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Labour's Crisis
John Cruddas, The New Statesman
The Labour Party has faced two periods of real crisis since 1900 and now stands on the verge of a third. The first followed the crash of 1929, when the second Labour administration collapsed and Ramsay MacDonald formed the National Government. The second came with the party's defeat in 1979, the ascendancy of neoliberalism, or Thatcherism, and Labour's possible eclipse by a new third party in the early 1980s. If the decline in Labour's fortunes since 1997 continues, a third crisis will occur after next year's election. It took nearly 15 years for Labour to return to power after the first two crises and the resulting election defeats of 1931 and 1983. The stakes could not be higher.

We have lost many millions of voters since 1997. We have lost hundreds of thousands of members. We have become reviled by younger generations that view us as the party of the Establishment, war and insecurity. Our orthodoxy has defeated our radicalism. We speak a desiccated language of targets; our story, our essential ethic, has been lost on the altar of the focus group. We have retreated into what is essentially a Hobbesian utilitarianism, which considers self-interest as the only guiding principle. Alan Milburn recently described our goal as being to equip people to "earn and to own"; aspiration is reduced to a notion of acquisition. Materialism is all we have; we have lost the bright hope of building a different society.

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson once said that "hope is the basic ingredient of all vitality". At such moments of crisis and uncertainty, Labour often turns to its founding figure, Keir Hardie, for hope. But he has become a myth rather than a historical figure. We tend to look to him for reassurance, rather than to ask awkward questions. Hardie inspired total devotion. On his death, he was described as the "Member for Humanity"; Sylvia Pankhurst (a friend and onetime lover) simply saw him as the "greatest human being of our time". He was worshipped among the grass roots. Some considered him, literally, to be a prophet...
(3 September 2009)

France's Sarkozy pushes ahead with unpopular carbon tax
Agence france-presse via Grist
French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday unveiled a new carbon tax to help combat global warming, calling it a “fiscal revolution” and overriding strong public opposition to the plan.

The new levy on oil, gas, and coal consumption by households and businesses will come into effect next year, making France the biggest economy yet to impose a straight-up carbon tax.

“It is time to create green taxation,” Sarkozy said in an address in Culoz, a town near the French border with Switzerland. “This is a major fiscal shift, an important innovation,” he said. “It is the first step of a fiscal revolution that will be developed.”

Sarkozy set the new carbon tax at 17 euros ($25) per tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) and said it would be gradually increased to penalize only those who refuse to abandon their wasteful ways.

The president insisted the new tax was not a ploy to fill state coffers hit by a gaping deficit, and the additional revenues will be put back into taxpayers’ pockets through other tax cuts and “green checks.”
(11 September 2009)

The Great Cop-Out
George Monbiot, monbiot.com
So there will be no reckoning. There will be no firm restraint, no punishment, no measure sufficient to prevent a repetition of the crash. The only people who will not be harmed by the banking crisis are the bankers who caused it.

At the G20 meeting in London on Saturday finance ministers and central bankers put their great heads together and decided to do next to nothing. Their proposals to restrain the excesses of the banking industry were meek, flimsy, lily-livered(1). Unless there is some table-turning at the Pittsburgh summit this month, there will be no cap on pay and bonuses, no pruning of banks deemed too big to fail, no separation of retail and investment banking, no measure to restrict the speed or scale of the financial markets. Their dam is built of paper and it’s already beginning to leak.

There was collective cowardice here, but the main impediment to effective restraint can be summarised thus: Gordon Brown. Before the meeting Brown told the Financial Times that the question of pay and bonuses could not be resolved at home, but “is a legitimate debate for the G20 and the world community to have.”(2) He then set out to kill that debate. Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel had proposed an absolute cap on bonuses and stiff sanctions for companies that break it. Brown refused. He held out for three days until Sarkozy and Merkel dropped their firm proposals, in favour of a commitment to “explore ways” of limiting bonuses(3). The bankers must be quaking in their Gucci boots...
(8 September 2009)