The Virtual Stoa

Ralph Miliband, Belgian socialist, author of Parliamentary Socialism, The State in Capitalist Society and other fine books. Born 7 January 1924, died 21 May 1994.

Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist, baseball obsessive and socialist, born 10 September 1941, died 20 May 2002.

Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the (so-called) utopian (so-called) socialists, born 17 October 1760, died 19 May 1825.

Not much blogging recently, I’m afraid. My brother Michael asked me about ten things I’ve never done, and three of them are reading Paradise Lost, completing my first book, and preparing a lecture to give next week at the Maison Française at rather short notice, and these three are filling up my time at the moment (with good progress, I’m happy to report, on all fronts).

There may be seven other things I haven’t done (voted Conservative, learned to drive, that kind of thing), but I’m blanking on most of them — well, at least five of them — right now.

Well, a dead anarchist, really, but I think she belongs here. “Red” Emma Goldman, born 1869, died 14 May 1940.

It’s sad to see that the Government lacks the courage of its convictions and is re-renaming the Department of Productivity, Energy and Industry the dti:

“A man with a screwdriver” will replace the sign outside the department’s HQ, Mr [Alan] Johnson told the Financial Times. DPEI had prompted “various descriptions…penis and dippy”, he said.

[via]

There’s a fine piece in the Guardian by Greil Marcus about Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone”, the greatest of his many great songs (and there’s a Normblog poll to prove it), and the problems he ran into in the same year when Dylan Went Electric. And then he came to the UK:

But in the UK the sort of protests that had followed Dylan and the Hawks around the US were organised. The Communist party had long operated a network of Stalinist folk clubs where the songs to be sung, who could sing what, and in what manner, was strictly controlled. The idea was to preserve the image of the folk, whereas pop music symbolised the destruction of that community by capitalist mass society.

Is this true? It’s terribly funny if it is. Where can I learn more?

John Smith, leader of the Labour Party, 1992-4, born 13 September 1938, died 12 May 1994.

James Connolly, socialist and Irish patriot, born in Edinburgh, 1868, shot by the British, 12 May 1916.

There’s an archive of some of his writing here.

Apologies for the silence over the last few days. I’ve been in the Bodleian reading Richard Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae. I don’t think many people blog while reading De Legibus Naturae, but I may be wrong.

The fools who read the Observer think that Nick Hornby’s somewhat engaging and mildly interesting Fever Pitch is a better sports book than C L R James’s imperishable classic Beyond a Boundary (and scroll down to #3). This is idiocy on a large scale.

In the end the polls closed at the Virtual Stoa, just as they opened around the rest of the country, and the final results were as follows:

Labour: Nineteen
Lib Dems: Twelve
Greens: Four
Undecided: Three
Tory: One
Legalise Cannabis: One
Spoil Ballot Paper, Probably: One
Concerned of Switzerland (Disenfranchised): One

So we weren’t quite a representative sample, overshooting the Labour vote by a bit, getting the Liberal share of the vote about right, and understating the number of Tory voters by quite a lot.

Many thanks to all who took part, and I’ll see you again in 2009…

And, finally, to complete this alphabetical survey, we come to Westmorland & Lonsdale, where Virtual Stoa favourite Tim Collins failed to beat off a challenge from the Lib Dems and became the only Shadow Cabinet Minister to fall victim to the so-called decapitation so-called strategy. What went wrong? It’s hard to say. Right at the start of the election season I signed up to receive “special messages from Tim” over at timcollins.co.uk, but special messages came there none. So that’s it for the Tim Collins Watch, at least for the time being. If I do manage to find out what he does post-defeat — you know, get a job, or something — I’ll let you all know.

So Kirsty McNeill (Balliol PPE, c.2000) for Labour in Southwark North & Bermondsey managed to cut Simon Hughes’ majority almost in half, with a 5.94% swing away from the Lib Dems. There was a vanishingly small number of swings to Labour in this campaign, and I’m going to guess that this was the largest. (Even I’m not dull enough to comb through the newspapers checking to see if this is true.) Even if it wasn’t the largest, it’s impressive enough. Good stuff.

Well, Oxford West and Abingdon’s a pretty safe Lib Dem seat these days. (I remember when John Patten was the local Tory MP, but those days are long gone.) But Antonia Bance (or Bunce, if you believe the Guardian, which you shouldn’t) was a terrific Labour candidate, polling a thoroughly respectable 8,725 votes, and somehow managing to appear to be in a good mood all the way through. It was a good choice by the constituency party, and a good campaign. Shame about the County Council results, though.

