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Showing posts with label British general election 2019. Show all posts
Showing posts with label British general election 2019. Show all posts
In the aftermath of the UK General Election, People And Nature featured a number of analytical reflections on the defeat of the British Labour Party.



 To continue discussion on the aftermath of Labour’s election defeat, I am republishing these “thoughts on the strategy of democratic socialism” by Angry Workers of the World, a group of worker militants based in London. This article was published on Saturday on their web site here, and is part of an upcoming book reflecting on six years of working class inquiry and intervention in west London.

“Democratic socialism” is currently the main alternative vision to transforming capitalism, and as such we need to take it seriously, despite our deep disagreement with it. By democratic socialism we mean the idea that by using the two legs of the organised labour movement – the trade unions and a socialist party in government – we can walk step-by-step towards socialism. Socialism is defined as a society dominated by either nationalised or cooperative ownership of the means of production and workers’ representation when it comes to management of these economic units.

The general strategy of democratic socialism can be summarised briefly.

The idea is to campaign for an electoral victory of a socialist party based on an economic programme of partial re-nationalisation of a limited number of key industries, and the creation of a wider sector of “solidarity economy”, formed by cooperative or municipal companies that can guarantee more decentralised workers’ participation. In tandem with electoral activities, democratic socialists encourage the support of working class or “social movement” organisations outside of parliament, in order to have an economic power-base to put pressure on both capital and government.

Once the party is in power the strategy needs to create a dynamic between a) structural institutional changes decreed by the government which creates more space for the participation of working class organisations (so-called non-reformist reforms) and b) pressure from below to defend and extend these spaces. An example could be to enact banking sector reforms, which limits the scope of financial speculation and tax avoidance and at the same time gives ‘common ownership enterprises’ preferential treatment when it comes to commercial credits.

While this happens on the governmental level, trade unions in companies that might try to undermine the reform by threatening to disinvestment will have to increase the pressure on management. The material improvements of workers’ lives and the strengthening of trade unions are supposed to create greater unification within the working class – a kind of jumping board into socialism.

There are two hearts beating in this project. We see many comrades, fed up with the social isolation of so-called “revolutionary politics”, becoming attracted to the practical and strategical debates of the democratic socialist project. They can be intellectually invigorating. These comrades might have come from classic anarchist or otherwise “revolutionary” organisations or they might have been politicised during the horizontal, but ineffectual and often self-referential “social movements” of the anti-globalisation or Occupy era.

We understand the urge of these comrades to “make a difference” and to think about short, medium and long-term steps towards social change. We can see many fellow working class people who feel the limitation of trade union activity, and who hope that Labour in government can turn trade unions into powerful workers’ organisations again. We want to fight for the hearts and minds of these comrades. Then there exists the usual careerist swamp within these organisations, from the Democratic Socialists of America and Podemos in Spain to Corbyn’s Labour. The in-fights and power-games.

The direction of the democratic socialist project in the UK is not primarily determined by its political outlook, but by its class composition.

The new Labour left is composed of three main forces: a segment of ambitious and perhaps precarious professionals who feel that according to their educated status they should have more say in society. They also want a good life for “the working class”, but their approach is technocratic: learned people and progressive experts are supposed to decide how things are run, not the bankers and the parasitic elite. They form an alliance with the second main force, the union bureaucracy. The union apparatus allows the new professionals to speak in the name of the workers and the union bosses can extend their power into the political class. The third element are the most marginalised parts of the working class who’ve had to suffer from years of benefit cuts and sanctions. Labour under Corbyn gave them hope, but the party machine will end up instrumentalising their victim status.

We could write a long list of points of disillusionment with Corbynism, which took place even before the election disaster. The second leader of the party’s “hard-left” wing, John McDonnell, felt obliged publicly to whitewash the war-criminal Tony Blair. People who voted with Blair to invade Iraq are presented and hosted as “left candidates”, such as the MP David Lammy.

Activists at the 2017 party conference learned that Momentum could be used as a disciplining arm, enforcing that delegates wouldn’t vote on contentious issues, such as a Brexit referendum. Experiences in local party branches are largely dominated by tedious petty power plays and boring formalities.

During the winter 2019/20 it turned out that the only thing that Corbynism has been able to re-nationalise is the fringe left. As we witness one of the biggest wave of working class protests – from Ecuador, Chile, Sudan to Iran – the left in the UK was completely focused on whatever Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson were saying on TV. The national narrow-mindedness would have become worse if Labour had entered government: would any democratic socialist have supported unruly working class mobilisations, such as the Yellow Vests or the protests in Iran, under a new and fragile Labour government?

We can try to adorn “Corbynism” with all kind of radical looking paraphernalia and woke memes, from Acid Corbynism to “luxury or literal communism” – but in the end it’s a Party that promises us a minimal minimum wage increase, free broadband and slightly less austerity. But then our focus here is not to argue about utopian visions, but to point out the internal shortcomings of this political strategy.

1) This is not a historic phase for social democracy

Historically, social democracy developed during phases of economic upturns, based on a relatively strong national industrial production capacity. What we face now is an economic crisis and an internationalised production system. This limits both the scope for material concessions and for national economic policies. Secondly, social democracy primarily became hegemonic in post-revolutionary situations. Social democracy was based on large organisations within the working class and a ruling class that allowed workers’ political representation in order to avoid revolutionary tensions. Left-communists never get tired of repeating that the establishment of the NHS was not a result of Labour party reformism, but of Tory Cold War counter-insurgency – to avoid large-scale social discontent after the war.

Again, this is not a situation we find ourselves in today. The main point for us to stress is: we face harsher conditions of struggle than democratic socialism prepares us for. We can’t bypass the day-to-day confrontations with bosses and their violent lackeys. Democratic socialism tends to overemphasise the autonomy of government politics. In the UK the Labour left portrays the Thatcher government and their “wicked policies” as the source of evil neoliberalism, whereas it was the global crisis in the mid-1970s which forced all governments to attack the working class. You cannot vote your way out of this.

2) Current democratic socialism ignores the capitalist character of the state

Democratic socialist strategies are based on the assumption that the state stands above “capitalism” and could intervene in it as a politically neutral form. Historically the state emerged as the violent arm to impose and secure class relations, e.g. through enclosures, vagrancy laws and the military expansion of markets. The state appears as a neutral force that is only there to look after law and order and the wider organisation of society. But law and order means primarily that the property relations which are the material basis for the exploitation of the working class are maintained.

By making us citizens, the state disarms us as a collective class force. State politics separate the sphere of social production from the sphere of social decision-making – we are supposed to produce the world, but apart from casting a vote every four years have no say in how the world is run. Materially the state apparatus depends on the continuous exploitation both through taxation and as an employer.

3) Current democratic socialism misreads the relationship between the market and capitalism

Democratic socialists think switching from private to public (state) ownership will be the antidote to capitalism. They see no contradiction therefore between a “big state” and socialism, despite the fact that state intervention – regardless of where it is on the political spectrum – has always played the fundamental role in expanding, enforcing and defending the market. The process of industrialisation itself required state ownership and central economic planning, last but not least in order to enforce order against the emerging industrial working class. During this phase it didn’t matter if the left or the right was in government – large-scale state planning was required by the social situation and was not a political choice.

Furthermore, the idea that cooperatives and national (state) ownership go hand in hand is not verified by history: the big decline of cooperatives in the UK didn’t happen under Thatcher, but during the ascent of national economic planning and concentration in the manufacturing sector during a 1960s Labour government. The competition between companies – the market form – or the formation of monopolies is just a surface appearance of the underlying class relations.

