2On Your Marx Get Set

“Capitalism is a confidence trick” – Selina Todd1

“A system where some people earn in an hour what others live on fora year is simply unfair, uncivilized and repugnant” – Albert Beale2

“Inequality is corrosive. It rots society from within” – Tony Judt3

“Man must assert his native rights, must say/We take frommonarch’s hand the granted sway” – Percy Bysshe Shelley4

“Then he went into the temple and began drivingout the traders” – Luke about Jesus5

“Democracy has very little meaning without appropriateeconomic equality” – George Orwell6

"Besides having captured the basic drama of capitalist dynamics, Marxhas given us the tools with which to become immune to the toxic

propaganda of neo-liberalism" – Yanis Varoufakis7

“What is the proper limit to a person’s wealth? First, having what isessential and, second, having what is enough” – Lucius Seneca8

EqualityThroughout my adult life, political argument and analysis and associated campaigning have each been pursued with considerable enthusiasm and commitment, though not always regularly or consistently. The political views I hold today, however, are fully consolidated, being strongly Leftist in character, possessing traditional socialist and

1Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, London, John Murray, 2015, p.368.

2Letter to the Guardian, 29 April, 2010.

3Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land. London, Alan Lane, 2010, p.21.

4Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things’, 1811, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

5The Gospel According to Luke, chapter 19, verse 45.

6George Orwell, ‘Review of Bertrand Russell’s Power: A New Social Analysis’, in Seeing Things as they Are: Selected Journalism and Other Writings (Selected and Annotated by Peter Davidson), London, Harvill Secker, 2014, p.75.

7Yanis Varoufakis, ‘How I became an erratic Marxist’, Guardian, 18 February, 2015, p.30.

8Lucius Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, London, Penguin Classics Edition, 1969, p.34.

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communist facets. I subscribe for example to a form of political economy that considers the ways goods are produced and distributed within society should be administered chiefly by central government and local communities. And I am a keen advocate of the principle that wealth and income differentials should never be so large as to prejudice significantly the life chances of any single social class or group of people.9

The social and economic hopes that arise out of this perspective inevitably include a utopian prospect that anticipates the bringing about in the UK of an economically egalitarian society, by which I do not mean a society in which everyone has the same, but rather one that provides all of its citizens with sufficient means – like a a basic income and a decent home - to live in a state of dignity and self-respect; or, slightly to rewrite Marx, one in which each of us, while contributing according to our ability, receives that which is consistent with our basic needs.

I need to add too that, while I am idealistically a socialist-communist, this does not mean I am naively uncritical of the historic and contemporary failings of most communist party governments in different parts of the world. I don’t then approve of the shocking human rights violations of Castro’s Cuba; I have always abhorred Stalin’s gulags; and I don’t turn a blind eye to China’s authoritarianism. And I have been influenced by the likes of Leszek Kolakowski, whose trenchant criticism of organized communism is impossible to refute.10 Indeed, it amazes me that some of my political friends, who consider they know me well, think I haven’t read and noted his stuff and other arguments like it. Maybe this is because I am not an unqualified admirer of western conceptions of liberal democracy, which means I am willing to look for, identify and celebrate in each of Cuba, Russia and the PRC, and in other countries with different kinds of governments to our own, major social achievements, which include notably the levering of huge swathes of their populations out of abject poverty. Apologists for Western forms of democracy are sometimes too easy-going about or ignorant of the faults of the systems they champion, which lead them simultaneously to be very slow to acknowledge the merits of radically different ways of governing, including ones that eschew the merits of multi-party rule. No society, no state formation and no ideology has the monopoly of truth about anything, though some get closer to it than others, which means it is an absurd simplification to conclude that any one way of organising society is bound better to protect human rights than any other. On the contrary, if recent news is anything to go by, even torture is now a near universal feature of most nations, embracing both communist and liberal democratic ones, and everything else in between.11 It’s all then ultimately a matter of establishing the best set of approximations to an ideal, which is not, of 9On how unequal the UK is today, see John Hills, Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us, Bristol, Policy Press, 2015, pp.24-32. A series of social maps illustrating how unequal the UK is can be found in Daniel Dorling & Bethan Thomas, Bankrupt Britain: An Atlas of Social Change, Bristol, The Policy Press, 2011.

10See, for example, the chapters which make up Part 1 of his collection of essays Is God Happy? NY, Basic Books, 2013.

11See for example the December 2014 report of the US Senate Intelligence Committee on the use made by the CIA of torture interrogation methods in secret prisons in different parts of the world to extract information from detainees in the immediate wake of the September 11 terror attack in New York, and subsequently. The widespread international use of ‘extraordinary rendition’ is also discussed in John Urry, Offshoring, Cambridge, Polity, 2014, pp.147-50.

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course, another way of saying I am a political relativist. Far from it. I am rather a political activist who is essentially a Marxist ideologue, without being a communist party member, despite for a brief while, in my youth, as I will go on to explain, being an active supporter of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

I am intellectually and ideological a communist because I regard Marx’s central arguments about capitalist economic reality and human flourishing to be both true and prescient. For sure, many of his actual predictions about the economy and society have not come to pass – for example, the rate of profit in capitalist societies has not fallen; markets have not always hampered technical progress; the working class has not become totally impoverished; and nor has it been a revolutionary force – but his general forewarnings on the endemic instability of financial capital accumulation and the crisis-ridden nature of its institutions surely have.

Despite what might be imagined to the contrary, my commitment to Marx’s overall prospectus on fairness, equality and the socialization of the means of production has surprisingly never ultimately proved a barrier to me being a long-standing and active member of the British Labour Party, whose inclusive politics generously accommodates all manner of Leftist outliers. That constitutes its greatest strength and also most momentous weakness. For by being open to many ideas from the Left, and some too from the Centre, and a few from the Right, it lacks sufficient progressive identity and purpose, with the result that when it secures power it always fails to live up to its constitutional commitment to democratic socialism. The Labour Party’s open- door character, sometimes described as its ‘big tent’ nature, also makes it an easy prey to entryism, from both the Left and the Right. Indeed, I often think that Tony Blair’s successful campaign to both lead and reinvent the party in the late 80s and 90s represents one of the best examples there is of its inability to be sufficiently ideological discriminating. Over-preoccupied with the desire to win elections instead of losing them, too many Labour Party members failed to notice that Mr Blair’s political and economic views were basically those of a Conservative. As a newly published history of Labour says, “he showed little intellectual grasp of, or ever underwent a conversion to, the principles and values of the party he went on to lead”.12 Indeed, I’d go further, and say he purposively distanced himself from them, enabling lots of members, who failed to notice what was really going on at the time, to do the same. The party is still recovering from this process, as I will also explain later on.

If I had tomorrow the power successfully to impose my socialist-communist ideals on the Labour Party, I would therefore constrain it to include a set of general election promises on the economy which would have the collective effect of making the UK a more equal society. My promises of choice, which I discuss in detail and evaluate in the next chapter, would include the following six statements of intent: (1) to levy a graduated 50% to 90% personal income tax on those of its 300,000 citizens whose annual earnings presently exceed £160,000 a year; (2) to introduce a tax on the ‘bonus pots’ held by financial organizations and large corporations; (3) to impose an 80% tax on the accumulated wealth of those three million ‘super rich’ persons (the richest 10%) who between them own assets valued at over £4 trillion; (4) to introduce a system of state-controlled rents affecting both land and property; (5) to phase in over five years a universal unconditional basic income; and (6) to instigate radical changes 12Martin Pugh, Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party, London, Vintage, 2011, p.389.

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to the regulations currently governing the way in which financial organizations operate, including putting an end to their tax evasion practices and all tax havens over which the British government has a controlling influence.

While other initiatives would completely seal the deal - such as a huge increase in capital gains tax, new ‘make the polluter pay’ taxes on the wasteful use of resources, a revamped higher council tax on the most expensive properties, and a significant hike in the national insurance rate on big earnings - these six are the ones I consider most important. I discuss each of them in more detail towards the end of the next chapter.

In my utopia, which would be a republic - without a monarchy, a House of Lords, an honours system and an establishment Church of England - there would be employment of a meaningful kind for all those who want it; wholesale equality of opportunity; greater participatory democracy at every level of society, including neighbourhood and regional assemblies with significant subsidiary executive powers; the right, life-long, to continuing forms of education, which would outlaw private and academic and faith-based selective provision; thriving social housing and state-protected rental accommodation sectors; free public transport; direct state management of water and energy supplies and mail services; and a fully comprehensive state-supported care system for the elderly.

These socially useful outcomes would be financially underwritten by the huge increase in state revenues which would accrue from the various tax reforms I have just identified. In a single year, these would realise for the UK treasury a sum of money that exceeds comfortably Britain’s current budget deficit (£105 billion), and appreciatively contribute as well to paying off in less than four years its existing longer-term public sector debt (£1400 billion). These two paying downs would liberate central government to invest in new forms of growth via regional industrial development initiatives, a massive house-building programme, a huge upgrading of existing infrastructure, and a radical greening of the economy, giving rise to at least a million new jobs within two years. On this basis, all ideologies of austerity, and their neo-liberal correlatives, would be condemned in perpetuity to the dustbin of political history. At the same time, existing privatized services, notably the railways, would be brought back into public control and constrained fully by government to operate in the national interest; and market economics in general throughout society would be subordinated to the common good.

While my utopia has other social features, including ones that seek to remediate the negative consequences of poor housing, indifferent health care, and ineffective schools, its economic facets dominate. This privileging of the economic sphere of course is a recognizably Marxist position. It is also grounded in a set of well-known facts: that citizens of more economically equal societies enjoy happier and healthier and more fulfilling lives than those who live in highly unequal ones;13 that greater equality equates with increased levels of social cohesion and reciprocity in society; that children from poor families are more likely to under-achieve in schools than

13To review the evidence, see Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, London, Penguin, 2010 edition, espec. Part 2; Daniel Dorling, Inequality and the 1%, London, Verso, 2014, ch.5; Michael Marmot, The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World, London, Bloomsbury, 2015; and John Hills, Good Times, Bad Times, pp.181-2011.

