Ken Livingstone has been criticised for a proposed deal to get cheap Venezuelan oil for London’s buses, in return for consultancy services…
The deal could subsidise Oyster travel cards for the poorest Londoners, Mr Livingstone said.

Fare’s fair, Chavez-style, or oil-for-wonks scandal?

The usual suspects aren’t happy:

But opponents on the London assembly, who want to question the mayor at City Hall today, are unconvinced. Angie Bray, the leader of London’s Tories, dismissed the scheme as a “socialist propaganda fest”.
She said: “Ken and the president of Venezuela should be ashamed of themselves for even contemplating such a proposal. I’m sure the Venezuelans who struggle below the poverty line, many of them critically so, would be shocked at the cynical siphoning off of their main asset to provide one of the world’s most prosperous cities with cheap oil.”
Mike Tuffrey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats in London, said the deal smacked of aid, not trade. “This reduces us to the status of a third-world barter economy. We should be weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, not trying to get them at subsidised prices from Venezuela.”

First, London in general may be one of the richest cities in Europe, but it also contains some of its poorest districts. Fuel poverty is a real and growing concern and, whilst I would dearly like to see a reduced dependence on fossil fuels in general, this should not simply mean debarring the poor from travelling – as the Greens also appear to suggest here.
Second, Mike Tuffrey is adopting the classic Lib Dem pose: confused opportunism. He appears to have little idea what “trade, not aid” means for resource-rich developing countries. Countries rich in natural assets have long suffered from the “resource curse”: under capitalist relations of trade, being a country with great natural wealth generally makes you poorer, not richer.
Part of the reason for this is the so-called “Dutch disease”: if I as, say, Chad (PDF), want to sell you some of my oil, I will do so for dollars on international markets. But if I want to use those dollars in Chad, I need to convert them into francs. Demand for francs pushes their price – the exchange rate – up. Rises in the exchange rate in turn squeeze other exporting sectors of the economy, like agricultural producers and manufacturers, as the prices of their goods internationally rise with the exchange rate. They will be forced to cut domestic costs – that is, wages – or face going out of business.
Unlike the classic Dutch disease, Venezuela has not recently discovered oil. But the skyrocketing price of crude in recent years has had a similar effect on the Venezuelan bolivar, creating great pressure for its appreciation.
One way to avoid this pressure is to avoid the international currency market altogether. A “barter agreement”, such as the one Tuffrey is becoming so sniffy about, is the ideal means to do this: a direct exchange of valuable UK services for valuable Venezuelan products, with no need to introduce debilitating exchange rate pressure.
Compare this to the consequences of insisting that developing countries follow the markets’ diktat. Tories and Lib Dems in London are all but demanding the immiseration of those in Caracas slums.

There’s something unpleasant about the hounding of Prescott. Not that the man isn’t a Blairite stooge: of course he is. But that’s not why he’s being attacked, and this ought to inspire a little unease. There is a pattern to this.

The Chancellor is berated for being too glumly Scottish. The Home Secretary, whilst not a dour Scotsman, is sniped at for his apparently aggressive Glaswegian lilt. John Prescott is unmistakably Northern, from a working-class background and (we are invited to believe) therefore a bit dim.

It is a parade of stereotypes. Not only politicians now all expected to believe the same things, it seems they all have to look and sound the same: look and sound and believe, in fact, exactly the same as those in the absurdly elitist media they desperately cling to. Only the Home Counties is good enough for classless, meritocratic Britain.

Once the sectarian identities multiculturalism inevitably promotes get hold, it doesn’t seem to matter how bad the politicians who exploit
them are, as Respect’s success in London’s East End shows…

Once again, we find a slice of the electorate in a poor part of Britain that is so lost in identity politics and victimhood that it will vote for those who stoke their rage, no matter how worthless they are.

You can almost smell the contempt, wafting over from the Betsey Trotwood.

Elsewhere, we find that Respect is “Britain’s first electoral Islamist party.”

This is plainly a racist argument. The author has seen councillors with certain names, and with certain coloured skins, and assumes he is looking at “Islamists”. It is an argument designed to appeal to that squealing section of the former Left dangerously close to convincing itself that the Muslim hordes are massing against poor, vulnerable “liberal values”. Latter-day Pope Urbans, dropping religious obscurantism for an “anti-totalitarian” perversion of the Left’s history, urge vigilance against the unbelievers.

