Saturday, June 08, 2024

Ming Vase Politics: UK Labour and Purging the Corbynistas


By any reckoning, this was the move of a fool.  A fool, it should be said, motivated by spite larded with caution.  Evidently playing safe, adopting what has been called a “Ming Vase strategy” (hold it with scrupulous care; avoid danger), the British Labour Party under Sir Keir Starmer is already laying its own boobytraps to step onto.  This is some feat, given that Labour currently leads the incumbent Tories by such a margin it is projected to win a majority of 194 seats, giving them 422 in all.

With the election campaign still salad green, Starmer has made it clear that a number of the progressive faithful will no longer be expected to keep him company on his way into government – assuming he doesn’t cock matters up before July 4.  A cull is being made of the old Labour guard, and they are not going away quietly.

One is a former leader of the party, an unabashed progressive who has been hugging the left side of politics since he was a callow teenager.  Jeremy Corbyn, a member for London’s Islington North for over four decades and party leader for five years, is running as an independent.  In March, the National Executive Committee (NEC) voted by 22 to 12 to approve a motion proposed by Starmer insisting that it was “not in the best interests of the Labour Party for it to endorse Mr Corbyn as a Labour Party candidate at the next general election.”

The response from Corbyn was resoundingly biting.  The move was a “shameful attack on the party of democracy”, showing “contempt” for those who had voted for the party at the 2017 and 2019 elections.  “If you start shutting down dissent and preventing people from speaking out, it’s not a sign of strength, it’s a sign of weakness.  A sign of strength is when you can absorb and listen to the other person’s arguments,” says Corbyn on the YouTube outlet, Double Down News.

Things were also further muddied by the near juvenile incompetence regarding the future of the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, Dianne Abbott, a figure who has been an enduring feature of Labour politics for decades.  She was the first black woman to be elected to Parliament, reliably Left, admirably innumerate and always reliable in having a moment of indiscretion.  (She had been suspended over comments made in a letter to The Observer claiming that Jews, the Irish and Travellers suffered “prejudice” rather than the “racism” suffered by blacks.)  The question here was whether her readmission to the party would qualify her to run again or enable her to journey into a veteran politician’s sunset.

Here was a moment of genuine danger for Labour.  Confusion, always fatal for any party seeking government, ignited.  Was Abbott banned by her party from running at the next election because of her recently spotty record?  Some Labour functionaries thought not, but felt that the NEC should have the last say.  Whispers and rumours suggested the opposite.

Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC bored her readers senseless with a slew of anonymous sources that did little to clear things up.  “She was looking for a way to stand down with dignity when it was blown all up,” one source claimed.  Another is quoted as a “senior ally” of Starmer, suggesting that things had come to a pass.  “Everyone was aware of the symbolism.  We had to draw the line, it couldn’t just go on and on.”

A strategy is certainly afoot to stay, remove or frustrate candidates of a certain left leaning disposition who fail to fit Starmer’s ultra cautious strategy.  They are memory’s heavy burden, a reminder of the roistering, scuffling legacy of the party.  Distilled to its essence, it is a crude and clumsy effort to purge the Corbynistas.  As Katy Balls of The Spectator appropriately describes it, the Labour leader has been selecting “candidates they trust to have a low risk of scandal or rebellion”.

Economist Faiza Shaheen, for instance, has found herself blocked for taking issue with her party’s Middle East policy, though, as she put it, it entailed “14 tweets over 10 years, including me liking a colleague’s tweet saying she was running as a Green councillor, and a retweet containing a list of companies to boycott to support Palestine, both from 2014.”

In an article for The Guardian, Shaheen describes how she was “removed, via email, from being a Labour parliamentary candidate from Chingford and Woodford Green.”  She faced the dreaded NEC regarding her deselection.  “More than four years’ work thrown in the bin.  Any connection to my community brushed aside.”

Shaheen proceeds to make a fundamental, if obvious political point.  “The irony is that taking me off the ballot and replacing me with someone no one in my community knows will jeopardise Labour’s ability to win this seat and finally unseat the Tory grandee Iaian Duncan Smith.”

