There are serious tensions building up within the Conservative Party ahead of tomorrow, as MPs prepare on whether Britain should have an in/out referendum on the EU. Cameron has whipped has MPs to vote against it, and the possibility of a minor rebellion has generated numerous column inches. However most commentators have failed to grasp what these intra-conservative tensions are fundamentally about.

According to some accounts this is an insurgency by the Conservative right. Certainly there is a hardcore of traditional Tories who feel deeply alienated from Cameron and Co’s metropolitan clique. Yet despite the huffing and puffing in the Telegraph, Cameron is not the Conservative Party’s Tony Blair. The “modernisation” of the Tory Party has been very much a cosmetic job, and Cameron and Osborne have made no serious attempt to pull the party’s politics towards the centre. Equally flawed is the tendency in the Liberal press to frame this as simply a repetition of previous conservative squabbling over Europe. Back in the early 1990s the were a number of serious, ideological Europeanisers at the top of the Conservative party – think Michael Heseltine, or indeed Geoffrey Howe, whose resignation over the government’s failure to follow a sufficiently integrationist path lead to the fall of Thatcher.

This is not, in any sense, true today. The Conservative ministers holding the line against their Eurosceptic bankbenchers are themselves a heavily Eurosceptic bunch – not least David Cameron. The tensions we are seeing arise not from a clash between different ideological wings of the conservative party, but from a dissonance between the ideology of the Conservative party, and the politics Conservative government.

Throughout most of the 20th century, the Conservative party has been the primary representative of the interests of British business, and, in turn, has generally won its backing. Yet, having a political life of its own, the Tory party has never been a perfect vehicle for the interests of the business class. This is partly because, while the interests of business are liable to change over time, politics is not simply a matter of turning one tap off and another tap on. There have been periods in which fiery patriotic rhetoric – of the kind we may see from the conservative backbenches on Monday – deeply suited the interests of capital. The word “jingoism” arose at the turn of the 20th century, as the conservative government was firing up up hundreds of housands of ordinary Brits to fight and die for the gold and diamond mines of South Africa. More recently, Margaret Thatcher leant heavily upon the rhetoric of “making Britain Great” in order that the destruction of many people’s living standards could be reframed as sacrifices made for the sake of national salvation. Meanwhile, across the 19th century and into the 20th, the Tories made a point of fetishising Britain’s ancient constitutional machinery in order to stem the tied of democracy – again something that will feature in tomorrow’s debate.

Given the party’s philosophical baggage, it is not surprising that its activists, its Parliamentary party, and its leadership display an instinctive antipathy towards the European project. But here’s the rub. The party relies on the backing of big business, and, like any government in capitalist economy, relies on the acquiesence of corporations in order to get things done. And a desire to get out of Europe is utterly incompatible with the party’s crucial relationship with corporate Britain.

Despite the delusions of some on the liberal left – who see the EU as nothing more than a cuddly internationalist project – it is in no way surprising that the FT has consistently taken a ridiculously integrationist stance on Europe. Britain’s major corporations have little to gain and a great deal to lose from British withdrawal from the EU. Not only does the current situation grant them a huge open market. It also enables matters like the EU-India FTA – wherein the working class stand to take a huge hit for the benefit of the investor class – to be hived off beyond the reach of democratic institutions. Moreover it grants British business unfettered access to enormous reserves of cheap non-British labour (an uncomfortable truth for us lefty internationalists, but a truth nonetheless). In other words, British business would not countenance a decision to put Britain’s relationship with Europe in the hands of the mainly Eurosceptic public.

Cameron gets this. As the leader of business backed party, and as a Prime Minister who relies upon the co-operation of business, he knows that a referendum on the EU is not an option. Yet, it appears that these realities are less prominent in the minds of those lower down the conservative food chain. Thse people are less invested in conservative government, and for them the trade-off between politics and strategy is rather different. And so tomorrow we will se the manifestation of tensions inherent in the Tory party’s relationship with business. Yet the possibility of the British people actually being given a say over how they are governed remain as slim as ever.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

When it comes to the discussion about immigration, both its advocates and its opponents tend to display a certain contempt for the working class. Last week Cameron lamented the consequences of high immigration, and blamed the phenomenon on the British welfare system. British workers, he argued had become addicted to welfare, in turn forcing British firms to look abroad. It is unfortunate that, in making this case, he was echoing some of the arguments that get made by what we consider to be the liberal left. As I have noted in the past, the Guardian and the Independent have sometimes made the case for immigration but telling us how “useless” or “revolting” low skilled British workers are.