So it wouldn’t be enough to just “smash the monopolies”. A more fundamental change is required. We can see this when class relations are in crisis – when workers organise mass strikes and hit the streets. The state, no matter if it is left or right, has no problems suspending the “free market” in these situations to repress and maintain class society. For example, after the oil shock in the 1970s it was no contradiction that the Indira Gandhi government nationalised the mining and banking sector in order to prevent economic collapse, inscribed ‘socialism’ into the Indian constitution, obtained the support of the Communist Party and launched the most brutal attack against striking railway workers and other working class insurgents during the State of Emergency.

4) Democratic socialism in practice avoids the structural weakness of the working class and focuses on professionals

The current proponents of democratic socialism know that class struggle is at a low ebb – but instead of focusing on building organised cores within the class they largely focus on the recruitment of professionals and “activists”. While previous revolutionary upheavals like 1968 questioned the role of the “intellectual expert”, the current generation celebrates it. This is very obvious for parties like Podemos or Syriza, but also valid for the so-called Labour surge – most of the new party members have a higher education and are living in metropolitan areas.

Materially the new left intelligentsia reproduces itself as the “neoliberal self” that they pretend to criticise: hardly any of them are “organic intellectuals” forged in working class existence and struggle, most of them survive by creating a social media and academic persona whose opinion is valued on the marketplace.

Whether you read the “Alternative Models of Ownership” by the Labour party advisers, Aaron Bastani’s writing on “luxury communism” or Alex Williams’s and Nick Srnicek’s Inventing the Future, the prime agent is always the figure of the well-educated and networked activist. Unfortunately this forces our intellectual democratic socialist comrades to chase their own tails. There is a big blank space when it comes to the question of how their well-meaning ideas will be enforced and implemented.

Who will enforce workers’ participation if workers are seen as people who are only able to engage in political discourse during election times? The absence of a strategy rooted in the working class then leads to the creation of a trite and kitsch icon of “the people” – a mass of honest victims who need cultural belonging and political leadership.

5) Democratic socialism’s understanding of “workers’ participation” is formal and therefore flawed

We criticise socialist thinkers for seeing state planning as essentially opposed to capitalism, though confronted with history most of them would hasten to add that nationalisation and planning have to go hand-in-hand with the “democratisation of the economy”. The problem is that their understanding of “workers’ participation” is largely formal, e.g. proposed in the form of workers’ shares in enterprises, union delegates on company boards or voting rights when it comes to management decisions.

The aforementioned class background of many of the new socialist intelligentsia also contributes to their limited understanding – or actual trajectory – of what workers’ control would require. Their understanding of class is largely economistic – defined by the fact that workers all depend on wages. This understanding of class doesn’t focus on the actual form of the production process and its hierarchical division of labour (intellectual and manual workers, productive and reproductive work etc). In their policies, their understanding of “ownership” of the means of production and “democratic participation” of workers is formal. Just because workers or trade unions hold 50% or 100% of shares doesn’t mean much.

If workers are still forced to do the drudge work the whole day, performing only a limited amount of tasks, this won’t allow them to have an understanding of, and therefore say in, how a company or sector is actually run. You might give them a vote on a company board, but it will be those who have a greater overview and more time – due to their professional status as intellectuals (engineers, scientists, etc) – who will make the decisions. The “vote” will be reduced to a fetishised process to confirm the experts’ monopoly of knowledge.

As we have seen in history, workers survive the worst defeats inflicted by the class enemy. But the deepest and longest-lasting traumas are inflicted when oppression and exploitation is enacted in their own name – didn’t the “workers’ state” of the Stalinist regime formally belong to the workers, too? A mere change in government or a shift from private to state property would not touch the core of what defines “working class”, its power and disempowerment.

6) The trade unions and the workers party are not the working class

The democratic socialist perspective relies on the idea of a transmission between the working class and the state through the interaction of the two main “workers’ organisations” – the parliamentary party and the trade unions. This perspective relies on an idealistic or pre-historic view on trade unions as the “democratic representation” of the class.

Plenty of historical examples (Labour/TUC in the UK in 1926 or the 1970s; CC.OO in Spain after Franco; Solidarnosc in Poland after 1981; PT/CUT in Brazil recently, etc) demonstrate that during the heat of struggle waves, the trade union/government connection becomes the heaviest blanket on working class initiative.

During the last years that we’ve been shop stewards, we’ve gotten quite a bit of insight into the internal mechanisms of two major trade unions – both loyal to the Labour party.

Democratic socialism’s idea that these organisations will be the main force in “keeping the government and its enemies under pressure” is totally illusory. More often than not we can see how the party and the union leadership instrumentalise workers’ struggles for their own ends, e.g. the recent symbolic “strikes” at McDonald’s in London were called by the union leadership at a time where it suited the Labour campaign circus, but actually undermined the organising work of the union’s own organisers.

Many of the proposed reforms that Labour wanted to bring in, e.g. sectoral collective bargaining and contracts, would facilitate economic planning for the bigger capitalists and strengthen the central trade union leadership’s grip than actually boost workers’ independent power. The regional and sectoral contracts in Germany are the best example.

7) Focus on the “political arena” saps energy

The leadership of democratic socialism tends to try and bypass the mundane and laborious problems of power relations between workers and capital and instead focuses on the electoral leap. But these tend to be leaps forwards and backwards. The governmental politics of 21st century socialism in Latin America (Chavez, Morales, Lula, etc) and their structural weaknesses have created widespread disillusionment. The subjugation of the Syriza government in Greece to the system and its representatives has closed down, rather than opened up spaces for the class movement against austerity. The internal power-fights within Podemos or Momentum has created cynicism and burn-out.

By adopting a “lesser evil” voting strategy and calling for people to vote for Macron to avoid Le Pen, the left undermined its own position in the anti-government rebellion of the Yellow Vests. The media hype of Corbynism, the engagement with electoral tactics etc. diverts focus from daily struggles for working class self-defence.

There is also a misunderstanding of parliamentarianism: just because a political party is composed by workers doesn’t make party politics and the parliament a form of working class politics.

Parliamentarianism is the exact opposite of working class politics, as it is based on individual citizenship, not on collective and practical relations. This is true for national parliamentarism as much as for the “parliamentarianism light” in the form of “radical municipalism” (campaigning for independent candidates in local elections) that some activists propose.

The best example for the limits of local electoral politics can be found in the US. The election of militants of the black liberation movement after its decline in the late 1970s meant that in towns like Chicago and Baltimore, black mayors had to enforce austerity and anti-poor policing measures in the 1980s, which further weakened and divided the movement while stabilising the system: who better to enforce cuts against black urban poor, but a black mayor?

While history provides us with ample examples, cracks also appear in the present. If we look at Barcelona En Comu, the citizen platform that won the local elections in Barcelona and provided the new mayor, Colau, we can see various moments of tension between the local working class and the new “citizen-friendly” local government, e.g. when the local government acted against the striking airport and metro workers in 2017.

Comrades in Spain also noticed that the “redistribution” of local politicians’ wages by platforms like Barcelona En Comu did not primarily benefit rank-and-file organisations, but created a larger number of so-called “movement jobs”, a new layer of professional activists with all the contradictions of professionalisation.

One outcome of these tensions with the local working class is that Barcelona En Comu tries to channel some of the discontent into Catalan nationalist waters, as if Catalan independence had much more to offer working people than yet another dividing line within our class. We will now face the same problem in Scotland.

8) Parliamentary power and state power are two different things

Let’s assume a socialist party manages to get into government. The idea of a parliamentarian road towards socialism neglects the fact that “taking over government” and “having state power” are two different kettles of fish.

There is little analysis of the actual material and social class structure of the state (administration, public servants, army) and its independence from parliamentary democracy, for example, despite changes to its outer form the material core and trajectory of the Russian state apparatus (i.e. social strata of people employed in carrying out state functions) has reproduced itself from the time of the Tsarist regime, through the Bolshevik revolution, Stalinist terror, Glasnost to Putin.

If we want to look closer to home, even the revered Tony Benn had to understand as Secretary of State for Industry in the mid-1970s that the struggle with the right-wing of the Labour party was child’s play compared to the struggle with his “own” civil servants.

