Will anyone want to talk welfare in 2015?

The main chunk of the Welfare Reform Act has been up and running for under a week, and already the Westminster-Fleet Street axis is salivating over its next assault on social security.

Encouraged by a serial child-killer – read those words again for an encapsulation of our political class in 2013 – the shadow boxing has turned into full frontal confrontation as the main parties make their plans for 2015.

With the economy stagnant and no-one in parliament having a clue what to do about it, both the Tories and Labour are instead gearing up for the next general election campaign, which – like every general election campaign – is set to be the most vicious and mendacious on record.

But it won’t last.

Early overkill

If you want to read an article on Mick Philpott, read this by Grace Dent. All I will say is that the government has nuked the fridge. Blaming the actions of a misogynist, abusive murderer on child benefit payments? The Tories aren’t so much scraping the barrel as splintering the wood. This kind of brazen smear tactic can ‘work’ – but only rarely, and only in the middle of an election campaign. Think Willie Horton in the 1988 US presidentials, the swift-boating of John Kerry in 2004, or even the ‘War of Jennifer’s Ear’ in the 1992 general election. None of these were as extreme as this week’s Philpottiness, but they all had an immediate short term impact that helped swing the final result. They were, in essence, stink bombs.

This week was different. We are two years from an election, and the Tories are already reaching for some of the most desperate and extreme tactics ever seen. Even if they get some small, meaningless, bounce in the polls – unlikely – how can they possibly maintain this level of attack for two years? Where can they go after this? Blaming child benefit for encouraging the birth of children who ‘attract’ paedophiles? Perhaps blaming disability benefit for incentivising disability? Britain is not a nation of savages (a point often lost on the Left) and this kind of Brass Eye rhetoric repels most people – if not already, then within two weeks of sustained repetition. Two solid years of this? No chance.

Thanks, Iain Duncan Smith

Perhaps the Philpottiness was a desperate attempt to distract from Iain Duncan Smith’s Monday misstep, when he claimed he could live on £53 a week. No matter – the damage was already done.

The ‘damage’, by the way, was not ‘embarrassment’ or ‘looking out of touch’. It was, instead, the truth. For years, both this government and the last have relied on a ready stream of hysteria about welfare payments to undermine social security – asylum seekers getting mansions in Kensington, families making thousands in child benefit for ten kids, workless scroungers earning more than shop assistants. On and on.

And then came Iain Duncan Smith.

No amount of worthy Guardian columns, no carefully researched think tank paper or academic study, could have imprinted the reality of Britain’s welfare state so firmly on the public consciousness as IDS saying he could live on £53. The story itself is froth – it’s the figure that counts. In the weeks, months and years ahead, long after the detail of this story has been forgotten, that figure will remain. £53. People won’t remember who said what when. They’ll remember £53.

So thanks, IDS. Couldn’t have done it without you.

Byrne the witch!

Liam ‘Duncan’ Byrne truly is Iain Duncan Smith’s ‘shadow’ – he shadows his every move, replicating it exactly. But let’s not just blame him for Labour’s grand plan for welfare. Many a Labour lefty wants to single out Liam Byrne as the wicked witch of One Nation, some kind of rogue right-wing agent without whom Labour would be leading us all into an egalitarian utopia. They single out Liam Byrne to hide the inconvenient truth – the Labour leadership, and the Labour Party itself, is riven with people who share Liam Byrne’s mentality, either from ideological conviction or a faux-pragmatic view that they can’t win without it. Liam Byrne is not an aberration of Labour. He is Labour.

So let’s be clear – when Liam Byrne unveiled Labour’s welfare roadmap for the 2015 election, he wasn’t speaking for himself. He spoke for Labour. He has the full authority, agreement and support of the party leadership. It was Ed Miliband who appointed him to the welfare brief. It was Ed Miliband who originally put him in charge of the party’s entire policy review – whose current head, lefty darling Jon Cruddas, is no doubt also on board. This is not an aberration of Labour. This is Labour.

‘This’ being a contributions-based welfare system. Don’t get so excited. It’s back to Beveridge for Labour, as they plan Britain’s 21^st century future by gazing dreamy-eyed at photos of long-dead Liberals. The idea is a simple one – the more you pay in through national insurance, the more you’ll get out in benefits payments should you need them.

‘Need’. Ha.

Let’s take this to its logical conclusion. If you have worked all your life in a high-paying job – let’s say, investment banking – and then get made redundant, your subsequent unemployment benefit will be high. You won’t need it, but you’ve earned it.

If, like many people, you rotate in and out of low-paid, short-term, insecure jobs, then while you’re out of work, you’ll be living on a pittance. You’ll need money to tide you over, but it won’t be there. You will be punished for providing the bottom-of-the-barrel ‘flexible’ labour our broken economy is built on.

And if you’ve just left school or university and haven’t found a job yet? Um. Dunno. Beg.

