Thursday 2 July 2020

Know Your Strength, And Use It

The New Deal never went far enough. On its own, it did not end the Great Depression in the United States. That came when the War and post-War reconstruction enabled the federal government to force corporate America to adopt the latest technology, thereby creating America's famous technological advantage. But the New Deal did what it did, and Boris Johnson needs to be held to his identification with it, as well as confronted with the things that needed to done over and above it in order to have the full desired effects.

Johnson entirely accepts that the areas that have given him his overall majority had been left to rot, under all three parties, since the Budget of December 1976. He sells himself, highly successfully so far, as the man who will halt and reverse that decline, which had been imposed by central government while being aided and abetted by useless and corrupt right-wing Labour local government.

That differentiates him starkly from his seven most recent predecessors, and from the neo-Blairism of Keir Starmer, but it does not distinguish him at all from Jeremy Corbyn, who said exactly the same thing, only with less emphasis on the Leader's Messianic personality. Johnson's premise is that the Red Wall reacted to 40 unbroken years of active abandonment by casting the decisive votes in favour of Brexit, by voting for Corbyn's economic programme in 2017 when the Labour manifesto was still committed in black and white to Hard Brexit, and then by voting for him, Johnson, in 2019 because Starmer and his ilk had changed the Labour Party's Brexit policy.

In order to hold onto those seats, Johnson contends that not only must there be a full strength Brexit at the end of this year, but also, and made possible by that, there must be enormous public spending along, and to the benefit of, the Red Wall. That spending is made possible by the recognition of the principle that Corbyn and John McDonnell could never quite get past the Labour Party's labyrinthine committee system. A sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling inflation, means that must therefore be under democratic political control.

Starmer is the cry of rage against all of this. He is the howl of the people who had assumed that once they had installed their preferred Leader of the Labour Party, then the economic and foreign policy debates would once again have been closed, with the combination of neoliberalism and neoconservatism as the only permissible position. Accordingly, Britain would have stayed in the Single Market and the Customs Union. Everything would thus have been set up for a barely perceptible reaccession to the EU within 10 years.

We have yet to see what a Johnsonian foreign policy would look like. He wants to be Donald Trump, so expect it to be as far as from Starmerism as his economic policy was. Pretty much, we would go to war if our territory were invaded, or at a push if it were in imminent danger of being so, but absolutely not under any other circumstance. Any invasion of our territory is wildly improbable. So, again, it is for all practical purposes as if Corbyn had won.

Except that we would still be arming the likes of Saudi Arabia. But that is detrimental to the safety of our own streets, so Johnson might be amenable to change. He is not shy of the measures that would be necessary to diversify employment while retaining skills, in order to defend ourselves by getting out of the international arms trade. We never know where these things might end up. Or we do, and they are pointing at us.

To the Starmerites, however, Saudi Arabia is sacrosanct because it is the enemy of Iran, which is the enemy of Israel. Russia and China are qualified allies of Iran, so they are respectively the Red Menace and the Yellow Peril. And so on. The world is divided up into goodies and baddies, defined by Tel Aviv. Subtleties such as India's alliance with Russia are entirely lost. Narendra Modi is a firm friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, so he in on the side of the angels. And as an enemy of China, both directly and by its enmity with Pakistan, India is one of us, not one of them. It is all very simple. Everything is simple if you yourself are simple.

That brings us to Starmer's cack-handed intervention on Kashmir, which has lost Labour a million votes. Not only has the Red Wall only half-fallen, with the other half set to fall next time, but only the absence of an election has failed to bring home the collapse of Labour's Black Wall under Starmer. Nor do the two Walls merely run in parallel.

Until a few months ago, the Labour Party was led by the only Leader of any party whom the anti-racist movement had ever truly rated. He was one its staunchest supporters and participants in the House of Commons, and one of the longest-standing. He had been an active anti-racist since long, long, long before it had become fashionable, and his was not a vague, generic niceness about these matters, but a very high level of commitment to a very long list of highly specific causes.

By the starkest of contrasts, the Labour Party is now led by a former Director of Public Prosecutions. He has chosen to identify with those who took selfies with the corpses of black murder victims. He has tried to steal Marcus Rashford's dinner money. He has dismissed Black Lives Matter, for all its many faults, as a "moment". The statues of slave-traders are coming down now, but they remained standing under all past Labour Governments.

