Maia Thomas

Food is essential to everyone but inaccessible to many. Hunger is a matter of urgency but constantly ignored. Many people say they are ‘hungry’ as a throwaway comment daily, but have you really experienced true hunger? Behind closed doors some people face an empty fridge most days of the week with nothing but hopes and prayers till they see their next meal. In a world where the gap between rich and poor continues to grow daily, some have little or no access to food.

As an Equality Activist I have championed numerous projects in my community to be a leader in creating change. Creating the opportunity for thousands of individuals to gain access to food which they struggle daily to get, was essential. So I did it. I created Feed Our Community – a project supplying food packages to those in food poverty, struggling financially, on furlough and anyone truly in need. Over 2,600 households have received food packages in around six weeks.

some of the food donations

But reducing food poverty in my area could not be solved just by providing food packages. I wanted to provide opportunities for free education on household and financial management, meal ideas and smart ways to shop. This has been achieved by hosting free zoom meetings and coaching sessions. I have created a support group, so people no longer feel they are alone; this is extremely valuable due to the tumultuous world in which we currently live. Hundreds of individuals from my local community and beyond have attended these informative sessions. Many have since got jobs, are on track to paying off their debts and now have a network to confide in.

The project started one lunchtime when I was scrolling through Facebook. I found a young woman reaching out to her community for guidance on getting food, due to the financial hardship she was facing. This was not what I usually come across and that moment made me decide to act. I created a food package for her and delivered it to her doorstep. I was unaware at this moment that one food package would turn into supplying over 2,600 households six weeks later.

To decide the content of food packages I always give what I would like to receive, a value that I have stuck to throughout the development of Feed Our Community. Fresh fruit and vegetables should be accessible to everyone, so I made this a priority. After planning a week’s worth of meals, I packaged the bags with different nutritious ingredients. The packages include tinned meats and fish, pasta, rice, other tinned products, breakfast items and daily essentials such as toiletries.

This woman was young, at an age where you may lack knowledge of available support systems. Reaching under-represented and often unreachable groups has been a core focus of Feed Our Community. For some, reaching out for help – whether that be food or financial assistance – is viewed as shameful in their culture. Others may not be able to get to food banks due to being disabled physically or having mental health challenges. Exploring accessibility to Feed Our Community through the lens of different groups is essential. Accessibility of a service is fundamental. No one should have to suffer in silence, not having food available to them. Therefore, this project was designed with a range of groups in mind and contactless delivery was the best way to be most inclusive.

Maia speaking at an Exeter Black Lives Matter rally.

The young woman who originally reached out was extremely brave to allow public knowledge of her financial situation but not everyone would feel comfortable doing so. Feed Our Community has always been confidential. After finding my posts via different community groups, or through being a member of my Facebook group, people can reach out via direct message, expressing their need for a food package or other financial assistance: for example an emergency electricity top up. The Facebook group was created to break down the barriers and end the sense of shame about needing to reach out. The world is in a particularly difficult space and now more than ever people need to feel able to get assistance when they need it.

Reducing food poverty and food waste go hand in hand. Making the connection between food that would otherwise be wasted and those truly in need is part of my mission. Connecting with supermarkets through FareShare has enabled this project to reduce food waste in my community. The project also works alongside farms and other local businesses to get good quality food to those who are truly in need.

In a society where we spend a lot of time talking, I decided to act. Food poverty is a matter of urgency which we cannot continue to ignore. The number of people in food poverty is rising yet food waste is greater than ever before. Why do we continue to waste, when so many do not have? Society is becoming increasingly divided yet so many groups’ voices are unheard and not catered for. Feed Our Community intends to bridge these gaps.

It is time for a revolution, and this is a first step among many.

Maia will be speaking a public meeting on Thursday 18th March at 6.30pm and discussing her campaigning work and  the Peace and Justice Project of Jeremy Corbyn which she has signed up to. She will be joined at the meeting by CND General Secretary Kate Hudson and former MP Thelma Walker. Please register for the meeting using this link. It will be held on Zoom

]]> https://prruk.org/a-lesson-in-the-ruthlessness-of-the-british-ruling-class/ Thu, 13 Feb 2020 10:26:35 +0000 http://prruk.org/?p=11470 Martin Wicks examines Labour’s election defeat

Whilst there will be no shortage of efforts to apportion blame for the electoral defeat of Labour an indisputable factor was the PLP’s participation in the four year witch-hunt against Jeremy Corbyn. Symptomatic of the rage of sections of the PLP against the membership for having the audacity to elect Corbyn, was the case of Angela Eagle and the brick which was said to have been thrown through her office window, ostensibly by Corbyn supporters. On the back of this ‘incident’ she helped the rabid anti-Labour media to paint his supporters as thuggish bullies. “Call off the dogs”, she said. The only problem was that there was no brick thrown through the window of her office, there was only a cracked window in a shared stairwell. Yet Eagle never apologised for her falsehood. She and others in the PLP gave credence to the lies of the Mail, the Sun, the Telegraph. They facilitated the witch-hunt against Corbyn.

Behind this hostility was a fundamental contradiction between the aspirations and views of the membership and the majority of the Parliamentary Party which was still gripped by the neo-liberal virus of New Labour. After all, one of the key reasons for Corbyn’s victory was the outrage of members at the PLP when Harriett Harman was temporary Leader. Labour abstained on the welfare reforms, the ‘hostile environment’ against the poor and the disabled. Blair had adopted the Clintonite ‘tough love’ which ‘incentivised’ people who were dismissed as scroungers. The abstention was rooted in this reactionary New Labour policy. Only 40 Labour MPs voted against the reforms.

That such a weak creature as the Labour left was able to win the leadership election was a reflection of the bankruptcy of Blairism, made obvious by the global crisis of capitalism. Although it didn’t receive much attention Gordon Brown’s statement in his interview during the recent election campaign was significant. “The neo-liberal consensus was wrong,” he said, admittedly somewhat belatedly. This consensus was the bedrock of New Labour’s politics.

Faced with the ongoing global crisis, with another crash likely sooner rather than later, and deteriorating environmental conditions, the tinkering which most of the PLP seems to want, is the equivalent of playing the fiddle whilst Rome burns. Some of them, such as Gareth Thomas want “moderation, and patriotism”. Others a “progressive patriotism”.

Heaping all the blame on Corbyn is just a convenient excuse. The election of Corbyn was a necessary means of beginning to break from the politics of New Labour. Yet there was no thorough-going critique of New Labour.¹ Not long after Corbyn’s first election I was at a meeting in Bracknell where John McDonnell spoke about the ‘good things’ Labour did in the public sector. This may have gone down well with those still attached to New Labour but it was a travesty of the truth. It was the New Labour government which opened up the NHS to the private sector, sought to eradicate council housing, promoted the growth of the private rented sector by tax breaks to buy-to-let landlords. The deregulation which was de rigueur under New Labour was one of the contributory factors to the Grenfell Fire disaster. It introduced austerity into the NHS with its £20 billion cut just before the 2010 election. The global crisis which resulted from neo-liberalism destroyed the political foundations of New Labour. That was why its supporters lost so heavily in the two leadership contests. They had no credible political perspective.

Let those nostalgic for those good old days (when the Sun supported Labour) explain why it was that after the first four years of government there was an historically unprecedented 12% fall in turnout at the 2001 general election, to 59.4%. Here was the beginning of the ‘disaffection with Westminster politics’. The scale of this fall can be measured by the fact that in the previous 21 general elections the turnout had always been over 70%. There was a widespread sentiment that it was difficult to tell the difference between the two major parties. There was a large scale exodus of Party membership because they could not stomach New Labour’s neo-liberalism and the partnership with the US war machine.

A constructive critique of the leadership – liberalism in the face of a ruthless ruling class

The culpability of the PLP, however, should not stop us from a thorough-going critique of Jeremy and John McDonnell’s leadership and their mistakes. This is not a holier than thou or sectarian criticism but simply the need to learn from experience.

We have just had a salutary lesson in the ruthlessness of the British ruling class, its propagandists and its hangers-on. Any lie, any calumny, however outrageous, will be used to prevent the election of a government and a movement which might threaten their power, their wealth and their privilege. There have been many historical precedents. Despite the Zinoviev letter in 1924 Labour gained an extra million votes. Churchill’s preposterous assertion that Labour would introduce “some sort of Gestapo” had no influence on the outcome of the 1945 election. Today, with 24 hour media and ubiquitous social media, lies have better prospects of being taken as good coin. The witch-hunt against Corbyn has been withering and constant, to an unprecedented degree.

However, the key factor in Labour’s electoral failure is the one-sided class war we have suffered for 40 years since the watershed year of 1979. Jeremy’s injunction of “a kinder, gentler politics” in the face of this was pure small l liberalism. Although he can be very dogged in defending principles that he holds dear he is an instinctive conciliator. But you cannot conciliate with people who are out to destroy you. That was what the worst sections of the PLP wanted to do. They collaborated with the Tory media to keep Corbyn out of Downing Street. ‘Labour cannot win under Corbyn’ became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many of them did not want Labour to win under Corbyn.

Jeremy’s instinctive conciliatory nature was expressed even after the defeat of the attempted coup against him. To take one example, he gave John Healey, one of the coup supporters, his job back even though he was the main obstacle to radicalising Labour’s housing policy. And still members of the Shadow Cabinet were leaking to the press and undermining Corbyn. Deputy Leader Tom Watson was allowed to get away with the most outrageous behaviour without serious challenge.

Momentum and ‘Corbynism’

There were problems from the very beginning of ‘Corbynism’. The Labour Representation Committee, of which John McDonnell was the chair, was effectively frozen out the leadership campaign and Jeremy and John plumped for John Lansman as their main lieutenant. A campaign to democratise the Labour Party therefore rested on a movement, Momentum, which was undemocratic; set up as a company owned by John Lansman. Later on Lansman would change its constitution by fiat. You cannot democratise the Labour Party whilst using undemocratic methods yourself. Symptomatic of Lansman’s approach was the bureaucratic attempt to remove Watson just before the general election by getting rid of the position of Deputy Leader. As an act of stupidity it has rarely been surpassed. The timing was appalling but in any case it was the action of a ‘machine man’ who attempted to tackle a political problem – the treachery of Watson – by a machine manoeuvre rather than openly challenging his collaboration with the anti-Labour media; something which should have been done a long time before that.

