Cheery weekend update: Mandelson thwarted

Cheeringly, Mandelson came a resounding 4th in a final field of 5 for the Chancellorship of the university.  He had really pulled out all the stops on this, including blow-by-blow briefings to LabourList (who must have groaned, but still published it all through gritted teeth - I expect he indicated there'd be something in it for them.  Or issued some kind of threat, he is never slow with the menace**).

Couldn't have happened to a nicer bloke.  We read that what he's really going to be doing over the next few years is be Ambassador to the USA.  I can just see him now, wheedling with Bum-Steer Kier: "what you absolutely must have, is someone who can effectively negotiate with Trump in the only ways he understands ... What my many US contacts tell me, is that he only respects people who've been in the game for a long time, with a lot of personal money and a track record of dealing with global issues in a transactional, realpolitik way ..."  

Will it work?  I'm told not: but strange things are happening quite a lot these days.

ND

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** I have told this story before.  Many years ago I had an office in No.4 Millbank, a fine Edwardian building you will be familiar with from its roof terrace and staircase because, overlooking the Lords, it also houses the Beeb's Westminster offices and they conduct many a TV news clip or interview from there.  At the time, the Labour Party also had a suite there - it was just before New Labour's great 1997 GE victory - and Mandy was in his prime, calling all the shots.

One day I happened upon him in a corridor with a small gaggle of very young Labour staffers.  I have no idea what was the context; but in a soft, conversational manner, he berated them thus:  "... and if you ever screw up like that again, I will make sure you never work in London for the rest of your lives".  Such a nice chap.

Ed Miliband, Starmer & energy policy: a curious political tale

15 years ago now: could do with updating

We've recently looked at the fairly extensive list of energy policies Labour brings into office: deeply implausible at best, outright impossible at worst.  We know it's Ed Miliband's doing, Starmer having invited him to pick up where he left off in 2010 when his fairly pivotal Energy Act 2008 didn't save Labour at the polls.  Mili is of course an ex leader of the Labour Party, losing fairly ignominiously in 2015 (- though it's hard to see who could have done much better).

It's somewhat unusual, but by no means unprecedented, for former party leaders to row in behind a successor with sufficient humility and unthreatening purpose that they are invited to bring their experience to the table & take up office again at a subordinate level.  Of course, other ex leaders are not wanted at all, and variously just piss off to make money and/or snipe from the sidelines.  (We may need to write about Tony Blair in this context quite soon.) 

To get the obvious out of the way: overall, I have little time for his politics and in particular his lazy, slapdash energy policy.  But over the past 2 years I have been very impressed with his loyalty, which is the point of this post. 

Mili put together his fairly detailed energy strategy for release at Conference in '22, at which time the numbers presented were at least arguable, even if they're now hopelessly wrong.  The plan came complete with a costing: he needed £28bn a year.  This number, too, could be defended, given that it didn't mean "total cost of plan" (which would be much more), it meant "incremental Treasury cash", a very different thing.  The balance would be made up mostly by subsidies levied on all our energy bills, and private capital.

Labour ran with this for more than a year, to some acclaim from Green quarters (and Red) - which is far from being any kind of ratification but it is germane for what followed.  Reeves then abruptly pulled the rug out, leaving him with perhaps £7bn, perhaps £10bn - barely enough even for the Warm Homes bit of the plan.   Cue outrage on the Green/Red flank: and many people would say Mili had every reason to chuck in the towel (& maybe even become a heavyweight totem for that wing of politics, which is his natural positioning anyway).  But he didn't, and has loyally stuck with Team Starmer, not breathing a word of dismay; indeed, making a very brave and positive face of it all.

I am strongly inclined to find this admirable.  There are too many egos in politics who stomp off in disgust in such circumstances, disloyally briefing to any journo they can nobble on the outrage they've just suffered and the stupidity of the decision.  The temptations are great: & what has Mili got to lose?  But that's not how he's behaved.  

