Comrade Corbyn's Last Chance

Labour's losses in yesterday's local elections came as little surprise; and nor for anyone reflecting on how our first-past-the -post voting system works was the collapse of UKIP to just one councillor (from 145) a true shock. Even the Tory resurgence in Scotland was predictable given their showing in last year's Scottish Parliamentary elections (and nor was it that spectacular - one "incredible" result was on the basis of 629 votes on the tenth count to win the last seat in a 4-member ward; not the stuff of revolutions, or perhaps more appropriately reaction).

Unsurprising too was Jeremy Corbyn's vow to fight on and John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, explaining it all away as not as bad as expected. What politician doesn't try that - UKIP after all claim their losses were because they are victims of their own success, while the Lib Dems "Tiny" Tim Farron hailed their net loss of 42 councillors as a stunning success. Among opposition parties, only the Greens (up 6) and Plaid Cymru (up 33) actually had any concrete good news, but both were studiously written out of nearly all news stories.

What is surprising is Labour's attitude, both before but especially now after their bad local showing, to those smaller opposition parties given Corbyn's previous calls for political pluralism. In the face of all reality, they continue to talk as if it is still 1950 and the Tories and Labour stand to poll 97% of the vote between them.

The Greens have debated the idea of working with Labour and others in a "Progressive Alliance". The objectives of such a beast - was it to gain electoral reform or simply beat the Tories? - generated more greenhouse  heat than light at times, as did the vexed question of whether or not the Lib Dems might be welcomed to root among the progressive compost. But with Theresa May's snap election called three weeks ago, the overtures to Labour gained a real urgency given the Tories' commanding lead in the polls.

Green leaders Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley both offered to talk with Jeremy Corbyn, while in almost every region of the country, local Green parties offered to consider local accommodations where Green voters are numerous enough to make a possible difference to the outcome. So far, a couple of agreements have been reached in Brighton Kemptown and in Ealing where the Greens will back the Labour candidate in return, among other things, for a commitment to support proportional representation. Greens have also stood down in Shipley, along with the local Lib Dems, to back the Women's Equality Party against the odious Tory incumbent Philip Davies, but so far Labour are adamant they will stand in spite of having little prospect of success. With a few honourable exceptions such as Clive Lewis, this is typical of their national stance: Labour are prepared to stand down absolutely nowhere at all, for any one else. Period.

On Radio 4 just yesterday, Labour's Lord Faulkener insisted the "minor parties" have been wiped aside and it is a straight contest between Tory and Labour ignoring the fact that these same parties had just won almost exactly the same number of council seats as Labour. A few days previously, speaking in Batley (where, ironically, all the major parties stood down in favour of Labour after Jo Cox's murder), Labour Front Bencher Emily Thornberry responded to a question asking if she felt only two parties - Labour and Tory - should be standing in the elections with a plain, "Yes."

So much for Corbyn's pluralism. And so much for any chances of stopping a Tory tidal wave.

We are where we are in good part because of our undemocratic voting system: first-past-the-post, with its winner-take-all outcomes, had repeatedly produced election results completely at odds with the wishes of voters. Time and time again, Government's have gained outright power with a minority of votes cast - only once since the war, in 1955, has the winning party achieved over half the vote.

Keir Hardie, the first leader of the Labour Party, recognised this. He declared first-past-the-post as unfit for purpose, especially outside a two-party system, and the Labour Government of 1929-31 actually introduced a Bill for electoral reform which was held up by the House of Lords until the Government collapsed. With Labour's success in 1945, the party's commitment to a fairer voting system was quietly forgotten.

And so we are left with this impasse: Labour decry those on the Left who stand against them as stooges for the Tories because of how the voting system works. And yet they refuse to change that system for all sorts of spurious reasons, but at its core is the repeated mantra that we are a two-party country and the choice we face is purely binary.

These claims however are a denial of reality. While in 1951 97% did indeed vote Tory or Labour, in 2015 that figure was just 65%, with more people (35%) voting for "minor parties" compared to Labour's total of just 29%. Just look at Scotland, where the SNP virtually eliminated Labour and where the party continues to fall relentlessly and the claim that UK politics are binary is immediately swept away. And while UKIP is clearly on the wane in England, this is largely because the hard right Tories have adopted their agenda - there is no dividend for Labour. The Greens, meantime, while not at breakthrough, have continued to grow steadily in elected representatives and their current poll ratings show them at least likely to equal if not just yet better their record 2015 showing.