Indeed, as distasteful as Cameron’s remarks were, the case being made for immigration by Cable and the business lobby is not that much more appealing. Cable’s approach is that immigration is necessary to fill gaps in the labour market. This line of argument is frequently echoed by business. Robert Peston recently alerted us to the complaints of leading British industrialists who argued that the pool of talent in Britain alone is not wide or deep enough.

It is indeed rather galling to hear that migrants are desperately needed to fill gaps in the labour market, while 2.5 million of our citizens are without work. Of course there can be a mismatch between the skills that people have, and the skills that businesses require, and of course, as Chris Dillow recently argued, labour is not completely mobile: “An unemployed council workerin Swansea”, he writes, ” cannot easily become a plumber in London or fruit-picker in Lincolnshire.” Yet the discussion ought not to end there. First of all, people’s abilities are not completely immutable. People can be trained and retrained, and the businesses that have benefitted the most from the upturning and remoulding of the British economy over the preceding decades to be prepared to shoulder some of the costs. Secondly, it is not completely crazy to suggest that Britain should seek to direct its economic activity towards the kind of skills that people have.

This modern globalised economy in which we live is characterised by uncertainty and constant change. Patterns of comparative advantage can rapidly shift, and developments elsewhere can – if things are left to the market – very suddenly make whole sectors of the economy inviable. This is what we saw in the 80s. For business, mass migration can be a means of transferring these risks onto the working class. Workers whose skills are now the “wrong” skills can simply be dispensed with. There is no incentive to retrain and reskill, when those with the “right” skills can simply be cherry picked from across the globe. Equally, the kind of activity in which businesses engage can be determined only by what can be sold most profitably, without reference to what the existing labour force is best able to produce. The scrap heap piles up, and piles up some more.

If this looks like a call to limit migration, it is not. But what I am saying is that a defence of migration cannot simply be a defence of the status quo. We need to push for the kind of society and the kind of economy in which migration genuinely works to the benefit of all concerned. Because right now, the picture is not as rosy as some on the liberal left seem to complacently believe. In response to Cameron’s speech, Mehdi Hassan – senior political editor at the New Statesman – made a spirited defence of immigrtation. In doing so, he boasted of a Low Pay Commission report which, he said, found that immigration increased the average waes of non-immigrant workers.

The report itself did indeed discover that immigration was increasing the “average” wage. Yet it also found that while immigration was associated with “significantly positive wage effects around the middle of the distribution”, it also had “clearly negative wage effects at the lower end of the distribution”. In other words it was associated with increasing inequality. There is no necessary reason why immigration should have such an impact. As with any other phenomenon, the impact of migration is dependent upon the social and economic circumstances in which it takes place. With, for example, stronger unions and better labour laws (ours anti-union legislation is amongst the most restrictive in the developed world), wages for the worst off need not simply a matter of supply and demand. But unless we are prepared to put forward such an alternative, then we might as well hold our peace.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

Cameron said: “I simply don’t understand how you can’t understand how democracies have a right to defend themselves. I would have thought this argument is particularly powerful right here in Kuwait which, 20 years ago, was invaded by a thuggish bullying neighbour who disrespected your sovereignty, invaded your country and destroyed parts of your capital city.

He added: “Are we honestly saying that for all time, forever and a day, that countries like Kuwait have to manufacture and maintain every single part of their own defences? I think very few people considering that argument for any time would give it any consideration at all.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. No one – no one – who’s criticising Cameron for taking a trip to the Middle East to talk up democracy in between visiting arms fairs is saying democracies shouldn’t be allowed to buy weapons to defend themselves. That would be stupid. The idea that nice cuddly democratic governments might still need to buy weapons from time to time is entirely reasonable. But as an adequate response to the criticism at hand Cameron’s statement falls short so badly it’s hard to know where to even begin.

First, isn’t it a teensy bit of a stretch to imply – as Cameron seems to – that Saddam Hussein still constitutes a threat to Kuwait’s sovereignty? I don’t think even Genghis Khan managed to conquer anywhere from beyond the grave.

Second, Kuwait’s a democracy now? Oh dear. The Economist’s Intelligence Unit’s only ranked it 114^th out of 162 countries for political freedoms, and classified it as an authoritarian regime. Boy, are they going to feel stupid when they learn that all that ‘research’ and ‘studying’ they did was a waste of time. A country where peaceful political meetings are violently broken up by riot police is clearly exactly the kind of place we want to be selling riot shields to.