But surely, he can't be expected to front for a policy when he's not going to get the resources he knows are required?   I don't see it that way.  I'm a soldier at heart, and the rule is:  loyalty downwards before a decision; loyalty upwards after a decision.  Show me the commander who went in to battle having been granted all the resources he believed necessary.  Not unheard of, but very rare.  That's life: soldier on & make the best of it.

Only "inclined" to find this admirable?  Well, there are one or two other factors in play.  I'm told by Labour insiders that Mili is not at all in the Starmer inner circle, and stands the risk of being axed at any time.  (We've just seen what happened to Thornberry.)  Right now, for choice, anyone in Labour would want to retain a seat nearish to the top table - with the chance of being a hero to the Green/Reds if he just hangs in there (they know he's not to blame for Reeves' strictures).   The 2008 Act is unfinished business for him.  He must now surely see Net Zero as his life's work & legacy - nobody would want to be remembered in terms of the Graun piece Anon gave us the link for, or ignominious bacon-buttie embarrassment - and really, really wants to be on board in what he must imagine to be the crucial years.  So there's a degree of self-interest at work, albeit measured in prestige rather than career considerations per se.

Overall, an interesting little political drama.  I shall unfailing strive to illuminate the nonsenses in his plans, at the same time as holding him in at least some degree of regard.

ND

Sue Gray: more trouble than she's worth

The old troublemaker

We should probably get this in quick before Kier Starmer retreats behind procedure and un-invites Sue Gray to be his chief of staff, a contingency that must be on the cards given the very weak ground they are both on.  At best, the precedent is that she'll need to wait a year before taking up the appointment, which pretty much sanitizes her usefulness for the GE.  At worst, the move will be ruled against.

What's the attraction?  Maybe her reputation as a sea-green incorruptible?  Hmmm.  She puts me in mind of Alexander Solzhenitsyn - best admired at a distance.  He was a troublemaker in Russia; and he wasn't about to change his spots when he was expelled from the same and lived in the west.  

Sue Gray will either cause trouble for Starmer now, or (if she makes it aboard his ship) when in post.  Probably seemed like a clever idea at the time: but a bad decision.

ND

Weekend reading: informative essay on Sturgeon's SNP

 Further to our brief Scottish foray after the Supreme Court ruling ... here. Extracts: 

Where [Salmond] imposed his chaotic ego on issues foreign and domestic, [Sturgeon] had more strategic nous, crystallizing the party’s Europhile credentials in the wake of Brexit and consolidating its standing among Scotland’s middle-class Remainer majority ... Sturgeon engineered the destruction of Scottish Labour, lifting support for independence to record-breaking highs. Recently, however ... the semi-biblical belief in Sturgeon’s power has started to fade. [She] saw the 2016 Brexit referendum as an opportunity to de-risk, or de-radicalize, Scottish nationalism. From then on, the SNP moved to the centre in pursuit of liberal Remainers; the Yes campaign began to splinter and dissipate (thanks in part to a controversy over trans rights); and the prospect of a second independence vote receded.

... she will leave behind a threadbare political legacy ... pledges to scrap Council Tax and abolish student loan debt were ditched. In their place came a botched green industrial strategy, record drugs deaths and, potentially ... tens of thousands of public sector job cuts. In 2015, Sturgeon ostentatiously invited the Scottish media to ‘judge’ her on her record of eliminating the class attainment gap in Scottish schools. Nearly a decade later, that gap remains as vast as ever. 

... In 2018, the SNP appeared to concede that the era of petro-nationalism was over was by removing North Sea revenues from its fiscal projections for an independent state. But in her speech to the SNP’s annual conference on 10 October, Sturgeon abruptly repositioned oil at the centre of her vision for Scottish self-government. Tax receipts from remaining North Sea fields would be paid into an investment fund, she said, which would help kickstart Scotland’s economy during the early years of independence. The announcement eradicated what was left of Sturgeon’s meagre environmental credibility and reflected a ‘business-as-usual’ vision for independence.      

