One Nation Labour, by David Lindsay

On the scale of public ownership and on the extent of trade union power, Jeremy Corbyn is well to the right of Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home. That is not hyperbole. It is fact.

As it is that Margaret Thatcher presided over publicly owned railways, and over a 60p top rate of income tax well above that proposed by Corbyn. And as it is that Tony Blair promised to renationalise the railways in several speeches leading up to the General Election of 1997.

Why would Corbyn’s position not be the centre ground? You can have all the private health insurance that you like. But if you were hit by a car, or if you collapsed in the street with a heart attack, then someone would call 999, and an NHS ambulance would take you to an NHS hospital.

That that call would certainly be made, even by a perfect stranger, is testament to the definition of the United Kingdom’s culture by the social democratic legacy of previous Labour Governments, and supremely of that which was elected in 1945.

Everyone benefits, of all classes and in all areas. Such was always the intention behind it. This is the only British identity that almost anyone alive can remember, or that almost any of the rest would wish to have. Today, however, it is under threat as never before.

Even in the 1980s, nothing came close to the scale of the attack, not merely since the recent General Election, but since that of 2010; under the Liberal Democrats, who never moderated a thing, as much as under the Conservatives.

Labour grew from many and various roots. Trade union and co-operative. Radical Liberal and Tory populist. Christian Socialist and Social Catholic. Fabian and even, in the space both on Labour’s fringes and on Marxism’s fringes, Marxist, subject to the balancing and moderating influences of the others. Giving the wrong answers does not preclude asking the right questions. Much of the Fabian tradition also gives the wrong answers.

Labour has always had a right wing. It always will have. It always should have. People who would prefer the purity of a Stalinist, Trotskyist or Maoist groupuscule have never been short of options. The point is to have a right wing of the Labour Party, and not merely a right wing in the Labour Party. The Leadership of Jeremy Corbyn will achieve that.

From the Trade Union Bill, to public ownership, to the proper centrality of rail and coal, to foreign policy and wars, to Trident, to civil liberties, to the case against the European Union from the very start, Corbyn’s views are the views of Peter Hitchens. Many of them are also shared by Peter Oborne and by several other commentators who could hardly be described as “Loony Left”. 

Furthermore, they are popular. For example, the renationalisation of the railways is consistently supported by between 65 and 70 per cent of the population, stable across all parts of the country and across the electoral bases of all parties. There is strong public support for rent controls, and for a mandatory Living Wage properly so called. Defending the NHS is massively popular.

But even if none of those things were the case, a political party does not exist purely in order to follow public opinion. What would be the point of the Labour Party if it did not campaign for such policies as these?

Labour needs to be a broad alliance between the confidently urban and the confidently rural, between the confidently metropolitan and the confidently provincial, between the confidently secular and the confidently religious, between those confident in their liberal social values and those confident in their conservative social values. It must seek that alliance across all ethnic groups, across all social classes, and across all parts of the country: One Nation.

The basis of that alliance includes the contribution-based Welfare State, with contribution defined to include, for example, caring for children and caring for elderly relatives. It includes workers’ rights, with the trade unionism necessary in order to defend and advance them. It includes John Smith’s signature policy that employment rights must begin on the first day of employment, and apply regardless of the number of hours worked.

That basis includes community organising. It includes profit-sharing and similar arrangements: not “shares for rights”, but shares and rights. It includes the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, not least in the provision of financial services, especially following the loss of the Co-op Bank precisely because it was not itself a co-operative, but was merely owned by one.

That basis includes consumer protection. It includes strong communities. It includes fair taxation. It includes full employment, with low inflation. It includes pragmatic public ownership, including of the utilities, of the postal service and of the railway service, and always with strong parliamentary and municipal accountability. It includes publicly owned industries and services, national and municipal, setting the vocational training standards for the private sector to match.

That basis includes local government, itself including council housing, fiscal autonomy, the provision as well as the commissioning of services, the accountability provided by the historic committee system, and the abolition of delegated planning decisions.

That basis includes the State’s restoration of the economic foundation of the civilised and civilising worker-intellectual culture historically exemplified by the pitmen poets and the pitmen painters, by the brass and silver bands, by the male voice choirs, by the Workers’ Educational Association and the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, by the people’s papers rather than the redtop rags, and so on. In order to restore a civilisation in continuity with it, that culture must be rescued from “the enormous condescension of posterity”.

That basis includes the Union, the Commonwealth (unsentimentally understood), and the ties that bind these Islands, recognising that only social democracy guarantees the Union and that only the Union makes possible social democracy in these Islands, so that the erosion of social democracy is the most powerful of separatist arguments, despite the fact that the separatists could not possibly deliver social democracy, and very largely would not wish to deliver it, in the entities to which they aspired.

