Teresa May, Russia, Margaret Thatcher, Gorbachev and how to get rid of mediocrity

When you are threatened by members of your own tribe, one strategy which is available to a leader is to find or create a threat from an alien tribe. I think this is what Teresa May was doing when this morning out of the blue she discovered Russia as a threatening and dangerous enemy.

Her strategy is a far cry from Margaret Thatcher's in 1984, when, in an interview with John Cole, the BBC political correspondent, our then Tory leaderine declared, "I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together."

Of course in 1984 Mrs Thatcher was still assured of her position in the Conservative Party. Later in 1990 she was ambushed by senior people in her tribe and had no time to magic up the kind of enemy threat which had helpfully come her way in 1982 at the time of the Falkland crisis. 

Having said all that don't let it be thought that I don't know that Mrs Thatcher was an enemy of most of us in the United Kingdom during her years of power. You just need to look at how she began the destruction of the post-war consensus which insisted that we needed a national health service, an education system available for all, a welfare programme, a national transport system, many other public services as well as fair rights for workers. Oh! I forgot to mention that she introduced the Poll Tax.

Teresa May is in a weak position. She is, like her predecessor David Cameron, an incompetent Prime Minister. She will be ambushed by her political tribesmen (it is likely they will be men) when the time is right for them. The thing is we have an immediate need to be rid of her and her political kin. They are sub-mediocre. They are calamitously incapable. Why is it in a so called democracy we, the ordinary folks, have no apparatus to help us dismiss them now?

Ken Loach writes about the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn and Inequality

I reprint here, in full, the filmmaker Ken Loach’s article “Corbyn has the right answers. So stop blaming him for Labour’s troubles” which was published in the Guardian on March 1st, 2017. I do so because it expresses my own feelings on this matter so much more succinctly than I feel I can do myself at present. I almost feel too upset to write about the injustices served upon Jeremy Corbyn by people who should be supporting him. To give The Guardian credit it did publish this article but I am disappointed by The Guardian’s editorials and its columnists’  articles which consistently condemn Corbyn without really engaging with the policies he espouses. The panic cries set out against him of “Extremist”, “Revolutionary, and “out of touch” among others, are scurrilous and deliberately so, because the few who wield most of the power and wealth in the United Kingdom want to keep it and are fearful that the so-called “outrageously radical” policies of Jeremy Corbyn will rip it from their grasp. Policies like, sharing the world’s resources more equally, having publicly owned national health, education, and transport services rather than privatised ones, maintaining workers’ right, keeping libraries open and making sure public parks are free to all, providing students with grants rather placing them in debt. Do we really wrestle sleeplessly in our beds over policies like these ? 

We are told by our government that the United Kingdom is one of the world’s richest economies. After World War II when we were a relatively poor country paying back our war loans from the USA we had a Labour government which achieved all the policies of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership team espouse and yet now, as the world’s 6th wealthiest economy we can supposedly afford none of them. 

Where is all this wealth? Who is keeping it? There has been mention of the 1% percent who own and  99% who don’t own the world’s wealth and it may be people are more aware of inequality.  In 2014 the president of the USA (Barak Obama) and the Head of the International Monetary Fund (Christine Lagarde) declared rising inequality to be a priority for the world economy but it is still seldom at the forefront of  public debate and certainly there is little evidence to suggest any serious effort is being made to lessen inequality. 

Ken Loach’s film I, Daniel Blake and the following article give us an accurate record of how things actually are for most of us than does the judgmental rhetoric of the established body politic and the fourth estate. 

Corbyn has the right answers. So stop blaming him for Labour’s troubles  

by Ken Loach

The Guardian, 1st March, 2017.

The spate of calls for Jeremy Corbyn to quit since last week’s byelections in Stoke and Copeland has been as predictable as it was premeditated. It says everything about the political agenda of the media, and nothing about people’s real needs and experiences.

I went to Stoke and Whitehaven, in Cumbria, a few days before polling. Momentum arranged screenings of Daniel Blake. We went to Labour clubs in neglected areas, old estates away from the centre. At one club I was asked: “Why have you come here? No one comes here.”

Joe Bradley and Georgie Robertson, the organisers, were a model of how Labour activists should work: full of energy, hard-working and brilliantly efficient. They had a warm greeting for everyone, checked the screening facilities, made space for local contributors so people from that community felt it was their event and that they were being heard. This is how Labour can reconnect.

Both screenings were packed. The discussions were passionate, informed and invigorating, a world away from the tired cliches of the public discourse. This was not a marketing exercise but a real engagement with people and their concerns.

