London Meltdown posted by Richard Seymour

What could go wrong did go wrong. Boris Johnson is mayor, with a convincing lead. The BNP got a seat on the Assembly. And the Left List failed to make an impact except in a few concentrated areas. The reasons for the latter are obvious enough: launching a new brand name in the space of a couple of months; set-back by a recent split in the organisation; squeezed by the Tory surge and the desire of many to 'Stop Boris' by backing Labour; squeezed by direct competition with those who still had the old name (who did poorly, but better than us overall, and much better in City and East); squeezed by a higher turnout. There were so many things militating against a strong Left List showing. But even I would not have expected last night's atrophy. New Labour has collapsed decisively not on some right-wing hocus-pocus about crime or immigration (although the media hysteria obviously contributed to Livingstone's defeat), but on the ten pence tax rate and the economy and the sense that Labour doesn't even try to represent ordinary working people any more. But the Left has not been in a position to make any inroads as a result. On the contrary - all of the Left experienced a decline, and the right-wing parties got a boost. And, in part because of the poisonous climate generated over immigrants and Muslims, the Nazis of the BNP are on the Assembly while their estranged half-cousins from the National Front (who consider the BNP sell-outs) polled strongly in Bexley and Bromley as well as in Lewisham and Greenwich. There are some hard fights ahead.

The Blairites' advice was evidently no use to Ken, who lost it in the last few days with a series of bizarre declarations, building up to his claim that he wanted to arrest people for littering. Even Boris Johnson didn't go that far. The Blairite strategy is to move so far to the right on certain issues that even the Tories can't criticise you, while giving the left some friendly words. More accurately, this is the Clintonite strategy of triangulation developed by the Republican PR man Dick Morris. Livingstone listened to this kind of advice at his own immense peril, but what else did he have to offer? He tried at the last minute to cut a vaguely 'progressive' looking deal with the Green Party, but I suspect that most Berry voters would have given him a second-preference anyway. And the Greens didn't do all that well in the end, despite some locally strong votes. They kept two seats on the Assembly, but gained little from the extensive media exposure. Livingstone didn't have anything new to offer Labour voters, wasn't really keen to distance himself too much from the government, had no chance with most right-wing voters - his niche was exhausted and depleted. The Tories have been canny in selecting Boris because, despite his obvious unfitness for the role, his burlesque comedy obscures the memory of the 'nasty party'. I suspect that 'nice' centre-right voters who might previously have lumped for the Lib Dems went back to the fold. It's been hard to detect much in the way of policy from the Tories, and certainly little distinctive. Johnson did not win on an aggressive platform of clubbing the unions, hammering immigrants and brutalizing petty criminals. This isn't Margaret Thatcher, the next generation. It is BoJo the Bozo, the clown from hell, all slapstick and bravado. His platform consisted of some relatively unthreatening centre-right soundbites, which is one reason why the (quite legitimate) attempts to make him sound scary didn't work. One very small contributor to Johnson's win is highlighted by John Harris in the Guardian today: "the topsy-turvy, faux-progressive politics minted by the self-styled pro-war left". I don't credit Nick Cohen, Martin Bright and company with very much influence at all, but they certainly contributed to the reactionary media campaign about 'Islamism', providing a 'progressive' proscenium for the racist dramaturgy.

What of Labour's national wipe-out? First of all, we've just seen the complete enervation of the New Labour vision of a Whiggish coalition, a 'progressive' lib-lab bloc for centre-left hegemony in the 21st Century. New Labour collapsed, but the Liberals didn't pick up very much of the slack. In Wales, as in Scotland, the nationalists are getting the benefit of the anti-New Labour vote. In England, the Liberals lost control of some councils and gained some, and they seem to have a net gain overall of just one council. It is surprising in this context to see the Lib Dem result being spoken of as if it's a credible one for Nick Clegg. Commentators have been quick to draw comparisons with 1983, but the last time Labour's share of the vote was this low was in 1968, shortly after Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech and at the height of Harold Wilson's unpopularity over devaluation. Wilson's government had also, despite some moderate reformist pledges, reneged on many commitments at the behest of the IMF. What is different this time round is the extent of Labour's collapse in its heartlands. It didn't just crumble in the marginals. It lost core votes across Wales, in Hartlepool, and in Wolverhampton. It lost a strong presence in Reading, by no means a marginal seat. It was kicked out of Bury in Greater Manchester after 22 years. The rapid erosion that began under Blair is now an avalanche. Blair's 2005 election victory was more of a loss for the Tories than a thumbs-up for New Labour, with just over a third of voters backing the government and with less voters than supported Labour when it lost in 1992. It is now obvious that the Labour Party will crash to a poor second in 2010, while the Tories will pick up around 40% of the vote. The Lib Dems will not match their 22% vote in 2005.