That basis includes economic patriotism, itself including both energy independence and balanced migration. It includes the recognition that we cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level.

That basis includes an approach to climate change which protects and extends secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encourages economic development around the world, which upholds the right of the working classes and of non-white people to have children, which holds down and as far as practicable reduces the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refuses to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.

That basis includes the full compatibility between, on the one hand, the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and, on the other hand, the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past.

That basis includes the organic Constitution, with the full pageantry and ceremony of the parliamentary and municipal processes, and itself including a very British trait of inbuilt self-criticism: variously Radical and republican, populist and pacifist, Celtic and regional, proletarian and intellectual (often both at once), exemplified in the present age by the distinct role of Dennis Skinner at the State Opening of Parliament, a role as much a part of the event as that of the Queen, with each of them as the latest, but far from the last, in a long, long line. It includes the lesson that the public ownership, the local government, and the trade union rights that existed in 1979 were by then integral parts of the organic Constitution, such that the assault on them set the precedent and the pattern for further assaults on other such parts.

That basis includes the national and parliamentary sovereignty of the United Kingdom in the face of all challenges: from the United States or from the European Union, from Israel or from the Gulf monarchies, from the Russian oligarchs or from the rising powers of Asia, from money markets or from media moguls, from separatists or from communalists, from over-mighty civil servants and diplomats (including in the intelligence services) or from over-mighty municipal officers, and from inappropriately imported features of the economic and political cultures of the Old Dominions. This list is not exhaustive.

That basis includes co-operation between the United Kingdom and the United States on the basis of civil liberty, which includes and necessitates national sovereignty, which compels international realism, which tends towards peace, which safeguards civil liberty.

That basis includes the understanding that the national and parliamentary sovereignty of the United Kingdom is, with municipalism, the only means to social democracy in the territory that it covers, and is thus the democracy in social democracy. It includes, no less than the previous point, the understanding that only social democracy, and not least the public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, is capable of safeguarding that sovereignty, national and parliamentary, and that democracy, parliamentary and municipal.

That basis includes conservation and the countryside, especially the political representation of the rural working class. It includes personal freedom through superb and inexpensive public transport, ultimately free at the point of use. It includes academic excellence, with technical proficiency, refusing to compromise on either, and according to apprentices and trainees the same benefits as are accorded to their peers in further and higher education, as well as vice versa.

That basis includes civil liberties, with law and order, including visible and effective policing, and including an end to light sentences and to lax prison discipline through a return to a free country’s minimum requirements for conviction.

That basis includes fiscal responsibility, of which neoliberal capitalism is manifestly and demonstrably the opposite. It includes a strong financial services sector, with a strong food production and manufacturing base, and with the strong democratic accountability of both.

That basis includes a total rejection of class war, insisting instead on “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon”. It includes, nevertheless, the understanding that justice is prior to peace, and that justice always necessitates some kind of struggle against injustice, which can take the form of a war under certain very exceptional circumstances, so that Her Majesty’s Justices maintain the Queen’s Peace precisely because there is, and there can be, “No Justice, No Peace”.

That basis includes a large and thriving private sector, a large and thriving middle class, and a large and thriving working class; all depend on central and local government action, and with public money come public responsibilities.

That basis includes very high levels of productivity, with the robust protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, including powerful workers’ representation at every level of corporate governance. It includes a base of real property for every household, to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State. It includes an absolute statutory division between investment banking and retail banking.

That basis includes a realist foreign policy, itself including strong national defence, and precluding any new Cold War against Russia, China, Iran or anywhere else. It includes British military intervention only ever in order to defend British territory or British interests. It includes a leading role on the world stage, with a vital commitment to peace, and with a complete absence of weapons of mass destruction. It includes the diversion of the cost of the renewal of Trident to conventional defence and to the real nuclear deterrent, which is civil nuclear power within an “all of the above” energy policy organised around that nuclear power and around the exploitation of this country’s vast reserves of coal.

And that basis includes the subjection both of Islamism and of neoconservatism to an approach defined by our proud history of equal opposition to Stalinism, Maoism, Trotskyism, Nazism, Fascism, and the Far Right regimes in Southern Africa, Latin America and elsewhere.

@davidaslindsay

Increase The Budget, But Slay The Cow?, by Paul Bicknell

An argument in favour of bona-fide public works schemes.

Honest conceptual clarification of the NHS, which few wish to hear on either side of the chamber, will help the public decide on what may be a crisis, but not necessarily one of patient care. Meanwhile, liberated funds could be used to fight child-poverty.