The failure of Labour governments – and, importantly, Labour councillors – was a common theme. It is not hard to see the neglect around Stoke. Solid Labour, for sure, but what good has it done them? A 2015 report into the area found 60,000 people in poverty, 3,000 households dependent on charity food, and £25m in council tax arrears. The presence of the BNP, now replaced by Ukip, shows how Labour’s failure left space for the far right.

It was a similar story in Copeland. Industries have been lost – steel, mines, a chemical factory – without any plan to replace them. Labour is seen to be as culpable as the Tories. Someone said that in Copeland it was an anti-establishment vote, and Labour is the local establishment. It was a vote against Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and previous MPs Jack Cunningham and Jamie Reed.

In both constituencies the Labour candidates, neither from the left of the party, were invited, but both candidates ignored the meetings. With coverage on television, radio and the press, this is bizarre. Could it be because Momentum were the organisers? We were there to support Labour. There was not even the courtesy of a reply.

Now let’s ask the real questions. What are the big problems people face? What is the Labour leadership’s analysis and programme? Why is Labour apparently unpopular? Who is responsible for the party’s divisions?

The problems are well rehearsed but rarely related to the leadership question. A vulnerable working class that knows job insecurity, low wages, bogus “self-employment”, poverty for many including those in work, whole regions left to rot: these are the consequences of both Tory and New Labour’s free market economics. Employers’ “flexibility” is workers’ exploitation. Public services are being dismembered, outsourced, closed down, the source of profit for a few and an impoverished society for the many. The central fact is blindingly obvious: the Blair, Brown and Peter Mandelson years were central to this degeneration. That is why Labour members voted for Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn and the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, make a different analysis, and are proposing different policies. The market will never provide a secure, dignified life for the vast majority. If there is a need but no profit, the need goes unanswered. Collectively we can plan a secure future, use new technology to benefit everyone, ensure that all regions are regenerated with real industries, and rebuild our public services and the quality of our civic life. It is a vision of a world transformed and a rejection of the bitter, divided and impoverished society we see around us.

Corbyn’s policies would make a start. First, public investment in the neglected regions to provide properly paid jobs; a health service that is fully funded, with everyone from cleaners to consultants employed directly and the private contractors kicked out; resolving the PFI disaster so beloved of New Labour; council housing to resolve the crisis of homelessness, with planned and sustainable communities; and transport restored to public ownership to end the chaos of privatisation. There is an understanding of the problems and ideas to begin reconstruction. How to pay? Redress inequality through taxing great wealth and profits. I would also add that the economy needs fundamental change so that all “receive the full fruits of their labour”, as my old Labour party card says.

The irony is that these policies are popular. In a recent poll, carried out by the Media Reform Coalition, 58% oppose private involvement in the NHS, 51% support public ownership of the railways, and 45% favour increased public spending and raising taxes for the wealthiest. Why don’t we hear Labour MPs promoting this programme? Why the silence from the grandees who refuse to serve in the shadow cabinet? Do they reject the policies, preferring the New Labour politics of privatisation and austerity, or do they remain silent to isolate Corbyn and his supporters?

Corbyn and his small group fight the Tories in front and deal with the silent mutiny behind them. Yet the MPs, unrepresentative of the members, are doing immense damage. How come the media don’t put them in the dock? It is they and their backers in the party bureaucracy who have been rejected.

It was their Labour party, not Corbyn’s, that lost Scotland, lost two elections and has seen Labour’s vote shrink inexorably. Yet they retain a sense of entitlement to lead. They have tolerated or endorsed the erosion of the welfare state, the dereliction of the old industrial areas, public services cut back and privatised, and the illegal war that caused a million or more deaths and terrorised and destabilised Iraq and its neighbours. If Corbyn can be removed, it will be business as usual, with scant difference between Labour and the Tories. If it is to transform society, the party itself must be transformed.

And what of the press? The abuse of the right wing is as crude as we could have expected. But the papers that present themselves as radical have been revealed to be nothing of the sort. The Guardian and Mirror have become cheerleaders for the old Labour establishment. Column after column demands that Corbyn should go. Extinct volcanoes from New Labour are quoted with glee. A big headline for Mandelson: “I work every single day to oust Corbyn.” Mandelson had to resign twice from the cabinet in disgrace. Why give him such prominence, except to add to the anti-Corbyn mood music?

Broadcasters take their cue from the press. A report found that during the campaign for Corbyn’s re-election the BBC chose twice as many interviewees who were hostile to Corbyn as were supportive. The critique is personal and as vicious as that waged against Arthur Scargill. If evidence were needed of Corbyn’s strength, it is his ability to withstand this onslaught.

Why this attack? Why are the abstentionists in his party exonerated, and he is held personally responsible for Labour’s prolonged decline? Could it be fear that Corbyn and McDonnell mean what they say? If they had a powerful movement to sustain them, Labour under their leadership would start to cut back the power of capital, remove multinationals from public services, restore workers’ rights, and begin the process of creating a secure and sustainable society in which all could share. That is a prize worth fighting for. It would be a start, just a start, on a long journey.

