"He was a member of the BNP but he never said anything racist"

Today marks something of an epiphany. I had, sort of, assumed that the Labour Party would eventually get round to sorting itself out on the matter of antisemitism. After all, being a Jew is recognised as an ethnic designation - in the words of our equalities laws, a 'protected charcteristic'. This means that language attacking Jewish people on the basis of their Jewish identity is a 'hate crime'.

The revelation that the leader of the Labour Party was a member of a "secret" forum on Facebook that seems to have specialised in antisemitism was pretty shocking. But it is only half as shocking as the reaction of Labour members and supporters to this revelation. With a few notable exceptions, Labour MPs, councillors and activists responded to the existence of this forum and Mr Corbyn's involvement with what amounts to a shrug. If these folk said anything it amounted to "nobody cares" - probably because there are only 300,000 or so Jews in Britain making racism towards them pretty marginal in political terms.

When poked or pushed the typical reaction from Labour members has been to make excuses for Mr Corbyn - like this:

...being a member of a group where obnoxious views are expressed does not mean that you share them. Unless there is clear evidence, such as a racist post or a like of a racist post by an individual it is merely circumstantial, and at worst cause for concern.

So Mr Corbyn is invited to join a group full of racists, chooses to join the group (we'll give him the benefit of the doubt on whether he checked out the group before joining) and remains a member for at least two years. During that period we're expected to believe that Mr Corbyn didn't witness a single antisemitic trope, meme or statement even though he appears to have helped (or so the people involved said) organise a meeting of some sort - here's a letter to Mr Corbyn from Joan Ryan, Labour MP for Enfield North:



It may be - I haven't seen - that Mr Corbyn denies helping organise this meeting or deflects it by passing off the organisational blame onto his office but, for me at least, this shows that he was actively engaged with the people running the group who were (judging from their posts) deeply antisemitic. It's not just a case of being a member and occasionally posting.

Overwhelmingly the membership of the Labour Party is not antisemitic but, when the leader and people around the leader are closely associated with antisemites, you have to ask whether the sort of "Jeremy's not antisemitic he was just on a forum full of antisemites" argument gets thinner and thinner. We've not quite got there yet but it's getting close to the position where the defence is effectively: "he was a member of the BNP but he never said anything racist". And people who remain in the Labour Party without, at the very least, questioning whether the Party has a problem are pretty complicit in perpetuating the too widely held view that being racist to Jews isn't as bad as other forms of racism.

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Nothing new about the Russians trying to influence our politics

Like this:

Nor is Russian interference in American politics new, or for that matter vice versa. The Comintern funded “The Daily Worker” in the 1920s, and various Soviet and communist sources have funded agitation around the world for many decades. Those nefarious activities used a variety of cooperating Western suppliers, including delivery trucks, publishers, paper makers and much more, but again we don’t regard those businesses as sinister.

Or, closer to home (and to the Labour Party) there's this:

He confirmed in April that Jack Jones was a Soviet agent. ‘I was his last case officer,’ wrote Gordievsky (Daily Telegraph, 28 April), ‘meeting him for the final time in 1984 at Fulham [six years after Jones’s retirement from the T&G], together with his wife, who had been a Comintern agent since the mid-1930s. I handed out to him a small amount of cash. From 1981, I had had the pleasure of reading volumes of his files, which were kept in the British department of the KGB until 1986, when they were passed on to the archive.’

Or this:

He and the former editor of the left-wing newspaper Tribune Dick Clements, were in regular contact with the East German secret police, the Stasi, according to the security service's files.

The allegations come only 24 hours after the BBC unmasked Hull University lecturer Robin Pearson as a former Stasi agent.

Earlier in the week, it was revealed that Melita Norwood, an 87-year-old great-grandmother, and former Scotland Yard detective John Symonds had also betrayed Britain during the Cold War.

The latest revelations suggest the KGB and the Stasi saw Mr Allen and Mr Clements as "agents of influence", who could provide useful information and help promote pro-Soviet policies.

So bunging out loads of bots and inviting Nigel Farage for tea is in a long and dishonourable tradition. One that sought for decades to subvert Britain's left to the Soviet cause - a cause with so much blood on its hands it stained the flag red.

