Life should not be conditional

 

According to a large-scale, biennial study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Heriot-Watt University, destitution, defined as not being able to afford essentials such as heating or food, afflicts 2.4 million people in the UK, up 54% from two years before.

This figure includes 550,000 children, an increase of 52%, or an additional 185,000 children.

An indication, you might think, of the terrible toll taken by lockdown and the pandemic in Britain. Except that the study looked at the state of the nation at the end of 2019 – before Covid-19 struck.

By now it’s certainly a lot worse. The Trussell Trust, which operates around 60% of the more than 2,000 food banks in the UK, has reported an 89% increase, compared with 2019, in the number of emergency food parcels it has distributed. At the end of May 2020, the number of new claims for Universal Credit (2.9 million) was almost double the total number of Universal Credit (UC) claimants – 1.5 million – before the pandemic.

The one trend in the opposite direction comes from the £20 week top up to UC introduced in April last year. But the increase doesn’t apply to other benefits (the nearly 2 million disabled people on Employment and Support Allowance don’t get it) and is, as the government has explained, only “temporary” and due to come to an end in April 2021.

Destitution and food banks are becoming normalised in Britain, obscuring the absolutely central role of our ‘welfare’ state – more aptly punishment state – in creating this situation. Destitution in this country is not, in the main, about being homeless or having a drug or alcohol addiction. According to the JRF/Heriot-Watt study, only 19% of the people it classified as destitute had these additional problems. Over half, however, (nearly 1.3 million people) had a chronic health problem or disability. 14% had a job.

For example, new UC claimants – and new claims for unemployment benefit are by now Universal Credit claims – have to wait, as a matter of policy, at least five weeks for their first tranche of money to arrive. And because UC claimants invariably don’t have other means of support (that’s why they’re applying for it), they have to take out a loan from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Which has to be paid back. Half of those experiencing destitution were claiming or had applied for UC. And debt deductions were identified as integral in pushing people into destitution.

According to research, more than one million people who claimed UC during the first coronavirus wave were having money regularly deducted from their benefits payments.

Universal Cruelty

But the problem with UC is far more fundamental. The brainchild of Iain Duncan Smith and legislated for in 2012 during the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, UC was intended to implant ‘the world of work’ into the benefits system. It is paid a month in arrears, with deductions for how much the ‘customer’ has worked during that period. A legion of DWP work coaches is on hand to ensure claimants take the necessary steps into employment – the department has even recruited work coaches during the pandemic.

With the mushrooming of zero-hours contracts, on-demand labour and temporary work in the economy, UC is the perfect benefits system to serve this new work order, enabling, according to one analyst, employers to turn workers “on and off like a tap” .

But the flow has to be enforced; it can’t be left to market forces. Claimants are compelled to sign a contract with the state (a “claimant commitment”), pledging to spend up to 35 hours a week looking for work. If they fail to meet these demands, they can be sanctioned, which involves the withdrawal of all financial support for a week, a month, six months or longer. Sanctions can also be imposed – or threatened – for not attending training or not updating a CV. This is known as ‘conditionality’. Its scope has hugely increased in the pandemic; 1.8 million people, a rise of two-thirds since before Covid-19, are subject to ‘searching for work’ conditionality.

Conditionality was suspended for three months during the first wave of coronavirus, then reintroduced at the start of July. Although pre-existing sanctions, sanctions that had been imposed prior to the first lockdown, were not lifted. More than 36,000 UC claimants in April last year were ‘under sanction’.

According to Work and Pensions secretary, Thérèse Coffey, sanctions are “an essential part of the contract to help people start to reconsider what vacancies there are”. Job Centres have been closed in the latest lockdown but whether sanctions have been suspended remains a mystery.

