Job done, Sir Keir: you may now leave

From the perspective of Britain’s establishment, plus those of America and Israel, Sir Keir’s work is done. Aided by the Israel Lobby – plus levels of character assassination which saw not only the UK’s gutter media at their worst but for good measure the true colours, when the stakes rise for power, of liberal media – he returned Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition to ruling class hands when Corbyn’s mildly socialist programme rattled said establishment to the point where a high ranking general could speak openly of army mutiny in the event of a “Jezza” premiership.

But that was then and this is now. Having delivered handsomely, Starmer enjoys the lowest poll ratings on record – lower even than Mad Liz in her lettuce-lived tenure at No. 10 – and is of little further use to those who, behind a thinning veneer of democracy, actually run Gt. Britain Inc …

… though it would be helpful if, before handing back the keys, he could push through on a digital ID which eluded even that more agile operator, Sir Tony Blair. I say this in passing because, as is irritatingly common with YouTube videos mis-labelled for clickbait purposes, the Duran podcast below is not reducible to Starmer’s push on digital ID. More a blunt and, at a shade over sixteen minutes, aptly short assessment of his government’s achievements as viewed from high street, job-centre and the exploding precariat of his blighted realm.

Indeed, it spends less time on ID than on why an Andy Burnham coup would not improve things in the slightest for millions of Britons in deepening debt and living with spiralling cost of living, workplace precarity, the lowest pensions in Western Europe and welfare support degrading by the month. I don’t always agree with Duran assessments outside their strong suit of Ukraine but on this you couldn’t slide a cigarette paper between us. Not only is the mayor of Manchester a political chameleon to rival the knighted nonentity he would replace. More alarming is the fact he couldn’t deliver even if he wanted to.

Nor, truth be told, could Corbyn or Sultana. I say this not because of the shenanigans on display this past fortnight. Those certainly haven’t helped but more serious is the lack of any economic program capable of addressing the state we’re in or of credibly challenging the ferocious TINA onslaught, from a neoliberal orthodoxy dominant for half a century, certain to erupt should they begin to make headway in the polls. If good intent and appeals to fairness cut serious ice in this sorry world we’d have been living long ago with socialism and everything, from sane custody of the planet to peace and prosperity, attendant on an economy planned for – and, in conditions of meaningful democracy, planned by  – humanity.

Forgive my quoting at some length from my post of nine days ago, The seeds of fascism, part 2 – itself a steal from Roads to WW3 Part 4 – wherein I spoke of a West:

• …  in decline. Over the late 19th and 20th centuries labour-sellers gained sufficient bargaining power to negotiate a social contract – higher real wages than in the global south, plus state welfarism at its zenith around 1950-80 – which gave them a stake in a colonialism reinventing itself, post WW2, as modern imperialism; defined by export from global north to south of monopoly capital, and south to north repatriation of profits.

• [But] the past five decades have seen the steady dismantling of that social contract as labour bargaining power has been weakened by automation, collapse of the Soviet Union (and with it the case for ‘bribing’ Western workers away from socialist solutions to capitalist crises) and the offshoring of wealth creation by rentier  oligarchies which found it more profitable to have the global south make our stuff and grow our food.

• Those corporate oligarchies became immensely powerful as super profits from Asia were recycled in the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sectors which now drive Western economies. Inequality (read Piketty) soared to levels as economically dysfunctional and democracy-incompatible as they are morally abhorrent. But with trade unions reduced to offering club perks, and social democrat parties jumping aboard the Neoliberal Express while Mr Fukuyama declared the end of history, too few were complaining. Workers had for profit leverage been recast as consumers on a crack cocaine of easy credit, house price bubble and cheap flights to sun-kissed beaches. Few noticed a burgeoning underclass out in the cold, or gave time of day to the doom-mongering of a tiny and perennially discontented subset of the intelligentsia.

I continued:

Capitalism is predicated on most of humanity having no other means of satisfying its material needs, and those of dependents, than by selling its labour power to ruling classes defined by monopoly ownership of the capital required to set it to work. But for reasons just given, in the West capitalists either aren’t buying labour power at all, or are in the game – with barely more control than the labour sellers – of driving down its price and terms of employment even as that erosion of welfarism continues apace.

Hence the entry to common parlance of the term, race to the bottom.

For the first time ever, hundreds of millions of men and women are permanently surplus – with billions likely to join them soon – to economic requirement. In a society whose economy served humanity not profit, this would be a blessing. It would free us to develop morally, spiritually and intellectually to realise our full potential as homo sapiens sapiens; doubly wise in that we know that we know. In the one you and I live in, however, the implications are dire when its elites have zero interest in changing that equation: sell your labour-power, no matter how diminished and cruel the market for it, on pain of mounting deprivation and despair.

Those remarks, applicable to the West at large and Europe in particular, carry added weight for a UK struggling with decaying infrastructure vital to modern industrial capitalism and the key to Britain’s 19th and China’s 21st century success. Struggling too with chronic underinvestment in an economy dominated even before Mrs Thatcher by finance capital, and with the aftermath of a train-wreck Brexit.

(I say that last as no friend of the EU.)

Andy Burnham’s past form shows that, while he’s done passable well in Manchester, he has no answer to the problems advertised here. Those who say otherwise betray a failure to grasp the severity of the state we’re in. There’s no shame in that; just a burning imperative to wake up and smell the coffee.

Soon I’ll be looking – still within a Britain which for all its problems has the singular advantage, over the Europe it brutally crashed out of, of a fiat currency – at alternatives to a neoliberalism disastrous for the many, head-spinningly enriching for the few. In the meantime, for a diverting blend of entertainment with a soupçon  of enlightenment, let me leave you with Owen Jones in top form as, barred from the Labour Conference just wrapping up, he confronts with frequently unwelcome microphone a celebrity assortment – Cooper, Thornberry and the loathsome but in his goonlike way stylish Lord Mann – of apologists for austerity and genocide.

Enjoy. The video, that is. Not the austerity, still less the genocide.

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