Phew! Andrew Smith just held on in Oxford East. People used to wonder whether he’d be vulnerable, on the grounds that Oxford East contains subtantial numbers of students and Muslims and gentrifying yuppie professional types, who are the three groups most often reckoned to be turning against Labour because of the war, and other things, but mostly because of the war. I used to be slightly concerned about this until I remembered that he had a majority of 10,000, and then I turned my attention to other things. But in the end he needed every vote he could get (one or two, possibly, delivered partly as a result of my efforts knocking on doors in Lye Valley around lunchtime) and just beat off the challenge from the Lib Dems’ Steve Goddard, who cut his majority by, well, an order of magnitude.

Why didn’t the Lib Dems win? They managed an impressive 11.83% swing, but that’s nothing compared to the 14.99% they scored in Cambridge to knock off Anne Campbell, or the colossal 17.33% they achieved in Manchester Withington. Perhaps the point here is that Oxford East isn’t really the university seat in these parts. That’s #8, above.

I thought Labour would do better than they did. But when I contemplated what would happen if about fifty seats were lost, I looked at a list of the most vulnerable Labour MPs, and concluded that the only one I’d miss would be Bob Marshall-Andrews, whom I’ve known for over twenty years, down in Medway. And, splendidly, he held on by a whisker — 213 whiskers, to be precise — and will live to fight Mr Blair another day. Good for him, good for Medway, and good for the gaiety of the nation, which is also important.

I’m pleased to note in passing that the former odious Lib Dem student hack Liz Truss failed to win Calder Valley for the Tories. Seems to be one of those seats where she might have won it if she’d managed to hit the national average swing, but the Tories weren’t doing terribly well on that front north of Watford.

As predicted (well, as was pretty obvious), Kitty Ussher (Balliol PPE, 1990-93) won Burnley for Labour. So with luck now she’ll become too busy representing her constituents to write terrible newspaper articles like this one.

Looking at the results, I was struck by independent candidate Harry Brooks taking third place, ahead of the Tories, with 5,786 votes, and wondered who he was. A few moments with Google suggests that he’s not an especially nice character, a former Labour councillor whose activities helped to pave the way for the rise of the BNP in the town. Some details here, here and here.

But Harry’s is where one goes for Burnley blogging, so I won’t try to compete.

My old friend Kwasi Kwarteng fought Brent East for the Conservatives, and polled 3,000 votes. More importantly, though, I’d hazard a guess that this was the seat in which the variation in the heights of the various candidates was most pronounced. Kwasi’s really quite tall, and the two leading candidates, Sarah Teather for the Lib Dems and Yasmin Qureshi for Labour, are really quite short. It certainly made for dramatic television as the Returning Officer announced the result.

Some generally sensible people seem pleased that Peter Law won in Blaenau Gwent, an “independent socialist” beating a candidate who’d been “parachuted in”, etc., all of which makes him sound a much more attractive figure than he seems to me to be. Law’s candidacy stems not from any particular objection to the particular candidate (Maggie Jones) but to the fact that the Labour Party insisted that Blaenau Gwent select from an all-woman shortlist. If you’re against such shortlists, then cheer for Law, by all means. But bear in mind the background.

Between 1918, when some women were given the vote, and 1997, only four women sat for Welsh seats in Parliament. Megan Lloyd George, Eirene White, Dorothy Rees and, much later, Ann Clwyd.

Three more were elected in the Labour landslide in 1997, the first election in which all-women shortlists were in operation: Julie Morgan, Betty Williams and Jackie Lawrence. With Ann Clwyd being re-elected, that raised the total of women among the Welsh parliamentary delegation to four, or 10% of the total. And these four MPs were all re-elected in 2001.

Another round of all-women shortlists were imposed for 2005, and the beneficiaries included Sian James (elected in Swansea East, replacing Donald Anderson), Jessica Morden (Newport East, Alan Howarth) and Nia Griffith (Llanelli, Denzil Davies). There was an open selection in Bridgend (replacing Win Griffiths), won by Madeleine Moon, and with Jackie Lawrence being defeated in Preseli Pembrokeshire, and the Lib Dem Jenny Willott winning in Cardiff Central, the number of women MPs in Wales is now eight out of forty, an all-time high, but still a scandalously low 20% (comparable, however, to the also scandalously low UK average, with 136 women MPs, or 21% of the total).

The all-woman shortlist, in short, has been a crucial weapon in the fight to secure more women MPs representing Welsh seats.

The all-woman shortlist was imposed on Blaenau Gwent in line with democratically agreed party policy. No exception was made — properly — on the grounds that it’s a famous old Welsh seat represented by Michael Foot and Aneurin Bevan; no exception was made — again, quite properly — for the fact that local men might have been hoping to inherit the seat from retiring MP Llew Smith.