This risible nonsense does not stand up to the most cursory examination of politics in Tower Hamlets. Take, for example, the two new Respect councillors in Whitechapel. One, Wais Islam, described himself in his election literature as “leaving New Labour to join Respect”. Another, Shahed Ali, was a Labour Party member for nearly twenty years. Now, they are both Muslims; but I trust our tolerant, liberal friends would not be so crass as to say outright that every Muslim is a “fundamentalist”. The same pattern appears across the borough: those joining and campaigning for Respect are former Labour Party members and supporters. Some are Muslims, some are not.

These new members have joined Respect partly because of the war, but mostly because of the awful fashion in which New Labour has run Tower Hamlets for the last twelve years. In Shahed’s case, the final straw was the destruction of local Labour Party democracy: local members were not even allowed to select their own council candidates, the final list being dictated by central office. New Labour, sensing rebellion, attempted to rule by fiat.

The privatisation and dismemberment of local services, the housing crisis, the absence of youth facilities: these are the issues that mattered on the doorstep. Far from the apocalyptic fantasies of the pro-war “Left”, this election was fought, street-by-street, on bread-and-butter issues. Respect stood on a demonstrably Old Labour platform; it will stand in the council chamber for demonstrably Old Labour values. A previously under-represented, deprived, and thoroughly working-class area of London now has councillors prepared to fight its corner.

New Labour, in marked contrast, repeated its 2005 election trick, leaning towards communalism. In Shadwell, leaflets promoting the impeccably New Labour council leader, Michael Keith, urged voters to ignore Respect’s “lies” and vote for the “Muslim party”. In Whitechapel, a vicious whispering campaign against the Respect candidates’ alleged lack of Muslim virtue managed to return one of Michael Keith’s lieutenants at the expense of a politically talented young Bengali woman.

It is worth noting, by the by, that Respect has more Muslim women councillors than all the other parties put together. Labour ran next to no female Muslim candidates; the Lib Dems did not field any in winnable areas. Only Respect broke with a long-standing local tradition. These are not the actions of a “communalist”, still less a “fundamentalist” organisation.

In the topsy-turvy world of the Euston Manifesto group and their clique, all this is stood on its head: far from demonstrably fighting for women’s rights, Respect is alleged to be repressing them; far from fighting on a traditional, socialist platform of public services, local democracy, and working-class solidarity, Respect is alleged to be dividing the community; far from being the only party consistently opposed to communalist politics, Respect is alleged to be promoting “communalism”.

This smoke-and-mirrors trick only works when Tower Hamlets is presented as some desolate heart of darkness, into which the light from brave, sure-footed liberal scribes occasionally penetrates. Much of the borough is poor, desperately so, and overcrowded; too many of its residents have been effectively abandoned by all the main parties; the inequalities it presents are breathtakingly severe. This much is true. But claims that Tower Hamlets is also “Muslim-dominated” are very wide of the mark: at the last census, the borough was found to be 51% “white British”; it is 33% Bangladeshi, not all of whom are Muslim; and there is only one council ward in which Bangladeshis are even the majority. One-third of respondents in Tower Hamlets as whole defined themselves as Muslim.

Put simply, a plain “communalist” party cannot win here. The demography is set against it. The degenerated local Labour Party, in attempting to shore up its weakened vote, has taken to running two, separate “communalist” campaigns come election time: one for “white” areas, and one for “Muslim”. But New Labour’s serious defeats in two critical wards, Whitechapel and Shadwell, show there is no great appetite for communalist politics amongst British Bengalis. The unpleasant settlement between New Labour and old-style clientelism has been very significantly weakened.

And the wild-eyed fundamentalists? Some can be found, in dribs and drabs, attempting to break up election meetings, or campaigning against the Brick Lane Mela. They cannot be found in Respect.

Respect has already pushed New Labour onto the back foot over council house privatisation. We have exposed the ballot-rigging that has taken place under their watch. We have built an organisation that can overturn wards they have held for nine decades. With at least three council seats likely to be reballoted in coming weeks, New Labour’s slender council majority is close to vanishing.

First up, I live in London. If there’s no tubes running, it will have a direct impact on my evening. (Just to make that clear.)

But there’s not a chance in hell I’m going to line up with the predictable furore about “greedy unions” and “£30,000 a year” and “35-hour weeks” and all the rest of it. Nor can I stand the equally tiresome claims that yes, of course we support the right to strike… but not at New Year! Heaven forbid that this right should ever be exercised.

This strike’s not about money, or some perverse desire to “spoil a great night out” on the union’s part. It’s about Transport for London wanting to break arrangements it had previously made over rostering. The RMT claims this will reduce safety on the tube.

