German elections: what can the left learn?

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FEBRUARY 26, 2025

Mike Phipps analyses the results of Germany’s parliamentary elections.

The parliamentary elections to Germany’s Bundestag produced some highly significant changes – the collapse of the ruling SPD into third place, their displacement by the conservative CDU/CSU, albeit with less than 30% of the vote, the surge of support for the far right AfD into second place with 21% of the vote and a significant vote for the Left Party (Die Linke) on 9%.

Turnout was the highest since German reunification, with nearly two-thirds of voters saying they feared for the future of their democracy. And despite the media narrative, only 15% of voters identified immigration as their priority, while 18% said it was the future of the welfare state.

A significant gender gap was also evident. Women were far more likely to vote for parties of the left than men, whereas men were far more likely to vote for parties on the right, particularly the far right AfD.

The collapse of the coalition

The SPD, which had led the ‘traffic light’ coalition of the last three years, was particularly punished, getting its worst result ever. As an article on Labour Hub said fifteen months ago, “Contrary to its election promises, the SPD has hardly addressed social issues. There is no Baföger increase (state subsidies for students).  Because of increased building costs and loans, there are no promised 400,000 new flats per year. Also in the health sector, led by the SPD health minister Karl Lauterbach, there is talk of clinic closures; medicines are not available and people often have to wait months for doctor’s appointments.”

The neoliberal, business-friendly FDP  controlled the finance ministry and set much of the economic agenda, for example rejecting an electricity price brake for companies, which is favoured by all the states in Germany. The FDP also paid a high price in this election, dropping below the 5% threshold of the vote needed to secure seats in the parliament.

The German economy is in a dire state. “The great manufacturing powerhouse of Europe, Germany, has ground to a halt since the pandemic,” says Michael Roberts. “German real GDP has stagnated for the last five years. Real business investment in Germany is severely depressed, more so than in the Eurozone overall. Real household consumption in Germany has been hammered… Real wages in Germany remain below pre-pandemic levels.” Additionally, energy costs have rocketed, partly because imports from Russia have dried up as part of the sanctions imposed following its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

The government’s response to the increasing numbers of immigrants was simply to crack down on people smuggling and reduce welfare for new arrivals. This has had little effect, primarily because there is little evidence that ‘welfare magnetism’ is a driver of immigration. In any case, Germany needs 288,000 migrants every year to maintain its workforce.

The political elite ignores this. The first televised debate of the election campaign between Scholz and Merz became a competition over who was tougher on migrants. The narrative that immigrants were a burden was exploited by the AfD, who made it their central election campaign issue.

As Owen Jones says, “We can see this phenomenon across the West – mainstream parties adopting the rhetoric and policies of the far right. They think this will keep the far right at bay, but in practise it legitimises the far right, and shifts the political conversation on to the territory that suits them.”

The rise of the far right

The AfD came second overall, doubling their vote share. But they came first across the eastern states, getting a shocking 39% in the state of Thuringia. They did remarkably well with younger voters, coming second among the under-25s, first among 25 to 34-year-olds, and joint first with the CDU-CSU in the 35-44 age bracket.

Their rise was clearly aided by the way in which the political elite legitimised their arguments on immigration. A series of violent attacks by migrants, including one by an Afghan refugee in Munich on a Christmas mas market, have also been exploited by the AfD, who called for forced deportations in their election propaganda.

Other factors helped the AfD, not least the open support they received from sections of the Trump administration. Additionally, the absolute support that the entire political class in Germany has given to Israel and the state crackdown on voices supporting Palestine helped the AfD push a narrative that demonized migrants from Muslim countries as well as left wing activists.

The Left Party did well

The Left Party result was also spectacular in the circumstances. Sahra Wagenknecht, once one of its best-known politicians, left in October 2023, to form her own organisation, denouncing “lifestyle leftists” for not listening to voters enough on the need to curb immigration. She also called for closer ties with Russia, voted against proposals to make it easier to change one’s gender and opposed Covid vaccine mandates. In the event, her BSW got under 5%, while the Left Party surged to 9%.

The Left Party stood firm on the issue of immigration and won a number of urban liberal voters who might once have voted Green.  A Bundestag speech in which Heidi Reichinnek, the Left’s joint parliamentary leader, denounced CDU leader Friedrich Merz for relying on AfD support for a parliamentary motion to tighten asylum rules, has been watched at least 30 million times.

Merz’s pitching for AfD support on refugee policy broke a major taboo in German politics and provoked a significant backlash. Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated across Germany against the move. The revulsion against Merz’s attempt to bring proposals to the Bundestag with far right support helps explain the high turnout and the surge in support for the Left party, the only party to defend migrants in this election.