The voters of Blaenau Gwent can, of course, vote for whomever they want. Labour has no claim to return an MP for BG automatically. But shame on the local party members and activists who supported Peter Law, breaking with sensible, effective, progressive party policy, in order to side with the reactionary elements in the Welsh Labour Party and in Welsh politics more generally, the kind of elements which made women-only shortlists a necessary tool in the first place.

It was a great achievement in 2003, when the National Assembly for Wales became the first national parliament to have gender parity among Members, with the election of 30 men and 30 women. It’d be a very great shame if Welsh politics settled down such that the women went to Cardiff and the men to Westminster.

I’d like to know more about the demographics of the vote in Bethnal Green and Bow than I do. Glancing at the results, Oona King’s vote only fell by 5,000, or a quarter, since 2001. So the easiest way to account for Galloway’s 15,000 votes is to say that 5,000 were people switching from Labour, 5,000 were people switching from the Lib Dems or Tories (whose combined vote was around 15,000 in the 1992, 1997 and 2001 elections, but which fell to c.10,000 this time round), and 5,000 were the extra votes cast in 2005 compared with the 2001 total (these are rough numbers, obviously). But Tories and Lib Dems might have been tactically switching to Labour, and replacing a larger number of Labour voters going to Galloway. Or they might have been staying at home, being replaced by a larger number of first-time voters. Who knows? I certainly don’t. And what happened to the racist vote — 3,000 in 1997, 2,000 in 2001 (split between two parties, the BNP and the rather tiny NBP)? We heard a lot about the campaign for Muslim / Bangladeshi votes in the press, but Muslims were only (I think) 40% of the electorate. Lots of accusations of communalism have been thrown around by both sides: do we have — or will we have — voting breakdowns by ethnic group to help make sense of some of the claims? It’s been such a controversial contest that it’d be good to have a bit more solid data to chew on.

“The English people thinks it is free. It is greatly mistaken. It is free only during the election of Members of Parliament. As soon as they are elected, it is enslaved, it is nothing. The use it makes of its freedom during the brief moments it has it fully warrants its losing it…” — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contact (1761), III.15.

YouGov has a poll (conducted I don’t know how) which claims that 83% of people think this statement (the first part of it, anyway) applies very well or fairly well to the UK. That’s quite interesting, because if 83% of people agree with the thought that the population to which they belong in general possesses a false belief, that on its own would be evidence to suggest that in fact they didn’t. (A bit like the poll that found that 90% of French people thought they were more of more than average intelligence. Well, that’s a bit different. But it’s still a good stat.) But it seems to me that when the bulk of the UK population and Jean-Jacques Rousseau find something to agree on, then we really ought to pay attention.

The broader point that Rousseau’s helping to make, of course, is that although it might be one of the pillars of our so-called constitutional so-called order, parliamentary sovereignty is bullshit. (He didn’t use that word, though it’s a perfectly respectable technical term these days, but that’s not the sense in which I’m using it.) Sovereignty resides in the people, powers can be delegated to government institutions, including parliaments, by the people, but nothing can ever take away a people’s sovereign right to determine its own politics, to determine its own future. Sovereignty can never be “transferred” — from the Coalition Provisional Authority to the Interim Government of Iraq, say — because sovereignty always and everywhere resides in people, not in institutions, and no monarch, no parliament, no government, no occupying power, no political party, no social class, even, can ever reasonably stake a claim to sovereignty. That’s not how it works.

Of course politics requires institutions, and practices of sovereignty require institutionalisation, and democratically-elected parliaments may be a pretty good way of institutionalising the ideals of republican self-government. (They usually are, being quite a bit better than most of the alternatives occasionally on offer.) But there’s a lot more to politics and to democracy and to sovereignty than the election and composition of parliament — and so while everyone should get out and vote today, that’s not to say they should stay in for the next four to five years, and quietly accept the rule of whatever political lords and masters get elected to Parliament today.

Because they aren’t our lords and masters, and that’s not how democracy works.

That’s a policy from the Tory Policy Generator, but this is a quote from Martin Pugh’s new book, Hurrah for the Blackshirts: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars, discussing the House of Commons’ 1921 debate on the Criminal Law Amendment Act:

Members took it for granted that lesbianism was a psychological disorder and Lieutenant Colonel Moore-Brabazon suggested: “There are only three ways of dealing with these perverts. The first is the death sentence… The second is to look upon them as frankly lunatics and lock them up for the rest of their lives… The thid way is to leave them entirely alone, not notice them, not advertise them.”

I didn’t know, though I should have known, that one of Britain’s leading fascists in the 1920s was the transvestite lesbian, Valerie Arkell-Smith, aka ‘Colonel Barker’. It’s a good book.