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those from wealthier backgrounds;14 that the availability of good affordable housing – either to rent or to buy - is increasingly beyond the means of even middle-earners;15 that substantial reductions in income and wealth differences are positively consequential for moves towards an environmentally sustainable way of life;16 and that inequality at the bottom of the income distributive curve dramatically curtails economic growth, even as conventionally measured.17 It also inhibits innovation and lowers investment rates. On the other hand, contrary to orthodox economic theory, the redistribution of wealth is generally benign in terms of its impact on growth, and in some cases can contribute to it.18

My utopian vision looks forward then to a Good Society – a socialist-communist one based on cooperation and reciprocity, rather than competition and rivalry, in which, after Marx, “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”19 Indeed, underwriting my Marxism is the view that a society which condones excesses of poverty in the midst of great wealth is not one that adequately recognizes its citizens to be of equal worth, and so therefore is not sufficiently democratic. As the feminist theorist, Anne Phillips, says, “ideals of equal citizenship cannot survive unscathed by great differentials in income and wealth. When the gap between rich and poor opens up too widely, it becomes meaningless to pretend we have recognized all adults as equals.”20 Put another way, economic inequality always leads to political inequality.

PurposeOne purpose behind writing this chapter and the next one is to explain how I first came to subscribe to an earlier version of this vision; how I developed it subsequently; and how my political activism over the years has largely been shaped by it. This account also reveals how a substantial part of my political life has been thinking about politics, having spent as much time reading, studying and writing and publishing about Left ideas as acting upon them directly. Terry Eagleton, the Marxist critic, partly sums me up in this regard when he remarks: “Like a lot of intellectuals, I’m not 14See Daniel Dorling, Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists, Bristol, The Policy Press, 2011, especially Chapter 3.

15See Daniel Dorling, All That is Solid: How the Great Housing Disaster Defines Our Times, London, Penguin, 2013.

16This is one of the theses of Naomi Klein’s, This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate, NY, Simon & Schuster, 2014. See also Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, A Convenient Truth, London, Fabian Society, 2014, which includes discussion of relevant policies.

17See Trends in Income Inequality and its Impact on Economic Growth, Paris, OECD, 2014; Larry Elliott, ‘Revealed: how the wealth gap hold backs UK’, Guardian, 9 December, 2014, p.1; and Will Hutton, How Good Can We Be: Ending the Mercenary Society and Building a Great Country, New York, Little Brown, 2015, Chapter 4.

18On the errors of orthodox economic theory where growth and inequality is concerned, see Stewart Lansley & Joanna Mack, Breadline Britain: The Rise of Mass Poverty, London, OneWorld Publications, 2015, pp.184-198.

19Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Harmonsdworth, Penguin Books, 1962 edition, p.105.

20Anne Phillips, Which Equalities Matter? Cambridge, Polity Press, 1999, p.131.

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temperamentally an activist. I get no particular kick out of it …”21 Thus, while I know that political campaigning is important, and I do a lot of it, always canvassing and leafleting for the Labour Party both at and between general and local election times, I am not easily attracted to it in the absence of convincing ideological argument. Indeed, party membership and loyalty, even when conjoined with emotional appeal, have never been enough to motivate me to be active politically. Ideas and ideals have always mattered far more.

This does not mean of course that my thought-through Leftism is correct by definition. It merely means it is heavily reasoned and very theoretically grounded. So, while I may be wrong in what I conclude about how best to inaugurate the Good Society, and about the principles that should guide its functioning, I need to be persuaded I am on the basis of superior analytical and evidence-based argument, notwithstanding my starting point, which is that idealism nearly always trumps realism. Indeed, I frequently reflect that what seems idealistic to many people often turns out to be the new realism in the long run. Accordingly, unlike most of the many political biographies I have read, this chapter and the one following are as much ideological challenges to those who read them as reports of key aspect of how I have acted politically.22

This means I am anxious to initiate debate, which is why towards the end of the next chapter I react to the most persistent criticisms that have been levelled over the years against my communist-socialist outlook, all of which I find lacking in sufficient credibility to cause me to abandon it. On the contrary, Chapter 3 concludes that the implementation of my utopia is neither impracticable nor unrealistic, but rather pressing and possible. Indeed, I am very struck by the fact that, while my socialist utopia is untried, their neo-liberal dystopias are both tested and found broken, failing entirely to produce a society whose members consistently and regularly benefit equally from the form of economic growth they have sought to encourage and which they falsely claim to be the outcome of what they propose.

Despite the rise in popular disquiet about growing inequality in UK society, most citizens possess neither an informed understanding of its nature and extent nor a political ideology capable of identifying ways to ameliorate its negative effects. On the contrary, the politics of the majority of people do not extend much beyond their personal interests and immediate concerns, and are rarely inflected in a specific Left or Right direction. During door-stepping for the Labour Party, I am, in this regard, regularly stopped in my tracks by the degree to which electors complain as much about their neighbours as the cost of living! In my case, this has never been so, for I have always acted and thought politically in an explicitly ideological, specifically Left communitarian way, and in a fashion that has had as a result huge consequences for how I have lived my life, which helps partly to explain why I have needed two chapters satisfactorily to account for the details of it. Their weaving discussion

21Terry Eagleton and Matthew Beaumont, The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue, London, Verso, 2009, p.312.

22An example of a political autobiography that offers not a single ideological challenge is the one authored by Jack Straw, former New Labour minister (Last Man Standing: Memoirs of a Political Survivor, London, Macmillan, 2012), which manages to tell us nothing at all about the big philosophical issues of modern politics, notably the limits of markets and the merits of egalitarianism.

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moreover accurately reflects the vacillation evident in my political journey, revealing for example how for nearly fifteen years, beginning in the mid-1990s, I reneged badly on my youthful communism, flirting naively with a superficial interpretation of social democracy called ‘The Third Way’, which included its neo-liberal embodiment in ‘New Labour’.

My expressions of regret about that period of apostasy, which are also set down in Chapter 3, are the context for a re-engagement in my final years with conventional class politics and a new version of communist-socialism, entailing a vigorous attack on the gross inequalities of income and accumulated wealth that are so characteristic of the UK today. So, unlike many people in their youth who embrace Far Left ideas, but who then move inexorably to the Soft or Hard Right or Comfortable Centre as they get old, my political odyssey has taken me from the former to the Middle and back again, and with renewed vigour. Indeed, it’s fair to say that I am more, rather than less, a Leftist in my late 60s than I was in my early 20s.23

I anticipate saying such a thing will irritate those readers who are highly suspicious of the motivations of people like me who sound off in their twilight years about the need for radical political change against the backdrop of enjoying a relatively privileged life-style. While I am neither a contented ‘comfortably numb’ parlour critic nor champagne socialist, I am then not insensitive to the possibility I might be thought of as one. A favourite George Orwell essay – his famous ‘The Lion in the Unicorn’ - resonates here, of course. It argues that British socialism is a sham because no one on the Left seriously wants to make fundamental changes to society because this would have the effect of cutting back on their own high standard of living, with the result that “revolutionary politics [as practised by the likes of myself] is a game of make-believe”.24 And, in his earlier bitter polemic The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell goes further, writing that “most middle-class socialists, while theoretically pining for a classless society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige”.25

There is some truth in what Orwell states here, but not remotely the whole of it. For, while he is right to ridicule infantile and highly abstract forms of left-wing intellectualism, he is wrong to include in this condemnation more mature and less obtuse conceptions of it, which is what I like to think I subscribe to. And, to be sure, while backsliding and hypocrisy is the condition of anyone on the Left, and I am no exception, as I will make clear, the reality too is that most Leftists work hard consistently to hold onto their beliefs, and regularly to campaign for them, and often against the backdrop of isolation and vilification. And there is an important truth here: being a socialist in the 21st Century in the UK is not an attribute likely to attract plaudits. The exact opposite is more the case, in the sense that locating oneself on the Left is strongly associated with being, at best, eccentric, at worst, absurdly impractical and naively utopian, which connects with what I am beginning to think is a universal truth: that inconvenient arguments always tend to be denigrated.

23On this issue, see Owen Jones, ‘Do lefties always turn right?’ Guardian, 9 September, 2015, p.34.

24George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’, in Sonia Orwell & Ian Angus (eds.) The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters of George Orwell, Volume 2: My Country Right or Left 1940-1943, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970, p.116.

25George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, London, Penguin, 1989 edition, p.162.