With 64 seats in the Bundestag, the Left Party can now make or break any attempts to revise the German constitution, which require a two-thirds majority. It did especially well among younger voters in the big cities, coming first in Berlin, in the under-25 age bracket and with first-time voters.

Besides taking on right wing extremism, the Left Party came out clearly against ‘those at the top’ – landlords, corporate bosses, millionaires or the government. “We are taking on the rich. Nobody else is doing that,” they said.

They also offered concrete help, creating a ‘rent gouging app’ that tenants can use to check whether they are paying too much for their apartment. In recent months, the party is thought to have gained 20,000 new members.

Ines Schwerdtner, the Left’s co-chair, is keen to build support for the party among the industrial working class. That’s a challenging task: at this election, the AfD won an estimated 38% of working class votes.

Lessons for Labour

“This is a story we’ve seen across Western Europe – social democrats have abandoned social democracy, have proved unable to protect the living standards and security of working class people, and the far right has offered their own answers to that,” opines Owen Jones.

“There are obvious parallels between what’s happened in Germany and what’s unfolding here,” writes Phil Burton-Cartledge. “A centrist coalition of sensible grown-ups have presided over years of economic stagnation and lacklustre investment. Coincidentally, farmers’ protests over the cancellation of a tax break was one of the nails driven into the SPD-FDP-Green coalition’s coffin. The final straw was the provocative proposal of the FDP to take the axe to social security and public spending… Having learned nothing and uninterested in the lessons of history, the SPD and Greens both pursued policies at odds with their popular constituencies and have paid the political price.”

New evidence emerged this week that Labour is losing support fastest among voters who feel economically insecure. The analysis by the University of Oxford academics Prof Jane Green and Prof Geoffrey Evans, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation poverty charity, is a warning to the Government that it will pay a high price for failing to solve the cost of living crisis.

Prof Green, who is the director of the Nuffield Politics Research Centre, said: “Financially insecure voters are the ones looking for political alternatives because they can’t see things getting better for themselves or their children. All the talk of culture wars and immigration misses their primary experience.”

The lesson is clear: if Labour fails to deliver on these key issues as miserably as the outgoing SPD-led coalition in Germany, it will be swept out of power – by forces to its political right.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Image: Friedrich Merz. Creator: Steffen Prößdorf | Credit: Steffen Prößdorf Copyright: Steffen Prößdorf. Licence: Namensnennung-Share Alike 4.0 International CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed

 

UK Solidarity conference to confront Trump-Putin designs on Ukraine

FEBRUARY 28, 2025

Labour, feminist and environmental groups from across Europe are coming together in Brussels on March 26th-27th, for the Solidarity With Ukraine conference, which calls on Europe to increase its support for Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion while also rejecting US President Trump’s claims on Ukrainian resources. 

The conference has been initiated by the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine and its national affiliates and the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign in England, Wales and Scotland.

Adam Novak, coordinator of the European Network for Solidarity With Ukraine, said: “It’s time for those who understand the Ukrainian people’s suffering and support its heroic resistance to organise their solidarity effort on a much larger scale. The clouds over the country’s future threaten more than at any time since the Russian full-scale invasion began three years ago. ”

The Solidarity With Ukraine conference, will coincide with another important event in Brussels: the March 26th  European Parliament meeting “Solidarity With Ukraine–Reconstruction and Civil Society”, organised by the Left Group of MEPs.

Novak said: “Shocked ordinary decent people can’t believe what’s happening before their eyes regarding Ukraine: there’s Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin scheming to carve up the country and its resources, with Trump actually blaming Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the Russian invasion.”

He stressed that “now is definitely not the time for us to get intimidated by the scare tactics of great and powerful thugs. And it’s not the time to just hope that Europe’s divided and often hesitant governments finally manage to provide Ukraine with the aid it has been begging for.

“It is the time to act, to compel our governments to replace their nice words about ‘standing by Ukraine’ with deeds providing genuine support to the Ukrainian people’s resistance to the dismemberment of their country.”

Novak outlined the twin goals of the Solidarity With Ukraine conference:

• To drive home the message that the Trump-Putin scheme will destroy any chance of a just peace for Ukraine or Europe. He underlined: “Ukraine must receive all the help it needs to defend and recover its internationally recognised territory. All Russian troops must leave all of Ukraine.”
• To provide a forum where Ukrainian and European trade union, feminist, environmental, LGBTI+ and democratic rights movements can meet and build initiatives of solidarity and support. 

Novak concluded: “These movements will be indispensable for Ukraine’s socially just reconstruction, just as they have been for its brave resistance and the support given to its millions of internally displaced people.” 

Registration for the conference is free, but donations are requested to cover travel costs of Ukrainian participants, interpretation, etc.

Trump backs Putin against Ukraine. History turns darker 

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

By Simon Pirani

How bad can it get? When we strip away US president Donald Trump’s insults and temper fits, what can he actually do?