A welfare state for the rich

The Conservative government is intent on making the United Kingdom an offshore tax haven for wealthy individuals and multi-national companies thus showing Mr Trump what a good boy it is in its determination to break off entirely from Europe. A 2009 quote from the Polish born sociologist Zygmunt Bauman who died last week, reminds us that the process of establishing "Tax Haven UK"  has been going on for some time. Speaking of his fears for democracy, Bauman spoke of the United Kingdom New Labour government's bail out of the banks in 2007-2008 as the creation of 'a welfare state for the rich.'

In the summer of 2015 Bauman elaborated on his thoughts about the demise of democracy in an interview with Ricardo de Querol for El País :

We could describe what is gong on at the moment as a crisis of democracy, the collapse of trust: the belief that our leaders are not just corrupt or stupid, but inept. Action requires power, to be able to do things, and we need politics, which is the ability to decide what needs to be done. But that marriage between power and politics in the hands of the nation state has ended. Power has been globalised, but politics is as local as before. Politics has had its hands cut off. People no longer believe in the democratic system because it doesn't keep its promises. We see this, for example, with the migration crisis: it's a global phenomenon, but we still act parochially. Our democratic institutions were not designed for dealing with situations of interdependence. The current crisis of democracy is a crisis of democratic institutions.

Jeremy Corbyn is one politican who gives this issue a high profile and is, with his colleagues, already planning policy which will reverse the process when the Labour Party is elected to government.

_______________________________-

Sources:


2013: Mark Davis (ed.), Liquid Sociology: Metaphor in Zygmunt Bauman's Analysis of Modernity. Farnham: Ashgate


2015 Interview with Zymunt Bauman, Ricardo de Querol in El País http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/1453208692_424660.html  

Immigration, the cost of food and Jeremy Corbyn

Today I was once more energised by the negative way the BBC presents Jeremy Corbyn’s views. This morning for instance one of its reporters said the views Mr Corbyn expressed about immigration were confusing. This was untrue. Mr. Corbyn simply said that he didn’t think we should stop immigration but that we should stop  big business organisations attracting foreign workers here to the United Kingdom and employing them at minimal or below minimal pay rates in order to carry out mainly menial tasks. Preventing big business from doing this would be an excellent way to control immigration since the jobs that most of us imagine immigrants usually do would now be paid at a rate attractive to UK workers. If these enhanced pay rates did not attract British workers, we could reasonably conclude that it was the nature of the jobs that was not attractive to British workers and since many of these currently low paid jobs are carried out at a critical (critical because crops have to be harvested when they are ready, and critical because we all need to eat) stage in the food production chain, it would still be necessary for us to invite immigrants to carry out these jobs since the big supermarket companies want to keep the cost of food production down because this is what their customers (that is, all of us) demand. Still, should this be the case if we adopted Mr. Corbyn's approach at least those who were carrying out these crucial jobs would be better rewarded for their toil.

An alternative to this, as Jeremy Corbyn also suggested this morning, is to apportion the rewards of production differently by reducing the pay of very high earners and sharing this money around more equably. Now why would anyone think this an extreme idea? It might be argued that "top people" deserve higher rewards. Personally I don't see the logic in this. There is overwhelming evidence to show this doesn't work. Look at the mess the well paid "top people" have already made of our planet and you may see what I'm getting at.

Ah, well time to watch another BBC news report to see what will get my goat this time.

Lest I forget who bears the cost of lives

Lest I forget, it’s Remembrance Sunday.  Every day, for one reason or another, I think about people who have died in military action, and so I do not stand in silence for two minutes once a year to commemorate them. I understand and support others who do want to make public their feelings of loss.  I guess we each have to find a way of respecting and remembering those who have lost their lives so violently. This is not to set aside thoughts for those survivors who have been physically and emotionally maimed by war.

Those who die as a consequence of military action have almost invariably been carrying out the will of governments, and this, to an extent, might be morally satisfactory if those wars had been honourable ones. The latter has too seldom been the case. In large measure the less well off people in our country have been the ones who have lain down their lives waging war under the orders of a relatively small group of rich, comfortably off people. The latter generally instigate war to protect their own positions of power, their own financial interests and not the interests of those they would have fight for them. Of the wars in which the United Kingdom has been involved since the beginning of the 20th century it is my own personal view  - and I may be wrong -  that only World War II can be claimed to have been morally justifiable, in that those fighting against the Axis forces were truly doing so in the interests of the wellbeing of all humankind.

