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DARK wintry days will pass, but darker days of insecurity and want for vast numbers of people in Britain, battered by the policies of Cameron-Osborne governments since 2010 (protect the rich and privileged, punish the rest), will not pass as readily.
Predictably David Cameron and his Cabinet crew — more than a dozen of whom are millionaires and members of the wealthiest 1 per cent in Britain — have continued since re-election on May 7 to pamper their patrons.
Their punishment of the majority through devastating spending cuts also continues, undeterred by the important victory through public pressure in compelling Chancellor George Osborne last month to U-turn on tax credits.
But the cruellest treatment has been for the poorest 1 per cent — those least able to defend themselves.
Among these are, annually, half a million-plus jobless people left to survive on air, their life-support welfare benefits snatched away for inadequate work-finding efforts under a criminally harsh regime.
Add tenants of social housing and some disabled people, whose housing benefit has been docked for the crime of having a “surplus” bedroom, and who in many cases have to dock themselves meals so that their rents can be paid.
Thousands of sick or disabled people have died within a few weeks of being judged ineligible for benefit support by the infamously applied and deceptively entitled Work Capability Assessment.
They include some who have shortened their own lives. In September a coroner attributed the suicide of one 60-year-old north London man, Michael O’Sullivan, to his rejection by the assessment, in the face of medical opinion supporting his case for benefit.
Research reported last month by Liverpool and Oxford University academics associated the suicides of up to 590 people between 2010 and 2013 with this shameful test.
The horror goes on. In the absence of emergency hostel beds young homeless people in London have been routinely issued with bus tickets granting them “rest” on night buses. Some homeless people have resorted in desperation to sleeping in refuse wheelie bins.
Last May one refuse company admitted that over the previous year the machinery installed on its collecting lorries had crushed to death four such sleepers. Other street-dwellers die of cold or cold-related illness.
Thus the poorest have been, in effect, designated non-persons, without firm entitlement as members of humanity to a home and a life — and if our rulers continue to get away with such barbarism, worse will follow.
It is true that during the first four months of this year, when the Labour Party’s leadership geared up for May’s general election, it promised to jettison the bedroom tax.
But there was no across-the-board commitment to the defence of the poorest and no retreat from pro-austerity policies.
On January 13 this was underlined by the command to Labour MPs to support in a Commons vote the Cameron government’s Budget Responsibility Charter.
This promised cuts each year of the £90 billion budget deficit born of the 2008 financial crash and of the taxpayer rescue by the Brown government of socially irresponsible, greed-driven banks.
Most Labour MPs meekly obeyed the call inspired by shadow chancellor Ed Balls, any doubts allayed by the nebulous reassurance that a Labour government’s cuts would be “sensible.”
If that vote suggested the Parliamentary Labour Party was unsure whether its primary clients were the rich or the rest, a fortnight later, on January 26, came a bright signal of dissent.
That day, veteran left-wing MP Michael Meacher, now grievously missed, having died in October, issued a statement, backed by 14 more Labour MPs.
It urged Balls to ditch his “tragic” support for spending cuts and to substitute a plan to “kick-start the economy” with major public investment — using nationalised banks for the purpose — and also urged railway renationalisation. One of the 14 was Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North.
On January 30 a Labour List weblog poll of almost 1,000 readers revealed the support level for the Meacher plan among grassroots activists — 83 per cent in favour, something not given media prominence at the time.
Meacher expressed the hope that the makers of the party’s election manifesto would “take account of such strong and extensive support from activists.”
From January, policy indications were successively dangled by Ed Miliband before the electorate, culminating in April’s election manifesto.
But despite welcome divergences from Tory policy — worrying Miliband’s Blairite colleagues — this watery-weak document insisted on “common-sense spending reductions” to address the budget deficit, while withholding blame for rescued guilty banks. Meacher’s proposal was ignored.
Disgracefully, ex-banker Rachel Reeves, then shadow secretary for work and pensions, in March told a journalist: “We don’t want to be seen as, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work.”
Her comment reminded some with long memories of the declaration by Harriet Harman, just after installation of the “modernising” Blair government in 1997, as social security minister. She then announced that benefits were not “a soft option.”
In December that year came a minority vote by 47 rebel Labour MPs against the scrapping of “lone parent benefit.” One of the 47 was Jeremy Corbyn.
Away from the House of Commons, Labour Party members, ex-members and others in their thousands were promoting the policies of the People’s Assembly Against Austerity.
Founded at a massive delegate conference in 2013, the assembly has a formidable presence in well over 100 towns and cities and a solid record of anti-austerity campaigning.
Its commitment to radical change was emphasised at the end of February by the launch of the People’s Manifesto, which trenchantly denied the need for spending cuts.
Its solutions parcel included the public ownership of banks and essential industries, accompanied by government direction of investment, as well as taxation measures directed against the wealthy.
Such was some of the backdrop to the general election on May 7 when only a quarter of the registered electorate gave the Tories a small majority over other parties, after which Miliband resigned.
He had certainly not been offering the full Blairite box of neoliberal trickiness, and during his leadership the death-grip control exerted previously over the selection of parliamentary candidates had loosened, explaining the presence of leftwingers now selected and elected, such as Kate Osamor, Clive Lewis and Richard Burgon.
That control had been Orwellian in style and extent. An early example was the treatment meted out to Leeds North East socialist candidate Liz Davies in the summer of 1995, a year after Blair became leader.
Constituency Labour Party selected, she was then national executive committee deselected, reasons refused. The cause lay in her being too much of a socialist for the “modernisers” to stomach.
She was, moreover, the victim of a public campaign of vilification — in later libel proceedings she won an apology and an out-of-court settlement from three Blairite calumniators — which extended into that year’s annual Labour Party conference.
It illustrated New Labour’s scorn for democratic practices and flexibility about truthfulness in “a greater cause.”
The role demanded of Labour MPs over the years to follow was uncritically to back the leadership and candidates were selected and internal party debate regulated accordingly.
Into the Commons came a procession of compliant apparatchiks, while principled “old Labour” candidates were filtered out.
So, following Miliband’s resignation, the emergence into the limelight of a gaggle of individually unimpressive “centrist” would-be leaders was not astonishing.
Nor is it astonishing that “centrists” in the Commons and media were initially incapable, after Corbyn’s life-changing addition to the leadership shortlist, of visualising the possibility of a Corbyn victory.
For them socialist politics were by definition outside a Labour leader’s remit and that was that.
But socialist politics are within that remit now, however much lied about, castigated and caricatured. Hope is up and running.