First, he can withdraw US military aid to Ukraine – which he has been talking about doing since long before the US presidential election. If the European states got their act together, which is possible, the effects of this would be constrained.

US diplomats have reportedly threatened to block Ukraine’s access to the Starlink communication system on which its drones rely, potentially giving asymmetrical advantage to Russia.

Second, Trump can cancel sanctions. The latter would bring him into conflict with the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017, which was specifically designed to compel the president to lift sanctions only with Congress approval. Of course Trump could play fast and loose with the law, which he has done and is doing in other respects, and/or Congress could go along with him.

The cancellation of sanctions would be bad. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the sanctions were never very effective, in large part because previous US governments, under both Trump and Biden, sought to limit their effect on the oil market and the world economy.

Third, Trump can shift narratives. I broadly agree with people who say we should judge Trump and his cohorts by their actions, not by the constant stream of often incoherent words. Yes, but. Nazi salutes normalise Nazism; speculation about expelling the Palestinian population from Gaza normalises ethnic cleansing; and slandering the Ukrainian president as a “dictator” who started the war in his country reinforces Russian propaganda.

On the third anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion – and the eleventh year of its military attack on Ukraine, and the long chains of suffering it has caused – these are real dangers. It’s not clear how they will play out.

Putin is no doubt thrilled by Trump’s outburst against Ukraine and against Zelensky. He is pushing for the maximum. For now, he is happy to continue sending wave upon wave of young men to die in the scorched earth of eastern Ukraine, and negotiate at a later stage. The Russian economy – which was never going to collapse due to sanctions, as so many commentators irresponsibly claimed in 2022 – can keep going for now.

Putin wants to hold out for a complete military defeat for Ukraine. He knows that the Ukrainian population is exhausted. There are no more volunteers to go to the front, only conscripts. There are great strategic and economic pressures on Putin; he will hope to use Trump to ease these. Perhaps the worst case scenario is the US, Russia and the European powers stitching up a ‘peace’ deal that gives the Kremlin’s militarism a new lease of life.

When Trump first returned to the presidency, there were signs that he would push for a ceasefire, rather than a peace treaty marking Ukraine’s defeat and even break-up. Trump’s outbursts last week suggest he may be moving towards the latter.

But we are still far from the point at which Ukraine would be forced to sign such a treaty, which would surely have to acknowledge that Crimea, and all of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, are Russian territory, as the Russian constitution now stipulates.

The Ukrainian government always has the option of walking away. The Ukrainian people, however war-weary, will not accept humiliation.

Not only in Ukraine, but more widely, it’s not only what dictators do that matters. What society does matters too.  

Putin’s focus on Ukraine meant that he had to abandon his closest ally in the Middle East, Bashar al-Assad, in the face of popular opposition that he had brutally suppressed for more than a decade. Powerful social movements have in the last two months thrown Putin’s allies in Georgia and Slovakia, and the pro-European but Putinesque regime in Serbia, into crisis. The advance of this new type of 21st-century fascism we are facing is not uniform or uni-directional.

When I make these arguments, some friends and comrades tell me I am being naively optimistic. I don’t accept that. I know fascism when I see it, and I’ve seen it in Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine for the last three years. I have seen how the Israeli government has implemented the fascist right’s genocidal programme in Gaza. All this didn’t start with Trump.

Moreover, I see history as a more complicated process than it might appear to be while it’s happening.

If we are to take seriously the emotions we feel at the deaths and suffering caused by war, we shouldn’t indulge ourselves with foolish optimism – nor with panic and despair.  

How to understand Trump in the wider sense? For a start, he is a symptom of the long-term decline of the US empire.

The US economy was 40-50% of the global total after the second world war, now it’s under 25%. In the 1970s, when the US was forced into a humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam, China, India and Brazil were “developing nations” still largely at the mercy of the imperialist metropole. The US wars of the 1990s and 2000s, in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, were murderous attempts by this failing empire to maintain its grip.

Today, rivalry from China is seen as a key underlying motivation of Trump’s Russia policy (that is, that he wants to pull Russia out of China’s sphere of influence).

The US’s economic and strategic decline takes on social forms: a country with more guns than people, the rise of Christian nationalism, and the election as president of a man with the political style of a street thug.

The assault on the legal system and state institutions, the alliance with billionaire oligarchs, the encouragement for extreme right wing violence (for example, pardons of 6th January rioters) are all what they look like. Forms of fascism.

When Trump returned to the White House at first, I think I underestimated the murderous nature of his ideology. I thought he was more pragmatic, more of a plaything of big capital. Last week’s outburst can’t be dismissed, though. Trump really admires Putin, and hates democracy, in Ukraine and everywhere else.