ND

Mandelson's 'Starmer' strategy looks like a winner

The bulk of the Left of the Labour Party, having thoroughly swallowed the mendacious soft-focus "I'm really a Corbynite" leadership pitch of Kier Starmer, rapidly became disillusioned (and in some cases, defenestrated) when he started purging the Peoples Party in a singularly calculating manner. 

And we know whose are the calculations: it's Mandelson, the preeminent British political strategist of the age. 

I feel we may now summarise his 2019 thinking, and estimate his chances of success.

1.  Corbyn has done a Thatcher**, potentially sterilising the Labour vote for years to come

2. The only chance of reversing that lies in someone who looks the part (besuited, established), grabs all the levers of power within the party  AND ...

3. ... methodically, gratuitously, ruthlessly and flamboyantly takes every opportunity to do Corbyn and his acolytes down (in ways that Hague, IDS and Howard could never do to Thatcher).  You don't want an excrescence of people who remind the electorate of Corbyn and, crucially, you don't need them; neither for their pitiful subscriptions NOR as election-time infantry  -  because elections are lost by sitting governments, and won by clever media strategies funded by big donations, not knocking on doors

And now we come to the reason why this all might come to fruition in less than a single political generation.

4. Johnson is always going to self-destruct: possibly sooner rather than later: the key is to be in position for when it happens

With any luck (thinks Peter) it'll be Johnson who, in turn, sterilises the Tory Party as did Thatcher, for another decade of Mandelsonian influence.

Looks like it's going to work.  Still: at least Mandelson is intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, eh?

ND

_____________

** there's many a Thatcherite that has been in 30-year denial on this.  They have forgotten, or may never have tried, getting support for the Party during the leaderships of the aforesaid Hague, IDS and Howard.  Some things are never forgotten or forgiven by the electorate: Corbyn committed that kind of sin, and so IMHO has Johnson.  

Textbook Mandelson

Way back in 1997, the year in which the first Blair government was elected, Peter Mandelson wanted to be elected to the NEC of the Labour Party.  He wasn't popular enough for this to be any kind of shoo-in (to put it mildly); indeed, the Labour Party is fairly averse to johhny-come-lately just turning up and expecting to walk it, first time of asking, onto the NEC.  So he called in some of his plentiful markers in the telly-meejah, and pitched to the tame interviewers thus:  (I paraphrase, but on the basis of a very clear recollection)

"Now what I think Labour Party members are saying, they say - that Peter Mandelson, I don't know much about him, but I do know he had a big hand in getting the party elected, and I like that.  But I think he needs to be more accountable to the membership.  So I think he needs to be on the NEC, where we can keep a democratic eye on him.  - That's what I find Labour Party members are saying." 

Never short for a bit of self-serving spurious logic, are you Mandy?  Two decades on, and nothing has changed.  Today, for example, attempting to promote a second referendum he 

... put forward a new argument in favour - that it would be helpful to Theresa May too.  He explained: "People know want to make an informed judgment and choice between what is on offer as a result of this negotiation and the benefits we already have in the European Union.   Also I think, if [she] promises a people’s vote, it will strengthen her hand against the Brextremists in her own party.  She’s got to turn around to them and say, ‘Look, what I negotiate has got to pass muster.  It’s got to gain the support of the British people.  So untie my hands, let me negotiate properly, because you’re going to face a public vote at the end of the day.’  And unless she can say that to them, they’re going to continue keeping her hostage ..."

Oh so bloody clever, Peter.  She'll definitely fall for that.  Anyhow, gives me a chance to re-run one of my digi-gallery.  By the way, he never did get on the NEC ... 

ND

Marx @ 200: Concluded

So now for an assessment of anything we can salvage from Marx**.

