Pure class

Polly Toynbee hits it out of the park with her latest column, looking at how talk of a “classless society” has masked the continuing class divisions within Britain.

After a brief sortie against idiotic so-called “Christians” who have been sending her hate-mail – hate-mail is so very Christ-like, don’t you think? – Toynbee starts with an account of how “class and misogyny fuse together” in the viciousness of right-wing attacks on middle-class left-wing women (such as Toynbee herself or the likes of Harriet Harman and Margaret Jay), and continues:

Rightwingers have long used class against any middle-class leftist, a bullying that sidesteps the real political argument. It implies anyone middle class is a traitor to their own by supporting fairer shares. The abuser never explains what’s hypocritical about those born privileged arguing on the side of those who are not.

As a result, the idea is promoted that:

Only those on low incomes are entitled to speak up for themselves – which is convenient, since almost by definition, fewer low earners have access to political platforms. If they did, they’d earn political or journalistic salaries and get the same contempt for “hypocrisy”

Meanwhile, the Tory front-bench – stuffed with Old Etonians – prepares self-interested plans to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £2m, tilting the tax system in favour of their own class interests while proclaiming society now to be “classless”.

Toynbee marshals a few facts to highlight the class divisions that remain:

  • 50% of all employees earn less than £23,000, but “the low-paid imagine they are nearer the middle-income range than they are”.
  • “Half the population has seen very little real growth in recent years, and the bottom third has suffered an absolute fall in income for five years. People feel it, yet no one says it.
  • The benefits of “high GDP growth” over the past decade were enjoyed by the top 20% of the population, and mostly by the top 5%.

As Toynbee continues:

By sleight of hand, Britain abandoned class politics in a still deeply class-bound society. The illusion that anyone can make it is created by fixating on a few who do – or an older generation who did in the 50s and 60s. … Gut resentment rankles, but since Labour is silent on obscenely ostentatious wealth, there is no coherent political channel for it.

And she concludes:

The right spits venom at talk of class, except to sneer at middle-class leftists, but avoids hard facts: a working-class child is 15 times less likely to move upwards than a middle-class child is to stay put. This is no classless society, but a society whose politics conspire to deny it.

Labour’s urgent need to show some self-respect

Matthew Parris – one of my favourite political commentators, and certainly my favourite Conservative commentator – has written a great column about the likely mindset of Labour backbenchers as their party faces “shipwreck” at the next election.

He draws on his own experience as an MP in the 1980s to argue that “the most pressing thing on the minds of most Labour MPs this weekend is their own majority at the next election, not their party’s” – and hence that most would rather cling on to another two years in the Commons than risk an early election by dumping Brown, even if the early election produced a less catastrophic result for Labour than appears inevitable by 2010. As Parris writes:

Dr Johnson is wrong. The prospect of being hanged in two weeks does not concentrate the mind. It numbs. Paralysed like a rabbit before a snake by that ticking “time still to go” clock in the corner of the screen, your brain is drained of deeper thoughts.

And so it will be this morning for hundreds of Labour MPs. Few will have much confidence that, after the spring of 2010, there will be any kind of employment that would pay better than the £90,000 or so to which a backbencher’s salary effectively amounts, including expenses. 2010 is the wall, the void.

Indeed, these are the thoughts which Brown’s dwindling band of loyalists will be pressing on doubtful MPs: “It’s still only 2008. With Gordon, you’re totally secure until 2010. Who knows what may turn up in the interim?”

However, Parris argues that Labour’s predicament has now developed into a national “emergency”, as Britain heads into recession with a “doomed and flailing leadership at the helm”. Moreover, the long-term survival of the Labour party, and the integrity and reputation of centre-left politics in UK, depend on action being taken now rather than after Cameron has won his landslide:

The Parliamentary Labour Party, the party nationwide and the trade union movement, should be asking themselves how the 20 months ahead are going to look to an emerging generation and to history.

How would paralysis reflect on a political movement with claims to a future in the new century? How proud they are going to feel about the way they handled the recognition that, at a dangerous time at home and abroad, their party had landed itself with the most inept and directionless Prime Minister in British history; and with nearly two years left to go.

As Parris continues:

This is about more than electoral arithmetic. It’s about showing that a party has a heart, a mind and stomach for a fight; that it can stir itself in an emergency.

As for the wider left, beyond the confines of the Labour movement itself, a similar paralysis has taken hold:

[W]here are the voices raised from the Left, prepared to acknowledge this spasm, and distinguish between the failure of an individual, and the failure of an ideology? Is Polly Toynbee almost on her own? Has the whole centre left project lost its self-belief, taking refuge only in days, hours and minutes left profitlessly in office?

As Parris concludes, what Labour needs is to think about its future in opposition, and the need it will then face for:

a leader then who can hold his head up and say that he didn’t hold back, waiting for someone else to show some guts.

What happened to the Left’s moral compass?

The worst traditions of the liberal-left are flourishing while the best are rusting from underuse.

– Nick Cohen, What’s Left?, p.361

The key point made by Nick Cohen in his book What’s Left? is the shift over recent decades in the Left’s basic principles and motivations.

In the thirties, forties and afterwards, the Left’s key guiding principles included:

  • Anti-fascism: as Cohen points out, if there is one thing the Left could be relied upon to do from the 1930s onwards, it was to oppose fascism (albeit this often leading to double standards as contrasted with the frequent apologism for left-authoritarians).
  • Solidarity with those fighting against oppression around the world: democratic socialists, trade unionists, feminists and so on.
  • Universal values: a belief that what was right in the west (democracy, human rights, freedom and so on) was right anywhere in the world.

However, a fundamental shift has occurred in many sections of the Left, a recalibration of its “moral compass”:

  • Fascism has been replaced as the “great opponent” by America, Israel, the West, “the hegemon”.
  • As a result, solidarity is denied to those (such as Iraqi trade unionists or socialists) whose oppressors are themselves opponents of America, Israel or the West, even if those oppressors are fascistic (such as Baathists or Islamists).
  • Universal values are seen as an instrument of western hegemony: just because it’s wrong in the West to oppress women or to be racist or homophobic, doesn’t mean we should “impose” those values on other cultures.

If there is one thing I think is missing from Cohen’s analysis, it’s providing a positive statement, in broad terms, of what a revived “decent Left” should look like. The answer to that is implicit in his book, I think, but it would be useful to draw this out more.

What’s Left?

Have been very impressed by Nick Cohen’s book What’s Left?.

I supported the Iraq war at the time, which I now regret, feeling that those of us who supported the invasion were duped and manipulated. Not just over WMDs, but over the assurances of a quick victory and the establishment of peace, justice and democracy in the place of what was undeniably a foul, fascist tyranny.

However, Cohen has reminded me why I found the anti-war movement – with the narcissism of its “not in my name!” sloganeering, and its tolerance of Islamists and the far left (think: George Galloway) – so alienating.

And I am ashamed to realise that the one position I’ve never really found myself holding is that of opposing the war and George Bush, but simulataneously showing solidarity for democratic, socialist and progressive forces within Iraq and wanting them to prevail over the so-called “insurgency”. That’s the position I now want to hold, somewhat belatedly.

First post

No big introduction. This is a blog for thinking aloud about political issues, to avoid clogging up my main blog.

Why “The Wandering Hedgehog”? Mainly because my political views have been somewhat fluid and variable over the past few years – though I’ve recently joined the Labour Party, as something of a “homecoming” – which is one reason for wanting to sandbox them from my main blogging.