It’s the economy, stupid!

No coherent alternative to the economically and morally catastrophic consequences of the ‘austerity’ embraced in all but name by Starmer and his incompetent Chancellor is possible without decisively defeating the notion that “balancing the books” – i.e. repaying a creditor oligarchy that has captured governments whose access to a fiat currency could have funded public spending by printing money and managing any attendant inflation by fair taxation – is more important than a thriving economy.

To defeat such voodoo economics, another fight is necessary: with an Atlanticism that has captured the hearts and minds not only of Britain’s leaders, and not only of Europe’s, but those of the collective West at large.

Will ‘Your Party’  fall to IdPol?

Andy Beckett, writing today in the Guardian, makes valid points, positive and negative, about “Your Party”. He fails though to address the elephant in the room, mentioned almost as an aside in the very short and very lightweight post I wrote yesterday on the danger that so broad and rainbow an alliance as the one Zara and Jeremy hope to forge will prioritise divisions baked into identity politics over issues of class and political economy.

That elephant in the room is not, I stress, the absurdities of ‘woke’ IdPol. These are well known and often jeered at, mainly by the Right. (Indeed, by their near monopoly of the narrative, the Right has with some success framed in the public mind the idea that “wokeism” and the Left are one and the same.)

No, the pachyderm I have in mind was scarcely touched on in my post yesterday, and not at all by Andy Beckett today. I had written in a footnote that:

One problem for Zara, Jezza and the 600k and rising who, like me, have signed up is the absence of any public discourse acknowledging the depth of Britain’s (and Europe’s) plight: due not to immigrants, Brexit, ageing populations or even the hikes in arms spend – though they come closer – but to decades of having the global south make our stuff and feed us (because a rentier elite chose that path) coupled with comprador willingness – touched on in Road to WW3. Part 3 – to make its peoples and economies expendable assets in the fight by US elites to reclaim unipolar supremacy. That expendability, a taboo subject for Europe’s (and Britain’s) liberal order, media no less than politicians, places us economically no less than militarily in a far worse place than we need be. It debars “Your Party” from any convincing alternative to ‘austerity’ and will continue to do so until this new entity breaks decisively on the one hand with Washington dominance, on the other with the notion, economically illiterate if we’re being kind, that an economy with a fiat currency can validly be likened to a household, a business or a local government.

No coherent alternative to the economically and morally catastrophic consequences of the ‘austerity’ embraced in all but name by Starmer and his incompetent Chancellor is possible without exposing the notion that “balancing the books” – by repaying a creditor oligarchy that has captured governments whose access to a fiat currency could have funded public spending by printing money, and managing any attendant inflation by fair taxation rather than interest rate tweaks that exacerbate the evils of rentier capitalism – is more important than a thriving economy.

To defeat such voodoo economics, another fight is necessary: with the Atlanticism which – as I argued in Road to WW3. Part 3 – has captured the hearts and minds not only of UK leaders, and not only of Europe’s, but those of the collective West at large. My post yesterday drew a comment from bevin, worth reading in full, which includes these words:

Any socialist agenda, even one of the mildest incremental reforms, involves defiance of the United States ruling class. If we want socialism, sovereignty is needed – that was the basis of support for Brexit: socialism in the EU was impossible, as is socialism within NATO.

Britain should join BRICS, it is as simple as that-if you are not in BRICS you are in the Empire and if you are in the empire democracy and sovereignty are impossible.

Support for Brexit was not entirely  informed, we may validly object, by the drive to reclaim sovereignty as precondition for the socialism – not “sharing everything out” but socialising the means of wealth creation – whose sole alternative, as should now be clear, is barbarism. Yes, the EU is rotten but the car crash nature of Brexit, and crowding out of Left agendas by those of reaction, have for the foreseeable future worsened things for most Britons.

Otherwise I agree. Neither socialism nor a break with Atlanticism is possible within the EU. So how about this for a slogan, Jezza?

Brexit’s done. Now join BRICS!

With such thoughts, see what you make of the good, the bad and the indifferent in Andy Beckett’s column today.

Despite the chaos of its launch, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s new party has struck a nerve

Less than a month into its existence, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s new leftwing party is already widely seen as a mess. Its leadership, its launch schedule and even its name: all have caused inconclusive, semi-public rows. The opportunity provided by political novelty appears to be being wasted.

For the many journalists and politicians who always see the left as incompetent and naive, the stop-start, seemingly uncoordinated first weeks of Your Party, as it may or may not eventually be named, have felt like a gift – a summer silly season story after months of grim political acrimony. “Thank Christ Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana are here to give us a laugh,” wrote Sebastian Murphy in the Daily Express. “Labour’s loopy Left have bravely broken free of Starmer’s stultification to bring us a political party that is easily the funniest thing since the anti-Brexit centrists Change UK.” Now largely forgotten, Change UK lasted 10 months after splitting from Labour in 2019.

