Honorary Proletarian

Exactly 360 years ago today, on 30th January 1649(*), Charles Stuart, Kind of England, was publicly beheaded in Whitehall for high treason to his country.  This marked an epoch in the history of Britain, and for that matter of Europe – although kings had of course been murdered, imprisoned and deposed before, never had a sovereign been openly tried by a court appointed by representatives of (some of) his subjects, and sentenced to death according to the law of the land.

Charles and his supporters were utterly bewildered.  At the beginning of the trial and even on the scaffold the King denied that the court had any authority to try him – he simply did not understand where such authority could come from.  “A sovereign and a subject”, he said, ” are plain different things”.  His insistence on hisfeudal world-view is almost tragic, for a new world had dawned.  The full significance of the event lies in the fact that unlike the French National Assembly a century and a half later, Parliament did not abolish the monarchy and then commit the former King to trial as a common citizen – they acknowledged Charles’ title and indicted him as King, in order to emphasise that in future no-one, whatever his or her position, could be above the law.  Feudalism and feudal privilege were thus dealt their quietus in the person of their representative, and the subsequent abolition of the monarchy, on 17th March, was merely a formality.

 It is right, therefore, to call the execution of Charles Stuart a revolutionary act, and a foundation stone of our democratic rights.  However, we republicans are prone to exaggerate the modernity of the Parliament of the 1640s and the Commonwealth.  It was the 17th Century, after all – there was no example of any bourgeois democracy in the world, no example of a democratic movement apart from elements within the German and Dutch uprisings of the previous century, and no example of sovereign elected institutions unless you could read Livy (for the Roman oligarchic version) or Aristotle (for the Greek version that depended on slavery).  The Parliament that put Charles on trial wasn’t elected on anything like a democratic franchise, and some of its members had been arbitrarily excluded by the army.  It had far more legitimacy than the King, but by no means did it represent the people!

The fact that there was no popular democratic theory makes the emergence of democratic currents within the English Revolution all the more remarkable.  The best-known such current is the Levellers, an organised party that demanded a parliamentary republic with much wider suffrage (not though, in the case of their “mainstream”, for women, servants, apprentices or people dependent on poor relief) regular parliaments, absolute rule of the elected Parliament subject to the rule of law and certain absolute rights (freedom of religion and freedom from conscription).  To their left were groups like the Diggers (or “True Levellers” as they called themselves), who fought for a truly egalitarian society and agrarian communism in the countryside.  The Levellers organised soldiers’ committees in the army and drew up a proposed constitution for an English Commonwealth, which was debated in the democratically elected Army Council at Putney, against the elitist constitution proposed by the Generals and their supporters in Parliament.

The Diggers were before their time in social philosophy and unable to formulate a programme for the whole of society because the material basis for a socialist society did not yet exist.  The Levellers were defeated because they could not keep their radical coalition of urban artisans and traders, yeoman farmers and soldiers from a similar class background together, while the wealthy, who had been split between Parliament and King, reunited in defence of their property.  Two Levellers were shot by Cromwell in Oxford and three in nearby Burford (hence Levellers’ Day in that picturesque Tory village).  Most of the Levellers’ basic programme was actually achieved in the course of the nineteenth century, by people a lot less “radical” in their methods and rhetoric than the Levellers were (though, of course, under pressure from the growing trade union movement and at times in fear of revolutionary action from mass movements like the Chartists).

This doesn’t mean, however, that the Levellers and their demands were not revolutionary in their time.  Theirs was a world dominated by the remnants of feudalism and emerging mercantile capital, in which the “middling sort” – artisans, traders, yeoman farmers – constituted a revolutionary class against the big landowners and established merchants whose power and wealth depended at least partly on privilege as well as mere possession of capital.  Even when making limited demands, the Levellers based their philosophy on universal equality (”The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he”, sald Rainborough at the Putney Debates – and Cromwell’s son-in-law Ireton taxed him with wanting to share out property equally).  In the nineteenth century, by contrast, Britain became a capitalist society in which the main cleavage was between the owners of capital and the providers of labour.  In the Levellers’ time, the wealthy were sure that the implementation of the Leveller programme would fatally undermine their position.  Two centuries later that was no longer the case.  Universal suffrage no longer automaticall had socialistic implications, although it still represented huge progress and, of course, a sine qua non of labour and socialist political representation.