As Labour gears up to enact its own austerity post-2015, Beveridge 2.0 fits the bill perfectly. Last year Labour ‘rising star’ Stella Creasy promoted a ‘zero-budget’ spending review – all spending would be looked at and challenged.

Well, this is zero-budget welfare for a zero-hours world. If people must rely on ‘getting out what they put in’, there’s much less requirement for the state to subsidise the shortfall created by the income deficiencies caused by the likes of zero-hours contracts. Of course, the state does end up footing the bill – in homelessness costs, criminal justice costs, healthcare costs – but don’t expect politicians to grasp that level of nuance.

The gathering storm

The tactical error Labour have made is to give this maximum publicity. It’s deliberate, of course – they want to ‘win back welfare’ on the front pages. But by 2015, they’ll be regretting it.

As neoliberal austerity scorches its way across Britain, benefits-bashing has become the political class’ heroin hit. The thing with heroin is you need more each time to get the same effect. And then it kills you.

By 2015, no politician in the land will want to talk about welfare. It was easy for politicians to bash benefits before they had implemented their own plans. Now those policies are in full swing, the predicted disasters will unfold. Council tax benefit cuts will leave councils chasing unpaid council tax. Families evicted under the bedroom tax will be adding to the local government B&B bill. The Universal Credit IT mega-system will have broken down – oh, two, three times? UC itself will have forced the self-employed out of work. The Work Programme… oh, let’s not even go there.

Governments of all stripes have systematically attacked welfare and social security for 30 years. First it was council housing. Then it was Peter Lilley’s war on single mothers. Then the Blairite experiments and the attacks on disability. Now the outright dismantling of the welfare state.

And where are we at the end of three decades of cutting benefits? Why, we have the highest benefits bill on record, and a government that knows it’s going to get worse. For how many decades must an idea achieve the exact opposite of its aim before it is abandoned?

By 2015, the political class will know that this has been a disaster on every measure. The Conservatives will be getting lambasted from all sides for the abject failure of their project. Labour will be trying to avoid difficult questions about how Beveridge 2.0 differs from workfare and benefits cuts, given that it doesn’t. Low-paid workers in swing seats will see their income falling as a result of the cuts that were only meant to hit mythical ‘scroungers’, and will want to know why Labour is proposing more of the same.

And not a politician in the country will want to talk about it.

Arbeit macht frei

Welfare, like the banking system, reflects the failure of our economic model. But it is an economic model that the mainstream refuses to alter. So just as no politician wants to address our cankerous financial sector now, Westminster will be going very quiet about welfare in 2015.

But if the politicians won’t be talking welfare in 2015, who will they beat up on instead?

That’s right. Immigrants.

Snobs to the left of us, shysters to the right – here we are stuck in the middle with EU

I suppose I should be happy.

For the first time in 40 years, the British public will get a say in our membership of the European Union. When we last voted, the EU was an entirely different beast, with far fewer federal powers and considerably less rot. It isn’t too much to require a new democratic mandate for our continued commitment to this loveless marriage.

So, having been a member of that rare breed – a left-wing Eurosceptic – for well over a decade, I suppose I should be happy. But I have the ugly feeling this is going to be a mess.

Let us ignore the usual sneering of left-wing pro-Europeans, who dismiss all Euroscepticism as naïve, flag-waving jingoism. It’s odd how a political movement that is supposedly committed to human welfare is so utterly blasé about an organisation that is driving entire countries into destitution to defend neoliberalism.

Brainwashing Britain. Allegedly.

Let us also ignore the Europhiles’ inability to recognise that this is a referendum.  People will have a vote. Of course, the British left, for all its supposed belief in ‘power to the people’ and what not, actually regards most people as pig thick. They’re opposed to a referendum because they don’t trust people to make up their own minds on a crucial vote. They think everyone will read a Daily Mail editorial and vote to leave Europe. This sneering arrogance is precisely why people ignore the left.

The real problem is how it’s going to be done – and why it’s going to be done. Obviously it’s a desperate attempt to win back Tory deserters to UKIP – now boundary changes are dead, the Tories’ last shot is to get back the Eurosceptic vote. It won’t help them as this will mostly be in safe Tory seats, not in the northern and Midlands marginals they need to cling on to. But that’s neither here nor there.

The real problem here is the backstory – which, as ever, is the City of London. This is about protecting private profits. Again.

Shifting the centre

David Cameron’s famous ‘veto’ in 2011 hindered the passage of a truly awful treaty – but it was deployed purely to protect London’s ravaged financial sector. With Brussels (and Washington) increasingly exasperated by the spate of scandals emerging from lawless London, the EU wanted to bring the Square Mile under the yoke of Brussels regulation, seeing as the British government had utterly failed to defuse this timebomb. Cameron threw a fit and stormed out.

Ever since, it’s been about ‘repatriating’ powers from Europe. What powers? No-one really knows, but it’s quite clear that EU employment law and work protections are top of the Tory list. In his speech, Cameron singled out the working time directive, which limits working hours. It’s just another attack on workers.

