Labour and the Liberal Democrats have long shared a common progressive agenda. From taxation and public spending to the importance of education, democratic reform, Europe and the environment, more has united than divided the centre left. Those values often desert Lib Dem activists locally. Yet nationally our shared agenda has been so close that at times it seemed we might heal the tragic division in the centre left that enabled the Tories to dominate government for so much of the last century.
Nick Clegg changed all that (and is a timely lesson for Labour on the importance of who is elected leader). Peter Hain repeatedly warned of the Lib Dem drift to the right and the potential consequences for Labour of Clegg’s own Orange Book revolution. The Lib Dem leader’s decision to throw his lot in with the Tories is nothing to do with electoral arithmetic but a desire to make common cause with those closest to his own heart. For Clegg’s activists, to paraphrase Tony Blair, it’s worse than they think – he actually believes in this.
Clegg’s party remains progressive at heart and knows he has sold its soul for a clutch of second-tier cabinet posts and questionable influence. With David Laws’ personally unfair departure from government, he doesn’t even have a single true believer alongside him in cabinet. Simon Hughes’ election as deputy leader, as the conscience of the Liberal left, demonstrates the widespread concern even in his parliamentary party.
Clegg turns somersaults with his language to reassure his party, but talking of ‘progressive cuts’ makes them nothing of the kind. The reality is that this government’s progressive deficit is vast and Progress is right to target it through its Red Wedge series.
The coalition’s progressive deficit begins with their approach to the economy. The Lib Dems fought the election as part of a global progressive consensus that it was through fiscal stimulus that we would best weather the storm and do most to protect jobs, businesses and the fabric of our society. As Clegg said, ‘merrily slashing now is an art of economic masochism. If anyone has to rely on our support, and we were involved in government, of course we would say no’. He now says things are worse than he thought. This is a lie exposed by the government’s Office of Budget Responsibility assessment that the bulk of the deficit would have been wiped out by Labour’s own plans and their prediction that debt will be some £30 billion lower across the parliament. Nobel Prize winners Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz warn against cuts and former Monetary Policy Committee Danny Blanchflower describes George Osborne’s Emergency Budget as ‘totally unnecessary and wildly dangerous’. The respected Chartered Institute of Personal Development estimates the spending squeeze will consign 750,000 public sector workers to the dole queue, taking unemployment to nearly 3 million.
Yet the cuts will go ahead because it is a right-wing, ideological hatred of the role of government itself that drives these reductions. It is the Lib Dems doing the Tories’ dirty work, signing up to economic madness that will see unemployment cause spending on welfare to rise and tax revenues to fall.
Yet Clegg still talks of ‘progressive cuts’. There is nothing progressive in axing the Future Jobs Fund, cancelling 40,000 jobs for young people, when the LibDem manifesto pledged ‘a work placement scheme with up to 800,000 places’. Neither is stalling Labour’s industrial activism, which is critical to stimulating private investment and creating jobs. It isn’t progressive to kick away the ladder of opportunity provided by a university education from 10,000 young people. Or cutting £300 million from initiatives for young people including funds to reduce teenage pregnancies and get 16 and 17-year-olds to stay in education. Cuts to the Building Schools for the Future programme and plans to ‘refocus funding from Sure Start’, despite all those election denials, are not progressive. Nor is Michael Gove’s decision to abandon Labour’s extension of free school meals. A progressive government wouldn’t ditch house-building targets and reduce local authority funding leading the National Housing Federation to estimate affordable homes built this year will slump by 65 per cent.
In other areas the Lib Dems have chosen impotence. Norwich South, won with only 310 votes, would not have a Lib Dem MP without the pledge to vote down tuition fee increases. Yet, in comically sinister terms, the Coalition Agreement says ‘arrangements will be made to enable Liberal Democrat MPs to abstain’ as if they are all to be sent away on a fact-finding mission, perhaps in search of their principles. They will also abstain on reintroducing the married couple’s tax allowance, the renewal of Trident and the building of new nuclear power stations (although they have laughably won the right to speak against before abstaining). If Labour looked again at a graduate tax, alternatives to Trident and put renewable investment before nuclear, it would not only be doing the right thing, but would massively destabilise the Lib Dems.
