Five assumptions of the Left

People make assumptions all the time, not least about what lefties believe. How many times, for example, have you felt like an argument boils down to “so, you’re left-wing, so you must think X”?

But what assumptions about left-wing people are appropriate? As well as being critical of the wider problems in society, we need to turn our examination inwards and look at ourselves. This is how we build a robust movement. To that end, I have drawn up a list of five basic assumptions I feel it is necessary to make to be on the left. It is not exhaustive, but I do think that if you feel any of these points are invalid, then you are probably not leftwing. In my opinion, they represent core underpinning beliefs.

1. Privilege exists

Or - that the world is unfair. It is important to acknowledge that everyone is given different advantages or disadvantages in life purely based on the circumstances of their birth.

This isn’t to say hard work shouldn’t be valued – it is an unfair accusation that the left favour dependency or handouts. It is to say, though, that if you are born into a well off family you are more likely end up wealthy yourself. Being successful in life (i.e. having lots of money) is not automatically a function of how hard you work, but is determined by how fortunate you are in your birth.

Accepting privilege is an essential leftwing belief. It runs under everything else and is connected to all the other points on this list. It also connected to the idea of questioning authority and what privileges brought someone into a position of authority. Being a woman, from an ethnic minority, gay disabled, or a whole host of other things means you must work harder to be successful, as well as being more likely to face obvious discrimination and harassment compared to a group society has favored with more power.

The Right claim everyone is given an even footing and that success is a result of hard work. But privilege is the crux of what makes society unequal. Biology should not be destiny. The circumstances of your birth should not determine your lot in life.

2. Rational people can be irrational

Not every decision everyone makes is always clearly thought out and considered. This may be obvious, but it’s also very important. Consider the reverse of this point. To lean to the Right you must believe that everyone is rational all the time: criminals make rational choices to commit crimes; addicts choose to continue their addiction; the poor are responsible for their own poverty. This underpins a lot of right-wing policy: criminals should be harshly punished because they chose a life of crime. That the poor deserve to have their benefits cut because they chose not to get a job.

To lean the left is to say that some things are beyond your control and that society should step in and help out in these circumstances. Not just to correct privilege, but because people make irrational decisions and need help to get them out of the situation they have found themselves in. To be left wing is argue against the sentiment ‘you made your decision and now you must pay for it’.

3. Inequality is a bad thing

Having an uneven distribution of wealth and power does not create incentives for those at the bottom of the pile to better themselves but instead creates social strife which in the long run makes us all worse off. This is linked to questioning the fact that those at the top of pile did not get there through their own hard work but through unfair advantages. Why else, for example, are there so many people from rich, privately educated backgrounds in the Cabinet – pure coincidence? Inequality in wealth and power is a symptom of the sickness of privilege.

One of the things I find very strange about the right is when they claim that those who have less should work harder to have more, but society clearly throws obstacles in the way of some and not others. This right wing argument boils down to saying that women should work really really hard to be successful and that men just need to work hard to be successful. Claiming that inequality is a good motivator is just silly.

To be on the left is believe that inequality is caused by privilege and not laziness, and that to defend inequality is to defend a society that privileges some over others.

4. Collaboration is preferable to competition

More can be accomplished by working together than in fighting each other. The free market does not lead to the most socially beneficial allocation of resources. Competition favors privilege – this is why the wealth gap has widened so much in the past three decades.

The right argues that free market competition creates incentives for innovation and that, if left to its own natural devices, it will allocate society’s resources to where they are most needed. Those who are left-wing dispute this and claim that the free market allocates more of society’s scarce resources to the most privileged, rather than to where they will do the most good.

To be on the left is to argue that by working together, through government, collectives or other means, we can achieve a more socially beneficial resources allocation that overcomes privilege. That together we are stronger and that competition divides us.

