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.