9) By focusing on the national arena and the state, democratic socialism tends to misjudge the global relation of capital

Let’s assume that a socialist party not only manages to get into government, but also manages to dominate the state apparatus. Due to the fact that the nation state is the core element of the strategy for democratic socialism the project is immediately confronted with the global nature of capital. Higher levels of taxation and other impositions will result in capital flight amongst global companies. Democratic socialism accounts for this, by, for example, proposing alliances with smaller enterprises, as a kind of national productive united front against global corporations and finance.

We’ve seen time and again how this necessary alliance shifts the ideological viewpoint towards “left patriotism” and other bullshit. If a Labour government would actually try to increase taxation and redistribute assets, the most likely outcome is a devaluation of the pound and an increase in inflation due to a trade deficit, which cannot be counteracted easily – given the composition of agriculture, energy sector, general manufactured goods. The new Labour left leadership – trained in political activism and speech and aided by their influence amongst the union leadership – will be the best vehicle to tell workers to “give our Labour government some time”, to explain that “international corporations have allied against us” and that despite inflation workers should keep calm and carry on; wage struggles will be declared to be excessive or divisive or of narrow-minded economic consciousness. We have seen how, for example, the Chavez government in Venezuela organised the “urban poor” against strikes of teachers who demanded higher wages, denouncing them as greedy and therefore responsible for other workers’ poverty.

10) Class struggle doesn’t develop gradually

Democratic socialism’s focus on electoral campaigning and official union organising results in a misjudgement of how class struggle develops. Historically class struggles developed in leaps and bounds – in a much more complex dynamic between ‘organising’ and external forces and factors. The belief that class struggle is based on ‘step-by-step’ organising and mobilising often results in leftists putting stumbling blocks in the way of future waves of struggle. In the short-term getting ‘community leaders’ or your local MP involved, or relying on the trade union or party apparatus in order to mobilise or encourage fellow workers, might seem beneficial. What initially seemed a stepping stone turns out to be a stumbling block: for example middle-men who get in the way of things or illusions in symbolic forms of struggle.

The challenge is to find “step-by-step” forms of struggle which help in the moment, but don’t pose problems long-term. In their need to create a transformation of workers’ action (controlled strikes etc.) on the ground into “economic pressure” to support state policies, socialist organisers tend to become scared of the often chaotic and seemingly spontaneous character of struggles. They run the danger of misunderstanding that these situations of breakdown of normality are precisely the situations where workers have to face up to their responsibility to re-organise social reproduction. These moments are the necessary learning curves and laboratories where we actually change things and ourselves. To stifle this means killing workers’ participation.

11) Democratic socialism and its fear of uncontrolled class struggle becomes its own gravedigger as it weakens the working class activity necessary to defend it

The fact that the biggest socialist party in history – the German SPD – first agreed to support the German government in the 1914 war efforts and oppressed workers’ revolutionary upheavals after the war was not a betrayal. It was part and parcel of a long-term strategy to gain governmental power and to re-shape the national economy – to which workers revolutionary ‘adventures’ posed a risk. After having weakened workers’ self-activity the SPD was then confronted with a global crisis in 1929, which limited a national economic strategy. The combination of these two factors – a working class weakened by government tactics and powerlessness vis-à-vis global capital – resulted in the SPD opening the door for the most brutal reactionary turn in 1933.

Another example is the social democratic government under Allende in Chile in 1973. It shows us that the relationship between working class movements and left governments is more complicated than the often mechanistic picture of force (movement) and container/stabiliser (government). We can see that the initial social reforms were introduced by a right-wing government, which failed to contain class struggle.

When Allende took over he had a hard time keeping workers‘ and poor peoples‘ struggles under control – struggles which might well have been encouraged by the incoming left government. Allende feared that the local upper-class and international imperialist forces would use the social turmoil as an excuse for intervention. Industrial unrest also created shortages which threatened to destabilise the government further. International price developments, in particular of mining products, curbed the scope for material concessions towards striking workers. Allende’s policies towards the working class unrest – which ranged from concessions to military repression – undermined and literally disarmed the working class. When the local military, backed by the CIA, went in for the kill, the resistance was already weakened.

This historical example seems irrelevant for the sitation in the UK or the US today, but once we look beyond short-term goals of electoral tactics we still face the same fundamental dynamics.

12) Strategy starts from actual struggles and actual potentials and difficulties imposed by the social production process

We need strategies and we need organisation. We have to start by analysing the real conditions and relationships of our class: how is production organised today, how is it organised beyond company or national boundaries, how are we as workers divided from intellectual labour and knowledge and how can these divisions be overcome? How can we make use of the fact that workers cooperate along supply-chains, often using modern communication technologies in order to develop new forms of transnational organisations of struggle? How does our class lead its struggles today, where do we use the potentials of modern production and where do we fail to use them in our favour? How do the struggles in the bigger workplaces and industrial sectors relate to areas or regions where workers are more atomised?

We have to create a dynamic between industrial and workplace power and the inventiveness of working class people to organise their survival, be it in the form of workers’ cooperatives, hack-labs, squats or self-run community projects. Within these struggles we have to develop the organisation and strategy to imagine a coordinated take-over of the central means of production, their defence and their socialisation beyond national boundaries. This will not happen on Day X of our choosing – this will happen with the increasing disfunctionality of this system to which our own struggles for survival contribute. Democratic socialism and its strategies will not be adequate for the vastness, harshness and joy of what lies ahead for the working class.

We have seen that the strategy of democratic socialism clashes with the two main historical forces in capitalism. Firstly, by focusing on the national arena it clashes with the global character of capital. And secondly, by reducing the question of exploitation to the question of whether workers work under private or public command, their strategy clashes with the substantive discontent of the working class.

A socialist government would be forced to weaken its own power base in order to deal with the continuing discontent (“Keep calm and give your workers’ government a bit more time”). In the long run this creates disillusionment and the material basis for a reactionary turn. These are the historical lessons.

■ From the Angry Workers of the World website

■ More on People & Nature about the election:

Confronting the agents of capital: a Corbynista’s dilemma, by John Graham Davies

Standing up to the global rise of nationalism, by Martin Beveridge

Nightmare on Downing Steet, by Gabriel Levy

⏭ Keep up with People And Nature.

Labour Defeat ➤ Thoughts On Democratic Socialism

From People And Nature Some thoughts on the election from Liverpool Riverside. A guest post by John Graham Davies written not long after the devastating defeat for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour in the UK General Election. 

Listening to Radio 4 on Tuesday morning was a lesson in the gloating ruthlessness of our ruling class. We had just heard a clip of Jeremy Corbyn giving a dignified, measured assessment of his, and our, calamitous loss in the election. Corbyn explained why it was necessary for him to stay on for a short transitional period.

Cut to the studio: a cackling young BBC journalist, with an accent which sounded like it came out of one our more expensive public schools, armed with the obligatory fragment of Latin. 

Jeremy Corbyn addressing a crowd outside St George’s Hall, Liverpool, in 2016

“What’s the opposite of mea culpa? Ha ha ha! Not much self-criticism there, is there? Bit of a non mea culpa if you ask me.”

This braying buffoon, like so many of the other highly paid liars at the BBC, lives in so much of a bubble that he seems unaware of how much in contempt most of the British public now hold him. Him and his beloved BBC, that pompous foghorn of the state.

A right-wing Labour member of parliament was sharing the studio and made no attempt to silence the attack, or challenge it.

We all know that the knives are out for Jeremy Corbyn, but they are also aimed at our movement as a whole, and her silence was a reminder of that.