Anyone who thinks that Labour is about to turn left is kidding themselves. Far more likely is that the government will take a more aggressive stance toward the unions (as it did in 1969, with 'In Place of Strife') and make a demonstrative crackdown on immigration (as it did with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1968). Labour doesn't contain the resources for a regeneration of its battered left, any more than it did when John McDonnell failed to get enough PLP support to even run a campaign against Gordon Brown. The last vaguely leftish credible alternative to Brown was the late Robin Cook, whose standing after his dignified antiwar resignation speech would have made him the obvious candidate. And even he would have struggled. Just because the left-of-Labour vote was poor, just because the Tories have made a decisive recovery, don't think that we can place our hopes in a New Labour conversion, or that we can avoid continuing to try to build a left-of-Labour alternative. We will be lying to ourselves in quite a dangerous way if we imagine that we can claw back some space by just abandoning the electoral terrain to New Labour. The fact that it is now a more difficult task in the short-term does not mean it can be wished away.

For socialists, however, elections are not our main kind of activity. Saying that, I run the risk of appearing to diminish the hard work put in and the hopes invested in the campaign, and that is not my meaning. However, while we should spare no blushes in being directly honest about what just happened, we should not allow ourselves to disappear up our own ballot-boxes. How we intervene in the coming crises over pay, the economy, and the rising threat of racism and the far right, is far more significant than how many votes we rack up. One of the first things we can do is turn out for the protest against the Nazi BNP outside City Hall, this coming Tuesday at 6pm.

Labels: boris johnson, disaster politics, ken livingstone, left list, london, mayor, new labour

Early results posted by Richard Seymour

Well, first of all for the Left List, not bad so far. The Left List has not stood many candidates outside London, so the main event will be the results for the London mayor and GLA. Nevertheless, according to the Respect website, the results in the local council elections include 37% for Muktar Master in Preston, 23% for Neil McAlister in Bolton, 12.5% for Nahella Ashraf in Manchester, 11% for Raghib Ahsan in Birmingham, and a spate of other strong results. The full results for the Left List candidates are updated regularly here. These reflect continuing pockets of strength despite the obvious difficulty of having undergone a split and then, due to a legal technicality, having to launch a new name in a very short space of time. We're down in some places but notably Muktar Master actually increased his vote somewhat, and was barely kept out by the Labour candidate. Having seen the results for both sides of the split organisation, I can see that both have suffered somewhat in a number of areas. I am not going to get lachrymose about that - we all knew it was coming, and anyone who didn't had their head buried in rocks. The real question from my point of view is what sort of basis the mainstream of Respect that stood as the Left List has for a regroupment, and while we shall have to see how well we've done in London, these few results show that we're in a decent position. (I don't want to be rude, but I honestly don't think the Renewalists have any such basis, simply on account of who they are and the incoherent politics holding the fragile coalition together. My intuition is that they are going to spend a few years guarding diminishing pockets of strength and slowly seeping back into the Labour Party.)

