Labour

 Well, I've been fretting for a few days about the bits I missed out of my talk at the Oxford "Speak Easy" last week.  Those who were there early enough heard me begin with a few lines from my notes, before I went rambling off elsewhere and lost my place, so whilst I mentioned that I'd like people to disassociate for the purposes of the discussion the (big-m) "Mutualism", the successor to the Individuality Anarchist movement, and the (small-m) "mutualism" that describes the use of a particular co-operative business form.  For whilst there are similarities, especially in their theoretical basis, there are also differences, especially in the way the Co-operative Movement in the UK operates.

But I think it is important to compare and contrast them, and I intended to do this on Wednesday night, but didn't get to that.  At the moment, politicians from all the main parties are talking about embracing mutualism, using co-operative businesses to deliver certain public services and so on.  And what worries me is that people will get the wrong idea about both co-operative businesses and about "Mutualism" and if these attempts to use co-ops in public policy do not work out as well as they are now being touted will be disillusioned with the idea of mutualism, and Mutualism, itself.

There has also been much discussion of this around the blogs and media recently, so I thought I would add my tuppence worth.

So some thoughts...

First the Co-operative Movement is innately anti-statist.  This may not appear to be the case in the UK where the Co-operative has established a political party, called, unsurprisingly, the Co-operative Party, and which many years ago now hitched itself to the party of the big state, the Labour Party.  But in its early years and, as some would say its hey-day, in which co-operative business forms were founded from the ground up, by ordinary people wanting to meet all sorts of their needs, for food, for insurance, for health care, housing and so on they worked in spite of the state which most often seemed to grant privilege to those who would rip them off.

Indeed, the first of the seven Co-operative Principles, based on those set down originally by the Rochdale Pioneers and now guarded and promoted by the International Co-operative Alliance reinforced that a co-operative is based on voluntary, open membership, for all people who are able to make use of the benefits the society is created to deliver.  It is inherently voluntarist - anarchist - the complete opposite of which is the sort of compulsory collectivist state socialism engages in.  Even when that state is apparently "democratic", it is still not voluntary in the same sense.  If you really don't like a democratic decision of your fellow co-op members, you can, ultimately part company; go and get whatever services or goods they deliver from somewhere else, or start another co-op.  Try doing that if you don't like the "democratic" decision that leads to one party running the country however they like.

So in this sense, the co-operative business form is a very useful one for those of us who see co-operatives and social enterprises not as a way of delivering government policies, but as a way to develop truly voluntarist means of doing what the state often does by coercive collectivism.  But it is only one business form of many, and to a large extent Mutualist-anarchists are agnostic about what business form should be used in any particular instance, just so long as it is not coercive.  

That said, there are some areas in which the co-operative form seems to me to give particular benefits; where for example a good or service is too big or difficult to procure individually, or where the different interests in an organisation, the workers, consumers, financiers and so on want to align their interests in the ongoing management of the organisation because of the nature of the sort of transaction they are involved in.  And schools might very well be a good example of this.  It's not something you want to change your supplier of every day.  You can buy your newspaper or groceries from a different person every time, but you will want some stability for your children's education.  So you may want to agree to participate in setting policy and direction in your chosen school alongside teachers and managers.  

Second, a co-operative business or a social enterprise is not a "not-for-profit".  I know that people have qualms about things they perceive as public services being delivered by organisations that aim to make a "profit", but it is simple fact that you cannot run a business without aiming to make a "profit" - to aim for "break even" is to fail.  What matters is what you do with that profit, perhaps.  And sure, in a shareholder owned limited company, the whole purpose of the business is to make financial gain for its investors.  But the same could be true of a co-operative.  There is nothing that prevents a co-operative business distributing its surplus to its owners.  In the case of the ubiquitous Co-operative Group retail businesses this usually involves sending us members discounts off our future purchases, but there's no reason why it should not be a cash dividend if that is what the co-operative membership decided.