These instances may not be enough to derail the Labour train that is destined, at this point, of storming into the House of Commons and Number 10 with tearing effect.  But Starmer’s culling program is already taking the shine off the effort.  Abbott has a loyal following.  Those of Corbyn’s are the stuff of legend.  Riling, obstructing and barring such figures serves to cloud the message, impairing an electoral effort that may, ironically enough, see the Ming Vase slip out of Starmer’s desperate hands.Facebook


Tory Nightmares: The Return of Nigel Farage


Few have exerted as much influence on the tone, and outcome of elections, as Nigel Farage.  Fewer have done so while failing to win office.  In seven attempts at standing for a seat in the UK House of Commons between 1994 and 2015, the votes to get him across the line have failed to materialise.  Yet it is impossible to imagine the Brexit referendum of 2016, or the victory of the Conservatives under Boris Johnson in 2019, as being possible without his manipulative hand.

Before an audience at the MF Club Health and Wealth Summit at the Tiverton Hotel in March, Farage had words for his country’s voting system, one that notoriously remains stubbornly rooted to the “first past the post” model.  It was a system that had, in his view, eliminated any coherent distinction between the major parties.  They had become “big state, high tax social democrats”.

Farage took the budget as a salient illustration.  The leader of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer, agreed “with virtually everything in the budget.  It would’ve made no difference if Rachel Reeves had delivered that budget instead of Jeremy Hunt.  They are all the same.”

Having been made leader of the populist Reform UK party for the next five years, Farage felt it was time to make another tilt.  On June 3, he announced that he would be standing in the July 4 election in the Essex constituency of Clacton, one that had conclusively voted to leave the European Union in 2016.  It is also the only constituency to have ever elected an MP from UKIP, Reform UK’s previous iteration.  The decision concluded a prolonged phase of indecision.  And it will terrify the Tory strategists.

The speech offered little by way of surprises.  The usual dark clouds were present.  The failure by both Labour and the Conservatives to halt the tide of immigration.  Rates of crushing taxation.  General ignorance of Britain’s finest achievements battling tyranny, including a lack of awareness about such glorious events as D-Day.  The poor state of public services, including the National Health Service.  A state of “moral decline”.  Rampant crime.  In the UK, one could “go shoplifting and nick up to 200 quid’s worth of kit before anyone is even going to prosecute you.”

From the view of the Conservatives, who already risk electoral annihilation at the polls, Reform UK was always going to be dangerous.  Roughly one in four voters who helped inflate Johnson’s numbers in 2019 are considering voting for it.  It explains various efforts by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, including his insensibly cruel Rwanda plan, to court a voting base that he hopes will return to the Tory fold.

Unfortunately for the PM, such efforts will hardly matter now that the real Nigel is running.  “The pint-loving populist offers a splash of colour in an otherwise grey campaign,” suggests Robert Ford in The Spectator.  “The result will be a constant background hum of populist criticism undermining Tory promises and reinforcing voters’ doubts.”

Veteran British commentator Andrew Marr relished the irony: here was the architect of the Brexit victory bringing calamity to the Conservatives.  Farage had effectively raised “the pirate flag of what he calls ‘a political revolt’ against the entire Westminster class; but in particular against the listing, drifting and battered galleon that is the Tory party.”

Leaving aside – and there is much on that score – the issue of Farage’s Little England image, his presence in the Commons would come with various promises that will rock Britain’s political establishment.  There is, for instance, the proposal for electoral reform, one long strangled and smothered in the cot by the main parties.  Finally, he insists, a proportional representation model of voting can be introduced that will make Westminster more representative.

He also proposes ridding Britain of the House of Lords in its current form, replacing it with what would essentially make it an elected chamber accountable to voters.  This “abomination” and “disgrace” of an institution had become the destination for shameless political hacks favoured by Labor and Tory prime ministers.  “It’s now made up of hundreds of mates of Tony Blair and David Cameron; they’re the same blooming people,” he rattled to the entrepreneurs at the Tiverton Hotel.  “They all live within the same three postcodes in West London.  They’re not representative of the country in any way at all.”

There is a case to be made for Farage to stay behind the throne of UK politics, influencing matters as sometimes befuddled kingmaker.  Even if he fails at this eighth attempt – and given current polling, Reform UK is not on course to win a single seat – there is every chance that he will have a direct say in the way the Conservatives approach matters while in opposition.  He might even play the role of a usurping Bolingbroke, taking over the leadership of a party he promises to inflict much harm upon next month.  Short of that, he can have first dibs at the selection of a far more reactionary leader from its thinned ranks. The Farage factor will again become hauntingly critical to the gloomy fate of British politics.






 

Inexplicable Investments: Elbit Systems and

Australia’s Future Fund


Australia’s modest sovereign wealth fund, modestly standing at A$272.3 billion, has crawled into some trouble of late.  Investors, morally twinged, are keeping an eye on where the money of the Australian Future Fund goes.  Inevitably, a good slice of it seems to be parked in the military-industrial complex, a sector that performs on demand.

