WeeklyWorker

Letters

Monarch threat

A new book by Lord Hennessy and Andrew Blick, Could it happen here? The day a prime minister refuses to resign, makes amusing and instructive reading. The authors speculate about what might ensue if a rightwing, populist prime minister were to lose his majority in the House of Commons, and attempted to cling to power through a minority government, on the ground that his party is the largest. In such a constitutional crisis, with the prime minister refusing to resign, what expedients are available for the restoration of order?

The answers to this question make Hennessy’s and Blick’s account interesting to a constitutional critic: they tell us plainly - and quite ingenuously - that the securities on which the constitution depends in extremis have a dark and sinister aspect.

They tell us, for example, that the king - far from being a purely ceremonial head of state, as we are incessantly told - would play an important part in the resolution of such a crisis, in accordance with his pledge to uphold the constitution. He retains the legal power, we are reminded, to dismiss a prime minister, and to dissolve parliament if he wishes: although such powers have not been employed for approximately 200 years, there is still no legal barrier to their being used.

Perhaps the king would not go to such an extreme: he might confine himself to making a public broadcast, directly intervening in the politics of the day, and exerting pressure upon the embattled government. In the meantime, the palace would conduct private discussions with the speaker of the House of Commons, and other political parties, as part of efforts to re-establish order. Behold the powerless, ceremonial British crown! The authors do not stop to contemplate what ruinous effects the monarch might have, if - as is just possible - a fool, a fascist or a corruptionist were to inherit the throne: for there is surely no better means of selecting a constitutional guardian, than by the lottery of birth.

We learn from our authors too that the security services may (regrettably) have to become involved in such a crisis, for the Security Service Act 1989 stipulates that the function of the service includes the protection of national security “from actions intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means”. The same act, it is true, tells the security services to refrain from inappropriate intrusions in party politics, but that has never stopped them before. Indeed, even the surveillance of the communications of members of parliament - and, below them, members of the devolved legislatures - is lawful, provided that the prime minister approves it. It begins to seem, I venture to say, that Britain is not so perfect a democracy as we are accustomed to think!

In a discussion of what might be done by cabinet ministers, on the supposition that they may turn on the “limpet prime minister”, we are told the following: “A chancellor of the exchequer, for example, might choose not to use their power to impose courses of action upon the Bank of England intended to deal with problems in the financial markets, which can be the most potent force of all in trumping political outcomes.” There are no misgivings or anxieties here for the fate of democracy: the “trumping” and “potent” financial markets wield their authority free of concern for such superficialities as elections; and it perhaps makes little difference whether a renegade chancellor decides to help them along.

The list of constitutional barricades continues: perhaps the chief of defence staff might refuse to follow prime ministerial instructions; perhaps the speaker would decline to sit upon his chair, and the clerks abandon their table; and so forth.

I do not raise these matters because it would gratify me to see a hard-right prime minister remain in office: I raise them because any attempt to democratise British society, and challenge the established power of the capitalist class, will no doubt be met with the full catalogue of sinister designs; and socialists ought, therefore, to understand them. In the interval, it is our obligation to expose the oligarchical armour of the British constitution, and to labour for a true democracy, capable of promoting the general interest.

Talal Hangari
London

Trans pedagogue

A friend sent me your recent article on the draft theses of the CPGB on trans people (‘Communism and trans liberation’, May 1). He liked my reply and suggested I share it with you. I’m glad the CPGB is taking tentative steps to join our side, but there’s more to do. This critique is offered with love, in the hope you can do more and give us the Communist Party we need.

The draft theses state: “… it is possible to stand unequivocally against the fraudulent rightwing witch-hunt of trans people, and to campaign for the liberation of trans people from their present-day oppression, without accepting the framework of ‘intersectionalist’ tail-endist politics, which necessarily leads to ‘Vote Harris, get Trump’ and to ‘Vote Sturgeon, get the UK Supreme Court’s Christianist definition of ‘woman’’.”

