European Union democracy is a near-impossible task - reform will be difficult

Jurgen Habermas: the singular representative of European Utopianism

Everyone is familiar with the criticism by now: the European Union ails under a "democratic deficit." No single fact about it is repeated more often across the whole of European politics. For those who wish to remain in the EU and reform it from within the extraordinary difficulty of the task is seldom acknowledged. Rarely is it suggested that the EU's democratic deficit is essential to its smooth (or not so smooth) running. Moves to democratize the EU are squeezed in two directions. Firstly, democratizing the EU would require further sacrifice of sovereignty and democratic initiative by member states - something those states simply will not tolerate. Secondly, the EU's high chiefs do not want democracy to intrude on its operations. As EU Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker once said, "There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties."

Juncker's famous dictum states quite honestly the long-felt conflict between the legal precedent set by the treaties and the democratic choice of the member states. This is nothing new, and believers in EU democracy have long since advocated a step-by-step advance beyond this legal formalism towards a substantial democratisation. But Europe cannot be democratised - that is, turned into a federal liberal state with real democratic powers - unless further powers are taken from the member states. The very structure of the political questions - democracy or bureaucracy? federalism or nation-statism? - militates against any change to the status quo.

Let's look a little more closely at the great advocate of EU democratic integration: Jurgen Habermas. The spirit if not the letter of Immanuel Kant is how Habermas once characterised his vision of future peace in global politics. At a time of crisis he counselled integration. The players in that bloody drama were a briskly assembled New Europe and an older, divided Core. The stakes were of course President Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003. The very twilight of pomp, so difficultly adjusted to by Europe's once great powers, had invested the Core with a special kind of political self-awareness. This was, Habermas argued, to be mobilised for the defeat of Eurocentrism and enforced modernisation. Over a decade later such European misgivings count for little. Iraq is now not only a failed state but practically non-existent. A most bloody and brutally enforced modernisation, in the form of the fanatical IS caliphate, is wreaking havoc on the entire region. Europe, for all its hard-fought post-imperial wisdom, is once again nudged towards military intervention.

At that time Habermas called for peace through a telling paradox: "a global domestic policy" in the Kantian tradition. This common domestic policy can arise only from a joint experience of European peoples, fueled by a communicative and deliberative experience. More recently Habermas has expanded on his conception of a "global domestic policy", situating the kernel of world civil society nowhere other than its earlier battleground, Europe. It is through "constitutional law," Habermas argues in The Crisis of the European Union: A Response (2011), that the "political fragmentation in the world and in Europe", which blocks progress "towards civilizing relations of violence" within and between states, can be overcome. In Habermas's telling the constitutionalisation of law (by which he means, quite prosaically, the treaties so abhorred by actual Europeans) is made the friend of a de facto world society. It is only the tribalism of national elites which prevents world society's continuing development. Habermas supposes an identity between the world society of individuals and the international law which represents them, with domestic political elites cast as the recalcitrant villains.

The three components that can underwrite successful democratic integration are "first, the democratic association of free and equal legal persons, second, the organisation of collective decision-making powers, and finally, the medium of integration of civic solidarity among strangers." Later he frames these three as a "process" of legal persons coming together in a geographical space; a "distribution" of powers which "secures" collective decision making; and a "medium" of integration of civic solidarity. The former two are usually dealt with constitutionally in the areas of fundamental rights; the latter refers to the status of the "people" as a "functional requirement of the democratic process" - "to the political-cultural conditions for appropriate communication processes in the political public sphere." In short, though still in wholly abstract terms, the common European identity is founded in the European people who, through a communicative process, develop a common identity.

Crucial here is Habermas's assertion of identity between the treaties and the people. He finds that the treaties, along with the decisions of the European Court of Justice, "establish a direct legal relation between the [EU] institutions and citizens of the Union." Although the sovereignty of states is restricted under the law of the EU treaties, it is primarily as free citizens that Europe addresses the people, and only as subjects of the states whose sovereignties are circumscribed second. "For good reasons" nation states persist as protectors of certain civil rights. But both identities - "as an individual and as a member of a particular nation" - are figured into the "opinion and will formation processes" of European politics. No supremacy can take hold here, since popular sovereignty is from the outset "shared" between the two "personae."

Once the boundaries of a state can no longer contain the "constitutional community" a cross-border solidarity (necessarily mediatised) must "keep pace." The timidity of tribal national-political leaders who shirk the "risky" but "inspired" "struggle within the broad public" over allegiance to Europe, prevents the formalisation of the identity between constitutional law and the free citizens of Europe. Thus, Habermas finds the blame for the failures of Europe neither in the people nor in the European institutions as such, the identity between whom would play out quite naturally were it not for the real culprits: self-interested national elites bent on preserving their power.

From Habermas's perspective, however, it is difficult to explain the foundational act of post-war sovereignty sharing out of which the European Community developed in the first place. In what is basically a functionalist conception of the "pasifization" and "civilization" of postwar Europe via the treaties, the soon-to-be states of the Union committed to shedding some of their sovereign rights in order to meet mutual needs. They would maintain their monopoly of the means of violence, but pledge never to use them and indeed to share other crucial areas of sovereignty (taxation, trade, fiscal and monetary policy and so on). What could have caused self-interested national elites to establish such mutual processes of decision making? Here it is necessary to introduce a class basis to social analysis. The reason the states of postwar Europe were compelled to enter novel forms of treaty association was a newly powerful insistence by the European masses on a modicum of social peace. In the context of international American supremacy, meanwhile, the best that could be hoped for by European ruling classes was to reproduce the basis of their domestic power by restoring that peace without challenging American imperialism. Social reproduction within and between the European states bore a suddenly high premium.