Of course, nobody would ever vote for a national pay cut and longer hours, so the Tories have had to reframe it. An EU referendum – lower pay dressed up as democracy. Cameron’s plan is this:

1)      ‘Renegotiate’ powers with the EU (fat chance they’ll let him) by opting out of European employment law and financial sector regulation

2)      Offer this as the ‘in’ option in a referendum, with the ‘out’ option bringing full withdrawal

3)      Campaign to stay in the EU, presenting this as the ‘moderate’ approach, and thereby dressing up a full-frontal assault on workers’ incomes as the ‘centrist’ position

4)      Repeal the minimum wage, the maximum working week, maintain financial sector deregulation etc etc

Doing so gets rid of the main good thing the EU has done in the last 20 years, and keeps us tied in to all the poison. But instead, Cameron may find people simply vote to walk out.

The dream that died

The real problem with the EU is that over the last two decades it has shifted from an intergovernmental to a federal body. This is a fundamental point, completely missed by the know-it-alls of the left. They look at the employment legislation and think of the EU as some fuzzy social democratic idyll. It is not.

Europe’s former left-wing bent was simply the product of the politics of the continent. As an intergovernmental body – where nation states met to agree new measures on a consensus basis – the European Community, as it was then, reflected the political make-up of European national governments. These were often social democrat – think Francois Mitterand. National polities made European policy.

That was then. Since the Maastricht Treaty, Europe has seen an ever-growing transfer of power and direction to the unelected, federal European Commission. The Commission has become outright neoliberal in its agenda – Bolkestein was the canary in the mine – and its current president, Jose Manuel Barroso, was a warmongering, pro-cuts prime minister of Portugal before he took his Brussels seat.

‘Fractured Europe’. Oh Google Images, you never let me down.

The elephant in the room is what the EU is actually doing in Europe. Whole swathes of this continent are being frogmarched into the gutter to save the European private banking system, all at the behest of the Commission and the European Central Bank. Neo-Nazis roam Greece’s streets, youth unemployment is soaring in Italy and Spain, and Ireland is losing a generation. This is not an aberration or a hijacking – this is the EU functioning exactly as its masters intend, as a shock doctrinaire for neoliberalism’s continental recalcitrants. The poverty and joblessness sweeping Europe is not because of the EU – it is the EU. It is neoliberalism, and the EU is neoliberalism. Whatever it once was, that is what it now is.

Not that you’d know it from listening to the British left. They fret over Britain’s lost ‘influence’ with its main trading partners, apparently not realising that the EU is taking these trading partners – the nation states of Europe – down the toilet.

A more urgent call

The EU is now a broken, bankrupt kleptocracy, stamping a banking jackboot onto the people of Europe. It will spend every last devaluing cent trying to keep its federal, neoliberal dream alive – embodied most strongly by the Euro – but its banks are bust, its nations are going under, and its remaining democratic legitimacy has long since bled away. Anti-EU sentiment will skyrocket across Europe in the next two years. It’s not impossible that in four years time – by when our referendum will supposedly have been held – there won’t be an EU to leave, at least not in its current form.

Inside or outside the EU, it is this task – defeating austerity – that is the most urgent. The rise of Greece’s Golden Dawn shows the potential consequences of the status quo. Whether we have any influence within the EU right now is hard to ascertain – our own government is austerity’s biggest fan – but even a more enlightened leadership would struggle to make itself heard above the masochistic din of Brussels and Berlin.

Anti-austerity protests – a real European movement.

The only way forward is for workers across Europe to build on what they have already begun – a cross-continental movement against austerity. As the UK is outside the Eurozone, it’s only natural that our protest movements will feel more distant from what is happening on the continent, but our role ought to be to give European workers the courage to refuse the blackmail visited upon the Greeks last year – namely, that any resistance to austerity means leaving the Euro, leaving the EU, and economic oblivion. Our role should be to help lay a path whereby countries can reject austerity – and if that means they leave the EU, that this shouldn’t be their economic downfall, but instead must be a source of revival. To build the foundations of a democratic Europe to replace the sclerotic bankocracy we have today.

But that is not what our so-called ‘progressives’ are doing. Instead we are getting sneers driven by fear. For behind every casual dismissal of the Eurosceptic case lies a dread terror that without the EU, there can be no clipping of the City’s wings, no maximum working week, no minimum wage. That the British left does not believe it can persuade the public to support such basic measures via the ballot box, and cannot detach itself from political parties that might refuse to do so, simply embodies the three decades of failure that have reduced the left to this wretched, whining state.

The British people are fully entitled to a vote on their membership of the EU. It’s a simple point of democracy, of which the left seems bafflingly terrified. There are arguments for staying in Europe – mostly scaremongering, in my view – and there are arguments for leaving. It is a debate there is no harm in having. But the bigger fight will have been won and lost by the time Cameron rolls his loaded dice in 2017.

