nothing to tackle the underlying congestion problems, and is quite likely – by increasing the volatility of flow on the network and crucially by increasing the number of accidents – to make things worse.  And finally the Government argues that most people are breaking the speed limit anyway – so where is the evidence that lifting the limit will make them stop?

And I’ve blogged before about the “war on the motorist” nonsense – the fact is that over many years the real costs of motoring have fallen and the real costs of public transport have risen.  In the next few years we’ll see swingeing fare increases on the railways so that’s not likely to change.

In other words – as with so many other coalition measures – we’ve left the world of evidence behind in the name of cheap populism.  I’m looking forward to seeing the analysis that underpins this one – I guess it will largely be based on time-savings to all users without considering the offsetting costs.  The creative accountancy that appears to afflict the appraisals for HS2 – another project that values speed for the privileged few more highly than the impact on the many – is likely to be deployed in force here.

Underlying all this is one of the defining themes of this Coalition – the flight from evidence and the conduct of government according to prejudice. As I’ve said before, the Coalition appears to want to do politics rather than government, and in this case is pandering to what is, frankly, adolescent prejudice – there is no more flagrant and depressing example of cognitive bias than the motorist assessing his own driving skills, especially when excusing his desire to go faster and break the law.

A perfect Green storm in Brighton Pavilion?

I was fascinated to read an article by Nancy Platts, Labour candidate in Brighton Pavilion at the General Election, on a Labour party website, discussing why Labour lost Pavilion to Caroline Lucas.

As someone who voted Green in 2010 and joined the Party immediately after the election I agree with much of her analysis.  Nancy Platts was a very good candidate; she clearly articulated a powerful, attractive and radical political vision which was more calculated to appeal to Brighton voters than her party’s official line.  She is certainly right that the Green party was able to motivate students and others  who might in other circumstances have voted Labour – or, more likely, not voted at all.  She is right that Iraq, tuition fees, PFI and environmental issues were important (the student vote was vital to Green gains in Hollingbury and Stanmer ward at the local elections).  And she is also right that electing a free radical who would not be whipped into line as soon as she set foot in Westminster held a lot of attractions.

But there are other issues at work too.

First, demography.  In many respects, Brighton, with its two universities, its high proportion of graduates and its focus on information technology and media jobs, is a classic Liberal Democrat town.  But the Liberal Democrats have long been an irrelevance; a tradition of infighting has never allowed them to gain any purchase.  These are people who are motivated by issues, but, as Nancy Platts said, Labour let them down.  But the effect may have been mitigated by Labour tribalism – I recall so many conversations before the election with people who expressed their disgust at New Labour over Iraq, Afghanistan, tuition fees, PFI, appeasing the Murdoch press and so on, but who also said they’d be Labour till the day they died.  Whether these middle-class tribalists revolted in the privacy of the polling station I don’t know; the vehemence of the protest did suggest a certain lack of conviction.

Second, it’s important not to underestimate the arrogant, complacent tribalism of Brighton Labour.  I was, around the time of the 1997 election, briefly a member of the Brighton Pavilion Labour Party.  Even at that stage it was inward-looking and arrogant, reluctant to reach out to new members.  Actually finding someone who would talk to a new member about meetings and events was hard enough, but the moment when I decided that this shower were no longer worth the candle came with a local election candidate selection meeting from which I was excluded for the crime of arriving five minutes late – as a commuting wage-slave dependent on trains home from London. Evidently the reality of life for many of their core supporters mattered rather less than the letter of the rule-book.

It was an attitude to those outside the inner elite that extended to Labour’s management of the council – given the behaviour of the recently-departed Tory administration it’s easy to forget how awful Labour were. Having – as a governor of a primary school in a Tory suburb – been told that the extra resources we needed were unlikely to be forthcoming as the kids concerned were not “our people”, or having watched the stitch-up that led to the building of Falmer Stadium, in which Labour at local and national level showed a contempt for process that would have had Eric Pickles whistling in admiration, I have no difficulty in understanding that, when presented with an alternative, many people who might otherwise have been natural Labour supporters turned to a radical alternative elsewhere.  Brighton Labour’s obsession with demonising Caroline Lucas demonstrates yet further that Brighton Labour still looks like a group intellectual self-abuse session conducted behind closed doors.  I don’t think Labour has any prospect of winning Pavilion back while Caroline Lucas remains a candidate, but continually fighting the last election is not an intelligent or confident approach to the next one.