As countless foreign interventions - from Kosovo to Libya - attest the European nation state has by no means been "pacified." The fact that European states no longer exercise their belligerence directly on one another (except in the case of the maladapted Balkans), does not mean they have any compunction about doing so to others. Moreover the damage wreaked by the supposed legitimacy of the treaties on smaller states - Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and so on - borders on more traditional modes of violence.

If the conceptual limit of the national elite is, in the final instance, the limit of the nation, then the concept is unable to capture the essence of power. In a simple hierarchy, each transfer of sovereign powers by national elites to European institutions appears as a surrender. This chimes with the conceptual distinction in Habermas's most important work (The Theory of Communicative Action [1981]) of a "system" of functional integration from a "lifeworld" of traditional social regulation: the former emerges out of the latter only where "functional specialisation" permits the delegation of "the authority to direct" into the hands of experts. Power is thus made commensurate with this "ability to direct" and the question of class domination is quietly sidestepped. It is in this conceptual setting that Habermas can conceive of the possibility of a democratic European future as issuing only from a deepening of the European institutions. Only these institutions, with their address to the European people as individual citizens, can rescue democracy by subverting self-interested elites. Habermas is in the end willing to concede that the "democratic deficit" of the EU is only resolvable by a radical deepening of EU powers, not by their reversal or their transformation.

However, Marxist class analysis takes a different, historical view of why the EU was founded and what exactly it meant for certain national sovereign powers to be surrendered. Postwar European history can be divided into two eras. In the first, starting from the early 1950s, integration figures as a process of reconstruction, with fixed exchange rates, some price controls, and social and capital protections and guarantees combining with rapid growth. In the second, starting in the 1970s, the means of integration slowly but profoundly changed - with leading economies much more focused on competition over free-moving capital. Now integration significantly internationalised production and capital movements where once it had attempted to suppress them. It is not that tribal elites have deliberately sabotaged organic processes of integration, maintaining tradition at the expense of modernity. Rather national elites - organised or statised "fractions" of the ruling class - have reoriented themselves to changing historical circumstances. As inflation and the internationalisation of capital eroded the postwar settlement, a new policy based on deflation and active liberalisation was developed.

Habermas would like the anarchic Hobbesian relations between states to be overcome by an identity of individual European citizens with European constitutional law - an emergent "world civil society" in Kant's phrase. But he he misses the social reality constituted by European capitalism itself. Indeed it seems that Habermas would like to banish from consideration the distinct rejection by European people of EU constitutions in various referendums. When we look at the dynamics of European capitalism itself we find, instead of a static division of national and supranational interests, class division between those who benefit from the internationalisation of capital flows and those who do not. The transfer of sovereign power to the EU by national states is not best conceptualised as national elites either virtuously forgoing their own power or resisting its further erosion, but as an evolving single system wherein power has been maintained in two historical phases, each time by opposite means. In this system of European capitalism the EU institutions operate with a specific "relative autonomy" from the particular states they mediate between. The EU does the dirty work - either of enforcing basic health and safety norms or of labour market deregulation - that national governments find unpalatable. That the EU is plainly a proto-capitalist state is proved precisely by the "relative autonomy" of its bureaucrats from competing interests; the precise nature of its relation to the fully developed states of European capital remains to be explained. Indeed this relation can only be fully understood as it develops historically.

What does all this mean for a putative "European consciousness"? It means simply that any consciousness that arises will do so dialectically - from political struggles across the continent and against the prevalent forms of institutionalisation and integration. The idea of Europe today finds its clearest political expression not in the posited identity of European citizens with the various treaties mandated by the the continent's rulers, but rather in their popular rejection. After all, nothing has so powerfully expressed a shared consciousness in Europe - from France to the Netherlands to Ireland and most recently Greece - as the common "No." Reformers would do well to remember: in the old slogan "within and against the state" it is the latter which should take precedence. If there is a progressive future for Europe at all, it will involve a protracted fight against its institutions.

The next piece will look at how a progressive government could defy the EU while remaining a member

We should stand up and fight for free movement of people - immigration is not just a necessary inconvenience

Free movement of people is a right we should fight for. Migration is undertaken by millions around the world because it is the only way to avoid loss of livelihood through economic disaster or decline, not to mention those fleeing climate disaster, persecution or war. There is a clear reason to support free movement of people: in a situation where capital is free to move, people must be free to do the same.

But what about the countries immigrants go to? Much of the Leave campaign's argument in the EU referendum rests on the supposed threat to Britain of "uncontrolled immigration." But a recent report which analysed the effects of European Union migration by the London School of Economics - far from a left-wing propaganda base - made clear not only migration's benefits for the country as a whole, but also the lack of almost any local drawbacks. Drawing on data from a range of sources, notably the Labour Force Survey, the report concluded that even though the EU migrant population trebled between 1995 and 2015, almost no perceivable downsides emerged. In terms of raw economics, they found migrants made an obvious contribution to GDP: 78.2% of the UK's EU migrant population are in work (above the UK average). Moreover, because they are on average better educated than UK born workers and have the potential to earn more, they add to demand in the economy, spurring economic growth and creating more jobs than they take.

Immigrants from the EU are not on the whole taking jobs but making them. "Alongside increased demand that a rising population brings, greater movement of labour allows countries to specialize in what they are best at," they conclude. Half of all net migration to the UK comes from the EU and the people coming here are not taking jobs from the poorest. Nor are they placing undue pressure on services or placing any notable downward pressure on wages. Indeed highly-skilled migrants may contribute to productivity growth and drive up wages across the economy. The Migration Observatory does, however, argue that low-skilled workers in certain sectors do stand to lose. But this short-term loss can be offset by rising wages and rising employment in the long-run, both things that can be achieved through investment, an interventionist economic policy and a restored role for trade unions.

