I thought, hey, I’ve not done a generic ideology post in months and this is as good as an excuse as any to do one. A short one.

Socialism is a very ill-defined concept and anyone who tells you otherwise is likely to be confusing, “wot I reckon socialism means” with “wot socialism means”. You show me one book with a clear definition (unlikely, but I’ll let you try) I’ll find another that contradicts it and explains why the other lot are totally wrong.

Individual socialists are very clear about what their version is not “It’s not the USSR” , “It’s not Capitalism”, “It’s not fascism” etc, but as for what it actually is? Well it’s an ever changing, mean-anything-to-anyone concept that has some sort of vague notion of collectivism at the core.

I appreciate that there’s some sort of “Hobbyist Socialism”. Hobbyists up and down the country have little political parties and pressure groups that dabble in a more hardcore, DIY, build-your-own Socialism. Some even write blogs and pamphlets. And books. There’s a whole cottage industry devoted to explaining the inexplicable.

But, for the sake of my own sanity and not getting involved with long protracted arguments about what one particular word means, I have found a useful way of explaining “socialism” (at least the British variety) is to say simply that it’s whatever stupid shit The Labour Party are doing today. I call Labour “Socialists” because, lacking another credible definition that any two people can agree upon, it makes sense to regard Labour as “Mainstream Socialism” and Mainstream Socialism is defined by what Labour do.

It’s not ideal but, seriously, politics is dull and complicated enough without pointless additional complexity created by deliberately vague labels and words like this. It’s not dumbing down – it’s about not wasting energy on stuff that doesn’t matter.

The Coalition isn’t the fault of all those people who voted Tory, giving them the 306 seats.

It’s not their own fault for running up a budget deficit of £175 billion and running a Government based on spin and celebrity, pandering to the The Sun and the Daily Mail on law and order and immigration, waging George Bush’s War on Terror here in the UK and, most unforgivably of all, treating Civil Liberties as something a ‘modern’ society doesn’t need. Nope, it’s not their own fault.

Who’s fault is the Coalition? That’s right: It’s the Liberal Democrats fault, you traitors! You liars! Obviously the Labour Party would never have compromised their principled objection to economic sanity by doing a deal with the Lib Dems, so that left the Lib Dems with the one option they were supposed to take: Don’t do the deal and help bring down the minority Tory Government within a few months. Then there’d be another election, Labour would be returned to power with a new leader and we’d all go back to living in a Progressive Paradise(tm)

You know, I’m looking at this narrative and wondering just how out of touch and crazy Labour really are likely to become. For all the trite talk of a “New Politics” this Coalition is exactly that. Partisan, tribal politics has been ditched in favour of compromise, negotiation and attempts at harmony.

Do Labour seriously think that the real people, the normal ordinary voters that don’t get quite so involved, will see more virtue in Labour’s principled objection to co-operation, or will they reward the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats for doing something no-one really believed possible?

The Lib Dems have played their hand extremely well. They’ve taken an opportunity to get a lot of their manifesto turned into real living Government policy, and in return they just had to avoid their instincts to become partisan bores about it.

I think history will show Labour to have been on the wrong side of this particular movement, no matter how confident they feel that others will share their tribalist dogma.

The problem isn’t that he called her a bigot; it’s that he assumed, on so little evidence, that she was.

It’s worse than that, of course. This is the same party with a ‘tough’ immigration policy and that famously stole the BNP’s “British Jobs for British Workers” slogan to pander to, well… bigots.

How are we supposed to react to this apparent world of difference between Gordon’s personal feelings, his willingness to be very nice and friendly in public with a woman he privately believes to be a bigot, and the policies he puts forward?

Is the real significance of this event that it’s exposed a bit of a liberal streak (in the ‘Liberal Conspiracy‘ sense of course) in Brown, one that he hides to create an image of himself as a hard nosed anti-immigration populist? Surely it’d have been worse if he’s said, “That was brilliant. She was anti-Immigration and she supports our policy”?

