Until relatively recently, standard British usage meant that describing someone as ‘a progressive’ was more or less the equivalent to branding them a communist fellow traveller. Not any more; we are all progressives now, it seems.

Isn’t anybody willing to stand up for honest-to-goodness barking mad reactionaries these days? It’s not as if they are an endangered species, after all. Surely such a sizeable constituency surely deserves a spokesperson more articulate than Melanie Phillips.

Yet the way things are going right now, most politicians would rather confess diabolism or an entry on the sex offenders’ register than admit to being on the wrong side of this divide.

This silliness reached its apogee in an article in the Independent last Friday, in which Tory leader David Cameron - pictured - attempted to rebrand the Conservatives as ‘the true progressives’:
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Two recent politic stories highlight just how rapidly remaining differences between the only two political parties in Britain capable of forming governments continue to erode. That can only be to the detriment of voter choice.

First off, we read that the Smith Institute - a thinktank linked with Gordon Brown - and the Centre for Social Justice - a thinktank linked with Iain Duncan Smith - are to publish a joint strategy on how to get children out of poverty.

As Guardian reporter Andrew Wintour notes, accurately enough: “The joint initiative suggests the differences between the two parties are much smaller than they pretend.”
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Personally I’ll only believe that there is really an upturn in the class struggle at the point of production when Leicester Square is knee-deep in rubbish, at least a dozen bodies remain unburied, and the ghost of Red Robbo bestrides the now presumably deserted Longbridge car park once again.

But as someone schooled in the quasi-syndicalist brand of Marxism that sees industrial action as the first step to imminent world revolution, the co-ordinated public sector stoppages involving 350,000 workers does have a sort of seventies retro ring about it. Just in time for the Rock Against Racism 30th anniversary gig, too.
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The coming collapse in the UK housing market largely flows from events outside New Labour’s control. That’s a sharp contrast to the last crash, which was the direct consequence of the economic incompetence of successive Conservative governments.

Remember the late eighties and early nineties, when hundreds of thousands of people lose their homes, as mortgage repayments became just too much for them? When millions more learned firsthand the meaning of the phrase ‘negative equity’? Much of the blame attaches to John Major, who as prime minister oversaw the policies introduced during his stint as cabinet minister and chancellor.
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So much for that old labour movement slogan about unity being strength; Marxists of one description or another are contesting seats in the London elections on no fewer than five separate tickets.

The divisions underline a generalised lack of political seriousness, perhaps driven by some sense that the stakes are low. After all, the pumped up borough council that is the Greater Rubberstamp Assembly hardly represents Britain’s most puissant political body, is it? What does it matter that not a single socialist candidate has even a remote chance of success?

Well, it does matter, and this is why. The British National Party is looking good to secure at least one and possibly even two seats. That will confer on it greater legitimacy and a better platform than it has ever previously enjoyed.

The truth is that the BNP has built itself – in the outer eastern suburbs of London, anyway – primarily by articulating real working class grievances. Socialists that still espouse class politics need to ask themselves why the far right is succeeding where the far left has so completely failed.
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Never mind what’s best for the kids; education policy in Britain since 1997 has been characterised by New Labour’s free market-driven determination to turn our schools into one big extended profit opportunity for the private sector.

Nothing whatsoever has been off limits. Used car salesmen with a few million to spare have enjoyed free rein to inculcate creationism in evangelical City Academies, entire Local Education Authorities have been privatised, and Private Finance Initiative school rebuilding programmes have handsomely underwritten the profits of construction majors.
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Stephen Glover is in no doubt that one part of the UK political spectrum consistently accommodated itself to the Zanu-PF regime that has misruled Zimbabwe for the last 28 years; his column in the Daily Mail this morning is headlined ‘Never let it be forgotten that it was the British Left who gave succour to the monstrous Mr Mugabe’. There are, however, just a few snags with this thesis. Not the least of them is that it simply isn’t true.

