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Syria: Where is the International Brigade?

22/04/2013, 04:08:27 PM

by Jonathan Todd

There is much to enjoy and admire in the New Statesman centenary issue. I read of George Orwell taking a bullet through the throat, as he fought in the Spanish civil war. And that John Gray thinks: “For the foreseeable future, no one will rule will world”. The transition from the G7 to the G20 reflected the passing of power to the global south and talk of the G2 denotes the centrality of China and the US but maybe G-zero is more apt in a world without predominant power.

Is the sorrow of Syria a harbinger of a G-zero world that no one, whether reluctantly or otherwise, is willing or able to police? Roosevelt, unlike Hitler and Stalin, was as disinclined to involve his country in the Spanish civil war as Obama has been to date in Syria. Yet Orwell walked towards the bullets. Where are the Orwells of today? If the war in Syria is a war for rights and democracy, why isn’t the International Brigade on the frontline?

The truth is that Syria is sucking in Jihadists who don’t believe in rights and democracy, not liberals prepared to stand up for these values, which is one of various reasons why Syria is not a simple war for rights and democracy. Little is simple in Syria.

Last week Channel 4 showed a documentary by Olly Lambert, who had spent weeks living deep inside Syrian territory – with both government and opposition supporters. Both sides think that the other would exterminate them if they did not fight and that they are opposing the sectarianism of the other. Western liberals, thousands of miles from the frontline, might see their kin in those who have risen up against Assad.

But how confident can the Alawites and other Syrian minorities be that these opposition forces, largely Sunni and increasingly under the influence of Saudi Arabia and Al-Qaeda, will not extract a bloody revenge as soon as they are able? Why wouldn’t these minorities lay down their arms for a future Syria that respected their rights and gave them the vote if this is what the opposition offer?

If the UK were to arm the opposition then we would be risking these arms being used for the persecution of these minorities. Equally, weaponry from Iran and Russia is being used by the Syrian government to persecute their opposition. While such persecution is utterly repellent, it would be to succumb to Bertrand Russell’s fallacy of superior virtue of the oppressed not to be concerned about the sectarian and extremist motives of the opposition.

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The real lesson of Thatcher for Labour

10/04/2013, 11:18:29 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Toby Helm and Daniel Boffey wrote in the Observer, the day before Margaret Thatcher’s death was announced, under a headline of “Labour plans radical shift over welfare state payouts”. But did their article tell us anything about the party’s commitment to the contributory principle that Liam Byrne didn’t tell us in his speech on William Beveridge over a year ago? And did their article tell us anything about our jobs guarantee that had not already been announced?

In short, the Observer splashed on a story devoid of new content at the end of the week in which George Osborne audaciously – but predictably – used the conviction of Mick Philpott to attack again on welfare. We must presume that Labour felt this attack strong enough to wish to respond to but lacked any new policy with which to do so.

Then Thatcher died and decisively moved the news agenda on. Perhaps we should be grateful to her for obscuring Labour’s lack of substance on this central and contentious issue. But is there anything else that Labour should be grateful to Thatcher for?

We should all, according to the words spoken by David Cameron on Downing street on Monday, be grateful to her for saving the UK. Her alienation of Scotland may yet, though, come to be seen as having contributed significantly to the breakup of the union.

While the decline of some industries may have been inevitable, her dearth of industrial policy stripped whole regions of alternative futures. Local government was gutted of capacity to respond to these changes, as power was concentrated in Whitehall by a government that claimed it did not believe in the role of the state. Ballooning welfare payments also meant that this state was hardly minimal.

All of these baleful legacies remain to be dealt with. Yet Martin Amis spoke for many on Monday when he told Newsnight that she was “a necessary prime minister”. Thus, the real question for Labour is not whether we have anything to be grateful to Thatcher for but why, even after all the suffering endured by areas within which our movement is woven most deeply, this view is widely held.

Is it because the rest of the country lacks the compassion to care for these communities? Has Thatcherism or capitalism itself made our fellow citizens spiteful and capricious? The truth is closer to home than that.

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Labour will need both Darling and Johnson at the next election

02/04/2013, 08:18:51 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Unity should run through Labour like a stick of rock. Following David Miliband’s departure, we should reflect on what this might mean for figures like Alistair Darling and Alan Johnson in the general election campaign.

It seems that Ed Miliband left the door open for his brother to serve on his frontbench but David preferred to run the International Rescue Committee. It also seems to me that Jonathan Freedland has called this correctly by saying this was the best decision for David but may not be for Labour.