There is a false dichotomy concerning the National Health Service.

Under the aegis of the left, we are led to believe, it is a neo-Keynesian employment racket which telegenic Tory rascal Dan Hannan will tell any voter in earshot (he tells it glibly and inaccurately) employs three times as many managers as medical staff and is the worlds’ third largest employer after the Chinese Red Army and Indian National Railways.

Meanwhile, under the imagined corruption of the right, so the story goes, millions, albeit not billions are wasted on cronyism; the money which is ‘haemorrhaged’ on external consultants either directly, but also indirectly; there are thousands for example of what one candid recruitment consultant said to me recently of private sector recruiters for the NHS regularly taking home six figure salaries (you know, four times that of a junior doctor etc).

There are very laudable, honourable and genuine reasons for those of us on the left to laudably proclaim the virtues of a cradle to the grave, free at point of access (and various other pieces of dogma) public health programme.

What can be more touching a use of income, what could be more apple pie and mother than the public’s health? This hasn’t been a partisan issue, even in the dark days of Thatcherism (who would nevertheless never speak about using the NHS on the record).

John Major, a more benign Tory in his party conference speech in 1991, famously pledged: ‘No privatisation of healthcare, neither piecemeal, nor in part, nor in whole, not today, not tomorrow, not after the next election, not ever while I am prime minister.’

Now what’s the schtick? 

He was required to say this against the ‘better’ instincts of the right hand side of the chamber, because under Neil Kinnock, sensible centrist policy was under threat of stealing the lower middle-class vote and he could not afford to lose the voting block which the NHS represents?

It is a fine example of how the praxis (the mid-point of the dialectic between left and right) has worked in British politics since the people’s budget of Lloyd George and the introduction on these islands of superannuation.

There is a centrist path-dependent dynamism, which sadly exists in the absence of revolution. To put this simply, the would-be revolutionary zeal, the once real possibility of full-structural Marxism, has had the rug pulled out from under it by revolutionary social policy instead.

The radical left-has thus won a great many battles, but sadly few if any in government. Those of us, who in the absence of revolution, wish government to be more left wing, must do so almost playfully with a kind of magnetic inertia which operates around the praxis. Then we can win elections. 

The crisis of NHS funding is one at its heart then which is not about patient care per se, but is about what the NHS is largely in practice once you subtract its MacGuffin, one of the largest scale public works schemes in the western world.

It’s the beastly Hannan postulate again, but I wish to eat the cake and have it. I wish to bite the bullet.

While 98.8% of NHS funding comes from general taxation and National Insurance, with just 1.2% coming from patient charges, amounting to 9.3% of GDP, according to the Kings Fund, under the French system big business pays for peoples’ healthcare, with the tiny percentile coming from general taxation.

Let’s keep the health service for what it was originally intended for, firstly. Secondly, with the liberated funds, let’s create an honest-to-goodness quangocracy which deals with ‘public works’, which would exist at regional levels only (more of which at the end).

There is a unique opportunity for the Corbyn faction of the Labour Party to do this.

It could be a better idea than nationalising the railways and in any case it would be underpinned by sound neo-Keynesian economics and economists such as David Blanchflower as well as the conservative International Monetary Fund.

What would the public works scheme be for the Blairite monkey on my right shoulder is asking me?

Well this misses the point, given the fact that currently the public works scheme is already in existence; it forms a large part of the NHS, and its existence is there merely to propagate itself with ‘wastage’.

The wastage is the creation of millions of upper middle-class non-jobs. University educated ninnies who believe the tradesman of Wychwood Avenue owe him or her a living.

And then call it ‘Left’, or ‘Conservative’ or ‘the common ground’; because one thing is true, on the NHS nothing really substantive seems to change.

In any case, with the issue such as the relative poverty of children at the absolute forefront of our minds, with homelessness at very high levels and with the myriad of worthy causes proclaimed by many of the charities, it should not be beyond the wit of human kind to concoct a package of schemes which could put these very bright and able graduates to better use.

Let’s break the tired narrative of NHS funding, the bloated entity which has grown since inception. It still existed pervasively under New Labour and continues to this day.

Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England appointed last year by the Tories, despite being policy advisor to two separate Labour secretaries of state for health Frank Dobson and Alan Milburn, may be one of the more shrewd moves made by David Cameron since in government.

But he is not committed to coming clean with the public: Telling them honestly what the NHS has come to be about. There are other more minor ideological issues as well.

