I’m publishing elsewhere on this website a selection of articles written over the years, information about my latest book DEFIANCE: Greece and Europe, and an updated CV.
And here’s my blog…
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16/9/2016
MY APPEAL AGAINST SUSPENSION
Dear Mr McNicol,
Notice of appeal against the decision to suspend my membership
Name: Roger Silverman. Membership No: L1416560
In response to your letter dated 14th September, I am writing to give you notice of appeal against the decision to suspend my membership of the Labour Party and to discount my vote in the leadership election. I wish to register my protest at this arbitrary action and my intention to resist it most vigorously.
I note that the only evidence cited in support of my suspension refers to my “comments on social media between 19th July and 2nd August”. It seems, therefore, that my only “crime” was to participate in the widespread debate taking place throughout society on the current crisis in the Labour Party. Among my comments I included what I consider a scientifically accurate and objective assessment of the true nature of the “New Labour” phenomenon. As with the contributions of others from all sides in this general debate, my arguments were politically sharp; they could not, however, in any shape or form be construed as personally “abusive”. I have checked most painstakingly all my postings on facebook and can find not a scrap of justification for your innuendo that they violated your procedural rules – rules, incidentally, that I fully support – against “racist, abusive and foul language”. I challenge you to find any such language in my name. Apparently, for some Labour Party officials, honest forthright political debate is not allowed.
Most Labour Party members would consider it perfectly legitimate to use emphatic language to characterise a political current which represented, after all, an explicit rejection of time-honoured fundamental Labour principles, such as public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange; political representation of trade-union interests; and opposition to colonial wars.
I come from a long Labour family tradition. My father was a Labour MP for 33 years until his death; I would describe him as the Jeremy Corbyn of his time. He, too, was on occasion subjected to unjust bureaucratic victimisation: expelled from the Parliamentary Labour Party (along with others including Michael Foot) for opposing nuclear weapons in line with conference policy, and accused (ironically) of disloyalty to the Leader. My mother too was a Labour member of the London County Council. I remember canvassing for Labour in general elections as far back as in 1959, as a young teenager. I was active in the Labour Party for decades: in Hampstead, Brighton Kemptown, Barons Court, Hammersmith North, and more recently West Ham. Like many others, I left the Labour Party in revulsion during the Blair era; and, along with hundreds of thousands of others, I rejoined the Labour Party in the surge of enthusiasm that greeted Jeremy Corbyn’s election.
Amid all the prevailing destructive acrimony, one positive effect of this leadership contest is that hundreds of thousands of people have been motivated to join in a debate about serious political issues. To try to suppress this debate with unilaterally imposed mass suspensions and retrospective cancellation of votes is an affront to Labour’s identity, as proclaimed on my membership card, as a democratic socialist party.
I am particularly outraged at the decision to cancel my vote in the leadership election. I insist on immediate restoration of the validity of my vote until such time as the allegations against me, along with thousands of other unjustly disenfranchised bona fide Labour Party members, are proved; otherwise, there could be only one rational conclusion. My suspension and theirs could only be interpreted as a blatant exercise in vote-rigging on a massive scale.
Please inform me in detail of the precise charge against me; its date and source; copies of the minutes of any meetings, internal e-mails or reports setting out the grounds for my suspension; and the date, venue and all other relevant details of my appeal hearing.
Yours fraternally,
Roger Silverman
5/9/2016
AUSTERITY
“Austerity is a political choice, not an economic necessity.” While this is a welcome and refreshing message from a Labour leader, it could frankly be misleading without further amplification. It is not mere personal greed and spite that motivates the Tory government (even though it is true that the Tories are personally greedy and spiteful); it is the relentless logic of capitalism. From the point of view of big business, to reduce the share of the working class in the wealth of society IS “an economic necessity”, because it is the only way in which productive investment can be made profitable and worthwhile, and the only chance to withstand the innate tendency within the capitalist system of the rate of profit to fall. (For further explanation, see the brilliant blog of the Marxist economist Michael Roberts: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/.)
The Tories are the party of big business, and therefore for them austerity (i.e. cuts in the workers’ share) ARE “an economic necessity”. The Labour Party, on the other hand, is currently in the long-overdue process of becoming at last reclaimed by the working class from the clutches of the former pro-capitalist New Labour leadership.