Britain has seen a 10% drop in median income since 2008. And the LSE report is equally clear as to where the blame for this should be placed: "The cause of the fall of wages is the impact of the Great Recession - not immigration." And as if that wasn't clear enough, when it comes to unemployment, the authors state: "There is absolutely no statistically significant relationship (positive or negative) of EU immigration on unemployment rates of those born in the UK." Again with the provision of public services, they note no increase in hospital waiting times other than those related to the government's squeeze on NHS funding. And finally housing: "Lack of access to housing has more to do with the falling supply of social housing." As the government plans yet another council house sell-off, it has spectacularly failed to meet rising needs. The root cause of all this is a government hell-bent on making the less well-off pay for a crisis caused by global finance and the collapse of the banking system.

Support for the free movement of people doesn't have to be a zero-sum trade off in which either foreign-born or UK-born residents get ahead at the expense of the other. It doesn't have to be seen that way because indeed it doesn't really work that way. The enduring tension between the nation-state, so necessary for supporting and subsidizing the inefficient capitalist system, and the global market, into which capital self-destructively over-extends itself, is not the fault of labour. The contradiction belongs in the final instance to the capitalist class and the system of gross inequality it creates. Global labour movements are not the cause of capitalist crises, but one of its few correctives.

Still, it will do no good to get starry-eyed about the European Union's labour movement policies. The EU is not really a free movement option: for years mainstream European politicians of both right and left have been lambasting the "failure of multiculturalism" (Angela Merkel) and the rise of "benefit tourism" (David Cameron) while calling for "a clampdown on illegal immigrants" (Nicholas Sarkozy) and "strict migration rules"(Tony Blair). Politicians of both the centre-left and centre-right have felt no compunction about blaming the poorest ethnic communities in their countries for social ills caused by their own regressive policies. Recently fences have gone up between central and southeastern Europe to prevent free movement; the ideals of the EU itself are violated by the agreement to deport non-EU migrants and refugees to Turkey; and most recently looming deals with criminal states like Eritrea and Sudan will put lives in extreme danger. For those outside the EU and increasingly for many within, the EU is an impregnable fortress, content to let people die on its borders and suffer destitution and inhumanity within. Within the EU's migration system - if the chaos, suffering and death that goes on across Europe can be called a system at all - the actual dangers are clear. Yet they are not in anyway dangers for "native" populations, but indeed for migrants and refugees themselves.

The costs of migration are almost always negligible while the gains are significant. However, the threat to migrants' lives from unsafe migration are clear. Punitive, negligent or even deliberately life-threatening migration policies solve nothing. Over three thousand migrants and refugees have drowned in the seas around Europe in the last year - yet people continue to come. Thousands more languish in pointless destitution in camps and on borders. But the retort goes that surely not everybody can move? Surely, by accepting those in camps, we are sending the wrong signal abroad? It is obviously true that not everybody can live in Northern Europe. But the answer to this is equally obvious: of course, free movement is only a good insofar as the choice to migrate is taken "freely." I use this word fully aware of its complexity, especially in choices like migration, which involve abandoning everyone you know and love and moving thousands of miles away from home. But we will only have conditions in which free choices can reasonably be made when there are no western-backed or western-imposed wars or murderous regimes; no globalised neoliberal state corruption in the world's poorest states, financial expropriation or resource extraction; no sucking of the economic life out of poorer states and into western-controlled tax havens. If you want to curb global population movements and all the destructive waste of human life that they presently entail, then campaign to end western wars, economic exploitation of under-developed countries and against climate change. Those who do not wish to talk about global war, capitalist economic exploitation and climate change, should remain silent about immigration.

It may simply be the case that some British people will never accept high levels of immigration and that they are irrepressibly against it. But throughout the history of postwar immigration there has been a political discourse attacking it. Neither Labour nor the Tories are guilt-free in this. Even as inward net migration has increased, mainstream politicians of all parties have pledged to reduce it and repeatedly betrayed their promises. This is one reason trust in politicians is so low and why that loss of trust is channelled through immigration. No party leader has ever attempted to deal with anti-immigrant sentiment or to sell free movement on its own merits because the only consistent way to do so is to simultaneously oppose the ravages of global capitalism itself. We must change that situation fast - or face the continuing rise of the racist and violent far-right.

The likeliest outcome of the EU referendum? A hike in anti-immigrant racism, whatever the vote

Corbyn must fight anti-immigrant racism

A majority of recent polls show a growing, if still shaky lead for the Leave campaign in the EU referendum. This is deeply worrying for Remainers: whatever people say about a swing to the status quo in the final weeks of a campaign, that simply hasn't happened this time - at least not yet. It seems that in this case, as with so much in politics around the world at the moment, normal rules no longer apply.

A few months ago I wrote that the left's argument about remaining in the EU was made with too many qualifications to cut through. In that I was right. But I was also wrong in that I declared, "Nationalism and Liberalism will carve up the debate between them." Let me stress, liberalism is nowhere to be seen in this debate. The choice is between two establishment-co-opted, right-wing nationalisms and the reason for this boils down to how the left's impotence - or rather its absence - has negatively impacted on the debate.