In the early days John McDonnell told us that he and Jeremy would come under enormous pressure and that we would have to provide a counter-pressure. However, he and Jeremy were effectively quarantined. It was impossible to get to them, surrounded as they were by ‘advisers’ who, to my knowledge, had little experience in the working class movement, certainly at the grassroots level. Jeremy and John acquiesced at this state of affairs. They chose who they spoke to and who they didn’t.

Anti-Semitism, real and counterfeit

The issue of anti-Semitism was badly mishandled. Jeremy and John, by the way they dealt with it, gave credence to the idea that there was a major problem with anti-Semitism in the Party. Instead of saying let’s examine the evidence of the extent of anti-semitism, real and counterfeit, we heard generalities about opposing anti-Semitism. What has been forgotten was that when the issue first arose the General Secretary was McNichol, who would be one of the key organisers of the attempted coup to oust Corbyn, together with Watson. There was undoubtedly a factional purpose behind this assault, reflected by the fact that Margaret Hodge, sent in hundreds of complaints about online behaviour, the majority of which² were against people who weren’t actually Labour Party members. Instead of being openly transparent and publishing the facts – the number of complaints, how many were found to be true, how many were vexatious, how many were expelled, or warned – the issue was allowed to fester when McNichol was the General Secretary, precisely because it was a useful weapon against Corbyn.

There is, of course, no place for anti-semites in the Labour Party, but opponents of the Israeli state were slandered as anti-semites. The sharpest point of this dispute was between Jewish members of the Party, Zionists and anti-or-non-Zionists. The initial wave of complaints included Jewish members accusing other Jewish members of being anti-Semitic. One example was Glen Secker, Secretary of the Jewish Vocie for Labour group. Even when no case was found in relation to the accusation, there was no apology from McNichol’s apparatus, and no action was taken against the vexatious claimant. There were other examples. When Jenny Formby took over, statistics were published but by then they weren’t believed and they were not detailed enough. Even the latest statistics, recently published, provide only numbers without any indication as to what members have done to merit expulsion or sanction. Without that information then the members cannot judge whether the apparatus has acted fairly nor hold them to account.

The political purpose of the witch-hunt against Jewish members by Jewish members was to outlaw all but the mildest criticisms of Israel. The BDS campaign and deeming Israel to be a racist state were denounced as anti-Semitic. People were denounced for their political views not for anything they had done. The Jewish Labour Movement (a Labour Party affiliate), in particular, launched a war against other Jewish members, as well as Corbyn, ending up with a policy of opposing the election of a Labour government so long as Corbyn was leader. This was clear grounds for disaffiliation, but nothing will be done because it would be denounced as anti-Semitism. Imagine if the left had opposed the election of a Blair government? They would have been swiftly shown the door. Indeed the RMT was disaffiliated for supporting Scottish Socialist Party candidates. The JSM was in breach of party rules which demand support of all Labour candidates but no action has been taken nor even criticism made.

During the election campaign the very people who used the issue as a means of preventing the election of Labour, launched an orchestrated campaign, culminating in the propaganda of the most rabid ex-Labour MPs, Austin and Woodcock, assisted by Rabbi Mervis.

Politically, Jeremy and John’s failure to identify the fact that there was a political aspect of this campaign, designed to make anti-Zionism persona non grata, meant they handed the initiative to those who were trying to bring them down. Whilst there was all manner of offensive rubbish published on social media, at the root of the dispute were conflicting views about the nature of the Israeli state.

Ironically, the very author of the IHRA working definition of anti-semitism, Kenneth Stern has said that anti-semitism has been weaponised by right wing Jews to stop debate on Israel. This opinion, of course, has been sufficient reason for Labour members to be expelled.

During the general election campaign the Jewish Chronicle was found guilty of a breach of press standards in relation to its reporting of events in the Liverpool Riverside Labour Party. It lied about what happened there – the myth of the local MP being “driven out of the Labour Party” – and against an individual member, Audrey White. Needless to say this did not receive much coverage in the press.

When the three Jewish publications issued their joint statement saying that the election of a Corbyn government was an “existential threat” to British Jews, Watson and co did not even object to such ridiculous hyperbole. Their silence in the face of a comment which implied that Jews would not be able to exist in Britain (was Corbyn going to set up concentration camps?) gave credence to such hysteria. When the Jewish Labour movement said they would not support a Labour government so long as Corbyn was leader, Watson and co remained silent.

Recently Barnet Momentum managed to get hold of a video from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism which shows a gloating Joe Glasman drunk with joy at having ‘killed the beast’ (Corbyn). It expresses a chilling Jewish nationalism which suggests that England’s green and pleasant land has been restored by putting Johnson back into Downing Street. Judge for yourself here .

One of the reasons why supporters of the Israeli state have been able to present political criticism has somehow unfair on Israel, treating it differently to other countries, has been the absence of any campaigning by Labour in support of those struggling against the theocratic or military regimes in the Middle East. This has facilitated the Israeli state’s contrast of itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East”, with the autocratic and dictatorial regimes in other countries. Of course, Israel did nothing to support the democratic struggles of the Arab spring and has quite happily had friendly relations with the some of the regimes such as that of Egypt.

Corbyn’s unpopularity

We are told that Corbyn was “an issue on the doorstep”. Undoubtedly he was unpopular in some quarters. Yet they don’t follow on by asking why was that? Was it all his fault? Much of the material in the media combined the slanderous (the Czech agent) with the ridiculous (his non-existent intention to close down the army). However, what was critical in creating this response on the doorstep was the campaign against Corbyn from within the PLP, supported by Watson, who spared no effort in collaborating with the Tory media. Without any mandate whatsoever, he was regularly promoting his own policy against that agreed by the Party. Jeremy’s instinct was to do nothing to lead to a blow up. Allowing Watson to behave as he did, however, meant that he came across as a weak Leader. Frankly, he should have demanded Watson’s resignation for his undemocratic behaviour. He and others were organising what was in effect a civil war against Corbyn and the elected leadership bodies. MPs like Ian Austin and John Woodcock were saying in the House of Commons that Corbyn was ‘unfit to be Prime Minister’ and generally abusing him (e.g. in defence of the Iraq war). They should have had the whip taken off them but nothing was done against their treacherous behaviour which showed contempt for the membership. After all, if Labour MPs were seen to not support their leader and denounce him as a “terrorist supporter”, why would you expect people to vote for Labour and put him in Downing Street? Yet Jeremy and the NEC did nothing to challenge this. Its repetition over time had an impact. We will never know now but the media witch-hunt may not have had the impact it did but for the fact that sections of the PLP were feeding it. It is an old cliché that voters don’t vote for divided parties.

The Brexit conundrum

In relation to Brexit Corbyn is now being damned from both sides: for not supporting Brexit and not allowing Labour to become a Remain party. The problem with the compromise position was that it alienated both those who wanted to leave and those who wanted to remain; the leavers, because staying in a/the customs union was being seen as ‘EU lite’ (in Michael Gove’s words) and the remainers because it proposed giving another opportunity to leavers to vote to depart. According to the Ashcroft poll data Labour lost 11% of their voters in areas which voted leave and 6% in those which voted remain. Emily Thornbury’s criticism that we should have had a referendum before the election is spurious because there was no way that a referendum would have been conceded by the Tories.

Jeremy’s liberal streak was expressed in the ludicrous idea that Labour wanted to “bring the country together” as if if had been ‘together’ before the referendum and it was possible (and desirable) to unify the classes. In any case the message was not well received because ‘the country’ did not want to be brought together, it wanted its (opposite) way.

The anti-austerity party?

For all the talk of Labour being an “anti-austerity party”, in practice Labour councils were implementing it. ‘Sorry, it’s not us, it’s the Tories fault’, was not well received by the victims of austerity. Perhaps the key point was when Jeremy and John sent the letter to Labour local authorities telling them to set legal budgets. Whilst there is no simple answer to the difficult circumstances councils face (they have a legal obligation to produce a balanced budget), the fact is that there was no effort to organise a national campaign bringing together councils, unions and community groups, to demand funding based on social needs. The Tories had ended the link between funding and an annual assessment of needs in 2013.

For many years Labour councils, most of them supportive of New Labour’s neo-liberalism (e.g. huge numbers of them transferred their housing stock to housing associations) acted not as representatives of the working class in their area but as administrators of central government decisions. It was no surprise therefore, that after the PLP, Labour councillors had the lowest level of support for Corbyn in the leadership elections. In reality Labour was an anti-austerity party in name only.

Scotland

In relation to Scotland, Jeremy must take responsibility because Labour was pursuing the line that the SNP was some sort of ‘Tartan Tory Party’. Accusing the SNP of implementing austerity when Labour councils were doing the same was not exactly a convincing argument. Labour under his leadership took no account of the fact that New Labour had destroyed Labour’s electoral base. Historically, Labour had been the Party of the establishment in Scotland. It had treated its working class base as electoral fodder. The SNP was to the left of New Labour, not just in its rhetoric but it some of the things it did in government. It ended Right to Buy, prevented the market being introduced into the NHS, opposed tuition fees, ended prescription charges. The last straw, in terms of its electoral consequences, was Labour’s joint campaign with the Tories in the independence referendum, ‘in defence of the Union’.

There were grounds for Labour working with the SNP against the Tories in Westminster but instead of working with them where they could find agreement, Labour’s unrealistic election campaign was based on the unrealistic idea that they could win a majority in Scotland. Whilst the SNP is certainly no socialist Party, the SNP government was more social democratic than New Labour. That’s one of the reasons why there was little ‘Corbyn bounce’ in Scotland, winning only five more seats in 2017. It was no wonder that Labour lost 200,000 votes in Scotland in the 2019 general election.

Labour should now support the right of the Scottish people to self-determination. It should not line up with Johnson in opposition to a referendum. It would be perfectly principled to support a referendum yet oppose independence. Lining up with the Tories on this, though, would deepen its decline.

The worst defeat since 1935?