The big picture, beyond insurgent left-of-Labourism, is that the Tories have made significant gains across the board, with 147 new councillors at the minute. According to The Guardian, with a turnout of 35%, "Labour looked set to be pushed into third place, with a meagre 24% share of the vote, trailing the Lib Dems on 25% and the Tories on 44%." This is a catastrophic low of New Labour's making, and it is self-evident that nothing beyond a sudden very popular policy reversal could have saved the situation. And the fact that it is going to continue in 2009 makes the task of building a left alternative all the more urgent. This is a perception quite contrary to the impulses of some who take it as a cue to rush back to the Labour Party. But that is British politics for you - the rats flee onto the sinking ship rather than the other way about. In addition to the Tories' success, the BNP have 8 extra councillors including two in the Labour stronghold of Rotherham and a couple of new ones in Coventry and Warwickshire. From what I gather, their overall vote has not surged and is probably even down a bit, which is a relief. But if the far right can pick up 8 council seats and that is not a big night for them, this just points to how much they have been able to insinuate their way into local politics on the basis of the toxic Islamophobia and bigoted nonsense about asylum seekers that their Express-reading petit-bourgeois constituents lap up. And we haven't seen their results in London yet - if they get someone on the assembly, we're talking about a whole new kind of fight, especially if it coincides with the victory for Boris Johnson that the fascists are eager for.

The liberals have done abysmally. In the prevailing circumstances, they ought to have been taking Labour councils. They certainly did far better under the slightly left-of-centre leadership of Charles Kennedy, but they are crashing and burning under an uncharismatic right-wing leadership after the Orange Book crowd mounted an effective coup. It's not just that they don't have any distinctive policies to speak of. They don't even have any resonant policy flavours. In 2005, they were seen as a major 'anti-war' party, and they made gains as a result. They seemed to stand against the corrupt and hated Blair regime on some principled grounds. Now the co-ordinates of the situation have drastically changed. They no longer have the affable Chuckie-Egg, New Labour no longer has Blair, and the Tories no longer have Michael Howard. Their London candidate is even less memorable than Susan Kramer and will be lucky not to see his vote fall below the 2004 level. True, the war is not as immediate an issue as it was before. If it points to everything that is rotten about New Labour and unites a broad swathe of people against the party, it has been eclipsed by the economic crisis and the government's responses to that - the public sector pay cuts, the blundering over Northern Rock, and the abolition of the ten pence tax rate. However, I can't believe that even supercop Brian Paddick really believed that people would storm the polls on the basis of a promise to 'cut crime'.

If these results are a reliable guide, it seems likely that New Labour are in for a hammering in London. And it's hard to see Ken Livingstone escaping from that - he might just scrape through on the basis of not being Boris Johnson, perhaps with a small lead in second preferences, but if so he's going to be presiding over an Assembly that has more Tories in it. The Greens, who have made a few gains nationally, but are generally on stalemate, may have been boosted by the attention given to them in the press coverage - Sian Berry is seen as somehow the 'natural' fourth candidate, despite the fact that the Greens were beaten by Lindsey German in 2004, and has already received the full backing of the Independent and a nod of approval from the Observer. Yet, the Greens have done little to distinguish themselves from New Labour, and it is hard not see their London campaign as an adjunct of Livingstone's. That is partially a result of a conscious decision not to seem left-wing, as the party's election agent Chris Rose has explained. Further, their record in power is pretty flimsy and sometimes disgusting - as per Jenny Jones' backing for Sir Ian Blair (so much for the party of civil liberties and anti-racism). Given that, it is just possible that they will suffer from some of the same reflux that is about to hit New Labour.

While I don't think people are moving sharply to the Right, the Tories are going to be the main beneficiaries of New Labour's woes for as long as the alternatives are faceless Lib Dems, rightward-moving Greens, and some small radical parties. And the Tories will be much more aggressive on privatization and public sector pay, and may well try to force through strike bans. There is no alternative to the project of realignment, which must be grounded in the organised working class.

Update: We've just got a brilliant result in Sheffield Burngreave, where we came second with about 23% of the vote, beating the Greens and the Tories.

