The Sort of Triumph of the Sort of Will!

Letter from America – Ian Williams

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: December 19, 2015 Last modified: December 15, 2015

There are shades of euphoria from supporters of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change announced so triumphantly at the beginning of this month. “Universal” and “legally binding” are epithets brandished in its favour. Well, up to a point.

The mere fact that there is an agreement, of any kind, understandably warms the hearts of the many committed people who have for years tried to effect a change. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary General, has made it a major issue since he took office – and he and Gordon Brown played a major part in turning the previous Copenhagen talks into a holding operation rather than a complete disaster. So trying to count the ways in which Paris is a more limited success than the headlines suggest, let us accentuate the positive.

The mere existence of a global agreement accepting the reality of man-made climate change is a big step forward. It rebuts untold millions of dollars poured into public relations by oil and coal producers with direct mercenary interests, not to mention conservative kooks who have decided that the whole idea of global warming is a communist plot to subvert entrepreneurial activities.

If the Shadow Chancellor can quote Mao, so can I. One of the lines in the Chairman’s Little Red Book was that ideas can become a material force, and without endorsing the rest of the Maoist oeuvre, that is very true. In that sense, the Paris Agreement is a turning point in international sentiment for combating the unfolding ecological disaster, ideological leverage in the coming struggle.

The right have become experts at having their will triumph, both positively and negatively over the years, which is why they have fought this outcome so hard and so long. Even relatively rational politicians in America and elsewhere, faced with the wrath of the carbon fuel lobby have temporised about the reality of global warming. Saudi Arabia, continuing the constructive role that it plays in so many spheres, has spent enough hiring the mercenary PR companies to fight its oil-soaked corner globally for it to have resettled several threatened low lying atolls by now.

That is why the Paris agreement at the beginning of December was such a landmark event, despite all the compromises and weaselling that went into it. The simple fact of acceptance of reality, no matter how belated, is a great leap forward in the face of the industry lobbyists.

Gaining recognition of that premise made other forms of progress possible – like the Pacific mini-state of the Marshall Islands who campaigned to ensure that there would a review of the targets within five years instead of 15. However, the review is desperately needed. The targets are hopelessly inadequate and it is a small consolation that the signatory countries recognise when the agreement effectively postpones the reaction needed now until the second half of the century. It is as if we stood in a burning city and congratulated ourselves for noticing the flames and temperature, but decided not to set the fire brigades on the case for a while longer.

In that sense, the Paris agreement is an egregious example of the fun and frivolity that the city was once so famous for. Having evaded the targets set in Kyoto, Bali and other resorts, the nations of the world have now set a non-binding set of targets that they will probably ignore and evade again.

While considering the triumph of the will, one can see in this agreement how the faith-based solutions of the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan era still haunt us. A carbon tax, on the fuel used could be one of the most effective inducements to encourage investment in more efficient energy use and generation, and thus emissions. However, reflexive right wing (and now “centre”) recoil from the very idea of taxation – which would put cash in the hands of governments for the public good –- has been subsumed by the idea of alleged market mechanisms and trading emissions.

The agreement is deeply flawed, weak and ineffectual. But it lays down what should be done – at a minimum. It is up to the rest of us to risk a few virtual carbon-emissions by holding the feet of governments to the burning coals, making sure they keep their promises.

Base Instincts

Comment is Free
May 5 2008
Ian Williams

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed New Labour functionaries have been popping over to the United States for inspiration since the very beginning of the Blair project.

Indeed even before he became leader, Tony Blair visited New York in search of inspiration from the Clintons. When I suggested that Bill Clinton would sell his grandmother in the streets to get votes and donations, his answer was: "He wins elections."

Up to a point. Labour's debacle in the British local elections last week offers an opportunity to reverse the balance of trade in political advice. Democrats in the US can take a lesson from it.

In fact, it is now clear that New Labour has been a political neutron bomb that has destroyed the party while electing its leader. Brown may carry the can, but it was the cumulative disastrous effect of years of Blair's emulation of Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) that made it possible. Blair saw what Clinton was doing, and saw that it was good. He went home to produce a party without principles, dependent on wealthy donors. New Labour's bureaucratic weed killer withered Labour's grassroots organisation so that the leadership could be free of its membership's importunate reminders of what it was elected for. As local organisations were stripped of power, alienated members left like passengers from the Titanic, not least because they could see the iceberg toward which the captain and his officers were serenely steering.