This election result, according to those who hold the wellbeing of our class most dearly to heart – well paid journos; former Labour politicians now earning nice salaries fronting radio shows; Tory politicians who sportingly feel it is “so vital” for our “democracy” to have a “proper opposition”; Labour MPs who have spent the past three years slandering the party that generates their generous salary and pension arrangements – all demand (for the good health of the Labour Party of course!) that this result must mark the definitive defeat of Corbynism as a movement.

If we mean by Corbynism something that was attempting to build a broad socialist coalition going beyond Westminster elections, then I don’t think it has necessarily failed – yet.

But I think we have to be honest. Last Thursday was a catastrophic defeat and we know what will follow in its wake: spiralling worries about money, how to feed our children, mental health problems.

All these – bad already – will get worse. We will see more homeless people on the streets, and some of us, particularly elderly and disabled people, will die younger as a result of cuts and our health service being given away to the sniggering spivs of the City and Wall Street.

It will be harder for our unions to rebuild and fight back. Racism, violence and the far right will grow.

There are things that we can do to try and counter all this, but this is what the victory of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) over Corbyn last Thursday means.

For that is what the election was.

The victory was not only Johnson’s. It also belongs to those on the right of the party (i.e. most of the PLP) who have worked night and day for the past three years to undermine Corbyn and the ideas of the movement which made Corbyn’s leadership possible.

We don’t forget the shocked and disappointed face of Stephen Kinnock at the exit poll announcement in 2017. He was smiling smugly on Question Time the day after this election. A defeat for Corbyn was vital for these careerist leeches, and they worked might and main for it. The bulk of them remain.

Before I move on to Brexit, it’s important to briefly mention the context, the Labour Party context, which has fuelled much of the scatter gun anger felt by many working class communities.

Others have written about the effect that Labour cuts have had. The fact that these originated in Tory government funding cuts to Labour councils was of no comfort to those seeing their services shredded. For many, Labour’s claim to be “for the many” must have rung hollow.

The fact that some of this righteous anger took the form for support for Brexit, and in many cases a little Englander mentality closely related to racism, should be no surprise.

One of the first acts of the Blair government, when it first took office in 1997, was to capitulate in the face of an assault by the media on “asylum seekers” and “economic migrants”. Fifteen years down the line, some Labour MPs were still talking about creating “hostile environments”. This was all manure for the far right and racism.

Coming out of that context, Brexit was a big factor. But, for me, neither the Brexit issue nor its effect on the election result are as straightforward as some comrades claim.

It was a difficult issue to deal with, given the twin demands of on the one hand our movement’s much vaunted (though seldom realised) tradition of internationalism and anti-racism, and on the other of recognising the hatred felt towards the institutions of the EU by those working class communities decimated by Thatcher, and then left to rot, clutching their lottery tickets in hope, by Blairism and, by extension in their eyes, the EU.

So it was a difficult issue and how it played out in parliament did us no favours. But it was certainly a big factor in the election result.

But so was the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Or should I say, so was the portrayal of the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

In the canvassing that I did, it was clear that a sizeable number of voters had doubts about Corbyn. These doubts were often vague. Yes, some voiced ludicrous claims about the abolition of the army (once), allowing the rest of the world in (if only it were true!), meetings with the IRA, and, of course, antisemitism. But when asked for details about these fears, they collapsed quite quickly into an inarticulate sense of unease.

Voters were unsure or hostile, but often found it difficult to express the exact nature of their opposition to Corbyn. There was a general sense that he was dodgy, weak, and probably a racist.

The effect of the media lies and smears has been for a thin layer of disapproving dust, disapproving of Corbyn in person, to settle on a lot of people. This shouldn’t surprise us, and the media campaign should not on its own have been enough to have turned a significant section of the electorate against Corbyn.

The problem was that the campaign wasn’t properly challenged – for two reasons.

Firstly, a large and very vocal section of the PLP was noisily reinforcing the smears, or in many instances instigating them. Our own MP in Riverside, Louise Ellman, had carte blanche to lie about Corbyn and about local pro-Corbyn members. For three years she had open access to every TV channel and newspaper column in the country to spread this filth. She was energetically supported in this, both locally by a small group of Liverpool councillors, and nationally by a network of MPs, Dame Margaret Hodge being only the most prominent amongst many.

As a side note, Ellman’s fantasies about antisemitism reached their comic nadir when she claimed on national radio to be able to sense that Jeremy Corbyn had anti-Semitic thoughts, even though Jeremy didn’t himself know he was having them. Twenty years ago there was a psychic called Doris Stokes who used to earn a good living at the London Palladium peddling this kind of thing. If Ellman can add the laying-on of hands to her repertoire, she might get a call from the late Doris’s agent.

The hostile, unremittingly false media campaign was out of our control. But right-wing Labour MPs shouldn’t have been. MPs like Ellman and Hodge should have been de-selected or expelled two years ago.

Unfortunately there was opposition to this course of action from most of the leadership around Corbyn, and by some on the left. Certainly, in our Constituency Labour Party (CLP), there was far too great an appetite from its leadership to hide behind “advice” from anti-Corbyn regional officials, and carry on a kind of “peaceful co-existence”. This “advice” was then marketed as “instructions” to the membership, preventing free discussion about the need to have Open Selection, or to discuss the slanders aimed at the most prominent and staunch pro-Corbyn members (e.g. Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Tony Greenstein, Chris Williamson).

So the failure to deal with those in the PLP hell bent on destroying Corbyn’s leadership was a serious mistake in my view, and permitted the character assassination to continue unabated for three years. We should have protected him and our fellow comrades better.

The second factor which allowed this paper-thin veneer of disapproval to settle on Corbyn – for some of our electorate at least – was the failure to robustly challenge the various witch hunts, most centrally the fake antisemitism campaign. We should have been clearer and, in Chris Williamson’s words, less apologetic.

Antisemitism is the oldest and – for the numbers killed, and the chilling industrial efficiency of the Holocaust, among other reasons – the foulest of the various racisms in our racist country. And antisemitism still exists throughout our society.

But it is at its most ideological in our ruling class and within the far right. As recently as the noughties, a Tory front bencher characterised the problems of the Tory Party as being centred on Michael Howard, Oliver Letwin and Charles Saatchi because … “could they know how Englishmen felt?”. This isn’t a slip in language, an ambiguous mural, a re-tweet of an obscure anti-Semitic meme or a harmless joke about Jewishness. It’s conscious, ideological racism.

The Labour Party has no reason to be defensive about its record fighting antisemitism. Had it not been for the labour movement in general, with the Labour Party at its heart, antisemitism would not have been challenged at Cable Street. This fight against Oswald Mosley was carried out against the wishes of the Jewish Board of Deputies, but with the support of vast numbers of Labour Party members, many of them Jewish. And we have no reason to be apologetic or defensive about antisemitism now.

Allowing ourselves to be driven onto the defensive had a negative effect in two ways.

Firstly, for those who were inclined to be taken in by the fake claims, our defensiveness and unending apologies made it look suspicious – as if we had indeed been up to something.

Secondly, for those who saw the smears for what they were, a political campaign to destabilise the Corbyn movement, our repeated apologies were a puzzle, demoralising, or worse. For these people, Corbyn’s repeated self-flagellation in the face of a fake campaign appeared strange. I have heard numerous people say so. For some, it took the shine off his well-earned reputation for plain speaking and probity. For others it appeared weak.

Since the election result, the witch-hunters have renewed their campaign with confidence. They have to be challenged robustly and directly.

The result of this prevarication and compromise was that some in the leadership ended up actually participating in the witch hunt. Much has been written about Momentum’s degeneration, both in terms of its democracy and its participation in the witch hunt. This was eventually echoed in the CLPs.

From being initially staunch opponents (at least vocally) of the witch hunt, some leading left members in our CLP ended up supporting it, or urging silence in the face of the suspensions. Solidarity with those suspended locally became weaker. And this was only an echo of what was going on in the national leadership circle.

