We should welcome Lynton Crosby's knighthood

The honours system was ever thus.  Originally devised by absolute monarchs as a means of providing for their bastard progeny, and perhaps as compensation for the cuckolded husbands of the passing occupants of the royal bed, peerages have always been a reward for service to the ruling elite.  Knighthoods, too, have generally been bestowed upon those whose activities have served and bolstered the privilege of the ruling elite.

In the years after the Second World War, the façade of democracy was built up through the use of the lower honours – the MBEs, OBEs and BEMs – to reward charity volunteers, lollypop men and dinner ladies, and the host of entertainers and sportspeople who engage in the essential work of distracting the masses from the injustice of the British class system.  Even so, for the most part, the honours system provided rewards for service to the ruling elite.  This has always been most obvious in the honours conferred upon the luminaries of the (centre) left.  Over the years we have witnessed a steady stream of “moderate” trades union leaders famous primarily for shafting their own members, elevated to the peerage or knighted be the monarch of the day.

As with so much of British life, Blair’s New Labour government was responsible for messing things up.  In opposition, New Labour had used a growing voluntary (sic) sector as an alternative civil service; developing many of the policies that the incoming government eventually enacted.  As a reward, New Labour opened up the honours system to people employed in the voluntary sector, together with the special advisors and senior civil servants charged with enacting New Labour’s programme.

The public were involved to the extent that we were all invited to nominate people who had provided public service.  These nominees would be vetted by a new Honours Committee, which would forward their recommended recipients to the Prime Minister.

These Blairite changes served to confuse the public into believing that the honours system was no longer about privilege and class.  However, even under Blair, the charity fundraisers and lollypop men only got the lesser honours.  Peerages and knighthoods continued to be the preserve of the brown-nosers and lackeys of the ruling elite.

This is why we should welcome Lynton Crosby’s knighthood.  It is an honour in keeping with the historical tradition of the honours system.  It is a reward for (cynical and socially divisive) service to the ruling elite.  It highlights exactly what the system is about.  It helps us tear aside the curtain of celebrities and community workers to see the real class divisions of our increasingly inequitable and divided society.

We should recognise that you cannot have a democratic honours system when you do not live in a democracy.  Nor can you expect a grossly inequitable society to produce anything other than a class-ridden system of rewards to those who serve it.

Like statues in public places, knighthoods and peerages are generally a reward for crapping from on high onto the heads of ordinary people.  And like statues in public places, the best we can say is that the pigeons have it about right!

Can we find a better way of naming these storms?

The key benefit of naming storms would seem to be to provide a reference point where regions experience one catastrophe after another.  We can no longer speak of the “Carlisle floods”, since there have been many.  Nor, now, can we simply refer to them by year – there may have been just one in 2007, 2009 and 2012.  But we may well see three in 2015, and several more in January and February of 2016.  So at least by naming the storms responsible for each episode, we have a point of reference for each one.

The trouble is that in true British fashion, the Met Office has opted for the most banal and uncontroversial names they could find.  Yes, I know that the public were invited to send names in.  But it will have been the Met Office PR department that chose the names that were finally allocated.  So what we have ended up with are a series of storms named after everyone’s favourite uncles and aunts – Desmond, Eve and Frank being the most recent.

These soft, cuddly names appear to directly contradict the chaos and damage caused by the storms themselves.  And I cannot believe that the British public lacked the creativity to capture this.  We can be sure, for example, that someone at the Home Office (or perhaps UKIP HQ) will have attempted to link weather to terror by suggesting names like “Atlantic Storm Osama” in an attempt to imply the potential for death, destruction and disruption.  Far more of us will have undoubtedly suggested naming storms after our favourite villains – “Storm Voldemort” or “Deluge Davros”, perhaps – in an attempt to convey the seriousness of these weather events.

There may be copyright issues that prevent the use of fictional bad guys for naming storms.  And there is a deeper reason for not doing so.  The storms that are currently devastating large tracts of Northern England are not a manifestation of evil impacting us from outside.  They are events entirely of our own making.  These storms are a manifestation of climate change – so-called 1 in 100 year events that have been occurring every couple of weeks (and breaking records each time) cannot be viewed as anything but.  We were warned decades ago that global warming would disrupt the jet stream, push more water vapour into the atmosphere, and produce more violent storms – exactly like the weather events we have witnessed for the best part of ten years now – if it walks like, quacks like, and looks like a bird of the genus Anas, it probably is.