Things are not quite so desperate that all Ed can offer the British people is blood, toil, tears and sweat. But it might not be so far off. We are in the slowest economic recovery on record and the fiscal position becomes ever more horrific.

The only quick and easy road for Ed will be to the kind of unhappy position of Francois Hollande, which he created for himself by having “rather pretended to the French that he and they wouldn’t have to make any difficult choices”, as Andrew Rawnsley put it.

We should level with people that life under PM Ed will be a hard slog. But less so than under this government because of the one nation approach that Ed would bring to his task. Yet Gaby Hinsliff has observed of this thematic frame:

“For all I know it may embrace raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, and feel warmly towards brown paper packages tied up with string: it’s not that these ideas are impossibly contradictory, just that cramming too many of them beneath one umbrella term renders it faintly meaningless.”

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Osborne chooses Tory politics over one nation economics

21/03/2013, 11:42:11 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Daniel Finkelstein is a leading commentator and one of David Cameron’s most articulate defenders. No other columnist has the economic gravitas of Martin Wolf. Pieces from Finkelstein and Wolf in the week before the Budget exposed the tensions at the heart of the government’s economic and political strategies.

Finkelstein argued that the Conservatives have three assets: David Cameron; a Labour Party that “has pitched itself too far to the left”; and “the large constituency of voters who … don’t want to borrow more”.

On the same day Martin Wolf demolished David Cameron’s “there is no alternative” speech.

“What truly is incredible is that Mr Cameron cannot understand that, if an entity that spends close to half of gross domestic product retrenches as the private sector is also retrenching, the decline in overall output may be so large that its finances end up worse than when it started.”

What Wolf considers economically indefensible – not taking advantage of rock bottom interest rates to borrow more to stimulate recovery – is what Finkelstein considers to be a political strength. Those who join Wolf in advocating stimulus include: Labour, TUC, CBI, BCC, Vince Cable, IMF, NIESR, Bloomberg, The Economist, and Oxford Economics.

Equally, the political rationale that Finkelstein appeals to is not groundless. That 10 per cent more voters blame the last Labour government for the cuts than the current government speaks to the reputation for dangerous profligacy that continues to attach to Ed Miliband’s party (YouGov, 17/18 Feb). These voters believe that the Conservatives are doing the tough but necessary, while Labour offers only a risk, not a sound alternative.

This popular view, which sustains Finkelstein’s political logic, is, however, challenged by a growing economic consensus in favour of an approach quite different from that offered by Osborne.

He talks of supply-side reform when it is an absence of demand that holds the UK back. He claims fiscal responsibility when the stuff of genuine fiscal responsibility would involve recovering this demand. He pins his hopes on active monetary policy – near zero interest rates and QE – when the experience of recent years provides amble justification for Keynes’ view that loose monetary policy amounts to pushing on a piece of string in a depressed economy.

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Will Miliband face either Cameron or Clegg at the election?

11/03/2013, 03:24:31 PM

by Jonathan Todd

This weekend the fog of war descended on Brighton, central London and Grantham. It seemed to be thickest in Brighton where the Liberal Democrats met for their spring conference. Some think their enemy are the “self-appointed detectives” in the media. Others are convinced that their enemy is the party with whom they share government.

Orange-on-orange attacks are more to the taste of some: What did Nick Clegg know about Lord Rennard and Chris Huhne? And when? Is the party capable of avoiding electoral annihilation with him at the helm? Does he agree with George Osborne or Vince Cable on public investment? If Cable, where does that leave the commitment to immediate deficit reduction that supposedly lies at the heart of the governmental compact between their party and the Conservatives?

It’s not clear whether Cable’s abdication of this compact is a declaration of war with Osborne or Clegg. He’s undoubtedly taking collective responsibility and unrelenting commitment to deficit reduction on fleet-footed dances. In so doing, he wants to emerge with his now battered reputation for economic wisdom restored and his status as the heir apparent to Clegg renewed.

The sensible argument for the defenestration of Clegg is that the alternative is to reduce the Liberal Democrats to a parliamentary rump of cockroaches. His embrace of Cameron and support for increased tuition fees shattered public trust, so says the argument against him, which can never be regained. No masochistic radio phone-ins or relaunches are going to change this. Clegg, pace Jonathan Freedland and John Kampner, is a dead man walking and if he is not removed then he will drag his party down with him.

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The public’s fear of the future will frame George Osborne’s budget

04/03/2013, 04:10:05 PM

by Jonathan Todd

It is not only Charlie Brooker who thinks the future is broken. Businesses and households do too. This is why businesses are sitting on billions of pounds. They don’t think there is a future worth investing in. This is massively economically significant, but perhaps more politically significant is the resignation of the public to their grim economic fate.

