Left Unity, is it just a joke?

In recent months there have been numerous calls for "a new party of the left", most notably from the film director Ken Loach. 

That there is no mainstream political representation for those that place themselves in the left-liberal quadrant of the political spectrum is more clear than ever. Labour abandoned this territory in 1994 when they allowed Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to usurp the party and set about their 13 years rule of privatisations, dodgy PFI scams, bank deregulations, imperialist warmongering and attacks on our civil liberties. The Liberal Democrats tried to cash in on this Labour betrayal by posturing as a left-liberal party, but abandoned this stance as soon as they got a whiff of second hand Tory power. It is beyond question that all thee establishment parties are adherents of centre-right orthodox neoliberal pseudo-economics, all three are grotesquely illiberal (detention without trial, secret courts, internet snooping, retroactive legislation) and all three are riddled with selfish, self-serving, expenses scamming career politicians.

There is a huge amount of popular dissatisfaction with the political establishment, but the problem of course is that for the last few decades "the left" has been riven by factionalisation. 19 years after the Labour party abandoned socialism and 16 years after Neo-Labour rose to power, other than George Galloway, Caroline Lucas and a few old school Labour "leftie die-hards" like Dennis Skinner and John McDonnell the left has had no representation in Westminster.

The project to unify the left and create a new political party seems like an interesting and worthwhile project. Even to people that do not share particularly left-wing sentiments must find it difficult to oppose the idea of more political plurality. If the right-wing have the choice between extreme-right UKIP and the three right-wing establishment parties, surely the left need more choice than just the Green Party and the Respect party (which will always be overshadowed by George Galloway).

I decided to check out the "new left" project by visiting the The Left Unity website, but the very first article I stumbled across was one entitled Just how left wing is the Green party? Which starts out reasonably well, but soon descends into the construction of a tribalist division between the Green party and the "new left".

"Those of us outside the [Green] party often point to the record of the Greens in Germany, where the party joined a neo-liberal coalition and voted for the Afghanistan war, and in Ireland, where they joined a right wing government and cut healthcare and benefits while saying it was OK because they were creating new cycling schemes."

It is obviously unfair to judge the Green party in the UK by the actions of other Green parties abroad, especially when there are plenty of examples of other national Green party groups that haven't sold out to neoliberalism (Italy, Turkey, Greece, Catalonia, USA).

It's also a bit rich for "the left" to be criticising the Greens by citing a couple of examples of Green party groups in other European countries have sold out to the neoliberal economic orthodoxy, when they allowed the main left-wing group in this actual country (Labour) to be usurped by orthodox neoliberalism almost two decades ago. The supposed party of the left then enforced the neoliberal establishment orthodoxy for 13 long years. 13 years in which they not only failed to reverse the work of their Tory predecessors, but actually served as the neoliberal establishment and continued the lunacy of financial sector deregultaion, housing neglect, state sell-offs, corporate outsourcing, doggy PFI scams, extraordinarily lax tax enforcement, expenses fiddling and corporate warmongering.

As a supposedly left-wing party Neo-Labour had a truly lamentable record, yet in this long 13 year period of left-wing betrayal, the "alternative left" in the UK was democratically represented by just two Scottish blokes, Tommy Sheridan in the Scottish Parliament and by George Galloway representing the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency in Westminster. One of the strongest criticisms of "the left" is that in two decades they have utterly failed to galvanise any kind of credible left-wing alternative to Blair's continued Thatcherisation of British politics.

The Left Unity article then goes on to lambaste the minority administration Green council in Brighton for having made spending cuts. Even though the author of the Left Unity hatchet job openly admits that the scale of the cuts were forced onto the Green party by the Tory local government minister Eric Pickles and due to the fact that they only have a minority administration. Their minority rule allowed opposition Labour and Tory councilors to give the Greens an ultimatum to either enforce the cuts, or to quit their only local government administration in the whole of the United Kingdom. It is extremely harsh to criticise the Greens for actions that were forced onto them by the establishment parties, because even if they had quit the council and let Labour and the Tories form an anti-Green coalition (as the author of the article implies they should have done), the cuts would still have been made.