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Acting in a minorityCertainly, because of their Left orientation, my politics have never enjoyed a majority prospectus, especially within the Labour Party, to which I have frustratingly belonged, without interruption, for the past forty-five years. The contrariness I feel today as a disappointed Leftist member of Labour, however, is a quite different phenomenon psychologically from the curmudgeonliness experienced by Rightist reactionaries. The latter frequently entails a nostalgic acerbity, often about the loss of a traditional Golden Age of social deference, including Empire; the former, by contrast, usually entertains a caustic utopianism about the absence of a better and progressive future that always seems frustratingly on the horizon of possibility. Don’t then believe anyone that tells you otherwise: being in a minority politically is never a comfortable experience, especially when it entails compromising close friendships, which has been the case with me on at least two occasions. The recently deceased critic, Christopher Hitchens, captures well this condition, remarking that “the real test of a radical . . . is not the willingness to confront the orthodoxy and arrogance of rulers, but the readiness to contest illusions and falsehoods among close friends and allies”.26 Susan Sontag says something similar about the broader effects of this state: “to fall out of step with one’s tribe is to step beyond it into a world that is larger mentally, but smaller numerically [. . .] is a difficult process.”27

Running with, or blending into, the crowd has never ultimately attracted me. On the contrary, I like to go against the political grain because I believe that is where the truth is more likely to be found. Dissenters have the knack, to quote Isaiah Berlin, to “uncover the cracks, the flaws, the places between the ribs where the dagger can successfully be inserted”.28 The upshot is that a lot of my life as a political activist has been spent miserably at the margin, a place the political Right, both within the Labour Party and outside of it, seems to know little or nothing about, chiefly because its devotees superiorly assume they have, without the need for much argument, the monopoly of truth about most of the big social issues of the day. I have thus always been irritated by the knowledge that some versions of Conservatism are considered almost true by definition by those who advocate them. This presumptuousness is frequently reinforced by a political discourse which specialises in denigrating my own. While theirs is said to be the voice of political ‘moderation’ and ‘broad-mindedness’, mine is labelled ‘hard’, ‘narrow’ and ‘extreme’. How they get away with this cynical sleight of hand is one of the less written about features of the workings of ideology, I have decided. For what is ‘narrow’, least of all ‘extreme’ and ‘hard’, about championing greater social and economic equality, more meaningful work for the majority, decent housing for the homeless and an education and health service which privileges the many and not the few?

But much more distressing to me is the knowledge that many of my friends in the Labour Party are seemingly unaware of the neo-liberal values the party’s parliamentary leadership has asked them to campaign on since 1997, which if 26Windsor Mann, The Quotable Hitchens, Cambridge MA, Da Cappo Press, 2011, p.232.

27Susan Sontag, At the Same Time, London, Penguin, 2008, pp.181-2.

28Isaiah Berlin, Affirming: Letters 1975-97, edited by Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle, London, Chatto & Windus, 2015, p.?

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translated into economic policy and subsequently implemented consolidate rather than ameliorate the social inequalities which I know they abhor as much as I do. Those that are aware seem totally at home with and so happy to endorse a shockingly flawed theory of economic and social life which (to quote one my favourite Marxist intellectuals, David Harvey) “proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights and free markets”.29 This is not just a philosophically defective prospectus; it is also one unsupported by evidence, to the degree that strong property rights and free markets have been shown (notably by the likes of Thomas Piketty30) to encourage huge inequalities in wealth and income which combine to undermine the long-term flourishing of individual citizens, threatening simultaneously, as I stressed earlier,31 social cohesion as we know it.

One of my heroes is the Nineteenth Century English essayist, William Hazlitt, who wrote this once about his own political contrariness and steadfastness:

“It requires an effort of resolution, or at least obstinate prejudice, for a man to maintain his opinions at the expense of his interest. But it requires a much greater effort of resolution for a man to give up his interest to recover his independence . . . A man, in adhering to his principles in contradiction to the decisions of the world, has disadvantages. He has nothing to support him but the supposed sense of right; and any defect in the justice of his cause, or the force of his conviction, must prey on his mind, in proportion to the delicacy and sensitiveness of its texture; he is left alone in his opinions; and . . . grows nervous, melancholy, fantastical, and would be glad of somebody or anybody to sympathize with him . . . Nothing but the strongest and clearest conviction can support a man in a losing minority . . .“ (my emphasis)32

Like Hazlitt, I have politically been in a succession of losing minorities. But, for all its perils and frustrations, Leftism still grips my imagination, despite stupidly once abandoning it, entirely because it possesses a distinctive set of critical necessities and uniquely progressive affirmations. But, before I explain what these are, and from where I first derived them, I have an important debt to pay.

Debt of honour: Michael FootShortly after beginning to write this chapter, I learnt of the death, at 96, of Michael Foot, the veteran Left English parliamentary democrat and man of letters.33 Given the huge influence Foot exerted on my political development, it seemed right to return to and rewrite the earlier part of it, so as fully to acknowledge at the outset the huge debt of honour I owe him. For Foot embodied and helped to nurture in me many of the political notions that constitute the core of my current ideological outlook, including a

29David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, p.5.

30See his masterwork Capital in the Twenty-First Century, London, Belknap Press, 2013.

31See pages 4 and 5.

32William Hazlitt, ‘On Modern Lawyers and Poets’, in Duncan Wu (ed.) The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt [Volume 4], London, Pickering & Chatto, 1998, pp. 129-30.

33Michael Foot died on 3 March, 2010.

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commitment to the principles of egalitarianism and collectivism.34 Because he was always a scholar and a man of learning, he also educated my judgement generally, introducing me to many writers who I might otherwise have ignored, of which William Hazlitt, who I quoted from earlier, must be the most important.

Michael Foot significantly entered my political life in the early 1980s, by which time I was in my thirties, and he was the recently elected Leader of the Labour Party,35 which a dozen years earlier I had first joined. An important year for me professionally that decade was 1983, on All Fools Day of which, aged thirty-six, I took up the post of deputy headteacher at Queen Elizabeth High School, a large secondary comprehensive in Hexham, Northumberland. I can recall easily my nervous state as I drove to the school for the first day of my work there, feeling I had been appointed to a role far above my competence, fearing I would be quickly exposed as hopelessly out of my depth. (Such feelings, as I reveal in other chapters, have frequently haunted me at turning points in my professional life.)

1983 was also a significant year politically in the UK. The Tories were then the governing party, having easily overturned James Callaghan’s minority Labour administration in 1979.36 Margaret Thatcher was Prime-Minister; and she had called a general election, identifying Thursday 9 June as polling day. Despite the heavy demands of my new job, I was able in the run up to that election to be a reasonably energetic member of the Hexham CLP. I attended local meetings, did some door-stepping, and frequently delivered campaign leaflets on behalf of its Labour candidate, the then very young Stephen Byers, no less, who in 1998 (he’d become Wallsend’s MP by then) became a cabinet minister in Tony Blair’s first administration.37

While Foot did not visit Hexham during the 1983 general election campaign - it was neither a targeted marginal nor important enough generally38 - he did speak at a major rally in nearby Newcastle, to which I went, where he delivered this peroration: “We

34Two appreciative biographies of Michael Foot are: Mervyn Jones, Michael Foot, London, Victor Gollancz, 1994; and Kenneth Morgan, Michael Foot: A Life, London, Harper Press, 2007. An admiring essay about him is authored by Neil Kinnock in Philip Norton (ed.), Eminent Parliamentarians: The Speaker’s Lectures, London, Biteback Publishing, 2012, pp.159-180. Kenneth Morgan has also written and published a similar-length appreciation in Charles Clarke & Toby James (eds.), British Labour Leaders, London, Biteback Publishing, 2015, pp.231-245. I was lucky to meet with and talk to Foot shortly after his 90th birthday, on 10 April 2003, at the official unveiling in Soho of William Hazlitt’s newly restored memorial stone. To learn about his role at this event see: Ian Mayes, ‘Mr Foot’s devotion to Hazlitt’, The Hazlitt Review, 3, 2010, pp.5-6.

35Foot was elected Leader of the Labour Party by the Parliamentary Labour Party on 10 November, 1980, defeating Dennis Healey by ten votes in a second ballot. In a first ballot, he came second to Healey, 112-83 votes. Foot had been Deputy Leader of the PLP since 1976. 36The 1979 general election marked a pivotal point in Twentieth Century British politics. The Tories won a majority of 43 seats, in the first of four consecutive general election victories, enabling them to be continuously in power for eighteen years, until Labour’s landslide victory under Tony Blair in 1997.

37He subsequently disgraced himself in 2010 when he was secretly audio-recorded saying he was like a ‘cab for hire’, willing to work for private firms as a highly paid parliamentary lobbyist.

38Hexham has continuously returned a Tory MP to the House of Commons in General Elections since 1945.

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are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth. So, if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer, ‘To hell with them’. The top is greedy and mean and will invariably find a way to take care of itself. It always does.” Like many others who listened to these words, I was positively affected by their crusading rhetoric, which is why they contributed to a naïve false optimism on my part about the outcome of the 1983 general election, and right up to voting day itself, despite all the opinion polls that pointed accurately in an entirely contrary direction.

Youthful communismThe 1983 general election campaign was the third of its kind I had been involved in since joining the Labour Party, aged 23, in the last week of June 1970, in Bath, shortly after Labour had surprisingly lost power that same month to the Tories. Most opinion polls prior to that election had indicated a comfortable Labour victory, putting it over 12 points ahead of the Tories. However, a late swing gave the latter a 3.4% lead and an overall majority in the House of Commons of 14 MPs.

Sixteen months previously, in September 1968, I had resigned from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), with which I had been very loosely linked since leaving grammar school in 1966, and subsequently in my undergraduate years, during which time I was heavily involved as well in CND and the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and more generally in the student protests of 1968. As a student activist, I recall taking part in many trade union demonstrations during this time, even getting briefly arrested in Manchester during one of them.

The decision to leave the CPGB was entirely provoked by my inability to accept its endorsement of the Soviet Union’s military suppression of the political liberalization efforts being attempted in Czechoslovakia, its so-called ‘Prague Spring’. At the time, the CPGB responded with only very mild criticism of Moscow, refusing to call what took place an ‘invasion’, preferring to describe it as an ‘intervention’. Its then General Secretary, John Gollan, said at the time: “we completely understand the concern of the Soviet Union about the security of the socialist camp … we speak as true friends of the Soviet Union”. I too considered myself then to be a ‘friend of the Soviet Union’; but its actions towards Czechoslovakia were intolerable, as far as I was concerned; and my party’s mealy-mouthed support for them inexcusable. I had to leave.

My short association with the CPGB was prompted as much by adolescent Christian idealism as by political argument, which means I first became attracted to the idea of communism more because of the church’s influence than the Communist Party’s. Today, by contrast, I am not a communist because of any faith in Christianity, but because, as I made clear earlier, I consider Marx’s version of socialism, and its embodiment in communism, to be easily the most superior theoretical form of political economy available, offering a continuingly relevant and damning critique of both industrial and financial capital and a glad-heartening vision of what a Good and Just Society might look like, including signposts to how it might be brought about.