The EU referendum has turned into a regional, racial, and class vote which mirrors almost exactly the breakdown of results at the 2015 general election. A true blue Tory English south; a cosmopolitan Labour London; a solid centre-left showing in Scotland and Wales; and an English north split between Labour loyalism and UKIP. Balanced for turnout and population spread (and given the fact this is a simple yes/no vote, unlike the parliamentary voting system), this shifts the vote in favour of Brexit. What this means is that the seizure of the Labour Party leadership by the radical left since the last election has done little to create new cleavages in the electoral map. It also shows that most Tory supporters will be voting against the Tory leadership. In case of a Brexit vote, the big losers will be the leadership of the established UK parties - Labour in the north; the Tories in the south.

The 2015 election was the first time a long-gestating crisis in British politics bore tangible fruit: the collapse of the Labour vote since 2001; the collapse of wider voter turnout since 1992. The narrowing policy and ideology gap between Labour and the Tories led to a collapse of the traditional representative link between political parties and the voters who turned out for them. Finally, despite a parliamentary system that militated against it, politics fragmented. All over the country - and indeed most of Europe - voters turned to whatever alternatives they could find. That habit is showing no sign of slowing with this referendum: voters are choosing to vote against everything the perceived establishment tells them to do, and they are doing so along startlingly similar lines to last year.

The crisis in British politics, born of the victory of Thatcherism and New Labourism, was brought to boiling point not long after the biggest economic crash in postwar history and a series of violent global confrontations, all of which have, needless to say, brought death and instability to much of the globe. These twin crises have brought to the advanced heartlands of global capitalism the same morbid symptoms crisis always brings: an intensification of racism and other burning resentments. It is no coincidence then that immigration has become the single outstanding issue of this referendum. Labour and the traditional social-democratic left has not been able to fight anti-immigrant and refugee racism because the only intellectually consistent way to do so is to criticise global capitalism, the crisis policies of the neoliberal state and imperialist foreign policy. Blairism, indeed the entire social-democratic tradition, is unable and unwilling to do any of this. Indeed, while tacitly accepting the economic need for immigration, Blairism has been quick to attack immigrants when it has proved politically expedient.

Labour sneaked anti-immigrant rhetoric into the mainstream. In 2005 Blair boasted about reducing asylum claims faster than anywhere else in Europe and claimed he would "put in strict immigration controls that work." They didn't work - because the UK economy needs immigration and global population flows are complex things that are only becoming more complex with - well, all those wars we keep launching. Now anti-immigrant sentiment has become common sense and far-right racism a much more acceptable, though still peripheral, view. That tendency has reared its head again in the EU referendum as leading Labour Remainers from the right, panicking at the strong polling of the Brexiters, demand an end to free movement within the EU. These are the same tawdry, graceless manoeuvres that made Labour into a laughing stock under Blair and Ed Milliband and they won't win voters away from either the Tories or UKIP. The radical left leadership - basically Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell - have not been half as forthright in their defence of immigration as they ought to be. Indeed a defence of immigration is the only way the public conversation can be led away from the issue and towards the real causes of the stress on public services: the budgetary pressure on local government; the lack of revenue coming in to central government; the squeeze on NHS funding; the refusal to increase the pace of house building. Anti-immigrant sentiment cannot be ignored - and only a radical left leadership of Labour have the moral authority to fight it.

This brings us back to what happens after the vote. For the left the referendum itself is a purely tactical question: the choice between the cartelised, belligerent, authoritarian institutions of the EU on the one hand and the free market utopia espoused by elements of the British establishment on the other. Not forgetting, of course, the conduits of financialised capital which operate (and will continue to operate no matter what) between them. That choice has become clearer and clearer - there is no lesser-evil option, a Liberal soft option which will spare us the nastiness of unleashed nationalism. The intensification and increasing visibility of anti-immigrant sentiment which has resulted from Labour triangulation and establishment vilification of migrants and refugees is likely to be the awful legacy of this referendum whatever the outcome.

Here's my bet: a close remain victory will nevertheless see UKIP massively emboldened in the north, where they will replace the Tories as the second place to Labour and even overtake Labour in some constituencies. Anti-immigrant frustration, even of the quiet and simmering kind, will turn into outright racism. That racism is partly conjured by elites looking for a useful distraction but its base materials are a sense of powerlessness and a feeling that the ruling order is inevitable and unchangeable. It can only be quelled where there are meaningful attacks on and victories against the real source of wage repression, flatlining productivity, shitty jobs, decaying public services and infrastructure: that is, neoliberal capitalism.

Malia and the Media

The election of the left-wing, pro-Palestine and minority rights activist Malia Bouattia as President of the National Union of Students has provoked ardent condemnation by self-declared guardians of liberal tolerance.

 

The NUS itself, which has for some time been dominated by the right, is in a state of collective panic. Elite universities are threatening disaffiliation. Among students themselves Bouattia is popular enough (she won 50% of the votes), but her enemies have been quick to associate her with antisemitism, citing co-authored blogposts, speeches, public statements and her voting history as NUS black students officer as incontrovertible proof of the dark times ahead.

 

Yet it hardly takes the most thoroughgoing journalist to discover how much the panic about Bouattia and the supposed antisemitic bent of young student activists relies on  exaggeration, misreading and vicious personal attack. The fact that Bouattia is a black Muslim woman in a new-found position of leadership can hardly have escaped the attention of her many attackers, though their interventions are peculiarly framed as anti-racist. Bouattia has not claimed to have a perfect record and has embarked on meeting with Jewish groups to repair any damage she might have caused in the past. Yet rather than shouting Bouattia - a very rare female Muslim voice in a position of public leadership - down, her critics would do well to read her past and present statements a little more closely and with less of the distortion that has characterised so much of the debate about antisemitism, Islam and the Left.

 

So what are the allegations made against Bouattia and how do the claims stack up against what she actually said and did?