The next Labour government will, it is true, have “a political choice” to reject austerity and carry through a fundamental and irreversible change in society. To do that, it will need to go a lot further than mere renationalisation of the railways and curbs on the profits of the utility companies. It will need to return to the socialist aspirations contained in what used to be Clause Four of the Labour constitution between 1918 and 1994, until it was scrapped by Tony Blair: “to secure for the workers by hand and by brain the full fruits of their labour, by means of the public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”
Past Labour leaders like Attlee and Wilson were based on the support of the trade unions, and were therefore very different from the openly pro-capitalist New Labour leaders. Nevertheless, it’s important not to forget their own grave limitations. Jeremy Corbyn promises us the best chance yet of providing a genuine socialist leadership; but if he is to succeed, it is our duty to offer him more than mere passive cheerleading; he needs to know he can rely on a strong educated rank-and-file support base.
2/8/16
AN UNPRECEDENTED CAMPAIGN
The establishment campaign to undermine Corbyn is unprecedented, even by British standards. In the early 1980s, the mildly left Labour leader Michael Foot had been subjected to a barrage of mockery and ridicule by the press; and in 1924, a forged letter allegedly from Zinoviev had been used to forestall the re-election of a Labour government committed to diplomatic recognition of the USSR. But these skirmishes pale into insignificance beside what is happening now. The surprise election to the Labour leadership of the left MP Jeremy Corbyn last September on a landslide vote of a quarter of a million Labour Party members and newly-registered supporters – the product of a tidal wave of radicalisation in Britain and the beginning of a reclamation by the working class of its traditional political party – marked a turning-point.
There is a complete media black-out on Corbyn’s policies and speeches, and the deployment of every possible device to discredit him. Foremost among the agents of this campaign have been the rump of Blairite Tory-lite “New Labour” MPs stranded in parliament, relics of a bygone era, who passed a vote of no confidence in Corbyn, forced a new leadership election, and discovered among their ranks a previously unheard-of obscure upstart challenger for the leadership who has belatedly assumed an improbably radical masquerade; and the bureaucratic machine of the Labour Party apparatus, who first tried brazenly to wipe Corbyn’s name off the ballot, and then enforced draconic restrictions on the franchise, including the arbitrary withdrawal of voting rights from around 150,000 recently-recruited members, and the imposition of a £25 fee and a two-day registration deadline on new supporters.
The challenge was taken up with magnificent determination. 190,000 new supporters registered within the two-day deadline. However, there is no end to the dirty tricks practised by the bureaucracy, which has completely arbitrarily rejected 50,000 of these. Nor is there any limit to the lies the press have peddled: the manufacture of cheap stories alleging hooligan tactics by Corbyn supporters, and the fiction that Corbyn – demonstrably the most popular Labour leader for decades – is “unelectable”. The fact is that there is a huge surge in support for Corbyn, who has been speaking at mass meetings up and down the country (to take the latest example, last night’s meeting in Liverpool, which attracted an audience of 10,000). Not only have hundreds of thousands of people joined the Party to support Corbyn, but in a recent opinion poll a decisive majority of Labour voters have expressed a preference for him rather than his challenger Smith as leader. There are even reports from around the country of former UKIP voters expressing regret at their mistake and flocking back to Labour now that it has a radical new leader. Corbyn personally has 750,000 Facebook followers! A mass movement has sprung up to campaign for Corbyn: Momentum has tens of thousands of members actively mobilised, meeting, leafletting, and telephone canvassing up and down the country.
The latest weapon in the armoury of the right wing is to tempt prominent former allies to defect. One example is the former dissident Bank of England economist David Blanchflower. Another is the popular young newspaper columnist Owen Jones, who has recently denounced Corbyn’s alleged neglect of media opportunities. These criticisms may or may have some validity, though they take no account of the systematic suppression of Corbyn’s arguments and programme. But whether or not, to raise them at this juncture, on the eve of the ballot, is a despicable stab in the back. If Jones is supporting Smith, let him say so clearly (as Blanchflower has done). If not, then he should wait to raise his objections later, once the battle is won.