5. One size does not fit all

Also know as diversity, a phrase much mocked by the right. We are all different, as are our needs. Yet in general society doesn't take this into account, and benefits some over others. This is essence of privilege.

The right argues for a universalist approach. But measuring everyone by the same standard in a clearly unequal society does not work. In contrast, diversity also means accepting that there are valid lifestyles different to yours. It can be hard to accept that others value things differently, some value family more than others, for example. Some value their peers more than their family. It can be hard to understand people with different lifestyles, but everyone deserves dignity, compassion and respect. It should be accepted that one size doesn’t fit all.

Accepting diversity, and that other people live lives completely differently to your own, is essential to being left wing. It is also important to accept that there is not always a single standard of behavior or proper way to do things.

I wanted to show how these problems are interlinked through the idea of privilege, in other words that the circumstances of your birth determine a lot about your life and that society is deeply unfair. Ideas that are essential to how we see the world – and the problems we want to fix.

It is important to always question our own ideas, our own assumptions, and our own privilege. This contributes to both a stronger ideology and a broader movement.

The politics of Iain Banks novels

On Wednesday the 3^rd of April, best-selling Scottish author Iain Banks announced that he was dying of cancer and that his next novel, The Quarry, will be his last. In light of the news, many fans must be looking back over his oeuvre, considering what conclusions can be drawn while he is still alive.

Iain Banks was famously described as “two of Scotland's best authors” because he writes both science fiction and literary fiction (the former as Iain M. Banks). Despite the different genres, the same broad political and social themes come up in all his novels and a lot of common ground can be found.

Iain Banks is amongst the most popular writers of today who is clearly left wing. He is outspoken on subjects as varied as Scottish independence and Israel’s military intervention in Gaza. Politics infiltrate his novels to varying degrees, but it is ever-present in the themes, characters and settings he explores. One recurring theme is the idea that political opinions are a manifestation of peoples’ deepest values, such as in The Steep Approach to Garbadale. The difference between left and right wing people, according to main character Alban Wopuld, all comes “down to imagination. Conservative people don’t have very much so they find it hard to imagine what life is like for people who aren’t just like them... empathy and imagination are almost the same thing, and it’s why artists, creative people, are almost all liberals, left leaning.”

Allegory is often used to convey these ideas. 1986’s The Bridge presents a strange coma-world which symbolises the crumbling of Britain’s post-war consensus and the onset of Thatcherism. The part of the Iron Lady herself is filled uncompromisingly by a sadistic Field Marshall, who indulges his pigs with luxury accommodation on his captured train whilst enjoying such activities as forcing tethered prisoners to run to exhaustion in front of the slowly driven locomotive. But it is, perhaps, the puzzling allegory of his Culture series which pose the most interesting political questions.

These novels mainly explore the question of “how perfect is the Culture?” Is this anarchistic, socialist, post-scarcity collective really a utopia? It caters for every possible human need and removes the need for sickness, death, money, want and intolerance. No one works as society is administer but hyper intelligent computers known as Minds for the benefit of humanity. Who would not want to live in the Culture where literally anything is possible? The subtle question asked by most of the Culture novels is: “is the Culture so perfect that they feel the need to meddle in the affairs of the less perfect?” Banks’s reaction to real-world military interventions perhaps suggests an answer: on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he returned his torn-up passport to 10 Downing Street in protest (after abandoning his original idea of “crashing my Land Rover through the gates of Fife dockyard, after spotting the guys armed with machine guns”).

Many of the early books provide simple comparisons between the Culture and other civilisations. In Consider Phlebas, the Culture is at war with the Idirans who seek to aggressively conquer other species because they believe themselves to be superior. In The Player of Games, the Culture encounters the Azad who have a suppressive hierarchical society, repressive gender politics and the material problems of scarcity. Compared to these societies, the Culture appears utopian and the reader feels that they are justified in intervening to improve the lot of their citizens. Similarly, in Excession the Culture face the Affront, who are so disgustingly violent towards every other living creature that the reader has sympathy for the Culture in declaring all-out war against such an insult to sentience.

