Labour's Crisis Over Anti-Semitism

Anti-semitism is not anti-Judaism. I am no expert, but I believe that the semitic language was used by Jews and Arabs. However, most people use the term to mean anti-Judaism. Contests over the meaning of language become political conflicts when people invest emotions in a narrative. Rather than being able to decide on the validity of a narrative based on its congruence to external events, its internal logic, or the authenticity of its author, the validity becomes decided upon which opponent can raise the greatest emotional force to back their argument, e.g. which opponent has 'God on their side'.

Ken Livingstone has said that it is a historical fact that when Hitler came to power in 1932 he wanted to relocate Germany's Jews to Israel. Is that true? I don't know. However, by his own logic Naz Shah was therefore on decidedly dodgy territory suggesting that the Israeli State should be relocated anywhere. The most charitable position on her comments that the State of Israel should be relocated to America suggest that she was only making the point that the US should stay out of Middle Eastern politics. This sort of statement is typical of the pro-Palestinian, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, left-wing militants that Jeremy Corbyn has been assumed to be attracting into the Labour Party: Hence its political interest and its potential for division within the party.

As I understand it the pro-Israeli lobby would not necessarily have a problem with the US keeping out of Middle Eastern politics. But what they do object to is the political assumption that the US is only involved in Israeli politics, and not Egyptian, Libyian, Syrian, Iraqi, etc. politics; or that Israel is the only country in the Middle East that has a problem with external influence of its internal democratic power structures. That's a fair enough point and an argument that has value in terms of laying a pathway towards peace within the region and away from 'tribal' conflicts. Within this context it is perhaps fairer to say that Ken and Naz's statements were condemnable because they were 'anti-Peace' rather than being 'pro-Nazi'. Portraying them as 'pro-Nazi' could, in itself, also be deemed as inflammatory. Such condemnation could also be construed as attempting to influence the internal democratic power structures of the UK Labour Party. It is probably no coincidence that Tony Blair was the UN's Middle East Peace Envoy from 2007-2015. So perhaps the position he has now vacated has become something of a political battleground within (and outside of?) the Party.

In the end I don't believe anyone seriously believes anyone in the Labour Party is actually intending to try and relocate the Israeli State to down-town USA. But I think plenty of people are trying to relocate the reasons for the current crisis in the Middle East intellectually to some other place in space-time. From my reading of history I can see a clear historical link between the current wars in the Middle East and turn of the century political life in Vienna (involving Hitler, Marx, Freud and the then Mayor of Vienna, apparently); the First and Second World Wars; the subsequent Cold War; and the eventual creation of the European Union. Thus, in this context the current 'crisis' is actually just another aftershock of the 'Arab Spring'. That it should erupt on the streets of London at a time when the country is trying to decide its role in Europe through the referendum is probably to be expected. But it is not a conflict that is restricted to the Labour Party. The Labour Party has been debating these problems for years; it has been a significant part of many difficult peace processes, in many different regions in the world, for many years. That it has the honesty to face these challenges is to be commended. In the end, "jaw-jaw is better than war-war" as Winston Churchill, one of the founding fathers of the European Union once said.  

           

Election 2015

No-one could have predicted last nights results and fewer people will be able to predict the future after it. I was hearing a lot of people undecided and unsure how they were going to vote; there was a promise of much tactical voting; the number of parties involved meant that the normal pendulum and predictions based on swing were basically redundant; and this election attracted a large number of people voting who had never voted before even though the turnout was down on previous years. So, with the benefit of hindsight, nobody could have predicted the result, at least statistically speaking.

A post hoc analysis is needed now the fog of war that clouded the respective campaigns has cleared. Simply put, it seems to me: the SNP wiped out Labour in Scotland; the Tories wiped out the Lib Dems in the South; and the two main parties made very little ground on each other, apart from the odd marginal. I doubt any previous UK election could have provided a template for that outcome. And of course there has been one unknown now becoming known, that UKIP have managed to steal the working class nationalist vote from all their rivals, including the BNP. Although it looks like they may have also soaked up the LibDem vote in some places, espcecially Essex.

