The shameful collapse of New Labour into a mire of sleaze and incompetence ends any lingering hope it would win a majority at the next general election, argues Trevor Fisher.
Gordon Brown has to be removed to prevent total electoral collapse. Alas the rot goes deeper than the leadership and is rooted in the New Labour Project itself. Tony Blair once said “I have removed from my party everything it once believed in. What holds it together is success and power”. The pursuit of power without principle inevitably lead to disaster.
The thrust of the New Labour Project was to achieve a party run by a professional elite, utterly contemptuous of its own supporters and hostile to any democratic control over its operation. The inevitable result of this was to reduce the party’s practice to appeasing the rich and those in the media in London and Edinburgh who shared its values and attract to its inner core people who were essentially interested in power for what it could deliver to themselves.
New Labour is institutionally corrupt. While some Labour MPs are perfectly honourable people who have done no wrong, the dominant tendency and its culture is a Faustian bargain where power was traded for any sense of purpose. The success of the Blair years now has gone. Power will follow. While removing Brown is essential to sustaining any significant political presence after the next election, it will not be sufficient to save the Labour Party from a generation in the wilderness. Only if it can regain a core of social justice and democratic practice can it save itself from total disaster.
The future of the Labour Party matters for those of us who are on the outside, whether we left, like myself, from the sense that the Party had been taken over by a new and more powerful militant tendency, or for those who have never belonged. There are no forces to the left which can pose a serious alternative, and the chances of electoral reform to produce the space for a democratic socialist alternative rely on having a hung parliament. In the immediate future a real attempt to explore the means to remove Brown and produce a revival of Labour sufficient to produce a hung parliament is the urgent need. If this cannot be achieved, then the alternative is to explore ways to save what can be saved from the wreckage as new Labour sinks for ever. Anyone for Operation Lifeboat?
Kevin Meagher asks why Labour MPs don’t seem to understand the significance of the past week and the magnitude of response required.
Anyone who has ever grappled with how to tot-up their business miles or had to query whether their M&S sandwich is tax exempt will have little sympathy for our Members of Parliament as the first gory details of their exotic personal expenses slither into the public domain, (courtesy of the Daily Telegraph’s leak) ahead of July’s scheduled publication.
The first thing to say is that set against the backdrop of a painful recession with millions out of work, the squalid, shameful self-aggrandisement of our MPs is all the more appalling.
The second thing is that the simple response from voters to this welter of lurid revelations about what our MPs get reimbursed for will be: ‘why on earth would anyone struggling to get by in Britain vote Labour again?’
How can a Labour minister ever pledge to crack down on tax loopholes when half the Cabinet seems to routinely abuse them themselves? When ministers’ lavish predilection for interior design at the taxpayer’s expense makes Lord Irvine’s infamous £600 a roll wallpaper seem frugal by comparison.
As Labour ministers use their positions to stack up multi-million pound property portfolios, many of their constituents have sleepless nights fretting about mortgage payments, with tens of thousands having already lost their homes. With our already bulging waiting lists for social housing, what kind of message do they think they are sending?
So much for Harold Wilson’s much quoted aphorism that the Labour Party ‘is a moral crusade or it is nothing.’ Too many MPs have been revealed for what they have become: money-grubbing freeloaders who have clearly given up crusading for social and economic justice, content merely to feather their own nest - or, indeed, portfolio of nests.
The sole crumb of comfort for Gordon Brown is that this tsunami of public hostility is due to a collective failing. The blame - and indeed shame – falls evenly across the parliamentary Labour party, from greedy backbenchers renovating holiday homes at public expense, to cabinet ministers who seem so under-employed they have enough time to manage wholesale renovations to their properties.
But then to learn of their sniveling entreaties for the House of Commons fees office to rubber stamp their bloated demands heaps insult onto injury. The quibbles, the tantrums and even the pleas to avoid marital breakdown simply demeans the office they hold.
Of course the Tories and other parties come out of this no better. Indeed, as expected, they are even worse. In a system where MPs effectively regulate their own affairs can we ever expect anything else?
But the point is that Labour MPs should behave differently. They should have a basic moral grounding that recognises they are not sent to Westminster from some of the poorest communities in the land to line their own pockets. They should be equipped with a self-denying ordinance – ‘a moral compass’ - that sees them eschew the estate agent morality of the Tory party and concentrate on the job – the vocation – of being a Labour MP.