P.S – We can now see the political stupidity of Labour trying to corner the Tories on Europe without going all the way themselves. Cameron has scratched his party’s Eurosceptic itch, possibly resolving this long-running sore, and improved his standing with deserting grassroots supporters. Meanwhile Labour still have no actual policy on Europe at all. If they hold out against a referendum, they risk the next election being fought on Britain’s EU membership – and that cannot end well for them.

Dartford doesn’t matter – and that spells trouble for Dave

Dartford is a nothing sort of place. It has nothing much of note in it – a tunnel, a bridge, and a shopping centre. That’s about the sum of it. The Rough Guide to Dartford would consist of the way out.

Dartford town centre. This is what ‘nothing’ looks like.

But in politics (and like so many politicians) this nobody becomes a somebody. Dartford is one of Britain’s most reliable ‘bellwether’ seats. At every single general election since 1964, the people of Dartford have elected an MP from the party that goes on to form the government. Win Dartford, and you win the country.

No wonder Dan Hodges is worried. The permanently embittered Blairite recently took to his Telegraph column to claim that Labour is headed for disaster for not pitching further to the right. Most the article is abject nonsense, but one line did ring true:

“Labour’s southern discomfort is as much of a problem today as it ever was”

He’s right that Labour is not making up ground in southern England. Recent local elections have not seen the party seize control of the kind of councils they swept up in the mid-90s. The experts will tell you Labour are doomed unless they reverse this trend.

The experts know nothing.

Labour’s 69 position

A glance at the BBC’s 2010 election results map for the south east (excluding London) makes grim viewing for Labour. Election night left them with just four out of 84 MPs in the region. Half the regional vote went to Cameron.

But take another look at those figures. Yes, Labour had a terrible night in the south east, losing more than three quarters of their seats. But they only had 17 MPs there to begin with – and that was with an outright majority at Westminster.

Meanwhile Labour lost two-thirds of their south western seats. But again, this was always solid Tory and Lib Dem territory.

Now, assuming the government’s boundary changes fall through, and putting to one side the fate of the Lib Dems, if Labour take 25 seats from the Tories at the next election, they’ll be the largest party. 69 seats will give them an overall majority.

Now have a look at this – http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/guide/labour-target-seats/. It’s a list of Labour’s target seats at the next general election, plus the swing they’d need in order to take each one. Check out the sea of blue.

Much more of this and I’ll turn into Jeremy Vine

Count off the first 69 Tory seats (ignoring Corby, which turned red in a 2012 by-election) and you reach Aberconwy. Labour need a 5.67% swing to take this seat – pretty makeable in rural Wales. All other 68 seats need smaller swings – a uniform 5% swing will give them almost 60 Tory seats, while a piddling 2% swing will win them 26 seats, enough to become the largest party and first in line to form a coalition. In many of those seats, they can get a 2% swing just by showing up.

But look closely again at that target seat list, and another thing becomes apparent – these seats are not in the south. In fact, just five of the 69 are in the south east region of England (which excludes Essex and Greater London), and six more are in the south west. Eleven seats across the whole south of England, out of 69 targets – and half of those have tiny majorities to overturn. By comparison, ten of the 69 target seats are in the north west alone.

Rather than being duked out in the southern counties, the next election will be won and lost in the Midlands, the North West, and the East of England.

A cliché that became a canard

So why do the hacks place so much weight on the south?

The south east has always been the big focus. Perhaps it goes back to 1997, when Labour gained a smattering of south eastern seats amidst their national landslide, including a cluster in Kent – Dartford among them.

Many of these seats had been won by the Conservatives in 1979. They had become archetypal ‘swing seats’. Michael Howard sized them up in 2005, but seized only one of them. Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews famously predicted he had lost Medway on election night before ultimately hanging on by a hair’s breadth.

I have turned into Jeremy Vine.

But that night in 2005 is why the south east matters so little now. Labour clung on to its treasured south eastern seats by often tiny majorities. Five years later, those majorities were obliterated by hefty swings – Crawley, Portsmouth North, Milton Keynes North, and Medway’s successor seat all went from ‘ultra-marginal’ to well over 10% Tory majorities.

And then there’s Dartford. Labour’s vote cratered in this trusty old bellwether, leaving the Tories with a plump 21% majority. Look again at that list of Labour targets in 2015. Dartford’s way down at number 130, barely even on the radar.

Cameron’s northern problem means Labour don’t need the south east to win. Dartford may have voted for the winning party at every election since 1964 – but rules are there to be broken.

But does it matter?

In one sense, no. Sure, it makes it likelier that Labour will be the largest party after the next election – even if the economy magically picks up – but since Labour has committed to permanent austerity, and is on the verge of matching Tory post-2015 spending plans, it makes very little difference who wins the next election. We’re in for more of the same.