As far as I understand, Chris Williamson’s expulsion was discussed by John McDonnell and his advisors – and McDonnell maintained a deafening silence when Williamson was suspended. At around the same time, McDonnell appeared in a cosy interview with Alistair Campbell, the snake oil salesman who sold us the mass murder in Iraq. During this chat, McDonnell chummily told Campbell that he’d happily have Campbell back in the party.

So in the same week we had two things: the strongest voice in parliament defending Corbyn being thrown to the wolves, and cosy overtures being made to a notorious Blairite liar.

I found this change in McDonnell quite shocking, and, if I’m perfectly honest, demoralising.

I felt the same shock listening to comrades locally who were quite happy to watch as a succession of innocent comrades were thrown under the bus on spurious charges, and who seemed indifferent to the fact that local right-wing councillors were behind this, routinely running to the hostile press, slandering local members, creating stress, health problems and family conflict.

Loss of solidarity at the top was followed by the same thing in our CLP.

Demoralisation and drift away from the Party has been evident on social media for two years, but has speeded up in the last nine months. Those who have left were among the most politically conscious and experienced Corbyn supporters. Momentum membership has plummeted. There has been an initiative by some ex-Momentum members, and others concerned about the absence of a democratic grass roots movement, to set up a national Left Alliance. This may still go somewhere.

But the Party was seriously weakened at the grass roots before this election was called. You could see it at the various rallies, which whilst still outshining the Tories by a country mile, did not have the size or fervour of 2017.

So, where do we go from here? Is the Labour Party the vehicle we need to bring about radical, fundamental social change? Is it up to the task? Can it even play a part in a wider movement?

I’m asking that question because this article is aimed at those party members who do not want a return to the free-market, capital-friendly Labour Party of the past, which is being presented to us as inevitable.

If you can’t face that, there are two alternatives, it seems to me: 

We stay inside the Party, and make sure we get as good a leader as we can, continuing, as far as is possible, in the spirit of the Corbyn movement’s ideas. This will involve an urgent and determined fight to democratise the Party: open meetings, no limits on discussion, rotation of CLP officers.
We join with others, those socialists who remained outside, in a broad, democratic, grassroots movement.

I think we should do both. I don’t suggest this though without misgivings.

A close political friend told me four years ago that he wouldn’t be joining because the Labour Party was corrupt, pro-imperialist, and was incapable of change. Fuelling illusions in its capacity to do so would only bring about disappointment and alienation from politics for a large number of people. That comment has popped into my head a good deal recently.

I have to say that my own experience of the party is that its machinery has not changed much since a lot of us joined in 2015. The party’s bureaucracy remains out of democratic control, and its disciplinary processes are opaque and corrupt. Despite some limited improvements, attempts to change these things have essentially failed.

However, we do have some things in our favour. Half a million voices – while they remain – can make a lot of noise. Two or three hundred thousand people, a lot of them young and previously unengaged with politics, have experienced a very intense political education: the importance of trade unions, of fighting social injustice, learning about the Palestinian struggle. This knowledge and experience won’t go away.

The question is, will that knowledge now become active, part of an ongoing struggle, or will it turn to disappointment and disillusion. And if we do continue to try to change the course of this massive, undemocratic tanker that is the Labour Party, do we do it by trying to accommodate those on the right whose careers and material interests are bound up with a political ideology alien to ours?

In my view, the right wing of the Labour Party is a representative of capital within the workers’ movement. It acts as an agency of capital. Without defeating it, there can be no democratic socialist movement. It is acting now, ruthlessly, to try to extinguish our movement and our hopes. We need to confront it, without compromise, and re-build our trade unions and grass roots organisation. Our leaders can’t do this, we have to.

The Radio 4 programme I mentioned at the beginning of this article continued with the same journalists speculating on the next Labour leader. As if to reinforce how detached they are, one of these hired mouthpieces opined that the right-wing Labour MP Jess Phillips was a real, viable contender.

He continued, “those fanatical Corbynistas from 2015, they’ll all have disappeared in a week or so!”

Let’s prove them wrong.

■ More election comments on People & Nature: Nightmare on Downing Street (Gabriel Levy, 16 December), and After the election: standing up to the global rise of nationalism (Martin Beveridge, 17 December).

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Confronting The Agents Of Capital ➤ A Corbynista’s Dilemma

Written after the UK General Election for People And Nature ➤ a guest post by Martin Beveridge who was out canvassing in Bedford, and is working on a book about the history of socialist ideas in the UK.

I’m still recovering from the shock of the exit polls on Thursday night. The only good news from my end was that Labour hung on to Bedford, where I was canvassing over the previous two weeks, and retained both Luton seats with comfortable majorities. 


Now, taking a breath, I think it important to think objectively about where we are now, before we can figure out what to do next.
Jeremy Corbyn speaking at a rally in Bedford on the night before the election
Let’s be clear: Johnson and the Tories did not win a resounding mandate. Their vote hardly increased overall. What happened was that Labour lost, big time, and lost most in the areas that Labour badly needed to win.

What caused the slump in Labour votes?

First: in my view, Labour was totally unprepared for the kind of election this was going to be. The journalist Patrick Cockburn wrote that, instead of looking backwards to Thatcher, British politics should be understood in the context of the international rise of right-wing authoritarian governments elected on the basis of nationalism: Modi in India, Orban in Hungary, Trump in the US.

The Tories learned from 2017, and not only carried out a vast undercover social media campaign but also didn’t allow the broadcast media to be as impartial. They carefully framed their message about the referendum: “Brexit means Brexit” became “Get Brexit done”, conveying an implicit appeal to English nationalism.

Their playing of the media convinced many voters that all politicians were the same, with the result of further suppressing the Labour vote among the undecided.

Labour did not learn from 2017, and I think they don’t really understand why their vote rose so sharply in that year. They assumed that they would benefit from a spontaneous increase in support during the campaign, as before, but the establishment took great steps to prevent that from happening this time. Complaining about the BBC coverage after the fact is beside the point.

What is more important is the intervention of a global right wing in supporting Johnson – Trump himself, and also Modi who campaigned among British Indians on the ground that Corbyn was anti-Hindu because of the Labour position on Kashmir.

This is not hindsight from the election result: I remarked to friends in September that local Constituency Labour Parties were still focused on internal procedures and not on how to prepare for an election by turning out to the community.

Besides, why did it take so long to select candidates in areas where the MP had defected – like Gavin Shuker in Luton South? This problem derived, I understand, from bureaucratic conflicts at the level of the National Executive Committee. But the culture at local level is also bureaucratic, draining the enthusiasm of new members if they ever attend meetings.

Second: the party leadership has been systematically reviled for the past four years. Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-racist, anti-imperialist politician in a country that still celebrates its colonial past. The accusations of lack of patriotism and anti-semitism, whatever their source, are code for hostility to this anti-imperialist record.

But some of the mud stuck, and it appealed to the nationalism of Labour supporters who told me they were uncomfortable with his leadership.

Third: Brexit. And again, Brexit. The party’s position in 2017 was infinitely superior to the confused muddle of a second referendum which was interpreted by voters as a push by the political establishment to overturn the original result.

On the doorstep, lifelong Labour voters who voted remain made clear that they do care about the referendum vote being worth something, about respecting those who demanded to be heard.

Fourth: the manifesto had great policies, but they were a ton of fixes for the systemic problems created by years of neoliberal governments. It was virtually impossible to generate a clear class answer from it to Johnson’s “Get Brexit Done.”

Whatever Corbyn’s faults, he has succeeded in unparalleled fashion in rebuilding the Labour party’s membership founded on a transformative agenda. The manifesto will stand as an achievement for the future.

All those with whom I campaigned last week – many, but not all, mobilised by Momentum, who went out in the cold and dark and rain to get out the vote – created a camaraderie that will not be forgotten. Right now, across social media, the election experience is being discussed and dissected. That achievement will not go away.