So what on earth possesses Labour, including Jeremy Corbyn, like some sort of Death Wish?

The announcement of a Progressive Alliance and real reciprocation between Labour, Greens, Plaid and the SNP up to the close of nominations on Thursday would produce a wave of support far beyond the current sum of its parts. The Tories have decried such an entity as a "Coalition of Chaos", but it is in fact the thing they fear most - because far more unites these parties than divides them. Faced off against the lacklustre Tory campaign, an alliance would catch the popular imagination and reinvigorate the political landscape.

And yet, although it is technically possible even now, there is little sign of it from the Labour ranks. Regrettably, and almost certainly in vain, Corbyn puts his party's tenuous and frankly impossible unity ahead of the needs of the country. For the sake of trying to conjure up the illusion of a two-party contest, Labour risk delivering Britain into the grim reality of a One Party state.

War of the First Resort

"Old men make wars. Young men fight them."

The quote is attributed rightly or wrongly to Einstein, but it came to mind this morning with the news of the ludicrous harrumphing of Tory Lord Howard, former party leader, on the subject of the British enclave of Gibraltar's place in the Brexit negotiations.

Showing all the insecurity of a playground bully faced with having to talk on equal terms with someone else, Howard dismissed Spain's wish to be involved in the talks on the creation of a new "hard border" on its southern frontier with a ridiculous over the top threat to go to war.

 “Thirty-five years ago this week, another woman prime minister sent a task force halfway across the world to defend the freedom of another small group of British people against another Spanish-speaking country, and I’m absolutely certain that our current prime minister will show the same resolve in standing by the people of Gibraltar,” Howard told Sky News.

The Government did not comment directly on his words, but it is clearly an orchestrated move: Defence Secretary Fallon took the opportunity to say the UK will "protect" Gibraltar come what may, while Downing Street announced the PM had spoken to her Spanish counterpart to stress Britain's support for Gibraltar.

The colony on the tip of the Spanish peninsula is a relic of our imperial past: conquered from the Habsburgs at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, it is a large rocky promontory of just 2.6 square miles that has served ever since as a major naval base. Along its precipitous clifftops, a tiny statelet has grown with a population of some 30,000 people governed by their own legislature with powers similar to the Scottish Parliament. Defence and foreign affairs, including with the EU, are handled by the UK Government. Its economy is centred on online gambling, tourism, shipping and financial services.

All of Remain-voting Gibraltar: Spanish border is just north of the airport.

And while two referenda have made clear Gibraltarians wish to not be part of Spain itself, they voted by 96% to just 4% last year to remain part of the European Union. As part of the UK, however, Gibraltar will be due to Brexit along with the rest of Britain. Mrs May, however, forgot to include the colony in the notice to leave the UK, so this mini-crisis is perhaps predicated on the concept of the "dead cat" defence. This is where politicians hide their mistakes in plain sight by creating a diversion. So, in this case, his Lordship has turned the issue of omitting the territory from the Brexit notice by coming up with a completely non-existent threat to Gibraltar's sovereignty of a level meriting a declaration of war.

With who is not clear - Spain for sure, but maybe the whole of the rest of the EU as well? And, as we would be attacking a member of NATO, all our previous NATO allies would be duty-bound to support Spain. So, especially with UK armed services somewhat reduced by Tory austerity, our military will have their work cut out.

Spain is a member of NATO as well as the UK

Of course, it won't, or at least shouldn't, happen - while Spain has retained its demands for the return of the Rock ever since Britain seized it three hundred and four years ago, its actual demands at the moment are for an agreement on Gibraltar's post-Brexit status. At the moment, thousands of Spaniards and Gibraltarians travel across the border every day for work, social and other activities. It is hardly surprising that, like Eire, Spain may want to have some say in how a new "hard border" on its southern land mass might function.

It rather makes sense for the people of Gibraltar too. It is notable that in the Sunday Times today, the local legislature has briefed that it has no concerns about its sovereignty, but rather  IS worried about the Government not including them in its application for talks on the future relationship with the European Union and, by default, with its Spanish neighbour.

But the rhetoric remains deeply troubling. In just a matter of weeks, the Trump Administration has excelled at leaping to hostile pronouncements towards other countries with explicit and implicit threats of violence. The fact that the UK Government now pathetically invokes the spectre of the Falklands War, and even the battle of Trafalgar, when it hasn't even begun talking to anyone is worrying indeed.