And of course there is the conflict between the apparent continued belief that Labour “owns” the left while, in almost all the essentials, it has ceased to be a party of even the social democratic centre left.  Yes, Labour achieved some important things in office – like the minimum wage – but only when it was being true to its roots.  Today, the national party’s acquiescence in the cuts agenda and its continued support for neo-con adventurism abroad, along with its refusal to speak up for those suffering as a result of cuts in DLA and other benefits, is an illustration of one of the reasons why there is a crisis of democratic legitimacy in Britain – three parties fighting over an ever-smaller piece of political ground, none of them prepared to challenge a neo-liberal economic and foreign-policy agenda, with increasing numbers of voters simpy opting out or lured by the extremes.  One of the reasons why Caroline Lucas is likely to remain MP for Pavilion for as long as she wants to is that she is not compromised by the intellectual and moral evasions of the Labour Party when faced with the shock doctrine.  My own experience of the last local election – in a Tory suburb, no less – is that there is huge respect for Lucas’ unequivocal and eloquent opposition to the Con Dems’ ideological agenda.  Her rejection of the economic illiteracy of Osborneomics is a more convincing and powerful argument than Labour’s agenda of slower, fluffier cuts that don’t upset the middle classes.

The real problem for Labour in Brighton is that the Green Party is standing up against Cameron, Osborne and Clegg’s agenda; Labour, intellectually and morally compromised, can’t and won’t.  How a Green minority administration manages our city will be a hugely important test, but Labour’s problems in Brighton are deep-seated, structural, ideological and will not be solved by organisational change.

Solving the puzzle of gullibility

A great little post from nobel laureate Paul Krugman on his New York Times blog today asks why the pundit class are so gullible:

Looking at the House budget proposal, in all its ludicrousness, makes me wonder about an enduring puzzle: the gullibility of so much of our pundit class.

In the time I’ve been writing for the Times, I’ve watched my colleagues in the commentariat, en masse, agree that:

George Bush is a nice, moderate guy, who will work in a bipartisan way.

George Bush is a heroic leader, who has risen to the occasion.

The case for invading Iraq is overwhelming; only a fool or a Frenchman could fail to be persuaded by Colin Powell.

John McCain is an independent-thinking maverick.

Paul Ryan is an honest, deeply serious thinker who really cares about the deficit.

The tax cut deal paved the way for a new phase of bipartisanship.

The Ryan plan sets a new standard of seriousness.

In each case, any educated citizen with internet access could quickly see overwhelming evidence that these things weren’t true. And you would think that people would learn something from the repeated failure of these kinds of consensus.

And yet LinusCharlie Brown keeps trying to kick that football, over and over again.

It wouldn’t take long to pull together a similar list for the UK:

• We are facing an unprecedented level of public debt, necessitating severe cuts in public expenditure;

• Public expenditure was allowed to run out of control in the by NuLabour and we now have to pay for Gordon Brown’s profligacy;

• Cutting people’s benefits will encourage them into work;

• Public servants are highly-paid feather-bedded wasters who can expect to move from cosy jobs-for-life into early retirement on gold-plated pensions;

• Bureaucracy is a public-sector phenomenon;

• Health and safety legislation has proliferated to the point where it is undermining the competitiveness of the British economy, and is preventing British people from enjoying their traditional pastimes;

• Mass immigration has destroyed jobs and lowered pay;

• Privatisation and competition lead to greater efficiency and productivity;

• Political correctness has gone mad;

• The Liberal Democrats are a left-of-centre party exercising a profound influence on government, protecting the vulnerable;

In all of these cases, ten minutes with Google will be enough to dispel the myths.  Yet they persist – despite the fact that in many cases they directly conflict with the day-to-day realities of life.  Of course, much of it has to do with a mass media that has a distinct social and ideological agenda, and in the BBC a public service broadcaster that has lost sight of its responsibilities.  And it’s easy to cry “false consciousness” and to disappear up the fundament of cod Marxism, and the reality is much more subtle than that; it’s a mix of ideology and the way in which political discourse has become disengaged from daily reality.

And that detachment lies at the heart of what looks to me like a real crisis of democratic legitimacy, when political discourse loses its grounding in day-to-day reality and those with wealth and power both promote and exploit that.

A party dying on its feet

Nearly thirty years ago, a politically-engaged student and president-elect of the Oxford University Liberals, I sat in a dingy hall in Llandudno with several hundred of my fellow party members and heard my then leader, David Steel, tell us to go back to our constituencies and prepare for government.  It was heady, inspiring – and unrealistic.  Nevertheless there was pride and passion in that party – admittedly some of the pride related to passing a pro-CND motion, moved by one Cllr Paddy Ashdown, on the conference floor earlier in the week – and radicalism.  Our mission on the radical wing of the party was to change the world, not to preserve its inequalities and power structures.

Over the ensuing thirty years, the Liberal Party and I went our separate ways – the Party moving to the Right  into merger with the SDP and eventually into government in alliance with the Tories, while I spent much of the next thirty years in Whitehall as a politically neutral Enemy of Enterprise, watching, thinking, reading and moving to the Left as my knowledge and experience deepened, and now in retirement engaging with the debate.

