Old school unspooked

It isn’t really a spoiler to talk about the end of The Italian Job, is it? It’s become a classic. The coach teetering on a cliff edge, its back wheels over a sheer drop, its front wheels still on the road. The bullion robbers are at one end, the bullion itself at the other on a wheeled trolley. If they try to move near it, the gold rolls away towards the back of the bus, threatening to plunge the whole coach into the abyss.

“Hang on lads, I've got a great idea,” says Michael Caine.

I've got a great idea

And the film ends. With absolutely no suggestion of what the idea might be. Or whether there is any possible outcome other than the coach going over the cliff, taking the gold and the gang with it, or at the very least, the gold.

Len McCluskey is one of Britain’s most powerful trade union leaders. One of the keys to his grip on power is the ruthless way he protects it. Challenged for re-election to his post as leader of the Unite union by a fellow official, Gerard Coyne, he ensured that his rival was dismissed from his union role the day before the election. McCluskey won by a narrow margin, with his vote less than half what he had obtained the previous time.

Even more appalling was that the turnout for the election was just over 12%. McCluskey won with a 4% margin over his adversary, among fewer than one in eight of the union members, but the power that gave him was immense.

McCluskey: unrepentant, unspooked, unrepresentative

For instance, look at what happened to the defeated candidate. Coyne sued for unfair dismissal, but McCluskey had the financial clout of the union behind him and could bring up legal firepower far in excess of what his rival could afford. Eventually, Coyne dropped his case.

In the US in the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, party bosses held sway over city neighbourhoods or even whole cities. They controlled huge funds and used them to offer favours to supporters, whether in the way of jobs or housing or other forms of wealth, to ensure their continued support – or to keep them under control by threatening to withdraw it. They were unprincipled, ruthless and effective.

One of the more famous of the Republican Party bosses was Mark Hanna. He said, “in politics, there are only two things that matter. One is money. I can’t remember the other one.”

McCluskey’s use of his financial clout reveals how true that remains today.

It’s highly ironic. Hanna was a man of the right. McCluskey a man of the left, head of the union which is a huge contributor to the Labour Party. But both men were political bosses, ruthless in their pursuit of power and their crushing of opponents. Both belong to that Old School of politics in which sheer brute power is all that counts, and money provides it.

In particular, McCluskey is ruthless in his support for Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. McCluskey is indeed believed to favour rule changes so that there would always be someone from the same left-wing current in the party, in any future election for leader. In other words, he wants Corbyn kept in his post and, even when he finally goes, he wants to do all in his (considerable) power to ensure he’s succeeded by someone out of the same mould.

This is curious. Because McCluskey’s stated aim is to see a government in office in Britain that will legislate genuine Socialist policies. And yet the man he’s backing to lead the party has taken it to a constant loss of standing in the polls and, only ten days ago, to its worst performance in a national election in nearly 120 years.

So why did I start by talking about The Italian Job? Not because McCluskey is as interesting a character, and certainly not because he’s as entertaining, as that rip-roaring film. No. It was because he told TV presenter Robert Peston, “my message to the Labour Party is don’t be spooked by these euro elections”.

We in Labour have long laughed at the poor third party, the Liberal Democrats, while we contest the position of top dog with the other big player, the Conservatives.

Well, the latest polls have the Conservatives, thoroughly discredited after their lamentable performance over Brexit, on just 19% of the vote – a disastrous level.

And Labour, who should by now have a 20-point at lead at least, are level-pegging with them. Just behind the hard right Brexit Party, itself behind – the Liberal Democrats. For now at least, they are in poll position.

“Don’t be spooked”? Well, no, one shouldn’t be. Spooking means panicking which never serves a useful purpose. But that’s not what McCluskey means. What he’s saying is “stay firm, stay the course”. In other words, just keep going as you are, however clear it may be that you’re on a hiding to destruction.

That’s why I thought of the Italian job. “I’ve got a great idea”. While the whole bunch of us wait to go over the cliff.

Taking all the gold we fought so hard for, down into the depths with us.

Aftermath of a rout: calling time on Corbynism?