Starmer has pretended not to understand the term "defunding the Police", and he has ruled out its true meaning of "investing in programmes that actually keep us safe like youth services, mental health and social care, education, jobs and housing. Key services to support the most vulnerable before they come into contact with the criminal justice system." Yet that would in fact be perfectly compatible with Labour's 2017 and 2019 manifesto commitments to restore and increase funding of the Police, in need of reform though they obviously are. See above on how the money supply works.

Labour subscribes to the IHRA Definition, which is a denial of BAME, migrant and refugee experience redolent of the Windrush scandal and of the fire at Grenfell Tower. On the basis of that Definition, Labour has expelled Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and Tony Greenstein, who were members in good standing even under Tony Blair.

Rebecca Long-Bailey has been sacked for having retweeted a link to an article that contained the previously uncontested statement, "The tactics used by the police in America, kneeling on George Floyd's neck, that was learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services." If it has any consistency, then Labour will sack or expel anyone who objected to the Israeli annexation of the Jordan Valley. Yet one's approach to the Palestinian struggle is the litmus test of one's attitude to white violence against people of colour throughout the world, including in Britain.

Labour no longer supports the Chagossian cause either in itself or in the person of Julian Assange. As has been mentioned, Labour no longer supports self-determination for Kashmir. It has replaced Diane Abbott with an all-white Home Office team that has been outflanked on the left by Priti Patel. It has promoted Jess Phillips. Its refusal to participate in Munira Mirza's new commission on inequality puts its supporters on the menu by denying them a place at the table.

Labour has a particular problem with black men. Only six black men have ever been Labour MPs. There are only three at the moment, with only two black men currently sitting as Labour Peers. There are fewer than 100 black men as Labour Councillors, and no black man in this century has sat either as a Labour Member of the London Assembly or as a member of the party's National Executive Committee.

Working-class pupils are twice as likely to be predicted an E grade, and black pupils' grades are staggeringly under-predicted, with only 39 per cent of predictions turning out to have been correct. Boys are also ill-served. 13 years of Labour Government did nothing to improve any of this. Quite the reverse, in fact. The people who make these mistakes are the backbone of the Labour Party's membership, and their children are the direct beneficiaries of the present system. Starmer is those members' choice as a potential Prime Minister.

The Labour Party's staff has been shown to be rampantly racist; one of those who have been so exposed has been calling me a "mulatto" since 2003, when he was on the staff of the then Government Chief Whip. And Labour has failed to oppose an early relaxation of the lockdown despite the far greater risk of Covid-19 to BAME people.

Covid-19 has put a lot of things into abeyance, but here along the Red Wall we are more than conscious of our newfound power, and we fully intend to use it. A rail link between Consett and Tyneside, you say, Richard Holden? And hospital provision in succession to Shotley Bridge? We are already impressed that you have secured the reversal of the increase in Vehicle Excise Duty on new motorhomes. Deliver these and other goods as well, and your majority of 1,144 could go up dramatically in 2024. But fail to do so, and it could disappear.

Along the Black Wall, you could have the same power. Some of you already do. Grenfell Tower is in a constituency that the Conservatives hold by 150 votes. Kensington is a Red Wall seat, just as there are major centres of BAME population in the North and in the Midlands. Know your strength. And use it.

Roll on Super Thursday, 6th May 2021. We are already planning to devastate the municipal Labour Right in the Red Wall areas. Do so in the Black Wall areas as well. Vote for whoever was best placed to defeat Labour in each ward. If necessary, organise those candidates. If necessary, be those candidates. Know your strength. And use it.

Use it ward by ward to vote for whoever was best placed to defeat Labour at next year's elections to Durham County Council. Deprive Labour of every seat, and then work with what came next. The most prized trophy of all is, of course, the Leader's seat. And the need to unseat this particular Leader demonstrates the fundamental unity between the Red Wall and the Black Wall.

That defeat would be heard from the souks to the favelas, from the Dalit colonies to the Rohingya camps, and from Kashmir, to Crimea, to the scattered outposts of Diego Garcia. We would make sure of that. Armed with an impeccably local running mate in order to stop the target from slipping through, some of us know just the man to do this. They would dance in the streets of the annexed Jordan Valley at his election, and not least at his election against this opponent. And we would show them doing it.

If you doubt that you could make Boris Johnson say that Britain was as racist as America, and then act accordingly as you directed, consider that we have got him to say that we had been left to rot for 40 years, necessitating enormous public spending on us, with that spending made possible by the acceptance of the principle of Modern Monetary Theory. If we can do this, then you could do that. The Budget of March 2020 has ended the era that began with the Budget of 1976. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. It already has plenty going on. Know your strength. And use it.

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