The government will have to listen to the voice of the electorate and answer some major constitutional questions. This is probably not before time. Cameron will have to balance the demand for an independent Scotland with the demands to have the entire UK withdraw from the European Union. The monopoly of the NHS in the UK healthcare market depends on that referendum. The UK will have to look again at the fairness of its polarising first-past-the-post system against the more multi-party EU style of proportional representation. And the English Parliament issue is unlikely to go away.

As for Labour, I think the less tears spilt over Scotland the better. We need to shine a light on the unholy alliance between the energy industry, military equipment, and financial services that has propped up the Tories for the last two hundred years; appeal to the working and business classes in the northern metropolitan areas with a nessage of hope and multicultural values; develop a narrative linking overseas aid with sponsorship in the scientific and techinical industries; and attract the disenfranchised Lib Dem voters in the South during the next local government elections.

We have not been defeated but we have been contained. We must use this result as a mandate for change and progress.

One Nation Labour: One Europe? (Basildon 2014)

I was pounding the pavements all day yesterday in Basildon (South East Pitsea Ward) and attended the count at the local Towngate Theatre for the early results. As the first successes of UKIP were announced across the tinny tannoy the room froze. We were aware of the other results in Essex; the sheer size of the UKIP votes stunned and shocked us in equal measure. Suddenly there was an awareness that politics in Britain had changed: huddles of panicked whispering began to discuss the new brand of fascism that had just come of age in Britain!

Is this an over-reaction? Not really. If fascism is defined as a political movement that: appeals to the emotions rather than the intellect; defines itself according to idealised romantic images of national identity; and feeds on the absence of truth and vacuums in power, then UKIP is as much a fascist party as Berlusconi's Forza Italia. Forza Italia held power in Italy over the last couple of decades.

Why are UKIP so successful? It is probably an over-exagerration to describe UKIP as a 'political force' in Britain. So far they have made useful progress in terms of representing the protest vote - but this is a fairly flimsy foundation upon which to build a career. The reality is that protest is (and always has been) a political force in Britain. Protest has mutated through various forms of extremism in the past. But no other party is making politcal capital out of our need to protest today. The protest vote is a curious animal. In theory it is all about cultural and economic anxiety and a collective surge towards a unifying identity in the face of a variety of (real or perceived) threats to our (national?) security.

How can the UKIP threat be challenged? Inside the hall last night it began to occur to me that Labour is weak on narrative. By narrative I mean the one thing people would say is the main reason they are voting for any political party. And a narrative that is situated: in this case on the door-step not the TV/Radio studio. The UKIP narrative is about Immigration and/or Europe. The Conservative narrative is about Capitalism. The LibDem narrative has virtually collpased now but was about Localism. The Labour narrative set out to be 'One Nation-ism'....but tell me now, how much more have we learnt about what this means?

What is the Labour narrative? Milliband needs to revisit the 'One Nation' agenda in response to the strong support for UKIP on Immigration and the Conservatives on Capitalism. If 'One Nation' means more Equality, then that can be interpretted as more equality for Britain among our European allies, a more equal balance between immigration and emigration within the borders of Europe, and more equal access to the profits of capitalism across the UK. Equality also means a rainbow alliance that has now become part of our national identity - if changes to the constitution of the monarchy and the Church of England are to be believed.

So the voice of Basildon, Essex and the UK has spoken: now the leaders of the country must listen. Milliband is a new type of inoffensive politician who appeals to young voters, has a clean media image and is fairly user freindly. But he is not good at the cloak and dagger, violently aggressive, coup de'tat type of politican that the older generation respect and admire. Rather than question the Labour leadership it is time for the leader to step up to the challenge. Milliband must now organise a re-shuffle to clearly define the 'One Nation' image for the party and the country; create a policy narrative around the central idea of Equality; and lead the party to success at the next general election.  