Like the Clintons, Blair and New Labour took their traditional base for granted, assuming that tribal loyalties, and the absence of a reasonably humane alternative, would keep the voter banks of the working families delivering for them.

Inspired by the Clinton example, Blair cultivated wealthy donors so that he could avoid having to listen to what his guru used to call "special interest groups", like the unions which had set up the party and bankrolled it for most of its history. He also ignored the members, whose voice on every issue from selection of candidates to determination of policy was watered down.

Blair's desperate Clintonesque attempts to raise funds were the scandals that undermined Labour's claim to the high ground. However, the authoritarian, top-down leadership built by Blair, in emulation of the DLC, was convinced that it knew better than its rank-and-file members.

The leadership stuck to policies, ranging from the "private finance initiative", which quasi-privatised state functions on a no-risk, high-profit basis, to abolishing student grants, and most recently the proposed abolition of the lowest 10% income-tax band, despite most of its members' opposition.

Sadly, Brown was fixed on these policies, perhaps more so than Blair, who, like the Clintons, was somewhat flexible on policy issues as long as he personally won elections. Under the circumstances, it has hardly surprising that the party's traditional voters, faced with yet another boot in the testicles from the party that purported to represent them, deserted Brown last week.

So what is the lesson for Democrats stuck in the marathon synchronised seppuku that the primary has become? Simply that Barack Obama is their best hope. There are many who are justifiably agnostic about Obama's policies, about which he has been as vague as the other candidates. However, on at least one issue he has been consistently in advance of Hillary Clinton, and that has been on grassroots mobilisation - not just for fundraising, but getting out the vote.

It is not just his own efforts. Organisations like MoveOn.org have responded to their members' votes and steered money his way. His campaign has inspired huge numbers of young people who had never bothered voting to register and campaign.

It is true that his success has bred increasing amounts of corporate money, but Clinton never had any other kind.

In keeping with what her husband and the DLC had done to the party as a whole, her campaign has relied on big donors while neglecting grassroots campaigning. Her only reason for staying in the race now is that she hopes to suborn the convention by persuading the unelected superdelegates to overturn the actual balloting for elected delegates.

Her chosen weapon is swift-boating Obama in the way that the Republican's racist slime factory will eventually do in the general election, regardless of the damage she is causing the party if he becomes the Democratic candidate.

There is no need to be dewy-eyed. People who want to reverse the baleful effects of the Reagan revolution have to expand those grassroots initiatives, and keep the Democratic candidates' feet to the fire to make sure they never again take their voter base for granted.

And who knows, maybe Brown and the Labour party may learn the same lesson?


For more blogs on the US elections, click here.

For more US election coverage, click here.

For more Cif blogs about the London elections, click here.

Click here for further Guardian coverage of the mayoral race and here for the local elections.

Faithful Follower

Guardian Comment is Free

On Dominie Brown, Pope Benedict and benighted Bush.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ian_williams/2008/04/faithful_follower.html


Premier Brown and Pope Benedict share some superficial traits, not least a sense of infallibility. But when the son of the manse meets the father of the church, there's no competition in the USA.

There is a reason why it is Captain Kirk who is the hero of Star Trek, and not Scottie down in the engine room of the USS Enterprise. Sad to say, the era has gone when many, let alone most, Americans would resonate to a dour Scots engineer keeping things running steadily down below.

The Pope may not have many divisions, but he is Catholic, which guarantees him a hundred million or so fans. Poor Dominie Brown may "love America", and even may love American TV, but it does make one wonder how closely he has scrutinised either.

If he had viewed closely, he would have realised that the somewhat befuddled and less-than-popularly rapturous reception for "Who?" - as he is affectionately referred to by the person on the street in New York and Washington - puts the "special relationship" in its proper, very low-profile perspective.

As House speaker Tip O'Neill declared "all politics is local". With all those voters behind it, the Vatican can chide the US over abortion and the death penalty. With the inimitable lobby behind it, Israel can break promise after promise over the Road Map, and still ask for more.

However, there is no British lobby in the US, despite millions of expats living here. Collectively they have no presence at all. The cultural flow from Britain to America probably does not resonate too much with most Americans now. Britain is neither the mother country, nor even the original enemy. It is as irrelevant as any other country that generally does what its told.

The Pope never committed the Swiss Guard to Iraq, so he avoids Brown's embarrassment at inheriting a British troop presence there. Brown is in the uncharismatic position of actually having divisions in Iraq that Blair so foolishly committed, but practicing a sort of military coitus interruptus, keeping his troops on the edge of withdrawal but never quite reaching the climatic moment to pull them out.