 

Numerous articles have appeared in the right wing press, some within hours of her election, passing judgement on Bouattia and her allies. It is possible that the Daily Telegraph follows student politics with a keen eye, but rather more likely is that these early pieces were assembled from briefings by the defeated right-wing of the NUS itself. 

 

The first was a straight news story, whose opening paragraph contained the oft-repeated accusation that Bouattia had blocked an NUS statement "condemning ISIS" during her time as black students' officer. In fact Bouattia had requested an amendment and then later voted in favour of it. The Telegraph failed to address this part of the story, or to provide any balance to its negative news coverage of her.

 

According to Bouattia herself in her recent Guardian op-ed, "Two years ago I delayed a National Executive Council motion condemning Isis – but that was because of its wording, not because of its intent. Its language appeared to condemn all Muslims, not just the terror group. Once it was worded correctly I proposed and wholly supported the motion." If Bouattia is lying about her subsequent support for the statement, this would need to be proved. However, no one has even alleged she maintained her opposition, and nobody has bothered to report the fact the statement was eventually passed.

 

Two days after this initial reaction the Telegraph invited Aaron Simons, former head of Oxford University's Jewish Society, to comment. Simons described Bouattia's election as "a dark message to Jews" and compared her "rhetoric" to "Neo-Nazism." Stating that Bouattia's politics was "anything but nuanced", he catalogued the accusations against her:

 

"There are intelligent analyses to be made of the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac, the US pro-Israel lobbying group), or of media bias in international conflict. Then there is the claim that “Zionist lobbies” control the UK government’s counter-terrorism policy and that the “Zionist-led media” orchestrates the misrepresentation of the “global south”. This is dog-whistle anti-Semitism at a deafening volume, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as 21st-century text."

 

Simons is quite right to point to the ideological slippage which sometimes takes place in anti-Zionist politics, from criticising to conspiracy theorising. But the "dog-whistle politics" he cites requires a presumed audience, and suggests Bouattia was deliberately stirring up resentment towards Jews in general. Bouattia is guilty of using a lazy shorthand which could clearly encourage a reductionist, even antisemitic view among her readers. She must be more careful in her criticisms of Israel, as it is her responsibility to inform as well as to criticise. However, it is highly questionable if her remarks amount to antisemitism as such.

 

I have personal reservations about the term anti-Zionism, and have argued its ambiguity can play into all the wrong hands. Yet for the many who identify as anti-Zionist, the point nevertheless needs to be made: Bouattia makes no reference to "Jews" or a "Jewish-controlled media." Her references to the "Zionist-led media" may be reductionist and clumsy, but I can't see how they are principally or even mainly antisemitic in effect. In Bouattia's recent reply to her critics she publicly wrote: “For me to take issue with Zionist politics is not me taking issue with being Jewish … it is a political argument, not one of faith.”

 

To be clear then - these are perhaps the worst statements Bouattia is accused of making. It is grossly mistaken to accuse major media outlets of being "Zionist-led." For this there should be no apologising. Yet do these comments or others warrant the attacks being levelled against her?

 

A day later veteran right-winger Simon Heffer made Simons look pretty level headed by accusing Bouattia of "vilifying Jews." A yawning gap between deed and accusation has opened up - without even so much as proper citation. Perhaps Heffer was referring  to Bouattia's comments about Birmingham University Jewish Society being "the largest in the country" and the university being "something of a Zionist outpost." Of course, these comments are problematic because they suggest a possible dislike for Jewish religious self-organisation. Bouattia cannot be excused from these implications and there should be pressure on her to clarify her arguments in future and repair any damage this has caused. 

 

Responding to Bouattia's election Daniel Clemens, the president of Birmingham J-Soc, puts his own views on record: “I think that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are two[sic] and the same thing. Zionism is the belief that Jewish people should have a homeland to live in without threat of annihilation or war. This stems from a Jewish belief. So when someone attacks Zionism they’re indirectly attacking Judaism as a religion, because the two go hand in hand.”

 

So Bouattia, according to Clemens himself, is really only guilty of criticising Zionism, which for him is de facto antisemitism since the link is a theological one. To be clear about the implications of Clemens' argument: imagine a situation where criticism of the British or French state was equal to treason. It is an extremely authoritarian view which would impose the same ban on dissent sought by religious fundamentalists around the world. This is also a thoroughly ahistorical argument: there have been other forms of Jewish nationalism and of Jewish political identity besides Zionism (see: Bundism). Clemens' argument is worryingly reductive. 

 

Simon Heffer went further, calling Bouattia "dangerous" and an "extremist", while her supporters were "odious" and should all be "prosecuted for incitement." Heffer issued these attacks following a single paragraph which restated the aforementioned accusations, shorn of context or any citation or referencing which might make such context available. 

 

By the first of May the posited identity of anti-Zionism and antisemitism had been tacitly confirmed, as the millionaire Tory party treasurer Mick Davis was given space in the Telegraph to condemn the entire left as "antisemitic" and as having "toxic views" - arguing also that anti-Zionist views were "mostly" a facade for antisemitism. 

 

This then became the venue in which to reiterate Israel's "vibrant democracy" - ignoring of course the disenfranchisement of the Occupied Territories or Israel'sown often persecuted Arab citizens (this according to Israeli daily Haaretz). Davis also went so far as to suggest a plot by liberal media outlets and the left to focus exclusively on Israel's "failings" (again ignoring the Left's very loud criticisms of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and other authoritarian, Islamic and secular Arab regimes).