All in all, the article was a disgrace. Instead of looking to the Green party success in Brighton as an inspiration and praising the tireless political work and social activism of the Green MP Caroline Lucas, the author used the article to launch an attack on the Green party and create divisions between them and this new left party that doesn't even exist yet! The whole idea of using a website called Left Unity to attack another left-wing party and to undermine the work of one of the only genuinely left-wing politicians in Westminster is so absurd and thoughtless that would make a very funny unwitting self-parody, were the abject lack of representation for the liberal left not such a serious issue.

Judging by the feeble tribalism of the Green party hatchet job they were happy to publish, I'd say that the Left Unity website certainly is a joke. However the wider concept of left unity is a perfectly serious proposition. I'd go further, I'd say that a different kind of unity should be striven for, a unity of resistance and desire for fundamental reform of the political system. It should consist of a broad cross party pact to stamp out political corruption and to reform the political system and the UK economy. Voters need to be given a choice between the expenses scamming, corruption, betrayal, dishonesty and self-interest of establishment politics and a new alternative, focused upon reform and renewal of the political system. Because as it stands now, in England there is only the choice between Orthodox Neoliberal Blue, Orthodox Neoliberal Yellow, Orthodox Neoliberal Red and a few fringe parties which stand almost no chance of electoral success. This abject lack of choice and the apathy it provokes is bad for democracy, because when all three of the main English parties fundamentally agree on almost everything, there's no scope for genuine discourse and debate, which is supposed to be the essence of what democracy is all about.

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ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE  

Why I blame the left for the economic crisis
     
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A warped Tory redefinition of rights
      
The Jobseekers (Back to Work) Bill
             
 Retroactive laws are fascist laws 
       
Mark Hoban's totalitarian tendencies
       
The great Lib-Dem betrayal
       
Secret Courts and the very Illiberal Democrats      
         

Why is it only spring in Bradford?

Respect celebrate their council gains with
an open top bus tour around Bradford.

Continuing on from the election of Geogre Galloway as MP for Bradford West in March 2012, the rise of the Respect party in the northern city of Bradford continued in May as Respect candidates took five seats on Bradford council, unseating the Labour council leader Ian Greenwood in the process.

In my previous article about George Galloway's election victory I discussed the Islamophobic reaction to his success, so I don't want to get bogged down in that issue again. Instead. I would prefer to remain focused on how Respect have broken the mold in Bradford and whether this is an isolated local phenomenon, or the beginning of a wider political revolt.

Over the three previous decades the big three parties have now all got clear and demonstrable track records of favouring the interests of the London based financial services sector over the interests of the British industries and industrial towns and cities that once made Britain the greatest industrial power in the World. Margaret Thatcher started off the process of trying to turn Britain into a pioneering post-industrial "financial services hub", converting London into the biggest financial sector casino in the World and overseeing a large decline in industrial output, a de-industrialisation process that was continued under Neo-Labour.

For the three decades that the political establishment have been prioritising the interests of the financial service sector, they have been starving Britain's industrial base of support, causing industry after industry to fall into terminal decline for the want of a bit of government support. Despite huge falls in UK manufacturing output, the governments' hands-off approach was cheered by the financial sector for obeying the neoliberal doctrine of "state intervention is evil". The whole idea was that any declines in the national balance of payments from this assault on manufacturing could be made up through increases in financial services activity.

This deliberate policy of de-industrialisation left once powerful manufacturing cities like Bradford to ruin. Neo-Labour cashed in on the traditional Labour voting habits of industrial heartlands like Bradford, that loyally returned Labour MPs and a Labour controlled council. Yet during their wasted 13 years in power Labour did virtually nothing to rejuvenate the industrial north, Scotland and South Wales. They were too busy cosying up to the money men, the city slickers and the property developers. The closest approach Bradford's Labour controlled council could muster to help for the economy of Bradford was the initiation of a gigantic city centre retail development called Broadway Shopping Centre, to be constructed by an Australian based multinational shopping centre group called Westfield.