Filed last October, a Freedom of Information request by Greens Senator David Shoebridge revealed that as much as A$600 million in public funds had found their way into defence company assets.  In December, it was reported that the 30 defence and aerospace companies featured, with some of them receiving the following: Thales (A$3.5 million), Lockheed Martin (A$71 million), BAE Systems (A$26 million), Boeing (A$10.7 million), Rocket Lab USA (A$192 million) and Elbit Systems (A$488,768).

The findings gave Shoebridge a chance to spray the board administering the fund with gobbets of chastening wisdom.  “The Future Fund is meant to benefit future generations.  That rings hollow when they are investing in companies making equipment that ends future generations.”

Some cleansing of the stables was on offer, and the choice of what was cleaned proved popular – at least for the Canberra security establishment.  In May, the Board upped stakes and divested from funds associated with the People’s Liberation Army of China.  Eleven companies were noted, among them Xinjiang Guanghui Energy, a natural gas and coal producer whose chairman, Sun Guangxin, teased US officials by purchasing ranches for reasons of building a wind farm in proximity to a US Air Force base in Texas.

Relevant companies included Jiangsu GoodWe and LONGi, both with expertise in the line of solar energy generation.  “Taxpayer funds and Australians’ retirement savings should never be invested in companies linked to serious human rights abuses, sanctions evasion or military suppliers to an authoritarian state,” gloated a satisfied opposition home affairs spokesman, Senator James Paterson.  The same, it would seem, would not apply to human rights abuses committed by a purported democratic state.

To that end, things are somewhat murkier when it comes to the companies of other, friendlier powers.  For some obstinate reason, Israel’s military poster boy, Elbit Systems, continues to make its presence felt in the field of Australian defence and finance.  Despite a spotty reputation and a resume of lethal drone production; despite the ongoing murderous conflict in Gaza, the Israeli defence company managed to convince the Australian government to throw A$917 million its way in a contract signed in February.  The contract, to be performed over a period of five years, will supply “advanced protection, fighting capabilities and sensors” for the Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFVs) of Korean design.  With wonderful opportunism, the vehicles are being constructed in the same electorate that belongs to the Australian Defence Minister, Richard Marles.

And what of the near half-million dollars invested by the Future Fund in Elbit Systems?  In October 2023, a list of the Fund’s direct holdings in various companies was published.  It included Elbit Systems.  An odd matter, given that the company, since 2021, is precluded from investing in the fund given, as Shoebridge tells us, the ratification by Australia of various “military weapons-related conventions or treaties”.  The board, accordingly, had to furnish reasons “how it continues to invest in Elbit Systems despite the publicly announced direction it gave to withdraw those funds because of Australia’s international legal obligations.”

The internal correspondence of December 7, 2023, prompted by Shoebridge’s FOI request, including the prodding of Michael West Media, proved arid in detail. A Canberra bureaucrat in finance asks  an official associated or attached to the Future Fund (both names are redacted) to clarify the status of Elbit Systems in terms of the exclusion list.  The reply notes the role of “expert third party service providers” (who, pray?) who keep an eye on company activities and provide research upon which a decision is made by the Board every six months.

Elbit had been previously excluded as an investment option “in relation to its involvement in cluster munitions following its acquisition of IMI [Systems]”.  IMI, rather than Elbit, was the spoiling consideration, given its role in producing technology that violates the Convention on Cluster Munitions.  As of April 2023, Elbit was “no longer excluded by the portfolio.  This reflects the updated research of our expert research providers.”

The response is not obliging on the exact details of the research.  Banal talking points and information stifling platitudes are suggested, crude filling for the news cycle.  The Board, for instance, had “a long-standing policy on portfolio exclusions and a robust process to implement” them.  The policy was reviewed twice a year, buttressed by expert third party research.  Recent media reporting had relied on an outdated exclusions list.  The Board did not invest in those entities on the exclusions list.  For the media establishment, this would have more than sufficed.  The Board had said, and revealed, nothing.

Last month, Michael West noted that efforts to penetrate the veil of inscrutability had so far come to naught.  The Future Fund and its Board of Guardians persisted in their refusal to respond to inquiries.  “Since our last media request for comment, Israel has ramped up its war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.”  Given various interim orders by the International Court of Justice warning Israel of a real risk of committing genocide, even as it ponders South Africa’s application to make that finding, what are those expert researchers up to?

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.comRead other articles by Binoy.

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