Conditionality does not just apply to Universal Credit. Other “legacy” benefits – so-called because they have not been replaced by UC as yet, although they will eventually – can only be successfully claimed under certain conditions. For example, Employment and Support Allowance (sickness benefit) is available only if claimants successfully surmount a Work Capability Assessment. A great number of genuinely ill people don’t. And many of those that do – those declared unfit for work but placed in the Work Related Activity Group – are still subject to the conditionality regime. Between 2010 and 2018, 110,000 sanctions were meted out to disabled Employment and Support Allowance claimants.

Face to face work capability assessments were stopped in March. But at the start of November last year – when the government was beginning the second lockdown – sanctions were re-introduced for sick or disabled people who failed to attend a fit for work test over the phone.

Open for infection

There is a macabre symmetry between the government general attitude to Covid-19 and its ‘welfare’ policy. After dallying with herd immunity, the government locked down too late and not comprehensively. It then attempted to re-open the economy, encouraging people to ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ while the virus was still present. After coronavirus came back with a vengeance in the winter, the government, supported by the ‘opposition’, refused to close schools despite clear evidence they were the main source of transmission, and pledged to ‘save Christmas’. The result has been 100,000 dead because of Covid, the worst death toll in Europe.

And, likewise, it was slavering at the bit to reintroduce conditionality and compel claimants to “reconsider what vacancies there are”. Last summer ministers even removed a line of guidance for UC claimants that had previously assured them they would not get a sanction if Covid-19 meant they could not comply with their claimant commitment.

However, as shown by the 2.4 million people who were destitute before the pandemic, Covid-19 has merely shone a light on the huge problems of the government’s conditionality approach; it hasn’t caused them. It should not be forgotten that the Conservatives’ whole analysis of poverty that underpins their welfare policy asserted that the prime cause was poor people’s patterns of behaviour – poor education, addiction, “worklessness”, family breakdown etc. It is mystifying, then, that the rolling out of their flagship policies – Universal Credit and the intensification of sanctions – has resulted in a huge increase in abject poverty and destitution. It’s almost as if the Tories’ explanation of the origin of poverty was utterly wrongheaded.

Unconditionality

There is one solution to this ocean of misery – Universal Basic Income (UBI). As its name suggests, this is a benefit paid to all individuals – the principle is much the same as for child benefit – so there is no means testing. For rich people, the amount can be clawed back by taxation. The UBI Lab Network is calling for a Post-Covid Recovery UBI of £1,000 a month for every adult and £500 a month for each child.

But the ‘U’ in UBI can, and should, also signify that it is unconditional. The massive bureaucracy that has been built up to means-test for benefits and ensure that recipients are spending every hour of every day looking for work or proving to the satisfaction of government officials that they are sick to the point of complete immobility would be dismantled. Conditionality – so beloved of the Conservatives and New Labour – would end. “An enormous amount of the machinery of government, and that half-government corporate NGO penumbra that surrounds it in most wealthy countries is just there to make poor people feel bad about themselves,” wrote the late David Graeber in 2018. “It’s an extraordinary expensive [my italics] moral game played to prop up a largely useless global work machine.”

This is one answer to a common objection to basic income – that, however desirable, it is prohibitively expensive. In fact, as has been demonstrated by the UK’s National Audit Office, the lynchpins of conditionality – benefit sanctions and Work Capability Assessments – cost more than doing nothing. Abolishing conditionality, notwithstanding the boost it would give to local economies, would actually save money.

As indicated by academic Guy Standing, basic income could also be funded by a “bonfire of the subsidies”. Enormous sums are paid to huge landowners who clearly don’t need the money; a gravy train that should be possible to bring to a halt now Britain has left the EU. Britain’s £10.5 billion annual subsidy to fossil fuel companies – the largest in the EU – should also be in the firing line. In 2016, other selective tax reliefs – such as exempting homes from capital gains tax and VAT relief on housebuilding – were estimated to come to £117 billion a year, a sum larger than the budget of the National Health Service.

Then there are new taxes to consider. Possibilities include a carbon tax, a wealth tax and a Financial Transactions Tax.