Now, as a reasonably regular tube passenger, I’d place the drivers and station staff of the RMT in a better position to make judgements about my safety than employers prepared to contract out repair work to notorious cowboys like Jarvis. If a strike’s necessary to defend my safety on the tube, so be it.

There’s a wider issue, however. Tube drivers are better-paid than others because they have a strong, well-organised union. Breaking that union won’t suddenly mean, say, nurses getting paid more; quite the opposite.

Weakening the most powerful and best-organised elements of the working class makes grinding away at the rest of the workforce so much easier. The only way lower-paid workers will improve their lot is through organisation. Anything that undermines their attempts at organisation weakens their ability to win better pay and conditions.

Historically, unionisation amongst lower-paid and previously unorganised workers has tended to follow the better-organised and better-paid workers. Successful strikes provide an excellent example for others; moreover, the support of the better-organised can be vital in defending the weaker sections – the solidarity between baggage handlers and food-packers in the recent Gate Gourmet dispute was an excellent example of this.

With that in mind, I wish a happy new year to Bob Crow and the RMT. I hope many more will follow their lead over the coming 12 months.

What is vaunted today as the “European social model” can only be defended if European political strength grows alongside the markets. It is solely on the European level that a part of the political regulatory power that is bound to be lost on the national level can be won back. Today the EU member states are strengthening their cooperation in the areas of justice, criminal law and immigration. An active Left taking an enlightened stance toward European politics could have also pressed long ago for greater harmonisation in the areas of taxation and economic policy.

“Harmonisation… in economic policy”? Habermas takes a wonderfully benign view of a process that is becoming only too familiar. In the race to the bottom demanded by neoliberal policy, Britain is the pacemaker. A major part for of the case for a “no” vote here, should we face a referendum, is not to defend social protections in Britan, but to defend them across Europe. There are no more ardent enthusiasts for wholesale deregulation and a thoroughgoing neoliberalism in Europe than the British political class, exemplified by the oleganious Peter Mandelson, here seen trying for screw over the Third World. Far from pulling Britain leftwards, the British government has, for decades, acted to pull Europe to the right: a supposedly internationalise left-liberal Europhilia turns out to be alarmingly parochial, privileging minor (if any) social gains in the UK over a baleful neoliberal backwash across the continent.

The debate over the Bolkestein directive showed just how pernicious an influence the British government and senior British officials are in the EU, persistently advocating greater “liberalisation” and further extensions of the rule of the market across the continent. These are delivered in hectoring style, with guardians of the Anglo-Saxon model wagging fingers at slovenly Europeans and their recidivist attachment to the welfare state, employment protection, and free education. Gordon Brown, that supposed “left-wing” alternative to Blair, is no better than Peter Mandelson in this regard, vowing to defeat EU legislation to restict working hours. The British welfare state has taken a hammering after 26 years of Thatcherism and its ideological children in power; those currently bashing away at the NHS, state education and the rest will be strengthened here, as elsewhere, by the constitution. As Brown’s opposition to the European working time directive indicates, New Labour are adept at cherry-picking EU policy to suit their own particular vision.

For what we are all presented with is a free market treaty with a few sops. That’s why the no campaign in France has been led by the Left. The case for a “no” vote in France is even clearer: backdoor Thatcherism should be fought just as much as if the Iron Lady walked in through the front. There will be no gains, no improvements, and the real possibility of distinctly worsened conditions for millions of workers across Europe – “old Europe”, and new – if this constitution is ratified. As one summary (accurately) put it:

There is no improvement in the content of the Union’s policies when it comes to workers’ rights, social issues, the environment or gender equality. There are some beautiful words, but no obligations made or tools created for progressive politics…

Any policy contradicting the free market is simply not possible for the Union, which of course limits the possibilities for progressive politics in almost any field. The single market is still the core of the project and the failed EMU policies remain unchanged, imposing austerity measures on the member states and the dictates of a central bank beyond democratic control. The goal of continued economic liberalisation is clearly spelled out in the treaty.

Startlingly, Andrew at Hold that Thought, following Habermas, seems to dismiss the actual contents of the constitution as irrelevant: social protections are “…under threat with or without the EU Constitution, thanks to globalisation.” It is as if the simple fact of declaring there to be a ratified constitution, irrespective of what it actually says, will be sufficient to usher in a glorious cosmpolitan dawn for the 25 member states. We, the happy Europeans – moving swiftly past the unhappy Africans and unhappy Asians we lucky few imprison on our borders – will march, volumes of EU legislation in hand, towards the new Jerusalem.