But there are two ways in which this is more than mere psephological magniloquence.

David Cameron gives his poll ratings the death stare.

First, it spells huge trouble for David Cameron. The devastating impact of austerity across northern England is guaranteed to lose him much of the turf the Tories conquered in 2010. Many of the marginals they hold look untenable – Pendle, number 58 on Labour’s target list, has been battered by cuts and youth unemployment has risen sharply. Holding the southern forts is no use when Labour are marauding towards their rear.

Labour MPs were ultimately loyal to Gordon Brown in the run-up to 2010. Many of them had decided they would step down in 2010, rather than defend seats they knew they would lose – and there was no point ditching the leader to save their seats when they were quitting anyway.

This time it’s different. Many of Cameron’s MPs are newly elected and ambitious for high office. They have little loyalty to their leader; around half the rebels who killed off House of Lords reform were from the 2010 intake. And they are defending marginal seats that the polls say they are going to lose. They will get very twitchy as the election draws near.

The party will probably have a decent time of it at this year’s shire county elections, but Universal Credit is a disaster in the making and the signs are grim for Britain’s retail sector. The 2010 intake is going to become very restless by the end of the year, worried about losing their seats. But 2014 will see the real fireworks.

David Cameron will, I think, face a leadership challenge in the first six months of 2014. It could be a ‘stalking horse’ challenge from a right-wing maverick like Peter Bone or Douglas Carswell, just to test the water. But David Davis could wade in and possibly win. A Davis win would bring down the coalition in a heartbeat, however – so if a mortally wounded Cameron did a Thatcher and shuffled off, Michael Gove would sweep in and win as the ‘unity’ candidate.

They’d still lose the national vote, mind.

But ultimately that’s just political chess. The second reason why this shift from the south matters is more significant: it gives the lie to the idea that a party must win the Home Counties to win power. For 30 years, political strategists have scoured the editorials of the Sun and the Mail to tell them what southern middle class voters supposedly want and think. They are assumed to want low taxes, spending cuts, and above all, welfare cuts – policies are duly concocted, and these policies do real damage to real people, miles from the manifesto cutting room floors. Even now, Labour bigwigs are dreaming up ‘southern strategies’ and focusing their attention on Basingstoke – which has voted Tory at every election since 1924.

But this demographic falsity is now an electoral delusion. ‘Chasing the Mail’ is wasted breath.

Old habits die hard, but south-centric politics is slowly dying – and that’s why it matters that Dartford doesn’t matter.

Update 09/01/2013 - rather neatly demonstrating the point, Dartford does not appear on Labour’s newly-released list of ‘key battleground seats’ – in fact, only two Kent seats make the cut. This must be the first election in a very long time where they are not focusing on Dartford. Hasn’t stopped them refusing to repeal the benefits uprating cap if they get into power, mind.

The TUC anti-austerity demonstration is a waste of time, money and effort

The national anti-austerity demonstration in London this October is a waste of time, money, effort, and anything else that is spent on it.

I am anti-austerity and anti-cuts. In the past I’d probably have complained that the TUC doesn’t hold national demonstrations often enough. My point is not that the unions are wrong in principle. My point is that there is no point.

What is this latest demonstration supposed to achieve? What’s the plan? Is there one?

26/03/2011. Didn’t change anything. Hey, let’s do it again!

There isn’t, of course, just as there so evidently wasn’t after the demo on March 26^th last year. And the point of holding a demonstration is far more opaque now than it was in spring 2011. What is this for? Is it to show opposition to the government? The government already knows the unions are against it. It doesn’t care. Unless a couple of million show up – not likely – ministers will see it as just another protest.

And since when did we need a demonstration to show opposition to austerity? Look at the government’s poll ratings. Look at its local election results. Look at the contemptuous shrug with which the public greets its every utterance. This is now a government of the undead. It knows it is unpopular. It knows it’s on borrowed time. Its only remaining objective is to implement the policies it has already voted through before it is booted from office. A national demonstration won’t stop this.

But while there isn’t really a point to this protest, there most certainly is a price tag. Word has it that organising and holding this demonstration will cost the TUC fully £250,000. A cool quarter of a million. And it’s that price tag that’s the real problem.

Crying all the way from the bank

The real war against the government’s cuts is not being fought in the plush offices of union leaders. Aside from the pensions dispute, it is being fought by user-led organisations (ULOs) representing disabled people, adult care users, unemployed people forced onto workfare, and the like. It is being fought through the courts when government departments, NHS trusts and local councils try and cut corners to cut costs. And it is being fought by people who have very little money.

This walking tour of London costs *how much*?

Imagine what £250,000 could do in their hands? The Spartacus report was produced for a few thousand pounds. Disabled people’s organisations have had their funding pulled for daring to challenge vicious cuts on behalf of their members. If ULOs had access to free legal advice and support, they could cause huge problems for the implementation of the government’s policies whilst defending their members.

