THE Times leader of September 2 1851, entitled “Literature for the Poor,” spoke to a bourgeois readership with the opinion that “only now and then when some startling fact is bought before us do we entertain even the suspicion that there is a society close to our own, and with which we are in the habits of daily intercourse, of which we are as completely ignorant as if it dwelt in another land, of another language in which we never conversed, which in fact we never saw.”

Learning from this, the most far-sighted of our bourgeoisie — including Winston Churchill by his own account — read the Morning Star as intently as they scour the columns of the Financial Times.

This urgent necessity for class warriors to know what the class enemy is thinking and doing is highlighted in the present storm of industrial action which is nowhere documented, analysed and described more comprehensively than in the Morning Star (although no day passes when it is not imperative for protagonists on either side of this struggle to consult the Strike Map website).

On this side of the conflict we would be taking class struggle as a frivolous diversion if we failed to consult the Financial Times ourselves. 

Because its mission is to convey — to the key decision-makers in finance, government, industry and commerce — a more or less truthful accounting of the state of the economy and the movements of markets, the FT is a useful read.

It is because our labour is the source of all profit that the Financial Times pays almost as much attention to what the working class thinks and does as the Morning Star.

While the Morning Star is daily engaged in shaping the thinking of workers, the FT is largely absolved of this responsibility which is subcontracted out to the likes of the Daily Mail. Hence that paper’s gratuitous attack on our comrades at Strike Map.

A series of graphs (tinyurl.com/2s47yxvd) produced by the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch, the doyen of data journalists — has been seized on as both a coruscating critique of Tory austerity polices and a demonstration that the last Labour government was distinguished by high levels of public spending compared to its successors.

Measured against Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development figures for Austria, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States, the data shows that the Blair and Brown governments saw substantial rises in total government spending in general and on healthcare, and that public-sector fixed investment as a percentage of GDP and that such fixed investment in healthcare rose substantially, only to plummet under the successive Tory regimes.

Against the argument that the Tories’ hand was forced in 2010, and that most countries had to tighten their belts as they faced off against the global financial crisis, Burn-Murdoch argues convincingly that the Tory belt-tightening was tighter than that of the other developed economies.

He goes on to demonstrate — in perfect confirmation of life as experienced by millions — that cuts in healthcare investment, limited investment in infrastructure and technology and in housing and communities budgets has resulted in a healthcare crisis.

The graphs appear in relentless detail illustrating a hollowing out of the capacity of the state and public services to deal with crisis: “You might appear to ‘get away with’ austerity for a few years if you’re lucky, but when your luck runs out you’re going to be in a world of trouble. Britain is dealing badly with the shocks of the last two years because it has been gutted over the last 12.” 

The FT itself editorialised against the Truss government’s economic policy and in doing so marked a rare moment when the opinions of a decisive section of our big bourgeoisie coincided with the views of most people in Britain.

Burn-Murdoch argues: “In conclusion, Cameron and Osborne are lucky to have escaped the fate of Truss and Kwarteng. Like Trussonomics, austerity was ideology-over-evidence. Unlike Trussonomics, it was not quickly reversed, and so has gone on to cause enormous, lasting damage.”

We have thus, it appears, a fair measure of consensus on the failures of the the Conservative/Lib Dem austerity government and the Tory administrations which followed.

New Labour’s educational record 

AS WE anticipate the possibility of a Labour government under Keir Starmer’s neo-New Labour leadership it is worth looking at the policies of this earlier Labour government.

During this period I was editing the journal of the education professionals’ union Aspect in education, children’s services and related workforce planning and tracked these developments in some detail.

It was a contradictory bag of measures underpinned by an eclectic mix of ideas — some drawing on traditional social democratic themes and others more responsive to the polarised and individualistic market economy “moralities” of the preceding Thatcher and Major regimes.

Funding for education was markedly increased and the assessment regime for school students intensified while a stiff system of targets for schools was introduced. 

New Labour pioneered the academies scheme later given a further disastrous twist by the Tories, rolled out Sure Start, created education action zones and introduced the education maintenance allowance.

Some of this stuff was a clear advance. Sure Start schemes, soon managed at local government level, opened in thousands of the “most disadvantaged” local communities and combined early learning and  childcare for a minimum of 10 hours a day, for most of the week and the year with support for childminders.