But there are lots of other things that could be done with "profits" - there could be a policy to help finance other co-operatives start up, or local community activities or charities, or to reinvest everything into the profit generating organisation itself.  The really key thing about a co-operative is that it is owned by the members who join it because they benefit from the goods or services it delivers, as opposed to it merely being a financial investment where shareholders may have little interest or intention, or even ability, to use what their limited company produces.

And so, finally, to the various noises being made by political parties about "embracing mutualism", "encouraging co-operatives" and so on.  Of course, as someone who does not believe the state has legitimate roles in delivering what they call public services in any case, I also do not believe it has the right to control who delivers them, or to whom to devolve responsibility for some of them to.  The most state-collectivist activists would not accept a co-operative as a compromise in any case.  They would say that it is wrong in principle to incorporate what is currently delivered by a unique sort of an organisation - public custodians elected by everyone - because it creates an organisational form that is itself vulnerable to take-over.  Even if you establish your public service delivery co-operative as, to start with, a business whose rules say they must reinvest surpluses and so on, they will point to the demulualisation of our former mutual financial services sector as an example of where member/owners can be tempted out by big money and big business.

But more importantly, as in my first point above, co-operatives are about voluntarism and grass roots action by people who want to work together to secure some kind of a benefit more difficult or less satisfying to achieve on their own.  They are not, and should not, be agents of state policy, of top down devolution of something in which the state will then, inevitably, want to retain a significant amount of control.  

It has been incessant growth of state action in the spheres in which very many people were already making their own voluntary arrangements that has extinguished much of the thriving co-operative and mutual self-organised culture that previously flourished.  When Lloyd-George promoted unemployment insurance for example, he quoted in his budget that 90% of the people likely to benefit from the proposed state system were already covered through friendly societies and so on - so his state action was to replace all of this voluntary co-operation in order to fund a statist way of ensuring the other 10% had cover.

Whenever I was asked, such as in those "go round the table and introduce yourselves" moments, as a director or chair of Oxfordshire Social Enterprise Forum, or as a director of Social Enterprise South East, I would make the point that I was not a promoter of social enterprise for delivering on government commitments, but as promoting self-organised social market alternatives to government action.  And I hope other would be co-operators and social entrepreneurs will sup with a long spoon when the man from the government comes along offering them the chance to "run their own public services".

Over at Lib Dem Voice Stephen Tall has a short piece on Our Glorious Leader's increasing positioning the Lib Dems as the party of "fairness" in the run up to the General Election.  He concludes that:

Nick’s stated aim – as detailed in his The Liberal Moment pamphlet last autumn – is for the party to replace Labour as the major opposition to the Tories. In which case it makes good, strategic sense to pitch the Lib Dems’ tent squarely on the territory – fairness – traditionally associated with Labour.

Perhaps the reason it has been associated with Labour is that it is possibly the most vacuous, subjective, politically hijacked notion one can think of.  Just what on earth is "fairness"?  It is a licence for politicians to make subjective judgments about which constituency to pour favours into at any one time.

Is it in the remotest sense "fair" for a bare majority to decide what is fair and then impose it on a substantial minority (that's if you can even assume that in any sense a majority has ever agreed with the winning party's notion of what's fair)?

Let's face it, democracy itself is not fair, enabling as it does the 51% to push around the 49% for a while till the positions are reversed next time around, or whenever.  Not for nothing has it been described as two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

Throughout human history, the story of the state is one that has at all times been "more fair" to one group than to another - that is, indeed, how those that rely on plebiscites to get into power actually win.  And in fact the only way one group or another can be exploited is if there is an entity with some kind of constitutional mandate to enforce the will of some on the many in support of the would-be exploiter: in other words, a state.  As Kevin Carson writes, the difference between (actually existing, exploitative...) capitalism and the free (and fair) market is state intervention.