I don’t think it’s wrong to question intersectionality in this day and age, as it’s frequently used as a meaningless concept. It’s been commodified and is often poorly applied. I know communists have spent a while trying not to be bigots, but also not to buy into cringy liberal identity politics (‘idpol’) stuff and it’s not necessarily easy even if they want it to be. Anti-idpol ideology is a square peg: they’re trying desperately to fit the round hole of not being a dickhead to people.

Then there is: “Equally, and connected to this, it is not necessary to commit to arguments for the social construction of biology, which logically entail the truth of subjective marginal utility economics (and thus that unemployment is caused by workers’ unreasonable refusal to accept below-subsistence wages).”

The question of whether there’s a socially constructed sex and biologically constructed gender is very contentious in gender conservative and trans spaces. There are thousands of theories, but I categorise them like this:

People often assume that the dreary model of sex and gender sold in trans inclusion training is trans ideology. Or, worse, they develop a view of ‘trans ideology’ from Daily Mail articles. You can’t generalise the trans theory of gender to necessarily backing economic policies, because there is no one trans theory of gender.

The theses state that it is not necessary “to commit to the psycho-babble language of ‘transphobia’ (or homophobia or Islamophobia), which, precisely by their over-psychiatrising character, destroy the space for rational disagreement”. I can kind of see that. But if your response to ‘Trans people are in shock, trying to organise themselves to fight a transphobic government’ is ‘I don’t like the word “phobia” there’, you’re not in solidarity with us facing a crisis: you’re in the way while we’re working.

Nor is it necessary “to imagine that no platforming ‘terfs’ is a productive policy”, it continues. This policy has developed from specific events, where trans people did debate with gender conservatives, but were given less chances to speak, were put in danger, had the conversation framed around issues that were irrelevant to them, etc. No tactic is sacred, but if you’ve sat out a decade of campaigning and you come in now to critique it, then shut up, sit down and learn the theory and history first.

The theses go on to state: “In the very short term, the dominant tendency among trans rights activists made themselves specifically vulnerable to this sort of attack by committing themselves to ‘intersectional’ unity with capitalist liberals, and thereby identifying themselves both with ‘human resource departments’ managerialism, and with free-market financial globalism.”

There are conversations to be had around the liberal project of trans rights and whether it works. It desperately needs to be re-evaluated and I’m glad I’ve been involved with activists discussing this. But also, alongside talking to the bosses and representing worker’s interests with them, we’ve been on the streets, in unions, at protests, building a movement. The reason the CPGB has to consider their policy is because their youngsters believe us and, worse, they march with us, live with us, learn with us, are us. Communists are often good comrades and we rely on them. The CPGB knows we’re going to be a bigger force in protests in future and they need to position themselves on our side, so they can sell their newspaper.

If you critique the ‘no platform’ policy, you can’t also critique us for turning up to meetings where our rights are discussed with gender conservatives. Without a concept of transphobia being a phobia it’s hard to explain why society cares when a gender conservative has to attend training at work, but was silent when a trans person was medically tortured and threatened with life imprisonment for protesting.

Then there’s this: “The form of this identification has most visibly two elements: the demand for official recognition as a member of the destination sex/gender, within the implied framework of accepting gender as a strict binary; and no-platforming ‘transphobes’.”

The Tories asked for a slate of policies that could help trans people, then they picked the one that seemed the easiest to actually work on. That was self-ID. We ended up having to fight on this one and the fight has been picked again and again. Legal recognition has material consequences and that’s especially true, now we have lost so many of our legal rights. Sadly these are the issues where we have a united front with the liberals. We’ve never been good enough at prioritising material concerns, but losing the fight on legal identity impacted our children, prisoners, rape survivors and homeless members of the community. We can’t abandon the fight for legal recognition without abandoning the most vulnerable members of our community.

I think it’s unfair to say we wanted “the implied framework of accepting gender as a strict binary”. Fighting for non-binary rights has been at the core this whole time. I think what the CPGB draft theses really want is us to accept being ‘third-sexed’. Please read Talia Bhatt on the treatment of Hijras for a view from a politically radical, third-world feminist on why this is a bad idea.