What will happen when there really is a crisis or serious dispute? The Remainer warnings about a European Continent once again open to the bloody wars that marked so much of its pre-Treaty of Rome history suddenly seem not quite so far-fetched. Turning Clausewitz on his head, it seems the regimes in London and Washington perhaps see politics as a means of warfare and rather willingly so.

But of course, if and when "we" go to war, Mrs May and Mr Fallon will not actually be at war. Young men and women of our armed services and their counterparts from whatever armies we take on will be doing that, and killing and dying by the scores and hundreds, or more. And Lord Howard will be able to toast the steadfast resolve of his successors with another brandy in the comfort and safety of his armchair. Through his blood-tinted spectacles, it's not so difficult to be brave with other people's lives.

"He felt a kind of hatred for these two old mandarins who knew so many dates and theories, but hadn't the least idea of the stench of a sacked town or the look of an open belly full of fat, green flies over which poppies droop their heads." 
(from Conquered City by Victor Serge)

Your Employment Is At Risk

As the Green Party votes on its approach to Brexit, some thoughts on what the real priorities should be for party policy on the British workplace. This article was first published on the Green Left website and in the Watermelon newsletter distributed at Green Party and Global Greens conference in Liverpool.

In the run up to the referendum, the Leave campaign talked repeatedly about the need to remove EU regulations that allegedly hold back the UK. As the debate descended into little more than internecine Tory grunting, neither side offered any explanation of what EU regulations cover, leaving voters to wonder what they were never mind their merit. And since the vote for Brexit, the Greens’ focus on staying in the Single Market may mean that we lose sight of the need to defend what truly is at risk – and what sort of society we could be looking to build instead.

While there is no question that a wide range of employment rights, especially in respect of discrimination, do derive from EU directives and agreements, many more do not but are arguably even more at risk in the gung-ho “entrepreneurial” environment May and her ilk are seeking to craft. While we argue about access to a free trade zone that is in many respects inimical to our long-term aims of localised and sustainable economics, employers’ think tanks are joining with their Tory allies to seek a bonfire not so much of EU regulations but of all employment rights.

Their adopted tone however is not the shotgun blast of the past, but rather an insidious, devious range of tactics aimed to divide employees and play people off against each other. The “choices approach” where employers offer staff a menu of rights linked to their performance at work – i.e., longer maternity leave for prized workers; varied periods of probation before employment protection is activated, etc – will be formulated to appeal to enough people, initially, to gain some level of acceptance. All this is proclaimed in the name of national competitiveness, when in fact the collective concept of “national” couldn’t be any further from the reality of corporations carving up even more of the cake for themselves. Having in effect destroyed collective trade union rights, they are now finally coming for the rights of individual employees and workers.

Yet we are mistaken in seeing the EU as a guarantor of our workplace security. Its’ flagship Acquired Rights Directive (better known in the UK as TUPE) offers little more than a fig-leaf of protection to transferred workers. Similarly, Brussels and the ECJ were nowhere to be seen when the Lib Dem Ministers in the Coalition introduce fee arrangements which have led to an 80% collapse in employment tribunal hearings.

The protections we have against unfair dismissal, the right to a written contract, the right to equal pay for work of equal value, the right to paid holidays and to bank holidays, the national minimum wage – all these come from British law, not European.

So are Greens making a strategic mistake in putting our energy into remaining in the single market in the belief that it protects workers? In truth, what workplace protections it does require are ultimately about ensuring no single member can undercut another rather than about the inherent rights of workers. It is about regulated capitalism, not human rights.

As the EU faces major “populist” challenges to liberalise its economy, in spite of the fact it already largely has been, Greens need to argue for positive rights in the British workplace as these will be squeezed out regardless of our membership status. It is imperative we use this time of change to advocate for the type of economy we want to develop, one which is not dependent on the protection of some distant behemoth of questionable repute, but rather one that rests firmly and deeply in our society and its shared values.

Now is the time to be calling for a business environment that gives breaks to co-operatives, community enterprises, employee buyouts and takeovers. Now is when we should be advocating hardest for the living wage AND the citizens’ income (not either or, but both) and even for some level of protectionism as we take key industries into democratic ownership. Corporate law should be transformed to end its cosy legalisation of profit-maximisation as PLCs sole objective to instead a range of duties to employees, communities and the environment. And we must be clear that we are happy to show the door to those who threaten to go – that is real “taking back control”.