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So, while I recognize that currently the UK’s top financial institutions pay annually about £20 billions in corporation tax, my communist intelligence also tells me they either avoid or evade paying other taxes valued at nearly £40 billions each year, with nearly a third of the UK’s top 700 companies handing over no tax at all, which is equivalent to about a third of our entire deficit.39 Moreover, many high-street brand multinationals – like Asda, Apple, Cadburys, Ikea and Starbucks – pay minimal tax on massive UK revenues, chiefly by diverting profits earned in Britain to parent companies in lower tax jurisdictions. Using this tactic, Apple, for example, has avoided paying over £550 millions in tax on more than £2 billions worth of sales in the UK since 2000, channelling much of this business through Ireland. Meanwhile, Starbucks, which has nearly a thousand outlets in the UK, has paid no corporation tax into our exchequer since it arrived in this country sixteen years ago.40

Treasury figures released in April 2012 flesh out further these raw statistics, revealing that of those individuals in the UK that earn between £250K and £500K per annum, almost one-third pay tax of less than 40%.41 Indeed, in 1977, the least well-off fifth of households paid 37% of their gross income in direct and indirect taxes, against 38% for the richest fifth. In 2014, the tax take from the poorest group had gone up to nearly 38%, while the taxes paid by the richest had gone down to less than 35%. Other data similarly tell us that, in 2006, 54 UK-based billionaires, with a combined fortune of £126 billions, paid a total of only £14.7 millions in income tax.42 No wonder then that the richest one-thousand people in Britain have seen their wealth increase by £155 billions since the financial crisis of 2007/8, a sum of money that comfortably exceeds the government’s existing budget deficit. While then the poorest 20% in the UK today has wealth totaling about £28 billions (an average of just £2,230 each), the five top UK entries in Forbes’ - the family of the Duke of Westminster, David and Simon Reuben, the Hinduja brothers, the Cadogan family, and Sports Direct retail boss, Mike Ashley – between them have property, savings and other assets worth roughly the same amount.43 This means, incredibly, that the rest of us, including disproportionately the poorest in society, subsidize the collective profit-making of a very small number of extremely wealthy people, a fact reinforced by the knowledge that UK taxpayers, in the tax year ending March 2013, handed over nearly £93 billions in the form of public grants, tax breaks and direct subsidies to some of our

39Michael Meacher, The State We Need: Keys to the Renaissance of Britain, London, Biteback, 2013, pp.204-205.

40For a detailed study of these scams, see Richard Brooks, The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became a Tax Haven for Fat Cats and Big Business, London, One World Publications, 2013. Also relevant is Andrew Sayer, Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, Bristol, Policy Press, 2015, pp.255-65 and Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, London, Vintage Books, 2011.

41See Guardian, 16 April, 2012, for details.

42Robert Peston, Who Runs Britain? London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2008, p.18.

43See Tale of Two Britains, Oxford, Oxfam, 2014.

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biggest corporations,44 leading Will Hutton to describe such welfare as “nothing less than communism for the rich”.45

Britain’s largest private-equity firms are a huge case in point here. Between 2005 and the economic crash of 2007 their fourteen biggest asset-stripping deals offered over 300% returns, half of which came from debt and almost a third from rising stock markets, with less than 20% coming from diligent productive entrepreneurship and effort, making it difficult to understand how successive Labour governments between 1997 and 2010 toadied up to them so much, reducing their capital gains liabilities in that period from 40% to a meagre 28%. Factor in the scam that is investment banking, which includes forms of fiscal and accounting arbitrage and associated foreign exchange rate-rigging,46 and the free-riding role played by rentier organizations in some of our inner cities, which make huge sums of money merely by exploiting inflated land values47, and the social uselessness of much of financial capital is made writ-large. Scandal-ridden and poorly managed, our investment banks focus their business activities largely on the selling of mortgages, devoting less than 10% of their lending to job-creating investment. And their corporation counterparts are not quite what they make out either. Rather than embrace fully the market ideology they claim to uphold, their very large scale enables them tightly to squeeze competition to such a degree that choice is reduced rather than enhanced. Nowhere more evident is this of course than in the electricity and gas industries.48

Ultimately, this class of self-serving, super-rich financiers can therefore be relied upon for one thing only: that it will always look after its own short-term economic interests before anyone else’s, which is why there can be no illusion they will voluntarily yield their ground, or simply melt away when confronted by society’s moral opprobrium and a demand that it should contribute more to the common good. Indeed, the very idea of the ‘common good’ is lost on such people, who routinely deceive themselves about what others earn or even where they stand on the income-wealth spectrum. Everyone they know is like them, which means they are ignorant of the other 99% who aren’t.49 You cannot reason with reason’s enemies, I learnt a long

44See Aditya Chakrabortty, ‘Direct aid, subsidies and tax breaks. The hidden welfare budget we don’t debate’, Guardian, 8 July, 2015, p.12.

45Will Hutton, Them & Us: Why We Need a Fair Society, London, Little Brown, 2010, p.?

46For details of the most recent case of illegal foreign exchange rate-rigging, involving six of the world’s leading banks, including Barclays and RSB, see Jill Treanor & Dominic Rushe, ‘Breathtakingly flagrant: the forex rigging that landed six banks with $5.7bn fines, Guardian, 21 May, 2015, p.27. A helpful source that explains the various forms of arbitrage referred to here John Kay, Other People’s Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People?, London, Profile Books, 2015. The amoral ‘professionalism’ of bankers is discussed in Joris Luyendijk, ‘Big banks have a problem with ethics and morality’, Guardian, 18 January, 2016. See also his Swimming with Sharks: My Journey into the Alarming World of the Bankers, London, Faber, 2015.

47See Andrew Sayer, Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, pp.49-57 and 103-4.

48See Aditya Chakrabortty, ‘The giants walk off with our billions’, Guardian, 9 December 2014, p.37.

49See the evidence obtained from the super-rich focus groups that feature in Polly Toynbee and David Walker, Unjust Rewards: Exposing Greed and Inequality in Britain Today, London, Granta, 2008, pp.21-54. And look also at Tim Di Muzio, The 1% and the Rest of Us: A Political Economy of Dominant Ownership, London, Zed Books, 2015.

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time ago, particularly when their ignorant and amoral version of reality is grounded in such profound self-regard which its lobbyists tirelessly seek to promote among politicians and regulators alike, with the result that the corporate infiltration of Britain’s democratic processes is today almost complete.50

Socialists have to know exactly who these enemies are, and what they represent, and stand fully up to them – clearly, objectively and uncompromisingly - using the power of the state to constrain their activities so that they act far more in the people’s interests at the expense of their own. Faced by this prospect, the traditional ruling class of course will fight back fiercely to protect its interests, which is why, to use again the words of David Harvey, “it will never willingly surrender its power; it will have to be dispossessed”.51 Christopher Hampton, a much earlier Marxist influence on my political outlook, concurs: “[the forces of reaction] remain as deeply entrenched as ever. And if there is to be any hope of breaking the power of such forces and of replacing them with a social and political order dedicated at one and the same time to the practice of co-operative and communal principles [. . . . .] a great deal is going to have to depend upon our ability to recognize and mark down those who would frustrate such hopes”.52 David Harvey, writing elsewhere, is clear about who especially needs to be ‘marked down’ in this process, advocating a form of socialist political praxis that “limits or excludes the capacity of private individuals to accumulate money as a form of social power.”53 But the challenge here is a huge one, given the highly complex networks of influence these individuals have created, who are very secretive about their activities.54

Harvey’s disgruntlement helps to explain why I often repeat to myself those words of Foot I quoted earlier: “To hell with them. The top is greedy and mean, and will invariably find a way to take care of itself. It always does.” Indeed, despite the advent since 2010 of a new age of economic austerity in Britain, the average salary enjoyed by the chief executives of the FTSE’s top 100 firms is still amazingly high, standing at £4.2 millions, or 145 times the median wage; and by 2020 it is estimated they will be paid £8 millions or 214 times the average.55 The very rich are thus soaring ahead,

50In 2011, over £90 millions were spent of such lobbying. Relatedly, more than one in seven members of the House of Lords is currently in the pay of finance firms or have financial services clients. About this, see Tamasin Cave & Andy Rowell, A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism & Broken Politics in Britain, London, Bodley Head, 2014. Also relevant is Martin Williams, Parliament Ltd: A Journey to the Dark Heart of Politics, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2016.

51David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, London, Profile Books, 2010, p.260.

52Christopher Hampton, Socialism in a Crippled World, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981, p.318.

53David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. London, Profile Books, 2014, p.294.

54On the extent and nature of these networks in the USA, see Michael Massing, ‘Reimagining journalism: The story of the one percent’, New York Review of Books, Volume 62, No.20, December 2105/January 2016, pp.64-67.

55See the Guardian, 9 September, 2010, p.18; 29 October, 2010, p.35; and 16 May, 2011, p.25. Also relevant is David Marquand, Mammon’s Kingdom, pp.134-35. It is estimated that about 1500 Barclays employees earn more than £500,000 per annum.

