Category: UK

10 Apr

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Thatcher, the ALP & the dregs of neoliberalism

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If there’s one thing the entire Australian Left agrees on right now it’s that “Thatcherism was a very bad thing”. But beyond that, it may be appropriate to ask what exactly it is that people think was a bad thing. The answer to that question rests on one’s interpretation of what exactly was going on in the high neoliberal period of the 1980s, and what followed it. There is an uncomfortable fact that many local progressives are also trying to dance around, one that impacts on their view of the domestic political situation. That fact is that the highpoint of the ALP’s federal political success with the Hawke and Keating governments shared much of its DNA with Thatcher’s neoliberalism, here understood as a political project to shift the balance of forces in the class struggle towards capital, and thereby enact a historic redistribution of wealth and power upwards.

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Filed Under: ALP, class, Featured, John Howard, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Liberal Party, neoliberalism, social democracy, Tony Abbott, trade unions, UK

01 Mar

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Far Right’s new footholds in UK & Greece

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London-based anti-fascist activist KEVIN OVENDEN reports on two aspects of the rise of the far Right in Europe. First, he analyses the high vote for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in the Eastleigh by-election, where they beat the Tories into third place. Following this, a short piece on how the mainstream Right is feeding the success of Golden Dawn and other far Right forces in Greece.

The UKIP vote in the Eastleigh by-election — second with 27.8 percent — portends a dash to the Right in mainstream politics.

UKIP’s central slogan was “Stop open-door immigration” — lumping together the movement of EU nationals with asylum seekers and others through a deliberate sleight of hand into a single racist or xenophobic scapegoat.

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Filed Under: Europe, fascism, Featured, Greece, UK

10 Nov

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A Left Flank dispatch from Europe: The ‘descent into chaos’ begins

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If the last week’s bizarre political contortions in Greece — first a referendum, then not, then a government of national unity, now more uncertainty — were not enough, the spread of contagion to Italy threatens even greater turmoil. As we arrived in London we were greeted by the Financial Times informing us that Silvio Berlusconi had (finally) agreed to resign as PM, but apparently in part so he could maintain a hope of running for the top job yet again in early elections.

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Filed Under: age of austerity, Europe, UK

20 Sep

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Limits of liberal critique: Murdoch, the media & the Manne Quarterly Essay

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Not so omnipotent anymore
  

Cross-posted from Overland Journal‘s blog and ABC’s The Drum. 

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.

— Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845)

Robert Manne has done everyone who hates the right-wing, hysterically partisan and mendacious editorial approach of The Australian a considerable service. In the latest Quarterly Essay he has compiled a dossier of some of the Murdoch paper’s most egregious crimes. It is a testament to his scrupulous attention to detail, wide-ranging knowledge of the issues involved and commitment to concretely uncovering systematic (rather than incidental) biases that the paper’s collection of responses by its editorialists and opinion writers limps along using isolated anecdotes and non sequiturs against mountains of evidence marshalled by Manne.

Filed Under: Bob Brown, media, neoliberalism, UK

14 Aug

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‘Mama said there’ll be days like this’ — The UK riots, the labour movement and the Left

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Special guest post by KEVIN OVENDEN*

What did people expect? Just over a year ago, during the general election campaign in Britain, I remember George Galloway on the stump warning that the last time the Tories came in to replace an already dead Labour government and pursue full-blooded, class war policies, Britain’s cities went up in flames. That was 1981. Three decades later the Sunday supplement features on Brixton, Toxteth and St Paul’s all situated those events in the aggressive policing, racist exclusion and darkening hopes of the young of the time.

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Filed Under: age of austerity, class, racism, UK

13 Aug

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Intended or not, the consequences of riots are not always negative

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Watts Riot of 1965 — how the rioters treated ‘their’ community then 
This is the original text of an article commissioned by ABC’s The Drum, which was published yesterday and can be found here.

The riots in the United Kingdom, mainly involving school age and unemployed youth, have provoked a backlash that seeks to paint them narrowly as “mindless”, “criminals”, “thugs” and an “external” threat to social order. Politicians and journalists sing from the same songbook, to condemn and excoriate first and to (preferably not) ask questions later. Voices that raise the social context in which the riots erupted, that point the very political flashpoint of the police killing of Mark Duggan (and its subsequent handling by the police), that argue that rioters’ own professions of being motivated by grievances relating to economic exclusion and racial discrimination — those voices are rapidly cut down by shrill cries that we must understand the rioters less and denounce them more.

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Filed Under: age of austerity, class, media, racism, state, UK

11 Aug

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Whoever expects a ‘pure’ revolution will never live to see it: The UK riots in perspective

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Mark Duggan, whose killing by police sparked the riots
Maybe it’s a sign of the times, but for mine the most depressing thing about the UK riots is how some on the Left feel the need to loudly proclaim their lack of solidarity with some of the poorest and most oppressed people in society, instead resorting to elite talking points about mindlessness, criminality, etc, and framing progressive politics entirely within the moral panics whipped up by the ruling elites.

Kevin Ovenden notes that such a reaction is anything but novel:

Predictable reactions from the usual quarters — including David Lammy and the Labour front bench. These were the kinds of reaction from those ideological positions to virtually every riot, from the unemployed protests of the 1930s, through the early 1980s to Tottenham and to South Central LA. Are there some inchoate and reactionary aspects of these events? Sure. Is that their motivation or why they happen? No.

It’s not my intention to respond to such arguments here. Others have done and are doing a better job of that.

Filed Under: age of austerity, class, racism, state, UK