Labour UK

Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to rewrite the rules of the UK economy | Financial Times

"At the heart of everything is one word: redistribution. Redistribution of income, assets, ownership and power. The mission is to shift power from capital to labour, wresting control from shareholders, landlords and other vested interests and putting it in the hands of workers, consumers and tenants. “We have to rewrite the rules of our economy,” says Mr McDonnell. “Change is coming.”...

“The question on the lips of any international investor looking at the UK, is ‘what would a Labour government mean for the economy?’ From company ownership to taxation, they want to know that their investments will be safe.”

Mr McDonnell, the architect of the economic agenda, has been careful to avoid causing too many controversies. But even the plans already announced are breathtaking in scope: the nationalisation of rail, water, mail and electricity distribution companies; significantly higher taxes on the rich; the enforced transfer of 10 per cent of shares in every big company to workers; sweeping reform of tenant rights; and huge borrowing to fund public investment.

But this may be just the start. The leadership is also studying an array of even more radical ideas, including a four-day week, pay caps on executives, an end to City bonuses, a universal basic income, a “right to buy” for private tenants and a shake-up in the way that land is taxed to penalise wealthy landlords...

To his opponents and those likely to be at the sharp end of such a programme — high-earners, business owners, investors and landlords, it is alarming. “Whenever we hold events I always ask, ‘what are you more worried about, a Corbyn government or a no-deal Brexit?’” says one business lobbyist. “Now the universal answer is Corbyn.” Terry Scuoler, former head of Make UK, the manufacturers’ organisation, has described the prospect of a Labour government as “nightmarish”.

It is not hard to understand their fears. Influential figures within the leadership now include former members drawn from various Trotskyite factions. The trade union Unite has a dominant role in the Labour leader’s inner circle. Mr Corbyn’s past opposition to Nato and the Trident nuclear deterrent and his onetime support for the Venezuelan regime continue to cause concern.

Already, the shadow chancellor has set out plans for £49bn of new taxes and extra spending a year, borrow £250bn to fund a National Investment Bank, nationalise a swath of utilities, rip up labour laws to help workers, build 1m social homes and sharply increase the minimum wage...

Mr Corbyn’s Labour is a far cry from Mr Blair’s “New Labour” of 1997, which sought to convince voters of its moderation... some political analysts argue that the deceptively gentle demeanour of a longstanding Marxist should not be misinterpreted. “Change doesn’t come from people having tea at the Ritz. It comes from people storming the Ritz,” [McDonnell] said a few years ago...

A plan to seize 10 per cent of the shares in every large company in the country — whether public, private or foreign-owned — and hand them to employees. In reality the workers would not entirely own the shares but would simply be eligible for up to £500 a year each in dividends, while the remainder would be taken by the exchequer...

Mr Corbyn and Mr McDonnell are also studying an array of other initiatives including: the break-up of the Big Four auditors; a ban on all share options and golden handshakes; curbs on the voting rights of short-term shareholders; and the public naming of all workers on over £150,000 a year. Companies that fail to meet environmental criteria could be delisted from the London Stock Exchange...

Labour would also take an unconventional approach to trade. John Hilary, who is acting international liaison for Labour, has called trade deals a “new form of imperialism” and a type of “plunder”. At one event he said that “we reject the whole principle of free trade”.

By conventional yardsticks, the Labour leader’s political views would keep him from Number 10. His personal ratings are among the lowest ever seen for an opposition leader, while the public remains sceptical about Labour’s economic credibility...

It has become clear to investors in water companies, the National Grid, projects funded by the private finance initiative, and the Royal Mail that a Labour government would not pay them the market price of their shares when nationalisation takes place."