Alongside this, we should be arguing for a root and branch change to the whole employment relationship. Incredibly, though maybe unsurprisingly, our employment rules still rest on the 18th century Master and Servant laws. While heavily modified over the years, the idea that you are a servant and your employer is your Master remains the central legal concept in the employment relationship. In any democratic society, this is a complete nonsense and it is time to turn it on its head, prefiguring of course a transformation of ownership rights and the control of enterprises.

For ecosocialists such as those of us in Green Left, there is also a wider debate to be had as we move towards a world where technology has the capacity to set more and more free from labour and how the abundance in both time and resources is used equitably and sustainably. The day is not far away when, as human labour is less central to material productivity and service delivery, the whole concept of paid employment can be done away with. As we develop that argument, of course, we will be charged with everything from utopian dreaming to economic treason, but as we know, if we don’t map the path for real change, capitalism will do it for us and take our planet in a very different, very hostile and very dark direction.

The Day Women Changed The World

The Women's Day March that brought down an Empire. Petrograd 8 March 1917 (photo- WikiCommons)

Today, 8 March is International Women’s Day, when we highlight the call for greater equality for women of both chance and outcome in our still highly misogynistic world. First established in 1909 by American Socialists to commemorate a women garment workers' strike the year before, it was adopted a year later by the Second International of Socialists to advocate for women's suffrage. This year's IWD is a particularly poignant one, not only because the recent rise of Trump brings into ever sharper focus the lack of progress towards gender equality, but also because it marks a full century since an International Women’s Day that literally shook the world and changed the course of history.

One century ago this morning, crowds of women downed tools and left the textile factories of Vyborg in Petrograd, then the capital of the Russian Empire, to march on the city centre. In what, by the Old Calendar, was still an fairly cold February morning, they protested loudly for bread and peace. This came as Russia faced another long year of the war that the Czar had initiated in August 1914 and which had claimed the lives of over a million Russian soldiers – nearly all of them peasant conscripts – with a similar number captured and twice as many seriously injured or disabled.

Of all the warring nations, Russia was perhaps the least equipped for a protracted modern war. Its society was still essentially one ruled by noble landowners and worked by often impoverished peasants. Such industry as had been developed, largely by the Czarist Government itself, was concentrated in the two key cities of Petrograd and Moscow, with lesser development in the Ukrainian city of Kiev far to the south. There was a small middle class, much of it the clerks and notaries hired to run the imperial bureaucracy or managers in the small industrialised sector. Represented by liberal parties like the Kadets and Decembrists, they were in truth little but a mild irritant to the imperial government, which sponsored its own nationalist, often anti-Semitic groupings, backed up with the violent “muscle” of the extremist Black Hundreds movement, a street force that would have put Hitler to shame.

Conditions in Petrograd were appalling for the urban working class, and the Vyborg district along the side of the River Neva was in many respects the worst of all. Essentially a dormitory for the workers who produced all the material goods for the army and for the wealthy classes who lived directly opposite on the far side of the river, site of the Imperial Palace, the living standards of the masses were beyond cruel. In Vyborg, an average six people lived per room, almost three times that of their English contemporaries, and only one in four had access to running water. Nearly all, including women and children, worked exceedingly long hours and it was common for workers to sleep in slings in their actual workplaces, the better to start their next shift on time.

Sooty pollution rose like tall dark dervishes from the factory roofs, while safety arrangements barely existed. Trade unions were mostly banned or ignored, and where they survived they were usually taken over by Czarist agents – one chapter of a union folded when gradually the entire committee realised they were all secret policemen. In response, the workers looked to socialist parties to speak for them though the Duma, a semi-parliamentary body grudgingly conceded by the Czar after the failed 1905 revolution, was toothless and elected on a franchise skewed in favour of the rich – and of course completely excluded all women from voting. It had barely met since the war began and some of its own members urged the Imperial Father to abolish it.

Many supported the Social Revolutionaries, a party based on the peasant class in the countryside, from where many had migrated to seek work in the cities. But the SRs were a party without a clear cause. Mildly syndicalist in outlook, it was often more certain about what it opposed than what it supported. The SRs often collaborated with the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Both held to Marxist theory that a bourgeois liberal phase of economic development, where a parliament of shopkeepers and factory owners would rule, was prerequisite to a subsequent transition to further revolutionary social change.

Little ideologically separated the Mensheviks from the harder-line Bolshevik wing of the RSDLP. Tactics were more the issue – while Mensheviks like Dan and Martov contemplated a reformist phase which they might embrace, the Bolsheviks’ exiled leader Lenin, while accepting such a phase was likely, preferred to emphasise the development of a party with revolutionary aims made clear from the outset.