However, blaming climate change is a cop out, since the destruction wrought upon the people of Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire (and several less publicised areas of Scotland and Wales) is more a consequence of human action (and inaction) in response to the threat of climate change than to the new climate conditions.  Perhaps least obviously, the abject failure of government land and housing policy has meant that most new housing in the last thirty years has been built on flood plains with the inevitable consequence that further investment in flood defences has been needed.  But, of course, for thirty years, governments have failed to invest in appropriate defences that take climate change into account – there is no point building defences just a few inches higher than the last flood when scientists are warning us of a need to build our defences several metres higher – anything less is just pouring good money after bad.  Not that the current government has been pouring money into flood defences.  Rather, for the past five years they have deliberately cut back on funding for flood defences – a false economy that may well cost the treasury another £1.5 billion (which will presumably be clawed back through cuts to benefits and social care).

Agricultural policy has also played a part in the deluge.  A deliberate policy of cutting down the trees and burning the peat bogs in the upland river catchment areas has dramatically lowered their capacity for storing water upstream.  The result is that when storms like Desmond, Eve and Frank deposit (what we used to think of as) a month’s worth of rain in a single night onto our hillsides, almost all of that water runs directly into the streams that run into the rivers.  Rivers that government policy has caused to have been straightened and dredged, so that all of this additional water runs into the flood defences downstream with vastly greater force.

So I have an alternative suggestion for naming storms in future – one that I am sure most ordinary people will embrace, but that the Met Office would never dare adopt: instead of using our favourite aunts and uncles, let us name our storms after the politicians who failed to plan for them!  It would, after all, be more accurate to say that “Kendal has been ravaged by “Deluge Davey” or that “the business district of Leeds has been demolished by Cyclone Osborne”.  And, of course, many of the poorest and most vulnerable among us will justifiably tremble at the imminent arrival of “Atlantic Storm Duncan Smith”!

Is this the end for Labour?

We may well come to look back at Wednesday 2^nd December as the day when the British Labour Party died.  Not, as the mainstream media would have us believe, because Mr Corbyn’s pacifism makes him unelectable, but because that was the day when a right-wing version of the Militant Tendency emerged to hold the party to ransom.

The schism has been long coming.  All of us have a moment when we finally tore up our Labour Party membership card in disgust.  My moment came the day Anthony Blair successfully removed “Clause 4” of the Party constitution… not because I believed that there was even the remotest prospect of Labour delivering to the people the means of production, distribution and exchange, but because without Clause 4, the Party was ideologically adrift.  Others were prepared to give Blair and New Labour the benefit of the doubt.  On the back of a huge housing boom, fuelled by record levels of private borrowing, fewer people were experiencing the kind of hardship that had been common in the 1980s.  More people were prepared to forgive New Labour its lack of principles so long as they felt better off.

Then came Blair’s Chicago speech:

“This is a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values. We cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand. We must not rest until it is reversed. We have learned twice before in this century that appeasement does not work. If we let an evil dictator range unchallenged, we will have to spill infinitely more blood and treasure to stop him later.”

This most dangerous of positions essentially destroyed the post war settlement and the doctrine of collective security expressed in the United Nations.  In its place was a return to the harsh imperialism of the nineteenth century in which the nation state (or alliance of nation states) with the most powerful military proclaimed the absolute right to shape the world in its own interests.  Once established, the doctrine paved the way for the failed NATO wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the destruction of Libya and today’s quagmire in Syria… and is likely to be turned back on us as the Western economies falter while Russia and China grow in confidence.

The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – which owe more to the American quest to secure and transport oil than any genuine concern about the plight of the people in those benighted lands – led many genuine pacifists to rip up their membership cards.  Others accepted the disgraceful lies that the Taliban were a threat to the West and that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that could be turned on us at a moments notice.  However, when it became clear that the government had lied, many more party cards were torn up… something that continued as the body count rose.

At home, too, New Labour became more authoritarian and vindictive in its dealings with its traditional supporters.  Even current Tory anti-terrorism legislations falls short of what New Labour would have put in place had they been re-elected in 2010.  And we should never forget that it was New Labour that introduced the hated Work Capacity Assessment test used to deny disabled people benefits, and which is thought to have led to more than 8,000 premature deaths.  Then there were the single issues – Labour being “relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, tuition fees, the authoritarian Mental Health Act, the sight of Ministers cosying up to the likes of Fred “The Shred” Goodwin, etc.  When the economic storm broke on Gordon Brown’s watch, even the claim to economic competence had disappeared – not helped by the ridiculous “there’s no money left” note left by Liam Byrne and joyfully publicised by the incoming ConDem government.