Labour lost 2.58 million votes in 2019 compared to 2017. It has been described as the worst defeat since 1935, the Party is facing “oblivion” and so on. In terms of the number of seats Labour won, it was the worst result since 1935. But it still received over 10 million votes, more than under Miliband or Gordon Brown (Labour received 8.6 million votes at the fag end of the Blair/Brown incumbency). Obviously the worst feature was the loss of seats in the so-called “Labour heartlands”. What happened in some of these places, though not universally, was the collapse of the Labour vote; the result of abstentions, voting for the Tories, or Brexit Party, and to a lesser extent the Libdems and the Green. See the Appendix for some stats on the seats that the Tories took from Labour.

To large extent the loss of seats was a direct result of the decision of the Brexit Party to act as an auxiliary for the Tories. They decided to withdraw from Tory seats which might have let Labour win some more and concentrate all their fire on Labour. As I have explained elsewhere in 18 of the 54 seats³ lost, the Brexit Party vote was higher than the majority the Tories won the seats by.

Working class people voting for the Tories is hardly a new phenomenon. Historically between a quarter and a third have voted for them at various times. What was new about this was that some of them appeared to vote for them for the first time and Labour lost seats that it had not lost for a long time. Even in the 203 seats it held onto, its vote declined considerably – 916,000 less than in 2017.

Reasons for the defeat

So why did Labour lose the general election badly after the relative advance in 2017 when it gained 3.5 million votes on 2015?

• The PLP gave credence to the witch-hunt against Corbyn in the media. Corbyn was perceived as a weak leader. By allowing the initiative to rest with those in the PLP who wanted to destroy him (even at the cost of losing an election), he could not challenge that perception.

• The Brexit policy was untenable, alienating people on both sides of the divide. Corbyn declaring himself ‘neutral’ (an ‘honest broker’) added fuel to the fire.

• There were, of course, more long-term reasons for a collapse of Labour’s vote in many areas which voted heavily for leave. There has been a big decline in class consciousness. It’s not that people don’t think of themselves as being working class, so much as they do not consider themselves as being part of a collective; a social group with interests in common. Obviously this is the result of the defeats we suffered from the 1980s onwards. Union membership has more than halved. Many younger people have never experienced a union in a workplace. They have to fend for themselves as best they can, as individuals. Even where there are organised unions, many of the members have joined as an ‘insurance policy’. They don’t conceive of themselves as active members who stick together for their common interests. They are in the union so that if they have an individual problem they can have some help. What help they get, of course, is dependent on the volunteer lay organisation in the workplace. Full-time officials cannot possibly handle the weight of individual members’ cases.

• There has been a decline of historical memory which was kept alive by generations of activists who passed on their experience to their children and their workmates. Our sense of our collective power was the result of improving our material conditions through practical action and solidarity. The Heath government, it should be remembered, called an election in 1974 on the basis of ‘who rules, the government or the trades unions?’ and he lost.

• For all the talk about a new radical politics the election campaign was fairly standard. Vote Labour and you will get x amount a year was a traditional appeal to self-interest. Policies were announced with unseemly regularity giving the impression of improvisation which was a desperate attempt to find something to shift the polls.

• Despite the fact that the housing crisis impacts not only on those directly effected, but parents and grand-parents concerned at the circumstances of their children and grand children, Labour’s housing policy was not presented as a key one. In fact a housing policy document was not issued until the day before the election!

• Despite the inclusion of policies of nationalisation there was no overarching theme of ending the market rip-off which has been suffered since Thatcher’s privatisation of the public utilities and council housing. Social needs could have been counterposed to profiteering. Thatcher famously talked of driving back the boundaries of the state, Labour should have spoken of driving back the boundaries of the market.

Crisis of social democracy

What does Labour do now? What will its orientation be? What governmental programme does it need? Finding a solution based simply on electoral tactics, presentation of a saleable leader, ‘acceptable’ to the electorate, is guaranteed to fail. Critics of Corbyn say that the left was not interested in winning power. That’s not true. What does Labour want power for? One way of preventing the media attacking them is for it to adopt an approach which is acceptable to the media tycoons. After all, this was what New Labour did. Who can forget the picture of Tony Blair holding a copy of the Sun with its headline, “The Sun supports Tony Blair”.

The crisis of the Labour Party can only be fully understood in its historic and global context. When the post-war Bretton Woods system was abandoned in 1971, the global architecture of capitalism was fundamentally altered. Liberalisation (the abandoning of the international rules adopted at Bretton Woods) took place, allowing free movement of capital. Social democratic parties abandoned their reformist programmes and implemented neo-liberal policies, including wholesale privatisation. New Labour was no innovation. It merely adopted a philosophy and practice which had already been implemented in France, Germany, Spain, Australia and New Zealand by the social democratic parties there. In Britain the phenomenon was simply delayed by the 18 years in government of the Tories.

After the global crash of 2008-9 many social democratic parties adopted austerity and have been severely punished electorally for it, with historically unprecedented decline of their electoral support. Labour’s electoral advance in 2017, when it gained 3.5 million votes was an exception.

What has kept the Labour Party together as a ‘broad church’ for so long was the absence of a proportional voting system. Elsewhere, there have been splits from social democracy during its neo-liberal phase, and other organisations have grown and sometimes participated in governments. Where PR has been introduced this has been reflected in a break of sections of the electoral base of social democracy to other left wing parties. In Scotland that was first expressed in the election of six Scottish Socialist Party members to the Scottish Parliament. The collapse of the SSP, the reasons for which are beyond the scope of this article, opened the way for the advance of the SNP which increasingly won over ex-Labour voters.

In Greece, the historic social democratic party, PASOK, was virtually wiped out as a result of its involvement in austerity governments, and Syriza was the electoral expression of the attempt of the working class to put in power a government which would serve its interests. The political collapse of Syriza and its adoption of an austerity programme which it had opposed was the result of a political and economic campaign of the EU leaders to prevent the success of a left wing government. What they were really worried about was an example which might spread.

What happened to Syriza was a marker of what a Corbyn government would face. The ruing class would either have tried to neuter such a government or destroy it. As it happened its campaign designed to stop Corbyn getting into Downing Street was a great success. Their efforts were inevitable since any potential government which threatened their wealth, their power and their privilege, could expect the same.

First past the post or PR?

The two party system in Britain has rested on the First Past The Post system. The idea of Labour being ‘a broad church’ is rooted in it. Labour could always realistically say it was the only governmental alternative to the Tories. Even the SDP/Alliance which was the most successful attempt to replace Labour (only 2% behind them in the 1983 general election) failed to make an electoral breakthrough because of FPTP.

This has encouraged a kind of Labour Party arrogance which dismisses all other parties even those with which there may be a lot of agreement on policy and political programme, such as the Green Party. Practically, it is difficult to see how Labour could win a Parliamentary majority today, especially given its collapse in Scotland. Moreover, it faces a task not just of winning a majority within the UK Parliament but of needing to win a majority in English seats. The introduction of English Laws for English Votes, on issues which only relate to England, makes Labour’s task even more difficult. If it won a majority in the UK Parliament but failed to win one on English seats it would be unable to implement its manifesto. That would be likely to produce a parliamentary stasis creating a constitutional crisis.

In the new Parliament today, in English constituencies, Labour has only 180 seats compared to the 345 of the Tories (3.5 million less votes). It would have to take 85 seats off of the Tories to gain a small majority in English seats; a tall order.

Labour should campaign for electoral reform; for proportional representation. It should do so not just for pragmatic reasons or the difficulties of its electoral challenge, but because First Past the Post is undemocratic. It provides the winning Party with a Parliamentary majority which has no relationship with the votes they received. In many areas it has created permanent seats for one Party or another; permanent administrations in local government. This is a corrupting influence. The Poulson/T.Dan Smith affair, associated with local council building, was the classic example. It is also corrupting in the sense that semi-permanent one party states at the local level make for complacent administrations which take their electors for granted. The alienation of much of Labour’s electoral base has been the result of the way that some of these semi-permanent Labour councils have acted.

The classic left argument against PR was that it would prevent a majority Labour government being elected. This was no reason to support an undemocratic system, but in any case, the two Party system has served as a drag on the radicalism of previous Labour governments. Today, the two Party system is dead. The Scottish and Welsh assemblies and the introduction of PR there killed it. It will not be revived.

The other argument is that PR leads to coalitions becoming the norm. There is nothing in principal wrong with coalitions, it depends on who they are with and what their programmes are. The destruction of the post-war gains of the working class which had been introduced by reforming Labour governments underlines the fact that a single Party is no guarantee of preserving social gains it introduces.

Electoralism

One of the defining features of social democracy has been its electoralism. Power has been conceived as simply electing a government. Yet faced with the ruthlessness of the ruling class, any attempt to challenge their wealth, power, and privilege, cannot succeed without building the power of the working class and its organisations, in work and in its communities. Given that we have been on the receiving end of a one sided class war for 40 years, we face the need to rebuild working class organisation, be it trades unions, tenant or community groups. Any attempt to challenge the entrenched wealth and power of Britain’s ruling class needs a powerful mass movement to support it against attempts to bring it down.

The Labour Party was founded by the trades unions as a means of enacting legislation to defend their members against the employer and state assault on their rights and their exploitation in the workplace. It was considered to be a working class party even if it was an alliance between working class and middle class members. Blair changed that when he transformed it into a neo-liberal party. He famously said that the founding of Labour had been a historic mistake which had “split the progressives”⁴. The leader of the Labour Party believed it should never have been founded! If he was unable to achieve what he wanted, a fusion with the Liberals, he managed to destroy the electoral base of Labour and drove out the majority of the membership who could not stomach its neo-liberalism and the alliance with the American ruling class which gave us the Iraq war. The large scale exodus of members in disgust at New Labour led many local parties to abandon their branch/ward structure and move to all member meetings. Those members who did not attend these meetings had no organic connection to the Party.

A ‘social movement’

Under Corbyn there was much talk about Labour building a ‘social movement’. Community organisers were hired and a series of meetings were organised. The main flaw in this was that it was done with electoral advantage in mind. In Swindon the first of these meetings was a wasted opportunity. Instead of a discussion with community activists we had a meeting which was controlled and the speakers chosen by the organiser.

