Gwydion M. Williams
(The photo shows Islington Town Hall)
I began this letter to urge you to stand in your current seat. I’ve now updated it to give reasons why you were right.
On the issue of left-wingers standing against top-down-chosen Labour candidates: there is no danger of letting in a Tory or Liberal Democrat in North Islington. The Labour majority has been larger than the total vote for the second candidate in every election since 2010. And polls show not just a collapse in Tory support, but a general feeling that Liberal-Democrats don’t represent very much. Meriting the mocking ‘keep politics out of politics’ slogan that was thrown at the Social Democrat break-away. And which they merited by letting the corrupt old Liberal party swallow and erase them.
In your case, I am sure you found it a painful issue of loyalty, in a way most of today’s politicians do not. And were right about who had first claim. You defy a party machine that grabbed power using Starmer’s false promise of sharing your values. You showed respect for the 34,000 who voted for you in the bad year of 2019.
Look carefully at numbers. They and the 40,000 in 2017 were well above the Labour norm. The constituency has been Labour since 1937, but never so decisively as when you led Labour.
Four decades of Thatcherism have made some decent housing almost worthless, while numbers of families without regular secure places to live are abnormally high for a rich country. The USA has more people sleeping in the streets, but post-Thatcher Britain has more people without secure rented homes.
The promise of a property-owning democracy was phoney. When I was in my 20s, most people like me could buy their own home. That was when council housing kept a balance, but most voters never saw the connection. Buying one’s home is now almost impossible even for skilled workers and middle-class professionals, unless their parents are rich enough to help them.
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I was born in 1950, and in the 1970s began a rather poor poem calling myself ‘half century child, expecting the millennium’. What we got was an unexpected mix of good and bad. Personal computers and instant global communication, way ahead of most science fiction dreams for the near future. No humans beyond Earth’s backyard, after the brief venture to the EarthMoon, but robotic probes have shown us unexpected wonders. And a lot of unexpected gains from a left viewpoint – you mentioned what you’d done for your part of London. But much has been blighted by the horrible economics and anti-welfare policies of Thatcher. And by Tony Blair’s willing endorsement of these, after John Major briefly sounded like a return to a more authentic Toryism.
Your later leadership also nudged the Conservatives back to something saner. Your main problem was that Cameron had not just promised a Brexit referendum, but accepted that it could be won by a simple majority. There was no need for that: super-majorities are a normal part of democracy. The tiny margin must have included people who vote mindlessly for anything that lets them vent their general frustrations.
Then Parliament disgraced itself by repeatedly voting down all practical solutions, after the Tories lost their slim parliamentary majority by mistakenly thinking that Labour would be crushed under your leadership in 2017.
People voted Tory for the first time in 2019, because they knew that a strong Tory majority would settle an issue that was hugely damaging when left hanging. And because Brexit voters felt they had been swindled, with Labour the main culprit. It was not your leadership, since there was no such trend in 2017. A record overall Labour vote, in fact, though the Tory vote also increased from the 2015 total.[1]
And who was the supposedly brilliant organiser of Labour’s Brexit tactics, at a time when one option was to accept Theresa May’s much milder scheme? Starmer!
Lost Labour seats were mostly seats with a strong Brexit vote. [2] I did a detailed study showing this, available on-line,[3] and also as a PDF.[4] But you were too nice, and accepted blame.
What happened with Starmer as leader was a return to the willing endorsement of Thatcherism. He did this even though the whole New Right project was visibly failing for most people.
The Thatcher / Reagan promises of low taxes, a small state, and fewer regulations were never met. Only the multi-millionaires and big corporations pay lower taxes. Privatising the state industries has failed for British Rail, and failed much more clearly and disgustingly for water. There are far more regulations, including more options for police to enter private homes without first convincing a judge that a warrant is justified. If they were ever sincere, they were seriously ineffective.
They relied on the dogma that whatever benefits the selfish interests of the rich will eventually benefit everyone. Trickle-down. An idea invented by Adam Smith, who talked as if things that made a commercial profit were the same as things that increased real material wealth.[5] But he slipped in the concept with no supporting evidence.
The raw facts are that the Mixed Economy that the West has run from the 1940s grew faster than Classical Capitalism ever had.[6] And what we’ve had from the 1980s has been a twisted version of the Mixed Economy system that developed in the 1930s and 1940s. Called capitalism, but actually The System that Dare Not Speak Its Name. Corporatism, but giving most of its rewards to a multi-millionaire class who have done nothing that wasn’t just as likely without the New Right.
