The Tory shires are Tory for much the same reason: the working class were driven out of them faster than they could organise electorally. PR would make things better in the US, as here, of course. But their written constitution is every bit as stupefying as our non-existent one.
The vision - labour intensive, technologically sophisticated co-operative food production - is intensely appealing. But to stand a chance it must be tied to a broader vision of democracy itself as a cooperative endeavour, characterised by communication between equals.
It's this vision - tying reform of the state directly to reform of the economy - that can unify diverse popular constituencies, and provide a template for radically democratic initiatives below the level of the national state.
US states are sovereign, except in matters expressly defined in the constitution - all of them could become prototype cooperative commonwealths. At each level down the powers are more restricted, but the barriers are lower.
England's local govts - feeble though they seem when compared with US equivalents - are freighted with untested democratic potential. Preston shows some of what is possible here. (And Preston's example might be what prompts Toryism's newfound interest in local gov 'reform'.)
Eliminate the districts by Parliamentary fiat, before anyone realises what a democratic reform movement might be able to do with them.
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Yep, that's definitely what happened. No need for further analysis, let alone investigation. Another layer of journalistic lacquer on what happened in 2019, and we're left with half-formed questions and a vague sense that something untoward is going on. theguardian.com/books/article/…
Gosh, why would that be, and what does it tell us about the recent behaviour of both the duopoly parties? Fragmented and politically complex in what ways? Again we are left surrounded by question marks, like a concussed duck in a Loony Tunes cartoon. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
A great deal of centrist and centre left political commentary seems determined to skirt round the politics of any given situation in its haste to put on a kind of satyr play, in which stock characters deliver the lines their readers and listeners have come to expect.
Reform won 2 councillors in a Conservative borough this week, & lost their one councillor in a Labour city. The Greens beat Labour in every ward in central Bristol. They're the real opposition to Labour in many places, where's their BBC piece??bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi…
Labour were also defeated in many places by independents, some of whom are former Labour councillors. Again, they look like a much more plausible "real opposition" than Reform. Where is the reporting on this, and on its implications for the general election?
Labour is looking to win the GE via a Conservative collapse. It's an approach that infuriates many in their 2015-2019 coalition and it depends crucially on the existing forms of political reporting, which fixate on the right and dismiss or downplay the left.
We should never get tired of repeating that politics and the media in this country since the financial crisis has been monopolised by people who think that everything is basically fine, and that those arguing for an alternative to Thatcherism are dangerous extremists.
This means that the pool of competent people to draw on to populate government and political journalism gets shallower all the time. Since 2010 our PMs have been a daft posho, an authoritarian weirdo, another daft posho, whatever Liz Truss was, and now a libertarian nitwit.
Meanwhile the media has constantly had to pretend that they didn't want this parade of incompetent freaks and the catastrophic mismanagement and venality they presided over, even though they themselves lied through their teeth to head off any and all alternatives.
"As we did at the end of the 1970s, we stand at an inflection point ..." There's a bit of rote Democrat-copying going on here as usual: Reeves is referencing Thatcher as Obama referenced Reagan - working with the grain of media-induced amnesia ... theguardian.com/business/2024/…
But it is useful to remember what Thatcherism was: a carefully planned project to revive the investing class at the expense of the working majority. It was given space by the refusal of the centre left to recognise the limits of postwar social democracy, and move beyond them.
This project to revive capitalist control of society was masterminded in the UK by the likes of John Hoskyns, who set out the plan in the seventies in a series of "stepping stones" memos, in which the need to break the power of the trade unions was repeatedly stressed.
The UK Chancellor today is doing what Chancellors always do in the face of economic stagnation and declining living standards: giving state subsidies to private investors. The stated purpose of this is to encourage them to invest more and so improve productivity, wages etc. 🧵
The problem is that UK private investors aren't interested in, or good at, directing real resources towards domestic projects that will increase living standards for the majority who work.
The UK’s rich got rich through land rents and through unequal trade with the rest of the world, enforced at gunpoint by the Royal Navy. They are still helping themselves to land rents, and now operate offshore under the wing of the US Empire.
The current mainstream debate on the economy mostly revolves around whether the BoE was too slow to raise interest rates, which sounds much like one 18th century doctor complaining that their rival waited too long before starting to bleed the patient.
Inflationary pressure isn't coming from the great majority of middle and low income earners. Increasing the mortgage interest payments of people who are already have less discretionary spending won't do much to dent inflation caused by supply shocks and corporate price-setting.
The pandemic has greatly increased the wealth of high earners and of those who own property and other assets. To the extent there is a monetary issue, it can be addressed through wealth taxes - a Post-Pandemic Readjustment Act should cover it.