However in later books, perhaps as a reaction to the cultural imperialism of neo-con foreign policy such as the Iraq war, the Culture's well-meaning interference has disastrous consequences. In Look To Windward, the Culture unbalances the fiercely cast-based Chelgrian society in an attempt to make it more egalitarian. This results in a bloody civil war for which many Chelgrians feel the Culture is responsible. The Culture's belief in their own perfection and how to better others ultimately leads to more death than the Idirans or the Affront could create deliberately.

Whereas the Culture novels show us how great the future could be, Banks’s non-Culture novels show us how awful the future could be. In Against A Dark Background, the Huhsz cult is allowed to hunt and kill people in order for their messiah to be born. In The Algebraist the future is divided between the overbearing Mercatoria and the sadistic Starveling Cult. In these nightmarish vision of the future, technology is turned against humanity to repress and cause suffering. Banks has scorn reserved for our own world too, from the cruelty of Thatcher’s Britain in The Bridge to money-grubbing US businesses in The Steep Approach to Garbadale.

In his Culture set novella The State of the Art, Banks turns his lenses directly to Earth as we know it. Set in the 1970s, it deals with the Culture's first contact with humans. The Culture citizens, with their perfect existence, are horrified by how cruel life on Earth is. However, one Culture citizen decides to stay on Earth, smitten by the concept of Christianity (reaching the opposite conclusion, co-incidentally, to The Crow Road’s Prentice McHoan, who eventually finds happiness by rejecting religion). Banks explores the idea of whether happiness is truly possible without experiencing suffering, and thus can anyone in Culture be happy? He poses the idea that the Culture's meddling in the affairs of others may just be a means to justify its own existence.

At its best, sci-fi tells us something about our own world – as Banks once said, “no-body who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history.” The Culture is more than just an aspiration of what lefties believe that a future society could be like, free from binding social roles, repressive leadership hierarchies and scarcity of resources. It is also an allegory for how westerners feel enlightened compared to poorer nations, and our need to meddle in their affairs – much as the West has done over the course of Banks’s career. We want to live in the Culture as much as we realise that we would rather live under western liberal democracy than under most other governments on Earth. The Culture reminds of the need to be critical of ourselves to see what effect we have on other societies.

Margret Thatcher an obituary

An octogenarian head of state has passed away, a former leader of a major economy who has divided opinion the world over, loved and hated, who instigated sweeping reforms and polarised a nation. Judging from recent headlines most people would expect the above to have been written about Nelson Mandela but in fact it was announced today that Margaret Thatcher has died of a stroke aged 87.

Divisive is the polite word the left leaning press and bloggers will use to describe Thatcher in an attempt to not speak ill of the dead. She was a leader who divided public opinion every step of the way. In recent years her request to have a state funeral became another contentious issue as the nation was once again divided over their opinion of Margaret Thatcher*. Throughout her life she sought conflict over consensus and drove deep permanent divides into the national psyche.

Right that’s the polite divisive bit out of the way…

Margaret Thatcher eviscerated this country’s manufacturing industry out of ideological zeal and a religious devotion to the free market. The resulting economy fallout devastated small towns that depended on manufacturing industry or coal mining. Some of these areas took years to recover (Liverpool’s dock yards is a good example) and some will never recover from their slide into urban decay after being forgotten about by successive generations of political leaders.

She passed laws deliberately designed to curtail the political power of her opponents, namely the trade union movement. Today’s trade unions are a shadow of their former selves and lack the influence not only to improve conditions but even to protect the rights workers already have which are bring eroded. In the 1980s she was content with making three million people who were unlikely to vote for her unemployed, something which would have been considered an economic disaster by previous Tory or Labour governments.