Over 300m consultations in England and Wales take place each year and more than one billion prescriptions dispensed (albeit three-quarters are free because they go to the elderly and the unemployed), according to the Health and Social Care Information Centre.

So keen are we on the left to hold-truck with dogma and so keen are they on the right to use weasel-words and policy which chimes with the public sector electorate, we refuse to acknowledge the usefulness of a small £5 consultation charge for higher-rate taxpayers which in turn would liberate funds to reduce treatment costs currently paid by the sick and needy poor.

It could be a simple trade-off. Wealthy drunks presenting on Friday and Saturday nights with frivolous and vexatious complaints pay in the stead of a young person needing for the sake of argument, expensive anti-retroviral drugs.

NHS finance announced last week what is needed to keep the unfit for purpose entity running: A £3.8bn increase to the NHS budget next year to cover £2bn on new drugs, 800,000 new operations, 5.5m more outpatient appointments and 2m more diagnostic tests.

Now behind the spin of course we can see while this money is indeed equivalent to these costs, one might just as well argue that the money is being used to fund NHS administration as much as anything else.

Heidi Alexander MP, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, barks up the wrong tree slightly then in riposte: “With hospitals facing a £2.2 billion deficit this year, and demand going up, this money will simply be plugging the black hole that has emerged in NHS finances under the Tories.”

This is true and while it is also undoubtedly true that patient care must not be compromised at any cost; it does not follow that cuts will necessarily cause detriment to patient care.

Meaning the statement by Alexander: “While ministers also remain committed to making £22 billion worth of efficiency savings in the NHS by 2020” is spot on. “Everyone in the NHS knows that efficiencies on this scale simply cannot be delivered without harming patient care,” may not be. 

Administrators of the odious new poor law of 1834, in replacing the more generous and fair system of local mandates which existed under the 43rd of Elizabeth, would become well aware of how much more costly it must be to run a centralised and bureaucratic system.

Let’s break the cycle of ‘unintended consequences’ and public dishonesty.

The Tories coalition government was rightly lambasted (though not nearly vocally enough) for removing pivotal components of regional governance, whilst doing little to dismember the centralised cronies; the apparatchiks closer to the heart of government.

We desperately need public works schemes: socially and economically. Let’s have them and be honest about it.

We also desperately need to eliminate wastage in the NHS: Let’s do it; there would be no unemployment consequences provided it could be done in a mature ‘piecemeal’ fashion.

@TallBiggles

The Founder Members of the Lanchester Forum

We are the Founder Members of the Lanchester Forum, which has been set up in order to offer supportive criticism and critical support of the Leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, and of the Deputy Leadership of Tom Watson. A multiauthor website will be set up in the near future. Beginning in 2016, at least three events will be held per year, one at Durham, one at the Labour Party Conference, and one at the Palace of Westminster. 

David Lindsay (Convenor), Lanchester, County Durham; @davidaslindsay
Roger Godsiff MP, Member of Parliament for Birmingham Hall Green; @RogerGodsiff

Professor Bryan Gould, Member of Parliament for Southampton Test, 1974-1979; Member of Parliament for Dagenham, 1983-1994; Shadow Cabinet Member, 1986-1994; Labour Leadership Candidate, 1992
David Drew, Member of Parliament for Stroud, 1997-2010; @DavidEDrew 

Kerry Pollard, Member of Parliament for St Albans, 1997-2005; @KerryPollard_ 

Tom Bailey, London; @TomBaileyBlog 

Paul Bicknell, West Midlands; @TallBiggles 

Dr Luke Blaxill, Research Fellow, Hertford College, Oxford
Ronan Dodds, Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne

James Doran, Darlington; @doran_j 

Daniel Downes, Buckinghamshire; @DanDownes 

James Draper, Lanchester, County Durham 

Paul Embery, Regional Secretary, Fire Brigades Union (London); @PaulEmbery 

Tom Fowdy, Sunderland; St Aidan’s College, Durham; Hong Kong University; @Koryo1992 

Councillor Mark Fryer, Workington; @MarkFryer61 

Dr Chris Horner, London; @spitfirepilot1 

Hani Latif, Hertford; Trevelyan College, Durham; @kinghani 

Paul Leake, Durham; Unison; @paulleake 

John Mooney, Lurgan, County Armagh; @FitzjamesHorse 

Joe Plumb, Pity Me, County Durham; Iquitos, Peru 

Dr Martin Prior, http://martinse.livejournal.com/ 

John Paul Reid, London; @JohnPReid 

James Rogerson, Victoria, Australia; @jfgrogerson 

Daniel Singleton, London; @DSingleton_ 

Andy Walton, Bow; @waltonandy

18th November 2015.