Indeed, while the Pope is not shy of promulgating dogma, justifying Galileo's fate and generally being a hard man on the theology front, Brown's Americophilia goes so far as to emulate the coy circumspection of American candidates when confronted with a hard issue.

Above all "Don't mention the war", from Basil Fawlty, seems to be the text of the day for Brown, whose editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal had all pointedness of an over-boiled haggis. He called for a joint Anglo-American crusade to teach the world English. There is no doubt that Webster's rather than the Oxford English Dictionary would serve as the reference book, but more to the point, the proposal does nothing to excite Americans, who assume that foreigners will learn English anyway. But worldwide it associates Britain ineradicably with the country that opinion polls show is almost terminally unpopular across the world. Now is the time to distinguish Britain, not to put truth in the rumours about it being the 51st state. (It isn't of course. It's a commonwealth like Puerto Rico, bound by Washington's edicts but without representation in its councils.)

As 1945 Prime Minister Clement Attlee proved, you do not have to sparkle to be a great prime minister, but Attlee had a stellar front bench, while Brown does not.

So it's all up to him. If Brown wants to play the dour Dominie, it's about time he got some hellfire and damnation in his sermons to Americans that will make them sit up and remember them. Reading the riot act to a lame duck president who historians consider to be the US's worst ever will do Britain no harm, and could lend some charisma to its prime minister, who is beginning to make grey John Major look like a superstar.

Ask not for whom the polls bill, they bill for you

Ask not for whom the polls bill, they bill for you
Tribune 14 December 2007


Democracy is an imperfect tool. As Winston Churchill said, it’s the worst possible system except for all the others and so it needs sharpening regularly to keep its edge. However, it needs constant work not least since it often seems that every improvement brings new and unforeseen problems.

In the US, the attempt to rescue party nominations from the smoke-and-bribery filled rooms of Tammany Hall led to the primary elections, where the leading Democratic contenders are currently running bills of around $100 million each just to be the candidates. It’s not in the constitution, but you could almost dispense with the formality of elections and declare the candidate with the biggest war-chest the winner.

The Supreme Court adds its own wacko embellishment to this emerging principle of one dollar one vote by rulings that invoke the first amendment right of free speech to stop curbs on money in campaigns. The poor man has an equal right to own newspapers as the rich, just as Murdoch family members have the right to sleep wrapped in their newspapers under a Manhattan flyover.

This election cycle is even worse. More and more states moved their primaries forward to the beginning of 2008, which means that active campaigning and spending began a year ago and has at least six months more to go before the parties’ candidates are chosen. Most of this money goes on television advertising, which at least Britain is spared.

The results of the system are apparent – and undemocratic. Under Blair’s mentor, Bill Clinton, a $100,000 in campaign contributions bought a night in the White House, half a million bought a WTO case against Caribbean banana preferences in the EU, or tightening sanctions on Cuba. Those donations showed clear cause and effect, but on a larger scale the fact that money comes from rich people and businesses explain why

Polls show popular support for universal healthcare, but the lobbyists for the big pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies and their campaign cheques ensure that almost fifty million Americans have no health insurance and all Americans pay the world’s highest prices for their drugs.

We can guarantee that whoever is elected as the Democratic candidate, or eventually the President, will be the beneficiary of several hundred million dollars in donations from rich individuals and corporations. Their policies will almost certainly reflect that, which is why the gap between rich and poor is widening and why ordinary working families under Bush have become more indebted and impoverished even as the economy has officially been booming.

In Britain, the entirely laudable attempt to extend the franchise for choosing the Labour Party leadership led to similar problems. Candidates had to raise their own money for canvassing and reaaching hundreds of thousands of members, and despite warnings from those who had seen what happened in the US, there was no system to oversee and reveal funding.

Enter Michael Levy, the vanguard of dodgy fundraisers, who made his debut financing Tony Blair’s leadership campaign. We now see where that led. In the name of removing the “undemocratic” influence of the unions that had actually founded the Labour Party, New Labour desperately sold itself to everyone from friends of Formula One Racing to friends of Ariel Sharon.

Being an entrist clique similar to Militant – but without the Trotskyist group’s grassroots appeal – New Labour felt no great need to tell the members of the party, or indeed the NEC, what it was up to. There have always been eccentric millionaires who have supported the Labour Party, and who have done so publicly. The minute money flows under the counter it is reasonable to assume that there is a quo being quidded. Even in the US, for all its faults, candidates must publish the list of donations.