As Cambridge professor Priya Gopal remarked: 

[Corbyn] and others in the Labour Party did put forward a viable oppositional program, a viable imaginative alternative, a viable progressive vision. And Jeremy Corbyn, the man, mistakes and warts and failures notwithstanding, I think, is owed a debt of gratitude for having put an alternative out there. 

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After The Election ➤ Standing Up To The Global Rise Of Nationalism

From People And Nature a piece written immediately after last year's UK general election where the author is wakening up to rather than from a nightmare.

By Gabriel Levy

Until I saw the exit poll from the UK general election on Thursday evening, I was holding out hope that there would be a hung parliament, leading either to Boris Johnson squirming again under an opposition majority, or a Labour-led coalition or minority government.

I wasn’t the only one. The polls were narrowing, and millions of people were at least giving the impression of being undecided until the last minute.

It didn’t happen. We suffered a defeat. Here are some thoughts about it.

1. Boris Johnson’s xenophobic populism worked.

Clearly there were many reasons why working-class voters either voted Tory or did not turn out to vote Labour. But equally clearly, amidst the fear and desperation caused by years of austerity policies, falling living standards and unemployment, the Tories’ vilification of outsiders (the continent of Europe, migrants, Muslims, and so on) had some resonance. Let’s not try to pretend otherwise. 

Demonstrators at Downing Street, Friday 13 December. Photo by Steve Eason

“Get Brexit Done” was the latest in a series that includes not only “Take Back Control” but also Donald Trump’s “Lock Her Up” and “Build That Wall”.

Three days before the election, Johnson returned to the heart of his Brexit message, complaining that EU nationals are “basically able to treat the UK as though it’s part of their own country”; that there was “no control at all” over this outrage.

Part of Johnson’s political success, I think, was in linking “Get Brexit Done” to the perception that the referendum outcome was the “will of the people”. Friends who canvassed for Labour told how Remainer voters said that – while they were heartbroken and worried at the thought of the UK leaving Europe – they believed that a second referendum would somehow be undemocratic.

Canvasser friends also reported a weariness with “the whole Brexit thing” – again, reflecting the success of the powerful right-wing and media campaign to present Brexit as a simple task, frustrated by an obnoxious parliament. “Parliament against the people.”

2. Johnson may get more extreme as his problems pile up.

I don’t buy the argument that, now Johnson has a big majority in the House of Commons, he can loosen his links to the right wing (European Research Group, etc), and reveal himself as a liberal, one-nation Tory.

For a start, he is not a politician of principle or ideology. Compare him to Margaret Thatcher, the last Tory prime minister to shift UK politics fundamentally. She believed in things: the need to smash the unions; neo-liberal economics; that “there is no such thing as society”. These beliefs underlay her actions.

Johnson is not the same. Whatever liberal things he may have said as mayor of London, since the Brexit referendum campaign his agenda has been set by Dominic Cummings, the ERG and the extreme right. To the extent that he has an ideology, it is shaped by this English nationalist wing of Conservatism. It’s not as though Johnson has any problem embracing it: we have all heard his one-liners exhibiting racism, Islamophobia and contempt for the working class.

Moreover, even though Johnson now has a parliamentary majority, the fundamental problems with his Brexit strategy – from capital’s point of view – still remain.

First, the north of Ireland. The major amendment Johnson introduced to the Brexit deal with the European Union is a customs border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, which Theresa May would not accept. When Johnson says there will not be checks, he is just lying, again.

The six counties – where the devolved parliament has been closed for nearly three years, where pro-EU parties won nearly twice as many votes as the Democratic Unionists last week, and where trade with the south is booming – are slipping out of Britain’s control. For all of us who oppose Britain’s imperial legacy, this is good news. But we have yet to see how the Tory party will deal with the raised threat of Irish unity.

The Tory vote hardly rose, while Labour’s fell. 
Thanks to the friend who put this together from BBC numbers

Second, Scotland. The Tories made clear at the weekend that they would not concede the Scottish Nationalists’ demand for a second referendum. But this is not the end of it. Assuming the UK leaves the EU on 31 January, Scottish people will find themselves bearing the economic burden of a policy they did not agree with.

Could they head towards a Catalan-style independence movement? Will there be organisation on class lines? Time will tell. However things develop, this will be a major challenge to the government.

Third, the economy. Michael Gove says a trade deal will be negotiated with the EU by the end of 2020. Oh yeah? Within hours of Thursday’s election result, French president Emmanuel Macron said “a very ambitious agreement” would require “very ambitious regulatory convergence” – the opposite of what Johnson and Gove want. Angela Merkel, German chancellor, said the UK would become “a competitor on our doorstep, now that it is no longer integrated in the internal market”.

As Johnson presides over a declining UK, facing aggressive capitalist competitors, and an economy battered by Brexit – and tied in knots by his own spending promises – he will lash out.

The challenge is to organise and build movements that can effectively fight back.

3. The causes of Labour’s defeat stretch back decades.

Of course the immediate causes of Labour’s election defeat included the political dead end of Brexit. Even on that, Labour’s big failure was not this year or last, but in 2016-17, in my view.

Labour did not question the basis of the June 2016 referendum; did not insist that it had only advisory status; and “pledged to respect the result” without pointing out the consequences. In February 2017, three-quarters of the Parliamentary Labour Party voted to trigger Article 50, thereby endorsing e.g. the idea that the Irish border issue could be wished away by magic.

Most Labour MPs thus joined the Tories in capitulating to the Nigel Farage myth that the referendum was the “will of the people”. They left themselves no room to propose the reversal of the process. My point is not that Labour should have ignored the result of the referendum, but that by accepting in the first place that the complex issue of the UK’s relationship with Europe could be resolved by it – which, as we have seen, it could not – they allowed the “will of the people” crusade to gather steam.

Once Labour was locked in to the Leave/Remain lunacy, it was too late. Having accepted the ridiculous premises of the referendum, the only way out of the May/Johnson mess it could propose was … another referendum.

But a far greater cause of Labour’s defeat – Labour’s disconnection from its working-class voter base, and the decline of organisations through which that was mediated – unfolded over much longer time scales.

Labour’s resounding electoral victories in 1945 and 1964 were built on decades of workplace and community organising. In working-class areas, the Labour Party was closely linked to trade unions, clubs, tenants’ associations; it was involved in a wide range of political and community activity.

As Thatcherism laid into the working class in the 1980s, these links were weakened. The relationships changed. The labour movement went into decline; social democracy as a form of social control went into decline. In the 1990s, Blairism turned Labour into an electoral machine increasingly distant from this base. As Aditya Chakrabortty wrote in this thoughtful article at the weekend:

While the party bigwigs threw their weight about, the mines and the manufacturers, the steel and the shipbuilding were snuffed out. With them went the culture of Labourism: the bolshy union stewards, the self-organised societies, most of the local newspapers.

Cynicism about politicians in general, and Labour politicians in particular, became more powerful in working class areas abandoned by Blair and then ravaged by the 2008-09 economic crisis.

It took time for this to feed through to electoral results. First came Scotland. In the 2014 independence referendum, Labour urged a vote for the Union. In the 2015 General Election, it was wiped out in Scotland: the Scottish Nationalists took 56 seats, compared to six in 2010 – and converted themselves from the “Tartan Tories” they were always seen as to some sort of social-democratic nationalists.

This shift, which came before the 2016 Brexit referendum, made it to all intents and purposes impossible for Labour to win an absolute majority in the House of Commons.

In the north of England, there is no party that can so clearly elbow Labour aside as the SNP has. Those votes that went to the Tories this time are still up for grabs in future.

4. It’s not about Jeremy Corbyn.

Friends who went canvassing – and who sided with Corbyn against the Labour right – say that voters were not convinced by him. He was “not seen as a strong leader”; his position on Brexit confused people; they “didn’t trust him”.