I mourn the deaths of each of the human beings who have died in recent decades obeying the orders of a UK government. I do even more so because they were told that they were fighting for our freedom and for the freedom of others. In my view it is difficult to argue that the latter has generally been the case and I am saddened that we do not mark as religiously as those of our own that we do today, the deaths of all the innocent civilian adults and children who have been slaughtered as a consequence of our military adventures in the middle-east in recent decades.  Who bears the cost of these lives ?

For Keir Hardie ditto Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn, like us all, is no doubt a flawed human being, but in my opinion he is a man modest about his own accomplishments, yet nonetheless proud of the achievements of the Labour movement. I am certain that he would not ask to be seen in the same light as James Keir Hardie, one of the founding figures of the Labour Party and its first MP at Westminster. Nonetheless Keir Hardie's treatment at the hands of the baying mob of Planet Westminster bears some comparison with what Jeremy Corbyn faces today and the following extract drawn from Bob Holman's biography of Keir Hardie* hints at the inner strength a person would need when in the face of orchestrated and unrelenting personal abuse.  

“Then he accepted personal abuse. The personal attacks and lies about him never ceased. Early in his parliamentary life, he printed the menus from which MPs gorged themselves and contrasted them with the lack of choice of the starving. They retaliated in the press with rumours that he was a glutton, smoked cigars costing 2s. 6d. each, and lived in a hotel where he enjoyed champagne and ten-course meals. He received hundreds of crude letters. At elections he was accused of advocating free love and being an atheist. Often when he rose in the Commons to make a case for the socially deprived he would be jeered, howled at, and interrupted.

When asked by his friends to hit back, he replied, “Let conduct be its own reward.” Yet the continual misrepresentations, false accusations, and cruel cartoons must have been among the factors which sometimes depressed him and increasingly affected his health.”

Things don't seem to have changed much in the ensuing 100 years.

From:  Keir Hardie by Bob Holman, Oxford, Lion (2010) and  iBooks. https://itun.es/gb/jug4H.l 

Alison Poltock of the East End Film Festival writes for Europe

I've just received this post from Alison Poltock, the Director of the East End Film Festival which opens today, June 23rd, 2016.

I can’t sleep. The festival kicks off in 4 days, but all I can think about is the fact that Thursday 23 June is going to go down in history, and not because it’s the opening night of the East End Film Festival, sadly.

A newsletter just popped into my email from a healthfood shop. It was a plea from the owners to vote Leave. It had some interesting points about the EU health directives, restrictions on drug trials, TTIP….

But the trouble is, all these discussions have become rather moot for me now. The debate has become polarized to such an extent that it reminds me of a journey back from a football match some years ago where my team were on one platform shouting “Watford” and the other team were on the opposite platform shouting “Chelsea”. It just went on a bit too long until you could see everyone starting to think ‘this is a bit embarrassing, we’d better add some words’ – but instead they decided to just shout the same one word, louder, with more menace and add a weird lunging movement.

The Leave campaign bleat that they’re not racist, but actually for all the chichi chitter chatter about trade and the economy (where it seems the only consensus is that NOBODY KNOWS what’s going to happen), unfortunately the ‘Freedom to control our National Borders’ is the main reason that people want to leave. The rhetoric is all about protecting our national identity, like it’s some kind of deified Toby Jug.

If you look at the Better Off Out campaign, It lays out a whole list of ‘freedoms’ that Leaving the EU will supposedly afford us: ‘Freedom to make major savings for British Consumers’ (in other words, to fuck-over workers rights), Freedom to restore Britain’s special Legal System (fuck over human rights), Freedom to save the NHS from EU threats…’(fuck the NHS).

I’m not a proponent of the EU - it’s an unelected organisation based on neoliberal ideology, but Leaving isn’t going to throw us into some kind of ambrosial orgy of socialist democracy, it’s going to throw us into a 3-way with Johnson, Gove and Murdoch with all the horror that entails.

To be honest, any nuance in the argument has disappeared for me. I instinctively thought we should remain before researching in any detail. And since then, any Lexit arguments seem marginal and pointless coz Leaving has come to mean only one thing: the rise of ugly nationalism.

If anyone can tell me how Brexit will make us more loving and tolerant to our neighbours, then I want to hear it. But no one can, that’s already become clear. I just hope that there’s enough people out there as horrified by this poisonous xenophobia as I am – and that they’ll get out and vote before things get any worse. So whilst I have some sympathy with a couple of the anti-EU points – ultimately, if we don’t want the haters to win, there’s only one way to vote: ‪#‎VoteRemain‬

Alison Poltock
Director | East End Film Festival

Mob: +44 (0)7973 836474
email: alison@eastendfilmfestival.com
web: www.eastendfilmfestival.com

Join the conversation #EEFF2016

Twitter: @EastEndFilmFest

Facebook: EastEndFilmFest

Instagram: @eastendfilmfest