Question: what’s worse than a politician who sacrifices political principle to attract a few more votes?

Answer: a politician who sacrifices his principles and doesn’t even get those votes.

Despite being technically leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn has spent three years avoiding all leadership on Brexit, the biggest political question of his generation. He has, instead, tried to attract both sides of the debate, explaining that he wants Labour to be the party of both Leavers and Remainers. Apparently, he thinks he has only to express the wish for it to be so.

Unfortunately, and only Corbyn fans will be surprised by this discovery, attempting to please both sides of a bitter debate only puts both off.

Conservative collapse, Labour rout

Those who back Brexit have deserted Labour for the Brexit Party, which came top in last week’s elections to the European Parliament.

Those who oppose Brexit, and there are far more of them among Labour supporters, have abandoned Labour to vote for openly and actively anti-Brexit parties. Encouragingly, for those of us on the Remain side, though none of those parties individually outscored the Brexit Party, taken together they came well ahead of the total anti-EU vote, covering both that party and UKIP.

As for Labour, across the country it came third behind the Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats.

Of course, Labour’s was not the worst performance of the night. The Conservative Party came fifth. It notched up the lowest popular vote it has had in its history, since its foundation in 1834. Both the big parties are in desperate trouble, with a mountain to climb to win back voter trust.

But, if Labour did less badly than the Conservatives, it nonetheless had a historically awful result.

The Labour Party first presented candidates in a national election in 1900. By 1910, at its fourth election, its share of the vote was struggling towards 10%. In 1920, its fifth campaign, it leaped forward to over 20%. It never fell below that level again until the European Election campaign of 2009. That was the tail end of the government led by Labour’s Gordon Brown. He was a good statesman, notably in the major steps he took towards eliminating child poverty, but he was a lousy politician, finding it hard to build empathy with voters. He achieved 15.2% of the popular vote in 2009 and was roundly, and rightly, criticised for that lamentable performance.

So it’s an extraordinary testimony to the Corbyn era that, in these most recent elections, he managed to reduce Labour’s proportion of the popular vote to an even lower level than Brown did: just 14.6%. The lowest level since 1910. It’s worse even than 1931, when Labour split after its leader, then Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, entered into a coalition government with the Conservatives. At the General Election that followed, Labour was reduced to 52 MPs, but it achieved over twice the percentage of the popular vote that Corbyn clocked up last week.

That’s not as impressive as the Conservatives, achieving their worst result in 185 years, but it’s still remarkable: Labour’s weakest performance for 119 years.

What makes this particularly ironic is that Corbyn’s supporters like to point to the increase in the popular vote Labour achieved under Corbyn in the General Election of 2017. It was the biggest increase since the end of the Second World War (though, and they sometimes seem to forget this, he didn’t actually win). His fans attribute that growth in support entirely to him.

I have to admit that I was surprised by the 2017 result. I had expected him to be crushingly defeated. Because I got it so wrong, a sense of shame kept me quiet at the time over what I believed had actually happened. Corbyn was still an unknown quantity that many felt offered them hope. He was also up against one of weakest campaigners I’ve ever seen, Theresa May, our soon to be ex-Prime Minister.

In addition, the Liberal Democrats had done themselves potentially irreparable damage by joining a coalition with the Conservatives in 2010, making them complicit in much of the harm inflicted on Britain in the name of austerity. At the time, I thought it might take a generation for them to come back.

Well, last week normal service resumed. Corbyn is no longer an unknown figure. Voters have seen him and they don’t like what they see. Weak and vacillating, he no longer inspires trust or hope. The damage I expected Corbyn to inflict in 2017 he did instead in 2019. Why, he even pulled off the extraordinary feat of making the Liberal Democrats electable again, only four years after the end of their coalition with the Conservatives, not twenty as I’d expected.

After nearly nine years of austerity, with millions dependent on charity to avoid hunger, the NHS withering for lack of investment, and the most vulnerable driven to despair by benefit cuts, Britain has never needed Labour in government more. But Corbynism has almost certainly left it unelectable.

Corbyn could and should go. He’s trying to change position to back a new referendum on Brexit, but after three years of resisting the proposal, will anyone think him sincere?

