Why Owen Jones is wrong to urge people to vote for Labour

I've got a confession to make - I'm an Owen Jones fan. I've read Chavs and The Establishment and I think they're both good books, not groundbreaking perhaps, but a timely reminder of the way in which our stitched up sham democracy works and the central importance of class - the issue which dare not speak its name in 21st century Britain. But I do have a problem with Owens Jones's politics because although he's a worthy fighter for social justice, public services and the welfare state, and an enemy of neoliberalism, he has chosen the wrong vehicle to further his political aims in the UK - namely the Labour Party.

As far as this election is concerned he has become a fully paid up member of the Polly Toynbee 'hold your nose and vote for Labour' faction. Polly recently repeated almost exactly the same call to 'hold your nose' in The Guardian as she did in the 2010 election. The problem is if you hold your nose for long enough you are certain to suffocate, and you are going to have to hold it for a very long time if you expect any change from the neoliberal Labour Party of 'red' Ed Miliband and Ed Balls.

So Owen urges us to vote Labour to keep the Tories out, and when a Labour government is in power, we can all put it under pressure to do the nice things instead of the nasty things - like continuing to implement cuts and austerity, applying a token plaster to the semi-privatised NHS and 'balancing the budget' - which is at best an economically illiterate policy. Its a bit like asking someone to vote for Terminator instead of Godzilla on the basis that there will be marginally less collateral damage. 

The problem is that many of us have gone beyond that stage and have no interest in the lesser of two evils. Despite the rotten electoral system we have to contend with with we want to vote for something we can believe in, a Party that is capable of delivering real change, even if that is not at the next election, or the one after that, because we are in it for the long haul. Its clear that the only Party that can deliver that change is the Green Party, the party that espouses the politics of Owen Jones himself, even if he can't yet bring himself to vote for it.

Both Labour and the Tories increasingly resemble zombie parties in a hollowed out democracy. Both have abandoned their traditional base for the corporations and super rich and both have been complicit in the drastic decline in our democracy in the past 30 years or so. No wonder fewer and fewer people can be bothered to vote for either of them. But more and more people are seeking out a progressive alternative to Labour and that is why the Green vote is growing and why Green Party membership passed 61,000 today, and will continue to grow. After neoliberal Labour have failed to win a majority I hope that Owen will fight to move a Labour-led government to the left - as a member of the Green Party.

Britain's democracy is broken, is it beyond repair?

David Cameron came into office in 2010 banging on about 'broken Britain', since then he and Chancellor George Osborne seem to have done their best to ensure that Britain's society is broken with massive cuts of over £80 billion affecting the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. Cameron also talked about the electorate's lack of trust in politicians, but he has done nothing to restore that trust, and if anything, trust in politicians continues to decline. Despite Cameron's best efforts its not our society that's broken, its our democracy.

Two recent news stories which reinforce this point caught my eye this week. The first was about a dramatic decline in Conservative Party membership. Depending on which figures you believe membership is down to about 100,000 and has halved since Cameron came to power. According to George Eaton in the New Statesman:

"Although Labour membership has risen by 31,000 to 187,000 since Ed Miliband became leader, this remains far below the peak of 405,000 seen under Tony Blair in 1997. The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, have seen membership fall by 5,000 since the general election to 60,000, down from a peak of 101,000 in 1994. But it is the Tories, who once boasted a membership in excess of three million (see graph), who have suffered the most rapid decline. Should the trend continue, membership will soon fall below the psychologically significant 100,000 mark."

A similar story appeared in the Independent which talked about not just decline in membership of the Tories but increasing disillusionment with Westminster politics. I don't find any of this surprising and I posted about the decline of the three main Parties recently. It's not really difficult to understand why any of this is happening. Firstly, there is nothing to choose between the three main Parties. For a bunch of Parties who talk about offering the electorate "choice", there is precious little choice on offer from them. All have the same identikit policies. Of course "choice" really means "privatisation", which is something millions of voters, who are sick of being ripped-off by the private sector 'fat cats', are totally disillusioned with.

But the disillusionment goes much deeper than this and its the second reason for this decline which is by far the most important; our democracy is broken, it isn't working, and the list of things that are wrong is a very long one indeed. For a start, our electoral system doesn't reflect voters views; first past the post is well past its sell by date, a rotten system which no longer meets voters needs and aspirations. Then there is the increasing centralisation of power, something which has been happening for more than forty years. Local Government has been hollowed-out and councillors are little more than mere managers paid to implement central diktat. Also, there is the ongoing scandal of the continuation of the House of Lords, which was recently reported to be the largest chamber in the world after the National People's Assembly in China! I could go on but that will suffice for now.