On Europe we have the extraordinary sight of Clegg accompanying William Hague to the continent, presumably deploying his language skills to translate Tory euro-hostility into something politer. What became of his accusation in the debates that Cameron had allied himself in Europe with ‘a bunch of nutters, anti-Semites and homophobes’? On immigration, a plan for earned citizenship for illegal migrants, a progressive idea worthy of exploration, turns into support for a cap on non-EU migration (despite the unskilled already being barred).
Scrapping the Human Rights Act would not be new politics, but the Tory desperation to do so is only thinly disguised by the Lib Dems’ agreement to ‘investigate the creation of a British Bill of Rights’ to replace it. A commitment to localism is undermined by a central government-imposed two year council tax freeze and the removal of democratic accountability from schools, while Michael Gove personally dictates a new history curriculum from Whitehall. Elected police chiefs sound democratic but are populist not progressive. Even on democratic reform, they have secured little for the sacrifice of their independence. The voting system referendum will only be on the non-proportional Alternative Vote and the Conservative machine and wealth will campaign against.
With only nine per cent of their voters identifying as being on the centre-right or right, the dangers for the Lib Dems of this bonfire of progressive polices is clear. The Fabians’ Tim Horton has calculated the 18 Lib Dem and 38 Conservative seats vulnerable on modest swings from Lib Dem to Labour.
To ensure the party is best placed to take advantage of this opportunity Labour must ‘rediscover our sense of progressive mission’ as Ed Miliband has put it. That mission should put at its heart the gap between rich and poor, support for a living wage, addressing pay differentials in the private as well as public sector and defending the new top rate of tax. It should recognise that affordable housing and employment protection, not tougher immigration laws and rhetoric, will address voters’ feelings that the system is against them. It should reclaim civil liberties for the left and, if it really wants to rip this coalition apart, support AV+ which is proportional while protecting the constituency link.
If Labour can reconnect to those who felt we strayed from our ideals in recent years, and elects a leader that has the most appeal to previous Lib Dem voters, we can win and it will be the Lib Dems who suffer most at the ballot box. The tragedy is that so many people across our country will have to suffer first.
Phil Taylor was a Labour special adviser from 2001-2007 and is a former director of Progress. He is currently a member of the senior leadership team at a secondary school.
I agree with most of this comment,however we have just enjoyed a long term in power but failed to provide decent housing for our most vulnerable citizens most of whom would be Labour voters, why? and what vision do any of the leadership contenders offer to deal with this important issue, what is needed is a prgramme of council house building.
Like all social movements, the Men’s Rights Movement struggles with its identity at times, and with factions withing its ranks that tend to do more harm than good. Many of us are a little hesitant to take this problem on directly. We have enough problems with divisions and infighting as it is. But the dangers of ignoring these things altogether are probably more significant than the frictions that ensue from talking about them. And, after all, it seems to be the calling of MRA’s to talk about a lot of things people would rather we didn’t. First, defining a real MRA is just as hard as defining what a real manis, which obviously means it can’t be done with any authority whatsoever. Opinions are all we have. That being said my personal definition of an MRA is very loose, but it isn’t just about being against feminism. A lot of people are against feminism, but you would never know it unless you asked them, and you might not get an honest answer anyway depending on who’s listening. They are the silent and quite useless majority, and they are more hindrance than help because they care more about social and political approval than speaking up for their values. The truth, rather my truth, is that if you can leave your values at the door when you walk into a room you never really had them to begin with. MRA’s in my experience are people who have and act on their values in many situations that other people won’t. It is what will eventually make the movement an unstoppable force for change, and it is what makes the MRA stand out above all others when gender is discussed. When someone makes an asinine, vacuous statement like “If women were in charge there wouldn’t be any wars,” the MRA is the man or woman that stands up and says, “Excuse me, that’s BS,” and then spouts off a string of names like Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi and anyone of a number of female European monarchs. The MRA is the one person that will publicly rip the covers off of someone who is spouting slanted numbers from an imaginary gender wage gap or making the ridiculous claim that domestic violence is mostly a male thing. So, in the simplest of terms, an MRA is someone, anyone, who