It is probably necessary to also assuage a great, unconscious fear – that basic income would lead to a dramatic dearth of delivery drivers, cleaners, waiters, shelf stackers and other low paid, repetitive jobs that a nonetheless considered essential to modern society. With an unconditional income, people would shun such jobs. Actually, because basic income – in contrast to current means-tested benefits – is not withdrawn as people move into paid employment, the incentive to work in order to top-up a person’s income is, if anything, strengthened and does not need the threat of being plunged into destitution to operate.

What basic income would do is empower people to, in the words of one basic income advocate, “say no to a bad deal”. Employers would be compelled to improve pay and conditions in order to attract applicants or, if necessary, automate jobs. A tamed and fearful workforce could no longer be “turned on and off like a tap”.

“If you commit a crime, no court is allowed to make you go hungry as a punishment,” noted one charity chief executive in 2014. “But if you’re late for an appointment at the Job Centre they can remove all your income and leave you unable to feed you or your family for weeks”. Conditionality – threatening to cast people who simply have an urgent need of income to live into destitution or starvation – has not been ameliorated in the intervening years, in fact it has intensified.

It must end. It is barbaric

The History of Mr Crank

The slur ‘crank’ is enjoying something of a renaissance in these red-baiting times. The ‘crank left’ is a general term of abuse directed at those who don’t accept the increasingly shaky presuppositions of mainstream debate, with the advantage of course of not having to deal with their objections. Such weird people typically read ‘crank’ news websites, such as The Canary or Skwawkbox. Then there are ‘crankademics’, a wonderfully witty neologism trained at academics who insist on pointing out the painful lack of evidence justifying the purge of Labour party members in the name of anti-antisemitism.

There is something quintessentially English about the barb ‘crank’. It means an eccentric who is obsessed with the minutiae of a specific subject, a fixation ‘normal’, well-balanced people don’t share. In the U.S., such people might be called oddballs or weirdos but not cranks. In America ‘cranky’ is used to designate bad-tempered people but that is something different. Cranks aren’t necessarily cranky.

And ‘crank’ is unusually employed against the Left, in particular the anti-imperialist Left. To be sure there are ‘crank scientific theories’, such as that Covid-19 is caused by 5G phone masts, which originate with the Right. The vectors of strange Trumpian obsessions might be labelled cranks. But generally the Right is not assumed to be outside the pale of civilised, ‘normal’ debate in the way the ‘crank Left’ is.

As far I can tell, crank was first deployed to any great effect during the First World War. Conscientious Objectors were contemptuously derided as cranks and female pacifists shared the same fate. “I can’t stand cranks,” barks Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army when a member of his platoon confesses to have been a Conscientious Objector during the last war. “Imagine not wanting to fight … it isn’t normal.”

But the person who really forged an indelible link between cranks and the Left was George Orwell, ironically an unashamed radical socialist himself. “[T]here is the horrible – the really disquieting – prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together,” wrote Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier. “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.”

Leaving aside the fact that undercover nudists and sex maniacs are not, as far as is known, overrepresented at Labour party meetings (nor, soon, will socialists it seems), there is the disquieting fact that some 1930s cranks – for example feminists – were clearly ahead of their time. Orwell also had a particular bugbear about vegetarians, and vegetarian options on menus. Yet anyone now branding feminists and vegetarians as cranks would themselves be open to the very same insult. Crankdom, as was noted long ago, is not a static concept.

A loyal Orwellian might retort that a being ahead of your time is scant consolation for being unelectable, or unpopular, during it. But it is also true if you accept the entire common sense corpus of your age, you end up not wanting to change anything for fear of stepping out of line. It’s also worth noting that a socialist Labour party, doubtless still replete with its fair share of cranks, won the 1945 election by a landslide.