The Palace of Westminster: home of a rotten and discredited parliament

Reform of our democratic system has never been more urgent. Without reform power will continue to be in the hands of the few, propped up by a shrinking number of voters. In the longer run this is a recipe for disaster, as people are likely to become disillusioned with the idea of democracy itself. We really need to re-evaluate what 'democracy' is, and I'd recommend you read David Graeber's recent book 'The Democracy Project', which examines what democracy really is, how it has developed, and how it can be made more participatory and responsive to people's needs. One thing is for sure, for a start we need real power devolved to regions and localities, instead of Tory platitudes about "localism", a completely reformed Parliament, with a fully elected second chamber, preferably based in a new chamber away from Westminster, which should become a museum, and an electoral system based on proportional representation. Until this happens, our democracy will continue to decay, and the legitimacy of Parliament, which is unloved and discredited, will continue to decline.

"Democracy itself is at stake"

A while ago I wrote a post about the UK's sham democracy. My argument was that our democratic system is there to make us believe we can change our society but that we are only actually allowed to tinker at the margins. What this means is that we may be able to change social policy - like gay marriage - but the fundamentals cannot be altered. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, our political parties, with the exception of the Green Party, are in thrall to a neoliberal consensus which revolves around austerity, deregulation, and privatisation and asset stripping of the public sector. Secondly, as a nation, we are locked into various international treaties including the WTO, and the Lisbon Treaty, which compel us to put commercial interests above our democratic sovereignty.

So I was interested to read an article by Ha-joon Chang in this weeks Guardian. Chang is always worth reading because he tells it how it really is. I have no idea what his politics are but, as far as I can see, he is a pragmatist who is interested in what makes economies work for people, and how that can be achieved. I recommend you read his post but Its worth quoting a key passage here:

"If even the IMF doesn't approve, why is the UK government persisting with a policy [austerity] that is clearly not working? Or, for that matter, why is the same policy pushed through across Europe? A certain dead economist would have said it is because the government is "in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor". Dead right [my italics].

Current policies in the UK and other European countries are really about making poor people pay for the mistakes of the rich. Millions of poor people have lost their jobs and the support they received through welfare, but how many of those top bankers who caused the crisis have suffered – except for a cancelled knighthood here and a partially returned pension pot there? If anyone has suffered in the financial industry, it is its poorer members – junior analysts who lost their jobs and tellers who are working longer hours for shrinking real wages."

Adam Smith: well aware that government acts in the interests of the ruling class

The quote about 'instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor' is from Adam Smith. Smith never was the patron saint (Chang's words) of economics that the 'free' market fundamentalists have made him out to be. And, as Chang says, it is a very telling quote, one that makes clear that our government was just as biased towards the interests of the 1% in Smith's time as it is now. As Chang also says "democracy itself is at stake" when it becomes just an instrument for maintaining to power of the few - the ruling class and corporations. We have to understand that this is how our democracy works if we want to change it, and we have to re-make it for us, the 99%, rather than for them, the 1%. If we don't do this we will continue to be used for the benefit of a tiny elite, a global ruling class, which sits above the sham democratic process and is immune to it.

The dregs of democracy

Its conference season. Its also election time in the USA. Last Wednesday there was a Presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, and earlier in the week Ed Milliband's conference speech.  What did we learn from these two events? The main outcome for me was that we learned how impoverished our democracy is in the west, how hollowed out it has become. We used to have a choice. In the UK it was a clear-cut choice between Labour and Conservative. Not any more. Politics has become homogenous. The very people who claim that they want us to have more choice, by which they really mean more privatisation, want us to have less and less choice when it comes to politics, and who we can vote for.

What was scary about to Obama-Romney debate wasn't the fact that , by all accounts, Romney won. It was the lack if difference between the two candidates. So dominant has the neoliberal consensus become amongst the political class that the debate is nuanced between minor differences in policy, whether to cut taxes a bit more or a bit less, whether to have a bit more private sector. Politics is now about personality. Is Ed a strong leader? Is he a geek? Who do you prefer Cameron or Milliband, Romney or Obama? Politicians have to market themselves to the electorate as Ed Milliband did on Tuesday. This is pure and utter bullshit, and a complete distraction from the things that matter - like policies for instance. But its a distraction which suits the neoliberal right. Let people argue about whether Cameron is better than Milliband, while we get on with asset stripping the NHS and the Public sector. Glenn Greenwald, writing in the Guardian, hit the nail on the head:

"Wednesday night's debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney underscored a core truth about America's presidential election season: the vast majority of the most consequential policy questions are completely excluded from the process. This fact is squarely at odds with a primary claim made about the two parties – that they represent radically different political philosophies – and illustrates how narrow the range of acceptable mainstream political debate is in the country."