According to the theses, “This theoretical commitment also directly counterposed the claims of trans rights activists who pursued this policy to the lived experience of the majority of women, in which the oppression of women is an embodied experience inescapably linked to the ways in which the class order exploits human biology.” I’ll let the trans rape and domestic violence survivors in my social circle know that their experiences are merely ideological liberal constructs and not an embodied experience linked to the ways in which the class order exploits human biology. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled.

They continue: “… constructing solidarity to defeat the witch-hunt is therefore a problem of constructing solidarity of the working class as such, not of constructing solidarity either of trans or of LGBT+ people as a distinct group”. So show us some solidarity then. Right now I want solidarity with workers who’ll show up and do the work, not Marxist dialectical theorists. My community is in a crisis and we already have brilliant radical theorists of our own. If the CPGB wants to show up to fight with us, we need people who’ll work; not people who want to manage and coordinate us.

The there’s: “… self-identification versions ... imply both over-claims and extensive policing of speech, appear as a threat to the very large majority who remain cis and heterosexual.” The appearance of a threat is true of any liberation movement - especially ones where someone is seen as threatening. We trans people cannot help but be seen as a threat, no matter what we do, and experience has shown that, if we ask for less or do less, what we do is always perceived as a threat to those who are irrationally afraid of us.

“The aim of communism is a society without classes, state or dependence on the family as an economic institution. ... Such a society will probably have the resources to enable a ‘full’ biological transition - one which produces self-generated hormones and fertility in the destination gender. Certainly, it will have no need to repress lesser forms of body modification.” If your dialectical materialism has nothing to offer more than pie in the sky by and by, then you’re offering me no more than Christianity and less than new-age progressives, who at least turn up to the fight and offer immediate help.

The theses state: “More fundamentally, such a society will have no need to insist that everyone must be either man or woman, and be publicly identified as such.” The CPGB has not covered gender abolitionism or non-binary rights. If they had, I’d say this is fine. But this just reads like ‘Trans women don’t need to be women. The important thing is they’re valid’. If I want meaningless platitudes, I’ll talk to the HR department, thank you. At least they pay me to be there.

I have no massive issue with anything in the CPGB’s suggestions for immediate action and I think it’s in line with radical transfeminist thinking in some ways, but I think the ‘intentional absences’ are worth noting.

What’s not here:

1. Anti-fascism - a big thing trans activists have been involved in is opposing the Posie Parker rallies. These objectively do unite local fascist groups with a wider liberal middle class audience. The CPGB is not opposing the fash and in fact you’re critiquing us for doing that.

2. The CPGB talks about unisex toilets, but a lot of people really don’t want this. I don’t think the CPGB understands the purpose sex-segregated spaces have, and why trans people need to be included in them. It’s promising pie in the sky - ‘Don’t ask for legal recognition now, as that will scare people, but after the revolution we’ll abolish sexual assault, then single-sex spaces’.

3. The CPGB isn’t going to protect trans prisoners so they are - to borrow a word they love - necessarily asking us to abandon our most vulnerable working class people.

4. I don’t care about the church in this context. Of course, I want to disestablish the church, but the one thing that is relevant to trans people in this is conversion therapy, which the CPGB doesn’t mention. Why should I care whether the priest who’s abusing a trans kid lives in a church-owned vicarage or not? The abuse is the problem.

The CPGB knows we are powerful in the leftwing spaces communists work in. They want the benefits of joining the movement for trans liberation without having to get their own house in order or confront their long-running divisions on trans rights.

They think, because we’ve been beaten, what they offer can now be viewed as enough, but really it’s only like three degrees to the left of the Equality and Human Rights Commission on anything they could actually immediately do. This is disappointing. If you’re going to critique performative, liberal, trans-liberation politics, at least do something other than saying nice words and asking for a trans ally lanyard.

It reminds me of a typical management tactic. Say ‘What we really need to do is something radical and impossible’ and use that to justify doing nothing now. And trans people need communists. So many of us are communists. Our friends are communists. We work with and campaign with communists. Communists are already in our movement.

I invite the CPGB to join us.

Devon Laing
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Reform supporter

I would like to reply to the letter by Reform UK Limited supporter Dave Douglass (May 15).

