The Democracy Ration

It's hard not to get depressed around election time. In 2005, the choice was between an overtly racist party led by a vampire, a flapping husk of a party led by a war criminal, and a party led by and supported by over-earnest students. Little has changed since then, although to believe the papers, everything has changed. The nearly unconstitutional TV debates (well, in so far as Britain has a constitution, they seem to be at least against the spirit of the thing) have flipped many people disillusioned with the Husk Party and the Racist Party to support the Earnest Party, or so hype would have us believe. Behind all this looms a giant recession the size of which the majority of people have never experienced - with the concomitant 'necessity' of mindblowing cuts. It's enough to make you emigrate, either to some politically dubious nation where your accent might render you charming (Australia, the US...) or to another astral plain altogether.

Why is this the case? My argument would not be that politics is inherently worse than it was. Many politically engaged people hark back to the days when the parties were really parties - when the Tories were openly racist, rather than tacitly, when Labour supported strikes and provided free silver spoons to every poor unfortunate in the land, and when the Liberals were so bland that you had to take speed to prevent yourself sleeping whenever they opened their mouths. This is bollocks.

I would wager the reason it's depressing is that the act of voting, in Britain particularly, actualises your powerlessness. This is your democracy ration, handed out every 4 to 5 years. It won't really do anything, but it will do more than the other elections you vote in every year or so - Assembly, Council and European - which are, scientifically, less important than votes cast towards X Factor contestants. You can vote for the people you agree with, but it's wasted. Go home, watch Dimbleby for a few hours, sleep, then go back to having less than no power, just as before, but with a different monkey dancing on the organ.

Or you can agitate, educate and organise. It's the only real political choice you ever have to make, and the only one that matters a jot.

Budgeting for the past: The Hauntology of Labour

Given the scale and profile of the current recession, the recent budget, traditionally the most trying of times for commentators (a great deal of numbers and infinitesimal changes in the price of fags do not a good 'angle' make) has become a goldmine for the boosters and gravediggers of 'New' Labour. The Guardian's Polly Toynbee alternates, with alarming frequency, between these two positions, but for a swift kick up the arse to the government, hers, with its close detail and wounded tone, is one of the best. In general, the conclusion drawn by commentators of the soft left and right is that the increase in tax for people earning over £150,000 a year is the death of 'New' Labour, given that not increasing tax on the rich was one of its key policy positions.

The tax raise is tiny, and largely symbolic. Labour has lost its funding from the very rich, as the hyper-rich now see Labour as an unsafe investment. As a result, 95% of its current funding comes from the trade unions, and with wage freezes/cuts and job losses clearly on the cards for the public sector, increasing tax a fraction on 1.5% of the population is considerably easier way to curry left favour than, well, raising wages and creating jobs. This symbolic murder of 'New' Labour is also an attempt to re-create the 'Brown bounce', when horror at the style of government of Tony Blair led people to hallucinate that Gordon Brown was authetically 'Old' Labour. The political problems of this are compounded by the fact that any hope in Brown as 'Old' Labour are an hallucination of 'Old' Labour as being a model of social democratic government.

If we take an actual appraisal of the last Labour government of 1974-1979, rather than a thumbnail one (beer and sandwiches, unions running the country, ill-fitting suits and regional accents), Brown is inarguably 'Old' Labour. Wage freezes, spiralling unemployment, global economic crisis - all very retro. The major discontinuity is the fact that, way back when, Labour hadn't dragged us into two absurd and disgustingly bloody wars. Brown has spent considerably less than fuck all on protecting jobs and wages, trillions on bankers and this is a 'left budget'?

Margaret Thatcher said her greatest achievement was 'New' Labour - undoubtably that is the case. But just as true is the fact that the greatest achievement of the pre-Thatcher Labour government was to soften the unions through collective bargaining, legal restriction and the argument that the unions should accept cuts in the 'national interest'. Maybe history the legacy of 'New' Labour will be to have killed, or at least critically wounded, the idea that Labour works for the working class. Sparks of resistance to the notion that the crisis is above and beyond control (we regret to inform you that we have to let you go) are burning. Let's hope Labour have lost the power to snuff them out.

"Ask not what your country can do for you"

The BBC have recently been showing a profoundly disturbing advert, as part of the promotion for their thoroughly ill-judged 'Britain's Got Talent' style search for the next great orator. Disturbing, first, for the shift between the ordinary voice of a child and the voice of the corrupt mayor of Springfield, Joe Quimby. But also disturbing in its content - the end of John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, in which he beseeches his citizens not to ask him for things ("ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country).

JFK is seen by some as a lost liberal hero - his assassination an attack on a reforming politician by the forces of reaction. The unimpeachable Marvin Gaye and Bill Hicks fell down on this camp (in fairness, Hicks had reservations). He was none of these things. Like Tony Blair, he took it upon himself to be more hawkish than the hawks, sending troops against Cuba and Vietnam. Two major invasions in just shy of 3 years is an impressive record.

The section of his speech chosen by the BBC to highlight great oratory is in fact apocalyptic, nonsensical and platitudinous. He tasks himself with "defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger", assuring the audience that "I do not shank from this responsibilty". Of course, this proved not to mean the freedom of Cuba and Vietnam to determine their own futures, although both of them managed to achieve an impressive degree of self-determination faced with the greatest military force the modern world has known. Aside from these churlish objections, what can Kennedy mean about freedom being in its hour of maximum danger in 1961? Surely we can agree that was, in modern history, when Hitler's armies had an iron grip over the vast swathe of continental Europe, with Kennedy's father's full support?

After dropping this millinarian clanger, he tries to sweeten his audience by praising their generation - "I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation". This is, over human history, largely true - the fact of technological progress, and the impossibility of time travel make exchanging places with other generations both undesirable and impractical.

But the most arresting phrase, and the most infuriating, is his call for Americans not to ask what their country can do for them, but what they can do for their country. The state behaves, at its most basic level, as a parasite. In the feudal era, the state acted as a protection racket, demanding taxes, and punishing those who refused to cough up. Fortunately, things are less one-sided now, following demands on the state to provide essential services, and a degree of security. Arguing for self-sacrifice in the name of the glory of the nation, must have, should have, sounded slightly kamikaze to an audience of people, many of whom had been detrimentally impacted by the struggle against oriental despotism.

Given that the rise of Obama is clearly the impetus for the BBC's search for an orator, the choice of this speech is highly ironic - Obama's arguments are almost opposite to those of Kennedy. Obama argued against fearful patriotic fervor in the form of the Iraq War, and for state intervention to help create jobs and widen health-care provision. Not counting the incongruity of JFK's nasal, Bostonian tones issuing from the maws of clearly British children, the speech hits the wrong notes.

I Knew I Was Right

The Julie Burchill lookalike and New Statesman contributor Suzanne Moore, has resigned, and come out with views similar to mine, decrying the decline of its content, which has hit a new low, getting the detestable Alastair Campbell to guest edit. Presumably, this is a marketing ploy on their part, but it's still ridiculous - not only is he hateful and wrong, he's also dull.