The ineptitude of the failed Corbyn coup

The most interesting thing about the failed anti-democratic attempt to bully Jeremy Corbyn into resigning as Labour leader (just 10 months after he was elected with the biggest democratic mandate of any UK party leader in history) is the sheer ineptitude of it.

If there was anything that the Blairite New Labour movement was undeniably good at in its heyday, it was stage managing the news agenda. They were masters at it. The glib soundbites, the cultivation of links between the party top brass and the press pack, the schmoozing with Rupert Murdoch, the pre-written editorials fed to the hacks to be lazily churnalised into newspaper column inches, the showy and modernistic presentation. In fact I'd say that stage management of the news agenda was the single most significant hallmark of the Blair years.

Damn, they were so persuasive that they even managed to convince about half the country that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was going to be a great idea!*

The remarkable thing about the pre-planned anti-democratic coup against Jeremy Corbyn was the sheer ineptitude of it. Not only did the Blairites carefully pre-planned operation leave their target still standing after they threw everything they had at him in a 24 hour "blitz", their explanatory narratives made no sense whatever and they left a trail of incriminating evidence all over the place.

Pre-planning

The coup was pre-planned. There is absolutely no doubt about that. The people who were planning it were so confident of success that they even briefed the Daily Telegraph about their plot to overthrow Corbyn ten days before the referendum result was even announced!

The fact the coup was pre-planned blew a large hole in the narrative that Corbyn had to be ousted because of his supposedly weak EU referendum arguments ruining the Remain campaign. In order for that narrative to make sense, the plotters would have had to have known the result of the referendum in advance, which they couldn't have done.

The Canary have done some sterling investigative work into the shady network of dodgy PR companies stuffed full of Blairites, shell companies, BBC collusion and so forth who are implicated in the coup attempt. It was inept enough to leave such a trail of evidence to follow up on, but the sheer hubris of telling the newspapers what they were going to do ten days before they did it looks like the kind of PR cock-up that Blair, Mandelson, Campbell and the like worked strenuously to avoid during their time at the top.

Apparently the methods are pretty much the same as classic Blairism, but the execution has become sloppy, over-confident and bizarrely incompetent.

A big misjudgement

Whatever the reason they decided to gamble on Corbyn caving in and resigning, it backfired terribly when he refused to go and defiantly challenged them to put up a candidate in a democratic election.

Perhaps the people who orchestrated this anti-democratic coup attempt believed their own propaganda a little too much? They'd spent the last 10 months, ever since Corbyn was elected as leader, briefing the press that he's a such weak leader, so maybe they thought he'd just meekly capitulate to their stage managed coup attempt?

Whatever the reason for this over-confident assumption that Jeremy Corbyn would simply roll over and resign (betraying the 250,000 Labour members who voted for him just ten months previously as a consequence), they got it badly wrong and put themselves in a terrible bind.

They've been scrabbling around looking for for their ideal "Anyone But Corbyn" candidate to stand in an election that Corbyn is almost certain to win, especially given the way he's attracted so many new people to the party that it's literally doubled in membership since he became the star of the Labour leadership election last summer.

An additional problem for them is the fact that 60,000 people have joined the Labour Party in the week since the attempted coup plot was launched. Anyone imagining that the majority of them are people enthused about voting for the as-yet-unnamed ABC candidate must be as delusional as the bunch of Labour MPs who actually seem to consider a low-profile, strategically inept, gaffe prone, insincere, iraq war approving political water carrier like Angela Eagle to be more electable than Jeremy Corbyn.

By putting themselves in a position where Jeremy Corbyn can take them on in re-election which he will almost certainly win with an even bigger mandate, they've clearly endangered themselves dramatically. Corbyn had demonstrated that he was willing to work with them and allow them to survive within the party, but by trying to stab him in the back and missing, they've now given him the chance to run a leadership election based on giving constituencies the right to deselect corrupt/right-wing/venal/self-serving/party damaging MPs and replacing them with people who might do a better job of actually representing their constituents interests rather than their own.