Trump instinctively warms to Israel’s extremist government and its genocidal assault on Gaza. He has made clear to Netanyahu that he is happy for the Gaza ceasefire to break down and a new round of genocidal attacks to begin – although, as I understand it, whether and how this will happen will be more Netanyahu’s decision than Trump’s.

What does all this mean for the labour movement and other social movements in the UK and other western European countries?

First, I think we need to separate, analytically, two strands of Trump’s policy. The first is his ideological kinship with dictators and mass murderers like Putin and Netanyahu. The second, related but not the same, is his assault on the alliance between the US and the western European powers.

In the UK media, it is this assault, and the existential threat it poses to NATO, that brings howls of outrage from Labour politicians and liberal commentators – very often the same people who have tolerated Israel’s multiple war crimes (with a few whispered words of criticism), who have slandered all who oppose them as anti-semites, and who re-hash the extreme right’s disgusting anti-migrant rhetoric.

What these Labour politicians and liberals fear is that the whole illusion of the ‘democratic’ post-war order is crashing. For Palestinians, and before them Iraqis, Vietnamese and many others, this ‘democracy’ was always a phantom, an ideological covering for brute imperialist force. I think the post-war order is crashing, and the ‘democratic’ illusion is crashing with it – but I don’t look back on that illusory ‘democracy’ with the same western-centric fondness.

Our democracy in Europe – valuable as it is, and vital as it is to defend every bit of it tooth and nail – has always been married with the violence of empire. Look at the treatment of migrants trying to throw themselves on the mercy of that democracy.

In Ukraine, the UK and French governments are preparing to step in militarily to a void that may be left by the withdrawal of US aid. Right now, we in the labour movement and civil society are on the same side of the war as they are, but fighting with independent aims.

We should continue to build our own kinds of solidarity, supporting Ukrainian resistance, supporting Ukrainian communities, supporting anti-war direct action in Russia.

Simon Pirani is honorary professor at the University of Durham and writes a blog at peoplenature.org, where this article first appeared.

Image: Demonstration in London in solidarity with Ukraine on February 22nd 2025, c/o Labour Hub.

 THE JAM

And then there were two

FEBRUARY 28, 2025

Mark Perryman writes of Rick Buckler and the legacy of The Jam as a three-piece he leaves behind. 

There are not many bands that are a three-piece. The classic line-up: a drummer with a frontline of vocalist, lead and bass guitarists, or sometimes, as with The Clash, three guitarists, one, in their case Joe Strummer, also on lead vocals duty.  Fancy-dan additions might include keyboards, brass section, backing vocals.  

The Jam were different. Rick Buckler on drums, Bruce Foxton playing bass, Paul Weller, lead guitar and vocals. They lasted together a mere five years, 1977-82 but for a generation born into music-loving by the punk era, Rick, Bruce and Paul have been part of our soundtrack of musical memories ever since. 

With the terrible February news that Rick, after a short illness, has passed away, now there are two. In a wonderful tweet, Guardian journalist and huge Jam fan John Harris summed up what he and his fellow fans have lost:

“Rick Buckler did what the best drummers do: served the song, and put his mark on all of them. Examples abound, but here are a few: In The City, All Around The World, the peerless live version of It’s Too Bad, Thick As Thieves, Eton Rifles, Scrape Away, Beat Surrender…”

Rick was no Keith Moon, Cozy Powell or Ringo Starr, he was almost as invisible off-stage as he was on it, tucked behind his drum kit. But the pounding percussive rhythm to the songs John picked out, and many more, would be every part of what we hummed along to, shouted out the choruses and made our dance moves for, as Bruce’s hypnotic bass lines and Paul’s vocals painting musical and verbal pictures of our imagination.  

The Jam, despite Paul Weller’s very obvious much higher profile, when they were together, when he left to form The Style Council, and his very successful solo career ever since, were and always will be a threesome.   

The split in 1982 left Bruce and Rick feeling more sad and disappointed than bitter and twisted. Although a reunion had never been mooted, nevertheless there was a genuine warmth from Paul on hearing the news of Rick’s sudden death for what his drumming had provided for The Jam:

“From our rudimentary beginnings the band evolved into the powerful force that it became. Rick’s evolution as a drummer, was such a vital part of that.”

Looking back almost 50 years – goodness if that doesn’t make those of us who were there at the start feel old – my first live sighting of The Jam was their Friday night headline slot at Reading Festival 1978. The Jam, although always bracketed with punk, were testament to this moment taking multiple forms. And in large part this was its strength. 

That Reading Festival of my fond Jam memories is mixed with the same weekend of Sham 69, poor Jimmy Pursey forced once more to evict that section of his fanbase that were National Front or worse from the stage. Sham and Motorhead fans were raining down on each other the cans and bottles thrown. Yet Sham 69 and The Jam both labelled as ‘punk’. 