The pioneer socialist William Morris noted “how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes about it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name”.  Even within fundamentally similar societies the content of a political programme can change while its form remains the same – in the 1840s, when both state bureaucracy and civil society were much less developed than they are now, the Chartists’ demands were revolutionary and it would have taken a revolution to achieve them, but most of them have long since been incorporated into our political constitution without any fundamental disturbance, though again it required the existence of a militant labour movement to bring this about.

Today socialists and trade unionists can follow in the footsteps of the Levellers – and the Parlaimentarians who called Charles Stuart to account – not by congratulating ourselves that we live in a society where their demands have been made reality, but by formulating a programme that will provide a rough equivalent in our own society of the revolutionary mobilising impact the Agreement of the People had in theirs.  We may not achieve it, but we will not have to wait another 360 years.  Human beings now have exponentially more knowledge and mastery of nature than our ancestors did in 1649.  With its unprecedented power to destroy both human beings and the environment in which we live, and its unprecedented capacity for mass communication of ideas – good, bad indifferent and some purely evil – modern industrial capitalist society has to choose between the two options Rosa Luxemburg identified nearly a century ago – socialism or barbarism.  The human race has the ability to shape its own destiny in this world.  Our activity, our articulations of hope and determination to build a better world for our descendants to live in, can move society in the right direction.

(*)  In the 17th Century Britain used a different calendar from the Gregorian calendar of Catholic Europe, and celebrated the New Year in March: so to most of the rest of Europe the execution took place on 9th February 1649, while in Britain it was 30th January 1648.  Subsequent calendar reform kept the original dating but changed the date of the New Year, so in modern parlance the date is 30th January 1649.  In any case, Janus, Roman god of doorways and changes, seems a more suitable patron for a revolutionary event than the month of fevers.

Thankfully, the war in Gaza is over – for now.  Since both sides have declared “unilateral” ceasefires and there is no actual agreement, the situation is unstable, but there is actually some hope, and at least people aren’t facing the imminent danger of violent death.

This is probably a good time to write something calm about my own view of the situation.  Socialists have a duty to take action against unnecessary war; but protests against the policies of the Israeli government are often seen as anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic – and there is no doubt that there are anti-Semites out there who want to take advantage of them.  For this reason we must be vary careful to make two things clear: that we are protesting only against Israeli government policies, not against Israel per se; and that we do not consider Israel in some way exceptionally bad.  I’m always uncomfortable when people chant slogans like “Israel is a terror state”, because this implies that there is something in the nature of Israel which makes it “terrorist”.  This idea must be rejected.  If Israel’s military has committed terrorist acts, then so has the military of Britain, the USA, Russia, Indonesia and in fact virtually every state in the world at on time or another.

Having said that, we can get on to opposing the specific war.  The response of the Israeli government to Hamas terrorism was grossly disproportionate; civilians were targetted and infrastructure destroyed; people who had nothing to do with Hamas were maimed and killed.  Israeli people cannot be expected to endure rocket attacks by terrorists who want to destroy their country, but the very worst way to fight terrorism is by bombing someone else’s country indiscriminately.  Apart from the terrible death and destruction, this merely makes people so desperate and hopeless that a few of them join the terrorists.  And although it’s a cliche, I really don’t see any moral difference between killing civilians with a Qassam rocket and killing civilians with a Merkava tank.  The government of Israel has sunk to Hamas’ level, and it has done so with an arsenal far bigger and more destructive than any terrorist group’s.