The UK Labour Party and the System of Diversity

"The Tribe describes how Britain’s Labour Party (and much of the wider labour movement, as well as other institutions) has been taken over (even ‘stolen’) by a political ideology that maintains we all have fixed identities, rather than being members of more malleable social classes. This ideology — Cobley calls it ‘the system of diversity’ — bears little relationship to the traditional Labour project. Instead of trying to raise up the poor and downtrodden by providing them with tools to organise and educate themselves, Labour — and institutions that feed it or recruit from its ranks — now exists to further a regime where we all exist in relationships of oppressor and oppressed with everyone else. These relationships of oppressor, oppression and power are always and everywhere based on fixed forms of identity: sex, race, religion (Islam, in particular, is rendered immutable), sexual orientation, gender.

Under the ‘system of diversity’, victimhood never ends. There is no room in it for the traditional trade unionist who wants better conditions for, say, coal miners so they don’t die underground; or a shop steward who wants call-centre workers or fruit pickers to earn better wages. There isn’t even room for the democratic socialist who aspires to any of the various forms of worker democracy that have existed historically, or who wishes to make use of alternative business structures, like cooperatives and mutuals. Instead, certain groups are taken always to require support. Certain groups must always be on the outer. Cobley calls them ‘the favoured’ and ‘the unfavoured’. The favoured include women, Muslims, and immigrants. The unfavoured include men and whites — but also uneducated people and most of the working poor. There are always victims, and always perpetrators. Oppression is systemic; it never ends, and can never end.

This has practical policy consequences. Cobley documents in mind-bending detail a regime of outrageous and systematic discrimination — in hiring, training, and in terms of financial largesse — across multiple institutions (including the BBC and civil service) and within Labour. The favouritism is meant to produce equality of outcomes, and diversity is treated as a per se good. ‘More women in STEM’ or ‘more BAME at the BBC’ or ‘more women in parliament’ are common catch-cries, with few arguments as to how this will improve STEM, the BBC, or Westminster. Even where there is an evidence base for ‘the system of diversity’ — Steven Pinker’s research showing an increase in the number of female parliamentarians produces more circumspect foreign policy — it isn’t used. Equality of outcomes is the only policy goal.

The scale of the favouritism and the precision with which it is targeted demands lock-step conformity, too, so when different favoured groups find themselves contesting the same territory, demarcation disputes arise. If, say, on the BBC, a feminist criticises the treatment of women in Britain’s Muslim communities or a Muslim outlines his religion’s traditional view of homosexuality, there is an embarrassing contretemps and ruffled feathers. Effectively, the two representatives can only be allies in ‘the system’ as long as the Muslim doesn’t say anything about homosexuality and the feminist doesn’t say anything about burkas or niqabs (which means the latter job is left to Tories like Boris Johnson). Rinse and repeat when it comes to other favoured groups...

He is probably the first person I’ve read to discuss Heidegger with clarity and élan. From being a philosopher I always wrote off as a purveyor of fascist nonsense, Heidegger has now become an important but dangerous thinker.

Heidegger developed a digestible way of thinking about fixed identities when it comes to fitting out and then fighting an ideological battle. As described by Cobley, this involves construing group identity so it bleeds out all individual characteristics. People are treated only as an instance of their fixed group membership. It allows rapid categorisation and assessment (‘friend or foe?’ and ‘with us or against us?’) and also ensures activists who administer it and promote it don’t have to think about what they’re doing or the club they’ve joined. They become the vanguard of a ‘thought tribe’ instead of the proletariat.

This means one can predict a left-liberal activist’s opinion across dozens of subjects based solely on his or her participation in ‘the system’...

Cobley tells the story of Rotherham through the lens of the system of diversity. He documents how leaders drawn from one of the system’s favoured groups — Pakistani Muslims — were able to cover up an extraordinary crime spree (at least 1400 children sexually abused in a single town)...

These individuals — by constantly referring to ‘community cohesion’ and making accusations of racism — were able to ensure police officers, teachers, and social workers from every kind of background were simply ignored when they pointed out that there was, in fact, a vast pool of criminality pullulating under their noses. Criticism was construed as an attack on a group the ‘system of diversity’ favours, or even on the idea of diversity or variation itself... One social worker told the Rotherham Inquiry, ‘if we mentioned Asian taxi drivers we were told we were racist and the young people were seen as prostitutes,’ while another said ‘we were constantly being reminded not to be racist’...