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Is Labour a zombie brand?

You all remember Smash don't you? Without doubt one of the 1970s mega-brands. The agency getting this account with its huge ad budget and massive sales would throw one hell of a big party.

What do you mean you've never heard of it? It's still there in the shops. You can buy it. Loads of people still do buy it - preferring to add hot water to powdered potato rather than peal, cook and mash actual potatoes. Those people do this out of ingrained habit. Smash isn't advertised, there's no big push to merchandise - it is, in essence, a zombie brand sustained only by this unthinking consistency from its customers.

There are plenty of other brands that still exist only from this sort of inertia, from their being part of our psychological geography - Yellow Pages, Spam, Kraft Cheese Slices, R White's Lemonade, Nimble. Pretty sure you will be able to add to this list - not just from nostalgia but from the fact that these zombies still fill shelves in supermarkets and gather dust in the corners of our cupboards.

Here's one comment on these zombies:

Brands are playing a ‘zero sum’ game: most of them compete in flat-lining categories, with private label sales expected to soon exceed branded product sales in Europe and other maturing markets like the US and Canada (Planet Retail). Brands are under increasing time pressure: the expiration date of brand creativity is getting shorter, with ideas being copied better and more rapidly. Brands can no longer rely on the classic Pareto rule: in any given category, 20% of customers currently represent maximally 50% of revenues. And brands struggle to connect with younger, more empowered consumer generations: what marketers consider to be important for the marketing-savvy millennials is not always thought of as such by the latter.

The world has changed, consumers have changed the way they make decisions and the media they use to inform them about what to buy. Brands aren't dead - just look at tech brands like Apple or at those with an ubiquity that transcends traditional media like McDonalds or Coca Cola. But that observer is right - most brands operate in stagnant markets and rely in the inertia of consumer habit, on the heuristics of brand equity, to sustain themselves. Unless they're actively shut down these brands slip lower and lower in people's perceptions, those brand short cuts aren't renewed - the brands die but still wander the land fooling a few that they are alive.

All this brings me to the Labour Party. Right now it seems pretty alive as it engages in another leadership tussle - as one member put it to me; "we move smoothly from one leadership crisis to the next". But the Party's position as a political organisation isn't sustained by the febrile positivity of the Corbyinista membership but rather by the inertial attachment to the Labour brand. That old joke about putting a red rosette on a donkey seems too true - people are voting Labour from habit. There is no other reason to do so. It's because they've always voted that way, their Mum voted that way and everyone round here votes Labour.

These voters have little in common with the people they're electing - the sons and daughters of former pottery workers in Stoke are electing Tristan Hunt, public school educated son of a public school educated life peer, without asking whether he really understands their lives or gets their concerns other than in a "these people are struggling, we should care for them" sort of way. And old-fashioned, conservative working class communities are electing middle class 'third sector' workers who are their polar opposite in values and outlook.

Yet the real truth about the struggle within the Labour Party is that it's a battle over this brand - over the loyalty of those voters. It's not a fight over the 'soul of the Labour Party' or any such nonsense, it's rather about two incompatible political positions - anti-market socialism and pro-market social democracy - having a fight to the death over the right to brandish that Labour rose. It doesn't occur to either camp to think whether the policies they propose are actually these brand-loyal Labour voters actually want. Do these mostly working class voters really think the gender balance in boardrooms or among BBC presenters is all that important? Or for that matter the plight of Palestinians, fair trade or solidarity with Latin American socialist dictatorships. Yet these are the issues the two competing halves of Labour seem most concerned about.

And none of this matters when the roof leaks, you've no overtime again this week, there's another red letter and your son can't get a job because he has a record for selling weed. Yet people like this - if they can be bothered at all - loyally troop to endorse the Labour brand. After all the alternative is the Tories - the party of the boss, the man in the suit and the patronising sorts with posh accents who drive big saloon cars and drink gin at the golf club.