The first Kennedy and Nixon debate in 1960

Out in the real world however, as we have seen all over the world, in Mexico, Spain, and the USA, millions of people want real choice and real change. Here in the UK our politicians have the democratic system with a Parliament and first-past-the-post voting system that is more fitted to the 17th century than the 21st century. That is why people are increasingly disillusioned with the democratic process. But that, in itself, suits politicians. However few people vote, they still get to be in power. What we have now, is a sham democracy instead of a proper democracy.  This is a sort of corporate-neoliberal totalitarianism maintained and stitched-up between corporations, politicians and the media, and before things can be changed for the better they look set to get much worse.

Talking about a revolution!

Did you know there was a revolution going on? If you had been watching and reading the corporate media you might have got some inkling but hardly the full picture. But lets look at some of the examples; the Arab Spring; Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Bahrain, and even Saudi Arabia; Occupy in the USA; Protests in Russia; in Greece with SYRIZA; and in Spain, Italy, Ireland and the UK; Massive student protests in Chile and Canada. Many of these protests have been ignored by the media but this is a real revolution, and it is happening before our eyes if we care to look for it.

There is a revolution going on!

Why is this happening? - it is because the mass of ordinary people globally are sick and tired of  poverty, unemployment, and the cosy neoliberal stitch-up between commercial interests and tame 'free' market fundamentalist politicians and economists, which is destroying our economies and the planet. In our own small way, as individuals, we are all part of this revolution, but we need to come together as part of a wider international movement which can throw-off the sham democracies we live in, and bring about real and lasting change.That change must include democratic control of our economies and decent housing, healthcare, jobs and education for all.

In the UK, we have the "let them eat cake" politics of David Cameron, his banker friends, and his rotten, discredited Coalition government. In the USA, we have a battle between Obama and Romney, the former is marginally less bad than the latter but both are corporate creatures, dependent on big money to get elected. In Europe, we have Merkel and the sterile dead end of austerity, designed to protect the banks at the expense of the European taxpayers. People have had enough!

It is time for radical democratic change,  and the only way that change can happen is for people to channel their anger and throw off their apathy with the 'system', take to the streets, protest, and vote for parties that can bring about that change. The people of Egypt have shown us the way. In the UK, the Green Party is the only mainstream party which opposes the neoliberal paradigm and has the policies to make the breakthrough that people want. But the Party can only do that if it maintains its radical edge, engages with and works with the wider movement, and campaigns hard for change. Simply seeking electoral success is not enough. To make that breakthrough, we need to demonstrate that we are serious about the changes people want, and we must be able to take them with us. In Romayne Phoenix and Will Duckworth I think we have two leadership candidates for the Green Party who can accomplish that task.


Footnote: I will give my detailed views about the Green Party leadership contest in a later post.

Will Hollande beat the EU austerity stitch-up?

Good news for all those on the left of politics who want to fight the neoliberal austerity programme being forced onto the people of Europe by the EU! -  Francois Hollande has been elected President of France on an anti austerity ticket and the Greek parties New Democracy and PASOK who collaborated in the EU, IMF and  ECB bankers carve-up of Greece have been battered in the latest elections.

The problem remains that the European neoliberal elite of politicians, bankers and corporations who run the EU are committed to crushing all democratic attempts to derail their austerity programme, which is designed to protect banks and bondholders at the expense of ordinary Europeans. As I've blogged before, previous attempts by the people of Europe to stymie this elite have been defeated. The Irish, French and Dutch people tried and failed to block the European constitution (we were told it wasn't really a constitution) in referendums but the attempts were in vain.

The Euro-elite have a way of dealing with the inconvenience of democratic decisions - they make you vote until you give them the required answer. This has happened in Ireland - twice. Now that Hollande has been elected and the Greek pro-austerity parties have been humiliated, you can be sure that Brussels and Berlin will be working overtime to ensure that their plans can't be derailed.

The obvious answer in Greece, as it has been in other European countries before, is to make the Greeks vote until they come up with a pro-austerity choice. New Democracy has failed to form a coalition, lets hope that SYRIZA can do it, if they can't, its likely that the `Greeks will be required to vote once again. As for Hollande, we can only hope that he is serious in bringing about real change, and even if he is, then he may be bullied into submission for all we know.