From its very beginnings, another early memory: 1976, and transfixed by The Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones with various members of the ‘Bromley Contingent’ (including, if I remember correctly, Siouxsie Sioux) heaping expletives on  presenter Bill Gundy live on his early evening TV show Today. I roared them on from the family sofa. Away in the kitchen, my parents were fortunately unaware of my antics.

The anarchic Sex Pistols also flirted with Nazi chic, as did the otherwise effortlessly stylish Siouxsie Sioux. The Clash and The Tom Robinson Band wore their politics on stage and off.  It is almost impossible to explain the huge statement made when Tom blasted out Sing if You’re Glad to be Gay as a punk anthem.  Sham 69 and the Angelic Upstarts were more early versions of Oi than punk but came along for the ride. The Stranglers: a supercharged but frankly conventional rock band. The Damned? A rousing mix of punk and thrash rhythm and blues. The Buzzcocks and A Certain Ratio: mainstays of the Manchester scene. Elvis Costello: link man from punk to what became known as ‘new wave’. 

While sharing the same label – punk – there was little or nothing musically this wonderful lot had in common. Except what they pitted themselves as an alternative to.  My mid-1970s O Level classroom was filled (please excuse the gender determinism here but it’s how I remember my classmates), by the girls teeny-bopping over the Bay City Rollers and serious-minded boys listening to Genesis, Pink Floyd and Yes. Punk in all its creative diversity stood against all this. It was DIY, independent, anti-corporate takeover, as much local as global, and eff you if you don’t like it. 

The Jam fitted perfectly with this: schoolboys, Bruce, Paul and Rick, who with various others since 1972 had shared the same dream of being in a band, rehearsing, sharing influences, writing their own songs, playing local clubs – in Woking, deep in the Surrey commuter belt, managed by Paul’s dad John. And when punk burst into life as a commercial hit, those teenage dreams made real, a major record label signs them on the dotted line of having a share of the commercial action.

But they weren’t an entirely natural fit. They looked, and sounded, like mods not punks, or even new wave. However this was a reinvention of the music, fashion and culture that had inspired three Woking teenagers rather than the straight copy of Mod revivalists The Secret Affair, The Chords,  Purple Hearts and others. It was a reinterpretation that, as the albums and singles progressed, increased in political messaging to dance to. Not, however good, of the anthemic kind that The Clash and Tom Robinson Band produced, theirs instead was wrapped in lyrical, and musical subtlety. Down in the Tube Station at Midnight was a testament of the menacingly violent mix of masculinity, drink and far right politics; Eton Rifles class war the music-mix. When Etonian old boy David Cameron who’d been in the cadets there described it as one of his all-time favourite songs, Weller’s unforgettable response was:  “It wasn’t intended as a fucking jolly drinking song for the cadet corps.” 

The Jam came to an end with their very final release Beat Surrender which depicted both the manufactured misery of what they had angrily depicted on their second album in The Modern World. Their retort? “Don’t have to explain myself to you, I don’t give two fucks about your review.” They gloriously played out with their response: angry hope that they had made The Jam’s mission to provide.  

Come on boy, come on girl
  Succumb to the beat surrender
  All the things that I care about (are packed into one punch)
  All the things that I’m not sure about (are sorted out at once).

It’s almost impossible to read those lines without the drumbeat growing in rhythmic intensity and irresistible volume in our heads. Rick, we will never forget.

Mark Perryman is the co-founder of Philosophy Football.The last few of the limited edition Rick Buckler memorial T-shirt is available from Philosophy Football here.   

 

TfL fares hike “will hit low-income households hardest”, says Fare Free London

FEBRUARY 28, 2025

Increases in public transport fares that take effect on Sunday (2nd March) will hit the capital’s low-income households hardest, the Fare Free London campaign warned today.

Tube and rail fares will rise by 4.6% on average – above the rate of inflation. 

“The government has forced the Mayor’s hand by making future transport funding conditional on these fare increases. Instead of endless fare increases, the solution is a drastic shift in the way the system is paid for,” Pearl Ahrens of Fare Free London said.

“Instead of putting the burden on low-income households, we should move in the opposite direction – towards a zero-fares system such as is used successfully in Luxembourg, in several French cities, and in more than 100 municipalities in Brazil.”

Public transport in London relies more heavily on fare income than in other global cities such as New York, Paris or Hong Kong. 

Unlike fares, which act as a regressive tax, there are fairer ways of paying for public transport that have been tried and tested, such as land value capture or payroll taxes, at city level, or a shake-up of transportation taxes at national level.

Fare-free transport would also help shift London away from a car-heavy transport system, and would tackle air pollution – from which low-income families suffer worst – and greenhouse gas emissions.  

