IT ALL comes down to Steve Reed.

The Communities Secretary, unprepossessing and intellectually challenged even by the standards of Starmerite administration, is charged with keeping the lid on mass discontent this summer, we are advised.

If that doesn’t start a run on the pound and a renewed dash to Dubai by the pampered and privileged then it can only be because the money markets are so punch-drunk from Trump’s wars that they are not paying attention.

Indeed, so catastrophic is the US president’s thrashing around that Rachel Reeves could be crying a river and no-one would notice.

Trump, of course, is at the root of much of the crisis to which Reed, a bullying Labour Together hack, is supposedly the answer.

Ministers and top state officials are meeting “almost daily” because of the fear that the cost-of-living crisis and fuel shortages, massively exacerbated by the aggression against Iran, could cause serious disturbances on the streets.

They worry, too, that the war will also generate a mass directly anti-war movement, rooted particularly in the Muslim communities, which are already deeply aroused by the Palestine genocide.

A summer of such consolidated mass action would represent a powerful fusion of popular discontents, bringing together the long-simmering agonies of the post-2008 capitalist crisis with opposition to imperialist war.
 

It is long overdue.

In 1981, the then-unsteady and divided Thatcher government was confronted by hunger strikes by imprisoned Irish republicans, urban riots caused by police racism, a mass union-led campaign against soaring unemployment and militant miners threatening strike action.

The ruling class had a solution to hand. Prince Charles got married, somewhat against his judgement and possibly his will as well, to Diana Spencer.  Then Thatcher sent the fleet to the South Atlantic to reconquer the Falklands to, alas, broad approval.

Today no circus-plus-chauvinism strategy appears available, with key royal figures either assisting police enquiries or in self-imposed exile.  

Once upon a time Prince George could still have been betrothed on the never-never to some infant Habsburg princess amid general rejoicing but now such a move would reinforce negative public assumptions about the Mountbatten-Windsors as well as attracting the righteous attention of the social services.

And the Navy, as President Trump has impolitely pointed out, is barely in a state to re-run 1982, however much John Healey likes to brandish its remaining assets at apparently unimpressed Russians.

So — Steve Reed it is.  He has been charged, not with numerous offences arising from his factional intrigues, but with managing “community cohesion.”

What tools does this stalwart of Labour’s brain-dead tendency have to hand?

When Whitehall talks community cohesion some form of state repression is usually not far away. You will cohere and like it. The police have been rehearsing their part with increasing alacrity recently, largely at the expense of the Palestine solidarity movement.

However, it will be a step change to move from arresting hundreds of elderly citizens peaceably protesting genocide to coping with a populace enraged by the continuing degradation of all the decencies of life.

The police have their enthusiasms, to be sure, and cracking left-wing heads counts among them. They also have their limits, however, being part of the warp and weft of the society they are charged with coercing.

Nor is there much that the Starmeroids can do about the source of the present crisis, President Trump and his erratic imperial impulses, driven by vengeful vanity and grasping greed.

In 1812 the navy did burn down the White House, but being several frigates short of a full fleet today, that is not on anyone’s agenda. Anyway, Trump is knocking the White House down for himself, both metaphorically and literally.

As this paper has already pointed out, if the stuff of Cabinet Office nightmares starts to come true much will depend who is leading the mass movement.

It would be possible for the Farage-Robinson neo-fascist bloc to try to place itself at the head of discontent over the cost of living and canalise it into objections to net zero, tax and, somehow or other, Muslims.

It is not so easy for such forces to lead an anti-war movement. Their every instinct is Trumpian and the far right is entirely wrapped in the Israeli flag, the global banner of racist genocide. There is no Tucker Carlson on GB News.

Thus the key is to bring the existing powerful movement against imperialism and war into closer alliance with the trade unions, as well as the emerging campaign of resistance to the racist right.

In turn that must depend on the left taking the initiative in ways powerful enough to attract the attention of the punch-drunk masses. Coalitions are built in action, at least initially, before they are ratified in committee rooms.

There would be, it is true, other ways for the Reed gang to head off disorder on the streets.

They could start arresting the rich, a programme overdue since 2008 at least.  In 1919, the fledgling MI5 warned the cabinet that high among the discontents then roiling the people was “the foolish ostentation of the rich.”  The wealthy have become no smarter, nor more self-effacing, since.

They could determine to offend Elon Musk every day — nationalise X! Tweak his algorithms good and proper.

They could end the privatised water industry scam. Close a couple of US military bases and send the Israeli ambassador packing.

In a nutshell — they could choose some of the public’s favourite enemies and go after them.

No, not Steve Reed’s bag really. When popular push comes to socialist shove, community cohesion can only be established over the corpse of Starmerism.
 

Oh-so civilised

LAST week President Trump announced that he would erase a civilisation overnight.

Also last week First Lady Trump held a press conference for no purpose other than advising the world that she had not slept with the paedophile pimp to the super-rich Jeffrey Epstein.

Later, the president depicted himself as Jesus, presumably to secure a decisive edge in his polemics with the Pope.

There is a civilisation we could get along without just fine.

Slavery and capitalism

ACCORDING to Karl Marx capital emerged “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

Letters page regular Will Podmore has a different take. He holds that “small provincial entrepreneurs” got the whole thing going by holding a whip round with their mates down the local.

It was nothing whatsoever to with slavery which was, per Podmore, an altogether fringe enterprise compared to the efforts of yeoman industrialists.

He dismisses generations of scholarship, beginning with Eric Williams, later premier of Trinidad, outlining the centrality of the super-profits made from the transatlantic slave trade to industrialisation in Britain.

Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson estimate that if you add plantation profits to slave trading revenue, they amounted to up to 10 per cent of British national income at the time.

Then there is the vast compensation paid to the slaveowners upon the end of slavery in 1834 — more than £23 billion in today’s prices, and 40 per cent of the state budget at the time.

It constituted a massive state-funded boost to capitalism which drove a stock market boom, fed its way through into British railways and other industries and was not finally paid off until 2015.

Had it been given, as it should have been, to the formerly enslaved, this sum would have funded a new small peasant class in the Caribbean. As it was, it entrenched industrial capitalism and its concomitant classes in Britain and, by extension, elsewhere.

The development of classes across the world is a mutually interrelated process. It is no fault of British workers, but they could not exist in a separate economy to that driven by slavery.

Holding otherwise involves “gazing in awe at the posteriors of the proletariat” as Lenin vividly put it, and risks degenerating into a chauvinism which marginalises the centuries-long abuse of black people in favour of a rustic fantasy about the British working class and the society it emerged within.

So, Marx again: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins, are all things which characterise the dawn of the era of capitalist production.  These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.”