Yes, a section of the working class is racist, including some former miners. Nigel Farage’s answer to the working class reaction to the effects of 40 years of neoliberalism is to simply blame migrants. All this guff about nationalising steel and water without compensation is just window-dressing to get elected. Marine Le Pen in France and the AfD in Germany similarly pose left by calling for workers’ rights, etc. However, this is just a smokescreen for their racism against migrants.

I live in Wisbech in North East Cambridgeshire parliamentary constituency. Wisbech town centre, just like the red-wall towns in the north of England, is run down - consisting of pound shops, charity shops and betting shops. The biggest problem faced by working class people in Wisbech is the high cost of rented accommodation. Fenland District Council, which covers Wisbech, hasn’t built a single council house or flat for more than 25 years now.

In the 2016 EU referendum, 72% of Fenlanders voted for Brexit. In the recent county council elections Reform UK Limited won five out of the nine county seats covering Fenland. At the same time, in the election for mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, Fenland was the only district where the Reform candidate for mayor came first.

I therefore read with interest Paul Demarty’s article about how Starmer’s anti-migrant stance is aimed at the Tories with the view to the next general election being a straight Labour-Reform fight, leading to a Labour victory (‘Starmer among strangers’, May 22). If this is so, Morgan McSweeney is completely wrong to think that such a Labour-Reform fight would result in Labour winning. The idea that Lib Dem and Green voters would vote Labour en masse to keep out Reform is sadly mistaken. As both Dave Douglass and I fully understand, the support of working class people for Reform UK is widespread and could easily result in a majority Reform government at the next general election.

However, as Aaron Bastani of Novara Media has correctly pointed out, the wiping out of support for Labour in the elections to urban councils (including in London), the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament will lead to the removal of Keir Starmer by the 405 Labour MPs. Already the days of chancellor Rachel Reeves and Downing Street chief of staff Morgan McSweeney are numbered. Reeves will soon be replaced in a reshuffle and, according to Bastani, McSweeney will be gone by Christmas.

At the same time, Angela Rayner, as reported in The Daily Telegraph, is on manoeuvres. So is Wes Streeting. The bookies are already giving odds on a Rayner-Streeting leadership contest. Rayner has called for a wealth tax to pay for the reintroduction of the universal winter fuel allowance and the scrapping of cuts to Personal Independence Payments and Universal Credit.

Dave Douglass should be careful what he wishes for. A Nigel Farage-led government would replace the NHS with a US-style private insurance scheme. Farage would introduce a flat tax, where millionaires pay the same rate of income tax as a binman.

Finally, if Alf Garnett was around today, he would, like Dave Douglass, be a Reform supporter. It must not be forgotten that Garnett was a London docker, and the dockers supported Enoch Powell.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire

Reform conscious

Dave Douglass has criticised the CPGB’s involvement in the Forging Communist Unity discussions (Letters, May 15). His argument appears to be threefold: firstly, he questions the need for organisation (“The structures are elaborated, a constitution hammered out”); secondly, he calls for “a truly working class organisation” to be “built by the workers themselves, and be fashioned from their demands”; finally, a call is made for the adoption of slogans that “the workers themselves are demanding”.

I believe Lenin’s What is to be done? is a decent enough starting point to address these points. He began writing it upon his return from exile in 1900, when he found that the political groups in Russia were focusing exclusively on the ‘spontaneous’ economic struggle of workers. Without dismissing the importance of those struggles, Lenin characterised those workers as having achieved “trade union consciousness” - the understanding that there is an economic struggle between them and their bosses. However, he identified the importance of workers attaining full class consciousness, which can only be achieved when they come to understand that they must move beyond capitalism and end their exploitation altogether. Lenin believed it was a mistake to neglect political issues ‘beyond the factory walls’, as this would ultimately fail to raise the class consciousness of workers.