Labour is a zombie brand. Any continued appearance of life is breathed into the corpse by habitual voting, the tribal inertia of brand loyalty. But this matters, those millions of voters who will never vote anything other than Labour really are why people are tearing the party to shreds over its brand. Whoever owns the brand - regardless of the policies they put forward - can rely on those loyal voters. If the Party splits - and it still might - the winner is the one with the brand.

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A funny old week....anti-semitism, suspension and the problem with social media

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Was always going to be quiet on the blogging front - there being a local election and all that jazz. But it has turned out to be a most peculiar week. It started with this:

A Labour MP has argued Israel should be “relocated” to America and praised the “transportation costs” of deporting Israeli Jews out of the Middle East. Naz Shah, who defeated George Galloway in Bradford West, shared a highly inflammatory graphic arguing in favour of the chilling “transportation” policy two years ago, adding the words “problem solved”.

Three days later it resulted in this:

“Jeremy Corbyn and Naz Shah have mutually agreed that she is administratively suspended from the Labour Party by the General Secretary. Pending investigation, she is unable to take part in any party activity and the whip is removed.”

As I said, a strange old week. Not only is it a lesson (again) about social media but it reminds us that hatred is easy to get sucked into - from putting 'hates Tories' on your Twitter profile to posting anti-Semitic tropes. A sense of injustice about Palestine is entirely understandable as is criticising the Israeli government but the next step, depersonalising Jews is a problem. I suspect Naz Shah knows this and knows what she posted was wrong - not because some people might be offended by those posts but because anti-Semitism itself is wrong.

There may yet be more to come on this story, I don't know who trawled through Naz Shah's social media, but whatever the personal cost I hope that the result is that my fellow politicians challenge anti-Semitism more strongly wherever it rears its ugly head.

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Drink, smoke, vape, eat fast food? You're not welcome in the Labour Party

Mr R. McDonald - Labour Membership refused

I don't know about you, dearest reader, but I'm not at all surprised to read that the Labour Party has turned down the request from McDonalds to open a 'pop-up' restaurant at the Party's annual conference. I am slightly surprised that the Party hasn't issued a lengthy, slogan-ridden justification for the refusal but this leaves us open to speculate as to the reasons.

Top of the list of reasons will be some sort of ideological objection to Ron and his burgers. After all the modern Labour Party does ideology, near everything is washed through the sieve of adopted political constraints. And, as a massive multinational fast food retailer, McDonalds is going to be pretty far removed from adherence to the Party's virtuous views on employment rights, public health, taxation, advertising and, of course, the children.

Right now, however, Labour is hiding behind it being the sort of 'commercial' decision they don't discuss in public. Meaning that we can tell the truth about the party - it's run by a bunch of right-on, snobby hippies who are just a bit uncomfortable with the sort of eating habits that those ordinary voters get up to. Especially the fat ones.

As we discovered from some 'research' by lefty politics professors, the left in Britain is no longer a party of the people who drag themselves bleary-eyed from bed in the morning to go and work in a regular sort of job - whether answering the phone in a call centre, making interminable cups of coffee for slightly rude people or flipping burgers for other ordinary people to eat. The sort of people who are active in the Labour Party simply don't do these sorts of jobs, they work doing public health campaigns or equalities monitoring in the public sector and third sector. Labour's enthusiasts are filled with righteous passion for banning fatty, sugar-filled and meat-ridden food (for the sake of the children, of course) and find the persistent preference of the regular worker for fast food, cigarettes and cheap lager slightly distasteful.

Here are those professors on who the left are today:

"People like us academics and the London elite just shrug off concerns about immigration, they shrug off concerns about the decline of Britain as a military power.

"This is where I think some of animosity is coming from and the electorate is saying we count too."

These are the people who Labour leaders will turn to ahead of tuning their ears to the worries of people with regular sorts of job in the private sector. For sure there's shouting about 'zero-hours contracts' that most working folk aren't on. There's stuff about trade union recognition that was relevant in 1880 but isn't today. And there's a load of cant about 'local economic strategies' that just means fewer of the shops those working people want and more for the well-paid, caring, gentrifying Labour supporter. Those Labour fans think they're sticking it to the man by going on protest marches, signing petitions and sending affirmatory messages to each other about Evil Tories or their own self-righteousness.