The education maintenance allowance scheme had a real impact, particularly on the education of boys whose parents were unemployed or in lower-paid manual jobs, while across education and children’s services there was a distinct turn to systematic workforce planning, with a particular focus on early years, exemplified by the development of the early years professionals role and related qualification.

These measures were consistent with the post-1945 welfare state model grounded in the necessity that a recovering Europe faced for structures which would integrate the working class into what was then imagined as a permanently stable capitalist economy based on a measure of public ownership supporting expanding private-sector production and capital accumulation.

In particular they reflected a welcome focus on the bundle of problems affecting working-class women.

But by the time New Labour took office, the social democratic consensus which governed the three postwar decades had dissipated. 

This was expressed most clearly in the creeping abandonment of the comprehensive principle, which is almost impossible to maintain while the fragmentation and privatisation of every part of the social sphere was under way.

New Labour’s accommodation with the Tory verities — encapsulated in Gordon Brown’s insistence that the previous government’s spending constraints would be maintained — finds a present-day echo in Starmer’s reluctance to advance much in the way of Labour’s spending policies. 

A stance which, incidentally, was echoed quite unnecessarily by the incoming TUC general secretary just last week.

In education, New Labour’s academies programme; the maintenance of an inflated and highly subsidised private education sector; a hierarchical and punitive apparatus of assessment for children, teachers and schools became components in a centralised system that reinforced the social reproduction of class distinctions. 

The consequent dissolution of local government provision ended democratic control and local strategic planning in education.

The unifying core of Labour thinking — coexisting with a rhetorical commitment to compensatory measures on the US model and inclusion — was grounded in an uncritical notion of markets and a revived sense that competitive models of pupil, teacher and school assessment were necessary.

There was little to disturb our highly stratified system of class-based education which remains grounded in a barely masked system of selection.

The state sector became still more stratified, with grammar schools and the grammar school ethos alongside a fragmenting “comprehensive” school system brought about by academisation and the abandonment of the local authority role.

Private education — highly subsidised and itself highly stratified — catered for more than one in 12 pupils. This surface diversity institutionalised a wide disparity in financing, provision, pupil-teacher ratios and the expectations about achievement which were and are reflected in entry to higher education.

Labour set the trend to greater centralisation and teacher and school assessment as a measure of that centralised control.

The total effect was to reinforce the expectations instilled in young people by Britain’s long tradition of class differentiation.

Labour pains

THE 2008 financial crisis destroyed the New Labour government and the model on which it relied. 

Gordon Brown’s gentle taxation of a vastly expanded and deregulated financial system allowed for a measure of state provision — until it no longer did.

There is no-one in the present Labour leadership line-up who betrays even the most minimal confidence that a social democratic domestic policy based on marginal taxation of super-profits will return. 

In this they exhibit a realistic assessment of capitalism’s general crisis and a particular sense of Britain’s crisis conditions.

Financial rectitude and the careful management of expectations is the guiding principle of every Labour voice from Rachel Reeves, an austerity chancellor in waiting, to shadow health minister Wes Streeting, whose enthusiasm for the endless privatisation of the NHS is barely suppressed.

The maintenance of this political project — an electoral strategy based on the hope that the Tories will be so discredited that Labour can form a majority without a distinctive offer to the general population or even Labour’s working-class electoral base — is the only policy possible when a socialist perspective is beyond imagination.

The Corbyn project — rooted in the mass movements against war and austerity — came about through a tactical error by the Labour right wing in opening up the leadership election process. Short of a seismic shift in British politics, this is unlikely to be easily repeated.

A strategy based exclusively on a long march through Labour’s institutions — while the very forces that frustrated the project exercise dictatorial powers — offers little prospects of success. 

It is this which accounts for the determination to depend firstly on our own strength and organisations to defend and promote our class interests.

Labour’s present state illustrates the paradox of current politics that in capitalist society — where, as Marx points out, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class — bourgeois governments of the classical type, those staffed by direct representatives of capital, find ways to pursue vastly unpopular policies without serious challenge in Parliament while nominally social democratic governments, staffed by the representatives of capital within the labour movement, find it impossible to implement policies which are wildly popular. In our case even when they are popular among traditional Tory and Lib Dem voters.