sees the emperor has no clothes and says so out loud. Marxist-feminist hate mongers were successful in hiding behind a thin façade of equalitarianism for a long time simply because no one wanted to challenge them. It was MRA’s and MRA’s only that finally blew the whistle on the stinking lot of them and continue to do so whenever the opportunity arises. Another group of men, part of the social phenomenon we now call MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) are also MRA’s in my opinion. These are men who see through the misandry of modern times and vote with their feet about marriage and about relationships. They won’t trade their dignity for sex, for attention and approval, and certainly not for a pathetic illusion of love. So far, all of this is easy enough to talk about. Most MRA’s agree that feminism is the enemy of decency and justice, that it is nothing more than female supremacy dressed up as a movement for equality, and we all agree that the MRA’s are the only ones that are actually doing something about it. It gets a tad stickier, however, when we start talking about what an MRA is not. This is the discussion that sends fingers pointing from and to within, and that’s seldom pleasant. But, it is an important dialogue because in defining what an MRA is not we create the opportunity to identify and rid ourselves of some pretty heavy baggage. First, a chivalrist is not an MRA. The guy who thinks his purpose in life is to care for women like they were children, to pay their way, to open all their doors, to rescue them from the harshness of the world, to pamper them and treat them like a princess is no friend to men and boys. He is just a trained seal balancing a ball on his nose for a piece of fish, and he is a Judas among his brothers. When he is not that, he is generally one of a truly dying breed, a real deal male chauvinist, seeking control in exchange for his niceties; the “man” that thinks he is paying in advance, that sex is owed him when he slides the plastic to cover dinner and drinks. Either way, the chivalrist will sell his best friend out over a skirt and a pair of legs. He does this because it is the only identity he knows or can even imagine. He sees himself as good and gallant, but he is actually a white knight with a black heart and bloody hands. He may call himself a traditionalist or chime on about his family values but he’s really just interested in getting laid and being admired (or obeyed) by women. He has no identity whatsoever without their approval and/or submission, and has much more in common with a feminist than he does with “us” because in every waking moment he is about and only about giving women whatever they want in exchange for his validation fix. That validation is his drug and he will walk right over our broken, bleeding bodies to get it. Regrettably, the traditionalist must be approached with some amount of caution as well. While tips of the hat are well due to men who chose and succeed at traditional marriage, they are the exception– not the rule. The traditionalist who knows his good fortune will not aspire to obligate other men to that path in life. They recognize the risks and vulnerabilities of modern marriage and they do not condemn, but rather fully support, men who choose not to go that way. They stand behind men who opt to un-tether themselves from the role of protector and provider and do not let shaming language about that choice pass between their lips. They tend to see their own path in life as one of free will, a choice followed by some measure of good fortune, not of the mandated disposability to which men have been historically yoked. Troubled families are a concern in this culture, but the men and boys bear the worst of that burden, so it is the otherwise unnoticed men and boys that remain the concern of the MRA; not marriage, not women or girls as a group. This is not an attitude of supremacy or contempt, but a rational response to the egregious state of imbalance that already exists. By advocating for men and boys, we pursue parity, not hegemony. The biggest pretender in the Men’s Rights Movement is the neocon. This is the right wing ideologue that asserts whatever Republican hopeful du jour is some sort of de facto MRA, and consequently a friend, despite their well documented track records of selling us out. In fact, this usurper is more dangerous than the left wing ideologue. We already know the left is owned and operated by feminists; that their thinking is saturated in misandry. And we know that they embrace whatever they are told to by McKinnon and the rest of that ilk. But that chap from the right, the one who hangs out in the MRA forums and contributes to threads, cheering on the Men’s Rights Movement and weaving in pitches for republican politics as usual is looking only for useful idiots. In reality he is a cancer growing near our vital organs. The modern right offers men nothing more than religious fundamentalism, conscription to traditional marriage and disposable roles for men like that of cannon fodder; all the things that have hindered us from fighting back against feminism in the first place. It still seems clear that elements in the right hold much more actual promise for men than anything on the left, but that promise won’t be realized with blind allegiance and automatic