Just like David Cameron's EU referendum gamble, the Blairite coup gamble has backfired spectacularly too.

The bigger picture

The Labour MPs who were planning this post-Brexit coup obviously got so giddy with excitement, and so locked into the mindset of putting their narrow party political plot into action, that they completely lost sight of the bigger picture.

The aftermath of the biggest Tory cock-up in decades and the resignation of the Prime Minister was the least opportune moment to kick off an internal party political spat imaginable.

Just look at it from their strategic perspective for a moment. They claim to care about the Labour Party (so much so that they shed crocodile tears on the telly over it) and they claim that Corbyn doesn't do enough to hold the Tories to account.

If they had any strategic nous, and if these clims were true, instead of attempting their coup immediately after Brexit, the plotters (Hillary Benn, Angela Eagle and the like) could have made a huge show of attacking the Tories for Brexit, they could have used their friends in the media to give their criticisms prominence, whilst Corbyn's get ignored, belittled and disparaged.

Instead of helping the Tories out of the Brexit hole they'd dug for themselves and booting the Labour Party down there in their place as they did by launching their coup immediately, the plotters could have won plaudits for their own strong responses in the crisis situation, boosting the Labour Party rather than trashing it, and ensuring their own stars were rising in the process.

Thus, a few weeks, or months after Brexit, when the public narrative was clearly set that Brexit was the fault of the Tories, they could have tried their rebellion, pointing to the fact that they laid all the big hits on the Tories in the wake of Brexit, not Corbyn.

They didn't play it that way because they lost sight of the bigger picture: That some things in life are actually more important than who is the leader of the Labour Party, and the vote for Brexit was undeniably one of those things.

Insincerity, unjustifiable claims and delusional rubbish

The hubris of briefing the Telegraph about what they were planning to do before they did it was bad enough, but some of the dire stuff the plotters came out with after the coup attempt was launched was staggeringly bad. Angela Eagle's resignation letter was catastrophically insincere. Just two weeks after praising Corbyn's determined hard work and blasting the mainstream press for the lack of Labour coverage during the campaign, she bitterly criticised him for conducting the campaign with "half-hearted ambivalence"!

Another example of an utterly appalling resignation letter is that of the Darlington MP Jenny Chapman who joined in the carefully choreographed sequence of resignations desgned to inflict as much damage as possible on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. In her letter quitting the shadow education brief she claimed to be speaking on behalf of her constituents in saying that they had lost confidence in Jeremy Corbyn. When she posted this letter on her Facebook page she was inundated with furious comments along the lines of "how dare you presume to speak on my behalf". The overwhelming majority of replies expressed confidence in Corbyn and an extreme lack of confidence in her.

Tristram Hunt probably wins the prize for the worst resignation letter of all though. In it he actually claimed that "Labour urgently needs to play the role of effective opposition" because the current crisis is as bad as Suez in his opinion. Apparently launching a failed coup attempt against your own party leader and completely letting the Tories off the hook for their culpability is his definition of "effective opposition". He then went on to slam Corbyn for making a supposedly poor case for Remain. In Tristram Hunt's constituency of Stoke on Trent 69.4% voted for Leave (in Jeremy Corbyn's Islington constituency 75.2% voted for Remain). Talk about trying to shift the blame! Apparently Hunt's own Constituency Labour Party have already had a vote of confidence supporting Jeremy Corbyn followed by a vote of no confidence in Tristram Hunt.

Forged signatures

Making bizarre claims to be speaking on behalf of your constituents when resigning is one thing, but listing 500 local councillors who you claim have signed a letter supporting the coup against Corbyn when the list contains the names of numerous councillors who back Corbyn's leadership and are utterly furious that their name has been added to the letter without their consent.