For the workers toiling in the imperial sweatshops, there was little respite from the daily grind. The Church was firmly rooted in the Imperial Establishment, propagating the mythology of a Divinely appointed Czar, his very title appropriated from the Caesars of Rome and Byzantium to lend a Holy Essence to the Slavic throne. Some priests did work for the poor, even organising unions and protests, but, perhaps most notoriously of all, when Father Gapon led crowds of praying workers to the palace bearing aloft icons of Jesus and the Czar to protest their loyalty and ask for their Imperial Father’s succour, the reply was in the form of bullets and bayonets.

But all this was to change on the morning of 8 March 1917.

The winter of 1916 to 1917 was even colder than normal and with reverses on the battlefield adding to the sense of impending disaster, the inhabitants of Petrograd plumbed new depths of misery. Bread, a staple of the workers’ diet, rose rapidly in price and in many cases was simply not available. Hunger stalked the masses while, just across the frozen river, the nobles, landowners, factory bosses and generals continued to indulge in their usual rounds of balls, ballets and bacchanalian revelry.

Alexandra Kollontai, Bolshevik
(photo - WikiCommons)

While the socialist hierarchy did include a significant number of prominent women leaders, including Alexandra Kollontai, Inessa Armand and Konkordia Samoilova (later founding editor of Pravda), local leaderships often as not were exclusively male, reflecting the patriarchy at the heart of the existing society rather than presaging the change of any future socialist world.

Yet because of the contingencies of feeding the imperial war machine, more and more women were working in trained roles, including as supervisors and organisers, and alongside that they became involved in the unions and in politics. While men might continue to run the committees of political parties, women’s voices were starting to be heard as never before.

And so, with their conditions ever more desperately subordinated to the endless war, women’s committees in textile factories planned for strikes and marches to mark 8 March to voice their demands to the city authorities in Petrograd. As they prepared, it became clear that their male comrades, including the Bolsheviks, didn’t want them to go. The Menshevik activist Sukhanov dismissed the optimism of some young women workers that a demonstration might start the long-awaited revolution as the immature fantasies of "silly girls." It was, the socialist officials argued, too much too soon. Support for the war was declining but had not evaporated and political strikes could be seen as unpatriotic and, hence, counter-productive. The sisters were asked to stay at work.

But the sisters didn’t listen and at dawn they left their homes and workplaces and marched round factory after factory in the Vyborg district calling on other women - and men - to strike and march with them. One Bolshevik described how the factory committee had refused to join them until women started throwing bricks through the windows to compel them to come out in a rather forced show of comradeship.

On the other side of the river, along the Nevsky Prospekt into the city centre, a smaller Women’s Day march had already started and had drawn in a cross section of bourgeois women, peasants and students. It was by all accounts good natured while loudly demanding equal voting rights for women with men.

The strikers from Vyborg tried to join this march by crossing the Liteny Bridge from Vyborg to the city centre. They were stopped by the police, who forced them back and dispersed many. But the core group of several thousand women textile workers turned down the steps from the river bank and defiantly, and bravely, marched across the ice on the frozen Neva to then climb the far side and join the women on the Nevsky Prospekt. From there, they marched together on the city Duma reiterating their chants for “bread, equality and peace.” And, emboldened, a new slogan erupted ominously from the crowds.

"Down with the Czar!"

The police continued to try to stop the marchers, but the Government made the mistake of sending some of the Cossack soldiers billeted in the capital to reinforce them. Unlike the police, who had volunteered as professional agents of the repressive Empire, most soldiers were peasant conscripts. While some clung to conservative notions of the Czar as Father of the Nation, many more were at least mildly sympathetic to the strikers.

When the police and troops moved on the crowds, women were often to be seen on the front line urging them to change sides, even dragging them across physically while berating them for not defecting sooner. The Cossacks would charge up to the women on their horses, but stop short of touching them and soon the protesters were aware that the military were wavering. By dusk, tens of thousands of women and men had occupied swathes of the city centre and the Czarist authorities had lost control of the streets. They were never to regain them.

Emboldened by the women’s initiative, the socialist parties hurried to bring more strikers out the next morning and by the following day all the capital’s factories had ceased to operate. As many as a quarter of a million men, women and children moved on the city centre, again clashing with the police while the army’s ambivalence became more and more evident.