Some of the public are drowning, few are waving, and most are shrugging their shoulders. George Osborne’s biographer, Janan Ganesh, recently noted in the Financial Times: “The regular focus groups that are conducted by Downing Street paint a picture of an electorate that is bleak about the economy, yes, but so bleak that they don’t believe things would much improve under an alternative policy.”

Those that aren’t drowning, waving or shrugging their shoulders, are getting angry, which increasingly means voting for UKIP. Not as a principled stand against the EU but, as Michael Ashcroft’s polling attests, an anguished cry against the established parties. UKIP recoils, as Matthew d’Ancona accurately puts it, not from Europe specifically but from change generally.

UKIP is an emotional spasm against the political class and the inadequate modernity that they represent, as well as an insatiable longing for an unrecoverable past. While a growing minority of the electorate fall for this spasm, most are bleakly indifferent.

Allister Heath on the right would sacrifice short-term deficit reduction for a dramatic cut in corporation tax and Will Straw on the left for increased public investment. There is, though, scant evidence that the public believe that the methods of either the left or the right will make much difference. And the public might have a point.

Given the piles of cash on which businesses currently sit, Heath’s policy may only deepen these piles. Straw is right to see the cuts to public investment as the most economically damaging of those inflicted by Osborne but only rapidly “shovel-ready” projects are likely to make a difference to GDP in the near-term.

While both left and right urge upon Osborne a focus on recovering growth, not short-term deficit reduction, there are reasons to be sceptical about the capacity of the policies of the left and right to secure their shared objective. And sceptical is certainly what the public feel about the ability of politicians to improve things.

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Labour must be careful: Osborne wasn’t downgraded for cutting, but cutting the wrong way

25/02/2013, 07:00:53 AM

by Jonathan Todd

John Moody first offered credit rating services in the US in 1909. By this time, Dutch investors had been buying bonds for three centuries, English investors for two, and American investors for one century. Investors have, therefore, prospered for long periods without credit rating agencies.

Many would argue that they could again. The agencies did not facilitate wise investment by giving triple A ratings to the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that were at the heart of the financial crisis. CDOs are, however, complex financial instruments. While the ratings were misplaced, it is understandable that financiers would place value on independent assessment of credit worthiness in the face of such complexity.

The UK is less complicated. We are, obviously, struggling. National wealth has not increased since George Osborne became Chancellor. But national debt has increased by over 30 per cent, taking it over one trillion pounds for the first time in history.

Osborne likes household analogies. His UK is a household with no more wealth than it had almost three years ago and little likelihood that this wealth will significantly increase in the near term. But ballooning credit card debts. This is the kind of household that finds it very difficult to get a mortgage in Osborne’s Britain.

Osborne has not practised the “arithmetic” that Bill Clinton beautifully described and praised in his speech to the Democratic National Convention last year. And we hardly need credit rating agencies to tell us this. Those trading in UK debt certainly don’t. This is why – like France and the US before us – a downgrade may have little impact upon the cost of UK debt. The factors that have led to the downgrade have already been factored into the price.

While the downgrade told us what we already knew, Osborne might privately lament: “The agencies told me to cut or be downgraded, so I cut. Then we didn’t grow and they downgraded me, anyway.” Not only are agencies discredited after their poor assessments of instruments like CDOs, they also urged cuts upon Osborne and welcomed his willingness to go further and faster than Alistair Darling had proposed. Osborne may be frustrated for being punished for following this path.

Up to a point, Chancellor, more balanced counsel would insist. What matters is not only that cuts are made but what is cut. The composition of public spending matters, as well as its level. Net public investment for 2015-16 was cut to just 1.1 per cent of GDP from 3.5 per cent in 2009-10 in Osborne’s 2010 budget.

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Ed needs to be clearer about what one nation Labour is not

18/02/2013, 07:57:43 AM

by Jonathan Todd

“‘You know something? It’s really quite satisfying when you help people to fulfil their dreams like that.’ ‘Christ, you fucking fascist,’ Tim said.”

This exchange between Malcolm Glover, a 1980s building society manager, and his son, Tim, features in Philip Hensher’s sweeping The Northern Clemency and comes after Malcolm helps a couple buy their council house. The formalities of this sale conclude thus:

“‘Goodbye, Mr Glover,’ the husband said, shaking his hand, ‘and thank you.’ He let go and, turning, took his wife’s beloved hand, and together they walked down the stairs. Malcolm watched them go with pleasure.”