Labels: bnp scum, boris johnson, gla elections, ken livingstone, left list, lindsey german, local council elections, london, sad sack liberals

May Day Greetings posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: left list, may 1968, may day, workers solidarity

And we're back. posted by Richard Seymour

Just in time for the election, the Tomb returns (like, er, Jesus and Easter and that). Just so that we're clear, this is your programme for today. You have three chances to vote, and what follows is an insultingly obvious step-by-step strategy for you to help secure the best possible result for the Left:

1. The Mayoral vote. PINK BALLOT PAPER
Has first and second preference. If you vote Lindsey 1 and Ken 2, you will in no way jeopardise Ken's chance of beating Boris Johnson. Voting Lindsey first will send a clear message that you are not happy with the way Livingstone is cosying up to City and the property developers.
Once the first preferences are counted, the top two candidates are set aside and everyone else's votes are re-distributed as per the second preferences. Once they are totalled the Mayor is decided. A second preference counts no less than a first preference.
Vote with a cross for No 5 Lindsey in the first column, if you want to put a cross for Ken in the second column.

2. The constituency candidates. YELLOW BALLOT PAPER
We are standing Left List candidates across the city, and the constituency elections are decided just like parliamentary elections - first past the post.
Vote Left List candidate with a cross.

3. The London Wide Assembly Member. PEACH BALLOT PAPER
This is perhaps the most important part of the election. It is proportional representation. If the Left List gets 5% of the vote, Lindsey gets elected. Conversely if the BNP get 5% they get a seat. We need the MAXIMUM turnout in this part of the election to get representation and to keep the BNP out.
One cross, next to No 8 Left List

Interesting to see what note the campaigns are heading to the polls on. Livingstone is rehashing his support for 'zero tolerance' policies, using the language of New Labour's 'Respect agenda'. He may just scrape through, but if he does it will be no thanks to his endless prostration before the Blairite court. Boris Johnson is wisely concealing himself from the public, and not saying too much about anything. This is presumably so that the first thing voters remember will not be a spoiled upper class reactionary who can't remember his lines, but rather a spoiled upper class reactionary who can't remember his lines on Have I Got News For You. The Greens, whose mayoral candidate is supported by the Federation of Small Businesses, have recently consolidated their pact with New Labour by launching a joint 'green manifesto' with Ken Livingstone. Brian Paddick is fading gracefully into the background, registering a pathetic 12% of the vote for the Lib Dems. I still don't know what exactly his campaign is about, beyond the fact that he is an ex-copper and considers himself the 'serious choice' for Londoners. I also heard once that he preferred hope to fear, which is nice, but I both hope and fear that he'll be doing traffic duty before the dust has settled.

So, at this glorious apex of Metropolitan democracy, in which no serious issue has failed to be neglected, there is only one candidate who doesn't believe in unaffordable housing, wants to slash tube and bus fares, isn't afraid to mention the war, and will back trade unionists. You know what to do.

Labels: gla elections, left list, lindsey german, london, mayor, socialism

Anti-fascism and the left. posted by Richard Seymour

I couldn't make it to the carnival yesterday, otherwise I'd have pics and footage for you, but all reports I've heard indicate two things: 1) it was a massive success, and 2) the Left List rocked. At least 100,000 people turned up for the carnival, some thirty years after the original 'Rock Against Racism'. It is important that this was a success, because it will provide a springboard for the hard anti-fascist campaigning that is going to have to take place, especially given the threat of the BNP getting a seat on the London Assembly. In 2004, the BNP were 6,000 votes short of a representative on the Assembly. This time they may potentially benefit from a lower turnout (thus diminishing the total number of votes they need). A frequent talking point is also the collapse in support for UKIP (after the Kilroy fracas), presumably leading potential UKIP voters to consider the fascists. It looks as if there is little support for other right-wing competition like the 'English Democrats' (a bunch of nobody whiners whose candidate, from 'Fathers 4 Justice', has stepped down) or the 'Christian Choice' (led by a ranting sleazeball who is focusing his campaign against an East London 'mega-mosque'). Suffice to say that with the surge in racism across the UK, particularly against Muslims and Eastern Europeans, it is all too possible that the BNP will end up both with a seat on the Assembly, and with a sizeable new tranch of councillors across the country.

