An Artificial Christmas Tree Mourns the Loss of its Roots

Here is New Labour’s Ed Milliband, one of the four little pigs currently competing with Diane Abbott for the leadership of New Labour. He is looking from above with some dismay at the result of the UK election:

‘The people have spoken and we don’t quite know what they’ve said.’
(The Guardian: ‘From Hung Parliament to Age of Uncertainty’)

And here is Romano Alquati (who died a bare few weeks ago) on the FIAT workers’ revolt of Piazza Statuta in Turin in 1962, looking at things from below:

‘Even though we had organized it we didn’t expect it.’
(Franco Berardi: ‘Romano Alquati è morto’)

The difference between these two quotations is important. Alquati’s irony is about the excess of achievement over anticipation and, indirectly, about openness: we advance into unanticipated, uncontrolled possibility. Milliband’s ruefulness is about insufficiency and about keeping control: I can’t quite hear what you’re saying is what he probably means; if we knew what you wanted we would do it, but as things stand we can’t.

Britain’s ‘Clean Hands’ Moment

Lucarelli introduces his De Luca trilogy with a fine story about interviewing a retired police sergeant who had served first in Mussolini’s OVRA, arresting anti-fascists and communists, then in the partisan police, arresting ex-fascists, then as a policeman in Italy’s Christian Democrat republic arresting former partisans. ‘And so on,’ up to 1981.

In fact Lucarelli was at the University of Bologna at this time, still researching a thesis (subsequently abandoned) on the police under Fascism pre ’43. But he had wandered somewhat off piste. A question came to mind: for whom did this chap vote?

‘I wanted to know if at least at some point he had been bothered about putting the handcuffs on someone, and instead he looked at me, slightly offended, and said, What’s that got to do with it? I’m a policeman.’

(Lucarelli: Nota di Carlo Lucarelli in Il commissario De Luca, 1990-1996)

That sense of a centre of gravity reappears during the second of the trilogy:

‘Look, I like my work. I’ve got it all in here. He tapped his head with the tip of one finger. And I think I’m good at it. But I lack experience. I took the police officer course when the armistice happened and I went immediately into the mountains with the partisans… The practical stuff I did alone. But it’s not enough. It won’t be enough very shortly because, yes, everything’s going to change. Perhaps there’ll be a revolution but the police, this much I know, will always be the same.’

(Lucarelli: L’estate torbida, 1991)

*

It might of course seem like trimming. It might be exactly that. But not always. Sometimes, ideally, there might be a loyalty to something higher which can unite the private person, his constancy, her self respect, with a social identity which perdures through all its changes.

What’s significant about Britain’s current parliamentary crisis is not that a significant number of MPs can now be seen to have been corrupt (that much isn’t surprising) but that the Fees Office had been drawn into that corruption, just as the intelligence services had been drawn into a different sort of corruption during the preparations for the invasion of Iraq under Cardinal Blair.

Indeed it has been the marvellous achievement of New Labour, heading towards a British version of Italy circa 1992, continuing the damage wrought by Thatcherism, to have destroyed much of the independence of the Civil Service, to have damaged gravely, unacceptably, the freedom of action of the Judiciary, and to have expunged almost completely any notion of politics as a set of actors, actions and beliefs that together constitute what we used to call a vocation and not something comparable to, say, the activities of some of the more questionable figures in the business community with whose salaries politicians’ incomes are now, apparently, meant to be in competition.

To have destroyed, in short, not only independence and self respect at a personal level (and thus in the case of individual MPs) but also constancy and integrity at a social level, which is the level at which institutions and those who make up those institutions have to function.

Keeping Cheerful

Ci ragiono e canto contains the splendid song Ho visto un re (words by or adapted by Dario Fo; music by Paolo Ciarchi, best known for Piccolo uomo and now, I believe, a noise artist, and/or Enzo Jannacci):

I saw a king
a king who wept, still seated in the saddle.
He wept so many tears, so many tears that
even the horse got wet. Poor king
and poor old horse as well.
The emperor had taken from him one fine castle
the crafty sod
out of thirty two of them he’d owned. Poor king
and poor old horse as well.