The internet and advanced electronics were products of a Military-Industrial Complex that allowed basic research in the hope of getting something useful militarily. Applying the socialist idea of Production for Use, not Profit, but only if the use might be military. But a lot of it was then applied to things people needed, and might never have had if all research and development was tied to an immediate hope of profit.
Much cleaner was the World Wide Web, a hypertext system running on the internet and imagined separately, before there were effective ways to run it. This was given its first useful form by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. He did this while working at CERN, where subatomic research has no obvious benefit beyond the joy of discovering new truths. If faster-than-light travel or anti-gravity are possible then they are almost certain to be discovered via such ‘impractical’ research: but it’s just as likely they never will be possible. Very unlikely to be feasible within the lifetimes of anyone now alive. But that’s also true of most astronomy, archaeology etc. Most people accept that knowledge for its own sake is excellent, with gains for consumers an occasional bonus.
What was done by Bill Gates, Elon Musk etc. would have been done by someone else had they been missing. Plenty were motivated, often without thought of profit. Their gigantic fortunes distort everything.
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Claiming merits for business people that far exceed what they’ve done in the real world, the New Right privately scorn the merits of the rest of us. They hide this, of course, especially those needing to be elected by people they see as ignorant and try to make even more ignorant.
And talk rubbish about the past. Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries made the basis for the modern world, but that included some of its worse aspects. Government was intrusive, but not democratic till the 1880s. Till the 1830s it ran a race-based slavery in the New World that was much worse than other systems of slavery. In most places, including the brutal Spanish and Portuguese settlements, a slave was a member of a lower class that individuals could rise out of.
Our rulers – what I call Upper London – drained wealth out of the Indian subcontinent, and stamped out the early pattern of Britons marrying and merging with the regional elites. It became strictly racist, which the rival Spanish and Portuguese and French systems were not. It forced farmers to grow opium that was then used to force open Imperial China.
Ironclad warships did not begin with the romantic duel of the Virginia and the Monitor in the US Civil War: they began decades earlier with an East India Company ship called the Nemesis, an armed paddle-steamer that was decisive in the First Opium War.[7]
There has never been a shortage of money for warfare. And there was plenty for the rich, when the rich as a class stood to lose a chunk of their fortunes in the 2008 crash. Austerity was then imposed, not because government debt could not be sustained, but because financial speculators felt better if government debts were kept small.
People gaining from this twisted version of a Mixed Economy made by the New Right include MPs and powerful officials in the Tory Party. And similar people in the Liberal Democrats, where the socialist aspects from the Social Democrats have vanished without trace.
And sadly, this also applies to most of the MPs and powerful officials in the Labour Party. Amidst all the other quotas – excellent in themselves – Labour had nothing about class origin or type of work. Student radicals from the 1960s and early 1970s – people much like myself – got an absurdly large proportion of the winnable seats when older MPs retired or died. And far too many came from media, academia, or permanent political work in administrations or think tanks. You could call these the Opinions Industry, where truth can seem to be whatever you say it is.
While some remained sincere leftists, with yourself as one, far too many defected.
It’s about class, and some human groups grabbing more than their share.
Radicals should not however use the 99% against 1% argument. There is a comfortable Next Nine who are a mix of small winners and minor losers. Who can hope to rise into the elite, though mostly unrealistically.
There are also more people who think they are part of the 1% than are actually in it. A US survey found that 19% of them thought they qualified, and many more expected to get there. Britons are less gullible when it comes to social mobility; but everyone should be clearer if one talks about a multi-millionaire class. It is possible nowadays to have net wealth of a million dollars or equivalents and still not quite qualify for the richest 1%.
There are millions of this elite. It is also good to speak of them and not just the billionaires. Motives and ideas are similar, and the billionaires could not flourish without the lesser super-rich supporting them. And millions beyond them, who hope to end up in the elite.
But with all that, the West’s total economy does not grow as fast as it did before the New Right. And they are losing influence in the Global South. Often losing to ideas that all of us in the West are sorry to see spreading.[8]
The whole Thatcher / Reagan experiment has demonstrated in a most costly manner that libertarian ideas were junk.