Truth be told, most people - let's call them the working class - don't have the time or money to spend on marching through London waving badly written banners about saving the NHS or banning tax havens. And even if they did have the time and money, I'm pretty sure they'd rather spend it taking the children into town for a film and a meal out (perhaps at a McDonalds) or, for those who've managed to offload the kids, a couple of pints and a burger somewhere disapproved of by the sort of judgemental snobs who sit on Labour's NEC.

Although there's a tenuous connection between today's Labour Party and the old unionised working class, the Party hasn't made the slightest effort to connect with the new working class - the one's who're working (and eating) in McDonalds, blowing vapour and buying the biggest, cheapest pizza in the supermarket. The Conservative Party at least has an excuse (not a good one but, nevertheless, an excuse) as it's always had a tendency to see the working classes as, well, a bit common. What's happened is that the same slightly disdainful attitude is now a dominant ideology in the Labour Party - the habits of these people need to be changed for their own good (and, one guesses, so they can be allowed into the sort of 'polite society' inhabited by the typical Labour activist).

People who drink beer (the cheap session beer they sell in working mens' clubs and discount supermarkets), smoke, vape and enjoy fatty burgers or sugary sweets, these are the people who aren't welcome in today's Labour Party. Indeed, it's hard to think of anywhere that these people - millions of them - can find a political place that doesn't treat them like some sort of pariah. It's a sad state of affairs when the persistent lobbying of a few - a tiny few - fanatics has resulted in the lifestyle choices of millions being condemned as unhealthy, unsightly and unfavoured.

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Some more good stuff for your reading lists

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Bradford West Labour Party - more fun for the politics watcher

"We would respectfully ask, out of courtesy, for a full explanation of the NECs decision to impose candidates in our constituency along with an explanation of the specific allegations without having to read in the press first.

"We are deeply concerned that the voice of our membership is being silenced and to this end we would ask the decision to impose candidates in Bradford West is overturned.

"We would welcome an urgent meeting with representatives of the NEC to further explain our concerns on behalf of our constituents."

Simple-minded lefties

Writing in the journal Political Psychology, a team of researchers led by the University of Montana psychologist Lucian Gideon Conway III reports the results of four studies that together call "into question the typical interpretation that conservatives are less complex than liberals." It turns out that liberals and conservatives are both simple-minded, depending on the topic under discussion.

Are the Koch brothers really right-wing?

How, then, are the Kochs members of the radical Right? They are pro-gay marriage. They favor liberal immigration policies. They are passionate non-interventionists when it comes to foreign policy. They are against the drug war and are spending a bundle on dismantling so-called “mass-incarceration” policies. They’ve never seized a national park at gunpoint.

Is rhino farming the answer to poaching?

The push to lift the ban on selling rhino horn came from game breeders, John Hume and Johan Kruger, who claim that legalising the trade within the country will reduce rhino deaths - rhino horn is similar to our fingernails, and can actually be harvested without harming the animal. Hume also argued that if the ban on rhino trade continued, he'd no longer be able to afford to keep his 1,200 farmed rhinos.

Don Boudreaux respectfully takes Stephen Hawkings down several pegs

"The above, Prof. Hawking, is, as you know, what people who know nothing of physics often sound like when they rely upon popular myths and personal intuition to make sense of physical reality. And it’s pretty much what you, a brilliant physicist who knows nothing of economics, sound like when you rely upon popular myths and personal intuition to make sense of economic reality."

The dark side of the liberal, progressive left

"Scopes was charged for teaching from a textbook called A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems, published in 1914. The book taught Darwin’s doctrine as fact, but it didn’t leave his conclusions there. The author, George William Hunter, not only asserted the biological difference of races, he insisted on the vital importance of what he called “the science of being well born”—eugenics. Like most progressives of the time, Hunter believed in “the improvement of man” via scientific methods. That meant promoting personal hygiene, proper diet, and reproductive control. A Civic Biology also has suggestions for what to do with “bad-gened” people, in a section called “The Remedy.” “If such people were lower animals,” the books says, “we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity would not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe.”