For left-leaning Britons who’ve had enough of Labour’s rightward shifts and intolerance of dissent, and have been hoping for a viable alternative, the new party’s launch has been depressing. Why, in times which so obviously require a radical fightback, can’t the left agree a clear way forward? Why is it still so dependent on Corbyn, who after 42 years in parliament can hardly be presented as a fresh figure? And where are the nimble strategists that the immensely difficult task of establishing a successful leftwing party is going to need?

Some of the answers to these questions, which British leftists often ask each other with despairing shrugs and eye-rolls, lie in socialism’s struggles in this country since the 1980s. These have left the movement with gaps and imbalances, which are exposed whenever it tries to take the initiative.

Yet as well as considering these weaknesses, it’s also important to acknowledge that, despite all the confusion and ridicule, Corbyn and Sultana’s new party has struck a nerve. It says that more than 600,000 people have signed up on its rudimentary website for updates and information about how to get involved – almost as many people as the memberships of Labour, the Tories and Reform UK combined. In some of the most hostile coverage of the new party, there is a revealing note of alarm. “Something has actually gone seriously wrong with British society,” wrote Camilla Tominey in the Telegraph, “if a party such as this could poll at 18 per cent” – the proportion who told YouGov they would “consider” voting for a new Corbyn-led party. “It’s a rebellion against the broken status quo.”

Superficially, this rebellion seems little different from the half dozen that have tried and failed to break Labour’s left-of-centre monopoly over the past 30 years: Respect, Left Unity, the Workers party of Britain, the Socialist party, the Socialist Labour party, the London Socialist Alliance. Well-known leftists such as Arthur Scargill and George Galloway attempted to turn strong local power bases, personal charisma and leftwing credibility into something bigger, at times when Labour was alienating its more radical supporters. A few parliamentary and council seats were won, but rarely for long. The new parties were both too narrow – dominated by one person – and too broad – prone to ideological differences – to sustain their initial momentum. With their ageing figureheads and traditional leftwing sectarianism, the new parties did not seem new enough.

This time, the involvement of Sultana, one of the most digitally fluent young MPs, sends a different signal. So does the involvement of innovative and ambitious political operators, such as Momentum co-founder James Schneider, who helped make Corbyn’s Labour leadership, at times, surprisingly dynamic and popular– despite it being widely written off, as the new party is now. Six years on from Corbynism’s defeat, there is finally a movement, largely undetected by the mainstream media, of bright, youngish leftwing activists back into the political game.

And yet, as the frictions between Corbyn and Sultana have shown, it remains tricky to unite two leftwing generations, very different in age and levels of political patience – while also appealing more effectively to middle-aged Britons, who grew up under New Labour and often absorbed its centrist assumptions. These difficulties afflicted Corbyn’s Labour leadership, and ultimately helped destroy it.

The British left has so often been excluded from power over the past 40 years that it frequently lacks the skills that experience of power can bring: building and sustaining coalitions, maintaining message discipline, creating political organisations that are representative without being too fractious. Truly leftwing British parties, in short, tend to be a bit rickety, yet they must stand up against our conservative political culture’s strongest winds.

Then again, such deficiencies may matter less nowadays. The deep discontent and many crises left by 14 years of rightwing rule, impatience with Starmer’s methodical but patchy reforms, and outrage at his government’s Gaza evasions, mean that many voters are in an adventurous – or reckless – mood. A radical party with a highly divisive leader, thrown-together structure and frequent internal rows already exists, and it’s called Reform. Its poll lead suggests that voters are less interested than journalists in party processes, and more interested in stories about what’s wrong with Britain, compellingly told. Whether at rallies or on social media, Sultana and Corbyn are just as capable of this as Nigel Farage. A new poll shows that Reform voters strongly prefer Corbyn to Starmer, which suggests that the new party could take Reform votes.

Reform has more media backing than the new party ever will. Yet it’s likely that rightwing journalists will keep giving the leftwing party publicity, and even some favourable coverage, in order to hurt Labour. So the new party will need to pull off a balancing act: keeping its personalities and factions happy, developing populist but not fantastical policies, and wounding the government without helping Farage into Downing Street.

Labour loyalists will say that a left divided is a left defeated. But if they truly believed that, Starmer’s party and government would be much more pluralist. What these loyalists really think is that the left should only ever be divided on their terms. That entitled and coercive logic has now had consequences. A new leftwing party, risky and imperfect, could be here to stay. This time, it’s possible that our politics will never be quite the same again.

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