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leaving the rest of society miles behind.56 Include the tax-avoidance and tax evasion strategies of these super-earners, not to mention the huge bonuses bank CEOs and directors of large companies enjoy,57 and the full scale of their cynical contribution to society becomes apparent – a UK society, moreover, in which presently almost seven million working-age adults are living in extreme financial stress, despite being in employment and independent of state support,58 and an ever-increasing number of people have to resort to begging to get by.59

The proposal that the ever-increasing wealth of UK’s super-earners and the growth of City profits are each good for everyone – ‘a rising tide that lifts all boats’ - is thus a notorious ideological trick posing as an economic fact. The City, and institutions like it, are simply not worth it; indeed, the behaviour of the majority of traders who work in them – we are talking here about no more than 300 thousand employees working for less than 200 firms - continues to be beyond the moral pale. Even Pope Francis isn’t taken in by what they get up to: “Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater social justice . . . This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power . . . Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”60 Pope Francis is right. Pro-rich economics always increase income and wealth inequalities. The reverse is only the case when the rich are compelled to deliver high investment. But such compulsion is largely absent in the UK economy, with the result that what ‘trickle down’ does occur is mostly obscured by an overwhelming ‘bubble up’.61

The French economist Thomas Piketty says much the same, empirically demonstrating that once profit returns exceed the aggregated growth of worker’s wages then the stocks of capital held by financiers rises disproportionately faster within the overall pattern of output. In our current system of capitalism, where there is an absence of appropriate regulative control of wealth accumulation and an

56This isn’t a recent phenomenon. The share of national income going to the bottom half of earners in Britain has fallen dramatically over the last thirty years, with ordinary workers seeing theirs fall by a quarter, while at the same time the proportion going to the top 1% of earners has increased by nearly a half. For the details, see Matthew Whittaker and Lee Savage, Missing Out: Why ordinary workers are experiencing growth without gain, London, Resolution Foundation, 2011. 57Average bonuses for directors of FTSE 350 companies rose by 187% in the period 2002 to 2011. In 2002, these were worth 48% of their salaries; today they are valued at 90%. For details, see The High Pay Commission, What are we paying for? Exploring executive pay & performance , London, HPC, September, 2011.

58For the details of the survey upon which this claim is based, see Guardian, 19 June, 2012, pp.10f.

59Evidence for an increase in street begging is provided in Rob Waugh & Helen Pidd, ‘Prosecutions for begging rise 70%’, Guardian, 1 December, 2014, p.12

60Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, 2012, para.54.

61On this, see Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, London, Allen Lane, 2010, pp.137-147. The fallacy of ‘trickle-down economics’ is also exposed in Trends in Income Inequality and its Impact on Economic Growth, Paris, OECD, 2014.

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inadequate top income, capital gains and corporation tax rate, economic inequality is therefore bound to rise.62 Shockingly, to illustrate graphically this conclusion, Zygmunt Bauman tells us that [in the US] “nearly all of the increase in GDP that has been achieved since the credit collapse in 2007 – like more than 90 per cent of it - has been appropriated by the richest 1 per cent of Americans”.63 It is the same in the UK, where the richest 10% of its population shared 52% of the nation’s wealth in 2007; now, despite eight years of austerity, it owns over 54% of it.64 Data released by the Office for National Statistics in December 2015 reinforce this bias, reporting that the richest 1% of the population have as much wealth as the poorest 57% combined.65

None of the mainstream political parties in the UK appears to have a serious clue about how to disrupt such trends, suggesting they aren’t really interested in trying to. Indeed, their ‘business-friendly’ economic policies – such as low capital gains and corporation taxes and easy-going ways with firms about paying tax generally - collude with the very market processes they claim to want to confound. As Ha-Joon Chang says, “being soft on tax-avoidance is paradoxically bad for business”, because it makes it hard for them to function at their best.66 To that extent, the establishment parties each pay mere lip service to the idea of reducing inequality of wealth and income, making my party, the Labour Party, which one would imagine to be on the side of reducing social and economic inequality, ultimately a variant of Conservatism. It would seem less so if it was to specify by how much it would like in government to redistribute income and wealth from the top 1% to the bottom 10% in order to promote greater equality. But that is a pie-in-the-sky hope, because Labour, as much as the Tories, is currently in the thrall of the vested interest which is financial capital, which is why the parliamentary road to socialism must be a dead-end.

For the House of Commons is a key element in the neo-liberal state, with each of its main parties unashamedly embracing an austerity ideology. This ideology says the current economic crisis is first and foremost one of overspending, thus justifying fiscal retrenchment and cuts in public expenditure, of which of course the financial elites approve totally, rather than the result of a banking bust, which they must pay for, of which naturally they don’t.67 As a result, the building up of good-will among

62This is the central argument of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.63Zygmunt Bauman, Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? Cambridge, Polity, 2013, p.39. See also George Monbiot, ‘The rich want us to believe their wealth is good for us all’, Guardian, 29 July, 2014.

64See the 2014 Annual Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, the findings of which are discussed in Jill Treanor & Sean Farrell, ‘London’s super-rich dominate as UK leads G7 economies – for inequality’, Guardian, 15 October, 2014, p.8.

65See The Independent, 19 December, 2015, pp.4-5.

66Ha-Joon Chang, ‘Ignore the pro-business rhetoric: a pro-rich government is anti-business’, Guardian, 3 March, 2015, p.22.

67For an excellent discussion of austerity as ideology, see Richard Seymour, Against Austerity, London, Pluto Press, 2014, pp.114-126. Also relevant is Barry Kushner & Saville Kushner, Who Needs the Cuts?: Myths of the Economic Crisis, London, Hesperus Press, 2003; Kerry-Anne Mendoza, Austerity: The Demolition of the Welfare State and the Rise of the Zombie Economy, Oxford, New Internationalist Publications, 2015; and Simon Wren-Lewis. ‘Covering up the austerity mistake’, New Statesman, 17-23 April, 2015, pp.44-47.

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the UK’s creditors, which helps these elites to continue to accumulate, is considered more important by most politicians than society’s general economic well-being. The assumption is that what’s good for the banks must be good for everyone, which is a version of the lie I earlier called ‘trickle down’.

Why most elected politicians propagate this falsehood, in defiance of both economic theory and evidence, is a mystery to me.68 Maybe it’s because they haven’t thought sufficiently about the matter. Or, maybe it’s because they have, and decided that satisfying the bond markets matters more than meeting ordinary people’s immediate economic needs, or that they naively equate one with the other. The only Westminster political party that bucks this false orthodoxy is the Greens, whose manifestos regularly call for increased taxation of the super rich and stiffer regulation of the City, while advocating at the same time the idea of a Citizen’s or Basic Income, a proposal which I will write more about at the end of Chapter 3. Astonishingly, many Labour Party members I know mock such ideas, little realizing that in doing so they are giving indirect support to the very forces they claim to oppose.

By writing in this way, I am not condemning outright, as both Harvey and Hampton do, all forms of capitalist activity, for my economics are as much neo-Keynesian as conventionally Marxist. The Keynes side of my political character says that capitalism’s great strength has been its extraordinary ability to adapt and regenerate, making it the best available means to get societies out of poverty and into abundance – a view shared by Marx who admired the positive achievements of capitalism, which he correctly argued had increased the productive capability of the world's economy far beyond that ever witnessed before or anticipated. My Keynesian aspect tells me too that the credit crunch of 2007/8 was not so much a failure of capitalism, as a crisis of poorly regulated financial markets, which unscrupulous investment bankers, encouraged by a succession of supine New Labour governments, fragrantly exploited.69 How did Gordon Brown, as Labour Chancellor, once put it: “The message [the City of] London’s success sends out to the whole British economy is that we will succeed if we think globally and nurture the skills of the future, [and] advance with light-touch regulation, a competitive tax environment and flexibility.”70 Oh dear. This is a Faustian bargain if ever there was one, entailing a mistaken belief that the financial roulette wheel which is the City would keep turning forever and so provide government with huge tax revenues to divert towards schools, hospitals and the poor. This was and remains not just naïve economics, but a way of organising our economy that encourages periodic crises which ordinary people always are made to pay for.

Accordingly, my Marxist self inevitably raises questions about the form that capitalism takes, including the aims it pursues: does it seek to encourage wealth for the majority?; or does it merely maximize the riches of individual financiers?; and can it be trusted to regulate itself in a fashion that takes into account the wider needs of society? My answers to these questions, as applied to capitalism in its present state,

68For discussion of this evidence, see Paul Krugman, ‘The austerity delusion’, Guardian, 29 April, 2015, pp.31-33, and his End This Depression Now! New York, W W Norton, 2012.

69My reborn appreciation of Keynes has been influenced in recent times by Robert Skildelsky, Keynes: The Return of the Master, London, Penguin, 2009. 70From Mr Brown’s 2007 Mansion House Speech, quoted in Will Hutton, Them and Us, pp.146-7.

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are: NO, YES, and NO. I take my lead here from China’s former Communist Leader, Deng Xiaoping, who once said: “To get rich is no sin. However, what we mean [in China] by getting rich is different from what you [in the West] mean. Wealth in a socialist society belongs to the People. To get rich [in China] means prosperity for the entire People.”71 That seems about right to me, as is the injunction that we need urgently to reform and democratise our broken model of capitalism, another theme to which I will return in Chapter 3.

Joining LabourGiven what I have just written about Labour’s historic inability forcibly to take on the negative forces of both industrial and financial capital, my move from the CPGB to its ranks in 1970 must seem very curious to most readers of this chapter. Certainly it wasn’t prompted by any new economic awareness on my part. On the contrary, my knowledge of capitalist economics at that time, despite being a member of the CPGB, and having read a few classic Leftist texts, was very inadequate. At best, I had just a broad-brush understanding of such things, simply thinking that, while capitalism was often a profane force, it could be easily reformed and brought to heel. Also, in my early twenties, the idea of ‘financial capital’ was still waiting to be understood even by many Left intellectuals. So, while financial capitalism is now buried deep into all our collective psyches, its impact was far less pervasive in the 1970s, a period when the British economy was, in any event, still geared significantly towards manufacturing. The service sector, including its retail and financial divisions, was in its infancy then, only coming fully to prominence in the late 80s and early 90s. Today, its contribution to the UK’s GDP runs at over 70%. When I left the CPGB in 1968, and joined Labour shortly after, it was less than half that figure.

