I am currently on a writing job, so can't spend too much time on this.  But the elections deserve at least a word or two on the Tomb. 

First of all, let us all rejoice in another Liberal Democide, a Liberal Defenestration, a Liberal Decomposition, a Liberal Debacle, a Liberal Demolition Derby, a Liberal Demise.  Let's hug ourselves with pleasure at Liberals Demolished, and Liberals Disemboweled.  There is no more civilized spectator sport than rubber-necking at a Liberal Democrash.  They're Lib Dead, Lib Dumped, and Lib Derelict.  They're finished.  Brian Paddick got less than 5% in the London mayoral elections, actually losing to Jenny Jones of the Greens, only just beating the ex-civil servant 'non-party-political' Siobhan Benita (to whom we will return).  Nationwide, they were mauled by Labour.  Their share of the vote remained in the region of 15%, meaning that they haven't recovered from their nadir last year.  They lost over three hundred councillors.  They held onto six councils, all in relatively wealthy areas of Cheltenham, Hertfordshire, the Lake District, Hampshire, and Portsmouth.  Their long march into Labour heartlands has been reversed, and their retreat has left orange carcasses everywhere.  It is not so much that the centre is collapsing, though there is an element of that.  It is that the Liberals can no longer occupy any space to the left of the centre. 

The wolf-eyed replicant seems unperturbed.  Watching him on the news yesterday, I suddenly saw that he had the look of a man who did not give an immense fuck.  He said the words 'sad' and 'sorry', and pouted in what might be a cyborg's imitation of human affect.  But it was as frigid as a penguin's fart.  One imagines him, faced with a demoralised membership and backbench, scowling at them all to grow up and live in the real world.  This is what it costs to be in office, to make difficult decisions.  There are parties and party leaders across Europe who are willingly immolating themselves in order to implement austerity measures and appease the gods of finance.  For Nick Clegg, to be down to 16% in local elections is no great pain.  He expects growth to resume at some point before 2015, and Osborne to introduce an inflationary, give-away budget just before the general election.  And perhaps there will be some landmark liberal reform just in time for the vote: the abolition of badger confinement, or the introduction of large print safety tags on electric blankets.

Second, and much better, the Tories finally got some of what they are due.  Their share of the vote is back down to 31%, they lost the GLA, and they lost over four hundred council seats.  Their notoriously ill-disciplined backbenchers are already decrying Cameronite triangulation for having failed to motivate grassroots conservatives with the classic poujadist pabulum: prison for strikers, deportation of you-know-who, and the restoration of the cat o' nine tails.  How about that?  And the reactionaries are not stupid.  They may slightly over-estimate the challenge from UKIP, for now, but they understand the need for a more populist conservatism.  One Tory MP complained yesterday that the government had wasted the last budget cutting taxes for the rich when they could have cut fuel duty.  The latter would have been a conventionally right-wing policy, while also handing a material incentive to the base.  Because the major reason the Tories lost was not due to a Labour surge, but to the complete demoralisation of the right-wing vote.  Turnout was the lowest for over a decade.  Labour under Ed Miliband certainly can't be credited with galvanising people on the basis of anything so tangible as an agenda.  It was almost wholly an anti-government vote.

Third - oh, and this is delicious - the rout of the fascists.  As things stand, the BNP seem to have lost every seat they contested, and their mayoral candidate received less than 2% in London.  The sad old geezer with the orange Sainsbury's bag who returned twice to deliver BNP newsletters in our area won't live to the see the Fourth Reich after all.  Their electoral meltdown, after a decade of constantly expanding their base, seemed to have come very suddenly after their peak in 2009.  It must be said, because few will admit it, that it didn't actually happen that way; there was a great deal of hard work by anti-fascists going on below the media radar to split the fascists from their right-wing, racist electoral base, thus preventing these racists from empowering a bunch of Nazis.  Such campaigns made all the difference in Barking and Stoke, which were the key electoral battlegrounds in 2010, where the BNP's slide began.  Simultaneously, there were ongoing fights to prevent the 'mainstreaming' of Griffin and the BNP, by fighting for a 'no platform' position within unions, student bodies and so on.  And of course, the physical obstruction of the far right organised under the canopy of the EDL, whose aim has been to incite the sort of riots and racial polarisation that gave the BNP their first open door in Burnley, Bradford and elsewhere.  (How different those cities look and feel today).  The EDL's decisive setback, I still maintain, was in Tower Hamlets.  Since then, they have been losing momentum and numbers.  There is still a mass base for right-wing, racist and authoritarian politics.  It just won't find expression in an empowered fascist bloc for now.

Finally, and this is no good at all, Boris Johnson returns to City Hall.  His friendships with Alexander Lebedev and Sarah Sands - respectively, proprietor and editor of the Evening Standard - undoubtedly helped.  The Standard ran a scare campaign to mobilise the anti-Ken Livingstone vote, claiming that reams of illegitimate votes were being racked up for Ken in Muslim areas.  But this would have had less traction were it not for the Labour Right.  These people embarked on a sabotage campaign in print and on television, their hatred for him vastly disproportionate to their real political differences with him.  Some openly said they supported Boris Johnson and would vote for him.  Others muttered darkly that it was far from ideal that Ken was the candidate.  'Hold your nose' and vote for him was Tom Watson's advice.  Some of this reflected resentment over the way Livingstone had himself defied the party bosses and the right-wing managerial establishment in the East End to back Lutfur Rahman.  More generally, it reflected discontent with Ken's anti-racist, centre-left politics, the way that he would occasionally shoot from the hip and embarrass the functionaries of our increasingly managed democracy.  And it has been suggested, and I can't help concurring, that there's a certain amount of resentment in the charisma-free political class over his ability to communicate with the plebs.

I don't completely disagree with those who say that Ken Livingstone helped sabotaged himself.  It's true that he could have motivated more people to turn out and vote for him, that his campaign wasn't hugely ambitious and that he's far too fond of the Metropolitan Police.  It's also true that he said some stupid things, offered some hostages to fortune, and allowed Andrew Gilligan to provoke him into a ridiculous miscalculation over his tax affairs.  But he would have carried an election on this agenda in 2000 or 2004.  His defeat cannot largely be explained by his lack of radicalism alone.  The fact is that he got fewer votes than the Labour Party itself, which was hardly running on a programme of radicalism; meanwhile, Boris received considerably more votes than the Conservatives.  There was an active anti-Ken vote.  This could only have been neutralised to the extent that Johnson was successfully depicted as an ally and confederate of the government, which he adamantly refused to be.  That is why it was so important that sections of the Labour Right endorsed Johnson, thus colluding in the attempt to represent him as something other than a Tory.