The struggles of the working class and trades unions have always extended beyond the workplace. Trades unions activists were often the backbone of tenant and community organisations. During the First World War it was the rent strikes of working class women and the threat of supportive strike action by trades unions which made the government introduce a rent freeze. This action also was instrumental in the first large scale council house building programme after the war, which was designed to mitigate against the prospects of a post-war radicalisation.

Working class communities have usually got the short end of the stick. They have had to fight for facilities and funding which is more readily available for more well-heeled areas.

Probably two of the most positive phenomenon over the past few years have been

• the growth of ACORN and other tenant/community unions which have succeeded in building collective tenant action. They have had success in tackling landlords and poor living conditions and raising the profile of housing politically on the national level. That is why, for instance, the government has committed to ending Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions from the private rented sector. ACORN also strives to build the collective power of working class communities.

• The success of some small independent unions in organising, for instance, cleaners, often migrant workers, winning the living wage and unionisation. These have been considered to be difficult to organise workers. They have shown what the major unions might do if they organised the most exploited workers. These successes have been based on collective organisation in which the members are involved rather than passive subs payers. On a small scale it has shown the possibility of struggles which can facilitate the rebirth of working class collectivism.

Instead of passively looking towards a future Labour government to do good deeds for us, we need to build our collective strength and fighting capacity. The electoral prospects of Labour will be enhanced by the rebuilding of a working class movement and class consciousness. A sense of powerlessness, the result of defeats and weak organisation, is a drag on its electoral prospects.

Patriotism and our glorious past

The appeal to patriotism exemplified by the article by MP Pat McFadden in the Observer suggests that Corbyn was unpopular because of his ‘world view’, hostile to ‘the west’.

Historically, Labour had an ‘Atlanticist’ position, reflected in their support for the ‘special relationship’ with the USA. During the 2^nd world war and the cold war this alliance was presented as defending the ‘free world’. This myth persists to this day. Yet the camp of the ‘free world’ included the British empire, what remained of it, and the apartheid system in the USA. Of course, the Russian regime, with its gulag, was no friend of the working class, but the alliance was fraudulent because the US regime’s idea of ‘freedom’ included vehement and violent opposition to democracy where it conflicted with US interests. And Britain connived with some of this, for instance in relation to Iran, where support for the dictatorial regime of the Shah opened the way to the theocratic dictatorship of Khomeini and the Islamic republic. Britain supported the 1953 coup against the government of Mossadeq because it wanted to keep ‘its’ oil in Iran. The Iranian government had nationalised it.

The Atlee government’s domestic programme was hampered by its decision to support the Korean War and to launch a rearmament programme. The Wilson government which, although it would not commit to troops, supported America’s war in Vietnam and in a case which has recently been in the courts, emptied the Chagos islands of its population to facilitate a US base; one of the worst stains on Labour’s record. The attempt to maintain Britain as a “global power” would lead to the debacle of Suez and much later, Iraq.

Rebecca Long Bailey, in her Guardian article, somewhat confusingly wrote of “progressive patriotism” in the context of the support of British workers for the boycott of the US southern states during the civil war. In fact it was an example of selfless working class solidarity. A more recent example was the boycott of Chile by Scottish workers, recorded in the film Nae Pasaran. Any socialist policy needs to be based on working class internationalism; direct solidarity between workers in different countries and support for democratic struggles. Diplomacy or ‘strategic interests’ are based on the idea of the ‘national interest. We need to support democratic struggles be they in the USA, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia or Israel. Our enemy’s enemy is not our friend. The USA is not our ‘ally’. Its rulers never did anything which wasn’t rooted in self-interest and the national arrogance of an imperial power. Even at the end of the Second World War it was quick to abandon support for Britain despite the fact that the war had exhausted its resources. The USA remains an imperial power which seeks to impose its interests on the world, be it with Obama or Trump in the White House.

What next?

Obviously the election of Leader and Deputy Leader will have a big influence on the direction of the Party. However, whoever is elected, there will be pressure to shift the direction of the Party, to shift it rightwards. Even the candidate labeled as ‘continuity Corbyn’ has said she would press that nuclear button if necessary (commit mass murder – “if you’ve got a deterrent you have to be prepared to use it”) and sign up to the Board of Deputies ultimatum (its 10 Pledges). There will undoubtedly be a battle to defend some of the policy advances won over the last few years. Yet the key question in terms of the evolution of the Labour Party is will it mobilise opposition to the Tory government? Jeremy Corbyn has said that Labour is the resistance to this government, but it failed to build any resistance under the previous government, especially in the local government sphere.

With no prospect of a Labour government and a workable majority for the Tories in Parliament, Labour cannot defeat the government in Parliament. If it continues to just function as an electoral machine it will not succeed in shifting the balance of forces and opinion in the country. Despite all the talk of the Tories turning into “the party of the working class” it remains a Party shich supports an economic system based on the exploitation of labour.

Whoever is elected Leader there needs to be a thorough-going discussion about the strategy and aims of the Labour Party in the global context. We face an unprecedented crisis of capitalism on a world scale combined with the environmental crisis which is worsening the conditions of life. Social democratic tinkering cannot address these issues. Rebuilding working class organisation is critical if we are to break out of the cycle of defeats.

Martin Wicks

February 2020

“For decades we’ve been told that inequality doesn’t matter because the education system will allow talented and hard-working people to succeed whatever their background…For 30 years, the media and the establishment tried to tell us that class doesn’t matter any more and that we should ditch any idea of representing and advancing the interests of the working class.”

This, according to Blair, implied the view that:

“In other words, Thatcher Government, last Labour Government, 10 years of Tory austerity. It’s all the same. All one unbroken line. All one policy. All one ideology. This is bad politics and worse history – and it is time to set the record straight…We made the UK more equal, more fair and more socially mobile. And we never, ever said inequality didn’t matter or that tackling it was not a priority of the Government.”

The alleged Blairite focus on equality would have come as a shock to Peter Mandelson, one of the key architects of New Labour, because it was Mandelson who while a cabinet minister explained he was ‘intensely relaxed’ about some people being filthy rich – provided they paid their taxes. (BTW: the filthy rich always avoid paying taxes).

But Blair was right about one thing: New Labour was not Thatcher, and New Labour’s descendants are not Boris Johnson. And Corbyn didn’t say they were. But New Labour shared (and shares) key essentials of Thatcherism, especially faith in market solutions and privatisation.

Blair’s government maintained harsh anti-union laws that made effective trade union action difficult. It deepened Thatcher’s adherence to labour ‘flexibility’; it kept her policy of starving local government finances; it continued the policy of rock bottom welfare payments and harsh penalties for claimants, including disabled people.

Most of all, despite several initiatives to help the poorest in society, it failed to take the kind of measures needed to make any significant dent in Britain’s status as one of the most unequal advanced capitalist economies. Which is why the few significant measures to help the most disadvantaged were so quickly overthrown by the post-2010 Tory-Liberal coalition government.

As we argue below, Blair’s government fully signed up to a low-wage economy which forced many working-class people to depend on consumer debt to finance their daily lives – which of course contributed to the dreadful outcome of the 2007-8 financial crash. The cost of daily life was massively inflated by the increasing reliance on the private rental sector for housing and the huge amounts of disposable income pumped out of working people by privatised utilities and transport networks. So let’s look at the real record.

Gordon’s Big Idea

New Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown had a central idea which he shared with Prime Minister Tony Blair. That was to allow the economy, especially financial services, to boom – as it turned out on a sea of debt. As the private sector blossomed it would create huge tax revenues, which it could then use to invest in schemes to help public services and the poor especially. Early on, Brown cut capital gains tax from 40% to 10%, as another gesture of good will towards business. The new government, Brown thought, could be business friendly and use private business to combat poverty. It was this philosophy that underlay the private finance initiatives (PFI) in key capital investments – the NHS, schools and transport. Although as a scheme to generate immediate cash to build infrastructure like new schools and hospitals it worked (for a time), in the long-term it failed to generate more equality. In 2007 economist Stewart Lansley commented:

“The strategy of indulging the rich while trying to tackle poverty does not square.” This is because, said Lansley, massive fortunes for rich people are usually accumulated at the expense of the rest of us. In fact, despite a whole series of measures to help the poorest, in the period prior to the 2008 crash -11 years of Labour government – inequality actually increased. In the first five years of New Labour government, the percentage of personal wealth owned by the richest 10% increased from 17% to 24%, and the percentage owned by the bottom 50% declined from 8% to 6% (1).

This trend towards increasing inequality occurred despite a raft of measures aimed at helping the poorest – Sure Start, Every Child Matters, the National Minimum Wage and above all tax credits, especially important for the working poor. How come these initiatives didn’t impact on inequality? Overall these measures attempted to alleviate or reduce poverty, but could not impact on inequality – that would have required a much more decisive shift in wealth away from the rich towards workers. What New Labour gave with one hand, big business took back with the other. How come?

Low Wage Economy

The National Minimum Wage was first set (for 21-year olds and above) at £7.83 per hour. In April 2009 it was set at £8.21. This was not a living wage, and many people earning it were eligible for tax credits. What really happened was that many employers – the big supermarkets for example – took this allegedly minimum wage to be their normal rate for most of their non-supervisory staff. For most people earning the minimum wage, take home pay on 35 hours would be around £1140 a month, or about £265 a week. This was – and is today – poverty pay. It would be extremely difficult to find even a small flat for rent in any major city for that amount of money. If a single worker can’t afford a roof over her head, plus money for food, transport and even an occasional drink in a pub, then they are not earning a minimally living wage. For single parents this type of income is catastrophic.

The second problem with the National Minimum Wage was its application. Inspection of employers was minimal, allowing whole sectors to evade it. The government of course knew this and tolerated it – particularly for the big farmers and gang masters who used dirt cheap immigrant workers to pick crops in East Anglia and elsewhere. Cheap labour was a decisive factor in keeping British labour ‘flexible’. The solution of course was not, as some argued, to ban immigrant workers from the EU and elsewhere, but to ensure that everyone was paid a living wage.

Brown reduced the minimum income tax rate from 20p in the pound to 10p in the pound, a measure he later abandoned. The maximum tax rate of 50% was lowered to apply to those earning £150,000 a year or more, but this too was later abandoned and the maximum rate reduced to 40%.