Tyler Cowen guessing at when we'll have driverless cars

Singapore will have driverless or near driverless neighborhoods in less than five years. But it will look more like mass transit than many aficionados are expecting.

...neoliberal orgasms - why capitalists have the best sex (or something)

Positioned as the ‘peak’ of sexual experience, orgasm is packed with sociocultural meaning. Exploring the construction of orgasm in Cosmopolitan magazine in the context of the shift towards a postfeminist sexuality and the neoliberal shift towards the rational management of sex as work, this article argues that magazines offer a ‘pedagogy of the body'...

Read responsibly.

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In which Labour becomes the NHS Action Party

In the run up to last year's general election a bunch of self-important left-wing doctors set up a thing called the National Health Action Party:

We believe a political party is needed to defend the NHS and its values. The NHS is more than just a structure for the delivery of healthcare. It is also a social institution that reflects national solidarity, expresses the values of equity and universalism, and institutionalises the duty of government to care for all in society. The NHS marks out a space in society where the dictates of commerce and the market should be held in check. We are fighting now to ensure that it is patients not profits that are the driving force behind our NHS. We hope you will join us.

In truth, this party was simply a vehicle for activists within the NHS to defend the interests of people who work - and profit from - the NHS. They targeted a few high profile politicians (the prime minister, the health secretary and so forth) and garnered the grand total of 20,000 votes with over 7,000 of those going to the former MP for Wyre Forest (in that constituency). The party's top cheerleader, Clive Peedell got 600 or so votes in Witney.

The National Health Action Party is still out there banging the rocks together but its relevence - in so far as it ever had any - had paled. Indeed it seems at times that with Labour now only having a poll lead on the NHS, that party has shoved aside the 'NHS Producer Interest Party' as I prefer to call it. Others have noticed too:

To put it brutally, we often give the impression that we'd prefer it if everyone could just work in the public sector, and ideally for the NHS. When we talk about self-employed people it's often as if we believe they must have been forced into it. We pay scant attention to arguments around competitiveness, especially global competition, and even where the evidence of competition working well is all around us (have you seen how cheap broadband is these days?) we are reluctant to acknowledge it. For some “competition' itself is a dirty word.

This is where Labour has got to and it has everything to do with who owns and runs the Labour Party. We look at Jeremy Corbyn, laugh at his political antics, and assume that a different, moderate leader would make all the difference. We point at a bunch of impressive younger MPs saying that they might be leader - Jess Phillips, Stella Creasy, Michael Dugher, Mary Creagh - but fail to ask where the policy platform will come from, whether those putative leaders will recognise that basing your politics on producer interests, albeit public sector producer interests, repeats the mistakes that led to 1979 and the destruction of 1983?

Labour's problem isn't a lack of intelligent, capable centre-left MPs but rather that the Party's policy platform is controlled by public sector producer interests. Opposition to more open international trade in services, for example, derives not from any valid economic argument but from the fear that the public sector managers who control the Labour Party will have to justify their effectiveness in a competitive environment. At the same time Labour has no idea - not the slightest inkling - how the private sector operates, what it's actually like to work in this sector and why most workers reject the stifling dullness of public sector work in favour of riskier but, in the end, better rewarded private sector work.

Until the advent of Tony Blair's New Labour, Britain's mainstream left-wing party had always been the vehicle for producer interests primarily through the trade union movement (which, of course, founded the Labour Party). Hence state monopoly, protectionism, price intervention and a host of anti-competition regulations badged as "workers rights". Today, with the trade unions all but extinct in the private sector, the Party's battle is wholly about defending the interests of public sector workers. The idea that, through new technology, innovation and efficiency, we can deliver the same public service outcomes is as much anathema to today's Labour as they were to the old Luddite union-led party - the one that crippled our manufacturing base and destroyed those communities they now mythologise.

What New Labour did - and what the Party has now rejected - was to recognise that the British public are, first and foremost, consumers in a consumer society and that their preference is for access to those consumer goodies the hair-shirted hard left sees as the baubles of late capitalist decadence. By rejecting this commitment to making the consumer society fairer, Labour has turned its backs on the idea that economic growth can - and usually does - mean a better world for everyone. Especially where there is a party not tied to crony capitalists and rent-seekers able to ensure the milk and honey of that richer land flows to all who live there.