And maybe that might put this in terms union leaders understand. Most of the main union bosses either explicitly or privately want to ‘bring down the government’.

Well, the key planks of the government’s austerity agenda are local government and welfare cuts. With the majority of local government job cuts having already gone through (let’s not get onto the unions’ performance on that front), what is left are attacks on adult care service users, children and young people, and those in receipt of state financial support.

If union bosses want to ‘bring down the government’, funding moves to obstruct the implementation of cuts to social care and welfare would seem a good way to go about it. Without these particular cuts, the government’s austerity agenda collapses pretty quickly.

That £250,000 – plus other money from the union movement – would be better spent providing funding for the ULOs fighting these cuts, and helping set up ULOs where none exist. It shouldn’t be that quantum a leap – Unison has previously offered small grants to parents fighting Sure Start cuts. It’s just a short hop from that to supporting those who are fighting more severe attacks.

For god’s sake, change the station

I don’t actually blame the TUC for this. I suspect they don’t especially want to spend £250,000 on something with so little demonstrable purpose. But the leaders of the TUC’s member unions have forced their hand.

My guess is it went something like this. The more militant union leaders – Serwotka, McCluskey et al – have wanted a national demonstration for a while, that being the stock response of the Left to most situations. The moderate leaders didn’t fancy such bolshiness, and held off until the Budget omnishambles and the Tories’ local elections rout saw Labour rack up a solid double-digit lead in the polls – thereby making said bolshiness suddenly acceptable to Dave Prentis.

With the militants and the moderates all demanding action – sorry, ‘action’ – the TUC’s hand was most likely forced. I don’t know that for a fact – but it’s how these things usually work.

Like so much else on the Left, this is all horribly redolent of student politics. Every year during the noughties, the socialist wing of the National Union of Students would demand a national demonstration against student fees as an article of faith. Every year the moderates would try and resist, preferring polite lobbying of the Labour ministers whose career paths they hoped to follow, unless and until a national demo served their own needs. At no stage did anyone think to look for an overarching strategy that might work – nor, heaven forfend, find out what students actually wanted. Needless to say, nothing was achieved.

There’s nothing wrong in holding a national demonstration if it is part of a broader, thought-out strategy – if there is something before it, something after it, something around it, something aside from it. But to just have a long march through London for its own sake is little better than a mass collective walking tour. With a union boss as the tour guide.

Any right-wing trolls loitering here are wasting their time. Your ideology is bankrupt and your policies discredited. I am solidly anti-austerity, anti-privatisation and anti-cuts. And to those many, many people who will work to organise and attend this demonstration over the coming months, I give my best wishes. There’s not going to be any turning back on this, the march will go ahead, so I hope it goes well for you. If you have worked out a benchmark by which to measure its success, I hope it meets it.

But the six-figure socialists who lead the union movement simply have to move on from seeing demonstrations (and their cheaper cousin, rallies) as the main tool to defend people from this government.

Assuming it is this, and not macho posturing, that they’re aiming for.

P.S – Perhaps the most enjoyment to be had from this demonstration will be seeing whether Ed Miliband gets an invite to speak from the platform, given his cold shoulder to striking public sector workers. Labour would see an outright snub from the TUC as rather uncouth, but the unions may not want to risk the sight of MiliE being roundly heckled by protesters. My guess is the unions will fudge it by inviting a left-wing Labour frontbencher like Jon Trickett or Diane Abbott. Such are the farcical neuroses of left-wing politics….

P.P.S – I’m writing this is in a personal capacity. Obviously.

The Guardian’s inadvertent slur on workfare protesters

Glorified high street herb-growers Holland & Barrett announced they were ending their involvement in the government’s unpaid work scheme late last week.

In a statement released on Thursday night, the firm stated: “…the 60 people currently undertaking the work experience scheme will be the last to complete the eight week placement. After this time Holland & Barrett will not participate further in that scheme.”

This, of course, is the Work Programme, the government’s much maligned attempt to abolish the national minimum wage by forcing unemployed people to work without pay. Anticipating a week of targeted protests by anti-workfare campaigners, Holland & Barrett ditched the government scheme in favour of their own ‘apprenticeship’ scheme, which itself will pay peanuts.

Shiv Malik, the Guardian reporter who has jumped on the bandwagon reported fearlessly and tirelessly on the workfare saga, filed a report the following evening. In it, he wrote:

“The health and nutrition specialists, owned by NBTY Europe, said the decision was due to pressure from activists, which it alleged included assaults on staff and the prospect of further disruption at its stores this weekend.”

Assaults on staff? Really? It’s true that the protests would have included peaceful occupations of shops, and it’s also true that by its legal definition, ‘assault’ doesn’t require the actual application of physical force (merely the fear of it) – but what evidence is there that activists had assaulted staff?

Imagine if it had been the other way round – if a workfare protester had accused Holland & Barrett staff of assaulting them. Neither the Guardian nor any other newspaper would have published a breath of it without documentary evidence, video recording, or at least corroborating eye-witness testimony.