Secondly, it was important for the Left List to make a good showing, because it is the only radical left-wing vote available for both the mayor and the assembly. Ken Livingstone's weakness, resulting from his embrace of New Labour, has given the Tory press confidence to viciously attack him often in Islamophobic terms. The Evening Standard's obsequious support for Boris Johnson is matched only by the daily helping of ordure about Livingstone and his connections with Muslims, trade unionists and others reviled by the right-wing. The Standard doesn't seem to care that its Islamophobic tirades are helping the far right, but Livingstone is in a weak position to counter this because he is trying to mobilise a voting bloc on the narrowest possible grounds - depoliticised multiculturalism, no mention of the war, not enough for housing, privatization of the East London line, pandering to the interests of the City, unqualified defense of the police etc. Realistically, the biggest immediate concerns facing Londoners are the brewing recession, the collapse in available credit, the lack of affordable housing, obscenely high transport costs, the growing poverty and inequality in the city, long working hours and shit pay. The only mayoral candidate to talk seriously about this is Lindsey German. This radical message went down well at the recent Stonewall hustings. New Labour can't effectively challenge the BNP politically, and not only because they are quite often responsible for giving the BNP their best publicity (ie, Margaret Hodge). The reason they can't challenge the BNP politically is because they rule out in advance even the vocabulary that is needed to express the real problems that their policies do so little to attenuate and so much to aggravate. The sole occasion on which many New Labour MPs can be relied upon to talk about class is in the context of a rebarbative formulation about a supposedly marginalised 'white working class', which of course plays straight into the BNP's hands. You didn't see too many New Labour advocates of last week's national strike action.

Mobilising the anti-fascist vote is essential, but there has always been an argument about what that should mean: should anti-fascists act as vote-catchers for the Labour Party, for example? This strategy of backing the main centre-left party has dogged the French anti-racist organisation, SOS Racisme, and undermined its early militancy. Indeed, its core of activists has often been drawn from the Socialist Party (PS), have always been close to its leadership, and its president from 1999-2003 is a leading PS politician who favours immigration quotas. I doubt the efficacy of such a strategy. Similarly, while it is important to 'bash the fash', it is increasingly obvious that just pointing out that the BNP are a Nazi organisation engaged in various levels of subterfuge ("As long as our own cadres understand the full implications of our struggle, then there is no need for us to do anything to give the public cause for concern ... we must at all times present them with an image of moderate reasonableness") doesn't do enough to motivate people to vote against the BNP, especially if the mainstream candidates are an unappealing crop with almost identical policies. Any anti-fascist campaign has to unite, as the UAF website puts it, "the broadest possible spectrum of society" against the far right. The main strength for anti-fascists is that at the moment, fascists of the BNP ilk and their more explicitly Third Reich imitating milieu remain a tiny and largely despised minority. As such, there is obviously no question of such a campaign outlining in any detail a political alternative to the far right. So, there is an unmistakable need for a supplementary strategy by the left. Even in terms of just mobilising voters who might otherwise abstain, a radical left candidacy is important in combatting the far right - for example, more overall votes in London makes it harder for the BNP to get the requisite 5%. But in a much broader sense, of course, the fascists are thriving on social distress and alienation that they have no intention of alleviating, and which only a vibrant grassroots left rooted in the labour movement can begin to address.

The Nazi hardcore is minute, and any strength they obtain is a result of their ability to pull around themselves different strata of voters and passive supporters. By no means should we imagine that their current supporters are just stray left-wing voters who are tempted by the racist message, albeit many BNP voters will be former Labour supporters. The 2006 Rowntree Report on the BNP's electoral appeal found that their main strategy has been to appeal to 'lower middle class' voters, and their success has been not among the poorest wards, but in the slightly wealthier wards - those which you can imagine accruing smug epithets like 'respectable'. However, lower middle class voters are hardly privileged. Their precarious position means that they are exposed to potentially catastrophic changes in their life chances given a crisis of the system. Further, the Nazis would inevitably rely on being able to mobilise a substantial tier of working class voters with 'anticapitalist' rhetoric (this is already a crucial part of their strategy in the post-industrial north). Only if the systemic critique is articulated and the working class movement radicalised is it possible to counteract this. Put it another way - more than a decade of New Labour, and the strategies of accomodation hitherto pursued in much of the labour movement, has done nothing to hinder the far right.