One Labour MP (Rotherham’s Sarah Champion) did do the job of representing her constituents. And the full force of the ‘system’ was brought to bear in a way enormously destructive not only of her political career (which one expects, politics being a nasty game) but also of her ability to function as an adult human being. To outsiders (including Conservatives) it looked like she was in trouble for writing a piece about Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs for The Sun. Not so. She could have written the same piece for The Guardian and the response would have been identical. The system set out to break her. Among other things, she now requires 24-hour security and is routinely deluged with vile abuse... Labour’s posh feminists refused to move the levers of power on behalf of poor white girls who formed a genuine (as opposed to political) victim class — despite being made well aware, thanks to Champion’s efforts, of what was going on...

Rotherham is not, however, Cobley’s most compelling case study of the ‘system’ at work. That appellation belongs to his analysis of the surge in ‘hate crime’ following the 2016 Referendum result. I am now reasonably satisfied the hate crime widely reported from June 23 onwards and seized upon by the Remain camp after its shock defeat was a classic example of moral panic, and that most of the reports were false.

This is because no evidence is required for the reporting of hate crime, only the victim’s subjective feelings. Worse, many reports are not made to police, but to an online portal called ‘True Vision’, which allows (and encourages) anonymous submissions and also allows the alleged victim to forbid police follow-up. Even when contacted in person, police officers are not allowed to contest an alleged victim’s interpretation of events. They can’t even ask ‘are you sure?’ All of this is set out in grisly and authoritarian detail in the College of Policing’s Hate Crime Operational Guidance.

Thanks to the collapse of multiple trials, we now have good evidence that lowering the evidentiary bar in this way generates a rapid uptick in false reports. Lawyers have also long known any legal system that makes use of untested evidence from anonymous witnesses is vulnerable to perversions of the course of justice. Meanwhile, allowing alleged victims to define what is and is not racism on a wholly subjective basis undermines the ‘reasonable person test’ that undergirds much of the rule of law. The same phenomenon became apparent during the period when ‘believe the victim’ in sexual assault reporting was also part of police operational guidance. This has since been rescinded precisely because it undermines the presumption of innocence. Not so with hate crime, which remains on foot and able to be used as a stick with which to beat those opposed to ‘the system of diversity’.

'In this way, hate crime and its reporting process have appeared as a handy political weapon to affix a legalistic form of guilt [emphasis Cobley’s] on to people who do not align to the system of diversity and its favouritisms, like on immigration. It has enabled high profile politicians like Sadiq Khan to use their power to influence the reporting of incidents, thereby affecting the statistical results which they then use for political ends — a variant of what The Wire creator David Simon has called ‘juking the stats’. It has helped activists and community leaders to promote their victimhood, claim that it is getting worse, and demand more resources to address it, reducing budgets for other things [p 17].'

At one point, Labour’s abandonment of the rule of law was so complete that Andy Burnham — at the time Shadow Home Secretary — argued British Muslims should be able to bypass police when reporting hate crime. He wanted them to be able to go to a local mosque and its ‘community leaders’ to make reports instead.

There’s a name for the activity undertaken by this particular ‘favoured group’, although Cobley does not use it: ‘rent-seeking’...

Key to understanding rent-seeking’s pernicious effect on the economy and wider society is that it involves increasing a given group’s share of existing wealth without creating any new wealth. It is typically legal but often produces disreputable behaviour, and can shade into bribery and vote-rigging, which are illegal...

Cobley moves on to immigration policy. He seeks to pick apart the current cooperation between centre-right economic liberalism (‘immigration is good for the economy’; ‘immigrants have more market value than natives’) and the system of diversity (‘immigrants are structurally disadvantaged’; ‘immigrants are oppressed victims’). He makes classical liberals look like smarmy gits, worthy of the nasty ‘neoliberal’ moniker.