Today's Labour Party - underneath the shouty rhetoric about 'austerity', 'equality' and 'fairness' - is a party that rejects competition, choice, innovation and efficiency. A Party that places the interests of those who work in the public sector - not just the low paid cleaners, road sweepers and caterers but well-paid administrative staff, 'fat cat' NHS bosses and, of course, the miners of the modern Labour Party, doctors. The Party - just like Clive Peedell's National Health Action Party - isn't interested in challenging the way the NHS works but rather in coating the whole thing in the aspic of changelessness, in the deranged assumption that Bevan's back-of-an-envelope fix can't be improved upon. The Labour Party has become the NHS Action Party.

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Because the left like to target "groups" for punishment doesn't mean the rest of us do...

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The problem with the left is that they think other people will behave as unpleasantly as they do. This leads to the belief that negative consequences of policies are always 'deliberate'. Here's a tweet from Clare Gerada, top GP, leftie and self-professed feminist:

#demoswomen Women hit much harder than men by recession. Kate Green "this is deliberate". Women double whammy - tax credits & benefits 

Now I don't know who Kate Green is but I'm assuming that she's another lefty and that Clare Gerada approves of her views. And this is pretty scary from someone who is bright enough to be a proper doctor. I'm guessing that, like all the other lefties, Kate and Clare think the Conservative Party's inner sanctum is like something out of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" with besuited Tory toffs guffawing as they deliberately design policies that "target" women. I find it deeply worrying that such people - Kate and Clare that is - are anywhere near the levers of power.

The Labour Party when in power may deliberately target groups it doesn't like - parents of children at grammar schools and private schools, people living in rural communities, smokers, small businesses and drivers spring to mind. But Conservatives don't think that way. We really don't.

I know the lefties might be shocked by this revelation but it's true. That doesn't stop us from proposing policies like minimum pricing for drink that fall heaviest on a particular group but that is a consequence of a daft policy not a deliberate act of punishment. It may be true that women suffer more from recession (a recession caused by the last Labour government but we'll let that pass) but it is an enormous leap to believe that the Conservatives are deliberately manipulating the economy and the government's spending just to "target" women. On a scale of 1-10 for stupidity that is definitely an eleven.

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Bradford and the creature from the pit...

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It was going to die. The good guys were ready and prepared to throw the full armory against the hideous, many-tentacled monster.

Limbs were hacked off, the indefatigable soldiers of right marched ever onwards - and then, a glimpse of victory! Slash, hack, crash, slash again. And the monster's head is severed.

Victory!

But no - the creature rises again growing new tentacles in places the righteous army had not seen or known about. Even with its head removed, the gruesome creature from the pit continued to devour Bradford*!

What can we do to kill this beast!


*Despite all the hype, all the bus travel and all the shouting, Bradford will not be having an elected mayor and will be having a Labour Council with an overall majority. Seems George's predictions were slightly wrong!

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Of course the Unions own the Labour Party - they always have...

Why do we act so shocked and surprised at the fact that the Labour Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the trade union movement? Apart from a fleeting moment under Tony Blair the party has always been controlled by the unions. After all, the unions set the party up – it’s their plaything.

Any Labour Government is a government of the unions, by the unions, for the unions. There might have been a day when this came close to being a government representing “the people” but today it is not. According to the Government’s own statistics:

“Private sector union density fell by 0.6 percentage points to 15.5 per cent in 2008, whereas public sector density fell 1.9 percentage points in 2008 to 57.1 per cent.”

And most of that private sector union membership is in privatised industries – air travel, gas, water , electricity. In the rest of the wealth creating sector, trade union membership is rapidly approaching zero. Any private sector employee voting Labour is voting for a Government controlled by and operating in the interests of public sector trade unions. In other words, voting for higher taxes, more regulation and more bureaucracy.

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Some thoughts on the Co-operative Party and their misplaced ideas

Given that Labour are saying “co-operative party principles” will be included in the Labour Manifesto for the coming election I thought it might be worthwhile looking at those principles and at their practical implications. And I do so from the perspective of someone who favours mutual organisations, community ownership and new models of service delivery – something I share, it seems, with David Cameron.