The fact that so many have plainly lost sight of that is a telling commentary about what has happened to Labour. Not different enough from the greedy arrogant Tories any longer. No longer the party instinctively in touch with ordinary people’s concerns.A self-styled “People’s Party” now slyly contemptuous of real peoples’ sense of right and wrong.
Why cannot Labour MPs understand that the anger people feel about their extravagant greed is palpable, visceral and real? They will not forgive Labour Cabinet Ministers “flipping” the designation of their second home in order to claim thousands for home improvements. Nor will they forget the low farce of John Prescott’s two toilet seats and Hazel Blears’ bills for chunky kit-kats.
The public will remember the disgust it feels today and we will be left to look back from under the rubble of next May’s general election result and say this is the week the election was truly lost.
Dave Toke, writing in Chartist, Mar/Apr 2009, says that WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme) has found that the death of recycling has been misreported.
Demand for recycled material is returning after only a slight dip and orders are increasing from across the world, including India and China as well as Europe. The weaker pound is helping British exports, even if they are rubbish! Prices for recycled products are rising once again.
Rubbish recycling rates are now over a third compared to only ten per cent just a few years ago. We are still behind some other European countries. However, the petulant moans of Brits who cannot understand why they should go to the terrible inconvenience of putting rubbish in different boxes for recycling are growing quieter. The need for burning waste is also receding as effective means of recycling hitherto problematic (from a recycling point of view) plastic materials have been developed.
Also the message is beginning to arrive in the UK that turning food waste and other organic waste into biogas is a major potential energy resource. Anaerobic digestion can be used to turn the organic material into a gas which largely consists of methane.The Germans are already generating over one per cent of their electricity from biogas, and this figure is rapidly increasing. However they are now hoping to send a purified form of the biogas into the natural gas grid. The British National Grid has estimated that biogas from food and organic waste could substitute for over 10 per cent of our national consumption of natural gas. A lot more energy could be derived from biogas if crops were grown specially to provide a feedstock for anaerobic digestion.
Have your say
Have reports on recycling problems affected the way you behave? Do you believe that the recycling industry is back on its feet?
Filed under: Europe on Monday, January 5th, 2009 by petec |No Comments
Sam Tarry argues that the time is right to form a Party of the European left
Socialist and social democratic party leaders recently came from across all EU member states to the Party of European Socialists Council in Madrid, to condemn the way neo-liberal policies had led to the unleashing of the worst economic crisis in decades. They demanded that a new social Europe be forged - with the first ever joint manifesto for the European Elections in June 2009.Apalpable sense of history being made rippled through the applauding crowd of hundreds of PES activists and international leaders. Socialists have long believed that socialism cannot ever be built in one country, that international solidarity is a cornerstone of progressive politics, and that in a time of global uncertainty where the transition of capital and labour forces sees no borders that the social democratic solutions to those problems must be transnational.
The joint platform was born out of a grassroots - international consultation. Itinvolved socialist party members from all 27 EU Member States. European-wide policies to build a new social Europe have been set. It is a historic first for cooperation between social democratic and socialist parties.
The process that led to the production of this manifesto is possibly the biggest, most transnational consultation process that has ever taken place. Each party that is a sister party of the PES and the PES Group in the European Parliament was invited to hold debates, seminars, discussions for activists, and to submit proposals for the manifesto under six key themes. A special internet portal was set up where proposals could be uploaded in formats such as video, and the debate continued by PES activists logging in to joining the blog debate. The consultation was a big success: 300,000 visitors, 500 posts, 100 videos, 1,350 members on the Facebook group, more than 60 written contributions from PES member parties, NGOs, Foundations and activists. During that process over 3,000 activists became PES Activists during the process meaning that the PES now has over 13,000 international activists drawn from sister parties across the EU. A draft manifesto was drawn up on the basis of that consultation, and discussions within the PES between member parties took place to modify the manifesto before it was adopted by the PES Council - a mini-Congress with voting representatives from all member parties at the start of December. The PES manifesto was adopted in Madrid by over 232 delegates from 33 PES member parties, and over 300 grassroots activists from all over Europe
The PES manifesto features over 60 concrete proposals including: A European strategy for smart green growth to create 10 million new jobs by 2020, new financial market regulation including hedge funds and private equity, Climate-changing emission reductions for industries such as transport and construction, a European Pact on Wages for decent minimum wages in all EU member states and initiatives to step up the fight against the trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation, the creation of a European Women’s Rights Charter, extended childcare entitlement rights, a European Common Energy Policy based on sustainability, energy security and independence, diversity of energy sources and solidarity between member states in the event of energy crises, a strengthening of anti-discrimination
Legislation to ensure equal treatment on grounds of gender, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion or belief, and proposal to strengthen Trades Union rights by developing “a European framework for cross-border collective bargaining and collective agreements. In addition, we will work to promote decent working time, meeting health and safety standards, and a fair work-life balance”, are all just some of the radical examples from the manifesto.