By the time the hapless Ed Miliband arrived, Labour had become an unprincipled shell, supported only by a rag-tag of careerists and die-hards; largely overseen by a caucus of MPs who stood for office as Blairites.  As David Cameron and George Osborne set about doing to working people what Cameron had once done to a dead pig, the best Miliband's Labour party could offer was to do much the same thing... but promise not to enjoy it.

In May 2015, millions of the people who would have previously voted Labour chose instead to stay at home.  Millions more turned in desperation to the Scottish National Party, the Greens and UKIP in an attempt to find a party that would stand up for them.

Labour would have died after the failure in May 2015 if Ed Miliband had put party before personal concerns and stayed on to clean up the mess he had made.  Having a leadership election immediately after such a catastrophic defeat was a tragic mistake.  The party had not had time to evaluate the causes of its defeat; still less to formulate its future policy direction.  The party needed Miliband to stay on while it sorted itself out.  Although whoever emerged as leader would be unable to secure a parliamentary majority in 2020 because of the loss of Scotland coupled to Tory boundary changes.

Calling an early leadership election paved the way for the "Corbyn surge" – although even this could have been stopped in its tracks were it not for Blairite MPs foolishly allowing Corbyn onto the ballot paper.  MPs opposed to Corbyn’s views claimed that they had nominated him solely so that his arguments could be aired (presumably with the intention that they would also be defeated).  However, the underlying concern was that the election of a Blairite would have led labour into permanent decline – no longer able to win in Scotland, and threatened by UKIP and the Greens in England.  Only in Wales, where Labour treats the Assembly as is own fiefdom and the electorate is backward enough to vote for a corpse so long as it is sporting a red rosette, could Labour guarantee a modicum of power.

The doubling of Labour’s membership as thousands of supporters rallied behind Corbyn’s leadership bid had the effect of a blood transfusion to a dying man.  But it was an intervention looked upon with horror by a Blairite parliamentary party that had already decided to hang a “do not resuscitate” notice at the foot of the bed.  

Always embarrassed by the party membership, the Blairites sought a passive electorate, not an active movement. The majority of Labour’s parliamentary party – who are largely the inheritors of Anthony Blair – see their mission not as opposing the Tory government, but of disenfranchising the party membership while making Corbyn a prisoner of a right-of-centre shadow cabinet.  In this they are aided by the fact that Corbyn was a relic – a lonely ghost of Labour’s left wing past – rather than a member of a growing party faction.  Irrespective of his massive support in the party, inside Parliament you can count on one had the number of Labour MPs who would not prefer a different leader.

What happened in the events leading to the vote for war on 2^nd December was the first flexing of muscles of the parliamentary Blairite Tendency.  And it is perhaps fitting that their first public act was to take Britain into a war that promises to be even costlier than Blair’s illegal war in Iraq.  However, the wider point is this:  Corbyn lacked the power to force a party line because his leadership would be fatally undermined by the ensuing rebellion.  On the other hand, his opponents calculate that they are not yet strong enough to overthrow him.  So within parliament we are left with a stalemate that is likely to manifest across a whole range of issues, and will become increasingly embittered the closer we get to the next election.

Corbyn’s real problem is that he can do nothing to remove his opponents.  Certainly he can use his supporter base to change the way the party does business and to make it easier for party members to elect candidates more in line with their own principles.  But none of that can remove a single Blairite MP from parliament.  Barring death or madness, elected MPs stay in place until they are voted out in a general election.  So whether he likes it or not, Corbyn is the leader of a parliamentary party that will increasingly reject his leadership.

Add into this mix the problems that arise when the Tories gerrymander the constituency boundaries and you have a recipe for open civil war.  Most Labour constituencies will be redefined, forcing sitting MPs to face reselection.  At this point, Corbyn’s supporters will get to reap their revenge.  But even deselected MPs remain as MPs.  And they are unlikely to go quietly into oblivion.  Rather, they are likely to follow the path mapped out by “The Gang of Four” in 1981.  However, this time round we could well see a gang of a hundred or more establish their own version of the Social Democratic Party – adding to Labour’s woes in attempting to win seats back from the SNP, Tories and LibDems.  By which time, I imagine most of Corbyn’s supporters will have given up on electoral politics altogether.