But because the company was accusing unnamed protesters, the accusation ran with the meaningless word “allegedly” – a get-out clause to avoid having to ascertain its veracity.

I don’t believe for a moment that Shiv Malik intended to slur the protesters – not when Boycott Workfare are the source of half his stories. Partly this comes down to libel laws – a big, named high street chain can sue; unidentified generic protesters cannot.

But more than that, it is an example of one of the flaws of media coverage on a raft of matters – the favouring of ‘official’ testimony over that of protesters, the public, or anyone whose role in life does not start with capital letters.

This has happened before amid the workfare row. When a rash of employers pulled out (or pretended to pull out) of the Work Programme in February, employment minister Chris Grayling claimed that the protests were a front for the Socialist Workers Party. Right on cue, that night’s Newsnight had Emily Maitlis asking someone from the Socialist Party about workfare protesters being an SWP front (and if you know your hard left, you’ll know what a tangent that’s going down…). Grayling’s mere utterance of the allegation had the media scuttling around in his wake.

This can have a very damaging effect over an extended period. In the run-up to the Iraq War, official testimony as to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction went infamously unquestioned by many journalists and politicians.

Or there was the run-up to the credit crunch. The hard left warned for years about the growing debt bubble and over-reliance on the financial sector. It was all completely ignored, because all the ‘serious people’ were absolutely certain that debt-fuelled growth and an unregulated Square Mile were the tickets to eternal prosperity.

Listen to officialdom. Ignore the plebs. Apparently, the media has learned nothing since.

The only banking inquiry worth having

I don’t much care if Bob Diamond’s gone. I mean, I’m glad he’s gone, but it’s all a bit of a distraction.

I don’t much care about the government’s inquiry to find out exactly who did what when in the Libor-rigging scandal. I mean, it needs to happen, but we know enough already to make our minds up.

And I don’t much care for an inquiry into the culture of banking – we’ve all known for ages that this is a thinly-veiled criminal operation, even if the politicians have only just found out.

Nor even do I hugely care for an inquiry into the relationship between bankers and politicians – again, we all know the former had the latter wrapped round their fingers, via donations, lobbying, cronyism and the politicians’ own ideological delusions. For most of us outside Westminster, the only thing we want from our politicians is to sod off and let some grown-ups take charge.

What I want is an inquiry into banking. Banking as an industry, as a service, as a concept. I want an inquiry that, yes, sifts through the details of the Libor scandal, and the details of how bankers behaved and misbehaved, and pins responsibility where it needs to be pinned.

But all that will be sepia one day. No inquiry into the Libor scandal will have a worthwhile legacy unless it addresses and answers the following:

- why were the investment banks bailed out?

- where did the bailout money – our bailout money – go?

- what roles are and have been played, both negatively and positively, by investment banks in Britain’s economy and politics?

- what is the proper role and purpose of investment banking and retail banking for Britain’s public interest?

- what is the best structure of ownership and regulation to deliver that proper role and purpose?

- what is the best means of providing credit to the economy, and internationally, what would be a better way of providing credit to governments?

I want to know why we bailed out the criminal enterprise that brought down our economy to the tune of £1.2 trillion. I want to know what has been done with that money, and if and how we can get it back. I want to know what bits of investment banking, if any, are of use to the rest of us – because the rest needs to go, now. And I want to know why banking is assumed to be best under the control of spivs and shareholders.

Anything less – anything less – is just noise.

Now they can say it – this is a criminal operation

Something changed yesterday.

The political and media establishments caught up with everyone else.

Yesterday, they went after the banks. Not the bankers. Not their bonuses. The banks. Perhaps they didn’t realise how far they were going. But it’s too late. The entire structure and nature of Britain’s investment banking sector is now on the table, whether Fleet Street and Westminster like it or not.

Overnight, a byword for malpractice

When the banks crashed the economy in 2008, many people took one look and said, “enough is enough”. Politicians took one look and bailed them out. Journalists took one look and hailed the politicians for “saving the world”.

Yesterday that changed.

At the heart of the latest scandal to engulf the London-based investment banking sector lies one simple word – impunity.

It’s not rocket science. If you give anyone large sums of money and power, allow them to hide from view, and let them – no, encourage them – to do as they please with no rules, no limits, no boundaries and no checks and balances, there is a very good chance they will run riot.

For the best part of ten years, investment bankers – and the heads of some retail banks, such as Northern Rock – lent recklessly, traded recklessly, and operated with total disregard for the financial safety of their institutions and the wider economy.

When it all went south, nobody in Britain was prosecuted. Those senior figures that were forced out got massive payouts. The banks were bailed out by taxpayers. Bonuses continued unchecked. Party time resumed in the City of London while the rest of the country suffered. I can skim over the details – everyone knows the score. It is the definition of impunity.