To work this one out, it may be worth dividing the actual Jeremy Corbyn from the monster “Jeremy Corbyn” created by the Labour right wing and the media. The actual Jeremy Corbyn, like all of us, is complex: a principled leftist, who fought against the stream for decades, embracing anti-racist and social justice causes long before they were popular, and who also, like many of his generation, was strongly influenced by Stalinism and, probably as a result of that, embraced views e.g. on Syria that I find repugnant. 


On the school students’ climate march, 29 November

He was, also, always in a tiny minority in the parliamentary Labour Party. His room for manoeuvre was always tightly constrained – and I’m guessing (i) that the left-wing criticism about what he “should have” done (usually, switch to the critic’s particular politics) will now intensify, and (ii) much of it will miss this point.

The monster “Jeremy Corbyn” created by the Labour right wing and the media, on the other hand, has done its work, with an unprecedented witch-hunt over a period of years.

When voters told my friends they didn’t trust Corbyn, or couldn’t work him out, was that the monster they were talking about, or the real Corbyn? The monster was there. But the real Corbyn was too, I think, in particular because he interpreted his “new kind of politics” as not only avoiding personal abuse, but also (apparently) avoiding too many direct attacks on Tory politicians who thoroughly deserved it. On TV he came across as an old guy who would rather be on his allotment, because that’s part of what he was.

What to do now? One thing is to sort through this “new kind of politics”, which was so hopeful, and brought so many thousands of young, and some not-so-young, working-class people into the Labour Party in the last five years.

Paradoxically, some of the things that in right-wing Labourites’ eyes made Corbyn a liability – his refusal to do presidential-style lying and grandstanding, his ability (so unusual among politicians) to speak a sentence as though he meant it – are what made him popular among young Labour party members in the first place. Being “electable” is not the same as doing what is needed to build a movement. But trust, I think, is different: as a movement, we have nothing without the trust of the communities we live in.

Let’s rethink the “new kind of politics”, keep the humanity, the connection with social movements, the radical social and climate policies, and reject what has failed – much of which, I suspect, may be more about the parliamentary Labour Party as a whole.

This is not, for me, only about the Labour Party (of which I’m not a member). Although elections can be important – and this one felt very important – they are only one of the ways in which the world changes. The development of social movements, the joining together of actions on climate with those on social justice, the shaping of internationalism in practice, the emergence of new forms of labour organisation – because those old forms with which Labour used to connect need to be superceded, not repeated – are decisive.

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Nightmare On Downing Street

Via The Transcripts The Nolan Show is conducting its series entitled the Nolan Manifesto Interviews on BBC Radio Ulster. Today Stephen is alone questioning the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party) in absentia as the party did not send a delegate to participate in the series. Listen to Stephen as you read along to enjoy the full experience. Please Note: The following transcript is only the first twenty or so minutes of today’s programme. 

Stephen Nolan BBC Radio Ulster 9 December 2019
BBC Radio Ulster
The Nolan Show

Stephen: On the programme today the Nolan Manifesto Interviews continue. Today it’s the turn of the DUP . Do they deserve your vote? (Stephen solicits listener calls.)
Stephen Nolan
Good Morning! And thanks for joining us today. Every single party who were asked to have their manifestos scrutinised by The Nolan Show have agreed a date with the BBC except one, the DUP. We’ve been talking to them for many weeks for an interview. They kept telling us they were looking at it and yet here we are – no DUP.

We think it’s really important this morning to scrutinise their manifesto whether they are here or not. Now you, through your licence fee, pay people like me to ask these politicians questions, to hold them to account so that they can’t create laws and policies that affect you without them having to justify it. That’s why this is important. Usually political parties fight for an opportunity to be on the BBC to sell their manifesto to the public. This morning the DUP could have been reaching out to well over a hundred thousand of you in this time slot appealing to you for your vote. They’ve chosen not to do that. There are so many questions I have for the DUP on your behalf and do you know what? I’m going to ask them whether they’re here or not.

Let’s start with the ‘Big Picture’ stuff: Nigel Dodds says in the DUP Manifesto that in the last Westminster election you gave them the strongest ever team of DUP MPs and he wants you to trust him and his party again to, in his words, ‘protect Northern Ireland’s place in the UK’. I want to ask the DUP if they’re not deeply embarrassed that with all of the influence they had Boris Johnson intends to put, in their words, ‘a border down the Irish Sea’. Are you, the DUP, not embarrassed by that? And is it true, as other Unionists claim, that your decision to compromise on a regulatory border down the Irish Sea was seen as a green light by Boris Johnson’s government to treat Northern Ireland so differently from the rest of the UK?

Was that a cock-up by you? Were you bluffed by the Prime Minister? Were you weak? Did the DUP allow its pursuit of Brexit to endanger the Union? So many questions and no one here to answer them. There are Loyalists and Unionists throughout the country now holding rallies as they think the union is under threat because of Boris Johnson’s deal. Nigel Dodds attended one of those rallies at the weekend.

Audio: Nigel Dodds speaking at rally.

Stephen: That’s Mr. Dodds at the weekend. But I wanted to ask the DUP if they now feel it was an error of judgement to have Boris Johnson as their guest of honour at their party conference just over a year ago? Listen to this!

Audio: Boris Johnson being introduced at the DUP annual party conference.

Stephen: Mr. Johnson did make the DUP a promise at this conference.

Audio: Prime Minister Boris Johnson addresses DUP annual party conference and promises his Brexit withdrawal agreement will not damage the union with regulatory and customs arrangements for Northern Ireland.

Stephen: And then he broke that promise. Here’s another question for the DUP: Why are you even contemplating still supporting a Johnson-led government? Where did the DUP’s own promises go when they told you, all of you – the electorate – that they would use their leverage and influence in the best interests of Northern Ireland? When, as they boasted time and time again, they were the ones holding the balance of power. Where did that get them?

Let’s ask the DUP another question whether they’re here or not. The DUP is saying they will never support a Corbyn government. Now given what some Unionists are describing as the ‘Betrayal Act’ why has the DUP not ruled out working with Boris Johnson? They won’t work with Corbyn. Why will they work with a Prime Minister who, in their own words, is endangering the union with this deal? If Johnson’s deal threatens the very essence of the United Kingdom why is the DUP still prepared to work with him?

Radio Silence

Stephen: All you get is silence.

Nigel Dodds says in his manifesto that he seeks a mandate to send a message that there can be no borders in the Irish Sea. Your own hand-written signature is under that statement, Nigel.

How can you and how can your party say this when it was you who agreed to Boris Johnson’s original offer to the EU (European Union) which meant Northern Ireland diverging from the UK on some regulations – yes, it was only with a unionist veto – but this was something a former advisor to the Prime Minister, Theresa May, said: Give Boris Johnson more leeway in his negotiations with the EU.

Why didn’t you rule out any prospect of any border, consent or not? Did Boris Johnson see that as a chink of light and exploit it? Does the DUP regret this now? Was this a fundamental failure in negotiations by the DUP?

All of these questions and you’re not here to answer them to people contemplating voting for you.
LucidTalk on Twitter
Here’s another question: Is the DUP’s pursuit of Brexit actually endangering the union?

A LucidTalk poll released just last week suggests a majority of Unionists are now pro-Remain. Once again, I’d love to ask questions around that but the DUP can’t find anybody to answer this morning. They’ve left us with silence.

Radio Silence

Stephen: Let’s turn now to what Arlene Foster says in the DUP Manifesto: Under her own hand-written signature she talks about ‘next generation Unionism’. I wonder does that generation include gay people in Northern Ireland? No doubt the DUP’s listening this morning. Are you prepared to apologise for some of the words your party has used in the past towards the gay community? Because politicians are being held to account during this election – they are answering questions about their past words. The Prime Minister, for example, is being held to task for words he used about single mothers many, many years ago. He’s being challenged about articles he wrote when he was a journalist. Jeremy Corbyn – he’s being challenged about his refusal, for example, in 2015 to specifically condemn IRA violence when I asked him if he would. But let’s look at the DUP. Your manifesto talks about reaching out to as wide a base as possible. To do that – do you owe an apology to the gay community for your words of the past?