Nonetheless, Orwell certainly started a trend and, since his time, left-wingers who strayed too far from the conventional wisdom of their epoch soon heard the epithet ‘crank’ ringing in their ears. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain could never shake the crank label. Gandhi was accused of “sheer crankiness” by right-wing historian Paul Johnson. More recently, in 2014, famed Conservative ‘moderate’ Kenneth Clarke urged Greeks not to elect the “cranky extremists” of Syriza. They didn’t listen, although presumably when the putatively left-wing Syriza utterly caved and implemented an even more ruthless austerity programme than the original, Tspiras and co. became normal adults.

Of course the most perfect crank of our age is undoubtedly Jeremy Corbyn. He had all the requisite qualities, personal and political. He was a resolute anti-imperialist and thought – erroneously actually – to be a pacifist. He also made jam, had a hobby of taking photos of manhole covers and possibly wore sandals on occasion.

Yet although he should have been an easy target, the British establishment had to strain every sinew to finally defeat him. He was subject to the most vicious and dishonest character assassination in British political history, relentlessly accused of being a spy, terrorist sympathiser and anti-Semite. Unbelievably, the campaign is still going on even after he was comprehensively defeated at the polls.

The enormous effort that needed to be expended, including within the Labour party, reveals, I think, two important things. One is that throughout the first two decades of the 21^st century, the cranks have been proven right on most important issues and the ‘sensibles’ wrong. The Iraq War was a terrible mistake, Iraq didn’t have – or claim to have – WMD and over two million Iraqis have subsequently died. The economic boom of the first years of the century was revealed to be built on sand, the bursting of which caused immense repercussions we have still living with. Austerity, supported at the time by all major political parties in Britain, but not the crank Left, was not only economically wrong-headed but imposed needless suffering on millions. Quantitative Easing – the main method of dealing with the old economic downturn and the new one – has merely increased inequality and augmented the wealth of the already wealthy. A strategy of confronting Covid-19 based on hoping it would quickly go away has prolonged the economic pain and resulted in innumerable excess deaths.

The role of ‘moderates’, of the sensible mainstream, in the 21^st century has mainly involved trying to plug holes in a dam that is springing leaks in so many places it is impossible to catch up.

The second revelation is that despite cranks residing on the farther reaches of acceptable debate, there is something inherently repellent about their main adversary, the professional politician. Politics is now a career, prepared for by a stint in student politics, followed by a sinecure in PR or the media and the obligatory role as a Spad (special advisor to a minister). It is its own world, sealed off from common experiences. As a result, most politicians, devoid of any ideas of their own, try to toady to what they perceive as public feeling without really understanding it. There is a desperate attempt to appear ordinary or normal, someone you’d want to go for a drink with. The most accomplished at this act – Boris Johnson for instance (who, it will be recalled, originally couldn’t decide whether to be pro or anti-Brexit) – are the most successful politicians.

By the contrast, conviction politicians – Thatcher or Corbyn – might appear obsessive, and thus strange. But because they see politics as fulfilling an ulterior purpose, rather than being something to be immersed in for its own sake, they come across as more human.

Yet, it has to be said there is some truth to Orwell’s accusation that the average socialist adherent is rather “out of touch with common humanity”. Partly this is due to the fact that socialists are intensely interested in politics and changing the world, passions which most people don’t share. But this trait is exacerbated by the fact that both the Corbyn movement in Britain and the Sanders equivalent in the U.S. were overwhelmingly political campaigns. They involved people signing up to organisations dedicated to changing the political sphere. Something they were incredibly successful in doing – in January 2018 the Labour party had 552,000 members.

However, they lacked an analogue in the economic sphere. They weren’t accompanied by a palpable rise in industrial unrest or trade union recruitment, features that invariably occurred in the past – for instance during the Great Depression – when left-wing movements started to take hold.

And, revealingly, the crank insult is rarely, if ever, applied to strikers or organised labour. This is not for reasons of timidity or acquiescence. Workers prepared to fight for their rights have been called ‘the enemy within’, work-shy, harbingers of mob rule or the naïve puppets of far left agitators. They are clearly seen as dangerous. But calling them ‘cranks’ just wouldn’t be taken seriously. And this, in a back-handed way, highlights the fatal flaw in Corbynism. It never overcame the Labour party’s fundamental weakness among private sector workers. And this, remember, was a party specifically founded to advance their interests. The 2019 electoral collapse had other, proximate causes – notably Brexit – but the exclusively ‘political’ character of the Corbyn surge was a major reason it was so ephermeral.