There is a barrage of attacks and dirty tricks against Corbyn: bureaucratic sabotage by the LP machine, the unjustified exclusion of tens of thousands of bona fide voters, high-profile stabs in the back, a crescendo of media slanders, the challenger’s newly-assumed mock radicalism, the universally peddled myth of Corbyn’s alleged unpopularity… In spite of this, it is generally regarded as a foregone conclusion that Corbyn will win the contest. That is not guaranteed, though, and complacency could be fatal.
Some comrades have asked for a description of the life of Momentum at rank-and-file level. Momentum consists of largely autonomous local groups, and there is a wide variation between them. The national leadership is struggling to cope with the huge demands on its rickety apparatus, and is open to plausible charges of excessive caution and timidity. But there are enormous reserves of elan, optimism and audacity at local level. The tens of thousands turning out at mass meetings up and down the country testify to this. And at local level, I can testify to the enthusiasm and determination in my own branch, the London borough of Newham, which was set up at the spontaneous initiative of Labour and trade-union activists and youth. We hold meetings of at least 35-40 people every week – working-class women, trade union activists, ethnic minorities, students, disabled people, all highly vociferous and enthusiastic – at which everyone participates in a lively bubbling of ideas, opinions and practical suggestions. Our ad hoc interim committee of six or seven people is in practically daily session either at meetings or by phone/e-mail contact. We recently held a successful public meeting of 120 people and are planning a mass rally in a couple of weeks. I personally have never witnessed in Britain, in 55 years of political activity, a comparable mood of political radicalisation. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say it offers just a faint foretaste of what a revolution would feel like.
Whatever happens now, a landmark has been reached. It is clear that Labour is on the precipice of a historic split. There has been some spurious speculation on this list as to whether I personally am “calling for” a split in the Labour Party. The fact is, irrespective of my or anyone else’s wishes on the question, that is what is going to happen. The rejected relics of yesterday’s crypto-Tory “New Labour” hijack of the Labour Party are not waiting for my permission or anyone else’s; they are about to perpetrate their last betrayal, by claiming a spurious inheritance of the Labour name despite their overwhelming rejection by a newly replenished and reinvigorated membership. Their defection is not just inevitable, but long overdue.
If anyone has an objection to the terms in which I have posed the question, then here are the same ideas, this time framed in a more academic style, in an extract from a recent article by Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London.
“It is abundantly clear that the vast majority of the current parliamentary party are just not personally, socially or intellectually suited to the task of representing even a moderately left-wing party or its key constituencies in the early 21st century. Almost all of them were selected as candidates and trained as politicians by the machinery established by Peter Mandelson in the 1990s, the key objective of which was to select and train parliamentary representatives who would never behave in any way likely to offend powerful financial interests or their agents. This was a key element of the project to re-brand the Labour Party as ‘New Labour’, a novel type of political formation in which most of the traditional apparatus of party democracy would be bypassed, the authority of the leadership being guaranteed by its control of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and its exclusive access to key media channels. Predictions of a full split in the party seem well-founded, given that the political, social and psychological gulf between the majority of the PLP and the majority of the membership now seems unbridgeable.”
19/7/16
BATTLE IS JOINED!
After decades of political stagnation, Britain is suddenly plunged into turmoil. It has become, for the moment, the most unstable country in Europe. Within a few weeks, it has witnessed the murder of a Labour MP by a Nazi assassin, the shock outcome of the EU referendum, an upsurge of xenophobia and bigotry, the unexpected resignation of a prime minister and the successive downfall of his two most prominent presumed successors… And, most crucial of all, the long-overdue split in the Labour Party.
At first sight Corbyn may appear a little less radical than Bernie Sanders in the USA, with his talk of “revolution” against the “billionaires’ dictatorship”. But Corbyn, an honest and principled traditional left reformist, stands implacably for resistance to austerity, nuclear disarmament, and renationalisation of the railways, and these are solid commitments. The difference is in the historical context. The election of Corbyn means a reclamation by the working class of the party it created over a hundred years ago from the clutches of conscious agents of the class enemy. It was the result of an unforerseen tidal wave: an anticipation of revolution. The violent class tensions that had been tightly compressed for two decades within the Labour Party, the traditional party of the working class created by the trade unions, could no longer be reconciled. Under the shock of the financial crash and the subsequent years of savage cuts, nothing could prevent it bursting asunder.