News From Nowhere

I am meeting a number of people who are complaining of common themes: socio-economic stressors putting pressure on peoples’ socio-emotional relationships that expose deeper conflicts in their socio-cultural and psycho-sexual identities. This is a picture of mental health that looks at the spread of illness through bio-psycho-socio-economic fissures buried deep below the surface of the structural relations of capitalism; this makes it a public health problem and an anthropological phenomenon that can best be studied using an epidemiologic methodology. However, this bizarre triangulation of scientific evidence-bases is not something that services are currently equipped to monitor let alone analyse.  

As central government’s austerity agenda begins to cascade down through local communities, a tsunami of economic stressors is swelling up and threatening to drown us all in a nightmare of gigantic proportions. The only thing now that is standing between us, our local health and social care services and complete psychological Armageddon is the resilience of our individual interpersonal relationships. In a post-modern, virtual-reality, multi-cultural, local/global community that is exposed to the daily fluctuations of almost every market, the fragmentations of the psyche are never far from the surface of our social-emotional and economic relationships.         

Guerrilla Rhetoric

1. Discourse is information that has been communicated.
2. Discourse is not the narrative but it is the material manifestation of the narrative.
3. Discourse is the collection of artefacts and material products produced by the intellectual and emotional labour of the communicators.
4. Discourse has dialectic properties: it is both the manifestation of the social consensus and the conflict within/between linguistic cultures - without a conflict in positions the need for communication does not arise.
5. Social conflicts within a broader consensus create internal contradictions that are recognised and exploited or buried within/concealed by the Master Narrative.
6. Internal contradictions can be located as logical anomalies within a discourse; but they are often hidden beneath habitual assumptions.
7. Internal contradictions within a social, political, clinical, educational, economic or historical discourse violates the perfect consensus:
8. Internal contradictions within a social, political, clinical, educational, economic or historical discourse violates the truth of, and trust in, the narrative.
9. Internal contradictions within a social, political, clinical, educational, economic or historical discourse create psycho-pathogenic ‘double-binds’ (RD Laing).
10. Internal contradictions cause fault lines within the consensus that can become exposed when the consensus/linguistic culture comes under stress.

1. Narrative is the sequencing of otherwise unrelated events; our brains do this automatically, the results are not always logical, as in dream sleep.
2. Autobiographical Narrative is the construction, integration and normalisation of emotional material/events in the construction of a Self-Identity
3. The more internally logically coherent and the more congruent it is with external events, the more valid the Autobiographical Narrative becomes.
4. The more valid an Autobiographical Narrative is the more able it is to minimise the damaging/destabilising effect of behavioural impulses and their cognitive associations in response to the environment through the prediction of otherwise unexpected events.
5. The more valid an Autobiographical Narrative is the more quickly the information from/ about the environment will be processed.
6. Autobiographical Narrative links the biological, psychological and sociological spheres; but the lexicon changes between each of these logical levels and between the different scientific/ linguistic cultures.
7. Autobiographical Narrative is grown organically from the memories embedded within neurons and their structural (material) relationships with the means of production.
8. The Autobiographical Narrative may be logically consistent or inconsistent with the Master Narrative at different points in its account of the organism's history.
9. The Master Narrative is the most efficient and effective Narrative according to the greatest number of Authors (e.g. Adam Smith, Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins) as determined by a process of natural selection (Charles Darwin).
10. The Master Narrative, like the American Monomyth, generalises over populations and geo-political spaces, this results in what we call 'culture'.
11. All Narratives necessarily contain generalisations (viz. heuristic expectations) like 'the Hero will always overcome the obstacle'; these generalisations are worked out within an infinite number of sub-narratives, or sub-plots.
12. Guerrilla Rhetoric attacks the Master Narrative by identifying specific sub-plots that contradict the conclusions of the Master Narrative, specific examples that defeat the logic of the generalisation.
    

Currency of Self: A Theory of Human Capital

Harmony Squared: A Response to Prince Charles