However, this alteration in economic life does not fully account for why I so easily left behind my communist aspirations in favour of Labour’s more lukewarm ones. What is clear to me is that my fledgling, post-grammar school, socialism had much more to do with a basic sense of Christian fairness, articulating with a starry-eyed vision of the perfect society, than with a well worked out political economy. However, this still does not entirely excuse my political flip-flopping, for the Labour Party, unlike the CPGB, has never really entertained any kind of comprehensive critique of capital’s exploitative tendencies, despite efforts in that direction by one or two of its intellectuals.72 Indeed, because it famously owes more to Methodism than Marx, the Labour Party has never possessed a theoretical tradition worthy of the name. Surely I should have known better and noticed this? Maybe then there were personal reasons, based possibly on local friendships, which led me to the ranks of the Labour Party in 1970; or other psychological factors which pushed me in that direction, such as the fear of political isolation, about which I wrote at the start. I can’t even say it was the consequence of influences at home. For sure, my mother and father always voted Labour, but they did so in a very subdued, conventional working-class kind of way, never directly suggesting I should follow their example.

The truth is I simply can’t accurately remember what happened, though my active involvement in trade unionism at the time – I was a National Union of Teachers

71Deng Xiaoping said this during an interview on American TV in September 1986.

72See, for example, Stuart Holland, The Socialist Challenge, London, Quartet Books, 1975; and Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism, London, Jonathan Cape, 1956.

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(NUT) delegate to the Bristol Trade Union Congress, whose meetings I attended and spoke at regularly - may have been an influence, given the historic links between organized labour of that kind and my newly adopted party. But even that conclusion needs to be qualified by the fact that the trade union meetings I attended in the late 60s were heavily populated by Marxist ideologues of every kind, often outnumbering Labour Party members by two to one. Such numerical inferiority however did not put me off joining Labour, which has been, as I have said, the most accommodating of progressive parties where my lefty contrariness is concerned, welcoming me into its ranks without asking too many questions, and then tolerating me fully when I started to ask awkward ones. The same cannot be said of the CPGB, the internal discipline of which I experienced as hard-going and ultimately intolerant of views outside its mainstream. Its great strength, which is not shared by the Labour Party, however, is that it takes very seriously the political education of its members, introducing them to classical Marxist literature and the tactics of political activism. I have always, by comparison, found local Labour Parties, some notable individuals within them notwithstanding, weak intellectually and largely unschooled in the practical arts of politics.

Whatever prompted me ultimately to join the Labour Party in 1970, I soon became a very active member of its organization in Bath. Indeed, within four years, in June 1974, aged 27, as a Labour candidate, I fought for and won a seat on the then Bath & District Council. I also campaigned in Bath in the two general elections which took place that year, although I cannot remember much about what I actually did, other than the usual leafleting and door-stepping.

For two years, between 1974 and 1976, I proudly enjoyed the opportunity to help govern the city of my birth. This experience convinced me that institutions and services like schools and nurseries, libraries, parks, transport and social housing, each administered and significantly financed locally, and in terms that stress equality of access and treatment, are significant symbols of a socialist society.

So, while town hall politics cannot ever address and challenge the commanding heights of capitalist excess, this does not mean such political activity is incapable of anticipating aspects of a communist social order. Though this may amount to a rationalizing of my political past in terms of how I think ideologically now, I like to believe my zeal as a Labour councillor was prompted in significant ways by radical Left intentions, and not just by a worthy sense of public civic duty, though of course neither is mutually exclusive. I imagine too I was beginning then to find a way of linking my Leftist views with the more moderate ones advocated by Labour, recognizing that half a political loaf is better than no bread at all. Certainly, that is currently how I sometimes think and act politically, albeit all the time holding onto and arguing for a bigger vision that anticipates a fully socialist-communist society.

I prefer Labour governments to Tory ones because they are more likely to identify and seek to meet the needs of the most vulnerable members of society; and I remain a member of the Labour Party, not because I think it will ever on its own inaugurate socialism, being neither radical enough nor sufficiently Leftist to achieve that, but because its philosophy is amenable to influence in that direction; and because, in tandem with other progressive forces in society, it is a party that might one day be a key catalytic agent for political and economic reform along socialist lines. As Nick

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Cohen, the Sunday Observer journalist, says: “Its engine is usually chocking; its exhaust is usually spewing; its passengers are frequently stabbing one another in the back; and its driver is often heading at full speed in the wrong direction. But … it’s all there is.”73 In government, the Attlee years excepted, Labour has believed chiefly in incremental change, while deferring always to conventional economic wisdom. It is a Party that lacks both the will and the confidence to educate electors on the benefits of socialism, seeking rather an accommodation with capitalism, which usually entails allowing it to call most of the economic shots, too many of which cause long-term societal damage. As a result, it bumbles along most of the time, both in government and in opposition, possessing no clear idea of what kind of progressive party it is or would like to be. As the Labour-aligned historian R H Tawney once observed, “the Labour Party is hesitant in action because it is divided in mind. It does not achieve what it could because it does not know ultimately what it wants. It frets out of office and fumbles in it.”74

General elections 1979 and 1983Before saying more about the origins of my communist ideals, including my recent re-engagement with them, I want to resume writing directly about Foot’s political legacy, returning to where I started in this chapter – my campaigning efforts in Hexham in 1983.

Foot was widely admired by party workers in the constituencies, both then and previously, who applauded him greatly whenever he spoke at the kind of mass rally I mentioned going to earlier. Indeed, his brilliant oratory was one of his trademarks, as I enthusiastically further learnt on another occasion. This time it was a Tribune event organised ‘on the fringe’ at Labour’s annual conference held four years before, in Blackpool, in 1979.

On that occasion, entirely without notes, Foot spoke persuasively about the need for, and roughly outlined the form and content of, a society run on socialist lines, the chief characteristics of which included equality, collectivism, full civil rights and extended forms of democracy, each buttressed by the public ownership of particular means of production, articulating with the state control and management of key services and utilities, like banks, hospitals, schools and the railways. By today’s standards, this may seem an archaic schema, particularly to those of a neo-liberal and New Labour persuasion convinced of the role of the free market in the public sphere. In the 1970s and 1980s, it constituted the bedrock of my political outlook. Basically, it still does, as I am unable to identify sufficient evidence to accept that the privatization of the means of production and many essential public services realizes a political economy capable of satisfying fully the needs of all members of society.

During the general election of 1979, however, this outlook barely provoked me into anything worthy of the label ‘politically active’. By this time, I had relocated to the north west of England, to study for my doctorate at the University of Lancaster, living nearby in Garstang, a small market town not far from Preston in Lancashire. Although during my studies at Lancaster University I maintained an interest in the ebb and flow

73Sunday Observer, 12 May, 2013. 74R H Tawney, ‘The choice before the Labour Party’, in The Political Quarterly in the 1930s, edited by W A Robson, London, 1971, p.96.

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of Labour Party politics, this did not translate into being very active locally. Indeed, I hardly did anything of a party political nature at constituency level in the period 1979 to 1982, other than to vote when called upon, and to hang around the Party’s annual conference when it was held in my area, in Blackpool.

Looking back, I am amazed, embarrassed more, by this lack of commitment, given the perilous circumstances in which Labour was then seeking to govern. It was also a period of huge turbulence within the Party, with its Leftist elements, notably the Militant Tendency, seeking to gain controlling influence over the direction of policy, particularly on the economy, culminating in Tony Benn’s narrowly unsuccessful attempt to become deputy leader in 1981. Astonishingly, given my previous record of activism, I inactively watched all of this taking place from the wings, as frustratingly did Labour’s then leader and Britain’s Prime Minister, James Callaghan, who had taken over from Harold Wilson following his surprise resignation in April 1976. By March 1977, his small majority government of three had become a minority one of nothing, following several by-election defeats; and from March 1977 to August 1978 he was only able to govern by agreement with the Liberals – the so-called ‘Lib-Lab Pact’.

Callaghan considered calling an election in the autumn of 1978, but decided finally that a possible economic upturn in 1979 might favour Labour at the polls. He was wrong about that, a decision not helped by a series of industrial disputes in 1978-79, dubbed the ‘Winter of Discontent’, which led to widespread strikes across the country that seriously hurt Labour's reputation. But, shamefully, I did little in my own way actively to make a difference in the other direction, opting out, as I’ve said, of doing anything at all of a practical nature to help Callaghan hold on to power and to fend off the expected Tory victory.75

Four years later, in Hexham, in June 1983, I returned to the political fray as an active campaigner during that month’s general election. While the Tories were able to present to the electorate a united party, led by a vigorous Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who had waged war successfully the year before over the Falkland Islands, Labour continued to suffer from a highly unfavourable public image, characterized by disunity among its own ranks and a general unfitness to govern. This impression spilled over into fears that Foot, Callaghan’s successor, would make a poor Prime Minister, an attitude fuelled by the tabloid press which cynically mocked him as being both ‘too old’ and ‘too extreme’ to be an effective leader on the world stage.

Labour’s manifesto for the 1983 general election was poorly drafted and communicated, and its campaign nationally, as I experienced it, was hopelessly organized. By contrast, the Tory effort seemed highly synchronised and effective, exploiting fully its broadcasts on radio and television. On two matters in particular Labour was found wanting by those voters I door-stepped: it failed to convince them it had a compelling solution to rising unemployment, which in Thatcher’s first two years in power had touched a total of almost three million; and its unilateral position

75Held on 3 May, the 1979 General Election saw a 5.2% swing from Labour to the Conservatives, the largest swing since the 1945 election, giving the Tories an overall majority of 44 seats. For details, see David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 1979, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1980.

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on nuclear disarmament persuaded them that in government it would leave the country defenceless.