But perhaps most importantly, the biggest issue I have with what Stephen writes above, is that it does not, in any way, follow that in order to realise some ambition to "replace Labour as the major opposition to the Tories" we need to camp on hitherto Labour territory.  Not at all.  In fact I do not want to be associated in the slightest with those who thought that the lying, authoritarian, interventionist, profligate, thieving, warmongering, scum bags who have "run" this country (as in "into the ground") for a decade were even on the right camp site.  Not for a minute.

If we cannot find a way of putting across that freedom is first and foremost about fairness, that the latter follows the former, then we are lost, and, frankly, an embarrassment to the name and the history of the liberal movement.  So please, if there is to be "change" this year, let it be the sort of change that can explain freedom, promote freedom.  Fairness will follow if that is done properly.

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There is ... an impression that if actual recessions [as in "state power receding" not economic recessions. Ed.] do not come about by themselves, they may be brought about by the expedient of voting one party out and another one in. This idea rests upon certain assumptions that experience has shown to be unsound; the first one being that the power of the ballot is what republican political theory makes it out to be, and that therefore the electorate has an effective choice in the matter. It is a matter of open and notorious fact that nothing like this is true. Our nominally republican system is actually built on an imperial model, with our professional politicians standing in the place of the praetorian guards; they meet from time to time, decide what can be “got away with,” and how, and who is to do it; and the electorate votes according to their prescriptions. Under these conditions it is easy to provide the appearance of any desired concession of State power, without the reality; our history shows innumerable instances of very easy dealing with problems in practical politics much more difficult than that. One may remark that in this connexion also the notoriously baseless assumption that party-designations connote principles, and that party-pledges imply performance. Moreover, underlying these assumptions and all others that faith in “political action” contemplates, is the assumption that the interests of the State and the interests of society are, at least theoretically, identical; whereas in theory they are directly opposed, and this opposition invariably declares itself in practice to the precise extent that circumstances permit. However, without pursuing these matters further at the moment, it is probably enough to observe here that in the nature of things the exercise of personal government, the control of a huge and growing bureaucracy, and the management of an enormous mass of subsidized voting-power, are as agreeable to one stripe of politician as they are to another. Presumably they interest a Republican or a Progressive as much as they do a Democrat, Communist, Farmer- Labourite, Socialist, or whatever a politician may, for electioneering purposes, see fit to call himself. This was demonstrated in the local campaigns of 1934 by the practical attitude of politicians who represented nominal opposition parties. It is now being further demonstrated by the derisible haste that the leaders of the official opposition are making towards what they call “reorganization” of their party. One may well be inattentive to their words; their actions, however, mean simply that the recent accretions of State power are here to stay, and that they are aware of it; and that, such being the case, they are preparing to dispose themselves most advantageously in a contest for their control and management. This is all that “reorganization” of the Republican party means, and all it is meant to mean; and this is in itself quite enough to show that any expectation of an essential change of regime through a change of party-administration is illusory. On the contrary, it is clear that whatever party-competition we shall see hereafter will be on the same terms as heretofore. It will be a competition for control and management, and it would naturally issue in still closer centralization, still further extension of the bureaucratic principle, and still larger concessions to subsidized voting-power. This course would be strictly historical, and is furthermore to be expected as lying in the nature of things, as it so obviously does.

...twas always thus.

Nice one on the BBC page at the moment with the caption under what ought to be a picture of the winning Tory candidate Chloe Smith saying that she will become the "youngest Labour MP":

Does anyone know whether there is precedent for changing Chancellor of the Exchequer between the budget and the Finance Bill passing all its parliamentary stages? This year's hasn't made it through the legislature yet has it?

While we're all having fun over MPs' expenses (by the way, sack the lot I say, and don't replace them - turn the building into a nice hotel and destroy the state apparatus as much as possible) space a thought for poor old Oxfordshire County Councillor Olive Steadman.