Londoners working in poorly-paying jobs will be disproportionately hit by Sunday’s fare increases. A single peak-time ride from Zone 4 to central London rises to £4.60 (up from £4.40). From Zone 6 it will be £5.80 (up from £5.60).

The one-day Pay As You Go Cap, the most cost-effective way for many Londoners to travel, rises to £12.80 for Zones 1-4 (up from £12.30) and to £15.60 for Zones 1-6. A one-day Travelcard for Zones 1-6 will now cost £23.60.

“London has the highest poverty level of any UK region – at 25%”, Pearl Ahrens said. “That’s 2.2 million people. Although housing costs are the biggest burden on household expenditure, transport is the second largest cost category.”

Fare Free London was set up last year to advocate free public transport in the capital. The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, and the UK’s oldest doctors’ union Doctors in Unite, have joined the RMT London Transport Regional Council and other community and campaign groups to support it. 

More information at farefreelondon.org and see Fare Free London’s campaign briefing, Free Public Transport for London: Why and How, here.

Image: 1967 Stock train at Finsbury Park in 2010. Creator: Tom Page  Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

UK Vassal state to the US or European partner?

FEBRUARY 28, 2025

Dave Levy ponders the bleak choices facing the Starmer Government.

The Trump administration’s proposals that the USA and Russia make peace in Ukraine without Ukraine being present at the table and mandating European NATO to provide peacekeeping forces are a return to great power politics unrestrained by the rule of law.

Left wing fools who consider Putin’s Russia to be the successor of the socialist Soviet Union must be very happy.

This attack on the EU was reinforced by the Vice President, J D Vance’s speech to the Munich security conference, where he criticised the EU and member state governments for suppressing free speech, failing to halt illegal migration and running in fear from voters’ true beliefs. He refused to meet the German Chancellor and yet met with the leader of the far right AfD (Alternative for Germany).

We all know his arguments on free speech are partisan; they want American rich people’s voices to be heard and amplified by privately-owned social media companies and fear Europe’s regulation of them based on a demand for truth. We also note the hypocrisy of the US ‘free speech’ advocates’ attacks on ideas, books and teachers in schools, universities and libraries in the US. His comments on not relying on foreign technology providers by which he meant China, may come to haunt him as Europe examines its supply chains on the basis of national security grounds.  

Trump’s call for European NATO to increase their defence budgets to 5% of GDP is a naked attempt to build budgets for the US arms industry, just as the UK’s requests to have a side treaty on defence and security with the EU is also at least partially based on the economic interests of BAe.

Trump’s arguments about what does his money, that is, the arms shipments to Ukraine, buy, has a moral vacancy but it is clear that the view that ‘the business of America is business’ has returned to the White House. The crudity with which Trump pursues his views of US fiscal and commercial interests is echoed by the UK Labour Government in positioning its ‘EU reset’,  arguing for changes in agreements which only benefit Britian from their limited, primarily electoral, point of view. 

The choices facing the Starmer administration are bleak. Starmer has promised to send British soldiers to Ukraine although this promise was made before the threat of US withdrawal from NATO had been made. Starmer seems to be seeking to avoid Trump’s tariff increases but on defence the choice is stark. The UK can either continue to act as a vassal state of the United States and as their unsinkable aircraft carrier, or develop more effective partnerships with the European Union. It should be noted that Vance has questioned the need for NATO joint command.

Starmer’s ambition on EU cooperation is limited. Many have argued that the UK should use the withdrawal agreement review clauses to re-enter the customs union and the single market. The suspicion is that the single market is a step too far because of the latter’s requirements for a free movement of labour and Labour’s fear of the Tories and Reform UK.

Today’s military questions and the need for ‘security of supply’ strongly imply that the UK should join the European Space Agency and possibly the European Defence Agency. The proposed military and security side treaty is looking less and less attractive to both sides. 

In order to protect our democracy against the attacks from US social media companies and US-owned AI search engines, the UK needs the umbrella of the EU’s competition and digital regulators. This means membership of the single market. At what point do we say: we need our MEPs, Judges, Commissioners and Council seats back – or will we just be rejoining the EU one agency at a time?

Dave Levy is a member of Lewisham North CLP and blogs at https://davelevy.info/blog. He is a member of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy National Committee.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/number10gov/54355300993/. Creator: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Str | Credit: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Str Copyright: Crown copyright. Licensed under the Open Government Licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Deed

Trump’s plutocracy  

The\global populist right is being emboldened and the forward march of the super-rich is being accelerated, argues Stewart Lansley.

MARCH 1, 2025

Over the last three decades, a global billionaire class has seized more and more control over the way states and economies operate. It is a process that has been led by the United States. At his inauguration as President, Donald Trump was flanked by four of the richest men in the world, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

Two years before the financial crash in 2008, a leading Wall Street investment bank, Citigroup, advised its clients that the US had come to resemble a “plutonomy”. This is a society in which economic decision-making is heavily concentrated in the hands of a tiny super-wealthy minority.