Having a common radical platform gives an exciting new dimension to those elections and has the potential for PES member parties to start to fight those elections on European issues rather then warping the debate to national issues that have little bearing on the work and legislation that comes out of the EU.
In this vein PES President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen said “The conservatives have had a majority in Europe for the last four years. What have they done to make a fairer society? They have ignored the interests of ordinary hard-working families. We want to take Europe in a new direction creating a fairer society and putting people first.”
“Our manifesto gives voters a clear choice between the PES and our opponents. A clear choice between a progressive European Union in which member states work together to tackle the economic and climate crisis for the benefit of all the people of Europe, or a conservative European Union which places our future in the hands of the market.”
As neo-liberalism has gone global the fight for socialist solutions has at least gone Europe-wide. This manifesto is one in which every social democrat in every sister party can be proud. The processhas seen the beginnings of a truly European party with international potential taking place. It hasunited social democrats and socialists from across Europe more closely then ever before.The process of grassroots participation to move towards common goals and to design common policies will help ensure that Europe is a force for social progress in which people really are put first, not the market. That is how the Left can act as a bulwark against neo-liberal entrenchment and deepen workers’ rights and decent work for all across the EU.
Some Chartists are now saying, vote Lib Dem or Green, with Mandelson in the Cabinet and a return to neo-liberal Blairism. Don Flynn questions this approach.
I don’t understand a position that says vote Lib Dem!As far as I am concerned there are two plausible positions that could be taken on the issue of voting.There are:
1/ Brown et al might be shits but the LP still rests on the base of a working class movement which might yet fight for class conscious socialist policies.We should therefore hang on in there and see what opportunities for a new radicalisation of politics come up in the crisis years immediately ahead.
2/ If New Labour has succeeded in liquidating the last elements of the working class movement then there’s nothing left in Parliament but different varieties of pro-market bourgeois parties and no particular reason why we should favour one against the other.We therefore call for a voting boycott and concentrate our work in building resistance to market policies in struggles taking place at the level of civil society.
My position is that we are still just about at 1/, but at the cusp of going into 2/.I could well imagine the parliamentary LP falling apart and into splintered factions if it is badly defeated in the next election, with the ultra-Blairites arguing for the reconstituton of what is left of its organisation into something resembling the US Democratic party - ie a caucus of local chieftains who come together periodically to decide strategies for grabbing a share of the political offices available at elections.The unions - I would presume - would support a rump parliamentary party still nominally committed to a mass popular membership and a left of centre reformist programme.Whether this provided conditions for a revived left social democratic party with a chance of winning a popular mandate depends on two factors - One: the groundwork done by groups like Compass this side of an election in providing a pole for the left to group around, and two, the extent to which groups rooted in civil society opposition to capitalist markets revitalise some degree of enthusiasm for oppositional politics outside of the parliamentary arena.
Okay - a couple of long shots in there I know, but it doesn’t seem out of the question to me that the crisis of the globalised capital model will be extended in the months ahead into the long-drawn out crisis of parliamentary democracy.The cards will be completely re-shuffled if this is the case, with the possibility of all sorts of new political formations coming into existence. A fair proportion of these will be decidedly right wing, as we are seeing in other European countries.But if the support if the unions can be secured forrenewed democratic left party perhaps, just perhaps, the left in the UK will be able to make progress.So, exactly why anyone should be thinking of a vote for the Lib Dems with this going on is beyond me.