Firstly, he is clearly right that capitalists often seek to establish monopolies.  Maybe all capitalists dream of cornering their markets.  But this is hardly unique to capitalism.  Monarchs since time immemorial have either maintained for themselves, or sold to others, monopolies on all manner of goods, generally with serious profit in mind.  Any intelligent ‘capitalist’ government - and indeed intelligent business people themselves – know this and, for the long-term good of the system, resist it.  (On a personal note I have spent a large part of my commercial career fighting monopolies in the energy sector, and the constant threat of their re-emergence.)  We may agree that, on a cyclical basis perhaps, there are periods in the history of the last 200 years when some pretty baleful monopolies have taken root – often in newly-hatched industries when governments and regulators were not on their guard (e.g petroleum in the Rockefeller era; and various aspects of IT more recently).   But it’s a big stretch to say that capitalism (or any other system harbouring greedy people) moves inevitably towards its own destruction because of this ‘tendency’.

Secondly, Marx’s colourful account of how the Revolution comes about has an exciting narrative flow, with some obvious points of contact with the here-and-now.  With some fairly extreme (though hardly unprecedented) concentrations of wealth forming after a period of relative egalitarianism, and plenty of dramatic developments in automation to be cited, several of the revolutionary preconditions Marx listed could be seen as starting to stack up.  Given the seriousness of what's at stake - and with John McDonnell waiting in the wings, Heaven help us - it behoves us to do a bit more than dismiss it all outright.

But, frankly, Marx's 'decline and fall' prediction has the ring to it of one of the more grandiose science-fiction plots set in a galaxy some little distance away.  One can certainly see some localized issues that may be described under the headings of his preconditions for Revolution – particularly in ‘the west’; and, yes, there’s political turmoil aplenty.  But there have been several even more scary periods of political crisis in the past 150 years.  Technology and automation have been steadily marching forward for centuries, without any manifest self-destructive end-game in sight.  ("Drones predicted to give British economy a £42bn lift by 2030" - from today's Grauniad!)  And – gigantic surpluses?  Wholesale unemployment among the 99%?  Worsening immiseration on a global scale?  Elevate your gaze from parochial worries, you western lefties: a large part of the globe is getting steadily better off!

We are no more compelled to accept Marx’s prediction for how all this ‘inevitably’ plays out, than we are to buy Plato’s account of how “tyranny naturally arises from democracy”.  We can, in the spirit of heeding the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, find the respective accounts salutary, and hopefully recognize the potential dangers being described - so as to avoid them by adroit political actions.  But there is no obvious reason to accept any of Marx’s forecasts as being preordained.  (Quite the reverse: the history of capitalism has been one of endless surprises, mutations and adaptability, to the dismay of embittered lefties. As the more-or-less-marxist American philosopher Brian Leiter acknowledges: “Marx misjudged the smarts of the capitalist class”.  It’s worth noting also that marxists’ belief that history is on their side can be a major psychological weakness, since it gives them an excuse for taking their feet off the pedal just when they may be in danger of nosing ahead.  I have long thought that one of the reasons the Soviets didn’t come across the IGB at their point of maximum pre-Reagan military advantage – pace Mr BQ - was that the risk seemed altogether disproportionate when they ‘knew’ it would all come their way eventually in any case.)

Finally, and for me the most interesting, we come to Marx’s thesis that wage-slaves can be (and maybe mostly are) fundamentally deluded about what’s really going on as regards both their own exploitation and their best economic and human interests.  In this, he is adding to a characteristically C19th strand of new(ish) thinking emanating most notably from Nietzsche, Marx himself and Freud.  These Germanic gentlemen all surmised that in important ways we have reasons to be systematically suspicious about what people say – and indeed what they actually believe - about themselves and their own feelings, drivers, reasons, motives etc.  Each thinker has a different angle, and they are all well worth considering.  Freud emphasizes the importance of ‘suppressed’ sexual drives and childhood experiences.  Nietzsche is difficult to summarise but, in just a few words, reckons that what we might term the articulated conscious is, for complex reasons he discusses at great length, a systematically warped version of what is ‘really going on inside’.

