A possible response by Jeremy Corbyn to recent criticism

I am a republican and an atheist. I am never going to join in the singing of a song that calls on a god to save the Queen, or expresses the hope that she will long reign over us. That is not to say that I do not respect the Queen, as a person and as my Head of State, or that I would be incapable of holding a civilised and civil conversation with her. I also respect the memory of those young people who have lost their lives in this country's wars. I mourn them, and I find it difficult to stand alongside hypocritical warmongers who would not and will not hesitate to send more young people to their deaths in the interest of vainglory and for the protection of an economic system that victimises and dehumanises those same young people and their communities. That is the way I am. If you don't approve, then you will no doubt not support me. That is your right. It is the proper function of the state to uphold and defend that right, and my right to differ from you.

Who is the state for? What is the state for?

Originally, back in Anglo-Saxon times in the case of England, I guess that the state grew in response to a need on the part of already powerful individuals to consolidate and project their power. These individuals were backed by ancient, originally tribal tradition, and the increasingly prevalent and powerful dogma of the Church, which endowed the powerful with divine right and divine protection. The growth of Christianity also brought with it a debate about the responsibilities of the powerful towards the weak. The majority of the inhabitants, however, were never consulted: they were regarded more or less as the property of the powerful, and their responsibility to obey their masters was backed with the overwhelming use of force by the powerful, backed by the Church. This was the way at that time. I would say, though, that there were benefits for the majority in the parallel development of a state-sponsored legal system, to some extent influenced by Christian ideals, and the (imperfect) protection this provided against some feudal excesses.

Over the ages, the state became more powerful, and the position of the powerless hardly improved. Most people had no option but to obey, often to sacrifice life and limb for a state whose interests were largely foreign to their own. Most of the time, however, it was preferable to live under a system of law rather than under anarchy, and the people colluded in their own subjection to a great degree.

The Enlightenment should have put paid to the divine right of princes. But the Enlightenment took only partial effect. Most people are unable to enjoy the luxury of living rationally. And reason, in any case, was largely arbitrated by the ruling elite. The power of the state was always there to quell any demand on the part of the majority for a degree of rational equity. A kind of democracy grew in England with the expansion of the franchise. But I would argue that the power of parliaments had always been slight; they had always been packed by the powerful, and, as the franchise expanded, any real power withdrew from elected bodies, and remained in the hands of those who had always ruled, joined by a growing class of those who had become wealthy on the back of industrialization. This is not to say that sometimes, as in 1945 in the United Kingdom, the interests of the majority were not temporarily advanced. But the voice of the powerful, which now enjoys a near-monopoly of the means of mass communication, soon made itself heard, and those advances have progressively been repulsed. Now, democracy is more or less flouted by governments, with an electorate that, disillusioned by its powerlessness to change anything profoundly and effectively, and by the corruption of some politicians, has to a great extent become voluntarily disenfranchised. And, of course, the media always trumpets corruption: it undermines a democracy that the owners of the media do not want, as they themselves are profoundly involved in the exercise of power and the consolidation of the privilege that accompanies wealth and power.

So I would say that the state as at present established is for a powerful elite, as it always has been. It could be somewhat less so, with reforms to the system of election, the financing of political parties, the protection of alternative centres of power such as the trade unions, etc. It is possible for a modern state to operate bearably for the majority of people. It has even happened for periods, even in Europe and on the American continent. But the celebration of unequal wealth, and the subjection of the population to the unregulated power of markets, which comes with the celebration and protection of unequal wealth, has entrenched the power of an unanswerable elite.

And what is the state for? The only defensible answer, I would say, is that it should be for the material, social, and psychological welfare of its population as a whole. We live by a market system, and I don’t see any realistic alternative to that. So there will always be inequalities of wealth. But those inequalities, and the power that goes with them, have to be moderated. A progressive system of taxation of incomes and wealth would appear to be the best way to achieve that, especially if it means that an effective ceiling is imposed on the accumulation of wealth and power. We have to demand that our politicians advance that project - and stop demonizing the powerless, or conniving in their demonization. In the meantime, it means that we must exercise what democratic power we have, and cherish what sparks of democracy still exist.

This is a woefully incomplete, and perhaps highly personal overview of the situation of the state. Many will disagree profoundly, and I would ask them only to respond honestly and rationally. I am no economist, but then economics has always been more a kind of religion than a science, so I don’t apologize.

I have been translating from the French some chapters about John of Salisbury, a 12th-century Anglo-Saxon cleric and jurist. He became secretary first to one archbishop of Canterbury, and then to Thomas Becket. He was in Canterbury when Thomas was killed, and he finished his life as bishop of Chartres.

The third and last of the chapters discusses John and the law. So far as I can see, from my humble tertiary position in the academic hurly-burly, it seems that John's main concern in life was to impose limits on the whims of princes, and to emphasize the centrality of an objective quality of equity as the ultimate arbiter of justice. To him, of course, this quality was divine, but today, perhaps, we might just as well call it natural law, or, in the absence of a god, endeavour to rationalize it as some kind of universal imperative. I have a feeling, based largely on ignorance, that philosophers don't concern themselves much with such things in these times. But perhaps we all should.

For, if we don't try to base our actions on some such universal system of values, even if we have to invent it, I think we risk descending into a new kind of barbarism. Of course, sections of the human race have already been there in the last hundred years or so. Some are still living there. Perhaps it is the fate of civilized humanity to exist on a precariously thin crust of decency, sometimes breaking through, often covering our faces to mask out the stench that rises from the fissures. Perhaps it's the same old kind of barbarism after all.