A leader who has failed as he has enjoys no right to cling on. The problem, however, is that Corbynistas still have a death-grip on the party. It’s not enough to part with Corbyn, if the Corbynistas can simply impose another of their inept favourite sons on Labour. It’s not clear how we do it, but we need to prise their fingers off Labour, or give up on it altogether.

Which would force anyone looking for a progressive alternative to turn to the Liberal Democrats. The Greens might be preferable, but the Lib Dems seem closest to power. On the other hand, they’re tainted by their association with the Conservatives. Can we trust them not to play the same trick on us again?

Well, we may not have much choice. If Corbynism continues to strangle Labour, what else can we do? We might just have to take our chance on Liberal Democracy.

Interesting times ahead.

And not in a good way.

Knaves and fools: edifying acquittals and convictions in Britain

“My client's a moron,” says Tom Cruise, “that's not against the law.” 

As well as being an unforgettable line in an outstanding film, A few good men, the statement makes an important point, not just on legal issues, but on society generally and the people we inexplicably choose to run it for us. 

For instance, ever since he appeared on the scene, I’ve wondered whether David Cameron was a knave or a fool. In the last couple of years, it’s a question I’ve asked myself repeatedly about Rebekah Brooks, to whom Cameron used to send text messages which he signed off “lol”. Like a teenager, except that no teenager would think that “lol” meant “lots of love”.

I also had my doubts about Andy Coulson, sometime lover of Ms Brooks, and her successor as editor of the News of the World when Rupert Murdoch, its proprietor, promoted her to be Chief Executive of his European operations. That was before David “lol” Cameron appointed Coulson his spinmeister in Downing Street.

Brooks seemed so bright and acute – the first female editor of the Sun, the youngest editor of a national newspaper in this country, Chief Executive of a significant element of the Murdoch empire – that I couldn’t believe she could possibly be a fool. So when she went on trial for allowing phone hacking by her journalists while she was editor, I thought she could only be a knave: after all, the trial made clear that the practice was widespread and some of the papers’ most significant stories were obtained by hacking, so how could she not know about it?

How wrong I was. The court has now pronounced her no more than a simple fool. Her acquittal means one can only conclude that, as she claimed, she really had no idea of what was happening at the papers she headed. Being a moron is legal, as we’ve seen, so she walks free.

Rebekah Brooks:
all the relief of being found a fool and not a knave

Andy Coulson, on the other hand, has been convicted and therefore officially found a knave. Which takes us back to our fine “lol” Prime Minister. He appointed Coulson to a key position, in Downing Street, privy to all kinds of information and channels of influence. He did it against the advice of many, but on the recommendation of his Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. So it has to be said that the jury’s still out as to whether they’re fools or knaves. They can’t be anything else. 

Actually, the jury’s only out on Cameron if you ignore other evidence. For instance, take the latest Euro-spat Britain has become embroiled in. There’s been most noise about the far right’s wins in the recent elections: UKIP in Britain, the Front National in France. But when the dust settled, what emerged was a clear victory for the Centre-Right grouping, the European People’s Party. Now I didn’t vote for them, but I can count, and it’s clear to me that 221seats are more than 192, the number of seats won by the second strongest grouping, and by the kind of logic that has become traditional in these circumstances, that makes the EPP what is technically known as “the winners.” 

Now it’s not unusual for the leader of the winning party in a parliamentary election to become the leader of the organisation to which the parliament belongs. It’s annoying when the party in question hasn’t actually won an overall majority, but is just the single biggest party, and has to line up with others, as the EPP leader, Jean-Claude Juncker has done. But none of that should be unknown territory for David Cameron, who emerged from the last British General Election as the leader of the biggest single party but with no overall majority in parliament. He came to an agreement with the Liberal Democrats, a pact with the devil some on each side might say, and as a result he became Prime Minister.

I suspect he’s noticed.

Despite the similarity of their positions, he has decided to go out on a limb to oppose Juncker’s becoming the next Commission President. And he’s done so on the grounds of democracy: it would be much better to decide the next President in a meeting of Ministers. Because as we all know, meetings in back rooms are much more transparent than elections for a Parliament.