This is what democracy looks like. Apparently. Image - TTC Press Images/flickr

Third – and this is so obvious it really shouldn’t need pointing out – it might have escaped Cameron’s notice, but Kuwait’s not the only sodding country in the Middle East. We’ve sold tear gas to Gaddafi’s Libya, Land Rovers and Armoured Personnel Carriers to Saudi Arabia, combat helicopters to Algeria…the list goes on. At this point I almost feel it’s insulting all of our intelligence to point out that none of these regimes are in the least bit democratic, but Cameron seems not to be aware of it, so it seems worth spelling out.

All in all, it’s hard to see how Cameron’s statement could have been less convincing. It’s as if someone had a go at him for running over a small child while five pints over the limit and he came out with a spiel about the vital role cars play in meeting our travel needs in modern society. I know politicians have a habit of being evasive when faced with awkward questions, but it’s kind of galling to see it done so brazenly.

When explaining the Conservative vision of the ‘Big Society’ to the public, Cameron and co. have always emphasised the role to be played by the voluntary sector (after all, most people would agree that charities are generally a good thing). The state, they claim, often ‘crowds out’ other non-government organisations that are better suited to the task of providing social services. Moreover, the state often does this in an impersonal, alienating way; Francis Maude talks about the ‘We are the State, you are the citizen’ mentality of the bureaucrat that the Big Society is meant to end. The picture that emerges is one of closely-knit communities all chipping in while Leviathan keeps its distance. Lovely.

Too bad we now know that private firms, not voluntary groups, are in line for most of the contracts to run public services in place of the government. The Independent’s 20p counterpart I (or ‘the I’, whatever we’re meant to call it) reports that:

“Private firms Serco, Sodexo and Mitie have been chosen as preferred bidders to run the Community Payback scheme for offenders, with no voluntary groups on the shortlist…Only two voluntary bodies are among 35 groups to qualify to bid for welfare-to-work contracts worth £2bn.”

There’s a word for this: privatisation.

Far more worrying is the plan by the American firm LSSI to manage public libraries in several local authorities. Libraries are inherently unprofitable (the reason they’re public in the first place) and to make the difference it has been suggested that libraries could open coffee shops and introduce self-scanning technology, a prospect that minsters have said they are “relaxed” about. So, rather than having spaces held in common by a community, the Big Society intends to liberate us by providing garish, overpriced coffee shops with under-staffed book-lending appendages attached.

We really are dealing with people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. A public library to them is just a possible venue for another bloody Starbucks; social housing is a real estate opportunity gone to waste; ancient woodland is just so much potential lumber. Luckily the British public isn’t putting up with it (most identified Cameron’s vision as a cover for spending cuts in a recent poll.) Let’s hope the ‘Big Society’ will be for Cameron what ‘Back to Basics’ became for John Major – a Tory joke.

Like Cameron, the Tories came in in 1979 on a wave of rhetoric about cuts, deficit and spending. The top rate of tax was moved down (!) to 60%, and the bottom rate similarly adjusted down from 33 to 30% – which meant the decrease in government spending still ‘had to’ come from cuts to public services, rather than tax revenue.

In 1993, David Willets, now head of Universities & Science, and one-time policy advisor to Thatcher, said: “In the 1980s, social policy featured relatively little on the No 10 agenda. She was concerned with the economy, industrial relations, the unions and the nationalised industries – not with health or social security or education.” (Timmins 1995)

This is basically right. In 1979, David Howe’s budget removed the link between pension and earnings and froze child benefit. The end result however, was a new rules based system which actually benefited families with children. The remnants of these struggles are what we still face today: the universal child benefit. The other aspect, delinking pensions, was essentially continued by New Labour, along with  a neo-liberal outsourcing, but surely it won’t be too long before Cameron follows Sarkozy in mucking around with the pension system even further.

The main thrust of the Thatcher attacks weren’t benefits, however, but the decreasing of the health and education budget and raising revenue through privatising council property.

Houses were sold off, to the extent that now we have 2million people on social housing waiting lists, 850,000 of whom are at the top of those lists (and, of course, 600,000 empty homes which developers are waiting to renovate when/if capital starts moving again). The massive increase in class inequality aside, this is the greatest legacy of Thatcher’s government: a system of privatisation through which people can’t afford to have a decent home.

What Cameron and the Coalition goons are planning is building on these foundations, a structure which New Labour didn’t shake enough. The PFIs have created the perfect legal and business framework for the Thatcherites to continue their policies: selling off public services in order to raise revenue for the rich. We’ve seen where this is going: the White Paper on the NHS essentially sets out the dismantling of the institution as it was built in the 1950s, and the Browne Review makes sure that the drastic levels of cuts to education will lead not just to deprivation, but privatisation.