An alliance between the crank Left and a movement of alienated private sector workers would be some people’s worst nightmare.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If the public is wrong about nearly everything, why are they right about Corbyn?

According to polling, most British people – 58% in fact – think it was right that Jeremy Corbyn was suspended from the Labour party for saying the scale of the problem of antisemitism within it had been “dramatically overstated” by political opponents and the media.

This is despite the fact that it obviously was. The British people were told in all seriousness that Corbyn represented “an existential threat” to Jews in the UK, that Labour was a “cesspool” of antisemitism, that it was “institutionally racist” (which the EHRC specifically refuted), that Corbyn was leading an “antisemite army”, that the “soul of the nation” was at stake in the General Election, that if elected Corbyn would be the first antisemitic leader in the West since 1945, even that (courtesy of ‘respected’ conservative commentator, Simon Heffer) he was planning to “reopen Auschwitz”.

A search of eight newspapers revealed there to be nearly five and a half thousand articles on the subject of Corbyn, antisemitism and Labour between June 2015 and March 2019. And that’s discounting the voluminous coverage on broadcast and social media.

The truth, as Corbyn patiently relayed in interviews about the EHRC report, was in reality only 0.3% of Labour members had been accused of antisemitism. On average, however, the public believed 34% had. Exaggeration by a factor of 100*.

In fact, the two polling results are not remotely divergent. If you believe – in line with what you have been incessantly told by the media for the previous four years – that the Labour party is a nest of vicious bullying and racism (such that a third of Labour members have been accused of antisemitism) and that Jeremy Corbyn had allowed this to happen, probably out of his own hatred of Jews, then you’re likely to think it right that he is drummed out of the Labour party.

And therein lies the problem, the elephant in the room. Thanks to our atrocious media – a description that includes the supposedly liberal-left Guardian and the ‘impartial’ BBC – the British public is staggeringly misinformed. But few people, certainly not the politicians and media organisations who live by these misconceptions, will admit this.

In 2013, that noted far-left organisation, the Royal Statistical Society, pointed that out on a range of issues public perceptions are wildly out of kilter with reality. So much so that we are really talking about two separate countries – perceived UK and real UK.

To take one example, 58% of the public think crime is rising when in fact there were 53% fewer incidents in 2012 compared to 1995 (if you want an update crime fell by 9% between March 2019 and March 2020).

The perception of benefit fraud (24% of the ‘benefits bill’) is 34 times greater than the reality (0.7%). Teenage pregnancy rates are believed to be 25 times higher than they actually are. More people think foreign aid is the largest item of government expenditure than believe it to be either pensions or education despite the latter two being vastly greater.

On average the public thinks 31% of the population are immigrants when 13% actually are. The average estimate is that black and Asian people make up 30% of the population when in truth it is 11%. The most common belief is that 24% of the population are Muslim when it is really 5%. And so on.

Electorally speaking, there are undeniable pitfalls in bluntly telling the public that many of their most cherished beliefs are nonsense. But there are also obvious drawbacks – an amply demonstrated by the last Labour government – in meekly accepting the ‘reality’ presented by the mainstream media. The atrocity of the Work Capability Assessment was enshrined into law because the Blair and Brown governments not only swallowed, but actively propagated, the idea that millions of people on sickness benefits could find a job if only they were motivated enough. The abuse at Yarl’s Wood had its roots in the belief that Britain was being overrun by asylum seekers and immigrants, a dehumanization that has become a thousand times worse since. The lies behind the Iraq War became second nature to the government and were unremittingly amplified by an obedient media so that millions were shocked when Iraq didn’t turn out to have any WMD. The consequences of that duplicity are immense. It is estimated that 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed as a result of the illegal 2003 invasion.