While these MPs get away with excuses like "it was a paperwok error" and so on, and whilst it's not that we actually believe them when they say it but there doesn't actually seem to be terribly much movement on taking criminal action, Ms Steadman, a truly batty seventy-something lady whom anyone in the world who knows her would believe that she makes regular paperwork errors, was immediately suspended from the Labour party, dragged through the courts, convicted and fined for having claimed some pension enhancement while she was receiving councillorrs' allowances.

Her excuse, too, was that she had not understood the entitlement and the forms (to be fair not a terribly rare ocurrance with the 347 page forms they make people fill in I imagine) and had since paid it all back or made arrangements to do so.

But no mercy was shown.  She had the whole book of forms thrown at her.  The same needs to be done where possible to the Westmonster troughers, every one of them!  We need them even less than the county councillors I suggest.  Less perhaps even than a hole in the head.

Labour MP Denis McShane has quite an extraordinary article on Comment is Free today, reflecting on the Guardian's hypocritical "tax gap" campaign. He moans that:

We may denounce bank accounts in the Alps or Caribbean but who is willing to reveal the details of their own accounts? Journalists beat up on MPs and their expenses, but the BBC will not even reveal what it pays its top broadcasters from the public purse, and the thought of disclosing payments that newspapers make to sources and in expenses would have every editor reaching to abolish the Freedom of Information Act.

No Denis, you just don't get it do you? Those of us who want the use of our tax money to be transparent and accountable don't really care whether it's the BBC or you MPs - we'd like it all to be accounted for. BBC Journalists may not like that, but to be honest they are not leading the campaign. But he goes on to suggest that because we want them to account for our money they spend on themselves we all need to adopt a more transparent approach and be open about how much we have ourselves:

We need a new approach to money to make it a de-sanctified commodity, the ownership of which should be in the public domain, much as we know who owns land or shares. It took centuries after the Domesday Book to make it law to reveal the ownership of land. Market democracy requires transparency about who owns shares. Yet the ownership of money is enclosed in secrecy. Our sexuality, faiths, passions, illnesses, relationships, ownership of homes and cars have lost the aura of secrecy in which they were once shrouded.

But we still expect our ownership of money to be kept secret by banks. Until we have a new philosophy of openness about money we should not be surprised if the great lengths to which people go to hide their money - even from family and friends - is not reproduced by firms. Transforming our thinking about money will require philosophers to make the case more than MPs to propose laws. And we have not even started. Money secrecy remains the last taboo. [From Denis MacShane: Lift the lid on the secrecy of money ownership | Comment is free | The Guardian]

Too bloody right we have a right to keep our wealth private. The big difference is that what we have is ourmoney, or what is left of it when you've taken your share. We take care over where we spend what's left, most of us, and all we want is for you to show you are careful about what you spend the rest of our money on. It's all our money. Government doesn't just magically produce money for you to spend on your homes and travel and so on, it takes it from us.

Only a generation ago each schedule on someone's tax return would be evaluated for its tax by a different tax inspector, so that no one inspector would have a complete picture of anyone's overall worth. Now you want us, what, to emblazon our bank balance across our foreheads for you and everyone else to see?

You forget that money is not itself wealth. It is just the tokens with which we buy real wealth - the things we value. You already have so many ways of poking into our actual wealth as you have enumerated - land, shares and so on. But these are not made public for the benefit of others. They are public because they are conditional property - claims that we have to assert in law. And in cases like shares, interests that have to be disclosed in the cause of market transparency.

But if I spend all of my spare cash (not that I have any sadly) on vintage cars, wines, art, jewelry, or whatever, and keep them to myself for my own enjoyment, you'll never find them. Nor have you the right to find them or expose them. So why should you have the right to know how many of our tokens remain unspent in our accounts? You people are just tinkering around the issues here, probably just trying to obfuscate the trail that leads to your trough. This melt down, and the internationalization of money flows and places to keep it are a fact of modern life. I have long said that this could be a great liberalization, or a journey towards totalitarianism. Your idea of us being expected to show you our money all the time is part of the latter journey, which exists solely in order to maintain the power you think you have.