But the most important thing about tax credits was that they reduced the amount of tax workers would pay, but that move in itself could not transform a low wage into a liveable wage. But it did temporarily help many working families to just about keep their heads above water. The Tory replacement – Universal Credit – doesn’t do that at all. Effectively though, tax credits were a subsidy paid to low-wage employers, shifting the burden of trying to sustain workers paid ridiculous wages to the state and the tax payer. The retail sector, fast food outlets, the care sector and many others all benefited from this huge subsidy, which would have been prevented by a living minimum wage and workable enforcement.

The aim of reducing low pay suffered two other problems. First was the increase in zero hours contracts, and the growing percentage of workers in part-time jobs. An increasing number of workers did not have a stable, relatively well-paid, full-time job, which deprived them of many benefits as well as pay.

Take for example holiday pay and pensions for zero hours, occasionally employed workers. EU directives meant workers in full-time jobs had the right to four weeks holiday. For casually employed workers, holiday rights accrued only after 13 weeks of continuous employment. Employers therefore often keep workers for 12 weeks, then make them redundant for a week, and then re-employ them. So, no holiday rights.

The EU moved against this to try to give all workers pro-rata holiday rights, but Labour resisted this. In 2002 the EU issued a directive compelling Britain to institute holiday rights for part-time and casually employed workers. Many companies responded by lowering the hourly rates to compensate for holiday pay. The workers paid for their own holiday pay, and New Labour tolerated this abuse. And of course these workers were not paid any form of occupational pension.

A classic example of the National Minimum Wage as poverty wages was (and is) care for the elderly. Many care homes charge residents £1000 a week or more for barely adequate care, while nearly all their workers are on the National Minimum Wage. Care companies providing in-home visits will typically employ workers on a ‘labour only’ contract system, require them to pay their own transport costs between visits, and pay them only for the time actually spend in houses. Often workers, then and now, had no new client to visit for several hours, but not enough time to go home in the break. So they hang around in cafes and libraries, suffering unpaid dead time. All this was part of the labour flexibility New Labour promoted.

Labour market ‘flexibility’ – a low-wage economy – goes hand-in-glove with squeezing welfare payments. For getting people into the low paid, part-time or zero-hours gig economy absolutely requires welfare payments not to be able to provide any type of liveable income. The desperate will take any work, albeit that there is poverty pay and dreadful conditions, when the alternative is to be sanctioned and have no income at all. This was the reality of the ‘welfare to work’ strategy, which from the very start of New Labour, stressed that getting people into paid work is the key way to end poverty. But outside of effective pay and employment guarantees, it just isn’t. Labour’s welfare to work approach was closely modelled on the US welfare ‘reform’ under Democratic President Bill Clinton, whose 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act severely limited welfare payments, trying to force people off welfare and into any form of low-paid work.

Education, and social mobility

Nowhere was New Labour’s confusion about social mobility and equality more visible than in education. New Labour perpetuated the delusion that by having a more skilled workforce, Britain would become richer and more socially mobile. This would be measured by targets, especially in the grades students achieved, but also in things like the number of people going to university. The means to achieve this were teachers’ ‘standards’ imposed and policed by the regulator Ofsted, targets, so-called academies run by the private sector and including ‘faith schools’ and new school buildings mainly financed from the private sector. And increasingly schools and colleges would be responsible for their own budgets, rather than managed by local authorities.

What was imposed through Ofsted supervision of schools were ideas from American corporations, especially their human resources departments – especially the idea that everything can be measured. This included detailed prescription of the teaching methods that should be used, including near-impossible targets like ensuring a positive learning outcome for every student (in classes often 30+!), and personalised learning objectives, which meant different learning tasks for each student. It meant masses of detailed record keeping, so that above all a paper trail could evidence the ‘value added’ to each student. And this prioritised grade outcomes above all else. The targets and administration imposed by Ofsted demoralised schools and teachers, stunted real education and drove tens of thousands of teachers out of the profession.

New Labour had 203 privately-run academies in place by 2010. Aimed especially at giving a boost to Ofsted-type targets in disadvantaged areas, they signally failed to make substantial improvements and gobbled up a disproportionate amount of financial resources. Academies were wracked by a series of scandals as private capital grabbed government grants, in exchange for some vast salaries by managers, an over-reliance on temporary supply teachers, complete secrecy about how things were being managed, a refusal to recognise teaching unions, and poor exam results. An analysis by Sam Freeman found that six in ten academies resulted in worse exam results for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Academies were another market-based failure by New Labour.

But the whole ideology of massive social change through education, although very attractive to many teachers, is false – or at least partially so. By every measure, the students who do best in the present education system are those from upper and middle-class families, especially those in private (so-called ‘public’) schools. Their families have more money and more cultural capital, with more books, museum visits and foreign holidays. Their schools have fewer very large classes, and in public schools the ratio is often one teacher for seven or eight students, and not one teacher for 30+. And the educational outcome is inevitably skewed by the class structure, as of course are the career outcomes. That is not to say that everything is set in stone and no students can break though. But on average, educational outcome reproduces the existing class structure. Individuals can be socially mobile, but whole classes cannot, without a frontal assault on inequality.

Continual change in education and the setting of new and more fiendish requirements by Ofsted reinforced the typical Daily Mail idea that the ‘problem’ in education was incompetent teachers, an idea seemingly recycled by New Labour education ministers from 1997-2010. It drove hundreds of thousands of teachers to despair.

The one really positive measure was the Education Maintenance Allowance of up to £30 a week, that financed teenagers from poor families to stay in education. That was quickly ditched by the Tory-Liberal coalition after 2010.

NHS market and PFI

In 1999 New Labour marked the start of a transition of the NHS from a public sector provider to include the private sector under the disguise of choice and competition. The last Labour Government laid the groundwork for everything that the Tory-led coalition is now doing to the NHS. Market structures, foundation trusts, GP consortia and the introduction of private corporations into commissioning were all products of an ill-conceived Labour vision of ‘public service reforms’. It would be tedious to relate all the changes, which closely parallel those carried out in education – bring in private money, create an ‘internal market’, create ‘choice’ by boosting the private sector and encouraging middle class users to gain advantage by ‘going private’.

The shiny new hospitals are a testament to the way in which New Labour operated -using Private Finance Initiatives to raise huge amounts of money, at high interest rates, and repayable over many years. This debt mountain is a poisoned chalice that has a devastating effect on the public sector. According to the National Audit Office, the state will be forced to hand over nearly £200bn to contractors under private finance deals for at least 25 years. The NAO also found that the cost of many projects was up to 40% higher than if they had been funded by public investment. This is devastating for the NHS, many of whose trusts have to pay upwards of £3m a month to pay off the debt. PFI companies have made vast profits through the scheme and will continue to do so. The alternative would have been to raise taxes on the rich to provide public sector infrastructure renewal, something New Labour was never going to do. When the government announce ‘there is no new money’ for schools, hospitals and transport systems, bear in mind the totals that would have been available without PFI, based on higher taxation for the very rich.

New Labour and the Great Crash

The Conservatives and the Liberals who formed a coalition with them in 2010, have blamed Labour for the financial mess they inherited in coming to power, and the subsequent austerity they have imposed. At one level this is rubbish. An international banking collapse was hardly caused by New Labour.

And yet, there is a crucial aspect of the crash for which New Labour cannot be exonerated. New Labour under Blair and Brown enthusiastically championed a de-regulated financial sector, which engaged in a ferocious competitive battle to lend ever larger sums of money. This was promoted by a high price economy and an insane financial bubble as house prices shot up to astronomic levels. This was compounded by the finance sector using privatised utilities as a machine for pumping vast amounts of disposable income out of the working class, re-balancing the focus of exploitation towards consumption. In a society of great inequality with important layers of dire poverty, the result was always going to be the same – the use of credit to sustain living standards. The absurd spectacle of millions using their credit cards to buy food, pay rents and fund transport went alongside the growth of pay-day loan companies like Wonga, charging astronomic levels of interest.

The heartlands of the debt economy were the United States and Britain, because it is these countries that are the centres of neoliberalism and the world pioneers in privatisation. New Labour did nothing to stop it because its commitment to market solutions and the gig economy prevented it even trying. A deadly set of factors emerged that included the growing gig economy and zero hours contracts, huge percentages of disposable income being hoovered up by finance capital, massive and for many unaffordable housing costs and – for sections of middle class and better off workers – a consumption boom focused on fashion, holidays, hi-tech gadgets, cars and restaurants and bars. Including vast production of material goods that were ecologically unsustainable.

This was an era of untold millions running harder and harder to stay where they were, and many millions falling into a poverty trap of debt and insecure employment. And the structure of this era was enforced by the harsh anti-union laws that made a collective working-class fightback very difficult.

Cost of War

In 2000, Chancellor Gordon Brown got a massive £22.5bn windfall from the auction of 3G mobile networks, won by the likes of Vodafone, Orange and BT. By the end of the decade that sum, and probably more, had been wasted on Blair’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his book Investment in Blood (2), former army officer Frank Ledwidge estimates the cost of these wars by 2013 to have been around £37.5bn, most of that spent before 2010. How many schools and hospitals could have been built with that money? How much social housing? How many more nurses and teachers employed?

If New Labour had really done something to overcome inequality, then it would show. It would show above all in the streets of the post-industrial towns in the North, in South Wales and the North East. But it doesn’t. The areas and people ‘left behind’ by Margaret Thatcher were still left behind when Blair and Brown had gone.

Effectively this was the end of so-called ‘third way’ theories, enthusiastically promoted by Blair’s favourite sociologist Anthony Giddens. The idea here was that a middle way could be found between the dominance of the market, and socialist planning. Under Blair, the third way remained ever elusive. Repeated attempts to bring it to life, carried out by an army of educational and health bureaucrats, armed with a mountain of targets and cleverly named projects, failed miserably.

The guilty not-so-secret of the third way was that it was really the market, dressed up to look like something else. And it could absolutely not do anything fundamental about inequality.