2008 was the turning point when the deregulated financial sector gamblers at London casino suddenly realised that a huge proportion of their "winnings" were nothing more than toxic debt legacies bundled up, disguised as assets and given AAA stamps of approval by the incompetent/corrupt Credit Rating Agency oligopoly. This realisation sent the financial sector gamblers squealing to the government for bailouts, creating the revolting spectacle of a so called Labour government subsidising the hypocritical private financial sector gamblers with the biggest state subsidies in history after over a decade of turning a blind eye to the severe decline of British industry, and the losses of millions of productive jobs.

It is now quite clear that the financial services boom was illusory and that the "prosperity" of the last three decades was little more than a severe economic decline disguised with a slush fund of North Sea oil revenues, cash raised by asset stripping the state and a boom in "easy credit" backed property speculation triggered by the deregulation of the financial sector.

The failure of the Westfield development left Bradford
city centre with nothing but what the locals call "the hole".

As it stands now North Sea oil production has slowed down and there is a good chance that what is left of it will be used for the benefit of a newly independent Scotland. The state is running out of potentially profit spinning assets to hive off, it has got so serious that the police that gladly acted as Thatcher's bully boy militia during the Miners' strike are now protesting against Tory plans to privatise and outsource local police services. The mess in the financial services sector is even greater, they have absorbed hundreds of £billions in bailouts, another £325 billion through the Bank of England's barmy Quantitative Easing money printing scams and what is worse, the hard working people of the "real economy" are being made to pay off the financial sector's reckless gambling debts by the Nasty party / Lib-Dem liar Coalition in the form of "austerity".

The bursting of the unsustainable property speculation bubble and the resulting ideologically driven austerity measures have had a disproportionate effect on the post-industrial north. Bradford Council has been required to cut council spending by £129 per head of population, whilst the much more affluent area of Witney that elected Prime Minister David Cameron as their MP have only been asked to save £26 per head of population. It is quite clear that the cost of "austerity" is being pushed onto the majority of ordinary people whilst the rich just carry on getting richer.

Not only are the citizens of Bradford being made to pay an unfair price for the cost of the failure of the establishment's barmy neoliberal experiment, they also have a daily reminder of the ruinous impact of the establishment parties post-industrialisation fantasies upon their city. As they see the gigantic hole in the city centre where the abandoned Westfield retail centre was supposed to go, as they see the scores of closed mills and factories around the city and if they know any of the ever rising numbers of young people in the city that are finding themselves unemployed.

Alexis Tsipras and the left-wing Syriza block
benefited from a huge electoral surge, thanks
to their anti-austerity policies in Greece.

With track records like this across the UK from the three main parties in former industrial towns and cities like Bradford, the surprise isn't that an alternative party has won an MP and five City Councillors in a relatively small northern City. The surprise is that this tiny uprising is the extent of the rise of alternative parties in England, whilst anti-austerity parties are storming into power across the rest of Europe.

In France, the austerity supporting President Nicolas Sarkozy became the first French President since 1981 to be ousted by the electorate after only one term, to be replaced by the left-wing austerity critic François Hollande. In Greece a host of anti-austerity parties benefited from a backlash against the "austerity loving" mainstream parties and in the Italian local elections centre-left and protest parties gave Berlusconi's PDL party an absolute hammering. Yet in Britain the parties opposed to the cosy neoliberal establishment consensus are relatively tiny phenomena of Respect in Bradford and the Green party in Brighton, who have a single Westminster MP each in a chamber of 646, a pathetic 0.3% representation for anti-austerity parties that are opposed to the cosy neoliberal consensus amongst the three dominant establishment parties.

It seems that outside of Bradford and Brighton, the English electorate have become such a bunch of servile, spineless, cap doffing, forelock tuggers, that the great majority of those that bother to vote at all, will continue to mindlessly elect the same toff dominated, corruption riddled establishment orthodox neoliberal parties that have repeatedly lied to and shafted the great majority of ordinary working people for the last three decades.