Radio Silence

Stephen: Would any current member of your party ever again be allowed to say that homosexuality is nauseating? That these sorts of relationships are immoral, offensive and obnoxious? That a hurricane was punishment from God because of a Gay Pride parade? Would they ever again be allowed to say that gay people were, quote, ‘perverts’? That the filthy practice of sodomy has resulted in the great continent of Africa being riddled with AIDS?

Is there any apology needed for those words of the past?

You say in your manifesto you want to protect animals better – might you be minded to protect gay people better? And should they vote for you this time round?

Radio Silence

Stephen: Let’s stay on that section of your manifesto that talks about next generation Unionism: Might the next generation of Unionism be less interested in the colour of a flag? Yeah, Orange and Green – it does attract votes in Northern Ireland – but is the DUP worried that the next generation this time will vote less on Orange and Green but prioritise health and education and the economy? Can the DUP convince this next generation that they are the best in class with these policy areas?

Now, the detail of any manifesto is important. Every other political party in Northern Ireland has consented to me scrutinising the detail within their promises – except the DUP. Let’s look at some of the detail: Figures and amounts matter – we saw how important that was with RHI (Renewable Heat Incentive). The DUP say in their manifesto that they secured two hundred million for health transformation which will help, for example, with waiting lists. But what I wanted to really ask the DUP on behalf of all of you this morning: How high up their priority list does health actually come? Is it more important than blocking an Irish Language Act?

Radio Silence

Stephen: If allowing Sinn Féin to have an Irish Language Act brought about a devolved government again so that local ministers could tackle waiting lists why is that not a price worth paying?

Radio Silence

Stephen: The DUP is the biggest party in this country. Do they take any responsibility for over three hundred thousand people now waiting to see a consultant? That’s up twenty-three and a half thousand on the previous year. Those are real people in Northern Ireland. It doesn’t matter whether they’re Unionist or Nationalist – it doesn’t matter what the are – over three hundred thousand people now waiting on that list. Northern Ireland’s figures are the worst in the whole of the UK. Does the DUP take any responsibility for that?

A hundred and thirty-three thousand patients are waiting more than a year for hospital treatment yet in England and Wales, with a population more than thirty times larger than that of Northern Ireland, the figure is less than six thousand. Think about that – six thousand – with a far bigger population – against a hundred and thirty-three thousand patients! Are you in any way responsible for this in the DUP? Yes, you can say you’ve been out of government for years – but maybe if you could get back into government or you had got back into government you could have been helping some of the patients on that waiting list. Are you responsible for any of this?

Radio Silence

Stephen: And then, of course, there was the DUP’s decision to break pay parity for our hard-working NHS (National Health Service) staff. Here’s the reality: It was a DUP Health Minister who did this in 2014. I want to spell out to you what that means:

Up until then NHS employees were paid equally across the UK. Under the DUP’s ministerial watch that was broken. So my question to you, the DUP, this morning: Why did you think it was acceptable to pay our nurses, our hospital cleaners, our porters less than those in England? Do you regret that? How is the DUP standing on picket lines supporting workers asking for pay parity when it was the DUP who decided to pay them differently in the first place? Should health workers pay you back in the DUP for breaking that parity by refusing to vote for you? What would you say to them this morning? It leads me to the following question: Why should NHS staff trust the DUP over pay? Can they reach out and convince them to do so?

There are loads of articulate, seasoned politicians who could have come in here this morning and answered these questions – possibly quite well – possibly attracting you to vote for them – instead my questions on your behalf are met with silence.

Radio Silence

Stephen: I have so many questions for the DUP. They say in their manifesto: Let’s make the Assembly better. They say any new Assembly will have to undergo far-reaching reform to deliver more and deliver better – would that include a change in the rules so that no Speaker could continue to get paid while off work for over a thousand days? Think about that. There’s not enough money to give our nurses a pay rise but the outgoing Assembly Speaker, the DUP MLA Robin Newton, has earned tens of thousands of pounds with no job to go to. Millions have also been spent on MLA salaries. Does that sound right to you, DUP?

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Stephen: There are many figures published in this manifesto where you talk about some of your promises around family budgets. Can the DUP, with any authority, talk to any citizen in this country about a family budget when we’ve all seen how you handled our money with RHI? Have you learned the lessons from RHI yet?

Let me remind people how Arlene Foster replied to Sir Patrick Coghlin’s RHI Inquiry when she was asked if she had read the legislation which she brought before the Assembly in her name.

Audio: Arlene Foster being questioned at the RHI Inquiry.

Stephen: Does the DUP give a promise to voters that they will never do this again? Propose legislation that they haven’t fully read. Can people trust you?

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Stephen: I have questions on behalf of our rural community who may be contemplating voting for the DUP. The party manifesto says the following:

The primary custodians of our rural areas are the farming community. Their commitment and strength of connection to their farms and businesses are vital to sustaining rural communities producing high quality food and improving our environment.

During the last Parliament, through our Confidence and Supply Agreement, the DUP write, we secured commitments to the same level of direct support and cash as currently received through the common agricultural policy. That direct support for farmers – when will that money run out? How can a farmer invest long term? Was Brexit worth this? Should those farmers vote for you?

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Stephen: I have questions for the DUP about welfare reform. Many DUP voters will be worried about their benefits being cut because of welfare reform. Now you, the DUP, were one of the parties who voted in support of allowing Westminster to intervene and legislate for welfare reform in Northern Ireland. Was that the right decision?

If any of your voters are going to suffer and have their benefits cut if the mitigations stop early next year should they vote for you? The DUP say in their manifesto they were the first advocates of a mitigation package for welfare. It is mitigation against cuts the DUP helped bring about, some people would argue, by allowing Westminster to intervene in the first place. Is the DUP embarrassed now about this?

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Stephen: I’m not sure that silence on The Nolan Show helps any citizen in this country if they’re looking for further answers. To be fair to the DUP they have given answers to other BBC Northern Ireland broadcasters and I would encourage you, as a citizen of this country, to find those interviews and answers on the BBC Northern Ireland News website, on BBC Newslines pages and the DUP are scheduled to appear on Talkback tomorrow and on Spotlight on Tuesday night.
Photo: The Nolan Show
  
But let me ask the DUP one final question this morning about their refusal to speak with me. They’ve told this programme recently that there is no Nolan Show boycott. Yeah, there’ve been a handful of answers since RHI but very, very few. Listen to what Sammy Wilson told Talkback in June of this year.

Audio: Sammy Wilson, appearing on BBC Talkback, mentions the DUP’s decision not to appear on The Nolan Show and says that not appearing on Stephen’s show is ‘the best way of hurting him’.

Stephen: I would just say to the DUP: If you’re now saying there’s no Nolan Show boycott then why aren’t you here this morning? If it’s even possible for some people to think that you cannot face-up to me how have you got what it takes to face down Boris Johnson or Mary Lou McDonald when your voters really need you to?

I hope I’ve been able to bring you some of the questions this morning that I would have asked the DUP and I deeply regret that I couldn’t convince them to answer them on this programme.

(Stephen solicits listener call-ins and advises listeners to visit the BBC’s Northern Ireland News website and its Election 2019 page and to search online for the DUP’s Manifesto.)

Note: The Nolan Show continues with Stephen hosting BBC Northern Ireland Political Editor, Mark Devenport, and BBC Northern Ireland Economics and Business Editor, John Campbell, who provide analysis of the DUP past performance and future strategies in Northern Ireland in relation to their manifesto. Keep listening!


The Transcripts, Of Interest to the Irish Republican Community.

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