‘Preferment towards immigrant populations [is] justified both for their situation as victims and based on a survival of the fittest story,’ he points out, ‘often by the same people’ [p 126, emphasis Cobley’s]. The doublethink involved is obvious. The leftie diversity-booster wants to tell a story about the poor Syrian refugee fleeing from Assad’s gas attacks, while the Tory or LibDem neoliberal wants cheap labour to mow his lawn or clean her floors (because natives demand higher wages). Both, however, sing from the same hymn-sheet in an utterly cynical alliance of convenience...

People who do not like immigration do not necessarily think immigrants are bad (an important point undergirding data analysis showing employment discrimination against women and minorities in modern Britain is rare)...

Where economists do suggest immigration is a problem — Harvard’s George Borjas is notable here — it’s only low-skill immigration at issue. Borjas’s most famous study looks at the Mariel Boatlift in Miami. He found that wages for native born school drop-outs (a significant share of the labour market in Florida) fell by up to 15% relative to other cities over the next 5-10 years before recovering in the late 1980s. If Borjas is right, then low-skilled immigration can depress the return on pure, or manual labour for up to 10 years — especially if the labour market is already rigid or education and retraining systems are (forgive the Keynesian language) ‘sticky’.

However, when one sees a long-term negative effect from immigration — as opposed to just a transitional one — that means there are labour market rigidities like wage controls or limits on hiring and firing or poor geographical mobility. The effect of low-skill immigration in France, for example, is consistently negative and has been for a long time. France combines an inflexible labour market with a generous welfare state for citizens, while low-skill immigrants are more willing to work at the same wage under less pleasant conditions. Meanwhile, Denmark tells a very different story — low-skill immigration there has a strongly positive effect. Denmark has a flexible labour market and no minimum wage, which it combines not just with a social safety net but also systems to retrain the native workforce for non-manual tasks as migrants replace them at the bottom of the job heap...

Cobley builds up a detailed portrait of systemic discrimination against an already disadvantaged group (poor whites, particularly poor white men). He may well have proven that social policy around ameliorating disadvantage has been misdirected, even flat wrong, for something like 20 years. Along every metric that matters — education, wealth, life expectancy, suicide rates — poor white men and boys are at the bottom of the heap, yet are weirdly written off as ‘privileged’ by the system of diversity...

One of Steven Pinker’s concerns has been to show that the principle of moral egalitarianism can survive the reality people are not all the same. That some people — both individually and on a group basis — are better at sums or faster in the fifty-yard dash seems trivially true. Unfortunately, much current policy is dedicated to handwaving away large average statistical differences across groups. Worse, people are born unequal, too — our aptitudes and interests have a genetic basis. To turn the famous line from Julius Caesar on its head, the fault is in our stars and not in ourselves that we are underlings. This is something we haven’t confronted honestly since classical antiquity, which probably explains how such thoughtless policy become popular. It’s worth remembering it took centuries to reject the pagan Roman view that if you’re beautiful, or clever, or courageous, you’re a better person and deserve more consideration.

All the while equality of outcomes is sought but not achieved, the foundation of liberal democracy is at risk: equal suffrage or ‘one-vote-one-value’ and equal treatment before the law. We are in danger of making moral egalitarianism dependent on equality of outcomes."