Sadly, the infiltrators have drastically reduced the size of the Labour party electorate that potential leadership candidates have to address even if that does not seem to lessened their appetites for funny money. Those original members whom Michael Levy’s money helped win for Tony Blair, have left in droves, whether in protest or apathy when it became clear that their role in decision making was minimal. It is sad that Gordon Brown should now be carrying the can for decisions made by his predecessor, but it does give him the opportunity to put some serious distance from previous policies. Above all, if he wants to increase individual membership and ensure continued and increasing support from unions and their members, then he has to ensure that they have an effective voice in everything from the selection of candidates to the direction of policies.

The alternative is to follow through on the American road, and put a big “For Sale” sign up.

Brown, Blair .. and Clinton

With one bound, he could be free

Gordon Brown must publicly break with Blair's US-inspired techniques of fundraising and party-bashing
Ian Williams

Guardian Comment is Free
December 6, 2007 7:00 PM | Printable version

Poor Gordon Brown. With the latest contribution-laundering scandal, he is carrying the can for Tony Blair's over-enthusiastic fundraising. But there is, in fact, someone else to take the blame.

The New Labour project has always involved a slavish emulation of American models, and in this case Bill Clinton can take a bow. He really pioneered how to make a left-of-centre party conservative despite its members and supporters.

Both Blair and Brown were totally bowled over by Clinton's ability to win elections when the then-inseparable pair visited the US while John Smith was still the apparently healthy and eminently elected leader of the opposition.

As Blair and Clinton jointly pioneered the "third way" as a means of passing off conservative policies as modernisation of reformist parties, Clinton showed Blair the way. Fairly sure they had nowhere else to go, Clinton scorned the Democratic party's hardcore electoral base of unionised workers and minorities, deriding them as "special interests". He could do so largely because he ran away with much of the old Republican funding base, attracting donors from Wall Street.

Oh, those were the best of days for the real special interest groups, who came bearing cheques. A quick drop in the hat from America's biggest banana importer brought a Worlad Trade Organisation case against the EU and the West Indian banana producers. A small fundraiser from Cuban-American exiled sugar barons ensured that there would be tighter embargoes against Castro, and continuing tariffs against developing-world sugar. For a sufficient fee, a night in the White House was the reward.

With none of the ideological baggage of the new Republicans, Clinton's policies were up for sale - and all that was without a House of Lords to rent or lease!

On the other hand, it was easier for Clinton than for Blair because the Democratic party was already on the way to being a PO box for corporate donors, helped because in the US's rigid two-party system, most Democratic voters felt they had nowhere else to go.

Blair and New Labour had a bigger challenge, the comparative advantages of saleable peerages notwithstanding. The unions founded the Labour party and, mostly, paid for it. It had a membership-based structure, policy conferences and a national executive committee. But Blair rose to the occasion.

The unions became special interests; then we had peerages (a bow to Lloyd George) dodgy loans, proxy donors and the assiduous courting of business interests, not to mention a succession of funders who seem to think it would be good for Israel to fund Blair. This was Blair's creative adaptation of Clintonian funding principles.

The structure of the party was ignored or dismantled, and membership was converted from being actively concerned in policy formation and candidate selection to being part of a leader's fan club run by a coterie of New Labour infiltrators who in truth probably had a smaller support base than did Militant of old. Many ordinary members took the hint and left.

One should point out that, just as in the primary elections in the US, (only millionaires or billionaire-backed candidates need apply). The Labour party's own leadership elections seem to have been the chink through which the real special interests grabbed Blair by the wallet, confident that his heart and mind would follow. The now ennobled Lord Levy helped bankroll his campaign for that as well.

The US is not always a bad example to follow, but in this case it is disastrous and undemocratic. American politicians follow money more than the voters. So far in this election cycle, one in 600 US voters donated the minimum $200 or more that candidates have to declare. And you can be sure that most of the money came from far, far fewer voters than that. The leading contenders have already spent nearly $100m each - and that is just on the party primaries, not the general election. And voters will stay away in droves as they are increasingly doing in Britain.

Gordon Brown can extricate himself in one bound: disavow Blair's and Clinton's political and financial heritage and rebuild his party as one based on an active membership representing working people. That is, after all, a large part of the reason why so many were happy to see him take over from Blair of Baghdad.