Sod Tebbit. There’s only one story that’s going to dominate the next few news cycles and that’s the footage of Brown chatting to a voter then getting into his limo with his microphone still on, creating an almost pure “The Thick Of It” moment. Transcript:

Brown: That was a disaster… should never have put me with that woman.  Whose idea was that? It was Sue I think… just ridiculous (punches back of seat?). Another voice: What did she say?  Brown: Och, everything, just some awful, bigoted woman. Used to be some Labour voter… (breaks up)

What effect will this have on the election? I think you can safely predict that the Gillian Duffy herself will have the entire media bearing down on her to give her reaction, and if the Tories and Lib Dems have any sense at all they’ll simply let this one play out without getting too involved.

Another consequence might be to reignite the stories about Brown’s temper and lacklustre social skills highlighted in Rawnsley’s book, “End of the Party”. Is this bad for Labour and Brown? Well, yes. It’s absolutely terrible and sensational at the same time. I’ll take my hat off to Brown though – he’ll have finally put Labour in top billing in the news for the first time this election.

UPDATE: I hadn’t finished typing this up when Brown had already gone on the radio to apologise. Gillian Duffy is apparently, “very upset”. Sky’s Adam Boulton says, “I’d be surprised if any of this turns out to be a vote winner.”

Truly I’m inspired. It starts with a beautiful image of a peasant family toiling in the fields taking a break to allow the vision of the Sun of Socialism to illuminate their poor, working class lives. Gone is the slick design of manifesto’s past – say hello to simplicity and crap hand drawn shit. This is the manifesto of a true people’s party, like the Holy Grail is actually the crappy wooden one at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

I’m going to steel myself and read this masterpiece and report back later.

A rabble rousing propaganda piece – deployed to great effect in mentally numbing the drones at the Labour Conference – has been chosen as Labour’s new Party Political Broadcast. This news has been met with cheers of delight by all sections of the political bubblesphere.

The video is called, “Against the Odds” and recounts the heroic struggle against reality by Labour over the last 100 years – a battle, it seems, they’ve won. Epic won.

See, Labour’s spent the first ten years of their current period in office waiting for Gordon Brown to take over so they could do some ‘real’ Labour stuff. They knew, or at least believed, that by keeping to the moderate, centre ground (or, “keeping the fucking beardy weirdies off the telly”) they could stay in power. While they weren’t getting everything they wanted it was still better than the Tories.

Now, with their doom inevitable, Labour are now beginning to reflect on their time in office with a sort of dewy eyed nostalgia. It’s been a triumph, a golden era – we are, it seems, extremely lucky to have had them.

Do you see the problem, though? During Blair they bemoaned the lack of progress. Now, with Brown, they’re celebrating all the progress they made.

So the decision to use this video is a significant one. It’s not aimed at Liberal Democrat voters, or Conservative voters, or SNP voters, or Plaid voters, or swing voters or undecided voters. They’re trying to prevent Labour voters dragging the Government down in their suicidal malaise. They’re trying to motivate the core, the True Believers.

The language is that of war – the constant repetition of the word, “fight” and “fighters”. They’re fighting us. They’re fighting you. They’re fighting me. This is a war and they’re motivating their troops to do battle against Labour’s enemies. This sort of rhetoric does for Labour what Sarah Palin did for the Republicans -sending everyone else screaming and running in the opposite direction.

It’s nauseating, profoundly partisan stuff. There’s a schmaltzy Sean Bean-a-like narration invoking the old Hovis advert vision of a simple and pleasantly prolitarian Britain filled with ordinary, common working folk that need to… er…  fight against our enemies and the system that denies us what we deserve, Comrades! Swing voters, beware.

What effect will this Party Political Broadcast have? Absolutely none, obviously – no-one watches the bloody things anyway. It apparently reduces certain Labour activists to tears. For hardened, embittered cynics like me, Against All Odds reduces me to tears of laughter – it begs – no, it demands mockery, it demands parody.