That afternoon, again on the Nevsky Prospekt perhaps the single most crucial moment of these insurrectionary days occurred when the crowd encountered a large squadron of Cossack soldiers blocking their path. Unlike other troops, this force was drawn up ready to charge and a tense stand off followed.

It was then that a young girl moved forward on her own from the crowd towards the soldiers, who readied to shoot. But she boldly walked up to their commander and from under her cloak lifted out a bunch of red roses, a joint symbol of peace and revolution. The commander leaned forward, grinned and accepted the gift and the cheering crowd rushed forward to embrace their new soldier comrades.

By the end of the week, after the entire military garrison switched sides and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people occupied the streets, power had slipped decisively from the centuries old Imperial Order. On 15^th March, the Czar abdicated and his Ministers fled or were arrested.

Faced with the demands of the crowds, a rather bewildered group of liberal members of the near-moribund national Duma rather reluctantly established a Provisional Government working out of the right-wing of the Tauride Palace. In the left-wing of the same building, a group of socialist parties established a very fluid body of elected workers’ representatives, soon joined by soldiers as well, to speak for the masses. They sought to hold the new liberal regime to account for the three main demands of bread, land and peace. The first soviet of 1917 had been established.

Soviet Women: a challenge to the world

So International Women’s Day, one hundred years ago today, shook the world and set in train a series of events that turned the old order on its head. In time, women were to see a huge change in their position –revolutionary Russia brought equal rights in the workplace, education and in the home. The USSR pioneered paid maternity leave, workplace creches and family planning. When Trotsky was asked by some incredulous westerners if it was true Soviet women could get divorced just by asking, he responded by asking them, with mock incredulity, if it was true that in western countries women could ask for a divorce but not get one.

The Soviet Union of course was in many ways to have a poisoned history. Stalin was to rise and crush the freedoms briefly brought about by the revolutions of 1917 and he embodied in his “Red Court” the epitome of patriarchy. Lenin's strong advocacy of equal rights for women was in many ways undermined, and of course centuries of sexist thinking under the Czars had a very long reach still to be found in post-Soviet Russia, which recently decriminalised some forms of domestic abuse of women. But without the challenge to the world of Soviet Communism, there is little doubt that women and all humanity would be the worse for the lack of it.

So as we celebrate International Women’s Day, remember it as a day for socialist values; and remember the courageous women who a century ago braved the ice of the Neva to forge a new way of life for all of us, sisters and brothers together.

And remember, men - socialist men - told them not to go…

Callous Capitalism; or The Land With Three Empty Homes For Every Person Without A Home

Your brother? Your son? Your daughter? You?

 In the days when capitalism truly is dead and buried, in the annals of the Great Collapse in the UK, this last week may well be marked as a seminal moment in our history. As with most seminal moments, of course, no one notices at the time and it is left to the historians to mark them, and even invent them. But perhaps Monday 6th February will be remembered as the day that the arch-champions of capitalism and the representatives of our ruling elite let their mask slip, however unintentionally, with a frankly startling admission of the failure of our market economy, the system they have fought so hard to impose on everything that moves and nearly everything that doesn't.

Communities Secretary Sajid Javid MP

Launching the Tory Government's latest White Paper on housing, Communities Secretary Sajid Javid MP told the Commons that, "Our housing market is broken. We have to build more, of the right homes in the right places, and we have to start right now.”

Javid went on to detail the litany of disaster most of us are more than familiar with - average house prices are now 7.5 times average annual salaries; mortgages frequently swallow up over half of household income; fewer and fewer young people can get affordable rented property never mind snatch hopelessly at the cruel  illusion of home ownership. The result is stay-at-home offspring remaining in the family home into their late twenties and early thirties, jobs away from home being unaffordable because of the inability to rent and the formation of new household by young couples frequently delayed or even frustrated.

Buy-to-let sector: source of rocketing homelessness?

Javid declared that Britain needs to increase annual housebuilding completions from 190,000 units in 2016 to 275,000  as soon as possible. The white paper, strikingly if laughably titled "Fixing Our Broken Housing Market" then comes up with a rag-tag mix of banning letting agency fees, "incentivising" smaller construction companies, reducing the time that developers can leave construction unstarted after planning permission is granted and, perhaps most incredibly of all, "forcing" councils to start building council housing again.