There was also a slight whimper of excitement among some Labourites over Siobhan Benita, a former civil servant who espoused a vague, seemingly apolitical liberalism - a drip, you might say, of the first water.  Well, why not?  She was a close colleague of Gus O'Donnell, the former Blairite cabinet secretary, and had accumulated supporters such as Sir Richard Branson and Michael Portillo.  She had high profile communications experts on her campaign team, who procured some glittering coverage of the passionate 'Mum for London' with her 'People Not Politics' schtick.  They made her a t-shirt which, appropriating a recent Stonewall campaign, said "I'm an independent.  Get over it."  Inevitably her clothing and appearance came up.  Because she's a lady and, well, that goes with territory does it not?  Between lechery on the one hand, and condescension on the other ("she's awfully pretty, but..."), it seemed that her professional dress and business-like demeanour conformed to a certain ego-ideal among the capital's petty bourgeois ideological producers.  She was like Nicola Horlick, supermum, juggling a career and a family, striking an almost Zen balance on all sides.   As a consequence, Benita polled much better than pre-election surveys anticipated.  But if London's politicos have got that out of their system, I hope it's the last we'll be seeing of that sort of thing.  I disapprove of the 'non-political' politician, just as I think we need more of what the bores call 'punch and judy politics', not less.

As for Livingstone, I regret that this was his last election.  As the results came in, and his tally crept ever closer to Boris, one almost thought he might do it on second preference votes.  To paraphrase P G Wodehouse, the voice of Fate seemed to call him, but it was the wrong number.  "Harrow?  Is it me you're looking for?  No?"  No.  Goodbye, Ken.

The Syrian regime is fighting for its survival.  I have no sympathy for it, and will welcome its consumption in a revolutionary overthrow.  The struggle in Syria is fundamentally - not exclusively, and not in a crude, unmediated fashion - a class struggle.  It is an open war of movement between, for the most part, the most advanced sections of the popular classes and a narrow state capitalist oligopoly which has always dealt with the surplus of political opposition by jailing it or killing it.  In that struggle, inasmuch as it matters what I think, I situate myself on the side of the popular opposition.  Not in an undifferentiated manner, and not without confronting the political problems (of eg sectarianism, pro-imperialism etc) that will tend to recur amid sections of the opposition to any of these regimes.  But without conditions or prevarication.  

Yet imperialism has its own reasons, of which reason knows a little, for seeking a different kind of ending to the regime: one which does not empower the currently mobilised masses.  And I really think the chances of an armed 'intervention' in Syria under the rubric of the UN have noticeably increased.  And how we orient ourselves to that situation politically is, I suspect, going to be an important problem in the coming months.  The following pleonastic stream of head-scratching and arm-waving is my contribution to securing that orientation.

***

For what it's worth, this is how I read the international situation with respect to Syria at present.  The revolutionary wave that was unleashed over one year ago has reverberated through every major social formation in the Middle East.  Because it broke the Mubarak regime, which was a regional lynchpin of a chain of pro-US dictatorships, its effects could not be localised.  The response of the US was one of confusion and fright, followed by the bolstering of some of the ancient regimes and simultaneously a very cautious 'tilt' toward some mildly reformist forces (in general the most right-wing and pro-capitalist forces).  The Saudi intervention in Bahrain was an instance of the former.  The invasion of Libya was an improvised policy along the latter lines.  And the position within Yemen has been somewhere between these two, with the US attempting to manage a replacement of the leadership without empowering the actual popular forces calling for its downfall, some of whom were conveniently vaporised by US bombing raids.  

In general, I think the liberal imperialists have won the ideological argument that the US must be seen to be on the side of reform, because today's insurgent forces are potentially tomorrow's regimes, and the US will have to deal with them on oil, Israel, and so on.  However, the political argument as to what concretely to do about it is much more in the balance.  The realpolitikers have dominant positions in the Pentagon, while the lib imps seem to have a strong voice in the State Department.  It's schematic, but nonetheless a reasonable approximation of the truth to say that the former are very cautious about any Middle East wars, especially wars fought on a liberal (rather than securitarian) basis, while the latter are much more bellicose.  Obama's 'state of the union' address, which undoubtedly had its share of theatrical sabre-rattling, made it clear that he would see the overthrow of the Syrian regime as a logical corollary to the overthrow of Qadhafi, which he boasted was made possible by ending the occupation of Iraq.  Moreover, his administration has continued to ratchet up pressure on Iran, through sanctions, and we are beginning to hear serious arguments in the bourgeois media in favour of a war.  I am not saying that an attack on Iran is likely in the short or medium term.  But any escalation regarding Syria could not but be linked to the escalation against Iran.

Obama and Clinton are also highly responsive to pressure from the European Union and particularly France.  Sarkozy is naturally leading the EU's response to the Middle East crisis.  He may not have a triple A credit rating, but he does have nuclear weapons, a large army with extensive imperialist experience, and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.  (Merkel, who has none of these, is taking a much more passive role.)  And since the Sarkozy administration has been embarrassed and damaged by the extent of its relations with dictatorships in the Middle East, its 'tilt' toward potentially pro-EU reformist forces has been all the more pronounced.  Britain, consistent with its imperial past in the Middle East, its adjusted but continuing role as a subordinate partner of the US, and the warmed over 'liberal interventionism' embraced by Cameron and Hague, has tended to align with France over both Libya and Syria.

***

Another important actor is the Arab League, and within it the prominent figure of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).  In the latest Socialist Register, Adam Hanieh points out the strategic centrality of the GCC to the region as far as imperialism is concerned, due to its pivotal role in the region's capitalist development, its hold of enormous oil resources (a quarter of future production), and its articulation with the world economy.  Three GCC states have experienced their own uprisings - Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman - all of which have been repressed with military force and marginalised in the ideological apparatuses.  Even so, it is the GCC monarchies which have been most stable in the context of the global recession, and the most active in managing the fall-out.  So, while the Arab League has not adopted a single, coherent policy response to the regional uprisings, GCC states have played a key role in manouevering the League to support selective interventions, monitoring missions, sanctions and so on against regionally awkward regimes.  The League's support for the intervention in Libya was a decisive factor in enabling it to come about.  Saudi Arabia, which has coordinated many policy initiatives to contain the region-wide uprisings, has involved itself deeply in the Syrian context.  The involvement of Arab League monitors, received with some scepticism by the Syrian local co-ordination committees, was driven by Saudi Arabia; their recent withdrawal has also been triggered by Saudi Arabia.  The subsequent lobbying for a UN resolution calling for the Assad regime to step down and supporting some form of UN intervention, has been led by Britain and France, but strongly supported by the Arab League.  Russia is at present the only obstacle to the resolution, due to its long-standing relationship with Assad.  

Finally, there is the Syrian opposition.  The pro-imperialist bloc, the Syrian National Council (SNC), largely led by exiles based in France and Turkey, has not thus far been representative of the sentiment among the rank and file of Syrian opposition members.  There is a left and nationalist contingent to the revolt, moreover, that complicates any attempt to simply annexe the revolt to the wider regional strategies of imperialism.  Further, even in Libya, where no left or labour movement existed prior to the overthrow of Qadhafi, and where the revolt was quickly disfigured by a racist component, the opening of the political space subsequent to that overthrow has created a window in which germinal popular forces have been able to assert themselves.  A political strike in the oil industry took out a pro-Qadhafi chairman, while unrest in Benghazi has resulted in a serious rift with the governing 'transitional council'.  The ongoing struggles in Egypt, which is strategically central to the whole region, can also swiftly make calculations made on an ad hoc basis, moot.  Nonetheless, complications and problems in a line of development do not necessarily mean that the line will be impeded.  Were the Syrian opposition sufficiently crushed, I think it would be more likely that a pro-intervention 'line' could gain ground, and this would tend to divide the left-nationalist contingent.  This has to be the assumption because, as Bassam Hassad has pointed out in his critique of the SNC and various pro-Assad types, the existing support for imperialist intervention is itself already the result of brutalisation, mediated by certain types of politics, (generally both liberal and Islamist).  