votes. The right must be brought back on track towards small government, constitutional ideals, and must become openly and energetically counter-feminist to be anything but useless to us. We must hold allegedly conservative leaders to account for participating in travesties like VAWA and the full gamut of feminist governance that they have either supported with their votes, or by omission with their shameful silence. Joe Neocon in the comments section doesn’t care about all that, he just wants to push his Republican candidate. So it is Joe Neocon who should be pushed right out of the Men’s Rights Movement and into the street where he belongs. And it means. at least to me, that all politicians of both parties are considered feminists or sympathizers till proven otherwise. It must be said, however tactfully, that misogynists are not MRA’s either. Misogyny is a touchy subject in the MRM. All of us who take public stands with our opinions are used to being called woman haters. It comes with the territory. But there are a scant few real ones in our ranks. They should be invited to join Joe Neocon in the street, but by MRA’s, not by feminists. In the end, it seems clear that the MRM doesn’t have a political party (I’d vote for a three-legged chihuahua if it would dump VAWA). We don’t have a religion, or even a sex. We don’t have a nationality or an ethnicity; a universal identity or even national organization that centralizes our leaders. Heck, we don’t even have leaders. We are more a scattering of diverse and independent voices, unified by the quest for justice and an unyielding refusal to be silenced. As such, we are generally policed from within, all of us keeping an eye on each other, and keeping the all but ungovernable masses more or less in line for the greater good. The few misfits among us won’t stop any of that from happening.
Will 2010 come to be seen as the Election Labour was glad, like 1992, to lose? No, I think it will come to be seen as the Election that Labour not only should have won but, post-Election, should have put in more effort to stay in power. Notice how dameejer have been friendly to the Coaltion and how “we” have all become accustomed to the need for cuts. The Public Sector is perceived as having become to fat. As long as people have their streets cleaned and their rubbish collected once a week and – oh – child care is kept as a priority nothing should go wrong, should it? What’s wrong with not only putting VAT on newspapers and periodicals but outlawing multi-ownership? Next time let’s squeeze the liars until their pips burst! Some good news today, however, with those graduates in Media Studies unable to get jobs. If I was Tesco’s I would insist on a 1/1 before they’re allowed to stack my shelves.
A message to women There is a problem with the women in this culture. Yes, I know, there are problems with men, too. Believe me, I have heard about them for the last forty years. Some of it true and fair, much of it neither. It was a necessary dialogue just the same. So is this. To understand this we need a brief look at history. Women, in the past, were denied voting rights, couldn’t own land and didn’t have much access to employment that would give them the freedom to make it on their own. This needed to change, and of course, did, as can be confirmed with a cursory glance at the world around you. I laud those changes. But the problem was in how we got here. The reality is that the gender roles of our history were traps for both men and women. Women were relegated to home and children; men to sacrificial roles as protectors and providers. It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was just a matter of survival, and for many thousands of years it worked quite well to that end. But once men made the environment safe enough for women to metaphorically “leave the cave,” it was only natural and right that men change and allow that to happen. And ladies, we did. This is the simple but accurate truth of the matter. Men and women developed gender roles that facilitated the survival of the species. And once those roles were not necessary, they did begin the often complicated path to change. The problem here is that your knowledge of these historical events is largely shaped, convoluted rather, by feminism. Feminists taught you that your history with men was of unremitting evil; that you were chattel, slaves to men who held all power and shut you out with extreme intent. They even gave it a name. Patriarchy. It is a word that has become synonymous with oppression. But feminists were loathe to remind you that “Women and children first,” was the patriarchal mantra, and that much of the social norms, even when misguided, were a product of a code adopted for the sole purpose of preserving your life. It wasn’t always fair, but the unfairness wasn’t always yours. Men died by that code, and trained their sons to do the same. The fact that we still do is the subject for another essay. So what happened? As feminist distortions were increasingly embraced, and intertwined with the legitimate need for change, men did what they usually do. They reacted to the message and not the messenger and unblocked the entrance to that cave. Many of you spit on us on the way out. Many of you still do. It has to stop. This isn’t just about decency. And it is not