Notes

1. Stewart Lansley, ‘Wealth’, in Closer to Equality?, published by Compass, 2007, p 37. Download available at https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/closer-to-equality-assessing-new-labours-record-on-equality-after-10-years-in-government
2. Frank Ledwidge, Investment in Blood, Yale University Press, 2013.

Source: The Guardian

Under socialism for the rich, you can screw up big time and still reap big rewards. Meanwhile most Americans are working harder, getting nowhere, with less security than ever.

“America will never be a socialist country,” Donald Trump declared in his State of the Union address. Someone should alert Trump that America is now a hotbed of socialism. But it is socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.

In the conservative mind, socialism means getting something for doing nothing. That pretty much describes the $21bn saved by the nation’s largest banks last year thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, some of which went into massive bonuses for bank executives. On the other hand, more than 4,000 lower-level bank employees got a big dose of harsh capitalism. They lost their jobs.

Banks that are too big to fail – courtesy of the 2008 bank bailout – enjoy a hidden subsidy of some $83bn a year, because creditors facing less risk accept lower interest on deposits and loans. Last year, Wall Street’s bonus pool was $31.4bn. Take away the hidden subsidy and the bonus pool disappears.

Trump and his appointees at the Federal Reserve are easing bank requirements put in place after the bailout. They’ll make sure the biggest banks remain too big to fail.

Trump is promoting socialism for the rich and harsh capitalism for everyone else in other ways. GM has got more than $600m in federal contracts, plus $500m in tax breaks. Some of this has gone into the pockets of GM executives. Chairman and CEO Mary Barra raked in almost $22m in total compensation in 2017 alone.

But GM employees are subject to harsh capitalism. GM is planning to lay off more than 14,000 workers and close three assembly plants and two component factories in North America by the end of 2019.

When he was in business, Trump perfected the art of using bankruptcy to shield himself from the consequences of bad decisions – socialism for the rich at its worst – while leaving employees twisting in the wind.

Now, all over America, executives who run their companies into the ground are getting gold-plated exit packages while their workers get pink slips.

Sears is doling out $25m to the executives who stripped its remaining assets and drove it into bankruptcy, but has no money for the thousands of workers it laid off.

As Pacific Gas and Electric hurdles toward bankruptcy, the person who was in charge when the deadly infernos roared through Northern California last year (caused in part by PG&E’s faulty equipment) has departed with a cash severance package of $2.5m . The PG&E executive in charge of gas operations when records were allegedly falsified left in 2017 with $6.9m.

Under socialism for the rich, you can screw up big time and still reap big rewards. Equifax’s Richard Smith retired in 2017 with an $18m pension in the wake of a security breach that exposed the personal information of 145 million consumers to hackers.

Wells Fargo’s Carrie Tolstedt departed with a $125m exit package after being in charge of the unit that opened more than 2 million unauthorized customer accounts.

Around 60% of America’s wealth is now inherited. Many of today’s super-rich have never done a day’s work in their lives.

Trump’s response has been to cut the estate tax to apply only to estates valued at over $22m per couple. Mitch McConnell is now proposing that the estate tax be repealed altogether.

What about the capitalist principles that people earn what they’re worth in the market, and that economic gains should go to those who deserve them?

America is on the cusp of the largest inter-generational wealth transfer in history. As rich boomers expire over the next three decades, an estimated $30tn will go to their children.

Those children will be able to live off of the income these assets generate, and then leave the bulk of them to their own heirs, tax-free. (Capital gains taxes don’t apply to the soaring values of stocks, bonds, mansions, and other assets of wealthy people who die before they’re sold.)

After a few generations of this, almost all of the nation’s wealth will be in the hands of a few thousand non-working families. To the conservative mind, the specter of socialism conjures up a society in which no one is held accountable, and no one has to work for what they receive. Yet that’s exactly the society Trump and the Republicans are promoting for the rich.

Meanwhile, most Americans are subject to an increasingly harsh and arbitrary capitalism in which they’re working harder but getting nowhere, and have less security than ever.

They need thicker safety nets and deserve a bigger piece of the economic pie. If you want to call this socialism, fine. I call it fair.

Robert Reich is a former US secretary of labor and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few

Source: The Guardian

The solutions to this crisis will not be handed down from a mountain top to the grateful hordes: they will rely on us taking power for ourselves.

Whatever dog-eared platitudes they may recycle for the TV cameras, what grips them is the havoc far below. Just look at the new report from the summit organisers that begins by asking plaintively, “Is the world sleepwalking into a crisis?” In the accompanying survey of a thousand bosses, money men (because finance, like wealth, is still mainly a male thing) and other “Davos decision-makers”, nine out of 10 say they fear a trade war or other “economic confrontation between major powers”. Most confess to mounting anxieties about “populist and nativist agendas” and “public anger against elites”. As the cause of this political earthquake, they identify two shifting tectonic plates: climate change and “increasing polarisation of societies”.

In its pretend innocence, its barefaced blame-shifting, its sheer ruddy sauce, this is akin to arsonists wailing about the flames from their own bonfire. Populism of all stripes may be anathema to the billionaire class, but they helped create it. For decades, they inflicted insecurity on the rest of us and told us it was for our own good. They have rigged an economic system so that it paid them bonanzas and stiffed others. They have lobbied and funded politicians to give them the easiest of rides. Topped with red Maga caps and yellow vests, this backlash is uglier and more uncouth than anything you’ll see in the snow-capped Alps, but the high rollers meeting there can claim exec producer credits for the whole rotten lot. Shame it’s such a downer for dividends.

This week’s report from Oxfam is just the latest to put numbers to this hoarding of wealth and power. One single minibus-load of fatcats – just 26 people – now own as much as half the planet’s population, and the collective wealth of the billionaire class swells by $2.5bn every day. This economic polarisation is far more obscene than anything detested by Davos man, and it is the root cause of the social and political divide that now makes his world so unstable.

No natural force created this intense unfairness. The gulf between the super-rich and the rest of us did not gape wide open overnight. Rather, it has been decades in the widening and it was done deliberately. The UK was the frontline of the war to create greater inequality: in her first two terms as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher more than halved the top rate of income tax paid by high earners. She broke the back of the trade unions. Over their 16 years in office, Thatcher and John Major flogged off more public assets than France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Australia and Canada put together.

Oh, shrug the Davos set, that’s ancient history. It is no such thing. Thatcher may be gone but her ideology keeps on taking cash out of your pay packets. If workers today got the same share of national income as in the 70s, we would be far better off. According to calculations from the Foundational Economy collective of researchers, a full-time employee now on the median salary of £29,574 would get a pay rise of £5,471.

Meanwhile, FTSE bosses enjoy skyrocketing pay, precisely because bonus schemes give them part-ownership of the big companies they run. So Jeff Fairburn of the housebuilder Persimmon took £47m in 2018 before getting the boot, which works out at £882 for each £1 earned by an average worker at the firm.

Where Thatcher’s shock troops led, the rest of the west more or less followed. Political leaders across the spectrum gave the rich what they wanted. It didn’t matter whether you voted for Tony Blair or David Cameron, Bill Clinton or George W Bush, either way you got Davos man. They cut taxes for top earners and for businesses, they uprooted the public sector to create opportunities for private firms, and they struck trade deals negotiated in secret that gave big corporations as much as they could ever dream of.

At last, more than a decade after the banking crash, the regime has run out of road. Hence the popular anger, so ferocious that the political and financial elites can neither comprehend nor control it. I can think of no better metaphor for the current disarray of the Davos set than the fact that Emmanuel Macron – surely the elite’s platonic ideal of a politician, with his eyes of leporid brightness, his stint as an investment banker and his start-up party – cannot attend this week’s jamboree because he has to stay at home and deal with the gilets jaunes. It’s a bummer when the working poor spoil your holiday plans.

None of this is to say that the 1% – holed up in their resort and fenced off from the world with roadblocks and men toting sharpshooters – don’t care about the immiseration of others. At Davos a couple of years ago, the New York Times reported that among the summit’s attractions was “a simulation of a refugee’s experience, where [conference]attendees crawl on their hands and knees and pretend to flee from advancing armies”. The article continued, “It is one of the most popular events every year.”

They care about other people’s problems – so long as they get to define them, and it’s never acknowledged that they are a large part of the problem. Which they are. If they want capitalism to carry on, the rich will need to give up their winnings and cede some ground. That point evades them. Welcoming Donald Trump last year, Klaus Schwab, Davos’s majordomo, praised the bigot-in-chief’s tax cuts for the rich and said, “I’m aware that your strong leadership is open to misconceptions and biased interpretations.” The super-rich don’t hate all populists – just those who refuse to make them richer.

Cutting the ribbon on this new economic order back in the 80s, Ronald Reagan claimed that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” A joke perhaps, but the intention was real enough. The last three decades have seen the political and economic elites hack away at our social scaffolding – rights, taxes and institutions. It proved profitable, for a while, but now it threatens their own world. And still they block the quite reasonable alternatives of more taxes on wealth, of more power for workers, of companies not run solely to enrich their owners.

The solutions to this crisis will not be handed down from a mountain top to the grateful hordes: they will rely on us taking power for ourselves. Three decades after Reagan, the nine most laughable words in the English language are: “I’m from the elite and I’m here to help.”

See also:
• Do we really need billionaires?
• How depraved individuals like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos rise to the top and rule over us

Source: Counterpunch

Billionaires devote enormous energy and money to controlling governments, using that wealth to perpetuate their power.

Source: Medium

In a system where money rewards sociopathy and money equals power, we necessarily wind up ruled by sociopaths.

I often look at Jeff Bezos when trying to understand how American oligarchy functions for a few reasons.

Firstly, currently occupying the number one slot on Forbes’ billionaires list, he is the top dog. He figured out how to play the plutocracy game quickly, and how to play it better than anyone else.

Second, our civilization is currently headed on a clear trajectory deeper and deeper into Orwellian tech dystopia if we don’t turn things around or drive humanity into extinction first. The new money tech plutocrats own the foundation of that dark future, and we should all keep a very, very close eye on them on general principles as well as to get a read on where things are headed.

Lastly and most importantly, as a new money plutocrat Bezos has had to build his empire with high visibility in the information age. The old money plutocrats built their kingdoms in much darker times, with some families setting the foundations of their rule hundreds of years ago when there was very little in the way of newspaper coverage, and certainly no alternative media scrutinizing power. Bezos’ wheelings and dealings are above ground to a much greater extent, because he’s had to do everything in the public eye.