George Galloway, the "Muslim vote" and his far-right critics

As a preface I would like to express my personal opinion about George Galloway, to prevent people from thinking that my views here are some kind of biased pro-Galloway rant. I think the man is a bit of a buffoon with a questionable track record, but he is a fine orator and a politician of principle, in that unlike the vast majority of his political peers he actually seems to have any at all. I mean none of his principles seem to be particulary fashionable these days (sobriety, pacifism, renationalisation, direct funding of state infrastructure, increasing rather than decreasing the funding of education and research). Even if you completely disagree with his principles and/or loathe the man, it would be unfair to claim that he hasn't got any principles. To me this is the esscence of his appeal, Labour sold out when they betrayed their founding socialist principles and millions of their core left wing voters in the 1990s to enable their passionate embrace of corporatist neoliberalism, the Lib Dems volte-face on tuition fees utterly demolished their credibility as a party of principle and the Tories have only ever had one central principle, to protect the wealth, property and power of the rich establishment elite. The people of Bradford were looking for a person they could trust to not sell out and Galloway (of all people) was the closest aproximation they could find to "an honest politician".

On 29 March 2012 George Galloway (in his own words) recorded "the most sensational result in British by-election history, bar none". He overturned a massive Labour majority in a "safe seat" (political stronghold) they had retained since 1973, whilst representing a "minor" party without any sitting MPs. In this landslide victory he polled that largest post war percentage of a by-election vote and the second largest swing (52.8%) in by-election history. Aside from the remarkable statistics, the intensity of the shock was magnified by the fact that the Bradford West by-election campaign was barely even covered by the mainstream London based media. Only The Guardian even bothered to send a reporter up to Bradford to cover it. When the news of Galloway's victory broke in the early hours of the following morning the mainstream media commentariat and the political establishment were utterly taken by surprise.

I spent the following couple of days checking what the mainstream media and the below-the-line comments had to say, in order to gauge the press and public reaction to Galloway's amazingly comprehensive victory. It is understandable that in the wake of unexpected happenings, reactionary views become prevalent, since the mainstream media has not been able to coach the public in the political nuances of the subject. The most commonly occurring of these ignorant reactionary views seemed to be that "Galloway had won by pandering to the Muslim vote".

George Galloway celebrating his remarkable victory in Bradford West.

Firstly, this view demonstrates an unwillingness to consider the fact that huge numbers of people from all kinds of backgrounds voted for Galloway, disaffected white working class former Labour voters, students, non-muslim ethnic minorities and Bradford's massive swelling tide of unemployed young people. Secondly it ignores the fact that Galloway's Labour opponent, Imran Hussain was actually a Muslim and a prominent member of Bradford's Muslim political establishment.

This unwillingness to embrace the facts either demonstrates ignorance (which is almost acceptable in the immediate aftermath of an unexpected event) or a deliberate evasion of reality. Over the next few days these reactionary "Muslim pandering" accusations began to intensify rather than die down, becoming the de-facto official reactionary line on "that distasteful Galloway affair", demonstrating that either growing numbers of people were prepared to speak out in complete ignorance of the facts, or that the official "Galloway is a Muslim panderer" position relies on the deliberate evasion of reality and a distasteful underlying Islamophobic sentiment.

The idea that Galloway was "courting Muslim voters" can hardly be considered as a stand-alone criticism, after all, in Britain, a Muslim vote counts exactly the same as a non-Muslim vote. Anyone attempting to win election in a constituency containing many Muslims would either be a fool or a racist not to attempt to engage with the Muslim community. This is precisely the reason that representatives of all three mainstream political parties have paid their respects at local mosques, visited Muslim businesses, canvassed Muslim neighbourhoods and fielded Muslim candidates (such as Galloway's Bradford West opponent Imran Hussain). 

An overt appeal to Muslim voters is nowhere near enough to be considered as a stand alone criticism, so there must be something more to these Galloway "Muslim pandering" accusations, otherwise all of the other major parties would have found themselves at the centre of regular "Muslim pandering" storms of criticism over recent decades.