Labels: anti-fascism, bnp scum, left list, london, love music hate racism, nazi

Left List for London posted by Richard Seymour

From the Left List page, I see they've put up the election broadcast. Thought you all might like to see it, in case you're not in front of the television when it is broadcast tomorrow evening:

Labels: gla elections, left list, lindsey german, london, mayor

Death on the Underground posted by Richard Seymour

Via Socialist Worker, we learn that it it gets a year closer with each stop east from Westminster station:

Labels: inequality, left list, london, neoliberalism, socialism

Election sums. posted by Richard Seymour

Guest post by 'christian h':

Those pesky preference votes...

First, the conclusion: A Ken (1st) - Third Party (2nd) vote is mathematically equivalent to a Third Party (1st) - Ken (2nd) vote as far as the eventual outcome is concerned. However, the Third Party (1st) - Ken (2nd) option is preferable as any second preference votes of Third Party won't be counted.

Here's how it works.

It's election time in Londongrad. Running for mayor are Dr. Evil (Boris, to his admirers), Mini Me (aka Ken) and Austin Powers (fusion of left-of-Ken candidates). The voting system is "preference voting", also known as "instant run-off voting." Voter X really prefers Austin Powers, but she absolutely doesn't want Dr. Evil to win. What should she do?

The system works as follows: every voter can assign two votes, a 1st and 2nd preference vote. It is legal to leave the 2nd preference blank, but it isn't possible to only vote for a 2nd preference. The votes have to go to different candidates. After polls close, all 1st preference votes are counted. If one candidate obtains more than 50% of those - that is, more votes than both his opponents together - he is declared the winner. Otherwise, all 1st preference votes of the candidate with the fewest votes are discarded and the corresponding 2nd preference votes counted instead. since only two candidates are left in the race, one of them now is guaranteed to win.

Assume there are 100 eligible voters in Londongrad. On election day, 78 come out to vote - the rest are watching football. Of those 78, 40 vote Dr. Evil 1st preference, 37 vote Mini Me, and one (that's X) votes Austin Powers. The next day, the website socialistsplitters.com accuses X of throwing the vote to Dr. Evil. Are they right? No. If X had voted Mini Me 1st preference, Dr. Evil still had 40 votes - more than half. In formulas, if E, M and A denote 1st preference votes for Dr. Evil, Mini Me and Austin respectively, Dr. Evil wins outright if and only if E > A + M. Only the sum of A and M matters, not the individual totals.

... phew, bad dream! Turns out, Dr. Evil got only 38 of the 1st preference votes, Mini Me 37, and Austin Powers got 3 (one of them cast by X). Now Austin has the fewest 1st preference votes, so they are discarded; instead, the 2nd preference votes on those ballots are now added to the totals of Dr. Evil and Mini Me. If at least two Austin-voters did their duty and voted Mini Me with their 2nd preference, Mini Me has 37+2 = 39 total votes to Dr. Evil's 38, and wins. Only if X and her comrades inexplicably decided to leave 2nd preference blank will Dr. Evil walk away victorious.

In formulas, if e, m and denote second preference votes of the Austin Powers voters, for Dr. Evil and Mini Me respectively, Dr. Evil will now win if E + e > M + m.

To recap, Dr. Evil will win if

(a) either E > M + A

(b) or M + A >= E and E + e > M + m. and E + e > M + m.

Since M + A is at least M + m and no Austin voter will vote Dr. Evil with 2nd preference (that is, e = 0), this simplifies to give that Dr. Evil will win if and only if E > M + m. That is, the only number that matters is M + m - a 2nd preference vote for Mini Me is equally as good as a 1st preference vote.

Labels: gla elections, left list, london, mayor, respect

Left List for London posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: ken livingstone, left list, lindsey german, london, respect

Schadenfreude posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: capitalism, left list, neoliberalism, recession, respect, socialism