There is also the problem of sectarianism.  As far as I can tell, the majority reject any explicit political appeal along sectarian lines.  The banners saying 'no to sectarianism' reflect a popular sentiment.  The local co-ordination committees have explicitly opposed sectarianism in the movement.  Every substantial report I have encountered indicates the strength of the determination to overcome sectarian politics.  Nonetheless, the regime has a sectarian basis and has reinforced sectarian divisions as a technique of statecraft - not fundamentally dissimilar to a protection racket.  Even though many of the Christians and Alawites supposedly protected by the regime are among the protesters, it would be astonishing if some sections of the opposition were not themselves driven by sectarian politics.  It is noticeable that commentators dismissing the revolt as mere sectarian intrigue tend to focus on the role of the salafists.  They exist as a subordinate stratum in the revolt, and they are among a number of forces which are against the regime on sectarian grounds.  Far from constituting the main political current in the uprising, they nevertheless represent a problem and a weakness for the opposition.  Such divisions are, moreover, always manipulated and amplified whenever imperialism is involved - Iraq, anyone?  

Finally, there are divisions over the use of armed force against the regime.  The Free Syrian Army (FSA) is a large army of defectors from the regime's armed forces, perhaps including tens of thousands of soldiers - at least 15,000 on recent estimates.  This exists, to put it crudely, because the Israeli occupation exists.  These soldiers, trained to defend Syria from Israeli aggression, are now defending Syrians from state aggression.  But their remit has expanded.  While their initial rationale was to defend communities against the security forces, they have consistently engaged in military attacks on the regime's infrastructure.  The risk of doing so, of course, is that it brings down the regime's repressive apparatus.  There is gossip and speculation to the effect that the FSA represents an imperialist conspiracy.  I see little proof of this.  Despite representing a layer of military defectors, it looks to have gained real support among the oppressed and exploited.  The problem is that most of the movement's organised core has insisted on keeping it peaceful, on tactical grounds: the terrain of violent struggle is not where the regime is weakest.  Yet, in some parts of the country, particularly the poorest, the regime is not leaving that option open.  So, tactical divisions underpinned by geographical disparities and the regime's tactics of selectively striking out at opposition strongholds, are also a potential weakness.  Now since the FSA is loyal to the Syrian National Council, which supports an imperialist intervention, there's an obvious dynamic that could come into play here.  That is that in the event of the popular movement being crushed or at least severely set back, the armed component comes to the fore and substitutes for the masses; and in the event of a UN-sanctioned intervention, the FSA becomes an auxiliary of NATO, and alongside the SNC forms the nucleus of a post-Assad regime that is not representative of Syrians. 

There is not an immediate move to bomb or invade Syria.  There is, however, mounting external pressure to create the conditions that would allow this to happen fairly quickly and expediently.  It would be a mistake to assume that because such a path would be riddled with problems, it would not be pursued.

***

With all that said, I intend to elaborate further in an abstract manner before coming up for air.  From a marxist perspective, the most fundamental antagonism in the capitalist world system is class antagonism.  These, of course, cut through the dominated regimes in the imperialist hierarchy just as much as they do in the dominant regimes.  As such, in a popular struggle against these regimes, marxists start from the position of supporting those struggles.  To be more specific, in various direct and indirect ways, these antagonisms are amplified by imperialism, inasmuch as the ruling classes of the imperialist chain benefit from the exploitation of workers and popular classes in the dominated societies.  This is a fundamental cleavage which, arising from the outward extension of capitalist productive relations from the core, separates the dominant from the dominated formations. As a consequence, marxists also start from an axiomatic position of opposing imperialism.  It is not simply that imperialism retards the social development of these societies, but that it constitutes an additional axis of exploitation and oppression.

Within the class and state structures of such societies, moreover, the domination of imperialism is reproduced in various ways, such that the modes of domination within those states cannot be extricated from the question of imperialism.  As a consequence, popular movements arising against them will tend to have two targets: a domestic and international opponent.  Their struggles will also have a tendency to be internationalized, and to have global effects.  By the same token, where you have a national bourgeoisie that has developed in resistance to imperialism, that resistance will also be inscribed in its forms of class rule and in the state through which its political domination is secured.  Its legitimacy will depend in part on the national bourgeoisie's promise to organise the society in its self-defence.  It follows that where there is a break-up of the regime's social control, the issue of imperialism will be to the fore in its ideological and political strategies for retaining its dominant position.  This isn't merely manipulation, nor can it be wished away.  It poses a particular challenge to popular movements aiming to depose the regime, which is why the role of the anti-imperialist pole in the Syrian uprising is so critical.

But the reality is that these dying regimes can't effectively resist imperialism.  The republics organised under the rubric of Arab nationalism have rarely, even in the rudest health, fared much better against Israeli aggression than the old monarchies, and have often been available for opportunistic or long-term alliances with imperialism.  This is even true of partially resistant regimes.  Hafez al-Assad's support for Falangists against the Palestinians provided the occasion for Syria's initial invasion of Lebanon.  Assad senior was also a participant in the Gulf War alliance against Iraq.  His son, Bashar al-Assad, has always notched up plaudits from Washington as a neoliberal reformer - the liberalisation of the economy along lines prescribed by the IMF has been one of the causes of the polarisation of Syrian society, and the narrowing of the regime's social base - and leased some of his jails to Washington during the 'war on terror' to facilitate the torture of suspects.  The Islamic Republic has a similarly chequered record with regard to imperialism.  So, if the regime's raison d'etre is partially that it is an anti-imperialist bulwark, the obvious answer is that it isn't even very good at this.

So how do we orient to this situation, politically?  It seems obvious enough that the greatest bulwark against imperialist intervention in societies like Syria is the fullest and most active mobilisation of the masses themselves.  Their defeat at the hands of their regime would represent a green light to those pressing for intervention.  This is not the main reason why I think marxists should support these rebellions, but it is a very strong reason for doing so.  Second, the organised opposition are for the most part, the most politically advanced sections of the popular classes in both Syria and Iran.  They are the ones who, however they represent it, are responding to the class antagonism in a way that we would want the most radical workers in Europe, the United States and beyond to do.  For this reason, arguments along the lines that both regimes continue to have a popular base and shouldn't be written off are fundamentally wrong.  They do have a popular base, but it is not predominantly organised around any claims or values that the left, especially the revolutionary left, has a stake in.  So, one must hope for that base to erode, and rapidly.  Third, the same basic political grounds on which one opposes an undemocratic capitalist regime and supports its downfall are those on which one must oppose the regime of US imperialism, and work toward its downfall.  Anti-imperialism is an indispensable and not merely occasional aspect of emancipatory politics.  