Claiming that somebody has signed a letter when they haven't is tantamount to forging their signatures. LabourList should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for such deceitful behaviour, but they're not. They're far too concerned with their anti-democratic efforts to force Corbyn's resignation than they are with maintaining anything resembling decent standards of truth and honesty.

Conclusion

Blairism has undeniably lost its shine. Tony Blair was once the golden boy who won landslide after landslide, but he isn't anymore. He's widely reviled, and his sequence of attacks on Jeremy Corbyn during the leadership election in 2015 probably did more to raise Corbyn's profile than any other factor. Blairism lost two General Elections in a row (2010 and 2015) and in electing Corbyn with such a huge mandate the Labour members were crying out for a change of direction,. But Blairites think they know best, so they've been sabotaging Jeremy Corbyn at every turn culminating in their the launch of their inept coup attempt after just ten months.

The failed "chicken coup" demonstrates that the Blairites aren't even good at the stuff they used to be. In the age of social media, their attempts to manage the news agenda have failed spectacularly. They may have the entire press pack on their side supporting their grubby self-serving coup, but social media is alive with criticism of the mainstream narrative, and the more they try to force their version of events down people's throats, the more people are seeing their crude manipulative propaganda for what it is.

Perhaps the most telling thing of all is that the failure of their own coup attempt means they can be hoisted by their own petard. If Jeremy Corbyn is as weak and incompetent as they've always claimed, how incompetent must they be to have failed so spectacularly to overthrow him, despite planning it for weeks and then throwing everything they had at it?

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* - The million+ of us who marched in London on February 15th 2003 thought differently mind.

The case for investment in high-tech industries

"The Case For...." series

As an economic recovery strategy austerity is not working. Defenders of the "orthodox neoliberal" response to the ongoing economic crisis often demand to know what the alternatives are to their favoured "cut-now, think later" strategies.
In this series I'm going to explore what some of these alternative economic strategies could be.

The UK post-industrial experiment has created a large trade deficit, whilst
 the German high-tech economy has developed a large trade surplus.

After the financial sector bust the UK post-industrial experiment is as good as over. Neglecting the UK industrial sector in order to turn London into a hub for deregulated financial sector gamblers was always going to be a risky strategy, but few would have predicted such a catastrophic failure. The government and the Bank of England have been forced into a position of pouring hundreds of billions of pounds into the black holes of debt created by reckless and idiotic speculative gambling on transparently unsustainable house price inflation and complex derivatives that even the traders betting on them didn't understand. The financial sector has not replaced the industrial economy, it has become a huge and unsustainable drain on what remains of it.

Since the financial sector meltdown the UK economy has been running the biggest trade deficit (the difference between imports and exports) in its history. At more than £4 billion a month since 2011 it is even worse than the peak of £3.5 billion a month at the height of the UK financial sector meltdown in 2007-08. The financial sector has not adequately replaced the industrial sector, the only way that the trick even seemed to be working was through the inflation of a vast unsustainable "easy credit" bubble.

Once the financial sector had been exposed as a giant ponzi scheme of bad debts dressed up as reliable assets stamped with AAA ratings from the Credit Rating oligopoly, it became absolutely clear that the UK must return to the core productive economic activities of industry and manufacturing. There are two conceivable approaches, the establishment can either drive down the wages and working conditions of the UK labour force in order to parse costs down to compete with the Chinese or they can attempt to invest in the development of leading edge high-tech industries.

The chosen path of the three establishment parties is obvious, the economically destructive austerity measures of the Coalition and Neo-Labour's bland "austerity-lite" posturing show that they have no faith in direct investment in the UK industrial sector as a viable option. The nay-sayers and doom mongers would have us believe that UK manufacturing has been left way behind by the high-tech economies of Germany and Japan and couldn't hope to compete with Chinese productivity, however, despite three decades of deliberate government neglect in compliance with the utterly discredited "state intervention is evil" fallacy British manufacturing is not yet completely dead in the water.

The rapid decline of the British train building sector
coincided with the botched privatisation of British Rail.