He argued that the leap from ‘spontaneous’ to ‘class’ consciousness needed to be guided “from without” - not meaning, as opponents would argue, an elitist vision of the intelligentsia imposing it, but rather its need to come from outside everyday bourgeois thinking. Lenin proposed that workers can achieve class consciousness by engaging in the general political struggle, not merely day-to-day economic struggles. Only then could they successfully engage in the working class organising to take power in its own name.

With Lenin’s advice in mind, let us take a look at Douglass’s points. Firstly, in regard to ‘slogans’: I agree the CPGB should be bold and forceful about what strategy and tactics the workers’ movement needs to adopt. But when Douglass uses the slogans of Reform as examples of those “the workers themselves are demanding”, he unconsciously confirms the need for class consciousness. Reform’s tactical slogans are populist, looking to address day-to-day struggles of workers (cynically, by the authors’ own admission). There is no strategy behind it to raise class consciousness, as this would risk threatening the ruling class/status quo, which Farage et al ultimately defend.

Douglass’s points on organisation are also answered in What is to be done? Far from looking to create another “lefty liberal lash-up”, the unity discussions aim to create a party for those that have achieved class consciousness as a vehicle for carrying out the move beyond capitalism, whilst also pursuing tactical interventions to assist and educate workers (like myself: a construction worker from outside the “London backyard”), who have achieved ‘trade union consciousness’ in those day-to-day economic struggles.

The point about the need for “a truly working class organisation” is entirely valid. Many attempts have been made to this end - not a few by George Galloway, who Douglass mentions in his letter. Douglass touches on several aspects of the epoch in which we are living: large-scale apathy and despondency towards politics amongst the working class; the failure of social democracy; the lack of political democracy in the bourgeois system. To this I would say there is no silver bullet. For those looking to transition beyond capitalism, adopting the tactics of Reform - based as it is on populist slogans, backed up by a compliant, rightwing media - is certainly not an option. Reform was certainly not “built by the workers themselves” nor “fashioned from their demands”. Nor, I would argue, is Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, which, despite being able to claim it is more connected to the workers, is unable and unwilling to raise the class consciousness of the workers, as it looks to replicate Labourism.

I support the CPGB’s organisational efforts in the unity discussions, and applaud the principled stand in looking to create a party which aims to arm workers with the class consciousness required to transition beyond capitalism, when the time comes. Another organisation describing itself as a ‘workers’ party’ with little more than popular slogans and the ideology of Labourism is the last thing we need.

Carl Collins
Stamford

Hope at last!

George Monbiot has written much fine stuff over the years - in particular on climate and the environment, but also on the slow, but steady, privatisation of health, including a recent article on the near end of NHS dentistry. But what is to be done? He’s generally seemed to me to be one of those who thinks that ‘we’ or ‘the government’ needs to do something. But how? When?

Now at last we have an answer. In The Guardian of May 27 he writes that the real problem is the ‘first past the post’ electoral system. People want, apparently, proportional representation, so that we can get, between us, the government we want: “Here’s the strategy. Join the Lib Dems, Greens, SNP or Plaid Cymru. As their numbers rise, other voters will see the tide turning. Encourage troubled Labour MPs to defect. Most importantly, begin the process in each constituency of bringing alienated voters together around a single candidate.”

We’d better get on with it, we may only have four years before we’re lost forever, but “Game the system once and we’ll never have to game it again. No longer will we be held hostage, no longer represented by people who hate us.” This all looks very ‘promising’, doesn’t it? We get all those Lib Dem, Green, SNP, etc MPs together. King Charles asks one of them to form a government (this is assuming, I guess, after Nigel Farage has perhaps failed in that quest). An act of parliament passes in the house, the Lords (?) and then the king gives his assent.

Then what? A quick election under the new rules, so that we will no longer be “represented by people who hate us”? Somewhere in this process we might have to consult some of the others who hate us - the International Monetary Fund, the US government, the EU … Onwards and upwards!

I think it might have helped if he’d included in the article some of the governments in the world where proportional representation has already delivered what he wants. Albania? Belgium? Germany? And how they’ve delivered it, and how loved the governments are? Perhaps that’s an article for the future - I’ll keep an eye open.

Meanwhile, I still think we need a mass Communist Party!

Jim Nelson
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