But there is a second tier to all this, one which Thatcher would only dreamt of having installed but 8 months into a Tory reign: across the board attacks on social security. Again, because New Labour failed to strengthen the unions, the Cameronites believe they can get away with attacks on the working class which just wouldn’t have been possible in 1979, given the militancy of the unions  and, I’m sure, a whole range of other factors (e.g. the living memory of WW2; strong communist parties bolstered by China and Russia) which made people far less complacent.

The poll tax was not a usual Thatcher policy – it was the exception that proved the rule. That’s why it’s the one everyone remembers, and why it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and why it provoked a riot: because an out and out attack on the working class like that was unthinkable.

But what’s being unveiled this week is the poll tax in every sector, and every part of the benefits system. Social security is the only thing that allows us to tolerate the rich. We’ve seen the sneaking attacks on it under New Labour, my favourite being the shift from Unemployment Benefit to Jobseekers’ Allowance – note the horrible, puritanical shift in language. But now even that isn’t being allowed, despite more people seeking jobs than any time in the past decade.

The only reason Cameron doesn’t need to sell off the housing is because Thatcher already did it. The decimation of the Health and Education sector have already been part-announced, though it’s very likely that the media-savvy ‘leaks’ have made the situation sound worse than the reality in order to soften the blow. Either way, it’s excellent that given the news, the unions are rumbling from their mountains – and membership is on the up.

But Wednesday will bring the cold realisation that Cameron is about to do what Thatcher could only dream of.

Image: wwarby/flickr

I have to confess that I can’t get that worked up about the scrapping of universal child benefit. I get the absurdity of a two-parent family where only one person works losing out while a similar family with nearly double the income where both parents work doesn’t. I also get the value of universal benefits for social solidarity (a point also made by Rupert Read and quite a few others – this seems to be the main lefty objection, while the right are going down the ‘spluttering apoplexy at the shocking victimisation of the middle class’ route). But I think it’s a weird thing for the left to latch onto.

Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t a good reform. It’s just…out of everything the Tories have done and will do, this is what we’re choosing to get all outraged about? Really? We’ve had a cut in housing benefit, which will force countless poor families to relocate and probably leave a lot of them homeless, a VAT hike at the same time as cuts in corporation tax, and a blatant attempt to kick as many people as possible off Disability Living Allowance. Even if families are all you care about, we’ve already had a freeze in child benefit for those who’ll still be eligible for it and the scrapping of the SureStart maternity grant, both of which are going to hit poor families pretty damn hard, but suddenly everyone’s up in arms because families with a household income of 45 grand or above are going to be a bit worse off if only one person in the family works. I realise that it’s totally disingenuous to pretend this is redistributive (if it’s ‘fair that those with broadest shoulders should bear a greater load’ an increase in the top rate of income tax would clearly be a hell of a lot fairer; coupled with the announcement that the married couples’ tax break is going ahead after all, this reform is effectively a poll tax on single-income families where the parents aren’t married or really poor) and that £45,000 before tax isn’t a huge amount for a whole family to live on, but come on. This is a long way from being the worst thing they’ve done. And given that the spending review’s probably going to push tuition fees up to ten grand and gut public sector pensions, there’s a lot worse to come too.

In a recent email to the rest of this blog’s editors, Jacob requested, in his usual forthright fashion, that we refrain from writing ‘pseudo-insightful piece[s] based around new years’ resolutions’, so I’m not going to do that. However, because it’s Boxing Day (at the time of writing), because I’m full of too much wine and unhealthy food, and most of all because I’m frankly a lazy fucker, I’m going to do the next worst thing: my predictions for the world of politics in 2010. If you think I’m wrong about any of the following, by all means say so. I freely admit most of this is sheer guesswork, with occasional instances of stating the bleeding obvious. (But if any of it turns out to be right I’m still going to crow about it for weeks).

In the months leading up to the election, Labour will start sounding a lot more leftwing in an effort to shore up their core vote. They’ll bring out a raft of populist policies aimed at boosting their share of the vote, but it won’t be enough, and the Tories will win the general election. And yes, I realise that isn’t exactly the boldest of forecasts, so let’s be a bit more specific: the Tories will get a majority of between 50 and 100, the Lib Dems will lose seats but not so catastrophically that they get rid of Clegg, and Labour will be badly hurt but not wiped out like the Conservatives were in 1997; Brown and the rest of the government are obviously pretty unpopular, but at the same time my hunch is that there isn’t enough love for Cameron and friends for them to get a landslide. Caroline Lucas won’t become the Greens’ first MP in Brighton Pavilion, though she’ll probably come close. Galloway will be unlucky too: Bethnal Green and Bow will revert to Labour once he leaves, and he’ll split the traditional Labour vote in Poplar and Limehouse just enough to let the Tories in.