There is also the underlying issue of the continued occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza by the Israel Defence Forces.  I am, as the above should make clear, one of those ho always insists that Israel is a country like any other, the Israeli people have an unquestionable right to their own state and to deny that the Israeli people should have the same rights as any other nation is wrong and dangerous.  But the Palestinian people have the same rights.  Their right to their own state is being denied by military occupation, and this is the major problem in Israel-Palestine.  I know that Hamas denies the right of Israel to exist; I know that the surrounding Arab states have a history of denying Israel’s right to exist; but the Israeli govermnet has the power to bring a Palestinian state into beng by withdrawing its forces from the West Bank and ending the blockade of Gaza, and it should do so.  Two wrongs don’t make a right.

The Israeli people are understandably concerned about security, but so are the Palestinian people, and with more immediate day-to-day reason.  Here, the geography of Israel-Palestine plays a major role in the insecurity and instability of the situation.  It’s surprising that people often discuss the situation without realising how small the area they’re discussing is.  From the Mediterranean at Tel Aviv to the nearest town in the West Bank is nine miles.  The Gaza Strip is only five miles wide.  Israelis and Palestinians live cheek-by-jowl, and while there is hostility people living in such close proximity understandably have a tendency to look over their shoulder.  In such a situation, as long as there is not a sustainable peace, not just between Israel and Palestine but across the region, there will be permanent hostility and occasional wars.  Terrorism, extremism, war, occupation and blockade are all major obstacles to reaching a sustainable peace.  More than this, occupation and blockade are unjust and undemocratic.  The government of Israel must withdraw from the West Bank and lift the blockade of Gaza, as much for its own good as for that of the Palestinian people.

Socialists have, as I said, a duty to oppose unnecessary war.  We also have a duty of international solidarity with all peoples against those who oppress and misgovern them.  The peoples of Palestine, Israel and the neighbouring countries, their labour movements and their peace movements, are the only hope for peace in the region.  A quotation my friend Sacha has highlighted says it all: “The despots of all countries are our enemies; the workers of all countries are our friends”.

See here: http://occupiedoxford.wordpress.com.

That takes me back a bit…running down St. Giles with a long chain wrapped round me.  On the negative side, it was heavy and uncomfortable and the rattling could be heard a mile off, but on the positive side I was probably impervious to bullets.  The Uni management’s incompetent barrister.  Sleeping in the Uni fundraising office and not showering for several days.  Everyone going for a fry-up at St. Giles Cafe at 8am when we finally left (it was a lot cheaper then!)

Happy days…!

I think Tony Woodley is essentially right here (thanks Ian): “The Labour party, the first major socialist party to embrace neoliberalism, now has to let go of it to have any future”.

Now, there are two possible explanations for the current unpopularity of the government in its long-neglected “core” areas of support (and yes, my choice of adjective kind of gives away my conclusion).  One is that everyone loved Tony Blair and everyone hates Gordon Brown, thinking him  much worse.  This is obviously nonsense.  After all, Brown was very popular during his first few months in office, Blair was scarcely well-liked, and as for the Brown government adopting worse policies, or indeed many different policies at all…I don’t believe that voters are stupid.

The second explanation is that the lack of difference is prcisely the problem.  Many people, especially among working-class “natural” Labour supporters, genuinely thought Brown’s takeover, however unsatisfactory in its details, would bring the change necessary to the Labour government, getting rid of all the disastrous Thatcherite elements of “New Labour” ideology.  People expected an end to the obsession with “market solutions”.  They didn’t get it.  And now they’re fed up: they’ve lost hope in politics.

It follows that the only thing that can rekindle that hope in politics, and save the country from the Tories, is a dramatic change in the whole policy agenda - considerably more dramatic, by the way, than Brown would have needed to enact to keep his popularity.  “New Labour” is dead – unsalvageable – defunct – kaput.  Do you get it now, you blithering gaggle of political strategists?  The post-Thatcher consensus, in which Labour economic policy sought to be the social-democratic face of the free market, is dead, and you killed it with your ideological inflexibility.

You may have done the Labour Party and the labour movement a big favour.  Because now the choice is stark: real change, and a reinvigorated Labour Party genuinely responsive to the labour movement, and setting the agenda with sweeping new reforms; or a Tory government, and unbridled Thatcherism without any attempt at social responsibility.