Thatcher expounded the idea that we would be better off if we all looked ourselves and the degree to which this idea has been taken on by the population is one of the reason we remain such a deeply divided and unequal society. Her government behaved appallingly to Ireland, attempted to levy taxes which fell disproportionately on the poor and passed laws forbidden teachers from telling students that homosexuality is natural. The swing away from manufacturing and towards financial industries lead and the aggressively corporate culture her policies encouraged lead to the financial crash and the banking crisis.

Thatcher’s greatest accomplishment (apart from becoming a one word political exclamation, an hour she shares with Tony Blair) is how she fundamentally changed British politics. Her emphasis of the free market over the state is now a universally accepted political truth. Thatcher successfully dragged the entire political spectrum to right, at least on economic issues, and her influence has been felt as profoundly on the Labour party as the Tories.

Labour leaders from the 1980s to today have accepted Thatcherite principals to a degree. In his statement following her death, Tony Blair commented that “some of the changes she made in Britain were, in certain respects at least, retained by the 1997 Labour Government” (full statement can be found here). The current Labour leader Ed Miliband summed her legacy up most effectively by writing “she will be remembered as a unique figure. She reshaped the politics of a whole generation” (same source as above). I find it hard to imagine Tory party leaders speaking so highly of recently departed icons of the left. In fact when I think of the death of Labour party leaders from the 1980s and how the right responded I think of this disgusting Daily Mail piece.

Thatcher won three electoral victories and led the country for 12 years. In that time she permanently redefined the political and economic landscape the Great Britain. By the time she was ousted by her own party in November 1990, the trade unions had been diminished, manufacturing industry was one the way out, financial services and tertiary industries were on the rise, nationalised industries were privatised and Nash’s enlightened self-interest was the prevailing view in both the private and public sector. In short the Britain of the early 1990s was entirely changed from that of 1979 and no one person has had such a singular impact on the country as Margaret Thatcher has.

Describing Thatcher as divisive is more than just a polite way to say that she is very unpopular in certain circles (or parts of the country) and that a lot people strongly disagree with her values and policies. Someone’s opinion on Thatcher cuts to the heart of where you stand in British politics. We have seen leftist leaders saying that they disagreed with her but respect who she was, which some would argue reflects how centrist the leftwing establishment has become in the post-Thatcher years. Her biggest champions are the leaders of the economic right; her biggest critics are the darlings of the old left (Ken Livingston described her as clinically insane in an interview with the New Statesmen magazine before 2012 London Mayoral elections).

Personally I feel her views on the merits of self-interest, especially the infamous ‘no such thing as society’ comment, are the most despicable of political opinions. I cannot disagree enough with this view and feel that society has been made a colder, darker and less compassionate place by the ruthless pursuit of money which her polices endorsed. It is because of the values she inspired that it is always acceptable to disregard human well-being when doing business. The worst excesses of private business from the banking crisis to third world sweat shops are legitimised by governments who refuse to involve themselves in market and by individuals who argue for enlightened self-interest. All of which Thatcher was an icon for.

I began by saying Thatcher was divisive, as is anything written about her. Most people’s response to this article will have already been determined before they started reading as their opinion on Thatcher is fixed deep within their political ideology. At the time of her death, we remain a deeply divided nation. Divided by class, region, wealth and how we response to the death of someone who will continue to cast a very long shadow over British politics.

*Contrary to her request she is receiving a ceremonial funeral with military honours, the level below a state funeral)

HS2: On the Right Track?

Fifty years ago, the infamous Beeching Report was published by the government, aimed at dealing with the spiralling losses incurred by British Railways. On Dr. Beeching’s recommendations, over 2,000 stations and around 5,000 miles of line would close down, leaving many towns and regions without any public transport at all. And even after all that, BR still ran at a loss. At the time, coinciding with a huge motorway building programme, it seemed to represent an epochal shift from public to private transport; from rail to road – as inevitable, it appeared, as the shift from canals and stagecoaches to railways one hundred years earlier.