These problems cannot, of course, be resolved with such abstract formulae: but such formulae have a role in reminding us of our political coordinates.  In concrete struggles, socialists in the imperialist societies would be trying to maintain relations with the opposition to these regimes, linking with exile groups and supporting their protests.  But at the same time, they would be the first to oppose military intervention, and would try to assemble the broadest coalition of forces to stop it.  Even if the deep political logic of events suggests that there is a confluence of these positions, in the real time in which such practices are developed it means negotiating some potentially fraught alliances.  Serious disagreements over the issue of imperialism are bound to emerge in any solidarity campaign; just as there will be sharp disagreements over the regime in any anti-imperialist campaign.  Socialists would have to manage these tensions carefully, while being the ones to consistently argue that the two goals are mutually necessary, rather than opposed.

This is the delayed final part in a series of posts on the ruling class and the Murdoch scandal.  The first two are here and here.  Just to summarise the arguments thus far.  In the first post, we said that the Murdoch empire should be understood in terms of ruling class power.  Classes, we argued, should be analysed not in terms of status, rank or even income flows, but in terms of their role in the reproduction of the system.  The capitalist class is that class which reproduces capitalism by investing its money in labour and technology in order to produce commodities for exchange on the market and in the process extract surplus value (profit).  But that class only becomes a ruling class when it rules politically, that is when it colonises the state - when the state acts as a capitalist state.  So far so good.  But the Murdoch empire comprises a special kind of class power, because of its role in ideological reproduction.  So, the relationships between the Murdochs, the Tories, the Labour Right and other leading media people - especially, we are now discovering, senior figures in the BBC - express the political-ideological dominance of the ruling class.

In the second post, we developed the argument about the colonisation of the state, with the example of how the British state was permeated with the ordinances necessary for the reproduction of the capitalist class after the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688.  Every office, instrument and law of the state thereafter was developed under bourgeois rule: the state came to concentrate and concretise the political and ideological relations already present in capitalist relations of production.  The police's role in such a capitalist state would therefore be to uphold an appropriate politico-legal order suitable for the reproduction of capitalism.  This role was not just repressive, but ideological - even in their most directly repressive capacity they contribute to the reproduction of the dominant ideologies.  Because of this, the relationship between the police and the reactionary press made perfect sense, formalising an already implicit structural co-dependence - one expressed the political-ideological dominance of the ruling class, the other concretised it.  That said, I now want to move to a slightly more detailed argument about the media's role and the position of the Murdoch clan within British capitalism.

First of all, the media.  We are speaking of a capitalist media not in the sense in which it was understood in the 19th Century, but in the sense of a mass media which has been closely bound up in its historical emergence with the spread of capitalist markets, imperialism and the spread of nation-states.  The mass media comprises networks of vast corporations interlocked in various ways with other corporations and the imperialist states.  That is, it is the media appropriate to the phase of what is sometimes called 'monopoly capitalism'.  The Chomsky/Herman 'propaganda model', which applies to precisely this phase of the development of the capitalist media, is a superior theoretical vehicle that accounts for the ways in which these structures work to produce a series of 'filters' which ensure that the media communicates an image of the world congruent with the interests of capital.  In my opinion, the theory is best at describing the realities of the US media, and its predictive accuracy is at its peak when the subject is imperialism.  It is also best at capturing how the elite media works - that is, newspapers produced for wealthy and powerful audiences, such as the New York Times.  It describes well how limits set by various determining factors such as ownership, sponsorship, government, advertising, flack and so on ensure that lively and intellectually stimulating debates occur in the media "within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus".  And journalists go along with this largely due to their socialisation and the habits built into gathering and reporting the news.

Yet, there are limits to the model's applicability.  Colin Sparks, in a recent scholarly review of the propaganda model, elaborated some of these, which I'll very roughly outline: 1) it overstates the degree of unity among the elites, and understates the presence of serious strategic disunity in the ruling class, as manifested in the capitalist media; 2) its focus on the US leads it to ignore the fact that capitalist democracy can permit (depending the relations of class forces that obtain in the democracy in question) mass media outlets to be owned by popular mass parties, or at least subject to far more popular pressure than is the case with the New York Times - and even within the US, eg, the interests of labour obtain more headway in the mass media than would be anticipated by the model; 3) the focus on the elite media results in the underdevelopment of an important argument, namely what results from the fact that most of the media is not directed at elites but at popular audiences.  In his interview with Andrew Marr, Chomsky insisted that the press sells privileged audiences to advertisers, but this isn't strictly so in the case of most of the media.  Therefore, the content must be capable of appealing to popular audiences, seeming plausible to them, tapping into their interests, and so on.  This can be done in a relatively reactionary or progressive way, but it makes a difference that it must be done.  This is a point that is generally true of ruling ideologies - they must plausibly incorporate some popular themes and aspirations, otherwise they won't be ruling ideologies.; 4) the focus on the US leads to insufficient emphasis on two features common in Europe - i) public service broadcasting, which permits the possibility of a limited range of diversity not anticipated by the model (here I disagree with Sparks, or at least with his analysis of the BBC's coverage, but the point that public broadcasting is under-theorised in treatments of the model is correct), and ii) the greater degree of competition among newspapers in European countries, where the local monopolies which obtain in the US are rare.  This produces a degree of partisanship and social stratification among the readers of newspapers, with again some limited but genuine divergences; 5) one of the features identified by the model - 'source dependence', in which hard-pressed journalists come to depend on certain sources, and thus on their perspectives - also permits for the expression of some limited popular input, but more importantly of substantial strategic disagreements among the ruling class.; 6) the model correctly anticipates that socialization in the mass media largely produces submissive journalists, but understates the antagonisms that exist within the media and which are capable of disrupting this process - the majority of journalists are not the professionalised middle class folks whom one sees being interviewed on ITN, but exploited wage workers.  Submissiveness has been produced as much by defeats inflicted on those wage workers (notably, by Murdoch in the UK) as by socialization.  Strikes, news blackouts, print stoppages and various forms of subversion and disruption were a far more regular feature in the UK media in the 1980s than today.

Those criticisms are intended to leave the core of the propaganda model intact while adjusting some of its outer belt of explanatory claims to better account for some of the evidence.  But I think they do more than simply rectify some shortcomings in a classic, superior model of media analysis.  They offer a way into the subject of the specificity of Murdoch's power.  While the propaganda model focuses on similarities of  structure and output within the industry, Sparks' criticisms advert to important distinctions.  Murdoch began his UK newspaper career by acquiring two newspapers intended for the popular end of the market: The News of the World (1968) and The Sun (1969).  The latter had been the trade union-owned Daily Herald, and was not a tabloid - until Murdoch purchased it and saved on printing costs by turning it into one, which enabled him to print it with the same machine that turned out the News of the World.  Murdoch's strategy was very simple: he delivered content that would attract popular audiences not by attending to their interests but through sensationalism, sports and entertainment.  The later alliance with Margaret Thatcher, which reflected Murdoch's long-standing views, followed after Murdoch had already built up a consumer base and after it had become clear that there was a popular base for Thatcherism.  He radically restructured the whole production model for his newspapers, making them cheaper and more efficient to produce, significantly by defeating trade unions.  (One of the reasons he was able to acquire the Sunday Times was that its then owner was sick of constant industrial action).  He bought up newspapers that were losing money or otherwise in parlous condition, expanding through 'horizontal integration' and mergers, and later expanded into broadcasting with the initially low-key Fox Broadcasting Company.  Again, before there was the infamous radical right Fox News that we know today, the company had to spend years assiduously cultivating a consumer base with genuinely popular material such as The Simpsons.  And Murdoch sought to go further, expanding into the production not only of media content such as television and newspapers, but also the hardware - the channels, the cables, the cinemas, the sattelites, etc - that facilitated the delivery of that content.  He has expanded across the Atlantic, into the US, and then across the Pacific, into China.