Make your choice.  Go forward or step aside.

It will only last as long as there are folks left with the faith to fight for it – Nye Bevan

Sixty years ago today, every household in Britain got a leaflet from the Labour Government.  This leaflet explained that:

Your new National Health Service begins on 5th July.  What is it?  How do you get it?

It will provide you with all medical, dental and nursing care.  Everyone – rich or poor, man, woman or child – can use it or any part of it.  There are no charges, except for a few specific items.  There are no insurance qualifications.  But it is not a ‘charity’.  You are all paying for it, mainly as taxpayers, and it will relieve your money worries in time of illness.

Until the 5th July 1948 there had been nothing worthy of the name of a health care system in Britain.  Doctors, chemists, hospitals and laboratories were privately owned and run, uncoordinated and for most of them patients had to pay.  Even the limited medical “insurance” scheme introduced by the Liberal Government of Lloyd George covered only workers who could afford to pay into it and not their families – so the poor health of working-class women was one of the worst aspects of gender inequality, and class discrimination began before birth.

All this was changed by a combination of events and people.  In 1945 the people of Britain, mainly the working class, determined to build a just societyafter six years of war, elected the Labour Government of Clement Attlee by a landslide.  In 1944 the Party Conference had voted for a policy of wholesale nationalisation that the right wing of the party had immediately condemned as sure to lose Labour the election.  Attlee had the vision, or perhaps just the political nous, to appoint as Secretary of State for Health Aneurin Bevan, a man that same right wing had spent most of the previous decade trying to expel.

The result was a comprehensive revolution in health care.  The statement quoted above doesn’t sound revolutionary to people who have grown up with the NHS, but it is.  There is no question here of “means testing” or even a “safety net” for people failed by capitalism.  The service is universal; and far from the rich getting undeserved benefit from (which is today’s usual “progressive” argument for means testing) they are paying for it through graduated general taxation, and not deriving any great benefit from it since they could afford health care already.  Neither is there any idea of “qualifying” for benefits by one’s actions, any of that division between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor which is actually a vicious form of class discrimination (since the rich don’t have to be “deserving”).  Rather, everyone gives according to their means and receives according to their need.  If the capitalist class don’t like it they will be prosecuted for tax evasion.

Today, though, the NHS and the socialist principles embodies in it are under threat.  The attacks on the NHS perpetrated by the Tories have been perpetuated by a Labour Government.  Although this government has invested huge sums of money in the NHS, in contrast to Tory neglect, they have continued and even extended the creeping privatisation of health services the Tories planned and initiated.

“The NHS,” said Thatcher, “is safe in our hands” - but she struck the worst blow right at the start by compelling NHS institutions to function as if they were part of a capitalist “market”, even in relation to each other.  Since then the logic of this “market” has resulted in the introduction of private finance and private norms to more and more of the public health service.  The government insists that there is no danger to the public nature of the NHS, since “only” 8% of services involve private finance; but the NHS being the biggest employer in Europe, that 8% represents a huge field of play for profiteering scum, and that field is growing.

Government spending restrictions, based on “market” imperatives that insist on a predictable balance of income and outgoings and expenditure being set for each type of medical procedure, threaten the future of specialist units like the Nuffield Orthopaedic Hospital here in Oxford, where obviously a high proportion of procedures with many complications are carried out.  Similar market dogmatism has caused the decline in the number of NHS dentists.  The Department of Health restricted expenditure per procedure, and greedy dentists decided that rather than offer what they said was a second-rate service to everyone, they would offer a first-rate service to those who could afford to pay.  here i am afraid the government is to be condemned on two grounds – first for cutting services and then, having made that bad decision, for compounding their error by not compelling all dentists to accept it.

It is not scaremongering to say that the NHS faces the ultimate question.  With the real prospect that there might be a Tory government in a couple of years, a government committed to a Thatcherism of teeth and claws, no current promise of investment in the universal public service, or restriction on privatisation, can be guaranteed.  In such circumstances to play a game of public-private brinkmanship with the country’s most vital public service is nothing short of grossly irresponsible.  Ultimately, since a universal service cannot be profitable or anywhere near profitable – as amply demonstrated by the state of health care in Britain before 1948, and in the USA now – the involvement of profit-making corporations and, more generally, of “market” norms, threatens the very existence of the NHS.