These Labour MPs are not just a new generation of the old-style reformists of yesteryear – tainted individuals perhaps, cowardly, treacherous, bribed or intimidated, but with roots firmly implanted in the labour movement. During the 1990s, an openly pro-capitalist grouping assumed the leadership of the Labour Party. One of them, Mandelson, openly boasted: “I am supremely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, so long as they pay their taxes”. They tried to eradicate Labour’s socialist and trade-union traditions and proclaimed a new identity, calling themselves “New Labour”.
New Labour served a very specific historical purpose. It was the product of a conscious conspiracy by the ruling class: to carry onward the Thatcherite counter-revolution wrapped in new packaging, once the Tories had become too discredited to do it themselves under their own banner. It was only after the financial crisis in 2008 that New Labour was deemed to have outlived its usefulness; once having served its purpose in government, it was unceremoniously ditched, and the reins of power firmly grasped by Britain’s traditional masters.
The Blairite MPs have no links or allegiance to the labour movement, let alone any aspirations to a new society. They are plain careerists who at a certain time found it opportune to jump on the New Labour bandwagon. Most of them are relics of that Blairite influx: an alien force of lawyers, lobbyists and “special advisers” hostile to the workers’ interests. One trade union leader rightly called them a “virus”.
Two classes can’t share one party. It was always inevitable that, sooner or later, the working class must either reclaim the Labour Party or replace it. With the mobilisation of the Labour ranks and affiliated trade unions, and a huge influx of new and overwhelmingly younger members, we see a combination of both variants: a replenished and reinvigorated mass workers’ party, already numbering half a million members.
The exact mechanism by which the crisis has erupted is a consequence of the arrogance of the Blairites, who still delude themselves that they enjoy mass support. They had blamed the election of their previous leader, the pathetically ineffectual Ed Miliband, on the trade union block vote, and imagined that by throwing open the franchise to all and sundry, allowing anyone to register as a supporter, they could secure victory for their own preferred candidate. They then compounded this mistake by lending Jeremy Corbyn enough MPs’ nominations to cross the threshold to stand as a candidate, hoping thereby to demonstratively humiliate the left.
Actually it was a questionable exercise of “democracy” to allow the party leadership to be determined by selling cheap votes to all and sundry, irrespective of their commitment to the party. However, such was popular outrage at New Labour’s despicable record of treachery, and anger at the election by default last year of yet another even more right-wing Tory government, that hundreds of thousands of people registered as supporters, exercised their voting rights as affiliated trade unionists, or joined the Party outright. Jeremy Corbyn won a decisive majority in all three sectors, with 60% of the vote and a popular mandate of 250,000 people.
If Corbyn’s victory was not to mean a reclamation by the working class of its traditional party, then it would have been meaningless. What had to follow was a clean break between the mass of trade-union rank-and-file Labour activists and the parasitic rump of New Labour MPs clinging on to their parliamentary seats.
Under the impact of current historical shocks, what was already a simmering crisis has now come to an immediate showdown. Predictably, it was the MPs who precipitated it. By a four-to-one majority, they passed a vote of no confidence in Corbyn’s leadership and are now scrambling around trying to find a candidate to challenge him. Having failed in a brazen plot to keep Corbyn off the ballot paper (a provocation that could only have precipitated an immediate split), in an act of pure spite they disenfranchised over 100,000 Labour members at a stroke by imposing an arbitrary cut-off membership date, and raised the affiliation fee for new supporters from £3 to £25, while giving them a deadline of just two days to register.
It’s not, as they pretend, the risk of defeat in a coming general election that the Blairite MPs are afraid of; what terrifies them is the prospect of victory under a socialist leadership. Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party with the biggest mandate of any political leader in British history. Hundreds of thousands of people were inspired to join the Labour Party to support him. Since his election, Labour has begun to recover from years of decline under Blair, Brown and Milliband.
Who are the Labour right to complain of declining support? It is eleven years since they last won an election. Since the 1997 election, under Blair and Brown, Labour lost four million votes; not to mention losing every single seat but one in Scotland to the Scottish Nationalists. In contrast, under Corbyn’s leadership, Labour gained the biggest share of the vote in local council elections around the country; won all four successive by-elections with increased shares of the vote; and won all four mayoral elections, including London, where the Labour candidate won the highest ever vote for any individual candidate: 1.1 million votes.