In the election aftermath, Brown will resign (yes, I know, big surprise again), and he’ll give a resignation speech which sets an all-time record for mentions of the words ‘Britain’ and ‘British’, with ‘values’ and ‘duty’ following close behind. Now that they’re sure he’s on his way out, the mainstream media will be really nice about both the speech and the man himself. A mob of pundits will gather to wax lyrical in print and on air about all his good points that were so often overlooked and downplayed by…well, those same pundits, as it happens, but never mind. David Miliband, Jack Straw, Alan Johnson, Harriet Harman and one or both of Jon Cruddas and John McDonnell will stand for party leader. Ed Miliband will look like standing but will stand aside at the last minute and back his brother. Harriet Harman will be unable to come up with any substantial reason why anyone should vote for her other than her lack of a Y chromosome, and the rightwing press will once again paint this as evidence of her radical man-hating feminist nature, rather than simply evidence that she’s a technocratic New Labour drone whose sex is the only thing that distinguishes her from the majority of senior figures in her party, and who – unfortunately – long ago lost touch with anything remotely resembling radical feminism. David Miliband will win the leadership race, and be instantly immortalised as Harry Potter by every unimaginative editorial cartoonist in the land. Jack Straw will come in second despite having less charisma than the common cold (or Harriet Harman). Rising Labour star Chuka ‘definitely not the British Obama’ Umunna will win his seat in Streatham pretty comfortably, and probably get a shadow ministerial brief.

Once in power, the Tories will make lots of noise about eliminating waste in government and cutting public sector fatcats’ pay, then slash and burn everything they can get away with. Budgets for the NHS and schools will probably get off pretty lightly (too easy to mount photogenic anti-cuts campaigns that make the government look bad), but welfare, higher education and anything to do with rehabilitation in the penal system will get hit hard. Immigration policy won’t change much, but the Daily Mail’s hysteria about it will die down a bit. Spurious and unpleasant stories about benefit-cheating single mothers will increase in volume to make up for it, helped along the way by the Tories’ ‘pro-family’ policies (tax subsidies to convince unhappy married couples to stay together – the case for ‘family’ legitimately meaning anything other than Mum, Dad and a couple of apple-cheeked kids will be set back by decades). The recession will deepen and unemployment will rise, thanks to the Tories’ spending cuts, with all the consequences you’d expect – rising crime, increasing urban decay, and so on.

In the wider world, nothing much will continue to happen in the fight against climate change. The pool of deniers will get smaller and people – even Telegraph readers – will slowly pay them less and less attention, but no meaningful action will be taken by any government, as they’ll all be waiting for the others to do something, and the prospects for concerted multilateral action look pretty damn bleak after Copenhagen. There’ll probably be at least one big jump in oil prices for some reason, though it’s hard to guess exactly what. A storm that wrecks some big refineries? Industrial action by hauliers or oil rig workers? Terrorism? Take your pick. Whichever it is, once it happens any worries about climate change in the higher echelons of government will be sidelined as the rush to exploit new sources of fossil fuels (in the Canadian tar sands, in the Arctic and so on) will intensify. The environmental protests will be stepped up in response, but they probably won’t do enough. The old standbys of war, disease and famine will continue to kill millions before their time, and civilisation will continue to lurch towards collapse. Happy New Year.

Working class universalism is not enough. Labour does not deserve our unwavering loyalty

Power to the people!

It’s Friday evening. I should be out partying or down the pub. Instead I’m sitting in front of my computer, wondering what wondrous topic to opine upon for my column. I’ve scoured the news. David Cameron’s doing God and Boris, hopes for a climate change deal this year are looking scandelously dismal, British soldiers are getting shot in Afghanistan and American soldiers are getting shot at home. But what’s really caught my attention tonight has been the debate on Though Cowards Flinch which emerged from an article Guy Aitchison wrote for The Third Estate on Power2010. The discussion on democratic reform, whilst interesting in and of itself, is not really what’s piqued my interest in this thread, rather the disagreements on left wing organisation within and without the Labour Party.

I very rarely get involved in internal left-wing organisational disputes anymore. Partly because, despite their utility to a point (and it is a definite point), they bore the hell out of me. And this is speaking as someone who considers themselves switched on. For the wider public, sectarianism is to socialism as talking about your ex is to sex. It’s a turnoff. More crucially, however, these sorts of debates in the end only serve to distract us from our common goals, our common enemies, and the wider issues facing us in a very unjust world. While we’re bickering about the best way to rally the British workers to our cause, Iraqi civillians are getting blown up, Afghanistan’s tearing itself apart, kids are slaving away in sweat shops, Palestinians are having their homes knocked down, the ice caps and glaciers are melting and David Cameron’s doing God. And Boris.