Lack of investment, mismanagement, botched privatisations, lack of protection and sheer malice have all contributed to a three decade long era of unprecedented decline in the UK industrial sector. To take one of many, many examples; the hopelessly botched Tory railway privatisation led to the ruination of the once world leading UK train building sector. In 1994 when rail privatisation plans were drawn up, the entire UK rail network ran at a cost of £1.6 billion (£2.2 billion adjusted for inflation) and the British train building industry was still near the cutting edge, having recently built one of the world's fastest trains (the InterCity 225) and done pioneering work on the bogey technology necessary for high speed tilting trains. By 2009 the annual cost of the rail network had risen to £5billion in government subsidies. In this period in which government spending on the rail network had actually more than doubled, the UK train building industry was left to ruin. Most of the train builders were wiped out by a 1,063 day delay in ordering any new trains as the private sector operators maximised profits by rinsing as much value as they could out of former British Rail stock. As of 2012 the only remaining commercial train building operation on UK soil is the struggling Canadian owned Bombardier group and the only entirely British train to have been built in recent years was the heritage project A1 peppercorn class Tornado, built at Darlington Locomotive Works.

Swathes of the UK industrial sector have been deliberately run down or left to ruin by successive Tory and Labour administrations and Britain has rapidly slumped towards the bottom of table of nations ranked by industrial output as a percentage of GDP, with an industrial sector accounting for only a paltry 21.6% of GDP (when the global average is 31.1%). In 2011 only 5 of the 27 European Union nations experienced worse industrial sector growth than the UK (Greece, Portugal, Italy, The Netherlands and Norway).

Rolls Royce, an example of a world leading UK based industry.

Despite the rapid industrial decline as a percentage of GDP, there are some grounds for optimism about UK manufacturing. Despite the disgraceful mismanagement of the UK industrial sector over the last three decades, the UK is still the sixth-largest manufacturer of goods in the world according to the value of its outputs. If the UK is to reposition itself as a high-tech economy, there are a few remaining industries that demonstrate that British workers can still do cutting edge technology. The prime example is Rolls Royce Aero-engines, which is the World's second largest jet engine manufacturer, producing both the most powerful and the most fuel efficient jet engines on the global market. Another example is Formula 1 where several of the most successful teams in a highly competitive high-tech business are based in the UK. Although these racing teams are tiny cottage industries in comparison to Rolls Royce, the fact that these extremely high-tech racing teams base themselves in the UK demonstrates that Britain is still a potentially viable home for high-tech cutting edge industry.

If the UK is to reposition itself as a high-tech economy several key reforms will be needed:

Firstly: A complete reversal of Coalition austerity cuts in funding to research and development budgets and the engineering and technology departments of universities. Without well funded research and a Strong education sector, hopes of becoming a leading high-tech economy are nothing more than idle pipe dreams.

Secondly: Direct state investment in the industrial sector, preferably through a government backed National Investment Bank. The practice of pouring of hundreds of billions into the debt riddled financial sector in the hope that they will lend it on to the "real economy", instead of using it to pay down their astronomical gambling debts (deleveraging) or gambling it on the derivatives markets must be stopped. Either the state invests in the productive industries directly or it doesn't intervene at all, propping up the financial sector gamblers that caused the crisis in the first place should never have even been considered as an option.

Thirdly: State investment in infrastructure projects. Without significant infrastructure improvements the UK is going to struggle to compete with other high-tech economies. Priorities should include, a high speed broadband network and massive improvements to transport infrastructure. High-Tech businesses considering the UK as a base would surely be put off without improvements to the neglected infrastructure, congested roads and especially the massively overpriced and severely overcrowded public transport network. Not only would improvements in UK infrastructure make the country seem like a better base for high-tech industries, it would also create a short term economic boost by creating tens of thousands of much needed jobs.