For those too young to remember, much of our housing crisis was brought on very predictably by the Thatcher Government's determination to destroy council housing. First of all came the tax-payer subsidised "right to buy", whereby hundreds of thousands of council tenants were deceived into home ownership that sooner or later saw most of the sold stock resold into the hands of private rental agencies.

Next came the effective blocking on councils from building new council housing or even using the receipts from sales to maintain the stock that remained - for years, several billions pounds sat frozen in bank accounts. Housing associations, originally small community enterprises providing cheap, niche accommodation to vulnerable groups, were effectively taken over, forced to expand with central-government provided Housing Corporation money and then driven to become in effect large faceless companies far removed from their original purpose.

Then finally came the coup de gras: large scale transfer of remaining council housing to large scale housing companies, notionally not-for-profit but, as government funds were reduced and housing groups grew ever larger, functioning more and more like big private landlords. In some places, housing trusts were created by effectively hiving off and privatising the local council housing department as an ALMO (arms-length-management-organisation), which was great news for the bank balances of some transferring senior staff, but not so good at all for the lower paid staff, eventually shorn of their council terms and conditions, and most of all of little use to tenants and their communities.

Chuck into the mix the deregulation of the private rental sector - last year, the Tories passed a law that removed any requirement for private landlords to ensure their properties are fit for habitation - and the advent of previously banned buy-to-let mortgages, now almost one in five of new loan approvals, and the stage was indeed set for housing apocalypse.

Bullion blocks in the sky - empty new flats in London

With much new build now not even lived in - just pop into central London or the edge of Cambridge to see the thousands of "investment properties" owned like so many vintage wine bottles by the global elite, sitting empty, their owners preferring to avoid the hassle of rental while they wait for their assets to appreciate in value. Buy to let has very often become buy-to-leave (empty).
Unsurprisingly, this callous disregard of the real needs of real people has meant more human beings chasing fewer properties actually available to rent or buy, inflating prices massively. It is a process that the state even subsidises, exempting these often large scale property investors from full council taxes.

And so, Britain's 700,000 empty properties are no surprise, but no less an obscenity because of it. With official homelessness figures soaring and migrants the appalling and false scapegoat for the greed-is-good mentality that infects our developers and our elite, Javid's admission of market failure, while disarmingly honest, is nevertheless not exactly news. And his white paper leaves almost none of the real problems tackled - no action on empty homes, nothing to end the scandal of tax-advantaged buy-to-let loans or to break up the now huge housing corporations that dominate the "affordable" housing sector. People on even above average incomes will remain mired in debt, genuinely struggling the keep roofs over their heads and those of their families.

And, of course, more and more no longer have roofs over their heads; 250,000 people - a quarter of a million - in England alone are homeless and many really, truly have nowhere to go and are sleeping rough as a result.

Last week, in Cambridge, the city that is growing fastest of all in the UK, where cranes and construction hoarding are ceaselessly painting a new skyline as more and more investment properties are built and snapped up by the rich, I spoke to a man camping in a shop doorway on a freezing cold night. I recognised him as Tony from the previous summer when I had spoken to him in the same doorway on a better evening. As we sipped coffee and chatted, he told me he had been homeless for three years now and had nowhere to go that night. There was an emergency shelter but because he had turned up 10 minutes after 11pm curfew the previous week they had turned him away into a freezing, rainy night. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he had sworn at them and so was barred for a month.

He is one of many. Like Chris, whom I encountered, shaking from cold this afternoon in Leeds, or a street away last month John, who was curled up in a blanket outside HMV, his wispy beard, bedraggled hair and sunken cheeks giving the appearance of a dying Jesus, discarded on the edge of the crowds doing their shopping.

And so too with the many others who have silently come back onto previously empty streets over the last four or five years. If you look, you will see them, the young couple crying on the steps of an empty bank in New Street in Birmingham, both not long out of care, with no money and no food. Or Brian huddled on the ground in the rain under his umbrella with his dog on a Sunderland street; or the young man on a back stairwell in Edinburgh, thrown out when his mother was evicted and
apologising to everyone he shyly asked for a few coins to help him.

All of them are there - many of them terribly young, and all with the same desperate stories, the utterly unwarranted shame in their voices, their pale, paper-thin sunken cheeks and their sad, sad eyes. Bedding down on concrete pavements on the streets of the fifth richest country on planet Earth. And the second most unequal in the western world - a country where there are nearly three empty homes for every homeless person.