The imminent split in the Labour Party is long overdue. The mass of trade-union rank-and-file Labour activists and the parasitic cabal of crypto-Tory MPs who have made their nests in the parliamentary party could not preserve for long their uneasy cohabitation. For them, this is not a political debate. They are fighting for their careers, their livelihoods, their privileged place in society. This is a fight to the finish.
Hundreds of thousands of Labour activists are ready and waiting to defeat this coup by a clique of embittered careerists, and restore to Labour its socialist traditions. Everywhere throughout Britain, every day, local branches of Momentum, the grassroots mass movement that has sprung up in support of Corbyn, are meeting, planning, recruiting, discussing, campaigning, enraged at the MPs’ dirty tricks and determined at all costs to win: working-class women, ethnic minorities, youth, disabled people, older men… a real parliament of the people!
Battle is joined!
1/7/16
ANOTHER LEFT BLUNDER
It is scandalous that, at a time of unprecedented racist attacks which could end up almost on the scale of pogroms, the Socialist Party is calling for tomorrow’s demo’s slogan to be changed from “No more austerity – No to racism – Tories must go” to “Keep Corbyn“. Please note: it is proposing, not to add this slogan, but to substitute it. This could only restrict the demo’s appeal and dilute its political content. It is also a betrayal of the natural upsurge of solidarity with victims of bigotry.
In any case, who are the left groups to put forward this slogan? The way to “keep” (i.e. defend) Corbyn is to join the Labour Party and to campaign and vote for him. I too had previously been sceptical of any hope of changing the Labour Party, but once the Corbyn surge had become clear, I drew the right conclusion and signed up. At Monday’s Corbyn rally, I had a similar argument with an SWPer who was earnestly advising me to deselect my local Labour MP… until I reminded him that to do that, you have to be a member. How will the SP be fighting to “keep Corbyn”? On the contrary, SP members on the demo will presumably be hoping to make new contacts and recruit them to the SP, thus in effect weakening the campaign to “keep Corbyn”.
One SP member I’ve been in contact with asked me: is Roger seriously suggesting that we should dissolve the SP and join the LP? I would ask him: are you seriously suggesting you shouldn’t? Militant practised “entrism” in the LP for four decades, without needing any openly declared organisation. Can he dispute the fact that conditions for work in the LP are a thousand times more favourable today than they were in those days? In the past, it was the Grant group which ended up glorifying a practice that had originally been presented as a transitional tactic, and maintaining it through thick and thin, irrespective of objective circumstances, thus elevating it into an obsession. Now it is apparently the turn of the Taaffe wing to insist on the sacred strategic principle of operating as a separate mini-“party”, regardless of the utterly changed objective situation, keeping not just its most prominent leaders but its entire membership away from the current arena of political struggle (including its less conspicuous activists and newer recruits, who could not be excluded from the LP). This too means putting tactics before strategy and turning them into a fetish.
The SP is compounding the appalling mistake it made in campaigning for LEAVE by bypassing the crucial battleground of politics today.
BE CAREFUL…!
The British ruling class must have lost all hope of ever finding a competent political administration. Cameron staggered on from week to week, switching policy as easily as changing his socks, with constant U-turns on tax credits, forced academicisation, prison reform, disability benefits, and dozens more issues. To stave off an inevitable confrontation with his rivals over the most crucial and fundamental strategic question, membership of the EU, he recklessly gambled the whole future of British capitalism on a referendum he had no clue how to win. By doing so, he put his own crumbling career over the needs of his class.
And what alternatives have they got now? Boris Johnson is an even more nakedly self-interested shallow unprincipled demagogue; and now they’ve exhausted their former ever-reliable standby New Labour substitutes (though they’re desperately trying to breathe life back into them now).
Be careful… in this situation, they start looking for more brutal instruments of rule. Expect to see a bit more official licence given from now on to UKIP and the racist gangs.
26/6/2016
THE BLAIRITE REVOLT
At last! The battle begins!
It’s not the risk of defeat in a coming general election that the Blairite MPs are afraid of; what terrifies them is the prospect of victory under a socialist leadership.
Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party with the biggest mandate of any political leader in British history – a quarter of a million votes. Hundreds of thousands of people were inspired to join the Labour Party to support him. Since his election, Labour has had spectacular success in recovering from years of decline under Blair, Brown and Milliband.
Who are the Labour right to offer advice? It is eleven years since they last won an election. Remember that since the 1997 election, under Blair and Brown, Labour lost four million votes.
In contrast, under Corbyn’s leadership, Labour gained the biggest share of the vote in local council elections around the country; won the Oldham and Tooting bye -elections with increased shares of the vote; and won the London mayoral election with the highest ever vote for any individual candidate: 1.1 million votes.
The imminent split in the Labour Party is long overdue. Two classes cannot share one party. The mass of trade-union rank-and-file Labour activists and the parasitic clique of New Labour crypto-Tory MPs who have made their nests in the parliamentary party could not preserve for long their uneasy cohabitation.
These are not just a new generation of the old-style reformist Labour leaders of yesteryear – tainted individuals perhaps, cowardly, treacherous, bribed or intimidated, but with roots firmly implanted in the labour movement.
During the 1990s, an openly pro-capitalist clique assumed the leadership of the Labour Party. Mandelson openly boasted: “I am supremely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, so long as they pay their taxes”. They tried to eradicate Labour’s socialist and trade-union traditions and proclaimed a new identity, calling themselves “New Labour”.
New Labour served a very specific historical purpose for the ruling class: to carry through to a conclusion the Thatcherite counter-revolution under new wrapping, once the Tories had become so discredited that they were no longer capable of finishing the job under their own banner. It was the product of a conscious conspiracy. Only in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 was New Labour deemed to have outlived its usefulness; once having served its purpose in government, it was unceremoniously ditched, and the reins of power firmly grasped by Britain’s traditional masters.
The Blairite MPs have no allegiance to the labour movement, nor any aspirations to a new society. They are plain careerists who at a certain time found it opportune to jump on the New Labour bandwagon – an alien force hostile to the workers’ interests.
Hundreds of thousands of Labour activists will be ready and waiting to defeat this coup by a clique of embittered failed careerists, and restore to Labour its socialist traditions.
24/6/16
THE EU REFERENDUM
The vote for Brexit has sent Britain and Europe spinning. The instant reaction of the EU has been an insistence on immediate and irrevocable withdrawal and a point-blank refusal to negotiate a single concession. They see clearly ahead the nightmare of an unravelling of the entire project, with Brexit followed by Dexit, Swexit, Frexit, Spexit…
To their honour, Scotland and multi-ethnic London strongly voted REMAIN. But England, Wales and the Protestant community in Northern Ireland mostly voted LEAVE by significant margins. All the passion, the rhetorical tricks and the emotional manipulation had come from the LEAVE side, while the sole argument of Cameron and the establishment was: membership of the EU gives us access to a market of 500 million people; in other words, “we can make lots of money out of Europe, so to hell with your problems”. Corbyn, to his credit, did rightly defend free movement of labour, and stress the threat posed by Brexit to the minimal workers’ rights wrested earlier from the EU (which had been conceded as a means of protecting German and other employers from the risk of being undercut by weaker competitors). However, his voice was drowned out as usual by the media.
Cheap demagogues like Johnson and Farage have used outrageous jingoistic bombast to conjure up the faded glory of British imperialism 150 years ago, when Britain was a “great trading nation” and “the workshop of the world”. It is a ridiculous fantasy.
Ever since the wilful destruction of British industry by Thatcher’s government in the 1980s, used as a deliberate policy to smash the power of the trade unions (a policy cheerfully maintained under Blair’s subsequent “New Labour” government), the old manufacturing base of the British economy has gone. There are virtually no shipyards, coal mines, steelworks or car plants left. What then will be the basis of Britain’s revived role as a “trading nation”? What can Britain offer for sale? All that is left is the banks, whose crooked practices already so recently plunged the economy into catastrophe. Britain is now little more than just another money-laundering tax haven offshoreisland, siphoning up the dirty money of the world’s oligarchs and gangsters into a booming property market that shuts out the local population from any hope of ever buying or even renting any living space.
One EU bureaucrat scoffed that Britain would end up as just an island off the European coast like Guernsey. Maybe its main attraction will be as a theme park, living off visits to Stratford-on-Avon and the Tower of London.