In September 2007, the governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, warned that bailing out Northern Rock might create “moral hazard”, where banks felt they could get away with irresponsible practices, safe in the knowledge that the taxpayer would bail them out. The banks attacked him for dragging his heels. The chancellor, Alistair Darling, considered firing him. Sir Mervyn relented in short order, and Darling cooked up a botched nationalisation that could end up losing the taxpayer billions of pounds.

Scene from an investment banking graduate training scheme. Perhaps.

Look at that date. September 2007. Right up until 2009, Barclays was rigging Libor, potentially pushing up the cost of borrowing for millions of people. Did Barclays executives start rigging Libor because Northern Rock was bailed out? Of course not – the Libor rigging predated the bailout.

But did they think they could get away with it? Clearly. Did they feel anyone was watching? Clearly not. Did a culture of “anything goes” prevail in the City of London after the bailouts, with swaggering City whizz-kids confident that nobody could touch them? Well, look at those bonuses. What is that telling you?

This culture of impunity, even after the financial crisis broke, was borne of the very attitudes that allowed the crisis to develop – the sanctifying of the City of London by Westminster. The bank bailouts represented the government saying to the Square Mile – we can’t make it without you. Whatever it is you’ve done, we need you to survive if we are to survive; we need you to grow if we are to grow. By tying the survival of Britain’s economy to the survival of London’s investment banks, the government was writing a blank cheque of support to the banking sector:

- the government couldn’t get back its investment in the bailed out banks without those banks achieving significant growth, meaning a return to business-as-usual

- breaking up the banks was off the table, and even separating investment and retail banking operations was kicked into the long grass

- the government wouldn’t touch bankers’ bonuses, for fear of driving them to Dubai

- the government wouldn’t force bailed out banks to increase lending to the real economy, for fear of the state encroaching on the private sector status of the banking industry

- when Tory MP Sir Peter Tapsell asked David Cameron when there would be prosecutions of miscreant bankers, the prime minister’s response made it clear he wasn’t interested in upsetting the applecart

- when all else failed, the government settled for irrelevant sideshows such as Stephen Hester’s bonus and Fred Goodwin’s knighthood as a distraction from more fundamental issues

Of course, having a party in government that is bankrolled by the financial sector is the icing on the cake.

Impunity is what got us into this mess. And impunity is what is keeping us there. Impunity, and a failure to recognise that the investment banking sector has been corrupted from top to bottom – that it has become, inherently, criminal.

Not a diamond geezer

According to the Telegraph, up to forty banks – forty banks – are thought to have been involved in rigging interest rates. In recent years UBS and Société Générale have been hit by rogue trader scandals. In the last two years the biggest swinger of all – Goldman Sachs – has paid $550m to settle civil fraud charges of misleading investors, $22m to settle charges related to insider dealing (both of these cases were settlements rather than convictions), and £17.5m for failing to provide full information to UK regulators.

Those are just the banks. The actions of UK Uncut have set off a chain that has dragged all manner of tax avoidance scams run by accountants and financial advisers into the open. Most of the key tax havens are UK territories, in an extended network with its heart in the City of London.

And these are merely the scandals that have emerged under the prevailing “light touch” regulation – the crimes that come to light in a system designed to keep them in the dark. The activities of commodities traders are largely ignored. Trillions of dollars of financial transactions are conducted “over the counter”, away from formal exchanges and any kind of scrutiny.

Not all of this took place in the Square Mile or its offshoots in Mayfair and the Docklands. But as John Snow wrote this morning:

“Evidence set before the US Congress last week claimed that the very worst of recent US banking scandals – JP Morgan for one – were hatched and executed amid what was termed the ’loose’ regulatory world of the City of London.”

Put all of this together, and it’s telling us something. This is not an industry. This is a criminal operation. Playing and scamming the system for the personal gain of the super-rich lies at its very heart. Libor-rigging isn’t an aberration of investment banking – it is investment banking. If it isn’t criminal, it should be – there’s that impunity again.

Calls are growing for a Leveson-like inquiry into the banking sector. Not before time. Questions are being asked as to why the bankers responsible have not been prosecuted via the criminal courts. Bob Diamond’s position as chief executive of Barclays is clearly under threat. The three main political leaders – still utterly in hock to the financial sector – are treading carefully, but backbenchers are restive. This is an insult too far.

There are bigger questions that must now be belatedly asked. What is the proper purpose of this country’s banking sector? What form of ownership and management is best placed to deliver that purpose? Why does the investment banking sector, which contributes a relatively small proportion of national wealth, command such a hold over awestruck politicians and journalists? What useful purpose, if any, do different aspects of investment banking serve? Where does the money it generates actually go? Where did the money us taxpayers pumped in actually go? Does it obstruct the rest of the economy? Why has London become a dumping ground for the world’s financial elite?

And most of all, why has all this been allowed to go on for so long, nearly five years after the house of cards came crashing down?