Shorter pieces:

The public is more afraid of Jeremy Cobyn in Number 10 than No Deal Brexit - "Nearly half the country - 43 per cent - think Jeremy Corbyn in Number 10 would be the worst outcome of the current Brexit impasseBy contrast only a third - 35 per cent - think No Deal would be worst, and around a quarter rate the two as equally bad outcomes... Fully 40 per cent of those polled said Boris Johnson would make the best Prime Minister, versus less than a fifth - just 18 per cent - who favoured the Labour leader
The polling also found:- The country backs Boris Johnson's position of leaving the EU with or without a deal by October 31, with 52 per cent in fabour and only 38 against, and 10 unsureDespite a sense of public irritation with being asked to go to the polls so regularly, the poll revealed an unlikely majority in favour of an October general election, with 46 per cent in favour and 36 per cent against.But the outcome of such an election is anything but certain: the same sampling puts the Tories in front on 33 per cent, Labour on 26 percent, the Liberal Democrats on 17 percent and the Brexit Party on 14 percent."

Patrick Stewart leaves Labour over Corbyn - "Stewart mentioned that he was also upset by Corbyn's inability to effectively handle problems such as anti-Semitism."

Corbyn saw antisemitism in history book but did not mention it in foreword | News | The Times - "Mr Corbyn said the work was a “great tome”, praising Hobson’s “brilliant, and very controversial at the time” analysis of the “pressures” behind western, and in particular British, imperialism at the turn of the 20th century.In the book, Hobson, an economist who was a great influence on Lenin and other Marxists, argued that those pressures were brought to bear by finance — which he claimed was controlled in Europe “by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience” and “are in a unique position to control the policy of nations”.In a clear invocation of the antisemitic Rothschild conspiracy theory, he added: “Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European State, or a great State loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connections set their face against it?”Mr Corbyn also praised Hobson’s “correct and prescient” passages “railing against the commercial interests that fuel the role of the popular press with tales of imperial might”. In the book, Hobson claimed that “great financial houses” have “control which they exercise over the body of public opinion through the Press”."

Jeremy Corbyn’s not an anti-Semite, he’s just very unlucky | Coffee House - "Can you be sure, dear reader, you haven’t inadvertently indulged lately in a spot of Holocaust denial? A little light Jew bashing? The problem with modern life is there’s so much to remember. Have I got my keys? Have I got my money? Have I apparently become a member of an organisation which is vocal in its support of writer Roger Garaudy – who claimed the murder of six million Jews was a ‘myth’? Have I got my shopping list? No one can be expected to remember every last thing at all times.We can, then, surely sympathise with Jeremy Corbyn’s discovery only last week that he was listed on its website as an international convenor of the Just World Trust, an NGO described by the Observer as a ‘trenchant critic of Israel.’ It’s the sort of thing that could easily slip anyone’s mind. Likewise the Labour leader’s inability to recall for sure whether or not four years ago he laid a wreath to deceased members of the Black September terrorist group in Tunisia. Most of us can’t remember what we did last week.Dave Rich, head of policy at the Community Security Trust, points out that Jezza is ‘the unluckiest anti-racist in history. He repeatedly manages to get involved with organisations and people that promote anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, apparently without ever noticing anything is amiss.’ There but for the grace of God go we. It must be infuriating beyond words to again and again find yourself seeming, despite the very best of intentions, to endorse by association events at which Jews are likened to Nazis"