Just this once, however, I’m going to throw in my two Euro cents. The impetus for this is a comment by Carl Packman in response to my damnation of the Labour Party and everything it stands for these days.

I see what you’re saying Salman, but take something that Mark Fischer said, when he gave a lecture on Marxism recently at Eton: ‘I assured the audience that the whole point of Marxists’ identification with the working class was its universalism.’ The very reason British Marxists should remain tied to the Labour party, and not join fringe yoke like SWP, or any of the other Trot splits, is because the party is historically linked to the Labour movement, and is henceforth the site of working class universalism. New Labour neo-liberalism is its inappropriate thorn, those careerists should not be vindicated by socialists jumping ship.

I tend to avoid discussing Marxism in 19th (or indeed 20th) century terms anymore. The last time I used the words bourgeoisie and proletariat were in an essay on The German Ideology. I believe many of Marx’s ideas remain fundamentally relevant to the modern world, but the modern world is dynamic and disjunctive and theory must remain equally adaptable in its adoption. Creationists, after all, are laughed at in modern Europe. Christians who have successfully incorporated Darwinism into their world view remain part of relevant discourse. The reason I personally feel this point warrants discussion however, is because it’s a debate I’ve had with Reuben many times. It’s a very old idea and one that has never failed to leave me feeling cold.

No political party reserves the right to go unchallenged. And no left-wing organisation deserves the right to be reified, to become a concrete fact in and of itself, to demand the unwavering loyalty of the workers regardless of its political positions. If that party is not the right vehicle for change, we should not be in it. I simply cannot accept that because the Labour party was once the locus for progressive working class political activity that it should always be and will always be, irrespective of its current leadership and its present policies. That is the political equivalent of Creationism. It relies on nothing more than blind faith. Not least the faith that New Labour – a neo-liberal, neo-conservative, repressive war machine that, by gutting the Labour movement and accepting the basic tenets of Thatcherism has done far more damage to the country and the world than the Iron Lady ever could -  is simply a transient thorn. It isn’t. It’s been here for the best part of two decades and will remain for the forseeable future. Labour may be heading for a spell in opposition, but the fight against Cameron as he does God and Boris won’t be led by the old class warriors. It will be led, most likely, by David Miliband. Or another obsequious, spineless, supine, Blairite clone with a pretty face and ugly politics.

And it is precisely this kind of faith-based thinking which will continue the New Labour project long after Brown’s government has faded to a dim, uncomfortable and embarrassing memory.  New Labour is not a transient thorn. Its intelligent, educated and very bourgeois (look what you’ve made me do!) architects made a calculated, and very correct, decision that they can afford a sharp swing to the middle ground because whatever they do, their core support of left-wing voters will back them come what may. As long as they believe they can get away with that, New Labour will remain entrenched and the British working class will find nothing more than a few empty platitudes.

The workers of Venezuela once owed their loyalty to the loosely social democratic Acción Democrática party. Indeed their largest trade union remains linked it it. But AD was not the right vehicle for a country that desperately needed change. That’s why Chavez rose to fill a gap in political representation, without any reliance on historical links or organisational ties, because he is the right vehicle and the right voice at the right time. That time is now. Parties cannot just be viewed in terms of their history. A week’s a long time in politics and a decade’s even longer. We have to look at their policies here and now and make informed decisions about the change they are likely to bring. Otherwise we’re betraying our own principles, all in the name of some ideological committment to a homogenous, united, organised, class-conscious working class of the last century that thanks to Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown, no longer exists.

In an exclusive interview with The Third Estate, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg sets out his vision for change

Nick Clegg

It can’t be easy, being the leader of Britain’s third major political party. Caught between a disintegrating New Labour and a resurgent Conservative Party waiting for its coronation, convincing the British public that what you have to say can make a difference to their lives is an uphill struggle from the start. Nick Clegg, however, is a man of firsts. Elected to the European Parliament in 1999, he became the first ever Liberal Democrat parliamentarian in the East Midlands, and the first Liberal since 1931. Ten years later, MP for Sheffield Hallam and Lib Dem leader, Clegg has his eyes on Gordon Brown’s job. “Let me tell you why I want to be prime minister. It’s because I want to change our country for good,” he said at last month’s party conference as he attempted to position the Liberal Democrats to oust Labour as the dominant force in progressive politics for the first time in almost a century. On the back of the conference, as Parliament returns from recess and we prepare to enter a general election year, I quizzed Clegg on some of the big questions facing his party and whether or not his policies in the current economic climate can truly be considered progressive.