Labour was trounced in 1983, losing sixty seats, reducing its representation in the House of Commons to only 209 MPs. The Tories, on the other hand, gained fifty-eight seats, giving them a total of 397, and an overall majority of 144. Seats lost did not tell the whole story, however. More worrying was the huge slump in Labour’s share of the vote, from 37% in 1979, to under 28% in June 1983 – almost 15% behind the Tories, and only slightly over 2% ahead of the then Liberal-Democratic Alliance Party.

Labour had thus only narrowly avoided becoming the third party in terms of popular support. Further detailed analysis only made things look worse. Labour did not have majority support among either men or women, among either the young or the old, among either skilled or unskilled workers, or even among the unemployed,76 despite the fact that over one-quarter of those who voted had, in effect, supported a socialist programme. Meanwhile, Labour’s performance in Hexham mirrored the national picture, Stephen Byers trailing in a poor third behind the Tory victor and Alliance runner up.77 I can easily bring back to mind my inability to take in all these events, fearing that Labour might never again win a majority in the House of Commons, making the Tories forever the natural party of government, a mood of pessimism which eventually made me, like many other members, an early convert to the New Labour ‘modernizing’ Project. As Lewis Minkin says in his study of the Labour Party’s management structures, “even on the Left, the events of 1979-83 came to be seen . . . as a political dead-end.”78

After Labour’s ghastly general election performance in 1983, it was then only a matter of time before Michael Foot’s tenure as Leader would be ended, and a successor sought. Neil Kinnock, who I had met once socially in the 70s, and whose Leftism in opposition I had grown to admire, took over at a specially convened Party Conference in October. He was elected Leader with either near or convincing majorities in each of the three components that made up the Party’s new electoral college, taking 75% of the union votes, over 90% of the constituencies (my vote being cast in his favour), and nearly 50% of the votes of MPs.

Kinnock made a short speech after the votes were declared, during which he paid handsome tribute to his predecessor and my hero: “I want to thank Michael Foot for a past, present and future in which he is and will be a growing inspiration to all of us who believe that the purpose of socialism is the gaining of liberty for humankind.” Twenty-seven years later, at Michael Foot’s funeral, Kinnock recalled and reinforced this earlier positive assessment of his friend and comrade: “Michael's religion was

76My source here is David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 1983, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1984.

77Geoffrey Rippon (C) 21,374 (51.5%); Euan Robson (L/All) 13,066 (31.5%); Stephen Byers (L) 7,056 (17%). C majority: 8,308. Turnout: 76.4%. 78Lewis Minkin, The Blair Supremacy: A Study in the Politics of Labour’s Party Management, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2014, p.52.

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humanity, his country was the world. He is dead now, but the memory of him endures to illuminate all our lives."79

Foot’s radicalism illuminated considerably my politics in the 80s, though this took the form more of a consolidation than an awakening. For my Left attitude had been forged much earlier, chiefly in the period 1965 to 1969, in my teenage years, which is when I first became familiar with and influenced by Marxist ideas. Foot played no part at all in this process, for his socialism was never explicitly ideological, being chiefly inspirational, despite his admiration for some of Marx’s ideas. As one of his biographers Kenneth Morgan accurately says of him: “Michael Foot was a highly intellectual politician. But he was not really an intellectual in politics. . . . [His] was a socialism of emotional sensibility rather than empirical analysis . . . As a result, he made no major contribution to socialist thought.”80 To that extent Foot is very like his arch rival and eventual political enemy, Tony Benn, another Labour conviction campaigner I grew to admire at about the same time.81

Intellectual communism Theory about the nature of socialism and communism was crucial to the development of my youthful Leftism. Indeed, I seem always to need a well worked out narrative to make full sense of how I should act in any significant sphere of influence. As I said in this book’s opening chapter, I tend to feel mostly with my thoughts. Thus, socialist emotional sensibility of the sort championed and articulated by the likes of Foot and Benn, reinforced even by the moral teachings of the New Testament, was not politically sufficient, even in my naively impressionable twenties. For sure, I was initially attracted to socialism because its moral prospectus about fairness, justice, community and equality coincided with a Christian sense of what I imagined characterised the Good Society. But gut feeling, even when reinforced by biblical authority, required the adjunct of ideological argument and economic reasoning for it ultimately to have motivational effects on my political actions, which is why I sought out literature about socialism and communism from the very outset.

Two publications, each a classic, got the ball rolling. Both were acquired in 1966, following recommendation by one of my sixth-form tutors, to be read by me during the post A-Level period of my last year in grammar school. One was a short tract – Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ (1848/1962) The Communist Manifesto; the other a substantial book - R N Carew Hunt’s (1963) The Theory and Practice of Communism.82 I recollect buying these books as a single item one Saturday morning from a local bookshop, each soft-back, blue-covered Pelicans, eagerly reading them

79See Neil Kinnock, ‘Michael Foot’, The Sunday Observer (The New Review Section), 12 December, 2010, p.11.

80Morgan, Michael Foot, pp. 481, 482 and 493.

81Benn, who died on 14 March 2014, rarely read any serious Left literature, including even the works of Marx. He admits as much in his diary entry for Sunday 26 December, 1976, in Against the Tide, Diaries 1973-76, London, Hutchinson, 1989, p.692.

82Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Harmonsdworth, Penguin Books, 1962 edition; R.N. Carew Hunt, The Theory and Practice of Communism, Harmonsdworth, Penguin Books, 1963.

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each over the next three weeks. Such was my introduction to the extraordinary literary world of Left political ideas.

The Manifesto, alongside Carew Hunt’s critical history of communist thinking, alerted me to a sensationally original version of history – specifically, a new understanding of the nature of Western capitalism – entailing the thesis that there is a fundamental struggle underway in capitalist society between two social classes, the bourgeoisie (the ruling class owners of the economic means of production) and the proletariat (the working or servile class). The ‘bourgeoisie’ constantly exploits the ‘proletariat’ for its manual labour and cheap wages. But it does not have things all its own way. For the ‘proletariat’, I learnt, eventually challenges this abuse, rising to power through revolutionary praxis, supported by trade union and communist party activism, overthrowing capitalism in the process, triumphantly inaugurating a classless and equal society based on the common ownership of the means of production. What a story, I thought, despite failing to understand how the economics underpinning it worked.

My first attraction to Marxist social and economic analysis is then not difficult to explain. For it provided a compelling ideological critique of how the world works, its comprehensive analysis of Western forms of political economy striking home massively to my then highly impressionable Christian moral intelligence. It also proposed to me a way in which the world ought to work in a better and fairer fashion, offering an ethic of human relations that again made complete sense to my youthful romanticism. And, crucially, it announced incontrovertible grounds for believing that things will work that way in the future, thanks to a cast-iron belief in historical necessity. This rich cocktail of economic description, moral prescription and historic prediction was not just highly seductive, but serviceable as well, thriving on its own utopian impossibility, identifying a vision of a better world that my day-to-day political activity should strive to help bring about.83

Its appeal to me again in the last phase of my life is also immense. This has as much to do with a psychological need to be reconciled with my youthful Leftism, as with a desire to rediscover and re-apply some of its core ideas following an extended period of political apostasy, during which I became infatuated with a particular form of social democratic revisionism, an episode I will write about in the next chapter. I seem to want to end my days re-accommodated to a version of communist idealism, which, deep within me, I have always known to be the Truth, and ought never to have abandoned in my late middle years.

This is maybe a secular-political version of how those on their death beds, having agnostically or atheistically engaged with religious belief for much of their lives, desire ultimately to be ‘blessed’ by an explicit version of it before they die. Although, I have no desire for my funeral to be a religious one, I would therefore hate anyone attending it to think I’d died a social democrat, least of all an uncritical supporter of New Labour.

83For an additional discussion of the appeal of communism, see Archie Brown, The Rise & Fall of Communism, London, Vintage Books, 2010, pp.117-134.

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As I have said twice before, Marx seems to me basically to have got things broadly right, being prophetically correct in his grasp of capitalism’s endemic instability, offering us also a profound over-arching theorization of its regressive and potentially de-humanizing effects.84 As Paul Mason similarly argues, “he anticipated the world of Enron, Bernie Madoff and the wealthy 1%”.85 And there is a paradoxical dimension at work here as well. The Parisian Leftist, Alain Badiou, tells us how, explaining that we are now curiously closer to the problems that Marx investigated in the first half of the Nineteenth Century than we are to those we have inherited from the last one: “Just as in around 1840, we are faced [in 2014] with an utterly cynical capitalism, which is certain that it is the only possible option for a rational organization of society . . . Today, just as back then, very extensive areas of extreme poverty can be found even in the rich countries. [The sixth richest country on earth, the UK, now has half a million people dependent on food banks]. There are outrageous, widening inequalities between countries, as well as between social classes . . . More than ever political power . . . is merely an agent of capitalism”.86 And it’s not just Marxists that say such things. A charity like Oxfam does as well. In its most recent report on economic equality, published to coincide with the 2015 Davos economic summit, it tells us that just 80 individuals now have the same net wealth as 3.5 billion people, which is about half the entire global population.87

Class conflictBadiou’s highlighting of class inequalities is either mocked by the Right or denied by it. Even New Labour’s leader, Tony Blair, did as much, declaring in his speech to the 1999 Party annual conference that “the class war is over”. Such absurd denials are always supported by selective reference to the facts of sociology, which tell us correctly that the UK’s class structure has altered significantly over the past fifty years. But significant alteration is not the same as fundamentally changed. As the late Richard Hoggart puts it: “class distinctions do not die; they merely learn new ways of expressing themselves.”88

84I am aware that others think the exact opposite. For example, a very recent biographer of Marx, Jonathan Sperber, argues that his critique of capitalism is “of very limited value to the modern world”. See his Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, London, Norton Books. I think he is wrong, preferring those studies that promote the continuing relevance of Marx’s analysis and communist ideology, albeit in a reworked form, which include Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2011; Kieran Allen, Marx and the Alternative to Capitalism, London, Pluto Press, 2011; Keith Graham, Karl Marx Our Contemporary, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1992, and Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx, London, Bookmarks Publications, 1995.