To get his way, he’s threatened to call an early referendum in Britain on EU membership, which would probably go against staying in. Given how much we all love a blackmailer, you can imagine how his stance has won him friends and influence in the EU.

Why, even the Polish leadership has called him stupid, as we discovered yesterday from secretly taped conversations.

No, the jury’s back in on him, as it is on Brooks and Coulson. We know where we stand on all three now, with official confirmation: Cameron and Books are legal and morons; Coulson’s the knave and about to be jailed.

All three are part of a pretty vile crew. The trick now is to make sure none of them ever gets anywhere near the levers of power again.

After an Earthquake, reconstruction

So now we’ve had the earthquake in Britain. UKIP topped the poll for the European elections. We know the worst, and we know its extent.

After an earthquake, the first task is rescue and recovery. But actually this one wasn’t that scary. It’s nasty to see success for a party which, while strenuously declaring itself to be neither racist nor homophobic, somehow keeps turning up spokespeople who express thoroughly racist and homophobic views. Nevertheless, these were elections for the European Parliament, and though UKIP ran a campaign claiming that 75% of our legislation is made in the EU, the reality is that power still remains in London.

Victory in a forum which exerts little power over us? It’s not as catastrophic as success in Westminster elections would have been.

So no rescue or recovery. Instead we move straight to the next phase: reconstruction. And there we certainly have a lot of work to do.

While UKIP came top, it took just over 2% more of the vote than Labour. The last time the elections were held, in 2009, Labour fared miserably; it has rebounded into a perfectly respectable position. It has even forced the Conservatives into third place. That’s the first time they’ve fallen so low in a national poll. Not the first time for ages, the first time ever, in their entire history.

All that’s good. What’s much more worrying is that Labour took under 1.5% more of the vote than the Conservatives. That’s far too anaemic a lead for an Opposition party a year out from a general election: there tends to be a swing back towards government in the last few months and Labour is perilously close to losing its lead.

It isn’t clear whether that wisdom remains true in the new environment created by UKIP, with four parties in contest. Or five, if we include the Greens, and we should, since they overtook the Liberal Democrats, junior partners in the present government, last week. 

Maybe there will be less of a resurgence of government popularity in these circumstances than in the past, but I don’t think Labour should rely on that faint hope. Especially as a lot of UKIP supporters in these elections are likely to return to backing the Conservatives next year.

No, reconstructing a politics in Britain based on simple liberalism and tolerance is going to depend on Labour taking positive action itself. And the big question is going to be, what sort of action?

Commentators are all saying that UKIP’s success is going to force the other parties to consider its agenda more seriously. And that agenda has just two points: anti-immigration and anti-EU. The Tories will find it easy to move closer to those positions, but what about Labour?

Ed Miliband's task for Labout
win support back from UKIP without adopting its positions

Adopting a similarly little-England and xenophobic stance would be wrong in itself. Labour stands for inclusiveness and for international collaboration. Coming down hard on immigrants and opposing the EU means betraying fundamental principles.

But in any case it would do Labour no good. If I’m going to vote for a party which has those views, why would I vote for one that has only adopted them recently and doesn’t really believe in them? I might as well vote for the real thing. No, Labour needs to do something much harder. It needs to take on the UKIP discourse and show how profoundly misguided it is.

It has to argue the case for the EU, a reformed EU by all means, but the EU all the same; and it has to argue the case for Europe’s open borders – surely one of the great extensions of human liberty the European experiment has given us. And also deeply necessary, at a time when we need immigration to shore up an ageing workforce.

Labour needs to argue that case with conviction to win back enough supporters from those tempted by UKIP to give it a 5 or 6 point lead. That would be sufficient. But it isn’t going to be easy.

Put off by the scale of the challenge? 

Marine le Pen: the French have a real, devastating earthquake

Think of our friends in France. There the elections were won by a Front National which even UKIP is shy of, because of its racism. And the Socialists, far from coming second, came a poor third, massively diminished by a weak and ineffective President Hollande.