Too right it's the last taboo. But being taboo does not make something bad!

...and is not "liberal" either.

There are often attempts by ministers (Jacqui Smith is mentioned in Sunday's Independent for example about the recent prisoner data loss) to shirk their responsibility for government cock-ups. There are also left wing commentators who crow that these incidents are clear proof that "neo-liberal" policies of "privatising" government functions are evil and should be stopped; that the "free market" does not work in the public sphere.

But I don't consider such contracting out of work as either liberal nor as implying that ministers are no longer responsible for their incompetence. Nor, even, are they truly "privatisation". To me the doctrine that says some things are better done by profit motivated companies (or other, non-government organizations) does not mean merely sub-contracting to a government service level agreement.

Yes, such arrangements may save on costs or similar. But all they are doing is delivering the same policies and procedures designed by government. This is the "corporatisation" of government. It is inherently protectionist - the government grants usually monopolistic contracts to firms, sometimes even, like Capita, that started life as a bunch of civil servants deciding they could do better for themselves by making a profit out of what they do.

No, real privatisation, so called "liberalisation" of government functions, should mean the state divesting themselves completely from interference in that policy area. For example, just because DVLA contracts out its computer systems and administration does not mean the registration and licensing of vehicles and drivers has been "privatised". Not bothering with a DVLA at all and allowing insurance companies to work out ways of ensuring the drivers and vehicles they are prepared to insure comply with what they consider to be safe would be. i.e. a different way of working, free from government entirely, and open to proper competition where new ideas and ways of achieving similar ends can be developed. Finding new structures, free from the dead hand of government to do the things we need, rather than what politicians think we ought to need.

Similarly with ID cards or passports - it is not "privatising" simply to contract out the development and implementation of a government policy to profit making firms. Indeed, this is anathema to true economic liberals - for it is corporate welfare, money for old rope if you like. My idea from yesterday about getting rid of government validated passports entirely and instead letting people buy their own guarantee of identity if and when they need one using a new mechanism such as digital certificates would be liberal; the true privatisation of functions the state previously chose to regulate and deliver itself.

And of course, such liberalisation may not end up being delivered by "for-profit" corporations at all.

So Jacqui, stop trying to hide from your responsibilities. You have cocked up just as surely as if the person with the memory stick were your permanent secretary. You are incompetent. Indeed doubly so - for not only have you failed to do your job, but you've even failed to make sure the simpler option - getting someone else to do it for you is done properly.  You should go.

Area planning decisions to be recentralized? Area committees disbanded? Is this Labour in Oxford's response to near universal calls, in political terms (not least from their own Communities Department), for greater devolution and localism in our government structures?

They're pretty much already committed to the Stalinist recentralization of all planning decisions, slightly modified now to have two wider area based development control soviets as well as a supreme soviet committee in case even these two go against the Politburo's diktat or predilections. All because Labour councillors seemingly cannot work out how they could possibly "lobby" for their constituents wishes on some applications whilst helping decide on neighbouring wards' local applications.

I prefer the Danish system I believe it is, where areas more or less the size of streets have small committees purely dedicated to development control.

But in the absence of that a much more open system of area committee planning hearings would be a step forward rather than Labour's regressive centralizing power grab. Colleagues in other authorities received different legal advice to Oxford's and hold open discussion at their area committees where parish council members usually attend en masse and they claim get better decisions, more local acceptance of decisions and an all round feeling of compromise giving the better solutions for all. The rationale is that it doesn't matter how much time objectors and applicants spend at any individual stage of the process as the applicant in particular can have all the time they like to argue their case at appeal - that it's the entire process from start to finish that has to be fair to both sides.