Fourthly: A co-operative economic strategy. The divisive politics of the Thatcher era really have to be abandoned. Economic strategy should not be considered as a series of pitched battles between the state sector and the private sector, or between businesses and the trade unions. The state sector and the private sector need to co-operate in order to develop a coherent economic growth strategy, the state providing an educated and adaptable workforce, direct intervention to assist key industries and offer tax incentives to companies that are prepared to contribute to the national economic growth plan whilst the private sector must begin to reinvest in the "real economy" and to pay their fair share of taxes. The anti-trade union antagonism also has to be stopped, the German economy is a good example, through their co-operative approach between businesses and trade unions they have built a strong, highly productive high-tech economy. After all the workers are still the engines of economic productivity, treating them as if they are "the enemy within" is never going to get the best out of them.

Unfortunately, the three establishment parties in England seem absolutely determined to plough on with their ideologically driven "austerity agenda" no matter how badly it effects the UK industrial sector or the UK trade deficit. As much as they tell us that austerity first is the only option, I would like to think that I have outlined a reasonable case for an alternative strategy of intelligent, targeted investment.

More articles from "The Case For......" series

See also

The case for a National Investment Bank

Austerity and the Double-Dip

The Tory contempt for the value of labour

Cautious Ed, Where are your policies?

After over a year in the job, Labour leader Ed Miliband doesn't seem to
have formed any kind of coherent alternative to defunct neoliberal dogma.

It is the eve of the 2011 Labour party conference in Liverpool and I am getting heartily sick of reading columns by Labour politicians and Labour supporting columnists talking up the Labour alternative to Osborne's "self defeating austerity".

These columns feature plenty of party approved soundbytes ("Cutting too hard, too fast") conjecture ("if Britain slides into another recession, the next election ought to be Labour's to lose") and Miliband eulogies (the "breathtaking boldness" of his new strategy for the Labour party) but they are dreadfully thin on actual alternative policy.

The best Ed Balls could come up with in terms of "policy" in his piece was "I believe we can only win public trust by making the case for a credible and compelling plan that will revive growth, get unemployment falling, take the tough decisions to tackle the deficit in a balanced way, and transform our economy for the long term." Nothing but vague generalised guff masquerading as an alternative strategy, with absolutely no substantive policy ideas at all. In her piece Angela Eagle just criticised the neoliberal status quo without mentioning a single policy (radical, populist or anything at all) and the best Andrew Rawnsley could come up with in his Labour puff piece was a mention of Labour's latest pitiful attempt at populist strategy, a plan to undercut the ridiculous Tory "aspiration tax" on university education from £9,000 to £6,000, which is still double the fees Labour introduced over the course of their thirteen years in power and would do absolutely nothing to counter the grotesque commodification of higher education.

Three articles in two days and the sum total of concrete alternative policies is a single pathetically misguided and reactionary attempt at a populist appeal to students, most of whom loathe the Labour party for having introduced the "aspiration charges" in the first place. If after a whole year in the job, this cack handed attempt at populism is the best "headline policy" Ed can come up with, Labour are not an alternative, they are a sad joke.

Over the last 32 years militant neoliberal dogma has enriched the top echelons of society at the expense of millions of hard working ordinary people who have seen their discretionary income eroded away with disgraceful utilities and transportation price hikes, mass unemployment, wage deflation, are now they are suffering the brunt of Osborne's self defeating austerity programme. Not only that but neoliberal economic dogma has created biggest economic crisis in the UK since the Second World War increasing the national debt back to 164% of GDP (including bailouts & PFI economic alchemy schemes).

Ed should be pointing out that there are successfully tried and tested alternatives to the socially destructive "slash and burn" policies favoured by the Tories out of their refusal to abandon their clearly defunct neoliberal dogma. Ed can point to Roosevelt's "new deal", to the prosperous years of the Post-War Consensus & more recently the astonishing post-neoliberal Argentine Economic Recovery.