As Nye Bevan rightly said, then, it is as necessary to fight for the NHS now as it was in 1948.  Thankfully there are many “folks left with the faith” to do so.  I’ve just come from an NHS birthday party organised by the Labour Lord Mayor of Oxford, Susanna Pressel, and the local branch of Keep Our NHS Public.  Attending were trade unionists from across the NHS who, whatever the cowardice of their leaders, are determined to fight for patients, fellow-workers and their own jobs; campaigners who have saved the Horton Hospital in nearby Banbury from the threat of closure; and others in solidarity.

There is a danger that people are so used to the NHS that they don’t notice any threat to it.  However, awareness of the threat is growing and campaigns to defend it are growing in step: thousands of people demonstrated in Banbury.  Ultimately we will save the NHS if we see it, and can make the labour movement and the public at large see it, not only as a great public asset to be kept out of rapacious hands, but also as a platform for even greater and more far-reaching change in the future.  The NHS is one of the few achievements of the 1945-51 Labour Government to remain more or less intact, and the commitment of NHS workers over the past sixty years and today is a great inspiration.  Nye Bevan, thinking of the workers’ self-organised health scheme in Tredegar, said he wanted to “Tredegarise” the whole health service of Britain.  Let us adopt as our ambition the “NHSisation” of the whole of society.

Welcome to a British summer!  I just have to mention the dedication of a group of local schoolkids who not only put on a good brass band performance on the Lord Mayor’s Parade this lunchtime, but kept it up for an hour while walking through the streets of Oxford under a real barrage of water.  I think they deserve the rest of the week off school for that!

Nothing like awful weather to produce a feeling of solidarity with all the gowned, feathered and belly-dancing-costumed participants in the fun run to the beer tent at the end; the man with the Heath Robinson music machine built on a pram, that reminded me of a similar device the British branch of the PKK take on demos; and the two functionaries who took turns carrying the Mace (which is bigger than either of them) a mile and a half, before collecting the Councillors’ sopping wet gowns to take back to the Town Hall.  And well done to the rickshaw drivers – not a job I’d want myself (I remember a late-night ride in a rickshaw with Volty, with a growing conviction that the poor guy was about to drop dead of heart failure).

Here’s hoping for better weather…

Ruskin College, where I have the honour to be completeing my MA dissertation, was founded in 1898 as a workers’ college in the heart of elitist Oxford, providing the best education money could buy without the necessity of buying it.  Its buildings on Walton Street were funded (apart from one large donation) by unions, by union branches and by union members gathering pennies from their fellow-workers.  These represent not just bricks and mortar, but 110 years of British and international Labour Movement history.

Now the College’s Principal, Audrey Mullender, wants to sell these buildings to Exeter College and move the whole College to its secondary site in Headington, some way from convenient transport links (which, if you’re one of the elderly people who come to Ruskin for short courses and workshops in the holidays as part of the College’s “Ransackers” project, is quite a big deal).  One of the few arguments put forward in favour of this plan is that the Principal wants to provide all en suite accommodation for conference guests, as general secretaries and their cronies expect luxury hotel standards (when students from outside Oxford arrived for the last MA workshop they found chocolates on their pillows).  Shame on the management of a college supposedly dedicated to providing education for those who would otherwise miss out, for wasting money on such extravagance!

The planned development in Headington has three years to be largely completed and six at most to be completely operational in very detail – but it does not yet have planning permission, or anything definite enough to apply for planning permission.  There is no business plan – or at least, if there is Audrey Mullebnder isn’t telling anyone about it – and the scheme faces a potential shortfall of twelve million pounds, even after the sale of all the buildings in Walton Street, with no ideas at all as to how to raise this money (unless you count the principal suggesting weakly that the Headington canteen could be opened as a public restaurant some time in the future!)  Nor does it seem that Exeter management are entirely confident of having enough money to buy the site.

