Letters

Taking part?

According to TheGuardian, the Labour Party has estimated how devastating will be the cut in income if the anti-trade union bill becomes law this summer. Instead of detailing this, I just want to look to the future by examining the recent past and the present, to indicate that a mood for action is not to be expected if the participation rate in two important recent elections are anything to go by: perhaps 1.4% in the Corbyn election, 10.6% in the re-election of Dave Prentis as head of Unison - ie, abstention rates of 98.6% and 89.4%.

In the LP election 422,871 voted, 71,546 being affiliated supporters (the Weekly Worker reported this on September 17). These were members of affiliated organisations - mostly trade unions, but also the Cooperative Party (7,936 members - last annual report) and sectional groups. To vote all you had to do was request a ballot, and you could even vote online. So how many were eligible? Only 14 trade unions are affiliated to the LP, but the website doesn’t say how many people give money through their union. However, the 2014-15 annual report of the state certification officer says 4,954,606 members contribute to their union’s political fund (this as of December 31 2013). So at least 1.44% voted in August-September. Inexplicably - and this is not trivial - of the perhaps 148,162 unionists who bothered to request a ballot less than half, 48.3%, actually voted.

As of December 31 2014, Unison, market-leader in the public sector, was the affiliate paying most to the LP: 1,184,458 payers (17,920 more than the nominally bigger Unite, biggest in the private sector). So each of these unions pays just under a quarter of the LP’s affiliation income. Unison’s general secretary serves a five-year term, and Prentis’s reign covers the elections of 2000, 2005, 2010 and the one last month. The participation rate has trended downwards: 17.6%, 18.7%, 15.7%, 10.6%.

It took a while to get this data because participation rates are never mentioned on the Unison website and hardly ever by the ‘far left’. What is also striking is the recent decline in the number of (valid) votes over these 15 years, with the membership only varying a few tens of thousands either side of 1.3 million: 224,390; 244,481; 216,116; 134,014. So, compared with February 2000, almost three years into Blairism, the start of Corbynism has been presented with a 40.3% fall in the number of Unison voters.

Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. Well, sometimes humans are too disorganised, they set wrong goals, develop non-efficacious ideas, strategies and policies, lack adequate means for implementation, and then aren’t that skilful in the act. It’s much easier to mess up than do a good job. There’s no guarantee of success; failure is our sword of Damocles. Satisfying practical imperatives is a contingent matter.

As often happens in history, humans are forced by circumstances not of their choosing to address their situation. The working class in Britain is in a right pickle, the onslaught of more than 35 years continues unabated, but it’s when the cash gets tight that even the indolent are stirred into action. The check-off system, having to opt-out - both are procedures loved by rulers of offices; until, that is, superior powers change the rules. That’s what now faces both the LP and the unions with political funds. The primary fact is that bureaucratic convenience is always at the expense of argument, of having to make one’s case, of having to be political. The consequences when adjusting to new social rules are time-dependent: can these lazy organisations change quickly enough? For the first time since whenever, union members will have to be systematically approached - and convinced.

The Tories may be doing us a favour. Without them what was the incentive to change? Witness the Public and Commercial Services Union. Mark Serwotka has been in post as long as Unison’s Prentis. Year after year, supporters of ‘far left’ groups seemed quite content. And the participation rates? There were no elections for Serwotka’s job in 2005 and 2014, even though it pays very nicely: the union’s 2014 annual report is too polite to tell the members, who are suffering real wage and pension cuts, but the state has to be told (form AR21) ... £92,198 gross plus £29,573 employers’ (ie, the members) pension contribution, a total of more than £2,300 a week. So why no elections? No-one could jump over the branch nominations threshold - something straight out of Erdoğan’s playbook. Indeed, after the 2005 experience, in 2014 not even one branch nominated anyone other than Mr Serwotka. For the incumbent, no contest.