Labour need to quickly and loudly apologise for their passionate embrace with neoliberalism and the financial sector elite and begin setting out clear and distinct alternatives. This radical new approach should be structured around policies such as ensuring that any further fiscal stimuli are used to improve state infrastructure, invest in education, research, the sciences and to make low interest loans to high-tech and green industries rather than just handing the cash over to the financial sector to pour into their black holes of debt or for them to lend on to the "real economy" at a huge mark-up.

Labour need to set out clear policies on how they are going to clamp down on corporate profiteering, punish inherently risky business practices and get tough on corporate and personal tax dodging. They also need to demonstrate that there is no harm in raising taxes if they are properly targeted at unearned wealth (such as a Land Value Tax) and on profits from risky and unproductive financial sector practices.

Labour need to promote measures to increase the discretionary income of the masses in order to get people spending again and they need to explain how policies like artificially low interest rates, austerity and quantitative easing combine to create a stagflationary effect that harshly punishes careful people such as families that have tried hard to live within their means, careful savers and pensions investors, in order to protect the reckless gamblers that borrowed way beyond their means and wrecked the economy in the process. They need to demonstrate that Coalition policies punish the self disciplined in order to protect people that lied on their (ridiculous) self-assessment mortgage applications, the buy-to-let parasites that borrowed vast sums in order to hoard property and exploit ordinary working people, stoking house price inflation in the process and the banks that carelessly lent so much money to these people, as well as engaging in their own over-leveraged debt fuelled speculative activities.

Labour need to reform the property market to ensure that hard working people can once again access decent affordable housing and to prevent the inflation of another dangerously unsustainable speculative property bubble. They should remind people that the principle function of a house is as a home, not as a commodity to be traded or as part of an exploitative get rich quick scheme. Labour politicians need to remember there are many more potential voters to have experienced exploitation at the hands of unregulated buy-to-let landlords than there are venal something-for-nothing slumlords (who are more than likely to vote Tory anyway).

Labour should consider what the neoliberals consider to be "the unthinkable", the renationalisation of failing private sector industries. Everyone knows that the privatised railways are an absolute shambles. The privatised rail network soaks away far more in government subsidies than the entire system cost to operate in 1994, line operator Network Rail is a disorganised and unaccountable botch-job that has created vast debt legacies, train franchises are nothing more than anti-competitive oligopolies at best and absolute monopolies at worst, franchisees have been allowed to cost the taxpayer £hundreds of millions by walking away from contracts that they don't like (East Coast mainline) without suffering punishment and rail passangers have been hit with above inflation fare hikes year, after year, after year.

Possibly the most heart wrenching effect of rail privatisation is the catastrophic effect on the UK train building industry. In the 1970s and 1980s Britain was second only to Japan in the development of high speed trains, nowadays the last (Canadian owned) train manufacturer based in the UK is on it's last legs. Not only have thousands of jobs and valuable skills been erased, Britain has also completely lost the immense prestige of being global railway pioneers.

Miliband should openly engage with the concept of renationalising the railways, a move that would be extremely popular with the left, and if the EU try to obstruct the idea he should stand up to them and assert British sovereignty, a move that would be hugely popular across the political spectrum.

If Miliband and the Labour party don't soon come up with a coherent set of socioeconomic strategies and some actual concrete policies of their own, they must start agitating for a return to the Post-War Consensus mixed economy that created 28 consecutive years of budget surpluses and reduced the national debt from 237% in the aftermath of WWII down to 43% when the Neo-Tories tore it up in 1979. Didn't the Tories have an election campaign based on the phrase "you've never had it so good" during the Post-War Consensus years? In 1957 didn't Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan say "go round the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime – nor indeed in the history of this country"? Doesn't the mixed economy approach have a wonderful track record of reducing the national debt? Hasn't the Post-War Consensus era been repeatedly referred to as the "golden age of capitalism"?

Most importantly of all, Ed needs to make sure that the party never again forgets that the role of Labour is to represent the interests of the hard working, law abiding, tax paying, working people of this country, above all other interests.

 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.