The Ideology of Corbynism - "Corbyn’s foreign policy views are flatly inconsistent with any claim to a universalist moral ethos. He vehemently denounces Saudi Arabia’s many appalling human rights abuses but has happily accepted money from the propaganda arm of the Iranian regime. His ostensible opposition to violence and racism and oppression, meanwhile, does not extend to genocidal terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, the former of which he has implausibly described as “dedicated to the good of the Palestinian people and bringing about long term peace and social justice and political justice in the region.”... this inconsistency [is] the product of an ideology they call “two-campism”... my enemy’s enemy is necessarily my friend. “The ‘West’—primarily the ‘imperialists’ of the USA, Israel, the UK, the EU—falls squarely in the enemy camp”... What matters, ultimately, is not what these groups and nations propose, but the fact they are antagonistic to the West. Prior to becoming leader of the Labour Party, Corbyn was a chair of the “Stop the War Coalition,” a supposedly pacifist organisation that has published, inter alia, a defence of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. The ‘W’ in StWC should more accurately stand for the “West” than for “War.” It is in this ideological and institutional context that Corbyn was infamously moved to describe Hamas and Hezbollah as “our friends.” But incidents like these have scarcely dented Corbyn’s support among his base. A significant reason Corbyn’s disciples appear uninterested in his inconsistency is their non-negotiable belief in his unimpeachable moral integrity. Corbyn, they aver, is a good man; criticisms of him therefore constitute either “smears,” or else his wrongdoing indicates errors made in pursuit of noble intentions rather than malice... Corbyn’s acknowledgement that antisemitic attitudes had seeped into the Labour Party were “rejected by a sizeable chunk of his own base.”... “Corbyn’s symbolic representation thus takes precedence over words from his mouth.” All political ideologies involve narratives, and the Corbynite narrative is one in which Corbyn is a virtuous man maligned by a coterie of special interests. This is despite the aggressive posturing he displays during interviews when questioned about his previous affiliations, and the sneering contempt with which he dismisses even fairly charitable critiques of his positions... Corbyn is always presented by his followers as the victim of a malign plot. This paranoid article of faith brings us to the third salient aspect of Corbynism: conspiratorial thinking... “capitalist social relations are consciously and covertly designed by a minority of individuals or groups in order to exploit everyone else.”... If we suppose that society is rigged in favour of special interests, we are inevitably invited to wonder who these malevolent actors are. And, historically speaking, there seems to be one particular group that always happens to occupy such a position... after Jewish activists and mainstream Jewish organisations gathered outside Parliament this year to protest the cascade of antisemitic scandals within the Labour Party... more than 200 Corbyn supporters signed a letter portraying the protest as the work of a ‘very powerful special interest group.’”... One of the central ironies of this debacle is that charges of antisemitism are often repudiated by directly invoking the classic tropes of that racist malady... 85 percent of Jews in the UK believe that Corbyn himself is antisemitic. This followed the emergence of a video in which Corbyn described British Zionists as not understanding “history” and not “understanding English irony, either.” If the same percentage of black people considered Corbyn to be racist, or if he was recorded making similar disparaging comments about, say, Muslims, it is inconceivable that he would have risen to the pinnacle of British progressive politics."
Apparently we should shut up and listen to what minorities say about their oppression - unless the minorities are Jews

BBC News: Labour MP STUNS John Humphrys – 'you have to be antisemitic' - "“Because it’s very much part of their politics, of hard left politics, to be against capitalists and to see Jewish people as the financiers of capital.“Ergo, you are anti-Jewish people.” Reeling, the veteran radio host stuttered: “In other words, to be anti-capitalist you have to be antisemitic?” Ms McDonagh’s response was chilling: “Yes.”"

Lucas Lynch - To be fair - I think most Labour MPs embroiled in... - ""The Jews" = monied interests, and seeing as Marxist philosophy is in opposition to monied interests, that means opposition to the Jews as well. Don't believe me? Read Marx's "On the Jewish Question" and "The Russian Loan", where this can be made even clearer.Let us not pretend all this is just misunderstood anti-Zionism. These currents in leftist thought predate modern Israel by almost a century.And I believe this is why the modern far left finds it trivially easy to affirm pathological hatred of Israel and refuses to see anti-semitism as a very serious thing, as Jews are members of a privileged class - either by identifying them with money, or with being 'white'."

The strange death of Labour Scotland - "There is a remarkable irony to this turn of events. In the 1990s, the then shadow secretary of state for Scotland, George Robertson (now Lord Robertson of Port ­Ellen), asserted: “Devolution will kill nationalism stone dead.” Several years after the foundation of the Scottish Parliament, another well-known Labour figure – Brian Wilson, the former MP and minister who is an arch-opponent of devolution – surveying the wreckage of his party in the Scottish elections, concluded that in delivering the parliament, Labour had, in effect, constructed its own scaffold."