And Marx, of course, thinks that the ‘false’ consciousness of the proletariat has been systematically moulded to suit the economic and survival interests of a manipulative capitalist class, aimed in particular towards a compliant quietism amongst the workers in the face of their own growing misery.  (Personally, I suggest that underpinning all of these three accounts in their Victorian context is the work of Darwin, establishing the idea of blind, unconscious processes affecting the fates of organisms and species, ‘whatever they think is happening’.  Marx explicitly acknowledged Darwin’s contribution to his own thinking: his work “is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle”.)

Darwin aside, though, just how new is Marx’s economic determinism as it impacts subliminally on individuals and classes?  There are clear pre-echoes in Adam Smith (another authority recognized by Marx), for example when he writes that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest” – however much the butcher may protest to his customers, or indeed to himself, of a higher purpose (or “mission”, as so many companies these days fatuously term their commercial motivation) behind his business endeavours. 

We can accept Marx’s far-ranging social-psychological insight on these matters at face value, without imagining he has come up with the most profound, innovative or definitive contribution on the subject.  It isn't the preserve of lefties to be caustic about Rupert Murdoch, or the BBC, or any other agency seeking to throw a warm suffocating blanket over honest efforts to see the truth prevail, whether those efforts be directed towards economic relationships or anything else an ‘establishment’ would choose to deflect attention from.

So: an interesting thinker, is old Karl - but the aspects of his voluminous output that survive critical review are not particularly, ahem, revolutionary.  Nor does his fame rest upon those; but rather, on the overblown 'scientific' political predictions he makes that are such tosh, so gratifying and stimulating for all manner of bitter social malcontents, and that have made him a quasi-religous cult figure. 

We may yet, however, have to suffer once more from his baleful cult.   

ND 

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**If it seems a bit rich to summarise in a few paragraphs the work of a man that some spend their whole lives studying - then take a look at Don Cox's comment on yesterday's thread ...

Weekend Essay: Marx @ 200

May 2018 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx.   Not so many years ago, just about the only mention you’d find of the man was in Marxism Today edited for decades by Martin Jacques. Nowadays of course Marx has a serious revival, nay, a positive vogue.   Lefties from John McDonnell, Paul Mason, Little Owen Jones, all the way to Brian Leiter and Chris Dillow – are pleased to associate themselves to a greater or lesser extent with the bearded one. 

So – given C@W’s declared interest in Kapital, what do we think?  Marx 1.01 starts nicely with his opening paean to capitalism.   “What did the capitalists ever do for us?”  He had a fulsome answer for that and credited capitalism with relieving the western world from the horrors of the peasant way of life.  Plus a whole lot more achievements and public goods besides – science, technology, enlightenment, the lot. 

From this perceptive and auspicious start, he headed off in two directions: some absolute dead-ends, and some useful insights. It’s not hard to be dismissive of several of his most famous themes: the ‘labour theory of value’; his historical determinism and belief in ‘dialectical materialism’ as a science (taken from Hegel, always a risky move); and of course his view on the timing of the Revolution - like early Christians and the Second Coming, he saw it as being pretty imminent. (This latter error indicates in turn that he was not at all capable of good judgement regarding the implications and outworkings of his own theories: he should have recognised that the pre-conditions he laid down were nowhere near being met in C19th.) 

For all his overblown theorizing and system-building, there is no merit in throwing the insights out with the turgid bathwater. I would highlight two, before getting back to the good old Revolution again.  

The first is a matter of social psychology.  Marx identified the phenomenon whereby capitalism’s wage-slaves fundamentally fail to recognize what’s really going on as regards both their own exploitation and their best interests.  There could be a lot of factors at work here but the main interest for Marx is how the ruling class reinforces its own interests by instituting a popular culture to mislead the workers systematically, and neutralize discontent.  “Religion is the opiate of the people” is perhaps the simplest way of summarizing a diagnosis that extends more broadly than religion, of course.  Another important coinage is “false consciousness” which bears reading up on, and to which we will return.  And, bridging the first and second insights, he also describes the “alienation” of the worker from his true humanity and potential.  