With that in mind, here are six things we can learn about how US plutocracy operates by looking at Jeff Bezos.

1. The rich rule America because of a system wherein money translates directly into political power.

Amazon has increased its spending on Washington lobbying by 400 percent in the last five years, far in excess of its competition. Bezos hasn’t been doing this to be charitable. With growing antitrust concerns, taxation to avoid, lucrative Pentagon deals to secure, and what some experts are describing as an agenda to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy, he needs Washington on his side.

Plutocrats do not pour large fortunes into lobbying campaigns without reason. They do it because it works.

2. Because money equals power and power is relative, plutocrats are naturally incentivized to keep the public poor.

Plutocrats necessarily rule such an oligarchic system as surely as kings rule a kingdom. But if everyone is king, then no one is king. If your entire empire is built on a system where money equals power, then you are necessarily incentivized to keep money out of the hands of the public while amassing as much as possible for yourself.

The larger the Amazon empire grows, the more of its competition dies and the lower wages get. At the hottest point in the 2016 Democratic party primary, Bezos’ Washington Post ran sixteen smear pieces in sixteen hours against Senator Bernie Sanders, who is largely responsible for bringing the word “oligarchy” into mainstream consciousness.

Sanders famously ran a campaign powered by small donations averaging 27 dollars. The less money people have, the less of those kinds of donations they can afford to make, and the less political influence the masses can wield. With a majority of Americans already unable to afford even a thousand dollar emergency, it doesn’t take much more squeeze to kill all hope of another populist insurgency of that sort.

Power is relative and money is power, so the poorer you are, the more powerful the plutocrats become.

3. Controlling the media is very important to plutocrats.

Jeff Bezos, the most crafty plutocrat alive, did not purchase the Washington Postin 2013 because he expected newspapers to make a lucrative resurgence. He purchased it so that he could ensure exactly what WaPo did to Bernie Sanders in 2016. The neoliberal Orwellian establishment that Bezos is building his empire upon requires a propaganda mouthpiece, so Bezos purchased a long-trusted US newspaper to accomplish that. WaPo is now easily the most virulently pro-establishment among all large mainstream publications, not just defending establishment narratives but actively attacking anyone who challenges them.

The current system which only serves the wealthy and the powerful cannot exist without nonstop advertising convincing the American public that the status quo is in their best interest. Plutocrat-owned corporate media is used to manufacture consent for that system; for the economic system, for the wars which prop it up, for the politicians which the plutocrats own and operate, for the political system which they have infiltrated every level of. The ability to manipulate the way the public thinks is an essential part of plutocratic rule.

4. Plutocrats form alliances with defense and intelligence agencies.

Jeff Bezos is a contractor with the CIA and sits on a Pentagon advisory board. He is doing everything he can to cozy up and ingratiate himself to the establishment on which his empire is built, up to and including kicking WikiLeaks off Amazon servers in 2010. This dances very creepily with Amazon’s involvement in surveillance systems and digital “assistance” devices like Alexa.

If you want to be a millionaire in the current system, you can probably do so with luck, privilege, talent and hard work. If you want to be a billionaire, you’ve got to learn how to collaborate with existing power structures. Due to the extreme opacity of those power structures in America hidden behind the veil of government secrecy, it is hard to know exactly what forms those alliances take, but they clearly do happen as a glance at Bezos’ career shows.

5. The people willing to do anything it takes to get to the top are the ones who get there.

Normal human beings would have a difficult time knowing businesses are dying and workers are getting poorer as their empire grows. Jeff Bezos just keeps growing. He will happily collaborate with depraved intelligence agencies, manipulate and propagandize Americans, and expand the gulf between the rich and the poor just to be king of the world.

This is the sort of person who rises to the top in unregulated capitalist systems. Money rewards people who have shut down (or are born without) that part of themselves which empathizes and is made uncomfortable by exploiting and harming others. In a system where money rewards sociopathy and money equals power, that means we necessarily wind up in a system that is ruled by sociopaths. Those plutocrats form alliances with each other and with defense and intelligence agencies to ensure the continuation and expansion of their empires, and that alliance is currently king of America.

6. It will never be enough for them.

Jeff Bezos is worth 131.5 billion dollars as of this writing, and he is getting moreambitious, not less. He doesn’t need that money to buy more stuff; it isn’t about money for him. It’s about power. The impulse to rise to the top of your monkey tribe is an impulse buried deep within our evolutionary heritage, and when that impulse isn’t checked by empathy for your fellow man it creates an unquenchable drive to grow and grow in invincible power no matter what kind of suffering that creates.

This explains why the world is the way it is today, with billionaires making so much money last year alone that they could end extreme poverty for our entire planet seven times over, but don’t. With Americans dying of underinsurance and exposure on the streets while billions of dollars are poured into bombing poor people overseas. With tensions escalating between two nuclear superpowers over some petty geopolitical agendas. With the Arctic warming at an astonishing rate while rainforests and biodiversity vanish perhaps forever.

It will never be enough. They will keep taking and taking and taking and taking, killing and killing and killing and killing, until they have it all and everything is dead. They lack the part of themselves which stops that from happening. This is a vehicle with no brakes.

We need to change the system which enables these depraved individuals to rise to the top and rule over us. Governments should serve people, not omnicidal, ecocidal sociopathic oligarchs. We must take our world back from these monsters.

The original article by Caitlin Johnstone with links for all references is available at Medium…

¡No pasaran! Confronting the Rise of the Far-Right

2 March 2019  ¡NO PASARAN! Conference in London to organise against Europe-wide rise of the far-right. Bringing together activists, MPs, campaigners from across Europe.

Details and registration…

In the 1920s, Harry Leslie Smith was shunted from one cold, dirty, overcrowded hovel to the next, fleeing by night when his father could no longer pay the rent.

When it comes to housing, we have moved beyond crisis in 21st-century Britain and snuggled up to catastrophe. Low wages, along with curtailed government benefits, have made more than 82,000 tenants two months in arrears on their rent. It’s worse for universal-credit tenants: three in four of them are in serious arrears for their lodgings.

The problem people face today was faced by their ancestors before the welfare state. I am living proof of this because I remember our flits. In January 1927, my family upped sticks in the freezing darkness because my dad just wasn’t able to pay our landlord his due. That first time we disappeared under dark clouds, my dad tapped my shoulder to wake me as I slept with my sister on a filthy mattress that stank of other people’s piss and sweat. My sister and I jumped from our bed, still dressed in shabby clothes provided by a local charity. We quietly shuffled downstairs in confused fright and into the night air.

All we took was what we could put into sacks and carry on our backs, like modern-day migrants. In an act of sentimentality or defiance against our fate, my dad brought with him an oil portrait of his father in an ornate gilded frame, which indicated that at one time our family had the luxury of adorning the walls of our home with painted mementoes of much-loved relatives. Along with the portrait, my father carried an eight-volume edition of the Harmsworth History of the World. I think he took those objects with us so that my sister Alberta and I would know that, even though he had been undone by an unequal economy, he once had greater ambitions and prospects for himself than fighting like an animal for scraps of food to keep his family fed.

Being homeless is in many ways like being orphaned because your moorings to love and security are cut and you are cast adrift into a torrent of uncertainty. As a child and teenager, I never felt secure in my housing or whether I’d be able to get a decent meal at the end of the day. The tenement we fled to in Barnsley in 1927 was smaller than the hovel we had left just one hurried step ahead of the bailiff. We had to share it with an elderly, childless couple. For the first few days, the fireplace grates were cold because our housemates were waiting for my parents to buy the fuel.

In truth, the house we moved into was no better than a stall for an animal in a poor farmer’s paddock. That we were forced to live this way in the past was unjust, but if you don’t think it is happening in today’s Britain, think again. Sky News reported in 2016 that one-third of private rented homes aren’t up to proper standards of health and safety. Moreover, three-quarters of a million homes are infested with rodents, are damp and have other problems that make them dangerous to dwell in. Yet the owners of these fleapits can earn a fortune in rent because 21st-century Britain is becoming as socially dystopian as it was in my boyhood.

Governments have encouraged both greed and the notion that housing is the best investment for those with disposable income, fuelling house-price and rent increases by speculation as well as a decline in affordable accommodation. Moreover, the Tory government in London, and Tory councils all across the country, have slashed regulations, making it easier to exploit those seeking affordable and safe housing.

As there were only two bedrooms in our new home, my family kipped together while our housemates slept in the other room. The four of us huddled on one small mattress under dirty blankets for warmth as if we were rabbits packed tight in a hutch being sold at Barnsley market.

Shortly after our arrival, the man who shared the house with us died and his widow moved out. She left carrying a cardboard suitcase and much later my mother told me she had made a vague promise, “like a bloody sailor”, to return and sort out her portion of the rent. Before she could make good on her word, my parents decided it was better for us to move on to an even less expensive and more inhospitable area. We never seemed to move far from where we started, and this time we ended up near the local tip. On most days, you could smell it festering from our stoop.

My sister would drag me to the tip in hope of finding lost treasure. There, we scampered through its ocean of rubbish looking for something to sell or barter like children now do in developing countries.

In the winter of early 1928, my family was undone by its greatest calamity when my dad was seriously injured in a mining accident. He was brought home to us on a barrow pulled by two mates. At first, my mother was relieved that he hadn’t been killed in a cave-in. For those who worked underground, death or injury at work was a normal occurrence.

Over time, my mum’s relief at my dad’s survival became clouded by her rage at being saddled with a man who couldn’t provide during an era when married women were not encouraged to work by the state, their families or potential employers.

My parents and the rest of the lower classes were being immersed in petty debt, lack of affordable housing and work shortages that were producing malnutrition, premature death and anxiety in epidemic quantity.

Sadly, not much has changed for many people since 1928 because 3.9 million British families are just one pay cheque away from insolvency, which means that should the breadwinners of households lose their income like my dad did, their prospects in Tory Britain may become as bleak as ours were almost a century ago. Many people just don’t know any more if they can keep their heads above water, and that’s a recipe for social disaster. Revolutions and civic unrest always develop after prolonged inequalities. Some, like the 1945 creation of our welfare state, are peaceful; others, like the Arab spring in 2010, are chaotic and brutal.