 

This process of intensifying caricature of pro-Palestinian arguments, starting with the sometimes problematic language of left-wing activists and proceeding to a demonisation of the left at large and an uncritical celebration of Israel itself, is dangerous for several reasons. First, it enshrines the false assumption that criticism of Israel is somehow identical with antisemitism. Second, it eradicates any trace of nuance from debates about the Middle East, one that is far more damaging than any leftish political correctness it opposes. Thirdly, at its most elaborate and rhetorical it posits a kind of liberal conspiracy against Israel, run by Islamists, their leftie sympathisers, and a politically correct media. In other words, it skirts the obsessions of the far-right.

 

When these arguments are advanced without countervailing views, especially by Tory millionaires or commentators who,in Simon Heffer's case, have a tendency to scapegoat liberalism (he is the author of the Spectator's famous Hillsborough rant, an opponent of gay rights and advocate for the influence of Christian values on education and society), public discourse suffers. Eventually the space for rational argument is gravely reduced.

 

Malia Bouattia has her Jewish defenders. One group of former students and NUS members wrote to the Jewish Chronicle defending her from what they called an "Islamophobic" campaign. The Guardian also printed a letterby Mike Cushman, convenor of Jews for Boycotting Israel, which drew attention again to the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. There are no doubt others, and though it may even be the case that they are in the minority, you would expect the media to show some interest in their views.

 

In its coverage of Bouattia's election the Guardian did at least acknowledge some of the left's defence of the new president, though featured no pro-Palestinian Jewish voices. Not only does this play into the narrative of a strict religious-cum-racial divide, it also excludes dissident Jewish opinion. Though evidence shows the vast majority of British Jews support Israel's right to exist, two thirds are critical of Israeli policy towards the occupied territories. A plurality of opinion is unsurprising - Jews are not a homogeneous group. But you wouldn't know from even the liberal Guardian's coverage that a majority of British Jews agree with some of the views articulated by the pro-Palestinian left. Indeed, public statements defending key figures on the left from accusations of antisemitism, including the Jewish Socialists' Group, have been massively under-reported. The views of Jews are as divided as those of Muslims or indeed any other group - and we must seek to build alliances where we can.

 

In effect, what is being stymied is criticism by the left not only of Israel but also of the implementation of the Prevent Agenda to police extremism (which has proved seriously unpopular among students despite the government spending years trying to implement it). One reason Bouattia won the recent elections was her opposition to Prevent. Following Bouattia's election prominent "anti-extremism" activist and government adviser Maajid Nawaz took to the Jewish Chronicle to deride Bouattia as a symbol of the "poison" of the "regressive left." Indeed Nawaz perversely blames the left for the rise of right-wing populism, failing to mention the left's campaigning against media harassment of migrants and refugees. 

 

Nawaz picks up the IS statement rejection story (again failing to report Bouattia's subsequent support for it) and her comments on the Birmingham University JSoc. But most telling is Nawaz's quotation at length of a Bouattia speech in which she questioned the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel and the dissociation of international campaigners from violent Palestinian resistance, suggesting they were too weak to really secure Palestinian liberation. She said at the time:

 

“To consider that Palestine will be free only by means of fundraising, non-violent protest and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is problematic… My issue is that whilst at time it’s tactically used, or presented as the non-violent option, it can be misunderstood as the alternative to resistance by the Palestinian people…"

 

Bouattia was highly critical of the peace process, which she said was only deepening colonisation and prolonging Palestinian suffering. This "chilling speech", Nawaz suggests, is a sign of the intolerance and bigotry of the student left. It is a mark of how low the standard of debate on Israel-Palestine has fallen that Bouattia's words could be met with such horror. Bouattia's views are far from unconventional - indeed they were voiced by the late Edward Said in very similar language during the Second Palestinian Intifada:

 

"What of this vaunted peace process? What has it achieved and why, if indeed it was a peace process, has the miserable condition of the Palestinians and the loss of life become so much worse than before the Oslo Accords were signed in September 1993? And why is it, as the New York Times noted on 5 November, that ‘the Palestinian landscape is now decorated with the ruins of projects that were predicated on peaceful integration’? And what does it mean to speak of peace if Israeli troops and settlements are still present in such large numbers? Again, according to RISOT, 110,000 Jews lived in illegal settlements in Gaza and the West Bank before Oslo; the number has since increased to 195,000, a figure that doesn’t include those Jews – more than 150,000 – who have taken up residence in Arab East Jerusalem. Has the world been deluded or has the rhetoric of ‘peace’ been in essence a gigantic fraud?"

 

Though many disagreed with Said's radical criticisms of the peace process and of the compromises of the Fateh-led Palestinian Authority, there was no concerted effort to silence him or remove him from public life. 

 

How different are things today, when a self-styled anti-extremist - and former adviser to George Bush and David Cameron - can label a Muslim student leader a threat to peaceful dialogue with barely a mutter of dissent. It is precisely the concerted manipulation of misplaced words into elaborate racial crimes that is allowing critics of Israeli and by extension US and British foreign policy to be silenced.  

Anti-Semitism and the Labour Party

A couple of points about anti-semitism

Anti-Semitism and Ken Livingstone

Ken Livingstone, all too fond of his own voice and supremely confident in his own knee jerk opinions, has yet again waded into a public argument and got burned.

Here's what he told the BBC today about Hitler:

"Let’s remember, when Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism. [He then] went mad and ending up killing 6 million Jews. "

All it takes is the toe-curling qualifier "Let's remember.." and you know what's coming: some half-baked, misremembered reduction of the Holocaust to the status of mere accident or act of madness. The Holocaust was deliberate policy and Nazism's hatred of Jews total from the outset. Hitler didn't just "go mad." It was the systematic, rationalised implementation of barbarism at an industrial scale.