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You were good for the Labour Party. Blair and Starmer were bad for it. My own experience reinforced what I’d seen from national politics.
While living in Peterborough, I joined a local Labour Party that initially had a good atmosphere. And decayed into a few people bitching about how bad the local Labour Party was: part of a general malaise.
I also found the pro-Labour region I was living in had been detached from Peterborough constituency and drowned in a sea of rural Tory voters. It was suspected that this was to save the redefined Peterborough for Brian Mawhinney, then a leading Tory. In fact he switched to the safe rural seat, and Labour won Peterborough in 1997.
But it was never my sort of place. Coventry I feel more in tune with.
After being eventually disappointed with my local constituency branch in Peterborough, I found it barely existing in my part of Coventry. Called to meetings where the officials had no interest in us except as an audience for their cleverness. Except it changed when you became leader, and Labour was revitalised for a few good years.
And now de-vitalised. Sad.
My constituency remains Labour. I thought it good that our current MP had been working as a pharmacist at a cancer unit. Taiwo Owatemi is one of the few MPs from outside the Opinions Industry. She has so far backed Starmer, but I assume she will take a strong stand on NHS futures.
To my regret, I thought it needless to help campaign for her in 2019. The election was sure to be lost, but the seat seemed safe Labour. She actually won by the smallest majority in the seat’s history, a mere 208.[9]
The same thing happened in Coventry South, with Zarah Sultana scraping home with a majority of 401.[10]
2019 was mostly about Brexit, but two normally-safe seats were nearly lost after switching from white men to non-white women. Much still to do, clearly. But I’m assuming they are safe this time round. At age 73, I plan to live long and spend most of my time making broader studies of what’s gone wrong and how we can fix it.
Back in the year 2000, I did what seems to be the only left-wing study of Adam Smith. Hardly anyone took an interest. I suppose denouncing capitalism as if it were unchanging is more emotionally satisfying than explaining that New Right claims are a cover for a twisted Mixed Economy
Even without an abolition of capitalism, which I see as a long-term aim, the system could be run much better. You could cite real-world examples: much of Continental Europe, and especially Scandinavia. With the best being Finland, and there is a book with hard facts called Finntopia, which people should read.
You could sensibly say that your own work made North Islington less distant from ‘Finntopia’ than it might have been, but there is a long way to go.
In the modern world, new divisions open up. And the denunciations of peace demonstrators as anti-Semites reminds me of how just the same trickery was used against you. And which you were too nice about.
At the time, I tried to shift the debate by pointing out that surveys showed just as much anti-semitism among Tories and Liberal Democrats. I compared it to people making lurid headlines claiming Tunbridge Wells had a drugs and murder problem.[11] The place is not free of those things, but has less of them than the British average.
No one important wanted to slander Tunbridge Wells. They were out to sabotage a Labour Party that threatened to give voters what the voters actually wanted.
If you take up the issue again, you might remind everyone about assassinated Israeli Labour Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Killed by an extremist who saw him as a traitor to Zionism. And though it’s agreed the assassin was a lone fanatic, it’s not so far from what the current Israeli government is now saying. Their attitude to Jewish protestors who want any concessions at all to Palestinians.
Your immediate strategy seems to be to remind the voters of North Islington that you have been good for them. You are not calling Starmer a traitor while he still has the option not to be.
While he might notice that the New Right is a sinking ship. Not just the Tories: everyone who has stuck to the twisted version of the Mixed Economy that has been harming us since the 1980s.
Left-wing moderation is what comes naturally to you. I hope and expect that you succeed in it.
Copyright © Gwydion. M. Williams
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_Kingdom_general_election
[2] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/past-issues/editorials-from-labour-affairs/the-brexit-defeat/labours-lost-seats-causes/
[3] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/why-labour-lost-in-december-2019/
[4] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/problems-41-labour-coolhearts.pdf
[5] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/48-economics/037-adam-smith-misleading/adam-smith-faked-his-most-famous-claim/
[6] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/the-mixed-economy-won-the-cold-war/
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(1839)
[8] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/the-west-fails-in-five-civilisations/the-west-fails-in-five-civilisations-2/
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_North_West_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2020s
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_South_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2020s
[11] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/past-issues/2018-labour-affairs/2018-05-magazine/2018-05-fewer-anti-semites-in-labour-than-tories/
Labour Affairs 