Following the Liberal Democrat conference this week, then, has produced mixed emotions.  Overwhelmingly, there is a sense of despatches from the front line of the shock doctrine.  They don’t quite know what’s hit them – from the intemperate reaction to the protests outside the conference to the growing realisation of their deep unpopularity.  Like Macbeth faced with Banquo’s Ghost demanding to know “which of you have done this”, there is a deep denial of the reality of what their party has done.

For anyone with a knowledge of history it was astonishing to hear Clegg referring in his closing speech to Beveridge and Keynes. Seventy years ago, William Beveridge was starting work on the most important document in British social history.  His report paved the way for the creation of the welfare state and identified five Giant Evils in society – squalor, ignorance, want, idelness and disease.  Keynes had warned of the futility of tackling economic crisis by cutting public expenditure.  Clegg claims that “ours is not a government of cuts”. And yet, in the face of all the evidence, from Ireland and elsewhere, Clegg is part of a government that is slashing and burning the public sector, while promoting the cruel lie that you can take £80bn out of the economy in expenditure and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.  He sounds like – is – one of the boneheaded fiscal conservatives that Keynes so excoriated in the 1930s.  It is not difficult to see him as one of the wing-collared Tories that had done well out of the First World War, arguing for cuts in the face of the depression and rationalising it by claiming that unemployment is down to the fecklessness of the poor.  Keynes and Beveridge knew those people, and their Liberal tradition opposed everything they stood for.

And what sort of failure of awareness does it take for a man who styles himself as a radical not to realise that, thanks to his Government, Beveridge’s five Giant Evils are more prevalent than they have been for a generation?  Squalor, Ignorance, Want, Idleness and Disease.  The assault on welfare, the effective privatisation of the NHS, and perhaps above all – because this lies at the heart of Beveridge – a belief that benefits for the most vulnerable are not a matter of right but are charity, the hand-me-downs of a Big Society of the wealthy and privileged.  It takes a special kind of self-deception for the Deputy Prime Minister of this coalition government to portray himself as the heir of Beveridge.

So what of Liberal Democrat activists?

No doubt activists like to laugh at their predecessors.  I’m sure that there is no lack of smooth young folk in PR and marketing – people to whom the free market has been good – sitting in the bars at Liberal Democrat gatherings, patronising their bearded and sandaled predecessors.  But we stuck to the task and fought for what we believed in.  Do you?  Is it really more honourable or more adult to be the Tories’ useful idots? You may not have liked the protesters outside your conference, or for that matter the students who marched in London last autumn, but at least they had got off their knees. Have you?

I have no doubt that many of those in the hall in Sheffield were decent, progressive people.  But the record makes it clear: a government in which Nick Clegg is comfortable is one that no decent progressive could support.  And I’d say to those delegates – stop whining. You may not like what this Government is doing, but you have made it possible.  By going into formal coalition with the Tories, you’ve made it possible for them to pursue their shock doctrine.  Privatising the NHS and the Universities? Cleansing the poor from the inner cities? Do you really believe any of this would have happened had your party been deciding its position in the Commons on a vote-by-vote basis, rather than going into full coalition with the Tories?

And do you really think that Clegg, let alone the Tories, will take any notice of your vote on the NHS?  Yes, Lansley’s been talking the language of compromise, but you know that the die has already been caset.  The private sector providers are already looking for the opportunity to profit from the GP commissioners, just as the private sector has leached public provision through privatisation and PFI for the last two decades.  The fact is, Clegg’s loyalty – and Laws’ and Alexander’s loyalty – is not to you.  It’s to the Tories who control the coalition, and the ideology that drives them.  The electorate knows that, and it’s why you’re coming sixth in by-elections.

And if you believe in tackling Beveridge’s Five Giants, every Liberal Democrat leaflet you deliver, every sub you collect, is an expression of moral delinquency.  It’s over.  Your party is no more than the fading figleaf on a decaying Victorian statue – if you really believe in anything better, tear up your membership card and get out now with your integrity reasonably intact and before the denial poisions your soul.

Bossy bollards

The Coalition Government has recently declared war on cluttered streets, which it claims are changing the nature of our towns.  Patchwork paving and bossy bollards have been named as the number one enemies of the urban environment.

So I thought the time had come to look more closely at our towns and document this insidious enemy within.

And where better to begin this Odyssey than in the spiritual home of the coalition, Tunbridge Wells.  A town with a variety of street furniture, much of it anti-social.  Here, for example, is a truculent row of bollards outside the Victoria Place Shopping Mall, clearly set to intimidate passers-by:

While others lurk morosely, ready to jeer lewdly at any passing 4×4:

The presence of CCTV is no deterrent.  As we can see here, bollards move in and mob the cameras, jeering and gesticulating:

And it’s not just the bollards of course.  Here, even in Tunbridge Wells, gangs of assorted tribes of street furniture gather on street corners to intimidate the law-abiding:

While here the social problems of binge refuse dumping are all too plain to see.

It’s clear that even in this heartland of all that is decent and sensible in Britain, the street furniture problem is serious and growing.