I'm trying, I really am trying, not to descend into a political rant. I think of those medieval scholars working in the opposite camp to John of Salisbury, trying hard to justify the barbarity of their secular rulers, and the parallels with our present-day situation are so apparent that, really, it's not worth going further into them. Sufficient to say that I think John of Salisbury would have been saddened at the venality, the casual amorality of our present baby-faced, baby-minded rulers, and would wonder what we had been doing in the intervening 850 years.

I pointed out to someone on Twitter the other day that their views on political and social inclusiveness were very totalitarian. They replied, *shrug*, it's what the majority think. John, John, where are you? We need someone who cares about truth, or at least about the search for some truth. Edward Snowden? Ah, I feel a bit better.

I watched the Wikileaks film Mediastan. A fine, interesting work on many levels. John of Salisbury was looking over my shoulder, open-mouthed. Access it via http://wikileaks.org/Mediastan.html . Mind, it will cost you £1.20 for a week's rental, incl. VAT.

Missiles and Milliband, Money and Power

What a shame! After what had seemed a kind of victory in the Commons, the GMB funding affair and then the exoneration of Unite make this an awful weekend for Ed Milliband. Of course the victory in the Commons was a fumbling, accidental sort of victory. Ed did not come back to the House to fight a principled battle against military intervention in Syria, but to hide behind a UN inspection result that he knew could only pose as many questions as it answered. He and Cameron had both read the mood of Parliament wrong: I don't think either of them had much of an eye for "the mood of the country", if that elusive quantity can ever be satisfactorily determined. In the end, Ed's speech was terrible, almost pathetic, and I suspect he was as amazed as Cameron at the result of the vote. Nevertheless, one was prepared to give him a cheer.

The GMB and Unite debacle - they belong together - is entirely different. An own goal if ever there was one. Having been goaded by Cameron, Ed proceeded to chew off his own foot. New Labour was always unhappy about Labour's links with the unions, and Ed has shown himself to be dyed-in-the-wool New Labour. The fight he picked with Unite was crass and cowardly, egged on by the taunting Flashman figure across the dispatch box. GMB's withdrawal of funding was the hens coming home to roost, and now the whole affair turns out to have been unnecessary and deeply damaging, both to Milliband and to Labour.

The relationship with the unions has long been fraught. Those of us whose actual memories go back to the 50s and 60s and beyond are fully aware that Britain's industrial relations back then were very much of the two-cats-in-a-bag variety, although the two sides sometimes did manage to collaborate, at the price of a lot of effort on both their parts when it happened. But the easy pickings for capital were always in the City, which, then as now, fed off the economy like a flock of bloated crows - no, unfair to crows, a fine and noble species: like an immense parasitic worm. There was no money for investment, and so the push for productivity was always fatally handicapped. After all, why should we bother with these embarrassing, fractious industrial dinosaurs when we could all make it hand over fist at the great casino on the Thames - or, failing that, clean each others' windows? Labour never managed, after the '51 defeat, to articulate the fundamental arguments. It always found itself playing catch-up, on criteria decided by the other side. And, of course, there is and always was another side. We have never been all in it together, despite the euphoria that brought Attlee to power. Great achievements by that government, but whittled away from within, almost from the outset. Perhaps Britain is fundamentally too deferential, too eager to tug at its cap. Another fatal legacy of Empire.

Now, if Labour loses the money of the unions, how will we ever have a meaningful opposition to the party of wealth? Will we ever grasp the nettle of state funding? A bigger question, though is: will we ever shake ourselves free from the lure of that glittering fun palace squatting between Wapping and Westminster? Will we ever see through the divisive mongering of hate and resentment that passes for politics in this country? Will we ever feel free to grasp the true benefits of new technology, which so far has enriched a few, impoverished many, and made hedonistic credit-slaves of the majority?

Inevitably, we are left with a morning/weekend-after feeling in the wake of the Commons vote on Syria, and recriminations fill the air. Some of us feel a pang of loss as we listen to John Kerry's hypocritical diatribe in defence of intervention in Syria, to protect the population, to punish the breach of the Geneva Conventions: we could have been part of this, and now we are bereft, left out in the cold. These feelings are natural in those among us who treasured the Special Relationship, and the opportunities it gave us to strut in America's footsteps. For that is all it was and is: the strutting of the bully. And that special relationship is now more than ever tarnished by the revelation that it involves a massive espionage machine, spying, on our territory, against ourselves and much of the world. Of course, it is to defend us against terrorism.

America will now, presumably, lob her bombs into Syria in defence of freedom and democracy, and in the furtherance of peace. France, to her shame, may this time be yapping along at America's heel. Barack Obama, presumably, will derive some comfort and some electoral advantage, and let us hope that the scale of the damage will be lost in the general, already-existing mayhem. Certainly the Syrian people will draw no benefit from it.

Ed Milliband finally found himself acting courageously and effectively. He should now try it more often, for example in challenging the orthodoxy of austerity, which is damaging us, not as immediately traumatically as Assad is damaging his people, but as assiduously. For a class war has been declared in this country, by a section of the governing class against the rest of us. The opportunity offered by the financial crisis is being grasped in an effort to roll back the state. And why should we not applaud the rolling back of a state that seeks so to deceive its people? Of course, it's not that part of the state that's being rolled back: it's the part that protects us against the fall-out of the market in its impersonal, crushing operations. It's the part of the state that mitigates wage-slavery, and seeks to ensure that citizens enjoy enough freedom from economic constraints to exercise their democratic functions without fear.

A war, a cull of badgers, is always handy to divert us from what is actually being perpetrated against us.