Fast forward five decades, though, and investment in railways is once again on the political and economic agenda. Passenger numbers have increased hugely since the 1990s, and are now at their highest level since the 1920s. Any closures suggested nowadays would be political suicide, for any government. And there is even broad consensus on building a new high speed line, HS2, to connect London and the North. A lot has changed since the Beeching era. Or has it?

To begin with, I was a strong supporter of HS2. In a context of ever deeper cuts and austerity, the HS2 project looked like one decision the government had got right. Aside from improving public transport, it’s an example of using infrastructure investment to prime the pump of the economy – the sort of thing which the Tories are, elsewhere, ideologically opposed to. There is a wide range of opposition to the scheme – not just from the usual nimby brigade, but more concerningly from groups such as Greenpeace and the Campaign for Better Transport. In these quarters, it’s not so much a question of whether rail investment is a good idea or not, but whether the £30bn about to be spent on HS2 could be used better elsewhere on the network. This is the source of my own doubts about the scheme.

For a start, I would argue that ticket prices, not the speed of the trains, is the main change ripped-off passengers would like to see in intercity travel. At its best, public transport can be a great equaliser – whereas HS2 will be of the greatest benefit to a minority of business travellers who can afford to pay for high speed. At 125mph on many parts of the west coast main line, train speeds into the capital are already pretty good. Capacity on existing lines into London could be improved to some extent by laying more passing loops to prevent slower freight trains delaying expresses, and by improving signalling to get more trains onto the line at a time. As far as London goes, the rail scheme Londoners really need isn’t another main line terminus – it’s Crossrail. And then there’s the small matter of the rest of the country. Away from the glitz of the main lines, local services in many areas are still appalling (not to mention overpriced). A Northern Rail train I was on recently reminded me of the BR of my childhood – draughty, grimy, late, and for all the private sector branding everywhere, giving the sincere impression that the operator just didn’t give a damn.

So what could we invest in instead? The association of train operating companies (ATOC) has proposed 14 lines, closed by Beeching, that should be re-opened as a priority. I’d add a few more to the list too. The former line connecting Penrith on the west coast main line with Keswick and Cockermouth in the traffic-clogged Lake District looks like an obvious candidate, as does the Carlisle to Edinburgh Waverley Route, the closure of which left much of the Scottish Borders isolated from the rail network. But reopening these lines doesn’t just benefit the localities in question, it also strengthens the network as a whole with increased versatility. Similarly, several main lines (such as the Western and Midland main lines) are still diesel operated. Electrification does more than improve train speeds and reduce carbon emissions – it also ‘cascades’ down newer diesel trains to replace clapped out rolling stock in non-electrified areas (the hateful, cheap-ass 1980s ‘Pacer’ units favoured by Northern Rail in my part of the country being particularly prime candidates for scrapping). And that’s even before we get to more general improvements such as better station facilities, longer trains on busy routes and more services extending into the evening.

Of course, HS2 won’t be without its benefits – I’d rather have that than nothing – but the money could be used to give a much more evenly spread beneficial impact on the network as a whole. The much vaunted reduction in flights probably wouldn’t happen either – it would have to extend to Scotland, not just Manchester, to achieve that.

As always, the elephant in the room is still the obscenely powerful road lobby (look how much fuss petrol duty causes, for example). It has more than anyone to lose from rail investment. But unlike road building, which only benefits those who can afford to use them, improving public transport benefits everyone, both by reducing carbon emissions from transport and increasing quality of life. Back in the Beeching era, the common complaint was that government shouldn’t subsidise BR, and that it must run at a profit – even though motorway building effectively subsidised haulage firms and car manufacturers.  But it isn’t the idea of HS2 that frightens the road lobby. Trains are already the quickest and most convenient way for most people to travel into London. What actually terrifies them is the idea of a net improvement in public transport across the UK – an efficient, accessible, systematically invested in railway system.