The Co-operative Party has helpfully published their guide – “A Co-operative Party Agenda for a Fourth Term” (so no question as to who they’ll be backing despite the enthusiasm from all three main parties for mutualism). I thought I’d pull out some of their suggestions and give a considered view set against our mixed experience of co-ops.

Promoting co-operative and mutual enterprise. The underlying argument here – although it isn’t quite put that way –is that co-op and mutual models of business are superior to “capitalist” models of business. These models are dubbed “social” – presumably implying that the joint stock company is anti-social. There is no attempt made beyond glib statements about service and lies about profits (co-ops and mutuals are profit-making organisations) to explain the basis for this distinction. In my view Government should not involve itself in how private citizens and private organisations choose to organise themselves yet it is clear that the Co-op Party wished to force unspecified co-operative “values” on private firms and to “reconnect them with stakeholders and society”. Nowhere in all this is there a word about the consumer, the customer – the most important stakeholder in any business.

Employee-ownership. John Lewis has a lot to answer for! This for-profit, quite pricey general store and supermarket chain is held up as a paragon of socialist virtue. We’re told that this shows just how effective employee-ownership can be. Truth be told though – for the amount of real control employees have over the management of John Lewis – the “employee-ownership” model is just a glorified bonus scheme. Don’t get me wrong – if firms wish to organise this way they can – and it clearly works for some organisations. But there is no evidence of more social or economic benefit compared, let’s say, to being owned by faceless Swiss gnomes or big-hatted Texan billionaires.

Remutualisation. Ah, here’s the cheap shot! Those wicked Tories allowed all those nice cuddly building societies to get turned into banks – and look what happened! We must turn Northern Rock back into a mutual organisation pour encourager les autres! Excuse me but do you remember what those mutual organisations were like? Do you recall how unaccountable, producer-led, unresponsive and lazy they were? Mutual organisation works pretty well at the level of the working mans club (or Conservative Club for that matter, most of which are mutuals) but scale it up to a multi-billion financial organisation and you can forget real accountability. These organisations become run purely for the interests of the management not the member or the customer. And certainly not for any wider “stakeholders”. A quick look at the US savings and loan scandals shows just how vulnerable mutuals are to managerial abuse.

Land reform. Now we get the real lefty stuff. Introducing a land value tax to replace council tax and business rates. Apparently the reason for the strange behaviour of the UK’s property market is because the existing property taxes create a system that favours the developer over the user. Leaving aside the scale of destruction in our property sector during this recession, this argument not only shows profound ignorance of how land is valued but ignores the primary reasons for our distorted property market. And those reasons? Our planning system and our preference for freehold models of residential ownership. If the Co-op Party wanted a really radical approach that would allow for more affordable housing in places where people want to live, then they would be proposing the privatisation of property rights through the repeal of the Town & Country Planning Acts and associated guidance and secondary legislation.

Trade Justice. As we might expect from the UK’s biggest recipient of Common Agricultural Policy cash, the Co-op is firmly in the protectionist camp. OK, they call it trade justice but what they mean is that we carry on the protectionist agriculture policies that puff up the Co-op's profits while assuaging our guilt at the damage this does to poor African farmers by promoting so-call “fair trade”.

There is some good stuff in the Co-op ‘manifesto’ too – mutualising the health service would take us back closer to the private (mostly charitable) delivery that existed prior to Labour nationalisation of health and there are some interesting ideas about increasing participation. However, the Co-op's connection to the Labour Party holds it back – they seem obliged to continue to nod in the direction of groupthink and to promote the failed initiatives of socialism.

It seems to me that trying to make party political capital out of the idea of mutuality and co-operation is misplaced. And it also seems to me that, for all the talk of engagement and participation, the one thing not proposed here is the real transferring of power from centralised, monolithic and failing government to ordinary people. Now that would be radical!

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The Raft of the Medusa: A Metaphor for the Labour Party?

Some of you will be familiar with the Raft of the Medusa but doesn’t it remind you of the Labour Party and Government?

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