There were two candidates in each of the 2000 and 2009 elections - fewer than run for US president. The PCS website report, December 17 2009, doesn’t even give the number of votes for the candidates, just their shares of the vote. Neither the number of eligible voters (c 231,323) nor the turnout were disclosed. Although the abstention rate was 78.9%, a vote of 21.1% puts Unison to shame. However, compared with the almost 30% who voted in 2000, it dropped, coincidently, by almost 30%.

PCS illustrates an unfortunate complacency amongst those who should know better. It also indicates how difficult it must have been when attempts were made to enthuse the membership. But the question remains: to do what? To achieve what? And how? The three cases examined indicate the obduracy of the dominant attitude that participation is to be observed if at all, and certainly not practised: the treatment of democracy, a kind of government, as a spectator sport, as spectacle. Political participation is not a popular organised enthusiasm of the British working class. Fishing is, politics isn’t. How can this be changed?

The stakes are high indeed. The other week someone made an interesting point to TheGuardian’s Michael White. If the Labour Party is not transformed successfully with Corbyn as leader then the next chance Labour has to win a general election is likely to be 2030: fail in 2020, not trusted for 2025, ready to compete in 2030. It has the ring of truth.

Lastly, the Socialist Workers Party had their annual conference last weekend. Where are the Pre-conference bulletins? Where are the malcontents? Why has the Weekly Worker been boycotted? Will no-one come forward and give a frank conference report? This becomes more disturbing by the day. The class demands to be told.

Jara Handala
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Fascist Bowie

In 1976, David Bowie, in his late 20s and already a public figure for about a decade, not content with giving a Nazi salute from the back of a Mercedes (Hitler’s favourite car) in the middle of Victoria Station, told Playboy: “Britain is ready for a fascist leader … I think Britain would benefit from a fascist leader. After all fascism is really nationalism … I believe very strongly in fascism; people have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership … Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars … You have got to have an extreme-right front to come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up.”

Apparently that is all OK for most of the so-called left, because Bowie was high on cocaine at the time and later gave 50p to the Anti-Nazi League in the 1990s (or some such nonsense), as they kept repeating ad nauseam on Facebook every time I raised the issue of his totally unambiguous praise for Hitler and fascism (which Guardian obituaries call “flirting”).

Unlike John Lennon or Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix (or, some would argue, Tory squire Sir Mick Jagger in his youth), there is absolutely no sign that he ever made even one political statement supporting our side. A lot of his individualistic stuff clearly gives sustenance to the right, which is why David Cameron, Tony Blair and the Archbishop of Canterbury (a former oil trader from Eton) were so keen to mourn him.

Yet most of these very same self-defining Marxists who would not hear a word against a fascist propagandist on Facebook were more or less saying in January 2015 that the martyred leftist atheist cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were blaspheming Islamophobes who deserved what they got. And they would probably agree with the Vatican’s condemnation of the first anniversary issue, attacking the survivors for their more generalised onslaught on all monotheistic religion, exemplified by their image of a Judaeo-Christian god.

Maybe those who thought the title track of Black star was a hymn of praise to IS were right and maybe these so-called leftists would endorse such sentiments. Words fail me.

Toby Abse
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Shocking

I think the left needs to have a word with itself regarding art versus politics.

Some artists may be scumbags and politically beyond the pale, but - and you might need to take a deep breath and sit down for this bit - an artist’s politics has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the artistic merit, or indeed lack thereof, of the artist’s work.

In other news, internationally famous, incalculably wealthy rock stars may not actually be fully conscious socialists. Wow, imagine that ... Finally, despite all that, their output might still actually have artistic merit.

Shocking, eh?

Harry Paterson
Nottingham

Status update

Mike Macnair’s insightful analysis of an ex-SWP comrade’s Selected works (‘The Davidson papers’, January 8) looks at the important issues (and their misinterpretation) of ‘stages theory’ and permanent revolution, ‘people’s fronts’ and united fronts. Well worth discussing for those of us trying to critically approach the thinking adopted by ‘the revolutionary left’ - not to dismiss everything as ‘dogma’ but in a spirit of learning.

