 t is unfashionable to feel despair. That
is the message of our new-found opinion makers. In May last
year we entered a new era characterised by hope, vision,
determination
and a belief that there exists no problem that is not susceptible
to the treatment. And there is every sign that Blair believes
his own propaganda. Watching the man perform should not be
permitted to the under-aged. By contrast, Lolita is nursery
material.
The certainty of the Blairite agenda is terrifying. The despair
felt by some of us in the Party comes from the knowledge that
there is an amazing number of still active Party members who,
despite the examples of Australia and New Zealand, cannot
believe that a government which calls itself Labour is not
their government.
But taking on the neo-Liberals on their own terms can only
prove frustrating and, ultimately, futile. Pro-capitalist
premises can only lead to pro-capitalist conclusions. That
it requires effort to dismantle something that has become
part of the fabric of our daily lives must be accepted. The
effort has to be made.
Begin with 'law and order', the erstwhile favourite territory
of the old-fashioned Right, now fallen to the power of the
silly slogan that many of us, when we first heard it, could
not believe was tripping from the lips of a serious Labour
front bench spokesman. From that moment politics became, simultaneously,
both less and more serious. That disbelief became total incomprehension
when the sloganizer was swept into the Party leadership, largely
by the power of a Press campaign without discernible provenance.
All the institutionalised Tory assumptions about the nature
of crime and the necessity for punishment have gained new
life under New Labour. One year on, the prisons are still
being filled to overflowing, some are privately run for profit;
suicides in custody are not unknown; the rich, the powerful
and the white can still get a better deal from the legal system;
funds which ought to assist justice are withdrawn from the
poor. Children are still being denied an education because
they have broken the law by smoking cannabis, whilst the use
of alcohol and tobacco are subject to no such sanction. Worst
of all, there is no attempt to analyse the causes of crime,
despite the silly slogan. We still believe that there exists
a 'criminal class' which must be made to feel the consequences
of its character failings. The possibility that crime is substantially
the result of an unhelpful social structure is not only not
aired by any aspiring politician, it is considered eccentric
and unfit for the pages of the Murdoch Press.
What of education? The survival of the ancien regime
was signalled even prior to the election when it became known
that Chris Woodhead would keep his Ofsted job in the event
of a Labour victory. Sufficient consideration, it seemed,
had been given to the awkward reality of the opposition of
a substantial part of the teaching profession that disliked
both Woodhead and Ofsted. Later, it emerged that the notorious
league tables of school performance would also be retained.
Grant maintained schools persist, albeit re-named. We are
asked to believe that many of our teachers are incompetent
lay-abouts, determined to protect a quiet life and an assured
future. (Have any of these purveyors of Right Opinion ever
been school governors?) Not even education is to be immune
from the requirements of the business faction. Some head teachers
have been driven to consider the posting of commercial material
in their school premises; school grounds have become 'natural'
for communications companies looking to site radio masts.
Now we have business funded educational 'action series'. Here
again, the notion that education might have an autonomy to
protect it from the commercial interest is the preserve of
the crank. Wisdom resides in and emanates from the dual Blunkett-Woodhead
oracle. All this certainty is awesome and frightening.
We are, by now, aware that welfare, like income redistribution,
possesses the rare quality of intrinsic evil. All must be
herded, cajoled, and press-ganged into employment, because
that pays the taxes and reduces the welfare bill. No thought
may be given to the possibility that it might be more socially
useful for young single mothers to be given adequate welfare
income, enabling them to spend more time, not less, with their
children, rather than to sit them behind a supermarket till,
bored out of their minds for a derisory wage. We have yet
to see that the jobs are there for any significant number
of those who might wish to take them. The orthodoxy is that
the taxes of the burgeoning poor will help make up for the
absence of taxes from the burgeoning rich, for whom the leisure
choice has never been thought reprehensible.
Behind all this progress the capitalist agenda persists,
based on a set of seemingly unquestionable assumptions: that
corporations have rights; that capital is always benign in
intention, if not in outcome; that profit is good, provided
the right people are making it; that, by exercising our own
judgement in matters economic we are in danger of fouling
up the workings of a divinely ordained economic rectitude
which is constituted naturally to work for our benefit. This
entire philosophy, to give it a dignity it does not deserve,
underlies the latest attempt to bind ordinary mortals to the
heavenly treadmill - the notorious Multilateral Agreement
on Investment, a charter designed finally to make the world
safe for capital. We escape that, so far, only because the
capitalist cannot agree on the fine print, not because there
is any challenge to the principle. Given another twelve months,
they will get it right. Blair and his Government are enthusiastic.
The time to challenge the neo-Liberals is not later, but
now. It is time to re-assert the primacy of the state over
capital. 'Democracy' which, at best, has been a delicately
crafted drama, is being turned by these people into a farce.
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