After several days of reading below-the-line opinions about Galloway's victory I was astonished when I finally came across a criticism of Galloway that actually bothered to mention and paraphrase the Respect party manifesto and completely avoided the subject of "the Muslim vote". I didn't agree with the criticism, because the guy was parroting the hackneyed neoliberal line that "the money has run out", therefore social democratic policies are an unaffordable luxury, but I have to give credit because the comment was the first one I found in days to base criticism of Galloway on the political issues, rather than on a blatant personal attack or an barely concealed anti-Muslim sentiment.

I find it quite amazing that such a high percentage of Galloway's critics choose to attack the man through association with Muslims, some going as far as to claim that "proper British people" don't really care about the Afghan war of occupation, and that "people that complain about it" are confirming their status as "permanent foreigners". This type of argument is nothing but a thinly veiled attack on British Muslims, relying on claims that their opposition to war makes them somehow "un-British", and that Galloway is a traitor and a charlatan for pretending to oppose the war in order to win the "Muslim vote". Once again, this is an argument that is made in ignorance (or deliberate evasion) of the facts, namely that the majority of the wider British population also oppose the Afghan war and above 70% consider it to be "unwinnable".

One of the recurring themes of the "Muslim pandering" smear campaign has been the repetition of the fact that Galloway openly stated his abstention from alcohol and then praised Allah after his victory. The reactionary response was to accuse Galloway of sectarian Islamist behaviour, however it must be remembered George W. Bush often spoke of how giving up alcohol had saved his life and referred to God on a near daily basis, and he could hardly be described as any kind of Islamist fanatic hell bent on creating a worldwide Islamist theocracy.

I lived in West Yorkshire for many years, just off Stanningley Road between Leeds and Bradford. I met many people there and feel that I have a decent understanding of the area and its various communities. I spoke with a great number of West Yorkshire's Muslims and found the huge majority to be genuine, respectful, hard-working family orientated people, who were mainly preoccupied with providing the best for their families. When speaking to people, I like to offer my respect and my honest opinion, I rarely met a Muslim who wouldn't reciprocate to create an atmosphere of mutual respect. 

Presumably, the anti-Galloway ranters
would prefer Bradford's protest vote to
go to the divisive racists at the BNP.

Through work I also met a number of West Yorkshire's far-right, BNP voting reactionaries, people completely incapable of understanding the concept of mutual respect. I often interrupted their ignorant, hate filled rants to demolish their arguments and expose the lies and distortions that they were content to believe and broadcast endlessly. The retort of the West Yorkshire anti-Muslim reactionary when confronted is to accuse their opponent of being a "Paki-lover". 

"Paki" is considered to be a grossly offensive racial slur, aimed at people of Pakistani origin, however the average BNP voting reactionary is so grotesquely ignorant that they use the word to mean anyone Muslim, or even anyone of west Asian origin. These racist wankers didn't care about the distinction between the various forms of Islam, or care that "Muslim" isn't an ethnic group, they just hated the "Paki bastards" and fantasised about mandatory repatriation schemes (or much worse) for their brown skinned neighbours. The term "Paki-lover" is offensive, but it was used against me so many times I almost felt compelled to make myself an "I heart NY" style "I heart pakis" T-shirt to wear to work, just to rile my racist work colleagues.

To my ears, this "Galloway pandered to the Muslims" rhetoric, sounds incredibly similar to the "Paki-lover" accusations I used to face, just with the underlying racist sentiment more carefully cloaked in seemingly acceptable language. The fact is that these kind of Islamophobic comments were to be expected from the reactionary outliers in the aftermath of Galloway's unexpected victory, but that "Muslim pandering" has become the most commonly heard criticism in the long term betrays a disturbinly widespread anti-Muslim sentiment.

Many of Galloway's critics defend their anti-Muslim stance through invoking the most famous technical clause of the racist armoury, that Islam is a faith, not an ethnicity. This allows the racist to believe that it is entirely within "the rules" to cloak their racially motivated antagonism towards the "Muslim community" in the language of a "reasoned" critique of Islam. The crux of their argument seems to be that "it is not racist to hate Muslims, because Muslims are not a race". That the vast majority of Muslims are also ethnic minorities doesn't deter them, and neither does the fact that there is no such thing as the generic and ubiquitous "Muslim community", that the divisive reactionary thinker considers to be "the enemy within", the "Islamic threat" or the "permanent foreigners".