Need the European elite worry about the inconvenience of democracy ?

So conformist and robotic has been the acquiescence of Euro-politicians to neoliberalism and austerity that its tempting to think that they must have Euro-microchips fitted before they are allowed to take power. Lets hope that Hollande can avoid this fate. Whatever happens its clear that the European people, when they get a chance, want no truck with austerity, and the sooner the left can get its act together and respond to this the better. In the UK the Green Party have made a good start, but its time for others to stand up and follow.

The phone hacking scandal exposes our sham democracy

I blogged a while ago about our sham democracy, the cosy carve up which means that whoever gets elected, the policies pursued by governments are always the same. The economic crisis caused by the collapse of the banks illustrated this really well, because that crisis lead directly to the sovereign debt crisis, and we have seen that successive governments in countries like Greece and Ireland have toed the party line, and swallowed the neoliberal medicine, to the detriment of the people who elected them. How ironic it is that the electorate in Greece should boot out an incredibly unpopular conservative government, only to replace it with a 'socialist' government which then proves to be even more unpopular, by kow-towing to the IMF and the ECB and introducing yet greater austerity.

So that's how it goes. You have an incredibly unpopular government, you boot it out and elect another government which then goes on to do exactly the same thing. There is only one way to break this cycle - vote for a party which is not neoliberal and has different policies. If that means voting socialist or green - do it!

So what has this all got to do with phone hacking? The essence is that the problems with the banks and Murdoch's media empire are the same - capitalist corporations which have too much power and are out of democratic control. Just as our politicians have ceded power to the banks, they have also ceded it to moguls like Murdoch. News International should never have been allowed to control 40% of the UK press. Sky should never have been allowed to build up a monopoly of satellite TV through exclusive rights to Premier League football. But it was allowed to happen, and in the process our democracy has been undermined and our body politic corrupted. This is what happens when you have unregulated capitalism and 'free' market fanatics in government. The sad reality is that there is no change in sight. Murdoch may have his wings clipped for a while, but the neoliberal juggernaut moves on, crushing decency, democracy and freedom in its path.

I'd just like to finish this post with two pertinent quotes from an article in today's Telegraph (my italics):

"There were those who believed that Murdoch had debased and debauched British public life, and there is indeed great evidence that this was the case. For example, the News of the World was a respectable – if racy – family newspaper before Murdoch brought it under his ownership. As we now know, it converted into a flourishing criminal concern that took an evil pleasure in destroying people’s lives."

"The bitter truth is that no major figure in British public life was prepared to take on and expose the Murdoch newspaper empire. Rival proprietors were silent. Senior public figures did not dare to speak out for fear of exposure and attack in the Murdoch newspapers. This is why, for more than a generation, Rupert Murdoch’s empire has been a spider at the heart of an intricate web that has poisoned British public life. "

Strange it is though that a paper which can see the shortcomings of Cameron and speak with loathing about Rupert Murdoch will be trumpeting the wonders of the 'free' market which is the real engine of inequality, poverty and the corruption it so rightly condemns.

Britain's new ruling class

I grew up in Britain in the 1960s. A that time, people used to talk about the ruling class. Nobody thought there was anything odd about that - such talk was common currency, on the bus, in the pub and in the workplace. This was because people wanted change, they wanted the ruling clique bust wide open. I have already referred to this in more detail in a recent post - about how things improved, and how people thought that power had become more accessible to all, largely through the opening up of our higher education system. How things have changed! Now you never hear anyone talk about the ruling class. There is a kind of tacit assumption that we all have equal access to the corridors of power - but I beg to differ. I think that the ruling class  is back, and with a vengeance.

There is no doubt that over the past 20 years or so we have seen the development of a political class of career politicians. Peter Oborne, the right wing polemicist wrote about this in his book, The Triumph of the Political Class, in 2007. In a nutshell, his argument was that a new self-serving political class had grown up, and become dominant in the UK. I have to say that, on the whole, I agree with him. Prior to the emergence of this class, politicians had often lived and worked in the real world before entering parliament. They had to work their way up the ladder. There were working class MPs. But this has changed. Many of the most important and influential of our politicians have jumped straight from higher education into parliament. Worst still, many are the appointees of our leaders, people who were chums of Tony Blair or are pals of Dave and George. These people are parachuted into safe seats knowing that they will be elected, and they owe their allegiance to the people who 'appointed' them.