Exeter College management have at least been open with students about the negotiations (see below) – and as their message reveals, they at least appreciate the value of a central site!  By contrast, despite meeting with students several times Audrey Mullender has refused to reveal the state of negotiations or even if she was negotiating with anyone, and has tried to hide from students the names of members of the Governing Council.  She appears to be – frankly – stupid enough to believe that by doing this she could prevent anyone finding out what she was doing, when Exeter is emailing all its students and Ruskin Students’ Union representatives sit on the Governing Council!

I know Ruskin is supposed to be iconoclastic, but anyone who thinks it is a good idea to sell the college – or that they will be allowed to do so – is barking mad.  The whole scheme constitutes the most ill-thought out and fatuous bundle of plans I’ve ever come across.  Given the nebulous nature of the financial plan there is even, surely, a serious danger the College could go bankrupt.  Ruskin is irreplaceable and this must not be allowed to happen.

Announcement from the Rector of Exeter College
 
Exeter College is delighted to announce that the Governing Executive of Ruskin College has agreed to sell us its Walton Street site.

This is terrific news and an outstanding opportunity.  It effectively creates a Third Quad, expanding our space in central Oxford for teaching, research and student accommodation by roughly half.  It will bring much of our student body closer to our main site.  Together with our plans to build new accommodation for our graduates at Exeter House on the Iffley Road, it will give us some of the finest student facilities in Oxford.

As part of this historic arrangement, Exeter and Ruskin will develop a programme of joint academic, cultural and social activities.  We hope that this new relationship will, in time, expand the range of academic interests of our College, create opportunities for our graduates to undertake teaching, including teaching students from non-typical backgrounds, and widen the social and ethnic diversity of our student body.

There is still a long road between here and a move into the Ruskin site.  Ruskin will relocate most of its activities to a large site in Headington, for which it does not yet have full planning permission.  We may not be able to get on to the Walton Street site till 2011, or to inhabit it fully till 2014.  But we can begin at once to discuss how we use this fantastic opportunity for the benefit of future generations of scholars.

There is a nice historical twist to this arrangement.  William Morris was an undergraduate at Exeter College, and had close links with John Ruskin.  Ruskin College in turn was founded to educate those who were otherwise excluded from education – on principles established through the collaboration of these two social and educational pioneers.

We will be coming to the whole Exeter College community for advice and support in order realise the full potential of this exceptional opportunity; please be part of that discussion.  This acquisition will form a central part of the major fund-raising campaign that the College will launch next year to celebrate our 700th anniversary in 2014.  We will enter our eighth century with a truly exceptional range of possibilities – academic, cultural and social – to reinvigorate and develop the collegiate ideal.

Frances Cairncross

Rector
 

There were a few who were in open rebellion against the said Whiggery—a few, say two, Carlyle and Ruskin. The latter, before my days of practical Socialism, was my master towards the ideal aforesaid, and, looking backward, I cannot help saying, by the way, how deadly dull the world would have been twenty years ago but for Ruskin! It was through him that I learned to give form to my discontent, which I must say was not by any means vague…

Was it all to end in a counting-house on the top of a cinder-heap, with…a Whig committee dealing out champagne to the rich and margarine to the poor in such convenient proportions as would make all men contented together, though the pleasure of the eyes was gone from the world?…So there I was in for a fine pessimistic end of life, if it had not somehow dawned on me that amidst all this filth of civilization the seeds of a great change, what we others call Social-Revolution, were beginning to germinate.

- William Morris, “How I became a Socialist”.

Just a quick plug for this event organised by some students at Wadham College (inevitably, says I with a swell of pride!)  It looks quite impressive, with lots of people coming and some really good speakers, including my comrades Dan Randall and Sofie Buckland.  It’s going on for three days (commendably ambitious!) so I doubt if anyone, barring the organisers, will be there for the whole thing – but people can drop in for whatever meetings or events they like.

Hope to see you there!