A quick trawl of the main British leftwing websites – well, the free access ones, at least - reveals not a single readily available pro-Mugabe article from the pen of any socialist. Nor am I aware of any Labour MP, of any persuasion, or even one single prominent trade unionist, backing for the Zimbabwean ruler.
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Christians are surely the last people who should be getting uptight about healing the sick; after all, Jesus was reportedly a bit of a dab hand at it himself.

OK, I’ve never actually read the Douay-Rheims Bible on which I presume Cardinal Keith O’Brien bases his teachings on. But according to the King James Version that I am familar with, Christ cured dozens of people with ailments ranging from unspecified fever, leprosy, menorrhagia and/or haemophilia, withered limbs, dropsy, deafness, blindness and paralysis. What’s more - unlike the average NHS general practitioner - he didn’t even have a problem with Saturday call-outs.

All of this makes Christ a tough act to follow. But humanity could be on the verge of doing just that.
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Erstwhile radicals who drift rightwards in middle age are too plentiful to need exemplification. Their ranks include a fair chunk of leading Labour politicians and trade union leaders, for starters.

Then again, the world has changed tremendously over the last quarter of a century, say. Political analysis has to keep pace. Just because somebody advanced a position in 1983 and advances a different position in 2008, it does not automatically follow that they are mutating into a reactionary.

This train of thought has been sparked, in part, by my toe-curling recollection of a student union meeting in the early eighties, at which I opposed a resolution calling for Chinese withdrawal from Tibet. My argument was that the Chinese annexation of 1951 had introduced proletarian property relations to a backward feudal country, and was therefore historically progressive. Such was the Trotskyist orthodoxy of the day.
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Peter Mandelson famously proclaimed in 1998 that New Labour was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’. One decade later, the government’s mood is not just chilled out but positively euphoric. That’s the clear message in a speech that business and enterprise secretary John Hutton - pictured - will deliver tomorrow, anyhow:

Rather than questioning whether huge salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country

… he will tell a meeting of the pressure group Progress.
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£25bn here and £25bn there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money. It has been absolutely apparent for at least five months that nationalisation represents the only realistic means of safeguarding the astonishing sums of taxpayer cash shovelled into Northern Rock to rescue the bank from the consequences of managerial incompetence.

Finally Alistair Darling has gotten the message. The erstwhile bearded Trot himself has brought the UK’s number five mortgage lender within the ambit of proletarian property relations. Only another 199 of the top 200 monopolies to go and Britain becomes a workers’ state, comrade. Shame the government didn’t see things the same way when Rover was going tits up. But in the financial services-driven British economy of today, grubby little manufacturing concerns seem somehow not to count.

What this episode proves is that nationalisation really is no worse than, say, bestiality, ebola, paedophilia, diabolism or any given combination thereof, and could at least be seriously discussed in other contexts.
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David Nowak – a 16-year old kid with the street name ‘Turk’ or ‘TK’ – fell victim to a knife killing in the playground across the road from my apartment block shortly before Christmas. Another teenage gang fight, apparently. Same thing happened to some other boy a couple of blocks away only a few months previously. Shrugs shoulders.

Three young men in the same age group - pictured right - were yesterday jailed for life for the murder of Garry Newlove, kicked to death outside his Warrington home in August last year after remonstrating with them for damaging his wife’s car. They were drunk and spliffed up at the time of the crime; Teenage Kicks, 2007 remix.

Meanwhile, one of today’s top stories in the British media is the controversy over ‘the Mosquito’, a device that prevents young people congregating in public places by emitting a high-pitched noise audible only to those aged under 25. The Children’s Commissioner for England and human rights group Liberty want it banned.

Violent or otherwise unruly behaviour on the part of youth is a real issue for working class communities, in inner cities and smaller towns alike. It is also one that many on the left – I’ll include myself here – feel instinctively uncertain about tackling.

The difficulty is avoiding the twin dangers of coming on like either a ‘Gee, Officer Krupke‘ parody or some deranged love child of David Blunkett and Melanie Phillips, manically demanding the return of the birch.

Yes, we can always advance a standard radical sociology critique. Of course these kids – socially formed under Labour governments, let us underline – are both products of the society around us and obviously deeply alienated from it.