This process means that more and more of the people who sit in parliament are hand-picked by a small ruling clique. No one else can get a look in. Its as if the House of Commons is set up like the House of Lords. Sure, you can vote for people, but only people chosen by Dave, or Nick, or Ed. Put like that, its a chilling thought, and what does it say about our democracy? I'm not suggesting this is the whole story because I don't believe that these politicians rule on their own. The new ruling class is an alliance of these leading politicians and big business leaders (capitalists, increasingly from the financial sector). What matters is that we are talking about a cabal of people who have things sewn up, and act in their interests - not the interests of the people in the UK. The resulting irony is that Britain is becoming more like Egypt, with a rotten self-perpetuating elite and a fraudulent democracy, just as Egypt struggles to become, more like how Britain is supposed to be.

What suits this ruling group is a narrow neo-liberal right wing ideology dressed up as economic necessity i.e. the usual suspects - privatisation, de-regulation, ending welfare and pensions etc. - which amounts to a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary people to the elite - the rich and the big corporations. No wonder we are being told to tighten our belts, we are facing the biggest heist in history. 

Its not just the fact that our democracy has been subverted by this new ruling alliance that we should be concerned about. Its the fact that some of these 'chums' are unfit to be in positions of power, and never would have been, if they'd had to go through a normal selection process. One topical example that springs to mind is Michael Gove, Minister for Education, and chum of David Cameron, who was parachuted into parliament because Dave thought he was a good egg. But Gove is a deluded right-wing crank who draws his inspiration from Tom Brown's Schooldays. His latest potty idea, that parents should break the teachers strike on June 30th by taking over schools, shows exactly what sort of extremist he now is. Take a look at this priceless photo, which shows just what sort of 'extremist' he used to be.

We can end this  situation, but only by re-asserting control over our political parties and our democracy. By using our votes wisely and judiciously at election time and fighting for change. Its going to be a long hard struggle, and we need to get started now!

How our sham democracy works

So you think you live in a democracy? Well, you are right, you do. But it's not quite the democracy you probably think. I just pulled this definition off my Mac: - "control of an organization or group by the majority of its members " . To me, that is a satisfactory definition. You could substitute 'organisation' with 'country' and 'members' with electorate', and you would have a definition which fits the UK. The key word though is 'control'. In a democracy 'control' means that the will of the electorate can make change happen - including fundamental change.

So why is our democracy a sham? It works like this: You can vote, and you can make change happen but there are certain things that can't be changed, really important things like our economic system, which determines the kind of society we have. Why can't 'we' make those fundamental changes? Because the market, or call it big business or capitalism if you prefer, is in control. How does this work and how did it happen? If we look at recent history - in the past 40 years or so our politicians have ceded control to the market. It has happened through the capture of institutions. The European Union is a good example of this. European treaties contain clauses which dictate how our economy works. In effect they create a European constitution which binds us to the market through so called 'liberalisation'. It means that we have to follow a right wing ideological economic programme. 

This 'free' market programme is neoliberal and its one that is followed by almost all governments in the 'West'. It means that corporations can dodge taxes, trade unions get disempowered, environmental regulations are watered down and countries are run for the benefit of the 1%.

The USA is still the epitome of capitalism but its doesn't say in the constitution that the country has to be capitalist. Those kind of ideological-cum-economic statements have no place in a constitution. What has happened is that politicians have put commercial interests above our democratic rights. On a lower level it works in the UK like this. If a multinational wants to build a superstore in your town centre your local council can't stop it from happening. The citizens of that town can't take a democratic decision that they don't want it. The 'rights' of the multinational have been put above our democratic rights. Of course we can still vote, and we can still decide to do things like introduce gay marriage, but we can't run our economy in the way we choose.

Our politicians never asked us if we wanted this. If they had they know we would have rejected it. But the point is that many if not most of us are unaware of exactly what happened. Where people have kicked back, such as in the referendums in France and Ireland where European treaties were rejected, the politicians have fixed it so they got the result they wanted in the first place. It's not just the EU but all the major institutions such as the WTO, IMF and World Bank now adhere to this neoliberal ideology masquerading as economic policy. The plan is to ensure that a particularly nasty, laissez faire version of capitalism is completely dominant. Social and collective concerns are subsumed to the agenda of big business.

Despite this, our democracy is still worth something. We can put democratic rights back on top. But we can only do this if we first understand what's really happened, and have the will to re-capture our institutions from those who have 'stolen' them. At the very least we need to tame the markets and bring them back under democratic control. If we can't do this it's hardly worth voting at all.