I don't think Livingstone intends to be anti-Semitic, but he is. Just like when a perfectly innocent grandparent says something racist. Except you tolerate racist grandparents because they are not usually lifelong leftists with decades-long public careers. This last point is crucial: Livingstone should be well aware of how subtle coding can influence the public reception of certain statements which appear relatively benign but give off a certain malignant message beneath the overt words. The left calls this "dog-whistle" politics - and is rightly angry at the Prime Minister and the Zach Goldsmith campaign for doing it to Sadiq Khan. Livingstone has been a public figure his entire adult life. This seems not to have made him more reflective about his influence on public discourse but less so.

A final note on Livingstone: why on Earth did the Labour leadership allow such a knucklehead to dominate the public debate about this sensitive issue? 

Labour and anti-Semitism

The most controversial episode of the week involves Labour MP Naz Shah, who has been suspended from the party because of anti-Semitic Facebook posts. One reportedly advocated the mass relocation of Israeli Jews to the USA.

There have been odd attempts by left-wingers today to defend Shah from accusations of anti-Semitism. But imagine an analogous situation in which someone on social media proposed relocating the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek with its high Mislim population to, say, Saudi Arabia with the caption "Problem solved." Many on the left would, quite rightly, accuse that person of stupidly endorsing the forced relocation of an entire population. People would call it Islamophobic and they would be right. 

So, Naz Shah shared something on social media that was in effect anti-Semitic, even if she didn't intend it to be. But how widespread is Labour anti-Semitism? At Open Democracy today Jamie Stern Weiner counts nine individuals and one Labour organisation accused of anti-Semitism. In each case the accused were suspended or inquiries launched within one or two days. Both Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell have publicly spoken out against anti-Semitism and racism of all kinds throughout their careers and especially as Labour Party leaders. If we lived in a rational world this would be enough. Anti-Semitism is poisonous - and where it occurs it should be stamped out.

So why are so many in the Labour Party desperate to associate the current leadership with anti-Semtism? After all, a Tory councillor was recently expelled from his party for anti-Semitism, with no remonstrations aimed at David Cameron for tolerating such an individual. Are the accusers - mostly from Labour ranks themselves - really saying that something about their party attracts or even creates anti-Semites? Of course, they are not. Their assertion, entirely without evidence, is that Corbyn is the inadvertent cause of all this. Never mind the fact that some of these allegations clearly pre-date Corbyn or involve people within a large organisation he can hardly have had anything to do with.

After all, why would anti-Semites be attracted to a party led by a fiercely left-wing leadership famed for its supposedly wet Islington multiculturalism, positive views about immigration, racial minorities and a multi-faith society. Or for that matter a leader who says things like, “I go to churches, I go to mosques, I go to temples, I go to synagogues. I find religion very interesting. I find the power of faith very interesting.” During the leadership election last summer Corbyn stated that the UK should have “relationships with all sections of society in Israel” and said, “We shouldn’t judge everything to do with Israel through the prism of whatever Benjamin Netanyahu is saying from one day to the next – Israel’s politics is much wider than that."

Indeed, every one of Jeremy Corbyn's enemies in the Labour Party - and many of those beyond it - knows this. The truth is they want to stamp out this left wing upsurge as quickly as they can, at any cost to the long term reputation of the Party.

Anti-Semitism and the Left

Since the anti-Semitism controversies started leftists have been arguing that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are different beasts, and that to criticise Israeli policy is not to be anti-Semitic. Both statements are in a sense true. But they are in fact separate arguments and there is a careful process of elision operating between them. What is missing is a definition of anti-Zionism and whether it is itself identical with criticism of Israeli policy.

To be clear, I do not consider myself an anti-Zionist and I don't think the left more generally should endorse thee term either. This is because anti-Zionism is hard to pin down and this very ambiguity plays into both the hands of the left's enemies and the anti-Semites. After all, what does it mean to be anti-Zionist? It cannot mean simply being against this or that Israeli policy, since that might make Barack Obama an anti-Zionist. Does it mean being against all illegal Israeli settlements? Or all the territories seized by Israel after 1967? Or is it to be against the existence of the Jewish state? And what would that mean in practice? It
is one thing to regard Israel's foundation as unjust (so was that of the USA) and quite another to think it worthwhile to oppose its continued existence.

Anti-Zionism is an increasingly unhelpful designation, which merely throws up barriers between leftist Palestinian solidarity activists and potential allies. Its easy confusion with anti-Semitism does too many favours for all the wrong people.

Now, it is important to remember the cause of all this: Jeremy Corbyn is a long term Palestinian solidarity activist and much of the Atlanticist state, the conservative and imperialist right, the private media and the neoliberal wing of the Labour Party want desperately to destroy him. It is useful for them to associate him with anti-Semitism.

A note on the embattled Labour leadership then: they knew full well this storm was brewing - that anti-Zionism and Palestinian solidarity are a discursively delicate issue; that their weaknesses could be exploited by their enemies; that they would need to carefully construct an unassailable ideological position. They didn't do enough to prepare for this battle. Why didn't Corbyn give a set-piece speech months ago on internationalism and solidarity with the world's marginalised, declaring a Labour foreign policy based on cooperation and an end to imperialist wars, with arms open to all willing to cooperate? Instead we get Livingstone fudging his own bizarre Hitler theories on daytime telly. The Labor leadership needs to get better, fast.

Let Sleeping Tax Dodgers Lie

In normal times, when it hangs around in the periphery of politics, tax can seem a dullish grey thing. Revolts against it tend to come out of that periphery too: sensible people keep their heads down and pay up. Only the agitated right of the white middle class, angry at the poor getting its dough, can summon any passion for it.