85Paul Mason, Post-Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future, London, Allen Lane, 2015, p.53.

86Alain Badiou, ‘The idea of communism’, in Costa Douzinas and Slavok Zizek (eds.), The Idea of Communism, London, Verso Books, 2010, pp.13-14.

87See Rising Inequality and Climate Change: The Defining Challenges for Global Leaders in 2015, Oxford, Oxfam, January 2015. An earlier Oxfam report, Even it Up (Oxford, Oxfam, 2014), says that today seven out of ten people live in nations where the gap between rich and poor is greater today than it was thirty years ago. See also Larry Elliott, ‘World’s richest 62 people now controls as much wealth as the poorest 50%, Oxfam says’, Guardian, 18 January, 2016, p.20.

88Richard Hoggart, ‘Introduction’ to George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, London, Penguin, 1989 edition, p.vii.

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While Marx’s notions of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat’ no longer trip off my tongue, I therefore still hold on to and follow through politically the implications of his basic thesis – that there are essentially two distinct classes: a small, dominant class, made up of the upper crust and its capitalist allies; and a larger subordinate class, comprising the majority of citizens who ‘sell their labour’ to either the bosses of private industry or the managers of public utilities that each exploit them economically.89

The existence of a large number of individual entrepreneurs running small businesses does not alter this fact. Such businesses contribute annually less than £1 billion to the UK economy. Meanwhile, the education and health service sectors, which employ over 1.5 million people, have a gross value of nearly £100 billion. Nor does the knowledge that nowadays the bulk of the traditional working class is employed in neither mining nor manufacturing make a difference either. For the mass of workers is still compelled to make a living by hiring itself out for less than its labor is worth. Indeed, the highly damaging template for much business as I write is one that extracts the maximum amount of ‘flexibility’ from workers at a minimum cost to employers.90 The idea that this anticipates or coincides with an end to the class war is risible.

The experience of my own subordinate class location underlines this conclusion. Going back a long way, it was vicariously communicated via my father in my late adolescence, as I learnt from him the importance of workers’ solidarity, which required him to go on strike twice, and for us temporarily to live off trade union (AUEW) handouts. It was directly communicated at grammar school where I was constrained to speak a version of the so-called Queen’s English rather than the West-country working class dialect-inflected version of it I had been brought up on, and still retain; and where I was taught to deny other aspects of my origins, including a love of soccer, whose character-building qualities were assumed to be of much less worth than rugby’s. It was reinforced by the relative poverty manifest in my parents’ home, which initially lacked an inside lavatory and bathroom. And it was consolidated by wide reading of Leftist literature which taught me that the economic subjugation of my class was neither natural nor inevitable, but rather the result of the conscious and selfish actions of those occupying the dominating seats of economic power and influence in society.

Today, these realities are frequently obscured by other contemporary accounts which say that, if class is not quite dead, it is very differently experienced. This counterfeit sensibility, taking advantage of the fact that the bulk of the working population no longer knows accurately where it stands on the earnings scale, fosters the delusional perception that most members of the subordinate class belong not to the working classes, but to the middle classes. The current Prime-Minister, David Cameron, recently cynically exploited this way of thinking, announcing that he too is ‘middle

89The analysis of class I offer here is largely based on that provided by Ralph Miliband in his Capitalist Democracy in Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982, pp.5-15 and Marxism and Politics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp.17-41.

90An infamous case study of what I am writing about here is the UK firm Sports Direct, the awful work practices of which at its Shirebrook distribution centre were exposed in the Guardian on 11 December, 2015. The workers at this centre, many of them Polish, are paid less than the minimum wage and are so frightened of getting a black mark from their employer that they leave sick children at school rather than ask for time off work to look after them.

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class’, obscuring the fact that, as a senior member of Britain’s dominant class – a millionaire Old Etonian married to the daughter of a baronet – he is aligned through birth, socialization and education with society’s most wealthy minority elite. But we are not supposed to notice that.

Nor are we meant to discern how the language of class, and its cognate class conflict, have each become displaced by the politics of personal identity – about gender, sexual orientation and race, notably - that tend to obfuscate social differences and the inequalities with which they are associated. They achieve this by successfully disguising the facts of poverty – facts to do with lousy housing, poor schooling, low pay, and the rest – by individualizing them, stripping away in the process the need to identify and address their root causes, which are mostly structural and only minimally personal.

To appreciate the full nature of this ideological victory one has only to note that the recent announcement of the ‘death of class’, and its corollary the ‘end of the class war’, coincided with a huge increase in economic disparity, making Britain today the third least equal society in the developed world. And, as Owen Jones shows, when the Right is not proclaiming the end of the working class, it is inventing and demonizing a particular version of it – profiled as ‘work-shy welfare scroungers’ - in order to encourage a class war of a different kind in which working men and women are incited to turn critically on their own kind.91 In doing so, it tells the most divisive of lies: that the squeeze on people’s living standards is not to do with growing economic inequality, but the fault rather of a lay-about, subsidized underclass which takes more out of the system than it contributes. Now that is a very clever, if highly cynical, form of politics, don’t you think? But it is more than that. By declaring that class is either not an issue, or a freak show when it is, this way of arguing conveniently shuts down all critical scrutiny of how wealth and power are unequally distributed in modern Britain. Christopher Hitchens tells a joke about how class is experienced in the USA which is highly relevant here: an Oxford professor meets an American former graduate student and asks him what he’s working on these days. “My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.” “Oh really, that’s interesting. I didn’t think there was a class system in the US.” “Nobody does. That’s how it survives.”92 Another articulating aspect of all of this is the way in which it is relatively common to find the term ‘class war’ used in statements made by the rich and privileged when they want to attack as divisive leftist ideas and policies. Again, this is a clever ideological ploy designed to show that it’s always the Left and never the Right that wages class war.

The politics of austerity neatly sidestep issues of social class entirely by the way they neglect to highlight the fact that, well before the credit crunch of 2007/8, the allocation of wealth and opportunity was heavily skewed towards those who already had both. Labour, entirely in denial about this, contributed significantly to this process between 1997 and 2010. Meanwhile, the current Tory Government’s economic polices will have the effect of compounding the misery, maximizing insecurity and

91Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, London, Verso, 2012. See also Andrew Sayer, Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, p.297.

92Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22, London, Atlantic Books, 2010, p.217.

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anxiety among the low-paid, while insulating the richest from risk. Indeed, these policies will sneeringly help the rich by hitting the poor, with reductions in benefits being used to finance cuts in taxes, resulting in a regressive income transfer from the poorer half of households to most of the richer half.93 If this is not a class war being waged by the Right then I don’t know what one is. Warren Buffett, the second richest American in 2011, without a hint of irony, brazenly agrees with me, saying in 2006, “there’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning”.94 To that extent, as Selina Todd rightly says, “class, as a relationship of unequal power, continues to shape British society”.95

The suggestion that it has been eliminated is thus absurd. On the contrary, class is central to any proper understanding of the current economic problems faced by the UK, because the austerity measures advocated by the Tories to address them affect people very unequally, with the less well off taking the main brunt of their cuts in welfare and public sector spending.96 The Tory mantra that “We’re all in this together” is both offensive and ludicrous. It’s also cover for the silent promotion of a single ideology – that of free-market capitalism. Indeed, saying the nation can’t afford to maintain a properly-funded public sector and welfare state is just a way of being coy about political priorities. There is plenty of money; it’s just that it is being creamed off at the top and circulated among a very small number of people – the so-called ‘1%’.

Radical discourses about class have then been turned inside out and largely neutered, which has had the effect of disconnecting in most people’s minds the cast-iron link between their class location and what they earn. But, if you follow the money, people’s incomes match their class location pretty accurately. As I highlighted earlier, and keep emphasizing, GDP may have doubled since 1978, but only the top 10% have seen their incomes grow at or above that rate, which is twice as fast as the medium and four times faster than the bottom 10%. What matters most to the dominant class is the rate of profit it secures on its investments; whereas what matters to labour – the subordinate class – is the wage rate and the amount of work it has to do to get enough of it to live decently. These are incommensurable interests.

Mugsborough revisitedThat claim of course is the thread that holds together Robert Tressell’s famous 1914 socialist novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, which I first read in my late teens.97 As most readers know, this fiction tells the story of a group of exploited workers from ‘Mugsborough’ which resists wanting to know the causes of their down-trodden condition, thinking that a better life is "not for the likes of them". The hero of the book, Frank Owen, is a socialist member of the group who believes that 93See Mary O’Hara, Austerity Bites: A Journey to the Sharp End of Cuts in the UK, Bristol, Policy Press, 2014; and Daniel Boffrey, ‘Revealed: how the coalition has helped the rich by hitting the poor’, Sunday Observer, 16 November, 2014, pp.1 & 8.

94Quoted in the New York Times, 26 November, 2006.

95Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, p.399.

96On all of this, see Tom Clark & Anthony Heath, Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2014. 97Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, London, Harper Collins, 1993 edition.

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the capitalist system is the real source of the poverty he sees all around him. In vain he tries to convince his fellow workers to think as he does, finding that their education and experience has trained them to distrust their own thoughts and to rely instead on those of their "betters".

While I have shared Frank Owen’s understanding of why the poor are made poor for most of my adult life, and rarely gone along with the thoughts of ‘my betters’ which suggest otherwise, it’s fair to say that there have been times when I have politically distrusted my own thoughts, causing me even for a long period of time to put aside my socialist principles in favour of an ideological prospectus that embraces rather than confronts the very neo-liberal economics I have so forcibly critiqued in this chapter. The chapter which follows explains how this came about in the 1990s, and with what consequences, and how I rediscovered, a dozen years later, my original starting point.

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