So, what you have here is a business empire with a genuinely global reach, and sufficient turnover and profit to leave Murdoch one of the richest men on the planet, worth over $7bn (well, until recently).  It is in some respects an exemplary case of ruling class power, but it's also a special case.  Because the business empire is bound up with a set of strategic orientations and ideological perspectives that set Murdoch in opposition not only to much of his popular consumer base, but also to sections of the ruling class.  Murdoch's opposition to European monetary integration, for example, is aberrant as far as the British capitalist class is concerned.  He has much more in common on this issue with petty bourgeois producers and traders than with most big businessmen and women.  Yet, Murdoch undoubtedly had some influence in restraining British entry into the eurozone, not least because of his ability to prepare the ideological terrain by ensuring that his newspapers pursue a fairly inflexible line on the issues closest to his heart.  In this respect, he made the Tory hard right seem much stronger than they would otherwise have been, articulating their themes of hyper-Atlanticism, aggressive 'globalization' and so on, on a daily basis.  (Perhaps this explains their delusional belief that they alone could recuperate the Conservative Party after the Major interregnum).  Now, this is real power.  That such power has been expressed in a network of corrupt and often criminal relationships is not an incidental fact, but it is a consequential fact.  The relationships sustained by the Murdoch family and businesses extend, as we know, along a number of radial axes connecting it to the government and the Labour Right, the police, senior members of the judiciary (including Lord Leveson, the man the government has appointed to lead the inquiry into phone hacking), the BBC, networks of private investigators and quite possibly intelligence.  These resulted from his cynical, ruthless and - in a certain light - impressive accumulation of capitalist class power.  But they were also made possible because of certain features of the UK political and media scene which he successfully exploited: the fact of a relatively competitive media market in which popular audiences are both significant and polarise; the emergence of a reactionary Thatcherite bloc in the mid-1970s; the subsequent arrival of a vehemently anti-union government that energetically supported employers wishing to break the power of organised labour; the resulting capitulation of social democracy, and the bipartisan assurance of loose media regulation.

The weakening or reversal of Murdoch's power would not, of course, alter the fundamental structure of the media.  But it would remove or attenuate an orientation of power that is full of danger and hardship for popular forces - one that reinforces every vile prejudice, every base social aspiration, and every axis of oppression in that society.  It would weaken the radical right in the UK not just for now, but possibly for a generation.  And it would also reconfigure the industry, certainly in the UK, in a direction more favourable to popular forces, and certainly more favourable to the organisation of workers in the industry.  The Murdoch scandal has gone out of the headlines temporarily.  But keep a close eye on it - there's more detail coming out every day, more potential for criminal investigations on both sides of the pond, more material for the prosecution, and more reason to deny the company the very lucrative broadcasting licenses that it has so far seemed destined to retain.  The Tories may be trying to close ranks around Cameron, but he is exposed.  James Murdoch likewise.  The traditional role of a government inquiry is to slow things down to a manageable speed, take public issues off the boil, and kill controversy with officialdom.  But there is enough combustible material here that any such effort may well blow up in their faces

The big story of the parliamentary inquiries, I suspect, will not be the Murdochs squirming.  It will be the appearance of senior police officers and News International employees who are much more directly exposed in all this.  There is something symmetrical and appropriate about the criminal relationship between the police and the corporate media.  Is it that both are so innately venal and reactionary from top to bottom that it's hard to tell who is corrupting whom?  Is it that the power of both has been sharply enhanced in the era since 1979?  Or is it just that they complement one another in the respective forms of politicised class power that they wield?  Could it be that, as an ideological power, the Murdoch press took it upon itself to engage in moralised coercion?  Or that, as a coercive power, the police and criminal justice system have a clear moral and ideological function - think of the student protests, or 'black on black violence', the Islamophobic crackdowns, and all the way back to the suffragettes, etc.?  Is it that when the police wanted to target someone their evidence can't touch, they turn to the tabloids (remember News of the World's claims about the Koyair brothers); and when News International wanted to get an enemy (Sheridan) they turned to the police?  At any rate, as the scandal rolls on menacingly toward the Prime Minister, claiming scalps along the way, there is an opportunity to look into the usually opaque and secretive world of the ruling class, its forms of cohesion and coordination and, particularly, its ability to impregnate the state with its imperatives and priorities.  So, that's what we'll be doing all week at the Tomb.  Stay tuned.

The NHS has always been a vulnerable point for the Tories. They neither like nor trust what it stands for, how it works, but cannot assemble a viable coalition in favour of its destruction. Today, David Cameron has attempted to justify the present government's privatizing measures by claiming that they are the only way to meet a funding crisis that will hit the service in the next few years. That is, they intend to underfund the system by at least £20bn by 2015, and claim that the dire effects of this can only be avoided through their 'reforms'. But note what they're not saying. This is David Cameron's explanation:

"If we stay as we are, the NHS will need £130bn a year by 2015 – meaning a potential funding gap of £20bn.

"The question is, what are we going to do about that? Ignore it? No – because we'd see a crisis of funding in the NHS, over-crowded wards and fewer treatments. Borrow more so we can chuck more money at it? No – because we can't afford to.

"Ask people to start paying at the point of delivery for it? No – because, as I said, the NHS must always be free to those who need it. There's only one option we've got, and that is to change and modernise the NHS to make it more efficient and more effective and, above all, more focused on prevention, on health not just sickness.

...when I think about what our NHS will look like in five years' time, I don't picture some space age institution, a million miles away from what we have now. Let me make clear: there will be no privatisation, there will be no cherry-picking from private providers, there will be no new up front costs people have to pay to get care."

I select the NHS to focus on because, apart from the fact that Cameron has made this intervention today, it's the Tories' weakest point, the issue on which we can assemble the broadest social forces. The middle class suburbs are up in arms about what's being done to healthcare every bit as much as working class boroughs. The Tories have already had to retreat on this, and the issue divides the coalition somewhat. We have them beating a tactical retreat before a serious shot has been fired. Yet, if what Hall referred to as the "political-ideological thematics of Thatcherism", which today are concentrated in the politics of austerity, remain in place, then they will be able to continue to come back for more. Even if the Tories do not succeed in getting all that they want, they will gradually get some more of what they want; and more importantly, they will find that their occupancy in power is not disturbed by their losing an election. New Labour, operating within a broadly Thatcherite mode, took the logic of privatization and marketization in the health service further, faster, than the Tories had been able to. Labour's leaders today cannot think or articulate a politics outside of austerity, which leave us with a desperate need for a counter-hegemonic campaign to do just that.

I. The Right. The Right's response to the 2008 slump was fast and effective. They first participated in an enormous leveraging of the state, through the unprecedented bail out of financial institutions, then took every opportunity to explain that the problem was one of over-spending and indebtedness. It wasn't just the banks who had been too gluttonous. That old bogey, the socialist state, bore responsibility for burdening the British people with larcenous rates of taxation, in order to fund a useless and intrusive welfare state that left people miserable and dysfunctional. It's important to recognise how well-timed and well-pitched this was.