What else could I do? Cue several hours of relentless mockery in one of Labour’s little corners of Twitter. Their celebration of Labour’s triumphs became a hotbed of ego deflating irony and sarcasm:

The Labour Party also abolished slavery, put a man on the moon, started the Enlightenment and – AND – killed Hitler.

Mr Kipling’s exceedingly good cake recipes were stolen from Ramsey MacDonald.

Gordon Brown was immaculately concieved by himself. He *is* the Manse!

We had fun with this one. It went on and on, lots of people got involved and came up with their own brilliant little gems.

As long as Labour’s only strategy for winning back the hearts and minds of the British people is boasting and bragging about their achievements, I think it’s safe to say that this sort of irreverent mockery is how the rest of us can stay sane.

UPDATE: Sara Bedford has done a wonderful fisk of this video here. Highly recommended.

The issue is one that goes to the heart of their integrity, competence and fitness to Govern.

A pet theory of mine, as yet untested, is that the way parties run themselves internally is probably one of the best indicators we have about what a Government run by that party will be like. I base this on the idea that parties can run their parties however they like so, in effect, it exposes how they view authority, organisation, hierarchy, democracy etc. In addition we can see how they manage their communications, how they manage their own internal processes in drawing up policies, making announcements and finally – and crucially – we can see how they run their finances.

Is it reasonable to believe that an undemocratic, highly centralised, tightly disciplined party with strict processes and chains of command and rules about what people can and can’t say to whom would somehow then produce a decentralised, open, democratic government that values civil liberties? The very idea seems absurd, and in practice – in reality – Labour’s approach to Government appears to mirror their approach to their own internal organisation.

More relevant and important – can you believe that a party with a well documented “spend now, worry later – nothing must get in the way of winning” reckless, scorched earth attitude to funding election campaigns, landing them in serious debt would run the public finances with prudence, care and diligence?

Time has told on this one – Labour have run the public finances with the same ‘whatever it takes to win’ attitude, and has left our public finances mirroring their own.

The Times today runs a story that alleges Ray Collins, Labour’s General Secretary, has attempted to seize assets held by local branches of Labour – not to repay the debts they have, but to be able to borrow more against them. A very ‘Labour’ solution to the problem of impending financial (and electoral) doom. The NEC have stopped this – they fear that if they begin securing more borrowing against all the assets Labour has, they stand to lose absolutely everything.

It is desperate, humiliating stuff.

Labour’s having a rough time of it, but considering real long term public opinion typically lags about a year behind, the worst is yet to come. The longer Brown stays in, the more permenant and engrained the hostility towards Labour will become.

Tony Blair, for all his trickery and deceit, made Labour electable 3 times in a row. In hindsight I think perhaps I underestimated this man’s talent – he made Labour electable. The mind boggles. Famously Alistair Campbell said, “We Don’t Do God” which I thought, at the time, meant they didn’t want to offend Christians. Turns out the opposite was true, that they “Didn’t Do God” because Blair’s religiosity would frighten voters and turn the media spotlight onto something that Campbell intuitively understood would be electoral poison. But then that was the point – say nothing and let people see whatever they wanted to see.

But the veil of electability, so fragile and so hard fought for, is being brutally torn down. The latest Kamikaze ‘Scorched Earth’ Budget shows a political party still thinking no further ahead than the next day’s Newspapers. Just do whatever it takes to get a popularity boost, deal with the consequences when they arise.

So in this manner they’ve borrowed more money than all previous Governments put together since the creation of the Bank of England. Prudence? Golden Rules? The golden rule was, “whatever it takes to get good headlines.” This ‘strategy’ has, unsurprisingly, nearly bankrupted the whole economy.

Next, the Labour Party itself has borrowed too much money without the means to pay it back. They are in a financially compromised position. This mountain of Party Debt (acquired during General Elections) means the risk that they can be ‘bought’ is very real. They need the money so desperately that they have no power or leverage over the Unions – or any other donor. This internal ‘strategy’ has nearly bankrupted their own party.