Some of Galloway's reactionary critics have claimed that he represents some kind of dangerous fringe element, the left-wing mirror of the far-right racists. A reactionary attempt to slur Galloway by association with the far-right by opining that " the far left and far right are two cheeks of the same arse". 

There is so much wrong with this argument it is hard to know where to begin. I think that the first observation has to be that Galloway's views are hardly far-left. Forty years ago during the post war consensus mixed economy era, policies such as state administration of economically vital infrastructure (nationalised industries) were subscribed to even by the Conservative party (until their neoliberal revolution in 1979). 

Galloway is not far-left, he is a capitalist and a social democrat, it is just that the British political spectrum has shifted so far to the right, what was once a middle ground synergy of state planning and capitalist growth, a left-right compromise of a social democratic system, is now characterised as "the far-left", in the "loony left" territory once occupied by the British Communist party. 

This huge rightward spectrum shift is actually one of the main causal factors in Galloway's appeal, the fact that all three of the mainstream political parties have destroyed England's political plurality through their uniform embrace of neoliberal/corporatist economic ideology. 

 

Political outliers such as Respect on the left, and UKIP on the right may be fringe elements, however what they do have is clean hands. They haven't got proven track records selling off what remains of the state off to their mates, coddling the reckless gamblers in the financial sector, fiddling their expenses, increasing the wealth gap, gerrymandering the political system to their own benefit and pimping themselves out to the highest corporate bidders in order to earn future seats on the board/lucrative advisory positions to augment their hefty pensions, paid for by the state that they spent their political carers dismantling from the inside (through massive privatisation and outsourcing scams and regularly handing chunks of British sovereignty to a bunch of unelected neoliberal technocrats in Europe).

To simplify to the level of a crude metaphor, "Neo-Labour and the Nasty party are arse cheeks of corporate backed neoliberalistion, with the Liberal liars as the stinking arsepiece of Establishment politics". People are sick of the sight of this fat rump of bloated politicians and their astonishingly inadequate responses to the neoliberal economic crisis. The English people are desperate to find a replacement political ideology. 

If 20th Century history hasn't taught us that at as at times of extreme hardship that people have traditionally turned to reactionary far-right elements, it must not have taught us anything. The fact that a principled man, with a populist appeal has waded into a ethnically divided community in order to create a sense of unity and plurality is a noble thing. Not only is he providing the disillusioned voters with a genuine political alternative, he is promising to steal the ground from underneath the divisive far-right BNP racists (that my ignorant and deluded former work colleagues saw as their only alternative to an alien and unrepresentative political establishment) by standing Respect candidates in BNP hotspots such as Bradford, Dewsbury and Rochdale.

Although I can't classify myself as a Respect supporter, I believe that Galloway's victory could break open British politics. Given just the right strategy, I strongly believe that it is possible for other minor parties such as the Greens, the Angry Doctors, the regional parties and UKIP to launch similarly strong campaigns and wrest political dominance away from the three discredited neoliberal parties. 

It is utterly apparent that England is a political monoculture, with all three main parties promoting extremely similar variants on the ideologically driven neoloiberal heterodoxy. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are fortunate in that they have much greater political plurality, whilst English politics has become the gerrymandered rump of the receded establishment empire in desperate need of reinvigoration.

The Respect party on the near-left and and Farage's UKIP on the near-right are far from ideal, but they both have strong central philosophies (an end to imperialistic wars of aggression and withdrawal from the grotesquely anti-democratic EU).  People like George Galloway, Caroline Lucas and Nigel Farage are at least capable of offering distinctly alternative political directions that do not resort to fascism and bitter accusations of "paki-loving".

  

See also

David Cameron's far-right immigration rhetoric

The Lib-Dem betrayal

Why I blame the left for the economic crisis

 If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you could buy me a beer? £1 would get me a can of cheap lager whilst £3 would get me a lovely pint of real ale.