When fiction becomes reality, and will not be admitted to be fiction even when conclusively demonstrated to be so, you have a huge problem.

Jeremy Corbyn attempted to tell the truth, rather than embroider myths, about each of the above issues. He also promised to confront billionaire, tax avoiding newspaper owners, not curry favour with them as previous Labour Prime Ministers had done.  As a result he was the victim of what two (marginal) commentators, Peter Oborne and David Hearst, have dubbed “a carefully planned and brutally executed political assassination”. His suspension for ‘downplaying’ antisemitism is merely the coup de grâce. 

Every British newspaper, with the exception of the Morning Star, avidly supported Corbyn’s suspension. So Keir Starmer’s “difficult” decision will find virtually unanimous support amongst the media and the political class. Attacking your own unreconstructed radicals – what Americans call “counter scheduling” – is seen as the tried and trusted way for a centre-left party to attain electoral credibility.

But even if this approach leads to success, which is highly questionable, the victory will be a Pyrrhic one. Accepting the media’s presentation of reality will so tightly hem in the freedom of action of a future Labour government that searing injustices like the ones outlined above are almost certain. And there will be no economic boom to soothe the sores with broadly egalitarian spending.

Reinstate Jeremy Corbyn and start telling, not repressing, the truth.

*The number of complaints of antisemitism differs according to when the start date is set.  According to the party in February 2019 it had received complaints of antisemitism concerning about 673 members since April 2018, about 0.1% of its membership. Or 300 times less than 34%.

Chasing Unicorns? Orwell, socialism and patriotism

“England has got to be true to herself”, a famous English socialist once wrote. “She is not being true to herself while the refugees who have sought our shores are penned up in concentration camps, and company directors work out subtle schemes to dodge their Excess Profits Tax”.

George Orwell typed these words in 1940, in the middle of the Blitz as German bombs were raining down. His short book, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, has subsequently become the ur-text of a patriotic vision of socialism. Corbynism, it is claimed, fatally lacked this essential ingredient of popularity – indeed stamping on any tendencies in this direction. This was a major reason why it crashed and burnt in the 2019 election. Socialism still – in Orwell’s phrase – has not “really touched the heart of the English people”.

Keir Starmer, on the other hand, is determined to avoid such a fate, wrapping the Labour party (literally) in the Union Jack and signalling a deep emotional attachment to the monarchy. He even ordered in his MPs to abstain on a bill authorising the security services to commit murder and torture without legal repercussion – for fear of appearing ‘patriotically’ suspect.

Don’t sing ‘Rule Britannia’

But the interesting thing about The Lion and the Unicorn is that the patriotism it pays homage to is not the same patriotism that the Labour party in 2020 is seeking to identify with. Starmer’s conference speech was trailed to the media as rebranding Labour as the party of “flag, forces and family”. Blue Labour, the Labour faction which heralds ‘conservative socialism’, is committed to the triad of “family, faith and flag”. There is a subtle difference if you look carefully.

However, Orwell explicitly rejects the idea that the patriotism of the English working class revolves around these cornerstones. Its patriotism is “profound” but “the working man’s heart does not leap when he sees a Union Jack”. Rather, there is an ingrained hatred of war, militarism and uniforms, and – outside of war – a widespread refusal to join the army even in times of mass unemployment. “So deep does this feeling go” writes Orwell, “that for a hundred years past the officers of the British Army, in peace time, have always worn civilian clothes when off duty.”

In Orwell’s view, “all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff is done by small minorities”.

Of course, The Lion and the Unicorn was written nearly 80 years ago. Attitudes may have changed – witness the ubiquitous uniformed soldiers before kick-off at football matches and the pressure of conformity about poppy wearing. But Orwell made a crucial distinction between nationalism or jingoism and patriotism.