There is no way I could hope to respond, at the moment, to the many points that comrade Macnair raised, but there are two related things I can comment on.

To the assessment of the aim of publishing the work - that it is to differentiate a ‘tradition’ - is added an almost throwaway comment: “Hence - from a very different point of view - the argument of Michael Ford, in his critique of Left Unity, that a really useful regroupment would be one between the Morning Star, Communist Party of Britain, Socialist Action and Counterfire. All that would be needed, though Ford doesn’t mention this point, would be for Counterfire to give up the Cliffite tics - ‘permanent revolution’, and so on - which no longer have any operative significance in their politics.”

This is something I had myself noticed. The differences between the CPB, Socialist Action and Counterfire are not enough to justify organisational separation, in my opinion. Not that I would call a regroupment of these groups “useful” or positive.

The main obstacles to unity seem to me to be about ‘tradition’, rather than looking at their converging political trajectory. Then the name of such a united group is an issue - unlike the situation in both ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ Europe, the Communist Party is probably reluctant to give up its name, and the others would be unhappy to accept that name: this may seem a trivial point, but it is still an obstacle.

Finally, can you really see people like John Rees and Lindsey German accepting minor league status in such a new united left party?

Alan Theasby
Teesside

On the up

Finally some good news comes from across the Atlantic! Recent polling suggests that Bernie Sanders now leads Hillary Clinton in the crucial Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, due to begin voting on February 1 and February 9 respectively. For those of us who believe a marginal shift to the left is hugely preferable to a further slide to the right, the news is encouraging indeed. More to the point, whilst the bookies all still have Clinton as favourite, the momentum is unarguably with the Vermonter socialist. Clinton has exhausted her reserves and now relies on the stamina of her support to carry the day. In Sanders’ case, short of a disastrous blunder, the only way is up.

Considering the respective positions of each candidate, we may have just witnessed a pivotal moment in the campaign. While every poll has to be taken with a pinch of salt (here’s looking at you, Ed), victory in these first two primaries could be even more decisive now than it has been in the past. Hillary likely needs to win both convincingly to prevent supporters crossing over into the ‘unelectable’ Sanders camp; failure to do so could provoke a catastrophic rout. Last week’s contorted attempt to corral ‘feminist’ votes - with the over-hyped ‘voice of her generation’, Lena Dunham, being roped in for cheerleading duties - could come straight from the Yvette Cooper playbook, still reeking of the same panic and desperation.

For Sanders (other than his principled refusal to accept the tainted money of Wall Street), the main obstacle has always been the semi-conspiratorial efforts of the establishment media to keep him out of the spotlight and bury him in obscurity. Winning the first primaries will force them to change tack - in all probability towards high-exposure mudslinging.

Socialists of all stripes should find succour in the fact that - already - the electoral rulebooks appear to have been rewritten. No, Sanders may not be our ideal candidate, but his basic position pushes the American electorate in the right direction. Enough even, for comrades over at Jacobin to launch an ‘ABCs of socialism’ guide to help manage an influx of inquiring political newbies and their swelling readership - developments which they unambiguously credit to the rejuvenating effects of the Sanders campaign.

Whichever way we spin it, this is something to be celebrated.

Tom Munday
@Tommundaycs

Curious

As a leftist, indeed Communist Party, I find it a bit weird that your paper promotes universal military service. Wouldn’t that just feed the war machine and militarise society? Isn’t communism against such things?

So why the support for such a policy? Your website does say it’s for universal military service time and time again and, furthermore, what is a ‘people’s militia’ and how would it not be a ‘standing army’? Just curious, as I find these stances confusing for leftists to hold.

Ian Bee
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In or out

I am active in the Red Party in Norway and a member of the ‘No to EU’ movement in Norway. What is your position in the coming referendum on the UK’s membership in the EU? Will you advise people to vote to stay or to leave the EU?

Could you advise me on articles that you have written concerning this issue recently?

Johan Petter Andresen
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