Three days before he took office, the outgoing President, the 82-year old Jo Biden, in his final speech from the White House, issued the country with a stark warning: “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms.”

Biden’s speech was not just hyperbole. Under Trump, plutocratic power has been taken to new heights. His administration includes at least 13 billionaires with a combined fortune of over $400 billion. Biden’s Cabinet, in contrast, was worth about $118 million. Trump’s government, is, by some stretch, the wealthiest democratically elected government in US history.

His appointees are there because of the cash they poured into Trump’s election campaign.  Operating as if in a medieval court, their role is to activate Trump’s agenda. The new ambassador to the UK, the investment banker Warren Stephens, has a fortune of $3.4 billion. Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, is worth $2 bn. The richest of them all, Elon Musk, has been charged with auditing federal spending. His ‘efficiency czar’ as Trump likes to call him, has recruited a small gang of youthful tech-savvy ‘Muskrats’ to sift through the US Treasury’s financial and personal records, a first step towards the shrinking of the state.

Donald Trump had once been remarkably candid about mixing politics and extreme wealth.  “When they call [for donations], I give,” he said on live TV in 2015 – of those seeking high office: “When I [later] need something from them, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”

What is striking is the resurrection of the nineteenth century American ‘gilded age’. The industrial tycoons were later dubbed the ‘robber barons’ for their ruthless industrial tactics and the harsh conditions they imposed on workers. Some of today’s billionaire class may have started as mould-breakers and innovators. But they have also exploited their power, through monopolisation and collusion, bringing much social damage, including crushing levels of inequality. JD Rockefeller, who created Standard Oil, controlled over 90% of the world’s oil supply. Google has swallowed up over 200 companies and now controls over 80% of Europe’s search market. In anti-liberal states from Russia to Hungary, oligarchs, handed the economic commanding heights, are there through presidential patronage.

In the 1930s, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr described America “in an ironical perversion of [President] Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg” as “government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations.”   The weakening of fusion of money and power from 1945, was short-lived. George W Bush once joked about “the haves and the have-mores” at a white-tie dinner of his wealthy supporters. “Some people call you the elite,” he added. “I call you my base.”  

Before Trump’s first Presidency, the American economist, Jeffrey Sachs, declared that even if government were turned over to “the CEOs  of ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, Bechtel and the Health Corporation of America, they would have very little to change of current policies which already cater to the four mega-lobbies, Big Oil, Wall Street, defence contractors and medical giants.”

Far from the utopia of free and competitive markets and economic dynamism promised by the neoliberal counter-revolution, global capitalism has been turned, under a veneer of democracy, into a model that is less addicted to markets and competition than to monopolisation. Today’s plutocratic class are only too happy with their freedom to crush competitors, and ignore or change regulations. A growing number of the world’s mega corporations, from oil and health conglomerates to Amazon and Google, have been turned into private fiefdoms for their owners.

In a speech to the Oxford Union in 1975, the leading Conservative politician Keith Joseph described the post-war social settlement as “an ephemeral political compromise”. With liberal democracy on its knees, the world is at another ephemeral moment, one in the hands of this new political nexus, a shotgun marriage of convenience between the world’s most powerful politician, and a group of ‘have-mores’ with front door keys to the White House.

While the veteran political activist and senator, Bernie Sanders, is taking his ‘Tour against Oligarchy’ to big crowds in Nebraska, Trump has issued a long list of executive orders, many of breathtaking audacity. The catalogue of upheaval, often bypassing the usual democratic processes, includes the withdrawal of the US from both the World Health Organisation and the Paris Climate agreement and closing of USAID aid programmes across the globe.  

Trump’s contradictory mix of anarcho-liberalism and absolute sovereignty is being delivered through Mark Zuckerberg’s early in-house motto, “move fast and break things”. Most of his Presidential edicts will benefit American and global oligarchs. They include the commitment to ‘unleash’ the oil and gas industry, the promise of lucrative state contracts for Big Tech, the opposition to the OECD’s attempt for a global minimum tax rate on corporations, the promise of top tax rate cuts, and the axing of state climate and employment regulations and anti-trust powers. Here is a charter of further empowerment for corporate extractors, monopolists and crypto-currency speculators alike. Musk’s personal fortune has boomed since last November, with his $250 billion contribution to his new boss’s election campaign proving a lucrative investment.  

Trump is dismantling, by diktat, those state institutions he sees as obstacles to change. Internationally he is aligning with other strong and anti-liberal leaders from Putin to Netanyahu. His goal seems to be that of an absolute ruler. He jokes about being ‘King’, but resembles a modern day Caesar, with a gang of corporate barons his centurions. One of Trump’s appointees, as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, is Michael Anton, a conservative thinker long admired by the new President and his associates. In his 2021 book, The Stakes, Anton argued that America needed ‘Red Caesarism’, a form of “one-man rule, halfway between monarchy and democracy.”