Yes, some of the blame for teenage binge drinking surely lies with the directors of the giant booze companies that endlessly seek out new ways to encourage young people to guzzle their products, from ever-tackier sugar-filled alcopops to expensive advertising and promotional giveaway campaigns.

And no, the iniquities of ASBOs and the de facto return of the sus law – to which I was regularly subjected as a council estate teenager myself – don’t seem to have solved the problem, either.

I can’t honestly say that I know the answers. But if socialists ever want to be taken seriously be the people at the sharp end of this one, we need either to put forward some joined-up social policy thinking or risk leaving the field to the demagogues of all parties. After all, it’s not kids in Belgravia or the posh bits of Cheshire and Surrey that are doing the dying.
* Cross-posted from Dave’s Part

If Gordon Brown’s timid continuation of the New Labour project has demonstrated anything, it has underlined just how far British politics has become de-ideologised.

No longer do the mainstream parties fight on the basis of competing visions for society, even to the limited extent that they did in the late 1980s, let alone the period of polarisation between Thatcherism and Bennism that immediately preceded the Kinnock years.

Instead, both New Labour and the Tories have cohered around a post-Thatcherite settlement, and are seeking to be elected on the basis of their greater managerial competence and the projection of the personalities of their respective leaderships in the mass media.

That such a state of affairs can have prevailed since at least 1994 does have some sobering implications for Britain’s political left. It implies that class politics can no longer be regarded as some sort of equilibrium state, or any kind of ‘golden mean’ to which politics inevitably reverts in the longer term.

Yet there are voices within the Labour Party who are unhappy with this situation, and not just unreconstructed Old Labourites, either. The clearest expression of this is support garnered by Jon Cruddas in his unsuccessful bid for the deputy leadership last year.
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The Daily Telegraph website reported on Monday the story that McDonald’s is to be empowered to issue A-levels with an entirely predictable sneer: ‘Would you like a qualification with that?’

The trouble is, that nasty little middle-class jibe reflects the reality on the ground for any kids naïve enough to undergo the course – perhaps with no little arm-twisting from the local JobCentre – in the expectation that they will come out of it with a piece of paper standing them in good stead in any function other than flipping burgers.

They will be following in the tradition of generations of polytechnic students who swallowed the spurious assurance that they would be accorded ‘parity of esteem’ with the products of Oxbridge. They weren’t; indeed, the polytechnic stigma subsequently may even have worked against many in the job market.
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Dalston has just got a new branch of Tesco. It only opened today, and as I was passing anyway, I stepped inside to take a look. It’s only one of the convenience store format versions, rather than a full-on superstore; but it’s handy and it’s open late, so I’ll probably be doing my mid-week fresh fruit and veg top-up shop there from now on.

For many years, anyone in this part of London without a car - and that’s most people around here - has pretty much been dependent on the large Sainsbury in Kingsland shopping centre. Grumbling about the place is a staple of local bus-stop small talk.

The stock control seriously sucks. Go in there with twelve items or more on your shopping list, and it is almost certain you will not be able to tick them all off. It remains shabby, even after a recent refit. And for those of us who work irregular hours and need to fit the purchase of groceries around such a schedule, the opening times are not particularly convenient.

Tesco will remain open after five o’clock on a Sunday, offering an alternative to the manky fresh produce and ramped up prices on offer from what I think is technically known as the independent retail sector.

Maybe - I even mused to myself as I picked up a packet of new potatoes, a pint of milk, Tesco own brand bog cleaner and some anti-sceptic wipes - Sainsbury will even get its act together as a result of the competition. As the guy on the till handed me change from a fiver, it occured to me that would once have been considered a heretical thought for a socialist.
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Gordon Brown, Thatcherite? I wouldn’t dream of saying that myself, of course; it’s just too damn Dave Spart for me to get away with. Oh no, I’m simply quoting the succinct title of a chapter in Simon Jenkins’ recent book ‘Thatcher and Sons: a Revolution in Three Acts’.