It’s ironic that the party’s own internal financial conduct told us more about the reality of Labour’s ‘prudence’ long before it became easily apparent in their handling of the economy. 

Finally, just as their “do whatever it takes to get a good headline” approach to policy has brought both their party and the economy to their proverbial knees, so this ‘strategy’ is exposed as political cowardice and…  moral bankruptcy. There’s nothing but media manipulation and creating the illusion of ‘good government’. 

So that’s the hat-trick. We’re not quite there yet – only 1 of the 3 so far – but there’s still a year to go. Most disturbing for me is the Party bankruptcy, vulnerability to coercion,  and the growing power of the Unions. Except now the Unions don’t need to strike – they just need to threaten to withdraw funding. When one particular lobby group is able to pull the strings of Government like this, we should all be very concerned indeed.

So 50 hours of compulsory “community service” is to be demanded of all 16-19 year olds, under plans that form part of Gordon Brown’s “please for the love of God don’t make us clean up this mess” manifesto for the next General Election.

Oh where to begin with this?

Let’s talk about enforcement, because, ultimately, if it’s going to be compulsory then there needs to be some sort of disincentive for evasion.

Will these young adults be subject to fines for failure to comply with a work order?

One can easily imagine that the well heeled will simply pay the fines as a means of getting their offspring out of this indentured labour.  To guarantee compliance, as with convictions for cannabis use in the states, being banned from attending university will be the only means of ensuring all children, from all backgrounds, are forced into this unpaid, unvoluntary labour. Or, at least, the nice middle class kids will attend, while the kids from the estates will find themselves in an even worse situation.

Of course, it may be that the parents will be the ones that suffer the burden of fines – it will be have to be determined who, exactly, is responsible. There are children that cannot be made to go to school… how do you make them attend a compulsory work order?

See, from a libertarian perspective this is simply a means of taxing young people. It’s taxation ‘in kind’ because they have no wealth worth taxing, but as yet they remain an unplundered resource, so they’ll pay it in pure labour. Based on 3.2 million 15-19 year olds (2001 census), and a minimum wage of £3.53, that equates to a levy over half a billion raised on the least powerful, the least democratically enfranchised part of the British workforce.

It took the Ancient Egytians an average of 15,000 people working over 10 years to build a pyramid (with numbers of workers peaking at 40,000 at times). With this scheme, Brown could build a pyramid in over 9 years (assuming that they get their half a billion worth of free labour once every 3 years). I just thought I’d put that in a bit of context for you.

If we accept that it’s good for the state and the nation to have state mandated compulsory labour (also known as slavery, even if it’s just for 50 hours) from 16-19 year olds, pressure will grow to have 50 hours from absolutely everyone. Think what you could do with 30,000,000 people doing 50 hours of work? A windfall to the state of £86 billion (based on full national minimum wage) every single year!

Taking cash is one thing, and there’s enough problems with that as it is – but taking tax in kind through labour is a whole new level of evil, as far as I’m concerned – and it must be fought, stopped and whatever else necessary to prevent this abuse of human beings as commodities to be exploited.

What makes all this possible is the ID cards programme. It’s easy when all young people have ID cards. You’ve got a centralised database of all the ‘eligible’ teenagers, and you can track how many hours they’ve ‘donated voluntarily’ through that. No exemptions, no excuses.

Worst still, they’re not going to be able to vote against this, just like they can’t vote against being forced to take up ID cards.

The minds that dreamt up this policy seem to me to be sick. That this has come from the Labour Party doesn’t surprise me anymore – it would have done 10 years ago – but to me this, when I talk about ‘socialism’, is what I’m afraid of. I can’t help it. I have this irrational fear of people making me do things against my will, and a sense of anger and outrage when I see someone else being made to do something against their will, too.

Of course minors are a special case, but to exploit this is beneath contempt.

Call me weird.

UPDATE: Anton Howes kindly reminds me that he did, in fact, send me a link to a Facebook group opposing this. If Web 2.0 based Cyber activism is your thang, try this facebook group.