just about the chasm of mistrust that separates us from each other, or the legions of the walking wounded from this godforsaken gender war. It is about our future. The vilification of men that you have accepted as appropriate now translates to catastrophe for our sons, for your sons. The problem is that what we say, think and feel about people invariably translates into what we actually do to them. Nowhere is this more evident than with our sons, in the here and now. If you take an honest look at the academic environment to which our boys are subjected, you will see that their masculinity itself is under attack with ideology that teaches them they are inherently flawed. Christina Hoff Sommers documented this in her highly recommended book “The War Against Boys.” She writes, “The pedagogy is designed to valorize females, such as teaching history in a woman-centered way. Boys are to be inspired to revere Anita Hill and to “enjoy” quilting. At the same time, schools discourage activities that are natural and traditional to boys, such as playing ball together.” She goes on to say, with sad accuracy, “Most parents have no idea what their children are facing in the gender-charged atmosphere of the public schools.” What Sommers didn’t add to that but I will is the fact that most parents have no idea about this because they choose not to. As girls and girls programs increasingly flourish, boys are falling to the sidelines in ever growing numbers. The results of that are chilling. Boys are more likely than ever to drop out of school and engage in delinquency and other problems. They are representing less college graduates every year. With this diminishing education and wholesale marginalization, they are on a fast track to being the “second sex,” that position that so many feminists touted as the greatest evil of human history when they claimed it applied to women. This is the lasting legacy of spitting on men. Your sons will not be the exception. Young men now grow up to be destroyed in corrupt family court systems where women are encouraged to and even praised for using children, their children, like pawns in order to drain the father of assets. And those same children also have their badly needed connection to their fathers severed in the process. When those exploited, abused children start quite naturally to act out and get in trouble, we blame the father who was removed against his will, for of all things, being absent. And the “freedom” women gained on this frenzied path of vengeance and victimization? It doesn’t appear to have settled well. Women are growing increasingly violent. They are matching men in domestic violence, blow for blow, and they are causing the lions share of injury and death to children in the home. But we don’t speak of these things. We are not supposed to. In your position as the identified victim, and mine as the identified perpetrator, there is supposed to be an indelible silence on these matters. For the most part, there is. That silence is destroying us. And it is a silence that is maintained with the collusion of shallow, weak men and misguided, self-serving women, which is to say most of the culture. The only answer I can think of is for men, and for women, to change. Perhaps you will consider this before concluding that men’s rights activists are whiners or woman haters or products of bad mothers. You might actually decide that most men’s rights activists are men who above all else, seek justice. For their children, for themselves, and ultimately for you. I hope that a few of you will read this and consider it the next time you hear someone say “men are pigs,” or when you hear a woman refer to her first born child as “the insurance policy,” or before you nod your head in unconsidered agreement with whatever negatives about men happen to be making the rounds. All of this will be visited on your sons, and their sons. I hope too, that some of you look at your sons and think, and ask yourself what kind of world in which you really want them to live. When your sons choose wives and marry, I hope you consider the agony they will go through when “taken to the cleaners” and robbed of their children in the family courts. You will be forced to stand by powerlessly and watch them have their hearts ripped out. As always, it will look much different to you when the system you help maintain with your silence crushes your son, and not just some obscure, unknown male whom you quietly think is getting what he deserves. It will happen to more than half of them. The best prevention for this last one is to teach our sons to choose carefully; to scrutinize a woman before committing his life and work to her; to evaluate her morals and values as a woman prior to putting a ring on her finger. or even whether it is wise any more to marry in the first place. But how can we do this if we keep teaching them that such evaluations are the stuff of misogyny? Indeed, how can we do this if scrutinizing women at all is such a taboo? And therein lies the rub, ladies. It is indeed time, just as it was for men, for women to be held to scrutiny, and to account. More importantly, it is time for women to do this on their own. I’ll do my best to provide a fair and compassionate mirror in my writings. It is always up to you whether that mirror is a place you want to look.