Not being a particular fan of the man’s newspaper columns, I don’t know whether or not I’ll get round to buying a copy. But according to the synopsis, the central thesis is that Major, Blair and Brown essentially constitute the apostolic succession in terms of the Iron Lady’s project.

Summarising the charge sheet against Britain’s current prime minister, Jenkins reportedly rails against:

‘Brown’s unbridled enthusiasm for the privatisation of public services and public investment, his aversion to the public sector ethos in favour of private profit, his crushing of union power, his introduction of workfare into welfare and his patronage of money making above all other virtues’.

None of this a particularly controversial assessment for much of the far left. But coming from Sir Simon – former editor of The Times and all-purpose member of the great and the good – it hasn’t gone down well among New Labour supporters.
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Far from being on the margins of British life – as Conservative MP Mark Pritchard weakly tries to argue – Christianity maintains a prominence far in excess of that merited by its number of adherents. However much the Tories would like to see the emergence of a cohesive ‘religious right’ core vote in the UK, the evidence is that the social base for such a phenomenon it simply does not exist in this country.

Last time I saw any statistics, only 48% of Britons described themselves as belonging to any religion at all. Some 14% said they do not know who Jesus Christ is, and a further 22% believed he is ‘just a story’. Yet one Christian sect has been singled out as an official state religion, with its leadership given a voice in legislation through seats in the House of Lords. Christianity alone enjoys the protection of the blasphemy laws.

Extensive government funding is available to schools with a ‘Christian ethos’, even if that entails the teaching of creationism in science classes. Nor is anybody seriously arguing, pace Pritchard, that we should forget the Christian contribution to the arts, science, and culture. But this is best achieved in examining the ideas that inspired Milton or Newton in actual context. To judge by his website, Mr Pritchard is an enthusiast for nuclear weapons and Israeli membership of NATO, although his concept of Christian charity seemingly does not extend as far as immigrants.

But oddly enough, he bases his spurious ‘Christianophobia’ claims on the same tenet that most of the secular left would also use as a starting point: ‘Freedom of speech and of religion are fundamental principles of any liberal democracy.’ This is exactly the point. A true liberal democracy can only be premised on a separation of church and state. Precisely because we all want freedom of speech and freedom of religion, it cannot be right for the state to compromise such freedoms by privileging any one religion over any other.

Christianity competes in the free market for ideas on the same basis as other ideologies, and stands or falls by how far it succeeds. As many intelligent Christians would surely agree, believers cannot rightly ask for any more than that.
cross-posted from Dave’s Part

Israel and the Palestinians – or one faction of the Palestinians, at any rate – have agreed to talks with a view to a peace deal and the creation of a Palestinian state by the end of 2008.

But yesterday’s announcement in Annapolis takes up no further forward than we have for at least 15 years. This is simply Oslo for slow learners.

The outline of a two-state solution to the root of all Middle East evil has long been easily sketchable on the back of a beer mat; Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders and hands over one-third of Jerusalem, and everybody lives happily after. Simple, really.

Except a two-state solution necessarily will not work like that. All it amounts to is the establishment of an aid junkie Bantustan on Israel’s doorstep.

In particular, the Gaza Strip – currently outside Mahmoud Abbas’ control, anyway - will into a giant prison camp, cut off on all sides with no seaport or airport. No one will be able to enter or leave without passing through Israel. Israel will at will be able to cut off the supply of food, raw materials, water, fuel, gas and electricity at will.

This much should be elementary to anybody on the democratic left.
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The website of Red Pepper magazine is currently hosting a debate on whether or not the democratic left should fill out Green Party membership application forms. The opening shot is written by gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, a former Labour parliamentary candidate who will contest Oxford East for the Greens at the next general election. Other contributions come from Clare Short. Jon Cruddas, Chris Smith and Neal Lawson. Here’s the case I make for being a member of New Labour, despite and not because of its track record in office:

Greetings from member L0093001 of Hackney North and Stoke Newington CLP. Yes, after devoting most of my political energies for over a decade to arguing and actively working for a new political party of the left - even writing a book making an extended case as to why such a party is essential - I last year decided to rejoin the Labour Party.
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