But times are not normal and today we are faced with an extremely rare thing: protests in favour of paying tax, a veritable springtime of tax returners. These dutiful citizens packing the squares of Reykjavik and - heaven forbid - London really only want to know one thing: why they have to pay tax but lots of very rich people don't.

The rich, it's fair to say, are probably unaccustomed to and thus unprepared for such polite scrutiny. So they dithered marvellously - our Hamlet-lite PM most of all. To publish or not to publish, that was the question. Only late last week, as the evidence of the Panama Papers and opposition pressure mounted, did the usual defences start to emerge.

Primus inter pares here - the inegalitarian go-to - is the familiar argument from victimhood. Boris Johnson got himself in a bit of bother by saying rich folk are the fiscal equivalent of saints, working miracles on the public purse for a doubting or even prejudiced public. The private accident of wealth should by no means lead to public scorn, he argued. David Cameron, in one of quite a few soliloquies on his family income, declared himself "lucky enough to be wealthy." Be it curse or blessing, wealth is apparently just the luck of the draw. The rich can no more choose their family backgrounds than other "put upon minorities" can. Thus the Tories' defence of inheritance reaches dazzling new heights. No mention though of correcting that lottery.

The same Johnson of City Hall flatly refused to say off shore tax havens were immoral. "It depends what you do with them," he said, which is true of anything in a way. If you use a nuclear missile head as a Christmas tree I suppose you're not doing anything wrong. The question is whether such gargantuan power should ever accrue in the hands of a single family. And one can hardly blame people for asking what the long-term social consequences of this habit of accidental wealth accumulation might be.

The British are fond of claiming they acquire things in a fit of absent-mindedness, like the contents of the British Museum or India for example. It's as if the sum total of our historical mea culpa is a slow "Oops." That barely phatic utterance tends to act as cover against deeper interrogation, specifically the question of what to do now about it all.

But no, that's envy, the second wall of sandbags defending the wealthy from the rising tide of the tax-prone mob. "They hate even a hint of wealth," we were told of tax campaigners yesterday in the commons. I'd say the Panama Papers offer more than a mere hint, but hate doesn't quite capture the response. It's more exasperation at the fact that anyone could fail to see their wealth is not wholly deserved. And if it ends up in your hands by accident - a result of the hard graft of others or a social coup - it should in part be redistributed. This is not after all victimless: the more wealth concentrates at the top the worse things get at the bottom (contra the myth that the more mega-yachts bought by the rich, the more jobs for the poor at the port).

"We've done nothing wrong," goes the last line of defence. After all, the PM just got a few presents from his family. One could, by the time he had to publish some information about his taxes, sense the creaking urge of the media to get back to bashing Europe and foreigners. This was all getting a bit close to the bone. After all, tax planning is as natural as family planning. The question of how laws written by wealthy middle aged white men are used by those same wealthy middle aged white men for their own benefit hardly arises.

There's the rub: we tend to hold the rich to different and much more relaxed standards than we do the poor. By the time the PM released info of his Oedipal endowments to the public, several news outfits were starting to feel decidedly sorry for him. Yes of course, the long-awaited summary was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Still, it was nice he'd made the effort. Best let sleeping tax dodges lie.

Benefit fraud amounts to £1.3 billion a year at the taxpayer's expense (less actually than the £1.6 billion left unclaimed). HMRC estimates that tax avoidance costs it £30 billion a year. Other estimates are far higher. Yet it is the poor - because they are more visible, because the papers exploit them, and because they have fewer defences - who receive all the scorn. When the rich play the system it's a "natural" part of life. If the poor do the same it's the delinquent or degenerate result of "welfare dependency." Tax and spending are, in the final instance, class issues. But they are class issues in which those who command capital too often also hold all the cards. Ultimately it's easier and more gratifying to hate the poor since bullying them is more likely to get results. They have fewer lawyers after all.

It's not that people envy the rich. That accusation is, apart from being insulting, rather wearying. Lefties don't object to all forms of competition either. They just object to one of the competitors being shot in both feet while the other is allowed to jump the gun. People are naturally competitive and collaborative in equal measure. It's the context that's important. And in our case the race is rigged.

The Left's Irrelevance in the EU Referendum

Nobody seems to like David Cameron's proposals for staying in Europe. For once the Tory leadership is getting a bit of a hard time from the press, which is nice. But Cameron's position is, in deed if not in word, clear enough: he wants Britain to remain no matter what.

That is more concise than the Left's position, which is slowly congealing, from centre to radical fringe, around remaining in the EU. The British Left has, in its typically storied way, come to the same conclusions as Cameron, though from very different principles and with the usual array of caveats. 

The radical and socialist Left, such as it is, has always disliked the EU. But it has always disliked the Eurosceptic Tory right more. Needless to say, it reserves a special hatred for Ukip. Although the EU is anti-democratic (after all, it's an accumulation of trade deals with an admin structure plonked on top, not a convincing model for a state-like government), it is less onerous in practice than the thuggish Victoriana envisioned by British free marketeers as its substitute. 

The Left's argument on the referendum is complex and full of qualifications. It opts for the better of two terrible options without offering an immediate alternative. I know this very well, because it's a position I share. It takes just a little too long - too long for snappy sound bites - to explain that, while the EU is anti-democratic, its disintegration could summon far darker forces. The only thing worse than financial globalisation is cut-throat global competition. Any old Leninist can tell you how that worked out last time: inter-imperial competition created conditions that led to a cycle of unprecedented violence from the 1910s to the 1940s.

Of course, we want a social Europe. But a government of the Left is at least four years away in Britain (likely far more) and unforeseeable in the likes of Germany. And you can't reform the EU through street demos. Which means we are probably doomed to irrelevance. Liberalism and nationalism will carve up the debate between them.