This is why everyone should be concerned by the 2016 presidential election in the US because, although it was a democratic vote that made Donald Trump president and gave power to his radical views on race, trade and diplomacy, it was also a revolution that upset the normal tide of government. The same has occurred in Britain with Brexit, and the question on everyone’s mind is: what will happen to our country once it is enacted? Will we see chaos, or progress?

Right now, the tipping point for our society might be the housing crisis. The threat of homelessness since the 2008 banking crisis has grown while the wages of the average worker have fallen. The Trades Union Congress, after analysing income data for the past nine years, has concluded that real income for average workers has declined by 1% each year since 2008: that is a 9% drop in earnings, whereas rent has increased over the same period by more than 2%, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Anyone who is an ordinary person in Britain is at risk of losing what little they’ve earned because, as the welfare state shrinks, housing becomes more expensive, dental care becomes unaffordable, higher education becomes out of reach. In fact, if you lose your job, or you or your loved ones get sick, you are at the mercy of a system that no longer empathises with your struggles because our Tory government is more concerned with preserving the entitlement of corporations to pay as little tax as possible to the state.

In seven years of government, the Tories have slashed corporate tax from 28% to 17%. In that same period of government, according to the Rowntree Foundation, the number of British people living in poverty has risen to 13.5 million. Moreover, the foundation has concluded that there are more than a million people in our country who are destitute and unable adequately to feed themselves or afford decent shelter.

It doesn’t take a clairvoyant to know that Britain isn’t walking into an egalitarian future under this Tory government. It is being frogmarched into an economic dystopia that has an eerie resemblance to the inequality I witnessed as a boy in the 1920s and 1930s, when poverty was the norm for working-class Britain. It’s why, despite all that is modern and beyond my aged grasp, I find the 21st century too familiar for my liking.

This is an edited extract from Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future by Harry Leslie Smith, published by Constable.

Source: The Guardian 17 May 2017

My generation is the last to remember the destitution of life in Britain before the NHS and the welfare state. Heed our warnings, before we are gone.

For me, a man who was born and bred in the harsh poverty of Britain after the first world war, it was inspiring. But what moved me most was the venue he chose to announce this manifesto of equality and fairness – because Bradford University is built on ground that, in my youth, was a site of great suffering and death.

You see, within the boundaries of what is now the university campus, my boyhood dreams and idealism were crushed under the cruel weight of austerity during the Great Depression. When I was young, this was not a place where one’s future was made but where it was condemned. The grounds that now hold this university contained a slum, and hope never penetrated its dark, enveloping canopy of destitution.

My family arrived in the neighbourhood that once covered this well-maintained university as penniless and jobless economic migrants from Barnsley in 1929. Then, it was an endless, warren-like landscape of dilapidated houses that nestled in cul-de-sacs where no one expected to enjoy either a decent or a long life because there was no welfare state or NHS. If hard luck struck, all that was available was poor relief, which paid a mean weekly stipend that guaranteed either starvation or homelessness.

My family couldn’t survive on poor relief, so we ended up living cheek by jowl in a doss house with a multitude of other desperate characters. Like us, all of them had been washed up on its doorstep like the flotsam that crashes on to a desolate beach after a terrible tempest. Soldiers from the first world war who had been promised a land fit for heroes by lying politicians resided in the doss where my family kipped. During the day, they still tried to hold themselves up bravely.

Like my dad, these Tommies looked for work in a city whose factories had been hushed by the collapse of the world’s economies. But at night when they tried to sleep, weary from unemployment and PTSD, I’d hear their cries of terror because their dreams had sent them back into battle at Ypres or the Somme.

As for me, my childhood was a nightmare of indentured servitude and malnutrition. At bedtime, my sister and I would huddle together for warmth on a piss-stained flock mattress on an unlit garret floor. We would try to quell the gnawing in our stomachs by wondering what our king had eaten for his tea that evening.

Even while playing, my boyhood was never blissful. In this part of Bradford I was always reminded that death for the poor is miserable, brutal and lonely: from open windows, I heard the inhuman howls of cancer sufferers dying in agony because poverty denied them the dignity of morphine.

But all of that changed in 1945 when, at the end of the second world war, the Labour party fought a general election on a manifesto that promised the creation of the NHS, affordable education, an end to that era’s housing crisis and fair conditions for all workers. The Labour party’s 2017 election manifesto echoes the sentiments found in Labour’s 1945 manifesto that inspired my generation to build a just society.

When I remember all the pain and sadness that once populated the part of Bradford that now houses its university, I can’t think of a better tribute to all those whose lives were blighted by the Great Depression than for Labour to have unfurled its manifesto here for the nation to see.

But I fear that the 2017 manifesto, no matter how just and how right for our times, may not catch the wind it needs to help this country sail forward to hope and prosperity because we have forgotten the hardships, tragedies and triumphs of my generation. It’s sad for me to ponder how on Remembrance Sunday people speak solemnly about their commitment to never forgetting those who fell in war, while those uncountable lives that were cut short because of economic injustice throughout the early part of the 20th century are forgotten.

I can tell you, as a very old man, that I am afraid for the future of ordinary people in Britain. Because by the time the next general election is scheduled, in 2022, most of those from my generation, who have survived for so long, will be dead or incapacitated. No one then may be left alive to remember the profound suffering, the hardship, the sorrow and the eventual victory all those nameless, ordinary people achieved in 1945 with election of a Labour government.

Forgetting them, and the lessons your parents or grandparents taught you from their lives about how to overcome austerity and build a proper and just society, will condemn you to something far worse than I experienced growing up.

Harry Leslie Smith ((25 February 1923 – 28 November 2018) grew up in 1930s Great Depression. He was a second world war veteran and, until his death at 95, he remained an activist for the poor and for the preservation of social democracy. He wrote 3 books of memoirs and two books of political memoir. His most famous book is the highly acclaimed Harry’s Last Stand. His last book, published in 2017, was Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future.

Source: The Mirror

The formation of the NHS was the greatest battle ever won by the common people of this country because it liberated us from the scourge of sickness.

I even needed my right lung drained of fluids. This brush with sickness reminded me that because I am very old, death is stalking me as a hunter tracks a wounded animal. But I know were it not for the NHS my life would have ended a long time ago because I come from an endless ancestry of hard-working folk whose labour never paid enough to afford a pleasant life.

The working class only came to good fortune when a Labour government was elected in 1945. Clem Attlee’s government dragged the country into the future by erecting a welfare state built upon the principle of universal healthcare, delivered through the NHS.

I recognised in 1948, when it was established, that it was a revolutionary concept because before then a trip to the doctor wasn’t based upon your needs but what was in your wallet.

When I fell ill with bronchitis a month after the NHS was born, I was gobsmacked that I’d been treated and issued antibiotics without having to wonder how I’d pay for it on my labourer’s wage. It’s why I’ve been frantic to impart to the younger generations that the consequences of not defending their right to an NHS that is funded by the State are dire.

If you are indifferent to the erosion of NHS services, the loss of trained staff due to Brexit or the demoralisation of staff due to austerity and inadequate wages, you are surrendering my generation’s greatest accomplishment – the creation of universal public healthcare. It will return Britain to the dog-eat-dog world of my youth, where I was traumatised by screams from poor people dying of cancer who couldn’t afford morphine to ease the agony of their end.

To this day, I recall with horror the parade of people I encountered during the Great Depression who died without proper medical attention because they didn’t come from the right class.

In the doss houses my family fled to when my dad lost his job in the mines, I met people with all types of untreated illnesses. Each suffered debilitating pain and stoically took their ang­uish as part and parcel of their existence. I remember how pathetic­ally my own grandad died in 1936 in the grim, tiny parlour of his rented two-up one-down, in great discomfort, being loved but inadequately cared for by my gran.

In those days we were at the mercy of our poverty. As a bairn I was sickly from malnutrition and suffered continuous bouts of diarrhoea that caused a prolapse. As there was no NHS or money for a doctor, all my mum could do was push it back inside.

From the moment I could walk, I knew a pauper’s pit awaited anyone too weak to withstand the ailments of childhood, as it’s where my eldest sister Marion ended up after she succumbed to spinal tuberculosis aged nine in 1926. As a boy I was witness to her slow, agonising death in our tenement squat.

What I remember most is the anguish my parents endured as they just didn’t have the dosh to afford medical specialists, sanitariums or proper diets that could have helped keep my sister’s TB as a chronic, rather than fatal, condition.

Marion died from the disease of systemic poverty and the indifference of the wealthy to those who lived below them. The pavements were crowded with malnourished children riddled with rickets, boils, lice and incessant hunger.

I was one of those and I was petrified by the knowledge that if I got hurt or sick, my survival depended on luck. However, over time and through the bloodshed of the Second World War, my generation ­finally demanded that all people of Britain deserved healthcare.

The NHS is your birthright, earned through the inhuman suffering that your grandparents and great-grandparents endured during the Great Depression.

If you do not stand up and resist its destruction by this Tory government, your fate will be as unkind as the one I saw meted out to anyone working class who got sick in the 1920s and 1930s.

I am one of the last people in Britain who can remember our country during an era when getting ill was a passport to extreme poverty, homelessness or premature death. Britain is suffering another winter of discontent in the NHS because of austerity, the threat of Brexit and the monetisation of medicine by giant oligopolies like Virgin healthcare.

A hard flu season means A&E departments look like triage wards just behind combat lines in war. Hospital hallways are stuffed with patients waiting for care or rooms while languishing on trolleys. Under Jeremy Hunt , the NHS has been stripped and starved of resources – and hope – when it should be protected and honoured.

In July it will be 70 and its creation should be treated with the same reverence as Nelson for victory at Trafalgar. You see, the formation of the NHS was the greatest battle ever won by the common people of this country because it liberated us from the scourge of sickness and the poverty.

As I am almost 100 years old, I am one of the last living bridges to your history. It’s why you must stand up and defend the NHS against the machinations of big business and the Tories who want to make my past your future.

• Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future by Harry Leslie Smith is published by Little Brown.