It is a similar story when it comes to religion or ‘faith’ as modern-day adherents like to call it. “The common people” says Orwell, are not puritanical and “without definite religious belief”. Though there is a “deep tinge” of Christian belief, in terms of organised religion, the Anglican Church is mainly the preserve of the landed gentry and the Nonconformist sects only appeal to minorities.

Defining patriotism

So what then is patriotism? According to Orwell, it is a purely defensive attitude and protective of a particular way of life. “It is bound up,” Orwell writes, “with solid breakfasts, gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes.”

Mercifully he soon becomes less misty-eyed and then makes an astute point about English culture which, I believe, is still true decades later. The English – despite the contentedly defeatist attitude of much of the liberal-left which sought salvation, oddly, in the neoliberal European Union – are not irredeemably conservative, capitalist or right-wing. This fatalistic stance should have been exploded by the 2017 election in which a left-wing Labour party gained nearly 42% of the vote in England. But there is, Orwell says, a definitive privateness about English life:

The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you.

Undeniably, this feeling can be used to fuel a seemingly endless housing boom – rooted in the comfort induced by seeing the value of the house you own continually rising and in viewing your home as a haven against the world. But it can also be – and would be by a serious Left – utilized in the opposite cause. In a country where millions have scant security as private tenants, and are being evicted as we speak, and where wealthy individuals and businesses buy up hundreds of flats and houses for no other purpose than renting them or selling them on, “the liberty to have a home of your own”, but not necessarily one you are free to sell, is the kind of aspiration the Left should champion. In Marxist terms, we live in a world where ‘use value’ (the function of a house or flat to provide security, stability and shelter) has become the slave of ‘exchange value’ (seeing them as simply ‘units’ to make money from). That is why Orwell could proclaim a fervent belief in the ‘liberty of the individual’ but also advocate (in the political programme that accompanies The Lion and the Unicorn) the abolition of private land ownership in urban areas – and see no contradiction between the two.

Orwell the Red

Indeed, what is striking about Orwell ‘patriotic socialism’ is that the socialism involved is of the deepest red. The second half of The Lion and the Unicorn is devoted to espousing an “English Revolution” that would set free “the native genius of the English people”. Railways, banks, major industries and land would all be nationalised (Orwell recommends allowing private ownership of land of up to 15 acres in rural areas, but as seen above, would completely abolish private land ownership – and thus landlordism – in town areas), incomes would be restricted to a ten to one variation, the House of Lords abolished and private schools flooded with state-aided pupils or simply closed. Orwell even envisages the stock market being torn down!

However, it is interesting that despite Orwell’s intense anti-Communism, his economic beliefs do not seem vastly different in their fundamentals. Orwell defined himself explicitly as a “democratic socialist”, not a Communist, and clearly saw great danger in vesting political power in an all-seeing political party, but in economic terms, did not see any alternative to state socialism.  “From the moment that all productive goods have been declared the property of the State,” he writes, “the common people will feel, as they cannot feel now, that the State, is themselves.” Despite fighting in an anarchist/syndicalist revolution in Spain, and with a Trotskyist battalion, just four years previously Orwell seems to have imbibed none of their critique of state socialism, nor their advocacy – indeed living example of – workers’ control.

Nonetheless, by comparison with Orwellian socialism, Corbyn’s mellow social democracy appears – notwithstanding the hysteria it generated – quite tame. And Blue Labour, which might claim to be the inheritor in the Labour party of the Orwellian vision, seems oblivious to his decrying of the party’s “timid reformism”. In aligning with – at best tolerating – insipid centrist leaders like Starmer and Miliband there is an all too common wilful blindness to Orwell’s radical side.