The song, of course, goes on. A king, a bishop, a rich man, an emperor and a cardinal have all of them been ‘half ruined’. (The bishop indeed is so upset that he bites the hand of his sacristan.) Fo then mentions the peasant. He’s been cheated out of his chicken, his turkey, his wife, his farmstead, his son who’s gone for military service, even his pig. So he’s been completely ruined.

But does the peasant weep? Not a bit of it. He laughs. Because it’s the duty of the poor to keep cheerful, to avoid upsetting wealthy folk.

*

Rowan Williams appeared to take a similar line in yesterday’s Times. Britain’s MPs have suffered enough. They’ve even sacked the Speaker, rather in the manner of the bishop biting the hand of his unfortunate sacristan. Enough humiliation. We must move on.

‘We must move on’ is painfully New Labour. Indeed there’s a thesis to be written (using Talmy’s Force Dynamics) on how New Labour likes to use ‘speed’ whenever it lacks direction, which is often. Here, though, it belies something else. Whilst Dr Williams purports to solicit restraint when attacking dodgy MPs, he actually seems more confident in making the perfectly valid point that public service is (or ought to be) about something more than rule based behaviour and that the something he has in mind includes (or ought to include) the institution of a higher morality of some sort.

And yet he misses the vital point, which is that the Great Expenses Fiasco with all its absurdities, its lying and its cheating is but a symptom of a very much greater corruption, that of representative democracy itself. So his thesis becomes a purely local one about cleaning up peculation, about how a regular audit by nanny (‘Turn out your pockets this minute, Master McNulty!’) won’t solve everything and not about more explicitly political issues, such as:

• how Parliament itself now fails miserably to represent the electoral will of this country. In 2005, for example, 22% of those eligible to vote supported the present government, despite its large majority. This was the worst result for any single party government since at least World War I
• how the Executive now retains almost total power within the parliamentary process, so that the views of the opposition can generally be ignored
• how the Whip systems, the Committee system and the craven acceptance of both of these by backbench MPs (who now function either as lobby fodder or as deracinated local ombudsmen or as both; hence the two homes) means that reams of fatuous and ill considered legislation are passed without scrutiny and, frequently, without comment
• how, in more general terms, principle has now become mere policy, consumables to be sold to a supposedly gullible public for whom New Labour has contempt; means have been severed from ends; political labels have become brands, power has been exiled into bureaucracy, and so on.

*

But if representative democracy is to mean anything, then it must be about something very like a sort of mutual inspiration: of the leaders by the people and of the people by their leaders. Whereas what we have is mutual contempt. We may or may not want to solve this. And if we do, it can’t be by keeping cheerful lest MPs should get upset.

Anger may embarrass many people, but it is the surest sign that our democracy isn’t yet dead.

We need to become angrier still. And angrier, of course, about still more. Not just about bent cabinet ministers, duck islands and moats.

Ms Harman’s Tame Kangaroo II

The role of John Prescott represents a strange little footnote to Ms Harman’s kangaroo court.

Prescott, for the record, is a sort of English Berlusconi; similarly amoral. Where the latter (was it Rosanna Rosanda who actually made this observation?) embodies a certain male Italian self perception as gaffe prone and inept (see the considerable Italian literature on ineptitude) but also oddly successful, so Prescott for New Labour has been its inarticulate, supposedly ‘working class’ soul: a buffoon who is also wheedling, stupid and aggressive, insufficiently despised. And successful.

Now Prescott has started a blog. A 15 March entry refers to an interview with the BBC:

‘They called because they read this blog. It’s remarkable how by being your own publisher you can get your thoughts out there unedited and have the mainstream media follow you.’

They called, of course, because Prescott has some status and because of his tireless self promotion. And his blog is a form of viral marketing designed to sell New Labour as a product, a label, as he knows but does not say.

Part of that viral marketing has been to give Ms Harman’s Court of Public Opinion some small semblance of flesh. Hence Mr Prescott’s bogus ‘petition’ against poor Fred Goodwin’s pension, which a vast army of 3,710 New Labour sympathisers have been induced to sign in the run up to red rose day:  Multitude 2.0, as it were.