The positive content of new Labour sought to appeal to voters like the grateful couple: attentive to their aspirations and eager to serve them. Notwithstanding this positive content, new Labour was immediately vivid because it clear about what it was not: the old Labour, the no-compromise-with-the-electorate vehemence of Tim.

New Labour connected with aspirant voters by relentlessly showing itself to be different from a Labour party that would deem it “fascist” to sell a council house to its tenants. It was new Labour because it was not old Labour.

Of course, this old Labour was always a caricature. The Labour party of Clement Attlee, Barbara Castle and Neil Kinnock was never as indulgent and disconnected as Tim Glover. The right to buy, for one thing, was a Labour policy before it was a Tory policy.

The sense, however, that Tony Blair’s election as party leader marked a year zero was reinforced early in his leadership by painting the past as an old Labour wasteland. Blair was the change that the country needed because he had the strength to move his party beyond the likes of Tim Glover.

The longer Blair was leader the less well this crude and simplistic contrast served him. What had cast him in broad strokes as a new leader came to motivate suspicion about him in the party later in his premiership.

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Back to the future with GDH Cole

07/02/2013, 04:44:58 PM

by Jonathan Todd

How much left the room when GDH Cole stormed out of a Fabian executive meeting in 1915? More than you might imagine.

James M. Buchanan was born a few years prior to Cole’s exit and died last month. He tends to be celebrated by right-wingers, enamoured with a small-state, as his work on public choice theory supports scepticism in big government. Unlike Cole, such right-wingers have never been inspired to socialism by reading William Morris. Yet Cole’s doubts about the central state were as vehement as Buchanan’s.

Cole’s was a socialism with as small a central state as possible. Subsequent perceptions have tended to see socialism and the state as so synonymous as to make Cole’s minimal state socialism oxymoronic.

Those who remained in the Fabian executive meeting after Cole had left it would be relaxed about this association. Their aim was to capture the commanding heights of the state through democratic elections and have socialist politicians use the organs of the state to gradually transform society to socialism.

Tony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism (1956), the great revisionist text of post-war Britain, contained some caustic lines about Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the leading exponents of this dominant Fabian view. He mocked them for spending their honeymoon investigating Trade Societies in Dublin. It was their austere methods that he had in mind when he warned that: “Total abstinence and a good filing-system are not now the right signposts to the socialist Utopia: or at least, if they are, some of us will fall by the wayside.”

Crosland liked a drink and was right to put more emphasis on relaxation, fun and culture than the Webbs did: quality of life, in contemporary parlance. And right also to assert that in the blood of the socialist “there should always run a trace of the anarchist and the libertarian, and not too much of the prig and the prude”. This liberalism justified the reforms enacted by Roy Jenkins, another protégé of Hugh Gaitskell, as Home Secretary in the 1960s and distanced Crosland from the Webbs.

But the break made by Crosland with the Webbs was not as decisive as he thought. While being socially much more liberal than the Webbs, his dominant pre-occupation was equality and creating a more equal society through a comprehensive school system. The Bevanites with whom Gaitskellites, like Crosland, quarrelled in the 1950s put more emphasis on nationalisation, rather than equality, as the end of socialism. In so doing, the Bevanites were as attached to the central state and public ownership as the Webbs were.

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Sunday review on Monday: Ed Miliband’s speech to the Fabian Society conference

14/01/2013, 07:50:12 AM

by Jonathan Todd

The Fabian Society conference marks the new year in Labour politics as the third round of the FA Cup heralds another calendar year of football. No matter how many bore draws football fans shiver through, irrespective of the persistence of interminable political speeches, we summon reserves of hope and forbearance to return.

Ed Miliband, however, thinks activists can have justified hope. We know this because he told pre-Christmas Westminster receptions of the unprecedented position of strength Labour is in for a new opposition. We know this because the Labour Party has announced 106 seats that we are targeting to win, many of which are now a long way from being Labour. We also know this because Miliband chose the Fabian conference to launch a more intensive differentiation of his Labour Party from both old and new Labour.

Andrew Harrop, general secretary of the Fabians, thinks Miliband is right to be hopeful, as he introduced Miliband by anticipating him leading a government as transformative as Clement Attlee’s. Polly Toynbee further reinforced this hope by later saying that Labour would have to try hard to lose the next election.

It is necessary to revisit the launch of a Policy Network pamphlet by Ben Jackson and Greg McClymont to appreciate the significance that Uncut sees in Miliband’s speech.

Here a consensus hung in the air: parties returned to government after only one term in opposition tend to run against not only the incumbent government but against the government evicted at the previous election. Margaret Thatcher ran against Edward Heath in 1979, as well as James Callaghan.

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