Ashamed of their own country

But the incongruous thing – and probably a large reason Orwell is claimed by divergent political philosophies – is that he combines a frankly revolutionary socialism with unvarnished contempt for left-wing intellectuals. Orwell berates the “shallow leftism” of intellectuals and the “mechanically anti-British attitude” which was de rigueur on the radical left of the time. Much of the contempt stemmed from widespread left-wing support for Stalin and the Soviet Union. Orwell, by contrast, had seen Stalin’s inherent brutality – and well as his anti-revolutionary stance – at first hand during the Spanish Civil War. However, some of the critique transcends the circumstances of the time. In The Lion and the Unicorn and elsewhere (for example the essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’), Orwell develops the idea of “transferred nationalism” – taking all the emotions, affection and loyalty that might have been attached to your own country and simply directing them somewhere else – the Soviet Union, primarily, in his era. Despite its pretentions, this mental transference gets the protagonist no closer to “genuinely internationalist outlook”.

The same transference was in evidence during the EU referendum campaign and the endless negotiations that followed. Implicit in much of the liberal-left embrace of the Remain cause was the idea that virtually everything that made life bearable in England came from ‘civilised’ European influence, without which the country would descend into a corporate free-loading, racist hell-hole (ironically, in devoting most of their energies to taking down Jeremy Corbyn – and thus helping Boris Johnson – liberal Remainers ensured this vision would come to pass). The idea that a home-grown socialism was even possible was dismissively rejected as a contradiction in terms.

Thus, Europe (the institutions of the EU) became a purely benign endeavour, without conflict or desire, pitted against a country whose temporary, austerity-wreaking rulers (a trait they shared with the EU) were seen as representative of its eternal character. But genuine internationalism involves the recognition that all countries (including pan-governmental entities and repressed or colonised nations), have their own elites and plebeians, their own fractures between capital and labour, their own bigots and mobs, and their own interests which leaders will attempt to pursue.

Orwell, notwithstanding his unabashed patriotism, is aware of this. Thus, in his treatment of India (at the time part of the British Empire) he can recognise both that Britain, out of fear of trade competition and a desire to make rule easier, has artificially held back Indian development and that, partly as a consequence of British domination, the average Indian suffers most keenly at the hands of his fellow-countrymen. “The petty Indian capitalist exploits the town worker with the utmost ruthlessness,” notes Orwell, “the peasant lives from birth to death in the grip of the money-lender”. That kind of analysis seems strangely sophisticated today.

Return of the ‘drowsy years’

However, in one important way, Orwell’s essay is rooted in its own time; a time when Britain (and its Empire) seemed the only obstacle to the total domination of Nazi Germany. He likens Britain to a family with the wrong members in control – the dividend drawers, the landed class, the “functionless” owners of industry – who are holding back the intelligent and capable. The ruling class, in Orwell’s view, are not corrupt so much as “unteachable” and mired in self-deception. While Nazi Germany has the SS man, we have the rent collector.

War, said Orwell, was the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up long-term processes and brings previously unacknowledged realities to the surface. In the midst of the Blitz, the “drowsy years”, as Orwell encapsulated the 1930s, were well and truly over and it was possible, necessary actually, to become both revolutionary and realistic.

But now the dividend drawers, the owners of industry, the tax evaders are back, if they ever really went away. Rent is the (anti)-lifeblood of the economy. Students are cajoled into returning to halls of residence so that they can pay rent to the owners. The spectre of city centres devoid of commuters petrifies the owners of commercial and residential properties who see their rental streams drying up before their eyes. Hedge fund managers and bankers are exempted from quarantine regulations because of their alleged contribution to the economy. The company directors of Orwell’s time who try and dodge “Excess Profits Tax” have been superseded by a multi-trillion dollar tax avoidance industry orchestrated by banks and green-lighted by governments.

The outright treachery that frightened Orwell has been replaced by ordinary corruption. The reverence for the impartiality of the law even if it is unjust, which Orwell believed characterised England, now pales before the staging of show trials of those who embarrass the rulers of the world. The “right to exploit others for profit” is deemed sacrosanct while a bill allowing MI5 agents to murder British citizens with impunity is waived through the House of Commons with the connivance of the Labour party. The drowsy years are back with a vengeance and nothing seems likely to jolt us back into attentiveness.