Grabbing headlines when you’re a bronze medallist often means you have to shout louder than the rest. And it was Nick Clegg’s call for “savage cuts” last month which became the buzzword for the conference season. I ask him how it is possible to reconcile these kinds of cuts in public spending with the assertion that the Lib Dems are poised to replace Labour as the true progressive force in British politics. Surely retrenchment has always been the antithesis of social justice? “Politics is about priorities,” he says. “Simply spending money doesn’t make you progressive; it’s about what you spend it on. This government has radically enlarged the amount of money spent by the state, but the gap between rich and poor has grown. There’s nothing very progressive about a country in which a child born in the poorest area of Sheffield will die a full fourteen years earlier than one born down the road in the wealthiest part. So it is right to look at the money government spends and work out if we can use more of it to help those who need more support.”

One area in which the Lib Dems certainly have picked up the ball dropped a long time ago by Labour is in their opposition to nuclear weapons. In his youth, Tony Blair was an active member of CND. In his middle age, he presided over the multi-billion pound decision to renew Britain’s nuclear weapons programme. “What’s progressive about renewing Trident – spending billions on a system that doesn’t protect the country from the modern threats we face?” Clegg argues. “We could put that money into helping people on the lowest incomes.”

But are the Liberal Democrats really willing to commit the money necessary to help people on the lowest incomes? One of the party’s most popular policies amongst students of all backgrounds has been its opposition to tuition fees. “I believe tuition fees are wrong, I believe they need to be abolished,” Nick Clegg told the party conference, shortly before saying that they had to be realistic about whether doing so would be affordable given the country’s current debt and fuelling speculation that the Lib Dems were planning to axe one of their core progressive policies. Given that improved access to education is vital for long-term economic growth, I ask Clegg, should we really be backing away from doing the right thing just because it’s easier now?

“None of these choices are easy, at any time,” he says. “But we’ve got to be straight with people about what can be afforded right now. I’ve set out a radical programme that would make our society fairer, and give every child – no matter their background – the best chances in life. We know that at the moment a poor, bright child will be overtaken by a better off, less intelligent child by the time they’re seven years old. So we have to get in there right at the beginning, with smaller class sizes for 5-7 year olds, and extra support for children from the poorest backgrounds. We would give schools more money for taking on children from poorer families and that big injection of cash would make sure everyone had the best start in life. Then more children from disadvantaged backgrounds would have the opportunity to go to university later on. And yes, I want to get rid of the tuition fees system too – it’s just a question of when.”

Meritocracy is not exactly Marxism, but it is an ideal to which most left-of-centre MPs believe we should aspire. Are the Lib Dems doing enough, however, to distinguish themselves from the other main parties? “I think we have distinguished ourselves very substantially by setting out the radical, progressive programme for change that I’ve been talking about,” Clegg says. I ask him why, then, the party is failing to capitalise on the deep dissatisfaction with the government. Labour suffered its worst defeat in almost a century at the recent European elections. But despite the wars, privatisations and crises, and despite the Lib Dems emerging from the expenses scandal as the cleanest party, why was it that they saw their share of the vote fall by 1.2 percent?

“Of course it would have been great to win more votes in the European Elections,” Clegg says. “But just look at the local elections which took place on the same day. We pushed Labour into a devastating third place, and we now control more big cities outside London than either of the other parties: Bristol, Sheffield, Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, Cambridge – they’re all Liberal Democrat cities, and I could name more. And in places like Bedford, where voters chose a new mayor just the other day, people are realising that Cameron isn’t offering real change at all. In an election where Labour came fifth, the Tories didn’t win – we beat them. In all these parts of the country we’re showing the way we treat power, dispersing it to the people, using it to cut crime, and regenerate areas that have wanted for attention for so long. People see the difference Liberal Democrats make in these places and they vote for us time and again.”

Smart, young, stylish, Oxbridge educated, leader of an opposition party, Clegg is keen to distinguish himself from Cameron as the voice of change in British politics. It was David Cameron who claimed that there was “barely a cigarette paper” between their two parties when he called for “one national movement that can bring real change” – broaching the idea of a Lib-Con coalition should his party fail to win a majority next year. Clegg was having none of it, however, describing the Conservative leader as a “con man” and attacking his hypocrisy on civil liberties. But how would a Liberal Democrat government under Nick Clegg reverse the alarming erosion of civil liberties and human rights that has taken place under New Labour?