The pessimism should be obvious. A classically ultra-left position, that constitutions are essentially irrelevant compared to the real demands of power, joins hands with an ill-founded Europhile reformism. Nowhere in this is any sense that other agencies or forces may exist that are better placed to deliver social justice than the venal political classes of Europe, committed for decades to a broadly neoliberal vision of the world. Quite why a declaration of faith in the existence of the EU by its citizens would alter their course is unclear.

This is Habermas’ major claim. He sees no possibility of change from below, and so retreats to a thoroughgoing legalism. Worse, there is an ugly undertone to statements like these:

Bush is the one who would rejoice at the failure of the European constitution, for it would allow Europe to develop a common foreign and security policy with enough soft power to bolster opposition to the neoconservative view of global order, also within the United States. It is in our common interest to develop the United Nations, and the law of nations, into a politically constituted world community without a world government. We must attain an effective juridification of international relations, before other world powers are in a position to emulate the power politics of the Bush government in violation of the law of nations.

Good Europeans vs. bad Americans is a model all internationalists should noisily reject. To dismiss – at a minimum – the 48% who voted against Bush in November 2004; to dismiss the many historic achievements of the US left; to write off any possibility of change in America that does not depend on external confrontation is to evince a profound, pessimistic conservatism.

Habermas is too smart not know that an “effective juridification of international relations” depends on the effective development of international force; if he is serious about wishing a strengthened Europe to face a neoconservative Washington, he must wish also that we enlightened EU citizens develop not just “soft power”, but hard military muscle. By such means can we hope to corral the backward peoples of the globe into a “politically constituted world community”.

It is not cynical to observe that the continent responsible for slavery, colonialism and genocide the world over contains no innate moral superiority by which such a new power might be justified. Absent the last fifty years, and we are left with a four-hundred year record of European colonial conquest and brutality sufficient to inspire a certain diziness – all conducted by the most enlightened of conquistadors and conquerors.

Where genuine progress in Europe has occurred, it has not been because of our vainglorious ruling classes; it has been in spite of them. Democracy, fundamental rights, welfare states were all forcibly extracted, continent-wide. The growth of mass labour movements and their ability to apply overwhelming political pressure are responsible for such progress as has occurred. For the last twenty-five to thirty years, such movements have been on the back foot; Habermas, searching for a force capable of breaking a brutal “neoconservative” offensive, ignores them entirely.

I believe he is wrong to do so. The “political spaces” Habermas wishes to develop through a mystified constitution-worship are already being developed: the growth and successes of the global Social Forums movement are the most visible expression of that. These, it is true, remain marginal. But they exist nontheless, and their marginality is not fated: we have seen, in Britain, what can happen when the broad global justice movement unites with and feeds into a narrower but deeper political movement against the war. Such a unity was critical to the success of the anti-war movement here. The great anti-war mobilisations could not take place without it. That anti-war movement, in turn, has been responsible for bringing a great rupture in the conventional political framework, whose political effects were are only just beginning to see. The battered labour movement is beginning to recover. These are the forces that will demonstrate “another Europe is possible”. The constitution, if ratified, will only weaken them.

With the dust now settling around us, certain new features have emerged in the grey and unpleasant land of British politics. New Labour continues is determinedly self-destructive bearing towards plain authoritarianism, seemingly unabashed; elsewhere, a definite series of new settlements are emerging. Take Tim Yeo, a liberal Tory, writing in the Guardian shortly after his resignation from the front bench:

Although the election of some talented and energetic new MPs could provide a springboard for recovery, a closer look at the results gives no cause for comfort. Conservatives are no longer the main opposition to Labour in great chunks of Britain. In Scotland we are not even the third party. Faced with a distrusted prime minister and a tarnished government, more people turned to the Liberal Democrats than to the Conservatives to protest.

In the aftermath of defeat, everyone says we must learn the lessons of the election but few spell out what this really means. Modernising the party means more than appearing on television without a tie and not being nasty to minorities. Now is the moment, perhaps the last moment, for Conservatives to accept that our brand was comprehensively rejected by the voters, not just in 1997 but at both the subsequent elections too. This doesn’t mean we have to abandon our principles. Belief in individual liberty, the merits of the market and a firm line on defence and law and order, and in the need to keep the state small, should remain the bedrock of our approach.