Prior to 2008, the Tories could not have made this argument and anticipated making any headway with it. Instead, their strategy was to match Labour's spending totals and conduct a war of position over the priorities within that accepted framework. But in a sequence notably punctuated by the quasi-comical (underwhelming, on its own terms) parliamentary 'expenses' scandal, the Right engaged in a series of manouevres which blamed Labour 'over-spending' for the deficit - 'over-spending' which, until then, they were committed to continuing. And they were given credence by a majority of the British people for a period of time. There was something very Thatcherite in the manner in which the Right sought to mobilise a certain residual culture of masochism behind austerity - you have over-indulged and must now repent. They operated on a series of connotative linkages, eg, between household and state expenditure, in which the private fear that one has borrowed more than one can afford to pay back is bonded to the ideologeme which holds that the state is always inefficient, always over-spending, necessarily unproductive, and always in need of perpetual down-sizing. This is the petit-bourgeois manner of thinking, univeralised - the nation imagined as a corner shop that has to balance its books and keep an eye out for thieves. Of course, no recipient of state largesse is more inefficient, and less productive, than the 'benefit scroungers'. Tory propaganda duly worked on this theme, and Osborne swung the axe heavily in the direction of the welfare lifeline. Polls tended to find that people approved of this aspect of the cuts agenda.

II. The Left. Until the student protests, the Left was beset on all sides by a pervading dysphoria and utter perplexity. We know the script after all. The capitalist system goes into an unprecedented global crisis, every stable co-ordinate of the political-ideological universe is unsettled, governments start borrowing and spending like crazy to stave off a complete collapse, suddenly the bastardised Keynesianism of 'old Labour' is back in vogue. In such circumstances, the Right should be on the back-foot and class struggles should take off. And by 'class struggles', I don't simply mean strikes and factory occupations. It is in the nature of capitalism to multiply sites of antagonism, and in each of these class will be present in different ways, whether it's over healthcare, supermarket chains, women's oppression, immigrant labour, the media, or war. Notably, the struggles that did emerge, in Vestas, Visteon, the Lindsey oil workers dispute, the Tower Hamlets lecturers' strike, etc., cannot be reduced to simple labour-management disputes over jobs, pay and conditions. Rather, each contained a pronounced 'political' element - the environment, pensions, education, immigration, etc.

Given an organic crisis in capitalism, a crisis in productive relations that could not be localised, but necessarily radiated to every political and ideological relation embedded in the system, the Left should have been aggressively making advances on multiple fronts. The Left should have been taking territory and hostages, leaving opponents reeling. But this is not what happened, barring the few flare-ups which I mentioned. And the case of Lindsey, which resulted in thousands of workers marching for "foreigners out!", showed that such struggles as did take off did not have to benefit the Left. This is the point at which, traditionally, one warns against 'vulgar economism' and 'workerism', but this is only a real temptation among a few hold-outs of the Left influenced by traditional labourism - recall that Gramsci's critique of 'economism' was aimed at the reformist trade union leadership. The more prevalent error today is to think that Leftist politics can be conducted without any orientation toward class. Still, it's hard to see how the Left, even discounting for its currently depleted, scattered state, could have done much about the level of class struggle. It was forced into a positional struggle, an ideological battle, in which the 'common sense' of neoliberalism initially prevailed over the competing 'common sense' of social democracy.

III. The War of Position. While we anticipate major social struggles continuing over the next few years, with no certainty of avoiding catastrophe much less of attaining victory, the 'war of position' will continue to be as important as outright combat. Indeed, ideological, parliamentary and cultural struggles do a great deal to prepare the pre-conditions for more militant forms of combat such as the withdrawal of labour, factory and university occupations, and other disruptive actions. Here, the Right has long understood something that the Left will do well to remember. Whatever the plane of crisis, whatever the axis of struggle, the issue can always be put another way.

The crisis of capitalism became a crisis of over-spending, just as the crisis of poverty became a crisis of social dysfunction, and a crisis of authority in the British state became a crisis of 'multiculturalism'. The Right didn't win all the arguments in 2008-9 - far from it. If the washout of yesterday's right-wing 'Rally Against Debt' is any guide, and it was plugged in the media far more than it deserved to be, there is hardly any enthusiasm for the latest assault on welfare and public services. But the Right doesn't have to win all the arguments, or generate enthusiasm. Its near monopoly of the popular and broadsheet press, along with the complicity of the centre-left, allowed it to operate on genuinely popular assumptions, absorbe the elements of popular discontent and polarise them to the Right.

The majority do want to keep some sort of well-funded public sector, don't favour privatization in the NHS, support state education, and blame the bankers for the recession. But distrust of the state (for some good reasons - the Tories focused a lot of their fire on New Labour authoritarianism and centralisation) is also widespread, as is discontent with how money is spent (again, for some good reasons - think of the PFI boondoggles). Anti-immigrant sentiment is at an all-time high, disdain for beggars and benefit recipients is widespread, and support for redistributive politics after thirteen years of New Labour in office is now a minority pursuit. Meanwhile, local councils are often encountered as some of the most inept, obstinate, and coldly indifferent bureaucracies in the country. So, with a near Pravda-esque capitalist realism propagated through the state and capitalist media - and one is struck by how often it is still taken as 'obvious' that some cuts have to be made somewhere - it only remained for the Tories and their allies to furnish the popular imagination with endless examples of alleged 'waste', incompetence, and fraud. Local councils spending your money on Muslim-only toilets, benefit fraud, illegal immigration, 'health tourism', etc. But things don't have to be this way.

IV. Winning. Left-wing campaigns have focused on reminding people that they hate the rich, really resent them and their power and arrogance; that they don't trust the Tories; that they like having free healthcare and schools; that the despised bankers caused the crisis, and not ordinary people; that mass unemployment is a social ill for which they will suffer; that they're against the wars for which there is endless government money; and that if they think the state is inefficient, they have already tried the private capitalism of Enron, Worldcom and Lehman Brothers. Since it is normal for people to entertain conflicting ideas and ambitions, the aim is firstly to shift the weight of emphasis along the continuum away from reactionary resentment and toward popular and class-based anger. Secondly, it is to destabilise the austerity alliance by attacking their weak links, and shaking free some loose elements ripe for re-appropriation. For all that we repeat that the ruling coalition is a Thatcherite one, we also have to constantly bear in mind its historical specificity. It is an unstable government, binding Whigs, Peelites, and High Tories, Thatcherite mods and rockers, Europhiles and Atlanticists, social liberals and reactionaries, have-a-go-heroes and hoodie-huggers, finance capital, producers, the petite-bourgeoisie and the progressive middle class. Attacking the unity of this coalition and dispersing its constituents is a precondition for any meaningful advance. Thirdly, the aim is to re-articulate many of the same elements operated on by the right into a new majoritarian leftist political mobilisation.