It's not just Javid's housing market that has failed. It is our whole, corrupt capitalist economy and the twisted society it has forged on its own fantasies where freedom is money and money is freedom. This week, its custodians have finally admitted that the edifice is crumbling. When the whole rotting structure comes tumbling down, as it soon will, we must be ready to build anew - not just buildings and economic systems, but lives, homes and dreams too.

Trump's Cardinal

Unlikely recount changes notwithstanding, Donald Trump will take office as President of the United

Steve Bannon in 2010

States at the end of January. In the days since the election, his team has been taking shape almost as chaotically as his ducking and diving on some of his policy announcements during the campaign. His narcissism is unbound as he poses in front of his golden elevator and sits on the thone-like chairs that adorn his Trump Tower apartment and many people seem genuinely afraid of where his narrow, uninformed world view and his sheer temperament ("Why do we have nuclear weapons if we can't use them?") might take our planet.

But behind the bluster and bigotry, we shouldn't think the emerging narrative will be chaos. For Trump is neither a fool nor does he stand alone. He represents a strain of thinking, not founded on the people who voted for his cod- "movement" but rather on the small group of rightwing populists who use a valid anti-liberal establishment narrative to push extreme capitalist solutions. These are the people who bemoan the ineffectiveness of welfare and who promote the idea that it needs to be abolished rather than revolutionised. They talk of crony capitalism while advocating for the outsourcing of government to private corporations.

A key figure in this is Steve K Bannon. Originally the TV Director of the successful Seinfeld show, Bannon became the chair of the rightwing Breitbart "news" organisation and Trump's election campaign CEO. He has now been named Chief Strategist for the Trump Presidency. His intellectual rigour and planning strengths will be deployed on behalf of and through one of the most ill-prepared Presidents in history and will be all the stronger because of it. Bannon will almost certainly be the deciding influence in how the next four or, as he had claimed, forty years of American policy and politics are shaped.

There have been some rather hysterical and amateurish attempts to trash him as anti-Semitic in parts of the media, although his revisionist take on Islamic history has been largely ignored - but in truth the threat from Bannon is at once more explicit and more subtle. For his is a logical philosophy, individualistic, radical and utterly stone-hearted, and one that chattering, compromised liberals are singularly unsuited to challenge.

The video below shows Bannon speaking in 2011 to a small group of fellow right radicals. His tone is measured, informed and all the more terrifying because of it. He regrets the challenge of the Occupy Movement as targeting, in his view, the wrong culprits of what he rightly characterises as America's fourth existential crisis and harps back to Lincoln's limited cannon of Shakespeare, Plutarch and the King James Bible as "all you needed" in simpler times. But crisis brings opportunity and "We will be different on each side (of the crisis)," he warns hopefully.

Yet he is not some uniquely evil individual. He is simply playing his part in the defence of and extension of the real elite he and Trump represent: the elite beyond the public establishment; the disciples of Ayn Rand and the Breitbartists who are now set to manipulate the narrative in the French elections in an attempt to install the neo-fascist FN candidate Marine Le Pen into office next year.

The outlook is chilling, but it is not illogical and it is riding the curve of history. However perplexing to liberals, it will be defeated neither by apocalyptic indignation, nor with hand-wringing, gut-wrenching appeals to restore the failed status quo nor through the machinations of mechanistic legalism. Court cases and constitutional pleadings will hasten rather than halt what has begun. As Bannon himself has remarked, "The liberals don't know what is going on."

Only a far more robust, collectivist response will have any chance of countering the radical right - for, unlike the vacillating showman Trump, Bannon is driven by conviction and belief. His agenda, his revolution, will only be defeated by those whose own convictions and beliefs run as deeply and radically as his do, but course in a very, very different direction. Radical rightism can only be met by radical leftism. There is no compromise, no common ground and those who seek it in some soggy centre condemn society to the predations of Bannon, Trump and their backers, and betray a future that could yet be better for all.

Nigel Farage Goes to Washington

President-Elect of the USA, Donald Trump, has tweeted that he thinks his friend and fellow-traveller, UKIP acting leader Nigel Farage, should be UK Ambassador to Washington. They have certainly admired each other from afar for sometime, with Trump promising his victory would be like "Brexit-plus-plus" and Farage excusing Trump's references to groping women as just how men talk. Apparently.

It seems highly unlikely, and Downing Street has already ruled out any use of Nigel and Donald's special relationship to shore up the tattered pseudo-special relationship between the US and Britain.

Yet, it might somehow be so very apposite an illustration it might be of our twisted, corrupted politics if it were indeed to happen.