This should be set alongside Tory MP Damian Green’s musings, also in the Guardian, in which he suggests that

What this election reveals to thoughtful Conservatives is that we have now tested to destruction the theory that continuing with the ideas that served us in the 1980s and 1990s will somehow win us back the affections of the British people. For three elections in a row we have tried variations on a post-Thatcherite theme, using either Europe or immigration as a signal that we share the discomfort of some British people with the modern world. There are many such people, and they need representing, but they do not form the basis for a government.

Green even goes so far as to say that a national coalition with the Lib Dems might be necessary. Vince Cable, on the same page in the printed edition, concurs. Cable is one of the few senior Lib Dems with a degree of ideological clarity about the direction the party should take – which is, as far as he and the Orange Book crew are concerned, still further over to the right. It is possible to imagine a coalescence of socially liberal but economically conservative votes around such a programme: roughly, gay rights plus the free market. As the newly elected MP for Sheffield Hallam, Nick Clegg, wrote of his free-market comrades, “Other strands of liberalism might place greater emphasis on social reform, on radical constitutional reform, on the abolition of inherited privilege.” But not his, and not Cable’s, and not a whole crowd born-again Thatcherites. An alliance, explicit or otherwise, with socially liberal Tories would make perfect sense, over and above the habitual opportunism that has delivered Lib Dem-Tory coalitions in cities up and down the country. On Europe, a key issue for British politics in coming years, the alliance already exists in the blind support for the EU that left Tories and all Lib Dems espouse. Charles Kennedy, days after the result, drew this conclusion, and precisely the opposite to that hoped for by tens of thousands of Lib Dem voters: drop the “high tax” image so disagreeable to Tories of any stripe, question the party’s opposition to nuclear power, and align the Lib Dems still more explicitly with a perceived business interest.

New Labour, as is now clear, bled to death in Iraq. Blair is finished; he may manage a few last unpleasant twitches, but there is simply no way Labour can continue as a credible party of government with a notorious liar and probable war criminal at its helm. The promise of the Third Way – that, given the right conditions, free markets could deliver social justice – was exhausted some time before Iraq, but Blair’s criminally misguided adventure in the Middle East delivered the coup de grace.

Although Respect’s win, and the staggering votes it received across East London and Birmingham, offer the Left an unprecedented opportunity. For the first time in generations the potential is there to build a mass party of the radical Left in Britain, in opposition to an enfeebld New Labour and all the other parties of neoliberalism. The obvious danger, however, is that without both an absolute clarity about both its firm stand against oppression, and a meaningful economic programme, this potential will be missed. Without a clear critique of neoliberalism’s general failings – and, I would argue, Brown’s specific implementation of neoliberal policy – we run the danger of merely repeating, in more forthright fashion, a clear consensus broadly in favour of a diverse and plural society. The Tory left, and the Lib Dem right, could both sign up to such a view of Britain; New Labour also fancies itself in favour of diversity and tolerance, though the rigours of neoliberal government have pushed it elsewhere.

The tie between these two poles is, of course, class. Respect is unashamedly a party of the working class; it enjoys, at present, the support of some of the most downtrodden and overtly oppressed workers in Britain. Its vote in East London came from Asian workers in alliance with sections of the white working class, on a platform of unabashed class politics. This alliance was decisive in bringing victory in Bethnal Green and Bow, and could only have been achieved through the absolute rejection of the communalist politics all other major parties indulged in. We delivered the same message to all parts of the constituency. The Labour vote came from the other half of white working class voters in alliance with the more dependable middle-class areas – including large numbers of better-off Bengali voters. New Labour tailored its message on communalist lines, whilst Oona King was heard on the doorstep telling white constituents that Galloway was “stirring it up” amongst the Bengalis. Elsewhere, they’d call this playing the race card. In the absence of credible class politics, it was all New Labour had to offer.

(An aside: Respect was significantly ahead of Labour during the ward-by-ward count of votes taken at polling stations. It was only after the delivery of the constituency-wide postal votes that the gap between the parties closed. This accounts for the delay in the result. There are numerous reports of voters – including, somewhat bizarrely, Mariella Frostrup – turning up to vote only to be informed they had already voted by post. The suspicion forms that someone attempted to rig the ballot, and that someone miscalculated; this side of a thorough investigation, it can be no more than a suspicion.)

For Respect to flourish, it will need to maintain that same political line. There is a crying need for a political force that can credibly represent the aspirations of working people in Britain, New Labour having long abandoned any pretence at doing so: when it talks about social justice, it is in the language of old-fashioned paternalism, not the language of working-class emancipation, and of the fight for justice. Like Lenin, I will end with an appeal: join us.