UK Uncut is an interesting political intervention in this respect. It can never fulfil the latter two remits, but look at its contribution to the former. There's been an awful lot of focus on its method of organising, which may be facing a crisis as it comes under the steamroller of police repression, but far more important is what it has said, the way it has interceded in the ideological field, drawing attention to the underfunding of the state by the rich, the state's leniency toward the rich, and the fact that cuts are not inevitable or necessary but rather a class-loaded 'ideological' project. From a peevish, sectarian perspective, one could write it off as a sort of middle class 'people power' movement that will change sfa. But that would be to miss the point entirely. It already has changed what it set out to change: the field of signification. This advance is highly circumscribed, was not achieved by UK Uncut alone, and leaves much work to be accomplished by other forces - but it's still not to be sniffed at.

The second goal, of shattering the coalition, which the Tories depend on to impose their version of austerity, is not something that one could just assume would happen as a result of the 'contradictions' of the coalition. It is something that has to be worked on. The student protests rightly targeted Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems as much as the Tories, turning the renegade Liberal leader ("wolf-eyed replicant"...) into a national hate figure, running the Liberals down in the polls, and ultimately making it difficult for them even to show their faces in public. I cannot understand the approach of those who say that the Tories are the real enemy and that therefore the venom toward the Liberal leadership is a waste of good spleen. It's because the Tories are the 'real enemy' that they have to be isolated, and this coalition broken. As of now, the Tories still don't have enough support to win an election by themselves. They briefly commanded an electorally viable plurality in the period from 2007 to 2009, but have since 2010 been back to their normal range votes, tending to be somewhere between the low to mid-thirties - this despite the astonishing ineptitude of a Labour leadership that never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Every time the Tories come out with some right-wing poison about immigration or 'integration', it places the coalition in danger. The harder they push for the deepest cuts, for privatization, the more the Liberal leadership has to placate its shrivelled 'social liberal' conscience. When the Tories hammered the disastrous AV campaign, it consistently put the Liberals on the back foot. Now they have nothing to show for their gambit, a sort of queen's sacrifice - bar the cuts, and the steadily accumulating ranks of knights, bishops and pawns on the Tories' side. The only rational thing for the Left to do in such circumstances is to keep hammering away, by every available means, until the coalition splits, or enough Liberals defect to trigger an early election.

The third goal, that of re-articulating the elements of popular discontent into a majoritarian leftist response to austerity, has proved more difficult. Let's not deny what has been achieved. The turnout for the big TUC rally was amazing, as deep as it was broad, truly representative of the British labour movement and its periphery - and what a powerful movement that could be if it decided to move all as one. There are real pressures for mass, coordinated strike action coming from below in every trade union. This hasn't turned into independent, rank and file initiative in most cases. Largely, the direction remains in the hands of the bureaucracy. But the pressure is there, and is contributing to the build-up for a mass strike on 30th June. But the attempt to build a national political campaign against cuts with similar social depth is taking time. Actually, there are several competing vehicles, and not one of them is adequate on its own; not one capable of extending beyond its party basis and periphery. While each broadly has the same analysis of the cuts, they all operate in different ways, relate to different constituencies, and address a different aspect of the same problem. Such parcellization almost guarantees that these vehicles will remain confined to the extant left, unable to harness wider forces. This isn't to play the sad old finger-wagging game of simply denouncing 'divisions on the Left', wryly referencing 'Life of Brian' for the boreteenth time, as if anyone is actually in favour of such divisions. Sometimes, these divisions are necessary, or have a legitimate basis, or are unavoidable; sometimes they aren't. There's no way, at any rate, to simply over-ride these. So, somehow, the different groups have to find the appropriate level at which they can engage in unified action, in order to coordinate publicity and solidarity campaigns, locally and nationally. One could envision, for example, a multiplicity of possible structures (more or less centralised, or federal, depending on the degree of agreement between the factions involved, and the degree of democracy each mode of organising permits) to which different campaign groups could agree to affiliate for a fee, and which would seek the funding and support of the trade unions, etc.. The alternative is to allow the political direction of the anti-cuts movement to be fixed somewhere between a Labour leadership that actually argues for (slower, less savage) cuts, and a trade union leadership some of whose big battalions have resigned themselves to doing the bare minimum to oppose cuts.

Of course, it isn't just about merging the vessels of the extant left into a single flotilla, at least not for its own sake. It is only worth doing if it increases the combined efficacy of the forces involved. But the point is to coordinate ideological and cultural counterpoints to the politics of austerity, which task seems to require a pooling of resources and combination of forces. As and when struggles emerge, unpredictably as they will, the aim is that they will not emerge in a socio-symbolic field cultivated exclusively by the Right, so that they merely appear as law and order problem, but in one where their actions are intelligible as logical and worthy responses to a widely apprehended injustice. This will be particularly important as, increasingly, we're forced to operate in the space between purely impotent civil society protest and illegal and potentially dangerous adventurism. The state hasn't been able to operate through cooptation and consent since the 1960s, and has thus tended increasingly toward the authoritarian end of the spectrum of rule. The criminalisation and suppression of protest, however peaceful and formally within the law, is consonant with that. The police will need to continually justify their mode of highly repressive policing without being seen as the armed wing of a particular government, which would be a threat to their legitimacy. Thus, they have to turn a growing number of protests into heavily fortified battlegrounds, with their opponents pre-designated as violent criminals. The propaganda battle is, of course, partly dependent on class struggles taking off. That is why some of the propaganda stunts are themselves miniature 'actions', forms of deliberate disruption. But even as they do, there can always be simultaneous work going on to reinforce the principles of articulation, the political logics by which diverse contestations are brought into a coherent whole. Opportunities for parliamentary mobilisation may come into this, although recent election results seem to have indicated that in most cases it's close to useless for left-of-Labour forces to stand their own candidates. But there will be other elections, where it is more plausible to stand: student and trade union bodies, local councils, etc. Certainly, legal battles will be important, as the recent G20 verdict demonstrates. Anti-fascist and anti-racist work will be important, as a desperate Tory party is apt to shore up support by attacking minorities. All of this can be done best if it is done with a constant focus on shifting the balance of common sense away from the neoliberal pole, and in the process transforming the contents of mainstream social democratic thinking in a leftist direction.

I've seen a very large number of people in different fora suggesting that Cameron, in his over-eagerness to get into Libya, is seeking a repeat of the Falklands, a prelude to a khaki election in which he can strut about under the bunting with the spectacle of victory rallies unfolding in the background. This may be true. But if so, it suggests that Cameron has both misunderstood that particular imperial jubilee and misread the current situation.

Such allusions correctly estimate that the primary importance of the Falklands was domestic, rather than international. Geopolitically, there was no sense in what Thatcher did. The islands were of little strategic importance, the British claim to them was far weaker than Argentina's claim, and at any rate a negotiated settlement was certainly both available and the logical long-term solution. The idea of Britain holding on at great expense to these purloined territories in the South Atlantic was bizarre. (And yet, there they still are, hoisting the Union Jack over someone else's Shetlands, no negotiations even plausibly in sight despite polite entreaties from Kirchner and Fernandez). Until 1982, no one knew anything about the Falklands, or cared. Their importance was solely symbolic.