The only heavy industry that still barely survives in Britain consists of a handful of factories owned by foreign companies like Honda, or – until its recent announcement that it was shutting it down – Tata Steel. These companies had strategically targeted a British location for no other reason than precisely as a stepping stone into the European market. Once Britain leaves the EU, these companies will inevitably pull out. Meanwhile, the sharp fall in the value of the pound will send the price of fuel, food and other essentials sky-high. So Brexit could well bring in its wake the added horrors of mass unemployment and soaring inflation – both of them problems which the British economy had avoided up to now since the start of the 2008 recession.
The victorious Brexit campaign has already in effect legitimised widespread moods of xenophobia and bigotry which had previously been largely muted. In conditions of intensified economic hardship, these could well now erupt into a huge rash of verbal and physical street attacks on immigrants, and – especially in the aftermath of any successful atrocities by Islamic terrorists – in outright race riots.
To their lasting dishonour, nearly all the left groups had opportunistically jumped on the Brexit bandwagon, using as justification their quite justified abstract characterisation of the EU as an instrument for naked rule by the multinational monopolies. At the same time, they shamefacedly brushed aside its increasingly blatant xenophobic character. They argued, correctly, that the vote to leave the EU represented a revolt against austerity; but it was a blind and perversely misdirected outcry against years of low wages, zero hours dead-end jobs, homelessness, welfare cuts and unremitting cuts. It was a classic case of the same old diabolical “divide-and-rule” manoeuvre. The media had succeeded in diverting their despair into safe channels by scapegoating immigrants: largely migrant workers from Eastern Europe and the handful of refugees allowed in from current war zones. In the process, like every authoritarian regime in the world, or in the best traditions of British imperialism (as practised so skilfully over the ages in Ireland, India, Palestine, etc.), the rage of the poor was neatly deflected from the ruling class to attacks on a despised minority.
Britain has entered into a dangerous, volatile period; a period of sharp and sudden shocks. It has witnessed huge trade-union demonstrations, student upsurges, youth riots, political instability, even a political assassination. Both the traditional political parties are on the verge of splits. The only certainty is that more such events are imminent, probably still more shocking and more violent.
20/6/16
THE LEFT AND THE EU
Most of the left groups must be squirming now at the appalling blunder they have made in allying themselves with the bigots of the LEAVE campaign. The Socialist Party, for one, justifies it as follows:
“As The Socialist predicted, voters – particularly working class voters – are increasingly seeing the referendum as a chance to protest both against Cameron and everything they have suffered in recent years: low pay, zero-hour contracts, benefit cuts, the lack of affordable housing, and public services cut to the bone.”
Isn’t there something missing from this list of grievances? There could not be clearer evidence of the Socialist Party’s persistent, blatant, wilful refusal to acknowledge the wave of xenophobia aroused by the LEAVE campaign. What began as a debate on Britain’s membership of the EU has become overwhelmingly a plebiscite on one single question: immigration.
The left groups console themselves that a victory for LEAVE could split the Tory party, and that Labour under Corbyn could win a subsequent general election. On the contrary: by far the most likely outcome would be an ultra right-wing Johnson/Gove/Farage government.
The atmosphere today smells of Weimar. A huge rise has been reported in verbal and physical attacks on migrant workers and racial minorities. Now a Labour MP has been gunned down in the street by a Nazi.
And, in a grotesque parody of history, today too, just as then, those who claim to uphold the legacy of Marxism find themselves on the same side as the ultra-right, and justify their stance by blaming the social democrats. I’m beginning to understand better Trotsky’s famous reference to the village idiot who sings wedding songs at funerals.
What position might Trotsky have taken on this issue? Certainly, he called for a socialist united states of Europe; but he also considered what at the time must have seemed a very far-fetched hypothetical situation:
“If the capitalist states of Europe succeeded in merging into an imperialist trust, this would be a step forward as compared with the existing situation, for it would first of all create a unified, all-European material base for the working class movement. The proletariat would in this case have to fight not for the return to ‘autonomous’ national states, but for the conversion of the imperialist state trust into a European Republican Federation.”
Note: “NOT for the return to ‘autonomous’ national states.”
Roger Silverman 