At least reconstructing after our own earthquake is a much more manageable task.

Euro elections, curious elections

Just been to vote. For the European Parliament. A curious election.

Where the action happened

On the one hand, we had the Conservatives, David Cameron’s Party. 

As usual, there’s the smell of corruption around them. The most recent scandal concerns the bright idea they had to encourage private colleges to spring up all over the place to offer higher education courses to anyone who could pay their fees. The London School of Science and Technology in Wembley has been signing up students as though they were going out of fashion, without getting too obsessed with banal details like qualifications or talent. 

The students pay the college £6000 a year for the privilege of registering. They collect £11,000 a year in dirt cheap student loans underwritten by the taxpayer. Rather a lot of them then don’t bother with any of those boring aspects of student life, like actually attending classes. It’s win-win: they gain, the college gains. OK, win-win-lose if you include the taxpayer, but hey, why bother about them if the government is applying its ideology.

This comes on top other wonderful experiences with privatisation, such as Serco failing to deliver on its contract to provide out-of-hours GP services, or G4S artificially inflating its invoices. None of that has stopped the government pursuing its privatisation agenda, with one of the most sensitive of services, child protection, the next in the firing line.

The main opposition to the Conservatives is Labour. Sadly, its leader Ed Miliband prefers substance over appearance. I say “sadly” because not many people seem all that interested in details of tedious hard work, like the drawing up of policy, and that’s what he seems best at. The policies are often good, but then he goes for an interview where it turns out he doesn’t know the name of the local representative of his own party or, when discussing the terrible standard of living problems he’s rightly identified as besetting ordinary people, the amount it costs most of them to shop for food.

That plays into the hands of those who want to write him off for his looks or how he talks, rather than listen to what he says.

What used to be the third party is rapidly becoming an also-ran. The Liberal Democrats used to be a great ginger group, snapping at Labour’s heels and occasionally helping to keep them honest. Now they’ve sold their soul to the devil, joining a coalition with the Conservatives, losing two thirds of their electoral appeal in the process and rapidly disappearing into irrelevance.

The great unsung story of the last few years is the rise of the Greens. Their share of the vote climbs slowly but steadily. It would be surprising if they don’t move ahead of the Liberal Democrats in this election.

And finally we have the great shocking spectacular of this campaign, the United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP. They are the reverse of Labour. They have lots of image but practically no policy at all.

You might think this might weaken their position but it has the opposite effect. Firstly, they don’t bore those people who find substance tiresome. Second, you can’t tie them down to anything. Every time an opponent says, “ah, yes, but UKIP want to do such and such,” a spokesman will reply “oh, no we don’t. That’s not our policy.” And that’s true, since they have no policy.

Instead they rely entirely on the politics of appearance over substance. Above all, that means the appearance of their leader, Nigel Farage. He seems friendly, approachable, honest. Where the operative word is “seems”.

The reality is that in the absence of any policy, he has concentrated on peddling a position based only on attitudes. And those attitudes are entirely negative. He and his party are against the EU, they’re against immigrants. They don’t seem to be in favour of anything much, unless it’s taking Britain – or more likely just England – back to a golden past, which is doubly impossible, firstly because you can never get back to the past, and secondly because it never existed in the first place.

As for honesty, you should watch Farage when he’s being quizzed about his own behaviour as a Member of the European Parliament. He started by declaring that he would have his expenses subjected to an independent audit. He then decided that actually he wouldn’t, unless the other parties did the same. When it was pointed out to him that the other main UK parties did just that, he said that it would be a decision to be taken by the entire UKIP group as a block.

Anyone else, in any other party, would be regarded as thoroughly shifty for dodging around like this, changing his ground and avoiding the issue. Farage seems to be allowed to get away with it, for reasons that escape me.

So what’s this election going to give us?

The most likely outcome: a thumping win for UKIP.

What will that show? That a sizeable proportion of the electorate prefers form over substance. And that it’s happy to be driven by a politics of fear and hatred, of reactionary nostalgia.

Quite a tribute to the deviousness and tactics of UKIP. Not much of a tribute to the good sense and good judgement of the British electorate.