Amid a generalised sense of British decay and decline, the loss of empire followed by a series of deepening economic crises, the seeming stalemate of industrial relations, the disorientation of the Left, the widespread sense of a crisis of public order, everything seemed to be going to the dogs - and then these Argentinians think they can walk onto British territory and take it over, just like that? Thatcher successfully took control of this furious resentment and used it to sideline her critics inside the Conservative Party, including the Foreign Secretary Francis Pym (who was a bit of a 'wet' and was apparently in serious, nearly successful, pursuit of a negotiated settlement). Determinedly seeking one outcome, that of a bloody victory, she mobilised the forces of jingoism the better to hammer the Left. Eric Hobsbawm, writing at the time, suggested that the war was like the world cup with guns, providing a victory as purely symbolic and spectacular as that which comes from a football match. (Unfortunately, Hobsbawm's wider argument was in favour of a leftist appropriation of 'patriotism', a tactic drawn from the Popular Front tradition whose virtues he always, in my view, wildly overestimated).

But the Falklands factor has always been overestimated if it implies that this won the 1983 election. Yes, the Tories' vote increased by about 15% between the invasion and the British capture of Port Stanley:



But deeper psephological research showed that this increase was already under way due to macroeconomic factors. With the revival in the global economy beginning, and flush with North Sea oil money, the government began a process of investment and stimulus that was intelligently and cynically designed to make people feel better about their prospects. In contrast to the hawkish, deflationary budgets since 1979, it was expansionary, increasing pensions and personal allowances, reducing stamp duties, etc. People accustomed to being hammered by the government were now being given some relief, after the hurricane of mass unemployment. At last, the decline was over. One study found that the Falklands added about three percentage points to the government's popularity in the three months of the war, and that this added popularity was short-lived and was not a major factor in the 1983 election. It's striking, reading the left literature from the time, that people expected the Falklands to resonate for long years, decades, after the war itself finished. It did not. But what it did do was provide a temporary rallying cry for the hard right amid the general economic recovery, giving Thatcher a little caesarist moment in which she could stand aloof from bourgeois opinion (and it does seem that bourgeois opinion was largely sceptical of the war), and rearticulating the various themes of British renaissance that underpinned the Thatcherite project. It gave Thatcherism a macho virility, with paras, SAS and ghurkas animating the drama of British resistance to decline, and soldiers returning home with the sign: "Call off the rail strike, or we'll call an air strike". And then, it was over, the wholy noisy hysteria and the choruses of 'Rule Britannia' (a tribute to the British navy's imperial adventures, long forgotten until the Falklands) drowing in egoistic calculation. What won for Thatcher in 1983 was what was always going to win for Thatcher - the historic split in the Labourist bloc and the revival in the global economy.

Were Cameron seeking a replay of the Falklands, he would be misreading today's situation quite dramatically. There is no latent passion for another round of blood-letting, and post-colonial melancholia is mainly expressed in hostility to 'multiculturalism'. Even the reactionaries have turned antiwar these days. And whereas the Falklands war was a lone adventure that the Americans didn't particularly like, a costume replay of Suez with a redeeming outcome, Cameron has no desire or ability to lead Britain alone into any conflict. Overstretched in Afghanistan, making deep cuts to the military budget, Britain can barely maintain its current imperial commitments. And, as he has discovered to his cost, the US is not overly keen to give Cameron a chance to strut about in front of the troops in the standard issue white shirt with open collar and rolled up shirt sleeves. There is also the obvious problem that were he to drag Britain into a war now, even were it popular the pay off wouldn't last until he next intends to stand for election. Perhaps, he may calculate, a war would be a good way of ratcheting up the government's control of the media narratives, creating an atmosphere of patriotism and 'supporting our boys', such that it would demobilise the Left and kill off any chance of mass strike action and protests bringing his government down prematurely. But this would imply either that he has lived under a rock for the last ten years or that he is desperate enough to try anything.

The results from the Barnsley Central bye-election:

This is a huge vote against austerity. The Liberals crashed from second to sixth place and lost their deposit - this in a seat where the Labour MP had been forced to resign due to his imminent imprisonment for fraud. Both the Liberals and the Tories saw their vote share slashed, from roughly 17% each in the general election. That is, the coalition parties saw their vote share cut by almost two thirds. The BNP vote is also down by three percentage points, though this can partly be attributed to the fact that UKIP more than doubled its vote share.

This means that not only is the electoral base of the Liberal component of the coalition shattering as working class voters rally to Labour as the only available parliamentary obstacle to the cuts, but the Tories' hard right base isn't dependable either. UKIP represents the defection of a racist, nationalist, Europhobic and hyperglobalising segment of the Conservative Party, based disproportionately on small businessmen, lone traders and the insecure newly affluent, initially concentrated in the suburbs and rural areas of south-east England. Its voters include many 'strategic defectors' from the Tories outside of general elections, middle class right-wingers who want to register their hostility to immigration and European integration without risking a Labour government if possible. However, the party has also assembled support from skilled workers in collapsing industrial areas, and its core support is demographically similar to that of the BNP, excepting that BNP voters tend to be a bit younger.

The Cameron-Clegg coalition was based on the existence of a large centre vote, as millions of voters looked for an 'honest broker' amid the crisis and after the dreadful New Labour years - but that centre ground is predictably collapsing. The austerity agenda is producing a rapid polarisation, with Labour consolidating its hegemony over the left vote (excepting in Scotland, where the SNP is consistently out-performing Labour as a rival reformist bloc based on soft left nationalism), while the right-wing fragments in multiple directions. With racism on the rise and about half of the electorate theoretically willing to consider voting for some kind of anti-immigrant party, the danger is of the most reactionary elements on the right using the support redistributed to them in order to polarise the agenda further to the right. The temptation for Cameron will be to steer to the hard right as his coalition crumbles - he can't really do without the Liberals, but he can manage even less without the Tories' core vote and in his despair he may have to gamble on re-pivoting his whole agenda on the basis of some reactionary-populist cynosures.

This is the terrain on which the anti-cuts left is going to be operating in the short-to-medium term. It is one in which the struggle against racism and fascism will inevitably be a crucial aspect of the fight against the cuts. The fire-fighting against the EDL mobs, the doorstepping in BNP target constituencies, and the painstakingly constructed cultural interventions of Love Music Hate Racism are currently retarding but not stopping the growth of the racist right. They are preventing the racists from fulfilling their latent potential, and thus keeping a space open for the Left. But it is when the anti-cuts movement takes off as a force in its own right, as when the student demos rocked Britain, that the far right looks weakest and least relevant. The EDL's impotent, foot-stamping fury at the way in which radical youths stole the agenda and limelight for the Left illustrates this beautifully.

It also means that those who think you can exclude Labour from the anti-cuts movement are kidding themselves, and would do well to free themselves from the Procrustean bed of formally correct but useless slogans. Rather, we should be operating on conflicts at the core of social democracy: the central conflict being between the Labour Party's aim to represent and convoke the working class as an agency for reform, and its inevitable drive to gain 'credibility' with capital, whose cooperation will be required once Labour is in office. In practise, this means that anti-cuts activism will involve interventions within Labourism itself, uniting coalitions of Labour members and supporters with those to their left, the better to oppose any concessions to the Tory agenda by the leadership, resist the 'realist' pro-cuts politics of Labour-supporting intellectuals, and put pressure on Labour councillors not to simply capitulate and vote for 'humane' cuts.

There you go. That's my short hand analysis of the Barnsley Central bye-election. Don't say I never do anything for you. Or at you.