Despite an initial increase in time spent in planning as everyone wanted to have their say, in practice, area planning meetings are now quite sophisticated - nobody feels the need to fill five minutes because can because they know anyone else could raise questions and so few are repeated. Good chairing of course helps, something also sadly lacking in Oxford City Council in my experience.

But centralizing planning is one thing, now there are rumours that Labour wants to disband area committees entirely. I hope one of them is reading this and will assure me this is not the case, or that something better will be put in their place. I have long argued that Oxford should reparish the city, shrink the city council effectively to an executive committee and have much more local control through parish or town councils. It's really not that long ago (in its history of over a thousand years) that Headington was administered by the Headington Urban District Council for example. Parish and Town Councils can actually have quite a lot of power - indeed more or less anything a higher level authority wishes to delegate to them.

I was at Thame Town Council a few months ago doing a presentation on Community Land Trusts, and I got the great feeling that this body was one that was prepared to fight its community's corner against the district level council when it mattered. Much moreso than where the committee is really a "branch meeting" of that district and collective responsibility trumps representing your constituents. In other parts of the county parishes precept as much as the district in council tax. Even in the few parts of Oxford where there are parishes it's more like 10% of the district level rate. Headington - or rather the current North East Area Committee area - is half as big again as Thame; easily able to support a stronger more local decision making body if the City Council took its claws out by at least as much!

But again, if the nirvana of local parish councils is not available to them for some reason, there are ways in which area committees can be given real power. Again, colleagues elsewhere only appoint a handful of central portfolio holders on their executive board, and then appoint one member of each area committee as ex officio executive members. Bound by collective responsibility each area committee executive representative can take a decision on a local issue, but which would normally fall under the competence of the executive board, there and then at the area committee meeting, advised by the open discussion amongst councillors and interested public at the area committee. Further, when they are at the executive committee, these area representatives can carry a majority, so if they are mandated by their areas in respect of a proposal by one of the core portfolio holders, they can overrule the core portfolio holders; effectively giving real positive control to those local community meetings collectively.

So, Oxford Labour, I'm sure there's more than just me out there, even if we do not often attend your City Council branch committee meetings, who appreciate the fact that they exist for us if we want to have our say on something, who will be very disappointed if you dismantle this structure and, Jack Straw like, leave it half reformed and more centralized.

Who wants to join a campaign to parish Oxford city then?

No doubt there'll be lots of Labour MPs muttering something about "none of my constituents lobbied me over 42 days" so I set about today just to write a quick note to my NuLabour MP Andrew Smith to ensure that he cannot in all honesty say that:

Jock Coats
OXFORD
OX3

Email: jock_nospam@jockcoats.org.uk

Tuesday 10 June 2008

Dear Andrew,

Whilst I expect it will actually make precious little difference -
shoring up a failing Labour leadership is more important than long
fought for civil liberties after all - but in case you currently find
yourself in the unlikely position of being able to say that nobody has
lobbied you to vote against the 42 day detention limit, let me rectify
that!

Despite polling claims that "65% of the population favours" the 42 day
limit, for myself, I do not know of a single person amongst my friends
in your constitutency that do agree with it. All regard it as an
unacceptable trampling over our ancient rights of habeas corpus and of
the very principle of innocent until proven guilty.

If I were being asked or told to vote in favour I would be examining
closely why people like the former Attorney General appears to be
against it. Wht British police require four times as long as other
countries' counterparts even before the extension to do similar work
(computers cannot be easier to crack just because they are in Italy
which maintains a 2 day charge or release regime).

Every change this government has imposed in the name of fighting
terrorism has been an erosion of existing liberties and protections.
Your job is to examine whether each proposal respects the balance
between liberties and the threat it is trying to counter-act. I
believe this one tips the balance and even if twenty eight days was
acceptable (it wasn't) extending it further requires extraordinary
justification that have not so far been forthcoming. Please vote
against 42 day detention, whatever "safeguards" you are offered by way
of "concessions".

Yours sincerely,

Jock Coats