At work is a bigger shake-up in governing politics than initiated by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The global populist right will be emboldened, as will the growing number demanding the shrinking of the essential functions of government. The forward march of the super-rich is being accelerated.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the political pendulum swung against the corporate barons. High profile figures, such as the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, promoted a new vision of an America free of plutocracy and of poverty, and the corrupt politicians supporting the robber barons. The decade long ‘progressive era’ was fuelled when Theodore Roosevelt became President in 1901, and launched the first break-up of some corporate monopolies. A progressive Republican, ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt was the first to take on, as he put it, “the malefactors of great wealth.” Despite his patrician background, he questioned the prevailing idea that making money was American’s primary goal. His government marked the first concerted attempt at state interference in markets. Private interests, he insisted, should be not be allowed to override the public good.

The robber barons overplayed their hand, and gave way to an age of populist revolt, anti-monopoly legislation, social reform and, eventually, the New Deal of the 1930s. Trump’s scattergun revolution may yet falter. Not all of America’s billionaire class are fans. His new lieutenants may not all stay in line. Then there are the many millions of likely losers, from jobless state officials to workers in clean energy and those industries hit by his resurrection of mercantilist doctrines. Without a similar progressive challenge, this unholy alliance is taking America and much of the world along a very uncertain, unforgiving and possibly irreversible path.

Stewart Lansley is a visiting fellow at the School of Policy Studies, the University of Bristol. He is the author of many books, most recently, The Richer, The Poorer, How Britain Enriched the few and Failed the Poor, a 200-year history.

Image: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/business/2024/03/05/bezos-dethrones-musk-to-reclaim-title-of-worlds-richest-man/. Licence: Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0 Deed

Trump’s first month

HubMP2012

FEBRUARY 23, 2025

President Donald Trump’s actions have dominated the headlines over the last four weeks. Aside from his pardoning of the Capitol Hill rioters, crackdown on migrants, attacks on the federal civil service and agencies like USAID and foreign policy outbursts, here are some of the less noticed things he has done.

January 21st – He instructed all federal health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health, to pause external communications, including scientific reports, updates to websites, health advisories, and social media posts.

January 22nd – The DOJ halted agreements for police reform in cases where prosecutors had found patterns of misconduct and issued a “full and unconditional pardon” to two DC police officers involved in the death of 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown.

January 27th – He signed an executive order banning transgender individuals from enlisting and serving in the military and signed another executive order ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the military. His deputy director for global health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered CDC staff to stop communicating with the World Health Organization.

January 28th – The Defense Intelligence Agency issued a memo suspending the observance of several holidays, including MLK Day, Holocaust Day, Juneteenth and Pride.

January 29th – He signed an executive order that seeks to deport international students who participated in pro-Palestinian campus protests.

February 4th – The Department of Homeland Security sent its first military flight with migrants to Guantanamo Bay.

February 5th – Trump signed an executive order banning trans women and girls from competing in female sports. He also called on Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to reject the visa applications of trans women athletes.

February 6th – Trump called for CBS to cancel ‘60 Minutes’ and said the network should lose its broadcasting license in a post on Truth Social.

February 8th – The Washington Post reported that candidates for top national security jobs have been asked questions about whether the 2020 election was stolen and if Jan. 6 was an “inside job.” Those who answered “no” were not selected for the positions. Russell Vought, the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), cut off new funding for the agency, saying it’s not necessary.

February 10th – Trump signed an executive order pausing the enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits US companies and foreign firms from paying bribes to officials of foreign governments to obtain or retain business.

February 11th – An AP reporter was prohibited from covering an Oval Office event because the news organization’s stylebook uses the Gulf of Mexico rather than the Gulf of America.

February 19th – The Trump administration said the Transportation Department would move to end federal approval for New York City’s congestion pricing program.

February 20th – The Senate narrowly confirmed election denier, Trump sycophant, and right-wing extremist Kash Patel for a 10-year term as FBI director. Patel has pledged to “come after” US media organizations.

February 21st – Trump fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the head of the Navy, the vice chief of the Air Force, and the top lawyers for the Army, Navy, and Air Force, in what the NY Times called “an extraordinary Friday night purge at the Pentagon.” 

This digest has been compiled from Zeteo’s excellent This Week in Democracy series, documenting the Trump administration’s attacks on the American democratic and constitutional order, with thanks. The full series can be found here.

Image: https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/world/2024/02/10/trump-vows-to-undo-bidens-gun-restrictions-if-re-elected/ Creator: Matt Rourke | Credit: AP Copyright: Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Licence: Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0