The second interesting strand of observation, then, is a view on how capitalism evolves in terms of a cluster of market dynamics. Capitalism tends to foster monopolies and concentrations of ownership.  At the same time, it leads to ever greater technological advances, not least in the means of production and, importantly, automation; so that it is capable of generating the most extraordinary surpluses of goods with an ever smaller workforce.  But the flipside of this impressive coin is that the 99% become ever more alienated, immiserated and – perhaps most problematically for the 1% - impoverished, so that ultimately there is no-one left to sell all that superabundant stuff to.  Capitalism sows the seeds of its own downfall.

So where does Marx think this all ends – and how?  Well, Revolution of course: but the precise answer is quite important.  Recall that, thanks to religion, false consciousness etc, the workers don’t actually have a good grasp of what’s really going on.  Nevertheless, driven by their increasing misery, they eventually intuit - I think we are invited to see this in a Darwinian kind of way as a broadly unconscious evolutionary process - that (i) the 1%-99% split of ownership is so extreme, and (ii) the surplus of productive capacity and stuff is so great, that (iii) any change whatsoever in the socio-political set-up must leave them better off than they are at that point in time.  With the added rider that Marx anticipated this would happen globally all at the same time, this folks is the Revolution. 

The final Marxist kicker is that all this is absolutely inevitable under his supposed ‘science’ of the direction of human history.  It’s not difficult to see how attractive this is to a certain kind of Murdoch-despising malcontent, and how easily it translates into an ideology for a bitter, revanchist political programme. 

Tomorrow, assuming the Revolution isn't set for the Bank Holiday, I’ll come back with some thoughts towards putting all this heady stuff into context, and offer my own humble evaluation.  In the meantime, with the caveat that Blogger has changed some of its functions post GDPR - Comments is open …

ND

Monty Python's Life of Jeremy

Well beard or no, he's obviously not the messiah and there's every indication he's a very naughty boy.   But the burgeoning ranks of the various People's Fronts for the Liberation of, errr, Hampstead (?) are starting to make headway, or is that momentum ... oh, "Peoples Momentum", I'm sorry.  Another one up today, I see: "Open Labour".  And another along shortly.  All makes work for the website designers.




And for the anti-bullying counsellors.  Not that Momentum intends to bully MPs, oh no.  That sort of thing never happens in the Labour Party, does it?


 
Anyhow, there is more current relevance in this little documentary - covering the Gemaine Greer spat as well as the splitters - than a whole week's worth of Newsnight.

ND

Digi-experiment: after Caulfield

Having found Powerpoint ® a handy medium for caricature I was challenged by someone to try for depth in an interior perspective.  So here's a crack at the Patrick Caulfield approach.  Apologies to him, he did his with a paintbrush ...  didn't he?

ND 

Salmond: Scottish Ogre In Town

Haven't added to the powerpoint®-based DigiGallery of late; but the yellow-green scottish monster is in town seeking money, & all the whingeing disturbed the muse ...

ND

Capello - Even Further Out Of Joint

On Me Head, Son ! Digi Capello

Not that he's losing his shape or anything ...

Go Ed Miliband !

Never mind Blinky Balls or Banana-boy -
Ed's the man for us !



ND

Sad Al Campbell

TV tears from Campbell ? Well, he is trying to sell his book to women readers ...

Digital Mandy

No.3 in the PowerPoint (R) series ...

Digital Guido: November 5th Salute

... again using only PowerPoint (R)

And a song for Guy Fawkes Night - the Ballad of the Most Satisfactory Death of McBride - in the comments below.

Digital Ed Miliband: An Experiment ...

. . . using only PowerPoint (R)