“We’ve published a Freedom Bill, which shows how we’d repeal thirty years of Labour and Conservative authoritarian legislation,” Clegg says. “That Bill would restore the right to silence, which the Tories took away; it would bring back jury trials, which Labour have tried so hard and so often to curtail, and it would stop government storing DNA from people who’ve not been convicted of any crime. On day one, we’d scrap identity cards – along with the Government’s massive National Identity Register. It’s an enormous, expensive incursion on our civil liberties; a total inversion of the relationship between citizen and state, where we have to account for ourselves to the government, not the other way round.” Clegg clearly doesn’t think that a cigarette paper is all that separates his policies from Cameron’s. “The Conservatives’ commitment to this kind of reform is just paper thin. I don’t think anyone should take them seriously on the rights of the citizen while they retain their commitment to abolish the Human Rights Act.”

"The weekly pictures of soldiers being returned home to grieving families should give everyone pause for thought about the merit and the purpose of this conflict."

But are Lib Dem commitments on human rights and civil liberties sufficient to see them running against the pack of British politics? I remember marching against the war in Afghanistan in November 2001. Back then, only a handful of MPs opposed the invasion, and only 12% of the country was against it. Eight years later, with Afghanistan in a worse state than ever and British casualties on the rise, opposition to the ongoing conflict is not such a lonely position when it comes to voters, even though a consensus remains amongst Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems on the need for a continued British presence in the country. The Lib Dems were widely praised for being the only major party to oppose the war in Iraq, but with the presence of foreign troops arguably exacerbating the instability of a country that has never in its history been successfully occupied, I ask Clegg if now is the time to take a principled stance against the war in Afghanistan too.

“We have taken and are taking a principled and practical approach to Afghanistan,” Clegg says. “The weekly pictures of soldiers being returned home to grieving families should give everyone pause for thought about the merit and the purpose of this conflict. But I want our troops to return when the time is right, with their heads held high, knowing they’ve made a real, long-term difference both to Afghanistan, and to Britain’s security.” Clegg’s approach, however, is not simply a military one. “The Government has a responsibility to our troops, now, to advance a political surge alongside the military surge; the Karzai Government clearly lacks the support of the Afghan people, and it is that among other things which is exacerbating instability. I’ve been calling on the Prime Minister for some time now to press for a Government of National Unity in Afghanistan, so that we can start to divert this conflict off the road of failure. Without that kind of reconciliation between the different interest groups in Afghanistan, we cannot hope to succeed.”

As a long-time opponent of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s a position I can’t subscribe to, but Clegg’s appraisal of the situation is refreshingly honest for a politician sitting on one of Parliament’s front benches. And it is on the question of honesty in politics that I turn to finally, raising, in the spirit of the organisation itself, a question suggested to me by Guy Aitchison of the Power2010 campaign. At the height of the expenses crisis, Nick Clegg responded to David Cameron and Gordon Brown’s attempts to position themselves as democratic reformers by pointing out that the Lib Dems alone had consistently called for reform of a “rotten” Westminster system. Power2010 has received nearly 2000 submissions from members of the public beyond Westminster who also want democratic reform. But what is Clegg doing to mobilise people’s anger with the way we are governed beyond engaging in the very routines of Westminster village politics that puts them off in the first place?

“Well, it would be odd if we didn’t use the platform that Westminster gives Liberal Democrat MPs to make it clear where we stand on political reform,” Clegg says. “We’ve always favoured a much more open, transparent and responsive system of government. And whether it’s freedom of information or the way in which MPs get elected, we’ve always led the way in calling for change. The others just lag behind, and – as we’ve seen after 12 years with Labour – they see constitutional change as a sort of refuge from other political crises, running to talk about it when they’re in trouble and drifting back into their establishment ways the second they think they’re out of the woods.”

As a party that has always been held back by the first-past-the-post electoral system, it is, perhaps, natural that the Lib Dems alone should remain consistent to their message on democratic reform. “For us, changing the way politics is done is a central part of what we’re here to do,” Clegg says. “But you’re right: speaking up in Westminster isn’t enough. That’s one of the reasons I meet people every week in town and village halls around the country. People can come along and ask me, to my face, anything and everything they like; believe me, they do too! One of the great things about Power2010 is that it’s asking for your ideas, from people well beyond the bubble at Westminster. I’m really looking forward to reading what people come up with after November 30th. Politicians don’t know it all, and we have to ask people directly if we’re to know what they want.”

Wisest is he who knows he does not know, goes the old Socratic belief. But philosophers are not kings. Nick Clegg is the third most likely person to be Prime Minister next year in a country that is still a two-party state. Until we see the kind of far-reaching democratic reform that he touches upon, that will not change. And change is what it’s all about. All politicians are either gamekeepers or gardeners and Nick Clegg clearly wants to be seen as the latter. Whether he has done enough to convince a public hungry for politicians to be the change they want to see in the world, only time and an election will tell.